Complaint Review: Truthfinder

Truthfinder offers to help consumers perform background checks. I was attempting to find information on behalf of an adopted individual and I got suckered in to what ended up being a useless, offensive and disgusting report.

Truthfinder says you can have access to unlimited reports for a monthly fee. That monthly fee is $16 but they bill it twice so it's actuallly about $30. Months can go by before you can get these charges stopped!

When you register with Truthfinder and register your payment information you are told that you can cancel at any time. But that's not really the case because there are website errors that will occur upon subsequent visits and on other occassions the website will claim that your username or password is wrong. The site basically jacks you around so you can't make proper use of it. That's a problem because Truthfinder makes you "agree" to use their website to cancel your account. There is a customer service line but oftentimes it rings off the hook. You can't count on getting through.

So you might think, "No problem, I'll just call my credit card company". Well, unless your credit card company is onto Truthfinder complaints they will want to research the dispute and that will entail contacting the company. Fair enough. Except your credit card company may have a hard time reaching Truthfinder too. And that means you will end up with long delays before you get your money back. In my case, we're talking months of charges and multiple calls to the credit card company with no solution yet!

Billing — trying to unsubscribe from monthly fees — is a big problem. But an equally significant problem concerns the quality of the reports. The "specific information" I received was either already out there on Google and/or outdated. They claim to pull court judgments, marriage, divorce and many other records. But none of that came up on the person I was researching and we're talking a 90-something-year-old woman! Now you tell me if there are few records to be found on someone that age?

I appreciate that a lot of these people finder services are just collecting information from public databases. But when they can't even grab what's out there any better than I can, it's a complete waste of time and money. I wanted a one-and-done experience and instead I feel like I got "had".

So now for the third problem: Truthfinder warns you that you are going to see disturbing and graphic content that may presumably appear in connection with criminal and court records associated with the individual you are researching. If you think the individual you are looking for is "safe" think again. That's because Truthfinder isn't going to give you a report that is specific to the person you are searching for. Most of the report I received was a rehash of a public sex offender database. My report was super long because apparently the person I was looking for lives next to a lot of sex offenders (which probably has to do with the fact that it is an urban area so be forewarned if you use this service to research anyone who lives in a big city!).

The person I was searching for did not have any court records or criminal history of her own — or at least nothing that Truthfinder was able to find — but that didn't stop my report from being very graphic. The report I paid to generate simply used one of her old street addresses to pull information about sex offenders who live (or lived) nearby. As a result, I was subjected to all this disgusting information not because the person I wanted to learn about is a criminal but because she simply LIVED next to criminals. For one, the sex offender registries are already public. For another, I don't need or want to pay for access to irrelevant content! This extraneous, offensive information did not tell me anything "specific" about the person I was looking for!

If Truthfinder can't pull more than two outdated addresses for a 90-something-year-old woman, can't identify where she was born and is unable to indicate if she is living or dead, that's a real problem. But when I pay to receive a report that ends up focusing almost exclusively on perverts who just so happen to live nearby? That's when I write a Ripoff Report!

Truthfinder ought to be called ScamsRUs.