This e-mail from Word of Mouth is worse than Snopes is saying. If you look at the link included in the e-mail, it has your e-mail address. You click that link to find out what the thing is about, it flags your e-mail as valid and worthy of a spam list.
There is the National Crime Info Center (NCIC) maintained by the FBI, with info supplied by the police forces of the 50 states.
But this is limited to serious crimes (felonies & gross misdemeanors, generally – state terminology varies).
And use of this database is restricted to public safety officials in performing their official duties. (And I don’t believe you have any right to examine any material about you that is in this database.)
So it’s pretty unlikely that a SoDak speeding ticket would be found by searching NCIC. (More likely place to find that would be the combined insurance industry files.)
Harder then you’d think.
If you’ve ever applied for credit, gotten a credit card, gotten a loan of any kind, had something go to collections, etc. at least one of the credit bureaus is going to have the address you used to apply/had for the duration of the loan or duration of the time you had the credit card. Buy your credit report–they’re pretty good at figuring out where you’ve lived. If you give addresses that substantially contradict what the Bureaus have, red flags may be raised.
So the insurance industry maintains a master database of all traffic offenses and offenders nationwide? A better, more comprehensive database than law enforcement authorities? Do you have a cite handy for that?
Well, in Great Britain it’s the Motor Insurance Database (MID). From the UN Organization for Economic Development, there is the International Road Traffic Accident Database (IRTAD). Here in the USA, I don’t have a specific site, but I know one exists. When I was a government employee, they purchased a copy of our data, and I had to work with them to transfer the file. I don’t think the auto insurance industry is very interested in publicity about this.
And I don’t know that it is “a better, more comprehensive database than law enforcement authorities”. It’s just a different one, concentrating on traffic offenses, and combining offences from all states into one database. I don’t know of any law enforcement database that combines this data nationwide – I think they have other things to keep them busy, and they aren’t too concerned with traffic offences in other jurisdictions. But the auto insurance industry thinks this is important information, and so they try to keep track of it.
By the way, this should not be relied on by law enforcement or other responsible parties.
The reason for this is that at least two of the major credit bureaus will simply remove old addresses from your file if you dispute them, without doing substantial investigation. I know this from personal experience. I had old addresses removed to reduce junk mail to my mom’s house with my name on it, although I’ve no idea if it worked.