Telephone Reverse Number Lookup

Gloria Moore asked:


Many times when you perform a backward or reverse telephone number search, you can run into the message that the number you are searching for is “unlisted” or is “unpublished”. Sometimes the site will mention both terms, and at other times they will simply list one or the other. You may have wondered, out of curiosity, if there is actually a difference between these two terms. Is there a difference between an unlisted number and an unpublished number?

The simple answer to that question would be “no”. The terms “unlisted number”, “non-published number”, “non-pub”, and “unpublished number” all pretty much refer to the exact same thing.

An unlisted number usually refers to a telephone number that has not been listed within a directory assistance list. Non-published numbers are those that have not been listed within a phone book. Therefore, when you see these terms, you can be assured that they simply have not been listed within the local telephone directory and that you likely will not be able to find them by calling 411 (directory assistance). Nor will you be able to locate the number by speaking to phone operators by dialing 0 or 00. Furthermore, this will mean that indeed, if you use a reverse telephone search service online, you will not be able to obtain the associated name and address to the telephone number.

In such a case, you will likely need to hire a private investigator in order to discover an unlisted number or to find out to whom an unlisted number belongs.

You may find, though, that many reverse search sites will simply say that a telephone number is unlisted or unpublished when it is, in actuality, a cellular phone number or a pager. Therefore, before you go to more extreme measures to discover the owner of a telephone number, you may wish to check with a few cellular phone directories, or see if you can hire an inexpensive reverse cell phone number service to try to get the number that way, first. This is because a reverse cell phone search is a great deal less expensive than a private investigator and is therefore well worth the try.

If you haven’t had much success in your search you can try to , find the owner of most landlines and cell phone numbers with this.

Ed Opperman asked:


Every successful private investigator has a tool box. On TV you’ll see a PI using a gun, lock picking tools and disguises. In real life it’s a bit less glamorous but also a whole lot more legal.

In real life an investigator will handle a telephone handset a million times more than he will ever handle a firearm. So in this series of articles we will examine the tools every PI must have in order to conduct successful telephone investigations. Reverse phone number databases, telephone trap lines and blind lines or caller ID spoof cards are all tools every investigator should have.

Reverse Phone Number Databases:

Before you can use the phone you need a phone number. Or you may already have a number but need to know the customer name and address of that number. This is where the telephone number data base comes into effect.

Every investigator should have access to databases that will return a customer name and address (CNA) from a non published or unlisted phone number. These database services will also have information on telephone numbers. They may be able to provide you with an unlisted phone number from a just a name or just an address. They also may be able to supply you with a cellular or wireless number from just a name or address.

Today on the Internet there are literally thousands of companies that offer this service. Some of these companies will only provide the information to lawyers, licensed private investigators , collection agencies or other licensed businesses with a legitimate need for this information. Other companies do not, all they require is a valid credit card. You submit your order and the information is returned via email a few minutes later.

Not all of these services are the same and not all have access to the same information. Some will have up to date information and some will have old outdated data. So do your research and homework first and try to establish a long term working relationship with your information broker.

There are also other ways to obtain reverse phone number information. You can call the number and using a pretext, perhaps in conjunction with a caller ID spoof card, and trick the person that answers into revealing their information. Likewise you might email the target or snail mail the physical address with a pretext and include a trap line number. When the subject calls the trap number their information will be revealed through automatic number identification even if they have caller ID blocked.

Obviously you can use your imagination and apply a reverse phone number search to many routine investigations such as skip tracing, current employment locates and infidelity investigations.

Our next article in this series will examine caller ID spoof cards and their use in routine investigations.

Before hiring a private investigation service be sure to perform your due diligence. Make sure the PI is considered an expert in telephone investigations. Check to see if they offer a variety of telephone investigative services such as reverse phone searches, trap lines, caller Id and even cell phone forensics.

You want to put your investigation into the hands of an expert in every area of telephone investigations.

Be careful of instant online searches that promise the world for a one time low fee. This is impossible. If it seems too good to be true it’s never going to be real. Its going to be a scam.

Sophia MUNOZ asked:


We all know by now -unless we are just back from another planet- that Google is the world’s number 1 information platform and it is universally accessible. When you visit Google.com or one of the dozens of other Google domains, you are able to find information in many different languages and lookup phonebook listings for every city in the World. It is naturally the best place to start you reverse phone lookup. Google being the number one search engine, it gathers millions of information. The only thing you need to do to start your reverse phone search with Google is to type the number using quotation marks at the beginning and the end and you are good to go.

When you put the number in quotation marks, you are doing an “exact match” search. That means that it allows you to determine the exact number of results for the telephone number you have typed within quotation marks.

Back in the days, The Yellow Pages and Big Foot were the number one places where people headed to when it came to searching for phone numbers. However, with the internet era, those two sites have become obsolete.

You can now do a narrower search with the use internet as you can not only find a name behind a number but you can also find the location of the person.

A new world of possibilities is opening up. You can get in touch with lost friends or find out who have given you prank calls pretty easily. With Google’s help you can identify a person and locate them in a matter of seconds.

However, keep in mind that when you search a phone number using a free reverse phone directory or a search engine like Google, you might be unsuccessful if the number is a cell phone number.

If the person has posted their number on social networking sites such as MySpace, Face Book or Orkut you might get lucky but that often does not correspond to the norm.

The main reason why reverse cell phone lookups are becoming more difficult to perform is because of more stringent privacy laws, that make the action of publishing a cell phone number illegal.

If Google proves to be unsuccessful, your best option to do a reverse phone lookup search is to use a professional service. Do not worry, you can access many of these professional services and for a small fee, you can perform unlimited searches and have access to unpublished, date, personal records, criminal history and, of course cell phone numbers.