Organizations leveraging skip tracing solutions have experienced both remarkable opportunities and operational challenges with the integration of big data and AI-driven automation. Advanced digital methodologies provide debt collectors and skip tracers with comprehensive information access that is broader in scope and faster in delivery. However, the exponential growth in data volume — encompassing individual profiles, locations, networks, activities, and geographic movements — has created the new complexity of efficiently navigating and analyzing vast information repositories to extract actionable intelligence.
The key question is, how does your organization choose the right tools to make your investigation teams more accurate and efficient for your specific types of cases?
Previously, skip tracers relied on traditional methods like social engineering and physical surveillance — basically building cases from scratch with limited information. They had to work around modern anonymity using careful questioning, strategic approaches, and discrete observation techniques.
Today's investigative landscape has transformed. Over the years, advancement in data accessibility and user-friendly tools has expanded the investigator's toolkit. Access to public and private databases, coupled with basic search functions, opened doors to information that previously demanded extensive manual effort. Despite improvements, many data sources remain isolated, leaving investigators to manually connect disparate pieces of information — a task where even seasoned professionals may miss critical links. Tools employing Entity Resolved Database (ERD) technology are especially valuable, as they match records across databases with varying formats and entry protocols.
With these advancements, digital search capabilities have ushered in a new era of people-finding possibilities. Modern skip tracing now revolves around identifying crucial information within the vast digital landscape. Rather than grappling primarily with the anonymity and mobility of subjects, investigators are now challenged to efficiently navigate and extract relevant data from overwhelming digital repositories.
All-in-one platforms like Thomson Reuters CLEAR Skip Tracing streamline the investigative process by providing real-time access to multiple data sources, associated analytics, and reporting tools, enhancing both efficiency and accuracy for investigators.
Skip tracing in the AI-driven digital world
The key question for firms adopting investigative tools today is whether these tools can perform two key tasks — organize, manage, and sort an overwhelming amount of digital information; and using new machine-learning capabilities, suggest overlaps, connections, and potentially useful bits of information that conventional database-query approaches might miss.
Modern digital solutions like CLEAR Skip Tracing bring together advanced search capabilities and comprehensive data access within a single, intuitive dashboard. These platforms not only accelerate the investigative process, but also operate with greater discretion, helping professionals avoid legal, ethical, and procedural challenges commonly associated with traditional methods — such as excessive outreach or limited data collection windows.
By leveraging next generation skip tracing technology, organizations can enhance investigative outcomes while maintaining strict compliance standards. Built-in compliance features, regularly updated to reflect evolving privacy laws and regulatory expectations, are essential in today's dynamic environment. Staying informed about federal, state, and international privacy requirements is critical, as regulations continue to adapt to the realities of the digital age.
Chapter One
What do we do when we skip trace
Because it is everyday work for firms that do skip tracing, we often forget that every method of skip tracing, at least as its core, seeks to enhance our knowledge of the person we are looking for. Targets try to stay hidden, and diligent investigators shake the hedges to find them. But hiding nowadays is simply harder than it used to be for all but the most skilled information manipulators.
Two factors have changed. First, each of us leaves many more recorded traces — digital crumbs — than we used to, and it’s not just when we use official or public documents or seek employment anymore. Indeed, there is a shocking amount of information that can be gleaned from consumer data, business and workplace records, web presence and social media use, online local news, credit header data — both current and historical— vehicle registration and ownership data, utility hookup data, and more. As we move through our day, we’re often unaware of the extent to which our activity is not just recorded in digital bits but is available to others to piece together.
Second, the efficient and quiet access investigators have to these enhanced information sources at their fingertips has grown exponentially. So much so, in fact, that these gains can only be realized if there’s some way to manage it all.
Skip tracers, collections specialists, and debt collectors can, at a glance, look at the digital traces of known relatives and business or workplace associates. This investigation can pay dividends because, for example, targets with debts often try to offload transactions to friends and relatives to stay under the radar. Or, beneficiaries might not even know that your client, such as an insurance company, is looking for them. Off-site property owners can benefit from knowing an investor might be interested in a distressed property.
