What are skip tracing techniques? Simply put, skip tracing is the art and science of collecting useful relevant and up-to-date information on people who have outstanding debts and need to be contacted. Debt collection services are far and away the entities most in need of good skip tracing. Skip tracing services that are technologically sound and effective are very important for this industry, as it is their primary tool.
People think of the need to track someone down when they have a bad debt and they are willfully trying to evade it, and obviously skip tracing is necessary in these cases. However, this is actually not that common. Today’s world, despite being very technologically interconnected, is also very transient. People move around more than ever before. Business open and close at astounding speeds, addresses chance, phone numbers change, emails change. People open and close social media accounts at breakneck speeds, sometimes having more than one account and switching between them. A lot of this activity is completely innocuous, and probably not related to hiding from creditors at all, but can still make their jobs more difficult. Hence, the pervasive need for skip tracing. Here are the three main points to consider:
Get The Essential Info
In the USA, the best and most important info to have is the social security number. In other countries, they usually use either something very similar to the social security number (like Canada’s SIN), or some form of numbered national ID card as a universal identifier. Other useful and important info are the complete name, date of birth, address, and other useful ID like a driver’s license number.
Expand It With Public Records
The next step is the essential knowledge of what is public record and what isn’t. There are many data registers that are public record by law exactly for these types of purposes, as well as for institutions such as the FBI and DEA, in order to prevent people from easily disappearing into the shadows.
Social Media Is Your Friend
Many people use pseudonyms on social media these days, even in violation of said platforms’ terms of service. However, it’s often not hard to infer who is who by analyzing and deducing based on peripheral clues they leave. There are many techniques here that professionals know that are useful.
Which leaves the final point: all of this is possible for anybody to do but there are professionals who are much better at it than you are going to be. Many companies choose to put untrained employees of theirs on these tasks, which often results in lost productivity, disgruntled employees (and maybe their immediate superiors), and poor results. Leave it to the pros as is recommended by the experts, and you will find it well worth the expenditure.
