370: Navigating Global MemberVetting w/ Seth Thevoz & Paul Dank

Ever wondered how private clubs maintain their exclusivity and reputation? This episode promises to uncover the secrets behind effective member vetting practices with UK investigative journalist Seth Thevoz and member vetting expert Paul Dank. We kick off by contrasting club management practices between the US and Europe, focusing on the invaluable role of thorough background checks and the influence of data protection laws. Our guests share captivating insights into the challenges UK club managers face when seeking guidance from American conventions, all while navigating the more informal nature of their local associations.

Join us as we dive deep into the essentials of member vetting, crucial for preserving a club’s integrity and harmony. Seth shares international anecdotes from London, while Paul highlights the significance of meticulous vetting processes to prevent future issues. We tackle the complexities of expelling controversial members and the difficulties in gathering reliable information, particularly for international applicants. Gain a better understanding of how clubs in different regions approach governance and member vetting to maintain their esteemed reputations.

In this comprehensive episode, we also explore the evolving dynamics of club membership vetting. Learn about the importance of distinguishing vetting from recruiting functions, and the necessity of robust data retention policies to protect sensitive information. We delve into the role of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) in modern investigative practices, drawing parallels with academic research methods. Whether you’re a club manager or simply intrigued by the mechanisms of exclusivity, this episode is packed with valuable insights and practical advice. Don't miss out on this thorough exploration of club governance and member vetting practices across continents!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

There's an Association of London club that acts as a sort of forum for best practice amongst managers of clubs and there is a sort of club managers association across Europe. But I don't think we've got anywhere near the scope and scale of club associations that you have in America to pair off advice at lots of different levels. Where a lot of club managers in the UK do often get advice actually is by attending the American conventions, but we don't have anything on quite the same scale and it's all fairly low key and fairly informal.

Speaker 2: 0:33

Hey everyone, welcome back to this episode of the Private Club Radio Show podcast, the industry source for news, trends, updates and conversations all in the world of private golf and country clubs. Whether you're a consummate professional or brand new to the industry, welcome. This is the show where we go over any and all topics related to private golf and country clubs. I'm your host, den Corbyn. Thank you all so much for being here. It means the world. Like I said, we go over any and all topics related to private golf and country clubs. And when we say private golf and country clubs golf clubs, country clubs, city clubs, yacht clubs, athletic clubs, military all of the private clubs and we say all topics, we mean all topics and from marketing, branding, leadership, governance, food and beverage you name it we're going to talk about it here. This episode a little bit unique, a little bit different and it's all about perspective, getting perspectives from different people and from different countries. As you know, I've been having a couple of guests on from different parts of the world not just here and from different industries. To me, I think bringing in outside perspectives and outside point of views is super important into what we do as leaders, as professionals here, and you just never know where an idea is going to come from, where a spark is going to come from, where something you're going to learn later on is going to come from.

Speaker 2: 1:52

Anyway, I was approached by a gentleman over in Europe, seth Feville, and we just got to chatting. He is an investigative journalist, an investigative reporter over in Europe, and two of his books that he wrote are on private golf and country clubs. One is Behind Closed Doors the Secret Life of London Private Members Clubs, and the other is about club government, how the early Victorian world was ruled from London clubs. Full disclosure, did not read them, but he and I just got to chatting and just talking about the differences and just you know clubs in the States and clubs there and we just had a really fun, genuine conversation. And when we were chatting about all of this I thought how cool would it be if I had a conversation with him as well as Paul Dank from one of our show partners, membervetting MemberVettingcom. Paul Dank head cheese over there, but he comes from the investigative background right, they do fact-based member vetting, they do this background research type of stuff, and that's what his books are about and that's what this is.

Speaker 2: 2:58

This is a really just fun chat where we talk about similarities and differences in member vetting practices between the states and Europe. And we talk about similarities and differences in member vetting practices between the states and Europe. And we talk about the importance of early background checks, consequences of inadequate vetting and the challenges of obtaining reliable information. Which is really what a lot of it boils down to is making sure that you not only have the information but the right information. We touch on data protection laws, the roles of interviews in the whole vetting process between here and Europe and the difficulties in vetting applicants who come from overseas as well, because data and how you get data is totally different, obviously, state by state, but even by country by country. So it's just a really cool, really fun conversation.

Speaker 2: 3:41

So, before we get to the episode, if you have not liked share subscribed yet, please do. It means the world. A five-star rating and a review on Apple Podcast. Spotify, wherever you're consuming, means the absolute world. Sign up for our newsletter over on privateclubradiocom. The box just pops right up so you can't miss it. And while you're over there, why don't you check out Paul Dank and the gang over at member vetting? That's member vettingcom Fact-based member vetting for your clubs.

