It's 6 p.m. Friday, and Washington has gathered his friends and relatives at a city hotel for a small fundraiser to support his ailing mother, who has been diagnosed with cancer.
Since her diagnosis two months ago, Washington has depleted his savings to secure treatment for her, but costs continue to rise with no sign of relief in sight.
This is the second round of fundraising but the deficit is estimated to be around Sh2.2 million.
In the first round, they managed to raise Sh300,000, bringing the cost down to Sh2.5 million.
While he was doing this at the hotel, he discovered his debtor!
The debtor also spotted him and felt unwell, causing him to leave the house.
Washington remembers selling the man a new car a year earlier on the condition that he pay off the debt in two installments.
After the first installment, the debtor's phone went off, he moved out of his house and made off with the remaining balance of Sh400,000.
Just like in Washington, there are many individuals and businesses that have lost assets due to bad debts attributable to defaulting debtors.
Many of these debtors often go offline, turn off their phones and flee to unknown locations to avoid the creditors who are hunting them.
Eventually, the creditors give up the chase and write off these debts.
This is often because creditors cannot hire a debt collection agency.
Even if it appears that the debtor is dead, imprisoned or even kidnapped; In contrast, many of them are still alive, in good financial shape and are actually getting off scot-free.
What would be the best course of action other than forfeiting the debt in the event of a debtor's disappearance?
It's very simple; Opt for people tracing rather than debt collection services.
Skip tracing involves attempting to locate a person who is missing and cannot be contacted in any way.
Typically, these services are offered by the same debt collection agencies and sometimes on a “no trace, no commission” basis.
Because if you use a debt collection service, the debtor cannot be contacted and the case will be referred back to you as irrecoverable.
With the advent of social networks on the Internet such as Facebook and Twitter, you can also try to do a skip trace yourself by checking whether the debtor is registered and belongs to an online group.
If yes, you can choose to pursue a relationship with one of his friends and start a relationship.
You can then carry out your search based on the debtor's location, his contacts and his place of work.
You can then pass this on to a debt collection agency for processing.
If the Internet option proves unsuccessful, you may consider employing the services of a freight forwarder to locate chips.
There are only a few debt collection companies locally that offer debt tracing. One of them is Metropol East Africa Ltd, which also offers debt collection services for local and international debts.
In conjunction with skip tracing services, the company may also perform asset tracing to determine whether the debtor has assets that can be seized to collect outstanding debts.
In the case of Washington, for example, a skip investigation company would first determine the debtor's residence, current contact address, and seizable assets.
After locating the debtor and his assets, the search company would then recommend the best course of action; whether a debt collection agency should be hired or whether legal action should be taken against the debtor through a court order.
Furthermore, it would not be advisable to contact the debtor directly after successful investigation as he would downplay the situation and make a promise of repayment while looking for another escape route.
Again, you should engage the services of a debt collection agency to collect the debt before you can initiate litigation, as not all people who cannot be located are necessarily hiding something.
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