How to do due diligence on a person

To do due diligence on a person, start from the decision their background could change, confirm who they are before you collect anything, and then test what they say about themselves against records they did not write: business registries for the companies they ran and how those ended, court records, news coverage and their public footprint over the years. Then look for anything material they left out, put it to them directly, and write up each finding with its source and how confident you are. The result is a short file a decision-maker can check.

This guide is about business due diligence from public records. It is for investors, corporate development and partnerships teams, investigators and financial institutions researching the people behind a counterparty, and for founders checking an investor or a prospective co-founder. It is not a consumer background check. Our guides to identity resolution and verifying a resume go deeper on two of the steps.

The people at the top of a counterparty decide how it treats you. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners' 2026 study covers 2,402 cases of occupational fraud, in which people defrauded the organisations they worked for, investigated between January 2024 and September 2025. Frauds by owners and executives were 16 percent of the cases but caused a median loss of $475,000, more than nine times the median for frauds by employees. They also ran longer before they were caught: a median of 23 months, against eight for employees.

Most of what you need is already public. Anyone who has run companies, sat on boards or raised funds leaves filings behind, and often coverage, interviews and court records too. A registry entry, a court docket and an archived web page were each written by someone else at the time, which is what makes them worth checking a story against.

Write down the decision first, then the questions that could change it. An investor about to join a founder's board needs to know whether the founder's account of their career holds up, how their earlier companies ended, and whether anything suggests they would treat investors or creditors unfairly. A partnerships team signing a referral agreement needs much less. A question whose answer could not change the decision is out of scope.

Then set the scope:

• Who: the person and the companies they have run. Relatives and associates come in only where a question needs them.
• How far back: far enough to cover the career the decision rests on, often the last ten years for someone running a company, and every company named in their pitch. Registries set limits of their own. Companies House's free service holds every company dissolved since January 2010, and its policy is to keep dissolved companies' records for 20 years, though it has paused destroying or transferring records while it reviews that period.
• Where: every country and state where the person has lived or done business, because registries and courts keep local records.

Resolve the identity before you collect anything, because a search on a name returns everyone who has it. In the 2020 Census, 258 last names covered a quarter of the US population. A record about a namesake, whether a court case, an old company or a news story, can attach itself to the wrong file and colour everything you read after it.

Start from what you know for certain: the person's full name and any former names, the companies they say they have run, the cities they have lived in, a work email address and a photo. Treat a new record as theirs only when two independent details agree, such as a name and a company, or a name and an address at the same date. Companies House shows the month and year of birth of each director on its public register, which is often enough to separate two people with the same name.

Keep a list of the namesakes you set aside and why, so nobody adds them back later. Our guide to identity resolution explains how much each identifier is worth and what to do when two records conflict.

Business registries record, to different degrees, who ran a company, when they joined and left, and what happened to the company.

In the UK, Companies House lets anyone search officers for free and see a company's current and resigned officers. An officer's list of appointments gives each company the person has been appointed to, the dates they were appointed and resigned, and the company's status, such as active, dissolved or in liquidation. Open each company's filing history too, for its accounts, its changes of officers and how it closed.

How a company ended tells you more than the fact that it ended. A company that can pay its bills can be closed by having it struck off the register or through a members' voluntary liquidation. A company that cannot pay its debts can go into a creditors' voluntary liquidation or a compulsory liquidation through the courts, among other routes. The status and the filing history show which route a company took, and the person's resignation date shows whether they were still a director when it happened.

Read a filing as what the company told the registry on that date. Companies House checks that each filing is complete, but says it receives so many documents that "a close review of each document during registration is not always possible."

In the US, each state runs its own registry, and the National Association of Secretaries of State links to them. What they publish varies: Delaware's free search gives an entity's name, file number, formation date and registered agent, and more costs a fee. Two federal sources reach further. EDGAR's full-text search covers every filing made electronically with the SEC since 2001, attachments included, so a name in quotation marks finds the filings that mention a person. And a company that raised money in certain private offerings may have filed a Form D, whose related persons section names its executive officers, directors and promoters.

Write the person's account down as a list of claims, then check each claim against a record they did not write. "Founded and sold a freight software company in 2021" is three claims: a founding, a role and a sale.

• Roles and dates: the registry, archived team pages, conference programmes and filings that name them.
• A sale: the buyer's own announcement, and the sold company's filings after the date. A sale of the company and a liquidation leave different marks on the register.
• Degrees, licences and certifications: the school's registrar or the body that issued them, which our guide to verifying a resume covers claim by claim.
• Numbers such as revenue, customers or returns: filed accounts where they exist, and people who were there.

