Spy Review

This is an interview with Steve Buckley from Online Spy Shop. Steve’s company specialises in Spy Phones and customised surveillance equipment.

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I thought you guys would find it interesting to hear about some of the guys in the surveillance world. Today’s interview is with Rob Slator from TrackerShack. Rob and I worked together for a while in the surveillance world. When I had to stop to focus on a change of career, Rob pushed forward with TrackerShack. TrackerShack has become one of the most respected companies when it comes to location tracking devices.

How did you get started in the spy world?

I had been involved in an affair with someone whose husband must have been a regular customer at a spy shop…he deployed all sorts of devices trying to find out what we were up to and it was that that made me aware such products existed. A while later, a friend came to me to ask me all about it, as she suspected her husband of having an affair, and we couldn’t really afford any decent kit on her budget, so I started building stuff for her.

The first item was a GSM tracker made out of an old Nokia, and then I built a GSM listening device. I carried on with those trackers & bugs, selling them on eBay and then building my own website. I teamed up with Dan Harrison from Spy Review and Dan brought into play a lot of the other spy items that we still sell.

What would you say your expertise in security and surveillance is?

Product wise, its definitely the trackers and GSM bugs, thats where our in-house expertise is. However, we have built really strong relationships with all sorts of suppliers throughout the world, so we still play strongly in the spy shone, spy sear and covert camera markets.

Recently we have started building the GSM bugs into household items such as clocks and picture frames, and they have proved to be firm favourites. Aside from products though, we also have another expertise - providing pre and post sale advice to customers. It often feels like we run a counselling service, but its an important part of the job. People need to understand what they are getting into and how they can best achieve results.

What interests you most in the spy world?

Long term, I strive for finding lower priced alternatives to currently over-priced products. When I started selling GSM trackers for fifty quid, no-one had ever seen anything like it before! I’d like to be able to develop mobile phone activity interception in the same way, for example covert text message forwarding. On a day to day basis its the customers that interest me most, the stories and situations that I hear of keep me preoccupied virtually all of the time. Sometimes they are funny stories, sometimes sad.

What would you say your favourite spy gadget is?

This changes over time, but currently its the miniature magnetic GPS loggers. They are so small, and give such a complete history of a vehicle’s movements. Only two out of ten customers ever choose to have a logger (historic tracking) over a real-time tracker, and thats often a mistake.

Unless you really need to know there and then where someone is, a logger is always the better option: you get the complete picture of a vehicle’s movements with no running costs other than a couple of batteries. Prior to that I was in love with the deleted text message readers, and before that the wireless cameras.

What can you see happening in the spy world in the next year?

The veil of secrecy is lifting from the spy gadget world, companies like mine are taking a higher profile and putting an increasing range of products under the nose of the general public

It used to be that folk would go down to Radio Shack and buy a cassette recorder. Now they think their partner is having an affair and with the same ease of process they go down to TrackerShack and buy a…whatever! Apart from that, the cost of GPS will continue to fall, as will the cost of virtual memory, and I hear theres some really wicked 3G camera kits on their way!

If someone is interested in your products and services, how should they get in touch?

Via the website, www.trackershack.co.uk or by phone on 0845 688 0490.