What Is Aunt Cass Checks History?
Aunt Cass Checks History is a background verification tool designed to pull public record data and compile it into a readable report. The platform focuses on screening individuals for housing, employment, and tenant vetting purposes. It aggregates data from court records, criminal databases, and civil filings to create a consolidated history report. I've used it across several property management scenarios where landlord responsibility requires tenant screening beyond what standard credit checks provide. The process is straightforward. You enter a person's full legal name, date of birth, and last known address. The system queries multiple database sources simultaneously and returns a report within minutes for most queries. Reports include criminal history summaries, civil case filings, eviction records, and sex offender registry checks depending on your subscription tier. I learned the hard way that a simple name search is not reliable enough. The first time I ran a check, the report returned multiple results because the subject shared a common name with individuals in three different counties. I had to refine the search with additional identifiers. Your workaround is to always run a secondary search with a known alias or middle name variation. This typically cuts false positives down by about sixty to seventy percent.
Subscription Tiers and Costs
The platform operates on a credit-based system. Each background check costs a set number of credits depending on depth. A basic name-and-address search runs about five credits. A full report with criminal and civil history costs roughly twenty to thirty credits. They sell credit packages in bulk, with the per-credit cost dropping significantly at higher tiers. One detail that trips people up: reports have a ninety-day validity window. Running a new check every time you need fresh data is the only reliable way to stay compliant. Some people try to reuse old reports to save credits. I did this for one property application and nearly missed an eviction filing that had occurred two weeks after the report date. I stopped doing that after the first incident.
Aunt Cass Checks History Setup Guide
Signing up takes about five minutes. You visit the official site, create an account with an email address, and select a payment method. Credit packages range from entry-level starter bundles to unlimited plans for high-volume users like property management companies. Payment is processed through their billing portal. Once your credits are loaded, you can run your first check immediately. The interface is clean but not particularly intuitive for edge cases. If you're running checks for business purposes, I recommend setting up a team account so supervisors can review reports before decisions are made. This prevents one person's oversight from becoming someone else's liability. I should mention the API access. If you need to integrate screening into a larger workflow, they offer API endpoints. The documentation is adequate but sparse. The key endpoint you will use most often is the applicant submission endpoint, which accepts name, DOB, and address fields and returns a case ID for asynchronous report retrieval. Setting this up took me about an afternoon to get working reliably with error handling around rate limits.
Get the Full Details
Common Pitfalls and Counter-Intuitive Facts
Most people assume that a clean background report means a clean history. That is not always true. Public records are incomplete. Some jurisdictions do not digitize older records. A person could have a significant history in a county that does not participate in the databases the platform queries. I encountered this with a subject whose record was in a rural county that only kept paper filings. The report came back clean. I flagged it as a partial screening and requested an additional manual county-level search. Another thing beginners miss: the date of birth field is not optional even if you think it is. The algorithm uses DOB to disambiguate between multiple individuals with the same name. Skipping it increases false match rates dramatically. I recommend requiring DOB from your applicants upfront rather than asking for it mid-process.
Limitations and When to Use Alternatives
The biggest limitation is data coverage. Aunt Cass Checks History pulls from available public records, but those records are fragmented across thousands of jurisdictions with different digitization standards. If you need comprehensive national screening, you will hit gaps. For federal positions or clearance-level checks, this tool is insufficient. You need a proprietary consumer reporting agency that complies with FCRA requirements for employment decisions. If you are a small landlord screening a few tenants a month, this service works fine for basic due diligence. If you are a large property management company processing hundreds of applications per month, you should negotiate enterprise pricing or consider a dedicated tenant screening provider with broader coverage and FCRA compliance built in. The customer support response time is another factor I wish had been clearer upfront. Typical response time for a support ticket is twenty-four to forty-eight hours. This is not useful when you need to make a decision within a few hours of receiving an application. I worked around this by running checks earlier in the screening pipeline so reports were ready well before any decision deadline.
Download links are available directly on their homepage under the plans section. There is no standalone software to install. The entire platform is web-based. Browser compatibility covers modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. I run it on Chrome without issues.
