If you’re reading this you likely know the drill. You visit a site with free people searches in the title, thinking you’ll find someone. You read their pages of countless and somewhat pointless text. You try a search. Then you’re transported to a pay site, stuck in limbo for minutes, continuously referred to a tracing service or asked to register to see the record in its entirety. It’s the old switcher and it’s rife in the UK.
Are there any free ways of finding people?
In short yes, there are many. When we starting locating people back in 1998, everybody used a phone book as their first point of call. It was free, comprehensive, and still is. We used to run our electoral roll searches for free in person and you still can. Then there’s the free people finder registries, they’ve been around a long time. Search engines, free also, and they even index the registries. Social Media, all free to conduct searches. Then there’s the different approaches you can take. Occupation based, free. Business based, free. Court records, free. There’s even services that will assist you in tracing somebody for free if you meet their criteria.
Why pay to search?
There is a time and a place for fee based records and services. Some people will simply be harder to trace than others and may require extensive research. Some searching will prefer the convenience regardless of cost. It is also commonplace for professional investigators to make use of paid databases frequently, but keep in mind though it doesn’t cost them anything as all costs are passed on.
How do I know what people search site or service is really free?
The simplest answer is to use our index and read the descriptions for the service or site you are considering. We state whether each database or information set is free or paid. We will always list the free options where applicable. You’ll also notice we are missing a lot of the top ranked finder sites from our index, and with good reason. We vet each and every listing to ensure it’s a valid source for finding people. A bunch of text and a deceptive search box heading to another website may fool Google, but it doesn’t get you in our index.
