Know Who You Are Really Dealing With

People come to us for a background check at roughly four moments: before investing, before signing with a partner or supplier, before hiring into a role with real access, and before meeting someone from the internet in person.

The question is always some version of the same thing. Is this person who they say they are?

What the cheap sites give you

Run a name through a twenty franc lookup service and you get a database match: an address history, maybe a phone number, maybe a relative. It is fast, and it is occasionally right.

What it cannot tell you is whether the person in front of you is the person in that record. It does not resolve common names. It does not notice that the company was registered five weeks ago. It does not spot that the founder's photo is a stock image, or that the same profile text appears under three different names.

That gap is where the losses happen.

What a real check covers

Identity resolution. Confirming the person and the record are the same human, not two people sharing a name.
Corporate history. Companies, directorships, and filings, including the dissolved ones and the ones in another jurisdiction.
Litigation and enforcement. Court records, regulatory actions, and sanctions or watchlist screening where it applies.
Digital footprint. Accounts, usernames, and history across platforms, including what was posted before the current professional persona existed.
Media and adverse findings. Press coverage, complaints, and reporting in the local language, not just English.
Consistency. Does the claimed career fit the dates, the locations, and the people who would have been there?

That last one finds more problems than any database ever does. Invented history rarely survives a timeline.

Red flags you can check yourself

Before you call anyone:

The company exists but was registered very recently, while the pitch implies years of trading.
The professional photo reverse image searches to a stock library or someone else's account.
Every online profile was created within the same short window.
The name appears in filings under slightly different spellings.
Urgency. Real opportunities survive a week of checking. Pressure to skip diligence is itself the finding.

Where the line is

This matters, so it is worth stating plainly. A background check uses public and lawfully available information. It does not include accessing anyone's accounts, messages, or devices, obtaining records that are not lawfully available to us, or pretending to be someone else to extract information.

In many jurisdictions, checks on employees or candidates also carry specific legal duties around consent, relevance, and data protection. We will tell you what applies to your case, and we will decline work that crosses the line. Our full position is in our legal and ethics commitments.

What you get

A written report: what was confirmed, what could not be confirmed, what contradicts what you were told, and a clear confidence level on each finding. No padding, and no implication of certainty we do not have.

Sometimes the answer is that the person checks out completely. That is a useful result too, and worth paying for before a decision you cannot reverse.

Ask us about a check. Tell us what the decision is and what you have been told, and we will tell you what is realistically verifiable.