MI:33 is a boutique investigative firm. We build evidence that holds up in federal court, across intellectual property, due diligence, and threat matters. Two brothers run it, Rob and Jason Holmes, second-generation private investigators who have spent their whole lives in this work.
What separates us is simple. Every matter is run by a principal. Your case is not handed to a junior or farmed out to a contractor. It is worked by one of the two people who built the firm, both of them early to online investigation and still hands-on with every file.
You do not have to take our word for it. The record is public. We have worked hundreds of federal cases, dozens of them landmark, and our investigations are cited in more than thirty academic and legal publications. MI:33 stays small on purpose, so the work stays personal and a principal stays on every file.
The Principals
Rob built the firm’s intellectual property and digital intelligence practice, and the press has called him the Sherlock Holmes of the Internet. He started as a boy, making undercover buys on the Jersey Shore, and by 2001 he was running an entire internet investigations portfolio before launching his own company. His work appears in the academic literature and behind landmark federal rulings, including the first cases to hold an internet service provider and an online marketplace liable for the counterfeiting they carried.
Jason runs the firm’s operations and its threat and physical security work, and he leads a deep practice for the video game industry, hunting the hackers and cheat makers who prey on major titles and the studios behind them. That work has put cheat operations in front of federal judges. A Navy veteran of the 1990s, he cut his teeth working counterfeit raids alongside his father in New York on weekend leave. Today he runs a worldwide network of vetted local operatives and sends the right one wherever a case lives, so MI:33 puts boots on the ground anywhere in the world.
How We Got Here
It started with Bob. In 1981, former New Jersey state trooper Bob Holmes earned his private investigator’s license. He made his name first managing physical threats for the celebrities performing in the Atlantic City casinos, then landed in intellectual property crime at a time when almost no one was investigating the counterfeiting of trademarked brands. Bob was on it early.
He put the whole family to work. His sons, Rob then eleven and Jason six, made undercover buys up and down the Jersey Shore and got paid in ice cream and funnel cake. Bob became one of the premier detectives on the East Coast and earned the title “Chief” on Canal Street in New York. The legend grew.
The brothers took their own routes back to the work. Rob chased stand-up comedy in Los Angeles and signed on with a top west-coast investigation firm, and by 2001 he was running its entire internet portfolio. He left to start his own company. Jason served in the Navy through the nineties, stationed near enough to Virginia to keep working New York raid days with Bob on weekends, until the Navy sent him to San Diego after 9/11.
Bob passed away in 2004. The brothers found themselves on the same coast and set on keeping the family tradition alive. They named the firm IPCybercrime and pointed it straight at their specialties, intellectual property and the web. In 2007 they moved the firm to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
Around 2009 the work widened. Clients began bringing physical threat and information-leak cases, and within a few years that work rivaled the IP side. The old name no longer fit, so they chose one that would not box them in: MI:33. Today the firm handles trademark investigation, due diligence, and threat mitigation for corporate clients, law firms, and high-net-worth individuals.
Every MI:33 matter is built to an evidentiary standard, supervised by a principal, and handled in confidence.