Background Check for Landlords
A landlord background check is not a casual internet lookup. The moment you pull credit, eviction history, or criminal records to decide whether to rent to someone, federal law treats that report as a regulated “consumer report” and you become a user of consumer reports under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. That brings duties: written applicant authorization, a permissible purpose, an adverse-action notice if you deny, and Fair Housing limits on how you weigh what you find. This guide walks the full compliant tenant-screening workflow, who has to run it, and where lawful public-records research lawfully fits afterward. It is general information, not legal advice.
The Short Version
If you screen a rental applicant by pulling their credit, eviction, or criminal history, that report is an FCRA “consumer report” and you must run it through an FCRA-regulated consumer reporting agency or tenant-screening company, get the applicant’s written authorization, have a permissible purpose, and send an adverse-action notice if you deny based on what the report says. You must also apply your criteria uniformly and stay inside Fair Housing limits, including individualized assessment of criminal records. A compliant screen covers credit, eviction history, criminal records where lawful, income and employment verification, and rental references, with negative items generally limited to a seven-year look-back. We are a public-records research firm, not a consumer reporting agency, and we do not sell tenant-screening reports for rental decisions. Where we lawfully help a landlord is afterward: locating a former tenant who skipped owing rent, supporting service of an eviction notice, or running an asset search to enforce a judgment you already hold.
Watch: Landlord Background Checks
What a compliant tenant screen actually involves.
Watch Overview
When a Background Check Becomes a Regulated Report
The line most do-it-yourself landlords cross without realizing it.
The single most important thing to understand about screening tenants is that the law does not care whether you call it a “background check,” a “reference check,” or “just looking someone up.” It cares about purpose and content. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a “consumer report” is information from a consumer reporting agency bearing on a person’s creditworthiness, character, general reputation, or mode of living that is used or expected to be used to decide eligibility for housing. The instant you obtain that kind of report to decide whether to rent to an applicant, you are a “user of consumer reports,” and the FCRA’s user obligations attach to you, the landlord, even if you own a single unit.
That framework lives in the federal statute at 15 U.S.C. 1681b, which lists the permissible purposes for which a consumer report may be furnished, and at 15 U.S.C. 1681m, which spells out the duties of anyone who uses one. The Federal Trade Commission, which enforces the FCRA against landlords, publishes a plain-language summary of those duties in its guide Using Consumer Reports: What Landlords Need to Know. If you read nothing else from a government source, read that FTC page before you screen your first applicant.
Why does this distinction matter so much in practice? Because the FCRA was written to protect consumers from being judged on inaccurate, stale, or improperly obtained data, and it gives applicants real rights and real remedies. A landlord who pulls a report without consent, or who denies an applicant and never tells them why or where the data came from, is not committing a paperwork foot-fault. They are exposing themselves to statutory damages, attorney fees, and regulatory attention. The good news is that compliance is genuinely straightforward once you understand the four pillars, and the rest of this guide builds them out one by one.
It is also worth being clear about who this binds. The FCRA’s user obligations do not switch on only for large property-management companies; they apply to the owner of a single duplex who runs one report a year just as fully as to a firm screening hundreds of applicants a month. The statute looks at the act, obtaining and acting on a consumer report for a housing decision, not at the size of the operation. Small landlords are, if anything, the group most often caught out, because they tend to assume the rules are for someone bigger, lean on a free website instead of a regulated provider, and skip the adverse-action step entirely. Reading the framework once and building a simple, repeatable process around it is what closes that gap, and it costs far less in money, time, and stress than a single avoidable dispute or set-aside denial.
The Four FCRA Compliance Pillars
Get these right and the legal mechanics of screening are settled.
Written Disclosure & Consent
Before you obtain a screening report, give the applicant a clear, standalone written disclosure that a consumer report will be requested, and get their signed authorization. Burying it inside the lease or the application is the classic mistake; the disclosure should stand on its own so consent is unmistakable.
Permissible Purpose
You must have a lawful reason to pull the report. Evaluating an applicant who has applied to rent from you is a textbook permissible purpose under 15 U.S.C. 1681b. The catch in the statute is that the applicant must have initiated the transaction, which is why you screen after an application, not before, and never on a whim about a neighbor.
