First Advantage Background Check Errors

A First Advantage background check usually lands after a conditional offer, which is exactly when a mistake in it does the most damage. First Advantage is a consumer reporting agency under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), and that status gives you real leverage: the right to see the file the company keeps on you, the right to force it to reinvestigate anything in that file that is wrong, and the right to be paid when a careless report costs you work. Our Employment Background Checks page walks through how the screening process is supposed to run from the applicant's side.

What is First Advantage?

First Advantage Corporation is an employment and tenant screening company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. It sells criminal-record searches, employment and education verifications, drug and health screening, and driving-record checks to employers, and it runs screens in more than 200 countries and territories. On October 31, 2024 it closed a $2.2 billion acquisition of Sterling Check Corp., folding one of its largest competitors into a combined business with roughly $1.5 billion in revenue — which means a single company now prepares a very large share of the screening reports American employers rely on. On paperwork you may see it under related names, including First Advantage Background Services Corp. and First Advantage LNS Screening Solutions, Inc., and its resident-screening arm supplies tenant history reports to landlords.

How to contact First Advantage

You can request your own file and file a dispute directly:

• Company: First Advantage Corporation, Atlanta, Georgia
• Consumer mail: First Advantage Consumer Center, P.O. Box 105292, Atlanta, GA 30348-5292
• Phone: (800) 845-6004
• Dispute email: consumer.documents@fadv.com
• Free file copy: fadv.com/candidates/free-report/

First Advantage provides one complimentary copy of your file per year and says it furnishes the report within fifteen days of a verified request. Check the address printed on your own report before mailing anything, since screening companies route disputes through different units, and keep a dated copy of everything you send.

One number to avoid. The number 844.718.0087 appears on a great deal of the web as though it were First Advantage’s consumer line. It is a sales line. It will not take your dispute and it will not reach the consumer center. Use the consumer number and the Atlanta address above, and put the dispute in writing.

Common First Advantage errors we see

• A stranger's criminal record attached to your file because you share a common name or date of birth — the mixed-file problem, and the costliest error in employment screening
• Charges that were dismissed, expunged, sealed, or decided in your favor still showing as live convictions
• One case reported two or three times, so a single old charge reads on paper like a pattern
• A misdemeanor written up as a felony, or an arrest reported as though it ended in a conviction
• Employment dates, job titles, salary, or education that the verification came back wrong on
• Records reported past the FCRA's time limits, or filed under the wrong Social Security number or address

How many people are complaining about First Advantage

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau keeps a public record of complaints filed against consumer reporting agencies. Complaints about First Advantage ran 268 in 2023, 321 in 2024, and 356 in 2025 — a rise of about a third over two years rather than a sudden jump.

The number worth noticing is the size of it. More than 350 people in a single year took the trouble to file a formal complaint with a federal regulator about a First Advantage report, and each of those is someone who had already tried the ordinary dispute route. A complaint to the CFPB is not a lawsuit and it does not get you damages, but if your report was wrong and the dispute went nowhere, you are not an isolated case.

How a First Advantage error hurts you

Screening reports almost always arrive after the offer, at the point where you have already given notice at your current job. One wrong line can turn a signed offer into a rescinded one inside a day, and the damage rarely stops there — the same inaccurate file sits in the system and can resurface on the next application, and the one after that. Federal law is built to prevent precisely this sequence: you are entitled to receive the report and a written summary of your rights before the employer acts on it, so that a mistake can be challenged while the decision is still open.

First Advantage's track record with regulators

First Advantage's accuracy procedures have already been tested in federal court, and the result is a matter of public record.

In Williams v. First Advantage LNS Screening Solutions, Inc., 947 F.3d 735, decided by the Eleventh Circuit on January 9, 2020, the company twice attached the criminal record of a man named Ricky Williams to a job applicant named Richard Williams. Its own written procedures required three matching identifiers before reporting a record on a common name; its staff used two. Worse, once the first dispute was resolved nothing in the file flagged the error, so the same misattribution went out again roughly a year later and cost the applicant another job. The court of appeals affirmed $250,000 in compensatory damages and, after cutting a $3.3 million jury verdict as constitutionally excessive, let $1 million in punitive damages stand. Source: Eleventh Circuit opinion, No. 17-11447.

