Judi Sheeks - How The *Bleep* Did You Find Me?: Real life lessons for protecting your privacy from one of Americas leading skiptracers

How the *Bleep* Did You Find Me?

How you have unknowingly been helping private investigators (and others) track your every move

Real Life Lessons for Protecting Your

Privacy from One of Americas Premier Skip Tracers

Dedication

Dedicated to my late husband, Sid "Wyatt" Sheeks - the man who always joked that he was my "partner in crime" and who was my biggest fan.

I hope I've lived up to his ideal of me, because I enjoyed the heck out of writing this book almost as much as I enjoyed the heck out of our marriage....

...and to my many mentors over the years for sharing their insights and exercising their infinite patience with a semi-talented kiddo learning the ropes.

Table of Contents

Preface

Everyone leaves a trail

The Huntress

Skiptracing (also skip tracing, or debtor and fugitive recovery) is the process of locating a person's whereabouts for any number of purposes. A skiptracer is someone who performs this task, which may be the person's primary occupation. The term "skip" refers to the person being searched for, and is derived from the idiomatic expression "to skip town", meaning to depart (perhaps in a rush), leaving minimal clues behind to "trace" the "skip" to a new location.

(Wikipedia)

For the last two decades, Ive been one of the elite practitioners of the art of skiptracing. Using those minimal clues, Ive successfully located thousands of people all over the world. Ive found people everywhere from Bangkok to Baltimore, from Caracas to Copenhagen, from Hawaii to Guadalajara.

In fact, when high powered attorneys and well known private investigators really need to find someone, 9 times out of 10.... they call me.

The subjects of my searches range from the mundane to the noteworthy, from the sublime to the outrageous. You name it, if theres a valid legal reason to find someone, Ive found them.

And I can proudly say that in almost 23 years, there has never been anyone I have NOT found.

You see, everyone leaves a trail. The most successful trackers know where to look when the trail has gone cold.

Introduction

I suppose being a skip tracer is something I was born to do. My late father co-owned a collection agency back in the 1960's. He was a supreme skip tracer - long before the internet was invented. He had a network of people across the country that he could call when he was looking for a subject. He did the necessary groundwork and then used his innate sixth sense to locate an area where someone most likely would end up.

With the advent of the internet, tracking has gotten infinitely easier. Over the span of my career, Ive been able to develop a network of people worldwide to assist me in my searches, just like my dad used to do.

Only now I e-mail them or contact them via chat instead of making long distance calls or sending letters. What took months, even years back in the day can take a matter of weeks, and sometimes only days in many cases.

I cut my teeth as a full fledged huntress back in 1994. I was working as a paralegal for a personal injury attorney in Colorado Springs. As often happens in court cases, one of the people that needed to be served with papers had disappeared. The process server and the attorney were both frantic, because they only had a short window of time to get him served or the case would be thrown out of court.

I asked the attorney if I could take a crack at locating the defendant. I looked through the file, found the accident report and got the names of the other people who were in the car with him on the accident date. Four phone calls later, I had a new address for the driver as well as a happy process server and a relieved attorney.

I also earned absolutely zip zero dollars for that locate. A little research on my own told me that there were precious few investigators who specialized in locating people here in town...and that they made substantially more money than a paralegal.

Shortly after that, my husband was laid off. He had been in law enforcement in California and stepped in to take over the process serving duties for the law firm. I networked with other legal professionals and attorneys that I knew in town, and within a few months, hubby had a thriving process service business - with a twist - he had ME as his secret weapon to locate subjects that werent where they were supposed to be.

By the end of the year, his business had grown so much that I left the security of a guaranteed paycheck at the law firm and went in to the business full time to help him. My trepidation about not working for someone else lasted all of 5 minutes when, on our first assignment, I billed out more money than I made in two months as a paralegal.

A few years later, due to some severe health problems, hubby retired and our business morphed into full time investigations. Much like my father years ago, Ive been lucky enough to have developed an incredible network of people I can call on for help - only my network is world-wide and computerized.

And Id be lying if I said I dont get a bit of a tingle up my leg every time I locate somebody. Especially someone who is actively trying to hide their whereabouts.

Ive found witnesses that even the investigators with the unlimited resources of the district attorneys office have given up on finding. I like to say that I inherited my fathers skiptracing genes - but really its more of an insatiable quest for knowledge and dogged determination to solve a mystery.

Admittedly, some have taken longer to find than others and, interestingly enough, the people who have been the most difficult to find are not the wealthy, powerful titans of industry, but they are usually the people who have the least.

So, why would a successful skip tracer actually tell people HOW she does what she does? This book happened purely by chance. Some time ago, I was meeting with a colleague. I had located a particularly difficult subject for her and she was marveling at how easy I made it look. I told her that it was a good thing I wasnt telling people how I found them. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made to me.

Chapter One

How the *Bleep* did you find me?

Time after time, when I do make contact with the subjects of my search, the number one question they all ask is How the *Bleep* did you find me? I usually just tell them that its my job to find them and dont bother letting them know how relatively simple their own actions have made it for me to track them down. Heres the deal. I make my living - a very nice living, I might add, by stalking you.

You see, if youre my target, Im going to take the path of least resistance. And that resistance has all but disappeared because of social media and primarily because of the information that you yourself have unwittingly put out there for the world to see.

Stop reading this right now and Google your name. Surprised?

What goes on the Internet....STAYS on the Internet. If your phone number was ever published in the phone book, chances are youre on one of the sites like Whitepages.com, Spokeo and Zabasearch.

Because the Internet is so personal to you, you forget that it's public to everyone else. Remember, I'm

looking for you for legal and good purposes, others may not have such lofty intentions.

And 99.9% of the time, the person who is going to help me the very most in tracking you........is you.

Usually people have no clue that Im even looking for them. Theyre normal human beings, out living their lives, blissfully unaware that not only is data being collected on them, but it is being packaged and resold to services that are the life blood of investigators like myself.

People also have no clue that what they thought was private, i.e. postings on FaceBook or social media, automatically defaults to public view. When you Googled yourself a few minutes ago, one of the entries should have been a link to your FaceBook page. If you hadnt taken the necessary precautions to make your page private, not only do I have your grandmothers coleslaw recipe (which was yummy, by the way), but I also have photos of you and more information than you ever thought possible.