- A reverse phone lookup can reveal the name and address associated with a phone number.
- Beware of most reverse lookup websites; in most cases, they are trying to collect your personal information or charge a fee for the lookup.
- Here's how to perform a reliable free reverse phone lookup.
- Visit Insider's Tech Reference library for more stories.
Have you ever had a scrap of paper bearing a phone number but had no idea who it belonged to? Or have you ever wanted to find out the source of a call or text you received from an unknown number? That, in a nutshell, is what a reverse phone lookup is all about.
You might be surprised how frequently such reverse lookups can come in handy, and there are online resources that make it somewhat easy. Beware, though: very few reverse phone lookup websites are truly free, and most will try to get you to give up valuable personal information or make a payment.
What is a reverse phone lookup?
A reverse phone lookup is just what it sounds like — rather than entering someone's name and using it to find their phone number, you start with just a phone number and use a service to reverse search for and discover who the number belongs to.
This is handy if you get a phone call from an unknown party, for example, or you wrote down a phone number with no additional information.
How to do a free reverse phone lookup
Unfortunately, as straightforward as a reverse phone lookup seems to be, it's tricky to do in reality because many (if not most) websites promising to do reverse phone lookups are not honest brokers. In most cases, these sites ultimately charge you for the service even if the initial sales pitch is that it's free.
Beware of any website that requires you to give up your email address or other personal information to perform a search, and be especially wary of sites that perform a lengthy search with a progress bar. A real reverse phone lookup should take a fraction of a second; if it takes several minutes, the site is trying to get you invested in the process so you are more likely to pay for the data at the end of the search.
One site that dependably performs a free and trustworthy reverse phone lookup is the simply named Phone Lookup. To use the site, simply enter the full 10-digit phone number you want to perform a reverse search on and click Search.
After a moment, you should see the results, which might include complete personal information including the business or individual's name, address, and type of phone (cellphone or landline).
In many cases, though, the results might simply report that the number is unpublished. In this instance, the most information you may get is whether it's a cellphone or landline and what city the phone number is registered in. As a general rule, personal phone numbers are more likely to be unpublished, while you should be able to get full details about most business numbers.