What Instant Checkmate Can and Can’t Tell You
The product is sold on criminal records. The law that governs criminal records in a screening decision says a consumer people-search subscription is not the tool for that decision. This page explains that tension honestly: what criminal-record content on a consumer site structurally is, where it goes thin, why a wrong match is the most damaging error in this whole category, and what a records-research firm working under a permissible purpose does instead.
Before you act on a criminal hit
It can tell you that a name is associated with something. It can surface aliases, an address trail, relatives, phone numbers and public-record hits attached to a name and a date of birth. It cannot tell you that the hit belongs to your person, because commercial matching runs on identifiers that repeat across a population while the official criminal-history systems that hold the underlying records are built on fingerprints. And it cannot lawfully tell you what to do about it in the decisions people buy it for: renting a unit, making a hire, choosing a caregiver, extending credit. Those are FCRA-covered decisions, and they belong with a compliant screening provider that owes the subject notice, dispute rights and an adverse-action process. Everything below is the long version of why.
Watch: Reading a Consumer Background Report Honestly
A short walkthrough of the three questions worth asking about any criminal-record line on a people-search report, before you act on it.
Three questions before you act on a hit
The Disclaimer Is the Whole Story
A consumer people-search product markets criminal-record content and disclaims the decisions criminal records are used to make. Understanding that sentence is most of what a buyer needs.
Search interest in this product clusters around a handful of moments: a new tenant application, a candidate who seems too good, a babysitter, a first date, a business partner asking for money. Those are the moments when a person wants to know about criminal history. They are also, almost exactly, the list of uses the Fair Credit Reporting Act covers – employment, tenant screening, credit, insurance underwriting, and eligibility for a license or benefit granted by a government body. A consumer people-search subscription sits outside that regime by design and says so in its terms. The result is a genuine mismatch between what the product is bought for and what it is offered for.
That mismatch is not a theory. In September 2023 the Federal Trade Commission announced an action against the operators of TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate, resolved by a proposed stipulated order carrying a 5.8 million dollar civil penalty and a requirement to build an ongoing program to assess whether the companies are operating as consumer reporting agencies. According to the FTC’s complaint, the companies sent push notifications and marketing emails saying a report subject had a criminal or arrest record when the record was a traffic ticket; the information in the reports came from third parties that expressly disclaimed its accuracy; and the companies took no steps to verify it. The complaint further alleged that a Remove button removed a disputed item from that one customer’s view while leaving it visible to everyone else who searched the same person, and that items flagged as inaccurate were never investigated. The Commission’s announcement of the case sets all of this out.
Two pieces of fairness belong here, and we are not going to skip them. First, the FTC files a complaint when it has, in its own words, “reason to believe” that a defendant is violating or is about to violate the law; a stipulated order is a negotiated resolution, not a verdict after trial. Second, we have not read the company’s contracts, data-supply agreements or matching code, and nothing on this page asserts anything about them. What the record supports is narrower and more useful: the presence of a disclaimer did not, in the Commission’s view, settle whether the reports were consumer reports. The FTC’s position was that marketing and selling reports for tenant and employment screening is what makes a company a consumer reporting agency, whatever the footer says.
For the reader that lands somewhere counter-intuitive. A disclaimer is a limit on you, not a warranty about the data. It tells you which decisions you may not make with the report. It does not tell you the report is accurate enough for the decisions you may make. Those are separate questions, and the second one is the subject of the rest of this page. If you want the field-by-field error taxonomy that applies across all of these sites – stale addresses, phantom relatives, the wrong person with your name – our guide to people-search accuracy already covers it in detail, so we will not repeat it here and will stay on criminal records.
Where Criminal-Record Data Comes From, and Where It Stops
There is no single national criminal-record file open to consumer search. There are jurisdictions, and jurisdictions have edges.
Criminal history in the United States is assembled from the bottom up. An arrest is made by a local agency, charges are filed or declined by a prosecutor, a court disposes of the case, and each of those events has to be reported into a state central repository before it exists as a record anyone can look up. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has surveyed those repositories for decades; its most recent published round covers 56 jurisdictions as of the end of 2022, with all fifty states, the District of Columbia and Guam responding. A criminal history record, in that survey’s definition, is an individual’s arrests and subsequent dispositions – and the survey measures, state by state, what share of arrests in the database actually have a final disposition recorded. The fact that a federal statistical agency measures that gap is the plainest available evidence that the gap is real.
