Hiring an Asset Search Firm Without Inheriting Its Liability
You are holding three quotes. One firm is cheapest, one answered the phone fastest, and one has promised you a bank balance by Friday. Every guide to choosing between them says the same four things: check the reviews, confirm the licence, ask about experience, request a sample. None mentions the part that ought to decide it, which is that federal law does not treat the person placing the order as a bystander. Congress wrote the request itself into the offence, and a second statute in a different act reaches a client who obtains consumer-report data under a purpose they do not have. This page is the test we would want a buyer to run on us. We are a skip-tracing and public-records research firm, working since 2004 under a permissible purpose. General information, not legal advice.
The Short Version
Choosing an asset search firm is usually presented as a quality problem. It is closer to a procurement risk problem, because two federal provisions attach to the buyer rather than the seller. Under 15 U.S.C. 6821(b) it is a violation to ask someone to obtain a financial institution’s customer information knowing they will get it by deception; under 15 U.S.C. 1681q obtaining a consumer’s information from a consumer reporting agency under false pretences is a criminal offence for any person. So “we can get you the balance” is not a capability. It is a description of how the vendor intends to expose you. Four questions settle almost every engagement: who does the asking, what the licence unlocks, whether the report is furnished as a consumer report, and what happens when you try to pull the underlying record from a sample line. General information, not legal advice.
Watch: Vetting an Asset Search Vendor
What to ask before the retainer clears.
Watch Overview
The Statute That Reaches the Person Paying
Why “I only bought the report” was never a position.
Start with the provision nobody in this market prints. Section 6821 of title 15 prohibits obtaining, or attempting to obtain, a financial institution’s customer information about somebody else by making a false statement to the institution’s staff or to its customer. That is pretexting, described by Congress rather than by a trade association, and it is why no honest vendor can hand you a live account balance.
The part that decides your purchase is the next subsection down. Subsection (b) makes it an equal violation “to request a person to obtain customer information of a financial institution, knowing that the person will obtain, or attempt to obtain, the information from the institution in any manner described in subsection (a)”. The grammar is doing the work. The prohibited act is the request, complete when you place the order, before anything is delivered and whether or not the vendor succeeds. A creditor who reads “we get balances, guaranteed”, knows perfectly well that balances do not sit in a public index, and orders anyway has supplied the knowledge element out of the vendor’s own marketing copy. Section 6823 sets what follows a knowing and intentional violation, and the ceiling there is measured in years rather than in fees.
The second cost lands earlier than any prosecution. Evidence has a provenance and opposing counsel gets to ask about it, so a finding you cannot trace to a named office and a document number can be neutralised with one question at a hearing. What a lawful search genuinely reaches, and which record offices have to answer it, is the subject of what an asset search actually reaches; this page is about the transaction before it.
Four Sentences From a Sales Call, Decoded
Each claim, the thing it implies, and the question that settles it.
| What the vendor says | What it necessarily implies | Ask this |
|---|---|---|
| “We can get the balance.” | Somebody will ask a bank for customer information without judicial process. | “Who does the asking, and what do they say they are?” |
| “We are licensed investigators, so we have access you cannot buy elsewhere.” | A state licence unlocks financial records. | “Name the provision the licence unlocks.” |
| “Fully FCRA-compliant asset search.” | The report is being furnished as a consumer report. | “Is this furnished as a consumer report? Yes or no.” |
| “Fixed rate, all fifty states, guaranteed results.” | Scope is undefined and a true negative counts as failure. | “Put the scope in writing, and tell me what I receive if the answer is nothing.” |
| “Here is a redacted sample.” | Findings can be re-pulled by your own paralegal. The good sign | “Show me a line with its county and instrument number.” |
Only the last row is a good answer, and it is the one test the ranking buyer’s guides get right. The first four are not matters of taste: each describes a method, and in three cases the method is either unlawful or a misdescription of the product. A vendor who says the first sentence has told you how they intend to work, and the response is to end the call rather than negotiate the price. What a lawful bank finding consists of, and why the institution rather than the number is what enforcement needs, is set out in what a bank account search returns.
Six Sentences That Should End the Engagement
Heard on real sales calls in this market.
“We have a contact inside the bank.”
An insider disclosure is the same subchapter from the other direction, and your file is the discoverable end of it.
“No permissible purpose needed.”
A firm that never asks why is a firm that has no answer when somebody else asks why on your behalf.
“Guaranteed results or you pay nothing.”
It prices honesty out of the deal. A subject who genuinely owns little becomes the one outcome nobody can afford to report.
“We will get you the account number.”
Nothing a court does with a bank requires it. A writ names the institution and the holder, and the institution answers.
