There are several paid services online where you can find out details of somebody’s shady past. In most cases, so-called ‘”free” sites are simply marketing tricks to get you to pay for the information you really need. However, since everything at MakeUseOf is truly free, here is how you can perform a free criminal background check online without paying a dime. Note that this is valid only for US residents.

Criminal Searches

Criminal Searches allows you to:

• Search criminal records by first and last name, optionally filtered by US state
• Search criminals in a neighborhood
• Search sex offenders in a neighborhood
• Sign up to receive alerts on criminal records of up to 5 names
• Get criminal statistics based on types of crime, ethnicity, gender and age

Search by Name

Criminal search results are categorized into Behavioral, Business, Drug & Alcohol, Sex Related, Theft & Robbery, Violent, and Traffic/Other. Not surprisingly, you will notice that criminals like to change names and the site shows you all the different names associated with that person.

Clicking the View Details button will take you to a detailed page with the free criminal background info about a specific individual. Where available, you can see information that can help identify a person such as age, height, race, eye color, hair color, etc.

A list of all offenses is seen along with details of each offense such as date and place of conviction, the verdict and sentence.

Free Criminal Background Check by Neighborhood

When you search an address or a neighborhood area for criminals, you get a Google Map mashup with the locations and types of criminals in that area. You can use the usual Google Map controls to move, zoom in/out, etc. Click on any of the offenders to see brief details from where you can jump to the full details of that person. For example, here is a map of criminals in Trenton, NJ:

Sex Offender Search

The Sex Offender search works in similar fashion, showing you a Google Map with locations of registered sex offenders. A search in Los Angeles for example revealed 77 registered sex offenders. Detailed information on each offender is seen on the left, when you click any offender icon in the map.

Advanced Search

If you know more details of a specific person you suspect, you can use the Advanced Search that allows you to do a free criminal background check using middle name, address, age range, or even date of birth.

Criminal Statistics

The statistics section of the website with pretty pie charts is compelling for anyone with even a passing interest in crime studies. The crime category chart allows you to further dig into each type. For example, Theft and Robbery can be further segmented into Stolen Property, Burglary, Fraud, Larceny, and so on.

Suspect someone? Want to check how safe is your neighborhood? Go to Criminal Searches and find out.

Important: Please be careful to use this website as a starting point. Remember that free checks work only on publicly available information and may not always be comprehensive. If your safety is at stake, it is best to get paid professional services before placing your faith in someone.

Also note that harassing anyone on the offender registry database is a misdemeanor and can be punished both by a fine and jail time.

You can also check out previously profiled SpotCrime for crime reports in your neighborhood and Family Watchdog to get a map view of the National Sex Offender registry. Did you find Criminal Searches useful? Liked this post? Tell us in the comments!

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It’s a process really. Here’s how I did it and how you can find someone’s email address.

(Please don’t be a stalker. That’s just rude, really – she’s just NOT that into you alright!)

Information Gathering

This is the most important step in finding a lost friend’s e-mail address. Recall what you can about them – Interests, last known location, hobbies – anything whether you think it is relative or not. Oh yeah! Relatives are a good one to write down too, if you know them.

Just-Being-Friendly Search Zone

Contact any mutual acquaintances you and the lost friend may still have. One of them might have the e-mail address you need. In that case, your search is over! If not, then they may be able to provide you with more up-to-date information. Maybe they bumped into the friend at the mall over Christmas and found out they have moved to another state.

You could try searching social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, but let’s assume you are lazy or efficient, or both. Then you would use search engines that search a bunch of social networking sites, like Spock, Pipl and 123people. Some more people search engines were mentioned in our recent article 15 Websites to Find People On The Internet.

Remember to search on name variants too. They could be going by Richard instead of Dick now. Or maybe they have got married and have a new last name. Lots of women seem to be listing maiden and married names on these sites. Not that I’ve noticed……

As an adjunct to these I’ve used both Bigfoot Directories and My Email Address Is with good results. These are both free sites – I prefer My Email Address Is since it checks 4 different directories at once. I even found some of my old e-mail addresses.

