So you may or may not have heard the term pretexting before. So what is pretexting? Often it's kind of perceived as a dirty word if you're familiar with it being used in our industry, but pretexting is actually a very important part of our job. It's when you kind of make up a little story and use it to get information out of somebody. It's a technique.
And there are good times and bad times to do pretexting. And there's certain times where it's a problem. appropriate and certain times where it's not appropriate.
For example, a private investigator may use pretexting to try to find out where somebody lives. If they're trying to track down a witness or someone who's being evasive about where they're living, we might use pretexting to kind of come up with a little story that isn't necessarily true to get that person to give us information. An example of us doing a pretext would be for trying to find out if somebody is living at a particular address. We might call them. and say, hi, I'm calling from UPS, and we have a package from Amazon, and the address is all got rained on.
It's all messed up. Oh, my God, we can't read what it says. It says you live at 1234 Broad Street, and sometimes that person on the other end of the line might say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, that's an old address.
My new address is 123 Side Street. Oh, okay, thank you very much, Mrs. So-and-so. We'll mark that down.
We'll send that right out. Do we really have a package? No. Did we need the address?
Yes. That's pretexting. The person freely gave it up, but we kind of fabricated a little story.
We didn't give any specific names of who we were or we didn't impersonate anybody. And speaking of impersonation, that is kind of the key there. Pretexting becomes touchy when you impersonate somebody. You can never, and you all know this, you can never impersonate anybody of authority such as a law enforcement officer or anything like that.
But you also generally can't impersonate another person for the means of getting information. For example, on social media, people are like, can you hack into somebody's Facebook? Well, you know, you can't pretend that you're somebody else.
Represent yourself to that. person that they feel like they recognize you and know who you are and they know your name and you're really not that person that's impersonation that's different than pretexting