BeenVerified Review: Cost, Feature Reviews and More

TLDR: BeenVerified offers many types of searches for one set price when rivals charge extra fees. But competitors beat out BeenVerified in accuracy and customer trust. We’ll help you decide if this popular background search site is a good fit for your needs. 

To write our BeenVerified review, we purchased a one-month subscription and conducted more than a dozen searches by name and address, testing for speed, accuracy and more. We also compared BeenVerified pricing to that of other background search services.

BeenVerified has more than 100,000 subscribed customers, and its background search function has been used more than 200 million times, according to the company.

What we like: The New York-based firm lists its top leadership on its website. We haven’t seen that with other background check search sites.

You could use a personal background search website like BeenVerified to search for a friend or family member you’ve lost touch with, scope out a potential roommate or online seller, or simply see what information is publicly available on yourself. 

These reports can help you make smarter, everyday life decisions. You could find photographs of the person you’ve searched for as well as their:

• Age
• Criminal records
• Property records
• Contact information

You can even use BeenVerified to look up a car’s vehicle identification number (VIN). 

BeenVerified combines eight products into one, so you can search:

• Addresses
• Businesses
• Email addresses
• People
• Phone numbers
• Social media accounts
• Unclaimed-money databases
• Vehicle identification numbers

You cannot use BeenVerified for professional reasons — for that, you’ll need a Consumer Reporting Agency (CRA). CRAs are used to: 

• Screen tenants
• Check a job applicant’s education or other qualifications
• Research insurance eligibility and professional services

 If you’ve ever applied for an apartment, your landlord most likely used a background check service at some point in the process. Federal laws restrict how employers and landlords can use background checks. 

BeenVerified is not a CRA. That means, according to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, it cannot be used for business or credit-related purposes. BeenVerified can, however, be used in many other ways for personal use that we described earlier.

You’ll need to purchase a subscription if you want to read a report. BeenVerified automatically renews your subscription unless you cancel your membership by phone, email or the contact form.

What we like: Versus TruthFinder, BeenVerified has an advantage over it and other background search services because the company lets you access all its search products without having to pay extra. When you sign up for a membership, you can rest assured knowing that you won’t be asked to pay any additional fees to access other parts of a report. You can also download your reports as PDFs for free.

Which BeenVerified Package is Right for You?

Both memberships offer the same search features and reporting, but you’ll save over the long run if you plan to use BeenVerified for more than two months. The one-month cost of $26.89 is lower than TruthFinder which runs about $48 when you add up the cost of its extra reports. 

In a standard people search report, BeenVerified can compile the following information:

• Associates and neighbors
• Contact information (address, phone, emails)
• Criminal and traffic history
• Financial info (bankruptcies, evictions, assets)
• Past location history
• Personal information (name, age, location)
• Photos
• Relatives
• Social media profiles
• Work and education history

Phone number and email address searches may reveal potential owners and their locations. You can also look up businesses based on website URLs, vehicles based on VIN or license plate number, and even unclaimed money that may be owed to you. 

What we don’t like: The reporting dashboard is cluttered, which clashes with BeenVerified’s clean and easy-to-read home page. For example, tabs and menu buttons are scattered everywhere on the dashboard, but you can at least access a new search or previous reports quickly with just one click.

BeenVerified casts a wide net to gather as much information as possible, but we found inaccuracies scattered among the facts. For instance, at the top of each report you’ll find a person’s name, along with potential aliases they go by. Some aliases might be accurate, but others may be wrong, which can confuse your report. This also applies to phone numbers, email addresses, possible relatives and more. Again, most of this information may be correct, but it’s hard to tell what’s outdated versus what’s still relevant. 

Additionally, the reports are harder to navigate and read compared to other background services. For instance, in order to access criminal records, we had to click two extra buttons in our tests before the records showed up in our reports. Other background search sites don’t require this.

It is, however, easy to find who you’re looking for. Overall, we spent less time trying to find the right person but more time perusing the reports.

You can start a new search anytime from the home page. 

Step 1: Enter a Name and Answer a Few Questions

You’ll be asked to provide some information about the person you’re researching. You may or may not know the answers to these inquiries, which is OK. You’ll then be asked what data you’re interested in discovering. This information can include:

• Business contacts
• Cars the person may own
• Contact information
• Criminal history
• Properties the person may own
• Social media accounts

Step 2: Verify Personal Use

BeenVerified will ask that you confirm that you won’t use the information produced by the service to violate the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Once you confirm this, BeenVerified shows a progress bar on your screen. 

Step 3: Enter Payment Information

The next page you’ll see is the payment screen, where you will choose a one-month or three-month subscription. After you enter your payment information, you’ll then create your account and gain access to your reporting dashboard.

What we don’t like: We encountered a few bugs in BeenVerified’s reporting dashboard menu. We had trouble getting the property search to go through and we had to hit the refresh button a few times to get a results page to load. 

How Long Does a BeenVerified Search Take?

Similar to other background search services, BeenVerified takes much longer to display your first report due to the various steps you must take before you can access a report. Any search queries you run after you’ve created your account will produce results in seconds.

On Trustpilot, BeenVerified’s rating is an average 2.7 out of 5 stars based on more than 400 reviews. Many reviewers complained about BeenVerified’s inaccurate reporting and system bugs in particular.

BeenVerified is a good fit for anyone looking for straightforward pricing for multiple types of searches who doesn’t mind sifting good information from bad. We liked the fast search results and how easy it was to pull reports. BeenVerified’s helpful website has how-to guides, blogs and customer testimonials. You can also learn more about the company’s history, mission statement, data practices and leadership team.

We didn’t like the hard-to-read reports. Frustrated customers complain that they felt scammed by BeenVerified. BeenVerified is a legitimate company, but it’s likely that more customers would be satisfied if BeenVerified culled inaccuracies and presented information in a format that’s easier to read.

Prices are accurate as of Sept. 21, 2021.