By Ankita Tripathy
In many industries, if a person cannot be found or doesn’t want to be, they’re referred to colloquially as a “skip.” Figuring out where these people are and how to contact them is a big part of skip tracing.
Many people need to realize how much information is available about them through public sources. Land records and court documents are available freely to the public. Examples include utility bill records, credit reports, loan applications, etc. There is so much of it that distilling it all into a “single source of truth” is often equal parts time-consuming and frustrating.
Skip tracing helps streamline all that, giving those who need it a way to learn more about hard-to-find people. You can find someone’s current address, phone number, and other contact information from these data sources that would likely have been unavailable even a decade ago.
As a concept, skip tracing has far broader implications than many think. It has become a pivotal part of day-to-day success in four key industries.
Industry #1: Real Estate
Skip tracing in real estate has become extremely popular in recent years. Real estate agents and investors alike commonly use it to help find people who may want to buy or sell a house.
Moreover, skip tracing is necessary for real estate agents since learning about new properties gives an agent a competitive advantage over others.
For example, if you are a real estate agent, you would want to know about new flats up for sale before they enter the market and other agents get to know about them. Therefore, skip tracing lets you acquire new clients and sellers and strike up deals before other agents can!
Industry #2: Debt Collection
If you had to make a mental list of all the people who likely do not want to be found, those who owe a significant debt would be on it. Based on that, it should come as no surprise that debt collection is one of the major fields that regularly leverages skip-tracing techniques.
According to one recent study, approximately 70 million people in the United States have some type of debt in “collection” status. When you also consider that the combined household debt in the country hit a massive $16.9 trillion by the end of 2022, it’s easy to see why.
Remember that a big part of debt collection involves verifying and notifying the individual of the debt. If the debt is legitimate, someone needs to be notified in writing so they can take corrective action on their own. It’s hard to do this if you don’t know where they are or how to contact them. Until that point, the law isn’t necessarily on your side.
Skip tracing has quickly proven a viable answer for those who have already gone to (often great) lengths to elude debtors. It’s empowered the overall recovery process, allowing legitimate debtors to reclaim legitimately owed money.
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Industry #3: Insurance
Along the same lines, skip tracing has quickly proved to be a worthy investment for those in the insurance sector.
It’s particularly helpful for fraud detection, which costs American consumers hundreds of billions of dollars annually. If someone isn’t falsifying or inflating their claim to get money from an insurance company, they might be filing a claim under someone else’s identity. It’s too late when the victim or the insurance company realizes there has been an issue. That money is gone forever.
Skip tracing is a technique that helps prevent that from happening. It allows officials to properly verify a claimant’s identity (along with other information) to help curb this problem.
Industry #4: Law Enforcement
Based on the previous two examples, skip tracing would also be invaluable to those in law enforcement. If the police are actively looking for you, the chances are high that it isn’t for a “happy” or otherwise positive reason. If you’ve committed a crime and are trying to evade a warrant, you must avoid police officers. Skip tracing can help them find where a person is so that justice can be done correctly.
Skip tracing is commonly employed as part of larger law enforcement investigations. It can even help guarantee public safety. If someone is wanted for a violent crime and is on the run, that isn’t good for anyone. The sooner law enforcement officials identify their current location, the sooner the citizens of an area can rest easy again.
Industry #5: Asset Recovery
Finally, skip tracing has become enormously helpful in asset recovery. While this term is broad, for discussion purposes, it will be limited to tracing, freezing, or even confiscating funds obtained through illegal means. Once this happens, that money can be returned to its rightful owner.
If someone’s savings account was compromised due to identity theft, law enforcement may later recover that money as part of an unrelated investigation. That money doesn’t just disappear—it can and should go back to the original victim. Skip tracing can help investigators locate who was impacted by the crime so that they can be located, contacted, and made whole. This is another example of how skip tracing helps safeguard people’s financial interests everywhere.
Conclusion
In truth, these are just a few of the many diverse industries where skip tracing has become a key to success in recent years. Finding someone isn’t necessarily easy for an unfortunately large list of reasons. Sometimes, tracking down their current whereabouts has become incredibly complicated. In other cases, a person may have gone to great lengths to avoid being found.
Regardless, modern technology has evolved to the point where it is easier than ever to effectively navigate the complicated data trails that most of us leave behind. A lot of information about a person is available online—even if we don’t necessarily realize it. Much of that information is public record, and skip tracing helps make sense of it throughout a person’s professional life.
Not only does skip tracing help someone in law enforcement or debt collection accomplish their goal, but it also moves them one step closer to true operational efficiency. For many, that alone is enough to embrace this sophisticated strategy with open arms.
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