Verify You Found the Right Person Before You Contact Them
You have a candidate. The name fits, the region fits, and the next thing you do is dial something, mail something or dispatch somebody. That is the moment the cost of being wrong changes character: a search that fails wastes your afternoon, while a search that succeeds on the wrong person delivers the consequence to somebody outside your matter who will never be told they were cleared. This page is about the confirmation step that belongs in between — how to tell two sources apart from one source read twice, which identifier settles the particular confusion in front of you, why every fact needs a date attached to it, and the written standard for stopping and saying not confirmed.
The short version
Corroboration counts only when the two things agreeing were created by different people, on different occasions, for different reasons. Consumer people-search products sit downstream of a small number of wholesale compilers and license from each other, so a second site agreeing with the first is often one file answering you twice. Ask three questions of every agreeing fact: who made this record, what event caused it to exist, and when. Same answers both times means one source, not two. Then choose the identifier that discriminates against the specific confusion you have — a suffix as executed on a signed instrument for a father and son, a marriage record where a trail splits at a surname, a death record plus one act performed afterwards where a candidate may not be alive. Put a date on every fact and on the conclusion. An address that was right in 2019 and a phone that was right in 2023 describe two different moments, and neither of them is now. If the standard is not met, the answer is not confirmed — written out, with the one document that would close the question named alongside the office that holds it, and delivered before anything is sent rather than after.
Why this step gets skipped and what that costs
A short run through the checkpoint between having a candidate and acting on one: corroboration that turns out to be a single source, facts that were true on different dates, and the point at which the honest output is a document request rather than a name.
The checkpoint before contact
A wrong confirmation is delivered to a stranger
Both kinds of error cost something. Only one of them lands outside your matter, and only one of them cannot be taken back.
Failing to confirm costs you time. Another afternoon of records work, a filing that slips a week, a call you did not get to make. Confirming the wrong person spends something that was never yours to spend. A demand letter arrives at a household with no connection to the debt. A summons is left with a family that now believes it is being sued and starts phoning lawyers. Somebody answers the phone and is told a relative has died, and several minutes of a stranger’s worst afternoon pass before anyone works out that this is a different family carrying the same surname. None of those can be withdrawn. You can send a correction. You cannot unsend the first thing.
The harm compounds because the misidentified person is invisible to the process that reached them. They were not a party to your matter. They received no notice that a search had been run, no opportunity to say that the birth date was eleven years out, and no route into the file where the mistake lives. When the error is finally caught, the correction happens in your records rather than in their life — nobody writes to tell them they were cleared. If the work is later folded into something written about them, the error can outlive the search that produced it by years.
There is a second asymmetry that people underrate, and it is the practical one. An unconfirmed candidate is a workable state; a wrongly confirmed one is not. “Two candidates fit, and the record that separates them is a deed filed in the adjoining county” is a position you can do something about: order the deed. The word “confirmed”, by contrast, closes the question and releases the consequence. Analysis stops the moment the label is applied, which is precisely when the mistake stops being reversible. Everything on this page is designed around keeping the question open slightly longer than feels comfortable.
Regulated work carries an additional exposure on top of the human one. Collections, tenancy, employment, insurance and lending all attach duties to the identity of the individual a decision concerns, and every one of those duties silently assumes the identification was correct. An identity mix-up therefore does not merely produce a wrong outcome; it produces a wrong outcome inside a framework built specifically to prevent it, which is a different and worse kind of problem to explain afterwards. That is why confirmation is the first hour of our skip tracing work rather than a box ticked at the end of it.
Two sources, or one source twice
The most common verification failure is not a check that was skipped. It is a check performed twice on the same underlying file.
Every guide on this subject gives the same instruction: cross-reference several sources until they agree. It is sound advice about a structure that largely does not exist at the consumer level. Most consumer-facing people-search products are publishers rather than collectors. They license compiled files from a small number of wholesale data compilers, they license from one another, and the same underlying record consequently surfaces on a dozen sites under a dozen brands, reformatted, re-titled and wrapped in different confidence chrome. When you open a second site and find the same address attached to the same name, the accurate description of what happened is that you read one file twice. The agreement you just observed was manufactured upstream, before either site saw your query.
Independence is testable, and the test is applied to the record behind the fact, never to the site displaying it. Three questions, in this order:
Who created this record?
