About a year ago I needed to do a search on someone who I suspected had a criminal record. So I “googled” this person. good effn luck, instead of what I wanted Google routed me to a site called TRUTHFINDER.COM.  

BEWARE!

A year later, Paypal sent me a notice that i has  been billed almost $30 a month  as recurring charge!

I had authorized a one time search.  I certainly had done my best not to authorize a recurring charge.  After this notice, I looked through my email to see if there were any messages from  Truthfinder over that time.  There was one.  That message made no mention of a recurring charge. 

I notified Paypal and Truthfinder.  After about 2 hours on the phone, I get to someone at Truthfinder who politely cancelled the recurring charges.  I say “politely” because she was very polite. However the Truthfinder representative tried to spin the story, telling me how careful they are on their website, etc.  She was telling me they try to give fair warning.  This included the claim that Truthfinder sends out emails. If so, my gmail account can not find them.

I also looked for reports of claims against Truthfinder on the web. The site itself is reported as expensive but assy to obtain  fast and accurate results. OK so far?   Perhaps, but the first hit that gave me this result THEN took me to another site that tried to garner all my personal information! Tried another review site that had personal comments, including this one ..

After being prompted with several questions and lead through several pages of hype about all of the info that was being gathered for me, I finally reach the final step where [as I was expecting] I was given the price for the info and the payment options which were 1) Plastic 2) PayPal. Okay fair enough. I didn’t expect it to be free. And the price of around $27.00 is not an issue with me. So what is? I REFUSE TO BE FORCED TO AGREE TO AN ONGOING MONTHLY CHARGE! Yes I know you are gonna tell me I can cancel any time! But we both know that is not the case. You tell me all I have to do is call the 1-800 # from 8-5 M-F.

There was a reply very similar to what I got over the phone. I explained to the lady that if I brought this to small claims court, her company would need to pay a lawyer to attend or forfeit the $300.  I offered to cooperate if they were sincerely interested in finding out what happened.