Skip tracers are professional searchers who specialize in locating people such as debtors and deadbeats (people who owe money).  Skip tracers often work for companies that are owed a lot of debt such as banks, credit card companies and utility companies.  Skip trace departments within these companies can be a great source to find someone you suspect owes money. 

Skip Tracers are constantly tracking down and developing current address and current employment information on debtors and deadbeats.  Skip tracers typically rely on using the phone and employing various pretexts (phone tricks) to get debtors and deadbeats to reveal their locations.  Sometimes this can be more effective than database or Internet Searching.

If you suspect the person you are searching for owes money to a specific company or companies, contact their skip trace departments and see if you can enlist their help.  (If you are searching for your deadbeat husband or dead beat wife, you may have possession of an old credit report, which will list all their creditors.)

When you call a skip trace department, tell them who you are and tell them you are skip tracing someone.  They may be more receptive to assisting you if you provide them whatever information you have on the person you are searching for (an information exchange).  Be as nice as pie and promise your unending gratitude if they help you! 

If they agree to help, get all you can get:

• Address history
• Employment history
• Social Security Number
• Date of Birth
• Phone numbers
• Driver’s information
• Spouse information

When done speaking with a skip tracer, thank him (her), provide him your phone number and address and ask politely that he contact you if he develops any new information.  Assure him that you will do the same and get the best phone number to contact him. 

Here is a link to many skip tracing departments throughout the USA: 

http://www.diogenesllc.com/thephonelist.html 

Of course, you can also contact OmniTrace – The People Search Experts – to help you with your search.  We’ll do all the work and only charge you a fair and reasonable fee.  You can also call us toll free at 1-888-965-6696 or email us at:  info@omnitrace.com.

First, visit free web resource www.zillow.com. 

1. At the top of the Zillow homepage, there is field where you can input your missing person ’s old address. 
2. After submitting your search, you will see a map of the neighborhood where your missing person once resided (you can view this map in street view, aerial view and hybrid view). 
3. The old address, that you submitted will appear, as well as tiny icons that represent homes surrounding the address you submitted. 
4. By clicking on the icons, you will obtain exact address information. 
5. Jot down the addresses surrounding your subject’s old address.  In particular, you will want the addresses on the left, on the right and directly across the street from the old address of your subject.

Then, visit free web resource www.whitepages.com. 

1. On the upper center of the home page, click on the “Reverse Lookup” tab and then in the form under the title “Reverse Address,” input the addresses you obtained at zillow.com. 
2. You will obtain the names and phone numbers of people who may have information about your missing person. 

The above search technique has an added benefit:  You can see a picture of each home in the neighborhood.  This allows you to approximately determine when the homes were built.  (No sense calling someone who has resided at an address for a short time when your missing person resided their many years ago.)

Call and interview these possible, prior neighbors who resided near your missing person’s old address.  They may be able to provide you the names of family members, church affiliations, employer information, the landlord of the property where the missing person resided, and much more. 

If you are searching for your birth mother, the above investigative trick can also help you obtain information about her–as long as you know her old address at the time you were born or adopted. 

Surprisingly, OmniTrace has many adoption related cases that includes the birth mother’s maiden name and an old address, and even when we begin a birth mother search without her name or old address, we may develop this information early on in our search.  Here’s an example:  

When we receive a search request from someone adopted in Oregon, we first help our client  obtain his or her original birth certificate (Oregon has open records).  The original certificate contains the birth mother’s maiden name (unless she was married at the time of birth) and the address where the birth mother was residing at the time of birth.

Once you have acquired a list of neighbors to interview, here a few things to remember:

• Confirm you are speaking with the correct persons listed in whitepages.com. 
• Be friendly and courteous and somewhat imploring.  You may want to represent yourself as a long lost friend or family member of the missing person.
• Make some small talk to loosen things up.
• Prepare the right questions.  Ask if they know the missing person; do they know where the missing person moved; who lived with the subject, who employed the subject, who in the neighborhood knew the subject best, etc.
• If asked how you got their phone number, say the truth:  you got their number from whitepages.com.

Recap:  If you have an old address of your missing person, interviewing prior neighbors can be a great people search resource. 