Speaker 2: 4:13

I cannot stress this enough the importance of making sure the right people are getting into your clubs. And now is the time to do it, because we have wait lists, we have people wanting to get in the clubs and now's the time we should be a little bit more selective. So, member vettingcom set up a call, paul Dank. Big shout out to our other show partners golf life navigator Zillow meets eHarmony for golf enthusiasts. Uh, if you were looking to bring in organic, fresh um perspective members, uh, without advertising, which is the key part. Uh, head on over to life navigatorscom, Check it out, contact them, see if you guys are a good fit. I love what they're doing over there and it's and it's advertising without advertising, marketing without marketing, magnetic marketing if you will pulling people in and only the people who you only get are the people who are the best fit for your club. Fascinating, definitely. Go check it out.

Speaker 2: 5:03

We also have Concert Golf Partners boutique owner operators, luxury golf and country clubs, private golf and country clubs nationwide. If you or your club is looking for some recapitalization, head on over to ConcertGolfPartnerscom. And finally, myself, if you're looking for one of the best, most fun member event nights your club will have. Check out dennycorbycom. We have the denny corby experience. There's magic, mind reading, comedy, crowd work. It's a full evening experience, uh, one your members are going to love and talk about for a while. Dennycorbycom, enough about me, let's get over to the episode. Let's welcome from overseas, seth bevel and our friend from member vetting, paul Dank. Seth meet Paul, paul meet Seth.

Speaker 1: 5:47

Greetings from London. It's evening here, but mid-afternoon there. Is that right.

Speaker 2: 5:53

Yep. So I thought this can be a fun chat. And then, especially, seth, since you said that you have, you know, more of the investigative journalism side, and yeah, I just thought this could be really, really fun. Just a good fun chat. You brought up Paul, which I thought was even funnier in the member vetting stuff, and you were members of a club and you were on that committee as well, so I just thought there could be some fun chat on both sides of it. What are some similarities, differences? Are there things that you heard about in the States that you can't believe, that you know we we possibly do or can do, or yeah, just head it down that sort of route, seth, like let's start it from here then? You know, you've listened to some of the episodes on member vetting and, from your perspective, what are maybe, uh, similarities that you see? Let's start with differences. Uh, that that you're maybe surprised about that happens here over in the states.

Speaker 1: 6:52

That doesn't, um, I mean, I might just start with the underlying similarity, which is that actually we're all trying to do the same thing. Um, firstly, there's there's a cautious element of just wanting to protect the club, whether that's protecting the reputation more broadly or protecting other members. You have a club that is composed of members, of staff and of the building, and all three of those components need elements of protection. But there's also just a more basic thing which is why we form clubs in the first place, and that's to have agreeable, convivial company, and somebody doesn't need to turn out to be an axe murderer to just think, well, we don't think they'd get on with us very well. Actually, we're just like chalk and cheese. So there's an element of looking for that on a much more simple level, as well as some of the more fundamental things which can get very alarming if a club gets wrong, and I think that's why it's very important to sort of head this off and know what we need to know very early on about applicants, so that you can make an informed decision. I would say that there is a sort of fairly universal law which is that it's very easy arguably too easy to keep someone out of a club altogether. It's really very difficult, if somebody is a member of the club, to then expel them or to take any sort of action. So that's why you want, at that very early juncture, to make an informed decision.

Speaker 1: 8:10

Otherwise, I mean if you're in a nightmare scenario where you have admitted somebody as a member, maybe six months ago, maybe 30 years ago, and then belatedly find out something about them or something happens, they're embroiled in some major controversy which, um know, poses a huge reputational risk or, even more, it can get very ugly. You know, lawyers can get involved, they can dig in. In an ideal world, all members are guided by a deep sense of honour and they will do the decent thing and resign. But it's not always an ideal world and people can stubbornly think well, you know, if my name's in the papers in a major scandal, I'm not going to get into another club anytime quickly, so I'm just going to hold on to this here. And if it gets to the stage where they're refusing to do the decent thing, you know, and ringing their lawyer in any sort of action becomes very contentious and aggravating, not to mention expensive all around. You don't want to be in that situation. So that is the reason why get the essentials right up front. You're absolutely right.

Speaker 3: 9:12

That's why Kennis exists. What we found is we're in this unusual place where clubs are following a traditional model which usually involves nomination by a member or two, and those nominations a lot of times are for people that we know loosely, not well, so we can't really speak about them, but we can say they've always been congenial Well, we've, for instance, done business together or I've met them two or three times at my kid's school, and so I'm willing to nominate them. And we use that nomination in place of facts because if you think about it and it's probably the same in Europe the applicant controls all the information. They decide what goes on in the application and then, depending on their relationship with people that are nominating them, they've probably controlled that. So if, for instance, someone that I'm doing business with wants me to nominate them for membership, they've probably behaved and that's why I'm still doing business with them and willing to nominate them. It doesn't mean that I have any sense of who they really are or what they're capable of, or beyond a really subjective and soft touch relationship.

