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Dec
05

How to Validate Phone Numbers for Apps

If you have an app, you need phone numbers. If you’re not using phone numbers in your app, you need to start.

Phone numbers can simplify your app and make life easier for your users. And, that’s in addition to increasing security. Some companies, like the Affirm lending company, use phone numbers instead of usernames and passwords.

But, regardless of how you use phone numbers in your app—to send SMS messages for two-factor authentication, person-to-person communication, text notifications, or anything else—you need to validate those phone numbers.

Here’s why you need to verify phone numbers in your app, and how to do it.

Why validate phone numbers?

First and foremost, you need to know what sort of phone number you have.

Landlines can’t receive text messages. So, you need to at least identify and separate the landlines from the cell phone numbers. That way you don’t waste text messages.

And, you need to make sure the phone numbers are correct. People make mistakes all the time when they enter phone numbers. And, people often give fake information, for fear of excessive marketing messages and harassment.

If you don’t validate phone numbers, you’ll waste a lot of text messages (and therefore money). And, your customer experience will suffer. People often won’t realize they’ve made a mistake entering their phone numbers. So, users will get frustrated when your app doesn’t work as expected. This causes excessive app abandonment.

Fortunately, validating phone numbers is easier than you might think.

How to validate phone numbers for your app

There are a lot of ways to validate phone numbers in C# and C++, with Python, or using Javascript. However, these methods require a lot of development. And, it’s just more code to debug and potential for development delays.

You have to choose a phone number validation regex. Some regex syntaxes work better than others.

Additionally, most regex methods only verify that the phone number is an actual phone number. Phone numbers will pass the regex check as long as the phone number has the right number of digits and there are no letters or other characters.

But, a valid phone number can be disconnected. And, the validity doesn’t tell you what type of phone number it is.

Then, there’s no central database of phone numbers that you can download and use for your app. It’s impossible to independently determine whether or not a phone number is connected or not, or if it’s a cell phone or landline.

Also, an internal regex check doesn’t tell you if phone numbers are on the DNC list or not. You can access the DNC list. But, it’s updated constantly. So, you’d need to constantly update any DNC database you create.

So, it’s easier, more thorough, and usually more cost-effective to outsource the phone number validation for your app. It shortens development cycles and makes your phone number validation more reliable.

This is how it works.

Integrated phone number validation

Rather than trying to add custom snippets of code to your app and experimenting with a phone validation regex, it’s much easier to use a phone validation API to connect your app to a data verifier.

A quality data partner will have access to multiple data streams to validate phone numbers in real time, on demand. And, the best phone validator API requires no API key. You just need a unique URL that’s generated using your account info.

All the phone validation code is replaced with a simple API call.

Then, add a phone validator API call to the interface where users enter their phone numbers. That way, phone numbers are automatically sent out to your data partner for validation whenever a user enters their phone number. The phone number is checked fast enough that there’s no impact on the user experience.

This checks to ensure that the phone number is syntactically correct. The phone validator also checks to ensure the phone number is connected and usable (not on the DNC list). Then, it determines if the phone number is a cell phone, landline, or VOIP phone number.

The phone number validation API does all the work for you. The only thing your proprietary code needs to do is gather variables from the API results and do a few if/then checks to determine what it needs to do.

If a user enters an invalid phone number, your app can prompt them to correct it. And, you can ask the user for a cell phone number if they enter a landline, or vice versa.

Then, you can automatically suppress text communication to landline phone numbers.

Additionally, using a phone validator API to validate phone numbers eliminates user experience issues from disconnected phone numbers and data entry errors.

Validating your phone numbers can also save you from hefty TCPA fines, since you’ll know if a number is on the DNC list. And, you can easily use an API call to check phone number before you call or text that number and ensure that it wasn’t added to the DNC list since you last used that phone number.

In short, using a phone validation API simplifies your code base, saves you money, and creates a better user experience. All this while also making your app more efficient since you’re outsourcing some data processing.

Phone number validation cost

Any good app developer wants to know how much an API will add to their operating costs. When you’ve got thousands or millions of phone numbers to validate, it’s easy to imagine that the cost would justify doing everything in-house.

But, most of the time, verifying a phone number costs a penny or less. And, the more numbers you verify, the lower the price-per-number gets. So, it’s cost-efficient to validate every number that’s entered into your app, and check numbers again before you contact them. And, the costs get better as your app grows.

