When you are a skip tracer people are captivated by the profession, they think of it as a dark calling with spy like connections. When in truth a good skip tracer owns a fantastic imagination saddled with devious phone skills. A good skip tracer can typically look at a file and know before hand if they are going to locate the subject or not. Their mind races out of control, with thoughts pretexting.



Pretext, the dirty word in the investigative and skip tracing world. For those of you who do not know what pretext means - misleading or untrue reason given for doing something in an attempt to conceal the real reason. You may know it as the term social engineering - the use of fraudulent means to gain access to computer systems that are protected by passwords or user Ids. Either way it's lying to get what you need.

The definitions sound more dastardly than they are; I have been a skip tracer for over twenty years and done a fair share of pretext. However, I was not pretexting the nice guy down the block who runs the boy scouts, nor was I pretexting the woman from the monthly book club. I was pretexting, debtors, paramours, insurance cheats, art thieves, celebrity murderers, philandering politicians, corrupt televangelist and the list goes on. If your name came across my desk, odds were you did something wrong to someone and they needed to find you in order to recoup what was lost.

So today pretext is evil, we saw it with the scandal of HP, like everything in life there is a right way and a wrong way to do things, they did it wrong. The HP scandal changed the pretext law; briefly, you cannot pretext a phone company. To back track, several years ago another law was enacted that stopped the pretext on banks and finance companies.

I understand the laws and actually agree with them, surprising coming from a skip tracer.

Information use to be sold in discreet ways, a private investigator knew someone who knew someone who could get the information. In a weird sort of way, the information was controlled and not easily accessed as so today. Being a skip tracer I never did business with the public; clients were always investigators or those within the industry.

With the rise of the internet investigators, skip tracers and information brokers were selling information as if it were EBay. The worst part, they were selling the information to anyone who popped in a credit on their website. In the days before the internet, most investigators met their clients or at least had a phone conversation with them, which created a screening process of sorts.

The new telephone pretext law has knocked the wind out of the investigative world; phone information was a great tool. It was an avenue to identify people, locate debtors, and search for paramours and so on. However, those days are over. Clients now ask me how I locate people with out pretexting a phone company or bank. I'm honest and tell them it's not that easy - the show must go on.

I know your thinking so how do you find people. The answer is Ahearn Search offers the next best thing! We have taken twenty years of skip tracing, pretext skills, and reinvented them to follow the letter of the law. To coin the phrase, we have gone old school, back to when there were no databases to search or Google to Google. We pick up the phone and contact the subject, the subject's family, friends and neighbors to locate the information needed for our clients.

We have created a unique type of report ASIR, which stands for Ahearn Search Internet Report. We all know the term Google it, however, to simply Google it, is not enough when you are searching for information. The new Ahearn Search Internet Report provides our clients with a detailed report of non-data-based collected information that exists online about a subject or company. We are not talking about database-generated reports that are resold repeatedly. The ASIR is hand searched by trained skip-tracer's, who manipulates search criteria to locate information about the subject we are attempting to locate.

It's simple we search a name and we search available online information, from sites like Myspace, Zoominfo, Linkedin, Zillow, Trulia, Melissa and at least twenty-five other search engines and personal pages where subjects may have left a foot print into their private life.

Yes pretext is a dirty word, however, we polished it up a bit!

Frank M. Ahearn