How Can an Adversary Use Information Available in Public Records to Target You?
Dave Moore - February 22, 2025
Public records may be helpful and convenient in many different situations when you need to discover important details about a person. However, public records are available about almost every person, including you, and adversaries can use the information available in these records to target you in an attempt to steal your money or information.
It’s important to understand how public record information could be used to target you and how to recognize and protect yourself from scams.
Our article will give you more details about how an adversary might use your public record information and how to protect your personal information from others.
What Are Public Records?
Public records are records that are available to the public and contain personal details, such as your criminal history, civil court history, and information like your educational or employment history. Public records can be found through local courthouses or county records offices, or you can access public records online.
If an official background check is being conducted on you, the person requesting the check will need to use a third-party service or another official service that looks through your public records. In addition, they’ll need to obtain your consent to this process.
If you are simply looking at your own public record information or checking someone else’s, you can use an online people search tool or online research to discover this information.
What Information Can Be Found in a Public Record?
Many different items of important personal information can be found in the public record. Below, we give you an overview of the most common information to see in your public record or someone else’s public record.
Information found in a public record includes:
- A person’s name and any other names that they might be known by
- A person’s contact details, such as their email address, phone number, and current address
- A person’s address history
- A person’s educational and employment history
- Known relatives, friends, and associates of the person you are researching
- Criminal and civil records
- Select driving records
- Arrest records, depending on the state
It’s important to note that states do have different laws about what can be disclosed on public records and during official background check reports. Check with these laws if you have concerns about what might be shown on a public record about you in your state.
How Can an Adversary Use Information Available in Public Records to Target You?
Public records are incredibly convenient for many people who need to find details about someone’s personal history or for individuals who are conducting official background checks. Unfortunately, the information in public records can be used by adversaries to conduct scams or attempt to steal your money and personal information.
For example, a person might look up your name through a public record search tool or through an online search. Once they have your name, this person can generally find any social media accounts that belong to you. If your social media accounts are public, this person can determine from your previous posts things that have happened to you – let’s say you bought a car recently.
The person now has your phone number, email address, social media accounts, and details about your new car. They may call you, text you, or email you about car-related scams, such as car warranty scams or refund scams.
If you accidentally interact with the scammer, you risk losing your personal information, sensitive information like your Social Security number, and your financial information.
Simply put, public record information allows an adversary to gather more details about you, which allows them to target scams and other attempts to gain your personal information. Because of this, it’s important to limit how much information is publicly available about you on social media websites and similar online accounts.
How Can I Protect Myself From Scams Online?
Protecting yourself from scams online is a matter of being cautious with your online information and looking for red flags that can indicate something is a scam. Indicators that you are dealing with a scam include the following:
- You are contacted randomly from a phone number or email address you don’t recognize.
- The scammer you are in contact with either acts very familiar with you or they may urgently be trying to get your information – this depends on the type of scam.
- Scammer websites will include poor grammar, poor design, and suspicious urgent calls for you to submit your personal and financial information.
- You get ads for items that seem too good to be true or targeted directly at you, and the website the ad leads to seems suspicious.
- The scammer you are in contact with uses bad English, strange word choices, and urgent or rude tactics to try and fool you into giving away your money or information.
The moment you suspect a website is a scam or that you are in direct contact with a scammer, you should block the person and navigate away from the website immediately. You may need to run a virus check on your device to ensure you haven’t picked up any malware by accident.
In addition to disengaging with someone once you suspect a scam is underway, you can protect yourself by refraining from putting your personal information in publicly available places. This might include public social media profiles and limiting what you post online.
You should also be cautious when giving out your email and phone number, and you should utilize call screening services to prevent scam or spam calls from reaching you.
Can I Limit What Is on the Public Record About Me?
It is generally not possible to limit what is on the public record about you. However, you can make your online presence as limited as possible to avoid certain items landing on public record information websites.
For example, if you have social media accounts, you may want to consider using an alternate email address and phone number to set up these accounts. You can also set your social media accounts to private to limit what can be viewed.
Steps like the above give you a degree of separation between your online accounts and real information. Plus, these steps can also help make the information that lands on public records less accurate.
Typically, you will not be able to hide criminal records or civil records. If you have a criminal record, you can petition for certain aspects of your record to be sealed or expunged, effectively hiding them from the public’s eye. A legal professional will need to help you with this process.
What Do I Do if I Suspect a Scammer Is Targeting Me?
If you suspect that a scammer is targeting you or that you are currently speaking to a scammer, the best thing to do is to immediately disengage with that person. You may need to block the number or screen calls, as many scammers will continually try to contact you and attempt to gather as much of your information and financial details as possible before you catch on.
Conduct further research into the phone number or email address you’ve been communicating with. If you have given out any of your personal information or financial details, you may need to contact your banks and credit institutions. You can freeze your credit, report fraud, and check your credit reports to see if your identity has been compromised.
You can also report certain scams to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) directly to help law enforcement with their investigations into certain scammers.
Should I Make My Online Profiles Private?
Setting your online social media profiles and other online profiles to private is a great way to protect your information and limit what can be seen about you by scammers. You can navigate to the settings option on any social media account you have active and look through the privacy options to set your social media account to the level of privacy you desire.
Limiting online information and being cautious about where you hand out your email address and phone number our key steps into reducing your availability is a target for scams.
Protecting Your Personal Information
Protecting your personal information is an important part of being online. While you can’t necessarily hide public record information, you can be aware of the potential of scams and the lengths a scammer will go to in order to target your information and identity.
Scammers can – and do – use public record information to track your behaviors, interests, and other life events to better target you for scams or identity theft.
Always try to limit how much information you give out about yourself online. onsider setting your social media accounts to private, and be cautious whenever you are contacted by someone unknown or by a phone number or email address that appears suspicious.