If you need additional search assistance, please leave a comment below, e-mail us at: info@omnitrace.com  or call us toll free at: 1-888-965-6696. And, please contact us if you have any questions about this post.

Nearly every county in the USA has a County Sheriff Department that handles non-municipal law enforcement situations.  A County Sheriff Office can be a great resource to help you find missing persons such as:  missing family members, missing birth family,  lost children, and persons in hiding. 

The County Sheriff handles the county jails, inmate transportation, outstanding warrants, vehicle accidents on county highways, non-municipal crimes, sheriff sales and more.  Needless to say, they have a lot of data on a lot of people.   

If you think your subject(s) are in a particular county, don’t hesitate calling the County Sheriff to help you find missing persons.  Please note:  you’ll have much better luck speaking with office support personnel or a deputy– the Sheriff can be a pretty busy person.

The support personnel at the County Sheriff Office can provide you (1) landlord information if you suspect your subject is a renter, (2) utility companies in the area, (3) the names and phone numbers of major companies/employers, (4) phone numbers of people with a particular last name, (5) inmate information. 

Someone from the County Sheriff Office may even personally know your missing person, particularly in a rural area. 

If you think your missing person is wanted by the law, click   HERE  and then click on the appropriate State abbreviation.  Our statewide pages contain wanted persons links for most counties in the USA.  They also contain much more information to help you find missing persons. 

Please give us a call toll FREE at 1-888-965-6696 or write us at info@omnitrace.com if you have any questions or would like us to conduct a search for you. 

You can locate someone free by searching the White Pages.  These are available free via the Internet as well as hard copy telephone books.

Our researchers often use free online telephone directories and telephone books to locate someone and verify their address and phone number information.  We have our own library of telephone books covering cities all over the USA as well a list of our favorite online white page web sites.

So, why do we use hard copy telephone books instead of online white page directories to locate someone free?  Good question!  We mainly use older telephone books to conduct historical research.  Sometimes, in order to locate someone at a current address, we need to obtain historical address information first and then work our way forward year by year.

For instance, in Oregon, an adoptee can obtain their original birth certificate, which will list their birth mother’s name and address at the time of the adoption.  So, if the adoptee provides us with a copy of their birth certificate, we can search an old telephone book for the year of the adoption and verify the birth mother’s old address and phone number (we can also verify the spelling of the birth mother’s name which sometimes is spelled incorrectly on the birth certificate).  Then, year by year, we can search other, more current telephone directories, to see when the birth mother underwent any address and name changes.  At the very least, we can determine when the birth mother moved out of the area, which can also be helpful when trying to locate someone free.

You can visit a local library and they’ll likely have a collection of telephone books for you to access.  If they do not, contact the local genealogical society or historical society and see if they can assist you.

Sometimes an old phone book can help you obtain your subject’s unlisted phone number.  Even if they currently have an unlisted phone number, their number at one time may have been listed and may still be in use.

Free online directories can also help you find birth family members.  If you are an adoptee searching for your birth mother and have her maiden last name (and the name is a bit unusual), you can research online directories to determine where in the USA the majority of persons with this last name reside.  Then you can contact these potential relatives by phone or by mail to see if they have any information on your birth mother.  (The Social Security Death Index can also help you with this type of research by observing where the majority of persons with a particular last name have passed away.  Then you can search for living persons in the same area to help you locate someone free.)

Online directories often have a reverse search function.  So, if you happen to have an old address or phone number of someone you need to locate, you can input that address and/or phone number and obtain a current listing.  The current resident may have information on prior residents.  You can also look up listings of persons who live nearby who can assist you.

Make sure that you search for all possible spellings of a name.  If you are searching for, let’s say our company president–David Betz, and find no listing, next look up David Betts, then David Bets.  Try different first name variations and nicknames as well:  David or Dave.  Other examples are:  Richard or Dick or Rick | Charles or Chuck | William or Bill or Billy.  Be creative and search as many name varations as possible.  Also search for initials (e.g., D.R. Betz or D. Betz instead of David Richard Betz or David Betz).

When trying to locate someone free and you know they are associated with a business, you can search the white pages for the business name.  Check out the yellow pages when you just know the type of business and don’t have a name.

Be sure to choose the correct telephone book when trying to locate someone free.  Some directories cover a single town and others cover an entire county or more.

