Truthfinder Scam? A Full Data-Driven Investigation Into Reviews, Accuracy & Subscription Tactics
- Daniel Fayoyin
- 3 days ago
- 12 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Publish Date: 2025/12/4
Update Date 2025/12/5
Quick Navigation
How Truthfinder Works: What the service claims to provide and how it collects data.
Data Accuracy Problems: Why Truthfinder’s reports often contain outdated or incorrect information.
Subscription Model & Dark Patterns: Why users report unexpected charges and cancellation issues.
Deep Review Data Analysis: Word clouds, rating graphs, and topic clustering of user complaints.
Removing Your Data From Truthfinder: What to expect from the opt-out process.
Final Verdict: Whether Truthfinder is a scam based on evidence and data.
As mentioned on our About Us page. No Scam is committed to unleashing the power of your stories. We do this via leveraging the power of data, to deliver solutions for consumer protection. In this spirit, for today’s post, we will analyze the company Truthfinder from the perspective of the consumers that have used its products. Many of the firm's customers mention feelings of being scammed. Using this customer data, we will highlight the structural flaws in the company that lead to the very poor reviews it receives and answer the simple question of: what is the scam in Truthfinder?
Many users online are asking whether Truthfinder is a scam, and the data available suggests serious issues with accuracy, billing, and transparency. In this article, we break down the real evidence behind the Truthfinder scam claims by analysing public reviews, the platform’s data sources, and its subscription practices.
Is Truthfinder a Scam? Understanding What the Service Actually Does
Truthfinder is an online platform that purports to find information on anyone in the USA using only their first name, last name, and most likely last known address. If you also have the person's phone number, Truthifinder will allow you to do a reverse phone number search to access more data about the individual in question.
What Truthfinder Promises to Users
If you go to Truthfinder's website, you will see a navigation menu that looks as follows:
We will break down each of these functions in the main menu of Truthfinder to show you the exact type of service you can expect from using the platform.
First Name
Last Name
State
If you have these three values, Truthfinder will conduct a search of that individual based on what they call “public records”.
How Truthfinder Collects Data (Public Records Explained)
The attentive reader might have already noticed that: on Truthfinder's main navigation, there is also a button for “Public Records". Meaning, the People Search button is simply an aggregation and compilation of the data found in the public records.
The fourth button on the main navigation leads you to a background checks page. On that page, they mention that “You can use Truthfinder to run online background checks with our people search engine”. Therefore, the background check functionality is a subset of the data found in the "People Search".
Secondly, Truthfinder provides is what it calls a “Reverse Phone Lookup”. In their own words: "You simply enter a phone number, and a reverse phone lookup will scan public records for information related to the owner of the phone number and carrier”.
From this, we can see that Truthfinder's second service is essentially the same as the first. In that, it analyses the same public records data, but this time, to provide a report based on the unit being a phone number. In the first case, the report is based on a person. In the second case, the report you get will be based on a phone number.
This begs the question. Given that the two “services” the company provides are based on the same dataset. What data is in these “Public Records”? In their own words: “Public records are any documents, information, or data that are created, collected, and maintained by government agencies or other public institutions.” These can include:
Birth and death records
Arrest and criminal records
Bankruptcies and liens
Social media profiles
Websites
Blogs
From here you can see the pattern. It is all based on public records. Via this, we can simplify what Truthfinder is: it searches public records to help you to find data about a person based on their First Name, Last Name, Address and Phone Number. This depends on which combination of these variables you have.
Thus, to fully understand the value proposition that Truthfinder aims to achieve, we must see what data lies in their People Reports. Luckily, Truthfinder provides a schema of the data you can expect in these reports. Here is the breakdown. You can find a link to it here. But to summarize. Here are the main sections:
Summary
Timeline
Personal Information
Contact Information
Location History
Criminal & Traffic Records
Sex Offender Information
Social Profiles
Business Profiles
Licenses
Finances
Assets
That said, where is the scam? Essentially, it comes down to whether Truthfinder can reliably provide information on these categories based on the data that it has. Judging from the reviews Truthfinder receives on the internet, it is clear that Truthfinder is failing in this service requirement (More data on that will follow). Yet moreover, what we will argue is that Truthfinder knows this. With a quick analysis of the data sources. The average data and software engineering professional will be able to pinpoint the shortfalls in this method of data collection to provide reliable results of the type that “Truth”finder suggests it has. Further, the company's pricing tactics and dark patterns in user journey construction give reason to demonstrate that Truthfinder's main goal is extracting revenue from customers through a subscription scheme powered by misleading promises.
