Investigative case: a thief under surveillance in a high-tech company

A sports day was held at one of the hi-tech companies in the Sharon region. The girls of the company chat among themselves about fashion and during the conversation it is revealed that the girls fired the housekeepers because a pair of shoes disappeared from their house. Since these are analytical women, it was immediately hypothesized that there is a connecting thread between the cases.
The facts began to be examined a little more deeply and it became known that this is a phenomenon and several other women in the company experienced the loss of shoes from their home. They contacted the CEO of the company and told about the strange coincidence.

The security consulting department of Focus Investigations accompanies the company with ongoing consulting in the fields of security and safety, and the first call of the company’s CEO was to us.
The operations department of Focus Investigations was given responsibility for the investigation. The investigators of the operations department discovered in the interrogation of the facts that the shoes disappeared from their homes without signs of an explosion. The conclusion was that the shoes disappeared by someone who duplicated the keys to the female employees’ apartments and broke into their house when he knew they were not there.

During the process of gathering information, the team of investigators cross-referenced dozens of testimonies and arrived at a suspect: a company employee, a talented and respected engineer, married and holding a prestigious position in an IDF intelligence unit.
In order to check the suspicion, we put Ronit, one of the researchers in the office, to work in the company as a secretary. Before she started working, the people of the technological array installed a hidden camera above her work station and the investigators of the operations department watched the video footage in real time from a nearby office.

A day after Ronit started working at the company, D. contacts her and with a sophisticated investigation tries to “fish” her address.

Another day passes and during the lunch break, Focus Investigations investigators notice that D. approaches Ronit’s desk, takes her bunch of keys and quickly leaves the company’s offices. Three operatives who were waiting in a nearby parking lot started tracking D. and recorded him driving quickly to the city center and duplicating the keys to Ronit’s apartment. The surveillance teams continued to record D’s activities until he returned to the company’s offices – where the video cameras recorded him returning the bunch of keys to Ronit’s desk.

At the end of the work day, the new secretary left the office and the tracking team was surprised to find D. quickly leaving the company’s offices, getting into his car and starting to follow the new secretary in his car, even though he already had her address. He is unaware that three surveillance teams from the Operations Focus Investigations Department are following him. We asked Ronit to stop at a gas station and we held our meeting in the stairwell of the apartment that was rented for her and where sophisticated photography equipment was installed.

At this point, the followers noticed that D quickly leaves the gas station and drives towards Ronit’s rented apartment. Surveillance teams that were waiting near the apartment and in the covered stairwell noticed D. going up to her apartment with the adapted key, while wearing a helmet.

At this point, the investigators of the operations department of Focus had no choice and they detained D. in the apartment until the police arrived. D. was arrested by the police and in a search of his house the police discovered a cache of about 250 pairs of women’s shoes. Another investigation file was successfully closed.