If you are trying to locate someone free who may be married, be sure you search for the names of both the husband and the wife.  You may also want to look under the wife’s maiden name in the event the couple are trying to not be found.

If you have no luck finding the one you seek in the white page listings, try searching the yellow pages.  The subject might be listed there, particularly if he/she has a home office, is self-employed or is a licensed professional such as a doctor or lawyer.  If you have a business name, search in both the white and yellow pages for a listing.

If you find a listing for your subject, make sure the listing is current by checking other white page resources or calling directory assistance.

If you have a last known address of your subject and notice that there is someone with your subject’s same last name listed at a similar address (e.g., 23123 State Rd. 7 instead of 22123 State Rd. 7) you should give that similar listing a call.  There may have been a typo in your original information.

We hope this post helps you locate someone free.  Of course, if you need additional search help or simply would like a FREE search consultation with one of our OmniTrace Search Advisors, please email us or call toll free at:

888-965-6696.

A while back, we wrote a post on how to search for people with free help from the city clerk’s office.  You can read that post here:  City Clerk’s Office Can Help You Find People.

When you search for people and you know the county where they reside, the county clerk’s office is another great free resource.  Here is a nice website to help you find any county in the USA:  NACO – Find A County.

An easy way to find the address and phone number of a particular county clerk is to enter the county clerk’s name in google.  For instance, if you google “Palm Beach County Clerk,” this clerk’s office will show up prominently in your google results and you can obtain their address and phone number.   

Make sure when you contact a county clerk’s office and ask them to help you search for people, you are polite and that the person you are speaking with has ample time to help you.  They may be able to help you:

• Search For People in a phone, city or reverse directory.
• Determine whether the people you search for have business licenses, business permits or occupational licenses. 
• Determine if the people you search for have been involved in any recent court proceedings.

If you are adopted and are conducting a people search for your birth parents ask if there are any birth, marriage or death records available.  Birth records or birth indexes may provide name information on the birth parents.  If you know your birth mother’s maiden name, marriage records can help you obtain her current name.  If one or both of your birth parents have passed away, death records can help you determine if you have any birth relatives.  (The informant’s name on the death certificate is typically a relative or close friend.) 

So, when you search for people, use the free help provided by the county clerk’s office.  Please send us a comment if you have any questions.  You can also us at info@omnitrace.com or call us toll free at:  888-965-6696 for a free and friendly people search consultation. 

When OmniTrace begins a new search for someone lost, we ask our client, who is requesting the search, for as much information as possible about the lost subject of the search.   We take extensive notes and use the following worksheet (feel free to make a copy for your own use):

Missing Persons Search Form

During the course of a search for someone lost, we attempt to fill in all the blanks in our worksheet.  We also take notes on any research that we conduct such as:

• Our telephone calls – who we speak with, the phone numbers dialed, when we call and what we learn.
• The research we conduct – we record what databases, genealogy records, census records, phone directories, city directories, etc. that we access.  We record when we access these records.
• The letters and emails that we send, when we send them, the dates we send them and if and when we receive a response. 

What we are emphasizing here is to keep extensive notes on everything you do during the course of your search for someone lost.  It’s vital!   Each source that you access will provide you with different details about your lost subject.  A marriage record may get you a maiden name.  An old city directory may get you employment information.  A criminal record may get you a date of birth.  The information you obtain from one source will allow you to search other sources for more information (e.g. obtaining a date of birth from a criminal record may allow you to request driver’s license information).

Trust us here, if you don’t take good notes when you search for someone lost, you will lose track of what information you have collected.  Not having good notes will prevent you from staying organized and putting the pieces of the search puzzle together.

When taking notes, try to clarify which information is exact and confirmed and which information is speculative and unconfirmed.  For instance, if you are an adoptee searching for your birth mother, you may have been told that your birth mother was 16 at the time of your birth and from the Bronx.  This is unconfirmed data and you need to make a note of this.  We have clients who have spent years searching on their own, unsuccessfully, because they put their trust in unconfirmed data.  You must be very careful working with unconfirmed data, particularly dates and places.  So, referring to our worksheet, you may want to write down unconfirmed information in red or in pencil. 

So, stay organized, take good notes, be accurate, verify your information (from as many sources as possible), don’t make assumptions and jump to faulty conclusions.  This will help you search for someone lost.     

