Intelius, Infospace, and Naveen Jain

When serial entrepreneur Naveen Jain left the company he founded, InfoSpace (INSP), in disgrace in late 2002, a lot of people thought he would never be trusted by the financial markets again (see this three part series from the Seattle Times that talks extensively about the rise and fall of Jain at Infospace and details his violations of insider trading laws). At its height Infospace was worth $31 billion. Today it’s worth less than 1% of that.

But memories are short, it seems. After leaving InfoSpace Jain started a new company, Intelius, across the street from his old offices in Bellevue, Washington. The company sells background information on people - they describe themselves as an “information commerce company.” They’ve grown rapidly and now claim that over four million people have purchased products from them. Revenue has grown from $18.1 million in 2004 to $88.5 million in 2007. In their most recent fiscal quarter, ending March 31, 2008 the company had $31.8 million in revenue, a nearly $130 million run rate. They are also very profitable, with $22.5 million in EBITDA in 2007.

It’s no surprise that the company’s revenue growth and profitability have led them to pursue an IPO [INTL]. Well known investment banks Deutsche Bank (DB) and UBS (UBS) are underwriting the deal, which was first filed with the SEC on January 10. The most recent version of their registration statement, filed on May 19, is here.

Given Jain’s history, you’d think he’d go out of his way to be squeaky clean at his most recent startup, particularly as the company is going public and under significant scrutiny. But that may not be the case.

Original post

Comments

[Outraged]

Intelius Revealed as a scam

It turns out that the facts are in and there is no question that Intelius is a scam. What they do is outright theft from consumers. For all of the details, see the excellent blog at: www.techcrunch.com/200.../

Many people on blogs and comments have said they felt that these guys at Intelius deserve to be in jail. Read the TechCrunch story and the various comments and decide for yourself. There are also numerous web site where consumers have complained about these guys.


Intelius claims to offer background checks and public information. It’s pretty clear that all they do is to scrape public data and repackage and sell. All by itself, that is a legitimate service, but for them that is just a vehicle for a scam. All consumers should be pleased that TechCrunch did a background check on them, and found what a fraud they were,

By the way, there are 100's of honest and ethical background check firm around that do a great job.