How to Find Someone With an SSN People Search: Expert Tips

Richard Grey - April 5, 2025

If you have a social security number and don’t know who it belongs to or where it originated from, there are ways to uncover who it belongs to. Social security numbers are incredibly valuable tools that allow people access to government resources, employment opportunities, and work as an essential form of identification.

Unfortunately, they can be absconded with, misplaced, or recovered through loose cards, data leaks, and more. If you need to find a person using a social security number, it helps to know where to search.

This page will examine how to find people using an SSN search. While there are multiple ways to find someone, we will focus on the easiest, quickest, and cheapest ways to access information. By the end of this article, you will be able to find the person and a detailed background on the person without having to hire a business or investigator.

Ways to Find People With a Social Security Number

If you have access to someone’s social security number, it may help you perform identity fraud, but it is not ideal for uncovering information on an individual. Thankfully, it can help loosen up other relevant details that can track someone down. If you are trying to return a card, find out where the person works so that you can return it at a neutral location.

Keep in mind that because SSNs are very private, and should be kept private, it can be almost impossible to discover who a number belongs to without access to specialized databases. Most people do not have access to these databases, so the best you can hope for is gathering limited information online and finding public records that might point you in the right direction.

That being said, the following tools can help you uncover who a social security card belongs to and provide other public records that can help you better determine who you are looking for.

Use Checkpeople.com

If we are going by the best methods first, there is no better tool to find information on someone than a people search engine. These engines allow you to use tools like reverse phone lookups, which return a detailed report from a phone number. These results take five minutes or less, are entirely free, and are more fruitful than other alternatives.

Of the hundreds of people search engines on the Internet, CheckPeople is in a league of its own. Unlike other spyware-filled sites that rely on predatory tactics to get people to enter sensitive financial information, CheckPeople is a trusted, free tool devoid of malware. The site is easy to navigate and provides all the tools needed to get a comprehensive report.

When using a search tool, it is essential that you follow the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) laws to ensure that you are not treading into illegal waters. If you are concerned about your information being easily accessed, CheckPeople gives you an easy way to request that your personal data be removed.

While you can’t use someone’s SSN to search with CheckPeople, if you find the name connected to the SSN, you can search for their name and find their contact information to return the card.

Check Google, Bing, Ask, Etc.

If you want to collect more information in order to conduct a more in-depth search on CheckPeople or to see if you can uncover social media profiles, using search engines is worthwhile. It won’t give you a person’s autobiography, but sites like Google and Bing are incredible for finding social media profiles, work websites, and more.

As discussed above, data leaks can result in hundreds of thousands of social security numbers being spread online. While this is incredibly unfortunate and stressful to those involved, it can help you get more information on a person if they were the victim of a data leak. It may seem unconventional, but enter the SSN into the search bar.

If the results come across as numerical gibberish, try putting quotations (“”) on either side of the numbers to ensure results only bring up exact matches to the social security number.

The chances of this bringing your person of interest to light are small, as SSNs are private and should be kept secret, but these searches may offer more relevant information. Quick solutions like this are essential to exhaust every avenue because of the challenge of finding someone with a social security number.

Skim Through Social Media

If the previous methods have uncovered social media profiles, you are in luck. Social media is one of the best ways to learn more about a person, from romantic interests to colleagues. When trying to locate someone, the issue with social media is that no two profiles are created the same.

Even though your friend John may enjoy posting about his life, career, and family on Facebook and Twitter, your other friend Jane may enjoy a bit more privacy regarding their personal life. Conversely, while John may work a job that doesn’t require a digital presence, Jane uses LinkedIn to attract prospective clients.

So, even though looking for some people on Facebook may be beneficial, others may have more information on their LinkedIn profiles. Because of this, it is good to try and search all the major social platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Remember that using only a social security number may not bring back a profile on most platforms.

It is heavily recommended that you use social media, search engines, and CheckPeople together. By using CheckPeople and Google, you can uncover social media profiles. Social media profiles can provide names, addresses, and phone numbers, which can be plugged back into CheckPeople for narrower search results.

If you can find a profile, try to find identifying information such as the person’s job, name, phone number, and any tagged pictures that might narrow in on their location. Remember that actively observing and monitoring someone online is considered cyberstalking, and you should not try to reveal someone’s address or personal information when looking through their profiles.

Submit A FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) Request

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a law that allows citizens to request information from the United States government. The downside is that if you submit a FOIA request for a social security number tied to a person still alive, you will not be able to find out who the individual is.

If they have died, you can request information on them. The process is involved, however, and you may need to prove that the person has passed on. You will need to create an account on the website before you can make a FOIA request. Once the request has been received, it can take twenty days before you receive a response.

Rely On Government Resources

There are a few ways to use government tools and institutions to find a person with their social security number. The first option you should consider is contacting the Social Security Administration to inform them you have an individual’s social security information. The SSA will let you leave your details and notify the individual that you have requested to contact them.

If the person consents, they can then contact you, which may solve the issue entirely for some. Otherwise, you can try their website to verify the social security number.

The website allows you to enter a social security number to verify its validity. If you have trouble uncovering any information using the SSN, this service can inform you if you are wasting your time with a fake number. It won’t give you the person’s life story, but it can eliminate the paranoia of wondering if the number is legitimate.

Finding People With an SSN People Search

Social security numbers are not incredibly useful in the hands of an honest person. They may help bypass financial institutions and even endanger someone’s identity, but using them to uncover who someone is can be difficult, as there is a great amount of necessary privacy surrounding these numbers. To lessen the inevitable headache, try using the above methods to make the process quick.

Using common digital watering holes like Facebook and Twitter is great for getting more information from someone. Similarly, a search engine like Google may even give you results from an SSN if it has been targeted in a data leak. Even a FOIA request can yield results if the individual has since died.

However, CheckPeople will be your best bet of all the different methods. It provides not only public information but also follows a person’s digital footprints by giving you social media profiles, dating profiles, and even previous employers. Finding out who someone is can be difficult, but if you know where to look, most people can be found online in just a few minutes.