Free Versus Paid Reverse Phone Lookup Sites: You Decide!

Sample Report

Probably not splashy enough for Discovery Canada’s MythBusters, the growing proliferation of free reverse phone lookup sites on the Web deserves some attention as well as comparison against what they offer versus the fee-based sites.

For Canadians living under a rock, a reverse phone lookup site allows them to discover an unknown phone number’s owner. They simply type in the phone number they want to look up into any of the many sites found on the Web and results come back instantly.

The applications for this type of phone number search range from businesses screening their latest job applicants to parents checking out prospective nannies to figuring out who just called from an unpublished phone number. It’s even been used by law enforcement agencies to solve crimes. But often times people just want to know more about a missed call they had. Was it from a possible business lead or a prospective employer? A reverse phone lookup site allows them to know.

Technically speaking there is such a creature out there as a free reverse phone lookup site for consumers but those sites are only really effective when the phone number is from a business or a private individual calling from a landline or residential line. Additionally, the phone number owner’s must also have chosen their number to be viewed publicly. If the number is unpublished, then these sites will only tell a consumer whether the number is a landline or not and what city it’s located in.

If the phone number’s owner has decided to allow the public to view the number, then these sites will give out the phone owner’s full name, full address, and, in some cases, even driving directions to that address.

In effect, free reverse lookup websites are using information that consumers have allowed to be viewed publicly or consumers have provided to third parties, such as when take online surveys or subscribe to magazines. This information is usually sold to data collection agencies that in turn sell the information to another source. So the free sites are basically just giving back consumers the information that is already out there and then trying to sell them on something else such deeper searches on unpublished numbers or criminal background checks. The information on these free reverse lookup sites is even gathered from many of the most popular social networking sites on the Web.

So while the sites don’t cost anything the catch is that the only fruitful searches will be for phone numbers that are from landlines and the owner’s have allowed them to be viewed publicly. Unknown or private cell phone numbers are not included.

And there is the fly in the ointment. They are free but only for …

On the other hand, fee-based search sites will offer consumers access to millions of those pesky private and unpublished numbers, ominous unknown ones and even toll-free numbers and pagers. These sites basically compile publicly available information, information from government sources, third party data collection agencies and even the phone companies and cell phone providers themselves, and offer consumers an information mega-store, even give consumers the option of getting a background or criminal check on the phone number’s owner.

Additionally, consumers can pay per search or subscribe yearly for unlimited searches and the fee-based sites will guarantee search results or the search is free.

So while the free reverse lookup sites tout of having millions of phone numbers, they don’t have many of the unpublished cell numbers that people are using today. But they will provide access to those cell numbers, they claim, for a fee, which just turned them from a free to a fee-based site.

Even they tacitly admit that for truly better-quality search results consumers need to pay up.