The price of validating phone numbers is actually low enough that you could develop an app that validated phone numbers for people for a small fee with a strong profit margin.

What to do now

Obviously, we can only guarantee those prices and API performance if you use the Searchbug phone validator API. Other data providers may not have the data streams to verify phone numbers in real time for the same price-per-validation.

If you need verified phone numbers for two-factor authentication, text notifications, peer-to-peer calling, or any other app operations, it’s time to check out the Searchbug phone validation API.

05 Dec/0 Comments/by James Miller

Nov
21

How Do I Stop People From Signing Up With Fake Email Addresses?

Email Marketing Collections, Data Processing, Financial Services, Health / Medical, Insurance & Claims, Law Firm / Attorney, Marketing & Information, Professional Services, Real Estate, Retail

If you collect email addresses through your lead generation funnel, you’re familiar with how many people submit fake email addresses, especially if you offer a quality lead magnet.

The fake email address epidemic wastes a lot of time and money. Sending lead magnets to non-existent inboxes or toxic email addresses and giving unusable leads to sales teams can devastate your sales efficiency.

This is why business owners and marketers want to know, “How do I stop people from signing up with fake email addresses?”

Well, we’ll show you.

How to stop people from signing up with fake email addresses

Weeding the fake email addresses from your email contact lists is more profitable than you may realize. Yes, it relieves a lot of headaches and sales inefficiency.

But, people will often enter a real email address to get your lead magnet if you can stop them from entering fake email address up front. Then, you get a true lead. And, a person who thought they were going to pull the wool over your eyes ends up becoming a customer.

In short, stopping the flow of fake email addresses gives you access to more potential customers.

Weeding out fake email addresses is a two-part process:

Validate email addresses at the point of entry.
Clean your email databases regularly to remove email addresses that are valid, but don’t belong in your email system.

Here’s how you complete both of these steps:

Implement data integration

In order to stop people from signing up with fake email addresses, you have to catch them in the act. That means that your lead collection form must check email addresses as they are entered.

This might seem impossible. But, it’s actually rather simple.

All you need is a data partner and a data validation API that gives you access to your data partner’s data verification system.

You’ll connect your lead collection form to your data provider’s system using the API. That way, when someone enters an email address on your form, your system will automatically send the email address to be verified.

If the email address is fake, you’ll find out on the spot. And, the potential customer will be prompted to enter a valid email address.

An email address validator detects invalid email addresses (those with an invalid syntax, such as without the “@” symbol) and non-existent email addresses. But, a good email address validator also identifies toxic inboxes, spam traps, and catchall email addresses that you need to avoid.

So, adding email validation API not only improves your lead quality, it also protects your domain and IP reputation, and helps improve certain email marketing metrics.

An email verification API integrates with a unique URL, which removes the need for an API key and simplifies the implementation. Many lead generation platforms have an interface for adding API connectivity, or your development team can add the integration in a matter of minutes.

Using data integration to check email addresses at the point of entry will catch the majority of fake and unusable email addresses. And, it can cost less than a penny per validated email address, if your email validation volume is high. So, increasing the quality of your leads and your sales efficiency will more than cover the cost of validating email addresses.

Maintain your databases

Even though data integration will stop almost all the fake email addresses from getting into your email lists, you still need to periodically check your email lists to remove email addresses that are no longer valid or have changed owners.

This part can also be done with an API. The same email validation API that checks emails at the point of entry will work in your CRM or email management system. You can use the same simple integration to create an automated email list maintenance process that regularly cleans your lists.

If you don’t have a system that’s capable of data integration, you can still clean your lists. Just use batch email verification.

Batch email verification puts your email addresses through the same validation as a data validation API. You just need to upload the email addresses manually.

The process is simple:

Export your email list to a .csv, .txt, or Excel file.
Ensure that each piece of information is separated into its own column. First names, last names, and email addresses get their own column.
Upload your list for processing. You’ll usually receive your cleaned list in a matter of minutes. However, very large lists may take longer.
The returned file will be a comma separated .csv file, which you can reload into your email databases.

These steps remove email addresses that have become unusable since they were collected. And, this process ensures that you have the right name for each email address. That way your email campaigns don’t suffer from data decay.

There’s also a bonus to using batch data processing: data append.

