Why we built CheatTracer

CheatTracer didn't start as a search tool. We started in 2022 as a cybersecurity and investigation firm, taking on cases that called for real digging — the kind of work where someone needed a complete, ground-up investigation into a person, a business, or a threat. That background is still the foundation everything we build stands on: the same methodology, the same standards for what counts as a verified finding, the same refusal to guess when we don't know.

But the more cases we worked, the clearer a pattern got: most people who came to us didn't actually need a full investigation. They needed something much smaller and much more human — a straight answer about a phone number, an email address, a name that kept coming up. They weren't trying to build a case; they were trying to stop lying awake wondering. Treating every one of those situations like a full-scale investigation was overkill, and it priced out and slowed down the people who needed an answer the most. We started asking what it would look like to bring that same rigor to something faster, more affordable, and built around one simple goal: peace of mind about the people and conversations in your life.

CheatTracer is where that thinking has landed — not a detour from our investigative work, but the next step in it. We've carried the same standards through hundreds of cases since 2022, and the track record is public: you can see it on our Thumbtack profile, our Bark.com profile, and the other places clients have reviewed our work directly. That history is what a CheatTracer report is actually built on — not a black box, but the accumulated experience of a team that has done this work by hand, over and over, and finally built a way to share it faster.