There are two large pools of data available to collections professionals, with sharply different characteristics. One is regulated data, protected by law and accessible through the proprietary databases of legacy collections data providers. The other is open source intelligence (OSINT), non-regulated data drawn from a range of public sources and accessible – at least nominally – to any who wish to seek it out.
Skip tracing and collections have traditionally depended on regulated data, but the cost of such services continues to rise even as their efficacy dwindles in the face of changing consumer behavior. OSINT, especially in the form of social media intelligence (SOCINT), holds significant promise as a means to return the initiative to collections professionals, and augment the shortcomings of legacy data providers.
The Case for Social Media Data
The regulated data accessible through legacy providers originates in consumer’s interactions with the mainstream financial industry, in the form of banks, credit card issuers, and similar institutions. This results in high-quality data, but it has well-established limitations: Consumers may fail to keep their information current, even on widely used accounts, and increasingly consumers are choosing alternative financial services over traditional players.
The FDIC’s 2021 survey of the nation’s unbanked and underbanked (the most recent available at the time of writing) found that these made up 4.5 percent and 14.1 percent, respectively, of US households. Many of these consumers, collectively accounting for nearly 1 in 5 Americans, have chosen non-traditional financial services not from necessity, but by choice. This openness to alternative financial services, and consumers’ ongoing disaggregation of services from banks to a combination of bank and non-bank providers, marks a significant change in consumer behavior; one which makes them opaque to legacy data sources.
This is the gap that can be bridged through the use of OSINT, and especially SOCINT. Statistics from late 2023 show that 72 percent of all Americans are online, and that 79 percent of those use at least one social media platform. On average, they spend over 2 hours a day online and use 6.6 social media platforms. Given that many social media users freely share details about their lives that would otherwise be difficult to source, this cumulatively represents a massive trove of potentially useful information.
Best Practices for Utilizing Social Media Data in Collections
While the case for using social media data is clear, this remains relatively novel territory for the collections industry. Legal and regulatory guardrails around the use of social media for collections are still evolving rapidly, and companies involved in collections must also develop and enforce their own set of best practices regarding social media. A few potential areas of focus suggest themselves.
Ensuring the Accuracy of Social Media Information
Information drawn from legacy providers of regulated data has this in its favor: it’s often dated, but it is known to be accurate at the time of collection. This is not necessarily the case with social media. Few platforms meaningfully verify the identities of users, and many allow anonymity or pseudonymity as a matter of policy. Furthermore, users’ posts may or may not contain accurate information.
Collections professionals require robust tools or procedures to ensure that:
- A given account corresponds to the debtor.
- Information gleaned from social media accounts can be verified through other means.
- Posts are in fact made by, or refer to, the debtor.
Ensuring Legal Compliance
The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) governs any direct contact between collections professionals and debtors on social media. The CFPB’s current guidance, at the time of writing, requires:
- That all communications be private.
- That collectors identify themselves as such.
- That debtors be afforded the opportunity to opt out of further contact through that channel.
The use of social media for purposes other than direct contact may be clarified with additional legislation at either the state or federal level. There were no new debt collection laws in 2023 at the national level, though the CFPB has scrutinized medical debt and cracked down on the collection of some forms of time-barred debt. Several states have also tweaked their exemption laws, altering the extent to which debtor assets and income can be seized.
None of these have a direct bearing on the use of social media, but the admissibility of social media data – should the courts become involved in a collection – will require ongoing scrutiny, and devoting a portion of your company’s legal spending to that purpose can be considered a best practice.
Establishing Ethical Standards for the Use of Social Media Data
Legal compliance is a fundamental obligation. Setting ethical standards for collections operations, while not mandatory, can be considered a best practice and is often intertwined with legal compliance.
Unethical use of data collected through social media can expose companies to reputational damage at a minimum, and potentially to civil or legal liability as well. Ethical lapses might include failing to follow up on reported misidentification of debtors, acting on social media data that could not be verified through other sources, or the misappropriation of data by collections personnel for personal purposes.
Establishing clear policies around these and other potential ethical issues, as well as procedures that provide both transparency and accountability, constitutes another important best practice.
Securing Actionable Social Media Data
The gap between information that’s potentially useful, and data that is actionable and accessible, can be wide. The sheer volume of OSINT and SOCINT represents both a strength and a weakness: the time and effort involved in winnowing through such a vast sea of data points can be substantial. While manually searching for the debtor’s name on the major platforms will sometimes yield results, often it is neither cost- or time-effective.
Many account holders may share a debtor’s name, and in the opposite case, a debtor’s social media accounts may be held under a nickname or a pseudonymous username. Securing consistently actionable data from social media, in a timely and cost-effective fashion, requires the use of a powerful search tool such as Spokeo for Business. Spokeo for Business’ algorithms draw on billions of data points from well over 5,000 sources, including both OSINT and regulated data, to find connections that other services may frequently miss.
Spokeo launched originally as a social media aggregator and retains an exceptional depth of insight in the crucial SOCINT sector. Spokeo for Business can provide collections professionals with a list of social media accounts linked specifically to email addresses and/or phone numbers matching those of the possible debtor in question, and ranked by their frequency of use. This includes a number of apps, sites, and services – 129 at the time of writing – that even seasoned investigators would not necessarily think of as social platforms.