A coordinated California class action captioned First Advantage Credit Cases, JCCP No. 4961, reached final approval on December 8, 2021 over allegations that applicants never got the clear and conspicuous stand-alone disclosure the FCRA requires before a report is pulled. None of that decides your case, but it does mean a wrong entry in your file is a known failure mode rather than a freak event, and you should not accept it as final.

Lawsuits against First Advantage

Williams, in the section above, is the case to read if you read only one. It is not the only one. The matters below are all a matter of public record. Some settled and an allegation in a filed complaint is not a finding of wrongdoing — but read together they show where First Advantage has repeatedly been alleged to fall down: identity matching, and the notices the statute requires before an employer is allowed to act.

Goode v. First Advantage LNS Screening Solutions, Inc. A class action alleging First Advantage used the contents of background reports against job applicants without giving them the notice the FCRA requires first, and did not hand over everything in the file when applicants asked for it. Settled for $2,365,000, according to plaintiffs' counsel at Consumer Litigation Associates.

Frazier v. First Advantage Background Services Corp., No. 3:17-cv-00030 (E.D. Va., filed 2017). Nineteen named plaintiffs. The complaint alleged three separate failures: that First Advantage accepted a disclosure form from Wells Fargo that improperly bundled a liability release into it, that it did not notify applicants at the time it sent employers reports containing adverse public-record information, and that it did not send the pre-adverse-action notice the FCRA requires before an employer acts on a report.

Martin v. First Advantage Background Services Corp., No. 0:11-cv-03357 (D. Minn. 2012). Mahlon Martin was working at Wells Fargo when First Advantage ran a criminal background check on him in January 2011. The report showed a 1997 misdemeanor for impersonating an officer as a guilty verdict carrying a one-year jail sentence. The court records said the charge had been dismissed. Wells Fargo terminated him on the strength of that report without giving him notice or any chance to respond — and when he disputed the entry, First Advantage confirmed it as accurate. He brought five FCRA claims, including failure to follow reasonable procedures, failure to follow the strict procedures the statute requires before reporting public-record information, and failure to reinvestigate. On 13 July 2012, Chief Judge Michael J. Davis denied the motions to dismiss, holding that Martin had stated a claim that First Advantage failed what the court called its grave responsibility to conduct a reasonable reinvestigation. This is the shape of the strongest cases: not simply an error, but an error the company was told about and left standing.

“The match may not be you” is not a defense. Screening companies increasingly attach cautionary language to a possible-match record — wording to the effect that the match was made on name alone and might be somebody else. That language does not do the work they want it to do. Section 1681e(b) requires reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy, and a warning label is not a procedure. If a disclaimer were enough on its own, a screening company could sell any record it liked, attach boilerplate saying it may have made a mistake, and never answer for what followed. The Fair Credit Reporting Act contains no such exception. What Williams shows is what the duty actually looks like in practice: the company’s own policy called for three matching identifiers before a criminal record was attached to a common name, and it used two. What you are owed is accurate identification. A caveat is not a substitute for it.

How to sue First Advantage for a background check error

You do not sue First Advantage because a background check came back badly. You sue First Advantage because the report was wrong, or because First Advantage broke one of the specific rules the Fair Credit Reporting Act imposes on companies that sell reports about you.

In practice there are two routes, and most cases run on the first.

The report was inaccurate and First Advantage's procedures were not reasonable. Section 1681e(b) of the FCRA requires a screening company to follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy. Someone else's conviction on your report is the classic version. So is a charge that was dismissed, expunged or sealed and reported anyway, a case reported twice so it looks like two offenses, and a record that is accurate about someone with your name but is not about you.

You disputed it and First Advantage did not fix it. Section 1681i requires a reinvestigation, generally within 30 days. A dispute that gets closed with the record unchanged, or that produces a form letter and nothing else, is a separate violation from the original error — and it is usually the stronger claim, because it is the point where the company knew.

