🔍 Skip Trace People Search

🚀 Find people across the United States by name and state. Pull full names, all known historical addresses with city, state, and ZIP, plus profile URLs. No login, no API key.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-01 · 📊 9 fields per record · 🇺🇸 50 US states · 🏙️ top 10 cities per state · 🆓 public address record

The Skip Trace People Search Scraper queries the public Spokeo state directory for any first name, last name, and state combination. Each record includes the full name, name variants from the public record, every known historical address with street, city, state, and ZIP, and the canonical profile URL.

City-level pagination across the top ten cities per state lifts the per-query cap from roughly 30 to 100+ unique people. Skip tracing has long been a manual research task for legal teams, real estate investors, debt collectors, and journalists. This Actor turns the public address record into structured data without manual lookups.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Real estate investors, legal teams, debt recovery, journalists, OSINT researchers	Address verification, asset tracing, contact research, due diligence

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📋 What the Skip Trace People Search Scraper does

Four filtering workflows in a single run:

• 👤 Name + state lookup. Submit a first name, last name, and US state.
• 🏙️ City pagination. When the state-level page caps out, the Actor walks the top 10 cities for that state.
• 🔗 Profile URLs. Each record carries a canonical Spokeo profile URL for follow-up research.
• 🏷️ Name variants. The public record often lists middle initials and historical surnames as alias entries.

Each row reports the full name, an array of name variants, an array of historical addresses (each with street, city, state, ZIP, and a combined fullAddress), the profile URL, the original search inputs (first name, last name, state), the source (spokeo), and a scrape timestamp.

💡 Why it matters: the public address record is the foundation of US skip tracing. Real estate investors use it to find off-market property owners. Legal teams use it for service of process. Debt recovery uses it to locate debtors. The state pages on Spokeo are the highest-quality public surface for this data, and city-level pagination is the practical way to break past per-query caps.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
maxItems	integer	10	People to return. Free plan caps at 10, paid plan at 1,000,000.
firstName	string	"John"	First name to search for.
lastName	string	"Smith"	Last name to search for.
state	string	"California"	Full US state name from a 50-state enum.

Example: 100 people named John Smith in California.

{
    "maxItems": 100,
    "firstName": "John",
    "lastName": "Smith",
    "state": "California"
}

Example: a less common name in Texas.

{
    "maxItems": 50,
    "firstName": "Aurelia",
    "lastName": "Vasquez",
    "state": "Texas"
}

⚠️ Good to Know: state names use hyphens (New-York, North-Carolina). The state-page is the primary surface; city-level pagination only triggers when the state page returns fewer than maxItems records. Phone numbers and emails are paywalled on Spokeo and are not exposed by this Actor.

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📊 Output

Each person record contains 9 fields. Download as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
👤 fullName	string	"John N Smith"
🏷️ additionalNames	array	["John N Smith"]
🏠 addresses	array of objects	see below
🔗 profileUrl	string	"https://www.spokeo.com/John-N-Smith/..."
🔍 searchedFirstName	string	"John"
🔍 searchedLastName	string	"Smith"
🔍 searchedState	string	"California"
📡 source	string	"spokeo"
🕒 scrapedAt	ISO 8601	"2026-05-01T01:14:33.402Z"

Each address inside addresses has:

Field	Type	Example
🏠 streetAddress	string | null	"11136 Provencal Pl"
🏙️ city	string | null	"San Diego"
🗺️ state	string | null	"CA"
📮 postalCode	string | null	"92128"
📍 fullAddress	string	"11136 Provencal Pl, San Diego, CA, 92128"

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🆓	No login. Reads the public Spokeo state directory.
🇺🇸	All 50 states. Full US coverage via state-name enum.
🏙️	City pagination. Top 10 cities per state to reach 100+ records.
🏷️	Name variants. Captures middle initials and historical surnames.
🏠	Multiple addresses. Full address history per person.
🔗	Profile URLs. Stable canonical links for follow-up research.
🚀	Sub-30-second runs. Typical 100-person pulls finish quickly.

