Every environment hides devices differently.

Corporate eavesdropping is rarely a spy in a trench coat. It is a supplier who knows your ceiling price, a competitor whose bid lands four hundred dollars under yours, a strategy that leaks the week after it was discussed. By the time the pattern is obvious, the damage is in the accounts.

A counter-surveillance technician working a commercial space has to understand the equipment used against it: room transmitters, hook-switch bypasses on desk phones, taps on data lines, recorders left in ceiling voids, and conferencing hardware that was never configured to stop listening. We examine all of it — the radio spectrum, the wiring, the furniture and the fabric of the room.

We work outside business hours by default. Staff arrive to a room that looks exactly as they left it.

If you believe you are being listened to or watched in your own home, the single most valuable thing we can give you is a definite answer. Either there is something there, in which case you need to know what it is and what it has been doing, or there is nothing there, in which case you can stop turning the question over every night.

Homeowners and renters alike are exposed. Access is the whole game: a contractor, a cleaner, a landlord, a former partner who still knows the door code, a house guest, a relative. Devices we recover from residences most often sit in bedrooms, home offices and family rooms — the places where private conversations actually happen.

We are quiet and we are respectful of the house. We photograph anything we move so that it goes back exactly as it was. Neighbours see nothing out of the ordinary.

A vehicle is the easiest thing you own to place a device on, because it spends its life parked in public. Modern trackers are magnetic, battery-powered, weatherproof and small enough to sit inside a wheel arch for weeks. The better ones report only in short bursts, precisely so that a hand-held detector waved around the car finds nothing.

We examine the vehicle properly: the undercarriage, the bumpers and wheel arches, the interior trim, the OBD-II port, the battery compartment, and the cabin itself for microphones. Hard-wired trackers spliced into the loom behave differently to magnetic ones and are found differently.

We also sweep fleets. If a driver is being followed, or a delivery route keeps being anticipated, the vehicle is the first place to look.

A private cabin is where people speak most freely, which is exactly what makes it a target. It is also serviced, cleaned, catered, maintained and chartered by a long list of people, most of whom the principal has never met.

Aircraft and vessels bring their own problems. They are dense with electronics that legitimately transmit, so distinguishing a hostile device from an avionics bus or a satellite terminal takes an instrument capable of resolving the difference, and a technician who understands the platform.

We sweep cabins, galleys, staterooms, heads, crew areas and cockpit surrounds, and we work around your schedule — on the ground between legs, or dockside.

Covert cameras are now smaller than a shirt button, run for months on a battery, and are sold openly inside working smoke detectors, USB chargers, clocks, picture frames and air fresheners. Many store to a card and never transmit anything at all, which means there is no signal to detect and no shortcut to finding them.

Finding them is therefore a physical discipline as much as an electronic one: optical detection of the lens itself, infrared examination, non-linear junction detection to reveal electronics inside objects that should not contain any, and a disciplined inch-by-inch search along the sightlines that matter.

We sweep short-term rentals and hotel suites for travelling clients, and we treat this work with the seriousness it deserves. Discovering a camera in a private space is distressing, and how the evidence is handled in the first hour matters a great deal afterwards.

A compromised telephone beats every hidden microphone ever made. It has a microphone, a camera, a location feed and a data connection, it goes everywhere you go, and you charge it yourself every night.

Commercial stalkerware is cheap and openly marketed, usually to partners and parents. It normally requires a few minutes of physical access and knowledge of the passcode — which is exactly the position a former partner, a family member or a colleague is in.

We examine the handset for configuration profiles, device-administrator privileges, hidden or disguised applications, abnormal battery and data behaviour, account and backup access from devices you do not recognise, and call or message forwarding you did not set up.

Stalking cases are rarely only technical. There is usually a person behind them, a history, and often a court file. What we contribute is the evidence: establishing whether tracking or eavesdropping is actually taking place, documenting it in a form an attorney or a detective can use, and closing the routes being exploited.

Because Special Solutions, Ltd. is a full private detective agency, the technical sweep does not have to stand alone. Threat assessment, surveillance, background investigation and executive protection sit in the same building, under the same case.

We also perform non-invasive electronic body scans for clients who believe they are subject to implanted tracking devices. We are not medical professionals and we make no medical claims of any kind. What we do is pass calibrated detection equipment over a person to establish whether it registers an electronic emission or a non-linear junction. The scan is harmless, and the answer is very often that nothing is detected — which is an answer worth having.

Every device we have ever recovered got there because somebody was able to be alone in the room. Sweeping without fixing the access is buying an answer with a short shelf life.

An assessment walks the site the way an intruder would: how doors are actually used as opposed to how they were designed, who holds keys and cards and whether anyone reviews the logs, how cleaners and contractors are escorted, where the unwatched approaches are, and which rooms deserve to be treated as secure and are not.

You get a prioritised list — what to fix this week, this quarter, and at the next lease renewal — with costs attached, written in plain English rather than in vendor language.