Been Verified People Search: What You Need to Know Before Paying

What Is BeenVerified People Search?

BeenVerified is a background check platform founded in that aggregates public records to help users find information about people. The service pulls data from various public sources to create reports that include address history, phone numbers, social media accounts, criminal records, and more.

The platform offers several search types: people search by name, reverse phone lookup, email lookup, address lookup, and even vehicle/VIN searches. It's become one of the most popular people search engines in the United States, though it only covers U.S. records.

Here's the reality that most articles won't tell you: BeenVerified is essentially packaging information that's technically available for free across various public record databases. The value proposition is convenience-they compile scattered data into organized reports so you don't have to manually search dozens of sources.

Founded by Josh Levy and Ross Cohen, BeenVerified has grown to serve over a million customers and handles more than 38 million searches every month. The company is headquartered in New York City and has been featured in major publications like The New York Times and Forbes.

How BeenVerified Pricing Actually Works

BeenVerified doesn't offer single-report purchases, which frustrates many users who only need one search. Instead, you must subscribe to access any reports. The pricing structure typically looks like this:

• Monthly Plan: Around $26.89-$36.89 per month
• Quarterly Plan: Approximately $17.48-$23.98 per month when billed every three months

A critical detail that catches many users off-guard: subscriptions automatically renew, and you're limited to 100 reports per month regardless of your plan. If you need unlimited searches, competitors like TruthFinder actually provide unlimited reports with their subscriptions.

The pricing also isn't transparent upfront. You'll need to complete the entire search process-entering names, locations, and other details-before seeing the actual cost. This design choice has drawn criticism from users who feel pressured into subscribing after investing time in a search.

Understanding the Trial Offer

BeenVerified sometimes offers a trial membership for $1 that gives you access to 100 reports for 7 days. While this sounds attractive, it's designed as a gateway to the full subscription. If you don't cancel before the trial ends, you'll automatically be charged for a full monthly membership.

The trial can be useful if you genuinely need to run multiple searches within a week and remember to cancel. However, many users report difficulty with the cancellation process, which we'll cover in detail later.

Hidden Costs and Premium Features

Beyond the standard subscription, BeenVerified offers premium add-ons that increase the total cost. These include access to criminal records in some cases, which may require an additional payment of approximately $14 to unlock. The website isn't always clear about which features require extra payment until you're already subscribed.

Sales tax also applies based on your location, so the advertised price isn't the final amount you'll pay. This lack of transparency is one reason BeenVerified has received a C rating from the Better Business Bureau.

What BeenVerified Reports Actually Include

Understanding what you're paying for helps set realistic expectations. BeenVerified reports typically contain:

• Contact Information: Current and previous phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses
• Criminal Records: Arrests, court records, and convictions pulled from public databases
• Address History: A timeline of where the person has lived
• Social Media Profiles: Links to detected social accounts
• Relatives and Associates: Names of family members and known connections
• Property Records: Real estate ownership information
• Professional Licenses: Certain licenses that appear in public records
• Marriage and Divorce Records: When available in public databases
• Bankruptcies and Liens: Financial public records

What BeenVerified doesn't provide well: accurate cell phone data (they lack direct carrier partnerships), real-time verification of information, and employment details beyond basic public records. Education records are particularly spotty-you might find more current information on someone's LinkedIn profile.

Data Accuracy Issues You Should Know About

The most significant limitation of BeenVerified is inconsistent data quality. Multiple independent reviews and user reports indicate that the information can be outdated, incomplete, or occasionally incorrect. Some users report finding records that don't match the person they searched, while others discover that recent changes-like new addresses or phone numbers-aren't reflected in reports.

The platform depends entirely on the frequency and accuracy of updates to the public records databases it aggregates. If a county hasn't updated its records in months, BeenVerified can't provide current information. This creates a particularly frustrating experience when you're paying for what you assume will be reliable, up-to-date data.

