You won your lawsuit, signed a settlement agreement, or extended credit in good faith — but now the person who owes you money has vanished. They stopped returning calls, moved without leaving a forwarding address, or simply went silent. 😤 This is one of the most frustrating situations anyone can face, and it happens far more often than most people realize. Studies suggest that approximately 80% of civil judgments in the United States go uncollected, largely because creditors cannot find the debtor or their assets.

The good news is that people who owe money rarely disappear completely. They still need to work, live somewhere, drive a car, use credit, and interact with the world in ways that leave traceable records. The key is knowing where and how to search — and that is where professional skip tracing services make all the difference.

At PeopleLocatorSkipTracing.com, we have spent over 20 years helping judgment creditors, attorneys, debt collectors, businesses, and individuals locate people who owe them money. Our professional-grade investigative databases and experienced team can typically find your debtor within 24 hours, providing you with current addresses, phone numbers, employment information, and other critical data you need to pursue collection. This comprehensive guide walks you through everything you need to know about finding someone who owes you money in 2026.

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🏃 Why People Who Owe Money Disappear

Before you can effectively find someone who owes you money, it helps to understand why they disappeared in the first place. Understanding their motivations gives you insight into their behavior patterns and helps predict where they might be. When a judgment debtor disappears, there are typically several common reasons driving that decision.

🛡️ Protecting Assets from Collection

The most common reason debtors vanish is to shield their assets from collection efforts. They may have income, property, vehicles, or savings they want to protect. Ironically, the very fact that someone goes to the trouble of disappearing often indicates they have assets worth pursuing — people with nothing to lose rarely bother running from creditors. This is an important insight for creditors who might otherwise assume their debtor is “judgment proof” and give up.

⏰ Buying Time and Hoping You Give Up

Many debtors operate on the assumption that if they stay hidden long enough, their creditor will simply give up and move on. Unfortunately for many creditors, this strategy works more often than it should. Judgment enforcement has time limits — depending on the state, judgments last anywhere from 5 to 20 years — and debtors who are aware of these deadlines may deliberately stall until the judgment expires. Understanding your state’s specific timelines is critical, and our skip tracing by state guide covers the judgment duration for every jurisdiction.

🏠 Starting Fresh in a New Location

Some debtors relocate to a new city or state, hoping that physical distance will prevent collection. They may believe — incorrectly — that a judgment cannot follow them across state lines. In reality, judgments can be domesticated (registered) in any state where the debtor resides or has assets, giving the creditor full enforcement power in the new jurisdiction.

💳 Multiple Creditors Pursuing Them

People who owe money to one creditor often owe money to many. When multiple creditors are pursuing someone simultaneously, the pressure can feel overwhelming, and the debtor may attempt to escape all of their obligations at once by relocating and cutting off communication. In these situations, being the first creditor to locate the debtor and take collection action gives you a significant advantage.

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⚖️ Establishing Your Legal Foundation Before You Search

Before investing time and money in locating someone who owes you money, it is essential to make sure your legal foundation is solid. Having the right legal documents in place ensures that once you find the debtor, you can actually enforce collection.

📜 Do You Have a Judgment?

A court judgment is the single most powerful tool for collecting money owed to you. If you have already sued the debtor and obtained a judgment, you have access to a wide range of legal enforcement tools — including wage garnishment, property liens, and bank levies — that are not available to unsecured creditors. If you do not yet have a judgment, your first step should be filing a lawsuit (or pursuing small claims court for smaller amounts) to obtain one.

Once you have a judgment, time is of the essence. Every state has a statute of limitations on judgment enforcement, and the clock starts ticking from the date the judgment was entered. While most states allow judgments to be renewed before they expire, missing a renewal deadline means losing your right to collect permanently.

📋 Verify Your Judgment Is Current

Before spending money on a debtor search, confirm that your judgment has not expired. Check the original court records to verify the judgment date, the amount (including any accumulated interest), and whether any payments have been made. If your judgment is approaching its expiration date, consider renewing it before beginning your search to ensure you have the maximum amount of time to collect.

📄 Gather All Documentation

Compile everything you have related to the debt and the debtor. This includes the original judgment or court documents, any loan agreements or contracts, correspondence with the debtor, the debtor’s last known address and contact information, Social Security number (if available), date of birth, employer information, vehicle information, and any other identifying details. The more information you can provide to a professional skip tracer, the faster and more accurate the search will be.