Append data to your email addresses

Collecting email addresses will generate excellent leads. Email marketing is some of the best marketing you can do.

And, the more information you have about a potential customer, the better you can market to them. So, it’s extremely useful to gather additional data using your email addresses.

Once you’ve verified the deliverability of your email addresses, you can upload the clean list to have additional data—phone numbers, mailing addresses, and names—added to your email lists to build complete customer profiles.

This is especially effective because it enables you to optimize your lead collection forms for conversions. Ask for just a first name, last name, and email address on your collection form. That way you collect more email addresses.

Then, use a data append service to get the associated information for each email address. That way your sales teams have geographic and demographic data to create personalized sales pitches and offers.

This is especially powerful if you use account based marketing, since your sales teams need the most complete customer profiles possible.

The first two steps will ensure that the email addresses you collect are valid. Appending additional data makes those email addresses more valuable and increases the ROI from your lead generation.

That’s how you stop people from signing up with fake email addresses. And, the same tools help you use those email addresses to build entire customer profiles. It’s inexpensive, effective, and it raises your email marketing ROI. You leave money on the table every time you collect an email address without validating it.

Check out the Searchbug data validation API and batch append services if you need to spot fake and unusable email addresses and improve your email marketing.

21 Nov/0 Comments/by James Miller

Nov
12

What is Data Decay, and How Much Does it Cost Your Business?

Data Cleaning Collections, Data Processing, Financial Services, Health / Medical, Insurance & Claims, Law Firm / Attorney, Marketing & Information, Professional Services, Real Estate, Retail

If data decay sounds big and scary, that’s because it is.

The reality is that no data remains correct forever. And, some data degrades faster than others. Furthermore, personal data is some of the most unstable data out there.

On average, Americans move 11.7 times in their lifetime. Over 37 million phone numbers are reassigned each year; some are reassigned in as little as a few days. And 60% of customers intentionally give false information—like fake email addresses—when they submit personal information online.

That’s why customer data goes out of date so fast.

This is especially bad news for businesses because they rely on customer data for just about everything—marketing, lead generation, sales, customer support and service, and almost every other stage of business operation requires accurate customer data.

So, what exactly is data decay? How much does it cost companies? And, most importantly, how do you stop it?

What is data decay?

Data decay is also called data degradation, data rot, or bit rot.

Data decay simply the gradual loss of accurate data in a database.

There are two types of data decay: mechanical and logical.

Mechanical data decay

Mechanical data decay is the most straight forward. It happens when there’s a hardware failure in the data storage system that causes data to be lost or corrupted. Hard drive failures are the most common form of mechanical data decay. But, corruption in data management software or failures in supporting hardware can also cause mechanical data decay.

Logical data decay

Logical data decay is harder to spot. It occurs when information in the database goes out of date or becomes incorrect because that data point has changed, but the database was not updated. This is the most common form of customer data decay, because customers usually won’t tell you when they change their phone number or move.

There’s something called the 1-10-100 rule that estimates how much data decay costs businesses. On average, it costs $1 to validate data as it’s entered, $10 to cleanse a bad record from your database, and $100 per incorrect customer that is never corrected.

The fact that there are three levels of cost tells you that both types of data decay are preventable with proper data cleaning and management.

Here’s how to do that.

How to prevent data decay

Mechanical data decay is the easiest to prevent, and you’re probably already doing it: backup your data. That way you can restore your data if it’s lost or damaged.

Additionally, use solid state storage whenever possible. And, monitor your storage hardware. Replace mechanical drives well before they reach a critical failure point.

That’s the easy part.

Preventing logical data decay is tougher, because you must identify entries that have decayed and update them, and remove entries that can’t be corrected.

Logical data decay is an ongoing process. So, it must be prevented with ongoing data management and cleaning.

Data cleaning steps

At a high level, the data cleaning process looks like this:

Validate data as it enters your databases.
Perform regular maintenance data cleansing and updates while data is in storage.
Verify data before use.

The most important step is the first step—validating data as it’s entered—because that’s the most cost-efficient way to quality control your data.

Prioritize the second two steps based on how you use your data. If you often reference your stored data without deploying it directly, you may need more frequent maintenance cleaning cycles.

On the other hand, if you immediately use your data once it’s collected, or if you know the data will sit, untouched, in storage for a long time before you use it, you can dial back your data maintenance processes in favor of on-demand data validation.

