Are Free Criminal Background Checks Worthwhile?
July 18th, 2008 by admin
Are you planning to do a background check on someone? If you are you do have a few different options. The most common ones being theFree Criminal Background Checks or paid criminal background checks. Now, which one would you chose?
Doesn’t quality cost? Is it really possible to find out anything worthwhile for without having to pay for it? You would maybe be really surprised by the amount of information that you can find online at absolutely no cost these days. While not all of the free background information can be found online most of it can be found while sitting in front of your computer.
There is a National Sex Offender Registry which often is a very valuable tool for checking up on people. You do not want a previously convicted sex offender to take care of your kids nor do you want to date a sex offender. Many states have got their own sex offender registries nowadays but you usually have to visit some local office to get the information. Some of them will provide you with a local map and show you where the registered sex offenders live. Whether this is good practice or not may be discussed but this is how it works. People may change and just because someone got convicted as a sex offender because they had sex with their thirteen year old girlfriend when they were eighteen does not mean they are a danger to others. Use common sense! Not all convicted sex offenders update their register as they should, not all of them update their addresses as they should and of course a lot of pedophiles have not been caught and convicted and are still at large.
For most parents these kinds of convicted people really are a nightmare. If you have children, and you knew that a pedophile lived near your house, would you allow your children to walk or bicycle past that person’s house? No, you most likely would not. I know I would not at least. However, on the other hand, what are the chances that this person is going to grab a kid and drag him or her into his house? You can find a lot of information if you just dig deep enough and visit enough public registries but it is a daunting and very time consuming task.
These kinds of free criminal background checks can also tell you if someone has been arrested and convicted for domestic assault and battery, shoplifting, fraud, drugs, driving under the influence, where they have lived in the past etcetera. All these things are the kind of stuff you really want to know about a potential tenant, boyfriend, girlfriend, employee, or babysitter. It is ok to use common sense and remember that people may change but when it comes to someone taking care of your babies or children you should not take any chances as these are some of the areas where there are the least chance that the person in question actually has changed their habits.
If you are planning to rent out a house or an apartment would you not like to know if the person you plan to rent out to person has been sued by his previous landlords or has filed lawsuits against his landlords and what the subject of these lawsuits was? Really, if someone has been sued by their past previous three landlords, is that not something you want to know that? I know I would like to!
While these kinds of free background checks have some limits they can provide you with the basic info you need. It is really time consuming going to all the different offices and archives as well and the information you get may be outdated. Also, another problem is that these kinds of free background checks that you get at your local offices only will tell you what happened in your county with an except for the National Sex Offender Registry. In a time were people move often, and especially convicted criminals move across county borders more often than before, these kind of county-restricted background checks do not have much use.
Therefore, it makes a lot more sense to do a nationwide search for not only a limited number of registries but a complete thorough check including 10-20 different records along with the possibility to search on SSN numbers. These checks are not completely free but for a small one-time fee of usually 30-50 dollars you will get unlimited lifetime access and can do as many searches as you feel like. Also, these kind of checks offered by CIS are updated regularly and takes no more than a few minutes (less than 5 minutes!) and give you all the information you can desire.
If you don’t want to go through a lot of hassle visiting offices I suggest you visit a site called SmartBackgroundChecks.com where you can do Free Criminal Background Checks through their preliminary search box and if you find something interesting on the person in question you may upgrade to receive the full record. It is absolutely worth a try.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 2:27 am and is filed under Management Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.