NEWS – “without comment”
“…the burgeoning private investigations market — an industry that, according to the research firm Fact.MR, generated sales of USD18.2 billion (GBP14.4 billion) worldwide in 2022”
Drones, honeytraps and trespassing: the murky world of corporate espionage
Claims that Boohoo executives were stalked by investigators have put the spotlight on a world where talk of honeytraps and ‘ripping’ phones is common
Jim Armitage – The Sunday Times
December 14, 2024
An interesting Article – recommended reading for the ‘professional’ PI.
Danny’s job certainly isn’t dull. “In the morning, I could be sitting in a piss-drenched doorway, dressed as a homeless person, doing eyeball on a target in the office over the road. A few hours later, I could be wearing a suit, tailing the guy around the City and trying to get close enough to rip his phone,” he said.
To translate the jargon from Danny’s 15 years in the police: “eyeball” refers to the person on a surveillance team who has the best line of sight on the target; and “ripping” a phone means downloading its contents.
While Danny spent much of his twenties and thirties in the service of the taxpayer on the trail of drug dealers and gangsters, he is now a gumshoe in the burgeoning private investigations market — an industry that, according to the research firm Fact.MR, generated sales of $18.2 billion (£14.4 billion) worldwide in 2022.
John Lyttle, former chief executive of online fast-fashion group Boohoo, doubtless wishes it were not so. After sustained, intimidating and intrusive surveillance by private investigators, he recently quit his job after five years.
In one of the most significant cases of alleged harassment to have hit the City in recent memory, he and his fellow directors claim to have been routinely followed by men and to have had their family houses spied on from the street.
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Lyttle is said to have encountered two trespassers on his property, and been followed in Kent, London and Manchester. Once, when he stopped and spoke to the men tailing him, they said they were “ex-forces” out for a stroll, it is claimed.
Boohoo co-founder Mahmud Kamani is even claimed to have been assaulted by one of them. Further, a drone was flown over BoohooMAN’s Manchester HQ, seemingly to keep tabs on those inside, while a surveillance camera was allegedly found pointing to the front doors of the nearby main HQ. A SIM card was recovered inside the camera, which is being investigated.
According to one senior executive at the firm: “People involved are expressing genuine concern in the context of what’s just happened in the US after the fatal shooting of UnitedHealth’s CEO [Brian Thomson].”
The Sunday Times has spoken to one private investigator who was asked “about three years ago” if he wanted to work on a job he suspects was this one. He said no, uncomfortable about the nature of the surveillance required.
Police are investigating potential stalking offences, although no arrests have been made. The identity of the alleged perpetrators is unknown, as is the identity of any person or organisation who may have commissioned them. Inquiries continue and no arrests have been made.
The allegations come amid a bitter board battle between Boohoo and Frasers Group, which wants its founder Mike Ashley to become boss of Boohoo.
There are many reasons why people hire investigators. The smaller players do brisk business in proving marital infidelity and bogus insurance claims, while the biggest spenders on this kind of intelligence-gathering are London’s law firms. They regularly use investigators to gather evidence on the companies or individuals that their rich clients are suing or being sued by. It has turned operators including K2 and Diligence into big corporations. Most boast of being staffed by ex-military and police, trained — at the taxpayers’ expense — in covert intelligence work.
One big-firm lawyer said: “I use a panel of investigators with various specialisms.” He went on to list tasks ranging from using open-source information to trace fraudsters’ assets around the world, to more dubious ones such as using hidden cameras and sticking tracking devices on cars, right down to illegal methods such as snooping in people’s homes.
Generally, it works like this: the chief executive tells their head of security or law firm what problem needs to be solved. That person contacts a trusted friend in private surveillance — either an individual or an intelligence agency. They agree the terms and appropriate actions, and appoint a handler to hire the operators on the ground, who will earn upwards of £60 an hour. Note the degrees of separation between the scary blokes on the ground and the boss who commissioned the work.
Not all firms work like that. Andrew Wordsworth, a partner at investigations consultancy Raedas, has been a private eye since the 1990s. A distant relative of William Wordsworth, he is a far cry from the ex-SAS personnel doing the on-the-ground surveillance. His firm specialises in running investigations with law firms, largely through interviewing people and sophisticated database work.
