The US Census Bureau has calculated that the average American moves 11.7 times over the course of their life. This increased mobility — alongside the increasing digitization of our culture — represents an increasingly complex challenge in collections and debt recovery.
Debtors are increasingly difficult to locate and engage, due in part to this transient population and the disruptive effects of events like the pandemic. More importantly, consumer behavior has shifted during the past decade. Skip tracing’s traditional tools remain useful but have shortcomings in a time of digital nomads and the work-from-home gig economy. Enter “deep” skip tracing, a more intensive method of tracking down debtors that goes beyond traditional skip tracing by leveraging the power of open-source intelligence (OSINT).
Skip Tracing and Deep Skip Tracing: What’s the Difference?
Skip tracing is a fundamental component of debt collections, employed to locate individuals when the contact information on an account is no longer valid. Individual debtors may deliberately choose not to update their account information after moving or may simply forget, but the net effect is the same.
Traditional skip tracing utilizes data sources like credit headers, public records, and proprietary databases to discover a debtor’s whereabouts. It represents the broad strokes of an individual consumer’s life, which often is enough to at least locate and contact a debtor. Unfortunately, the simple fact is that this information is always somewhat dated due to its root sources in the financial sector. Present-day consumers update their contact information at the bank sporadically, but post on their social media accounts on a near-continual basis.
As the name suggests, deep skip tracing augments relatively static legacy data sources by leveraging OSINT to go a level deeper. It involves not just locating the debtor, but also gathering available information about their relationships, locations, patterns, and public posting habits, including self-reported details. Locating and contacting a debtor are only preliminaries. This broader view of a debtor provided by deep skip tracing empowers tracers with the insights needed to build engagement and to tailor a personalized approach for making contact.
Why is Deep Skip Tracing Needed?
Increased mobility, societal shifts such as the rise of the informal “gig economy,” and events like the pandemic have dislodged many debtors from their usual patterns of life. Those factors have also made them harder to locate using traditional means.
Additionally, many debtors have become skilled at evading collectors. Many legitimate sites offer advice on limiting attempts to contact them or how to legally conceal assets from creditors. Less-legitimate sites or private forums may share advice regarding the common data sources used in skip tracing and how to avoid exposure to them. Given these challenges, deep skip tracing becomes a vital tool in locating elusive debtors. It harnesses a rich array of open source intelligence (OSINT) data sources, especially social media, to locate the debtor.
Traditional tracing under-utilizes social media, focusing on just a handful of high-profile platforms. Many others not commonly considered to be “social media,” from content sharing sites such as YouTube to payment and game-streaming platforms, all have a social component that can be leveraged. Combining OSINT tools like Spokeo for Business – which currently draws on over 120 social platforms – with traditional skip tracing increases the likelihood of debtor engagement, but it’s essential to ensure that this is done in a controlled and compliant manner.
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and Deep Skip Tracing
The Director of National Intelligence describes OSINT as “…publicly available information appearing in print or electronic form including radio, television, newspapers, journals, the Internet, commercial databases, and videos, graphics, and drawings.” In short, it’s any form of information that is available to the public or at least not explicitly restricted from the public.
Conventional skip tracing tools are primarily built on regulated data. Regulated data includes such personal information as social security numbers and other information shared with financial institutions, which is protected by law because of its source and the high sensitivity and privacy implications of the data. While these services are inarguably powerful tools, their tight focus on financial data omits much of a consumer’s online “digital footprint.”
OSINT Data Sources and Resources
Deep skip tracing integrates open source intelligence from a variety of resources not grounded purely in legacy financial data. These data sources and resources include, but are not limited to:
- Address history
- Court records
- Phone number records
- Search engines
- Social media platforms
- E-commerce and review sites
- Content sharing platforms
- Payment platforms
- Messaging platforms
- Professional and networking platforms
- Local tax records
While those sources do show some overlap with those used in conventional skip tracing data services, they provide a greater range and depth of available information, furnishing novel signals of consumer and debtor movement patterns that can’t be gained from conventional tools.
Deep Skip Tracing Tools and Services
To effectively conduct deep skip tracing, businesses can leverage a number of commercial tools and services.
Spokeo’s Spokeo For Business product is an especially intriguing OSINT option. Social media represents arguably the single most useful tool in deep skip tracing, and Spokeo can provide uncommonly extensive publicly available social media data coverage spanning more than 120 social networks. The company pioneered social media aggregation, and this remains a core competency.
