There are NO totally free background check services online. We tested 25+ background check services that add a FREE tag. Unfortunately, all those free sites either redirect you to a paid service or work in a freemium model.
These freemium services provide basic address and state information. This is enough if you are looking for the address of a long-lost relative.
But if you want to be sure about your safety when going on a date, you need more than address details. You will need your date’s criminal reports, arrest records, bankruptcy details, states they lived in, and more.
So,
How To Do Background Check for Free?
In scenarios like background checks for dating where you need complete historical and current details, the easy solution is getting detailed reports from paid background check services.
However, there are a few other methods to help you get background check data for free or almost free.
Method 1: $1 BeenVerified 7-day Trial – Visit Site
BeenVerified, with over 150 million records in its database, can be used to find extensive data on people, phone numbers, emails, addresses, vehicles, properties, and more. It is an excellent tool to find your relatives, old friends, and teachers, to do background checks on your new date, neighbor, and more.
BeenVerified is also the best free online background check service for doing a background check on yourself. In addition to scouting the details from the internet, it can also check if your identity is used on the dark web. Thanks to its dark web feature.
Another good thing about BeenVerified is its comprehensive feature-rich packages. For instance, the dark web scan feature mentioned above is a paid addon on other top services like TruthFinder, whereas BeenVerified gives it in a standard package.
So now that we tagged it as a free service, let’s get to the question – Is BeenVerified free?
No, it is not completely free. But it can be almost free.
BeenVerified has a $1 free trial that gives you access to 100 detailed reports for 7 days.
Here is how to access the 7-day trial on BeenVerified.
Step 1 – You can go to the coupons page on BeenVerified
Step 2 – You can see a 7-day trial for a $1 deal 
Note: But BeenVerified is pretty dynamic with their coupons. If you cannot find the deal in the picture above, you can use a cart abandonment hack to get this trial. We discussed it in the next step.
Step 3 – If you are new to the cart abandonment trick, follow these steps.
- Go to the sign-up page.
- Follow the screen messages until you see monthly price details like this.
- Once you are on this page, go to the card details part, enter your name, and try to go to the previous page on the browser.
- Then BeenVerfied pops up the offer.
Step 4 – Please remember this trial is valid for 7 days, and you can only generate 100 reports with this offer. If you do not cancel the subscription before the trial ends, you pay $26.89 monthly.
Note: If you are not keen on using your regular email for this cart abandonment hack, you can use mail.tm to generate a temporary email easily.
Method 2: Spyflu
Is SpyFly totally free?
SpyFly offers the closest thing to a free criminal record check. Users can get bits of a single report without paying. However, you must create an account to access the entire document.
The website pulls its information directly from state, federal, and municipal public databases. It lets you do a background search for free with a name, phone number, or email address.
A low trial fee gives you access to their databases for seven days. Then, if you choose to keep your membership, the price is less than $30 per month.
Method 3: Using Open Public Records To Do Background Checks
In our quest to find ways to do a free criminal background check on your new date or to analyze what your employer can see on your background check report, we tried free trials or cheap packages of all top background check sites.
Now we can clearly say NO as an answer to the question: is there a totally free background check site with no credit card needed?
But thanks to open and free public databases, finding background check information for free is still possible.
However, before you try this method, we would like to mention that it can be totally free and easy in some use cases and way more expensive and complicated in others. It all depends on the type of information you are looking for.
For example, finding basic information about an individual is relatively easy. You can use free city white pages or social media for basic identities and address details. But if you are looking for the criminal history and court records of someone, then it becomes way more complicated.
How To Do Free Criminal Background Check on Someone?
Many open public records can help you do criminal background checks on someone for free. How to find them and how to get access to them are big questions of this method.
Here are a few ways to find those open public records:
- Courthouses
Suppose you want to do a free criminal record check or dig up a person’s court case dockets or previous convictions. In that case, you can go directly to the respective county or circuit court websites to see if they have digitalized dockets. For instance, you can check most cases in Alameda, a county in California, at https://publicrecords.alameda.courts.ca.gov/PRS/home/.
Also, you can directly go to the courthouse office to access the open files. However, there are special requirements and restrictions with this method.
