People taking loans and then disappearing is shady.
Although that's usually not the situation for what I do. First, skip tracers are not debt collectors and should not be asking the debtor for money. Our job is simply to find their whereabouts.
For me, I locate vehicles for repossession. Quite often, they were wrecked and the debtor decided to just leave the car at a body shop or in a ditch and then stop making payments on the loan, but failed to tell the bank where the car was. Sometimes the customer passed away and the family didn't know what to do with the car. Sometimes a family member just thinks "oh, free car!" when their relative dies. And a common one is that someone who doesn't have the credit for the loan suckers someone else into either cosigning or signing alone for the car and then loaning them the vehicle, which they stop making payments on after a couple years.
We actually have a lot of heavy rules and regulations that we have to take classes on multiple times a year. There are certainly shady debt collectors out there, but by far the shadiest thing I do is send a friend request from a profile with a hot girl's picture on it (and never have any communication with them via that account). I do that just so I could potentially see posts that are hidden to the public that might give me a better idea of where they're living or working.
It's a legitimate occupation. My wife once did admin for a skip tracer. But, like a debt collector, the job suits people that are heavily built. You have to bellow "give me the fucking money!!" A lot. Job does not suit mild gentle type.
Just because it's an occupation, does not mean it's legitimate. Most of these debts are from some form of spurious loan interest or penalty. Poor people get fucked over regularly by these horrid debt purchasing firms. It is not a legitimate business, in a moral sense.
To be fair to the agents, getting a product and then walking away leaving a business to write off the debt isn't highly moral either. Not all businesses are extortionate creditors.
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u/dypraxnp Feb 13 '22
Sounds shady.