MOBILE, Ala. — As long as one human has had a need or a desire to find another human, we have had skip-tracing.

It is a process of tracking someone from point A to point B. Some of the most famous figures from our past come from the American West: The Pinkertons, Texas Rangers, Pat Garrett who tracked and killed Billy the Kid, and many more. These men and women of our past are the forerunners of what we have today.

The work that you perform now closely echoes the legendary exploits of these historical giants of the past. They traveled from town to town on horseback talking to friends, relatives, neighbors and known associates. They gathered information on their prey and went from point A to B to C until they found their subject.

The tools you employ now have evolved far beyond the basic implements of the old West, but the skills required to hunt your subjects demand the same cunning that Mr. Garrett would have used to track his elusive subject. Having the right equipment is, and was, a necessity in this line of work.

Can you image doing your job today without your trusted friend, Mr. BlackBerry or Mr. iPhone by your side? In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, which changed the face of not only our profession but the world. The horse was replaced by the iron horse or automobile in 1886.

Close to a hundred years later, I embarked on a career in skip-tracing and remember vividly the primitive tools of the day: my car, my beeper, a credit application and a cross directory. If I wanted something from the courthouse I had to get in my car and drive there, wait in line and have someone make the copies of whatever document I needed.

Fast forward to present day: the Information Age. Stated more accurately, it should be called the "I Can Have It Now Age." In a matter of a few clicks on a computer, we can gather the same information that would have taken weeks to compile 20 years ago. With this new era has come the highest evolution of the skip-tracer: the cyber-tracker.

The cyber-tracker is someone who successfully combines the fundamental cunning and instincts of the skip-tracing heroes of the old West with today's modern tools and technology to track his prey.

As many of you are aware, after having spent most of my adult life as a skip-tracer, I hung up the gloves so to speak, and took my unique experience to MasterFiles — who, in my opinion, is the leader in data. I now spend my days and nights traveling this country teaching and helping to develop new products and tools for the industry. I use my unique history and understanding of the needs of the modern cyber-tracker to work with MasterFiles to develop products to serve the skip-tracing industry.

Just as the skip-tracer has evolved beyond floppy disks and telephone directories, MasterFiles has used its mastery of providing "real-time" data to revolutionize the delivery of current, useful data through the Probe Credit Profile report.

The Probe Credit Profile is a unique report that gathers everything you need to work your skip or collection problem and serves up the data in real time. MasterFiles cultivated the best parts of the standard reports and the credit report, and merged the data into an optimized format that will enable you to become a powerful asset to any organization.

This innovative product knocks the dust off of the standard reports and their outdated data by showing you what your debtor is doing today — now — in a one-of-a-kind format that can't be duplicated anywhere in the country. Past and present come together to form a powerful tool for the modern-day cyber-tracker.

You will now have the ability to know more about your debtor than his own mother knows — who they owe, where they shop, known associates, relatives, nicknames, working phones, property, bankruptcies, landlords, liens, judgments and much more within the click of a mouse.

I say with pride: I am a cyber-tracker.

Alex Price is currently national sales and training manager with MasterFiles and has been a trainer to the American Recovery Association and former advisory board member to Time Finance Adjusters and the Society of Certified Recovery Agents. He can be reached at (251) 366-6779 or alex.price@masterfiles.com.