🔍 Public Person Finder

Research any public figure instantly. Enter a name, and Public Person Finder automatically searches Wikipedia, news archives, social media, government registries, and sanctions databases - then compiles everything into a single, fully cited intelligence report.

No manual source-hopping. No copy-pasting. One Actor, eight data sources, one clean result.

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🧠 What it does

You give it a name. Optionally, you tell it what angle matters most - "business interests", "recent legal issues", "political career". Then it searches across eight sources at once and writes a structured report where every fact links back to its source.

The report includes:

• 🧬 Biography and identity - who the person is, birth details, known aliases, Wikidata cross-reference
• 📱 Social media presence - profiles found across 13 platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, GitHub, Discord, and more)
• 🚨 Sanctions and PEP screening - automated check against the OpenSanctions database, covering politically exposed persons (PEPs) and global watchlists
• 📰 News coverage - recent mentions scanned from BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, AP, Le Monde, and Al Jazeera
• 🌐 Web intelligence - Google search results and scraped content from top web pages
• 🏢 Business registry data (optional) - UK Companies House directorships and SEC EDGAR filings for US-registered companies

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📡 Data sources covered

Source	What it finds	Included by default
Wikipedia	Biography, identity facts, Wikidata ID	✅ Yes
OpenSanctions	Sanctions lists, PEP status, watchlists	✅ Yes
Social Media Finder	Profiles on 13 social platforms	✅ Yes
Google Search	Top search results and "People also ask"	✅ Yes
RAG Web Browser	Full page content from top websites	✅ Yes
News RSS	Articles from 6 major international news outlets	✅ Yes
UK Companies House	UK company directorships	⚙️ Opt-in
SEC EDGAR	US SEC filings mentioning the person	⚙️ Opt-in

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💼 Use cases

🗞️ Journalism and background research - quickly build a source-cited dossier on a person you are writing about, with links to every claim.

🔎 Due diligence and compliance - screen business partners, executives, or investors against sanctions lists and open registries before signing.

👥 HR and hiring - verify a candidate's public professional presence and check for red flags in news or watchlists.

📊 Business intelligence - understand who you are dealing with before a negotiation, investment, or partnership.

⚖️ Legal research - gather publicly available information on a person of interest with full source provenance.

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🚀 How to use it

1. Open the Actor in Apify Console and click Try for free.
2. Enter the person's name (real name, pseudonym, or social handle).
3. Optionally add a research focus - for example "financial background" or "political activities" - to steer which sources the Actor prioritizes.
4. Paste your Anthropic API key (required - the Actor uses Claude to plan queries and write the report).
5. Click Start and wait around 2 minutes. Your report will appear in the dataset.

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📦 What you get

Each run produces one result with two views of the same information:

📝 Report - a long-form intelligence brief (typically 800-1,500 words) written in plain English, organized into sections, with every claim followed by an inline citation like [wikipedia-1].

💬 Summary - a 3-5 sentence executive summary hitting the most important findings, also cited.

🗂️ Structured data - machine-readable arrays for identity details, social profiles, professional records, sanctions hits, news articles, and web results. Useful if you want to process the output programmatically.

🔗 Citations - a full list of every source used, with URLs and retrieval timestamps, so you can verify any finding independently.

Example output structure

{
  "summary": "...",
  "report": "...",
  "identity": [{ "fullName": "...", "born": "...", "nationality": "..." }],
  "social": [{ "platform": "linkedin", "url": "..." }],
  "sanctions": { "hits": [], "cleared": true },
  "news": [{ "title": "...", "url": "...", "published": "..." }],
  "citations": [{ "id": "wikipedia-1", "url": "...", "source": "Wikipedia" }]
}

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⚙️ Input options

Field	Required	Description
Person name	✅ Yes	The name to research. Real name, pseudonym, or social handle.
Research focus	No	Free-text guidance on what angle to prioritize (e.g. "business ventures", "legal cases").
Anthropic API key	✅ Yes	Your Anthropic API key - used to plan the research and write the final report.
AI model	No	Claude model to use. Defaults to claude-sonnet-4-6. Only change if you have a specific reason.
Enabled data sources	No	Choose which sources to run. Leave empty to use all defaults.
Proxy configuration	No	Defaults to Apify Proxy. Change only if you have specific routing requirements.

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💰 Cost and requirements

🤖 Anthropic API key - you need your own key from console.anthropic.com. The Actor makes two API calls per run (one to plan the research, one to write the report). At default settings using Claude Sonnet, a typical run costs a few cents in Anthropic API usage.

🖥️ Apify compute - standard Actor usage applies. Most runs finish in around 2 minutes.

📦 Apify sub-Actors - Google Search Scraper, Social Media Finder, and RAG Web Browser are Apify Actors that run under your account and will be billed separately based on their own pricing.

🆓 Free sources - Wikipedia, OpenSanctions, RSS news feeds, UK Companies House, and SEC EDGAR are all free with no usage limits.

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⚠️ Limitations

• Public figures only - the Actor searches public sources. It will not find information that is not publicly available online.
• English-language sources dominant - Wikipedia, RSS news feeds, and Google Search return primarily English results. Coverage of figures prominent only in non-English sources may be limited.
• No real-time data - news articles depend on RSS feed freshness (typically updated every few hours). For breaking news, results may lag.
• Name disambiguation - common names may surface results for multiple people. Use the research focus field to narrow the scope (e.g. "Elon Musk technology entrepreneur").
• Not a legal background check - this Actor aggregates publicly available information only. It is not a substitute for a formal background check service.

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🔗 Related Actors

• Social Media Finder - standalone social profile lookup used by this Actor
• Google Search Scraper - full Google SERP scraper
• RAG Web Browser - reads web pages as clean markdown for AI use