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.