REVIEW | PublicRecords
REVIEW | PublicRecords
🔒 Confidential
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★★★★★ Rated 4.8/5
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32 Billion+ Records
Our #1 pick for top public records sites in 2026.
Our top-ranked sites are reviewed on the basis of our own views, knowledge, and expert opinions. We are able to provide this free resource thanks to referral fees we receive from companies reviewed here. This may influence scores and ordering but does not influence review content. The owner of this site is an employee of The Control Group Media Company, LLC, which provides management services to Instant Checkmate, TruthFinder, and Intelius.
Instant Checkmate is known as the 400-pound gorilla in the online background check industry. They're one of the most popular services around. Despite the fact that they're fairly old now (founded in 2012), they are constantly revamping their site.
I used Instant Checkmate a few years ago but wanted to give it another try to see if they've improved anything. To test it out, I put it to the real test. One of my friends just recently started dating a girl, and I wanted to see if her background check revealed anything shady about her.
One of the most striking features of Instant Checkmate is the home page dashboard. It's neatly organized, and all the reports you have pulled recently are listed in the order you last pulled them.
When I searched the woman's name and state, I was presented with a results page that showed a lot of women with the exact same name. Fortunately, the results page also lists age, cities people have lived in, and known relatives. That helped me narrow it down to the background report I was looking for.
I was able to see a lot of data about her, but for the purposes of this review, I blacked out some identifying information in these screenshots for the sake of privacy.
The report page is well organized. All of the data on the report appears on a single long page. There's a navigation bar on the left hand side that reveals which section you're looking at — plus how much of the report you've seen so far. If you want to jump to any section, you can jump straight to it.
One of the most innovative features of the Instant Checkmate report is the "Timeline." It features all of the events listed in the report — like birth, criminal & traffic records, and appearances of new addresses — listed in chronological order.
It got all of the basics right, even some more advanced information like her job and schooling history.
Any unknown family members she's not telling about? When I checked the related people section of the report, I saw that it correctly listed the names of her father and two sisters.
Here's where the rubber meets the road. Does Instant Checkmate provide good phone numbers and email addresses? Her report showed two: one older phone number and one current one. I checked with my friend to confirm that it did display her current phone number. It even listed her current email address.
Pretty impressive, considering that I was able to find all this info in under a minute.
The location section lists a total of six different places she had lived through her life, including her current address. They were all plotted on a map. If I want to see more data about any location, I can click on "View More Location Details."
Near the bottom of the report is the really juicy stuff: criminal & traffic records. Is my friend's girlfriend hiding a bad past? Here's what popped up.
That's just a single traffic ticket from April 9, 2012. Other than that, she had a squeaky clean record. Good to know!
She isn't big on social media, but the report does list her LinkedIn profile. Checking other reports confirmed that it can also pull social media profiles from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even a bunch of social media networks I hadn't heard of before.
Instant Checkmate offers another feature I've seen almost nowhere else: a sex offender map. It examines the most recent address for a person in a report, then reveals which sex offenders are nearby.
Shockingly, it revealed that there are eighteen sex offenders near her home. I wonder if she even knew about that?
The basic report already provided a lot of data. But for an additional charge, you have the option of pulling premium data on almost any report. Premium data might contain information such as:
When I upgraded to the premium report, all of the extra data was helpfully added to the existing basic report.
The financial information section can include data like properties, bankruptcies, and liens. There wasn't any info about properties and bankruptcies, but I was shocked to see that she had a tax lien from a couple years ago. I now know to warn my friend that she had some money problems with the California Tax Board.
Do you only have scraps of information? You can enter a phone number or email address and see if it connects to a name. If you find the owner, you can also try to run a full background check on them.
Do you prefer to keep PDF copies of your reports? They are easier to keep on your hard drive or email to people as an attachment. For an additional fee you can download as many reports in PDF format as you want.
New data is being added to background check reports all of the time. If you want to be notified whenever more data is added to a particular report, you can switch on report monitoring. This is a feature almost no other service offers.
Instant Checkmate changes their pricing frequently, but monthly memberships currently run $27.49. For that price, you get unlimited access to as many reports as you like.
Instant Checkmate may be one of the biggest background check services out there, but they don't rest on their laurels. Their reports were good before, but it's stunning how many improvements they've made to their user interface and data completeness.
A monthly subscription gives you unlimited access to basic reports, which already have a ton of info. But if you are greedy for data, the premium reports can provide you with some seriously sensitive personal information. It ranks at the top of our list as one of the best online background check sites you can use.