There are two ways to build a data verification process that prevents data decay: batch processing and data integration.

Batch processing

Batch processing is best for verifying data in bulk. If you need to validate single entries on demand, batch processing is too cumbersome. So, this is best for maintaining the integrity of your databases and updating existing data that hasn’t been cleaned in a long time.

The batch data cleansing process is simple, but requires a bit of manual work:

Export your data to a .csv, .txt, or Excel file.
Remove duplicate entries and separate personal information into separate columns (i.e. a separate column for first name, last name, address, city, state, zip, etc).
Upload your data to your batch processing service. You can select which data you need cleaned and updated in the online user interface. Your results will usually be returned in minutes, depending on the file size.
Reload your data into your database, ready for use.

Batch data cleansing is easy. However, data integration is better for real-time data validation, since it removes the manual labor.

Data integration

Data integration uses an API to add data validation to your data pipeline, and automates the process of uploading data for verification.

Typically, a data verification API integrates through a unique URL. So, there are no API keys to worry about. And, most CRM and data management systems have an interface for adding API integrations. However, if you need your tech team to do it, it will take them a matter of minutes to add API connectivity.

Then, your data management systems will automatically send data out for validation on-demand, with no effort from you or your teams.

There are two places where data integration will deliver the most benefit:

Data entry forms.
Systems where the data is used (such as a CRM system, where sales teams retrieve contacts for customer outreach, or a shipping system).

Adding data validation to your data entry forms where customers enter their information will filter out almost all invalid data.

So, why validate the data again when you use it? For a couple of reasons:

Data entry errors are the number one source of bad data. New errors get introduced whenever your data is manually transferred in transit from collection to deployment. It’s unavoidable.
You may need to append additional information to build complete profiles for the teams that actually use the data.For example, you may collect only a name and phone number on a lead generation form to improve form completion rates. But, the mailing address may be valuable for sales teams that can use geographic data for more personalized sales outreach.Or, email addresses can be appended to contacts for more customer communication channels.

Data integration is both a database quality control measure and a conversion optimization. And, it enables you to validate data at the point of entry, where it will cost you a mere $1 to verify, according to the 1-10-100 rule.

But, whether you use batch data processing or data integration, you’ll avoid the $100 price tag of each inaccurate entry in your database, which is a significant reduction in operating costs.

Really, you can’t afford not to validate your data.

If you’re ready to start working with dependable data, check out our batch processing services and data validation APIs that can verify any combination of personal information.

12 Nov/0 Comments/by James Miller

Nov
04

How to Improve Your Data Processing Accuracy

Data Cleaning Data Processing

There are two primary uses for data processing:

Internal processing that businesses use for accounting, lead generation, transactions, and so on.
External processing that data processing companies use to offer data processing as a service.

Both types of data processing suffer from the same plague: data processing quality control.

The problem is that, unlike most processes, you cannot perform quality control at the end, by inspecting the final product. In most cases, it’s impossible to spot incorrect results, unless there’s something that’s wildly incorrect. But, most of the time, incorrect data is indistinguishable from correct data, unless you have the right tools.

Data processing quality control must be performed on the front end, by validating the data before it’s fed into the data processing system.

Data validation is the key to good data processing. It doesn’t matter how good your data processing model is, or how precise your data processing system is if you’re using bad data.

Consider some of the most common data processing services and tasks:

Data Deduplication
Forms Processing
Order Processing
Student Loan Processing
Data Mining
Insurance Claims Processing
Market Research Forms Processing
Check Processing
Credit Card Processing
Transaction Processing
Survey Processing
Litigation Services
Mailing List Compilation
Text and Web Data Mining

Now consider what happens when you feed bad data into each one of these processes. Too much bad data essentially makes any data processing service useless.

So, here’s how to verify your data and improve your data processing results.

How to improve your data processing

The first thing to understand is where most data errors come from.

The vast majority of bad data comes from humans. Whenever you have people entering data on forms or writing it down, there are going to be mistakes. It’s inevitable.

We’ve talked about this before. But, removing manual data entry will cut off bad data at the source. Let computers handle, transfer, and copy your data whenever you can. Computers are precise. Humans are not.

However, it’s impossible to remove any and all manual data entry. This is especially true with personal information. People have to enter their information somewhere, no matter what. So, there’s always going to be mistakes to weed out.