Not who is showing it to you — who wrote it down in the first place. A county recorder creating an index entry when a deed was presented. A court clerk opening a docket. A licensing board issuing a number. A city clerk recording a marriage. A registrar issuing a certificate. If the honest answer for both of your agreeing facts is “a data compiler, and I do not know which”, you are holding one origin wearing two labels. The creator has to be a party with no relationship to your search and no reason to guess.
What event caused it to exist?
Records exist because something happened: a property changed hands, a case was filed, a license was renewed, a business was registered, somebody died. Two facts generated by the same event corroborate each other only weakly — the grantee name and the mailing address on one deed are one event described twice, however different the two fields look on screen. Two facts generated by unrelated events, years apart, in different institutions, are the thing you are actually looking for. A 2018 deed naming a spouse and a 2021 case caption naming that same spouse were produced by people who had never heard of each other.
When was it created?
Two extracts of the same snapshot are one observation, no matter how many products resell that snapshot. This is also where circularity hides most successfully: an aggregator’s relatives panel is frequently derived from clustering the very address history it is being used to corroborate, so the two panels agree because they were computed together. Nothing outside the vendor has confirmed either. If removing one product from the world would remove both of your facts, you never had two.
Some sources sit usefully in between and are worth understanding rather than dismissing. A business registration, a professional license application or a court filing contains information the subject supplied about themselves — self-reported, and therefore not independent of the subject — but it is entirely independent of the compiled data industry, because it was filed under the person’s own name, for a purpose of their own, and it is preserved by an institution with a legal duty to keep it. That is a genuine second origin, and it is often the cheapest one available.
Finally, the mirror-image error. When two genuinely independent sources disagree, the reflex is to treat the conflict as data noise and go with the majority. A conflict between independent origins is the most informative thing you will see all day. It usually means one of three things: you are looking at two different people, one record is describing an earlier phase of one life, or a clerk transposed something. Each of those has a different next step, and none of them is “take the average”.
Pick the identifier that separates these two candidates
Not the strongest identifier in the abstract. The one that discriminates against the particular confusion you are actually facing.
Verification checklists are written as though every case has the same shape, so they list the same fields every time: date of birth, middle name, relatives, prior addresses, employer. Run through that list mechanically and you will spend most of your effort on identifiers that both of your candidates satisfy, which produces a long column of agreements and no discrimination at all. Name the confusion first, then select the identifier that breaks it. The four confusions below account for most wrong calls, and each one defeats a different set of checks.
Two unrelated adults with the same common name
The pure coincidence case. Both live in the same metropolitan area, both are roughly the right age, and neither has anything to do with the other. Nothing about the name will help, and the relatives lists will simply differ without telling you which list is right. What breaks it is a full date of birth taken from a record that issued it, or an address history that overlaps your subject’s known history in time rather than merely in place. A shared address means nothing without shared dates; two people can occupy the same unit six years apart. If you need the birth date and do not have it, there are ordinary lawful routes to establishing a date of birth from records, and it is worth the detour, because a birth date is the one identifier that never drifts. An age is a rounding of a birth date and is the wrong instrument for separating two people born in the same year.
Father and son, one address, one name
The generational case is dangerous because it defeats address, phone, relatives and neighbors simultaneously — the two men genuinely shared all of them for years, so every corroboration you would normally reach for returns a confident yes for whichever one you had in mind. Only three things separate them reliably: a full birth date, a middle name spelled out rather than initialized, and a generational suffix as it was executed on a document the man signed. That last qualification matters more than it looks. Suffixes drift: a man who was Junior while his father lived often drops it afterwards, a clerk may push the suffix into the surname field or omit it entirely, and a III is regularly indexed as a II by simple transposition. A suffix appearing on a compiled profile is a formatting artifact. A suffix appearing in a signature block is evidence.
A name that changed, possibly more than once
Marriage, divorce, remarriage and elective changes split a life across surnames, and the giveaway is a candidate whose recorded history appears to begin abruptly in a particular year. It rarely means the person materialized; it means the earlier half sits under another name that nobody searched. The discriminator here is a document that carries both names at once — a marriage record, a deed executed in a former name with a recital, a court order. Two-part surnames add a mechanical failure on top of the human one: they get transposed, hyphenated, split into a middle name and a surname, or indexed under whichever half the clerk treated as the final word, so a single individual can appear in four index forms in one county. If a name has two parts, search it in both orders before concluding anything is missing.
