Public Background Checks Reviews

Editor's Star Ratings:

Background Checking Service:
People Finding Service:
Features:
Ease of Use / Navigation:
Ease of Joining / Registration:
Customer Support:
Value for Money:
Overall Star Rating:

Costs:

Options include:

• One-off people search for $9.95
• One-off background check for $39.95
• Unlimited people searching for 24 hours for $14.95
• Unlimited people searching for 7 days for $19.95
• Unlimited people searching for 30 days for $39.95

 

Features:

• Almost instantaneous access to billions of US records
• Search by name, address, phone number or other criteria for:
  • Addresses
  • Phone numbers
  • Property information
  • Background checks
  • Employee screening
  • Criminal records
  • Marriage records
  • Sex offender records
  • Divorce records
  • Death records
  • Unclaimed money
• Background check yourself - see what potential employers will see!
• Employee pre-screening service available
• Always confirms there are records to retreive before you pay
• Customer support is via email
• Searching help available by phone

 

Editor's Verdict:

Public Background Checks offers a good range of basic searches, both in terms of people-finding and background-checking. Whilst the lack of very many advanced searching options is partially compensated for by ease of use and affordability, this site still ranks more among the legions of perfectly decent searching websites rather than as one of the few really great ones.

The PublicBackgroundChecks.com homepage is bright, accessible and friendly, which makes finding your way around both easy and fun. There seem to be more animated adverts to put up with here than you generally find on other background-checking sites, but most of them are at least vaguely related to the purpose of the site itself, so they don't look too much out of place. In the unlikely event you need any help using the website there is a fairly succinct FAQ only a click away. In addition, PBC offer customer support via an email form and now there is also a phone line you can call if you require individualized searching assistance.

The range of searches on offer here is broad and covers most of the main areas of information which users tend to be interested in. That said, within those broad areas there tends to be only one or two choices of search for each category rather than the huge range and flexibility you can find on the sites higher up our top ten. Whilst the range of databases and information sources PBC can draw on isn't quite as wide as those offered by the very best background checking websites, their results tend to be fairly comprehensive, so in practice you're unlikely to notice the difference. In fact, for casual users who want to run a quick, general search and not be baffled by endless choices, sub-choices and fine-tuning this is likely to be just fine.

The range of criteria you can key your search on used to be limited to name, address and phone number, but PBC have now improved their interface to allow for a more flexible choice of search criteria, which is a real plus and helps begin to lift PBC above the level of the bog-standard background checking website.

A new addition to the range of services PBC offer is self-checking, which is administered under the separate banner of Iamscreened.com. This allows you to conduct a search on yourself so you'll know exactly what potential employers will see when they check you out. You can even pre-screen yourself and produce a full report to show potential employers, saving them the time and expense of screening you themselves. Cleverly, this allows the website to play both sides of the job-hunting market- providing both potential employers and applicants with a trustworthy screening service. Just the simple fact that PBC is constantly expanding its range of facilities is a good sign, it denotes a company that isn't content to rest on its laurels and is always keen to find ways to improve its service.

A point in PBC's favour is that signing up and getting started is a simple and transparent process. This may sound like a fairly basic requirement, but you'd be surprised how many background checking websites won't tell you how much joining will cost you, or even whether you have to sign-up to get your results, until just before you're expected to pay, when they can dangle the possible hits in your face to entice you. This site, on the other hand, tells you everything you need to know about joining, and what that involves, right up-front, which is refreshing.

There are several membership options available, each allowing you unlimited searches of the type requested for a different period of time (there are no automatically renewing membership schemes, so no chance of getting unexpectedly billed for repeat subscriptions you don't want). All these options are pretty good value although, unusually, the shorter term memberships actually seem to offer slightly more bang for your buck. The searches themselves are generally very quick and the simpler ones can often be almost instantaneous.

If you choose to purchase your searches individually rather than signing up, the system is very similar to that used by most other popular people-searching websites. You begin by inputting as much data on your target as possible. Obviously the more data you input the more likely you are to find them and the fewer possible hits you'll have to weed through to identify the person you're after. However, PBC is better than a lot of rival sites in that it will show you which categories of information are available before you decide to buy the full report rather than just letting you hand over your money and only then letting you see how much information the search has turned up. This sort of transparency is both commendable and useful given that people-searching is never an exact science - however good the website you're using, your results will only be as good as the information that's actually out there. This means that it's quite possible to pay for a full report and find that many of the fields in the report are empty because the information simply wasn't there to be found.

Of course PBC also has its limitations. In addition to the lack of many more advanced searching options, PBC will only search within the United States. This is a shortcoming shared by most US-based people-searching websites, but you can find a few that will search internationally further up our top ten, albeit for a few dollars more. Also, although PBC has recently branched out into self-checking, it doesn't yet offer anything in the way of an identity theft protection package. This is a useful facility some of the top background checking websites have begun featuring of late and, whilst there's no objective reason why a background checking service should necessarily be expected to offer identity protection as well, it is something the market leaders can offer that PBC currently can't.

All in all, PublicBackgroundChecks.com should be more than capable of taking care of most customers' basic searching needs. It doesn't offer the widest range of searches of any such website but what it does it does very competently and, encouragingly, seems to be constantly improving its range of services - this is a website with its eye on the big leagues.

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