Speaker 3: 10:23

So that's where trying to take facts and apply those to not only fact check the application the story had been told but maybe to look for those important little details that they left out about themselves and their background. That would, you know, have an impact on whether a club will say yes or no. And we're at a really unusual point in our history because in free societies there's never been more information about individuals out there, and it's information that we're putting out there ourselves, willingly, or our friends, our family, our sphere or those people around us are putting out there, as well as organized information. Now I know in Europe there's a lot greater restriction on records and information. You know, if you go to Germany you can find out almost nothing about someone legally, and I know it varies from country to country, but here it's still very, very open. And over there there's still an awful lot of information that's out there to use to fact check and to try and uncover problems ahead of time. So, yeah, interesting stuff.

Speaker 1: 11:29

Yes, I think the elephant in the room is that in the US there's much more of a culture of data for sale quite freely, whereas in the UK, although we left the European Union a few years ago, we still have a lot of EU laws, including the big one, what's known as GDPR. Few years ago, we still have a lot of EU laws, including the big one, what's known as GDPR, which essentially gives you a huge amount of rights of any data about you that's in a public domain, and so you can sue to have that revealed to you, for instance, and you can sue to have that suppressed. So there is, in all, the concept of the right to be forgotten. You can literally go to a search engine and you can demand that embarrassing websites about you don't come up in the search engine. That doesn't mean you take the website down, but it does mean that someone doing a standard Google search, for instance, won't be able to find that very easily and you can sort of cover your traces. And that's the sort of elephants in the room you have to bear in mind, when you're doing any kind of fact checking and investigations and background checks like this, that you do actually have a duty to the applicants as well and that they have their rights, and you are constrained to some extent by that, um, but that doesn't mean to say that there isn't a huge amount of scope that there isn't already out there. Um, I mean, there are public domain documents that can easily be sought. Nonetheless, um, it's worth mentioning, for instance, that I think about 98 to 99% of people who use the internet don't actually know how to use a search engine, and that there are some basic things you can do in terms of the settings and in terms of refining them and being really very, very specific to get a manner of data which is public domain.

Speaker 1: 13:02

I mean, it's out there for anyone who wants to look it up, but most people don't know how to look it up, and so it really does behoove a committee of a club or the staff of a club who are doing these sorts of background checks to know what they're doing in terms of the fine-grained detail, because a lot of it won't be as simple or as clear-cut. As you know, do they have a criminal conviction for something very serious? It might be more along the lines of um. Have they come up in press articles as being somebody very argumentative? Um, is this somebody who comes up in an awful lot of litigation and, uh, has never done anything wrong, but doesn't necessarily come up in a positive light universally?

Speaker 1: 13:40

All of these sorts of questions you're really sort of grappling with because you want to know are there likely to be any issues with this person and so, fundamentally, when you're electing them and you're wanting a background assessment as good as you can have of, are we risk-free or as low risk as possible on taking board this applicant, because you're effectively, as a club, can be vouching for that person for, you know, potentially decades? Um, and yeah, I fully endorse everything that's been said so far on this paul, have you had to find out anything?

Speaker 2: 14:16

or I shouldn't say find out, but do any facts and checking and do do your do your work on applicants who came from europe or from overseas to the States and are now applying to a club? Have you had to work with trying to find information in other areas of the world?

Speaker 3: 14:35

Well, we do that kind of work in other lines of business, but I don't run into it very often here. I do run into it with South America, which is, depending on the country, is a very difficult environment to get reliable information from, so sometimes those are limited to what can I tell you about your time here in the States? We have clubs, for instance in South Texas, who have a lot of people who have spent their entire lives crossing the border. Half their families on one side or the other have a lot of people who have spent their entire lives crossing the border, half their families on one side or the other, and it becomes a little bit difficult because they're.

Speaker 3: 15:09

Unfortunately you can't get necessarily great records out of Mexico. They don't have the same kind of system. Even the recording and a lot of common names leads to problems determining. Okay, well, I've got someone with a match on the name, but I really have no other data point to say whether it's that particular person or whether it's one of the 6,000 other people with the same name who have records in this system. So it can be different or it can be difficult, but really we just have to tell the clients. This is the environment we're working in.

Speaker 1: 15:41

You can have the best available or you can choose to go without the fact checking, so it doesn't come up too much, but it does come up to some degree in the same yes, it's worth mentioning something on who's actually the trickiest to look into, and certainly one factor is if their background is mainly in a jurisdiction which doesn't generate records or they aren't easily available online. The other thing is, just if they don't have much by way of a background, that might be that you can't verify it because they've got a very common name. You know, if you're looking up a John Smith, that could be really really tough, especially if they live in the big city. No, genuinely this is a recurring problem. If somebody has an unusual name, you can be pretty sure you've got the right person when you're looking into a background there. The other thing actually is age and career stage. You know, if you're looking at somebody who's 50 compared to somebody who's 17 or 18, you know who's coming up to the sort of minimum age of membership they will have no record at 18 to speak of. I mean, you might be able to confirm school attendance dates and that's it, but it would be quite exceptional and unusual for there to be any sort of a digital trail there beyond sort of basic things like social media and what sort of spontaneous things they may want to put into the public domain themselves. So at that point you start to rely much more on the one-to-one, you start to rely much more on things like the interview and the intangibles that come up in the interview. Again, there's the vetting that you can do by way of a background briefing, but then I am very much a believer that there's so much you can learn from an interview and you need properly trained interviewers in a club setting on this, not about what they're asking, but about how they ask it.