A candidate who may not be alive
A compiled profile carries on long after the person it describes has stopped. The relative list still looks plausible, the address sequence still reads cleanly, and the file continues to be resold. This confusion is not resolved by a death record alone, because a death record for a namesake proves only that some namesake died. What resolves it is a death record paired with one documented act your subject performed after that date — a filing, a recorded instrument, a license renewal. The pairing is the point: it converts “somebody with this name died” into “this cannot be the same individual”. It is an inexpensive check, and it gets left out for exactly the reason it should not be: the profile is too tidy to prompt the question.
The confusion in front of you, and what actually settles it
Read the middle column first. It is the list of checks that will feel like progress and produce none.
| The confusion | What will not separate them | What does |
|---|---|---|
| Two unrelated adults, same common name, same metroMost common | City, phone, employer, a relatives panel | Full birth date from an issuing record; address histories that overlap in time, not only in place |
| Father and son at the same address | Address, landline, neighbors, relatives — both men pass all of them | Middle name spelled out; birth date; a suffix as executed in a signature block |
| Suffix drift (a Junior who dropped it; a III indexed as a II) | The suffix as displayed on a compiled profile | The suffix on the instrument itself, read together with a birth date |
| Married and maiden names | Searching one surname and reading the gap as evasion | A record carrying both names at once: marriage record, deed with a recital, court order |
| A transposed or split two-part surname | One index search, in one order, in one field | Both orders, both halves, plus first name and birth date; check the middle-name field |
| A deceased candidate and a living subject | A complete, coherent, still-updating profile | A death record paired with one documented act performed after that date |
| Several relatives sharing one household | Anything attached to the household. Address, landline and mail all belong to the building, not to a person — you need an identifier tied to the individual: birth date, a license number, a signature on a recorded document. | |
Every fact has a date. So does your conclusion
A dossier is not a snapshot. It is a stack of moments, and nothing in the software requires them to be the same moment.
Each line in a compiled profile was true at some point. The trouble is that the profile presents all of them in one present tense, in one typeface, on one screen, with no indication that the employer is from 2016, the landline from 2011 and the address from last spring. “Current address” is a label the software applies to the most recent address it happens to hold. It is a statement about the file, not a statement about the person, and the gap between those two things is where a correct identification turns into a wrong delivery.
Facts also decay at wildly different rates, which is why a single freshness score for a profile is close to meaningless. A birth date does not decay at all. A recorded deed is permanently true as of its recording date and tells you nothing whatsoever about who sleeps there tonight. Residential addresses turn over constantly across the adult population. Mobile numbers are reassigned to new subscribers after disconnection. Employers change, licenses lapse and renew, vehicles are sold. So a profile that feels verified can easily be a birth date that is permanently reliable, an address that was accurate three moves ago, and a phone that now belongs to somebody in another state — all displayed with equal confidence.
The discipline is to write two dates beside every fact you intend to rely on: the date it was true, and the date you observed it. Those are different, sometimes by years, and only the first one matters for the decision. Then date the conclusion honestly. A conclusion is not as fresh as its freshest input; it is as fresh as the oldest fact it depends on. If the identity rests on a 1978 birth date and a 2019 deed, the identification is solid and undated, because neither of those expires. If the delivery rests on a lease that ended in 2021, the delivery is a 2021 claim regardless of when you looked it up.
Keep the two propositions separate. “This is the right person” and “this is where that person is now” are different claims, resting on different evidence, decaying at different speeds. Collapsing them is the single most common way that careful identity work still produces a wrong outcome, and it is the failure that looks least like a failure afterwards, because the identity analysis really was fine. Confirm the person from durable records. Confirm the current whereabouts separately, with its own date, immediately before acting on it.
One consequence is worth stating plainly because it changes how you read an address history. Overlap in time is the test, not overlap in place. Your subject was at an address between two dates; the candidate was at an address between two other dates. If those intervals do not intersect, the shared address is not corroboration at all — it is two people who happened to occupy the same building at different times, which describes a large fraction of every rental unit in the country. When a records extract gives you only a “last seen” date and no interval, treat it as one endpoint of an unknown range and say so in the write-up rather than quietly rounding it to now.
