How to use Make.com for Private Investigator

You spend hours manually scraping public records and social media for a subject, wasting time you should be spending in the field on surveillance.

💡 Why This Actually Matters

The initial OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) phase of an investigation is incredibly tedious. You are essentially doing high-level data entry—running a subject's name through half a dozen different paid databases just to build a baseline profile before you even hit the streets.

Make.com acts as your automated junior analyst. The moment you open a new case file, it instantly hits your trusted data APIs in the background, pulls all associated phone numbers, addresses, and social handles, and compiles a clean, readable dossier. It compresses 3 hours of manual clicking into 3 seconds of automated API calls.

The Blueprint

🕵️‍♂️ Trigger: New case file created in your CRM with the subject's name and known email.
🌐 Action: Trigger a series of HTTP requests to public data broker APIs (like Pipl or clearbit).
📄 Action: Aggregate the returned data and automatically append a comprehensive dossier document to the case file.

The Digital Dragnet

Architecture Map

This is the high-level structural flow of your automation. Build this sequence in Make.com:

CRM (New Record) -> HTTP Request (Data API) -> Tool: Text Aggregator -> Google Docs (Create Document from Text)

🛠️ Actionable Toolkit: Setup Guide

Follow these exact steps to implement this blueprint in Make.com:

Create a Make.com scenario triggered by a new record in your case management CRM.

Add HTTP modules for the specific data broker APIs you subscribe to.

In the Text Aggregator module, paste the exact Markdown payload below. It loops through the complex JSON arrays and formats it perfectly for Google Docs.

Power Snippet

### Subject Dossier
**Name:** {{1.person.names[0].display}}
**Primary Email:** {{1.person.emails[0].address}}
**Known Addresses:**
{{#each 1.person.addresses}}
- {{this.display}}
{{/each}}
**Social Profiles:**
{{#each 1.person.urls}}
- [{{this.domain}}]({{this.url}})
{{/each}}

Connect Google Docs or Word to generate the final dossier and attach the link back to your CRM.