If you have their e-mail address now, send them a short, but sweet and polite, e-mail re-introducing yourself. Don’t go into your life story, because you may have the wrong person. Just write something like:

Hello, I’m looking for an old friend by the name of John Smith. I went to Riverdale High School with him in 1953. Are you him? If not, please excuse me. If you are, I would like to renew our acquaintance, if that’s okay with you.

Yours Truly,
Jim Dandy

If you haven’t found an e-mail address for your friend by now, stop and ask yourself if maybe they don’t want people e-mailing them out of the blue. To go beyond this point is borderline-creepy. I understand if it is something of an emergency, like an old mutual friend is ill, or there’s a big 20th reunion, but make sure the reason is right.

Borderline-Stalker Search Zone

Still hunting, huh?

It’s time to Google then. Start by searching out their name and variations of their name. No cigar? Then you can search websites that the person is likely to be a member of. Let’s say he used to be a big computer geek. You might start searching through sites like Slashdot or Digg. There’s a good chance they joined a forum and may have their e-mail address listed there.

Still no luck? Wow, you’re persistent. Do you have a rare blood type because going any further with your search takes you into the….

What?!-Do-You-Need-a-Kidney-Transplant?! Search Zone

Let’s assume you know roughly where your donor, I mean friend, is living and you think you know what line of work they are in. Maybe they live in Redmond and are a computer geek. You might start searching Microsoft’s site for the e-mail address. At this point you are pretty much a stalker. Just so there’s no confusion here – you have crossed the line.

The e-mail isn’t there, but there is a reference to him in some obscure knowledge base article. Now, Stalker McStalkyPants, you can look at other e-mail addresses on the website and see if there is a naming pattern. Maybe it’s first initial and last name, like jdoe@website.com. Put your friend’s name into the same format and send them an e-mail. Be polite and not too overbearing. You don’t want to ask for the kidney at this point. See if they want to talk to you first. You are dangerously close to living on weekend passes here.

If you haven’t found the e-mail address yet, just give up. Please. It’s so creepy now, I need to take a shower in Listerine.

Best of luck on your searches and I hope the surgery is a success.

Got any other creepy-but-legal methods to find long lost friends, or people of the same blood-type? Did you ever manage to find someone’s email address by searching online? Share them here!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Crawl the Internet

The Internet is essentially a giant database, overflowing with data points about individuals. Today, it’s hard to find anyone who hasn’t commented on a blog entry, made a post in an online forum, or registered at Facebook or Flickr. The Internet is filled with opportunities to create a profile, and every single profile provides the Internet with additional data points about you that people can use to find you when they need to.

There are many websites that search standard social networks like MySpace or Facebook, but Pipl is one resource that conducts a “deep web” dig for the name you’re looking for on “non-typical sites.” The search results from Piple are pretty impressive.  You can read about how to use Piple at this article by Karl. Conducting a deep search for myself, I found that the results covered data pulled from profiles at MySpace, Facebook, and countless other sites like article directories and blogs. I was especially impressed by Piple’s efforts to dig for email addresses and content within miscellaneous web pages.

Another powerful search is Google’s Blog Search which will find anyone who has published to a blog on the Internet.  The results on this search turned up my published articles at MakeUseOf, those at my three blogs, and even articles that I wrote for clients and had completely forgotten about.

Probably the most powerful tool to find someone who may have only posted to the internet a long time ago is Google Groups.  Google Groups has incorporated over 800 million Usenet messages into its database, an impressive 20 year’s worth of Internet conversations dating back to 1981.

By far, one of the best search engine crawlers for finding people through searching all types of Internet content is 123people. I found that this website was able to find more accurate hits when I searched for myself than most other identity search engines.

Just a straight search without location found dozens of weblinks blogs, social network profiles and documents, most of which were an accurate hit. Needless to say, I’d recommend 123people to anyone looking to find if anyone they know has any content whatsoever published on the Internet about them.

Searching Social Networks

Social networks are very hard to avoid on the Internet. It’s impossible not to get sucked into a forum discussion, a Facebook group game, or connecting with industry leaders on LinkedIn. Because of this, the odds are very good that the person you’re looking for has registered and created a profile in at least one of those networks.