What you can recover. If the violation was negligent, you can recover your actual damages — most commonly the wages from the job you did not get — plus attorney's fees and costs. If it was willful, which is where a mishandled dispute matters, the FCRA allows actual damages or statutory damages of $100 to $1,000, plus punitive damages, plus fees and costs.

The clock. You generally have two years from the date you discovered the violation, and no more than five years from the violation itself. If a First Advantage report cost you a job, the two-year clock is already running.

What it costs you. Nothing up front. We take FCRA cases on contingency, and the statute makes the defendant pay the attorney's fees when we win.

The first step is not the lawsuit. It is getting your file and disputing it in writing, because that is what creates the record. The section below on how to dispute a First Advantage background check sets out how to do that.

Your rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act

Because First Advantage sells reports about you, the FCRA binds it directly. When it assembles your file it must follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy (§1681e(b)) — the precise duty the jury found was violated in the Williams case. It must reinvestigate what you dispute and delete or correct anything it cannot verify (§1681i). Public-record information reported for employment purposes must be complete and up to date (§1681k). And before an employer turns you down because of the report, you are owed a copy of it and a written summary of your rights — the pre-adverse-action notice required by §1681b(b)(3).

How to dispute a First Advantage background check

1. Get the report. Ask the employer for the copy and the summary of rights it is required to hand you, or request your file straight from the First Advantage Consumer Center.
2. Read every line and write down each item that is wrong — including anything that plainly belongs to someone else with a similar name.
3. Collect proof: certified court dispositions, expungement or sealing orders, a photo ID and Social Security card, and pay stubs or a transcript for verification errors.
4. Dispute in writing to First Advantage at the Consumer Center address, enclose copies rather than originals, and keep a dated record of what you sent and when.
5. Tell the employer in writing that the report is disputed and ask it to hold the decision. If it is not corrected, or the job is already gone, talk to an FCRA attorney.

This information is general and is not legal advice for your specific situation.

Sterling and First Advantage are now one company — and that matters for your dispute

On 31 October 2024, First Advantage completed a $2.2 billion acquisition of Sterling Check. Sterling’s own website now carries the banner “Sterling is now First Advantage.”

The consumer-facing systems have not caught up, and it causes real problems for people trying to dispute a report.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s directory of consumer reporting companies still lists Sterling as a separate company with its own dispute route, and does not mention First Advantage in the entry. Sterling’s own site publishes two consumer numbers, 855-747-9783 and 800-899-2272. The CFPB publishes a third, (888) 889-5248. And First Advantage maintains its own separate consumer line at (800) 845-6004 and its own dispute address in Atlanta.

If you are not certain which company ran your check, the practical answer is to dispute to both. Send a written dispute, with copies of your identification and any documents that prove the error, to:

First Advantage — Consumer Center, P.O. Box 105292, Atlanta, GA 30348-5292

Sterling — Attn: Consumer Reports, 6150 Oak Tree Boulevard, Suite 490, Independence, OH 44131

Send both by certified mail and keep the receipts. Under the FCRA a written dispute starts a clock the company has to answer, and a certified-mail receipt is the cheapest proof you will ever buy that the clock started. Being routed between two brand names for one company is not your problem to solve, and it is not a defense to a report that was wrong.

Did an inaccurate First Advantage background check cost you a job?

An employment screening report is a consumer report, and the accuracy rules that govern it are enforceable — through actual damages, statutory damages, punitive damages where the violation was willful, and attorney's fees paid by the other side. If a First Advantage report that was not accurate cost you an offer, a promotion, or an apartment, that loss is exactly what the statute exists to address. Telling us what happened costs you nothing.

How The Kim Law Firm helps

We are consumer-protection lawyers who handle FCRA cases nationwide, and First Advantage is a company we have written about before — see our post on a First Advantage report that included false criminal history. We represent people whose reports are inaccurate: someone else's record, a case that was expunged, a charge inflated into something it never was, a verification that simply came back wrong. We do not help anyone conceal a record that is accurate. Where the file is wrong we push for the correction and pursue the damages that follow, and you owe us nothing unless we recover.

