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I am often asked, “How did you find them? We ran all the data searches and came up with a blank.” The key there is their use of the word “all”. Obviously I know that they could not have searched “all” of the databases that contain personal information that can be utilized to locate a person or an asset. What they probably meant to say was they had searched “all” the databases they had access to; or maybe “all” the databases they knew about; or even just maybe “all” the databases they could afford. The bottom line is, and I repeat for emphasis, I know for a fact that they did not search “all” the databases available. How do I know? Because the databases that contain personal data shift, change and grow larger by the minute making it virtually impossible to search “all” the databases. In this article I wish to share with you a few of the little known databases that professional tracers massage and manipulate to extract information that allows them to “find them when no one else can”.

Public Sites

First let us start with www.DuckDuckGo.com. This is a little-known site that we use quite a lot in tracing as you may enter a full name, user id, email address or phone number and run a quick search of the entire net for matching information. This site pulls up Internet articles related to the information you input and you have the ability to narrow your searches by adding geographical locations.

The next group of sites I prefer to check are social sites. Yes…I know…you included Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter in “ALL” of your searches but here is where we separate the skip guessers from the skip tracers. Did you check www.jigsaw.com for business professionals or www.BlackPlanet.com, the largest social site for the African-American community on the net? Or have you visited www.Flickr.com to check their 537,731 photographs posted by people all over the world? I recently found a missing recreational vehicle valued at $480,000 and missing for 11 months by locating a photograph with a geophysical tag on this site. To continue please take a look at www.tagged.com which is a great tracing social site with over 300 million members in over 220 countries. This site enables you to search internationally around the globe with one keystroke. We will close this group with www.pipl.com which professes to maintain the most comprehensive database of people on the net and allows the tracer to perform a “deep search” by utilizing a powerful identity resolution search engine. There are approximately 42 social sites which professional tracers may use in one form or another if they know how to milk the information they need from the data stored at these sites. All 42 may be found on www.skipease.com under the heading of “SOCIAL SEARCH”.

Government Sites

Now let’s move on to another group of sites supplied to us by the United States government databases. There is an enormous amount of data maintained by governments around the world and much of it can be easily accessed if the tracer knows where to go and for what to ask. I first would give a word of caution: never try to hack past a government firewall. You do not want the FBI, US MARSHALLS SERVICE, NSA and Homeland Security knocking on your door. With that said, I would suggest utilizing data legally obtained from US Government sites such as the ICE detainee database, https://locator.ice.gov/odls/homePage.do, which lists all Department of Immigration detainees or people released in the last 60 days or the Department of Justice site which has links to almost all the federal law enforcement agencies including the Federal Department of Corrections at www.justice.gov. This site will provide a professional tracer with a wealth of usable information. I also would highly recommend you familiarize yourself with the abundance of link sites which may be found at www.sagal.com/ajax/ and see the potential in this international tracing site.

I hope the information provided in this segment is helpful to you and I look forward to sharing more data sources with you in the forthcoming 2014 issues of Collection Advisor.

Good Luck and Good Hunting.

Ron Brown is a member of the National Association of Fraud Investigators and the author of “MANHUNT: The Book.”Contact him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.