No Locate No Fee Skip Tracing? No Thank you!

We all love to receive something for free and nobody appreciates paying for a service where the costs were not warranted.

In a perfect world, all services provided would be straight forward with a fixed fee. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

Take for example your friendly neighbourhood mechanic. Now imagine you have brought your car to your friendly neighbourhood mechanic in hopes of having him diagnose a nasty metallic noise coming from your engine. "Not a problem", exclaims your friendly neighbourhood mechanic, "We'll just change your oil and filters, along with your spark plugs while we're at it. That will cost $300; NO MORE TO PAY!".

Sounds great, doesn't it? Well, it won't sound so great when you find out the real problem was that your car's engine timing was off and you now have a 150 kilogram paperweight sitting under the bonnet of your car!

As with the proper diagnosis of engine trouble, investigations (especially location-of-persons investigations and asset investigations) should never be approached with the "She'll be right" mindset.

An investigation must remain a fluid process and is ; by definition, an undefined endeavour. It is the process of ascertaining what you already know and what you need to know about the Subject of your investigation.

Now, you're probably thinking "If the person is not located, I don't pay a cent. I've got nothing to lose" right? Again, such things in life are not always so simple.

If you require a particular star witness to be located to enable you to succeed in a litigated matter; or you need to locate a debtor to enable effective recovery for yourself or your client, can you afford NOT to locate this party? Think to yourself; what is the cost of NOT successfully locating this party?

If you are given a false negative (That is, told that a person impossible to find, when they could be readily located using more sophisticated investigation techniques) you could be losing tens of thousands; hundreds of thousands; or even millions of dollars.

Another point to keep in mind; many firms offering "No Locate-No Fee" services rely on high turnover to remain viable. Such firms are unlikely to expend large amounts of time and resources in matter which are not commercially viable for their business. What does this mean for the client?

For one, the standard operating practices for such firms involve little more than conducting database searches utilising any known details you may have provided at the commencement of the investigation and maybe placement of telephone calls. If there is no direct match in available databases, the result is often a "non-locate". In fact, we have even heard stories from database providers of investigators calling in to complain that the databases do not contain enough information to provide an easy locate.

Secondly, such services rarely include comprehensive face to face HUMINT (Human Intelligence) gathering as a tool. This fact greatly diminishes the investigative data available for use within the investigation and is often the key failure point in unsuccessful skip tracing investigations.

On the other hand, if location details for the Subject of the investigation are readily available within the investigator's databases and the investigation is completed expediently, the costs of the investigation can be less than the fees associated with "No Locate- No Fee" services.

The greatest negative impact to the client comes as a result of "false-positives". That is, when a database lists a person at a particular location and the investigator passes this information on to the client as a "locate" without verification. It is often the verification process that takes more time than the database investigative resource utilisation process. When the investigator is only paid when a party is "located", the possibility for lax verification processes increases.

With a location success close to 100%, we at Periscope Investigations are the experts in Skip Tracing and Location-of-Persons investigations. As the experts, we would caution any party seeking such services against blindly utilising "No Locate- No Fee" providers. We communicate this warning from experience, as we routinely receive matters to investigate where previously engaged investigation firms have failed to locate a party. Yet, we have been successful in doing so.

Where costs are a major consideration, specialised practices can be utilised within the investigation to keep costs to a minimum and the client can be updated as to leads obtained throughout the investigation, so as to assess the viability of continuity in the investigation in relation to costs.