Intelius Says it's Capable of Conducting a Full Background Check on Anyone

Obviously, Intelius' background check provides some information, but just how much? A $50 fee will supply information from a variety of records at the state, county, and city level; an extra fee supplies a search of criminal records nationwide. When I checked myself out, I found addresses going back some 20 years to my time in New York City, but they didn't have dates of residence, and they were not chronological. Most impressively, the report dug out my parents' names and their address—although it also listed two additional erroneous addresses for them. The report included the assessed value of my house and the name of my husband, which is listed on the property. Yet, apparently going by people who share my last name and lived near a previous address, it listed a couple of supposed "relatives and associates" of whom I've never heard. When asked how Intelius comes up with relatives and associates, Petersen explains that the names listed are merely people who at one time lived with (and apparently, from my search, around) the individual in question.

But when I did a background check on Intelius CEO Naveen Jain, there was no mention of a healthy amount of civil litigation related to Jain's past tenure as CEO of InfoSpace, a Bellevue high-tech company where many of the Intelius founders used to work (and whose offices are right across the street). In those suits, shareholders accused Jain of misleading them and artificially inflating the company's stock value for private gain, a subject also explored in a 2005 Seattle Times investigation.

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More About

• Edward Petersen
• Naveen Jain
• Bellevue
• Kelli West
• Crime and Law

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Petersen, himself an InfoSpace alum, explains that the information may be missing because the suits against Jain are filed in federal court, a venue not plumbed by Intelius' background check, which looks only at state records in the civil realm. But you have only to plug Jain's name into the free online records search offered by the Washington state court system to find 20 cases in King County Superior and District courts (not all related to InfoSpace), in addition to 30 cases filed in federal court.

Whether or not suspicion is useful armor to take with you through life, even Intelius, it seems, can't offer the whole story.

nshapiro@seattleweekly.com