2025-12-08
33 分钟This is The Guardian.
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In the summer of 2018, the private investigator Simon Davison got a call from a woman who said her ex-boyfriend had stolen £10,000 from her.
Carol, not her real name, a traffic manager at a local council, was not a typical client for Davison.
As the Director of Investigations at Another Day, a crisis consultancy in London, Davison usually works for wary companies and wealthy individuals.
A former police detective, Davison has recovered stolen cryptocurrency, uncovered secret properties owned by bankrupt business people, and tracked down fraudsters to Cyprus.
Davidson's specialty is private prosecutions, a little-known area of law that allows victims to pay for justice.
These cases are heard in the same courts used by the Crown Prosecution Service, CPS, the Public Prosecutor for England and Wales, and they can carry the same amount of prison time for suspects.
We really mirror the process between the police and the CPS, Davidson said.
The difference is that the police are agents of the state, whereas people call on Davison when the state fails to help.
Carol's ex-boyfriend, Jiro Wilson, had persuaded her to lend him money to finance a company he was setting up.
In exchange, Wilson promised her shares in his fledgling firm.
Looking back, I could see how stupid I was to believe him.
Carol later recalled in a witness statement, He would often call me paranoid, and certainly made me feel this way when I suspected he was seeing other women.
One evening, while surreptitiously scrolling through Wilson's phone, she saved the numbers of other women in his address book and began texting them in secret.
To Carol's horror, three women told her that Wilson had also borrowed thousands of pounds from them, too.
Carol set up a WhatsApp group and arranged to meet the women at one of their homes in Exeter.
The four women discovered that each had been duped in the same way.
He was a disgusting narcissist, one of them told me.