The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois on behalf of the University of Illinois at Chicago and its Human Resources Department is seeking proposals from qualified firms to provide criminal background, exclusion and sanction check services for the 2-year period July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2009 with the option to renew for 2 additional two-year periods at the same terms and conditions based on satisfactory performance, continuing need and availability of funds.

The due date for this bid is set for Wednesday March 28, 2007

read more »

Users turn to software for storing and retrieving e-mails, instant messages

With its early embrace of Linux and its highly reliable online banking site, KeyBank NA is among the most efficient, cutting-edge banks in the U.S. when it comes to IT — but that wasn’t the case in one area until recently.

When Al Coppolo was asked by lawyers at the KeyCorp operating unit to produce old e-mails for litigation or regulatory compliance, he would have as many as four members of his IT team trudge to an off-site storage facility to retrieve tapes, mount them on servers and painstakingly search for the requested messages.

“It was a completely manual environment,” said Coppolo, executive vice president and director of infrastructure at Cleveland-based KeyBank. “Sometimes we would have to look through copies of the same e-mail on multiple tapes if there were multiple replies.”

The 2007 Ohio Insurance Fraud Seminar will be conducted Thursday, March 15 at Quest Conference Centers, located at 8405 Pulsar Place in Columbus. The hosts are the Ohio Department of Insurance, the Ohio Chapter of the National Society of Professional Insurance Investigators (NSPII), the Ohio Chapter of the Insurance Association of Special Investigation Units (IASIU), and the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB).

Be it a staged accident, a doctor practicing without a license, or a clinic paying for patients, fraud investigation supervisor Blanca Aparicio will uncover the lies.

Philandering spouses, it seems, will go to great lengths to cover their tracks.

As a supervisor in charge of fraud investigations at United Automobile Insurance Group in North Miami Beach, Blanca Aparicio can attest to said lengths. She oversees 35 investigators nationally, with 15 of them in Florida alone.

After one husband reported his car stolen, Aparicio and her team discovered he’d been out for a night with his mistress and had hired someone to ditch his car in a canal after his wife started asking too many questions. The hotel bill, it turned out, was the cheapest tab of the night.

‘’They claim all sorts of crazy stuff,'’ Aparicio said. “Especially after a hurricane.'’

How safe are schools in Southwest Florida? NBC2 sent three investigators, armed with hidden cameras, to Lee, Charlotte and Collier counties to test nine school campuses. What they discovered forced each school district to make changes.

When you send your child to school you have an expectation they are going to be safe. Our test was simple. We walked into each school with a letter to be delivered to the principal that states their school is a part of our investigation. Our mission was not to deceive, but to see what response any outsider would encounter.

Armed with hidden cameras and our letter, three NBC2 investigators simultaneously walked onto elementary, middle, and high school campuses to test school security.

When Laura Carlson graduates this spring with a nursing degree, she’ll likely have to subject herself to an FBI criminal background check before she can get a job in North Dakota. That doesn’t bother the 23-year-old Fargo resident at all.

“I think it’s a good idea, especially in our field,” the North Dakota State University nursing student said. “You have access to narcotics, and you have access to all the personal information in (a patient’s) life.

“Working in a hospital, in a professional atmosphere, they should know about us,” Carlson said.

Fingerprinting and broad criminal background checks are just some of the new requirements proposed for Minnesotans who want to be foster parents.

The changes, part of a $1.2 million-a-year overhaul of the foster parent system, are being proposed partly to comply with federal standards designed to keep sexual offenders from preying on children. Wisconsin would see similar changes.

Background checks are currently done in Minnesota, at the county level. The proposal would have the checks done centrally, through the state. Advocates welcome the change, but warn that computer databanks won’t necessarily protect kids.

Sean Chercover’s Big City, Bad Blood is the best detective novel you will read this year. Chercover delivers the goods - as real, bloody and in-your-face as only a former private eye can.

The author’s very tangible detective, Ray Dudgeon, leaps from the pages, shoves a gun in your face and demands attention. Ray is to crime fiction what Daniel Craig is to James Bond: cocky, unpredictable, tender-hearted, unscrupulous, lean and mean.

Ray’s business and love life are doing just fine -until he meets Bob Loniski. Bob’s a location scout with Continental Pictures in Hollywood. While checking sites for a new action picture in Chicago (Ray’s home turf), Bob and other renters get taken by a dirty landlord who has suspected ties to the Chicago Outfit.

Bob is asked to be a witness for the prosecution. When a fellow renter turns up dead, Bob realizes he needs protection.

Look out for the signs of an emotional affair. Emotional cheating can lead to a traditional affair, so keeping an eye out for the classic signs can help partners outwit pain down the road.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with a friendship. However, friendships do not involve the deception and the type of inappropriate emotional closeness that an emotional affair entails. Despite its name, an emotional affair can involve physical intimacy, although it does not always. What this type of infidelity always dishes out, though is pain: pain caused by a partner who invests more emotionally into another relationship.

Emotional affairs involve someone who builds an inappropriately intimate relationship with someone outside their partnership. This may mean that a husband suddenly starts confiding all his personal and work-related problems to a female co-worker rather than his wife. It could also mean a wife suddenly confiding all her successes and desires to a new male friend rather than her husband. An emotional affair is usually also marked by secrecy – a partner may downplay or outright lie about the amount of time spent with a new partner. Sexual attraction is almost always part of the equation, too, although it is not always acted upon.

read more »

Bail News Roundup - February 19, 2007

The staff at AboutBail.com has been busy looking at the week’s news and has come across a number of interesting and important news stories. The week was full of industry news and even some scandal:

New Orleans Newspapers Reporting on a Wave of Bail Business
Bail bondsmen and criminal attorneys have a busy week, thanks to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. According to bail professionals and attorneys, Carnival time in the Big Easy sees more tourists arrested - often for misdemeanours such as lewdness, public indecency, public drunkenness, and possession of marijuana - and fewer locals being arrested. Some attorneys and bail bondsmen actually leave town at this time of year, since tourists tend to pose a high flight risk, but those who stay report lots of business, according to New Orleans newspapers.

read more »

• Group for Private Investigators
• Group for Process Servers