Online criminal background check tools?
 

Do these things actually work?

Yep. A coworker ran one and got results.

Example sites?

The answer is "yes" and "no." If you use a service like Instantcheckmate you will get whatever is available via public records in your state. So great, right? Not really. If you take my state for instance they do not sell criminal records to private aggregate services, you must in affect go down to the court house to get real records. Going to the courthouse in our case it logging into our CBI site and paying a few bucks for the records you need.

The sources that are legitimate criminal background check companies like Hireright simply do these courthouse searches for you by again, going to the courthouse. Even if they use an aggregate database and find a hit they still have to verify it at the courthouse.

My wife uses ICHAT which costs $10 per report. I believe it uses the State Police database. I can ask her when she arrives home for more info if you are interested.

Thanks. WhitePages has some sort of "premium" level. There are other sites that offer this stuff. One of them claimed to have 6 items in the criminal background check of the person I'm investigating but wouldn't cough up the goods unless I shoveled in $39.95.

In Wisconsin it's free... And public...

Search your state for " circuit court access" and see if there is a free site...

Arizona has a searchable database.....
https://apps.supremecourt.az.gov/publicaccess/

Yes, all states I know of have searchable databases. You have to do a search for each state, and to be sure you want to search the county records too, but it's not hard if you know where they have lived. Lexis and Westlaw also have restricted databases you can subscribe to with some statement of legitimate need. They have access to all the public databases. There's another commercial database used by insurance investigators called Accurint. If you really want to do a criminal records check and don't want to search each state yourself, for about $100 you can get a private investigator run an Accurint report in about a half hour.

Thanks all. Craigster, thanks for the link. I looked this guy up and it appears he's been arrested a few times (DUI, resisting, disorderly, etc.) but the charges have been dismissed each time. He's been lucky so far, but Fortune is a fickle mistress.

the ones that the government uses aren't much better... Half of my speeding tickets don't show up, and even a criminal speeding ticket didn't come up....
Hit or miss depending on if the department uploads their stuff to it.

I'd say they're more like Carfax, in that, if you get a hit, it means there was probably an incident. But coming back clean doesn't mean there wasn't an incident. My DUI has never been found and I got TSA Pre-Check this year.

One of my "cohorts" in my Goldman Sachs group runs a PI service, mostly employee background checks. They are not expensive and probably produce better results.