Breaking Down the Background Check

If you are dating in today’s culture, it’s essential that you spend the time to select a background check company and do your best spy work before meeting anyone for a date. Background checks are literally the push of a button and seconds away in today’s highly connected cyber world. But, with so many online background check companies, it’s hard to know which one to choose.

• Online background checks do not include information about a person’s credit history, but they do offer a wealth of information about a person’s:

• Aliases (all other names used in the past including maiden name)
• Associated friends and relatives
• Social media accounts
• Sex offender registry info
• History of phone numbers, addresses, email accounts and social media accounts
• Misdemeanor and felony criminal convictions
• Employment history
• Bankruptcies and other court judgments
• Evictions
• Marriage and death certificate information

• Accuracy should be your #1 priority; not price. The goal is to find out if your date on Saturday night is a shady character. Your goal is to discover if the new roommate you’ve been assigned in the dorms has a criminal background. It’s a waste of money if you purchase a background check and the information is not accurate.

In researching online background check companies, Defense Divas® looked at three important criteria for grading their overall quality to your personal safety.

🎯 ACCURACY: As stated above, it doesn’t matter what you pay for a background check if the info you receive is not accurate. This is not the time to be frugal. Your personal safety is priceless! The following three online background checks produced very accurate info for the test checks we ran in this project.

🎯 SCOPE: All three of our top selections for best online background check company had something extra that really brings value to your safety game. They performed excellent social media searches, covering up to 20+ different social media platforms. (Some we had never even heard of!)

🎯 TIMELINESS: Each background check company mines their own data, but that doesn’t tell you when they did it or how far into the past, they went to gather information on the person. It’s important to use a background check company that has current information, so that you get the most accurate results. It’s equally important that the results go back as far as possible so that you get a complete picture of this individual. We love these three companies because they each produced results all the way back to my college dorm address- and that was 30 years ago!

Both Intelius and Spokeo got a slightly lower ranking because, for example, when I typed in my current (married) name, the main search result they came up with was my maiden name. They had my married name listed as an alias and the information in the reports themselves was very accurate, but I found that odd.

All three of the background check companies performed social media data searches, but we found that the information gathered from both PeopleFinders and Spokeo contained the most in-depth results. They searched social media platforms that we had never even heard of and that is a very useful tool for uncovering information that is not revealed on the big 5 social media giants.

We found that across the board, Intelius had the most current information as well as going back into our past many, many years. The two slight drawbacks to Intelius were:

• The information was not organized chronologically.
• You don’t have an option to download the report. The other services offer this as an additional feature for a minimal add-on fee.

As you can see from the quick synopsis chart above, each performed well overall but also had areas where it excelled.

In closing, we encourage you to run a background check on yourself! It’s important to your personal safety that you know how much of your own private information is available for others to find in the public domain and on the internet.

Doing so will give you an opportunity to do some ID clean-up and delete those old social profiles, emails and close those vulnerabilities to identity theft that may leave you exposed.

You’ve taken an amazing step towards empowering your personal and dating safety by choosing a background check company. Now, are you ready to step up your self-defense game? At Defense Divas®, we offer a diva-fantastic selection of self-defense products for women, including bulletproof gear, pepper sprays, stun guns and TASER® devices, concealed carry purses and more.