It gets subtler. The same survey notes that states do not even agree on what counts as disposed. Some treat an arrest as having a disposition if any final disposition can be associated with the arrest cycle – commonly called cycle matching. Others do not treat an arrest as disposed until every charge in it is linked to a final disposition, called charge matching. Two states can publish the same completeness figure and mean materially different things by it. That is upstream of every commercial product. No aggregator can be more complete than the jurisdictions it buys from, and none of them can repair a disposition that was never reported to the repository in the first place.
Then there is coverage. Court records are held court by court, and the terms on which a county makes its index available in bulk vary enormously – some publish, some sell, some allow only one-name-at-a-time lookups, some are not online at all. A commercial criminal search is therefore a patchwork of the jurisdictions that made records obtainable, not a sweep of the country. A clean result is not proof of a clean record. It is proof that nothing surfaced in the jurisdictions that particular product happens to reach, under the name and date of birth you typed. Those are very different statements, and only one of them is safe to rely on.
The most consequential gap is the one between an arrest and its outcome. An arrest entry with no disposition attached is not evidence of guilt; in most of those cases something happened afterwards – a declination, a dismissal, an acquittal, a reduction, a diversion that ended in no conviction – and the record simply does not carry it. Readers routinely treat the arrest line as the answer. It is the question. Our explainer on how arrests behave in background checks works through what that means when the decision is a hiring one.
None of this is a fault peculiar to one brand, and it would be unfair to present it as one. Arrest-to-disposition reporting, county publishing terms and repository coverage are properties of the criminal-record system itself, and every product built on top of that system inherits them – the paid tiers as much as the free ones. What genuinely differs is whether the inheritance is explained to the buyer or quietly sold as a national criminal search. Our primer on public records sets out who the custodians are and what obliges them to publish at all.
The Record That Should Not Be There
Sealing and expungement operate on the original. They do not automatically reach the copies that were sold before the order was signed.
When a court seals or expunges a case, the relief runs against the custodian of the record. The clerk restricts it, the repository suppresses it, and a fresh check of the official source comes back clean. Commercial databases are not the official source; they are accumulated copies, refreshed on whatever schedule a supplier contract sets. A copy taken before the order was entered does not know the order exists. Whether it disappears depends entirely on whether the aggregator ingests a correction and propagates it – which is a business process, not a legal automatic.
The FTC complaint discussed above is instructive precisely because it describes that propagation failing in a documented way. On the Commission’s account, the Remove button suppressed a disputed item for the person who clicked it while other customers searching the same name continued to see it. Whatever one concludes about that particular matter, it illustrates the general risk cleanly: a correction that is not propagated is not a correction. A person can watch an item vanish from their own screen and have no idea it is still being served to the next subscriber who types their name.
Federal law does put time limits on some of this, but only inside the consumer-report regime. Under 15 U.S.C. 1681c, a consumer report may not contain records of arrest that antedate it by more than seven years, or until the governing statute of limitations has expired, whichever is longer; and it may not contain any other adverse item, other than records of convictions of crimes, older than seven years. Note what that does and does not do. Convictions are not time-limited by that provision. And the limits themselves fall away for reports used in connection with employment at an annual salary that equals or may reasonably be expected to equal $75,000 or more, along with large credit and life-insurance transactions. These are rules about consumer reports. A product that is not offered as a consumer report is not applying them for you.
If you are the person a stale record is attached to, the practical routes are the official ones. Get certified documentation of the disposition or the sealing order from the court that entered it, then work outward: dispute with any screening company that reported it, and use each consumer site’s own correction channel. Our guide to clean-slate and expungement law covers the relief itself, and the walkthrough of what these sites publish about you covers finding every copy that is out there.
