Discover How To Locate An Individual

Locating an individual is one of the most challenging missions a private investigator takes on. Especially when the individual doesn’t want to be found and goes to extra lengths to make sure they leave no traces behind. However, no traces for the untrained eye isn’t just this for a veteran private investigator. I know this because I am one! People always leave some kind of crumbs behind them, even if they take all the necessary measures to “disappear”. They can close their accounts, change their address, and even move town or state, but they can’t hide forever from experienced private investigators. That’s because we have the necessary knowledge, resources, and patience to track them down. If you´re wondering how to locate a person, keep reading.

Even when you have nothing, you still have comprehensive reports

I actually had a case just like this a while ago. A very prominent Middle East family hired our firm to locate their estranged daughter who had just graduated from graduate school in teaching in Texas. After graduation, the daughter decided to cut all her ties with the family. She was determined to disappear from their lives.

She changed her phone number, cut them off from all social media, moved town, and just disappeared. We didn’t have too much to work with. We ran a bank account search on her. Unfortunately, this didn’t help at all. All her accounts were closed and with a negative balance.

This is when the only reliable solution is a comprehensive report. Comprehensive reports take time and patience but they were the only solution in that scenario. They provide information in real time and, because they’re dynamic, they always offer new bits and pieces about the whereabouts of a person. True, this also means the information can change from one day to another, but dynamic information is always better than no information at all. At least you have something to work with.

In this case, we ran comprehensive reports about every 30 or 60 days. We were looking for bank accounts and credit cards. We also ran a credit report to see if she had any credits or loans in her name. For a while, nothing was working. No sign of the missing daughter.

However, at one point, some financial transactions placed her in New Mexico, and we finally had a starting point. We continued tracking her transactions and found her in the Midwest. The reports also indicated an address used for her new cell phone.

Nothing is 100% sure if surveillance doesn’t confirm it

While comprehensive reports are valuable resources for a private investigator, you can never rely on them 100%. They have to be backed by surveillance. This is the only way we can confirm the information provided by the reports. So, we sent a private investigator in the field to check out the new address in Indiana. The investigator found the address she had her cellphone at, as well as her new car registered in her name. The daughter was no longer missing.

To be 100% sure she was living there, we also ran a new bank account search and found an account opened in Indiana in her name. The transactions were clustered around the address indicated in the comprehensive report. Moreover, we also found a payroll deposit. This helped us conclude that she was indeed living at that specific address and she was gainfully employed too. The direct deposit led us to her workplace. We sent photos of her to her family to let them know she was alive, healthy, and employed.

She’s moved since then but we have been able to follow her around at a distance, just enough to let the family know she is safe and doing well.