How Amateur Investigators Make Money

If you consider yourself an amateur investigator, if you’re good at doing research and find a lot of stuff online, you might think, “How can I make money doing this?” Well, you could become a licensed private investigator, but that’s a long, drawn-out process where you have to have specific licenses, experience, and pass exams. And you could certainly do that. However, there’s another way that you can make money by doing research online and being a sleuth online. And that’s what’s called “whistleblower profitability.” What does “whistleblower” mean?

Well, there are federal and state whistleblower reward programs: False Claims Act, Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodities Futures, and IRS. These are all federal laws and regulations that say if, say, a company is doing something wrong and you bring it to the attention of the federal government if the federal government benefits from it, you get some of the money.

For example, the IRS program: if you show somebody doing tax fraud and the IRS recovers that fraud, they give a percentage to the whistleblower. The False Claims Act is where if somebody is defrauding the government like they’re putting Medicare fraud through, or if you’re a defense contractor and you’re overbilling the government, then if you turn them in and the government benefits from it, either saving money or even if they get fines from that company, you as a whistleblower can get money from it. Now, it may be a drawn-out process, and it may take some time, but these programs are in mind.

You may or may not need an attorney to do this. You may be able to do it by yourself, but you do want to understand the process. And many of the cases we do are for clients that are basically fraud, amateur fraud investigators that are looking at, “Hey, I found this online scheme, the second one here, Securities and Exchange Commission. I found this company offering a 20% return per month. I know it’s a scam.” You can look into it, and we can gather some evidence and give it to them. And then they’ll go ahead and turn it in for the whistleblower program.

Many of these clients actually make money doing this. That’s how they make a living. They put in a bunch of cases, and some of them turn out well, and some of them don’t. But if you find yourself to be an amateur type of investigator, you may want to look into different options for monetizing that interest that you have. If you have the time and effort to put into searching for that needle in a haystack and you can find evidence that would qualify under compensation or reward from one of the many government whistleblower programs, you can turn your hobby of investigating into a lucrative type of business. You can read our website for more information on how to do this, but it’s a good way, as a side gig or a side hustle, to make some money as a kind of amateur private investigator.