- NCSC – National Centre for State Courts
If you are still looking for direct court websites or other details about the courthouses, you can use National Centre for State Courts to find information on the county or circuit court you are looking for in the USA.
Here is a complete list of websites for each state that can give you access to respective county court files.
For example, using this link, we found https://pa.alacourt.com/, which can help us find information on cases in Alabama.
Note: These court database portals have some requirements and restrictions, and most are not free. For instance, the website Just One Look, listed in the NCSC.org archives, charges $9.99 for a name search.
- PACER For Federal Courts Information
If you want to access federal information, you can do so at PACER.gov. Using the site is easy if you follow the sign-up guide. While signing up on the website is free, they still charge a fee if you wish to view court documentation.
The fee is 10c per page. Luckily, there’s a hard cap of $3,00 for multiple-page documents. So, you won’t have to spend $50 to look at a 500-page court document.
- National Archives and Records Administration
You can use National Archives Catalog to find if a person has served in the Army, Navy, or U.S. Air Force. They have state-wide records online, and also they let you book an appointment to go to their offices directly to find out the information you need.
- There are also other resources that can help you give background check information for free.
- www.nsopw.gov can help you check if a person has a sex offender record
- State and local correction departments to can help you find conviction records on a person
- US Tax Court has financial debacles, bankruptcies, tax evasions, and more data.
Even with all these, Paid Background Check Sites Still Make More Sense
Why?
Reviewing the portals listed in the NCSC archive link above shows that a 100% free criminal records check scenario is not possible in all cases, as only a few are free.
Also, the free background reports from these public directories and portals have a specific angle. If you are looking for a comprehensive background report like background check services provide, you must go through a long list of these public and open portals.
This is probably why the USA’s background check business is $4.3 billion.
Wrap Up!
So, is there a totally free background check?
Yes.
Are free people-check sites the best solution when you want to find out more about someone?
Definitely not.
The bottom line is that you can only get background check service for free by taking out your credit card. These $1 trials can give you all the necessary information and more for 5-7 days. If you temporarily do a background check on someone or want a quick check and confirm someone’s identity, these free background check methods with a $1 trial would work. But subscribing to one of the paid services would be the way to generate background check reports regularly.
FAQs
Where can I see criminal records for free?
You can access criminal records from the nationwide criminal database without paying a fee. It’s, however, questionable how often this database gets updated. If you want more accurate results, you might want to turn to a website that offers paid services. For more information on how much does a background check cost, check our article above.
Are there any free public record sites?
Yes. They, however, often only use it as a way to draw users to their website. Then they try to manipulate them into signing up for a paid membership. Free public record checks only yield the same information you can find without anyone’s help.
What is the best free public records search?
Is there a totally free background check? Yes, but these sites don’t always offer the best service. Some sites that offer paid background check services have free deals you might be interested in. BeenVerified is the best – it offers basic people searches for free and without any catch.
Why Background Check Cannot Be Completly FREE?
Background check sites collect data from government offices like courthouses, marriage offices, federal agencies, and credit bureaus like background check sites do it.
Getting data from these government bodies involves filling out forms and booking appointments. Also, as we see in method 7, free background search is not always a possibility. Most public databases charge fees to access their databases.
Considering all these costs, the legal barriers, complicated procedures to curate, process, and present data at scale, practically, background check sites cannot give their services for free.What is the best free background check app?
Most of the above-mentioned background check sites have apps for both Android and iPhone. Considering the apps’ ease of use and a deal that can help find people for almost no charge, we tag the BeenVerified app with BEST.
Can I use the above sites as free employment background check services?
Practically it is possible. But legally, it is not. To do an employment background check to find a prospect’s education and previous job experience details, you need to use FCRA consumer reporting agencies.
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By Ritesh
With more than five years of experience in the background check industry, Ritesh Kumar founded LookupAPlate.com - a free tool to report bad drivers and look up license plates. Besides that, he has been in the SEO game for the last decade. So talk to him about Google algorithmic updates, and he can continue until the sheep come home. Here at techjury.net, he contributes mostly to the category - Background checks.