What are the parts of a people search report?
Every report is laid out the same way in the same order, whichever identifier you started from. The sample report is the whole of one, drawn on invented data and laid out exactly like the one you get. What follows is a guided read of it.
| Part | What it answers |
|---|---|
| The verdict | Whether anything was found, in one sentence |
| Linked accounts | Which services hold an account for the identifier |
| Data breaches | Which known breaches contain it, and when |
| Timeline | The order those accounts and breaches happened in |
| Where we looked | Every source asked, including the empty ones |
| How sure are we | Confidence and exposure, each rated out of five |
| Most likely identity | The name, handle and location most sources agree on |
The first four run down the page. The last three sit in the margin beside them, because they describe the method rather than the person.
The verdict, before any evidence
The report opens on a panel carrying the identifier you searched, a badge reading Found or Clean, and one sentence. On the sample it reads We found 5 linked accounts and 1 data breach. That sentence is the finding, printed before a single card.
Four counters sit under it: sources checked, accounts, breaches and exposure. Exposure is a word rather than a figure — low, medium or high — because it is a judgement about how much of a person is already public, and a decimal would dress that up as arithmetic.
The panel also says what the report is not. A found result carries the line that this is a lead rather than proof, because public records go stale and people share names. That caveat is in the product, not only in this article.
What is in the linked accounts section?
This is usually the largest section, and it is one card per service. Each card carries the platform's own logo, its category, and a number you can refer to.
Inside, the fields are whatever the source returned: handle, name, location, the year the account was opened, a follower count where the platform publishes one, and How we know, which says whether the platform's own interface confirmed the account or a public page was read. Anything else that source gave up is printed under its own label, so a Duolingo card shows a streak and a domain card shows name servers.
Each card ends with a confidence percentage and, where a public profile exists, a link straight to it. When a source confirms an account and returns nothing else, the card says so in those words rather than showing an empty table. From six results up, a row of category filters appears above the grid, each carrying its own count.
The sources that answered with nothing are printed beside the ones that answered. A thin report is supposed to look thin.
What do the breach records show?
Which known breaches hold the identifier, and when. Each one is a card naming the service, the year, and a sentence describing what surfaced.
Three fields sit under that: When, Accounts exposed — the size of the breach, not a number about you — and whether the source verified it. Then a row of badges headed What was exposed: email addresses, names, passwords, job titles, whatever that particular dump carried.
The year matters more than the count. An address appearing in dumps from 2013 through 2024 describes somebody who has been online for a decade, and two appearances from last year describe something else. One incident often arrives from several sources at once, so records naming the same service in the same year are merged before the heading counts them.
The timeline and the confidence rating
The timeline is every dated event in one column: each account created, each breach it turned up in. It is the part that turns a list of findings into a shape. A handle that first appears in 2014 and stops in 2019 belongs to a different story from one still opening accounts last month.
The rating sits in the margin. Confidence is drawn in fifths rather than as a percentage, because the engine blends agreement across sources and a figure like 73% would imply a precision the underlying records do not have. Exposure is scored the same way: how much of this person is already public.
The percentage on an account card is a narrower claim — how sure one source is about one account — and the two are not the same number. A third panel, Most likely identity, prints the name, handle and location the most sources agree on, with the vote count beside each.
Why does the report list sources that found nothing?
Because a report showing only hits reads as though it found everything there was to find. The panel headed Where we looked names the sources that returned something, then counts the remainder in one line, and prints the total asked and how long the run took.
Coverage is uneven and the report does not hide that either. An email address reaches 71 sources; a phone number reaches eight sources, so a thin phone report is often the module's ceiling rather than a finding about the number.
A gap and an absence are not the same thing. A source that answered and found nothing is evidence about the person. A source that failed to answer is evidence about the internet. They are listed apart, because a report that blurs them lets you read one as the other.
What should you conclude from a mostly empty report?
That the identifier is new, private, or simply not tied to anything public — which the report states in those words, under a Clean badge rather than a found one. The account and breach sections are dropped rather than drawn empty, and the margin stays.