📊 In a single 18-second run the Actor returned 100 unique people named John Smith across California cities.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
Manual public-record search	Free	One-shot per query	Live	Manual	Hours per state
Paid people-search subscriptions	$$$ subscription	Full	Daily	Built-in	Account setup
Generic web scrapers	$$ subscription	Brittle CSS	Daily	None	Engineer hours
⭐ Skip Trace People Search (this Actor)	Pay-per-event	100+ per state	Live	Name, state, city pagination	None

Same Spokeo state directory open to any browser, exposed as structured records.

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🚀 How to use

1. 🆓 Create a free Apify account. Sign up here and get $5 in free credit.
2. 🔍 Open the Actor. Search for "Skip Trace" in the Apify Store.
3. ⚙️ Enter inputs. First name, last name, US state.
4. ▶️ Click Start. A 100-person run typically completes in 15 to 30 seconds.
5. 📥 Download. Export as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from sign-up to first dataset: under five minutes.

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💼 Business use cases

🏠 Real estate Find off-market property owners Verify owner addresses for direct mail Identify absentee owners across states Reach inheritance-stage owners early	⚖️ Legal & process Locate parties for service of process Verify residency for jurisdictional filings Trace witnesses and former employees Build location histories for case research
💰 Debt & collections Locate debtors who have moved Identify last-known address bundles Cross-reference multiple state records Surface name variants for fuzzy matching	📰 Journalism & OSINT Trace public figures' historical addresses Verify leaked-document metadata Find related parties via shared addresses Build narrative timelines anchored on residence

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Empirical datasets for papers, thesis work, and coursework Longitudinal studies tracking changes across snapshots Reproducible research with cited, versioned data pulls Classroom exercises on data analysis and ethical scraping	🎨 Personal and creative Side projects, portfolio demos, and indie app launches Data visualizations, dashboards, and infographics Content research for bloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters Hobbyist collections and personal trackers
🤝 Non-profit and civic Transparency reporting and accountability projects Advocacy campaigns backed by public-interest data Community-run databases for local issues Investigative journalism on public records	🧪 Experimentation Prototype AI and machine-learning pipelines with real data Validate product-market hypotheses before engineering spend Train small domain-specific models on niche corpora Test dashboard concepts with live input

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🔌 Automating Skip Trace People Search

Run this Actor on a schedule, from your codebase, or inside another tool:

• Node.js SDK: see Apify JavaScript client for programmatic runs.
• Python SDK: see Apify Python client for the same flow in Python.
• HTTP API: see Apify API docs for raw REST integration.

Schedule recurring runs on a list of names from the Apify Console. Pipe results into Google Sheets, S3, BigQuery, or your own webhook with the built-in integrations.

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

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🔌 Integrate with any app

• Make - drop run results into 1,800+ apps.
• Zapier - trigger automations off completed runs.
• Slack - post run summaries to a channel.
• Google Sheets - sync each run into a spreadsheet.
• Webhooks - notify your own services on run finish.
• Airbyte - load runs into Snowflake, BigQuery, or Postgres.

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🔗 Recommended Actors

• ⚖️ California State Bar Scraper - look up California attorneys by name or bar number.
• 🏛️ Federal Court Locator Scraper - find the right federal court for filings.
• 🅱️ Bing Search Scraper - run open-web searches on the people you find.
• 🦆 DuckDuckGo Search Scraper - alternative SERP signal for the same lookup.
• 🕰️ Wayback Machine CDX Scraper - audit historical web mentions of a person.

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more pre-built scrapers and data tools.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form and we'll route the question to the right person.

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Spokeo is a registered trademark of Spokeo, Inc. This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by Spokeo. It reads only the publicly-visible state directory pages every browser can access. Use of skip-trace data is governed by US Fair Credit Reporting Act and state-level rules; verify your use case with counsel.