Making connections: Who knows the primary?
In a typical case involving evasion, the primary contact may make efforts to hide their own digital traces. However, they don’t control public or easily obtained information about associates, family members, or neighbors — such as social media posts or local news mentions. If an investigator has conflicting information about the primary’s location, reading about the activities of their associates and local news announcements and articles might help the investigator narrow it down or prioritize leads.
In fact, CLEAR Skip Tracing offers access to deeper connections, with descriptors of the relationship that are immediately visible and searchable with one click. With only a few more clicks, you can do fuller searches of these associates if they are flagged for certain characteristics.
Places: Using maps more completely for full and partial addresses
Skip tracers, collections specialists, and debt collectors know that sometimes nothing compares to placing fragmented information onto a map — or more than one, for multiple locales tied to the primary contact. Doing so can reveal more than a list of text-rendered addresses; in fact, it can let investigators look for minute details, sometimes all the way down to street level. What’s nearby? How close is an address to main roads and transit routes? What commercial activities are nearby? What schools and universities or public spaces are around?
A target’s past activities in one place can tell us something about their likely activities in another. Now, much more quickly than previously, skip tracers can leverage their knowledge of past activities and habits to learn about current and future ones with digital maps.
Winnowing down or zooming out: Flexible search criteria backed by machine learning
Skip tracers know that names and addresses are just the beginning of it all, and the information that they obtain may be fragmented or ambiguous. For example, are there similarly spelled or similar sounding names that to-the-letter searches might miss? Machine learning can harness a variety of background techniques to suggest that two apparently different pieces of information are, in fact, more similar than they appear.
By joining human logic with a set of expanded, AI-generated grey area possibilities, an investigator can create a useful synergy between the two — not just for names but for partial addresses or emails. Harnessing these tools, investigators would have the ability to search more narrowly or as broadly as they wish.
Of course, software for searching should also have a way to work with outdated or dormant items, such as names, addresses, phone numbers — including cell and VoIP — various ID numbers, and Social Security numbers. Indeed, one practical problem in any investigation is managing the data and leads that you cultivate and fleshing out connections and overlaps visually. Again, CLEAR Skip Tracing provides an intuitive dashboard interface that tackles the too many inputs problem. Plus, users can customize and filter reports, choosing the most relevant characteristics while hiding or de-prioritizing others.
Showing your work and keeping sourcing at-hand
An important part of any skip tracing investigation is the tracer’s ability to generate reports and maintaining source transparency for documentation and reporting. In fact, the results of fruitful investigations should be accompanied by clearly organized presentations for the firm’s clients that include a set of links and notes explaining where the information came from.
A good, clear interim presentation can yield investigative results as well. Sometimes clients know more than they think they do — and your initial presentation, updating them about the status of your investigation so far, can generate new insights and leads from the clients themselves.
Newer investigative platforms can streamline the tracing process and enhance the rigor of the final product as well, allowing tracers to keep track of sourcing decisions and aiding case file organization. CLEAR Skip Tracing does this while offering a variety of file formats and visualization tools that users can employ to enhance their reports and case presentations.
Chapter Two
Comparing newer all-in-one systems with older methods
For those among us who want to disappear or greatly enhance their privacy to the point of invisibility, there are ways to do it and those that will help you, as author Benjamin Wallace of The Atlantic noted in a recent article. “Strong privacy is a luxury good,” Wallace writes, adding that it requires a concerted effort to escape into it. By contrast, most of us leave digital breadcrumbs every single day.
The differences between digital investigation now and skip tracing in past decades are not just logistical but conceptual. Skilled skip tracing focused on building up, stepwise, a net of information surrounding the target, with often a heavy component of fieldwork and multiple queries. Now, assembling the small but relevant pieces of information drawn from a big sea of data is primarily and preliminarily the main task at hand. And while the seasoned investigator is still crucial, you need modern tech-enhanced tools that are better suited to this overall orientation.
In situations where the primary is not evasive but rather is just someone who doesn’t know they are being searched for, a practiced investigator still needs to customize the kinds of searches that might be informative based on their training and experience.
