How to Run an Online Background Check for Free

Find out what you need to know about someone--or
find out the information that's out there about you--without spending any money.

By Sarah Jacobsson Purewal
Feb 14, 2011 6:30 PM

I know what you're thinking--but hear me out. Plenty of reasons for
doing an online background check exist, and not all of them are sketchy.
In fact, everyone should do at least one online background check
on--you guessed it--themselves. After all, if you can find out
sensitive information about yourself with a little (free) online
sleuthing, there's no telling what employers, stalkers, and ex-girlfriends or -boyfriends
will be able to uncover.So here's how to do a thorough online background check without dropping any cash.

If You Know Your Target's Name
If you know name of the person you're looking for, the first places
you should check are the usual venues--good old search engines and
social networks. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are all good
stepping-stones for discovering valuable information about people.
Google is your first stop for a DIY background check.

Remember to use advanced search techniques when looking people up on Google or
other search engines. Just enclosing your search terms in quotation
marks will help immensely in weeding out noncorrelated or irrelevant
search results. If the person you're searching for has a common name,
you should also add any information you know about them after the
quotation marks. For example, if I search for "sarah jacobsson purewal" pcworld,
I'm going to get more details about the Sarah Jacobsson Purewal who writes for PCWorld,
helping to narrow my search down a bit.
Use any information you know about this person, including places of
work, types of work, schools they've attended, cities they've lived in,
and the names of other people they know. You can also use site-specific
searches if you're looking for someone within a school or business. For
example: site:pcworld.com "sarah jacobsson purewal" will give a list of
search results found only in the PCWorld.com domain.

Searching Your Social Networks
Social networks are fantastic sources of information--and it's all
completely self-volunteered. This is why social networks are
particularly handy for employers--because if it's on your Facebook page,
it's not only information about you, it's information you've chosen to share with the world.
Facebook is indisputably the social networking standby--no
surprise, as it boasts 500 million users. You can search for people by
name and e-mail address, and modify the results by location, school, and
workplace. If nothing shows up, they may have made their profile
private and unsearchable.
If that's the case, you can do a site-specific Google search, and
any public pages or groups they may have commented on will show up. For
example, my personal Facebook profile is private and will not show up in
Facebook search results, but if you type site:Facebook.com "Sarah Purewal" into
Google, you'll see that I have commented on PCWorld's Facebook page.
You can now see my profile picture, as Facebook doesn't allow users to
make this private, even if you still can't search for me using Facebook's search.
Alternatively, you can use Openbook.org
to search across Facebook's public pages (including status updates) for
any search string you want and find search results listed with names,
profile links, and pictures--perfect for your background check.
Other social networking sites, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, are
also worth a look. LinkedIn usually reveals much less information about a
user, because it's primarily a work-oriented social network. However,
it is an excellent place to verify user's résumés and work histories
(though, of course, a user can lie on his or her LinkedIn profile very easily).
Twitter is a different type of social network. Unlike Facebook and
LinkedIn, Twitter asks for very little identifying information from
their users. Thus, you'll often find people's Twitter accounts via their
Facebook or LinkedIn pages--not necessarily by searching Twitter.
Twitter can still give you a wealth of information, though it's more
likely to give you an insight into their personality, interests, and
style, rather than information you can use to find their address or phone number.

Find the Basics: Phone Number and Address
Okay, so you've Googled your target and discovered all of their
sordid beer-bong photos on Facebook, but what you really want is to be
able to contact them. How can you get their phone number and address?
ZabaSearch is a fairly accurate phone number lookup service. It offers a free way to
look up people's phone numbers (you can narrow it down by state), along
with premium services for reverse phone number and social security
number lookups. I say "fairly accurate" because while ZabaSearch's
database includes listed and unlisted numbers, it's hit-or-miss when it
comes to cell phone numbers--and who doesn't have a cell phone these days?
WhitePages.com also offers a free phone number lookup, and throws in an address to
boot. WhitePages appears to update its database more frequently, as it
found a recent address change of mine that ZabaSearch missed (within the
last year). However, it does not list unlisted numbers. WhitePages also
offers a premium, reverse phone number lookup, and will show you the
location of the phone. Of course, this is simply the location of the
phone's origin, and is based on the phone's area code--when I look up my
phone number, for example, it says my phone is likely located in
Conway, South Carolina. (This is incorrect, as my phone is currently
located in California, but my phone's area code is from South Carolina.)

