What Is Skip Tracing?

People vanishing all of a sudden when they no longer have the ability to pay what they owe is a common story. If you’ve been a creditor, you might have experienced one of your debtors escaping from their responsibility of paying whatever they borrowed from you.  

In case you find yourself in this type of ruckus, what do you do?  Do you forgive, move on, and charge it to experience?  Or, do you try to look for your creditors through skip tracing services?  If it’s the first time you’ve heard of the latter, this article can help you know the process better.

What Is Skip Tracing 

When a debtor fails to make a payment on their debt, the creditor’s first step is to contact them or send notifications and reminders about their debt. However, even if a creditor has the physical address of a debtor, there are chances when the person no longer lives there. So, how can collection agencies send collection letters when the customer seems to have vanished all of a sudden?  One debt collection tactic is to skip tracing. 

How Skip Tracing Works

When a debtor can no longer be found in any of their given addresses, the process of locating them is called skip tracing. Skip tracers are the people who are doing all the work of locating debtors who seemed to have vanished in thin air. 

To understand how skip tracing works, it’s important to know the stages involved in the process. These include:

1. Verifying Information

Skip tracers start their work by going over the debtors’ information. This step allows them to know their subject better and to correct any information they received from their clients. 

2. Collecting Information

Just like a good researcher, a skip tracer would need to go through this step to collect all possible information they can gather about the subject. This can include the debtor’s job history, employment applications, background screening reports, credit documents, loan applications, utility bills, and courthouse records, too. 

3. Contacting People

When all documents and records have been exhausted, but not helpful enough to find the debtors’ whereabouts, that’s the only time that a skip tracer can contact people who know the subjects. These individuals can be people the subject has worked with or known in the past. They can be neighbors, former colleagues, landlords, and relatives. 

How Technology Helps In The Skip Tracing Process

Imagine how difficult it is for collecting agencies to find debtors or contact people who can help them find their subjects. They don’t only need to call each possible contact person; they also need to travel from one place to another, looking for information from public libraries or other offices available.  

Fortunately, with the exponential advancement of technology, skip tracers no longer have to do everything manually. The wealth of information can be gathered from social media, and a vast amount of data is now available through the Internet. Without moving from one place to another or spending countless hours making phone calls, skip tracers can now locate their subjects’ whereabouts efficiently.  

Are Skip Tracing Services Worth It?

Even though almost all of the information you need is now available on the Internet, it doesn’t mean that you need to do skip tracing activities on your own. As a creditor, it’s most likely that you’re a lessor or an entrepreneur, and you still need to run your business. The best option is to consider hiring a skip tracer to help you track down your money and do the workaround for you.