A Subscription Result Versus a Sourced Record Check
Both are lawful. They answer different questions, and only one of them can be defended when someone asks where it came from.
| The question | People Locator Skip Tracing | A consumer people-search subscription |
|---|---|---|
| What you receive | A record pulled to the jurisdiction that holds it, with the case number and the current statusSourced | A database extract compiled from third-party feeds |
| Identity confidence | Confirmed against corroborating identifiers before it is reported, or reported as unconfirmed | Matched on name and date of birth, with a likelihood indicator |
| Arrest with no outcome | Chased to the disposition, or reported explicitly as an open question | Displayed as it was ingested |
| When the answer is wrong | We correct it, tell you what changed, and say why the first read was wrong | Handled through the site’s own dispute channel |
| What it costs you to be wrong | Borne by us; we re-run the search | Borne by the person the record was attached to |
| Use it to screen a tenant, a hire, a borrower or an insured | No. Neither of these is a consumer report, and neither may be used for an FCRA-covered decision. That work belongs with a compliant screening provider. | |
The bottom row is the one people skip, so it is worth stating in full rather than in a footer. We are a records-research firm, not a screening bureau, and the fact that our sourcing is stronger does not move us into the covered-use column – it just means the answer we give for a lawful purpose can be traced to a custodian. That posture is the same across everything on our skip tracing services, and it is the reason we turn work away rather than stretch it.
When the Disputed Field Is a Criminal Allegation
Every people-search product has an identity-matching problem. The stakes are not the same in every field.
The official systems that hold criminal history solve identity with biometrics. The BJS survey describes state repository data as usually backed by fingerprints of the record subjects to provide positive identification, and the central repository is generally responsible for state-level identification of arrestees. That is the standard the underlying records were built to. A consumer search cannot meet it and does not claim to. It works from a name, a date of birth, sometimes an address history – identifiers that recur across a population, especially within families that reuse given names and within common surnames. A likelihood indicator next to a criminal line is an honest admission that the product knows this.
The consequence is asymmetric in a way that matters morally. A wrong address costs you a wasted letter. A wrong phone number costs you a wasted call. A wrong criminal record costs a third party a job, a lease, a relationship or custody, and that third party is not your customer, has no idea the search happened, and gets no notice and no chance to respond. In the whole taxonomy of people-search errors this is the one with a victim who never finds out.
Federal law recognizes exactly that hazard, though again only within the consumer-report regime. Where a report is prepared for a covered purpose, 15 U.S.C. 1681e(b) requires a consumer reporting agency to follow “reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy of the information concerning the individual about whom the report relates” – note the last clause, which is an identity requirement as much as an accuracy one. And 15 U.S.C. 1681k tells an agency reporting public-record information likely to have an adverse effect on employment that it must either notify the consumer at the time, with the name and address of the user, or maintain strict procedures to keep the information complete and up to date – and it defines up to date for arrests, indictments, convictions, suits, tax liens and outstanding judgments as reporting the current public record status at the time of the report.
Read that against a database snapshot and the gap is obvious. Current public record status cannot be satisfied by a copy of what a county published at ingestion time; it requires going back to the source on the day of the report. That is the specific work a records pull does and a subscription lookup structurally cannot, and it is why we treat a criminal-record hit as a lead to be resolved at the courthouse rather than a finding to be forwarded.
What This Looks Like In Real Situations
Six moments where the difference between a database hit and a sourced record changes what a person should do next.
A felony line with no year and no county
The single most common thing people paste to us. Without a court, a case number and a date it is not yet a record, it is a string. The first thing we do is establish which jurisdiction it claims to come from, because a hit that cannot be located in a court index is a hit that cannot be relied on by anyone.
An arrest from years ago that simply stops
No plea, no verdict, no sentence, nothing. Nine times in ten the case ended and the ending was never reported upward. Resolving it means the clerk’s index in that county, not a better search on the same site, and the answer is frequently that there was no conviction at all.
A father and a son sharing a name
Same surname, same given name, one generational suffix that half the source systems never captured. This is where a family record migrates onto the wrong member of the family, and it is why we will not report a criminal hit on a shared name without an identifier that separates the two.
A case the court says no longer exists
The subject holds a sealing order and the listing is still up. The order binds the custodian; the aggregator holds a copy taken earlier. The route is certified documentation from the issuing court, then each site’s correction channel, then a check that the removal actually propagated.
