What You Can & Cannot Accomplish With The Detective Sites

Before we dive into specific search requirements, I thought I would cover what you can and cannot do with the online detective services. We checked out 5 or 6 of these Internet detective sites and they all offer pretty much the same thing. So we are going to lump them together for today's post.

What you can do:
These services are typically organized into easy to navigate sections covering the most popular types of searches. Links are organized into topics and geography to help you find as many pertinent resources as possible for the task you might have at hand. The vast majority of the free information is listed by state with thousands of links to public records. You name it and you can probably find it somewhere on these sites. Most all of this information is available through a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, but it could take you many hours to sift through all the possible searches and sites. If you value your time, these sites are probably worth their small investment. However, although these sites provide thousands of free resources, do not be misled. Most real investigative tasks cannot be accomplished for free.

What you cannot do:
Do not be fooled by services promising you free private information about other peoples current FBI, credit, banking, or other private files. This just is not available and would grossly violate privacy laws. There is just some information about you that not just anyone can obtain legally without your express permission, or without being in a legal position to have a right to know. For example, these detective sites cannot find out if there is a warrant out for your arrest, get you someone else's credit report, access someone's bank account information, get you a copy of someone's phone bill, tell you what someone does on their computer, get copies of someone else's cancelled checks, locate someone who left home yesterday, or tell you how much money someone made last year.

But there are services that can legally obtain much of this information for you. In future articles, we will cover how you can go about getting this information - if you are willing to spend a few bucks.