Do you know how much of your personal information is available on the Internet? We all know how important it is to guard our social security numbers and protect ourselves against identity theft. Of course, we would never give out bank accounts or SS numbers through email or to phone solicitors. No matter what precautions you take to protect your identity, people can still access quite a bit of your life history.
There are many websites which can retrieve this type of information for you through the use of public records. Everything from your phone book listing, utility bills, property taxes and all of the places you’ve ever lives have a way of popping up on these searches.
The best site to use for performing a background check without having the person’s social security number is Intelius (www.intelius.com). For a fee, Intelius can perform several types of background checks, including email lookups, marriage and divorce records, tenant screening, criminal records checks and employment screening.
Intelius claims to be able to search for criminal information using only a name and date of birth. Social security verification is an extra option but the background information can be obtained without the social security ID. According to their website, they gather the information from thousands of sources. For example, criminal data can be sourced from Department of Corrections, Administrative Offices of the Courts, and individual counties.
A criminal background check is essential if you are a landlord with constantly changing tenants, an employer with a large amount of applicants or even if you are dating someone and want to ease any questions about that person’s history. Intelius can also provide current and previous addresses of a person, someone’s age, and how long they have been living at a certain address. All of this can be provided without having the social security number.
Propertyshark.com is a free service that you can utilize to look up how much someone paid for their house and it also tells you who the home’s owners are. This kind of information is essential if you are house hunting and would like to find out on your own the amount of money other residents in the neighborhood paid for their homes (if you have a realtor, he or she should also be able to help you find this out). The information given is: date of most recent sale and the price, year the house was built, lot size, current owners, most recently assesses land market value, building value, and yearly taxes.
This type of real estate information was previously only available to Realtors, but now it is public knowledge. Real estate information is useful in conducting a background check. If you are trying to figure out if someone is financially responsible or want to find out what kind of neighborhood someone lives in, Propertyshark is indispensable. Propertyshark only has information on certain metropolitan areas.
With the Internet, you can find out anything about anyone. Your life is an open book.
