Private Detectives in Ulm | Detective Agency Ulm, Germany*

Aaden Private Investigation Agency conducts investigations in Ulm with its qualified and well-coordinated team of detectives for both corporate and private clients: +49 711 7153 011-0.

Case Study: Manipulation and Defamation for Unlawful Customer Poaching

Many business owners believe that personal relationships with employees are ultimately detrimental to a professional workflow within a company. Mr. Huber, owner of a landscaping business and client of our detective agency in Ulm*, held a different philosophy in this regard, but it was one that would eventually catch up with him in a negative way. At the center of the matter was a complicated five-person constellation consisting of the managing director in question, two male and two female employees. Mr. Huber was in a relationship with one of the two female employees (M1), who had previously been involved with one of the two men (M2). The second male employee (M3), in turn, had by then started dating the other woman (M4), who was the managing director’s still-married wife.

This led to an internal turf war that harmed above all Mr. Huber and his company in Ulm. Specifically, he suspected Mr. Bach (= M3), the new partner of his wife, of deliberately carrying out manipulations out of frustration and personal dislike for his boss in order to ruin jobs and drive deserving colleagues out of the company. Since we are not speaking here of harmless damage but rather of substantial losses, and because there was even concern that Mr. Bach might attempt to murder Mr. Huber (motive: insurance payout), Mr. Huber commissioned our detectives in Ulm (+49 711 7153 011-0) to produce court-admissible evidence against his employee Bach.

Undercover Deployment to Obtain Evidence

During the case meeting, Mr. Huber and our corporate detective agency in Ulm quickly agreed that, in this case, undercover deployment within the company would be the most promising approach. In such an operation, a detective is hired by the client company in order to build social relationships with the workforce as an employee and thereby obtain useful information through both observation and questioning. A female detective was chosen because the main target person, Mr. Bach, was likely to confide sensitive matters more readily in a woman, whereas he was very suspicious of men.

On her first day at work in the company, our investigator was assigned directly to Mr. Bach, in order to accompany him to a client as an intern and support him there under the pretense of being a trained florist. The florist cover story could be used successfully in this case, since the detective in fact possessed sufficient knowledge in this field and the profession matched the business purpose of the undercover company. Even on the way to the work location, Mr. Bach talked incessantly and disparagingly about his employer and his employer’s partner. His statements were at times well below the belt and clearly defamatory in nature. As her first task, he assigned his supposed intern the trimming of hedges at the client’s property. However, he provided the detective with completely unsuitable tools with which the work could not be carried out. Before she could ask the target person whether there might be better tools available, Mr. Bach had already driven off with the client without saying a word.

Provoking Customer Complaints

Only after more than an hour and a half did the target person return with the client. Mr. Bach apparently did not consider it necessary to explain his absence. Instead, he told the investigator from our private detective agency in Ulm that she did not need to take care of the hedges after all, but should instead dig over a flower bed in the greenhouse. For this purpose, he handed her a rake that was about as useful on the rock-hard, dried-out ground as a teaspoon. He then assigned his intern various other tasks, all of which failed because of the unsuitable work materials. The client eventually became so annoyed because the two-person team was of course making no progress that the managing director and client, Mr. Huber, personally came by to discuss the problem with her. He later told our corporate detectives in Ulm that he had to handle such meetings constantly lately in order to put out fires.

Mr. Bach was not bothered in the slightest by his boss’s presence. He instructed the investigator to help him load the cut greenery that had accumulated, and then drove with her to the disposal site, while he left the work materials scattered all over the client’s garden, despite the fact that the client had a tool shed especially for that purpose. When the client apparently noticed after some time that the workers were gone and the area had been left in disarray, she called the target person several times without getting an answer. “The office should take care of that kind of thing,” Mr. Bach told our detective. An hour later, he finally relented and returned one of the repeated calls. The client sounded visibly irritated and apparently complained emphatically about the poor work performed by the detective. Mr. Bach then acted completely outraged and claimed that his intern had acted on her own; he would have a serious word with her. After ending the call, however, he only mocked the client. In the past, there had repeatedly been customer complaints about employees under the target person’s supervision. Apparently, Mr. Bach intended to let his own colleagues fail in order to further undermine the owner’s trust in his workforce and destabilize the company.

Difficult Standing Within the Workforce

The next day, our female private detective in Ulm first met M1, the colleague with whom our client, Mr. Huber, was in a relationship. According to his own statement, he trusted his partner almost one hundred percent, but he wanted her to be checked as well at some point, which is why the investigator lightly questioned M1. The overall impression was very positive: committed work and creative ideas. However, the lady had absolutely no fondness for the target person Bach; he constantly insulted her and treated her as if she were stupid, while not even doing his own work properly.

Shortly afterward, Mr. Huber gathered the entire working workforce to address them. In his speech, he announced that the dissatisfied client from the previous day had canceled the contract due to poor performance, resulting in a five-figure loss in revenue. In addition, M1, with whom the detective had just spoken, was appointed the new deputy managing director and received sarcastic remarks from Mr. Bach for it.

Hourly Billing Fraud

A few days later, the investigator worked together with Mr. Bach in the warehouse. By that point, a comparison of the investigation results with the target person’s timesheets had already revealed that he had committed working time billing fraud and was probably continuing to do so regularly. During the conversation between the supposed intern and Mr. Bach, he also remarked that his former employer had now received the contract from the dissatisfied client. The dishonest employee seemed anything but unhappy about this.

Later in the workday, Mr. Bach let his intern handle dangerous acid without protective gear, made aggressive negative comments about the new deputy managing director (M1), and drove around for hours to obtain simple work materials that allegedly could not be found anywhere in the required version. The total seven working hours on that day – which were billed as eight hours – produced no meaningful benefit for the company. A similar pattern emerged the following day, when Mr. Bach visited a construction site with the undercover operative from our detective agency for Ulm and had forgotten large parts of the necessary materials, so he once again searched the surrounding hardware stores for them, only to later say that he could not buy anything anyway because he only had ten euros with him.

Various Breaches of Employment Contract Proven

As a result of the investigations conducted by our corporate detective agency in Ulm, the following were established: defamatory statements against superiors and against employees in general, deliberate poor performance, irresponsible treatment of subordinates, hourly billing fraud, and a high probability of targeted customer poaching or improper contacts between the target person and his former employer in the same industry.

Because the offenses of hourly billing fraud and poor performance had been documented beyond doubt and in a court-admissible manner, the termination was issued afterward. He has since returned to working, also officially, for his former employer.

Notice

Note: For reasons of discretion and data protection, the locations and certain personal details have been altered without changing the substance of the actual events.

*Note: All assignments of Aaden Detective Agency Stuttgart are processed by our operations management in Stuttgart. We have a network of qualified, vetted investigators who can be active on site for you within a short time.