Another Missing Person Case

I recently told you about the story of some missing auto dealers, and what we would have done to find them. I have another missing person case for you.

What do you need or what do you need to start. That’s nearly always what the person making a deal, contemplating a big hire, or getting ready to sink half their fortune wants to know from me. And we need something to search, right. In most, but not all matters, we get some names and some things that go with the names, such as addresses and social security numbers. We use that information to start our research. More importantly, we use that information to know if what we found matters.

We always start with a basic question. Is the person we were given, the person we were given. It happens. People fake identities. Misspell their names on purpose or give phony social security numbers. The reason, they are trying to keep us from finding what’s out there, a bankruptcy, criminal record or such. We have various tools to see through these ruses. The bigger problem we usually face is, when we find lawsuits, bankruptcies, whatever, how do we know they are for the person we are searching. That’s where it matters to know what a person’s middle initial or date of birth or spouses name; something that we can use to say, yes or no that record is the person we are researching. There are times though, when it does not all work that way.

There are times when it’s less what do you need to start and more, this is what I have for you to start. There are times when all they have for us is a company name. Now, to understand a company one usually wants to also understand the people behind the company. We will typically seek to identify a certain amount of owners or officers or management to include in our research after we are given a company name. To do that, it usually comes down to the sophisticated step of going to the company’s webpage, finding their “about us’ “our team” or whatever they call their executive write-ups and jot down the most important looking people.

In a recent matter, we had the company to search. For this client, looking for information to assist them in knowing if they should do business, we identify three executives also to search. Went to the website. Number one was clear, identified as the owner and founder. Number two was also pretty clear, having COO in his title. We needed to pick a third, and we went with the one person with senior in their title. With three names, we needed three sets of identifying information to use for our subsequent public record searches; litigation, tax liens, etc.

Number one made it easy because he had a pretty unusual name. Number two we found by searching his name against the company’s address. Number three, she seemed to have, not a singular name like the founder, but something that seemed not that common. Putting her name into our online sources showed us otherwise. There were several people with that name. We found one person who seemed about the right age based on reasonable guesses of things, and she was in the same metropolitan area as the target company. We thought we had found her. This person also had a bit of a checkered past, with some financial problems evidenced by evictions and similar actions. Things we would report to the client to help them make their business decision.

Until we found a picture of her, via a social media site. We knew what our person looked like both from the company website and her LinkedIn page. Yes, those pictures could have been fake, but we did find another Facebook page for the person that looked a lot closer to the person on the company website. It seemed clear we had a least two people around the same age, with the same name, in the same metro area. Except from the Facebook page, privacy settings and all, we could not get anything else. We could go through directories and see all the people with the name, and while we had a pretty good idea which of them was not our person, we did not know which was. There was nothing we could do. Whatever address, date of birth, or other information we could dig up, we had no way of knowing if that information was the same as the person we were searching.

Without anything for us to grab on to, no toehold, we could not say which was who. It meant that if there were other public records, we could not determine if they mattered. After all, the client does not want to know a possible finding, they want to know if there is a finding. Unless we cannot. There are times when all our efforts end with a missing person. It’s up to you Ms. Dealmaker to come back to us with something, anything that we can use to see who the person really is. It’s not always what we need to start, but what we need to finish.