Screen risky orders before shipping.

Short answer. Screen the order, not the person. Public records tell you whether a named buyer exists as described; they do not tell you whether a card is stolen, and they may not be used to decide credit.

This page is about the narrow, lawful use: a high-value order from a new customer, and what a merchant can reasonably check before shipping.

What actually costs the merchant

Two different losses get called fraud, and they need different defences.

Stolen payment credentials. The card is real, the holder did not authorise the purchase, and the chargeback lands with you along with the fee.

Friendly fraud. The buyer received the goods and disputes the charge anyway. Here the defence is evidence, not identity: delivery confirmation, signature, the order trail.

A third, quieter one: the order that is genuine but uncollectable — a mis-keyed address, a business that folded between order and invoice.

Public-record research helps with the first and the third. It does nothing about the second.

The signals inside your own order

Before any external check, most of the answer is already in front of you.

Billing and shipping addresses that do not relate to each other, on a first order, at a size that stands out.

An address that resolves to a freight forwarder or a mail drop.

Several failed authorisations before the successful one, or several cards on one account in a short window.

Rush shipping on a heavy, resellable item, ordered outside the hours the rest of your customers order.

None of these is proof. Together they are a reason to spend two minutes verifying before the parcel leaves.

What a name check can add

For a business order, the strongest check is the register: does this company exist, in this state, with this name, and since when.

A purchase order from a company registered last week, shipping to a residential address, is worth a phone call.

For a named individual, public records show an address history, property and court filings, licences and published mentions.

What you are testing is coherence: does a person by this name have a footprint that fits the order, or is the name attached to nothing at all.

A name search shows the candidates sharing a name, and the records anchored to the one you choose are the evidence. We hold no phone or email data, so an address or a number cannot be turned into a person here.

The legal line, stated plainly

Deciding whether to extend credit, terms or financing to a consumer is governed by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. That requires a consumer reporting agency and a permissible purpose.

Recordwell is not a consumer reporting agency, and its results may not be used for credit, employment, housing or insurance decisions.

Checking whether a named business or person exists before shipping goods you have already been paid for is a different act, and it is the one this page is for.

If your decision is really about creditworthiness, use a commercial credit provider built for it.

The controls that prevent more loss than any lookup

Address verification and card security codes, enforced rather than collected.

3-D Secure on high-value orders, which shifts liability for many card-not-present chargebacks to the issuer.

Delivery with signature and tracking on anything above your threshold — the single strongest evidence in a dispute.

A velocity rule: one customer, several cards, one hour. Most platforms have this built in and switched off.

And a manual review queue above a value you set deliberately, rather than reviewing whatever happens to look odd.

When you call the customer

Call the number on the order, and ask them to confirm something only the real buyer would know — the last four digits of the card they used, or the exact contents of the order.

Do not read those details out yourself. The point is to have them tell you.

A genuine customer answers in a sentence. A fraudulent order usually stops responding at this step, which is the outcome you wanted.

Keeping the evidence you will need

Chargebacks are argued months later on paper.

Keep the order record, the AVS and CVV results, the authorisation, the tracking with delivery confirmation and any correspondence, all tied to the order number.

Write down what you checked before shipping. "We verified the company registration and called the number on the order" is a sentence that wins representments.

What not to do

Do not build a private blocklist of named individuals out of public-record research. That is a consumer-report-shaped decision without any of the process the law requires.

Do not ask customers for identity documents as a routine step; you become responsible for them the moment you hold them.

And do not treat a thin public footprint as guilt. Plenty of real people have almost none — the check is a prompt to slow down, not a verdict.

For a one-off counterparty rather than a customer, verifying a business contact covers the registration side in more depth.