Solving paranormal address problems with Smarty®

Ever feel like your address data is cursed?

Customers claim their packages never showed up.

Your CRM swears by an address that doesn’t exist. 

Meanwhile, your checkout form mysteriously rejects a perfectly valid street name like it's possessed. 

Healthcare claim denials, failed insurance verifications, suspicious fintech delays—something strange is definitely going on.

Instead of avoiding or running away terrified, we’re investigating the eerie and mysterious on Paranormal Day, May 3. We tip our foil hats to Charles Fort, the original chronicler of the weird and unexplained, and investigate a real threat to your data systems: unverified addresses. 

Charles Fort and asking weird questions

Born in 1874, Charles Fort collected reports of mysterious events: teleportation, spontaneous combustion, disappearing people, and fish raining from the sky. (Y’know, normal Tuesday stuff.) 

Fort usually didn’t solve the mysteries. 

But, he knew the questions to ask that could’ve helped him solve them.

And those questions? They're weirdly useful for anyone working with address data.

"Why doesn’t this fit the map?"
 "Where the heck is this coming from?"
 "Is this even real?"

These are the exact questions you should be asking when your data misfires. If a customer’s package disappears, or your system insists a real address doesn’t exist, you're not dealing with supernatural forces.

You’re dealing with false positives, formatting errors, or incomplete records.

Fort had theories (and so do we… like your address data provider might not be up to snuff), but you’ve got better tools and actual answers to those questions.

Address problems that aren’t just in your head

Some address issues feel like they belong in a paranormal investigation.

There’s the zombie address that reappears in your system no matter how many times you purge it. 

Or the delivery black hole where your tracking system says "Delivered" while your customer insists it never arrived. 

There are also doppelgänger addresses with slight variations from the valid address, which wreak havoc on customer records. 

Don’t forget about those rural addresses that your routing app navigates to the center of a field instead of the farmhouse on the property. (Children of the Corn, anyone?)

Unlike vampires or werewolves (which still haven’t been scientifically proven), these address problems are real. And, when left unchecked, they don’t just create confusion; they also cost you and your organization money, time, stress, and even your reputation with your clients and customers. 

• Lost shipments
• Failed verifications
• Regulatory risks
• Wasted marketing
• Angry customers

It’s time to start investigating and exorcising these address demons.

Exorcising bad address data with Smarty

Unlike Fort, you don’t need to haunt the library to track down answers. 

With Smarty, you’ve got modern tools to deal with modern mysteries.

As your customer's type, US Address Autocomplete populates relevant verified addresses from a drop down menu for them to easily find theirs, select, and move on to the next step. Smarty provides USPS and non-USPS (or non-postal) that are verified, standardized, and real. No fake or vanity addresses, no matter how convincing “123 Fake Street” looks. 

US Address Verification double-checks addresses against authoritative databases to verify their validity. It also detects typos or missing units and fixes these mistakes before and after if they happen to worm their way into your system. Continually running your addresses through address verification keeps your database clean and trustworthy and merges duplicate address records. 

And US Rooftop Geocoding provides the latitude and longitude coordinates that almost always hit the top of a location, so you don’t have to worry about trying to find a building on a large piece of land. If those coordinates aren’t rooftop accurate, we won't ghost you. In fact, we’ll tell you our accuracy level and give you the closest possible coordinates. 

When you’re looking to blend data and create a comprehensive database to rule your operations, you can use SmartyKey®, a persistent unique identifier (PUID) (included in US Address Verification, US Rooftop Geocoding, Reverse Geocoding, Property Data, US Secondary Address Data, Georeference data, and US Master address list) that assigns a unique ID to each address. So, even if the street name changes or the ZIP Code shifts, your data will keep its identity.

Haunted systems in telecom, healthcare, fintech, and insurance

Some industries feel these address issues more strongly than others.

Telecommunications spends way more money on truck rolls when address data lacks accuracy.

In healthcare, mismatched addresses lead to billing errors, failed patient matching, and claim rejections. 

For insurance, you can’t underwrite risk accurately if you don’t know whether the structure is in a storm surge zone or if the address even exists. 

And fintech platforms suffer compliance delays and hefty fees when addresses don’t line up across KYC systems.

Bad data is a hassle and a liability. Most of it’s entered through forms (internal and external), CRMs, and third-party imports. That’s why validation needs to happen at the time of entry as well as downstream. 

Keep paranormal data out. 

Build a database Charles Fort would admire

Fixing your cursed data shouldn’t require an exorcism. Good tools built for quality address data are enough to handle any freaky address situation. 

Smarty gives ecommerce brands like Fabletics, delivery providers like Highlander Tek, and data teams like Faraday the ability to work with clean, verified, enriched address information from the start.

Better address data means fewer ghosted carts, fewer failed deliveries, and fewer compliance issues. It also means stronger customer experiences—and fewer surprises.

Your Paranormal Day action plan?

This May 3, light a candle for Charles Fort. Pull out your spookiest mystery novel. And then, do something Fort never could: cleanse your data with science.

Want to see if your CRM has ghosts? Run a free test with Smarty’s address verification. With one click, you'll know whether your data is haunted or just overdue for a little validation.