Subscription Model or Scam? Analysing Truthfinder’s Pricing Tactics
So why does Truthfinder know that its data is insufficient? We use Truthfinder's own words as evidence to back this up. On their responses to customer complaints on the Better Business Bureau, on this page they say
What Truthfinder Admits in Its Own Terms and BBB Responses
“ As outlined in our Terms of Use and within all reports, discrepancies may occur, and we encourage members to use our reports as a starting point for their own research. ”
These are the exact words that Truthfinder used in their response to one of the complaints on the BBB. What can we infer from this statement? First, we must notice the lack of transparency. Why does Truthfinder put this in the Terms and Conditions? As we all know, T’s&C’s are long dense legal documents that most consumers don’t read. If any of you have managed to read the Google T’s&C’s you are a statistical anomaly and congratulations to you. The vast majority of users won’t read this, and Truthfinder knows that. Hence, they placed it in the Terms and Conditions.
Why Truthfinder Uses a Monthly Subscription Model
Secondly, we must analyse this statement in the context of Truthfinder's pricing and advertisements. Truthfinder operates on a subscription based model. This means, every month they charge you 30$ to get access to their reports. If the data they provide only serves as a “starting point” for the users own further research, how is it justifiable to charge a monthly fee for this?
The Misalignment Between Cost and One-Time Use Cases
The use cases Truthfinder places in its advertisements are often one time use cases. For example, finding out data about a “long lost friend” or “divorce information”. Most of us don’t have that many long lost friends whose details we are searching for. And I bet the same goes for divorce information. These are often specific use cases that don’t justify tying ourselves up to long term commitments.
Why Public Records Create Natural Accuracy Problems
Furthermore, it all comes down to the data sources that Truthfinder uses. Truthfinder uses what it calls public records. This is government, enterprise and social data. This website publicrecords.com is a directory of all the public records collected by government agencies in the USA. One thing you will notice about this data is that most of it isn’t on an individual level. The data is often already aggregated. This means, for most “Public Records” it is difficult to find individual level public data. For court cases, you are likely to find better coverage for individual level data, but if it is not Federal data, the coverage is unlikely to be 100%.
Why Truthfinder’s Reports Often Contain Outdated or Wrong Info
As for getting this data via third party purchases, the problem here is that the data is often outdated. Think about how much time it takes for basic aspects of your life to be fully recorded when they happen. For example, if you move houses and state, it can often take 6 months to 1 year for all of the relevant government and private databases to capture this information. Your electricity provider might know this fact before the DMV, which might know it after Amazon, but either way, the time it takes for all the databases to be updated will vary. Hence, there is a lot of variation in the datasets that provide this information and most of them struggle to keep up with the many changes we all make in our personal lives. Truthfinder also knows this, this is why they say that their reports should only be used as a “starting point”. And again, we must ask ourselves, if this is only a starting point, why are they charging so much for a subscription based model of service delivery. I think the answer by now should be clear. They want your money!
Deep Data Analysis: Our Clustering, Word Clouds, and Topic Modeling
Finally, let's leave theory and get down to the data. To support our point. No Scam analysed all of the reviews for Truthfinder on the BBB’s review section. What can previous user experiences tell us about the company?
Method:
Manually extracted the data
Clean the data
Build word-clouds based on all the reviews
Do a frequency count on the number of reviews for each star rating from 1 -5
Analyze the trend in the ratings over time
Use Natural Language processing Bert model to identify the main topics in the reviews
Split positive and negative reviews to show what Truthfinder could potentially be doing well
Breaking Down BBB Reviews (482 User Reports Analysed)
The dataset was extracted using a copy and paste of all reviews from all the pages pertaining to Truthfinder on the BBB. The link to the first page can be found here.
After cleaning, we were left with 482 reviews. Using the text from these reviews we created this word cloud shown below:
The Most Common User Complaints About Truthfinder
The main words are:
Information
Service
Report
Free
Pay
Time
Scam
Find
Money
etc
The Ratio of Positive vs Negative Reviews
Let's put this word cloud into context. If we look at the number of reviews with a rating of 4 and above out of the entire dataset the number is 31. With the rest of the 451 reviews out of the 482 being negative reviews. Defined here as having a rating less than four. Below is a bar graph of the rating distribution of Truthfinder based on the reviews on the BBB.
As we can see. Most of the reviews are 1 star. More than 400 out of the 482 reviews have one star. This means, most of the talk about “pay” and “money” and “service” from the word-cloud carry negative sentiment.
Review Rating Trends Over Time
In line with this reasoning, let's try and understand how the ratings for Truthfinder have evolved over time. Below is a graph of the ratings starting in 2023 when the first review was made, till the time of extracting the data in November 2025.