In testing, various reviewers found that BeenVerified successfully provided about 70% accurate information, with the remaining 30% being outdated, incomplete, or difficult to verify. For comparison, that's below the accuracy rates of some competing services that maintain more direct relationships with data sources.

The Limitations of BeenVerified for Business Use

If you're a sales professional, recruiter, or marketer, BeenVerified has significant limitations you should understand before subscribing:

Not FCRA-Compliant: BeenVerified explicitly states it's not a consumer reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. This means you legally cannot use their reports for employment screening, tenant screening, or credit decisions. If you need background checks for hiring, you'll need a compliant service.

No Bulk Processing: The platform is designed for individual searches, not batch processing. If you need to verify information for hundreds of leads, you'll waste hours running individual queries.

Outdated Information: Public records can be months or years behind reality. People change jobs, move addresses, and update contact information constantly-BeenVerified's data often lags behind.

Opt-Out Problem: Anyone can remove themselves from BeenVerified's database through their opt-out process. This is particularly problematic when searching for people who value their privacy or have reason to hide their information-exactly the people you might most want to find.

The opt-out process takes 4-6 weeks to complete, and once someone removes themselves, they essentially become invisible to BeenVerified searches. This has led to situations where known individuals with public records simply don't appear in search results because they've proactively removed their information.

How BeenVerified Compares to Competitors

Understanding where BeenVerified fits in the people search market helps you make informed decisions. Here's how it stacks up against major competitors:

BeenVerified vs TruthFinder

TruthFinder offers deeper searches that typically take longer to complete-between 5-10 minutes compared to BeenVerified's faster results. TruthFinder includes dark web monitoring as a feature, which BeenVerified doesn't offer. However, TruthFinder doesn't provide exact pricing upfront and only offers subscriptions without single-report options.

TruthFinder has an A+ BBB rating compared to BeenVerified's C rating, suggesting better customer service and fewer billing complaints. Many users report that TruthFinder's reports are more comprehensive, but the subscription costs approximately $23-28 per month, making it slightly more expensive than some BeenVerified plans.

BeenVerified vs Intelius

Intelius, which is actually part of the same corporate family as BeenVerified (under the PeopleConnect umbrella), offers a pay-per-report option that BeenVerified lacks. Individual reports range from $0.95 to $49.95, with an optional membership at $19.95 per month.

Intelius provides an identity shield feature for an extra fee that reveals who has checked your credit score and offers fraud resolution services. This makes Intelius more suitable for users who need occasional searches rather than regular monitoring.

BeenVerified vs Instant Checkmate

Instant Checkmate appears to use similar database sources as Intelius and BeenVerified but inserts significantly more promotional content during the search process. The subscription price is higher than BeenVerified, and they don't offer trial options or single-report purchases.

The main advantage of Instant Checkmate is comprehensive criminal record searches, making it preferable for users specifically focused on criminal background information.

BeenVerified vs Spokeo

Spokeo positions itself as a budget-friendly alternative with lower monthly costs. However, the reports are less detailed than BeenVerified's, focusing primarily on public records and social network aggregation. Spokeo works well as an entry-level option for basic checks but doesn't provide the depth that users often need for thorough research.

The BeenVerified Mobile App Experience

BeenVerified offers mobile applications for both iOS and Android devices, and even has an Apple Watch companion app. The mobile experience deserves separate consideration because it's where many users primarily interact with the service.

Mobile App Features

The mobile app provides access to all the same search types available on the desktop version: people search, reverse phone lookup, email lookup, address search, and VIN lookup. The app includes some unique features designed for on-the-go use:

• Caller ID Functionality: Identify unknown numbers calling your phone in real-time
• Contact List Scanning: Run background checks on people already in your phone contacts
• Location-Based Features: Check for registered sex offenders in your vicinity using geolocation
• Saved Reports: Access previously generated reports without running new searches

The app has received mixed reviews, with a 4.4-star rating on the Google Play Store based on over 22,500 reviews. Users praise the convenience and speed but complain about the same issues that plague the desktop version: pricing transparency, cancellation difficulties, and data accuracy.

