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 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 vital data on the subject we are trying to find. This makes the job easier. We encourage our clients to 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.
Washington PI License #3646