Speaker 1: 17:25

You know, very often you want to know really in what spirit. You know how do you want to use the club? What drove you to choose this club of all the clubs that are out there? Are you just after a facility that you can use and advance your business interests? Is there something different? You know, I can think of sort of scenarios where people have sworn blind that no, no, I would never dream of using the club to further my business interests. And then five minutes later they say, of course, when I'm bringing some business to the club and holding these meetings here, I thought that's not what you said five minutes ago.

Speaker 1: 17:58

But these sorts of things come out in spontaneous conversation and there's, you know, elements, element of just wanting to be with genuine people who you can feel that you're connecting with and members are likely to connect with, and that sort of intangible won't come up from a file. What the file might well do in terms of doing a proper background check is give you an idea of the potential flashpoints to ask them about and particularly around areas of concern, because I think on a lot of these and this is again where the sort of British jurisdiction comes into this people do actually have a right to reply and they do have a right to sort of give an explanation for it, and it may turn out the point that looked incredibly concerning on paper may have the most logical, pleasant explanation imaginable. On the other hand, you may emerge from a sort of quiet chat with them extremely troubled by what they had to say to you in terms of how they responded. So I do think that the combination actually of the proper background vetting with a robust sort of interviews process and I mention that because I know some clubs at the one end of the scale insist on interviews for absolutely everyone On the other end of the scale there are plenty of clubs that insist that they never interview anyone.

Speaker 1: 19:07

Touching on what Paul was saying earlier. The idea is well, our existing processes are good enough and we never need to ask this, because it would almost be seen as an insult to our existing members, who are putting their reputation on the line in this way. But we don't live in Victorian Britain anymore, and what I mean by that is that people do not now routinely resign on a point of honour if a candidate they have backed doesn't get elected to the club, and therefore it's much easier to sort of just say yeah, well, you know, we're doing everyone a favour, we're getting an extra member to the club, it'll be money under the table and so on, and so they don't take it as a point of honor that. You know I am vouching for this person with every fiber of my being.

Speaker 3: 19:51

I think you're absolutely right. I think one of the keys is determining whether a club is intending to say no ever. I think a lot hinges on whether a club says no currently. I mean, are they an exclusive club or are they a club that is accepting anyone with a check? And you know, when we sell the kind of service I like it to be the right fit.

Speaker 3: 20:13

The first question I have is do you say no and is this going to be new to actually vet people? And you know, if you're just used to everybody coming in, passing the interview or passing the meet and greet and their check clears and they're in, then it's going to be a little bit of a culture shock to modify that in any way, including adding facts to the process, to the process. I can never see a situation where I would say I wish I had less facts in making a decision. I mean, maybe when I'm in Vegas I want less facts. But aside from that, I think you always want to know whether it's going to be to prep you for an interview, so you're having an intelligent interview, or whether it's bringing us in to fact check what you've been told. But in the end, if you're not used to saying no and you're not going to say no, but for the person being a murderer or saying they're planning on murdering someone, then there really isn't any point. They should stay where they are. And I think that's a big hurdle for some boards to say okay, all of a sudden, now we're going to start rejecting people.

Speaker 3: 21:13

The flip side of the coin is I always laugh at the clubs that do all these informal things. The flip side of the coin is I always laugh at the clubs that do all these informal things. Right, so they whisper in the hallway another club and say I understand that. You know this person was a member of your club. Give me the lowdown the QT about. You know, should we let them in? Good member, are they going to work out? So they're willing to do that, but they're not willing to actually look at hard data points where they can look at the source of the information. So I find that interesting. Is that something that happens on the other side of the Atlantic?

Speaker 1: 22:00

Yes, I think there's very much a parallel for that, and I think it's very important also to have a good sense of what the culture of a particular club is and what you're actually looking to filter for. I mean, for instance, you mentioned whether a club is an exclusive club or not is a factor, and while I would agree with that, I know of no term that is more often misused in clubs than exclusive. I mean genuinely, people have 101 different meanings for it. They might just mean it's nice, but they can also mean literally, it's to exclude certain people. Well, what certain people?