Mark each claim as confirmed, contradicted or open, and note how far the record and the story differ. A rounded-up customer count and an invented exit are different findings.

Search the courts where the person and their companies have lived and done business, then read the records themselves.

In the US, federal court records are on PACER. Its Case Locator is a national index for the district, bankruptcy and appellate courts, and a search returns each case's party names, court, number and the dates it was filed and closed. PACER waives fees for anyone who spends $30 or less in a quarter.

Most cases, though, are in state courts. The federal district courts received 382,692 civil cases and criminal defendants in the year to September 2025. The National Center for State Courts counted about 70 million state court filings in calendar 2024, a count that takes in traffic, family and juvenile cases as well as civil and criminal ones.

In England and Wales, bankruptcies, debt relief orders and individual voluntary arrangements are on the Individual Insolvency Register, which can be searched by name, but records are usually removed within three months of a case ending. Older bankruptcies may be found in The Gazette, the UK's official public record, which publishes insolvency notices such as bankruptcy orders, discharges from bankruptcy and resolutions for voluntary winding-up.

Then read the record, starting with the docket, which the US federal courts' glossary defines as "a log containing the complete history of each case". A civil complaint states "the wrongs allegedly committed by the defendant", which is one side's account, and a judgment is "the official decision of a court finally resolving the dispute". Most civil cases end before anyone tests the allegations at trial: of the 298,208 civil cases that ended in the federal district courts in the year to June 2026, 0.5 percent reached trial. Note who sued whom, over what, how it ended, and whether the person was a party or only named.

Resolve the identity first, then read what the story says the person did. Our guide to adverse media screening follows a single hit through four decisions: whether the article is about your subject, what part they play in it, how far the matter got and whether it matters for the relationship.

Look for the rest of the story as well. The Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics, revised in October 2026, asks journalists to "gather, update and correct information throughout the life of a news story" and to "acknowledge mistakes". A charge may have been dropped or a detail corrected in a later piece, so search for follow-ups and corrections before you rely on the first story. And count sources: several stories that all rest on one press release are one source.

Look at how the person has described themselves over the years, in archived team pages, conference programmes, interviews and profiles, and at how others have described them, each with a date. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine lets you search the history of more than one trillion web pages, so a former employer's team page from 2018 may still be there after the company has gone. It does not hold everything: the Internet Archive says it does not archive pages that need a password, and that some pages are missing because of robots exclusions or a site owner's request.

Read the footprint for consistency. A real career builds up a record across years, written by different people, whose titles and dates agree. A biography that changes from one conference to the next, a former employer that never mentions the person, or a footprint that begins the year the fundraising did are questions to put to them.

Write each finding with its source, its date and how confident you are in it, and keep three groups apart: what the records confirm, what they contradict and what is still open. Our guide to running an OSINT investigation shows how to state confidence in words a reader will take the way you meant them.

Keep only what bears on the decision. The Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, published by the UN human rights office and the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley, says that online content "should only be collected if it is relevant to a particular investigation" (PDF). A person's health, family or politics will rarely bear on a business decision, and leaving them out keeps the file fair.

Then put the material findings to the person before anyone decides, since there is often an ordinary explanation the records cannot show. Journalists hold themselves to the same courtesy: the SPJ code asks them to give the subjects of news coverage a "fair opportunity" to respond to allegations of wrongdoing. Record the answer as the person's own account, and check what you can of it.

The case is a composite. Maren Edrecott, Martin Edrecott, Esterlow Systems and Ebberwick Freight are invented, and the domain uses the .example name reserved for documentation.

A seed-stage venture fund in New York is about to lead a $3 million round in Esterlow Systems Inc., a Delaware company that builds pricing software for freight brokers. Its founder, Maren Edrecott, moved from Manchester to New York in 2023. The deck says she founded Ebberwick Freight in the UK in 2016, grew it to 40 customers and sold it in 2021, after four years in operations at a large logistics group.

The scope. The decision is whether to lead the round and take a board seat. The questions are whether her account holds up, how Ebberwick ended, and whether anything since 2016 bears on how she treats investors, customers and creditors. The fund holds her name, her email address, maren@esterlow.example, her professional profile and the deck. Her family and her personal finances are out of scope, apart from any insolvency record.

The identity. A Companies House officer search for her name returns two people. One, born in April 1987, was a director of Ebberwick Freight Ltd. The other, born in 1958, is a director of a property management company in Norwich, shares nothing else with the first, and goes on the list of namesakes set aside.

