Step 1 — Write down what has actually been claimed
Before checking anything, separate what has been stated as fact from what has been implied. Families routinely discover at this stage that several things they believed were never actually said — an income figure that was inferred from a lifestyle, a property assumed to be owned because it was lived in.
List the specific claims: employer, designation, income, qualification, property, family occupations, marital history. You are going to verify this list, so it needs to be a list.
Step 2 — Do the free checks
Company registration on the MCA portal if a business is claimed. Professional council registers for regulated professions. eCourts for litigation. A careful look at professional networking presence for consistency with the stated tenure and designation.
Then compare accounts. Ask the same factual question of two different people in the family at different times. Small inconsistencies in dates and places are the most reliable early signal available to you, and they cost nothing to detect.
Step 3 — Decide what genuinely needs professional verification
Escalate where the claim is material to your decision and cannot be established at source by you. In practice that is usually employment and designation, prior marriage, and property — because these require contact with employers, records offices and the locality, which you cannot do without revealing who is asking.
That last point is the real reason to use an investigator rather than a relative. A family member making enquiries in the subject's locality is identified immediately, and the social consequence of that is usually worse than the uncertainty you started with.
Step 4 — Commission a focused check, not a broad one
Give the investigator the specific list from step one. A check scoped to three material claims is faster, cheaper and more conclusive than a general enquiry. Ask for the written scope and confirm the method for each claim — verification at source or document review, because these are very different things.
Set the contact protocol at this point too: how you may be contacted and when, particularly if the proposal is being discussed within a joint household.
Step 5 — Read the findings properly
A good report distinguishes four states, and the distinction matters: verified at source, corroborated but not independently confirmed, contradicted, and not obtainable. "Not obtainable" is not a failure — some records genuinely cannot be accessed properly, and a report that says so is more trustworthy than one that quietly fills the gap.
Be careful with inference. A finding that someone was observed meeting a particular person several times establishes exactly that and nothing more. A report that presents inference as conclusion is doing you a disservice, however much it seems to confirm what you suspected.
Step 6 — Decide what the finding actually changes
Most findings are partial. A salary overstated by forty per cent is a different matter from a concealed prior marriage, and both are different from a family's reputation being mixed in their locality.
The useful question is not "is this bad" but "would I have proceeded differently had I known this at the start". If the answer is no, proceed with better information. If it is yes, you have the thing the exercise was for.
Talk it through before you commit to anything
If this guide leaves you unsure whether your situation needs an investigator, the quickest way to find out is a short call. It is free, and you will get a direct answer — including when the answer is that nothing should be commissioned.