Speaker 1: 22:36

Is it just people who are different from you, who don't share your interests, or is it purely, you know, focused around a social ideal, for instance? So, really actually understanding between the lines, what is it you're actually trying to filter for here? You know what kind of community are you trying to build and we can work backwards from that of what sort of members are you actively looking for? And then you can know what sort of alarm bells there are like does this person argue a great deal in bars after too many drinks? And that's not going to be something that comes up necessarily with cold, hard facts, but it may well be something that's sort of flagged in terms of past publicity that they've generated and all of these sorts of things.

Speaker 3: 23:19

I represent a couple of clubs that I think that would be mandatory.

Speaker 1: 23:26

Quite Well.

Speaker 1: 23:29

That's why I say it's important to understand what they're getting at.

Speaker 1: 23:34

And if I'm thinking about the sort of differences, I think it's also worth saying something about the idea of proportionality, which is very big in EU law, but it's also very big in English and Welsh law, and that is going back to sort of people's data rights. You absolutely do have the rights to do background checks on them, but you do need to have reasonable justifications for that. So I think somebody applying to a club accounts under GDPR as being an implicit understanding that they will have a certain number of basic background checks. But essentially, the way you would probably structure those checks to be sure you comply is that you would check if there are any immediate alarm bells, and then that allows you to start getting into the territory of calling up records from government departments and these sorts of rather more forensic things that you might do if you've had any cause for concern just from the initial sweep and the initial sweep can be broad enough that it would probably capture a lot of these sorts of concerns straight away.

Speaker 3: 24:35

Can I ask is it really common practice at this point for clubs to use fact-based betting? Or? Um, is it really all about the internet?

Speaker 1: 24:45

not to be slippery in answering that, but that entirely depends on the club. So there are clubs that absolutely refuse to do anything like this because they think it's offence against the member who's sponsoring to even question a candidate they've nominated. More common is the idea that there's something in-house to do some vetting. It might be done by a staff member, it might be done by a committee. That also depends quite a lot on how many people a year they're processing applications from. So what the workload is like the club that might elect two people a month is very different from the club that might elect 30 people a month, and so the kind of work that's farmed out so you know whether it's being done by one person or 15 people makes a big difference actually in sort of depth and detail there yeah, I find it interesting that the, the demographic and the dynamic in the club world, at least here, has changed a lot.

Speaker 3: 25:41

You know, I think every club is dealing with younger members who are saying why can't we wear flip flops and cut off jean shorts everywhere? It's just, it's generational. It makes sense to me, but a lot of times the vetting process doesn't evolve and it doesn't factor that in. So I find it interesting how you can have that dichotomy going on.

Speaker 1: 26:04

Yeah, definitely no, it's still something that's relatively informal in a number of clubs. I think also it's worth saying that certainly in London there's an Association of London Cl clubs that acts as a sort of forum for best practice amongst managers of clubs and there is a sort of club managers association across Europe. But I don't think we've got anywhere near the scope and scale of club associations that you have in America to pair off advice at lots of different levels, have in America to pair off advice at lots of different levels. Where a lot of club managers in the UK do often get advice actually is by attending the American conventions, but we don't have anything on quite the same scale and it's all fairly low key and fairly informal.

Speaker 3: 26:51

Interesting, trying to figure out.

Speaker 2: 26:52

What can we do here in the States. Legally, that's a common practice that maybe you can't do over in the state. Legally, that's a common practice that maybe you can't do over in europe. Do you happen to know anything?

Speaker 1: 27:01

it's much easier to buy data in the us fairly indiscriminately, uh, than in the uk. Uh, there are a whole lot of records. So, for instance, um, we have an electoral register, we have versions of the electoral register that are commercially available, but people can opt out from being on the commercially available electoral register and if they've done that, there are multiple insurance company records. You could quite easily get to find out where somebody's been moving address, that sort of thing. That would be a big no-no in the UK. It would be let like court cases and criminal access to criminal records is restricted.

Speaker 3: 28:02

I'm not speaking just to the UK, but in Europe in general. You know, for instance, in Germany I don't think you can see any of that legally.

Speaker 1: 28:09

They're not too difficult. In the UK, I mean, all civil judgments are actually available and freely searchable online. That's not a problem. All civil judgments are actually available and freely searchable online, that's not a problem. Criminal judgments you can call up, but you need to. I mean, there are several ways of doing it, but the best one is to probably go in person to a computer terminal of the Royal Courts of Justice and it's sort of about three pounds a query, so you can do it very easily, but it requires some organization. Now, given that the Royal Courts of Justice are a sort of 10-minute walk from most of the clubs of London, it's not beyond the wit of somebody who's working for that client to do that. However, it requires a bit of organization. It's not something you can do from your home.

Speaker 1: 28:52

And now you said you were a member of a club or you'm a member of several clubs and I have been a committee member in the past and I have been on membership committees and, you know, done a lot of this and overhaul processes, and so from that side, I've seen quite a lot of it, and you know it's the kind of thing where I will never talk about individual cases.

