Many reasons exist why you might do a background check on someone. You might do it because you’re an employer, and you’re thinking about whether to hire this candidate. Perhaps you’re dating someone, and you want to learn about them before you take things to the next level and propose marriage or move in together.

You might do a background check on someone because you think they’re running a scam on you, and they’re not who they claim. Whatever the case, background check companies exist, and they can use the latest technological resources to find out about a person whose name you tell them.

In this article, we’ll talk about another reason to conduct a background check. Maybe you’re trying to locate a person, and doing a background check on them is how you can accomplish that.

If the background check locates them, you’ll need to decide whether or not to contact them. We’ll discuss what might go into that decision right now.

How the Background Check Locates Someone

Finding someone’s contact information is not usually as difficult as you might suspect. You might not find them that way if they are intentionally trying to stay off the grid, but that’s relatively rare. Occasionally you might have someone who’s paranoid, and they try to scrub themselves off the internet entirely.

Assuming that is not the case, and you are trying to locate a person who has some online activity, a background check company can use various means to track them down. They can look for this person’s employment history. They might look at voter registration or tax records. This is usually public knowledge, and if you use professionals to try and find someone, you can probably come up with a physical address, a phone number, etc.

Finding a Long-Lost Friend

You might try to locate someone because you two were friends many years before. Maybe you played together as kids, but then they moved to another city, state, or even a different country. You always wondered what happened to them, though.

You might have a high school friend you knew well, but you lost track of them after that. Maybe you knew someone in college and enjoyed spending time together in your classes or outside of them.

Whenever you knew this person, if you track them down using a background check, you might find out where' they live now and what they are doing. In addition to finding out their physical address, phone number, or email address, you might learn their marital status, how many kids they’ve got, and so forth.

At that point, you can figure out whether to contact them or not. If you got along well at an earlier point in your lives, you might reach out to them to try and rekindle the relationship for that reason. You might simply miss them and want to re-establish contact.

You might reach out, and things will go very well between you two. You may arrange a time to get together with them, and you can talk about old times. From that point forward, you might see each other regularly, or at least communicate sometimes.

Finding a Long-Lost Relative

You might hire a background check company because you’re trying to locate a relative who you have not seen in a long time. Maybe it’s a parent or a sibling. Perhaps it’s a half-sibling, nephew or niece, cousin, aunt, or uncle.

You can use that service to find out this person’s location and reach out to them if you want to re-establish the relationship. Maybe you’re trying to locate your family’s black sheep. You don’t feel they did anything all that egregious, and you never wanted to cut them out of your life at all. Perhaps you only did that because of familial pressure.

If you reconnect with this person, you might enjoy having a relationship with them again. You may find that this is a cathartic action that makes you feel whole. If you loved this person and felt sorry you lost touch with them, getting together can make you feel like you’ve taken a positive step in your life.

Finding a Former Flame

Maybe you decide to do a background check because you’re trying to locate someone you used to date. Perhaps you dated them in middle school, high school, or college. Maybe you had a crush on them even earlier than that when you were very young children.

Maybe you’re middle-aged, and you get out of a relationship. You divorce your spouse or separate from them. You may remember this particular person fondly, and you wonder if they’re in a relationship now.

It sounds like something from a cheesy romantic movie, but sometimes, you can rekindle a lost love affair from many years before. You might find that you’re contacting this person at a time when they are single, or they just got out of a relationship as well.

If so, you might end up getting back together. Maybe you can re-establish a long-distance relationship and eventually move across the country to be with one another. It’s unlikely, but these things do happen sometimes.

If you find this person and reconnect, maybe you will change your life’s direction in a positive way. You might find love again that you thought you’d lost forever. Technology and background checks can sometimes make that possible.

When Getting Back in Contact Goes Wrong

 

We’ve talked about a few reasons why you might find someone through a background check and some happy results that can come from that. You hope for these outcomes, but things don’t always turn out that way.

Maybe you’re trying to find out about someone you once knew because you’re curious about them. You get the background check report and see the person’s physical address, email address, or phone number. You look at that information and try to decide whether to reach out or not.

Depending on why you want to contact this person, things could go well, but sometimes they don’t. It is reasonable to at least consider some potential negatives before you reach out to this individual.

Maybe you are trying to contact a sibling or parent, or someone else from your family who you once knew. You should at least think about the possibility that maybe they do not want you to reach out to them.

Perhaps they didn’t try to contact you for years because they don’t want to re-establish contact for some reason. Maybe they have hurt feelings from some old interaction, and they decided to cut you out of their life and keep it that way.

Some Other Possible Outcomes

Maybe you reach out to a long-lost friend, and you find out that they’re not living a very happy life. Possibly they’ve dealt with depression, or perhaps they’ve even spent time in a psychiatric facility. Maybe they’ve dealt with a divorce, or they’re estranged from their children.

Perhaps they’re dealing with a serious mental or physical illness. If you try to get back in touch with someone for romantic reasons, you might find that they’re happily married, so you have no shot at getting back together. It might make you sad to find that out.

The point is that if you reach out to someone after many years, you don’t know what they’ve been up to or how it’s going to go. You might have a tearful reuni0n or get back into a relationship, but this attempt might turn into an unmitigated disaster.

If you’re an optimist, you might not think it’s very likely, but you never know how someone’s life turned out if you haven’t talked to them in five years, or ten, or twenty. Maybe they’ve had a very rough time of it for some reason, and you don’t know what you’re getting into when you call them on the phone or send them an email.

Essentially, we’re talking about optimism vs. pessimism. If you’re a glass-half-full type of person, you might feel like reaching out will do no harm.

You should at least look at the complete picture the background check reveals before you decide whether or not to reach out. If you see that this person has a spouse and kids, and you wanted to get back together with them romantically, it’s probably best that you refrain from calling them or dropping by.

Technology exists that can reveal a person’s location and many other things about them, but just because you’ve located them, it does not mean you should get in touch heedlessly. It’s best to look for warning signs that you’re getting into a bad situation before you move forward.

If you see no warning signs, that’s when you can probably contact this person to see if they want to hear from you. Maybe it will turn out wonderfully, and you will regain an old relationship or even romance. Just understand the unpredictability aspect before you make the proverbial leap.