YoName is one free website that searches through a list of over thirty popular and obscure social networks including Imeem, LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, Yahoo 360, Flickr, and Zorpia. We’ve examined it before at MakeUseOf. The results are displayed in tabular format so you can select which social network search to focus on. I found that YoName could only find a few of my online profiles.

Wink searches social networks such as MySpace, Reunion, LinkedIn, Friendster, and others. Wink results were somewhat limited though, with only 28 results and only one of those was an accurate “hit.”

Spokeo is a powerful social network tool that searches through a huge list of social networks and websites. It discovers things that aren’t very easy to find, like hidden Facebook profiles, posts or comments to YouTube, blogs or comments on Blogger, accounts on Flickr, Twitter, WebShots and more. The results are comprehensive and include results from over 40 major websites.

The only drawback is that to sign up you have to provide Spokeo with your email address and password so that it can actually access your email account and extract your contacts.

Jobs and Companies

If you know where someone works, but you don’t have their contact information, then tracing them by company or industry is your best option. There are several tools available that can help.

Jobster is a large database of job listings where you can find people not only by name, but within a certain industry or specific company. You can sift through the huge database of folks who’ve added their profile to Jobster in hopes of landing employment.

Another great industry search site is ZoomInfo, which is focused on company details. If you have a profile on the internet that lists your affiliation with a company, the odds are good that you’re in the ZoomInfo database. I even found myself listed in the database as co-owner of RealityUncovered, which is true, but it was only part of a few online profiles – meaning ZoonInfo can crawl profiles for company affiliations. Very impressive.

Online Public Records Search

Of course, if you’re conducting a full background check on someone, then you’ll want to find the following information:

• Residences over the last few years
• Criminal record check
• Driving record
• Birthday and birth location (for citizenship verification)
• Child predator check

If a person has a criminal record or any court ruling, it’s amazing how much information you can find about it online.  If you know a name and birthdate of the person you’re looking for, that’s all you really need – although the location information would make the search go even more smoothly.

Zaba Search is one of the best sites for conducting free public records queries. Using Zaba Search, you can determine a person’s exact past and current addresses and phone numbers. If you want a detailed report of all past addresses, relatives, criminal history, bakrupcies, small claims judgments and more, it’ll cost about $50 through Intelius. You can also conduct a phone number search, which is nice if you receive a prank phonecall from someone you don’t know. It will give you the latitude and longitude of the location, but for specific details you need to purchase an Intelius reverse lookup.

Google Government search sets the bar high with the ability to search through government news reports and even government websites. By searching names, you’ll often discover someone involved in government research, grants, or non-profit activities.

If you suspect the person you’re looking for is in prison, then search the state or federal inmate locator directories.  Just pick a state, or search through the federal system.

USA.gov provides a huge database for all state and federal agencies. Most services where you need to pay for background details on a person come from these free state and federal agency databases. You can find the data for free by searching through this website to find those agencies and conducting the search yourself.  For example, digging through the state of Maine agencies I found where you can search through Maine criminal records.

Criminal Searches is one of the first truly free search websites that allow you to call up the criminal records of anyone based on name, location, birthday or age range.  To test it, I searched for the record of a person in California who I know, from previous research, has a criminal record there.  Sure enough, Criminal searches found it.

The results also offer the source of information (court office) where you can send for a copy of the entire case records (for a fee).  Is this easy online access freedom of information or invasion of privacy?  Should your criminal records be on public display on the Internet?  Or is it more important for the public to know who the former criminals are and where they live? Either way, Criminal Searches is leading the way in making this information both public and very convenient.

Make it Simple

When it comes right down to it, you want to be able to find someone quickly and free.  The sites above will help, but in most cases you’ll need to at least learn a few details about the person, like their birthday or the state they live in.  Once you have those details, the volume of information you can find online about a person is amazing, and at times shocking.

Have you ever tried to search and find people on the internet? Do you feel easy access to personal records is an invasion of privacy or an important public right? What other free online people search tools do you know about for looking for people? Share your opinions and sites in the comment section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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