by Dave Moore, CISSP
11/10/2022
Have you ever wanted to track down someone’s whereabouts, but didn’t know where to start and you didn’t want to pay a high-priced private investigator? To the rescue comes the Internet, which is brimming with ways to find long-lost relatives or investigate shady characters.
One place to start is Zabasearch.com. Zabasearch lets you do free searches by name, age, city and state. The more information you provide, the better the search results. I usually jump right to the “Advanced People Search” tab. The results can include address, phone number, age, and the names and ages of family members. There are also links to Intelius, a paid service that can provide even more details about your search target. I’ve never tried Intelius, but Zabasearch is usually where I look, first.
Good old Google can be a great place to search for people. Have you ever “Googled” yourself? You should give it a try; the results can be pretty surprising. Put quote marks around your name and follow that with your city and town. The quote marks tell Google to search for an exact phrase and can be helpful in eliminating irrelevant search results.
Discovering phone number information can be a real hassle. One of the “free” phone lookup sites that actually is free is ReversePhoneLookup.com. “Reverse lookup” services can be handy when you know a number, but need to find who it belongs to. Anywho.com is good for this type of searching, too. For example, enter an address to find out who lives there; enter a phone number to see who it belongs to. As it turns out, people who landline phone service with Cox and AT&T are especially vulnerable to this type of search. Cell phone numbers are harder to discover.
Vitalrec.com lists many good ways to obtain vital records such as birth certificates, marriage records and more. People who do genealogy research do this sort of thing all the time and Vitalrec.com is a good way to get started. The Social Security Death Index can also be helpful. Rootsweb.com links to this index and has many other resources, as well. This is how I found out that my late grandfather was actually born in Iowa.
No serious search would be complete without a visit to USA.gov. This massive government website has more links to databases than any I’ve ever seen. Want 130 years worth of baby name data? They’ve got it. If there is a local, county, state or federal website with a database of records, it can be found on USA.gov. At first glance it can look a bit intimidating in its vastness, but spend some time digging around on this impressive website and you’re sure to be rewarded.
You should also visit spokeo.com and pipl.com, for more “high end” (and costly) searches. As well as addresses and phone numbers, search results can include photographs, email addresses, aliases (good for revealing married and maiden names), website links, blog entries, news articles and other interesting tidbits. Truepeoplesearch.com can also give some surprisingly accurate and free results.
The Internet is not perfect, though, when it comes to finding people. I’ve been searching for an old friend for about four years, now, with no success. Still, the amount of searchable personal information on the Internet is impressive, and you may just find that person you’re looking for.
Dave Moore, CISSP, has been fixing computers in Oklahoma since 1984. Founder of the non-profit Internet Safety Group Ltd., he also teaches Internet safety community training workshops. He can be reached at 405-919-9901 or www.internetsafetygroup.com