Ask most people what a private investigator does, and they'll describe one narrow slice of the job, usually something to do with a suspicious partner. The reality is a much wider set of services, covering personal situations, business risk, legal disputes, and insurance claims. Here's the full range, laid out clearly, so you know exactly what's actually available before you decide what you need.
Not every firm offers all eight of these, and that's worth knowing going in. A few, particularly loss adjustment paired with investigation, only show up together at firms built specifically around both disciplines.
Matrimonial and personal investigations
This is the most requested service, and it covers surveillance to confirm or rule out suspected infidelity, background checks on someone a client is planning to marry or enter a serious relationship with, and general fact-finding around a personal situation that's become impossible to resolve through conversation alone.
The work here relies on lawful surveillance and documented observation, never illegal methods like phone tapping or message interception, and typically produces dated findings that either confirm a suspicion, rule it out, or give a client the clarity to make a real decision either way.
Discretion matters more in this category than almost any other, since the outcome often shapes an ongoing personal relationship regardless of what the findings turn out to be.
Employee and pre-employment background checks
Before someone gets access to cash, stock, or company systems, a background check verifies what a CV and interview can't: employment history, education claims, and any legally accessible criminal record. This applies just as much to executive-level hires, where the stakes of getting it wrong are considerably higher, as it does to general staff.
Businesses working through agents or wakala often extend this same verification to anyone handling stock or payments on the company's behalf, since the financial exposure is functionally the same regardless of formal employment status.
This service usually takes days rather than weeks, which makes it one of the easiest to build into a standard hiring process rather than treating as an occasional, exceptional step.
Business due diligence
Before signing a partnership agreement, bringing on an investor, or extending credit to a new distributor, due diligence verifies the real story behind a pitch: actual company registration and financial standing, past business dealings, and reputation among people who've genuinely worked with them before.
This service exists specifically to catch the gap between how confident someone sounds in a meeting and what's actually true about their business, capital, or track record, before that gap becomes an expensive problem to untangle after money has already changed hands.
Larger, more complex deals sometimes need this to run alongside legal review, but the investigative side, verifying the facts a lawyer's document review can't reach, remains a distinct and necessary piece on its own.
Corporate and internal fraud investigations
For businesses already dealing with a suspected problem, stock that keeps coming up short, financial discrepancies with the same explanation every month, or a workplace conflict that needs an independent, credible process, this service establishes what's actually happening and who's responsible.
This covers procurement fraud, payroll irregularities, inventory theft, workplace misconduct investigations, and conflicts of interest, gathering evidence quietly enough that the person involved doesn't get a chance to cover their tracks before the business has enough to act on.
This service also extends to structural work: reviewing where a business's controls are weakest, even before anything specific is suspected, since spotting the gap ahead of time is considerably cheaper than investigating what happened after someone's already exploited it.
Insurance claims investigation
This service works both directions. Insurers commission it to verify a claim before paying out, particularly when something about a reported motor, fire, or cargo loss doesn't quite add up. Policyholders and businesses commission it themselves when a legitimate claim feels unfairly delayed or undervalued, and they want independent, documented facts to support their case.
Either way, the goal is establishing what actually happened, through site visits, documentation review, and witness interviews, so a claim can be settled based on evidence rather than dragging on in disagreement.
This category benefits enormously from speed. A claim investigated early tends to resolve faster and more fairly than one that's already hardened into a prolonged dispute between two sides who've stopped listening to each other.
Loss adjustment
This service sits alongside investigation rather than inside it, but it's closely connected and often needed by the same clients. Loss adjustment covers the technical side of an insurance claim, assessing the cause of a loss, calculating what it's actually worth under the specific policy's terms, and producing the report an insurer bases a payout decision on.
Having loss adjustment and investigation under one roof matters most on complicated or disputed claims, where establishing the facts and calculating a fair valuation are both needed, without the delay of coordinating between two separate firms who each only see half the picture.
This service applies across motor, property, business interruption, and cargo claims, each requiring slightly different valuation expertise depending on what was actually lost and how a specific policy calculates it.
Asset and skip tracing
When a business partner disappears after taking a deposit, a debtor stops answering, a family member has lost contact, or hidden assets need to be identified as part of a divorce or inheritance matter, this service locates the person or asset in question and supports whatever recovery or legal action follows.
Regional reach matters considerably here, since the person or asset being traced rarely stays conveniently within one city, and speed matters just as much, since a trail that's easy to follow gets considerably harder to trace with every month that passes.
This service often supports a broader legal or recovery process rather than standing entirely on its own, feeding directly into whatever action follows, a debt claim, a legal filing, or simply reconnecting with someone who'd been out of reach.
Litigation and legal evidence support
This service applies whenever findings need to hold up formally, in a divorce proceeding, a custody dispute, an inheritance case, or a contract disagreement heading toward legal action. It requires evidence gathered and documented to a standard that a lawyer can actually use, dated findings, witness statements, and verified records rather than an informal account.
People often don't think to bring in an investigator for this until a lawyer suggests it partway through a dispute, when earlier, properly documented evidence would have strengthened the case considerably more than reconstructing events after the fact.
This is arguably the highest-stakes service on this list, since the standard for what counts as usable evidence is set by whoever eventually reviews it, a court, a tribunal, an opposing lawyer, not by the client requesting the investigation.
Frequently asked questions
No, a clear description of your situation is enough. Part of an initial consultation is helping translate a general concern into the right service category and scope, rather than expecting you to arrive with that already figured out, since the eight categories above sometimes overlap in ways that aren't obvious from the outside.
Often, yes, particularly when situations overlap. A disputed insurance claim might need both investigation and loss adjustment. A business partnership gone wrong might involve due diligence gaps and eventual legal evidence needs. A firm covering multiple service categories can handle this without passing you between separate providers who each only have visibility into part of the situation.
Not every investigator offers it, since it's technically a distinct, separately regulated service. Firms that do offer both tend to handle insurance-related cases particularly well, since claims investigation and loss adjustment overlap heavily in practice, verifying facts and calculating a fair valuation are often needed together, not separately.
Most situations map fairly clearly once described plainly: a relationship concern is matrimonial investigation, a new hire or partner needs vetting or due diligence, a disputed claim needs claims investigation or loss adjustment, a missing person or asset needs tracing. If your situation genuinely spans more than one, that's worth mentioning upfront so the scope gets set correctly from the start.
Private investigation and loss adjustment both fall under the Tanzania Insurance Regulatory Authority's registration framework, alongside brokers, agents, and claims settling agents. Confirming a firm's registration is a reasonable, practical check regardless of which specific service you need, since the underlying legitimacy standard doesn't really change between categories.
Describe it as fully as you can in an initial conversation anyway. Real situations often blend elements of due diligence, fraud, and legal risk together, and a firm covering the full range of services is better positioned to see the whole picture rather than force your case into a single narrow box.
Whichever of these eight services matches your situation, the underlying goal is the same: replacing uncertainty with documented facts you can actually act on. FP Adjusters offers the complete range above across Tanzania and East Africa, under one roof.
Not Sure Which Service Fits?
Describe your situation and we'll help you scope it, whether it's one of these eight services or a mix of several.
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