Looking for reverse phone lookup directories can become complicated. You may start out with a quick internet search, hoping it will quickly pop up and you'll have the information you require with very little effort. Yet what actually appears is a long list of paid directories which vary from less than a buck for one number search to over fifteen dollars for a service subscription.
Revising your search to specify free reverse phone lookup reveals even more pay sites advertising claims to be free. They may allow you to enter the number without mention of a fee and award you with very basic information such as the city and state, but in order to obtain the important details like a name or address you will once again be requested to pay.
Totally free reverse phone lookup is not possible at this point. Providers of this data put out great efforts and even money to collect information like unpublished home phone numbers, cellular numbers, and sometimes address histories. These businesses have no use for this information other than to deliver it to buyers for a minor fee.
how you proceed from here depends on how much you really need to find out the person connected to that phone number. In the age of identity fraud most people won't just pull up the cheapest site and enter their private information. Finding the most trustworthy sites is just as crucial as when you shop for tennis shoes or pocketbooks online.
Retrieving the information you desire isn't very difficult, once you find a reputable source.
There are many competitive websites all offering different prices and delivering different combinations of data. When you only want to identify the person registered with a unidentified phone number calling your home or need to know exactly who your child is chatting with at all hours of the night, you may not have the time to rate different directories.
The most effective answer may be to go with a name that many people have grown up with and use the web-based version of the yellow pages. There is a sense of security with a well known household name that has been used for years. You can look up a phone number and get very basic information here without paying, including whether the number is a cell phone or residential line and a map pinpointing the general location of a home or business. You won't find much more than that, especially if you are searching a cell phone or a residential number that is unlisted.
Be alert at this point because there will be links from these pages that will deliver additional information, such as registered names and residential addresses, for a charge. These links go to other webpages, so you no longer necessarily have the security of the yellow pages website so you must verify the legitimacy of these services just as with any other. Yellow pages itself is not going to reveal much information other than a general location; you will need to look elsewhere for more, especially if you want to know about a cell phone or unlisted number.
The best way to find reverse phone lookup services for basic information is to go to a trustworthy database with a small one time charge collected with a secure payment system. If you only need a one time number search then it is probably not worth the charge to sign up for a long term service. Find one that offers a single lookup for a low charge, usually just a dollar or two.
Forking over a large fee for small amounts of information or being asked to pay by delivering card numbers through email or other non-secure forms are obvious warnings of a scam.