Spokeo For Business vs. Conventional Data Providers
What also makes Spokeo for Business a strong tool for deep skip tracing is the fact that legacy regulated data providers draw so heavily on financial sources for their data. While this class of data has the benefit of being well-vetted and accurate at the time of collection, it provides a relatively static and, above all, narrow view of the debtor.
The great virtue of Spokeo’s OSINT data sources, especially its depth in the area of social media, is that it enables collections professionals to “zoom out” and take a larger view of debtors’ lives and activities. Interactions with the formal financial system constitute a part of daily life for many – but not all – consumers, but their interactions with each other and with social media are more frequent and more data-rich.
Using Spokeo for Business for deep skip tracing, in the case of hard-to-find debtors, opens up many potential lines of investigation for tracking down the debtors’ location and can suggest numerous avenues for successfully establishing contact.
Best Practices and Applications of Deep Skip Tracing
When used responsibly, deep skip tracing has applications in numerous debt collection activities, including process service, repossession, asset recovery, and especially in managing aged debt that is still within the statute of limitations period. Aged debt is innately challenging to resolve, in part because the passage of time increases the likelihood of a debtor moving repeatedly, changing jobs, or otherwise becoming harder to trace. These moves occur more frequently in lower-income households, who may be unbanked, under-banked, or otherwise opaque to scrutiny by conventional tools that have their roots in the mainstream financial system.
According to a 2021 survey by the FDIC (the most recent available at the time of writing), the unbanked and underbanked account for 18.6 percent of Americans, or approximately 24.6 million households. Younger households are often classed as underbanked because, although they have access to the traditional banking system, they simply prefer to use alternative services. Bringing OSINT to bear on the problem can help clear your books of aged debt, even when those debtors are “under the radar” of traditional skip tracing tools or are deliberately attempting to evade detection.
Practical Applications of Spokeo for Business in Collections and Debt Recovery
The combination of regulated data and OSINT is powerful and can streamline skip tracing efforts, shortening the time and effort to find debtors. Spokeo For Business provides both regulated and unregulated publicly available data in a single product in a cost-effective subscription model, providing a versatile solution with multiple use cases.
A few examples include:
- Uncovering alternative phone numbers, email addresses, or public social media accounts that are linked to the debtor personally but not to their financial or credit history. Linking social media accounts to a specific debtor is a powerful feature and a time saver, especially in cases where the target’s name is a common one. On average, a Spokeo search will return seven social media accounts, prioritized by their frequency of use.
- Finding social media or forum posts by the debtor – or mentions of the debtor on others’ accounts – which can be utilized to trace the debtor’s location.
- Drawing on social media sources to identify and locate assets used as collateral for secured loans so they can be repossessed.
- Gaining insight into the debtor’s personality and attitudes. This “soft” data can inform the collections staff’s approach to communicating with the debtor once located so that future contact efforts are less likely to be ignored or evaded.
In total, Spokeo’s databases manage billions of pieces of public information drawn from over 5,000 sources. It’s also highly accessible, presenting search tools and search results in a clean, intuitive interface.
Enterprises that wish to maintain a relationship with an existing vendor of skip tracing information can make use of Spokeo’s powerful application programming interface (API) to integrate data from both services so they’re accessible from the same interface. At the time of writing, the API provides access only to Spokeo’s open-source data, though work is in progress to provide approved users with API access to regulated data in the near term.
Assessing Spokeo For Business Directly
Deep skip tracing can be a powerful tool in collections and debt recovery, opening up new avenues for locating debtors. Yet, as with any novel tool, it’s difficult to grasp just how large a difference it can potentially make without the opportunity to assess it in hands-on use.
The gap between changing consumer behavior and the information tracked by legacy data providers is already substantial. Powerful new tools like Spokeo for Business, which leverage OSINT, can help close that gap and keep your collections process timely, efficient, and cost-effective. To arrange a demonstration or trial for your own team and see for yourselves how it can extend your reach in difficult traces, contact the Spokeo For Business team by telephone or through the form on this page.
Disclaimer: The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice; instead, all information, content, and materials available are for general informational purposes only.
Sources
US Census Bureau: Calculating Migration Expectancy Using ACS Data
US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: How do I Get a Debt Collector to Stop Calling or Contacting Me?
Office of the Director of National Intelligence: What is Intelligence?
Squire Patton Boggs: Overview of Privacy and Data Protection Laws: United States
Johns Hopkins University: Poor Families Must Move Often, but Seldom Escape Concentrated Poverty
US Federal Trade Commission: Fair Credit Reporting Act
US Federal Deposit Insurance Commission: 2021 FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households
US Federal Trade Commission: Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act