Distressed Companies for Sale — UCC Lien, Bankruptcy & M&A Deal Sourcing

Find distressed companies for sale — dissolved, revoked, bankrupt, or hit with a UCC or tax lien — with the owner's direct phone + email for M&A deal sourcing.

This Actor finds distressed US businesses — administratively dissolved, revoked, delinquent, tax-liened, with a UCC lien, or in bankruptcy — fuses every signal onto one company (by business name + state), scores how urgently the owner is in trouble, and skip-traces the principal to a direct phone + email. It's a built-in business bankruptcy search, UCC lien search, and dissolved-companies list in one run. It pulls only free public records (state Secretary-of-State registries via Socrata, RECAP/CourtListener bankruptcy — never paid PACER), fresh daily.

Built for M&A advisors, business brokers, search funds / ETA acquirers, liquidators, and debt-resolution / factoring firms doing deal sourcing. AI-first: the input schema is the MCP tool schema, so an AI agent can pick and call the right mode.

Do not use this for a plain business-registry dump (use a KYB scraper), or for any credit, employment, insurance, or tenant decision (see the FCRA notice below).

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What you get

One uniform row (Record) per result, with a stable sha256 for change detection. The highest-value shape — enriched_lead — looks like:

{
  "mode": "enriched_lead",
  "payload": {
    "entity_name": "ACME WIDGETS LLC",
    "state": "CO",
    "signal_types": ["dissolution_status", "bankruptcy_filings"],
    "signal_count": 2,
    "distress_score": 53,
    "match_confidence": 1.0,
    "principal_name": "John Smith",
    "direct_phone": ["3035550100", "3035550101"],
    "email": ["john.smith@example.com"],
    "mailing": "123 Main St, Denver, CO 80202",
    "source_urls": ["https://data.colorado.gov/resource/4ykn-tg5h.json", "..."],
    "enriched": true
  }
}

Modes

Pick one mode. Each reads a subset of the inputs.

Mode	What it returns	Status (v1)
dissolution_status	SOS entities dissolved / revoked / delinquent / withdrawn (the clean spine)	Live — Colorado, New York, Connecticut (Socrata)
bankruptcy_filings	Chapter 7 / 11 / 12 / 13 dockets from free RECAP/CourtListener (never PACER)	Live
distress_match	One company with ≥2 stacked signals + a 0–100 distress score (the fusion moat)	Live
enriched_lead	A scored match + owner/principal name, mailing, direct phone + email (the lead we sell)	Live
check_for_changes	Stateful monitor (default): only NEW distress events since the last run	Live
reset_baseline	Re-baseline the monitor silently	Live
tax_lien	State tax liens against a business	Scaffold — phased in after v1 (source fragmentation)
ucc_lien	UCC-1 secured-debt filings	Scaffold — phased in after v1
sec_bankruptcy	Public-company bankruptcy via SEC EDGAR 8-K Item 1.03	Scaffold — optional, post-v1
principal_lookup	Officer + registered-agent from the SOS record (pre-skip-trace owner row)	Scaffold — needs the per-state officer feed

Scaffold modes register and route correctly but yield nothing until their (fragmented) sources are wired — v1 ships the two clean signals fully, plus fusion, enrichment, and the monitor.

Example input

Find distressed Colorado businesses, fused and enriched to the owner's direct line:

{
  "mode": "enriched_lead",
  "states": ["CO"],
  "min_signals": 2,
  "skiptrace_actor_id": "one-api/skip-trace",
  "max_results": 100
}

Just the clean spine signal, last 7 days, no enrichment:

{ "mode": "dissolution_status", "states": ["CO"], "date_from": "2026-06-08" }

Monitor for new dissolutions/bankruptcies since the last run:

{ "mode": "check_for_changes", "states": ["CO", "NY"] }

How the distress score works

The score (0–100) is the count + weight of stacked DISTINCT signals on one company. Financial-default signals (bankruptcy, tax lien) are weighted highest; registration-status signals (dissolved / revoked) next; a named principal acts as a multiplier. A company with revoked SOS status + a fresh tax lien + a recent Chapter 11 ranks at the top. The moat is the fusion: there is no clean shared key across SOS / bankruptcy / lien sources — they share only business name + state — so the Actor normalizes the name (strips LLC/INC/CORP/LP suffixes, casefolds, collapses whitespace), prefixes the state, and fuzzy-matches to collapse spelling drift onto one company.

Pricing (Pay-per-event)

The first 20 raw signal rows per run are free (the sample), except enriched_lead, which bills from the first row (each lead chains a publisher-paid skip-trace).

Event	Price	What it prices
signal_record	$0.002	one raw distress-signal row
owner_attribute	$0.003	one derived owner-state row (officer / registered agent)
distress_match	$0.02	one scored company with ≥2 stacked signals
enriched_lead	$0.06	one scored match + owner direct phone + email

Skip-trace is publisher-billed (resale) — the buyer pays only the flat enriched_lead price; a no-match returns 0 items = $0.

Sources (all free)

• State SOS entity status via Socrata SODA — Colorado 4ykn-tg5h, New York 63wc-4exh, Connecticut n7gp-d28j. Add a state = one config entry.
• Bankruptcy via the free RECAP archive / CourtListener REST v4 (courtlistener.com/api/rest/). A free CourtListener token (optional) raises the throttle ceiling.

PACER-free: bankruptcy data comes only from the free RECAP mirror. This Actor never queries paid PACER ($0.10/page) — that would break the zero-cost model.

Proxy & rate limits

Apify Proxy (US) is on by default — several portals and CourtListener block non-US / datacenter egress. Switch country or add residential groups per run if a source still blocks you. Identifying User-Agent on every request: distressed-business-ai-scraper tech-hub02@primecommerce.asia.

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Legal — FCRA boundary (B2B only)

Bankruptcy, lien, and dissolution records are lawful public records, resellable as B2B business leads for prospecting, acquisition, and business development. They are NOT a consumer report. Do NOT use this data for credit, employment, insurance, or tenant decisions — those uses are regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and are out of scope. The owner contact is a business-development contact, not a consumer-screening signal. By running this Actor you agree to use its output for permissible B2B purposes only.