Adverse-Action Notice
If you deny, charge a higher deposit, require a co-signer, or take any other unfavorable action based even in part on the report, you must give an adverse-action notice. It names the screening company, states that the company did not make the decision, and tells the applicant they can get a free copy of the report and dispute errors.
FCRA-Compliant Provider
The report has to come from a consumer reporting agency that follows the FCRA’s accuracy, reinvestigation, and dispute procedures. That is the part many small landlords get wrong by scraping free sites. A regulated tenant-screening provider is what makes the whole report lawful to obtain and to act on.
These four pillars are not independent options to pick from; they are a chain, and a break anywhere voids the rest. Consent without a compliant provider still leaves you holding an unregulated report. A compliant provider without an adverse-action notice still leaves the applicant in the dark about a denial. Treat all four as mandatory together, and document each step, because in an FCRA dispute the burden of showing you complied falls on you.
Adverse Action, Step by Step
The notice that trips up more landlords than any other rule.
An “adverse action” under the FCRA is any decision unfavorable to the applicant that is based, in whole or in part, on the screening report. Denying the application is the obvious one, but it is broader than that: requiring a larger security deposit, demanding a co-signer or guarantor, or approving on stricter terms than you offered others all count if the report influenced them. The duty to give notice is set out in 15 U.S.C. 1681m, and the FTC confirms in its landlord guidance that the obligation is triggered by any such unfavorable action.
The notice itself has required content. It must tell the applicant that the action was based on a consumer report, give the name, address, and phone number of the consumer reporting agency that supplied the report, state clearly that the screening company did not make the rental decision and cannot explain why it was made, and inform the applicant of their right to obtain a free copy of the report from that agency within sixty days and to dispute the accuracy or completeness of any item. While the FCRA permits oral, written, or electronic notice, the FTC recommends written notice as best practice because it gives you proof of compliance and gives the applicant a clean record of their rights.
A practical point landlords miss: the adverse-action duty is independent of whether the report was actually accurate. Even if the data was correct and your decision was sound, skipping the notice is itself a violation. Build the notice into your workflow as an automatic step that fires on every denial or conditional approval, not a courtesy you extend when you feel like it. Many tenant-screening providers can generate compliant adverse-action letters for you, which is one more reason the regulated-provider pillar pays for itself.
What a Compliant Screen Actually Covers
The five components of a defensible tenant background check.
Credit History
Payment patterns, outstanding debts, collections, and a credit score on the familiar three-hundred-to-eight-fifty scale. Many landlords set a soft floor in the low-to-mid six hundreds for market-rate units, but a score is one signal among several, not a verdict.
Eviction History
Court-record searches for unlawful-detainer filings and money judgments in the jurisdictions where the applicant has lived. This is the signal most particular to tenancy, and it is exactly what a tenant-focused screen weighs more heavily than an employment check would.
Criminal Records, Where Lawful
County, state, and national searches, plus sex-offender registry status, used carefully and only where state and local law allow. HUD guidance and a growing number of jurisdictions sharply restrict blanket criminal bans, so this component demands the most legal care.
Income & Employment
Verification against a stated standard, commonly gross monthly income of about two-and-a-half to three times the rent. Acceptable proof includes pay stubs, an employer letter, tax returns for the self-employed, and bank statements, verified rather than taken at face value.
Rental History & References
Direct contact with prior landlords about payment, care of the unit, and notice given on move-out. A useful trick is to weight the second-to-last landlord, who has no incentive to inflate a reference to move a problem tenant along.
Identity & Application Match
Confirm the applicant is who they say they are and that the report matches the right person. Mismatched or merged files are a real FCRA accuracy problem, and acting on the wrong person’s record is both unfair and legally exposed.
Notice that no single component is decisive on its own. A thin credit file can be offset by years of clean rental references and verified income; a single old, unrelated criminal record may carry little weight under an individualized assessment; a high income means little if eviction filings show a pattern of nonpayment. The defensible approach is a written, consistent rubric applied identically to every applicant, with the report as input to a judgment rather than an automatic gate. That consistency is also your best Fair Housing defense, which is the next thing every landlord has to get right.