Leveraging Social Media in Collections
At this juncture, having made a case for the use of SOCINT in general and Spokeo for Business specifically, it may be useful to outline a few examples of specific real-world use cases and their potential workflows. In each case, the use of Spokeo for Business streamlines what might otherwise have been a costly and time-consuming process.
Identifying and Locating Assets or Collateral
Identifying collateral for repossession, or assets for seizure, is fundamental to collections and recovery. The workflow for such an operation, using Spokeo for Business, might look like this:
- Search Spokeo using the debtor’s name, last known address, or other personal information.
- Achieve a positive identification.
- Locate the social media accounts identified in Spokeo’s search report as belonging to the debtor.
- Review the debtor’s accounts in search of public posts that may contain information about employment or gig income, geotagged check-ins for specific locations, or photos.
- Scrutinize photos for evidence of assets or collateral that might be recovered. Check the photos for geotagging, and the accompanying posts for further evidence of their location.
If necessary this process can be repeated with potential family members identified by Spokeo’s search report, and with friends and associates found on the debtor’s social media. In some cases, even if the debtor is scrupulous about evading a skip tracer’s attention, a friend or family member may tag them incautiously in a post, revealing useful information.
Determining a Debtor’s Location
Tracking down a debtor’s current location through skip tracing is another fundamental piece of the collections puzzle. By drawing otherwise non-obvious connections between individuals, from the billions of data points at its disposal, Spokeo for Business can make this process both rapid and cost-effective.
Search the debtor by name. In many cases, Spokeo’s search results will show the most recent address or addresses you already have on file, but also a newer address. If the latter is true, the search is already complete. If not, here is how the search may unfold.
- Search the debtor by their last known address. If the debtor has used variant spellings, initials, or nicknames, this may prove a more effective option than searching each possible variant of the name individually.
- Review the phone numbers and email addresses associated with the debtor, if the first pair of searches do not reveal a current address. In that circumstance there is a possibility that the debtor is currently sharing accommodations, and clicking through each number or email in turn may associate it with a specific address.
- Click through those addresses to identify the owner or tenant.
- Cross-check those against the debtor’s known family and associates, as identified by the earlier Spokeo searches or by their social media friends and followers.
- Review the social media posts of the debtor and their known associates for photos or posts that may indicate who the debtor is rooming with, and their physical location.
Assessing a Debtor’s Employment Location
A debtor’s place of employment can also be useful information. It provides a potential avenue for contacting the debtor, or – if necessary – for serving legal papers.
Search the debtor’s name or last known address.
- Review the information yielded by the initial Spokeo search to make a positive identification. The search results often include employment location, which may be current at the time of search. If not, continue to the next steps.
- Check the social media section of the Spokeo report, which often contains real-time insights derived from many social platforms, and look for a LinkedIn profile. If the debtor has an active public account, current and past employers will usually be listed there. Their posts may also explicitly mention being hired for a new job, and may provide a start date.
- Review the debtor’s other social media profiles, if they lack a LinkedIn profile. Scrutinize their posts for any mention of employment location, whether conventional or irregular (ie, Uber or Lyft).
- Click through to posts by friends and family, if necessary. These associates can sometimes make mention of a debtor’s new job location.
Using Social Media as a Point of Contact
Locating updated contact information for a debtor is only part of the puzzle; it’s also necessary to make contact with the debtor to move the account forward toward a successful recovery. A high percentage across all demographics use social media (the popularity of individual platforms varies with age), and this makes social platforms a potentially useful place to establish contact.
- Search the debtor’s name or last known address on Spokeo for Business.
- Review the debtor’s social media platforms, as reported in the search results.
- Assess which platforms the debtor most actively uses.
- Verify that you have the correct debtor.
- Provide any required compliance disclosures (check with your legal counsel on your specific requirements.)
- Reach out to the debtor through the platform’s private/direct messaging system.
Debtors can be approached through multiple platforms, either simultaneously or sequentially, if necessary. As with any communication with debtors, be mindful of the requirements of the FDCPA.
Putting Theory into Practice
The potential for OSINT, and specifically SOCINT, to empower the collections industry over the coming years is significant. Spokeo for Business, as a leading OSINT tool, addresses well-recognized gaps in the service provided by legacy data vendors, and does so in an intuitive, timely, and cost-effective fashion.
To assess Spokeo’s suitability for your own operations, and to test its real-world applicability to the collections problems you face every day, reach out to our team using the contact options found on our Collections/Skip Tracing page.
Disclaimer: This blog post is not intended as legal advice. Consult your legal and/or compliance department before making any changes to your operations.
With a career spanning three decades, Thomas C. Brown stands at the intersection of the risk information, FinTech, and RegTech landscapes, specializing in identity centric solutions, including those benefiting collections, investigations, and financial services. Throughout his career, he has covered the entire spectrum of the collections industry, from hands-on collections to providing innovative software, data, analytics, and skip tracing solutions. At Spokeo, he leverages deep industry insights to deliver data-driven solutions, empowering professionals in collections and financial services with unique access to actionable intelligence.
Sources:
US Federal Deposit Insurance Commission: 2021 FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households
DataReportal: Digital 2023: The United States of America
New York Institute of Technology: Risks of Oversharing on Social Media
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Understanding How the CFPB’s Debt Collection Rule Impacts You
Pew Research Center: Social Media Factsheet