We do a fair amount of skip tracing at ELN Investigations. Most often we assist lawyers and process servers in tracking down defendants, and sometimes we help find people who have outstanding debts or obligations in business or family law matters. Initially, this work bothered me a little; too often the debtor is in a difficult place in their life and can’t afford to pay, or has some legitimate reason for not paying.
BUT… that doesn’t mean debtors get to fall off the map, hide assets, or avoid their creditors. At some point it’s time to open the lines of communication between both sides of the disagreement. Debtors should get the opportunity to speak their truth, and creditors should have the right to know why they aren’t getting paid so that they can honestly assess their options.
Setting all of this aside, the real point I want to make is what distinguishes ELN Investigation’s skip-trace service. Why should you hire us instead of someone else? Better yet, why not use one of the multitude of commercial public-record aggregating websites yourself, like https://www.anywho.com/, https://www.beenverified.com/, https://infotracer.com/, or any of the multitude of others? The short answer is experience and a combination of deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning.
So what are deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning? I’ll leave explanation to the professionals — http://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/thinking/reasoning.html. What does it mean to our clients? That’s a question I can answer. Results.
When we perform a skip trace, we take public record information from a minimum of 3 or 4 sources (usually closer to a dozen), and start linking data points. Sometimes, those data points lead to an inevitable conclusion—John Doe lives at 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Other times, the data points have gaps we have to fill in—John Doe’s wife recently moved to 221B Baker Street, but they are still closely linked on social media, so he probably moved there as well. And sometimes, finding a target requires a logical or intuitive leap based on the data points—a vehicle registered to the target’s father does not frequent the father’s address but has been seen at addresses associated previously with the target and has been seen recently frequenting a new address, 84 Beacon Street…quite possibly the target’s new address.
Clearly, this is just one example (of many) that shows why it makes financial and practical sense to hire a professional skip tracer who has access to reliable sources, knows how to pick the pertinent information from those sources and, more importantly, knows how to tie apparently discrete data points together through instinct and deductive/inductive/abductive reasoning.
You identify your target. We’ll do the rest.
How can we help you?
eln@elninvestigations.com
(469) 702-0411
