Americans lost $8.6 billion to phone fraud in 2014. Make sure you're not one of them.

Telephones are a major source of abuse and fraud. BeenVerified’s reverse phone lookup service can help you identify who is trying to reach you, but it’s also important that you understand the ways that phone calls can financially and emotionally disturb you.

Sales Calls:

A more dangerous call is the scam phone call. There are a wide variety of scam phone calls, but they all involve trying to get financial information or money from you. Charity scams are when people represent themselves as legitimate charities seeking contributions, but the callers are not linked to the charity or the charity itself is fraudulent. Legal scams threaten civil or criminal legal action unless you take certain steps. Lottery scams say that you’ve won a prize, but ask for financial information to secure your winnings. Work from home scams offer to provide training or job opportunities, but without an actual attached job. Finally, false banking alerts suggest that one of your accounts has had fraudulent activity and asks for identifying financial information to remedy the problem.

"I received a call saying I won $250,000. It seemed too good to be true, but it just sounded so real."

Unwanted Personal Calls:

Hate to get sales phone calls? We do and we try to avoid them, but sometimes it seems like some companies just ignore the Do Not Call Registry. What may be the most challenging part of a sales call is that many of us have been raised to be polite, rather than assertive, and many telemarketers are taught to take advantage of those good manners. Knowing a phone call is a sales call can help you avoid sales calls in two ways: first, you can choose not to answer the call; second, you can contact the company and inform them that you are on the Do Not Call Registry and ask them not to call you.

Almost all of us have dealt with unwanted personal phone calls. Perhaps it’s an ex who calls from different numbers. Maybe it’s a stranger calling from multiple numbers in a persistent stalking pattern. Using BeenVerified’s Reverse Phone Lookup to identify who owns a number can help you decide whether to answer a call and can also be an important way to help build up a record of stalking or harassment.

Debt Collection Calls:

The final category of unwanted call is debt collections. There are some pretty basic rules outlining what type of behavior is legal for debt collectors, but many debt collectors step well outside of those boundaries. Using BeenVerified’s Reverse Phone Lookup service may help you identify how to contact debt collectors to direct them to contact you in writing, rather than on the phone.

Give BeenVerified a try and see what you find out. To run a reverse phone look up now, click here.

Try it yourself and see what you find out. Just search your name or someone you know, click here.

Google does not search all publicly available information. If the information is only available for a fee, then it is generally not going to be on a page that Google can search.

We love Google. Who doesn’t? Its wonderful search algorithm makes searching for things things fast and easy. This makes many of us think that we can find anything on Google. For example, you might think that you can run a background search by Googling someone. However, you would be wrong. A Google Search is not the same as running a background search with a company like BeenVerified.

Reason 1: Google does not search all publicly available information.

Google only searches information from publicly accessible websites. If information is only available for a fee or with a password, then it is generally not going to be searchable by Google. While BeenVerified does not have access to all public information either, it does have access to these for-pay and password protected records that regular search engines don't have access to.

Reason 2: Google returns searches by relevance, but does not exclude irrelevant information.

When you run a search for someone using their identifying information, it may return searches for people who share the same name, people who share the same birthday, or other identifying factors. The results may not be for the person that you’re actually trying to find.

Reason 3: BeenVerified creates unified reports.

BeenVerified consolidates records about a single person into a unified report for you. This helps eliminate the overlap that can occur when looking for people that share the same name and/or birthdate. By consolidating reports by person, BeenVerified can help eliminate this common source of confusion.

Reason 4: BeenVerified has access to databases that would otherwise require many expensive payments.

For the price of a single BeenVerified search, you get access to information that might otherwise cost multiple fees and require many searches. This type of information includes civil court documents and government records, such as marriage, divorce, and child support records. It also includes criminal records that do not generally appear on a generic Google search.

While Google can provide basic information, BeenVerified provides in-depth details you’re seeking when running a background search.

Try it yourself and see what you find out. Just search your name or someone you know, click here.

"I spent $200 on tickets to a concert that turned out be fake. I'm apparently one of over 5,000,000 people who fell for the same trick."

There are many things we can do to make ourselves safer when engaging in internet transactions. The first thing to do is to become aware of the common scams that people engage in on the internet. Craigslist scams tend to focus on people offering goods and services, because those are the people who tend to be placing the ads. These include rental scams, car buying or selling scams, ticket scams, job scams, and fake guarantee scams. Rental scams tend to target potential tenants and can be run in a variety of ways. In many of these scams, the alleged landlord has no link to the property that is being shown, but is collecting deposits and rent in an effort to fleece people. Car sales scams can either be on the buying side or the seller side.

Scamming sellers may have no title to the car that they are selling, while scamming buyers may attempt to defraud sellers of a vehicle by passing checks or money orders that are no good. Ticket scams involve selling tickets that are no good, whether because they are counterfeit, duplicates, or tickets that have been canceled. Job scams tend to be people offering jobs that do not exist, but saying that the person needs to pay for training or an application fee. Finally, guarantee scams are based on a fraudulent guarantee by the internet site, complete with an authentic-appearing email backing up the guarantee.

In May, a woman lost $4,700 by buying a fake used car in a fraudulent vehicle-selling scheme.

