A reverse phone lookup service will allow you to find people by cell phone number. This can be useful if you have prank calls, telemarketers, or even a strange phone number that doesn’t fit with anyone you know. Tracking down these numbers doesn’t have to be difficult because you have at least three decent options you can follow to find them.

public directories

For most, public directories seem like the most obvious way to try to find other contact and personal information based on nothing more than a phone number. For a landline, public directories are indeed the best option to use. That being said, mobile phone numbers do not appear in public directories due to privacy considerations. So, if the number you’re trying to trace is a cell number, you’re out of luck when it comes to public directories.

Free

Another option is to use free information online, either in the form of specific reverse lookup services or more generally with things like searching through a free search engine. These options can be a decent way to start trying to locate the person who called you, but they are also fraught with problems due to the fact that they are free and therefore not updated very often. The resources simply aren’t there to keep it up to date, and so even if you did find a name for the number, there’s no guarantee that it’s the correct name of the person who called you.

The most reliable option

The third option is to use paid search services. This option is actually the best because it fixes the issues with the previous two. All of these databases contain mobile number entries and since they have a monetized service, they can afford to constantly update all of their database entries. Although you have to spend some money with this option, it is still the best and most reliable way to get detailed information about any phone number, including mobile, landline and unlisted numbers.