Admitted in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; available to appear pro hac vice in other federal courts.

How much of the screening industry one company now covers

Employment screening looks like a crowded market from the outside and is a concentrated one from the inside. A handful of companies prepare a very large share of the reports American employers rely on, and each of them has grown by buying the others. That concentration matters to an individual for a practical reason: the same error, sourced the same way, can follow you from one employer's screening vendor to the next, because both employers are buying from the same underlying operation.

• Sterling — the competitor acquired here in a $2.2 billion deal that closed on October 31, 2024.
• HireRight — another national screener that has grown by absorbing smaller companies and their technology.
• Checkr — a large platform screener that acquired GoodHire.
• InfoMart — a Georgia screener that became part of Sterling before Sterling itself was acquired.
• Universal Background Screening — an Arizona company folded into this business in 2021.

If a report cost you one job, do not assume the next employer will see something different. Request your file from the screening company directly, correct it once and in writing, and keep the corrected copy. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act a consumer reporting agency must not reinsert disputed information it deleted unless it certifies the information is accurate and notifies you — a rule that exists precisely because errors in a consolidated industry tend to reappear.

Who does AT&T use for background checks, and every number and address First Advantage publishes

Most people meet First Advantage after a decision has already been made. An offer is withdrawn, an onboarding portal stalls, or an email arrives naming a company the applicant has never dealt with. The first question is rarely how to dispute anything. It is who this company is, why it has a file, and which employer sent it. This section is organized the way that question is actually asked.

Every employer relationship named below is one the employer or First Advantage itself has published. We do not repeat vendor relationships sourced from job boards, message boards or business-to-business data brokers, for the same reason we do not repeat unverified phone numbers.

Who does AT&T use for background checks?

First Advantage publishes a case study describing a digital identity partnership with AT&T, in which AT&T is named as the client. That is the screening company naming the employer in its own published material, which is a Tier 1 source by the standard used throughout this page.

What it does not tell you is scope. A published partnership between a large employer and a screening company does not establish that every role, every subsidiary and every hiring channel runs through that vendor. Large employers frequently use different vendors for different populations. The report you were shown names the agency that produced it, and that name governs.

Who screens applicants for Emory Healthcare?

First Advantage names Emory Healthcare in its published customer material. Healthcare screening is a distinct category because it typically layers license verification, sanctions and exclusion list checks and drug testing on top of a criminal record search, which means a healthcare applicant's file can be larger and can fail for reasons that have nothing to do with a criminal record.

If a healthcare offer was withdrawn, it is worth establishing which component of the report caused it before assuming the criminal section did. An exclusion list hit against a similar name is a recurring accuracy problem in this sector, and it is a Fair Credit Reporting Act problem when the match is not actually you.

The rideshare question, and why Uber appears on two companies' customer lists

This comes up constantly, so it is worth stating carefully rather than conveniently.

Uber's own driver help material states that its background checks are performed by Checkr, which it describes as its third-party background check provider. Separately, First Advantage names Uber in its own published customer testimonial material, and publishes rideshare-sector material of its own. Both statements are published by the companies themselves and they are not necessarily in conflict — a platform operating in many countries, hiring for more than one kind of role, can use more than one screening vendor over time.

Nothing on this page asserts that either company is Uber's exclusive screener, and nobody should decide who to dispute with on the basis of a marketing page. If you need to know which company produced your report, the report and the adverse action notice settle it.

Which other employers does First Advantage name?

First Advantage's published customer testimonial and case study material identifies, among others:

• Healthcare and staffing: Emory Healthcare, AMN Healthcare, AdventHealth, Quest Diagnostics.
• Business services and outsourcing: Conduent, Compass Group, Pyramid Consulting.
• Telecommunications and infrastructure: AT&T, MasTec.

Read that list for what it is. It is the set of relationships First Advantage chose to publicise, not a roster. An employer's absence from it means nothing at all, and several of the largest users of screening services never appear on any vendor's marketing page.

