How it works
How a report is made, and what it rests on.
Bottom line:ProbePeople works in five passes. It first establishes which person you mean, then measures how much public material each area holds, researches the areas you choose, re-checks the findings that matter, and delivers a dossier in which every finding carries a grade and a source.
- Passes
- 5
- Research areas
- 8
- Evidence grades
- 5
- Export formats
- 6
Methodology
The method, pass by pass.
- I
Resolve the person
You enter a name and any context that narrows it: role, employer, location, social handles or a website. ProbePeople runs web, news and image searches and groups the results into the distinct people who share that name, each described by what sets them apart.
You choose the subject. Nothing is charged at this stage.
- II
Scope the research
For the chosen person, a preview search runs in each of the eight areas and rates the public material it finds as rich, moderate, sparse or none.
You pick the areas and the depth. The screen shows the credit hold, the most the report can cost, and credits are held only when you confirm.
- III
Investigate each area
Every area first queries the official registers and databases that cover it: company registers and SEC filings for corporate, enforcement records and insolvency registers for litigation. It then runs its own queries across several web and news search engines, written for that kind of record. The most relevant pages are fetched and read, each finding is extracted with its source and date, and a follow-up search chases the strongest leads.
Material that plainly belongs to a namesake is excluded. Material that might is kept, graded unverified, and the doubt is stated.
- IV
Verify what matters
A separate pass, run on every report, takes up to 40 of the most material findings and checks each against the full evidence set across all areas. Grades move up where independent sources corroborate a claim and down where a high-stakes claim has thin support.
- V
Deliver the dossier
The report opens with a bottom-line summary, then analysis by area, every finding with its grade and citation, the points where sources disagree, and the relationship connectome. The purpose you stated is printed on the cover.
Depth
Standard or deep.
| Per area | Standard | Deep |
|---|---|---|
| Web queries per area | The first 3 planned | Every planned query |
| Candidate sources per area | Up to 20 | Up to 40 |
| Pages read per area | 6 | 12 |
| Text read per page | Up to 6,000 characters | Up to 12,000 characters |
| Thin claims re-searched | Up to 2 | Up to 4 |
| Extraction model | Fast | Stronger, slower |
Standard suits a first look at a counterparty or a routine check. Deep suits a decision with more at stake; it holds more credits and takes longer.
Sources
Public sources only.
What it reads
- Company registers and corporate filings
- Court, insolvency and regulatory records
- Sanctions list and PEP references
- News and investigative reporting
- Academic publications and patents
- Professional profiles, sites and code
- Property, vessel and aircraft records where public
What it does not
- Credit files
- Private databases
- Non-public personal information
Queried directly
Official registers, read at the source.
- Corporate
SEC EDGAR filings and insider reports, UK Companies House officer records, the ICIJ Offshore Leaks database, Wikidata, and France's national company register.
- Litigation & Regulatory
SEC enforcement actions, FINRA BrokerCheck, the Individual Insolvency Register for England and Wales, and The Gazette.
- Academic & Patents
OpenAlex and Google Patents.
- Relationship Connectome
Companies House co-directorships, SEC board interlocks, UK Electoral Commission donations and Wikidata.
- Property & Assets
New York City property records (ACRIS).
Evidence grades
Every finding says how well it is supported.
A background report is only as useful as your ability to weigh it. Each finding in a ProbePeople dossier carries one of five grades, set by the sources behind it, and the grade travels with the finding into every export.
- Verified
- Confirmed by an authoritative record, such as a company register, court record, regulator or formal filing, or by several strong independent sources.
- Likely
- Corroborated by more than one independent source, with no authoritative record found.
- Unverified
- Rests on a single source, or on the subject's own account: their website, profile or press release.
- Contradicted
- Credible sources disagree on a material point. The report sets out the disagreement instead of picking a side.
- Fabrication suspected
- Concrete signs that a claim is false or manufactured, such as impossible dates, copied text or an institution that does not exist. The report names the sign. Used sparingly.
Deliverables
One report, six files.
- The written dossier, ready to file or forward.
- DOCX
- The same dossier in Word, for editing into your own memo.
- XLSX
- Every finding with its grade, area and source, one per row.
- CSV
- The findings table for your own tools.
- SVG
- The relationship connectome as a static figure.
- HTML
- An interactive connectome that opens offline in any browser.
Limits
What a report cannot tell you.
Public records contain errors, gaps and namesakes. A report shows what the record held on the day of the search. When nothing is found, the report says what was searched; absence of a record is not proof that none exists.
The sanctions area searches for public references to listings. For a formal sanctions determination, check the official lists: OFAC (US), EU, UN Security Council and UK.
A report is not legal, financial or professional advice. Check any finding you intend to act on.
Start with a name.
Resolving the person and scoping the research cost nothing. New accounts include 10 credits.