Mobile-Specific Limitations

Some users report that certain features don't work properly on mobile. The PDF generation feature, which should allow you to save and email reports, has been reported as non-functional by multiple users. The app also requires a subscription even to see basic information, whereas the desktop version sometimes shows limited preview data.

The mobile app's most controversial aspect is its aggressive subscription prompts. Users who downloaded the app expecting to run a single quick search find themselves pushed toward subscription signup before seeing any results.

Better Approaches for B2B Contact Research

If your goal is finding accurate contact information for business purposes, BeenVerified isn't your best option. Here's what actually works for sales, recruiting, and marketing professionals:

Verify Before You Reach Out

Rather than relying on aggregated public records, smart professionals verify contact information before using it. An invalid email address doesn't just fail to reach your prospect-it damages your sender reputation and can get your entire domain blacklisted.

Our Email Verifier lets you instantly check whether an email is valid, risky, or invalid before you hit send. This prevents bounces that hurt your deliverability and saves you from wasting outreach on dead addresses.

Find Direct Contact Information

For B2B outreach, you typically need professional email addresses and direct phone numbers-not the personal information BeenVerified surfaces. Tools designed for professional contact discovery, like our Email Finder, locate business email addresses using just a name and company name or LinkedIn URL.

When you need phone numbers for direct outreach, our Mobile Number Finder helps you locate cell phone numbers from email addresses or LinkedIn profiles-far more relevant for sales calls than the landline-heavy data in public records databases.

Build Comprehensive Profiles

Modern outreach requires more than just contact information. Platforms like Clay aggregate data from over 50 sources to build complete prospect profiles, including funding information, tech stack data, and intent signals that help you personalize outreach effectively.

For technical sales teams, knowing what technology stack a prospect uses can be the difference between a cold pitch and a relevant conversation. Our Tech Stack Scraper identifies the technologies websites are using, enabling highly targeted outreach based on actual tool usage.

Generate Qualified B2B Leads

Instead of searching for individuals one at a time, professional prospecting tools help you identify entire companies that match your ideal customer profile. Our B2B Targeting Generator uses AI to analyze your target market and generate lists of qualified prospects based on industry, company size, technology usage, and other firmographic data.

When BeenVerified Actually Makes Sense

Despite its limitations for business use, BeenVerified serves certain purposes well:

• Reconnecting with Lost Contacts: Finding old friends, former neighbors, or family members you've lost touch with
• Personal Safety Checks: Researching someone before a date, meeting a stranger from an online marketplace, or vetting a new neighbor
• Verifying Online Identities: Checking if someone you met online is who they claim to be
• Property Research: Learning about property ownership and history in a neighborhood
• Unclaimed Money Searches: Discovering if you have unclaimed assets waiting in government databases
• Vehicle History Checks: Running VIN lookups before purchasing a used vehicle

For these personal use cases, the subscription model can provide value if you plan to run multiple searches over a month or quarter. The convenience of having information compiled into a single, organized report saves significant time compared to manually searching dozens of government websites and public record databases.

Free Alternatives to BeenVerified

Before paying for a subscription, exhaust free options that often provide similar information:

TruePeopleSearch and FastPeopleSearch: These free people search engines pull from similar public record sources as BeenVerified. Results vary, but you can often find basic contact information and address history without paying.

Social Media Deep Diving: A thorough search across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter often reveals more current information than any database. People update their social profiles far more frequently than public records get updated.

Google Advanced Search: Using operators like "name" + "city" + "site:linkedin.com" can surface professional profiles and public information directly.

County Court Records: If you specifically need criminal records, many county courts offer free online access to their databases. It requires more manual work, but the information is typically more current and accurate than aggregated services.

Property Records: County assessor websites provide free access to property ownership information, tax records, and sale history. This eliminates the need for paid searches when you're specifically researching real estate.