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🔎 DIY Methods for Locating a Debtor

Before engaging professional services, there are several steps you can take on your own to try to locate someone who owes you money. While these methods have limitations, they can sometimes produce results — particularly for debtors who have not gone to great lengths to hide.

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🏆 Why Professional Skip Tracing Is the Most Effective Way to Find Debtors

Professional skip tracing services offer capabilities that are simply impossible to replicate with DIY methods. Here is why creditors, attorneys, and collection professionals across the country rely on professional skip tracing to locate debtors in 2026:

💾 Access to Professional-Grade Investigative Databases

Our investigative databases compile data from hundreds of public and proprietary sources that are not accessible to the general public. These include credit header information (addresses and employers from credit applications), utility connection records (where someone has turned on electric, gas, water, or internet service), employment records from new hire reporting to state agencies, property ownership records across all counties, vehicle registration data, court filing addresses, and much more.

By cross-referencing data across these sources, our people search service can construct a complete picture of a debtor’s current situation — including where they live, where they work, what vehicles they own, and who they associate with. This multi-source approach catches debtors who have changed one or two pieces of information but not all of them.

👔 Employment Location for Wage Garnishment

One of the most valuable pieces of information in debtor location is employment data. If you can identify where the debtor works, you can pursue wage garnishment — one of the most effective collection tools available. Federal law allows garnishment of up to 25% of a debtor’s disposable earnings, and once a garnishment order is in place, payments come directly from the employer on every paycheck without requiring any additional action from you.

Professional skip tracing databases access employment information from new hire reporting databases, payroll processors, credit bureau employer records, and other sources that reveal where someone currently works. This data is often available even when the debtor has taken steps to hide their employment from creditors.

⏱️ Speed — Results in 24 Hours

Time is money in debt collection. Every day that passes without locating the debtor is a day they could be spending down assets, changing jobs, moving again, or taking other steps to make collection more difficult. Our 24-hour turnaround means you can go from not knowing where the debtor is to having their current address and employment information in a single business day.

📋 Comprehensive Reports for Legal Proceedings

Our search results are delivered in a professional report format that can be used to support legal proceedings, including applications for wage garnishment orders, bank levies, property liens, and debtor examinations. Having documented, professional-grade data strengthens your position with the court and demonstrates that you are pursuing collection in a thorough, systematic manner. View our sample report to see the level of detail provided.

📊 DIY Search vs. Professional Debtor Location

Factor	DIY Methods	Professional Skip Tracing
📊 Database Access	Free sites & manual public records	Professional-grade investigative databases
⏱️ Turnaround Time	Days to months of searching	Typically 24 hours
👔 Employment Data	Limited (LinkedIn, social media)	New hire databases, payroll records, credit data
✅ Accuracy	Often outdated or incomplete	Current, verified from multiple sources
📋 Legal Documentation	Informal, self-gathered	Professional reports for court use
🔍 Name/Address Changes	Very difficult to track	Cross-referenced across all data sources
🌍 Nationwide Coverage	Must search state by state	All 50 states in a single search
🚗 Vehicle & Property Data	County-by-county manual search	Nationwide records instantly

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🔧 Collection Tools Available Once You Find the Debtor

Locating the debtor is the critical first step, but it is only the beginning. Once you know where they live and work, you can deploy a range of powerful legal tools to collect what you are owed. Understanding these tools in advance helps you move quickly once the debtor is found.

💵 Wage Garnishment

Wage garnishment is often the most effective and reliable collection method because it creates an ongoing stream of payments that continues automatically until the judgment is satisfied. Once you obtain a garnishment order from the court, it is served on the debtor’s employer, who is then legally required to withhold a portion of each paycheck and send it to you. The debtor cannot prevent the employer from complying, and employers who fail to comply with valid garnishment orders can face personal liability.

Federal law caps garnishment at 25% of disposable earnings or the amount by which weekly earnings exceed 30 times the federal minimum wage, whichever is less. Some states have lower limits. Four states — North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas — prohibit wage garnishment for ordinary consumer debts entirely, making other collection methods necessary in those jurisdictions.