While he has paid for targets to be followed, the alleged Boohoo surveillance shocked him: “Putting someone under surveillance is a potential breach of their human rights; you have to write out a lengthy justification for why you’re doing it beforehand. You don’t just go: ‘Let’s make them feel really nervous and paranoid.’ ”
If you break the law of the country in which you are operating, far from helping the client, it can be used against them. Investigators digging up material to be used in court have to be willing to stand in the dock and be questioned about its accuracy and how it was obtained.
Being tailed is clearly a frightening experience, as London-based banker Alok Sama can testify. When he was a senior figure in Masayoshi Son’s huge investment firm, SoftBank, he and his then boss, SoftBank president Nikesh Arora, were both spied upon as part of a smear campaign.
The first Sama knew of it was when two ex-Mossad agents hired by SoftBank flew in to London to meet him. They presented him with a series of photos from a dossier that was being circulated about him by an unknown enemy. “The first showed my home in Kensington. Standing outside were my wife Maya, our daughter Alya and our dog Ellie.”
More pictures had Maya at her parents’ home in Dulwich, south London; Sama outside their apartment block in San Francisco; and Sama on a golf course with Arora. “I was terrified,” Sama recalled. Like the chief of Boohoo, he considered resigning amid the stress of it all, but was advised that would look like an admission of guilt.
As Sama describes in his memoir The Money Trap, SoftBank paid for him to hire lawyers to find out what was going on. The law firm brought in Kroll, which discovered that corporate investigators had been commissioned to dig up dirt on him and disseminate it to the media. Only later was it claimed, in a Wall Street Journal investigation, that the paymaster was a colleague trying to advance his career. The colleague has denied the claim.
The newspaper also revealed that Arora had been the victim of a botched honeytrap in a Tokyo hotel bar. Sama recalled that a “statuesque south Asian lady” approached him at the bar. “She wasn’t interested in me, but seemed agitated at having missed Nikesh,” Alok recalled. The WSJ’s sources said Arora’s hotel room had been rigged with cameras in an attempt to obtain compromising images.
Honeytraps are not uncommon. Former policeman Danny said: “You can use them for two things — getting compromising pictures or as a distraction technique. You find out if the target likes blondes, or boys, or trans, get one from a site like AdultWork [an online sex worker’s directory], tell them what you need them to do and away you go.” He recalled using a honeytrap to hack a target’s phone. “She took him into the toilets, and we ripped it while he was otherwise disposed.”
Such tales infuriate those at the “cleaner” end of the trade. Jonathan Benton is a former senior police detective who set up a corporate investigation’s agency called Intelligent Sanctuary. Asked about the alleged Boohoo case, he replied: “It’s just grim. So many of my competitors are going on to people’s drives, sticking trackers on people’s cars and private property, not understanding that’s not right. I’m angry because there’s people like us trying to run a legitimate business — deal with complex litigation, deal with frauds, where the police won’t take it on.”
He is one of a growing number in the sector demanding it be regulated to stop bad behaviour. “In the US, you need a licence to be a PI [private investigator], and most of them are ex-DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] or FBI.”
It’s a call championed by Conservative MP David Davis: “What I’ve called for is tighter regulation of this whole industry — clamping down on intimidatory practice, illegal surveillance. This [Boohoo case] reinforces it, really.”
But what is the law on surveillance techniques? Breaking and entering or obtaining access by subterfuge (one agent told me that his crew pretend to be gas men), is clearly illegal. Following someone in a public place, less so.
Richard Meeran of law firm Leigh Day acted for anti-asbestos campaigners spied on by K2 in a case settled in 2018. He said laws that could be used against surveillance firms included breaches of the right to privacy, the Human Rights Act, the Data Protection Act and the Protection from Harassment Act. It appears that the police in the Boohoo case might be considering using the Stalking Protection Act, which would be new for these kinds of cases.
Even so, Meeran said, the lines could be blurred, with legality a matter of “balance”. “Is what they’re doing proportionate, necessary and in the public interest? Or is it excessive, and just for personal or commercial gain?”
We may one day get such questions answered in court in the Boohoo case. It has obtained photos of the alleged stalkers and handed them to the police.
Posted by: Ian (D. Withers)
www.WAPI.org