Having debt is not always a negative situation. Not many people have the luxury to pay upfront for their major expenditures like their education, vehicles, or homes. As long as your debt is manageable and bills are paid on a timely manner, your credit will continue to strengthen, enabling financial institutions to confidently lend you money when required.
However, life can throw unexpected curveballs such as job loss, divorce, or a family tragedy —events that can drastically impact a person’s financial situation and ability to repay their debts. In such scenarios, lenders often strive to negotiate an altered payment plan with the borrower. If these efforts fail or if a significant time passes without any payment, the unpaid loan is classified as bad debt. In order to retrieve this debt, creditors may employ collection agencies.
Locating individuals who have neglected their debts can pose a challenge. Yet, merely changing residence, even across states, doesn’t effectively eliminate past debts. Collection agencies are incentivized to locate these individuals, employing searchable databases that utilize publicly available records. Given this information is public, this practice is totally lawful.
Nevertheless, publicly available information doesn’t always make it easy to locate a person without additional assistance. This is where companies specializing in aggregating public records step in, assisting lenders, investigative agencies, and other parties in locating individuals who have defaulted on their debt. These comprehensive databases collate data from phone records, property registries, survey data, and more, enabling them to sift through upwards of 130 million Australian records in search of a match.
A Person Locator service can thus, in a legal and straightforward way, locate individuals who’ve changed addresses, purchased or rented a home, or instituted a mobile phone service. These databases can utilize several data points, including year of birth, previous addresses, or even former names, to determine a defaulter’s current whereabouts. A key strength of these databases is the frequency with which their multiple data sources are updated. Frequently, if one source of information proves obsolete, others are likely to be up-to-date, thus providing an accurate address and contact number for the person in question.