That’s where data validation tools come in.

There are two ways to verify large quantities of data: batch processing and data integration.

Batch processing works best for internal data processing, like lead verification and low-volume transaction processing.

Data integration is what you need for big data processing and offering data processing as a service.

Here’s how both work.

Batch data processing

Batch data processing involves some manual work, which is why it’s not great for tasks that require constant, high-volume data processing.

However, it’s perfect for checking contact lists, verifying customer shipping and billing information, verifying leads, and so on. Customer data validation saves you a lot of money and headache from shipping errors, credit card fraud, and sales inefficiency.

The batch data processing steps are simple:

Export your data as a .csv, .txt, or Excel file. Separate each piece of information into its own column. For personal information, there should be an individual column for first name, last name, street address, city, etc.
Upload your list for processing. This can be done entirely through your web browser. During the upload process, you’ll select which pieces of information you want to verify and append to the list.

The results are usually returned in a matter of minutes unless you have an extremely large list to process. Your list will be returned as a .csv file.
Reload your list into the system where you use the data—CRM system, lead generation database, fulfillment system…

The key is to perform these steps immediately before you use your data. Personal data becomes outdated fast. Avoid letting your verified data sit for too long before putting it to work. Otherwise, you’ll need to verify it all over again.

Data integration

If you offer data processing as a service, data integration is the way to go. There’s simply too much data that needs to be processed too quickly to upload files manually. You’d probably need a full-time employee just to keep up with the demand.

The best way to validate all your data is to use an API to integrate data verification into your data processing pipeline. That way, you can build data processing tools that automatically send data out for verification before you do anything with it. The data cleaning process will be transparent and completely hands-free.

Now, there will be at least a little bit of development work to complete the data integration, especially if you’re doing data processing with Python or using a proprietary system that you built.

However, in most cases the development is minimal. The API integrates with a unique URL. There’s no API key to deal with. And, no third-party software to integrate.

Additionally, data validation will more than cover the cost of paying your development team to perform the integration. You can add the data validation to your data processing agreement and raise your prices accordingly.

Data validation also reduces strain on your customer service teams. You’ll deliver more accurate results, which is a better customer experience and reduces complaints.

Really, if you’re not validating data as part of your data processing service, you’re missing out on a lot of potential revenue and operating far less efficiently than you should be. That’s the bottom line.

Checking your work

If you use data for business, you need to validate it. There’s just no other way to eliminate the errors that cost money and time and erode your customer experience.

If you need dependable data, check out the Searchbug batch services or our data validation APIs.

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04 Nov/0 Comments/by James Miller

Oct
28

Lead Generation: How to Get More Qualified Leads

Data Cleaning Collections, Data Processing, Financial Services, Insurance & Claims, Marketing & Information, Professional Services, Real Estate, Retail

Look, your lead generation has a problem: getting enough information to qualify and contact leads.

Here’s what’s happening:

You get leads through your lead gen efforts. You and your sales team reach out to the new leads. And, half of those leads are no good because the contact information is incorrect.

Your lead database is riddled with incorrect phone numbers, invalid email addresses, and fake names. That translates to a ton of wasted time and money.

So, how is this happening? And, more importantly, what can you do about it?

Why your leads aren’t working for you

Simply stated, you’re losing leads to bad data.

Over 60% of customers intentionally provide incorrect information on lead generation forms.

Only 1% of contact forms get completed.

81% of people have abandoned a form before completing it.

On top of all that, most people have multiple email addresses and multiple phone numbers. So, even automated lead generation systems struggle to collect accurate data. That’s why 63% of businesses say that generating traffic and leads is their biggest challenge.

These inaccuracies cause three critical issues:

Your leads are unreachable. The contact information you have is incomplete or invalid. These leads are utterly useless.
Your leads aren’t who you think they are. The contact information is valid, but incorrect. When you contact these leads, you connect with the wrong person. These leads are also useless.
Your leads give you inaccurate sales information. Part of the lead generation process is gathering information that helps you sales teams. Information like an email or physical address help your teams research leads and create customized offers and pitches. If the information is incorrect, you have no idea what your leads want. And, this severely hobbles your sales efforts, even if you are able to contact these leads.
Your leads expose your business to fraud and collections risks. It’s very difficult to protect your business from fraud and collections risks if you don’t know who you’re doing business with.