Speaker 1: 29:09

That's just an iron rule for me, but I'm very happy, on this discussion, to talk about in general terms, the kinds of challenges that you look at. Yeah, these are a constantly shifting set of goalposts. I mean on the point, for example, about people using the right to be forgotten. That's interesting because very often people aren't very good in how they do that. So, for example, they may do what everybody does, which is to get in touch with Google and say I want these references to this court case removed, but they may not think about the dozens of other search engines that are out there which will also be displaced in this, but they've just never contacted them. Therefore, these court cases will show up there and if you start to find something like, not only are there some concerning things, but it appears that they've taken some steps to remove this from google. That's definitely a red flag well, it's uh.

Speaker 2: 30:03

One of the first things I remember paul telling me is uh, google represents what? Three percent, five percent, something silly of like the whole internet just under five.

Speaker 3: 30:14

Oh, I was getting there yeah, well, and google is a business, it has business interests, it's free to the consumer, right, and they're going to make somebody pay. And you know they have an algorithm, they wrote it, they get to decide what you see, um, and there's a whole bunch of they're not. They're not going to monetize by showing you, so it's not going to show up yeah, I mean, there are lots of search engines you can use.

Speaker 1: 30:40

Investigative journalists here tend to default to duck, duck go if you've ever come across that which is exceptionally good at sort of following privacy settings and varying tracks changes versions of websites. But, um, yeah, it's, it's a case of looking at has the public record been altered in any way?

Speaker 2: 30:58

The similarities between an investigator and an investigative journalist. How do you both go about getting your information, or just your favorite ways of getting information?

Speaker 3: 31:15

Oh boy, where do I start? Oh boy, where do I start? You know we have a lot of ways to get information, but probably the newest and the to search that were not necessarily intended for investigators to use but nonetheless can still find things that are valuable. And I gave a presentation and I talked about this. Osint really exploded onto the stage and started becoming known in more circles with the conflict in the Ukraine and what we had is a whole bunch of independent reporters who were fact checking all of the social media coming out of Russia and pointing out all kinds of things saying this person is with a different unit than they said they were, and I can actually tell you geo target where they're located, and I found 54 other people around them who are broadcasting things that are saying the opposite of what they're saying, and so they were really fact-checking the Russians and identifying where the Russians were at units, strength, troop movements, vehicles and it really sort of opened it up to where.

Speaker 3: 32:33

You started reading about it in the Wall Street Journal, you started reading about it in USA Today and you'd see OSINT investigators and OSINT sources and that's really the frontier. It's super unstructured and it's constantly developing, so new resources to search will open up at the same time that new search tools will open up, and so my R&D team just has fits. New search tools will open up, and so my R&D team just has fits. You know, they probably look more haggard than I do because they're constantly bombarded with new stuff. Or their favorite thing went away. It was this unintended great resource and now it's gone. And, yeah, osint's become a real thing and I think that's the cutting edge. I see that, you know, as now they're starting to form conferences. There's a lot of user groups that are sharing things. It's getting really nerdly and techie and I think that's the future, at least for now, because the public record space is pretty well defined, at least in America.

Speaker 3: 33:33

You've got the commercial databases that you can buy things from. You need to fact check those. In America. You've got the commercial databases that you can buy things from. You need to fact check those. They get some of the public record data, but what's happening here in America anyway, is every little municipality has figured out they can monetize their records. So why would I give them to a big data broker for one check or a small check when I can sell it every use over and over again.

Speaker 3: 33:54

To give you an example in New York City, in order for me to look for records in somebody, I have to spend $100 just to do the query. They won't tell me whether I'm going to get anything or not, it's $100 just to look and then after that I've got to pay for everything I get to see. So they've come and listen. They should. I mean, why do we want our municipalities to go bankrupt and the data brokers to get rich? I understand it, but these paywalls have come up and you get different states. California has a lot different rules on what you can look at, almost non-American rules. Sometimes they seem much more like Canada than like you would find in a Midwestern state, but that's part of it.

Speaker 3: 34:33

So I would say that the record's changing. I think we all thought it was going to be like the CSI TV shows where you could pop somebody's name in and all their records would show up at once. That's a fallacy that does not exist and in fact it's going the opposite direction. It's going in the direction where it's even harder to find it of laws that have been put in place to try and protect personal identifying information within the records, because what we found is, you know, like these Nigerian con artists who come in and take your identity right and get the credit cards. They found that they could go into American public record sources, find all that demographic information and use it.

Speaker 3: 35:14

So now they've tried to limit it. It makes the job even more hands on and harder. Tried to limit it. It makes the job even more hands-on and harder. So what should be costing less and be instantaneous has now become this quagmire of extra expense and extra energy to get through. So that's one of the byproducts, but those are really, in my opinion, the two biggest tools that we use is trying to get the public records and then using OSINT to find stuff that we never envisioned we could find.

