If you ever wanted to look up someone’s name in any public records, you’ve probably stumbled upon the platform called PeopleFinders. As you’ll see in our PeopleFinders review, this is an online database that enables online access to public records or any other public information you might need. The database is continuously updated with the latest official records provided by federal, state, and local agencies.
In this review, you’ll learn more about the platform, its history, and the services it provides. You’ll also find out what you can use the platform for. All its features will be listed and explained below to help you decide whether or not PeopleFinders is the right fit for your needs.
What Makes PeopleFinders Stand Out?
Whether you’re looking to perform an in-depth background check on someone or learn more about your neighbors, PeopleFinders is a great platform. Its database is regularly updated to ensure optimal accuracy, and its affordable pricing plans include an inexpensive three-day trial. PeopleFinders also lets you download reports without a subscription.
Pros & Cons
Pricing Plans
PeopleFinders (Basic) Membership
PeopleFinders Premium Membership
$24.95/month
$29.95/month
About PeopleFinders
Rob Miller, the founder of PeopleFinders, used to work as a private investigator for Intel Corporation in the 1980s. He left the company in 1986 to start his own background check service that provided information exclusively to businesses. In 1999, he founded PeopleFinders in Sacramento, California.
PeopleFinders initially provided people search services to companies like Classmates.com, but in 2003, Miller decided to expand the business by granting access to public records to the general public. Other key people behind PeopleFinders include Bryce Lane, President and COO, and Eddie Lau, VP of Information Technology.
Today, PeopleFinders provides access to, among others:
- Billions of public records
- Background checks
- Criminal records
- Property records
- Phone and email lookup services
PeopleFinders’ online reputation is glowing. The platform has impressive ratings on all relevant websites, and users are pleased with its services. Most of them highlight the fact that buying a report doesn’t require membership.
PeopleFinders Services
There are many things you can do on this background check platform. Depending on your needs, you can find a person’s contact information, access their criminal records, find out who lives in a specific neighborhood, run a reverse phone lookup, and much more.
Let’s take an in-depth look at each of PeopleFinders’ services.
PeopleFinders Background Check
The platform offers a variety of background checks that allow you to learn more about the people in your life, reconnect with old friends, check a property’s history, or find out who’s behind an unlisted phone number.
PeopleFinders’ database currently contains all publicly available information on more than 250 million US citizens age 18 or older. As long as the person you’re looking for hasn’t removed their information from the website and a judge hasn’t sealed their records, you’ll be able to find them. You can even look up your own public records on PeopleFinders to verify their accuracy.
To start your search, type in the name of the person you want to look up. You’ll see the basic information on this person: their age, all their known addresses, and their possible relatives. If you want a more detailed report, you’ll have to pay for it. By paying $0.95 for a three-day trial, you’ll get a report that also includes the person’s phone number and date of birth. If you pay $3.95 for a Premium trial, you’ll also have access to their financial and criminal records.
PeopleFinders People Search
As long as you have any information on the person you want to look up, you can perform a people search on the website. Simply enter the information you have in the designated fields on the homepage, and the platform will show you the results that best match your search term.
Once you’ve found the person you’re looking for, click on their name to see their basic information. As with the background search, if you want more in-depth information, you’ll have to subscribe to one of the trial packages. Click on the View Details button, and you’ll see all your options. Downloading a report without an active subscription will cost you $1.95.
If you compare PeopleFinders vs. Intelius, one of its main competitors, you may notice that the information provided by PeopleFinders is much easier to verify. In addition, Intelius has a confusing price structure for individual features, which is not the case with People Finders. This platform has a three-day trial for its basic services (priced at $0.95), a three-day Premium subscription (priced at $3.95), and two ongoing membership plans ($24.95–29.95/month).
PeopleFinders Marriage and Divorce Records
PeopleFinders gives you access to 700 million publicly available family records obtained from local, state, and national sources. These records date back to the 1700s, which makes them perfect for family trees and genealogy research.
If you suspect that your current loved one might be married, PeopleFinders can help you learn the truth. You can also find out if they’ve ever been married before. In that case, PeopleFinders marriage and divorce records will also show you the spouse’s name and other information.
The easiest way to learn more about a person is to enter their name into the search field. You’ll find out more about the past of your loved one and the people they were in close contact with. If your soulmate is secretive about their past, this will help you find out what they’re hiding.
PeopleFinders Criminal Records
With PeopleFinders’ premium people search, you can access criminal records, arrest records, and sex offender data for any individual. This information will help you find out if a person has ever been arrested, give you insight into their misdemeanors or felonies, and allow you to confirm or deny any suspicions you may have about them.