A clean report that the buyer reads as a clearance
The riskiest outcome on this page, because nothing looks wrong. A clean consumer result means nothing surfaced in the jurisdictions that product reaches, under the identifiers entered. It is not a national clearance and it should never be relied on as one, least of all where a vulnerable person is involved.
A request that is really a screening decision
Someone asks us to confirm a record because they are deciding on a tenancy or a hire. We decline that framing and say why: it is an FCRA-covered decision, it needs a compliant screening provider, and dressing it up as research would cost the applicant the notice and dispute rights the statute gives them.
How We Work a Criminal-Record Question
Four steps, in this order, with the option of stopping at any of them.
Establish the purpose first
Before any searching, we record why the record is being sought and who is asking. If the answer is a tenancy, a hire, a loan or an insurance decision, that is where the engagement ends and we say so plainly rather than reframing it.
Fix the identity, not the name
We assemble the identifiers that distinguish your subject from everyone who shares their name, and we set the threshold in advance. A hit we cannot separate from a relative or a stranger is reported as unresolved, never as a probable match.
Go to the custodian
Every line we intend to report is taken back to the court or agency that holds it, and read as it stands today – case number, charges as filed, and the disposition. That is the difference between a database echo and a record.
Report the gaps as loudly as the hits
You get what we found, where it came from, and what we could not establish – the counties not covered, the charge without an outcome, the name we could not separate. Absence of a record is written down as absence of a record, not as clearance.
The Lines We Hold on a Record Question
The limits below are not a footer. On a page about criminal records they are the most important thing on it.
We are a skip-tracing and public-records research firm. We are not licensed private investigators and we do not hold ourselves out as an investigative agency of any kind. We work from records that a custodian makes lawfully available and from lawful commercial data sources, and every engagement is opened against a stated permissible purpose that we write down before any searching begins. We do not pretext. Nobody here telephones a clerk, an employer, a landlord or a relative pretending to be someone else, and we do not buy from anyone who does. We do not obtain private financial contents – no account numbers, no balances, no card activity – and we have no access to anything non-public: no live location, no carrier data, no account contents. If a page anywhere promises you those things, that is the promise to walk away from.
We are not a consumer reporting agency, and nothing we produce is a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Our work may not be used to decide whether to rent to someone, to hire, promote or dismiss someone, to extend credit, to underwrite insurance, or to grant a license or benefit that turns on an applicant’s record. Those are the FCRA-covered decisions, set out in the statute’s permissible-purpose provisions, and they require a compliant screening provider that gives the subject notice, dispute rights and an adverse-action process. If that is the decision in front of you, we will tell you so and point you at the right kind of provider instead of taking the work. Our overview of FCRA-compliant background checks explains what that route involves.
We decline safety-adverse work. If the purpose of finding a person is to reach someone who moved to get away from the requester, we stop. Where a protective order, a stalking complaint, an address confidentiality program or any domestic violence concern is anywhere near the facts, the matter goes to law enforcement, to the court that issued the order, or to a victim-services advocate – people who can act on a location in ways a research firm cannot and must not. We do not take that work on the strength of a plausible story, and a criminal-record question is not a reason to make an exception; if anything it raises the bar, because the most common use for someone else’s record in a hostile situation is leverage.
Finally, and for the same reason: this page is general information about how criminal-record data behaves in commercial databases, not legal advice. What a specific record means for a specific decision depends on the law of the state that produced it, and that question belongs with a lawyer there. Since 2004 our answer to work that sits outside these limits has been the same – we say no, we say why, and we point somewhere better.
Who Asks Us About a Record
Note who is not on this list. Tenant screening, hiring and lending are covered uses and belong elsewhere.
Attorneys and litigants
Confirming a party’s record to the case number before it goes in a filing
Creditors enforcing a judgment
Locating a debtor already subject to a judgment, without touching their record
Probate and estate researchers
Separating heirs who share a family name across several generations
People named in a wrong record
Establishing what the court actually holds so a correction can be demanded
Servers working a stale address
Confirming an address is current before a service attempt is wasted
Journalists and researchers
Verifying a public-record claim back to the document before publishing it
What connects them is that none is making a decision the Fair Credit Reporting Act governs. Each needs a record established rather than a decision recommended, and each can say, if asked, exactly which office the answer came from.
