Reality Shows Skimp on Background Checks
The recent tragic homocide of bikini model Jasmine Fiore by her reality TV star husband, Ryan Jenkins, is an example of how useless a criminal background check is if your private investigator or background check service doesn’t use good data sources.
In 2007, Jenkins pleaded guilty in Calgary, Canada to assault. He was sentenced to 15 months probation and ordered to undergo counseling for domestic violence and sex addiction and to stay away from the person involved. Subsequently, Jenkins starred in the VH1 reality show Megan Wants a Millionaire. The production company behind the show, 51 Minds, issued a statement saying that they used an outside company to run background checks on its contestants and were not aware of his record.
How Jenkins’s criminal record slipped through the cracks is unknown. Some of the top background information databases, which only licensed private investigators can access, require you to input several identifiers, such as the subject’s name and birth date. If you have the incorrect birth date or misspell the name, the database will tell you that no records were found; in other words, it will wrongly tell you that the subject’s record is clean.
Perhaps the background check company only looked up its contestants in U.S. databases, hence missing his record in Canada. Perhaps they misspelled his name, and his record came back clean. Perhaps his name is misspelled in the court record, so it wasn’t found. Or perhaps the database they used wasn’t comprehensive. Unfortunately, there are many ways that a criminal background check can fall short. A good private investigator will have reliable data sources and try inputting different spellings of the subject’s name, for example, to make sure no records are missed. Before you marry or hire someone, make sure to get a thorough background check.
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