In our fast-paced world, collecting on unpaid debts can be a challenge. Technology has evolved to the point where even the smallest businesses can have a global presence if they want to. But with that level of scalability comes an inherent unpredictability—and a new set of challenges many organizations wouldn’t have had to deal with 20 years ago.
This is to say that even something as seemingly simple as collecting money you’re owed becomes an uphill battle when people can avoid contact and essentially “disappear” into the digital night. That’s where methods like skip tracing become invaluable, especially when traditional methods fail as debtors relocate or head “off the grid” entirely.
What is Skip Tracing?
As the term implies, skip tracing uses various data sources and modern-day tech-driven resources to track down people who want to avoid detection. Debtors trying to avoid paying a bill may be the most obvious example of this in practice, but there are many others.
Skip tracing can be a powerful tool for businesses – especially those smaller organizations. It’s an opportunity to improve collection rates while saving quite a bit of time and money.
Following the Social Media Trail
These days, one of the more valuable resources that skip tracers have available to them involves the social media sites that many of us take for granted daily.
Skip tracers regularly use publicly available information and other databases to make their lives easier. What is a site like Facebook or Twitter if not a publicly available database filled with information about a person? Only in this case was that information likely provided by the target.
Once a skip tracer confirms that they’ve found the various social profiles of the person they’re looking for, they’ll start looking at their public posts and other updates. They’ll see what types of photos they’ve been sharing. They’ll look closely at who they’ve been talking to. This is all in the name of creating a clear picture of their current (or recent) location and any connections they’ve made in recent memory.
Sometimes, a skip tracer gets lucky, and a person posts in great detail about their recent activities. They share news about a new job they may have received, an event they’re attending, or some similar update.
This isn’t always the case, but thankfully, social networking sites allow people to go deeper. This is where techniques like geotagging come into play. Remember that many social media sites (like Twitter/X in particular) will enable you to see precisely where a post was made from. A skip tracer will pour over someone’s profile to look for geographic information tied to posts, photos, location checking, and more. All this can provide invaluable insight into where someone is and where they might be headed moving forward.
Beyond that, skip tracing professionals will pay close attention to who someone is interacting with on a social networking site (meaning their friends) and who they might be following. Returning to the example of someone who has just recently received a new job, they may have started following all their new co-workers.
If a skip tracer sees that the person they’ve been looking for has recently started following people who all work for the same employer, they may have just located that person’s new job without the target having expressly posted about it on their own.
These are just a few of the many ways that skip tracers leverage the full power of social media sites to their ultimate advantage. Once you’ve located the person in question, you can contact them and inquire about whether they’re ever going to pay the debt that they owe. At the very least, that person will know that they can be found – which makes them more likely to consider paying at all.
Collaborating with Professional Skip Tracers
This can also be applied to specific industries within the context of debt collection. Take skip tracing in real estate, for example. When most people think about the situation, they think of scenarios where a real estate professional might be trying to figure out who owns a specific piece of property so they can buy it.
Skip tracing in real estate also often involves debt collection, however. People like realtors collaborate with professional skip tracers all the time. A tenant may have tried to disappear from a property owner to avoid paying rent that they owe, for example. Believe it or not, sometimes people will try to avoid being contacted by a real estate professional to get out of paying any fees that were associated with a past real estate transaction.
Skip tracing is also commonly used for things like tenant screening, legal compliance purposes, and even asset verification in addition to standard debt collection in this field.
In the end, most organizations operate with a fairly rigid profit margin, regardless of the industry that they’re in. When someone attempts to avoid paying a debt that they rightfully owe, that’s more than just a “minor inconvenience.” It could literally make or break a business depending on the circumstances.
That’s why techniques like skip tracing have become invaluable in the quest for better and more effective debt recovery. If you can’t find a person, you can never hope to recover the money they owe. If you can, it gets exponentially easier – it truly is as simple as that.
But ultimately, skip tracing is about a more efficient (and therefore more successful) debt recovery strategy. Nobody wants to be in a situation where they suddenly have to find people who want to avoid detection. But sometimes you will be, and skip tracing is an enormously helpful tool to have at your side to that end.