To start this search, enter the name of the person in the search field. While the search itself is free, to gain access to a complete report, you’ll have to pay $3.95 (that’s the cost of your three-day Premium trial). If you don’t have a Premium trial, the report will cost you $39.95. You can also look up your own records to see the information they contain.
Comparing Spokeo vs. PeopleFinders, you’ll notice that the former doesn’t provide access to criminal or marriage records, which puts it far behind PeopleFinders in terms of the volume of information it offers. Since 2007, PeopleFinders has also offered free sex offender email alerts containing registered sex offenders’ locations, physical descriptions, risk levels, and other info. If you’re worried about the people in your child’s life, these alerts should give you peace of mind.
PeopleFinders Address Search
If you’re wondering about how safe your current location is, PeopleFinders can help you with that. With millions of US addresses in the database, the address lookup feature will return the info about your property’s value, its history, and the people who have lived there before you. You can also learn more about your neighborhood and all the people you meet every day.
This feature is particularly great if you’re moving to another city or state. By entering your new address into the search field, you can learn more about your future neighbors before meeting them in-person. If there are any registered sex offenders or people with criminal records in the area, the platform will inform you of that.
PeopleFinders Reverse Phone Lookup
You can use the reverse phone lookup feature to find out who’s calling you from unknown landline and cell phone numbers. PeopleFinders’ phone directory is always up-to-date, and all search results are returned instantly. With this option, you can also look up entries from your phonebook with no names next to them to discover who’s behind those phone numbers.
If you’ve read any other PeopleFinders review, you probably know this feature is also helpful when trying to avoid telemarketers. When you enter a phone number and the area code into the search bar, you’ll get the information about its owner. If the owner is a company other than those you have some business with (e.g., your cable or internet provider), you’ll know they’re telemarketers, so you can easily block their number or ignore their calls.
This feature is part of PeopleFinders’ Premium plan. If you don’t have a membership, a phone lookup report will cost you a one-time fee of $3.95. Keep in mind that not all phone numbers have current ownership information as users may block access to their public records.
PeopleFinders App
You can access PeopleFinders’ services on mobile devices, too. Either visit the company’s website from your phone’s browser or download the platform’s official app called IdentityWatch from the App Store (for iOS devices) or the Google Play Store (for Android devices).
This app can perform different types of background checks and lookups, same as the website. There’s also the Hacked Account Monitoring option, which runs ongoing checks on the dark web to see if any online accounts registered to your email address show up on malicious websites or in any stolen databases.
IdentityWatch includes almost all PeopleFinders features. You can add your photos and scan the internet for any modified versions of them, too. The app also helps you block unwanted calls. It’s free to download, and you can use it for unlimited searches. If you want a report, the prices start at $1.99. There’s also a monthly membership if you want to access more reports.
PeopleFinders Email Search
If you’ve been receiving suspicious emails from unknown addresses, you can find out who’s behind them with the platform’s email lookup feature. You’ll learn more about the sender, and PeopleFinders’ scam detector will also tell you if the email is authentic or not.
With the information you get, you can proceed to perform a people search, address search, phone lookup, or background check. This way, you’ll learn everything you can about the person or company behind these messages. The report you’ll get may include links to the owner’s social media profiles, their photos posted publicly on social media, personal information, criminal records, and information about their family members and possible relatives.
Of course, you’ll have to pay to access the search results. With PeopleFinders’ three-day Premium trial version, all this information is already included in the price. The same is true for the platform’s Premium subscription ($29.95/month). If you don’t have an active membership, the price of an individual report depends on the type of background check you want to perform. It will cost you anywhere between $1.95 (basic check) to $39.95 (full background check).
PeopleFinders Opt-Out
PeopleFinders stores all public data on every adult US citizen, so it’s inevitable you’ll come across your own personal information. Thankfully, the platform allows you to remove this info by visiting their Opt-Out page. All you have to do is find your own records, click on the This Is Me button, and then click on Opt Out My Info. From there, you’ll be redirected to a security check page and then asked to confirm that you want to remove all your information.
Seconds later, you’ll receive an email from PeopleFinders’ customer service asking you if you’re sure you want to remove all your data. After you click on the confirmation link in the email, you’ll receive another message informing you that your data will be wiped within the next 48 hours.
To be sure, try looking up your name a few days after submitting your request. If the information is still there, contact a customer service representative via email and ask them for assistance.
PeopleFinders Trial Period
While PeopleFinders doesn’t have a free trial, you can still try out the company’s services for a small, one-time fee. There are two trial options, both of them limited to three days.