That’s the bad news. But, it’s not all doom and gloom.

There are ways to fight back against bad data, without overhauling your lead generation systems. You can even turn unusable leads into useful contacts. So, don’t toss out those bad leads just yet.

How to get more leads in minutes

You’ve already got a database full of leads. The problem is that you don’t know how to contact many of those leads. If you can get the information you need to reach out to them, those dead leads suddenly come to life.

Boom. Zombie leads.

Just kidding. More like instant lead generation.

Batch processing

Here’s how you do it:

Export your bad leads to a .csv, Excel, or .txt file. Put each piece of contact information in a separate column, like this:
Remove any duplicate entries. There’s no need to check the same lead twice.
Upload your file to our batch append service. You’ll select the data you need to get and the level of accuracy you want (standard, premium) during the upload process. Your results will typically arrive in a matter of minutes. However, very large files may take longer.
Download your results and reload them into your lead management system.

Our batch append service automatically retrieves the most recent recorded information for each lead, and turns incomplete and uncontactable leads into usable contacts that you can immediately hand over to your sales teams.

It’s estimated that 30% of your CRM data is out of date, on average. So, cleaning your lead databases could instantly generate a lot of leads. That’s how you turn bad data into profit.

How to get more qualified leads

Verifying your existing information is a good way to access leads that were previously useless. But, it’s even better if you can prevent bad leads from entering your databases at all. This is where data integration is the best solution.

Here’s how it works:

Use an API to connect your CRM system to our data systems. There’s no need for an API key. The Searchbug API integrates with a unique URL. Most CRM systems have an interface for integrating APIs. But, you may wish to have your tech or IT team take care of the integration.
Configure your system so that it automatically checks new leads using our system as soon as it’s gathered from a lead form. Or, you can configure it so that leads are checked whenever team members access them.Either way, your leads will be verified before anyone tries to use them. This means that your sales teams can pull a lead from your database at any time, and the contact information will be correct.
You can also use our API to integrate data verification into your lead forms. This will validate lead data as users enter it on your forms. Then, your lead generation software can prompt users to correct incorrect entries.

Both methods will automatically protect your lead databases, and maximize your lead generation ROI. Additionally, once the data integration is complete, your lead verification will be entirely automated. There’s no continuous effort or maintenance. Just more usable leads (and more profit).

Using data verification in lead generation

Lead generation isn’t all about quantity. It’s also about quality. When you add data verification to your process, you’ll see a drop in your overall lead count.

That’s because you’re going to identify and remove any leads with invalid contact information. These were never real leads anyway. So, this isn’t really a loss. It just makes the numbers look smaller.

But, if you use data integration, you’ll also see a dip in incoming leads. Verifying information at the point of entry deters people who want to enter fake email addresses or bogus phone numbers just to get to your gated content. Again, these were never useful leads in the first place. So, you’re not seeing a drop in lead generation, just a drop in false information.

All these numbers represent an increase in lead quality. Your overall lead pool may be smaller. But, you’ll see an increase in sales efficiency, which is the true goal of lead generation.

Additionally, verifying your leads reduces your risk of fraud. Validating personal information makes it significantly harder (if not impossible) for people to use fake identities or commit credit card fraud.

Adding data verification to your lead generation system is a simple process that will save you tons of time and money. Check out the Searchbug batch append and data validation API, and start generating leads with dependable data.

28 Oct/0 Comments/by James Miller

Oct
21

Halloween Safety: How to Find Out Who Lives in Your Neighborhood Before Halloween

Background Information Search

Neighbors can be Spooky! Find out which doors you should AVOID before Halloween!

Most people think that Halloween safety is just a matter of knowing their neighbors, but how much do you really know?

Consider this: Do you know all of your neighbors? Most likely not. How well do you know the neighbors you do socialize with? How many of them would you trust with your children?

The reality is that there are gaps in your neighborhood knowledge. And, you should fill those gaps before you go out Trick-or-Treating this Halloween. Otherwise, your Trick-or-Treating adventures could be a lot scarier than you want them to be.

Who might live in your neighborhood?

The most obvious reason to find out who lives in your neighborhood is to avoid Trick-or-Treating at the house of a sex offender.

