How Free Reverse Phone Lookup Works

When people used telephone books to contact their friends and neighbors, the listings appeared in alphabetical order and you’d simply look someone up by using their last name.

Now that most everyone has the internet at their fingertips, reverse phone number searches are now available if you are trying to determine who owns a specific number.

If you’re a clever person, you can use a reverse telephone lookup service to your advantage. Let’s take a closer look at the ways reverse telephone searches can benefit you.

Free Reverse Phone Lookup Services Are Helpful

How many times have you seen a number appear in your missed call list that seemed unfamiliar or unexpected? Using the internet, you can perform a reverse phone lookup to determine who called you.

Reverse phone number searching is starting to gain a tremendous amount of interest. In fact, it has become one of the easiest ways to verify a person’s identity.

With so many people being called by scam artists, the ability to perform a reverse phone number lookup on all of your inbound calls becomes an extremely important tool in today’s society. Here are some of the best uses of reverse phone number lookup services.

Reasons to Perform a Reverse Telephone Lookup

When your telephone starts getting random phone calls from random phone numbers, either someone needs to get in contact with you over a legitimate matter or you could potentially be the victim of phone spam. How can you rapid determine without immediately returning the phone call?

Knowing if a number is associated with a spam campaign can be a critical tool when deciding whether or not you should answer or return a phone call. Other reasons you may want to use a reverse phone lookup service include:

• Discovering Contacts – Did you write down a number but forget to save it in your mobile device? Being able to reverse lookup the owner the number can remind you who it is without having to call or text them and embarrassingly ask, “Who is this?”
• Confirming Identities – Perhaps you’ve started seeing a new physician and they’re calling you from a line that isn’t their main telephone line? With reverse search, you can confirm who is listed as the owner of the line. This allows you to determine if you are being contacted in regards to a legitimate matter.
• Screening Sales Calls – Unfortunately, once your number gets on a sales list, it doesn’t matter how many times you request to be on the “Do not call” list. They never seem to respect your privacy and they still seem to call your number. If you routinely get sales calls on your telephone, screening out those who are trying to sell you things can help you be more productive and focused on your day.
• Phone Records – If you are an investigator and you need to tie a name to a number found on a phone record; a reverse telephone search would be your best option.

How to Perform a Reverse Telephone Search

The fastest and easiest way to find out who owns a number is to go to Google and type in the phone number with the area code and hyphens included. If the number is associated with a business, it will likely bring up the business as the first search engine result.

If the number is an established landline that is owned by the same person for quite some time, it’s possible that Google will find the whitepages.com listing for this phone number and provide you with the person’s name, street address, city, state, and zip.

If Google is having trouble determining additional information about the number you are researching, it is possible that the number is a mobile line. Given the fact that mobile numbers are portable and reused often, many mobile phone records are either dated, inaccurate or missing information.

Free reverse phone lookup services exist. These websites include:

• Whitepages.com
• Pipl.com
• AnyWho.com
• PeopleLookup
• ZabaSearch

Many of these websites are free but others may have a paid component to them. One of the most popular paid reverse phone search websites is Intelius.

Using a Paid Reverse Lookup Search

If you’ve hit a dead end when reverse searching a phone number, a paid service like Intellius might be your best option.

Why? Private investigators often tout Intelius as one of the leading public information vendors online. Over 10 years ago, Intellius debuted a Caller ID lookup service for mobile devices.

The database contained over 90 million mobile devices but Intellius quickly shuttered the service after an uproar from privacy advocates. That being said, Intellius continues to be one of the best resources for services for finding people using only their phone number.

Intelius offers various packages that cost as little as a few dollars for one time searches while other packages cost around $20 per month.

If you are looking to perform a reverse phone lookup, these free and paid services are usually your best bet.