Did UCC Lead Generators Overload NY State’s System?

In the small business finance industry, New York State is known as one of the friendliest places to conduct a UCC search. You can not only search by debtor, but also by secured party, and get just about everything you need to create a list of prospects for free.

But the State’s website isn’t exactly a pillar of technological achievement. Indeed, the UCC Lien Search welcome page makes clear that searchers will need to be using Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher and that version 3.0 of Internet Explorer or lower is not supported. Those browser iterations were released in 1997 and 1996 respectively, before some in the business finance industry were even born.

And the online system built for Windows 3.1 users didn’t seem to be doing so well over the last few months. Routine manual searches that I occasionally conduct were leading to error messages and crash pages instead of results. Were UCC lead generators querying the system to death?

Last week, New York took the entire UCC system down for “maintenance” and when it finally came back up, a tool to combat automated queries had been installed.

Curiously, this has only been implemented for secured party searches and other debtor search options. Standard debtor search options remains unchanged.

As Captchas are designed to thwart automated queries, could this be a sign that lead generators were crashing the system?

To check it out yourself, it’s best to be using Windows 95 or higher. Typewriters and Etch-A-Sketch users may experience performance issues.

Sean Murray is the President and Chief Editor of deBanked and the founder of the Broker Fair Conference. Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on twitter. You can view all future deBanked events here.