Is BeenVerified The Right Place For A Background Check?

Founded in 2007 in New York, BeenVerified is a background check company that provides detailed background check reports to its customers on one's criminal records as well as other life details. Besides the background checks, BeenVerified provides apps like NumberGuru where a reverse track is possible to see your caller's info.

BeenVerified is wildly used by people looking to run a quick background check on their new business partner and looking for an affordable rate to do so. Regular people also use their service when there's someone they want details on. It can be for immigration purposes or just a dad looking to figure out the bloke that's about to marry his daughter.

You can purchase individual reports at different rates or unlimited reports from a subscription. A one-month membership fee costs $26.89 while a three-month membership fee costs $17.48/month. The key features it's their aggregated report on the candidate's profile, including but not limited to criminal history, social media engagement...

There's no law against BeenVerified and it appears to be legit because it simply generates a report from information available on the internet. It's not a private investigator. Many employers have chosen to take their service when they are too busy to do the scooping themselves.

Note that BeenVerified is not a consumer reporting agency and cannot be used for means of employment, meaning an employer should not be using BeenVerified to run background checks on their employees.

For most other companies, they can only offer you the criminal records of the candidate from the public database. Rarely does any companies take it one step further, without a considerable rise in cost anyways, to investigate the candidate's online behaviors. BeenVerified makes sure your candidate's stance aligns with your company and doesn't cause any outrage on the internet.

Also, BeenVerified is often able to provide timely reports to its customers which are of high value as time is of the essence a lot of the times.

BeenVerified gathers information from every major public database to generate the report. From their database, you can easily get the candidate's phone number, address, car registration plates, and even money associated with the person.

Basically it scavenges data on the internet. Every little piece of details associated with you will be hunted down and they will filter out duplicate names or information with the same name but for sure don't belong to you. Their large database makes it hard for your information to slip through and you will likely be tracked down if you are a digital person.

BeenVerified has come under scrutiny many times over the years due to various security reasons. Using their app allows them to fetch information of everyone on your contact list thus running a background check on them. Many have said this has posed serious security threats to users that do not wish to share information on their contact list or those sharing information on their phone without realizing it.

The company was also criticized for its lack of effort in protecting its customers' privacy. Rather, not only are they running background checks on the candidates, but they are also fetching everything from their customers through their apps. What they can gather through the app is appalling, from the contact list to users' personal information stored on the phone, not available to the public.

Although the company has made a strenuous effort to discount the rumors and upgrade its security system throughout the years to ensure customers that they are not stealing information from them and selling it to others, the fire against them has never ceased and remains one of the biggest concerns.

Another concern about BeenVerified is the lack of professional efforts in the company. The company only gathers information about the person available on the internet. Information that can be gathered by anyone with a little effort, and they charge you a great deal of amount for it. Some see that this is not good value for money while some think it still violates personal privacy for those you are investigating.

Such as, people have put forth that it's unfair for employers to go through candidates' personal profiles on social media platforms and decide if they are the right candidate. Since BeenVerified only provides information available to the public, the information gathered can be very skewed and inaccurate. Due to this, the report the customer gets is not necessarily reflecting the true background of the candidate.

The comprehensive report from BeenVerified might not be so comprehensive after all and can be seen as incomplete or misleading in some ways. Yet, many of the disclaimers aren't noticeably put up and may cause confusion.

But the biggest concern of all, it's its opt-out process. For companies or individuals who do not wish to disclose their information in public, they can simply do so by paying a considerable amount of fees to BeenVerified and the company will hide their information from the public. The company came under fire for its opt-out process due to the lack of transparency and potentially hiding crucial information for a company from the public.

BeenVerified is keen to work with companies to have their information shielded or hidden upon requests, making people wonder what's the point of hiring them to find out information about the companies they are protecting. They are making money off of both sides and it's unfair to its customers. This also poses a huge security threat if they can simply remove information with the aid of a company.

User reviews of BeenVerified have been heavily decided. Some praised it as the affordable ways to run a quick background check while others criticize it for the accuracy of information gathered. For the algorithms used, BeenVerified often mistake personal information of other people. Many users have reported false information fetched from the system and do not match up with real-life information while others have questioned their ability to fetch information at all as many people are unable to find information.

For the users satisfied with it, they praise the company for its quick response time and how fast they are able to generate a report off of information gather. However, the general criticism is that the information is gathered from the public databases so most of the time it's not useful nor it's what the users are looking for.

Generally, experts are doubting the actual effect of BeenVerified and the security concerns that it could go through its users' contact list and gather information from it. Most experts view it as a rather reasonably-priced search engine if you are too lazy or too busy to do the research yourself because essentially any information that can be found by BeenVerified, can be found by yourself too.

But even if you are happy to outsource the task, still be very careful because experts are pointing out the same thing many users have, the information they fetch is either inaccurate or out of date. The system doesn't seem to be able to distinguish outdated information.

Some experts do say that this app is a good choice if you are just casually checking up on the people around you, maybe a new tenant, etc. It's good enough to give you a rough idea to the person you are dealing but it's certainly not up to standard if you are using it for something bigger or more formal. But since you are not supposed to run background checks for employees, this app should serve with good enough quality to cater to most of its users' needs.

BeenVerified has been a popular choice for many for a reason. It's fast and it gets you what you want. Of course, if you are looking at it on a professional level, you are looking at the wrong place. It's not supposed to be a business-level service but for individuals to check up on companies and others. If you are just using it casually, BeenVerified has everything you need.

Do watch out for the security warnings and concerns put forth by other users as well as experts. Be sure you understand what information is being taken from you when you install the app and understand that the information they generate may not be always correct so take a look at it as a reference point only. Balance it all and value it for yourself and you will see what BeenVerified is worth to you.