We are flooded with ads for fast and convenient products. Problem is: fast and convenient rarely add up to “quality.” The fast and convenient option is a horrible way to try to do background checks. Don’t spend your money on cheap backgrounds checks. Instead, use a quality, experienced local private investigators who knows how records are compiled, stored and where to get these records.
A client recently contacted us after he had paid for an online criminal background check of a subject with a somewhat common name. It showed about 12 hits for this name in several different states. He paid about $50.00 for a mess of false hits. His background check just pulled up by first and last name, and not by middle name or date of birth. It took us about 2 hours to figure which ones were relevant.
Why they fail:
- Illusions of thoroughness. There is no such thing as a national criminal background check outside of perhaps an FBI database. Records usually have to be found on a county by county, state by state basis.
- Online background checks don’t discriminate by proper identifiers such as middle names, dates of birth and address histories. You have paid money for an incomplete product that you have to sort.
- You don’t know the geographic areas of their searches or the time frames. What if your subject has a criminal record in an area from 1991 but the database searched starts at 1995?
Our practices:
- We start with obtaining an address history on the person and we concentrate our searches on where the person has lived. We will start out with online criminal searches but we only do this for the counties we know have good systems and databases in place.
- If a subject has lived in Oakland or San Francisco or Walnut Creek, very likely the person could have records in Alameda, San Francisco or Contra Costa counties. We will look in adjacent counties as well.
- We will contract with court runners in out-of-state jurisdictions to look for records we can’t access online.
- We will often check civil and federal records looking for other relevant information.