If you are thinking of suing someone, you can start by finding out their full name (with correct spelling!) and their home address. In most areas you can go online to the county’s real property website to find out who owns the address and where they live.

To get a comprehensive idea of someone’s assets, hiring a private investigator who is an expert in asset location is the next step. Private investigators have access to sources and databases not available to individuals. This includes ownership of businesses, limited partnerships, vehicles, real property, and other forms of assets such as bank accounts. Experienced investigators can also find hidden assets that people may be trying to hide.

If someone owes you money and you need to find their assets and bank accounts, you can start by learning their real name and where they live. From there you can go online and research real property ownership and fictitious business they own. Fictitious business, also known as DBA’s (“doing business as”) are public records usually available at the local county seat. If they are officers of corporations or principals of limited partnerships, this information is kept at the state level.

Often people have assets that are not easily identified by public records, such as when they are held in different names (aliases), by family members or when other means of hiding assets are used. That’s why the services of an expert private investigator is needed to do a reliable comprehensive asset investigation. Private investigators can also search for bank accounts, brokerage accounts and offshore bank accounts and other hard to find assets.

Need to know how to find assets in small claims cases? For a majority of individuals a small claims lawsuit is the best way to collect money for loans or contract disputes. But after you win your judgment how do you collect the money you are owed?

First you need to file the proper papers after the judgment which starts with getting the debtor served with a “Writ of Execution.” This is a court order that enforces a judgment of possession, thus allowing the sheriff to take possession of property and transfer it to you. Once you have a Writ of Execution you can begin collection methods such as garnishing the debtor’s wages or putting a levy on their bank account.

In order to garnish wages you must know the debtor’s employer and have the proper papers served there. In order to levy bank accounts, you must know where the bank accounts are held. The best way to find out where bank accounts are is by hiring the services of a private investigator. After that information is gathered the sheriff can serve the Writ of Execution on the bank and you can collect our judgment.

In order to find someone’s bank account, you need to first gather detailed accurate information on the identity of the person. This includes full name, home address and hopefully a Social Security number. You may have the ability to do this yourself or in other cases where little is known about the person, you’ll need to hire a private investigator to help gather this information.

Once you have accurate identification of the person, with correct name and address, the next step is to identify where they bank. In most cases this is not a DYI (do it yourself) project. It requires the services of a private investigator with expertise in locating bank accounts. With hundreds of banking institutions in any one area, finding this information takes experience and skill. Contact us for more details.

If you need to know how to find assets in an estate after someone dies the search begins with finding out everything you can about the person. Do you have their full name, date of birth and Social Security number? Do you know what states they may have lived in? Do you know the names of relatives that may also be on real property deeds? Do you know where they banked?

If you have all this information then you will be in good shape to take the next step to research public records for ownership of the assets. If you are not familiar with researching public records, you can take the next step by hiring a private investigator to do the research for you. In addition the investigator can find other assets not available to the public at large such as bank accounts, safe deposit boxes and brokerage accounts.