UCC Lien Filing Scraper — CT + CO State Portals

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🎯 What this scrapes

Connecticut and Colorado both publish their UCC financing-statement filings as public Socrata open-data datasets — but each state ships its own field names, its own join shape, and its own quirks (Colorado alone splits filings, debtors, and secured parties across three linked datasets). This Actor queries both states' official portals directly, joins Colorado's three-way split in memory, and maps everything — CT and CO alike — onto one common ResultRow shape, so you get a single normalized dataset instead of hand-reconciling two government schemas.

Row granularity: a lien filing that lists multiple debtors ships as multiple rows — one per debtor — not collapsed into one row with a debtor list. This is the source data's own shape (Connecticut's dataset already ships one record per debtor per filing) and it's the more useful shape for lead-gen: every debtor gets its own row with its own name/address, ready to import as a contact. Rows sharing the same filing_id are the same underlying lien.

A new UCC filing against a business is a buy-intent / expansion signal — the business just took on secured financing — which is why commercial lenders, credit teams, and lead-gen shops watch this data on a recurring basis.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — every request goes through curl-cffi with real Chrome/Firefox TLS impersonation, as defense-in-depth even against a plain public API.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — if a state portal pushes back, we back off instead of hammering it and losing the run.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable filing IDs, one schema across two states' worth of source-format differences.
• 🧩 Per-filing fault isolation — if one Colorado filing's debtor/secured-party join comes back empty, that row still ships (with the missing fields set to null) instead of the whole run failing over one bad record.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for filings that land in your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• Commercial lenders and credit-risk teams watching for new secured financing against target debtors.
• Skip tracers and collections shops tracking lien activity on a name or business.
• B2B lead-gen operators re-running the search on a cadence to catch newly filed liens — a fresh UCC filing is a signal the business just took on capital.
• Due-diligence checks on a counterparty's existing secured-financing exposure in CT or CO.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Pick the states to query — CT, CO, or both (default: both).
3. Set a date window — daysBack, or explicit dateFrom/dateTo.
4. Optionally narrow with debtorNameContains.
5. Click Start. Results stream into the run's dataset as they're found.
6. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
states	array	no	["CT", "CO"]	Which state UCC datasets to query.
daysBack	integer	no	90	Rolling window back from today, applied to CT's filing-acceptance date and CO's filing date. Ignored when dateFrom is set.
dateFrom	string	no	—	Explicit filing-date lower bound, ISO YYYY-MM-DD. Wins over daysBack when set.
dateTo	string	no	—	Explicit filing-date upper bound, ISO YYYY-MM-DD. Defaults to today when dateFrom is set and this is omitted.
debtorNameContains	string	no	—	Substring filter against the debtor name (business or individual).
maxResults	integer	no	500	Hard cap on total rows emitted across all requested states in one run.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{"useApifyProxy": false}	Off by default — CT and CO's portals are public keyless APIs with no fingerprinting observed. Flip it on if you ever see a 403/429.

Example input

{
  "states": ["CT", "CO"],
  "daysBack": 14,
  "debtorNameContains": "",
  "maxResults": 25,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

📤 Output

One row per filing–debtor pair, joined across CT's and CO's differing native schemas into a single shape. A filing with multiple debtors emits multiple rows that share the same filing_id and differ on the debtor_* fields — use filing_id to group rows back into "all debtors on this lien" if that's what you need. A filing with a single debtor (the common case) emits exactly one row.

Field	Type	Notes
state	string	CT or CO — which dataset matched.
filing_id	string	CT: the state's lien filing number. CO: the filing's fileid.
filing_date	string	ISO YYYY-MM-DD.
lapse_date	string, null	ISO YYYY-MM-DD. Null when the source record doesn't carry a lapse date.
filing_type	string	CT: the state's filing-type code (e.g. "ORIG FIN STMT"). CO: always ucc in v1.
filing_description	string, null	Free-text description where the source dataset provides one; frequently null.
transaction_type	string, null	Derived: original or amendment, when determinable.
is_amendment	boolean	Derived from transaction_type.
debtor_name	string	Business name, or "last, first" for individual debtors.
debtor_address	string, null	Street address on file. Null when the source record omits it.
debtor_city	string, null
debtor_state	string, null
debtor_zip	string, null
secured_party_name	string, null	Null on the rare CO filing whose secured-party join returns no match — the row still ships.
secured_party_address	string, null
secured_party_city	string, null
secured_party_state	string, null
secured_party_zip	string, null
status	string	One of active, lapsed, terminated, unknown — derived from the source state's own status field.
source_record_url	string	Direct query against the source portal for this exact filing.
registry_url	string	Human-readable landing page for the source state dataset.
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp when this row was recorded.

Example output

{
  "state": "CT",
  "filing_id": "0002345678",
  "filing_date": "2026-05-21",
  "lapse_date": "2031-05-21",
  "filing_type": "ORIG FIN STMT",
  "filing_description": "All assets",
  "transaction_type": "original",
  "is_amendment": false,
  "debtor_name": "ACME WIDGETS LLC",
  "debtor_address": "12 Main St",
  "debtor_city": "Hartford",
  "debtor_state": "CT",
  "debtor_zip": "06103",
  "secured_party_name": "FIRST STATE BANK",
  "secured_party_address": "1 Finance Plaza",
  "secured_party_city": "Stamford",
  "secured_party_state": "CT",
  "secured_party_zip": "06901",
  "status": "active",
  "source_record_url": "https://data.ct.gov/resource/xfev-8smz.json?id_lien_flng_nbr=0002345678",
  "registry_url": "https://data.ct.gov/d/xfev-8smz",
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-22T14:03:11Z"
}

Individual (non-business) debtors and secured parties, and Colorado filings whose join comes back empty, will show null on the corresponding name/address fields rather than a fabricated value — that's the source data, not a bug.

💰 Pricing

Billing unit is a row, and a row is a filing–debtor pair — not a filing. A filing with 3 debtors bills as 3 result-emitted events, not 1. Most filings have exactly one debtor, but if you're budgeting off a count of filings rather than debtors, your actual charge can run higher than that count. Set maxResults accordingly.

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.20	One-off warm-up charge per run
result-emitted	$0.005	Per filing–debtor-pair row written to the dataset

Example: 1 000 rows at the rates above = $5.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account free credit to try it.

🚧 Limitations

• Coverage is Connecticut and Colorado only. This is not a national UCC search — if the debtor you're checking only filed in a third state, this Actor will correctly return zero rows for it. Adding more states is on the roadmap, not shipped.
• Colorado's lien_irs and lien_hosp filing types are out of scope in v1 — UCC filings (filingtype == "ucc") only.
• This is a point-in-time bulk export, not a monitoring/alerting service. Re-run on a schedule to catch newly filed liens.
• Full-text collateral/UCC-1 document images are not retrieved — this Actor emits structured index fields, not scanned filings.
• Individual (non-organization) debtors/secured parties on Colorado filings are handled defensively, but their field shape is less consistently populated than business filings — expect more nulls on that subset.

❓ FAQ

Does this need an API key or login?

No — both state portals are public, keyless open-data APIs.

What if my search matches nothing?

The run finishes successfully with zero rows and a status message describing what was searched — a genuinely empty result is a completed search, not a failure.

Does this cover UCC filings nationwide?

No — v1 is Connecticut and Colorado only. Don't rely on this Actor to clear a debtor across all 50 states.

Can I search by debtor name?

Yes — set debtorNameContains to filter both states' results to debtor names containing that substring.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new state added? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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