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The golden age of CIA agents destabilizing democracies may be over but there is a new, far more lucrative cold war playing out in companies all over the world. The FBI estimates that corporate espionage cost America as much as six hundred BILLION dollars [$600,000,000,000] every year! If you work with sensitive information in a large company, there is a high chance you have interacted with a corporate spy without even knowing it.

Corporate spies come in three varieties each working in progressively darker legal grey areas.

These people can earn millions of dollars for their work on top of the money they earn from working their day job. The most common type of corporate spy is one that never crosses the line into illegality. “Market research firms” work as “technically legitimate” consultants all over the world, selling information to market competitors and investors and like any other consultants they get paid on billable hours.

The most effective tool for collecting sensitive information is by just asking for it. If you become this kind of corporate spy one tactic you can use is to act as fake customer to talk to salesmen about a target company’s products, what their specs are, what their pricing is, learn the sales techniques they use, the conditions of their contracts and anything they lie about (which could be used against the company later in the press or in courts). If the companies operate in a business-to-business market, you will need need to set up a convincing fake business to act as potential customers for the target companies’ services. Depending on the budget your client gives you to conduct your research you may even buy the companies products to test its strengths and weaknesses.

One of your biggest clients will be the auto industry, they pay unaffiliated third-party research companies to buy a competitor’s new model off the lot and tear it down to learn about materials, manufacturing methods, and areas where the competitor has cut corners. Another great source of information you can access without breaking any laws are company employees by using networking events and sites like LinkedIn. You can pose as a recruiter and ask them questions about what they do in their current job, why they want to leave the company and what they think their employer could be doing better. These are all normal questions in a job interview that can expose weaknesses in a competitor’s operations.

Another legitimate way to get information is to buy shares in a company if they are publicly listed and attend shareholder meetings where you can work your way into private conversations with company executives, major shareholders and directors. Once you have collected your intel you put it into a secure data room, hand it over to the company that hired you, give a presentation on your finding, collect your fee and move on to your next job. The company can use this information to make better trades if they are an investment fund or bring a more competitive product to market if they are an industry rival. Insiders working in this field have reported that the hardest part of this job was not the clandestine operations but finding clients. Investigators had to market their services, but they couldn’t do it too well or their potential targets would learn who they are and what they are up to.

Investigative intelligence gathering like this is legal, you can find companies that will do this work by googling “competitive Intelligence Consultants”. A lot of this work just makes businesses more competitive, and it helps with price discovery in securities markets. Hindenburg Research is an investment company that blew the whistle on major alleged corporate frauds like Nikola Motors, CashApp and the Adani Group.

Their investment strategy is to conduct research like this and then short sell companies that they find compromising information on before releasing that information to the public.

So it’s time to learn How Money Works to find out how corporate espionage is actually done.