Despite the obvious truth, people are still marketing the mythical free cell phone reverse. It seems to have never occurred to the consumer that companies are not going to pay money to advertise a free service, cell phone lookup, or otherwise. Yet the scam continues.
We have gone over this many times, but in case you've just joined us, here is how the
free cell phone lookup scam works:
A company (usually one who does not provide a real cell phone number search service), places a plant article or a cost-per-click ad advertising a free cell phone search. The consumer who wants exactly that but can't find it anywhere (because it doesn't exist), eagerly clicks to ad, and is then transported to a nice, clean looking site with a search box wherein the cell phone number she needs to have reversed is to be entered. At last, she has found what she needs.
Perhaps she is trying to catch her cheating husband once and for all. Maybe she has been getting harassing calls and needs to identify the source. Whatever the reason, she needs to identify a cell phone number, and finally, someone is offering that service for free!
First of all, the ability to lookup a cell phone number and obtain the owner's name and address from a search box on a website means there is a database of hundreds of millions of cell phone numbers somewhere-from every cell phone carrier. Yes, people actually believe that the cellular phone companies are going to give each other their customer's names and addresses. Hint: no such database exists, and never has. There are some databases, like those that possess information gathered information from the credit bureaus, that might contain some cell phone numbers, normally because some person has listed their cell phone number on a credit application at some point. But this hardly qualifies as a cell phone number depository.
So back to the target of the scam.
This poor woman, desperate for the name and address from the cellular number, inputs the digits, as instructed, and presses "Enter." The fraudulent site displays some BS meter, to indicate that it is searching every database on earth. In a few seconds, she is told that the information has been found, and she should proceed to the next page to access it. She does. Now one of two things happen:
1. The next page explains that the information is almost hers, but it must be purchased after all. A low price is offered, and she is reminded that the answer to all of her questions is just a couple clicks away. In fact, the info has already been obtained, she just needs to access it. It is right there, just out of reach. So she pays. And having not read the paragraphs of fine print, she is unaware that the databases searched are those explained above, they are collections of data, but certainly not a cell phone directory, and-no surprise, the info is not there after all.
But she still paid for the possibility that it was there. No refunds from this scam-the fine print explained it all. As bad as that sounds, this is worse:
2. After clicking to proceed to the page where the cell phone number search results are supposedly displayed, the customer is forwarded to a completely different website, normally one of the few that actually provides real-time investigations of phone numbers. Here the customer has the option of paying for a service from a different site, that they thought they just paid for. This often has the consequence of making it appear as though the legitimate site-the owners of which have nothing to do with the scam site, and do not know they are involved-is part of the con.
This is exactly how "free cell phone lookup" scams work. If you want an actual investigation of a number, and need to find the current name and address from a cell phone, you must order such a search from a company that does not use databases or offer "instant results."
