People usually ask this question hoping for a short answer, and the honest one is: less than television has led you to expect, and more than you would guess about phone numbers.
Here is what actually lands in the report.
Identity, and whether the pieces fit together
The first thing a report does is answer a boring question that turns out to be the important one. Does this name, this phone, this email and this date of birth all belong to the same person?
Most of the time they do and you move on. When they don’t, that is the finding. A phone number registered to a different name, an email created three weeks ago, an address the person has no history at — none of those prove anything on their own, but together they are the pattern behind most of the trouble people get into.
You also get address history going back years, which is more useful than it sounds. It tells you whether someone has roots where they say they do.
Court and criminal records
Criminal convictions, civil filings, administrative matters, traffic. Where the record exists and is public, it shows up with the filing date and the jurisdiction.
Two things to keep in mind. First, coverage is uneven by design — some counties digitised their records in 2003 and some are still working through it, so an empty result is not the same as a clean record. Second, a civil filing is not a conviction, and a charge is not a conviction either. I have watched people conflate all three inside about four seconds.
If something has occured that matters, read the actual entry rather than the summary line.
Watchlists and sanctions
Global sanctions lists, PEP entries, enforcement actions. For most small hires this section comes back empty and stays empty. It earns its place when you are taking payment from someone new, onboarding a partner, or doing anything that touches money moving across a border. KYC and identity verification goes deeper on that side of it.
The phone and email trail
This is the part that surprises people, and it is usually the most practically useful section in the whole report.
A phone number carries a history. Who it is registered to, how long it has been active, whether the name attached to it matches the person handing it to you. Recycled numbers are a genuinely common problem — carriers reassign disconnected numbers after as little as 45 days, so a number can look established while belonging to someone who got it last month.
Email works similarly. An address shows a footprint: which services it has been used to register with, roughly how old it is, whether it appears in breach data. A ten-year-old address with a wide footprint behaves very differently from one created last Tuesday. Email lookup and reverse phone number lookup cover the mechanics if you want them.
What it does not show
No credit score. No medical anything. No sealed or expunged records. Nothing that requires a subpoena. And nothing that makes it a substitute for an FCRA-compliant screen when you are deciding on employment, housing or credit — that is a different product with different rules, and using a general report for those decisions is not allowed.
It also will not tell you whether someone is trustworthy. It tells you whether they are who they claim to be, and whether anything is on record. The judgement stays yours.
How a report is built has the full field list, and pricing is about thirty dollars a report if you want to run one and see for yourself.
- How a report is built — the six checks, section by section
- Verify someone — see a sample report and what comes back
- Pricing — from $29.99 a report, no contracts
Sources & further reading: Email lookup · Reverse phone number lookup · The $50M fraud bug caused by one wrong identity merge