Six Weeks of GPS, a Drone Over the Backyard, and a Fake Bank Caller
A Norman orthodontist believes her husband is hiding $240,000 in cash distributions from a dental practice he owns with his brother. She gives you his apartment address, his work schedule, and the plate of the 2021 Ford F-250 he drives. The truck is titled in his name alone and sits in an open, ungated apartment lot. At 11:40 p.m. you attach a magnetic GPS logger to the frame. Over six weeks it logs 41 trips, including 12 to a storage facility in Moore and 6 to a residence in Purcell. You then fly a drone at 120 feet over the Purcell property for 20 minutes, filming the backyard and an open garage. A neighbor comes out and demands you leave. Finally, you call the husband's employer, say you are "fraud department, First National Bank," and ask payroll to confirm his direct-deposit account.
1. Analyze the GPS placement: who could consent, what torts and statutes are in play, and what is the actual litigation risk to the client?
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Begin with consent. The truck is titled to the husband alone, so the client cannot authorize attaching anything to it. A marital interest in property does not create consent to a trespass on a vehicle the other spouse owns outright, and the fact that the lot is open and ungated removes a land-trespass problem, not a chattel problem. Clamping a logger to the frame is a physical interference with another person's property - trespass to chattels.
The constitutional question is mostly a distraction. Because you are a private actor, the Fourth Amendment and the Oklahoma Constitution's search-and-seizure provisions do not by themselves exclude the GPS data from a divorce proceeding. Suppression is not the risk; civil liability is.
The real exposure is twofold: intrusion upon seclusion for continuous tracking that reveals movements the husband took steps to keep private, and a protective-order or stalking petition if 41 logged trips get characterized as a pattern of conduct directed at him. Public-road movements are the defensible part - a person driving down Lindsey Street has no expectation of seclusion. The Moore storage unit and the Purcell residence are fine places to observe from a public vantage point; they are not fine places to instrument.
Practical correction: pull the tracker now, switch to stationary and rolling surveillance for the public movements, subpoena the storage facility's records, and log every observation with time and location. The product stays usable, but you have handed opposing counsel a counterclaim.
2. Evaluate the drone flight: regulatory compliance, privacy exposure, and whether the backyard footage can be used.
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Altitude is not your problem. At 120 feet you are under the FAA's 400-foot ceiling. Commercial operation, however, requires registration and a remote pilot certificate under Part 107, visual line of sight at all times, and avoiding sustained flight over people who are not participating in the operation. Keep the aircraft off the neighbor's low airspace and do not hover above anyone in the yard.
Privacy is the harder test. A fenced backyard adjoining a residence is the standard example of an area where a homeowner reasonably expects seclusion. Twenty minutes of sustained hovering over that yard, filming the interior of an open garage, is enough for an intrusion claim even though the airspace above is public. The garage frames are the weaker privacy target - a passerby on the street could have seen the same open doorway - but the sustained backyard filming is the exhibit that produces a protective order and a counterclaim.
Split the product accordingly. Treat the open-garage frames as potentially usable, subject to authentication by the pilot and a log showing the aircraft stayed off the curtilage. Treat the backyard sequence as compromised.
Better method for next time: shoot from a public street with a long lens, keep flights short, and keep a flight log with time, coordinates, altitude, and duration for every sortie - that log is your defense if the neighbor calls police.
3. Assess the payroll call. What is legitimate pretext, what is not, and what does the call cost the case?
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Pretext is a lawful and ordinary investigative tool right up to a recognizable line. The line is crossed when you assert authority you do not have, threaten consequences you cannot deliver, or impersonate a government agency or a financial institution. "Fraud department, First National Bank" does all three at once: it borrows the credibility of a regulated institution that never authorized you, it induces payroll to release information they would not otherwise release, and it exposes you to a false-personation complaint plus a federal pretexting theory whenever the information sought is customer information of a financial institution.
Oklahoma is a one-party consent state, so recording the call is lawful. Consent to record is not consent to lie, and the recording will be Exhibit A against you.
The evidentiary cost is severe. Whatever payroll tells you is now tainted: the employer can credibly say it was deceived, and the husband's lawyer will use the call to argue that every other statement in your file is unreliable. In a divorce asset case, credibility is the asset.
Rewrite the approach: a truthful, neutral persona ("I'm calling to verify employment for a legal matter"), a written authorization from the client if she has one, or a subpoena. Employment verification is almost never worth the risk.