Location: Shoreditch, London
Sector: Marketing and Creative Services
Reason for Surveillance: Preventing Conflicts of Interest
Background
A fast-growing marketing agency in Shoreditch instructed Bond Rees corporate private investigators after noticing a troubling pattern: a senior account manager responsible for several of the agency’s largest retail clients had, on multiple occasions, been unreachable during core working hours despite showing as “online” on the company’s internal systems, and had recently missed two client deadlines that were wholly out of character for someone with an otherwise excellent track record.
Management’s working theory, based on a colleague’s offhand comment about the individual “doing some freelance stuff on the side,” was that the account manager was taking on undisclosed freelance work — potentially for competing agencies or even for the agency’s own clients directly — in breach of an explicit exclusivity clause in their employment contract.
The agency’s managing director was candid, in our first conversation, that the account manager was one of the best performers on the team, and that this made the situation harder to act on rather than easier — nobody wanted to damage a valuable working relationship over an unfounded rumour. That candour was useful, because it meant our instruction was framed correctly from the outset: establish the facts first, rather than assume the worst, and give the agency an evidential basis for whatever conversation followed, whichever direction the evidence pointed.
The Brief
The agency needed to establish, discreetly, whether the account manager was in fact undertaking unauthorised freelance work during contracted hours, and if so, the scale and nature of that work, before deciding whether to proceed to a disciplinary process. Given that the employee worked in a hybrid pattern with two contractual days from home, a purely office-based investigation would have missed the majority of the relevant activity.
The Investigation
We began with open-source research, which is very often the fastest and least intrusive starting point in cases like this. A review of publicly available freelance marketplace profiles and business directories identified an active listing under a name closely associated with the individual, advertising exactly the kind of digital marketing services the agency itself provided, with a portfolio that appeared to draw heavily on campaign work strongly resembling projects run for the agency’s own clients.
To establish whether this freelance activity was taking place during contracted hours, we conducted a period of covert observation on the individual’s contractual work-from-home days, focusing on activity at a shared co-working space the individual had been seen entering on those days — a detail confirmed through discreet, proportionate observation from a public vantage point. Over three observed work-from-home days, the individual was seen arriving at the co-working space each time, and on two occasions was observed in what appeared to be client-facing video calls, visible through the space’s street-facing glass frontage, at times that corresponded with unexplained gaps in their responsiveness to the agency’s own internal systems.
We were very careful throughout to keep the physical observation genuinely limited and proportionate — we observed arrival and departure times and general activity visible from a public pavement, and at no point attempted to overhear conversations or photograph any screen content, which would have strayed into territory we regard as neither necessary nor appropriate for a case of this kind. The evidential value came from pattern and corroboration, not from capturing every detail of what was said or shown on a call.
To strengthen the picture further, we cross-referenced the observed co-working space attendance against the agency’s own project management system, identifying that on each of the three observed days, the individual’s assigned agency tasks showed materially slower progress than their typical pace on days confirmed to be spent in the agency’s own office — a subtle but telling secondary indicator that supported the picture built by direct observation and open-source research.
Findings
The combination of the freelance marketplace listing, the portfolio content, and the observed pattern of attendance at a third-party co-working space during contracted hours built a strong, well-corroborated picture of undisclosed freelance activity being conducted during time the individual was contractually obligated to the agency. We were careful to note in our report what we could and could not confirm — we could not verify the specific content of the calls observed, for instance — but the pattern, timing, and public-domain evidence together were compelling.
Outcome
Presented with the evidence, the agency proceeded to a formal disciplinary process. The individual admitted, in their disciplinary interview, to running a freelance operation using skills and, in some instances, campaign templates originally developed for agency clients — a further and more serious issue that came to light only once management had a firm evidential basis to ask direct questions. The individual was dismissed for gross misconduct, and the agency subsequently reviewed and tightened its exclusivity and intellectual property clauses across all client-facing roles.
Lessons for Other Businesses
This case is a reminder that conflicts of interest rarely announce themselves — they show up as small inconsistencies: missed deadlines, unusual unavailability, a slightly-too-vague answer about “personal projects.” Open-source research should always be the first port of call in cases like this; it is non-intrusive, cost-effective, and frequently provides enough of a lead to justify — or rule out — further investigation. For businesses with hybrid or remote staff, exclusivity clauses are only as good as an organisation’s willingness to actually investigate when the warning signs appear.
Investigator’s Reflection
We find these cases some of the more emotionally complicated ones to work, because they often involve genuinely talented people who have simply overreached, rather than career fraudsters. That does not change the evidential approach, but it does shape how we write the final report — factually, without editorialising, leaving the human judgment about consequences to the client rather than the investigator. The freelance marketplace listing in this case was, in the end, the single most important piece of evidence we found, and it took perhaps twenty minutes of searching to locate. It is a reminder that thorough open-source research, done properly and early, very often does most of the work before any more resource-intensive surveillance is even required.
