Monday, November 16, 2009

Cellular Phone Reverse Search is Available to Anyone

By Duncan Millows

So you are needing to figure out who owns a certain mobile phone number. Perhaps you are getting a lot of prank phone calls. Perhaps there is a number on your partner's phone that you don't know. Perhaps you came across a number in the dresser drawer that you don't know. There are a thousand reasons that you might want to find out who belongs to that number. Sadly, reverse lookups on cell phone numbers are a lot harder to do than reverse lookups of landline numbers. Why is this? This is because mobile phone numbers do not appear in phone directories so that a person's privacy is kept.

Think for a minute what it would be like for telemarketers to be calling your cell phone several times daily trying to get you to buy something. This would certainly occur if cell phone numbers were stored in a public database. In the big scheme of things, maintaining the privacy of these numbers is no doubt a good thing.

But let's get back on track. How do you go about finding information on the number's owner when it is not listed? You could certainly try a search engine, such as Google, search on the number and see what information, if any, is returned. But this probably will not be successful since most people do not put their cell phone numbers on public websites where they could be located by the search engines. You might just directly call the number and find out who answers. Maybe you would impersonate someone, saying that you are looking for their information to correct some records or something to that effect. This, however, is not a good idea. First, the owner of the number would now know that something is going on. Second, doing so could very well be illegal.

So, is there an effective, safe, legal and ideally free method to lookup somebody's cell phone number? Lucky, the problem can be solved! Cell phone numbers are still provided in the internal databases of phone businesses, even though they aren't provided in public records or phone books. Naturally, you'll have to have someone else search these databases. Some companies buy access to databases like this from different cell phone companies and put the results together in one large database that has current information on the majority of cell phone numbers in America. It's simple to use this database to do a cell phone number lookup to figure out who owns the number in question. Although access to databases like these isn't always free (since phone companies charge a fee to get this information due to privacy reasons), there is typically a small annual fee, and you can perform an unlimited amount of searches. - 16890

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