Background Checks for Dating

You can never be too safe when it comes to going on a date with someone you know little about. And even after a few dates, how well can you say you really know a person? That’s why there are many ways to run Background Checks for Dating online.

For these reasons, there’s no shame in utilizing Internet resources to run a background check on someone. If that person’s background is clear, you might feel much more comfortable being with her or him, and the runway to romance will be cleared for takeoff.

Nowadays, even the major online dating services, such as eHarmony.com, run Background Checks for Dating on people before they will run their profiles. This process helps them guard against civil lawsuits should known criminals commit crimes on the dates these companies facilitate.

What Can a Background Check Reveal?

Whether you meet someone online, at work, through mutual friends or acquaintances or however, you’ll probably feel safer running at least a criminal background check first. Criminal background checks reveal pertinent, even lifesaving, information, such as: Does this person have any kind of criminal record? In particular, has he committed any violent crimes or any sex crimes in the past?

You can also run a financial background check on a potential romantic partner. That way, you’ll discover if the person has filed for personal bankruptcy. That might not be a deal-breaker for you, but settling down with someone who is coping with the aftermath of bankruptcy can be a financial strain. And from such a check you might be able to learn of any outstanding debts she/he currently owes.

In addition, background checks can reveal a person’s marital history. Specifically, you want to know:

• Has your would-be partner been married before? How many times?
• Does this person have any kids? With how many women has he had kids? (Alimony and child support payments really eat away at people’s ability to save money and plan for the future.)
• Is this person still married? You may even know of someone who dated a person for a while only to find out, to her shock and dismay, that this guy was in fact married.

Complete Background Checks

Complete background check reports offer much more information beyond these basics. For example, does a person you’re thinking about dating use any aliases? Or has she or he changed her/his name in the past? If so, that might be a good topic to bring up over dinner. There can be innocuous reasons for people to legally change their names, of course, but it’s still something you should address.

You can also learn from a complete background check if this person actually works for the company she claims to work for, and if the position he holds is this position he claims to hold. (Maybe he’s not really the CEO of his company; maybe he washes windows there instead.) And has this person been the target of a work-related civil lawsuit before? Is she facing a malpractice lawsuit?

A full background check will confirm a person’s address, phone number(s) and email address. Further, private investigators running such checks often scrutinize a person’s social media pages, including social media accounts you might not even know about. For example, are there a lot of strippers posting messages on the wall of his secret Facebook account?

To really get a thorough sense of someone’s past, and by extension his or her level of honesty when it comes to describing that past, you’ll probably want to turn to a professional background checking service. Professional private investigators have the resources, the contacts, and the experience to do a much more effective job than you could do yourself clicking around on your computer. And the Internet makes it easy to find these kinds of services, too; plenty of them exist now. But do some research before settling on a company to hire. Compare prices, read testimonials, and talk to people you know and trust who have paid for background checks themselves. That way, you’ll really get a sense of which companies would be the best to hire.