How To Find Missing People

I began my career as a skip tracer who finds people and a social engineer who extracts private information. It was back in 1984 when databases and such were at a minimum, and the internet was yet to be born. The hardcore way of tracing people was by pulling phones, banks, credit cards, travel, and utility records; those days are long gone. That is not to say I can no longer find people who are missing. It does not matter if they walked out the door into the sunset, fell off of a boat, went lost in the woods, vanished without a trace, or faked their deaths. Everyone leaves a footprint.  

The question is, how do you find missing people? Everyone leaves a trace, which leads to another trace. The hard part is finding the connections people create when they vanish. Most who search for people search forwards; I see it as looking backward at a target's life: What did they do a week, month, or few months before they were gone? Where did they go? Who were the people they met? What were their finances, and other such things? I have found people by mistake, chance, and even trying things I thought made no sense. There is no one way to hunt. 

Most people find it difficult to have a budget when searching for someone, which unfortunately hinders the search process. I do not mean a search that renders a location via a database. I am talking about someone who is in the wind. Even having a budget does not guarantee success. You can hire the best investigator; they can come up empty in many situations. That is not to say they did not do a good job or were not thorough in their actions. They did not find the connecting piece to the subject's location. How people disappear can be a mystery, finding them is more art than science. 

If you are searching for a person, you can email me some background info, and I will tell you if it is something I want to work on. 

FA@FrankAhearn.com