If you need to find a specific person in Australia and don’t have their contact information, skip tracing is an effective means of discovering where they live and how to contact them. Skip tracing tools can help you to find people you need to contact, even if all you have to go on is a name. It’s a great solution if your debtors have missed payments, if you’re working on a genealogy project or if you need to serve a court order.
Here’s how you can use skip tracing tools to find any Australian citizen or resident – even if they’ve taken deliberate measures to stay hidden.
Skip Tracing: What It Is and How It Works
Skip tracing, according to Wikipedia, is the process of discovering someone’s location. The term comes from the common expression “to skip town” which refers to quickly departing a place while leaving few indications of one’s destination. A person who performs skip tracing activities is called a skip tracer. Skip tracers work by gathering vast quantities of information about the person in question and using that information to deduce their whereabouts. This includes online information like social media profiles and email accounts as well as offline information such as credit reports and social security benefits files. Skip tracers often have to talk to known contacts like family, friends or neighbours, which sometimes involves misleading said contacts.
It’s Not Just for Law Enforcement…
Law enforcement officials like police officers, attorneys, and detectives are among those who commonly use skip tracers, however, skip tracing tools aren’t just for finding fugitives. Skip tracers commonly work alongside debt collectors, bounty hunters, and repossession professionals in order to locate people with debts past due or people who fail to appear in court after posting bail.
It’s also common for professional journalists to use skip tracing in order to track down elusive sources, and both professional and enthusiast genealogists use skip tracing tools to locate relatives and ancestors or to add missing details to the family tree.
Skip Tracing Turns Up Information You Might’ve Missed
If you need to find a vast amount of online information about someone, it can be daunting to search dozens of sites to get the information you need. A professional skip tracing service will turn up all of the subject’s online personas in one easy-to-browse spot. For instance, a critical piece of information might be buried in a profile entry on an obscure social media site that most people likely haven’t heard of. Or maybe several critical pieces of information are distributed across multiple sites. With a skip trace, all of that information turns up in one place. This makes it faster and easier to find unlisted information like a personal email address.
Complete Information Means Better Intelligence Informs Your Tactics
It’s much easier to connect different data points together when all of the information is in one place. Instead of having to spend time extracting data points from your research, you can simply review them all in one spot and start connecting those points together to tell a story or develop a conclusion. If you need to deceive someone along the way (for instance, if you’re a bounty hunter talking to a fugitive’s family and you don’t want them to know you’re chasing the fugitive), having this cohesive story in one place can help you to create a more believable lie. If you’re a debt collector chasing someone who defaulted on a loan, having a complete picture means you’ll know what haunts your borrower frequents. That means you’ll know when and where to confront them or repossess their collateral if you’re worried they may try to skip town.
Search Offline Records in Just Minutes
Google and other search engines can easily turn up online records from online encyclopaedias, news websites, and social media accounts, but records that haven’t been entered into an online database or indexed by Google’s crawlers won’t show up in the search results. Skip tracing tools like those offered by Australia’s Detective Desk can turn up offline records like phone books and marketing databases almost instantly. Online skip tracing companies have vast libraries of information culled from hundreds of sources that users can search in minutes. If the person you’re looking for doesn’t turn up online, an offline records search might find them.
One Search Box. Dozens of Sources.
If you’re searching for someone on your own, without the help of a skip tracer, you’ll inevitably end up wading through boxes upon boxes of papers and reading search results from ten different websites for the first hint of a familiar name – only to try another search engine and another box of papers when the first one doesn’t pan out. With professional skip tracing tools, you can instantly search for someone across a dozen or more different sources.
Need to find a phone number, address or email? Gone are the days of flipping through the local white pages and cross-referencing names with social media sites or typing all manner of underscores, numbers, and name combinations trying to guess someone’s email address. Need to find a spouse or track interstate movements when a DOB search turns up empty? A ‘couple search’ can tie two people together via the same address and help you find a deadbeat dad or a runaway bride. Professional skip tracing tools take the effort out of finding leads by allowing you to instantly search and cross-reference multiple sources.
If you need to find a specific person in Australia, skip tracing is a highly effective means of turning up their contact information, relationships, credit history, whereabouts, and more. A commonly used tactic among law enforcement professionals, genealogists, repossession agents, journalists, and bounty hunters, skip tracing is a great way to find people who don’t turn up in standard searches or who simply don’t want to be found. With a few simple tools and databases, you can find anyone you need to – whether it’s a long lost relative, someone who isn’t paying child support, or a bail jumper on the run.
A professional skip tracing service can give you all the information you’d ever need to find anyone in the country.