Fair Housing Limits on Screening
Compliant data, applied in a discriminatory way, is still illegal.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act governs how you obtain and act on the report. The Fair Housing Act governs whether the way you weigh it discriminates. They are two separate bodies of law, and a screening process can satisfy one while violating the other. The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability, and that prohibition reaches not only intentional discrimination but also neutral policies that produce an unjustified disparate impact on a protected group.
Criminal-record screening is where this collides hardest with tenant background checks. In April 2016, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of General Counsel issued formal guidance on the application of Fair Housing Act standards to the use of criminal records by housing providers. The guidance starts from a documented fact: because of well-established racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, a blanket policy of refusing to rent to anyone with a criminal record will tend to fall disproportionately on protected groups, and is therefore likely to have a disparate impact that the landlord must justify. HUD concluded that “arbitrary and overbroad” criminal-history bans are unlikely to survive that test.
Out of that guidance comes a short list of rules that have become the practical standard. Do not consider arrests that did not lead to conviction, since an arrest is not proof of conduct. Do not apply a blanket lifetime ban on any conviction. Instead, conduct an individualized assessment that weighs the nature and severity of the offense, how long ago it occurred, and evidence of rehabilitation, and that bears a real relationship to protecting residents and property. HUD reinforced its posture on reducing screening barriers in subsequent rulemaking, and the direction of travel at the federal level has been consistently toward narrower, justified, individualized criminal screening rather than reflexive exclusion.
State and local law layers on top of all this and is frequently stricter than the federal floor. A growing number of jurisdictions have “ban the box” or fair-chance housing ordinances that limit when and how criminal history can be asked about or used; many cities and several states now treat source of income as a protected category, meaning you cannot refuse an applicant simply because they would pay with a Section 8 voucher or other lawful subsidy; and some jurisdictions cap how far back criminal look-backs may reach or restrict the use of eviction records. Because these vary so widely, the only safe rule is to check the law of your specific city and state, or ask a landlord-tenant attorney, before you finalize a screening policy. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development summarizes federal fair-housing protections at its fair-housing rights page.
The Seven-Year Rule and Applicant Rights
What can appear on a report, and what the applicant can do about it.
The FCRA limits how stale the negative information on a consumer report may be. Under 15 U.S.C. 1681c, most adverse items, including civil judgments, paid tax liens, collection accounts, and most other negative entries, generally cannot be reported once they are more than seven years old, with bankruptcies allowed up to ten years. There are exceptions, and the timing rules have nuances, but the working principle is that a compliant tenant-screening report should not be surfacing a decade-old collection or an ancient judgment as a current strike against an applicant. If your provider is showing very old negative data, that is a flag worth questioning.
Applicants are not passive in this system. Anyone screened has the right to know that a consumer report was used in a decision against them, to obtain a free copy of that report from the consumer reporting agency within sixty days of an adverse action, and to dispute any item they believe is inaccurate or incomplete. When an applicant disputes an item, the consumer reporting agency must reinvestigate, typically within thirty days, and correct or delete information it cannot verify. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which shares FCRA oversight with the FTC, publishes consumer-facing material on these rights, and its tenant-screening resources at consumerfinance.gov are a useful reference for understanding what an applicant on the other side of your decision is entitled to.
For landlords, the applicant-rights framework is not an obstacle so much as a quality-control mechanism. Reports are not perfect; files get merged, names collide, and identity confusion is common. The dispute process exists to catch those errors before they cost a qualified applicant a home, and respecting it, by sending proper adverse-action notices and using a provider that handles disputes correctly, protects you from acting on bad data as much as it protects the applicant.
Why Screening Earns Its Cost
The math behind treating a compliant screen as insurance, not an expense.
Landlords sometimes skip a proper screen because an applicant seems likeable, or because a regulated report feels like a needless fee on a unit that is already sitting empty. That instinct is where most bad tenancies begin. The cost of a comprehensive screening package is modest, typically in the range of a few tens of dollars, with turnaround usually inside one to three business days. Set that against what a single problem tenancy can cost, and the screen looks less like an expense and more like cheap insurance.
