Here is a great in-depth article from the Great Falls Tribune on the tricks of the trade used by a few Great Falls, MT bounty hunters. The article discusses numerous tips and tricks of a good bounty hunter that can be used by skip tracers, investigators or anyone conducting a people search or locator.

From the article —

“Human beings are easier to hunt than deer,” said Jack Sanders, another bail bondsman and bounty hunter in Great Falls.

“They’re dumb,” Sanders added. “They’re creatures of habit. A lot of times they’re on meth, and their friends will turn them in for 50 bucks.”

Last summer, Jara persuaded one client’s mom to hand over her fugative son’s address in Wyoming by fabricating a story about a mix-up with the courts.

Then Jara, a former long-time deputy sheriff, drove to the hideout in Jackson Hole and surprised the guy just as he was heading into town for the Fourth of July festivities.

“Part of our success in capturing these fugitives is the trickery and surprise that we use,” said Scott Olson, founder and owner of the oldest bounty hunter training program in the nation.

The main goal of bounty hunting, in fact, is to outsmart the fugitive. Brute force is almost never used.

You can read the entire bounty hunter article by Jared Miller @
Great Falls bounty hunters use brains, tricks of the trade to bring in their man

Here is a fun Christmas Eve free people search site for all you professional and amateur skip tracers out there. The NORAD Santa Tracker System is now operational. Merry Christmas to all our readers.

You can visit the NORAD Santa Tracker @ NORAD Santa Tracker

With all the search engines releasing their top search words and phrases for 2005, we thought it would be good to list our picks for the top 5 free people search sites of 2005. The sites are presented in no particular order, as each of these free people search sites has its own strengths and uses.

So, without further adieu, here are the Skipease picks for the top 5 free people search sites of 2005 –

1. WhitePages.com — WhitePages.com, in our opinion, is the best and most reliable free 411 and directory assistance site on the web. Any people search should start with the WhitePages.com site.

2. DA Plus — DA Plus is a great free people search that pulls its people search date from directory assistance as well as consumer and public record sources. As a result, DA Plus contains millions of people search results that aren’t available on other free people search sites.

3. Google — “Googling” people has become a common topic and activity over the past few years. Any mention of the top free people search sites has to include the web’s best search engine.

4. ZoomInfo — The ZoomInfo database currently contains over 27 million people search records associated with over 2 million companies. ZoomInfo is a great people search resource for looking at work history, professional biographies etc.

5. Zaba Search — Zaba Search is probably the most notorious free people search of 2005, garnering much attention in the press. Zaba Search, like DA Plus, contains numerous people search records not found on other free people search sites.

There you have it - our picks for 2005’s top free people search sites.

Good luck with your people search efforts.

Here is a great article by Frank Gray from The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette that details the street smarts and people search skills of a repo man, along with some insights into the repo profession.

From the article -

When he leaves to pick up a car, the first thing he does is do a complete skip trace, which shows where all of the owner’s family members live and the car owner’s financial records. It becomes obvious pretty fast when someone is simply in financial trouble or a skipper.

You can read the entire article @ Repo man encounters hard times all around.

Think about this one. Here is a people search idea that is both possible and probable. Add up the following existing and possible technologies and see what you get.

1. GPS cell phones that can pinpoint a person’s exact location. ( exists )

2. Mobile digital cameras on cell phones that can be used to capture images of anyone, anywhere at anytime. ( exists )

3. Date and time stamps encoded onto digital photographs. ( exists )

4. Photo sharing sites, like Flickr, and social networking sites, like Friendster, that allow people to freely upload digital pictures and publish them on the web. ( exists )

5. Online tagging technology, like del.icio.us, that allows people to “tag” web pages and images with relevant keywords, including people names, locations and other descriptive words for better searching. ( exists )

6. Facial recognition software like Riya that can recognize facial features of people in digital pictures. ( exists )

7. Bigger, better, “smarter” and faster online search engines. ( evolving every day )

8. Online satellite and map searches that use latitude, longitude location information for locating places. ( exists )

8. Location stamps encoded onto digital photo files from GPS cell phone cameras or GPS chips placed in any portable digital camera ( possible )

The possibilities from these 8 pervasive and possible technologies are endless; but, basically, you get the potential for online digital photos that can be searched and identified by an individual’s name on Google, and tell you the date, time and location of that individual when the photo was taken. Additionally, these photos could be linked to a map like Google Earth and Google Maps for a graphical view of the location - and let’s not forget the ease of obtaining driving directions to the photo location from your current location, using these same map searches.

Now, is there anything we left out? Please feel free to add your ideas and insights to the comments section under this post.

A Dec. 7th article on wired.com by Jennifer Granick discusses some issues that we have discussed in previous posts on this blog, regarding the new Riya facial recognition software; photo tagging and search engines potentially indexing personal online pictures and making them searchable by a person’s name.