🏦 Bank Levies

A bank levy allows you to seize funds directly from the debtor’s bank accounts. You obtain a writ of execution from the court, which is then served on the bank. The bank is required to freeze the debtor’s accounts and turn over available funds up to the judgment amount. Bank levies can be extremely effective because they capture whatever funds are in the account at the moment the levy is served — including recent deposits such as paychecks, tax refunds, or other income.

Timing is critical with bank levies. Accounts tend to have the highest balances immediately after direct deposit of paychecks and during tax refund season (February through April). An asset search can help identify which financial institutions the debtor uses, maximizing the effectiveness of your levy.

🏠 Property Liens

Recording a judgment lien against real property owned by the debtor secures your claim and ensures you receive payment when the property is eventually sold or refinanced. In most states, a judgment lien attaches to all real property owned by the debtor in the county where the lien is recorded. The lien must be satisfied before the property can be transferred with a clear title, which means the debtor cannot sell or refinance without paying you first.

🚗 Vehicle and Personal Property Levies

In many states, you can levy on the debtor’s vehicles, boats, and other personal property. The sheriff or marshal seizes the property, which is then sold at auction with the proceeds applied to your judgment. Vehicle registrations are often easier to trace than other assets because they are maintained in state databases accessible through professional skip tracing.

⚖️ Debtor’s Examination

Once you know where the debtor lives, you can serve them with a court order to appear for a debtor’s examination. This powerful tool puts the debtor under oath and requires them to answer detailed questions about their income, assets, bank accounts, employment, property, and financial situation. Refusing to appear or lying under oath carries serious consequences including contempt of court and perjury charges. The information obtained through a debtor’s exam can reveal additional assets and income sources that were not apparent from the initial skip trace.

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⚠️ Common Challenges in Finding People Who Owe Money

Over our 20+ years in the skip tracing business, we have helped thousands of creditors and collection professionals locate debtors in every conceivable situation. Here are the most common challenges we encounter and how professional skip tracing overcomes them:

📛 Name Changes and Identity Variations

Debtors sometimes change their name through marriage, divorce, or legal name change proceedings to avoid being found. Women who marry or divorce may use their new surname on employment and housing records while the judgment is under their previous name. Some debtors use middle names, nicknames, or slight variations of their legal name to create confusion in records. Professional databases cross-reference name variations across multiple data sources, linking previous and current names together to maintain a continuous trace.

🏠 Frequent Moves Across State Lines

Debtors who move frequently — especially across state lines — can be particularly difficult to locate through manual methods. Each move creates records in a new jurisdiction, and there is no single public database that tracks every address change. Our databases aggregate address information from credit headers, utility connections, postal records, and other sources to track a debtor’s movements in real time, regardless of how many times they have moved or how many states they have crossed.

💼 Working Under the Table or for Cash

Some debtors deliberately work for cash or in the informal economy to avoid wage garnishment. While this makes employment harder to trace through traditional databases, these individuals still leave footprints through housing (they need to live somewhere), vehicle registrations, utility usage, and social connections. Even if employment data is not immediately available, locating the debtor’s current address allows you to pursue other collection methods including bank levies, property liens, and debtor examinations.

🔒 Using Family Members or Shell Entities to Hide Assets

Sophisticated debtors may transfer assets to family members, business partners, or shell companies to shield them from collection. While these transfers can sometimes be challenged as fraudulent conveyances under state law, identifying them requires knowing where to look. Professional skip tracing combined with an asset search can reveal property transfers, business entity filings, and other transactions that indicate asset concealment.

⏳ Judgments Approaching Expiration

Every judgment has an expiration date, and debtors who know about these deadlines may deliberately stall until the clock runs out. Judgment enforcement periods vary widely — from just 5 years in states like Ohio and Wyoming to 20 years in states like New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. If your judgment is approaching its expiration date, time is critical. A professional skip trace with 24-hour turnaround ensures you can locate the debtor and take action before your rights expire. Our state-by-state guide details the judgment duration for every U.S. jurisdiction.

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⚡ How Our Debtor Location Service Works

At PeopleLocatorSkipTracing.com, we have streamlined the debtor location process to deliver fast, accurate, and comprehensive results. Our service is built specifically for creditors, attorneys, debt collectors, and businesses who need to find people who owe them money. For a complete walkthrough, visit our How It Works page.