Speaker 1: 35:38

Yeah, I think Paul and I are very much talking the same language on this, and these are very much the sorts of techniques which I, you know, have been using as a journalist for quite a few years, and if I'm thinking about, you know, undertaking a sort of standard search. Obviously it'll vary depending on the client, but let me give you a quick analogy, which is when I used to be a history lecturer. Uh, the standard thing that we used to uh have to be telling the students generally was uh, do not look up wikipedia now. Uh, this is complete nonsense. Every student is going to look up wikipedia. If you think they won't, you're completely mad. What I would tell students is think of it as an old-fashioned encyclopedia where anyone who's an idiot will look up Wikipedia, and the exact contents of Wikipedia on this topic is what the standard level of awareness will be. So I want you to look up Wikipedia because I want you to excel, I want you to know where the bar is, so that you can then do something more. So I mention that because, in this context, of course, you can start off with a standard Google search. This is the bulk standard information that anyone can find out about this person from five minutes of Googling and, frankly, if something is coming up in those sorts of searches you should be very concerned indeed.

Speaker 1: 36:50

But then from that point onwards you start to look at a little bit more. You start to look at their business career, for instance. Are there company affiliations and CV positions and all of these, everything that they say? They are as far as you can see, whatever sector they work in, are they registered with a regulator and in good standing, for example, with a current and active license, whatever area that might be? You know that sort of stuff is actually fairly straightforward because professions are very structured. Where it gets a little more unsure is when you're looking into more sort of personal things. Generally speaking and again this is where the proportionality point comes in you wouldn't be using human intelligence. You can do, if it reaches a certain stage where something is deeply concerning and you happen to know very well, informed contacts within that area and say have you heard anything about this case? Has this come up before? But that's extraordinarily rare. That would only be something that would be called for if you already had other existing indicators.

Speaker 1: 37:51

But there's quite a lot of structured information out there which, as you say, it's stuff that's there but unfortunately it does take a huge amount of digging to use, and so on. I mean, the more inane sort of things you might find yourself doing are if you think that there's something a little bit fishy about the address of the company you can't quite put your finger on, why don't you take a look? Well, it might be in a different city, but there's nothing to stop you from calling this up on Google Maps and then bringing up the Street View level. And if it turns out that their main office is a barn in the middle of nowhere, when you're on Google Street Maps Street level, you think, okay, there's something here that doesn't quite work out. So it's things like that. You're constantly setting yourself questions of what do I want to know? Why do I need to know it? And then how is there some information or some proxy information that I can use it?

Speaker 1: 38:38

And the last thing I sort of add on this is I do think it's really important that any membership process remembers to have at least two hats on in the vetting, because you do have the people who are there to actually vet and you do have the people who are there to recruit and identify and encourage like-minded members. Those are two very different things and it's very, very important that you make sure that you are acting in different modes. Ideally, you'll have different people within the club who are tasked with the. We're here to market for members as opposed to we're here to not necessarily treat with suspicion, but just make sure that there are some basic barriers to protect our members, protect our reputation.

Speaker 1: 39:20

It's much harder, I found, when clubs have the same people who are tasked with doing both things and you really do have to sort of instruct them. Remember you are in this mode right now, or you are in this mode right now when I've generally found clubs more effective on this is where they task those two functions in different groups and they each have to create their own report, as it were. Um, and there will be some tension in that, and that's quite a natural thing actually for there to be that level of tension. But I find rather like um attorney is arguing a case, it would be very weird if you ask the attorney to set out both the prosecution and the defense case in the same court case. A much more natural thing is to ask two different people to do that and then you can make a decision based on the submissions.

Speaker 3: 40:07

Yeah, and I also think it's a phenomenal practice to limit who looks at the fact-based due diligence report. You know there are going to be things that are not going to be offensive but are going to be personal, that they should have a right to share with whom they want and not have it spread around the club because 30 people saw a copy of their background and know everything about them. No one wants to enter the club that way. So yeah, how clubs handle that, I would add to that.

Speaker 1: 40:36

Sorry that I I wouldn't add to that. Sorry, no, I would very much add to that that it's very important that you have, particularly in a british context, very robust policies around data retention, and what I mean by that is that every time you're looking at data, particularly sensitive data like this, you need to have a compelling reasons to why you're doing it. Now. The fact that they are currently having an application that's live in front of you is absolutely a valid reason, but it's not a reason to hold on to that paperwork for 50 years and put it on a file. There is, firstly, the requirement to destroy it. I think it's after seven years, all records anyway but even then you actually need a very good reason during those seven years. It's also further complicated by there are things around archiving policies and all these sorts of things. Generally, my advice to clients is to not only, as Paul says, limit the group of people who see this very sensitive material, but make sure that they destroy all records of it once the case is closed.