What the Sterling acquisition means for who holds your file

First Advantage completed its acquisition of Sterling Check Corp. on 31 October 2024, in a transaction the companies valued at approximately $2.2 billion. The consequence for an individual applicant is practical rather than abstract: a report ordered through Sterling and a report ordered through First Advantage may now be held by the same corporate group, and the entity named on your paperwork may not be the entity you would have expected.

The United States entities that came across in that transaction, and which can appear on screening paperwork, include:

• Sterling Infosystems, Inc.
• Bishops Services LLC
• STS SID LLC
• A-Check America, LLC
• Employment Background Investigations, LLC

Any of those names can appear on a disclosure form, an authorization form or an adverse action notice. Seeing an unfamiliar one is not by itself an error. Sending a dispute to the wrong one, however, wastes the clock, and the clock matters under the statute.

Every number and address First Advantage publishes

• Consumer and candidate telephone number: 800-845-6004, also written 1-800-845-6004, (800) 845-6004 or 8008456004. This is the number First Advantage publishes for candidates and consumers, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau lists it for First Advantage in its published list of consumer reporting companies.
• Consumer center mailing address: First Advantage, P.O. Box 105292, Atlanta, GA 30348-5292.
• Corporate address: First Advantage, 1 Concourse Parkway NE, Suite 200, Atlanta, GA 30328.
• Operations address published for consumer document submission: 11800 Exit Five Parkway, Suite 120, Fishers, IN 46037.
• Email for consumer documents: consumer.documents@fadv.com.
• Email published for United States privacy requests: USDataPrivacy@fadv.com.
• Regional privacy addresses: privacy.napac@fadv.com for North America, privacy.sapac@fadv.com for South Asia and the Pacific, and gdpr@fadv.com for European data protection requests.
• Candidate help center: help.fadv.com, which carries a live chat route and the free report request path at fadv.com/candidates.

One number needs a warning attached rather than a listing. 844-718-0087 is published by First Advantage as a sales and business inquiry line for employers evaluating its services. It is not a consumer line, it is not a dispute line, and an applicant who calls it will reach people whose job is selling screening services to companies. Use 800-845-6004.

An email address First Advantage does not publish

A meaningful number of people search for dispute.docs@fadv.com. We checked, and that address does not appear on First Advantage's candidate pages or on its consumer dispute page. The address the company actually publishes for sending documents in support of a dispute is consumer.documents@fadv.com.

We are flagging this rather than repeating it, and the reasoning is the same discipline applied to phone numbers throughout this site. Search volume on an identifier is evidence that people have encountered it somewhere — on an old form, in correspondence, in a forum post, or in a message that was not from the company at all. It is not evidence that the company stands behind it today. If you have already sent documents to an address that is not published, do not assume they arrived somewhere useful. Send them again to the published route and keep proof.

The words on a First Advantage report, and what they do not mean

Applicants frequently search for the vocabulary that appears on the report itself — a status reading as judged or as disabled, a section headed with a national criminal file search, or a motor vehicle record section. These are worth understanding correctly, and the correct understanding is more modest than most web pages claim.

Adjudication labels are applied on behalf of the employer under the employer's own hiring criteria. They record how the employer's rules treated the information. They are not a legal determination, they are not a court disposition, and they do not establish that the underlying record is accurate. A report can be adjudicated adversely on the strength of an entry that is wrong, stale, sealed or somebody else's.

So the authoritative reading of any status on your report is the definition printed in the report itself and the explanation in the adverse action notice — not a definition on any website, including this one. If the report's own key does not explain a status, ask the agency in writing for the explanation, and keep the request.

Screening contracts change, so treat any list like this as dated

Everything above reflects material published by First Advantage or by the employer as of the date this page was updated. Screening contracts are re-bid, companies switch vendors, and a relationship that was real last year may not be real now. A published customer list is also marketing, which means it shows who a company wants to be associated with rather than a complete or current roster.

So this list will tell you who plausibly ran your report. It will not tell you who did. For that there is a document.

How to tell which company actually screened you

This is the part almost nobody explains, and it is the one that matters most.

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, an employer that takes adverse action against you — withdrawing an offer, ending an engagement, deactivating an account — based in whole or in part on a consumer report must give you notice, and that notice must identify the consumer reporting agency that supplied the report. The employer must also give you the agency's contact details and tell you that the agency did not make the decision.

