Locate Services

Personal Missing Person Search
The missing person search seeks to locate parties who may or may not want to be found. The missing person search is used to find long lost friends, lovers, and relatives. Locate searches are also used in cases of adoption, as you may need to find your birth parents to learn of your medical history, or you may be a biological parent (birth mother, birth father) looking for children given up at birth for adoption. (If you are looking for missing person locates for other purposes, select Insurance Skip Tracing or Legal Locate Missing Person from below.)

There are several levels of inquiry to missing person search. In some cases, such as finding long lost friends, lovers, and relatives who have just drifted away, you may have a fair amount of information about them already, such as last known address and date of birth. For other types of locate searches, you may not have any such vital data or the information you have may be decades old. These cases are more challenging, but they are solvable.

A couple of factors determine the level of difficulty in a missing person search where there is little more than a name to start with. The first factor is how common is the person's name. If the last name is Smith or Jones and the first is fairly common, the task is more difficult. The second factor is name changes. Women generally change their names when they get married. This presents some of the more difficult locate projects, especially when the date of birth is unknown.

The real-time missing person-the friend or relative or child that has disappeared recently requires-different strategies than those described to this point. In these cases our agents in the field must "pound the pavement" to find the missing person. We also employ high tech measures and discreet sources to obtain information leading to the missing person.

Insurance Skip Tracing
The term "skip tracing" refers to finding missing persons. The term comes from the debt collection industry and refers to those who "skip out" on their debts by moving and not leaving a forwarding address. Today the term skip tracing has been adapted to mean finding a missing person, regardless of if they have skipped out on a debt. The insurance industry requires skip tracing for a variety of reasons, most often to locate the claimant.

When conducting insurance fraud investigations, we conduct skip tracing on claimants, their family members, witnesses, and others who we need to find to investigate a claim. It is not uncommon to be assigned sub rosa surveillance on a claimant who no longer resides at the last known address. We then conduct missing person skip tracing to find the party.

In insurance fraud investigations we usually have a good deal of vita data on the subject we are trying to find. This makes the job easier. We encourage our clients obtain as much identifying information as possible on employees and claimants. This includes current addressees, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and names of family members and other relatives.

Locate Missing Person
The term "Locate missing person" is a frequent request of attorneys and others in the legal profession who often need to find parties involved in litigation. This includes clients, witnesses, experts, defendants or anyone else required for statements, service of process, depositions, or trial testimony.

Missing person locates vary in degree of difficulty. In general, the more you know about the person, the easier the job is. This is why we encourage clients to learn as much as possible about the parties involved in a legal matter. Whether it is an investigator taking a statement, an attorney taking a deposition or a legal assistant sighing up a new client, it is important to get dates of birth, Social Security numbers, full addresses and names of friends or relatives, people that will know the whereabouts of the person should they move in the future.