Private Detective Würzburg, Germany | Private Investigator Würzburg –

Kurtz Detective Agency Germany*

Third-Best Detective Agency in Germany in the Wirtschaftswoche Service Provider Ranking

Legally secure commercial and private investigations by IHK-certified specialist detectives in Würzburg. Surveillance and enquiries in cases of infidelity, custody disputes, missing persons, sick-leave fraud, theft, competition infringements and many other matters: +49 911 3782 0154.

Case Example of Our Detectives in Würzburg: Child Maintenance – False Claim of School Attendance

For 21 years Mr Roth (all names changed) paid maintenance for his daughter Caroline Frege from Würzburg, whom he had never seen in person because the child’s mother had refused any contact from birth. When the daughter reached majority, Mr Roth, who lived in Bern, Switzerland, made several postal attempts to make contact, but received no direct reply from his child. Instead, the mother told him that Caroline wanted nothing to do with him. From Mr Roth’s disappointment at this rejection, doubts gradually arose: doubts whether Caroline had ever received his letters; doubts whether she still attended school; doubts whether the monthly maintenance payments even reached her. The mother persistently claimed that Caroline, now 22, still attended a school, lived in the mother’s flat, had no regular income and no own bank account, which was why maintenance was always paid into the mother’s account. The assertion about the bank account seemed peculiar to Mr Roth, since virtually every adult in Germany has their own account.

Because of these questionable points he decided to seek the advice and services of our experienced detective agency in Würzburg. By conducting surveillance of the daughter we were to examine whether the mother’s maintenance statements were correct or whether this was a case of maintenance fraud.

Waiting for Caro – No Sign of the Target

The first three surveillance days of our detectives in Würzburg were overshadowed by a significant problem: neither the target person Caroline Frege nor her mother appeared at their registered and alleged residential address. Instead, investigators repeatedly recognised an elderly woman (about 80 years or older) at the windows of the relevant flat in the apartment building. Although the surname of mother and daughter appeared on the doorbell and the letterbox, this could have been a deliberate deception to misuse the address as a postal delivery address. The investigators therefore suspected that the target did not actually live at that address — on the one hand good for Mr Roth, since his doubts about the mother’s honesty gained new grounds, on the other hand problematic, because without a known place of residence the daughter could not be included in the surveillance.

To gather new clues at Caroline’s alleged training location, our two-person detective team in Würzburg split up on the third day: one observer remained at the known address, the other went to the school. Yet the daughter did not appear there either and no indications of her whereabouts could be gathered. The mother did appear during the day at the known address, entered the building with her own key, spent a good half hour inside, returned with several letters in her hand and drove off again. Our private detectives followed her, but she parked in an underground garage belonging to an extensive building complex with countless house numbers and far more tenants. As she must have left the garage by an underground access, our investigators could not determine which area of the complex she subsequently entered. Although they checked all nameplates at the end of the operation, the mother’s name was not found on any of them.

New Address = New Chance for Our Detectives in Würzburg

In consultation with Mr Roth a fourth surveillance attempt was to be made at the known address — not at the newly identified but hard-to-control building complex. If Caroline again failed to appear, further observation measures would have to wait for the results of a parallel initiated address enquiry. In the early afternoon — shortly before the planned end of surveillance — the target actually came running down the street towards the alleged address. She did not enter the building with her own key but rang at her supposed flat and was admitted. Later Caroline left the house in the company of the elderly woman who had been repeatedly seen at the windows of the relevant flat. Both women travelled by public transport to a kindergarten and took part in a St Martin’s procession, without any direct connection of either to one of the children being recognisable. Afterwards the target returned the elderly woman home and, after a short stay in the flat, travelled by bus to another Würzburg address where she also spent the night. Her name was unfortunately not on the doorbell, but there was a “WG A.R., C.F., K.R.” — possibly an indication of a shared flat with Caroline Frege (C.F.) as a flatmate.

With alternating observers the surveillance by our detective agency was continued well into the following day, since the chance had finally arisen to examine whether the target

• attended the school,
• engaged in gainful employment,
• actually lived at the new address,
• lived together with her mother.

The only problem: the following day was a Saturday.

