HELP??!! FTP file for Tax Delinquent list - ID10T error alert

[Erin Elam]

Hello BP,

So I am looking to get into the tax delinquent arena here in Denton county, Texas. I've read about the monthly live auctions, but I really wanted to get ahead of that list and try to market to the homeowners before it gets to the point of a sale. I courageously called the county, they told me they have attorneys who begin the collection efforts. I called the attorney she provided who told me they get sent the list from the county. I called the county back and told them I want a copy of the list - Sure she says, just send us an email and we'll send it to you. SWEET!!! All smiles I wait for the email.

The email comes almost immediately after I send my request. It comes with instructions that give me an FTP site, a username, a password, and mentions a programmer. I have IT people in my family, so after the first couple of hours of me trying to figure it out on my own (the instructions told me to use FileZilla, but when I went to do that, I got a security alert and when I googled the safety of FileZilla I didn't feel all that safe). So I searched for alternatives even coming across an option with FireFox - which of course no longer exists.

I reached out to the fam like hey what am I supposed to do. After looking into it, my bro (IT guy) said he'd have to call me because 'the way they did this is just stupid' - haven't received that call yet; my husband (IT guy) attempted to use a different FTP client to send the files to me ... didn't really work out that way, they are still coming up with .DAT extensions; my aunt (a programmer) said the county needs to tell me what software they used to create the file to figure out what is needed to open the .DAT files.  I've emailed the county and will look forward to their response tomorrow, however if there is anyone on BP that has already done this, I'd really appreciate the understandable instructions. I'm even willing to pay to get these files, but the only person on Fiverr that came up had only a 1 rating.

To further explain: I received an FTP site -> go to that site and get a directory/index of folders -> I click on the folder for the delinquent properties and get a list of zip files -> click on the file it opens in File explorer to extract -> I click extract and get these .DAT files. Opening up the .DAT with Notepad/Wordpad gives me mostly gibberish, I can make out some addresses and names but the format is all over the place and there are alot of 0's (which my aunt told me is some binary code).

SO... IF ANYONE has been through this and can PLEASE tell me who to call or what to use to get these files to a format that I can manipulate into a Word or Excel file I would be extremely grateful and I don't mind giving up some of these names if you want in on this arena.

HELP PLEASE! :)

TIA,

Erin

[Ed Tamayo]

@Erin Elam A .DAT file is by definition, a non standard file format.

It might be posible that the file matches the more standard definition of a ,CSV file or that of a .txt file.

My suggestion would be to rename the file so that it ends en .CSV and try to open it with Excel. If that does not work, rename it to end in .TXT and try to read it with notepad.

If all that fails, or to get extremely delinquent tax lists, you can try https://investum-data.com