Page 111 - CARS Standard Program

SKIP-TRACING
You arrive at the debtor’s residence, an address your client provided, but the collateral described in your assignment is not there. Since you have checked the address several times, during the day and night, you decide to confront the debtor and attempt to secure possession of the collateral. The result is that you learn the debtor moved six months ago to parts unknown.
For a Recovery Agent to be successful at his trade, it is imperative that he learn and understand at least the basics of skip-tracing.
First, what is a skip? For our purposes, any person who cannot be contacted via telephone, mail or in person can be classified as a skip.
What is skip-tracing? Again, for our purposes, skip-tracing is the specialized art of developing information for the purposes of locating debtors who meet the definition of a skip.
With the advent of the Internet, skip-tracing has changed dramatically. Although the telephone is still the least-expensive way to conduct skip-tracing, the Internet has brought a new dimension to not only the art of skip-tracing for debtors, but also for locating other types of people, such as relatives, missing heirs and criminals.
Skip-tracers have found social media sites to be a very effective new tool for practicing their profession, and use it extensively. The ability to effectively use the Internet has eliminated much of the field activity previously demanded of skip-tracers, such as physical records searches, and searching for a skip’s relatives and friends.
In this Section, we have provided many of the most important and effective websites available to assist the professional skip-tracer. As with any vocation, it takes time, practice and patience to become a competent practitioner in this unique profession.
Another new technology in locating skips is License Plate Recognition (LPR), which involves mounting special, weatherproof cameras on the provider’s vehicle. As these vehicles travel about, the cameras record pictures of license plates and automobiles (currently at a rate of more than 1 million daily). The pictures are stored in a database where lenders have provided license plate numbers and vehicle descriptions of their skips. When a photo “hits” on one of the cameras, the information is captured and a technological procedure takes place to alert the lender, the result being that the provider receives a repossession order.