Skip Tracing: What is it?

Skip tracing is simply gathering the proper information to find the whereabouts of an individual. The most interesting part about this "skip tracing" term is it originated from the idea of locating people who have skipped town for any reason. It is often that people disappear avoiding legal matters, spouses running off into the wild blue yonder, or those who wish not to be found for other reasons.

This is when the tactics such as visiting neighbors, tracking credit card transactions, wire tapping, and putting notices out on the appearance of an individual or make and model of their car comes into play. The primary objective is to gain as much knowledge as possible about the person before they left by identifying places the person may seek refuge or places that may provide a sanctuary to someone on the run. The longer they are gone, the harder the person may be to track.

Skip tracing means researching someone's past, present, and potential future. How does a private investigator obtain all this information? Most of the information is available through public records, such as employment history, places of residence, and utility bills. For the more personal information there is a tactic called social engineering that is brought in. This is a method in which you may or may not be using false pretense to get people in carious positions of the person you are seeking life to provide you with personal and harder to come by information.

Skip tracing is a hard and tedious task depending on how prepared the person who skipped town was in their planning or simply by how they lived their life. Skip tracing is in a nutshell finding those in which do not wish to be found.