Published: June 15th, 2009
Which People Search Service Works Best?
Consumers-Guides puts the top people search services to the test to find out exactly which ones you should use and how to spot the ones that will rip you off..
By, Ryan Sommers
Consumers-Guides.org
Dear Friend,
A little while back one of our editors tried to find an old friend from high school he had since lost contact with. Now, this friend should not have been too hard to find - he had a unique name, he was born in the United States, and our editor also knew the city and state he lived in. All he needed to find was a phone number or an address... easy enough, right? Our editor Steve jumped on the internet and got to digging, starting of course with Google.
While he was able to discover a past job listing, not surprisingly Google gave little clue as to his friend’s address and phone number.
However, during the search Steve did come across a web site that specialized in finding missing people. It claimed that the user would simply need to type in the name of the person they were looking for and bang! Their service would go straight into the “government database” and bring you back full contact info, job history, marriage records, and much more… all for a low, low price of course.
Steve, believing the clever sales pitch, signed up for the service. After giving his credit card info, he was allowed to access the database of millions of names. He anxiously typed in his old friend’s name, and as the site was searching grabbed the phone, ready to surprise his old buddy with a phone call…
Well, Steve was in for a surprise. You see, he didn't get his friend’s contact info - he got back the contact info for SEVEN people with the same almost unheard of name! To make things worse, the web site only supplied him with a phone number for two of the names... and... neither of the numbers were in service! Not good.
Steve was a bit frustrated, but he still wanted to find his lost friend and wasn't giving up that easily.
He searched the internet for more of these people finding services… and found dozens - all claiming the same thing. "Unlimited access to millions of names" Steve than carefully selected another service that looked more “pro” and trustworthy. He decided to give it a run, put in his credit card number and… nothing. Once again Steve was duped.
The Good News
Of course here at ConsumersGuides.net we are always looking searching the web and the world for companies and industries that aren’t treating customers fairly, and when Steve told us about the dozens of people search services out there (and about how he got scammed TWICE!), we decided to do something about it. We decided to put these services to the test!
Our plan was simple: sign up for all of them, then search the names of those who gave us permission in our office so we would know with 100% accuracy if the results the service gave us were legit… or if it was just another scam.
The Results
After signing up for and testing dozens of people search services we found that Steve didn't just get unlucky with his two selections. Frankly, the results we had were terrible. Over 80% of the services we tested did not work, with many not even going beyond the scope of a Google search. Worse yet, some of the services seemed to be loaded with fictitious names or old outdated data, as we discovered when we found accurate info for a co-worker’s grandmother who had passed on more than 20 years ago… but NOTHING on our co-worker herself!
That was when we decided it was time to bring in the professionals…
The Secret Way Private Investigators Find Missing People
I had an old buddy from college who came from a long line of private investigators. I decided to ring him up and ask him what HE did when he wanted to find someone who was missing.
“Oh, I have this service I subscribe to online… I just go on there and type in what info I have on them, and it searches the government database and brings me back everything they have on them, which is usually more than I need to know.”
Huh? I explained to him how we had tried all of these different services with no luck... maybe his was only open to licensed investigators?
“No, I’m pretty sure it’s open to anyone... they just don’t advertise much because they have all of us investigators already signed up. Most of the ones that advertise to the public are a bunch of scams.”
Ah… maybe that was why we hadn’t come across them! I quickly wrote down the names of the services he recommended and brought them to our team to run some tests.
The 3 People Search Services That Actually Work…
My friend gave me the name of the service he personally used to find people, and found a couple more by asking some fellow investigators.
Not surprisingly, with these 3 services we were able to find accurate contact info on just about everyone we looked up, with one service even boasting 100% accuracy!
Though the other 2 were not perfect, they still managed to provide us with contact info on over 85% of the names we searched for.
It turns out that since these 3 services cater to professional private investigators, they take great pride in their databases, constantly updating them and checking for accuracy.
If you are considering signing up for a people search service, make sure you go with one of these 3 services to avoid getting scammed:
Consumers Guides Top Pick 2009
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Net Detective
$29.00
For 3 Years Of Unlimited Access
90 Day Money Back Guarantee |
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Net Detective is the service most private investigators use, and also the only service to give us 100% accurate information on every single person we looked up. And it gets better - Net detective not only provided us with full contact info, but public records that are usually only available to police and government agencies… such as criminal records, employment history, birth records, full background information and credit reports. We were quite impressed with this service. If you are looking to gather information on someone and don’t want to take any chances, we highly recommend you make Net Detective your first choice.
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Reverse Records
$29.95 For One Year Of Unlimited Use
Money Back Guarantee |
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Reverse Records: Number 2 on our list! Reverse
Records strong points come in when you don't know the full name of the
person you wish to look up. With this site all you have to do is type
in the person's email address, phone number or home address. Than after
a short search you'll receive the individuals full name, address,
contact information and even background info. Yes it's that simple. If
you don't know the full name of the person you would like to look up..
This is the site to use.
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Locate People.org
$29.95
For Unlimited Access
Money Back Guarantee |
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Locate People.org found contact information of most of the names we searched for. Most of the information was accurate and up to date as well - Much better than the Scam sites we tested. And we would recommend this service to you. However, that's only as another option to Net Detective. Even though Locate People.org is a great service, we got far better result with Net Detective.
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