Background Checks and Investigations to Obtain Criminal Records

Background Investigation

Starting at $150, this is a very good general employment background check for corporation HR departments, for tenant screening, or just verifying facts about a person.

What's Included:

Address history (sometimes going back 30 years)
State criminal check
Sex offender status
Bankruptcies
Liens
Judgments
UCC filings
People at work (possible employment)
Drivers licenses
Vehicle registration (vehicles owned)
Real property owned
Watercraft (boats owned)
FAA pilot license
FAA aircraft (aircraft owned)
Professional licenses
Accident record (Florida only)
Voter registration
Hunting/fishing permits
Concealed weapons permits
Associates
Relatives (three degrees, including possible spouses)
Neighbors

Business

If you're an corporate employer or small business owner, you know how important it is to run a background investigation on potential employees. Sherlock Investigations can check for criminal records, including sexual offenses, driving records, bankruptcies, liens and judgments, and past employment history and education.

Personal

Before you invest with an unknown company (no matter how good they look on the Internet) you need to check them out. Sherlock Investigations will find the owners or officers, learn the number of employees, determine the company's annual income, assets, reputation, and find out if consumer complaints have been made against them, or if they're being investigated by any agencies or authorities.
Have you met someone on the Internet who appears "like a dream come true." Sherlock Investigations gets many cases like this, but too often we're contacted after they've sent someone money for "a plane ticket" from Russia, gotten pregnant and then the guy disappears, or after falling in love they've lent someone their life savings only to have the person disappear.
When you need to know, Sherlock Investigations will investigate a person's assets; find bankruptcies, liens, and judgments; determine marital status, education, current employment; and more.
Before you do something you really regret, let Sherlock Investigations check them out. This as an investment, because it could cost you much more in the long run, including a broken heart.

About Background Checks...

A general background check can be performed in a day. With that you could get a person's date of birth, Social Security number (at Sherlock Investigations, we only give out a person's SSN to attorneys on a need-to-know basis), address history, relatives, associates, and neighbors.

Locating a person's place of employment costs quite a bit more, because of what our private investigators have to do to get that information. (Sometimes our private investigators have to follow a person to work.) Also, marriage and divorce records cost more. In New York, for example, they're virtually unobtainable. In Massachusetts they're public record in the county courthouse.

When the FBI conducts a background check on a job applicant, it'll take up to eight months, and cost the government thousands of dollars. Sometimes our clients want this type of background investigation for $500!

At the very minimum, a background check should verify that the person is who they say they are. Of course, it can, and often should, offer much, much more.

Criminal background investigations can be obtained cheaply on the Internet, but they're often worthless. (There is no such thing as a national criminal check.) To do a thorough criminal investigation you need to first have positive identifiers on the person. In other words, you need to know who the person really is.

Then you need their address history. The reason for this is that criminal background investigations are carried out on at least three levels. At Sherlock Investigations, we check federal, state, and county records. A person who did a few months in county jails in four different states likely will not show up on any Internet searches. One often has to go physically to the county court house in every county where the person has lived.

Criminal background checks should also include a Sex Offender Status check. Then, there's bankruptcies, liens, and judgments, plus civil suits, and even newspaper articles search. Suppose the person that your checking is an alleged crime boss, but has never been convicted. Court checks wouldn't reveal this, but newspaper articles might.

In a pre-employment background check, it's more cost effective to have a resume or job application to start with. Then, the easiest thing to do is to verify everything the applicant has claimed. This includes the person's real name, address, address history, education, employment history, and references.

One thing we at Sherlock Investigations watch out for here is a continuity of dates. Say the person claims to have work on a certain job from January 1998 through March of 2006. The next job listed started on November 2006. There's an eight-month gap there. What was that person doing during those eight months — unemployed ... or in jail?

The hardest kind of background check to do is when you start with a minimal amount of information, such as the person's alleged name. These can be done, but takes much more time and effort. It really depends upon what kind of information you want on the target (the person being investigated).

Another thing to watch out for is references. These could be references from previous jobs, or personal references. A good thorough background check also checks out the background of the references, to be sure that they are who the applicant claims they are, and not their brother-in-law or great-aunt.

At Sherlock Investigations we often get cases where the client wants dirt on the target. This can be expensive, and may even require long-term surveillance.

In other cases, Sherlock Investigations deals with families, usually from India, Pakistan, or the Mid-East, who are arranging marriages for someone in the family. In these cases, Sherlock Investigations usually has to check out the habits, associates, lifestyle, and income of the prospective groom (the groom is usually in New York). Again, surveillance is often required in these cases.

In a nutshell, it's possible to find out just about anything on anybody. It's really a matter of time and money. Remember, you get what you pay for.