New Site Checks If Your Date Has a Secret -Like Are They Married?

Sleuthing a match before a first date is nothing new — most singles have Googled a name or scrolled a stranger's Instagram before agreeing to coffee. Someone has gone a step further and created an app to help you find out what the deal is with the person you plan on going on a date with.

What It Actually Digs Up

Type in a name, phone number, or a name paired with a location, and the platform pulls together court records, property history, marriage records, and bankruptcy filings, drawing on a database built from more than 120 billion public records collected since 1999. Results come color-coded—red flags, green flags—alongside AI-generated summaries meant to provide context rather than a verdict.

That distinction matters to the company. "Records give you context, not certainty," PeopleFinders CEO Amber Higgins told reporters, framing the tool as a supplement to judgment rather than a replacement for it.

The timing isn't accidental. Romance scams have grown sophisticated enough that one recent case involved a man posing as an NFL player, allegedly conning 26 victims out of more than $1.3 million combined. A recent survey found that one in four Americans has interacted with a fake dating profile or AI bot, and 15% reported losing money to an online dating scam.

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What This Means for Wenatchee Valley Daters

A Modern Answer to an Old Dating Ritual: PeopleFinders, a public-records company with more than two decades in the business, just built a tool designed to do that digging faster and with far more depth than a search engine ever could.

The site is called Stud or Dud, and it launched in beta late last month.

The initial search is free, with paid tiers ranging from a $5 one-time report up to $19.97 monthly plans for people juggling multiple matches at once. For anyone navigating the dating scene here in the Wenatchee Valley — where the pool is smaller and word travels fast, but online dating still dominates how most people meet — a tool like this offers one more layer of caution before meeting a stranger in person. It's not foolproof, and the company says as much. But for singles tired of guessing, it's one more piece of the puzzle worth having.