About

Most of my work starts the same way: something has already gone wrong, several people already know about it, and the person calling me has to make a decision they cannot take back.

I have been doing this since 2004 — around two thousand examinations and investigative interviews for companies in retail, logistics, manufacturing and services. Internal theft, staged incidents, leaks, schemes that ran for years across several departments. The cases that reach an outside specialist are rarely the simple ones.

What I actually do

Most people assume this profession is about the instrument. It is not. By the time anyone calls, the useful part of the work is deciding who to talk to, in what order, and what each conversation is for — and knowing which question will destroy the enquiry if asked too early.

I design that enquiry, conduct the interviews, and tell you what the results support and what they do not. Where an examination is the right instrument, I run it. Where it is not, I say so before you have paid for one.

What twenty years teaches you

That most enquiries are lost at the start. By the time someone calls a specialist, the incident has been discussed with half the office, the person under suspicion has been warned by a well-meaning colleague, and the useful ground has been trampled. A good part of the first conversation is establishing what is left to work with.

That people rarely lie the way films suggest. Most of what looks like guilt is the fear of being suspected. Telling those two apart is the professional skill — not spotting a twitch.

That "probably involved" is useless to a manager. A result has to be usable: what happened, what it means, what remains unclear, and what I would not put my name to.

Where the method comes from

I co-founded LieScan in Moscow in 2004 with Boris Guseynov (1947–2016), a physician who spent his career in the research group that developed the first Soviet polygraph and the testing methods that went with it, and have run the practice since. The core questionnaire I still use — SLOG — is his, later described in the professional literature under that name.

Its practical value is specific: it does not depend on the participant knowing details available only to the person involved. Which is why the situation everyone calls hopeless — the whole company has already discussed what happened, so what is left to ask about — is in fact its most common starting point.

I do not publish the structure of the questionnaire or sample questions. Knowing them in advance does nothing for an honest participant and a great deal for a dishonest one.

Working outside Russia

Case strategy, interview planning, expert review of another examiner's work, training, and advisory on verifying digital material — none of it needs me in the room, and all of it works in English.

I do not offer employment polygraph testing in the EU. The legal footing for workplace testing there is not what it is in Russia or the United States, and an instrument you cannot lawfully use is worth nothing to you.

What you will not find on this site

Case studies. Every case involves people who never agreed to appear in anyone's marketing, and an anonymised story is still perfectly recognisable to everyone who was in the room. I will describe how situations of a certain kind usually unfold. I will not tell you about someone's.