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 missing people; I can because most people leave a track or a trace. It does not matter if they walked out the door into the sunset, fell off of a boat, lost in the woods, supposedly vanished without a trace, or faked their deaths. Everyone leaves a footprint. 

The question is, how do you find missing people? I always approached it from the perspective of not searching for the subject directly but focusing on the information they left behind and working to connect the seen information with the unseen, which is the difficult part of skip tracing. Most tracers search forward, whereas I search backward because there is something there that almost always leads forward. What did they do a week, month, or few months before they vanished? Where did they travel to? Who were the people they met? What were their finances, and other such things? What is out of character? There are many items to take into consideration. I have found people by mistake, chance, and even trying things I thought made no sense. There is no one way to hunt. 

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 of information. How people disappear can be a mystery; finding them is more art than science. 

The difficult part for clients is having a proper budget. When you think about it, you are paying a professional to search for someone in the wind. What is the right budget to search for someone? There is no correct answer; it depends on the professional, case details, travel, etc., and many other variables. I am not talking about a database search that yields a solution for a long-lost love or a regular person who has a stable life. I mean those who are gone! 

If you are searching for a person, you can email me some background info, and I will tell you if it is something I can assist with. 

FA@FrankAhearn.com