There may come a time when you need to find out who owns a cell phone number.  For example, what if you were being harassed by an unknown caller whose number displayed on your caller ID box with no name?  In that case, you would definitely want to know who the owner of the number was so you could report them to the proper authorities.  Cell phone numbers are the most difficult to trace as they are not listed in most telephone books. It is actually a violation of federal law to publish cell phone numbers in offline or online directories without the consent of the owner.

All is not lost, however. There are ways to locate the information you need, even if all you have is a cell phone.  Try putting the cell phone number into a search engine like Google to see what comes up. Sometimes you won’t get any results, although other times you might hit the jackpot. Try entering the number with and without dashes. Try entering the number with periods or spaces instead of dashes, which is how some people separate numbers.  Some people include their cell numbers when placing online ads on places like Craigslist, an extremely popular online classifieds site. 

One of the most simple and often most effective way to find out who is calling you is to call the number from a public phone and ask who you are speaking to.  If the owner of the phone doesn’t realize you are the caller on the other line, they might tell you.  The reason to use a public phone is so that your home number will not show up on their caller ID if they have it. 

There are certainly plenty of sites where you can pay a fee for a professional quality search. Intelius is one such site which offers investigative research for a reasonable price.  If you don’t want to bother with the searching yourself, you can hire a professional to perform the search for you.  It will probably cost between $50 and $100 to have an investigator do a reverse cell phone search.  If you’ve tried everything else and cannot find the data you need, it is money well spent.

Comments are closed.