Neil Smith

During the 1980s and '90s, Neil served for over 10 years as a police officer in the UK police force in a number of different roles including spending time in uniform, as an authorised firearms officer, on the force drug squad and on a divisional burglary squad, before spending the last two years of his service investigating vehicle-related crimes in Bristol, before being pensioned out early from the police as a result of suffering a number of injuries whilst on duty. After a short break, he then spent the next few years working as a fraud investigator for insurance companies, working around the UK and into Europe and then as a counter-fraud specialist in a UK government department. He had already been using the internet as an investigative tool in his fraud investigations since the late 1990s and then in around 2004 he was introduced to the term Open Source Intelligence and was asked to start training people, mostly involved in law enforcement and investigations, in the techniques that he had been using in his own investigations over the last few years. His OSINT training has taken him all around the world, including many places in Europe, as well as to Australia and Japan, Mexico and the Middle East. In 2016, he helped form Qwarie with a business partner to build on what he was doing previously with his own small company but in a larger more international company, offering OSINT research and training to more clients around the world, with a team of in-house researchers and trainers, however, he left Qwarie after a few years to help create Locate, with the aim of training volunteers to use OSINT skills to assist the police and families in helping trace missing people.