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Chris Salgado (PS ’11) often says there are only two good ways for a private investigator to conduct an investigation.

“Be a ghost, or have a reason to be there,” says Salgado, who has spent decades being both.

Salgado has gone from being a naive young man who answered a law firm’s newspaper ad, to a global investigator at Facebook, to the owner of a private investigative firm that specializes in discrete “reputation management" of wealthy clients being threatened by online malfeasance. The lead trade publication of his industry, PI Magazine, has ranked Salgado as a top investigator.

“Online criminals hate him,” says William Mansfield, an Indianapolis-based intellectual property attorney who has worked on several cases with Salgado. “He is incredibly good at figuring out and absolutely demolishing online scams and illegal activities. They don’t maybe know his name, which is a very good thing—but they hate him.  

“And in this industry, you’re better known by your enemies than your friends.”

After 24 years in the industry, Salgado doesn’t share the details of what he’s witnessed—including things on the dark web that would chill your bones—with his family. But he tells them, whether they’re in the digital or physical world, to always be aware of their surroundings—and never, ever give more information to strangers than they have to.

“You don’t know what you don’t know,” Salgado says. “The day you think you know it all is the day you shoot yourself in the foot.”

**

There was a time when Salgado didn’t know as much.

After growing up in Chicago, he worked different entry-level jobs after high school, from fast food joints to the counter at a movie theater.

Then he answered an ad for a customer service manager at a Chicagoland law firm. During the interview, it came out that he had an interest in law, so they instead offered him a job doing background checks for a subsidiary business.

After one background check turned up a murder warrant, he learned to take the mantra “you don’t know what you don’t know” as gospel truth.  

After a couple years of learning to trust subjects less and less, Salgado went on to work at several private investigative agencies in Chicago, trying his hand at surveillance.  

It seemed like he’d found his niche.

“I liked it because it got me into being covert, and it was fun being covert. Somebody’s walking their dog, and they have no sense of your existence whatsoever. Growing up, I was in martial arts, and I loved ninjas. So it put me in the field as a professional ninja, and I soaked it up,” Salgado says.  

When you’re trying not to be noticed, Salgado repeats his mantra: you can be a ghost, or you can have a reason to be there. Meaning you could sit in a car—always the backset, never the front, like in the movies—or get a good disguise.

“I’ve dressed up in a lot of different outfits. Landscaper, delivery personnel, businessman,” Salgado says.  

Salgado’s stats grew to be impressive. Of the 15 years he did surveillance, he was only “burned”—the industry term for being noticed by a subject—three times.

But since he didn’t have a degree, he was passed over for director positions or other types of advancement. So he enrolled at ������ƵAPP to get his bachelor’s degree.

After graduation, he was hired at a major private investigative firm—which he requested not be identified—as a trainer, creating a 40-hour course from scratch for new investigators. He then became a director managing 400 investigators across the globe and picked up more skills in online investigations.  

After becoming acclimated to open-source investigations—cases involving online information virtually anyone can access—he gained access to tools that allowed him to aggressively dig into the “deep web”: information hidden behind passwords and paywalls.

It was also his first brush with the “dark web”—that 1 percent of the internet initially rolled out as a communication system for United States intelligence operatives and government agencies that eventually was overtaken by bad actors. It was a place where those looking to buy such things as guns, drugs, or hitmen could communicate anonymously—while also being a place where browsing could quickly make you a target.

“If you don’t know what you’re doing on the dark web, you can get in real trouble. There are websites on the dark web that if you just visit it, you’re committing a crime, such as pedophile sites,” Salgado says.  

“That’s not talking about the trolls that will intercept you,” he adds. “If you stumble across a hacker’s site, they’re watching their logs, and they can jump on you. And now you’ve got a vicious hacker troll that can follow you.”

In 2016, Pinkerton, a global detective agency, reached out to Salgado as a contractor of Facebook, which was looking to build up its global investigations division. Salgado, who was later hired as a full-time employee at Facebook, helped to build a company team that handled insider threats, data center investigations, supply chain investigations and threat management, at large.  

Rather than fight cybercrime, the team handled physical investigations, identifying and locating individuals of interest in the real world. Salgado—one of the team’s senior members—also built an investigations center that supported other investigative teams across the globe.

After approximately three years, Salgado created his own agency, All Points Investigations, LLC., which specializes in cyberstalking, physical stalking, intellectual property theft, cryptocurrency and romance scams, reputation management, and cult investigations. He also founded an AARP-sponsored annual event in Orlando, Florida, called Antihackathon, for those wanting to learn to protect themselves online. And he has created a training he developed called AGGOSO (short for aggressive open-source intelligence operations) for law enforcement agencies and private investigators. He has also presented to the FBI, ICE, DEA, Interpol, and Europol.  

The training teaches investigators how to gain information through open-source domains—but also how to safeguard themselves. One quick tip he emphasizes: when investigating, use an independent, sequestered computer that you don’t even Google movie times on, much less sign into an email.

“You have to treat every case like you’re dealing with someone really, really angry and capable of hurting you,” Salgado says.

One operation that Salgado tackled, without revealing details, involved a wealthy individual who was being targeted online by what he thought were two to four individuals. It turned out to be 12, led by a person in prison calling the shots from a cell phone.  

Another involved a Fortune 500 entertainment company whose content was being stolen and pirated by an experienced hacker—someone who constantly recycled his online profile and changed his online behaviors, such as login times and locations, to throw off behavior analysis. The hacker used different false identities or “proxies,” had partners posing as and assisting him, and even presented a red herring identity to throw off investigators.  

Salgado was able to track him down.

“The understanding of how to build an investigation and structure it—and add in on a deep level all that’s going on online—that’s a really powerful combination,” notes Mansfield. “You look at [Salgado] from the outside and he’s a random normal guy. So much of his type of work happens out of view, and that’s where an industry reputation is so important.” —Tad Vezner