Consider the downside it guards against. An eviction that goes the distance, between lost rent during the nonpayment period, court and filing fees, attorney time, lock changes, and turnover, routinely runs into the thousands and can reach five figures once you add the weeks or months a unit sits while the process plays out. Property damage from a tenant who stopped caring stacks on top of that. Against numbers like those, the screening fee on even a dozen applicants is rounding error. The discipline that actually protects you is not paying for the report; it is screening every applicant to the same standard, because the one you wave through on a good feeling is statistically the one most likely to become the expensive problem.
There is a compliance dimension to the economics too. The cheapest-looking path, a free public-records lookup, is often the most expensive in the end, because acting on an unregulated report or denying without an adverse-action notice converts a small screening savings into FCRA exposure with statutory damages and attorney fees. The regulated provider that costs a little more is what keeps the whole decision lawful, disputable, and defensible. Paying for compliance is the frugal choice once you price in the risk of getting it wrong.
Tenant Screening vs. Employment Background Checks
Same statute, different emphasis and different rules.
Tenant screening and employment background checks share a legal backbone, since both are consumer reports governed by the FCRA, which means both require disclosure, consent, a permissible purpose, and an adverse-action process. But they are tuned to different decisions, and treating one like the other is a common mistake. An employer is predicting job performance and trustworthiness in a role; a landlord is predicting whether someone will pay rent on time and care for a unit. That difference reshapes what each report emphasizes.
A tenant screen leans hardest on eviction-court history and rental payment records, the signals most directly predictive of how a tenancy will go, alongside credit and income. An employment screen leans on work history, education and license verification, and role-relevant criminal history, and it carries its own overlay of rules, including Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidance on the use of criminal records in hiring that parallels but is not identical to HUD’s housing guidance. The adverse-action mechanics look similar on paper, yet the underlying fairness frameworks come from different agencies and different case law.
The criminal-history piece is where the divergence matters most. In housing, HUD’s disparate-impact guidance and a thickening layer of fair-chance ordinances constrain how a landlord may use a record; in employment, the EEOC’s enforcement posture and “ban the box” hiring laws do the parallel work. A policy copied from a hiring manual will not automatically satisfy housing law, and vice versa. If you wear both hats, as some owner-operators and property companies do, keep the two programs separate and built to their own rules rather than reusing one checklist for both.
Two Different Jobs: FCRA Screening vs. Lawful Locating
What requires a regulated screening provider, and what a public-records research firm can lawfully do.
| Task | What It Is | Who Does It Lawfully | Legal Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-Lease Tenant Screen | Pulling credit, eviction, and criminal history to decide whether to rent. | An FCRA-regulated consumer reporting agency or tenant-screening company. | FCRA consumer report; needs written consent and adverse-action notice. |
| Setting Deposit or Terms | Adjusting deposit, requiring a co-signer based on the report. | The landlord, acting on the regulated screen, with notice. | FCRA adverse action under 15 U.S.C. 1681m; Fair Housing limits apply. |
| Locating a Skipped Tenant Our Lane | Finding a former tenant who moved owing rent or left damages. | A public-records research and skip-tracing firm. | Permissible-purpose locate, not a pre-lease FCRA screen. |
| Serving an Eviction or Notice Our Lane | Confirming a current address so a notice can be served. | A locate firm finds the address; a server delivers it. | Locate supports lawful service of process. |
| Enforcing a Judgment Our Lane | Asset and employment search against a former tenant you have a judgment against. | A public-records research firm conducting an asset search. | Post-judgment collection; permissible purpose. |
The line down the middle of that table is the whole point of this page. Everything in the top rows is a pre-lease screening decision and must run through an FCRA-regulated consumer reporting agency with the applicant’s authorization. We are a public-records research firm, not a consumer reporting agency, and we do not sell tenant-screening consumer reports for rental decisions. The bottom rows are different: they are lawful, permissible-purpose locating and research that come into play after a tenancy has gone wrong, when you already have a relationship, a debt, or a judgment, and you need to find someone or something rather than decide whether to rent.
Reading the Results: Signals, Not Verdicts
How to weigh a report consistently and defensibly.
A screening report is a body of evidence, not a yes-or-no machine. The landlords who get into trouble are usually the ones who treat a single data point as decisive, because that is both unfair to good applicants and a Fair Housing risk if the decisive factor falls unevenly on protected groups. The more defensible habit is to look for patterns across the whole file and to apply the same weighting to everyone.
