The founders of a company that carries out security checks across the world talk to Simon Cronin about their fascinating work.
Con artists and other criminals have much to fear from new Chamber member Spyrian. Founded by David Downing and Tristan Johns, the company carries out background checks on businesses and individuals on behalf of a wide range of clients. Over the years the dedicated detecting duo have uncovered everything from a murderer turned drug-dealer to companies evading sanctions and debtors with hidden assets.
David and Tristan first met at university where they found they had a shared interest in intelligence and investigations. After graduating, they both worked separately in the security and intelligence business before deciding to join forces nearly three years ago.
“We were both doing due diligence on the side and we sort of had a gentleman's agreement for several years that one of us would help the other out if they needed assistance on a case or an investigation,” David says, “We were working pretty closely together and burden sharing. We decided to formalise the arrangement and see how it went.”
Although David and Tristan are based on the South Coast and in London respectively, the fact they already had links with the University of Salford and several Manchester-based clients led to them to join Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce earlier this year to grow their business locally.
Searching the Records
A client may hire Spyrian because they have some concern about someone they are planning to do business with but it can also involve more routine work such as carrying out background checks on company directors to meet the requirements for listing on the Stock Exchange.
Explaining how Spyrian carries out its investigations, Tristan says: “It’s simultaneously quite a simple offering, but also quite broad. It's simple in so far as we do open source and sometimes non-open source research into a question that the client has. If somebody has a question and they want it answered, we can try and find the answer.
“This could involve investigations; it could involve background checks into an individual or a company. We could find that a company is trying to circumvent sanctions on Russia or that someone has been involved in multiple bankruptcies. We’ve found that people are trying to hire someone who turns out to have a false identity and a criminal record.”
Spyrian can also look at potential threats a company might face from activists or the risks of setting up a branch in an unstable country.
Tristan adds: “If activists are targeting the company, we can look into the activist groups and see what they're planning and how it might affect the company or things like security and travel intelligence or setting up an office abroad in a hostile country and the threats around doing that.”
David says: “We will go into things like court proceedings in different jurisdictions as well. We don't just look in the UK so different jurisdictions have different policies on sort of open data and transparency and what you can and can't find. In certain countries, we've been able to use mortgage records to piece things together, even marriage break-ups. On a particular mortgage deed you know that it was a Mister and a Miss with two different names but on another deed there was one name, so there’s a timeline where a marriage may have taken place.”
The Word on the Street
Sometimes a client will want to know the gossip about a certain individual, not just what appears on the official record, which is where Spyrian draws on an extensive network of contacts across the globe.
“We have a growing network of trusted contacts - journalists in Africa, for instance, and various other people around the world,” David says, “We ask them ‘What’s the speculation on the ground?’ ‘What have you heard?’ Because we're not finding anything online or there’s very little online. We can reach out to these contacts for information and then incorporate that into the report if necessary.”
“We don't sensationalise and we only report what we find out, or what we are told, as it is,” Tristan adds.
Criminal Pasts
Sometimes they have found out some hair-raising information about an individual and saved a client from doing business with a dangerous criminal.
Tristan says: “There was one case I did a while ago where it turned out the person had killed somebody in the US, changed their name, went to Spain and ran a drug operation, were chased by Interpol and then fled. They had disappeared for 10 years and then appeared with a Russian-backed deal in a different country. And the client didn't know any of that!
“That’s a more extreme example, but that's something we've directly done. We do a lot of asset tracing for clients who are debt-collecting. We try to find out if someone has a super yacht or a hidden house that they're not declaring.”
David adds: “Quite often the initial person we're investigating might seem OK, but then you look at their friends or business acquaintances and there's 15 companies that they are involved with, all of which have been breaking various criminal laws somewhere in the world. So technically they might be clean but the company they keep raises a lot of questions.
“Another common thing we’ve found is companies which have been engaging in sanctions busting or sanctions evasion in recent years. They’re a normal, upstanding company, but when look a bit more closely, as we’re paid to do, you find they're trading with entities whom it is technically against international law to be trading with, so maybe your client won’t want to do business with these people any further. You're saving these companies a lot of money because otherwise they could be dealing with people who turn out to be very dodgy and either cheat them or there'll be a legal problem because of the sanctions.”
Spyrian has also dealt with high-profile cases in the world of sport, where the owners of a football and Formula 1 teams have thought an employee was leaking negative stories to the media. After analysing hundreds of articles and tweets, looking for the source of the leaks, they found there was no pattern the stories were gossip and speculation dressed up as inside information.
Final Report
It is very rare that Spyrian can’t find any information on a person and their expertise is such that other investigators have called on them when their own enquiries have drawn a blank.
David says: “Another security and investigations company came to us saying they couldn't find anything, and they’d been trying for many days. They didn’t think we’d find anything, but they asked us to have a go as a final check as their client was very determined. It took us probably three or four days, but we managed to get the information they wanted and there was quite a ‘Hallelujah!’ moment when we cracked that one.”
Tristan adds: “It was an individual who was posting comments on LinkedIn and they thought it was a fake account and a fake person, a fake name. But it turned out it was a real person who had been using an alias. We managed to do some interesting network association to find out the actual person and all their accounts.”
Full reports by Spyrian can take between five and seven working days and will cover every jurisdiction that an individual has a working relationship with, but reports can be done quicker if the client is only interested in what a person has done in one country.
If you think your business could benefit from the investigative skills of Spyrian, you can make contact at https://www.spyrian.co.uk or via Ddowning@spyrian.co.uk and Tjohns@spyrian.co.uk.