Judgment creditors are the winning parties in money judgments. They are the parties to whom the monetary awards are paid. And in the effort to get paid, social media can be a gold mine. If you don’t know why, keep reading.
Enforcement Is the Creditor’s Business
It all starts with the understanding that enforcement – getting paid in the case of a money judgment – is not the court’s business. It is the creditor’s business. Courts make a few tools available to creditors, like writs of execution for example, but creditors need to do the work themselves.
A big part of that work involves research and investigation. A creditor or its representative must investigate a debtor’s income, assets, employment, and so forth. Any information that points to nearly any aspect of the debtor’s financial situation is up for grabs. And that takes us to social media.
5 Reasons It’s a Gold Mine
The expert investigators at Salt Lake City’s Judgment Collectors, a Utah collection agency that specializes in judgment collection, explain that social media is a gold mine for them because of all it offers. And since most people do not know how to lock down their profiles, data is freely available to anyone willing to look for it.
Here are five reasons social media is a such a gold mine for judgment creditors:
1. It’s a Wealth of Information
Social media is a wealth of information due to its nature as a tool for keeping up with friends, family members, coworkers, etc. Users are more than happy to share details about their lives with friends and followers. In so doing, it is not unusual for judgment debtors to reveal important information about their assets.
2. It Offers Visual Evidence
Videos and still pictures are a mainstay of social media. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Careless debtors gleefully posting pictures and videos can reveal a lot about their financial situations. Not only that, the pictures and videos provide compelling evidence when a judgment creditor decides to file a lien or ask for a writ of execution.
3. Geolocation Information Is Available
For some reason I still do not understand, many social media platforms publish geolocation information. It is information any skilled investigator can use to track a debtor’s movements. Doing so gives investigators clues as to where they can look for hidden assets. If they know which haystack to look in, their chances of finding the needle go up.
4. Network Traffic Can Be Analyzed
By analyzing network traffic across multiple social media channels, a skilled investigator can piece together a web of relationships between the debtor and his friends and relatives. Some of those associates can be targeted with third-party subpoenas and other collection tools.
5. Digital Footprints Are Left Behind
A person’s online activities leave digital footprints behind. Social media only makes it easier to find those footprints and start tracking them. Every footprint leads somewhere, right? And sometimes they lead to assets a debtor is trying to hide.
Tying all this together is the fact that social media offers real time information. It’s not like property transactions, which generally don’t go up until 30-45 days after a property is sold. Social media posts offer data in the moment they are posted. That means they are more accurate and up to date.
If I ever wind up winning a monetary award against someone, you can bet one of the first places I will begin looking for information is social media. I will not be afraid to use that gold mine to my advantage.
