Archive for April, 2011

In my prior post, Due Diligence on consumer data brokers, I discussed what you should know before purchasing public records from a consumer personal information data provider. The consumer pay-per-search websites package public record and private sourced data – property ownership, residential addresses, business filings, court records, telephone number listings. The pricing structure is usually not very transparent and the reliability and relevance of the records may be difficult to suss out before you plunk down your $50.

I followed the digital trail – using only free sources – of one data seller to find the identity behind the website and brush away a little of the dust clouding consumer-oriented data brokers.

How To Spot a Legitimate Data Broker
Look at the website. I mean, look at it. Is it an out-of-the-box design or does it have a unique look? I go to the “About Us” link, and that should be well-placed, easily found. Does it tell you about the proprietor or give entity ownership? Compare it to a professional database. For example, Merlindata and Westlaw.

Find a telephone number for customer support and call it. If the number connects to a live human, do they know the product and talk openly about it? Is the pricing structure and termination policy clear? Oftentimes the full cost of a search at a consumer site isn’t revealed until you’re into the signup and purchase process.

The site with the specialty services
My fellow private investigator was lured to a site by the suggestion that it could provide employment income information. There are many types of information that are legal to seek out but are not available through databases. Identifying where someone is employed is pure gumshoe work. The website “Govmarriagerecords (dot) org” lists “income” as one of the “premium search access” results available for a fee plus an automatic monthly charge (until you cancel).

Think about it. What public record would be electronically available that lists personal employment income? Likely none. It might be in a divorce file. But you’d have to go to the courthouse to review that. The salaries and names of employees of government agencies are public records. I’ve compiled links to hundreds of those that are in online databases.

A data broker that suggests you can get on-demand income information is playing with your assumptions. My guess is that the “income” this site provides is the median neighborhood income from the U.S. Census Bureau, which is available for free. You can search by city, town, county, zip code or state.

Guaranteed! Free! Complete!
You shouldn’t have to read the fine print to find out what you’re going to get for your dollars. What does the claim “Guaranteed Instant Results” suggest? There’s no such thing as guaranteed results, so the guarantee must be the “instant.” The cost for searches isn’t mentioned on the Home page or in the Terms of Service. Cost is revealed once you execute a search, and even then it’s not clear what the fee covers.

Follow the Identity Trail
A free search of the domain ownership for “Govmarriagerecords (dot) org” at Domain Tools identified the registrant and the number of other domains registered to the same entity. This site is registered to Information Technology Services Inc., domiciled in Nevada. I checked the Nevada Secretary of State, Business Entity Search for the corporate name and it revealed that one person — Areg Sakanyan – held all the officer positions.

Humm… that can’t be a very common name. I looked up the name using the free portion of the website’s search, which returned one listing, in Massachusetts. Not exactly near Nevada, but many businesses incorporate here even though they don’t operate in the state. Although the domain registration had a Nevada address, the phone number was from elsewhere. I searched the number through fonefinder.com and found that it was in Massachusetts. I plugged the business owner’s name into a search engine. One result piqued my interest because it linked to a media announcement at the website for the Pennsylvania Attorney General. In 2008, the AG filed a civil lawsuit against a Massachusetts man named Areg Sakanyan for “operating a deceptive and misleading” website. That website has since been taken down but you can see archived copies at archive.org. A collection of new domains was registered by him in 2009, including the one profiled in this post. They all begin with “gov” and end in “records.” Sandwiched in between are the types of many other public records.

Few website owners are going to have an Attorney General after them but the shady operator will often have negative consumer reviews at complaintsboard.com, ripoffreport.com or scamchecker.com.

The Terms of Service in the “members” section of the website (different from the “Terms” on the Home page) names two other entities that provide data. One, “Records Authority” is never clarified but is identified as the “public records search services”. The other, InteliGator (dot) com, provides “Premium Search Access.” I could go on but… How confident are you right now that this is a reliable, transparent service?

What should you know before you purchase public records from a consumer personal information data provider? Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has a list of some of the data brokers – the well regarded and the may-be disreputable — but many, many are not here and one site owner may have a dozen or more domains that draw on the same data. Professional investigators get snookered, too, much as consumers do who want to reverse an unlisted telephone number, identify the user of an email address or find where someone works. These searches are more uncertain because the information is not usually in electronic databases of public records.

When It’s Too Good To Be True
If a data broker uses terms that suggest you can get instant online access to court records, a residential address or income, look closely at their language. Are you making assumptions about what the words on the site refer to? Does it really say what you think it does? Sure, millions of criminal records are searched, but is a list of geographical areas covered and inclusive dates at the site? The town, county, state or type of record that’s relevant to your subject may not be included. At most, you may get a disclaimer I read at one site: “In the event of using this service for criminal background checks, you should not assume that this data provides a complete or accurate history of any person’s criminal history.”

Free or fee?
A common practice of the consumer sites is to layer the costs. First, the searcher is presented with a “free” name lookup. Then there may be a fee to identify an address, an additional one for a criminal record search or a “special offer” that reduces the cost but levies a revolving monthly credit card charge. After all that, the site may provide you with a residential address but how current is it? It’s more likely to be current if the person lives at a real property that they own. But then you can look that up for free at the online website of the County Assessor or Clerk-Recorder. You can find links to the free government public records at SearchSystems.net. This site has the most extensive collection of links, and they’re updated daily. Look for the section “Free Public Records Locator” in the middle of the page.

SearchSystems.net does offer fee searches – for criminal, bankruptcy, court judgment and tax lien records – that are good quality. This may meet your needs if you want to search more broadly than in just one jurisdiction or for filings that aren’t available at an online government site or if you don’t have access to a professional database source. Refer to books by Internet for Lawyers for evaluations of public records directories and other investigative resources.

Narrow your search, reduce the costs, get more accurate results
An uncommon name is helpful when you’re searching through thousands of people with the same name who may even have the same birthdate. But you probably won’t be graced with that. So look for a people finders site that will let you perform a free search by name and narrow your search by age or state. Then it should return a list with all the matches. This will give you a good idea of the number of people with the same profile. A middle initial, names of relatives and former addresses may also be returned. You’re more likely to find information on the right person if you know more about them. Once you’ve pinpointed the person, you can lookup criminal, divorce, property and other records at the associated state or county online database, for free.

In the next installment, I’ll illustrate the research I did on a data broker that a fellow PI considered using. The owner of that company was taken to court by a state Attorney General for defrauding customers of a public records site he operated.

Related post: CriminalSearches – A free criminal records resource

• National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors

  
  

• Military Installations – Facts and phone numbers

  
  

• Military Installations – APO FPO Addresses by Zip Code

  
  

• Links for Genealogy on the Internet

  
  

• Mocavo – Free Genealogy & Family Tree Search Engine

  
  

• Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs Acronym_Guide

  
  

• Reunion Planning: Family Reunions, Class Reunions, Military Reunion

  
  

• Data Mining: How Companies Know Your Personal Information

  
  

• Saferproducts.gov – Database of product recalls

  
  

• This Tract

The rest of my favorite links are here.