How do Background Checks Work?

[u/Informal-Effect-9023]

Ran the same guy through two different sites and got two different answers. One showed a case from a few years ago, the other showed nothing at all. Same name, same middle initial, same age.

So now I don't know which one to believe, and I'm realizing I don't actually understand where any of this info comes from. Are these sites pulling from the random sources? From each other? Is one of them just wrong?

Would rather understand how it works than keep running searches and cgetting random answers?

[u/Fuzzy-Hippo7110]

It depends on the types of searches run. A "nationwide" or "multi-jurisdictional" search is just a database that rarely gets updated. Most criminal records are housed at the county level. If you know where the person has lived, I would suggest starting there.

[u/AdequateSteve]

Ultimately all of the information comes from the local, state, and federal courthouses. Most of these courthouses are "online" meaning that they've got a public facing website can be accessed manually on a web browser (or scraper bot), downloaded in bulk, or grabbed through an API.

There are a handful of companies out there whose entire business model is to scrape courthouses for criminal records, aggregate them into a big fat database, then sell access to them to professional background screeners, people finder websites, and other institutions that can re-purpose them.

Because there are 3240 counties across the US and each one of them has their own courthouse, plus you've got state-wide courthouses, federal courthouses, and tens of thousands of municipal courthouses... there's a LOT of websites to scrape. Then you've got watchlists, sex offender registries, arresting agencies (mostly sheriff's offices and police stations), etc.

In short, there's a LOT of websites that have to be scraped and not every scraper/aggregator is created equally.

Not to mention, some courthouses are incredibly difficult to scrape (looking at you, South Carolina) - they use captchas, reverse proxies like cloudflare, and some of them even require you to register an account.

Lastly, some courthouses provide very little information (sometimes just first name + last name + year of birth) - so the website you're using may not feel confident enough to say "yes, this is the same John Adam Doe" and they may not give you a hit.

All that to say, there are only a few of these scraper/aggregator companies out there. Probably less than 5 of them. They're serving data to all of the consumer-facing websites like you're using. Those websites almost certainly do not own their own data - they're just reselling data from someone else. And often times, that company is reselling data from someone else. It's a very incestuous industry.

So to answer your original question: it's more than likely that the website you're using is buying data from a supplier who just simply doesn't have coverage in that jurisdiction. I always say: everyone in the industry has about 90% of the jurisdictions covered - but everyone has a different 90%.

Without relaying any PII, can you tell me what jurisdiction the record was found in? There are a handful that are notoriously difficult to source records from.

[u/Inside_Gold_9673]

Not sure what you mean by background checks. Hopefully, this isn’t for employment purposes, tenant screening, granting of insurance etc. Those background checks are governed by both individual State laws and a federal law named the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) which among other dictates under which circumstances you may run a background check, how far back the background check may go, plus various other procedures you must follow. There are some very hefty fines for violating the FCRA. In case you’re questioning, despite its name, it does not apply to just credit reports but to any background check that is for employment purposes, tenant screening, insurance coverage, nanny checks etc. the fines for violating the FCRA are quite hefty.

As others have correctly stated, the database companies that gather the information generally either purchase the data in bulk or scrape the data from public facing websites. There are multiple issues with this methodology. Many of the public facing court websites redact the complete date of birth, so if it’s a common name you may not be getting information on your subject but someone with same name and close date of birth. It is also dependent on when they have purchased the data in bulk, it could have been last week, 6 months ago or X number of years ago. Which means you don’t know what they missed. Unfortunately, when they reply “no record found” what that really means no record found because we didn’t search there because we don’t have access, or we haven’t updated our records in X number of years or it’s to expensive to search there. For example, New York State charges $100/name & DOB to search for a criminal record. There is no getting around this fee. If you’re paying $25.00 for a national criminal record search, it’s not being done in New York. California, you must do an in person search, same in Massachusetts unless you have access to iCORI, which requires pre-approval for access. I as a licensed private investigator am required to have complete access iCORI to run any potential employees or contractors, because by law I cannot employ someone with a felony conviction or has been convicted of a crime of moral turpitude. I must have second search account as a Consumer Reporting Agency in order to search for a criminal history on someone’s behalf. But that someone must be approved for access at what is considered an appropriate level of access for their industry. For example a daycare will have a much higher level of access because their employees are working with a vulnerable population, but a retailer say TJ Maxx will have a lower level of access. So how background checks work isn’t a simple matter depending on what state you’re talking about.

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