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 check See 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
Per-subject FCRA-compliant report with explicit consent timestamp
2
Categorized findings (criminal, financial, reputational, identity)
3
Adverse action workflow with pre-built notice templates
4
Audit log of every API call, viewer, and download
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.