Public records are another way to track down information about someone. Scammers make use of census, voting, property, and criminal records to find information about their target. These kinds of records are made public by the United States government, meaning scammers can obtain details about you without breaking any laws. Furthermore, there are many large data broker companies that search these public records and compile databases of personal information about people. For a small fee, it is possible to find details like the address, phone number, age, occupation, and family members of many people within the United States. Once again, this is a perfectly legal way of acquiring information and is very useful to the scammer.
While it may seem like there is nothing you can do to prevent this, there are in fact some measures you can take to restrict how accessible your public records are. You can send opt-out requests to most of the largest data brokers, demanding that they remove your records from their databases. Some online services may offer to do this for you, but it is recommended that you do this process yourself. While it takes more time to send individual requests to all these different companies, it is more trustworthy to do this yourself than to rely on yet another company to do it for you. A non-exhaustive list of major data brokers can be found ; this is a great place to start.