A licensed investigator can work most cybercrime matters that turn on identifying a person or documenting a pattern, and cannot work the ones that require compelled access. That single distinction explains almost every answer below.
Insight Investigative Group is a licensed Florida agency, agency license A3400127. Open source investigation starts at $600.
Which matters can a private investigator work?
Online harassment and cyberstalking, where the job is documenting a course of conduct. Attribution of anonymous accounts from open sources. Romance, investment and cryptocurrency fraud, including tracing funds across public blockchain records. Impersonation and cloned business listings. Online defamation, where preserving what was published and when is the whole case. Employee misconduct on systems the employer owns.
Which matters belong with law enforcement?
Anything requiring compelled disclosure: subscriber records from a platform, content of communications, financial records held by a bank. Anything involving an active intrusion into critical systems. Anything involving child exploitation material, which must go to law enforcement immediately and should never be collected or forwarded by a private party.
A private investigation frequently runs alongside a law enforcement one rather than instead of it. A well documented private file is often what gets an overloaded agency to pick a case up.
Why do people hire an investigator instead of just calling police?
Volume and threshold. Local agencies triage, and a single harassment complaint with a folder of screenshots usually sits behind matters with clearer immediate harm. A documented chronology with attribution already established changes what a detective is looking at.
There is also the civil track, which police do not serve at all. If your objective is an injunction, a defamation claim or a recovery action, you need documentation built for that, not a case number.
What is the hard limit?
We do not access accounts, devices, email or cloud storage. We do not recover or bypass passwords. We do not intercept communications, which section 934.03 of the Florida Statutes prohibits without the consent of all parties. Any firm offering to hack an account for you is describing a computer crime.
What should I preserve before calling anyone?
Everything, and immediately. Full-screen captures showing URLs, account names and timestamps. Intact message threads. A written log of when each thing happened. Do not confront the account and do not warn the person, because the first thing a subject does when warned is delete.
Written by Joshua Goldberg, Florida private investigator license C3400073, owner of Insight Investigative Group, LLC, agency license A3400127, Bradenton, Florida.
Related: cyber investigations and background checks.
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