To check on tenants and others.
I think the reputable companies such as choicepoint and kroll only offer their services in bulk for businesses conducting searches regularly.
I’ve been referred to freebackgroundcheck.org and ussearch.com
The only problem with the former is that it offers no identifying information other than the name and city in which the subject lived.
A search of a person with an uncommon name returned more than one result sharing the same general city. I’d have to buy all of them if I want to figure out which one matches to the person I want.
Another problem is that, when prompted to enter payment information, it says it’s contracted out to InfoPay, and that I agree to the website’s (not infopay’s) terms and conditions, but there’s no link to a page that lets me read what its terms and conditions are.
Also, this type of searching seems so informal that it borders on feeling intrusive to me, even though the subject of the search has consented.
Are they to be trusted, or are there alternative methods?
Are matches by name and city in those systems purely coincidental?
What explains the lack of uniformity across search services?
How do websites like those obtain records?
When I was doing investigative support for a DoJ component, we routinely used things like ChoicePoint, LexisNexis, and similar. They’re actually very good. ChoicePoint, I believe, will do one-offs for things like screening prospective renters, employment candidates, and so on.
The biggest drawback was that in many cases, these tools returned too much data rather than too little. In many (most) cases, for example, if I had a suspect’s SSN and ran a search against it, there would be many records associated with it. This is attributable to things like data entry errors being captured in the records, fraud (seriously, drug dealers - stick to dealing drugs - stealing SSNs made my life a pain). Generally, what would end up happening is I’d have to end up printing up hard copies of everything and cross-checking everything against multiple sources to see where there appeared to be interconnects. Once I had gathered up data that all seemed to be pointing at my target, we’d bring in the more reliable Federal systems (FinCEN, NADDIS, NCIC, and some that I won’t mention).
So essentially, the stuff that’s available to the average Joe is pretty useful, but if your subject has tried to obfuscate his/her history, they can pull it off. As an additional caveat, I would point out that I think the output we got from those services was a bit more than you can get just by paying $40 or whatever for a records search. My understanding was that we had unlimited “all access” searches, meaning things that would normally be off-limits to non-govvies were available to us.
I’m trying to remember the name of one of the services I found back then that was pretty cheap and comparable to ChoicePoint. I’ll keep thinking and get back to you if I remember it.
Interesting side note: we periodically did searches on our office location, employees, phone numbers (maybe even girlfriends… Amazing what we sometimes came up with. :eek:
The online services you mentioned are going to be aggregations of publicly available data. That may be helpful if you are trying to find an old girlfriend, but not much use for screening prospective tenants.
If you’re looking for a criminal background check, check with your local police. Many departments offer this service for a fee. If you want more details, such as their credit report, civil lawsuits, etc, you might be well advised to hire a local private investigator or a firm that specializes in screening tenants. You’re going to get more bang for your buck than trying to cobble something together yourself from online companies.
You have to read the terms of service carefully. I’ve curiously signed up for both Been Verified as well as Inteligator, and for both of these its says that you can’t use them in consideration for housing, jobs, benefits, etc.
my experience with inteligator:
So you’d have to find one in which that’s acceptable. Google what people say about each of these online companies.
they offer “mostly accurate” information often times, information can be confused with someone else’s or not up to date. Each state website for getting criminal records can be a little different than another, for example here in MN I was able to retrieve a person’s records by providing their name and date of birth (from a gov owned website).
even though info on criminal records can be found for free on gov websites , sites like Been Verified can still be helpful and provide good insight… they provide convenience for you, but its only a “casual” background check.
