Nowhere to hide

Debt, drugs or depression: whatever you're escaping from, the shadowy tracing agents can track you down.

A woman suspects her husband has rekindled an affair with an old flame. He insists he hasn't that they're not even in contact. His wife doesn't believe him. Miraculously, she later produces the other woman's itemised mobile phone bill - on which her husband's number appears two or three times a day.

A different woman lives with a drug addict. To finance his addiction, he beats her into taking out a series of loans from high-interest money-lenders. The woman flees to a refuge. The only people who know where she is are the police and the Benefits Agency. Yet within weeks two men turn up at the refuge demanding payments that have lapsed on the loans. The refuge is thrown into a panic at this failure in security; the woman's recovery is set back six months.

A man buys a stereo for £800 on hire purchase. He makes one payment, then, leaving a trail of debts in his wake, does a runner. He moves to another part of the country and changes his name. He assumes he won't be found - until there's a knock on the door, and he is.

While in each of these true-life cases the person's motive for covering their tracks was different, the people who uncovered them were the same: tracing agents.

It is estimated that tens of thousands of people go missing in the UK every year, and whilst it's impossible to gauge the precise size of this black economy, with over 1,500 tracing agents working in the country, finding them is big business. Agents typically work on a ‘no-trace, no fee’ basis for £30-£50. They range from highly professional organisations with dozens of employees, to a single man or woman sitting at home with a telephone. They range, too, from tracers who use entirely legitimate means to track down people on behalf of their clients, to those who don't.

Classic legal methods include searching the electoral register, door-knocking, and ‘the sting’: leaving a fictitious parcel delivery slip at the person's last known address. The staggering scale and ingenuity of tracers has only become apparent in the last 18 months as a result of the Baird Project - an inter-agency operation involving the Department For Work and Pensions, the Inland Revenue and the Information Commissioner.

The Baird project was instigated after the agencies realised they were being targeted by bogus callers. The Inland Revenue and the Department for Work and Pensions have specific procedures to deal with these and fulfil their obligations under the Data Protection Act - which they take very seriously. The Baird investigation estimated that these agencies run the equivalent of three call centres, employing 80-100 people in each, to deal with bogus calls from tracing agents - a problem they take very seriously. The cost to the taxpayer each year runs well into six figures.

As a consequence of Baird, prosecutions against tracing agents for thousands of offences of allegedly unlawfully obtaining, selling and disclosing information are currently in the pipeline.

Although anyone who holds confidential personal information - including GPs, banks, utilities or phone companies - are standard prey for unprincipled tracers, the two main targets are the Inland Revenue and Benefits Agencies. They've been aware of this for some time, but only since Baird have they realised the full extent of the problem.

Says Alec Owen, senior investigating officer at the Information Commissioner's Office “It's like going into a forest looking for one squirrel and seeing hundreds running around. There's not one part of the UK where we haven't found illegal obtaining of information,”. The commissioner is responsible for enforcing the Data Protection Act - a central tenet of which is the need to protect confidential personal information - and has the power to bring prosecutions that can lead to heavy fines, though not jail terms, for those who breach it.

He says “All they (the tracers) need is a business card, a bit of nerve and the telephone number of every benefit office in the country”, says Owens. The companies that employ them, often including well-known high street financial chains, generally couldn't or wouldn't be aware of the methods they use to find their errant customers,”.

The tracers' techniques are forever being honed. Some use detailed ‘blagger's manuals’, packed full of advice, sample scripts, jargon and acronyms, so they can pass themselves off as employees of whoever they're calling. Some have been known to find out what pubs the staff they are targeting drink in, so they can go along and eavesdrop on their conversations. One tracer's modus operandi was to pretend to be a barrister about to go into court. He would call up a phone company's customer service department at the exact time he knew the least number of staff were on duty, and demand that an itemised phone bill be faxed to him. “I'm outside court waiting to go in. If I go in without that bill the company will lose thousands,” he would say. “It was supposed to be here 10 minutes ago. Fax it to me at this number.” The person on the other end of the phone, under pressure and with a board flashing in front of them detailing the number of calls waiting, would duly oblige.

Peter Heims has been tracing people since 1953 and is currently writing a book on the subject. He's also vice-president of the Association of British Investigators, the country's leading professional body for private investigators. “Although the person you're trying to trace is usually a crook and has done a runner, you must abide by the law 100 per cent,” he says.

Heims argues though, that the tightening of the Data Protection Act in 1998 wrought excessive constraints on his and other tracers' work. “I used to boast that I could trace 70 per cent of debtors. Now the figure is much more like 50 per cent.” he says.

But while companies have every right to trace errant customers to get their money back, and of course tracing agents have every right to act on their behalf, the cost when they do so illegally - both to individual privacy and to the taxpayer - can be immense. “The Information Commissioner's position is that two wrongs don't make a right,” says Alec Owens.

This article has been reproduced from The Big Issue Dec 27, 2001.

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