Skiptracing - how we find you

This is something I've touched on a little bit in other posts, but haven't dedicated a post to. There are the usual ways of finding a borrower, from references to returned accounts to just having the information there. But when the immediate contact info runs out, what does a collector do from there?

This applies more to the line of business I work than others, since our loans have been in default for years. (I spoke to someone the other day who had made no payments on his loans since 1993. Really. No, he didn't pay me either.) The hunt now moves on to the world of skiptracing. The Private Eye part of the job. And, funny enough, the part of the job I'm actually good at.

We do get a number of tools to help us find people. For example, a credit report. Full report. It has former addresses, phone numbers, previous (or sometimes current) employers, and other loans and trade lines. All sorts of useful information to trace movements and figure out where someone might be.

We also have access to LexisNexis's people-finding database, which can be very useful. Phone numbers, contacts, jobs, vehicle registrations...all sorts of stuff. Which may or may not get us closer to the person. (I've found for my line of work the Lexis database of phone numbers is almost always disconnected.)

The most effective form of skiptracing is actually seeing what is available for free online. We leave digital footprints all over the place, even if we don't know it. Not all are useful, but some can be more useful than others.

First, a caveat - we cannot access social networking sites. I was told by management that this was due to some sort of lawsuit, but was told by fellow collectors it was actually due to collectors spending too much time on social networking sites monitoring their own social networking pages. So Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, MyLife, and other such sites are blocked. Though we can see the beginnings of the pages from the Google search summary - so if your latest MySpace comment is "Moved to Seattle - YAY!!!!" chances are I can see it simply from the Google hit. (Or, until this gets "fixed", I can view a cached version of MySpace pages if I use the Bing search engine rather than Google. I imagine that will vanish shortly, but I will abuse this loophole as much as I can until they close it.)

However, there is a treasure trove of other information on the web about people. I have found people through group affiliations on organization websites, news articles about contest winnings, job promotions, LinkedIn resumes, employer websites, and really awful fan-fiction. (I was trying to find someone who wrote ungodly amounts of pornographic 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer' fan-fic. Really.) In these situations, people want to be found, so it's all out there. Just a matter of looking for it.

Of course, finding someone doesn't mean they're going to pay you. Self-employed people are easy to find, since so much of owning a business is self-promotion. But without the threat of garnishment or tax seizure, what can you really hold them to? Not much. I've had more than one self-employed attorney laugh at me to pay on a 100K account. Because what can I do? Nothing.

(Some lines of business can go after professional licenses for non-payment, or some states have registration requirements based on credit reports. None of these apply to me.)

There is also the danger of getting lost in the sea of information, especially if you are easily distracted by stories and interesting trivia. I've found great reviews of borrowers' bands, stories of borrowers being world-ranked Pinball players, volumes of court cases and misdemeanor charges against borrowers, and borrowers who won State Fair prizes for their cheesecake recipes. All fascinating, none helpful. But I've always been a sucker for stories, and I get pulled in to reading about a traffic arrest or the opening of a borrower's restaurant. And fail to make enough phone calls.

But, to give you an idea of what I find - I have two Place of Employment calls to make on Monday. One I found through a hit from the corporate website corresponding to name and city (and it's a pretty unique name). The other I found through a LinkedIn profile. I also need to follow up with someone I found when they were named employee of the month at their local job. And I need to run a WHOIS scan on someone's small business website to see if they are also the registrant of the site and if there's a contact number.

The information age is a blessing and a curse. All depends on how much you want to not be found. Or how much someone is willing to try and find you. Off to try more of that tomorrow.