Speaker 1: 41:32

You may well have a decision paper that's kept that just simply says a decision was reached. It probably won't go into more details than that. It might say you know, financial factors were a consideration, but even that involves an element of risk, and actually the least risky solution is to have total disclosure to a very limited group of people, destroy all the records. Afterwards. There's nothing to stop that candidate potentially from reapplying, in which case it's a waste of everybody's time because you go through it all and you end up asking people who were around you know five years ago or 15 years ago, the first time they applied. Do you remember that guy? There was something about him that led him to being blocked. We don't know why, but better that than you are sitting on some compromising data you shouldn't be sitting upon, which could potentially open the club to liability, and you don't want to be in that situation.

Speaker 3: 42:23

I think the real irony is, once somebody gets into a club, you have all those nosy members who are going to spend their 10,000 hours on the internet looking for all that sensitive information to gossip about anyway, Fully agree, fully agree, and it'll be the talk of the bar. And then management's the last one to know. So that's always great.

Speaker 1: 42:44

But then that outlines the question, which is when you've gone down that road people ask why didn't anybody look this stuff up? Um, I mean, I I think that certainly london clubs in the last 15, 20 years have gone from a culture change of of course we wouldn't dream of looking stuff up online. That would be intrusive to people now routinely asking you mean, you didn't even do a basic google search like any member of the public might do. Um, you know, if somebody's standing for committee or being very opinionated at general meetings, fellow members are going to look him up. They're going to say what's the deal with this guy, why has he got such a bee in his bonnet on that? So these sorts of searches will be done when they're members.

Speaker 3: 43:31

I think the standard here is become reasonableness. Is it reasonable for club management not to vet applicants for membership? Right, these are people that are going to bring guests in. Who are those guests? They're going to interact with other members, obviously, and they're going to interact with the staff.

Speaker 3: 43:47

So when something goes wrong, the first thing that everybody does, especially in the media right, they dig in with a backhoe and find every piece of information they can about that person and then the club's in a situation where it's not a broken individual did something bad, it's. The club didn't find that this person was obviously a problem, and then the problem occurred and they let it happen. So that reasonableness standard is sort of sweeping the country. It certainly makes a lot of sense because if you look outside of the club world and anything else that you want to do in an organized fashion, you know you're going through some kind of fact based vetting.

Speaker 3: 44:26

I don't care if it's volunteering to be a referee at a youth soccer match or if it's trying to get into a public university. There are people digging through your background and looking at every piece of data. So why hasn't it happened here? I think it's just that the club world is slow to change and people's word is supposed to mean a lot, but the world is changing and people move around a lot. You have a lot of people that are entering clubs, that are virtual strangers to that community, and so to not look is crazy. And then, just equally as much, you have people who are family members, right? So Uncle Joe is great and we all like Uncle Joe, so I'm sure that his nephew is going to be fine too.

Speaker 1: 45:07

Well, let's actually check and make sure the nephew is fine that and it's very striking If you look at the sorts of reports. I mean I obviously don't know what Paul's reports would look like and he doesn't know what my reports would look like, but I think it's relatively rare that there's a sort of unambiguous steer in the conclusions on these things. It's relatively rare that you either say this guy's a fraudster or that you say this person is completely blameless and is a saint, and I give them a full, hearty endorsement. Usually it's a matter of assessing risk and if somebody is a low risk or an acceptable risk, or a negligible risk or a non-existent risk as far as you can see, and within the constraints of that, then flagging up any potential causes for concern, any potential questions. You know and again this goes back to how data is properly handled in the UK, giving people actually the right to have some sort of say over any concerns. So it's usually the case that if somebody is unsuccessful in an application, they'll probably have an idea as to why, because they'll probably have been asked about it, not necessarily directly. It might be a roundabout way of you know.

Speaker 1: 46:23

There is a question on our form about if there's anything in your background that might cause embarrassment. You didn't fill out anything on there. Are you sure about that? Would you like to say anything more? You know anything in the last five years, or whatever it might be? And they may say, oh, actually, now you mentioned it, I suppose there was this one thing, but I didn't think it relevant.

Speaker 1: 46:47

But all of that is geared towards giving them a right to reply and giving them a right to say well, it may look bad on paper, but actually there's a perfectly acceptable reason. And you know what, sometimes those are actually really good reasons that they come up with. Or it may just be a case of mistaken identity, of oh, has been coming up for 10 years. Now I know a chap with exactly the same name as me. Uh, who works in the same sector, is a convicted fraudster and yeah, it's really embarrassing. You know, here's the paper trail show. We are different people and that's fine. But you won't know that until you've just flagged up those potential flash points, and then it's very much for the club's management of processes to act on that appropriately hope you all enjoyed that.

Speaker 2: 47:21

As you know, like share, subscribe, five star review and the actual review. Putting in some comments in there, oh, it means the absolute world over on apple podcast and spotify, uh means the world costs nothing. Sign for our newsletter privateclubradiocom. I'm your host. Danny corby kept y'all on flippity flip.