Skip Tracing and Data Collection Tactics: A Simple Guide

While a customer is unable to pay for services or goods, the first thing you do is contact them for the missed payment. But what would you when that customer is no longer using that provided number or has vanished into thin hair? Most reputed agencies have various debt collection tricks that are useful to recover debt more effectively and conquer fundamental payment troubles.

One of those tactics is known as skip tracing.

Define Skip Tracing

It is the procedure of locating a debtor who has left or skipped town. Skip tracers are helpful for cases where the debtor has failed to conclude about the repeated emails and calls. Moreover, a client has a physical address to post letters to, but there is always a chance a respective person no longer resides there.

Thus, it leaves one with no option of informing the consumer about the debt and providing them with the chance to pay it off- before it affects their credit score.

Further, to debt recovery agents, skip tracing is appreciated by private investigators, detectives, lawyers, guarantors, and journalists. Skip tracing is also termed as bounty hunting. No doubt, both are quite different processes, bounty hunters hire skip tracers that may explain the misconception as two are synonymous.

Process of Skip Tracing

It includes a series of steps. The first one is to verify the details given by the client and correct any misinformation. This step helps the skip tracer know about the main subject. Secondly, the skip tracer starts collecting information about the subject through the public resources such as Public Records Databases, Criminal Background Checks, Courthouse Records, Credit Reports, Utility Bills, Job Applications, and loan Applications.

In case, none of these resources come out to be useful; the skip tracer will then commence contacting present or past acquaintances of the subjects like landlords, friends, family, relatives, or neighbours, and coworkers.

Before the coming of the internet and social media, skip tracers had to manage everything manually from reaching a location to spending lots of time in searching for the public records at the library. But, fortunately, with the considerable amount of data available in the present times online, skip tracers can now search easily anywhere in a less period.

In the current scenario, skip tracers have opted for advanced methods and practice them more than the traditional ways. Hire a professional skip tracer before you head for such cases.