“Our sources are proprietary.”
Proprietary is a fine word for a method and a useless one for a citation. Ask which office holds the record.
“We can find anyone, for any reason.”
To you it sounds like reach. Said to the next caller, it is how a subject who left for their own safety gets found.
What a Licence Actually Unlocks, and What It Does Not
Congress wrote exactly one carve-out. Here is how narrow it is.
“We are licensed” is the most common credential in this market and the least examined. State licensing regimes regulate who may hold themselves out and conduct certain investigative activity in that state. What a licence does not do is create access to protected financial records, and the proof is that the federal statute governing those records names licensed investigators exactly once, in a carve-out easier to state as a list of conditions.
Subsection (g) of section 6821 says nothing in that section prevents a State-licensed private investigator from obtaining a financial institution’s customer information, but only: to the extent reasonably necessary to collect child support; only from a person a federal or state court has already adjudged delinquent; only where the action is not unlawful under any other federal or state law; and only where a court of competent jurisdiction has authorised it. Four conditions, and the subject matter is child support. It is not a general credential and has nothing to say about a commercial judgment, a divorce, a due-diligence file or a fraud recovery.
So when a licence is offered as the reason one firm reaches further than the next, the question answers itself: name the provision. If the answer is subsection (g), your matter has to be child support with a delinquency finding and a court order in hand. If there is no answer, the licence was decoration on the invoice. Our researchers work from records offices are obliged to disclose, and where they are not obliged we say so.
“FCRA-Compliant Asset Search” Is a Category Error
And the version where it is not an error is worse for you.
The phrase cannot be satisfied, because an asset report is not the kind of document the Fair Credit Reporting Act regulates. We are not a consumer reporting agency, an asset report is not a consumer report, and it is not furnished as one, so nothing in it may be used to decide whether to rent to somebody, hire them, insure them, or extend or price their credit. A vendor advertising compliance is either using the acronym as a trust badge without meaning, or telling you something true and alarming: that the report is assembled out of consumer-report data.
If it is the second, the exposure is yours as well as theirs, in two provisions with nothing to do with banks. Section 1681q is one sentence long: any person who knowingly and willfully obtains information on a consumer from a consumer reporting agency under false pretences shall be fined under title 18, imprisoned for not more than two years, or both. Note “any person” – the statute does not distinguish the party who pulled the file from the party who commissioned it. The civil door sits beside it in section 1681n: subsection (b) makes anyone obtaining a consumer report under false pretences, or knowingly without a permissible purpose, liable to the reporting agency for its actual damages or $1,000, whichever is greater; subsection (a)(1)(B) puts a natural person doing the same on the hook to the consumer on the same measure, before punitive damages and fees.
Keep the two statutes apart when you ask, because vendors blur them and the blur is where the misdirection lives. Section 6821 concerns customer information held by a financial institution. Sections 1681q and 1681n concern consumer reports held by a consumer reporting agency. Different objects, different holders, different penalties. What a lawful search can and cannot surface is set out in what a lawful search can and cannot show.
Four Moves Before Anything Is Paid
In order, and none of them takes longer than a phone call.
Read the Marketing as Evidence
Whatever a site promises is what a court will later treat you as having known about the method.
Ask Who Does the Asking
Every record has a holder. Make them name the office, and note whether the answer is a place or an adjective.
Test One Line of the Sample
Take a single redacted finding to your own paralegal and try to pull the underlying record from it.
Fix the Scope and the Null
Get the classes and jurisdictions in writing, and agree what you receive when the honest finding is nothing.
What a Sample Report Has to Prove
The one test in the standard buyer’s checklist that actually works, made operational.
Asking for a redacted sample is good advice and almost everyone gives it. Almost nobody says what to look for once it arrives, which is why a glossy summary passes the test as easily as a real deliverable. What separates them is whether each finding carries the identifiers that let somebody else pull the same record without asking the vendor for help.
For a parcel of real property, that means the recording county and the instrument or document number, so your own office can order the deed. For a secured-transaction filing, the filing office and the file number. For a company, the state of registration and the entity number. A line reading “subject owns residential property in Maricopa County, value withheld” is a database summary wearing a report’s clothes. A line naming the warranty deed, the county recorder, a real instrument number and the grantee is a finding, because you can go and get it. The anatomy of a finished deliverable is laid out in what a finished debtor asset profile contains.
Two things belong in the same conversation. Ask how the vendor reports a negative, because a report showing only hits has hidden its own coverage. Then get the scope in writing: which asset classes, which jurisdictions, and what happens if identity cannot be confirmed to the standard the file needs. We quote no prices here, and what moves the number is set out in what sets the price of a search. An undefined scope and a guaranteed result cannot both be true at once.
