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No1Reviews.com >> Background Check Sites >> Net Detective Review |
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Net Detective Review
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Editor's Verdict: NetDetective.net offers background searches, criminal background searches and people-finding services and is quite a popular site. However, it has also been dogged by accusations of sub-standard service, weaseling out of refunds, billing for cancelled subscriptions and providing only information that could be found elsewhere for free. Their standard membership, which seems very reasonably priced, gives you access to unlimited standard-level searches over the membership period of 3 years. Alternately, you can upgrade to a premium level "law-enforcement database" membership, which is a subscription service, charged monthly, for more rigorous searches. Whilst the standard level membership is clearly priced, comes with a money-back guarantee and implies no ongoing commitment, information on the premium level membership is rather sketchy. Everything on the welcome page is geared towards sucking you into the lower level membership - if you navigate away from the sign-up page without filling in the form you'll frequently see a box saying that if you decide to sign up after all you can get it even more cheaply. Whilst the standard level membership claims to give you access to over 1.1 billion records, the premium level apparently brings you more than 3.3 billion. Presumably this includes a lot of different kinds of records about the same individuals, as a website that deals only with the US can hardly have access to the records of half of the world's population. Unless of course they're counting household pets in that total. The premium level membership is currently also offering you one months' access for free- although allegedly canceling before they've billed you at least once is very difficult. The website fairly blatantly uses the glamour associated with private investigations and law enforcement to make you want to sign up; the promise of privileged access to confidential information can be very seductive. Actually, as with any background checking site, the only information Net Detective can access is that which is legally available anyway. What good background check websites do is rapidly gather and collate this information for you and deliver it in a digestible format rather than uncover any information hidden outside the public realm. Customer service is available by both email and phone (reports on how accessible this is vary greatly) and there is a 90-day money-back guarantee, although consumer feedback suggests that successfully getting a refund is actually very difficult. Furthermore, the 90-day money-back guarantee applies only to the standard level (3 years for a low price) membership rather than the premium level monthly membership. Which brings us to the complaints... To put these into context, it's worth remembering that almost any on-line service will inevitably have one or two complaints against them. This could be due to anything from bad luck or miscommunication to bureaucratic oversight or a failure of technology. Plus of course we all know at least one person who will find cause for complaint with almost anything and is always trying to get their money back from somewhere or other. So even the best background check providers will have some critics, and in the majority of cases there will be no intent to defraud the customer. The trouble is, whilst it's undeniable that this is a popular website with many satisfied customers, it also seems to have rather more dissatisfied ones than you would reasonably expect to see. The accusations against Net Detective take various forms. They include employing petty tricks such as charging for low-quality information you could find for free using a regular search engine, or using "bait and switch" tactics. This involves falsely reporting that "no results were found" on a standard search in order to persuade you to upgrade to a premium level search. Essentially, the allegation is that the standard level membership scheme exists solely as a lure to persuade you upgrade to the more expensive package, which is charged monthly instead of every 3 years, debits your credit card automatically and offers no refunds. On a more serious scale, Net Detective have also been accused of regularly charging the credit cards of customers who have already cancelled or who expected only a one-off payment. Similarly, many who have found the service to be unsatisfactory and tried to claim on the much-vaunted 90-day money back guarantee have found this almost impossible, due to small print, stonewalling or endless bureaucracy. The trouble is none of this is technically illegal - the internet is a relatively young marketplace, so there are still loopholes, grey areas and technicalities which sneaky websites can use to make it practically impossible for aggrieved customers to bring them to book. Such accusations are vehemently made on internet consumer forums but hotly denied by the company itself. Whilst it is legally problematic for a review such as this one to take sides, the best advice we can give is to stick with services, such as those in our top 10, that have been shown to be trustworthy. After all, the regular mantra of background-checking sites is "better safe than sorry", so why not apply this to your choice of website as well. We can't say for sure whether this site is dirty, but what we can say is that there are plenty of other background-checking sites where you don't have to take that chance.
>> Click here to visit NetDetective.com or << Back to the rest of our Background Check Sites Reviews
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