That is a finding, and frequently a useful one. An address that reaches nothing, whose handle exists nowhere else and which appears in no breach, describes something created recently for one purpose. Read against a profile claiming ten years of history, the absence is the evidence.
Weigh it against the sources panel before concluding anything. A clean result from a module with wide coverage says more than a clean result from a narrow one, which is why the count is printed at all. If you hold a second identifier for the same person, run that one too — the email route is the widest of them.
What a people search report does not contain
Set against the American people search category, the list of absences is long, and none of it is arriving later. DetectiveCheck answers which accounts exist for an identifier. It keeps no public-records file on anybody.
| Not in the report | Where that record does live |
|---|---|
| Criminal and court records | United States county and state courts |
| Address history and relatives | US public-records aggregators |
| Property and vehicle records | County assessor and registration files |
| Live location of a phone | The carrier, under legal process |
| Private messages or inbox contents | Nowhere lawful |
Competitors do carry some of these. Spokeo, BeenVerified, Whitepages and TruthFinder are built on United States county and state records, which is a different product with a different mechanism under it; the ranked comparison sets six of them side by side, ours included and fifth. Live location is in none of them, and any service selling it for a monthly fee is lying.
Can you use the report to hire or rent to someone?
No. In the United States, using any report to decide employment, tenancy, credit or insurance puts you under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and a consumer lookup service is not a consumer reporting agency. That limit applies to every service in this category, whatever the marketing says.
The usable version is narrower and more honest: the report is for your own safety decisions. Whether to meet a stranger, whether to send money, whether the profile in front of you belongs to the person it names. None of those are decisions about somebody's livelihood.
Outside the United States the constraint is a different one. In the EU and the UK the identifiers in the report are personal data even where they are already public, so processing them needs a lawful basis under the GDPR.
Common questions
What does a people search report contain?
A DetectiveCheck report contains a one-sentence verdict, a card for each account registered to the identifier, a card for each known breach holding it, a dated timeline of both, and a margin carrying a confidence rating, an exposure rating and every source that was asked. Sources that answered with nothing are listed beside the ones that found something.
Does the report include criminal records?
No. DetectiveCheck holds no criminal or court records, no address history, no relatives and no property files, because it answers a different question: which accounts exist for an email address, a handle, a name or a number. United States public-records services such as Spokeo, BeenVerified and TruthFinder are where those fields live.
Can I see a report before paying for one?
Yes. The sample report is a complete report on invented data, laid out exactly like the one you get, readable with no account and no card. You can scroll it, open the sources panel and read the confidence ratings. Plans start at $15 a month, and that figure is on the plans page rather than at a checkout.
Why does the report list sources that found nothing?
Because a report showing only hits reads as though it found everything there was. The margin panel names the sources that returned something and counts the remainder in one line. It also keeps a source that answered and found nothing apart from one that failed to answer: the first is evidence about the person, the second is evidence about the internet.
What does the confidence rating mean?
It is drawn in fifths rather than as a percentage, because the engine blends agreement across several sources and a decimal would imply a precision the records do not carry. A high rating means several sources agree on the same person. Individual account cards carry their own percentage, which is a narrower claim about one source and one account.
Can I use a people search report to screen a tenant or an employee?
No. In the United States, using any report to decide employment, tenancy, credit or insurance falls under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and a consumer lookup service is not a consumer reporting agency. The same restriction applies to every consumer people search service, whatever its marketing says. Use a licensed screening provider for those decisions.
What does an empty report mean?
That the identifier is new, private or not tied to anything public, which the report states in those words under a Clean badge rather than a found one. It is a finding rather than a failure. Read it against the sources panel, because a clean result from a module with wide coverage says more than a clean result from a narrow one.
Can I export the report?
A signed-in report carries JSON and CSV buttons and prints to PDF through the browser's own dialogue, which the print stylesheet is written for. The public sample hides those buttons, because export, save and share mean nothing without an account. The JSON is what the engine returned, field for field.
Does the person know I looked them up?
No. The lookup reads public sources and the account-existence endpoints those services already expose. It sends no message, places no call and triggers no password reset, so nothing about the search reaches the person or appears in their notifications. The report is generated for you and stored against your account.
