The Problem

If you need to find out more information about a person, a client, a company or an organisation you want to deal with, then you generally need to spend a lot of time or money out of all proportion with your need.

Consider a few simple examples :-

• Let's say that an individual wants to spend a couple of hundred pounds buying children's toys from your mail order company. You're suspicious because although the credit card checks and the lady on the phone seems fine, she wants the toys delivered to her grand-children's address in a totally different part of the country.

  Do you accept what she says and break the rule that you must ship goods to the credit card address?

• You are employing a new serviceman for your BMW dealership. The guy seems fine, but his cv is rather thin and he also worked for another dealership since he left school. The trouble is that they went bust about two years ago and since then he has been trying not very successfully to run his own service business.

  Is the man what he seems? Or has he made up a simple fraud that is difficult to check?

• You are a pharmaceutical distributor and suddenly one of your newer customers, who has only spent a few pounds with you before, starts to order products in very large quantities. He assures you that he is in the process of setting up a new venture.

  Is everything as he says? Or are you being setup to be the victim of a long firm style of fraud?

• Do you fully check references when someone applies for a job?

Traditional Methods

Traditional methods take time and sometimes quite a deal of money.

You can phone a credit reference agency, get company registrations and even ask someone to go and look at the premises from where a company operates.

But people are lazy and usually do nothing! They just take a chance!

But then would you spend £ 50 to verify an order for £ 200?

A Tragic Failure

One example shows how this approach can go hideously wrong.

At a village in eastern England a school caretaker was not fully checked. He later murdered two little girls at the school.

In this tragic example, corners were cut, mistakes were made and many simple questions were never asked.

The Daisy MI Alternative

Increasingly the Internet knows more and more about us, even if it is often buried so deep that a simple search will not find it. Try searching for James Miller for instance! There are thousands of them!

But there are also many data providers which provide information. Look at :-

• Postcode Anywhere checks addresses are valid.
• MultiMap draws maps.
• NewsScape obtains the latest news stories.

Daisy MI takes advantage of all of this data to build a useful set of results.

From just a name, company, post code or full address, phone numbers and an E-Mail address, Daisy MI aims to get as much information as possible about an individual, company or organisation.

Daisy MI does not use any private data providers, that are not available to everyone. Postcode Anywhere is the only one for which there is a charge.

Results from Daisy MI

Typical results from Daisy MI include :-

• Full name and address validation.
• Detailed maps of the location.
• Targeted searches using the entered data.
• Phone number checking.
• E-Mail address verification.

On the other hand negative information usually only arises when it is really bad. One example, was an estate agent, who was checking why some properties didn't sell. One rather nice house was only two doors away from someone who was the general secretary of a rather distasteful political party.

But how do these type of results help with the examples given earlier?

• In the mail-order example, if you draw a map of the various addresses, you can see the sort of area, where the delivery is to be made. This in turn will lead to several verification questions, that can be asked.

  Remember that one picture is worth a thousand words.

• Old web pages are still in Google for some time, so the serviceman will probably have a presence on the Internet that a detailed search will find.

• All of the checks would be applied by the distributor, to check that the company is what it is, whether there is any news of it and whether all of the phone numbers, addresses and E-Mail addresses hang together correctly.

  Frauds are often identified, by phone numbers and addresses being miles apart.

• Refences are often faked, but those who write them are people like headmasters and employers, who usually have a presence on the Internet.

  If you can't find them, you must resort to traditional methods. If you do, you'll usually find a phone number or E-Mail address. So contact them!

James Miller - A Personal Experience

James Miller has two different profiles depending on how he is checked :-

1. He is an upright individual, who owns a large mortgage-free stud farm with his wife.

2. There is some dark financial secret in his past.

So this illustrates that traditional methods are not as exact as they would appear. It was also a strong motivation for the writing of Daisy MI.

Getting Started with Daisy MI

See An Example, applications and features for more details on Daisy MI.

It is intended that as more data providers become available, that the scope of Daisy MI will be appropriately increased.

You should also remember that Daisy MI grew out of a simple application, where supplier fraud was being located.