Finding someone who doesn’t want to be found is the process of locating a person who has deliberately reduced their public records footprint, changed their contact information, or taken steps to make themselves harder to locate — using the records they cannot fully erase and the traces their continued existence inevitably leaves. Someone has cut … Read more
Investigating someone with a common name is the process of isolating the correct individual from multiple people who share the same name — by building a unique identifier profile that distinguishes the subject from every other person with that name before running records searches. You’re looking for John Smith in Chicago. Or Michael Johnson in … Read more
Finding out where someone works is the process of identifying a person’s current employer through public records, professional profiles, licensing databases, business filings, and contact data — using sources that exist independently of what the person has told you. You need to verify a claimed employer before you trust it. You have a court judgment … Read more
Running a background check on someone is the process of searching public records, court filings, and identity data to verify who a person is, confirm their background matches what they’ve represented, and surface any history — criminal, financial, residential, or professional — that’s relevant to a decision you’re making about them. Someone applies to rent … Read more
Checking someone before sending money is the process of verifying that the person requesting payment is who they say they are, that the reason for the payment is legitimate, and that no signals of fraud are present — before the transfer is made and while it can still be stopped. Someone asks you to send … Read more
Verifying someone on Facebook Marketplace is the process of confirming that a buyer or seller is a real person with a legitimate account — before you meet in person, hand over money, or release an item — using the platform’s built-in signals, profile research, and independent public records checks. Facebook Marketplace connects millions of buyers … Read more
A background check shows someone living at the wrong address because address data in background check databases is aggregated from multiple sources — property records, credit header data, voter registration, marketing databases, and utility records — each updated on different schedules, each reflecting a different point in time, and none of them guaranteed to reflect … Read more
Criminal records look different across databases because there is no single national criminal records system in the United States — there are thousands of independent systems, each collecting different information, updating on different schedules, and presenting the same underlying event in different formats. You run a background check through one service and see a felony … Read more
Someone disappearing from public records means their name has stopped appearing in the records systems where it previously appeared — or never appeared in the first place in the systems you’re searching. It happens for legal, procedural, and practical reasons, most of which are explainable and none of which mean the person has ceased to … Read more
People search sites show wrong information because they aggregate data from dozens of independent sources — public records, marketing databases, user-contributed data, and commercial data feeds — and compile that data automatically, without human review, into profiles that may mix records from different people, reflect outdated information, or contain errors inherited from their original sources. … Read more