With a basic three-day trial, you can access basic people search results and download one free report. The information will include a person’s full name, all known addresses, phone numbers, aliases, date of birth and age, and a list of their relatives and family members. This trial costs $0.95. To download more than one report with this trial, you must pay $1.95 for each of them.
PeopleFinders also has a Premium trial version priced at $3.95. With it, you get all the features included in the basic trial, plus access to criminal, financial, and business records. You can also perform neighborhood searches and access the platform’s marriage, divorce, birth, and death records. As with the basic trial, you can download one free report. For every report you access beyond that, you’ll pay $39.95, though the platform sometimes offers a lower price of $9.95.
PeopleFinders Rewards
If you don’t cancel your trial, as soon as it ends, your membership begins. The basic trial turns into a basic membership (priced at $24.95/month), and the Premium trial turns into a Premium membership (priced at $29.95/month). These memberships are great for people who want to perform multiple people searches over a longer period of time. You’ll also be signed up for an add-on feature called Rewards, also known as CFK*PF REWARDS, which costs $24.95/month.
This feature gives you special discounts on certain reports. Namely, whenever you want to access public or criminal records or perform a PeopleFinders background check, people search, or reverse phone lookup, you’ll only pay $1 for each report you generate. The feature also includes one free self-background check per month and free assisted searches.
That’s not all. The Rewards feature gives you access to PeopleFinders Local, a service that allows you to look for movie showtimes, restaurants, and amusement parks in your area. With the Rewards feature, you’ll be able to enjoy discounts on movie tickets, meals, and much more. If you don’t want to pay for this feature, you can call customer service to cancel it.
PeopleFinders Promo Codes
The platform sometimes offers promo codes, which you can find on legitimate websites like Offers.com, Savings.com, and Groupon. These discounts usually apply to specific services, such as phone lookups, background checks, and address search.
If you search hard enough, you may even come across coupons that give you a sizable discount (often up to 60–70%) on the first month of your Premium membership. All you have to do is enter the code from your PeopleFinders coupon into the designated field when requesting a report or subscribing to the platform.
The coupons and special offers are usually available during the holiday season. Just search for PeopleFinders on the coupon site of your choice, and you’ll likely find at least one or more coupons for different services. Whatever you do, make sure to get all your coupons from reputable websites like those mentioned above. Otherwise, you risk becoming a victim of fraud.
PeopleFinders Customer Service
Similar to other platforms, PeopleFinders has an online Help Center if you don’t want to wait for customer support. When you scroll down, you’ll see all the categories where you can look for the solution to your problem. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can call the customer service phone number shown at the bottom of the page.
To resolve your PeopleFinders complaints via phone, make sure to call during the customer service’s working hours. They are available from 7 AM to 6 PM PST on weekdays and from 7 AM to 3:30 PM PST on weekends. You can also get in touch with them via the Contact Us page on the website. Select the general topic of your inquiry from the drop-down menu, choose a specific topic for your question, and fill out the form. You can expect a reply within 24–48 hours.
According to PeopleFinders testimonials, people are satisfied with its customer support. The customers keep mentioning some of the best customer service reps – Linzee, Selena, and Lori, advising users to ask for them if other reps can’t solve their problems. Even if there are payment issues, these support reps will do whatever they can to assist you.
Speaking of payments, many users are confused with the pricing plans this platform offers, but we’ve explained them in detail earlier in this review. As for PeopleFinders’ preferred payment method, they currently accept all major credit and debit cards. On the other hand, they don’t accept PayPal, cash, checks, or money orders. Payments for mobile app purchases are made via the App Store (for iOS users) and Google Pay (for Android users).
Some users have also reported difficulties when trying to end their membership. Usually, if you want to end your subscription, the only way to have PeopleFinders cancel your membership is to contact them via email. Head over to the contact page, select I Want to Cancel the Automatic Renewal of My Membership from the drop-down menu, and send the email. You can expect a customer service rep to reach out to you via email soon and help you solve this problem.
The Final Verdict on PeopleFinders
To sum up our PeopleFinders review, this is a great platform that gives you access to public data at very affordable prices. All searches are free, but if you decide to download a report, you’ll pay $1.95 for a regular search and $39.95 for a complete background check for any US citizen, yourself included. The database is regularly updated with the latest information gathered from various agencies across the US.
Many PeopleFinders reviews show that users aren’t always willing to pay the full price for reports. Luckily, there are many coupons available online if you’re looking for a discount. Also, PeopleFinders customer support is at your service whenever you’re facing difficulties.
Because of its quality, affordable prices, and up-to-date data, PeopleFinders could become your go-to place for background checks, but also email, phone, address, and people lookups.