Just because someone is a sex offender doesn’t mean they’re broke. Many sex offenders live in affluent neighborhoods and earn respectable incomes. And, even if a sex offender was convicted decades ago, and there have been no incidents since, sex offenders are never legally allowed to participate in Trick-or-Treating.

It’s impossible to surmise whether or not someone is a sex offender based on surface-level information. And, it’s best for everyone if you can avoid a sex offender’s house altogether.

Additionally, sex offenders aren’t the only unsavory types that you might want to avoid. It’s wise to dodge any criminal’s house on Halloween, regardless of the crime.

Fortunately, a little bit of research will show you which doors to knock on, and which houses to skip.

Find out who lives in your neighborhood

Each state maintains its own sex offender registry. Most state databases are searchable by zip code. Check your state sex offender registry first. It’s free and easy to find by searching: {your state} sex offender registry.

However, there’s no national sex offender registry, and the state databases are not linked. So, if a sex offender moves from one state to another, he won’t be listed in the sex offender database of the state he moves to unless he reports the move.

And, criminal records suffer from the same issue. A crime committed in one state won’t necessarily show up in the records of another state.

So, you may need to do your own digging.

Getting names and addresses

Start at Nextdoor.com. You’ll need to create an account but, you can pull a ton of names and addresses in your expanded neighborhood from their database for free. Some will have names for users that share that information, others won’t.

If there are addresses without names on Nextdoor, you can do a reverse address lookup to find out who lives at any address one by one or you can create an excel file with a list and look them all up at once.

A reverse address lookup costs a couple of dollars, but the information is incredibly accurate so you know that any criminal records associated with that address are correct. And, honestly, it’s like paying for insurance. It’s more than just a bummer if you didn’t do it and it would have avoided an issue.

Once you have names and addresses, you can run a couple of checks on them to make sure they’re safe to visit. If you have a lot of addresses without names you might find this batch append tool handy. It lets you upload an excel file with addresses to get the names appended to your file. It’s both faster and cheaper than doing them one by one.

Finding the bad apples

With just a name and an address, you can get all the information you need to decide where you’re going to Trick-or-Treat.

Run a criminal records check on the names and addresses you retrieved from Nextdoor.

A criminal records search will identify the vast majority of houses to avoid. This search will identify sex offenders. It also gives information about felonies, misdemeanors, and traffic offenses. It’s all the information you need to make a completely informed decision about where you Trick-or-Treat or for that matter, what neighbors you want to avoid anyway.

A good criminal records check also costs a couple of buck, but, the data is also dependable. While free searches do exist, that data is rarely updated and poorly quality controlled. You’ll likely get inaccurate data, so what’s the point of spending all that time checking if it leads to being unsafe anyway or missing houses with good people who have great treats.

So, a paid criminal records search is more than worth the price if you have any suspicions or really want to know your neighbors.

Check for arrest warrants.

Obviously, this step is unnecessary if the criminal records check found something. However, not everyone with an arrest warrant has a conviction. Arrest warrants are often issued for pending convictions because the perpetrator did not appear for their trial as ordered.

Pending charges may not show up in a criminal records search, because there’s no conviction (yet). Some arrest warrants are issued for failure to appear in court for excessive parking tickets. But, plenty of warrants are issued for more serious pending charges.

Either way, it’s wise to avoid people with active arrest warrants. If the criminal records search comes back clean, but you want to double-check, you can run an arrest warrants search to be sure.

Again, the arrest warrants search is not free. But, the data is dependable. However, in most cases, the criminal search results will be enough for proper Halloween safety.

Target your searches

Since it costs a couple of bucks to check an address, it’s not financially reasonable to check every house in your area. You don’t need to, anyway.

Nextdoor has a tool for identifying houses in your neighborhood that will have candy for Trick-or-Treaters. Use the Nextdoor.com treat map to establish your Trick-or-Treating route. That way you can limit your searches to the houses you’re going to visit.

This will make searching your Trick-or-Treat route more cost and time-efficient thereby maximizing your kids treat per hour or if you’re making a game out of it, treats per steps. How many steps, how many treats?

That’s it. With a few minutes of online searching, you can build a Trick-or-Treating route that you know is safe. That way you can focus on the other Halloween safety issues like traffic, costume malfunctions, and sugar overload.

Have fun Trick-or-Treating safely!

21 Oct/0 Comments/by James Miller

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