MelissaData, the marketing list service, has free information lookup databases, some drawn from government records, of boundary maps, city and county names and zip codes, public school locators and statistical data. Like most of these free sources, there is a fee component, often overpriced for the value of the information. Among them are people locators – “People Finder” and “Search Expert”, the later of which purports that “Search Expert are people trained in information databases and investigations” – which appear to connect to the Intellius/Confi-chek database.

It’s informative to lookup the domain that the “People Finder” is associated with. I entered “Tamara Thompson” and California in the People Finder Lookup search box, which is at the MelissaData site. The search brings up a list of names, ages, towns and possible associates – a fee is exacted to find out more – at a domain registered to Confi-chek, which looks like the Intellius search result product. This is funny because Confi-chek was sued by Intelius last year for trademark infringement.