The instrument, not the index entry
A database tells you a record exists. The record itself tells you what it says, and those are very different quantities of information.
Almost everything a compiled profile knows about public records it knows from an index. An index entry is a pointer: a handful of normalized fields captured so the underlying document can be located later. Names are truncated, middle names are reduced to initials or dropped, suffixes are lost, and the whole entry is transcribed by somebody whose job was findability rather than accuracy. That is not a criticism of indexes, which do their job well. It is a warning against treating one as though it were the document. The instrument behind the index entry is the thing that carries the signature, the middle name spelled out in full, the marital recital, the notary’s acknowledgement, the legal description, the co-signer, and occasionally a date of birth. Almost none of that reaches the index, and none of it reaches the aggregator that bought the index.
Knowing which office holds which document is most of the skill. The county recorder or register of deeds holds deeds, mortgages, releases, liens and recorded judgments, indexed by grantor and grantee. The clerk of court holds filings, dockets, judgments and the case file itself, which is where names appear as the parties actually pleaded them — if your question turns on litigation, working directly with court records rather than a court-records summary is usually the whole answer. State licensing boards hold license numbers, issue dates, status and discipline history, and a license is an unusually good identifier because it is unique, dated, tied to a specific human being and independently verifiable through the issuing board. Assessors hold parcel and ownership data as of a tax roll, which is a date, not a present tense. Vital records hold the strongest identity documents of all, under access rules that vary considerably by jurisdiction and by the relationship of the requester.
The strongest form to hold is a certified copy from the office that keeps the original, and there is a reason courts treat it that way. Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, a copy of an official record — or of a document recorded or filed in a public office as authorized by law — is self-authenticating if it is certified as correct by the custodian or another person authorized to make the certification, meaning it requires no extrinsic evidence of authenticity to be admitted. Note precisely what that certification asserts and what it does not: it attests that the copy is a true copy of what the office holds. It does not vouch for the truth of the statements inside the original document. A recorded deed containing a false recital is still a recorded deed containing a false recital, faithfully copied. Keep that distinction intact and the certified copy remains extremely useful; blur it and you have upgraded somebody’s assertion into a fact by photocopying it.
Read the instrument rather than the abstract of it. The caption names the parties as they were pleaded. The body names them as they signed. The signature block carries the suffix and often the middle name. The acknowledgement records that a notary saw identification, and names the county where that happened. The return-to address at the top says where the office was told to mail the recorded original, which is frequently the most current address on the whole document and is almost never captured by any index. And what an instrument cannot do is worth stating too: it fixes a named individual to a specific act on a specific date. It is silent about today.
Sometimes there is nothing to pull. Plenty of adults have never bought property, been sued, held a license or registered a business, and for those subjects the primary-source route simply ends. That is not a failure of research technique; it is a real limit, and the correct response is to say where the evidence stopped rather than to substitute a fifth aggregator for a first document.
Six ways a verification fails without looking like it failed
Every one of these produces a tidy file, a confident conclusion, and a wrong person on the receiving end.
The second source was the first source
You opened another site and it agreed, so the fact went into the file as corroborated. Both products were publishing the same licensed compilation. One upstream record produced two screens, and the file now records an agreement that never happened between two parties.
The check that was itself a contact
A quick call to see whether the number is right, a message to a relative asking if this is the family. Anything that reaches the subject or the people around them has already produced the outcome the verification existed to gate — made by somebody who was not yet sure, to somebody who may be a stranger.
The index entry read as the instrument
A docket line matched the name, so the case went in as confirmation. The filing itself named a different middle initial and a co-defendant who resolves the whole question. The index was never going to carry either of those fields, and nobody opened the document.
Three different years read as one present tense
The identity work was correct and the identity was right. The address was five years stale, and the papers went to a family who bought the house from the subject in the interim. Nothing in the profile marked which line was old, and nobody wrote a date beside anything.
The suffix nobody wrote down
The source document said Junior and the working file did not, because the intake note dropped it as decoration. Two men, one address, one name, and from that point on every check confirmed the wrong one perfectly. The suffix was the only discriminator available, and it was lost at the first transcription.
