Editorial Policy

How I Test

A review doesn't go up until I've paid for the service, run enough lookups to see it handle more than one scenario, and can point to specific results that illustrate what it surfaces and what it misses. The test set includes names I can cross-check against other sources, which makes it possible to compare what the service claims to return against what's actually there.

For each service, the Notion doc I keep tracks: which record types came back, how old the address history was against what I could verify independently, which criminal record entries matched court-accessible data and which ones didn't, and how the cancellation process actually worked. Notes start on a yellow legal pad during each session and get synced afterward. The specific gap I watch for is the difference between a report date and the actual age of the underlying data. That's where People Search services most consistently mislead, and it's what a product page won't tell you.

No service gets reviewed without a paid subscription. No free access codes accepted in exchange for coverage, no sponsored reviews.

Affiliate Relationships

Some links here are affiliate links. You click one, sign up, I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. The commission structure does not determine which services get covered or how they're rated. A service that charges a recurring monthly fee for recycled data gets described as such, regardless of its affiliate terms.

FCRA Notice

TruthFinder, Spokeo, and PeopleFinders each explicitly disclaim FCRA compliance in their own terms of service. Their reports are not legal substitutes for employment background checks, tenant screening, or any other purpose regulated under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Any review here that notes a service found or missed something is describing personal-use research, not a report that could be relied on for a regulated hiring or housing decision.

Scope

SleuthPost covers consumer People Search services for personal decisions: dating verification, contractor vetting, household checks. It does not cover VPNs, data removal services, identity theft monitoring, or password managers. Results described here are from lookups run in Arizona. Record coverage, data currency, and search accuracy vary by state, by whether a county shares court data electronically, and by how common the name being searched is. What comes back on a specific name in Mesa may differ from your results somewhere else.

Corrections

If a result I described went differently when you ran it, or a record I cited has since changed, the contact page is the right place to flag it. Data on these services moves. Reviews get updated when a service has meaningfully changed or when a concrete discrepancy gets reported.