That notice is the authoritative answer to who screened you. It outranks this page, the vendor's marketing, and anything anyone posts in a forum. Before the adverse action becomes final you are also entitled to a copy of the report itself and a summary of your rights, which is what the pre-adverse action notice is for.

• Read the notice, not the rumour. The agency named in it is the agency that holds your file.
• Ask for the report if you were not sent one. A pre-adverse action notice that arrives without the report is itself a problem.
• Check which entity is named. After the Sterling acquisition the notice may name Sterling Infosystems, A-Check America or Employment Background Investigations rather than First Advantage.
• Request your file directly from the agency. You are entitled to a copy of the file a consumer reporting agency holds on you.

Numbers and addresses that are not on this list

Screening companies and the employers that use them send notices from automated systems, and a legitimate message about a First Advantage report can arrive from a number or an email domain that appears nowhere in the company's published material. An unlisted number is not proof of a scam, and a number that matches this list is not proof the sender is genuine — caller ID and email display names are both trivially spoofed.

Numbers and email addresses circulating on directory sites, old forms and complaint forums as First Advantage dispute routes are not listed here, and dispute.docs@fadv.com is named above precisely because it is one of them. Where an identifier is published nowhere official we do not assert it, because search volume on an identifier is evidence that people are encountering it — not evidence that it belongs to the company those people name. The same discipline applies to employer relationships: business-to-business databases that infer a company's vendors from website tracking are not sources, and no name on this page came from one.

There is a different problem worth separating out. If a First Advantage report shows a criminal record, an employment history or an address that is not yours, the question is not which employer ordered it — it is that your file may be mixed with someone else's, or that someone used your identifying information. A consumer report may be obtained only for a permissible purpose, and a report pulled on you by a company you never applied to is itself a problem under the statute, separate from whatever the report says.

To check what you are actually looking at:

• Find the adverse action or pre-adverse action notice and read which consumer reporting agency it names, including which First Advantage or Sterling entity.
• Request your file from that agency directly, in writing, and keep the request.
• Compare every name, date of birth, address and Social Security number fragment on the report against your own records. Mixed files usually announce themselves in the identifiers, not in the offenses.
• Check whether the record has been expunged, sealed, dismissed or reported past the period the statute allows.
• Dispute in writing with the agency named on the notice, send supporting documents only to the published route, and keep the letters, the responses and the envelopes. The paper trail is what establishes what the agency knew and when.

A background report that costs you a job because it describes someone else, or because it reports a record the law does not permit it to report, is a Fair Credit Reporting Act problem, and the statute provides rights against both the screening company and the employer that acted on it.

Screened by a different company? We also handle HireRight background check errors, Sterling background check errors, Checkr background check errors, and Accurate Background check errors — and you can start with our overview of the major background check companies.

Frequently asked questions

How do I get a copy of my First Advantage report?

Ask the employer for the copy it is required to give you before it acts on the report, or request your file directly from the First Advantage Consumer Center by phone at (800) 845-6004 or through fadv.com. The company provides one complimentary file disclosure each year and states that it sends the report within fifteen days of a verified request.

How long does a First Advantage dispute take?

The FCRA generally allows a consumer reporting agency thirty days to reinvestigate, extended to forty-five if you send additional documents partway through. Ask the employer in writing to hold its decision while the reinvestigation runs, because a correction that arrives after the offer is withdrawn does not get the job back.

Can I sue First Advantage over a background check error?

In the right circumstances, yes. If First Advantage reported inaccurate information without reasonable procedures, refused to correct it after you disputed, or skipped the pre-adverse-action notice, and that cost you something, you may have a claim. A federal appeals court has already affirmed a seven-figure judgment against the company on facts like these.

What if the report already cost me the job?

That is the clearest kind of FCRA harm. Save the offer letter, the report itself, the pre-adverse-action and adverse-action notices, and every email with the employer and with First Advantage, then contact us. Lost wages, lost benefits and the reputational hit are all things the statute is written to compensate.