The answer that arrived because one was needed today
A deadline does not change the evidence. It changes the word written at the top of the page, and the word is what gets acted upon downstream. An unresolved file relabeled as confirmed looks identical to a confirmed one, which is exactly why the relabeling has to be a decision somebody signs.
How we work a confirmation before anyone is contacted
Four steps, in this order, whether the file came in with one candidate or eleven.
Write the sentence we have to be able to sign
Not “find this name” but the whole proposition: which named individual, carrying which distinguishing attributes, tied to which document, matter or event. It is written before any search runs, so no identifier can be selected after a candidate has been seen. A test chosen to fit an answer is not a test.
Trace each agreeing fact back to whoever made it
Every corroborating fact is logged with its creator, the event that produced it and the date it was created. Facts that trace to the same origin collapse into one entry rather than counting twice, and anything we could not trace is recorded as untraced instead of quietly counting as agreement.
Order the instrument from the office that holds it
Where a document exists that would settle the question and can lawfully be obtained, we obtain it and read the document rather than a summary of it — signature block, recitals, acknowledgement and all. Where nothing of the kind exists, the finding records that fact and states which document is absent.
Apply the stop rule, then decide
The five conditions below are checked one at a time and the result is written down before anything leaves the building. If a condition fails, the deliverable is a not-confirmed with a named next document. That decision is made by us, not by the calendar.
The stop rule: what we will not call confirmed
A standard is only real if it sometimes stops you. This is ours, written in the form we actually apply it.
All five conditions have to hold before a name is released for contact. Not most of them, and not four plus a good feeling about the fifth.
The five conditions
One: the proposition was written before the search began, so nothing was selected as an identifier after a candidate appeared. Two: at least two corroborating facts trace to records made by different creators, on different occasions — the independence test, applied to the records rather than the screens. Three: at least one identifier discriminates against the specific confusion present in this file, chosen for that confusion rather than taken off a checklist, and the file names which confusion it was. Four: every relied-on fact carries an as-of date, and the conclusion is dated to the oldest of them. Five: no competing candidate remains that the available evidence cannot separate. Condition five is the one people most want to waive, usually because the remaining candidate is inconvenient rather than because it has been ruled out.
What a not-confirmed contains
When a condition fails, the output is not silence and not a hedge. It has three parts: what was tested and what each test returned; what conflicted, and separately what could not be tested at all; and the single document that would close the question, named alongside the office that holds it and a realistic estimate of how long obtaining it takes. That is a finished piece of work. It converts an unresolved matter into a defined next purchase, which is a decision you can make in ten seconds, rather than into a shrug you have to interpret.
What does not happen while the answer is unresolved
We do not contact the candidate. We do not hand a plausible name to somebody else to contact on the understanding that they will “just check”. We do not narrow the question by reaching into the person’s circle. And a candidate we rule out is described in the finding by the reason for the exclusion, never by their file — passing along a dossier on a person who has just been established to have no connection to the matter is the harm the exclusion was meant to prevent, arriving anyway.
Refusing to confirm is not free for us either, and it would be dishonest to present it as costless discipline. It converts a finished job into an open one and hands a client who wanted a name a document request instead, and that conversation is never the popular one. We would still rather have it than the other conversation, which happens after a letter has already gone out.
Where our lines are drawn, and what holding them costs
The shortcuts available at this particular step are unusually tempting, for the uncomfortable reason that most of them work.
We are a public records research firm, not licensed private investigators, and we claim no investigative licensure on this page. Read the material above as general information about identification practice rather than as legal advice on your own file; anything with legal consequence attached to it belongs with your own counsel. No file opens here without a lawful purpose written into it first: service on a named party, recovery against a judgment debtor, notice to an heir or a witness, identifying the human being behind a signature, restoring contact between family members who both want it. That purpose is recorded before research starts, because a permissible purpose settled on afterwards is a justification wearing the word. The inputs are public records and lawfully licensed data, and nothing else.
We do not pretext, and on this page that refusal costs something worth naming out loud. The fastest way to end an ambiguous identification is to telephone the candidate’s employer, neighbor or relative under a false pretense and ask the one question that settles it. It works, it is quick, and it is not available here. Nobody on our side misstates their identity or their reason for calling. Nobody plays a courier, an alumni office, an old workmate, a clerk from some agency, a market researcher or a caller returning a missed call. And we do not hand the script to a client so that the same call can be placed at one remove. An identification extracted by deceiving somebody is not confirmed but contaminated, and where that somebody turns out to belong to the misidentified namesake’s life rather than your subject’s, the count of people harmed has just gone from one to two. Our fuller note on where pretexting sits in law and practice covers the ground in detail.
