{"id":715,"date":"2025-02-07T01:41:59","date_gmt":"2025-02-07T01:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.spokeo.com\/pathfinder\/?p=715"},"modified":"2025-02-07T01:42:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-07T01:42:00","slug":"use-of-social-media-in-child-support-investigations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spokeo.com\/pathfinder\/use-of-social-media-in-child-support-investigations\/","title":{"rendered":"Old Challenges, New Tools: The Role of Social Media in Child Support Investigations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A report published by the US Census Bureau in 2020<\/a> (the most recent available at the time of writing) found that while approximately 70 percent of custodial parents received at least some portion of the support payments they were owed, less than half received those payments in full. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This statistic is no surprise to those who work in collections, or in family law. While many of those who default on their child support obligations do so because of legitimate financial constraints, others are deliberate child support evaders. Differentiating between those facing genuine hardship and those gaming the system can be challenging, but social media intelligence (SOCMINT) can be an invaluable tool in such cases. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s look at how SOCMINT might be used by a legal team or collections professionals in the conduct of child support investigations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Defining SOCMINT and SOCMINT Tools<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Broadly speaking, professionals can draw upon two large pools of data for skip tracing and collections purposes. One is regulated data, which is protected by law because of its sensitive nature and privacy implications. It\u2019s drawn largely from consumers\u2019 interactions with the formal financial sector, and available through longstanding data providers with deep ties to the financial, legal, law enforcement, and collections sectors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second pool consists of open-source intelligence (OSINT)<\/a>, which is data gathered from any combination of public sources. A subset of OSINT is social media intelligence, or SOCMINT, which draws its data from publicly viewable information on social media platforms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

SOCMINT data is often more timely than formal regulated data, because social media users may post or update their accounts several times in a given day. However, because these posts contain unverified information and are ephemeral (on many platforms account-holders may choose to delete posts at any time), SOCMINT data is not in itself as reliable as regulated data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social media posts can be fruitful sources of information, since users are often injudicious in sharing the details of their lives. But no matter how active a person of interest is on social media, locating their  accounts they post on or and gleaning actionable information from them manually is both difficult and prohibitively time-intensive. To harness social media\u2019s potential as an investigative tool, professionals require sophisticated software tools that can apply advanced analytics to data aggregated across multiple platforms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using SOCMINT Tools in Child Support Investigations<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A powerful SOCMINT tool such as Spokeo for Business <\/a>can be utilized to address many of the barriers to constructive use of social media data. Arguably the most important of these barriers is simply establishing which social media accounts are linked to the parent in question. Difficulties encountered in that pursuit may include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n