Is the case review really free?

Yes. We review First Advantage matters for people anywhere in the country at no charge, and if we take the case you owe nothing unless we recover for you.

Who screens applicants for Emory Healthcare?

First Advantage names Emory Healthcare in its published customer material. Healthcare screening usually layers license verification, sanctions and exclusion list checks and drug testing on top of a criminal record search, so a healthcare offer can be withdrawn for reasons unrelated to a criminal record. An exclusion list hit against a similar name is a recurring accuracy problem in this sector, and it is a Fair Credit Reporting Act problem when the match is not actually you.

Which employers does First Advantage name as customers?

First Advantage's published customer testimonial and case study material identifies Emory Healthcare, AMN Healthcare, AdventHealth, Quest Diagnostics, Conduent, Compass Group, Pyramid Consulting and MasTec, among others, along with a published digital identity partnership with a major telecommunications employer. That is the set of relationships First Advantage chose to publicise, not a roster, and an employer's absence from it means nothing.

What is the First Advantage phone number for candidates?

800-845-6004, also written 1-800-845-6004, (800) 845-6004 or 8008456004. This is the number First Advantage publishes for candidates and consumers, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau lists it for First Advantage in its published list of consumer reporting companies. The separate number 844-718-0087 is a sales line for employers evaluating screening services, not a consumer line.

What address does First Advantage use for consumer disputes?

First Advantage, P.O. Box 105292, Atlanta, GA 30348-5292 is the consumer center mailing address. The corporate address is 1 Concourse Parkway NE, Suite 200, Atlanta, GA 30328, and consumer document submission is also published at 11800 Exit Five Parkway, Suite 120, Fishers, IN 46037. Documents in support of a dispute go to consumer.documents@fadv.com.

Is dispute.docs@fadv.com a real First Advantage email address?

It does not appear on First Advantage's candidate pages or on its consumer dispute page. The address the company publishes for sending documents in support of a dispute is consumer.documents@fadv.com. Search volume on an identifier is evidence that people have encountered it somewhere, not evidence that the company stands behind it today. If you have already sent documents to an unpublished address, send them again to the published route and keep proof.

What does First Advantage buying Sterling mean for my background check?

First Advantage completed its acquisition of Sterling Check Corp. on 31 October 2024, in a transaction the companies valued at approximately 2.2 billion dollars. A report ordered through Sterling and one ordered through First Advantage may now be held by the same corporate group. United States entities that can appear on paperwork include Sterling Infosystems, Inc., Bishops Services LLC, STS SID LLC, A-Check America, LLC and Employment Background Investigations, LLC.

What does a status on a First Advantage report actually mean?

Adjudication labels are applied on behalf of the employer under the employer's own hiring criteria. They record how the employer's rules treated the information. They are not a legal determination, they are not a court disposition, and they do not establish that the underlying record is accurate. The authoritative reading of any status is the definition printed in the report itself and the explanation in the adverse action notice.

How do I find out which company ran my background check?

Read the adverse action notice. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, an employer that takes adverse action based in whole or in part on a consumer report must give you notice identifying the consumer reporting agency that supplied the report. After the Sterling acquisition, that notice may name Sterling Infosystems, A-Check America or Employment Background Investigations rather than First Advantage, and the entity named governs where a dispute goes.

Where we practice, and what to do if you are somewhere else

The Kim Law Firm is licensed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and that is where we handle matters directly.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act is a federal statute. It applies the same way in every state, it is enforced in federal court, and the deadlines and remedies do not change when you cross a state line. So the answer to "does this apply to me in Ohio" is yes — but the answer to "can you represent me in Ohio" depends on the case and on where it would be filed.

If you are outside Pennsylvania and New Jersey, contact us anyway. Some matters can be handled from here. Some are better sent to a consumer lawyer admitted where you are, and we will tell you that plainly rather than let a deadline run while you wait. Either way you will get an answer, and the review costs nothing.

The one thing that does not wait is the clock. A claim under the Act generally must be brought within two years of the date you discover the violation, and in no event more than five years after the violation occurred. Finding out late does not extend the outside limit.