The financial side of that boundary is written into federal law and is worth stating exactly. It is a violation to obtain, or attempt to obtain, customer information of a financial institution about another person by making a false, fictitious or fraudulent statement to the institution or to its customer, or by presenting a document known to be forged, counterfeit or fraudulently obtained — and it is equally a violation to request another person to obtain that information in any of those ways. Read alongside the subchapter’s definitions, “customer information” is broad: information maintained by or for the institution, derived from its relationship with the customer, and identified with that customer. So the prohibition is not narrowly about balances. We do not retrieve statement detail, real-time device location, telephone toll records or the substance of anybody’s messages, and we do not commission anyone else to retrieve them on our behalf.
A verification method that touches the subject is not a verification. This is the specific trap of this page, and it is subtler than pretexting because it can be done with complete honesty. A “wrong number” text to see who replies, an email with a read receipt, a call that hangs up when a voice answers, a message to a listed relative asking whether this is the right family — each of those is a contact, made by somebody who had not yet established that they had the right person, and one of them is a contact with an uninvolved stranger. It also destroys the option of a considered first approach, which is often the thing the client cared most about. Where a search needs to stay unannounced, that is a decision taken at the start of the work and designed into it, not a technique improvised at the confirmation step.
This firm does not operate as a consumer reporting agency, and of all our pages this is the one where saying so matters most. The question “am I sure this is the right person” arrives constantly from employers and from landlords, and an identity finding is not a consumer report. It cannot lawfully drive an eligibility decision under the Fair Credit Reporting Act — a tenancy, a hiring or retention call, a promotion, the granting or review of credit, an insurance underwriting decision, or anything else on that list. There is a sharper reason than the formal one. A namesake mix-up is precisely the harm the FCRA’s accuracy machinery was built to prevent — wrong-person merges are among the most common serious errors in regulated files, and the statute answers them with a correction route: on a consumer’s dispute the agency must, free of charge, conduct a reasonable reinvestigation and either record the current status of the disputed information or delete it, generally within thirty days of receiving the notice. Nothing you assemble privately carries any of that. The person confused with your subject has no notice, no dispute route and no deletion right in your file. If the decision at the end of your question is a screening decision, it belongs with an FCRA-regulated provider, and our note on what a compliant background check actually involves sets out where the line falls.
Some confirmations we will not carry out at all, and the test is who stands on the other end of the answer. Where a file involves an order of protection, a history of stalking or domestic abuse, enrollment in a state address-confidentiality program, or a custody dispute in which one parent is trying to locate the other, we halt the work and say why. The referral goes to the issuing court, to a victim-services advocate, or to law enforcement: those routes can get a document delivered or a whereabouts checked without an address ever landing in a private requester’s hands. Establishing that somebody is the right person settles an evidentiary question and grants no entitlement to approach them, and we will not chart a person’s relatives and neighbors so that an approach they have already refused can arrive from another direction.
Who cannot afford a confident wrong answer
Different work, one shared exposure: the consequence leaves your hands before anybody checks it twice.
Civil litigation and service teams
Once a server is dispatched the identification is out of your control. Confirmation belongs before the assignment, not in the affidavit afterwards.
Collections and recovery counsel
A namesake reached about somebody else’s account becomes a problem the moment the first letter is posted, and every later contact makes it larger.
Probate and trust administration
Distributions run to a named individual. Same-name confusion here moves money, and moving it back generally requires a court.
Claims and subrogation
A claimant, witness or lienholder confused with a namesake restarts the file and puts an uninvolved person’s details inside it permanently.
Lenders and small businesses
Before a demand goes out on a personal guarantee, the guarantor has to be the individual who actually signed it, established from the instrument.
People with a personal reason to be sure
A relative who has to be told something, a birth parent, a co-signer whose name sits on a paper in your drawer. Identical standard, identical refusal when it is unmet.
