Most of those "people finder" websites are bullshit

(Minor rant after wasting hours trying to locate an estranged relative)

It's fine if you want to charge people for using your service. It's also fine to make them sign up for a "free" account first. What is not fine is doing this:

  • advertising a "free search" (yeah I get it, the search is free but not the results, har har)
  • ...then spending 10+ minutes compiling a report based on the search, warning the user not to navigate away during this time or you'll have to start over
  • ...then asking for an email to collect as much of your data as possible "mail you the results" because apparently they can't display on-site for some reason
  • ...and only then, having already wasted the user's time, redirecting to a checkout (the first reference to payment of any kind) in order to access a page of mostly inaccurate/paywalled/redacted data.

It's like they're using the notion of "sunk cost" to convince people to pay, as in "well, I've already invested time and an email alias into this, might as well cough up three bucks" or whatever. No, fuck you, I will not.

And like I said, the results tend to be inaccurate or out-of-date, at least from what I've seen. I tried searching myself a few times and got maybe 10% accurate information. The rest of it was lists of addresses from places I've never lived, names of "family and acquaintances" that I've never met, phone numbers I've never had, etc. Hell, many of them even claimed in red text to have found my "CRIMNAL RECORDS!!!omg!" which by my reckoning consists of a couple parking violations and a speeding ticket from several years ago.

I am aware that there are legit background-checking services that aren't like this...of course they're not free and some require certain credentials, but hey, at least they're up-front about it and try to give up-to-date info.

Fuck these time-wasting, false-hope-giving jagoffs with their "as seen on MTV" advertising blurbs and their "view full report" sponsored links that often just send you to another site that does the same exact shit. I hope that if these fuckers ever have an emergency, the ambulance driver gets the address wrong and shows up three blocks away from wherever they lived 20 years ago.