Whitepages: The free version of Whitepages provides basic contact information and reverse phone lookup without requiring a subscription. While less comprehensive than paid services, it's sufficient for simple identity confirmation.

Understanding BeenVerified's Data Sources

To properly evaluate BeenVerified, you need to understand where their information comes from and why that affects accuracy:

Public Records Databases

BeenVerified aggregates data from federal, state, county, and local government records. This includes court records, property deeds, marriage licenses, birth certificates, and professional licenses. The challenge is that these records update at different frequencies-some counties digitize and update records weekly, while others may be months behind.

Commercial Data Sources

Beyond government records, BeenVerified pulls data from commercial sources like magazine subscriptions, store loyalty cards, and mortgage records. This data is often sold and resold among data brokers, which means it can become outdated quickly as it passes through multiple intermediaries.

Social Media and Online Activity

BeenVerified scrapes publicly available social media profiles, blog posts, and online forum activity. This is perhaps the most current data they provide, but it's also limited to what people choose to make public. Privacy-conscious individuals or those who don't actively use social media will have minimal information in this category.

Why This Matters

Understanding these sources explains BeenVerified's fundamental limitation: they're only as current as the slowest database they aggregate. If someone moved last month, got a new phone number, or recently had a criminal record expunged, BeenVerified won't reflect those changes until their source databases update and BeenVerified re-aggregates the information.

The Trust Score Approach to Background Checks

For professionals who need to assess someone's credibility-whether for business partnerships, high-value transactions, or due diligence-a simple people search often isn't enough. You need context around the information you find.

Our Background Checker takes a different approach than traditional people search tools. Instead of just dumping raw public records into a report, it provides comprehensive background reports with trust scores that help you quickly assess someone's overall credibility.

This is particularly valuable when you're evaluating:

• Potential business partners or investors
• Vendors and service providers
• Remote candidates during the hiring process
• Clients for high-value services

The trust score methodology analyzes multiple data points to generate an overall credibility assessment, making it easier to make quick decisions without becoming an expert at interpreting public records.

How to Cancel Your BeenVerified Subscription

Given the numerous complaints about cancellation difficulties, understanding the process before subscribing is essential:

The Official Cancellation Process

BeenVerified doesn't make cancellation obvious or easy. The cancel button isn't prominently displayed in your account settings. To cancel, you have two primary options:

Option 1 - Phone Cancellation: Call their customer service line and navigate through an automated 6-step process that includes sales pitches designed to retain you as a customer. Users report this takes anywhere from 10-30 minutes depending on how persistent the retention attempts are.

Option 2 - Email Cancellation: Send a cancellation request to [email protected]. Response times typically range from 12-24 hours, but you'll need to confirm cancellation and watch for follow-up emails asking if you're sure you want to cancel.

Important Cancellation Details

You must cancel before your renewal date to avoid being charged for another cycle. BeenVerified enables auto-renewal by default, and there's no grace period if you forget to cancel and get charged. The company's policy is that once you're billed, that charge is non-refundable unless you can demonstrate a legitimate billing error.

Some users report being charged even after canceling. If this happens, you'll need to contact customer service again with your cancellation confirmation. In cases where the company doesn't resolve the issue, disputing the charge through your credit card company may be necessary.

The Opt-Out Process (Removing Your Information)

Canceling your subscription is different from opting out of BeenVerified's database. If you want to remove yourself from their searchable records, you need to visit their opt-out page and submit a separate request with your personal information.

The opt-out process takes 4-6 weeks to complete. You'll need to verify your identity and specifically identify which records you want removed. Be aware that opting out doesn't prevent your information from reappearing if new public records become available and get re-aggregated into their system.

Privacy and Security Concerns

Using any people search service raises legitimate privacy questions. Here's what you should know about BeenVerified's data practices:

What BeenVerified Does With Your Data

When you create an account and run searches, BeenVerified collects information about who you're searching for and what information you're seeking. Their privacy policy indicates they may use this data for their own business purposes, including improving their service and potentially for marketing.