Sparse Events but Insightful

The target was thus finally recorded. To avoid squandering this opportunity for the sake of economy (see our detective fees) and to ensure that Caroline indeed lived at the new address, the surveillance was to be continued on Saturday in agreement with Mr Roth. As expected, the target did not go to school that day nor did she engage in paid work. Instead she spent a few hours shopping in the city centre, ate a kebab and withdrew to the new accommodation for the rest of that unpleasant November day. Although not many activities, the day nevertheless gave our private detectives in Würzburg insight into two important points:

Firstly, the probability that Caroline would live there permanently had increased, since she returned to that address in the evening and secondly her full surname was found on the internal letterbox plate of the shared flat (our investigators had been unable to check the inside letterbox the previous day due to the lateness of the hour). Secondly, Caroline had withdrawn money from a Sparkasse cashpoint with a bank card, proving that she at least had control over an account and most likely even her own account. The two newly identified addresses of mother and daughter strongly suggested that they did not, as the client had been told, live together. Thus they were separate households that certainly did not operate on the same bank account.

Breach of the Duty to Disclose

In the following weeks our private detectives in Würzburg repeatedly carried out spot daytime observations on different weekdays. It gradually became clear that the target

• indeed lived permanently at the new address,
• regularly visited the original surveillance object in order to see the elderly woman,
• did attend school, but only two out of five weekdays,
• on the other three weekdays worked as an apprentice in a service company.

The mother never once appeared at Caroline’s new address.

According to applicable German case law, income generated by the child from gainful employment is to be offset against maintenance entitlement — even when it is income from vocational training. Thus Caroline’s employment led to a reduction, if not even the elimination, of the maintenance entitlement (depending on the level of the apprenticeship pay). The commencement of employment and the amount of remuneration would have had to be disclosed to the maintenance payer, Mr Roth. If the omission had been intentional, it would have constituted a case of fraud. To clarify the question of intent and also to shed light on the question of culpability (mother, daughter or both?), our detective agency in Würzburg undertook two further measures.

A Clarifying Conversation Between the Detectives and the Target

After the surveillance measures were concluded, an investigator obtained a school certificate for the target by virtue of the client’s power of attorney. The certificate did indeed confirm pupil status — in a part-time/dual system — but gave no information as to whether Caroline actually attended lessons to the required extent. More important, however: according to the certificate the target had held this status for more than two years. The last time the mother had confirmed the daughter’s pupil status and explicitly stated that Caroline generated no income was less than one year ago. Intent was therefore present and an “inadvertent forgetting” to pass on information to the maintenance payer was excluded.

Since Mr Roth, as mentioned at the outset, suspected that his letters had never reached the daughter, he was strongly inclined from afar to place the blame with the mother. He therefore instructed our investigators to speak with his daughter about the overall problem. The results of the conversation, briefly summarised:

1. Caroline had never been aware of the contact attempts by her father.

2. Her relationship with her mother had been fractured for years. They had not lived together since Caroline was 17.

3. Caroline received no financial support from her mother and thus not the father’s maintenance payments.

4. As Caroline received sufficient apprenticeship pay and had generated income from work since turning 18, she would in any case no longer have been entitled to maintenance.

5. She of course had her own bank account.

6. The woman frequently seen at the original address was her grandmother.

7. She would very much like to meet her father and therefore accepted his telephone number.

With that the case for our detectives in Würzburg was closed. Subsequently we learned that personal meetings and a clear rapprochement between father and daughter had taken place. Moreover, to our latest knowledge Mr Roth was in advanced, lawyer-handled negotiations regarding the repayment of the maintenance payments unduly collected by the mother over the years and concerning the detective costs thereby incurred.

Examples of Deployment Locations of Our Detectives in the Würzburg District:

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• Detective Agency for Estenfeld
• Detective Agency for Gerbrunn
• Detective Agency for Giebelstadt
• Detective Agency for Güntersleben
• Detective Agency for Höchberg
• Detective Agency for Kürnach
• Detective Agency for Ochsenfurt
• Detective Agency for Reichenberg
• Detective Agency for Rimpar
• Detective Agency for Rottendorf
• Detective Agency for Veitshöchheim
• Detective Agency for Waldbüttelbrunn
• Detective Agency for Zell on the Main
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