Detective Agencies use Spycams to catch adulterers and frauds
   - By Ambereen Alishah, The Telegraph

NEW DELHI March 25: It is not the Bangaru Laxmans alone who need to be a little more careful while stashing away ill-gotten cash into their desk drawers. Two-timing husbands or wives had better watch out for the secret eyes of the spycam too. Look what happened to a Bollywood actor who chose to have his fling in Delhi and thought his wife wasn't smart enough to catch on. Suspicious of her husband's frequent trips to the capital, she hired Lancers Network Ltd. to spy on him. After tailing him closely, the detective agency discovered a pattern to the actor's movements in Delhi.

He would check into a five-star hotel, which he would leave in a black Mercedes and stop by at a friend's house at New Friends Colony. There he would change his car and drive down south to another friend's house at Green Park. A white car would come at a particular time and whisk the actor away to a farmhouse near the Delhi border for the rendezvous with his girlfriend. The private eyes followed the girl, too, and found out that she would visit the actor at the hotel, too. The agency hired a suite adjacent to the actor's. Enter the spycams now, taking up places in the doorway facing the actor's suite. It didn't take much to find out that the girl would enter the suite from the lobby; but leave by the bedroom door.

"We made a complete video movie and gave it to the actor's wife. But I must say the actor was very smart because we took quite some time to figure out where he was going," said Kunwar Vikram Singh, managing director of Lancers, looking quite like the moustachioed Hercule Poirot, the detective in many Agatha Christie novels. For those that are anxious to know what happened to the husband after the wife ran the video for him, as in an Agatha Christie novel, you'll have to live with your curiosity: Singh isn't telling.

Tehelka has shaken up the government with its spycam revelations, but detective agencies have been using the gadget - shaking or breaking families - for their undercover operations for quite some time. The actor, for instance, was caught with his pants down as many as four years ago. Singh has used gadgets like still and video cameras and audiotapes to solve a whole range of cases from extra-marital relationships to fraudulent claims on insurance companies.

"Anything that produces conclusive evidence, be it a tape or a camera that helps in nabbing the culprit by unearthing the truth is valid," Singh said. It's not always that the detective agency is asked to do the job either. Suspecting his wife of adultery, a man went to a detective agency asking for tips on using the spycam.

When his wife was not around and he had the flat to himself, he placed the camera on an elevated platform near the bed and found… Spycam catches adulterers. These dangerous - depending on how they're used - contraptions come really tiny, as a lighter, a pen or even a bookmark.

Nothing to match what a non-resident Indian from Canada tried though. On a short trip to India, his wife fell ill and died. A death certificate was issued and friends informed of her demise. A few weeks later, a Canadian Insurance Company asked Lancers Network to prone the death. With a spycam smuggled into the NRI's house in India, it soon had pictures of the wife drinking water and reading a magazine. The man was trying to cheat the insurance company, but got caught. Just like the actor or Bangaru. No one is safe from the spycam.

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