The astute among you might have realised that this data is a bit noisy. Lets see if we can identify a trend by smoothing it out with a 30 day moving average.
As you can see, this graph is better. It shows that in the period of May - September 2023. Truthfinder did manage to start to see a positive upward trend in the reviews that it receives. However, this trend is not maintained and Truthfinder very soon starts to receive a rating average of 1 shortly after. If you look at the entire graph as a single timeline, most of the region of time is spent at a rating of one and not above it. From here, I think it is safe to say that this is the true consistency in the customer experience.
Topic Clustering: The Most Common Themes in Complaints
Going deeper, we decided to run a clustering algorithm on all of the reviews that are on the BBB. Using this clustering algorithm, we hoped to find the main topics that users mention when describing their experience with Truthfinder.
The model provides three variables as outputs of the clustering process.
The name of the topic cluster
The words that most represent the topic cluster
The review that is most representative
Below is the python output
Yes, that picture says a lot. Let's get more visual by looking at the topic distribution. The graph will show the number of reviews that belong to a given topic. The topic with the number -1 is used to designate outlier topics. This means, reviews that couldn’t be matched to any single cluster.
The topic names say a lot.
As we can see the first cluster (cluster 0) is called “information_report_truth”. Given that these are negative reviews and looking at the representative document it is talking about the quality of the data that Truthfinder provides. I.e, the truth in Truthfinder. The Second cluster is talking about problems with the monthly charge and cancelling the subscription. The third relates to customers feeling like they wasted their money while the fourth and fifth simply call the product a scam. With the fifth indicating that there could also be a rating scam going on. We decided not to investigate that further. The issue of fake loading screens and manipulative UI is also touched in the final cluster (8_fake_loading_screen_time). While the one before that reference issues related to asking Truthfinder to remove your data.
Can You Remove Your Data From Truthfinder? Here’s What to Know
As some of you might or might not know. You CAN ask your data to be removed from Truthfinder and other data brokerage services. Most people generally don’t exercise this right to their privacy. Part of the reason this is the case is because some companies make it very difficult for you to do so. Where, sometimes, asking to remove your personal data results in the said company having more data about you. Other reviews and complaints have indicated that this is the case for Truthfinder.
Although nice, there is still another way we can quickly visualize this data. Below is what we call a Radial mind map of the topic clusters. Showing the center node as our root topic being Truthfinder reviews, the middle layer is the topic names, evenly placed around the root and the outer layer is 4 keywords selected to represent the topics.
Final Verdict: Is Truthfinder a Scam or Legit? (Based on Evidence)
Ladies and gentlemen, I could go further, slicing and dicing this data to uncover even more insights to help you make your choice. However, I think at this point when we interpret these words in the context of knowing that more than 400 out the ~480 reviews on Truthfinder are 1 star. It is safe to say that there is some kind of a scam going on here.
No Scam is not biased. So we decided to see if we can use this data to get some kind of information about what Truthfinder does well. To do that, we split the positive and negative reviews. Positive reviews are defined as having a rating of 4 and above. Applying the same methodology, we tried to find representative topics for the positive and negative reviews. Because there were so few positive reviews (~30) the model could not find a representative topic cluster. Whereas in the case of the negative reviews the model was able to find seven. Most of them in line with the topics shown above. The inference we can make from this is that: it was not possible to find a statistically distinct topic that Truthfinder handled well and which consumers were satisfied enough to mention. I think that at this point the verdict is clear and the data has spoken for itself.
Our Conclusion Based on Technical and Review Evidence
In this article we did three things. We unpacked truthfinder to show you what services it provides and explained how they worked. Based on this, we made our case for why there are structural problems with Truthfinder’s technical approach. An approach which we argued that Truthfinder already knows of, but yet still chooses to advertise and trap customers with recurring payments. And finally, we dug very deep into the data to back up the arguments made in point two while at the same time identifying the real issues with the company. Based on the data and company’s underlying product engine, I think it's safe to say that Truthfinder is a scam.
Stopping Scams With Community Data
If you want more In-depth data based unbiased research like this, add a comment in the comment section to let me know which company I should cover next!!! I LOVE doing this.
Secondly, what we also hoped to show with this post is that with Data we can tackle the problem of scamming. All we need to do is share our experiences and leverage those experiences to really understand what is going on at a systemic and macro level. This article is just a glimpse into what is possible when we as consumers and individuals unite. If you or anyone you know has ever experienced a scam. Please share it here on No Scam. Those posts are completely anonymous but can have immense power. As consumers and individuals we have power. Let’s join forces. Let’s stop scammers!!!
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