Compliance
A book built on real case files carries obligations. This page sets out where the material came from, what was removed before publication, and what the book does not claim to be.
Where the material comes from
Every case in the Playbook is drawn from the closed files of David Shackelford, a private investigator who worked insurance fraud for more than forty years. The field reports were written at the time, for the carrier, as part of the work. They were not reconstructed afterwards for a reader.
They appear in the book word for word. Where the surrounding chapter explains what a report shows, that explanation is clearly the author's, set apart from the report itself, so a reader can always tell the record from the commentary.
Claimant names, carrier names, employer names, case numbers, and identifying locations and dates have been removed or altered. No matter discussed in the book is open. Nothing in the book identifies a living claimant, a carrier's handling of a specific file, or an investigation that has not been closed.
Where a detail could identify someone by combination rather than by name — an unusual injury paired with a small town, say — the detail was changed or dropped. Method survives that edit. Identity does not need to.
The book includes a state-by-state reference covering licensing, recording consent, GPS use, and drones. Every entry was verified against the law in force at the time of publication in 2026.
Law changes. Those tables are a starting point for your own check, not a substitute for one. Statutes are amended, regulators reinterpret them, and case law moves underneath all of it. Verify the current rule in your jurisdiction before you rely on it in the field.
Because a printed table starts ageing the day it ships, the same ground is now kept current on this site as a legal reference. Each entry there cites its statute, links the government page it was read from, and prints the date it was last checked; sources are re-fetched on a schedule and an entry whose source has changed is marked rather than quietly updated. How that verification works is written out in full, including what it cannot tell you.
The same limits below apply to it, without exception. It is a map of where to look, kept current and dated. It is not legal advice, it has not been reviewed by a lawyer, and it does not become either by being machine-readable. Terms for quoting and citing it, including the fact that it is not licensed for AI model training, are on the reference terms page.
Limits
Nothing in the book or on this site is legal advice, and reading either creates no professional relationship of any kind. Insurance investigation is regulated differently in every jurisdiction. If you need to know whether a technique is lawful where you work, ask a lawyer licensed there.
The book does not tell you how a claim in front of you should be decided, paid, denied, or referred. Those decisions belong to the carrier, the adjuster, and the law that governs them.
Licensing requirements differ by state and change regularly. The Playbook is field method — what the work looks like once you already hold the licence. It will not get you through a state exam and does not try to.
A working manual has to describe what actually happens in the field, including practices that were once ordinary and are now restricted or unlawful. Description is not endorsement. The chapter on ethical lines exists because the boundaries matter more than the techniques.
This website
This site is a small static brochure. There is no account to create, no form to submit, and nothing to log in to.
Two ordinary exceptions apply, and they are worth stating plainly rather than burying:
Web fonts. Typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts. That request tells Google your IP address and which page requested it, as any third-party asset would. Nothing else is shared.
Server logs. The host keeps standard request logs for reliability and abuse prevention. They are not used to build a profile of anyone and are not shared.
Counting the robots. Since the legal reference was published, this site counts two things so it can tell whether the reference is actually being indexed and cited: requests whose user agent identifies a known AI crawler, and the hostname of a referring AI assistant when one is present. That is the whole of it. No cookie is set, no IP address is read or stored, and no per-visitor record exists — the figures are daily integers, attached to nobody, and a person reading these pages appears in nothing but an undifferentiated site-wide total. It stays true that this site runs no analytics product, no tracking pixel and no advertising tracker.
If you email the address on the contact page, that email is held in an ordinary mailbox and used only to reply to you.
The buy buttons on this site link to Amazon, where the book is sold. Amazon's own privacy policy and terms govern anything you do once you arrive there. The author earns a royalty on copies sold, in the ordinary way any author does.
Rights & corrections
The Insurance Investigator's Playbook and this website are © 2026 Andrew Bouse. The field reports remain the work of David Shackelford and appear with his participation.
Short quotations for review, reporting, teaching, and scholarship are fair use and need no permission — a citation is enough. For anything longer, for reproducing the sample surveillance report or the legal reference tables, or for course and training use, write and ask. Permission is usually straightforward.
If a statute has moved, a table entry is wrong, or a detail in the book is inaccurate, tell us and it will be corrected in the next revision. Accuracy in the legal reference matters more than tidiness, so specific corrections with a citation are especially welcome. Write to theclaimsplaybook@gmail.com.
This site aims to meet WCAG 2.1 AA: it works without JavaScript, uses real text rather than images of text, keeps contrast above the required ratio, and can be navigated by keyboard. If something here is difficult to use with a screen reader or at high zoom, that is a defect worth reporting — email the address above and it will be fixed.
Last reviewed: 21 September 2026.