-- The conversation a competitor most wants to hear is usually spoken out loud, in a boardroom, a hotel suite or the back seat of a company car. Kimmons Investigative Services has spent more than four decades checking those places for devices that record it, and the Houston firm's results suggest the room itself is still one of the easiest ways into a company's secrets.
Rob Kimmons, the firm's president, is a former Houston police officer who has worked as a private investigator since 1981. His firm handles background checks, due diligence, and corporate fraud cases, but the work that sets it apart is technical surveillance countermeasures, the trade name for searching a space for hidden microphones, cameras, and trackers. In the industry, it is called TSCM. Most people know it as a bug sweep.
Photo by Robbie Kimmons
A Tap on the Chief Executive's Phone
One of the firm's published case studies starts with a single suspicious employee at a major energy company with operations worldwide. The employee raised a concern, and the Kimmons team swept the offices. They found a tap on the chief executive's phone, wired so that any of his calls could be recorded without his knowledge.
Removing the device closed the gap. The firm then carried out interviews to establish how the tap had been installed and what information might have been exposed.
In oil and gas exploration, seismic surveys and geological studies help decide where a company drills, so a tap in an exploration company’s executive offices puts commercially sensitive information at risk. In this case, the problem came to light because one employee spoke up and an investigator then checked the phone on the chief executive’s desk.
What the Sweeps Turn Up
Kimmons said in a 2021 podcast with the security platform Ontic that his firm carries out between 75 and 100 sweeps a year. In about 5 to 6 percent of the firm's sweeps, the team finds a listening or video device. Vehicle trackers turn up more often, in about 12 percent.
Put plainly, roughly one sweep in eighteen finds a device someone placed on purpose to listen or watch. Roughly one in eight finds a tracker.
The hardware has changed in ways that make it easier to plant. Kimmons mentioned that car trackers once came in a unit about the size of a VHS tape. Today a decent one is about a quarter of the size of a pack of cigarettes and costs as little as $100, cheap enough that whoever plants it can treat it as disposable.
Listening devices have shrunk the same way. The places the firm checks now include electrical outlets, power strips, phone chargers, USB cords and thumb drives, alongside older hiding spots such as lamps, clocks and smoke detectors. A device can store audio on a micro SD card for collection later, or send it out over Bluetooth, a cellular signal or Wi-Fi.
Equipment That Has to Keep Up
A sweep is a mix of instruments and patience. In the energy case, the team worked with an Oscor spectrum analyzer, which picks up radio transmissions in a space, and an ORION 2.4 nonlinear junction detector, which finds electronic components hidden inside walls, furniture, and fittings, including devices that are switched off.
Because the devices keep changing, Kimmons said the firm has had to buy at least one new piece of detection equipment every year to stay current. He trained in the work at the Jarvis International Counterintelligence and Counter Surveillance Academy, at both the basic and advanced levels, and holds the Certified Protection Professional and Certified Fraud Examiner credentials.
Electronics are only part of it. On the Ontic podcast, Kimmons described how a sweep starts with the client's concerns and any known threats, and how companies with sensitive work schedule checks of the same rooms on a regular basis. He also walked listeners through how to recognize common surveillance equipment and what a careful visual inspection looks for.
Where the Work Goes
The rooms that get swept are the ones where money and strategy are discussed. Kimmons named boardrooms, hotel rooms used by traveling executives, and private aircraft on the Ontic podcast. It’s the same point about meetings, writing that what is said in a board meeting or a business negotiation "can be of interest to a variety of actors, including competitors, state actors, and criminals."
Kimmons Investigative Services is a member of the Energy Security Council, and energy companies are among its clients. Countermeasure work is priced by area. The firm's 2025 rate schedule lists residential and business sweeps at $1.25 per square foot with a $2,500 minimum, and vehicle sweeps at $750 at the firm's office or $1,000 on site.
The Room as Evidence
The FBI says economic espionage costs the American economy "hundreds of billions of dollars per year," and warns that any company with a proprietary product, process or idea can be a target. Cyberattacks alone cannot reach what is said aloud in a room, which is why people who want it plant devices.
Kimmons made a related point to the Houston Chronicle in 1996. “A spy is a lot more common than people think,” he said. The cases his firm describes show that clearly. Exposure often comes through something as ordinary as a phone line, and the source can be closer to the business than its leaders expect.
Evidence gathering in these cases starts with the device. The tap on the chief executive's phone proved the leak existed, and it gave investigators a fixed point to work back from, through interviews, to the person who installed it and the company receiving the material. That sequence, a physical find followed by ordinary investigative work, is the method Kimmons Investigative Services has refined over four decades of sweeps.
Contact Info:
Name: Rob Kimmons
Email: Send Email
Organization: Kimmons Investigative Services, Inc.
Website: https://kimmonsinv.com/
Release ID: 89206006
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