Have you been searching for someone without success?  Perhaps you are considering using the services of a professional search company, such as OmniTrace.  

Why not visit the many search pages on this website first?  We have compiled hundreds of free investigative tools and links that may allow you to find the one you seek.  To get you started searching for someone, click here:

Searching For Someone

Have you been conducting a USA people search on the Internet, visiting many people search websites, calling directory assistance, ordering public records, but still cannot find the person you are looking for?  Have you contacted people who you thought were the right person, only to have your hopes dashed over and over?  How many hours have you spent on your USA people search?  Are you tired of spending $10.00 here and $15.00 there on ineffective, so called professional people search websites? 

Those are important questions!

The main reason we are providing our blog is to give you the free people search tools you need to find who you are looking for.  Even with these tools, however, searching can take a lot of time.  You might have to order public records from vital statistics, non-identifying information from an adoption agency, driver records from motor vehicles, etc.  It might take several weeks or months for your request(s) to be processed.  (This is particularly true if you are searching for your birth parents or an adopted child.)

So, please do conduct your own people search and utilize the free resources we provide you here!  You will likely find the one you seek.  But, your people search could take you much time.   

If you lack the time to do your own search, please contact us.  You will first receive a FREE and FRIENDLY search consultation from one of our search advisors:  Peggy, Sharla, Sheila, Barbara, Tatiana and Diane. 

You can then decide to retain our services at a very affordable rate or continue on with your own USA people search efforts.  You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by writing or calling us.  At the very least, you’ll receive a FREE search lesson !

You can also call us toll free at:  888-965-6696.

How To Find Missing Persons

Do you want to learn how to find missing persons?  

Join the club!  Just about everyone is interested in learning how to find missing persons in this transient / mobile world of ours.  Perhaps you want to find your lost love or an old friend. Perhaps you lost track of someone you met online.  Perhaps you are an attorney searching for a key witness for a court case or a missing heir to an estate. 

What point are we going to make here–you’re probably dying to ask? 

Our point is this:  All missing persons cases are nearly created equal.  How you successfully solve one type of missing persons case will very much apply to solving other missing persons cases as well.   In other words, the techniques used to find your lost love, will likely apply to finding your birth mother, missing military buddy or a deadbeat dad.

So, read ALL the posts on our website.  Each post will help you learn how to find the missing person you seek.  And, we love it when people reads our posts!!! 

Okay, now that we’ve got that off our chest, here’s another important tip on how to find missing persons:  STAY ORGANIZED! 

One of the most important things you can do when beginning a missing persons search is to stay organized. Your search may go in many directions and take quite a while to complete.  Trust us.  Good organization will pay dividends for you!  Here is a link to our:

 Missing Persons Search Worksheet

The research team at OmniTrace uses the above worksheet for each new case we open.  Just click on the above link, open the form and print.  (You’ll need Microsoft Word to view the worksheet.  If you don’t have Word, please send us an email to info@omnitrace.com.  Just let us know you need a worksheet and provide us your fax number.  We’ll send you a worksheet pronto!) 

Please leave a comment if you have any questions on how to find missing persons.

It’s easy to conduct a free prison inmate search.   Just visit our search page: 

Free Prison Inmate Search

There you will find links to Department Of Corrections inmate search pages for all 50 states.   You will also find the Federal Board Of Prisons prison inmate search website and a free nationwide sexual offender search website, provided by Family Watchdog. 

We are often asked what is the difference between a jail and a prison.  Inmates who are in jail are typically awaiting trial, are awaiting transportation to a prison or have received a sentence of less than a year (usually a misdemeanor sentence).  Inmates who are in prison have already been tried and convicted of a crime and received a sentence of more than a year (usually a felony sentence).

Jails are usually run by sheriffs, police departments or local government.  State Prisons are operated by the state where the inmate was convicted. 

Finally, Federal Prisons are operated by the Federal Bureau Of Prisons and hold inmates who have been convicted of federal crimes. 

We hope this post helps you conduct a successful free prison inmate search.  If you have any difficulty locating your suspected prison inmate or if you require background research on the inmate, please do not hesitate to call us toll free at 888-965-6696 for a FREE search consultation.