From the Wired article -

The service currently only searches photos uploaded to its servers. The technology could, however, be deployed across the internet, allowing people to search the web, Flickr, Tribe and Friendster photo sets, regardless of whether the owner or the person photographed wants to be identified. That’s where things get interesting.

Mothers could search MySpace.com and find pictures of their children at a party when they were supposed to be studying at a friend’s house. Insurers could search and find a photo of a customer bungee-jumping, and raise the daredevil’s premiums. I predict that the tool will be invaluable to former (and future) boyfriends and girlfriends checking up on lovers.

It certainly is fast becoming a brave new virtual world.

You can read the entire article by Jennifer Granick on wired.com @ Face It: Privacy is Endangered

There is a lot of talk about what has come to be known as “Web 2.0″, but not much in the way of it being a new goldmine for public record searching. Web 2.0 can be loosely defined as the collaborative web. Web content is no longer in the hands of a few techie web masters and a handful of search engines. Web content is now created by the masses for the masses.

With the growing popularity of blogs, social network sites and collaborative projects like Wikipedia, the new web ( Web 2.0 ) is being created by anyone with an internet connection. Some of the very people who complain about the dangers of traditional public record access and their names and phone numbers being published in online white pages are the same people who have no trouble posting all types of information about themselves in blogs; online communities and social network sites, like MySpace, Friendster and FaceBook. As a result, Web 2.0 is fast becoming a goldmine for a new form of public record searching.

Old public record sources will always be the best way to find detailed information like civil and criminal records and property assessor records; but Web 2.0 sites will be the place to search to find out all sorts of personal information like, biographical records; resumes and employment history; educational background; interests and hobbies and, yes, even pictures. This is the type of personal information and psychological insights that traditional public record sources will never be able to match.

Just as free online classifieds are making traditional newspaper classifieds obsolete and mass journalism and blogging are destroying the big news outlets; the personal content of Web 2.0 could make paid databases a thing of the past. Take notice, Accurint et. al.

The Friendster social network has over 21 million ( and growing ) user profiles. Friendster has a free profile search on their web site to search people profiles. Friendster users post everything from name; hometown; email address; schools and universities attended; personal pictures and job history on their profiles, making it a great free people search.

You can search the friendster site by name / email, school or hometown. Unfortunately the friendster search does not make it easy to search multiple criteria or keywords at the same time, but there is a possible workaround using Google.

Say you wanted to search Friendster for someone named Joe Shmoe who graduated from Duke University and his hometown is Atlanta, GA, you could try the following Google search: Joe Shmoe Duke University Atlanta site:friendster.com. This search would search all the Friendster pages that have been indexed by Google where the words Joe Shmoe Duke University Atlanta appear on the page.

You can access the Friendster people search half way down their log in page at Friendster

Bloomberg News is reporting that Verizon Communications Inc. has filed a lawsuit against Global Information Group, a skip tracing company based in Florida.

From the article –

Verizon Communications Inc., the largest U.S. telephone company, said it sued a Florida-based private investigative agency to stop it from trying to obtain confidential information about wireless customers.

Verizon claims that Global Information Group in Temple Terrace, Fla., made “thousands of attempts” to gather information about Verizon Wireless customers, the New York-based phone company said in a written statement.

The suit, filed Nov. 2 in a Florida state court, claims the agency “impersonated” employees of Bedminster, N.J.-based Verizon Wireless, the company said. Verizon said the court issued an order last week that temporarily prohibits Global Information from trying to contact Verizon’s customers or providing customer information to third parties.

“Global Information Group is cooperating with Verizon and complying with the terms of the lawsuit,” Global Information spokeswoman Allyson Von Holten said in a telephone interview. “They are absolutely investigating the claims made against them by Verizon.”

The company is a so-called skip-tracing firm hired by companies to find people who have “skipped out on loans and debt,” Von Holten said. “This is not a data-mining company. It is a legitimate business.”

Here are some interesting statistics from a December 12, 2005 Business Week cover story on the “MySpace Generation” –

The percentage share of 24 million U.S. teens ( age 12 - 17 ) who do the following:

Use the internet: 87%
Instant message ( IM ) : 65%
Go online everday: 44%
Keep several IM conversations going at once: 29%
Have more than 50 “buddies” on their regular IM list: 29%
IM people in the same room: 25%

With the growth and advance of networked people; search engine technology; blogs; online people searches; online public record locators and social networks like Friendster, MySpace and FaceBook, people will become easier and easier to locate, even as existing public record laws become stricter.

Mix a little vanity along with the ease of publishing online biographies, resumes, pictures and other personal information and you now have more options than ever for finding a person on the web without the use of paid professionals and fee-based databases.

You can read more about the “MySpace Generation” in Business Week @ The MySpace Generation