About SleuthPost

SleuthPost reviews and compares consumer People Search services for the kind of decisions real people are actually making: whether to meet a Hinge match, whether to hire the contractor with the oddly low bid, whether the babysitter referral checks out. Not courtroom-grade investigations. Personal decisions with real stakes.

The services being reviewed promise instant results. What they usually deliver is an address history six months to two years out of date, a phone number searchable for free, and a criminal record section that reflects only what county clerks happened to digitize and make accessible. There is useful information in there, but it takes a while to learn what useful looks like versus what is just interface.

SleuthPost is where that learning gets written down. Run by Renee Caldwell, a freelance bookkeeper in Mesa, Arizona, who has kept a Notion doc tracking search results, data discrepancies, and record-age gaps across three years and more than 60 paid lookups. The reviews here are built from that record: which services return which record types, how current those records actually are, and where each service routinely falls short.

One point stated plainly here and repeated often: People Search reports from TruthFinder, Spokeo, and PeopleFinders are not FCRA-compliant. They cannot be used for hiring decisions, tenant screening, credit checks, or any other federally regulated purpose. That is a legal limit, not a caution about accuracy.

SleuthPost covers People Search and personal background lookup services. It does not cover VPNs, data removal subscriptions, identity theft monitoring, or password managers.

Get to know the author on the author page.

Some outbound links here are affiliate links, meaning I get paid a small commission when you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I don't collect or store any data about which links you click. For more on how the editorial side handles affiliate relationships, see my Editorial Policy.