Is Been Verified a good service?

If you're interested in checking someone's background for criminal records for free online, you're not going to find a professional one. What you'll find is companies who let members search their databases, which use information that's publicly available (yet scattered all over the place.) Their goal is to be as accurate as possible about people's details which include, but aren't limited to a person's former and current address, criminal history and court records (may include records of divorce and marriage, judgments, etc).

In this post, I'll show a review of Been Verified which does offer a free trial. Your info and searches are kept safe, people you search for won't know what you were up to, according to the company (and most if not 100% of their competitors, as far as I'm aware).

As I'm updating the text of this post in the late summer of 2021, I can't remember the last time I've seen an advertisement from this company. In fact, Been Verified doesn't even show up in the first 5 pages of Google when I search for "background check", unless you count what is shown in related searches. Maybe this company has fallen off the radar over the years. Still, I'm leaving up the very old video review I did of it anyways, despite the quality of the video.

Update (2025): It turns out BeenVerified hadn't exactly fallen off the radar so much as the whole background check space got a lot more crowded around it. The company is now owned by Intelius, which also runs Instant Checkmate and US Search, so the parent company has multiple products competing for the same ad space. That probably explains some of the quieter profile. The service itself is still running and has expanded quite a bit since I first wrote about it, so it seemed worth adding some updated notes below.

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What BeenVerified Actually Does

BeenVerified is a public records aggregator. It pulls together data from court records, property databases, social media profiles, and other publicly available sources to generate reports on individuals. One thing worth knowing upfront: it isn't a professional background screening service. It legally cannot be used to screen employees, evaluate tenants, or assess creditworthiness. Those uses fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and BeenVerified is not an FCRA-compliant service. If you need a background check for hiring purposes, you need a different tool.

What it is good for is the more informal side of things: figuring out who's calling from an unknown number, looking up someone you met on a dating app, checking out a seller on Facebook Marketplace, or just reconnecting with someone you've lost touch with. It bundles together a fairly wide range of search types (people search, reverse phone lookup, reverse email lookup, vehicle history via VIN or license plate, and more) into a single subscription. One review aimed at private investigators described it as a solid first-pass research tool before moving on to more specialized databases.

What's in a Report

Reports cover a fairly broad range of data points: contact information, address history, relatives and known associates, criminal records where available, property records, social media profiles linked to a name or email, and more. BeenVerified also has an unclaimed money search and an obituary search, which are more niche features that other services don't typically offer.

The report layout gets consistent praise for being readable. There's a table of contents, plain-language explanations of technical terms, and a mobile app that works on iOS and Android (including Apple Watch, for whatever that's worth).

What doesn't get as much praise is accuracy. This is a recurring complaint across almost every people-search service, and BeenVerified is no exception. Employment data in particular tends to be unreliable, and address history can lag behind reality by months or longer. Reports are only as good as the underlying public records, and public records have gaps, errors, and delays baked right in.

Pricing

BeenVerified runs on a subscription model. There's no option to purchase a single report. Current pricing sits around $26.89 per month for a monthly plan, or roughly $17 to $18 per month if you pay for three months upfront (billed as a lump sum around $52). There's typically a $1 trial for seven days, which is the lowest-friction way to evaluate whether the service works for what you need.

The subscription covers unlimited searches, up to 100 reports per month, which is more than enough for most personal use cases.

One consistent complaint worth flagging: cancellation is not as simple as clicking a button. You typically need to call customer support or send an email to stop auto-renewal, and users report spending significant time on hold to get it done. If you sign up to run a few searches and then forget about it, automatic billing will continue. Using a prepaid card is a workaround a lot of people mention for exactly this reason.

How It Compares

The people-search market has a lot of players now, and BeenVerified sits somewhere in the middle of the pack. Instant Checkmate (which is now a sibling product under the same parent company, oddly enough) generally gets higher marks for report depth. It includes things like weapons licenses, vehicle records, and traffic incidents that BeenVerified doesn't always surface. TruthFinder is often cited as more thorough and more current, though it costs a bit more and doesn't offer a low-cost trial. Spokeo is cheaper and simpler but covers less ground. Intelius tends to rank well for flexibility.

BeenVerified's consistent advantages are its ease of use, its bundled search types, and the trial pricing that lets you test the waters before committing to a full month.

The Short Version

BeenVerified does what it says. It finds publicly available information on people and packages it in a readable format. It's not magic. The data is imperfect, the employment records are often wrong, and some reports will come back thin or outdated. But for the informal, everyday use cases it's actually designed for, it holds up reasonably well.

The subscription model and the cancellation hassle are real frustrations that come up repeatedly in user reviews, and they're worth knowing about going in. The $1 trial is genuinely useful if you only need to run a handful of searches. Just make sure you cancel before it converts to a full month if you don't plan to stick around.

If you're looking for something with more report depth and don't mind paying a bit more, TruthFinder or Instant Checkmate may serve you better. If BeenVerified's pricing and bundled approach fit what you need, it remains a solid enough option. Just go in with realistic expectations about how current the data will be.