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📋 Types of Debts and Situations We Handle

Our debtor location services cover every type of debt and collection scenario. Whether you are an individual owed money from a personal loan, a business trying to collect on an unpaid invoice, or an attorney enforcing a court judgment, we can help:

⚖️ Court Judgments and Legal Awards

Court judgments from civil lawsuits, small claims court, and arbitration awards are among the most common reasons creditors need to locate debtors. Once you have a judgment, you have the full weight of the legal system behind you — but you need to know where the debtor is to use it. We help judgment creditors locate debtors quickly so they can begin enforcement before assets are dissipated or hidden.

💼 Unpaid Business Invoices and Contracts

Businesses that extend credit to customers, clients, or vendors frequently encounter situations where the debtor simply stops paying and becomes unreachable. Whether you are owed money on an unpaid invoice, a broken contract, or a defaulted business loan, locating the debtor is the first step toward recovery. A comprehensive background check can also reveal the debtor’s other business interests and assets.

🏠 Unpaid Rent and Lease Obligations

Landlords and property managers frequently need to locate former tenants who owe back rent, property damage fees, or early termination penalties. Tenants who skip out on a lease often move to a new rental in the same general area, making them locatable through our databases. Once found, landlords can pursue collection through small claims court or by enforcing an existing judgment.

🤝 Personal Loans and Private Debts

Money loaned to friends, family members, or acquaintances can be among the most difficult debts to collect because the relationship complicates the situation. When someone you loaned money to has stopped communicating and you cannot find them, professional skip tracing provides an objective, non-confrontational way to locate them so you can pursue repayment through legal channels.

👶 Child Support and Alimony

Parents owed child support or former spouses owed alimony frequently need to locate the obligor when they have fallen behind on payments and become unreachable. While state child support enforcement agencies can help, they are often overwhelmed and slow to act. Professional skip tracing can provide current location and employment data much faster, enabling you to pursue enforcement through the court more quickly.

📄 Promissory Notes and Loan Defaults

Holders of promissory notes — whether from real estate transactions, business deals, or private lending — may need to locate borrowers who have defaulted on their obligations. Our services help note holders find defaulting borrowers and identify assets that can be used to satisfy the debt.

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✅ Best Practices for Collecting Money Owed to You

Based on our extensive experience helping creditors collect, here are the most important strategies for maximizing your chances of recovering money owed to you:

⚡ Act Quickly — Time Is Not on Your Side

The sooner you begin looking for the debtor and pursuing collection, the better your chances of success. Debtors who have recently disappeared are easier to find because their digital trail is still fresh. The longer you wait, the more time they have to move again, change jobs, deplete bank accounts, and transfer assets. Begin your search as soon as you realize the debtor has become unreachable.

📋 Document Everything

Keep meticulous records of all collection efforts, including dates of contact attempts, copies of correspondence, notes from phone conversations, and documentation of all search methods used. This documentation is essential for court proceedings and demonstrates that you have been diligently pursuing collection.

🔄 Use Multiple Collection Methods Simultaneously

Do not rely on a single collection method. Once you have located the debtor and identified their assets, pursue multiple avenues at once. File for wage garnishment while also recording a property lien and preparing a bank levy. This multi-pronged approach maximizes your chances of collecting the full amount owed and prevents the debtor from simply moving assets from one place to another.

📅 Monitor for Changes

If the debtor is currently unemployed or has limited assets, do not give up. Circumstances change — they may find a new job, receive an inheritance, purchase property, or come into money through other means. Periodic skip trace updates can alert you to changes in the debtor’s situation that create new collection opportunities.

🏆 Engage Professionals Early

The cost of a professional skip trace is typically very modest compared to the amount of money at stake. Do not waste weeks or months on ineffective DIY searches when a professional search can locate the debtor within 24 hours. The time and energy you save can be redirected toward actually collecting the debt rather than searching for the person who owes it. Browse our full resource library for additional guidance.

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

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🤝 Who We Serve

Our debtor location and skip tracing services are trusted by professionals and individuals across every industry. With over 20 years of experience and professional-grade database access, we deliver the results our clients need to collect what they are owed: