Skip Trace & People Search — Phone, Email & Address Lookup

A cold trail in, a live contact out.

You have a name on a deed, a number with no owner, or an address and nothing else. Skip Trace follows it to the person: where they live now and lived before, the mobile that was active last month, the landline that wasn't, their email addresses, the names they also go by, and who they're related to.

Every record comes with a 0-100 match score, so you can tell the difference between this is them and this might be them — and act accordingly.

You pay for people found, not for searches run.

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Try it in 30 seconds

Paste this into Searches, tick the terms box, and hit Start:

John Smith, Maple Valley, WA
(425) 281-1646
1600 Main St, Dallas, TX

Three search types, one input box. That's the whole learning curve.

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What you can search

You have	You type	You get back
A name	John Smith, Dallas, TX	The best-matching person, with a match score
A phone number	(214) 555-0100	Who owns the number now (and who had it before, if you want)
A street address	1600 Main St, Dallas, TX	The owner and current residents

City and state are optional on names, but they make matches far more accurate on common names.

What every record contains

{
  "input": "John Smith, Maple Valley, WA",
  "searchType": "name",
  "matchScore": 95,                    // 0-100: how sure we are this is your person
  "fullName": "John Louis Smith",
  "firstName": "John", "middleName": "Louis", "lastName": "Smith",
  "age": 63,
  "bornAround": "September 1963",
  "aliases": ["Jim L Smith", "John L Smith", "John Smith JR"],

  "primaryMobile": "(813) 731-6626",   // the number to actually call
  "primaryPhone":  "(813) 754-4953",
  "phones": [
    { "number": "(813) 731-6626", "e164": "+18137316626", "type": "Wireless",
      "carrier": "Verizon Wireless", "lastSeen": "Aug 2026", "isCurrent": true,
      "confirmedBySources": 2 }
  ],

  "primaryEmail": "jhnl@flash.net",
  "emails": ["jhnl@flash.net", "fortyber@hitmail.com"],

  "currentAddress": { "street": "22604 SE 284th Ct", "city": "Maple Valley",
                      "state": "WA", "zip": "98038",
                      "full": "22604 SE 284th Ct, Maple Valley, WA 98038" },
  "pastAddresses": [ /* with the years each was reported */ ],

  "relatives": ["Nicole Winegeart", "Cheryl Smith"],
  "phoneCount": 7, "emailCount": 3,
  "status": "found", "scrapedAt": "2026-09-17T18:04:11Z"
}

Export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or HTML, or pull it straight from the API.

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Who uses this

Real estate investors & wholesalers — turn a list of distressed or absentee-owner addresses into owners with live mobile numbers. Feed it the address, get the person.

Debt collection & recovery — locate account holders who have moved, with current addresses and phone numbers that show when each was last reported.

Process servers & legal support — find a current address for service, plus relatives and past addresses when the trail goes cold.

Sales & lead generation — append mobile numbers and emails to a list of names so your outreach actually connects.

Fraud & identity checks — confirm that a name, phone and address really belong together before you ship, lend or onboard.

Reconnecting people — genealogy, alumni outreach, unclaimed property, lost policy holders.

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What makes it different

One trail, three ways in. Name → contact, phone → person, address → resident. Most tools do one and charge you separately for each.

You don't pay for empty results. A record is only billed when it carries an actual phone, email or address. Blanks and near-misses are free.

Match scores you can filter on. Every name search returns a 0-100 confidence figure and the aliases we matched on, so you can auto-accept above 90 and review the rest — instead of guessing whether you got the right John Smith.

Phone numbers with context. Line type (mobile vs landline), carrier, and when the number was last reported active. Call the mobile that was seen last month, not the landline from 2012.

Built to keep working. Skip Trace draws on several independent data sources and switches between them automatically, so a single source having a bad day doesn't turn into a failed run for you.

Cross-check mode. Turn on Cross-check every person against a second source and we run two sources and merge them, flagging the phone numbers both agree on (confirmedBySources: 2). Use it for high-value lists where a wrong number is expensive.

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Settings

Setting	What it does
Searches	Your lookups, one per line: names, phones, or addresses
Structured searches	The same thing as JSON for bulk runs and integrations (firstName, lastName, city, state, street, zip, phone, minAge, maxAge)
People per search	How many people to return per search. 1 = best match only, the cheapest setting
Match confidence	Broad / Balanced / Strict. Strict returns only near-certain matches
Cross-check against a second source	Higher accuracy, higher cost
Include relatives and associates	Adds likely relatives to each record
Phone lookups: include previous owners	Also return earlier owners of a phone number

Everything else — connection handling, retries, source selection, pacing — is managed for you. There is nothing to tune and no proxy to configure.

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Bulk lists and automation

Drop thousands of rows into Structured searches, or call the Actor from the API:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/YOUR_USERNAME~skip-trace-people-search/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
        "people": [
          {"firstName": "John", "lastName": "Smith", "city": "Dallas", "state": "TX"},
          {"phone": "2145550100"},
          {"street": "1600 Main St", "city": "Dallas", "state": "TX"}
        ],
        "maxResultsPerSearch": 1,
        "acceptTerms": true
      }'

Works with Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets and the Apify API, and as an MCP tool for AI agents. Schedule it to re-check a list on any cadence.

Results you can trust

Every run reports what happened per input, so nothing fails silently:

status	Meaning
found	A person was located and billed
not_found	Searched successfully, no record matched — not billed
invalid_input	We couldn't read that line; the message explains how to fix it
error	Sources were briefly unavailable — retry that input; not billed

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Pricing

Pay per person found. You are charged only for records that include real contact data. Not-found, invalid and error rows cost nothing.

Set a maximum charge per run in the Actor's settings to cap spend on large lists; the run stops cleanly at the limit.

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FAQ

Where does the data come from? Publicly available US records and public directory listings, aggregated and cross-checked. We don't require you to bring any API keys or accounts.

How fresh is it? Each phone number and address carries the date it was last reported, so you can judge freshness per field rather than trusting a single "updated" stamp.

Why did a search return no results? Common reasons: the person is young or has a thin public record, the name spelling differs from public records, or the location is wrong. Try widening — drop the city, or set Match confidence to Broad.

Can I search a whole city or pull every record in a ZIP code? No. This Actor answers lookups about specific people, numbers and addresses. It is not a bulk database export.

Is international coverage available? US only today.

Does it work for skip tracing property owners? Yes — that's the address search. Give it the property address and you get the owner and residents with contact data.

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Terms of Use

By running Skip Trace (ticking I accept the Terms of Use) you agree to the following.

1. Permitted use. You may use the results only for a lawful purpose that you have determined is permitted in your jurisdiction — for example locating a person in connection with a legitimate business, legal, investigative, debt-recovery, fraud-prevention or reconnection purpose.

2. FCRA — prohibited uses. Skip Trace is not a consumer reporting agency and its output is not a consumer report under the US Fair Credit Reporting Act. You may not use the results, in whole or in part, to make decisions about consumer credit, insurance, employment, tenant or housing screening, government benefits, or any other purpose regulated by the FCRA or a comparable law.

3. Other prohibited uses. You may not use the results to stalk, harass, threaten, dox, intimidate or discriminate against any person; for unlawful marketing (including calls or texts that violate the TCPA, do-not-call rules or similar laws); or for any purpose prohibited by applicable law.

4. Your responsibility as data controller. You are solely responsible for how you collect, store, use, share and delete the results, and for complying with all applicable privacy, data-protection, marketing and consumer-protection laws in your jurisdiction, including responding to any opt-out, access or deletion request you receive from a data subject.

5. No warranty of accuracy. Records are aggregated from third-party public sources and may be incomplete, outdated or wrong. Match scores are estimates, not guarantees of identity. Verify independently before you act on a result, especially before contacting anyone or taking a decision that affects them.

6. No relationship with the sources. This Actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any third-party data source or brand.

7. Liability. The Actor is provided "as is", without warranties of any kind. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the developer is not liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of the results, and you agree to indemnify the developer against claims arising from your use.

8. Removal requests. If you are an individual and want your information removed, contact the underlying public-records sources directly; records are not stored by this Actor after your run completes.

If you do not agree to these terms, do not run Skip Trace.

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Found a case Skip Trace couldn't crack, or need volume pricing? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab — real dead ends are how the matching gets better.