Singles Check Potential Mate to Avoid Becoming a Pawn : Relationships: More O.C. women, and some men, are investigating backgrounds to make sure a match is not just a game.

In 1992, Anna--a divorced Orange County management consultant--started a serious relationship with a high-powered executive she’d met five years earlier at the Balboa Bay Club. Nine months later, she found out he was married to a Los Angeles woman.

He presented himself as a successful, single businessman who traveled a lot, recalls Anna, who last year told her story on CNN’s “Sonya Live” talk show. “He stayed at my home, took me on trips, and his secretaries knew me. I was furious when I finally found out he was married.”

It’s love-is-blind experiences like this that are prompting more and more women--and some men--to check out their dates, often before investing any time or emotion in a potential romance. They may hire professional investigators or conduct do-it-yourself gumshoe projects using sleuthing guides such as books or videotapes to learn how to legally access a myriad of public records.

“Knowledge is power,” says Anna over a pancake breakfast at a Newport Beach eatery. “If I’d known then the information resources available to me as a financially struggling single parent, I could have saved myself a lot of time.”

Anna, who asked that her real name not be used in this story, says she’d suspected her paramour might be married but every time she voiced those fears, both he and her friends told her she was “just paranoid.” Still, about three months into the relationship, she asked her attorney to run a check on the man’s property to see if there was a wife listed.

“That cost me about $22, and it came up clean,” recalls Anna. “So I just figured that yes, I was being paranoid.”

The ax fell, Anna says, when one weekend she was unable to reach the man on the cellular phone that he carried in his briefcase. She pulled out the property check report to get an address and dialed information.

“I just did it out of frustration,” she says. “I never dreamed I would get a listing, but the operator gave me one for a husband and wife.”

She called the wife, introduced herself and said: “(Not knowing he was married), I have been sleeping with your husband for the past nine months.” After a long conversation with the wife (learning among other things that the woman’s husband had even brought her lemons from Anna’s back yard), Anna called the man and confronted him. He hung up on her. They never spoke again.

“I felt betrayed, but at least I knew my intuitions had been correct,” says Anna, adding that in the future she will hire professionals to investigate any man she’s serious about. She sighs. “I’m an intelligent person,” she says. “I own my own company. I did my homework the best I knew how. It can happen to anyone.”

*

Pat Rutherford sits in his cramped San Clemente office, the wall behind him slathered with photographs of people he’s found. Much of his business, called Worldwide Tracers, is tracking the missing, but an increasing number of cases--about 20 a month--involve surreptitious background checks for love.

“It’s very common now to check out your man,” says Rutherford, 66. “Unfortunately, too many people think about it too late. They’re in so far and then it’s ‘Oh, my God!’ ”

Rutherford says 90% of his clients are women, because it’s usually women who are conned.

“They lead with their hearts and want to believe even though they sense something isn’t quite right,” he says. “Ladies have a sixth sense about these things, but some of the mistakes they make make you want to cry. I do a lot of counseling to hurting women.”

Rutherford’s first such case about four years ago involved a woman who was leery of her boyfriend.

“She called him Mr. Wonderful,” recalls Rutherford. “He swept her off her feet and did everything for her except for one thing: He wouldn’t give her his address or phone number. I checked him out and guess what? Mr. Wonderful had a family. Mr. Wonderful was not so wonderful at home.”

Rutherford, who employs seven investigators--most of whom are female--says any detective will say he or she can do date checks, but not all do a good job, and many charge a lot of money.

Says Rutherford: “Most of our clients are not rich people. So if you say ‘$50 an hour and I need up front six or seven hours pay,’ God, a person can spend a fortune.”

Worldwide Tracers charges a flat date check fee of $200. That price includes computer checks for criminal convictions; property ownership; bankruptcies; county, state and federal tax liens; small civil claims; judgments; notices of defaults; drunk driving convictions; date of birth and name verification; a listing of family members at same address; marriages and divorces, and employment.