Positive signals worth crediting
- A consistent record of on-time payments across credit and rental history.
- Stable employment, often a year or more, with verified income comfortably above your rent-to-income standard.
- Specific, corroborated landlord references that speak to payment and care of the unit.
- No eviction filings, or a single old filing with a clear, documented explanation.
- A clean or minor criminal history with no offenses bearing on resident or property safety.
Red flags that warrant a closer look
- Multiple recent eviction filings, which is the single most predictive negative for tenancy.
- Verified income that falls below your stated rent-to-income threshold with no compensating factor.
- Prior landlords reporting property damage or chronic late payment.
- Inconsistencies between the application and what verification turns up, which can signal misrepresentation.
- Refusal to consent to a lawful, properly disclosed screen.
Even with red flags, resist the reflex to convert them into an automatic denial without thought, especially on criminal history, where HUD’s individualized-assessment expectation specifically discourages mechanical exclusion. Document your reasoning, apply your rubric the same way to the next applicant, and send the adverse-action notice when a denial is based on the report. Consistency is what turns a defensible judgment into a defensible record.
Common Screening Mistakes to Avoid
The errors that turn into FCRA or Fair Housing exposure.
Skipping the Standalone Disclosure
Burying consent inside the lease or application instead of a clear, separate written disclosure is a frequent FCRA defect.
Applying Standards Inconsistently
Waiving criteria for some applicants and enforcing them for others is the textbook setup for a disparate-treatment claim.
Trusting National Databases Alone
National criminal databases miss county-level records and carry stale or merged data; county searches and verification still matter.
Accepting Unverified Income Docs
Taking pay stubs or employer letters at face value invites fabricated documents; verify directly with the source.
Blanket Criminal-Record Bans
A flat “no record ever” rule runs straight into HUD’s disparate-impact guidance and a growing list of fair-chance ordinances.
Forgetting the Adverse-Action Notice
Denying based on the report without sending proper notice is itself a violation, regardless of whether the data was accurate.
The Compliant Screening Workflow
A repeatable sequence that keeps you inside the rules.
Disclose & Get Consent
Provide a standalone written disclosure that a consumer report will be requested and collect the applicant’s signed authorization first.
Order From a Compliant CRA
Run the screen through an FCRA-regulated tenant-screening provider, never a free scraper, so the report and your reliance on it are lawful.
Apply One Written Rubric
Weigh credit, eviction, income, references, and any lawful criminal data against the same criteria for every applicant, with individualized assessment.
Send Adverse Action if You Deny
On any unfavorable decision based on the report, send the required notice naming the CRA and the applicant’s dispute and free-copy rights.
This four-step loop is the spine of a defensible program. Document every step and keep the records, because the FCRA puts the burden on the user to show compliance. If you run a portfolio and screen often, codify the rubric in writing and train anyone who handles applications, since inconsistency across staff is one of the most common ways an otherwise sound policy turns into a Fair Housing problem.
Where Lawful Locating Fits for Landlords
Not the screen, but the work that comes after a tenancy goes wrong.
Here is the boundary stated plainly, because it matters legally. We are a public-records research firm, a skip-tracing, people-location, and asset-search operation. We are not a law firm, not a consumer reporting agency, and not a tenant-screening company, and we do not sell FCRA consumer reports for rental decisions. If you need to screen an applicant before signing a lease, that is a job for an FCRA-regulated provider with the applicant’s written authorization, an adverse-action process, and Fair Housing compliance, exactly as the rest of this page describes. Nothing we do replaces that.
What we do lawfully serve is the other half of a landlord’s life: the moments after a tenancy has already gone sideways, when you have an existing relationship, a debt, or a judgment, and you need to find a person or an asset rather than evaluate a stranger. A tenant who vanishes mid-lease owing rent and leaving damages is a permissible-purpose skip tracing matter, not a screening one. We rebuild a current address and place of work from public records and licensed databases so you can pursue what you are owed.