The first two steps to avoiding scams on Craigslist are to insist on in-person transaction and insist on cash in the transactions. However, these two steps can still leave a potential purchaser vulnerable. BeenVerified can help fill in some questions and help avoid some scams by helping identify the actual owner of property, helping verify identity, and matching phone numbers and addresses to their owners. It can also help identify sellers or buyers with criminal records, which might inform your decisions about meeting to exchange goods or services.

eBay scams differ from Craigslist in that the scammers are more likely to be buyers than sellers and that scammer may try to use eBay’s affiliated payment system, PayPal, to further their scams. There are steps you can take to avoid being scammed on eBay, many of them involving eBay’s user rating system. Highly rated users with long histories of transactions may make you feel more confident in your sales. Unlike Craigslist, where cash is one way to protect yourself from scams, it is unusual for eBay users to only use cash or money orders for their transactions. BeenVerified can help fill in some questions and help avoid some scams by helping identify the actual owner of property, helping verify identity, and matching phone numbers and addresses to their owners.

BeenVerified is a monthly subscription service. Try it yourself and see what you find out. Just search your name or someone you know, click here.

Americans lose millions of dollars to online dating scams each year. Run a background check before its too late.

Since the beginning of time, people have been misrepresenting themselves to seem more attractive to others. However, the internet has created incredible new opportunities for dishonesty and fraud. Its easy to present a misleading story about yourself on dating sites or Facebook. Running a background check using BeenVerified is an easy way to gain more peace of mind.

You may think that running a background check is the least romantic thing that you could do. We absolutely disagree. In fact, we can easily think of ten things that are less romantic and more dangerous than running a background check on a potential date:

1. Going on a date with a married person who claims to be single.
2. Falling in love with an imaginary person.
3. A date with a history of sexual violence.
4. A date with a history of domestic violence.
5. Dating a deadbeat with a criminal record.
6. Catfishing.
7. Finding out your spouse is online and trying to date other people.
8. Dating someone who is bankrupt, or only interested in your money.
9. Going on a date only to be robbed or victimized.
10. Finding out that your date has family members that they don’t admit to.

These are some of the many ways internet dating creates opportunities for abuse. Unlike traditional dating scenarios, when you meet someone online you rarely have a common group of friends to identify red flags. Instead, with online dating, you are only left with your judgment.

"I had met a very shy guy online who was reluctant to tell me personal information. I searched BeenVerified and it turns out he had lied to me about where he lived and his actual family. You really just never know."

Background checks can help avoid the list of dating horrors above. Using BeenVerified, you can run a background check to find out important information about a potential date. When available, a quick search can provide information about marriages and divorces, and help determine whether someone is actually single. A search can help you determine whether someone actually exists or is just creating or stealing another persona (while some people may have a minimal public record presence, few real people will have no public record). This can prevent you from being catfished, where people steal others’ identities to create dating profiles.

BeenVerified’s Criminal Background checks can reveal convictions for sexual assaults and domestic violence, and sometimes arrests for those crimes that did not lead to convictions. A BeenVerified background check that reveals a history of fraud or property offense may be a red flag that a potential date is interested in your money, not in you as a person. Finally, BeenVerified can help keep you from being catfished.

Try it yourself and see what you find out. Just search your name or someone you know, click here.

A lack of a public record may serve as a big red flag that the person you're searching for is not who he or she appears to be.

We're confident that BeenVerified is an excellent background check service, but sometimes you do a search and you still can’t find who you’re trying to find. There are a few different reasons that this could occur. Some of the reasons are due to innocuous explanations, such as the person not establishing a public record or the material not being digitized. In other cases, the lack of a public record may serve as its own red flag that, perhaps, the person is not who he or she appears to be.

First, is the person you’re trying to find an adult? Public records are generally going to be in the name of a homeowner, the person responsible for paying the bills, etc. If a person is a minor or a young adult who is still financially dependent upon parents, then it is entirely possible that his or her information is not going to be part of the public record. Even older adults may avoid having their information become public if they live with roommates, have utilities in other names, and use disposable phone services. For younger people, the fact that they aren’t in the public record isn’t really a red flag; in many ways, it is to be expected. However, for older people, a total lack of a public record can serve as its own red flag, especially if your introduction to that person came later in life. While not impossible, it is somewhat rare for someone to entirely avoid having some information in the public record.

"I have friends calling me to find people for them and when I do, they can't believe that I did because they say they had no luck. They come back and ask me how I did it and I tell them I used BeenVerified."

The next question to ask is whether the person is who they claim to be. One reason that BeenVerified may be unable to locate the person that you’re seeking is that the person does not exist. The person may be using an alias. In other instances, the explanation may be far less nefarious. The person may be shaving a few years off of a birthdate in order to appear younger or using a nickname. If so, then a search using the known information may not return any results. Expanding search parameters may help you find the information that you’re seeking. Using BeenVerified’s People Search function with expanded possibilities for first name or date of birth might even help you narrow down the missing person.

Sometimes, you know the person’s identity is accurate, and you even know that there is some public information available about them, but it did not show up in a Background Check. The easiest explanation for these omissions is that a BeenVerified Background Check or Criminal Background Check is going to focus on material that has been digitized. If it has not been digitized, then it’s not going to show up on a standard background check. However, if you need access to documents that have not been digitized, BeenVerified offers a service that most on-line background check companies do not; real, live court-runners. These court-runners can held down to courthouses or country clerk offices to search for records in person, giving you access to documents that have not yet been digitized, without requiring you to go to a courthouse in person.

Try it yourself and see what you find out. Just search your name or someone you know, click here.