Criminal and Public Records
Finding an address or phone number is child's play. Only when
you're looking for criminal and public records do things start to get
interesting. If you want to know if your hot coworker has ever been
divorced, or if your neighbor might be running a drug ring out of her
apartment, this is how you can find out.CriminalSearches
allows you to do a criminal history check on people by name. You can
also narrow down the search by city and state, though these are not
required fields. The search results include the offender's birth date,
address, and what types of criminal offenses they have committed
(behavioral, business, drug/alcohol, sex-related, theft/robbery,
violent, or traffic/other). It does cost money to see the details, and
you should remember that some states include minor traffic citations as
offenses--so they may not really be "criminals," per se.
If you're looking for other types of public records--such as marriage records,
birth records, or death records--SearchSystems
offers access to free public records sites. You can search by type of
record, zip code, state, county and state, or city and state, or you can
search international records by region. Instead of "searching,"
however, you will end up being directed to the Website that contains the
records you're looking for--whether it's Clinton County Cemeteries or
California marriage licenses before 1900.
VirtualGumshoe also has a database of public records Websites, including wanted lists,
marriage and divorce records, voter records, and death records. Some of
these sites are free, while others are pay services, but little icons
by each listing will let you know which is which.

If You Don't Know Your Target's Name
Let's assume you want to search for someone whose name you don't
know. Say you got a random phone call at 4 a.m., or someone has been
spamming you with a certain e-mail and IP address combination, or you
really want to find out who that jerk is on the forums you frequent, who
goes by a particularly unusual handle.

Phone Number/E-Mail Address
Most services that offer phone number lookups also offer a reverse
phone number lookup--in which you input a phone number to get
information about the person calling you--for a nominal fee (usually
around $5). However, this information can be inaccurate--as I pointed
out above, an initial reverse phone number lookup on my phone places me in South Carolina.
One of the best places to do a reverse phone number lookup--and a
reverse e-mail lookup, while we're at it--is Facebook. While you can't
look people up by phone numbers (even if they have it listed on their
profile), you would be surprised at how many people leave their numbers
on their friends' public walls. If you search for a phone number on
Facebook and it's been left on someone's wall (or on one of those "I
lost my phone, need numbers" group walls), it will show up in the search results.
As for e-mail, well, you can search for people on Facebook
by e-mail address. And even if their e-mail address isn't publicly
available on their profile, if it's in any way affiliated with their profile it will show up.
Also remember to plug phone numbers and especially e-mail addresses
into Google, as people tend to slap their e-mails publicly around the
Net without even thinking about it.

Username/Handle
If you know nothing about the person you're trying to look up
except for their username or online handle, fear not. So long as the
username/handle is reasonably unusual, you'll be able to find a decent
amount of information (which you can then use to perform other
searches).Pipl is an aggregator
that searches the "deep Web," or parts of the Internet that are often
missed by regular search engines such as Google. Pipl allows you to
search by name, e-mail address, username, or phone number. Pipl then
crawls the Web and aggregates all search results that contain your
terms--so it's more of a one-stop shop for results.
Pipl is excellent for hunting down information about people whose
name you do not know (as for people whose name you do know, it mostly
just finds what you can find on Google and social networks). The
username search is particularly useful, especially because a lot of
people use one handle across the Web.
Other aggregator sites also exist, such as ZoomInfo, which aggregates
job and company information; iSearch; and Wink.
Unfortunately, aggregator sites can be as much of a pain as they are a
convenience, as they often confuse people and spit back a mix of related
and unrelated results.

Web Domain/IP Address
If you want to find out who owns a domain, the process is pretty simple.
The Whois database keeps a record of all domain registration data, and
you can search it via a number of sites. Whois.net and Whois Source
are just two sites that allow you to look up the registration data for
any domain, and, if you're lucky, figure out who the owner is. Users are
required to provide an address and a phone number when they register a
domain. Of course, many Website owners opt for private registration,
which hides their personal information.
You can also look people up by IP address on Whois.
You can use tools such as Geo IP Tool
to search the Whois database and find out some info on the IP,
specifically where the person is coming from. For example, my current IP
is 207.239.54.194. If I enter this information into Geo IP Tool, I can
see that I'm located in New York, New York, zip code 10019. Sure, that's
not enough to be able to find out my phone number, but it's a start.
While Web domain and IP address lookups may seem like a dead end,
they're often just the start of your search. If you can gather any
information from the Whois database, you can use what little you know to
aid you in your further searching.
For example, if you're looking for me and you find out that I'm located
in New York, thanks to my IP address, you can probably disregard the
search results that put me in other places.
Well, there you have it, folks. Go forth and stalk yourself without spending a bundle.

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