That locate work runs in several familiar directions for landlords. When you need to serve an eviction notice or court papers on someone who has moved, a verified current address is what makes lawful service possible, the same problem we cover in our guide to finding someone to serve papers. When you have a small-claims case against a former tenant, locating them is the prerequisite to filing and serving, which is the subject of our walkthrough on locating a person for small claims. And once you hold a money judgment for unpaid rent or damages, collecting it often means an asset search, the focus of our guide to finding hidden assets. For the related but distinct world of employment background checks, our explainer on what a background check shows for employment covers how those reports differ from tenant screens. For a legitimate landlord matter with a current address to start from, a verified locate typically comes back within 24 hours.
Who We Help
Lawful locating and research after the lease, not the pre-lease screen.
Independent Landlords
Skipped tenants located
Property Managers
Former-resident addresses verified
Landlord Attorneys
Respondents traced for service
Collections
Judgment debtors found
HOAs & Boards
Owners of record located
Small-Claims Plaintiffs
Former tenants located
Across every one of these, the common thread is the same: we do not decide who you should rent to, and we never substitute for a compliant tenant screen. We find people and assets, lawfully and for permissible purposes, once a landlord already has a debt, a judgment, or papers to serve. The screening decision stays with you and your FCRA-regulated provider; the locating, when a former tenant or their assets have gone missing, is where we earn our keep.
Our Commitment
Honest information about what tenant screening legally requires, and lawful, permissible-purpose locating when a tenancy goes wrong. We are a public-records research firm finding skipped tenants, supporting service of notices, and running asset searches on judgments since 2004. We are not a consumer reporting agency and do not sell tenant-screening reports for rental decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need the applicant’s permission to run a tenant background check?
Yes. Because a tenant screen is an FCRA consumer report, you must give the applicant a clear, standalone written disclosure that a report will be requested and obtain their signed authorization before you order it. Skipping consent is one of the most common FCRA violations by landlords.
Does People Locator Skip Tracing run tenant screening reports?
No. We are a public-records research firm, not a consumer reporting agency, and we do not sell FCRA tenant-screening consumer reports for rental decisions. Those must come from an FCRA-regulated provider. Where we lawfully help landlords is after a tenancy goes wrong: locating a skipped tenant, supporting service of a notice, or running an asset search on a judgment.
What is an adverse-action notice and when do I have to send one?
If you deny an applicant, require a higher deposit or co-signer, or take any unfavorable action based even in part on the screening report, federal law requires an adverse-action notice. It names the screening company, states the company did not make the decision, and tells the applicant they can get a free copy of the report and dispute errors.
Can I refuse to rent to someone with a criminal record?
Not with a blanket ban. HUD’s 2016 guidance warns that arbitrary, overbroad criminal-history bans can have an unlawful disparate impact under the Fair Housing Act. You generally should not consider arrests without conviction, and should make an individualized assessment of the offense, how long ago it was, and rehabilitation. Many states and cities add stricter fair-chance rules.
How far back can a tenant screening report go?
Under the FCRA, most negative items generally cannot be reported once they are more than seven years old, with bankruptcies allowed up to ten years. A compliant report should not be surfacing decade-old collections or judgments as current strikes. If old negative data appears, it is worth questioning with the provider.
What does a compliant tenant screen actually include?
Typically credit history, eviction-court records, criminal records where lawful, income and employment verification, and rental history with landlord references, plus an identity match. No single component should decide the application on its own; the defensible approach is one written rubric applied consistently to every applicant.
A tenant moved out owing me rent. Can you find them?
Yes, that is squarely our lane. Locating a former tenant who skipped owing rent or left damages is permissible-purpose skip tracing, not a pre-lease screen. We rebuild a current address and place of work from public records and licensed databases so you can serve a notice, file a claim, or pursue collection. For a legitimate matter, a verified locate typically comes back within 24 hours.
Is this legal advice, and who should I consult?
No. This page is general information, not legal advice. Tenant-screening rules under the FCRA and Fair Housing Act, and the many state and local fair-chance and source-of-income laws on top of them, vary widely. Before finalizing a screening policy, consult a landlord-tenant attorney or a compliant tenant-screening provider for guidance specific to your jurisdiction.
A Tenant Skipped Owing You Money?
We do not run tenant screens, but when a former tenant disappears owing rent or leaving damages, we locate them, lawfully and for a permissible purpose, so you can serve notice, file a claim, or enforce a judgment, typically within 24 hours. Contact us to get started.
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