Neil Smith

After serving over 10 years as a police officer in a UK police force, Neil has spent most of the last 15 years as a full-time investigative researcher for a mixture of clients; from insurance companies to law enforcement agencies and journalists. Neil currently delivers the OSINT accredited training for the UCLan Master’s Course in Cyber Crime.

During these last 15 years Neil has taught many hundreds of investigators; mostly from law enforcement, but also from local authorities and insurance companies, as well as private investigators and journalists, in the art of using the Internet as an investigative tool. These courses have mostly been in the UK, but have also been given in several different countries around the world.

Neil regular speaks on the subject of ‘Open Source Intelligence’ and ‘Using the Internet as an Investigative Tool’ at a number of conferences and events, both in the UK and around the world, to groups from law enforcement, local authority investigators, commercial & corporate investigators and people from the compliance and insurance industries.

In 2016 Neil helped form Qwarie (www.qwarie.com), to build on what he was doing previously in a bigger company, to offer OSINT research and training to more clients around the world. As well as having a team of full-time in-house researchers, who undertake online enquiries for our clients, Qwarie now has a number of trainers to deliver OSINT & Cybercrime courses around the world.

In the spring of 2020 Neil left Qwarie to concentrate his efforts on helping Locate develop their Open Source Intelligence training package for its research volunteers and to help investigate cases directly.