The thread running through all six is that a mistake here gets paid for by somebody who was never in the room and will never be told. That is the entire argument for a standard which sometimes returns nothing: what gives a confirmation its value is not the name printed at the top but the demonstrated willingness to have withheld it.
You will always be told which condition failed
Every confirmation we return names the facts it rests on, who created each one and when, and the identifier used to separate your candidate from the nearest one that was not them. Where the standard is not met we say not confirmed, name the single document that would close the question and the office holding it, and we say it before anything is sent rather than after. Most requests come back within 24 hours, and an unresolved answer that arrives on time is worth considerably more than a confident one that arrives at all.
Questions about confirming before contact
How many sources do I need before I contact someone?
Two, but the number is the least important part of the sentence. Two facts count as two only if the records behind them were created by different people, on different occasions, for unrelated reasons. Six agreeing panels on one profile can be a single compiled file displayed six ways. Before counting anything, ask who created the record, what event caused it to exist, and when. If both answers are the same, you have one source and you should keep working.
Two people-search sites show the same address. Is that verified?
Usually not. Consumer people-search products largely publish data licensed from a small number of wholesale compilers, and they license from one another as well, so the same underlying record appears across many brands. Agreement between two such sites is normally evidence that both bought the same file, not evidence about the person. Independent corroboration means a record created by an institution for its own reasons: a recorder, a court clerk, a licensing board, a registrar.
Which single detail is most likely to separate two people with the same name?
It depends entirely on which confusion you have, which is why generic checklists underperform. For two unrelated adults, a full date of birth from an issuing record. For a father and son, a middle name spelled out or a suffix as it appears in a signature block, because both men share the address, the phone and the relatives. Where a surname changed, a document carrying both names at once. Where the candidate may be deceased, a death record paired with one act your subject performed after that date.
How old can a fact be before I stop relying on it?
Different facts age at completely different rates, so a single freshness rating for a profile is not meaningful. A birth date never expires. A recorded deed is permanently true as of its recording date and says nothing about who lives there now. Addresses and phone numbers turn over constantly, and disconnected mobile numbers get reassigned to new subscribers. Write the date each fact was true beside it, and date your conclusion to the oldest fact it depends on rather than the newest.
What is the difference between a court record in a database and the filing itself?
The database is showing you an index entry: a pointer with a few normalized fields, captured so the document can be located later. Middle names are often reduced to initials, suffixes are dropped and spellings are regularized. The filing itself carries the parties as pleaded and as signed, the co-parties, the recitals and the acknowledgement. Under Federal Rule of Evidence 902(4), a certified copy of an official record is self-authenticating, but note what that certifies: the copy is a true copy of what the office holds, not that the statements inside it are true.
Can I just call and ask whether I have the right person?
Two problems, and the second one catches people who would never consider the first. Asking an employer, neighbor or relative under a false pretense is pretexting, and where the target is a financial institution or its customer, obtaining information that way — or asking somebody else to obtain it that way — is prohibited by federal law. But even a completely honest call is a contact, made before you established that you had the right person, and possibly made to an uninvolved stranger. That is the outcome the verification step exists to prevent, so it cannot be the method.
I need this for a job applicant or a prospective tenant. Can I use it?
No. An identity finding is not a consumer report and may not be used for employment, tenancy, credit, insurance or any other eligibility decision under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Use an FCRA-regulated screening provider instead. There is a substantive reason as well as a formal one: a namesake mix-up is exactly the harm the statute’s accuracy and reinvestigation provisions exist to address, and a regulated report carries a dispute and correction route that a private file simply does not have.
What does a not-confirmed actually get me? I need an answer.
It gets you a defined next step instead of an unmarked risk. A not-confirmed sets out what was tested and what each test returned, what conflicted and separately what could not be tested at all, and the single document that would close the question, named alongside the office that holds it and how long it takes to obtain. That turns an open matter into one purchasing decision. The alternative is a name with an unstated probability attached, acted on by somebody downstream who was never told there was any doubt.
Send us the candidate before you send anything else
Give us the name exactly as your source document spells it, whatever identifiers you already hold, and what you intend to do once it is confirmed — the intended action decides which identifier has to be settled first. You will get back a confirmation with its evidence named and dated, or a not-confirmed naming the document that would close it. Unsure whether the reason behind your request is one we are able to accept? Put that question to a researcher before you send the file over.
Start a confirmation request