Your payment information is processed through standard payment processors, and BeenVerified claims to use bank-grade encryption for data transmission. However, like any online service, it's a potential target for data breaches.

Legal and Ethical Considerations

BeenVerified explicitly prohibits using their service for stalking, harassment, or any illegal purposes. Their terms of service require users to comply with all applicable laws, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

However, enforcement of these restrictions is limited. The platform doesn't verify why you're searching for someone or how you intend to use the information. This creates potential for misuse, which is why BeenVerified faces ongoing criticism from privacy advocates.

Who Can See That You Searched

One common question: Does the person you search for get notified? The answer is no-BeenVerified doesn't alert people when someone runs a search on them. This anonymity is part of the service's appeal for users but raises ethical questions about surveillance and privacy.

Customer Service and Support Quality

Based on thousands of user reviews across multiple platforms, BeenVerified's customer service receives mixed ratings:

Response Times and Availability

Customer support is available seven days a week through phone and email. Live chat response times average around 10 minutes, while email support typically responds within 24 hours. This is reasonably competitive with industry standards.

Common Complaints

The most frequent customer service complaints involve billing issues, cancellation difficulties, and data accuracy problems. Support agents are reportedly helpful with billing questions but limited in their ability to address data accuracy issues since they're dependent on source databases.

Many users report frustration that customer service can't preview reports before you subscribe. If you find that a report doesn't contain the information you need, support generally won't refund your subscription on that basis.

Better Business Bureau Rating

BeenVerified holds a C rating from the Better Business Bureau, which is below average for the industry. The rating stems primarily from two factors: a high volume of complaints (over 1,000 in recent periods) and concerns about business practices that some users perceive as deceptive.

To BeenVerified's credit, they respond to 100% of complaints on review platforms like Trustpilot and work to resolve issues. However, the fact that so many issues arise in the first place indicates systemic problems with their business model and user experience.

Making the Right Choice for Your Needs

The decision between BeenVerified and alternatives comes down to your specific use case:

Choose BeenVerified if: You need occasional personal searches, want an established platform with a mobile app, and are comfortable with subscription pricing for consumer-focused reports.

Choose professional tools if: You're conducting B2B outreach, need verified business contact information, require FCRA-compliant screening, or want to process contacts at scale.

Use free alternatives first if: You only need basic information, want to test what's available before paying, or are comfortable spending time across multiple sources.

For outbound sales and recruiting specifically, combining purpose-built tools-email finders for prospecting, verification tools for cleaning lists, and enrichment platforms for context-will always outperform generic people search databases designed for consumer use.

Questions to Ask Before Subscribing

Before committing to any people search service, including BeenVerified, consider these questions:

• Do I need multiple searches, or will one report suffice?
• Is the information I need likely to be in public records?
• How current does the data need to be for my purposes?
• Can I accomplish the same goal with free resources?
• Am I comfortable with the cancellation process?
• Does my use case comply with FCRA restrictions?

Answering these honestly will help you determine whether a paid subscription makes sense or whether alternative approaches would better serve your needs.

Bottom Line

BeenVerified fills a legitimate niche for personal people searches, but it's not the right tool for professional use cases. The subscription model, FCRA limitations, and consumer-focused design make it a poor fit for sales, recruiting, and marketing workflows.

If you're researching someone for personal reasons, BeenVerified works fine-just remember to cancel before your subscription auto-renews. If you're trying to find and verify contacts for business outreach, invest your time and money in tools designed specifically for that purpose.

The most effective approach combines multiple specialized tools rather than relying on any single database. Verify emails before sending, find direct contact information through professional channels, and supplement with background checks when credibility assessment matters. That workflow beats any people search subscription every time.

For entrepreneurs and business professionals looking to leverage data effectively, consider exploring our Startup Idea Generator to discover how AI-powered analysis can identify opportunities in your market. The same principles that make professional prospecting tools superior to consumer people search services apply across all business intelligence applications: specialized, purpose-built tools deliver better results than general-purpose databases.