Tracelight
Background checks

Background checks that cover
what the credit bureaus miss.

FCRA-aware OSINT screening for pre-employment, contractor onboarding, and tenant vetting. Sanctions, dark-web exposure, social-media history, court records, and adverse media — every finding cited and reproducible.

Try a sample background checkSee the demo

What this fixes.

PAIN 1
Stock background checks are 80% credit history, 20% criminal.
They miss sanctions, social red flags, dark-web exposure, and aliases — exactly the things that get hires and contractors fired six months in.
PAIN 2
Manual social-media review is slow and inconsistent.
An analyst manually scrolling LinkedIn and X for 50 candidates is 30 hours of work, and the result is impossible to audit.
PAIN 3
FCRA compliance is on you when you DIY.
One miss-classified adverse-action notice costs $1,000 statutory + $1,000 punitive per applicant under §1681n. Compliance has to be baked in.
What gets checked

8+ data sources running in parallel.

Criminal record aggregators + state court systems
Sex-offender registries (NSOPW)
OFAC + sanctions screening
Dark-web breach indices (HIBP, Dehashed)
Social-media identity resolution + post history
Adverse media + news mentions
Phone + address verification
Education + employment verification (where consent provided)
What you get

The report that lands on your desk.

  1. 1
    Per-subject FCRA-compliant report with explicit consent timestamp
  2. 2
    Categorized findings (criminal, financial, reputational, identity)
  3. 3
    Adverse action workflow with pre-built notice templates
  4. 4
    Audit log of every API call, viewer, and download
  5. 5
    Re-screen scheduling for ongoing employment monitoring

Common questions.

Are you a Consumer Reporting Agency under the FCRA?+

Tracelight is a tool — your organization (or your CRA partner) is the reporter. We help you stay FCRA-compliant by enforcing consent capture, recording timestamps, and providing pre-built adverse-action notice templates, but you remain the data controller.

Can I screen contractors without consent?+

OSINT on publicly available data is legal, but FCRA's permissible-purpose rules apply to anything you use for hiring, housing, credit, or insurance decisions. Tracelight forces consent capture before letting you generate a report flagged for FCRA use.

How does this compare to Checkr or Sterling?+

Those are CRAs that focus on criminal + credit records. Tracelight covers the OSINT layer they don't — sanctions, dark-web exposure, social history, adverse media — and is meant to complement them, not replace them.

Try a sample background check — free for 7 days.

No credit card. Cancel anytime. Same product, same OSINT workers, same audit trail — just scoped to your investigation.

Start free trial See pricing
Other use cases
M&A diligence
M&A & pre-acquisition due diligence
Surface sanctions hits, undisclosed litigation, key-person liability, and reputational red flags before LOI. Citation-anchored reports your legal team can defend.
Fraud / insurance
Fraud & insurance investigations
Claim verification, social-media surveillance, address history, and behavior pattern analysis. Built for SIU teams and fraud investigators who need court-ready evidence.
Journalism
Investigative journalism
Source vetting + cross-platform identity correlation for investigative reporters. Verify identities, surface conflicts of interest, and audit your own sourcing trail before publication.
Skip tracing
Skip tracing
Find people who've gone off the grid. 32 OSINT workers correlate aliases, addresses, social activity, and breach exposure to surface a current location lead.
Expert witness vetting
Expert witness vetting
Before you depose them or hire them, run an expert through 32 OSINT workers. Surface prior testimony, conflict of interest, credentials disputes, and reputation risks before they cost the case.
Litigation support
Litigation support
Adverse party discovery, witness vetting, asset-search leads, and impeachment ammunition for civil + criminal litigators. Citation-anchored, deposition-defensible.
Asset search
Asset search
Find what they own — entities, properties, vehicles, hidden affiliates — for collection actions, judgment enforcement, divorce discovery, and pre-litigation settlement leverage.
Insurance / SIU
Insurance claim investigation
Catch claim fraud before payout. Social-media surveillance, address history, cross-claim pattern detection, and court-ready evidence preservation for SIU teams.
Cyber IR
Cyber incident response
Attacker attribution, breach-victim notification context, dark-web exposure verification, and indicator pivoting for IR teams + MSSPs. Citation-anchored, fast.
Executive protection
Executive protection
Pre-event venue threat assessment, named-target social-media monitoring, doxx-exposure baseline, and travel security briefs for EP teams.
Real estate
Real-estate diligence
Counterparty + entity verification + sanctions screening + adverse-media checks for commercial real-estate transactions. AML-aware.
Brand protection
Brand protection
Surface lookalike domains, employee impersonation accounts, dark-web mentions of your brand + customer data exposure. Continuous monitoring with severity-graded alerts.
Crypto
Cryptocurrency investigations
Wallet attribution, transaction-counterparty diligence, exchange-account holder vetting, and dark-web exposure for crypto investigators + exchange compliance teams.