The basic check also includes a “sting,” whereby investigators pretend to be someone else to gain information from neighbors, employers, ex-wives or the investigated parties themselves.

“Anyone can run a computer check,” Rutherford says. “But you gotta be in the right databanks and even so, that often that doesn’t tell you enough. That’s where the sting comes in. You’d be amazed at what we can find out through stings.”

The stings are also fun for the investigator, he adds.

“We’re licensed to lie,” says Rutherford with a laugh, adding that the only people investigators can’t claim to be are police, state or government officials. “That’s the fun part. It’s like being a 7-year-old playing games.”

After the basic check, some clients--about 20%--elect to have the parties followed, but Rutherford, who charges $35 per hour for surveillance, says he tries to discourage that.

“I say ‘look, you already found out he’s a jerk, why put any more money into it?’ Like in (Alcoholics Anonymous), you just gotta get rid of what’s killing you.”

*

Tom Lawson stands by the window in his Newport Beach office. The founder of Apscreen, a consumer reporting agency that since 1980 has performed hundreds of thousands of background checks for businesses, says his firm about four years ago officially expanded into the personal realm and now does about 300 “sweetheart checks” annually.

“We’re not a cloak-and-dagger private investigations firm,” Lawson says. “We don’t chase cheating (men), and we don’t carry guns. We’re a research company whose ethics come from a different plane.”

Lawson says Southern California is the “fraud capital of the world,” and sweetheart checks are the “hot new thing.”

“More and more people are going into this, but they’re less and less qualified,” Lawson says. “With a computer, you can access what appears to be a world of information, but database information is at best a spot-check tool, not a definitive search. People can be sold a bill of goods.”

Individual sweetheart services, such as a criminal or a property ownership check, cost from $12.50 to $50. But most people take the package deal for $300, which includes criminal and litigation histories (including divorces); asset discoveries; liabilities such as tax liens, judgments, evictions, defaults and foreclosures; business involvements and financial encumbrances; license, address, Social Security number and name verification; a media check, and marriages.

Lawson says the best sweetheart check is done with the consent of the person being investigated. (About 20% of his clients do obtain written consent.) He cautions against unscrupulous detectives whom he says sometimes do illegal things that violate a person’s legal privacy.

“Philosophically, you need to go into a relationship with your eyes open and with enough self-confidence to tell the person you want to know more about them,” Lawson says. “If they do have something to hide, they could respond adversely, which tells you something right there. Then again they could respond without concern, not thinking you can find what they’re hiding.”

Without consent, Lawson says, certain records--such as insurance files and credit reports--cannot be legally obtained.

“Beware of people who tell you you can get anything without consent,” Lawson says. “The industry is plagued by that.”

One of Lawson’s clients is Sharon, 30, who also asked that her real name not be used. Speaking by telephone, the stock analyst says she last year attended a white-collar crime seminar that included a discussion of all the ways anyone can gain information from public records. Her interest was particularly piqued, she says, because for six months she’d been dating a man she wasn’t sure had been truthful with her.

“He professed to be doing so well in the business world, but he never took me to his office or introduced me to his employees,” she recalls. “I thought that was awfully odd. And things just didn’t make sense in general: I just couldn’t get all the pieces of the puzzle.”

Her fear, Sharon says, was that her man may have been doing something illegal. She also worried that he might not be who he said he was or that perhaps there was a history of abuse. Not wanting to take the time to stand in line to obtain public records herself and not wanting to sign her name on any requests to obtain those records, she hired Apscreen to investigate for her.

The result: The man had told her some minor business fabrications, but there was no adverse information in his divorce, property or criminal files. Still, six months later she broke up with him.

“These checks can give you a feel for if there’s something drastically wrong, but they’re not a catch-all insight into personality traits,” she says. “I still felt like there was something really wrong, and in the end you still have to go with your gut.”

In this case, her gut was correct. After she left him, the man threatened her. She took him to court and won a restraining order.

“The next time some woman checks him out,” Sharon says, “there will be something there to find.”