What should you do first?
Make sure you are safe, then slow down.
If someone is in danger right now, call 911. Fuller Investigations is not an emergency service.
If there has been violence or a threat of it, or you are afraid of your spouse or partner, call the police before anything else in this guide. Nothing an investigator does can stand between you and a person you fear.
If you are safe, nothing has to be decided tonight. A suspicion is not a fact, and a decision made on a guess is hard to take back.
Then, in this order:
- Leave the phone, the car and the accounts alone, for the reasons below.
- Write down what you have seen or heard yourself, with dates and times.
- Work out the one thing you need to know, and what you would do once you knew it.
- Decide who to talk to: your spouse or partner, a counselor, an attorney, an investigator or no one yet.
Can anyone tell you whether your suspicion is right?
Not from a description. Lists of signs are easy to find, and we do not publish one. The same change in a routine can have many ordinary explanations, and we do not know your spouse or partner.
What can be established is narrower: where a person went, when, and who was there. Sometimes that record shows the hours you worried about were ordinary.
What should you not do, however tempting?
Do not track the car, record other people's conversations, open a phone or an account that is not yours, or look into a private place. Each is a shortcut people reach for, and Oklahoma or federal law speaks to each one:
Oklahoma's stalking law treats tracking a person's location with a GPS or other monitoring device, without that person's consent, as "following", with narrow exceptions. It covers a person who acts on behalf of another. 21 O.S. § 1173
Fuller Investigations does not place trackers on vehicles.
In Oklahoma, a person who is part of a conversation may record it, and so may someone who has the prior consent of one participant, unless the recording is made to commit a crime. 13 O.S. § 176.4(5)
Intercepting other people's conversations outside those exceptions is a felony in Oklahoma, and so is using or disclosing what was intercepted. 13 O.S. § 176.3
If you already hold material from a spouse's phone or accounts, talk to your attorney before you use or share it.
Oklahoma's Computer Crimes Act makes it a crime to access another person's computer, account or data without authorization, or to ask someone else to. 21 O.S. § 1953
The investigator does not obtain another person's texts, call records or account contents.
Getting someone's phone records by lying to a phone company is a federal crime. 18 U.S.C. § 1039
Secretly watching someone at a home or another place where they expect privacy, or secretly photographing them there, can be a crime. 21 O.S. § 1171
How any of this applies to a car, a phone or an account you share is a question for an Oklahoma attorney, not for this guide.
What is worth writing down?
What you know first hand, and one question:
- What you observed
- What you saw or heard yourself, with the date, the time and the place. "Home at 11:40 p.m. on Tuesday" is a note. What you think it means is not.
- What is routine
- The ordinary week as you already know it: work hours, standing commitments, the vehicles in the household.
- What you need to know
- One question, put as exactly as you can. "Where does the car go on Thursday evenings" is a question that can be worked on. "What is going on" is not.
Keep the notes where only you can read them: on paper, or in an account nobody else uses. A shared phone, computer or cloud account is not that place.
How notes like these could be used in a legal matter is a question for an attorney.
What can be documented lawfully, and how?
In a matter like this, a licensed investigator documents mainly two things: what happens in public view, and what a person has posted publicly. Neither touches a phone, a car or an account.
Observation from public places records meetings, arrivals and departures, the vehicles, the times and how long a visit lasted, in photographs, video and a time-stamped log. That is surveillance, and it is most of an infidelity investigation.
What someone has posted openly online can be saved with the date and web address of each capture, before it is edited or removed. That is online and social media research.
Observation stops at the door. A report does not show what happens inside a home or a hotel room, what two people said, what is on a phone, or why. It can say that two people met at a restaurant and left in separate cars at 9:15 p.m. It cannot say what the meeting was.
Doing the watching yourself is a different matter: you would be recognized on sight, and whether it would be lawful is for an attorney to say. If anyone offers a tracker or a way into a phone as a service, read what a private investigator can do in Oklahoma first.
When does it make sense to call a private investigator?
When you have one question that observation from a public place could answer, and you know what you would do with the answer. If you would rather ask your spouse or partner directly, or wait, those are real choices too.
It does not make sense when the answer could only come from inside a phone or a home, or when what you need is protection. The first is not work we do, and the second belongs to the police.
If a divorce may follow, talk to a family law attorney early. Whether documentation would matter in your case is a question to ask before you pay for any.
A first conversation with us is free and confidential and commits you to nothing, wherever in Oklahoma you are. Before anyone is observed, the scope and the cost go into a written agreement, and what a private investigator costs in Oklahoma shows what moves the figure.
To talk it through, call, text or book a consultation.
If texts or voicemail are not safe for you, say so on the first call, and only the contact method you choose will be used. Please do not send photos, documents or sensitive details by text before the first conversation.