One British citizen found himself in a tricky situation awhile ago. He liked a stewardess from his Kyiv-London flight, but had no idea how to contact the girl from distant Ukraine. All he knew was her first name, Alla, written on a badge.
The modern-day Romeo turned to private investigator Igor Timofeyev, 64, from Ukraine. But the job wasn’t so easy.
“First I found out that there was no stewardess named Alla on that flight. It seemed like a dead end,” Timofeyev said. “But it turned out that the stewardess he liked spilled coffee on her jacket just before the flight and borrowed a jacket from her colleague, with her name badge on it.”
After a short but difficult search, the private investigator discovered the woman had just moved to western France with her family.
“So she was just several dozen kilometers away from him. Imagine that! My client was shocked,” Timofeyev said.
Incredible stories like that are an investigators’ daily routine. Not all of them are rosy and romantic, however.
Some time ago Timofeyev was asked to vet a potential mail-order bride from Belarus. An American she was chatting with was troubled because his virtual girlfriend kept asking him for money. After the man gave her about $1,800 for her mom’s treatment, she asked for much more, saying that she broke a friend’s car and has to compensate the damages.
Private detectives find their services in demand from spouses to employers
It turned out the man was not sending money to the Belarusian beauty from the photos, but to a notorious pimp, who tricked him with the help of a female friend.
“My client was so disappointed he didn’t believe me, and even refused to pay at first,” Timofeyev said.
The fees Ukrainian private investigators charge for their services are not tremendous, though not everyone can afford them. One of the most expensive, but also most popular services is spying on family members, to expose cheaters or troubled teenagers. That costs upwards of $150 per day.
Meanwhile, business investigation fees run from $50-70 for quick routine checks involving accessible information and up to $5,000 or more for in-depth inspections.
The private investigation market has changed considerably since the days of Sherlock Holmes. Just one organization, the Association of British Investigators, has more than 300 members. Ukraine’s Private Investigators Association only counts three dozen so far, though many more work in the country, members say.
Investigators’ ranks are mostly filled by retired police detectives and state security officers, for whom the job strongly resembles their previous occupation, with the possible exception of spying on cheating husbands.
Women make up the bulk of the clientele, says Denys Klimov, head of Kyiv-based Private Investigations Bureau. It usually takes just several days to expose a cheater.
“Our longest project was when we spied on one man two-three times per week for a month,” he said. “Usually, it is just about three days.”
Some missions are even shorter. Once, Klimov says, his agents were hired to watch the potential cheater on a business trip. But when the man left home, agents just followed him to the next building. His “business trip” turned out to be an excuse to spend time with his lover.
Troubled teenagers are also popular targets, with parents wanting to see how they spend their free time. In 90 percent of cases, Klimov says, parents’ suspicions prove to be correct, with kids either taking drugs or gambling at slot machines.
But the jobs can be much stranger.
Timofeyev, a former KGB counterintelligence officer, mostly works with foreign clients. Once, an outraged woman from the U.S. asked him to investigate the past of her son’s Ukrainian fiancee. She was upset to find there were no legal troubles or former husbands in the girl’s biography.
In another case Timofeyev was recruited to find the Russian heirs to a fortune left in the U.S. “My share would have been about $150,000. But one of the heirs refused to take ‘American’ money, and the fortune went to the state budget,” he said.
Yet such strange behavior is not the only obstacle for Ukrainian investigators, who mainly complain about the lack of a legislative framework.
“Currently there is no law regulating our services,” said Igor Tsminsky, head of Ukraine’s Investigator Association. “The draft of the law has been wandering through government cabinets since 2001, and still hasn’t been approved. That is the reason why many of our colleagues work unofficially.”
Yet unofficial status, Tsminsky says, gives some Ukrainian private detectives freedom to perform controversial and illegal services. The most sought after of these is faking an alibi.
Websites promising alibi services assure this is mainly to save marriages from the occasional indiscretion. But Klimov says that when his agency first tried offering this service, only clients who wanted to cover up actual wrongdoings called in. So, the agency backed out despite the potentially higher fees.
“Illegal and barely legal services, like providing an alibi or putting hard pressure on debtors – pays very well,” says Klimov, explaining why some of his colleagues go for it.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].