What we promise about a record
We will not report a criminal-record line to you unless we can name the court or agency that holds it and state its current status. If we cannot separate your subject from someone who shares their name, you get that sentence instead of a guess. Where the answer is that nothing surfaced, we write down which jurisdictions we reached so you know the size of the silence. Most intake questions get a straight answer from us within 24 hours, including the answer that we are the wrong firm for what you need.
Questions People Actually Ask
Can I use Instant Checkmate to screen a tenant or an employee?
No. A consumer people-search subscription is not offered as a consumer report, and tenant screening, employment, credit and insurance decisions are the paradigm FCRA-covered uses. That is not a technicality about the vendor’s terms – it is the point of the statute, which gives the person being screened notice, dispute rights and an adverse-action process. Those protections only exist if you use a compliant screening provider. We hold the same line: our research is not a consumer report either.
Does a consumer background report show every criminal record?
No product does. Criminal history is assembled jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and counties differ enormously in what they publish, sell or withhold. A commercial search reaches the jurisdictions its suppliers reach. So a clean result tells you nothing surfaced under the identifiers you entered, in the places that product covers – which is a much narrower statement than a clean record, and should never be treated as a clearance.
Why does a report show an arrest with no outcome attached?
Because the outcome was frequently never reported into the state repository, or was reported in a way the aggregator did not ingest. The Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of state criminal history systems measures exactly this gap, and states do not even agree on how to count it – some treat an arrest as disposed if any final disposition attaches to the arrest cycle, others require every charge to be linked. An arrest line without a disposition is an unanswered question, not a finding.
Can a sealed or expunged record still appear on a people-search site?
It can, because sealing binds the custodian of the original while commercial databases hold copies taken earlier. Removal depends on the aggregator ingesting and propagating a correction. The FTC’s 2023 complaint against the operators of TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate alleged that a Remove button suppressed an item only for the customer who used it while others still saw it – an allegation resolved by a stipulated order rather than a trial, but a clear illustration of why a correction has to be verified rather than assumed.
How confident can I be that a criminal hit is the same person?
Less confident than the layout suggests. The state systems holding the underlying records identify people with fingerprints; a consumer product matches on a name and a date of birth, which repeat across a population and repeat especially within families. That is why these products attach a likelihood indicator to criminal lines. Treat a hit on a shared name as unresolved until something that is genuinely unique to your subject separates them.
What did the FTC actually do about Instant Checkmate?
In September 2023 the Commission announced an action against the operators of TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate, resolved through a proposed stipulated order carrying a 5.8 million dollar civil penalty plus a requirement to monitor whether the companies are acting as consumer reporting agencies. The complaint alleged deceptive marketing about report contents and FCRA violations. Fairly stated: the FTC brings a complaint on a reason-to-believe standard, and a stipulated order is a settlement, not a finding after trial.
A people-search site shows a record that is not mine. What now?
Start with the court, not the website. Obtain certified documentation of the disposition, the dismissal or the sealing order from the clerk who holds the case. That document is what every downstream correction rests on. Then dispute with any screening company that reported it, use each consumer site’s correction channel, and check afterwards that the item is actually gone rather than hidden from your own view. Do this even if the record has not yet cost you anything.
What can your firm do that a subscription cannot?
Go back to the custodian. We take a lead to the court or agency that holds the file and read the record as it stands on the day we report it, with the case number and the current status, or we tell you we could not confirm it. We also report what we could not reach. What we will not do is let that stronger sourcing be used for a covered decision – the answer to a screening question is still a compliant screening provider.
Got a Hit You Cannot Verify?
Send us the name, the jurisdiction you think it came from, and what you are trying to decide. If the record can be established at a courthouse, we will establish it and show you the source. If your question is really a screening decision, we will say so and point you somewhere compliant – tell us what you are looking at and you will get an honest answer either way.
Start a sourced record check
