Mobile Fingerprinting Services in Massachusetts. We Come to You.

The Basics

What Is Mobile Fingerprinting?

Mobile fingerprinting reverses the traditional model. Instead of you driving to a police station or storefront, a certified technician drives to you. We bring the FD-258 cards, the ink pads, the portable Live Scan scanner and the experience to capture clean, classifiable prints in your conference room, living room or facility.

The prints themselves serve the same purposes as prints captured anywhere else. Employers use them for background checks. Licensing boards use them to screen attorneys, real estate agents, insurance producers and healthcare workers. The FBI uses them to produce your Identity History Summary, the official record required for immigration, foreign visas, adoptions and personal record reviews.

Mobile service matters most in three situations. First, groups: fingerprinting fifteen new hires one at a time wastes fifteen half-days of employee time, while one on-site visit finishes the whole roster in an afternoon. Second, mobility: hospital patients, seniors in care facilities and homebound clients deserve the same access to background checks as everyone else. Third, schedules: business owners and professionals who bill by the hour lose real money sitting in a government waiting room.

Our clients already know this model. We built our reputation on mobile notary service, traveling to homes, hospitals and closings across Massachusetts seven days a week. Fingerprinting extends the same promise to a new document. Often, both happen in a single visit. A new hire completes an I-9 verification and gets fingerprinted in the same twenty minutes. A power of attorney signing at a nursing home doubles as a fingerprint appointment for a caregiver background check.

Why Electronic Wins

How Live Scan Expedites Your Background Report

Here is the practical difference between the two capture methods, in plain terms.

A mailed ink card follows a slow road. You get printed, the card goes in an envelope, the postal service carries it, a clerk opens the mail, a technician scans the card into a digital system anyway, and only then does processing begin. Add days on the front end for mail transit and days on the back end for manual intake. If a print fails quality review, the rejection letter travels the same slow road back to you, and the clock restarts. Total elapsed time: often two to six weeks, sometimes longer.

Live Scan skips almost all of this. The scanner captures your prints digitally, our technician verifies quality on screen before you leave the chair, and the file transmits electronically to the receiving agency or FBI-approved channeler. Electronic FBI submissions frequently process within hours to a few business days. For a nurse waiting to start a job, a contractor waiting for clearance or a visa applicant facing a consulate deadline, the difference between six weeks and three days changes everything.

Speed also comes from quality. The scanner flags a smudged or partial print instantly, and we recapture on the spot. With ink cards, a defect surfaces weeks later in a rejection letter. This is why smudged prints remain the number-one cause of delayed background checks nationwide, and why our technicians treat print quality as the whole job. Since 2007, our standard has been simple: right the first time.

One honest caveat, because you deserve accurate expectations. Final turnaround belongs to the receiving agency, not to us. We control capture quality and transmission speed. Before you leave, we tell you the realistic timeline for your specific submission based on the agency and channel involved.

Better Together

One Mobile Visit: Notary and Fingerprinting Combined

Documents requiring a notary and processes requiring fingerprints travel together more often than people realize. Adoption dossiers pair notarized affidavits with FBI prints. New-hire packets pair I-9 verifications with background-check fingerprints. Licensing applications pair notarized forms with Live Scan submissions. Estate and guardianship matters pair power of attorney signings with caregiver screening.

Booking two separate providers for these means two appointments, two travel fees, two schedules to coordinate and two chances for something to slip. Booking us means one trained professional arrives with a notary seal and a fingerprint kit, and both tasks finish before the coffee gets cold.

For businesses, the math is direct. An HR manager onboarding five employees saves roughly a full workday by replacing five individual errands with one 90-minute on-site visit. For families handling an adoption or an elder-care transition, the savings are measured in stress rather than hours, and those matter more.

Simple By Design

How Mobile Fingerprinting Works

1. Book your appointment

   Reserve a time online at fingerprintboston.com/contact or call (978) 424-4629. Tell us whether you want a mobile visit or an office appointment, and how many people need prints. Booking takes under a minute.

2. Send us your instructions

   Text or email a photo of the paperwork from your requesting agency. We check the ORI number, OCA number, service code and format requirements before anyone travels anywhere. This five-minute review prevents the rejections costing other people weeks.

3. Get fingerprinted

   Our technician arrives at your location, or greets you at our Tewksbury office, and captures your prints on Live Scan or FD-258 cards. Ten to fifteen minutes per person. Bring a valid, unexpired government photo ID matching the name on your application.

4. Submitted and done

   Electronic submissions transmit the same day. Ink cards leave your hands completed, checked and ready to mail. For FBI-plus-apostille clients, we take the report straight into the authentication process with no action needed from you.

Find Us

Convenient Location Near Boston, Plus Mobile Coverage Everywhere Else

Our office sits at 1215 Main St, Suite 115, Tewksbury, MA 01876, minutes from both I-495 and I-93 and about 30 minutes north of downtown Boston. Free parking at the door, no meters, no garages, no circling the block. Office visits are by appointment only, Monday through Friday, 10 AM to 5 PM. Book online and skip any wait.

Mobile fingerprinting covers the ground our office cannot. We travel throughout Greater Boston, including Cambridge, Somerville, Quincy, Newton, Lowell, Lawrence and the Merrimack Valley, plus southern New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Hospitals, nursing homes, corporate offices, schools, law firms and private homes are all routine stops. If you booked a mobile notary with us before, the fingerprint visit works exactly the same way: pick a time, and a trained professional shows up prepared.

Not sure whether a mobile visit or an office trip makes more sense for your situation? Call (978) 424-4629 and a real person answers with a straight recommendation. For one person near Tewksbury, the office is usually cheaper. For groups or anyone far from I-495, mobile wins.

Learn From Others

Four Mistakes That Delay Fingerprint Submissions

Most fingerprinting delays trace back to a handful of preventable errors. We see the aftermath weekly: clients arriving at our office after a rejection letter, weeks behind on a job start or visa deadline. Here is what went wrong, and how our process prevents each one.

Mistake 1: Poor print quality

Smudged, partial or over-inked prints are the leading cause of rejected submissions nationwide. Do-it-yourself kits and rushed high-volume counters produce most of them. Print quality comes down to pressure, rolling technique and a technician who checks every finger before you leave. Our certified staff has rolled prints since 2007, and Live Scan adds a second safeguard by flagging weak captures on screen for instant redo.

Mistake 2: Wrong or missing routing numbers

Every fingerprint submission carries routing data: an ORI number identifying the receiving agency, sometimes an OCA number or a service code. Enter the wrong one, or leave the field blank, and your perfectly rolled prints arrive at the wrong desk or nowhere at all. We verify these numbers against your paperwork before capture, which is why we ask you to send a photo of your instructions when you book.

Mistake 3: Name and ID mismatches

The name on your application, your ID and your fingerprint card must match. Recently married applicants, clients with hyphenated names and anyone whose ID shows a middle initial their application omits run into this constantly. We compare all three at the appointment and fix discrepancies before submission, not after a rejection.

Mistake 4: Choosing the wrong format entirely

Some clients pay for Live Scan when their agency accepts only mailed cards. Others mail cards to agencies with electronic-only intake. Both errors mean paying twice. Your requesting agency’s instructions control the format, and reading those instructions is part of our service, at no extra charge. When the paperwork is ambiguous, we contact the agency and get a straight answer.

Want to go deeper on any of these topics? Our fingerprinting division publishes plain-English guides, including Live Scan vs. ink card compared, what to bring to your appointment and how to get an FBI background check step by step. Read them, or skip the homework and let us handle the details for you.