The information gathered by CLEAR Skip Tracing, for example, is routinely updated, and CLEAR can draw upon continuous updates from each data source and make these results available for each case. CLEAR Skip Tracing can also process multiple data points simultaneously, providing fast results about targets that traditional methods might take days or weeks to achieve. Stale information is reduced, and access to premium data sources, including top credit bureaus and bank account header records, enhances the success rate in locating individuals.
As our digital world gets more complex, the bigger or more sophisticated a target is, paradoxically, the more that use of traditional techniques that are integrated with state-of-the-art new ones, will still be necessary.
Chapter Three
Best practices in skip tracing
The information glut of the current digital era presents a significant challenge to skip tracing and investigators. It’s not only the case that investigators have tons more data available to them, it’s also that sifting through it all can be daunting. On the bright side, search options and big data resources are improving.
People in investigation fields are learning every day about innovative ways to use and manage the wealth of information available. Today, understanding how to leverage social media platforms, public records databases, API integrations, and other proprietary digital resources that are now available are critically important.
Investigators have a wider variety of materials available about their target even before making any contact, which enhances their chances of successful and productive direct and third-party contact — and making investigations and compliance easier. With newer all-in-one skip tracing tools, preparation and research are much more complete at the outset, and your analysis of options regarding how to proceed at that stage are enhanced.
At the minimum, modern AI-driven platforms, such as CLEAR Skip Tracing, should offer users a streamlined interface for simultaneous searches of public and proprietary records that are continuously updated with the latest contact information for subjects of interest. The use of these platforms should accelerate queries and widen search practices to find information potentially relevant to your unobtrusive query.
Guardrails in an age of vast information pools: Compliance and reputational risk
Some of the very same tools that improve data search and organization can also aid your firm’s compliance efforts while enhancing its reputation for professionalism.
For example, getting into compliance with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) and other privacy laws is central to any legal and ethical practice, but it can be complex. In addition, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) as well as several states, require that your firm develop a formal compliance management system.
If you have a workable one in place, it is much easier to update and recalibrate when laws and regulations change, and it streamlines employee onboarding, training, and ongoing management. One advantage of having a good integrated software solution is that compliance help is available within it.
CLEAR Skip Tracing can also interface with other data intelligence tools that you are currently using in-house, increasing the ability to provide clarity and transparency to your compliance efforts.
Chapter Four
The CLEAR advantage in skip tracing
As we’ve shown throughout this e-book, CLEAR Skip Tracing can harness a bird’s eye view of your investigative search, allowing you to access a streamlined interface for simultaneous searches of public and proprietary records and offering you access to a real-time gateway to a wealth of current data, including social media and online news sites.
Key features and benefits of CLEAR Skip Tracing
- Tackling the “too many inputs” problem. One practical problem in any investigation is managing the data and leads that you cultivate and fleshing out connections and overlaps visually. CLEAR Skip Tracing provides an intuitive, dashboard interface that tackles this problem and allows you to customize and filter searches and reports, choosing the most relevant characteristics while hiding or de-prioritizing the ones you don’t care about.
- Avoiding stale or out-of-date data. CLEAR can draw on continuously updated information from each data source and make these fresh results available for each case, thereby reducing stale information. CLEAR Skip Tracing processes multiple data points simultaneously, providing fast results about targets.
- Contact View interface to reveal connections. CLEAR Skip Tracing also has a Contact View option for immediate display of connected phone numbers and addresses that puts known addresses, phone numbers, and email first. In some cases, this initial view may be all that is needed.
- Associate Analytics can discover relatives and associates. These connections, with descriptors of the relationship, are immediately visible and searchable with one click. With only a few additional clicks, you can do fuller searches of these associates if they are flagged for certain characteristics. And each associate is rank-scored based on strength of association.
- Aiding continuous professional development. CLEAR Skip Tracing offers in-person and online training as well as maintaining online training modules, as well as continuous customer service.
You can learn more about what Thomson Reuters CLEAR Skip Tracing can do for your investigating practice and receive a free demo here
