If it’s worth investigating then a background check is valuable
Yes absolutely free investigations are a myth but you can do some very useful background checking for very reasonable prices. In fact if you do it right then investigating someone online can cost you less than a cup of good coffee.
Nothing is ever truly free
Everything comes with a price whether it’s your money, someone else’s money or the investment of your time and effort. Doing background checks on someone is no exception. You either have to pay for someone’s services to investigate and discover the secrets in someone’s life or you have to do that work yourself. There is another way though. It may not be as thorough and accurate as hiring an expensive private investigator. Neither is it completely free but looking up someone’s details with a public records web site can not only be effective but it can also work out to be very inexpensive.
Public records web sites are a relatively new option that has been made possible by the incredible advances in Internet technology in recent years. Businesses have seen the need to make public information available to everyone and they have made it their mission to provide you with that very information. Now you can have access to it whenever you meet or do business with people or even when you are simply curious about them.
Background checks the long, hard and inexpensive way
If you know what you are doing then it is often possible to find out a lot of stuff about someone by trawling the Internet using search engines like Google and by physically visiting places where records are kept.
I must declare that I am certainly no expert when it comes to tracking down people in this way but I do know that it will involve you in an awful lot of time consuming searching, traveling and visiting places like court houses and other records offices.
Some of this will also cost you money to transport yourself about and to pay any administrative fees there might be to access the information that you are looking for. Suddenly even this method doesn’t look as inexpensive as you might think it is. In any case I would rather pay a private investigator who knows what they are doing than attempt to do this myself.
Background checks the expensive way
I was going to say that hiring a private investigator is the most expensive way to get some background information on someone but this may not be the case at all. A private eye can be very efficient at what they do. It’s their job. It could be that a good P.I. can find out more information for less money than you can by doing it yourself. Especially if you’ve never done this sort of investigative work before.
Hiring a specialist certainly isn’t going to be a cheap way of digging up secrets on someone but it is probably the most efficient way to find out the maximum amount of information. It is also likely to yield the most reliable data too. These people know what they are doing and that’s what you pay them for.
Investigating professionals generally charge by the hour and the time it takes to do a background check will depend on what information you are interested in and how much of it you want the guy to find for you.
I’m guessing that you may be able to find someone willing to do some basic routine checks for you and only charge the equivalent of perhaps an hour of their time. If you want a more in depth report then you could be paying for as long as it takes which could be a great deal of time.
Background checks the social way
Everyone uses Facebook don’t they? Make sure that you can “friend” him or her and take a look at the stuff they post. Take the time to find out who some of his Facebook friends are. See if you can find any tagged images with him in to give you an idea of the sort of things he gets up to. Mind you that is becoming a sure fire way to find some incriminating images of just about anyone because we have very little control over what other people post on the Internet. Is your own online presence squeaky clean?
The real benefit of getting interested in someone’s online social presence is to find out how they behave. For some reason most people seem to be a lot less inhibited about what they upload to the Internet than they would ever be in the offline world. Don’t they know that anything that they say on line is there forever? Privacy online seems to have been lost along the wayside somewhere.
Get to know his or her friends and try to meet up with some of their online friends out here in the real world. By interacting with their buddies you often get to see a different side of someone. A side of their personality that you would not normally see. This kind of information can potentially be worth far more to you than any background check could be.
Background checks the quick, easy and affordable way
I promised that I would give you a good cheap alternative way to do background checks and here it is. There are web sites on the Internet that strive to fill the gap that obviously exists when it comes to finding out information about people. You want something that is quick and easy to carry out and does not cost more than you can afford.
These public records web sites may not be as accurate or thorough as a good private investigator might be nor will they give you the same insight into someone’s character that you might get from socializing with their friends.
What you can do is use these public records databases to find at least something out about most people who you do a search on. Even if it’s just an address it could be useful information. Especially if the guy gave you a different one. The best part is that these web sites are quick to search and very cheap. In fact if you do it right then you can do unlimited background checks on as many people as you want and it doesn’t have to cost you more than the price of a coffee.