Your insurer sent a private investigator. Now what? | long term disability denial attorneys

Disability insurance surveillance is the legal practice where an insurer hires an investigator to secretly film you performing physical activities that contradict your medical records. Insurers use this footage (often just seconds of you carrying groceries or driving) to argue you are capable of working full-time. They pair this video with your social media posts to build a case for denial. Defeating surveillance evidence requires proving that a brief moment of activity does not equal the stamina required to sustain an 8-hour workday.

Here is exactly how the insurance company builds that trap. And here is how you dismantle it.

You notice a silver sedan parked three houses down. The guy inside has been sitting there for an hour. You walk outside to check the mail, grab a package off the porch, and go back inside.

Two months later, your claim is denied.

The denial letter references video footage of you “hauling heavy boxes and walking without visible distress.” They hired an insurer private investigator to watch your house. This is not a movie plot. It is a standard operational tactic used by every major disability insurance carrier in the country.

What LTD surveillance actually looks like in your denial letter

An insurer private investigator costs insurance companies roughly $1,000 to $1,500 for a few days of observation. That is a rounding error compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars they save by terminating your claim. Disability insurance surveillance is cheap, highly effective, and completely legal.

The investigator sits in a tinted car. They follow you to the pharmacy. They record you bending over to pick up a dropped set of keys. They film you lifting your grandchild into a car seat.

Then the insurer strips all context from that footage.

They will argue that if you can carry a 10-pound bag of dog food from your trunk to your front door, you possess the physical capacity to return to your job. They ignore the fact that carrying a bag for 14 seconds is a completely different biological requirement than sitting at a desk or standing on a warehouse floor for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

This is where long term disability denial attorneys make their money. Stewart Karlin’s breakdown of ERISA surveillance tactics shows exactly how legal teams cross-examine this evidence. A good attorney forces the insurer to admit that an isolated moment of activity proves nothing about sustained work capacity.

But you have to give your legal team the right tools to fight that fight. That starts with your doctor’s paperwork.

Why long term disability denial attorneys rely on your doctor’s notes

LTD surveillance footage only damages your claim if it contradicts your stated limitations.

If you tell your doctor you are completely bedridden and cannot walk without a cane, and the insurer private investigator films you walking your dog without a cane, your claim is dead. The claims examiner wins.

This is why getting your functional limitations properly documented is the single most important step in your claim. If your doctor explicitly writes that you can walk for 15 minutes before needing to rest, and the investigator films you walking for 10 minutes, the surveillance actually confirms your disability. It proves your stated limitations are accurate.

Honesty is your absolute best defense. Never exaggerate your symptoms on forms or to your doctors. Exaggeration gives the claims examiner the exact ammunition they are waiting for.

Experienced long term disability denial attorneys will tell you the same thing: your own medical records are the only shield you have against hidden cameras.

Your social media is already in the file

Insurers do not always need to pay a guy in a sedan to surveil you. You often do the job for them for free on Facebook.

Disability insurance surveillance starts at a desk. A claims examiner will pull your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok accounts. They will look at your spouse’s accounts. They will search for your children’s public posts.

You go to your niece’s wedding and post a photo of yourself smiling. The examiner saves that photo to your file. They use it to argue that your severe depression is in remission. You post a picture holding a fish you caught on a boat. They use it to argue your back injury is healed.

J. Frankel’s guidance on social media monitoring in these cases outlines a brutal reality. Insurers weaponize your good days. Chronic illnesses fluctuate. You have days where you can manage a family event, followed by three days recovering in bed. Social media only shows the event. It never shows the recovery.

Lock down your accounts. Set everything to private. Ask your family to stop tagging you in photos.

Documenting your reality before they film you

You cannot stop an insurance company from sending an investigator. It is legal for them to conduct LTD surveillance in public spaces or from a public street looking into your yard.

You prepare for them by documenting your reality. Keep a daily symptom journal. Log the days you cannot get out of bed. Log the days you manage to go to the grocery store, and explicitly note how much pain you were in afterward.

When the insurer inevitably produces a video of you at that grocery store, long term disability denial attorneys can pull your journal from that exact date. Raval Trial Law’s defense strategies often rely on proving that the claimant’s own reporting matches the surveillance timeline perfectly.

Before you hire a lawyer to fight a denial based on video evidence, you need to know exactly how they plan to handle it. Much like knowing the right questions to ask before hiring a small business attorney, you must ask long term disability denial attorneys how they dismantle out-of-context video footage during an appeal.

Do not confront an investigator if you spot one. Do not wave at the camera. Go back inside, write down the date and time, and call an attorney who knows how to tear their report apart.