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BACKGROUND SEARCHES
Background searches
are becoming increasingly popular because of the ready availability of
public information online. People are searching the backgrounds of:
- Job Candidates
- Potential Business Partners
- Potential Tenants
- Present or Potential "Significant Others" (dates,
fiancés, spouses)
- Boyfriends and Girlfriends
- Credit and Insurance Applicants
- Neighbors
- Roommates
- Friends
- Enemies
What kind of information is
available on line?
Through background searches online, you can
find a person's age, address, marital status, occupation, aliases, current
and past employment, educational level, driving record, litigation record
(including a possible divorce or divorces), criminal record (if there
is one), bankruptcies (if there are any), military record, and financial
worth. Really - just about anything having to do with their background.
Public records can not tell you everything
about everybody. But by searching backgrounds you can get a fairly accurate
(not perfect) snapshot of the subject you are investigating. You may
be able to deduce personality traits, consumer preferences, romantic
preferences, employment and financial stability.
What are the limitations
of the information online?
You will not get access to your subject's medical
records without that person's authorization. Marriage and divorce records
are restricted in many states and many counties. Driving records are
sometimes restricted as well. Typically you will not be able to discover
if the person is a drug user, unless there has been a previous arrest.
If it is your goal to find out this information, then you may want to
hire a private investigator to do your bank ground search, because they
will be able to conduct surveillance and interviews with acquaintances,
neighbors, and former employers.
Which Background Check company
should you use?
Obviously that depends on your needs. There
are online resources that will give you some information for as little
as $9.95. Others charge $19.95. Still others are much more.
What most people don't realize, however, is that almost all the companies
doing cheap background searches are using the exact same information
drawn from the databases. They just set up their Website so that it looks
a little different from others. But they are all asking the same information
from you. That's the clue that they are using the same background search
databases. So, if you want a cheap search, then do it as cheaply as possible.
However, if you want a more reliable and comprehensive
search of someone's background, then you may want to pay the extra money
for a better search. If the information is important, the results are
also important, and you want the most complete information check you
can get.
You can usually tell which companies are the
best by how personal their services are. A company that simply asks you
to put in the name and address of a person whose background you are searching
will simply run the basic computerized searches and produce a lot of
addresses and phone numbers of people with the same name that you requested
information about. Then you have to write to or call these places yourself.
In some instances that information may be useful to you, or it may be
quite a bother to continue the searching on your own.
A more personal background search service will
handle your case individually. For example, in some instances they may
do much more than merely search court records online. If the instance
warrants it, they may actually go to the court house to continue research
by hand. That's quite a service.
In other instances a background search company
may hire be able a private investigator to gather additional information.
Of course this will only happen after discussions with you about previous
results they have obtained, so that you can decide how far you want to
investigate.
Background searches are readily available,
generally inexpensive, and often with a quick turnaround time. Your choices
are how extensive you want the background search to be. And you can determine
that by deciding how important it is for you to have the information.
If you are hiring someone, or marrying someone, and you have doubts,
then it may well be worth the extra cost to find the most comprehensive
searches available.
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