Using An Online Background Check to Find Someone

Seeking Long Lost Love, friend, relative, classmate, roommate, military buddy, lender, debtor, teacher, foe? There are numerous ways you can use online background checks to find anyone at all you may be looking for, even if you know hardly anything about them.

If, of course, you know the person's first and last name you're in luck - locating them, as well as finding out anything publicly accessible about them, through an online background check is as easy as finding the public background check service you wish to have help you (we've reviewed the most popular to give you a head start).

But let's say you don't know the person's full name. Maybe you want to do a personal background check for a childhood girlfriend and you only know her maiden name. That'll work.

How about if you only know the first name and the state? An online background check with that little info could take some time (mainly spent poring through an overlong list of results) but a diligent enough effort could prove successful.

By cross-referencing any two or more pieces of publicly recorded information on an individual, online background checks can perform what seem like miracles in finding them.

What if you're looking for someone whose name you don't know? What if you met someone at a bar and he/she scrawled their phone number on your hand and told you their birthday but that's all you remember?

What if you got into a small car wreck in front of someone's house and the person was particularly kind and helpful to you. Let's say sometime down the line you wished to contact this kindhearted stranger, whose name you've since forgotten, but whose phone number you managed to jot down? You call them up, they've moved. The folks who answer don't know the first thing about the former residents of their home, sorry. All you've got is a phone number and an address. Can an online background check help you find them? It sure can.

Personal background checks can identify the current occupants of a particular address, as well as the previous occupants 20 years back. They can also look up email addresses, instant messenger accounts, phone numbers and cell phone numbers associated with that address. Likewise a public background check can identify and locate all the previous owners of a Post Office Box.

Here's a fun use of public records - an online background check can be used to find out a person's birthday. After witnessing the attention your office seems to heap on people on their birthday, you notice that one office gal being too tight-lipped about her big day. You can do an online background check and have a cake on her desk before she can say, "How did you know?"

If you have a person's social security number - say your spouse or teenage kid (heaven forbid) ran off; say your ex stopped paying child support and dropped off the face of the earth (also heaven forbid); say your sibling (need we say heaven forbid again?) stopped talking to you, moved away and changed her phone number - though all of these scenarios are horrible, you are no longer left floundering, helpless to find them. With their social security number, you can find out, through an online background check, someone's cell phone number and address. You can also find out their name, but why you'd have someone's SSN and not know their name we have yet to figure out.

You can even use an online background check to locate the relatives of people you know. What if your new roommate, whose friends and family you don't know, suddenly has a medical emergency and they can't speak for themselves. What do you do? Thankfully, perform an online background check, of course. What a relief, eh?

An online background check can search utility services (gas, electric, garbage, water, cable) and most states' registered voter profiles. They can match pictures to birthdays and reveal a tally of an individual's political contributions.

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