Free site offers criminal checks

By JIM NICHOLS

Competitors charge a fee for background checks.

So you think your new suitor, sitter, boss or neighbor really rocks?

Try lifting a few rocks at criminalsearches.com before sidling up to this latest “friend.”

“Do you really know who people are?” the new Web site asks ominously.

Bryce Lane is president and chief executive of criminalsearches.com, which launched last week. He calls the site the “most comprehensive source of criminal data online.”

Punch in a name, and the snoop site ferrets out millions of public records to find an individual’s criminal history — anything from traffic tickets to sex offenses to murder. With another of its tools, you can type in an address and see a Google map with the names, addresses and criminal histories of nearby ex-convicts. For sex offenders, there’s even a photo.

“Whether on a date, renting a room, spending time with neighbors or meeting new friends, people have the right, and now the means, to know if there is a criminal in their life,” Lane’s firm says in a news release.

That “right” has come at a price: A host of competitors in the red-hot “people search” industry offer services ranging from a $7 basic criminal background check on up to a full-bore private-eye pry for $300 or more.

“Now it’s free,” proclaimed Lane.

(He insists, by the way, that he is not the same Bryce Lane who, according to criminalsearches.com, pleaded guilty to two speeding charges in North Carolina back in 1982.)

The new Web site’s parent company, Peoplesearch.com, is one of the most successful and aggressive pay-for-backgrounder-data competitors. Over the past 20 years, it has amassed thousands of public-records databases — marriages, divorces, births, deaths, phone records, property transfers, lawsuits and more. For a fee, Peoplesearch.com mines that data for a wide range of clients with an even wider range of needs.

The Sacramento, Calif., firm decided to split off the cops-and-courts records into a free-to-use site.

Other sites on the Web tout themselves as “free” criminal-records portals. But they generally are little more than indexes — aggregators of links to hundreds of separate state and county databases. A thorough search by a prospective employer, landlord or parent would mean checking them all one at a time — the kind of tedium that would drive users to pay someone to do it for them. By happy coincidence, of course, the vendors offering the “free” indexes also offer to do the background check themselves, for a fee.

The folks at Peoplesearch.com, though, figured a free record-checking site would draw so much traffic that it could generate even more revenue from advertisers than it would have from users. In the site’s first week, the Internet buzz it generated drew so many users that Lane’s firm had to add new server computers to keep criminalsearch.com from slowing to a crawl or crashing.

But the searcher has blind spots, Lane concedes. Even though court records are all public, it’s up to individual states, counties and local courts to decide how to make them available, and some jurisdictions won’t release or sell entire databases wholesale to resellers. So the only truly comprehensive criminal-check database is one that hardly anyone outside law enforcement can use — the FBI’s National Crime Information Center.

Consequently, the data that criminalsearch.com compiles don’t include every jurisdiction.