What information can you get from a reverse cell phone lookup?

You can get a bunch of information about the phone owner with a reverse cell phone lookup, but how much you can actually get depends on how much you’re willing to spend. As we mentioned earlier, the amount of information you can obtain with a free reverse cell phone lookup is really limited. This is because cell phone owner information is considered private and is not available in a central database as mentioned earlier. The owner information for each number is held by the relevant wireless carrier and is not released to a public database.

Here’s the information you can potentially get with a reverse cell phone look up

1. Wireless phone carrier
2. The first and last names of the mobile phone owner
3. The current address
4. Previous addresses if any
5. Information about family members: e.g. marital status, persons currently living with him/her
6. Demographic data – average home value and income of people living in the area
7. Complete background check – may include court records, criminal records, civil records etc. when available

NOTE: Some of the above data will only be available through a paid reverse phone lookup. Some information may not be available through a reverse cell phone lookup report and you may need a background check to obtain some of the above-mentioned information.

As mentioned on this article on Wikipedia, “Right now, cell phone numbers are not available in any public 411 or reverse-number directories. However, several information companies provide reverse cell phone lookups that are obtained from utility resources, and are available online. Because there is no central database of cell phone numbers, reverse phone directories that claim to be free cannot return information on those numbers”. In other words, the many so called ‘FREE’ reverse cell phone lookup directories CANNOT give you customer information when it comes to cellular phones. If you want to find the name and other specific details, your only option is to get a paid report from a reliable source.

What’s special about reverse cell phone lookup?

If you want to do a reverse phone lookup on a land phone number, you could easily go to the White pages and do a free reverse phone lookup. But if you want to do a reverse cell phone lookup of a number belonging to a wireless carrier like Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Cingular or any other cell phone company, the White Pages or other free reverse phone directories won’t be able to help you. Why? Because cell phone numbers are unlisted or unpublished!

Cell phone numbers are unlisted?

That’s correct, cellular phone numbers are not listed on free public telephone directories like the White Pages, Yellow Pages or Anywho.com. This is because mobile phone owner information is considered private and confidential. There is no phone directory (forward or reverse) for cellular phones and the chances are that there won’t be one in the future either. This is because wireless carriers are bound to protect the privacy of their customers and would not want to publish their customer database in a public database. That could potentially open up avenues for prank callers, identity theft etc. etc.

A cell phone number has some privacy associated with it and we don’t like to give it away to anyone and everyone. Most of us don’t want all our classmates or friends’ friends to find our mobile numbers in a jiffy, and call us and disturb at unwanted times. It’s nice to be able to control who gets to know your cell number and who doesn’t. Should our mobile numbers get published on free public databases, this privacy will go away. This is why wireless companies won’t publish our cell phone numbers on any kind of phonebook. Most of us appreciate this, but there are times when we wish we could easily do a reverse cell phone lookup, as we mentioned on one of the previous articles. But I guess you can't have your cake and eat it too.

You can do a reverse cell phone lookup

Well the good news is that you CAN do a reverse cell phone lookup using special directory/database services and we’ll talk about that in a future article.

Reverse Phone Directories – What are they?

A reverse phone directory may be known as a reverse cell phone directory, reverse telephone directory, gray pages – in contrast to white and yellow pages – or as a criss-cross directory. Just like with a regular phone directory (forward directory), a reverse directory is a collection of customer details and their phone numbers; however there is a major difference. In the case of the regular day to day phonebook all of us have at home, the information is sorted in the order of customer details (last name of the phone owner) where as in the case of a reverse phone directory, the information is sorted in the order of the telephone number. So the person who looks for a reverse phone book is typically looking to find a person’s name and/or address using his or her phone number. If this is not clear, please refer to our previous post on what is a reverse phone lookup?

Why would anybody try to do a reverse phone lookup?

Simple! Let’s say you are in the shower and your phone rings. By the time you come out the ringing stops and there is a missed call. If it was a known number, you would obviously have no hesitation in calling back the number, but what if it was an unknown number? Would you instantly call that number back or like to find out who that might have been before calling back? If you belong to the second category above, then you will find a reverse phone directory very useful.

Let’s take another example. Let’s say you are being harassed by a certain caller repeatedly. The phone rings, you answer and it gets disconnected from the other side. Or, the phone rings, you answer and the caller tries to scare you, make funny noises or even threats. Seriously, some people have nothing better to do with their time and spend their days doing things like this that does no good to themselves or anybody else.

Above are two examples why someone would want to do a reverse phone lookup using a reverse phone directory.

What is a Reverse Phone Lookup?

A reverse phone lookup is when you reverse lookup a phone number. It's the opposite of what we used to do with phonebooks years ago. Traditionally, if you wanted to find someone's telephone number, you would go to the white pages (or yellow pages) and search for that person's name and you would find his or her phone number.

Reverse phone look up is the opposite of that

In contrast, with a reverse phone lookup, you have someone's phone number, you don't know to whom it belongs to, and you obviously want to find the name of the person that owns the phone number.

So what's the big deal about a reverse lookup?

Well the problem is that there are no reverse directories (at least in printed media). The regular phonebook has been arranged in alphabetical order of people's last names, so if you want to look at a Smith, you just go to the letter 'S' and find the 'Smith' you want by matching the name with the person's home/office address that you already know of.

Unfortunately there are no reverse directories that have been arranged by ascending/descending order of the phone number e.g. 555-123-1110 is S.G. Smith, 555-123-1111 is D.W. Doe, 555-123-1112 is L.R. Lewis etc. etc.

The internet brought the solution
Although it would be cumbersome, if not impossible, to maintain such a reverse directory on paper, it is relatively easy to do that on a virtual database. Basically once the database is setup properly, it's a matter of sorting by any parameter you want.

The best two resources for reverse phone look up

1. The White Pages Reverse Phone Lookup
2. Anywho.com