The roles. Her list of appointments shows her as a director of Ebberwick from its incorporation in March 2016 until she resigned in June 2021. Ebberwick's status is dissolved. Its filing history shows a resolution in March 2022 to wind the company up in a creditors' voluntary liquidation, the route for a company that cannot pay its debts, and its dissolution in 2024. The deck does not mention the liquidation.

The track record. Archived copies of Ebberwick's team page from 2017 to 2020 list her as co-founder and chief executive, as does a 2019 conference programme. The logistics group's archived staff pages from 2012 to 2015 list her in operations.

The courts. In the PACER Case Locator, the surname returns one case, a 2019 case in Ohio naming a Martin Edrecott, which is set aside. The company's name returns a 2024 case in the Southern District of New York, brought by a former customer against Esterlow Systems Inc. over a billing dispute, to which she is not a party. The docket shows a complaint, an answer and a stipulation of dismissal five months later, so the allegations were never tested. The New York state courts and the Individual Insolvency Register have nothing on her, and The Gazette carries Ebberwick's winding-up notices and nothing about her personally.

The news. A 2022 trade press story about Ebberwick's collapse called her its chief executive at the time. The publisher corrected it later that month to say she had left in 2021, which matches her resignation date, and the Wayback Machine holds the story as it first ran.

The conversation. The partner puts the liquidation and the lawsuit to her on a call. She says that in 2021 Ebberwick sold its software and customer contracts to a larger UK logistics company, which hired her for a year, and that what was left of the business, owing a large debt to a haulier after losing its biggest customer, was wound up the next year, with her co-founder still a director. To her it was a sale of what she had built. She sends the asset purchase agreement, and the buyer's 2021 announcement of the purchase, still in the archive, names her as joining. The lawsuit, she says, was settled for a small sum, and the settlement goes into the data room.

Put together, the records support her account of her roles and dates, and contradict one word in the deck. What she called a sale was a sale of the business's assets, followed by the insolvent liquidation of the company she founded, after she had left it. The fund leads the round. It asks her to describe Ebberwick accurately in the materials for co-investors, reviews the settlement as part of its diligence on the company, and calls two of Ebberwick's former customers, since no record shows the customer count. One question stays open, and the file says so: why Ebberwick lost its biggest customer. The fund has only her account of that, because her former co-founder did not reply before the round closed.

Two records count as two only if neither was copied from the other.

• A different name. People change their names, use initials or spell a name more than one way, and companies trade under names other than their registered ones. Companies House lists an officer's former names where they were given, but a search on a current name alone can miss earlier records.
• Someone else's name on the filing. A person who runs a company through a relative, a friend or a nominee may not appear in its officer records.
• Disputes that never reached a court. A claim settled before anyone filed it leaves no court record to find.
• Places with thin public records. Some countries publish little about their companies or court cases online, and a clean search there tells you less.
• A clean record. In the ACFE's study, 88 percent of the perpetrators had no known history of fraud-related charges or convictions. Court and insolvency searches show what has already happened, and say little about what someone will do next.
• A footprint built to order. Profiles and articles can be produced for the occasion, so weight records other people made at the time.

Most of what looks troubling in a person's record has an ordinary explanation, and a fair review checks it first.

• Namesakes. A record that matches only on a name is a lead until a second, independent detail agrees.
• Companies close for ordinary reasons. The Office for National Statistics found that 38.4 percent of UK businesses born in 2019 survived into 2024. A dissolved company, or even an insolvent liquidation, is a fact about a business. What matters is how the person behaved while it happened, and how they describe it now.
• A lawsuit is an allegation. The federal courts' glossary says settlements "usually do not include the admission of fault", and a case can be dismissed for many reasons. Read how a case ended before you count it.
• Most bankruptcies are about consumer debt. In the year to September 2025, about 96 percent of US bankruptcy petitions were nonbusiness petitions, filed primarily by individuals with mainly consumer debt. Weigh one by what it says about the decision in front of you.

Much of the work in researching a person is telling namesakes apart and keeping each record tied to its source. Sixtyfour's agent starts from what you already have, such as a person's name, an email address, a company name or a website, researches public sources such as registry filings, public records, news, professional profiles and the web footprint, links what it finds to the right person and companies, and returns every finding with its source. Anything it could not establish is reported as open, and a person on your team decides. It does not run consumer background checks or credit reports. There is more on how investigators use it on our investigations page.

Decide what the research is for, confirm who the person is, and test their account of their career against records they did not write: the registries for the companies they ran and how those ended, the court records, the news and their footprint over the years. Put anything material they did not mention to them directly, and write up each finding with its source, its date and how confident you are, keeping only what the decision needs.