Running through your monthly phone bills and phone records, you consistently find a few numbers which you do not recognize and you are adamant to find out who the owner is. You now need to do a reverse phone number lookup, meaning that you use a phone number to trace the owner of the number. Armed with the phone number, you start to trace by doing online searches, visiting white pages directories, free online phone directories, running searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN, all but to no avail.

Why Zero Returns On Free Online Cell Phone Number Searches?

The above zero returns result should fairly accurately indicate that the phone number that you are looking for is a cell phone number. This is because white pages and free online phone directories contains databases of land lines which are public domains made available to all who care to search. However, in the case of cell phone numbers, each service provider like AT&Ts, Verizon, T-Mobile, Cingular, Telstra maintain their respective client lists and database in a highly guarded manner and hence all the search engines put together, cannot find you the cell phone number.

Why Then Is There So Many Claims Of Free Reverse Phone Number Lookups?

You would have seen many youtube videos or literature about how to do a free cell phone number search successfully, but this is only and literally half the story. Most of them will show you how to run searches on land lines. And in the rare cases that you are able to find the cell phone number online, most often than not, they are advertised numbers, or the search engines picked them up from social networking sites.

Other videos tactfully guide you on how to use their commercial proprietary systems only up to the point whereby you get very limited details regarding the owner of the phone number such as the city and state in which he or she lives in with a prompt to click through for more details. At this stage of the search process you will be prompted to pay a small fee for full report.

In Short, No, There Are No Such Thing As Free Reverse Cell Phone Lookups, But..

However, there are a fair number of reverse cell phone lookups which are authentic, reliable and efficient with extensive accurate databases, albeit not free. You can do your searches online as a subscriber for a small fee with unlimited access, confidentiality assured. The vast information available are not limited to owner name, address, phone location, household members, carrier, service status. Some databases allow deep digging into people search to view full background checks and criminal records as well. That said, you need to note that the extensiveness of databases offered by each company do differ to some degree.

Should you really need to access such records, paying a small fee is worth all the hours of fruitless online searches, not to mention the stress and frustration.