Reverse Phone Look Up - Don't Get Scammed

Reverse phone look ups are a relatively new idea and have really taken root on the internet over the past 2 years.

Before the introduction of these services you'd have had to pay a private detective a substantial amount of cash to get the kind of information that is available at your fingertips today. But why would you want to try a reverse cell phone lookup in the first place?

There are quite a few reasons why you may need to find information about a phone number and the Internet seems like the ideal place to do this type of reverse phone look up. With the old style phone directory you'd be able to get a lot of information for free, after all Sprint, Verizon, Telus in Canada and many of the other phone companies provide free phone directories, so what's different online?

What You Get For Free and What You Don't

There's some good news and some bad news. A good starting point for free lookups is the white pages. It's the online directory of residential and land line phone numbers. There are a few other services that offer this, but as they all use the same database choosing one over another is irrelevant.

If you want to confirm a residential phone number just enter the number to find out who owns the account and their location, just like looking up a number in the phone directories! Of course they may have opted out of the directory so you'll get no results. Also if the number is a business number, an unlisted number or a cell phone number chances are you're out of luck.

Part of the problem is that there is no central database of cell phone numbers, mainly due to privacy legislation, so the free services cannot give you the results you're looking for. Even the free services can only give you a limited amount of information.

How Do I Get Information For A cell Phone Number?

When you search for the free reverse phone look up type services you'll see that there are many adverts offering free look-up services. Bet you're wondering if they are genuine? Unfortunately the answer is no, they are all teasers for the paid look up services. Before you decide that they're trying to scam you consider that they have to pay for the data that goes into their databases, then build searches and reports that you can request with a few clicks of a button.

These are premium databases of millions of phone and cell numbers with all of their associated data, collected from many of the major networks, so long as you find a reputable site! Also the reputable sites will state that the searches you make are guaranteed legal and confidential and give you some form of money back guarantee.

How does the process work?

That's a good question! With most services you can do an initial check free, then it tells you any results its found and the location of the phone number. This is the teaser information so that you know if you're going to find out what you need.

So far, so good and it hasn't cost a dime. Now if you want a full report on the phone number you'll need to spend a little money. You'll find that there are payment options designed to suit all budgets to entice you to use their service.

Using these types of search results will allow you to trace an unwanted caller, research puzzling phone bill entries or verify an address if you're looking for lost friends or loved ones.