What We Ask For, and What We Turn Down
The same test, applied to us.
A page telling buyers to interrogate vendors is worth nothing if it exempts the vendor who wrote it, so here is our side of the four questions. Who does the asking: our researchers query record offices and licensed data sources in their own name, on a stated basis. What the licence unlocks: nothing, because we hold none. Whether it is a consumer report: it is not. What the sample shows: each finding tied to the office and number that produced it, empty classes listed as searched.
Before opening a matter we ask what you are trying to establish and what lawful purpose sits behind it, because the answer changes what we may lawfully touch. We are not a law firm and not a collection agency: we research and document, we do not garnish, levy, seize, freeze or approach anyone to collect, and whether a holding can be reached is a legal question for your attorney. We report what the records show and how confident we are, which is not the same as ruling on whether a transfer was improper or an entity a sham. Where a request has no legitimate lawful purpose, we decline it and say so.
One category we refuse outright. Where the real object is not money but reaching a person who has separated for their own safety – a protective or restraining order in the background, stalking or harassment in the history, or a request really about someone’s whereabouts rather than what they own – we decline it and explain why. An asset search surfaces a home, a workplace and a daily pattern as readily as it surfaces a deed, and a case number is not reason enough to put a person in danger. The distinction between a records search and a deeper entity-level enquiry is argued on the difference between a bare search and an investigation.
Who Is Actually Reading This
Buyers at the moment of choosing, not clients mid-matter.
Holding Quotes
Three prices, one promise too many
Counsel Vetting a Vendor
Provenance before the exhibit
Procurement and Risk
Writing the vendor standard
First-Time Buyers
No basis yet for comparing
Auditing a Report
Checking what you already bought
Switching Firms
After a result that did not hold
Our Commitment
Every question this page tells you to ask a vendor, you may ask us. Each finding names the office and the number it came from, and every class we searched is listed, including the ones that came back empty. We would rather lose an engagement than hand a client a result an opponent can undo with one question. Lawful records research since 2004.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I tell a lawful asset search firm from an unlawful one?
By the method it describes, not by its reviews. A lawful firm names the office behind each class of finding and says where the record stops. An unlawful one advertises an outcome no public record contains, most often a live account balance, and answers sourcing questions with the word proprietary.
A vendor promised me a bank balance. What happens to me if I buy it?
Section 6821 of title 15 makes it a violation to request a person to obtain a financial institution’s customer information knowing they will get it in the prohibited way, so the order itself is the act rather than the delivery. A vendor’s own marketing is usually enough to show you knew how it would be produced.
Does a private investigator’s licence let a firm get more than you can?
Not for financial records. The federal section governing them names licensed investigators once, in subsection (g), and confines the exception to collecting child support from a person a court has adjudged delinquent. If a licence is offered as the reason for wider access, ask which provision it unlocks.
What does “FCRA-compliant asset search” mean when a vendor advertises it?
Usually nothing, because an asset report is not a consumer report and is not furnished as one. We are not a consumer reporting agency, and our work may not be used to decide whether to rent to somebody, hire them, insure them, or price their credit. Where the phrase does mean something, sections 1681q and 1681n reach the buyer.
What should I ask to see before I pay?
A redacted sample, and then one thing inside it. Pick a single finding and check whether it carries the identifiers that let your own paralegal pull the underlying record: the recording county and instrument number for a deed, the filing office and file number for a secured-transaction filing, the state and entity number for a company.
Do you need a judgment before you will run a search?
Not necessarily a judgment, but always a lawful purpose that you state and we record. Enforcing a money judgment is the clearest; deciding whether a defendant is worth suing, due diligence on a counterparty, and a divorce or probate matter handled with counsel are others. Curiosity is not one, and neither is a purpose really about a person’s location.
What should the engagement say about scope and about finding nothing?
It should name the asset classes and jurisdictions to be searched, say what happens if identity cannot be confirmed, and state that a class searched without result will be reported as searched. A guaranteed-results arrangement quietly makes the honest answer the one outcome the vendor cannot afford to give you.
Is there any request you turn down?
Yes, and the main one is not about payment. Where the real object is reaching somebody who has separated for their own safety, whether there is a protective or restraining order in the background, stalking or harassment in the history, or a request framed around a person’s whereabouts rather than what they own, we decline it and say why.
Ask Us the Same Four Questions
If this page has done its job you now have a short list to put to whoever you hire, and we would rather be measured against it than exempted from it. Tell us what you need to establish and the lawful purpose behind it, and we will tell you which classes we would search, which offices hold them, and where the record runs out – usually within 24 hours. Send us the matter and we will scope it in writing.
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