If you need to find the owner of a phone number, you may be considering doing a white pages reverse lookup, but do these services actually work?
There are so many different reasons for wanting or desperately needing to reverse search a number, and because of this - everyday thousands of people just like you take to the internet to find a phone directory that will permit them to do so.
Perhaps the first thought that has entered your mind is to use a white pages reverse lookup to get the job done, but you may not realize that there is a better route to using a reverse telephone directory.
The first problem occurs when you are dealing with a number other than a land line. At times a cell number or privately listed number will turn up, but here's what most people do not realize when using a white pages directory.
Most of these services can help, but they are free, and legally for a service like this to provide you with what you are really looking for they must charge a small fee to be on the up and up. These services a lot of times do not, because they are not necessarily always running as a business. This means that you only have about a less than 3% chance of getting the name behind the number.
The other thing about white pages, though its certainly always true, is that every now and then they get information wrong, as we have tested this with several numbers that we have access to. What was the problem? The numbers that we tested were registered under a family contract, which means that you will only get the number of the person who is at the front of that plan, and does not mean it is the same person who is calling you. This also means that anyone can register a phone under a certain area code, and not live under that area code at all, making any of this kind of data completely useless.
The other bad thing about these services is that they will either give you extremely limited information for free, or charge you a very small fee for yet again really inaccurate and limited data on the number.
In all fairness though, this is definitely a step above trying to do your own investigation by entering a number into a search engine to get results, and if all that you need is just to know the general location of the number that you are inquiring about - then a white pages reverse lookup will suit your purposes just fine.
Also, much like how a search engine will never show you a private or unlisted number do to privacy reasons, white pages really can't do this either.
Did you know that there are actually such services that can retrieve information on any kind of a phone number? they are also very affordable and user friendly.
So let's look at this again. Here are your three options to help you determine which route you need to take.
1. If you just need to grab a publicly listed number for say a local business - use a search engine such as Bing, Yahoo or Google.
2. If you need to simply know the general area (like a large city) that a number is registered under - use a white pages reverse lookup.
3. If you need information such as a phone service provider/carrier, full name, city, possible address, and maybe even other available information such as background records, or information on other members under the same phone plan - use a reverse phone lookup directory instead.
To find out which one we think takes the cake, please check out our reviews on the top 3 to learn which is the number 1 reverse phone lookup.
