I’ve tried googling phone numbers to find out who is calling me, but I never seem to get any results. Also many sites charge for the info. With all the data that’s out there, I’d think that there should be a free reverse phone look-up available. If there is, surely someone here can tell me.
http://www.zabasearch.com is a free reverse lookup. It works for personal phone numbers, but probably not for the numbers of solicitors or scammers.
Doesn’t seem to work on cell phones either.
I’ve had some luck with this, but it’s pretty spotty.
In Britain I just directly google the number and it shows a set of sites like this, https://who-called.co.uk/, where all the complaints about that scammer’s number can be perused.
I imagine there are too many cellphones to be enumerated; however you could always borrow a friend’s phone and call the number demanding answers…
A thread from another forum:
You can see if your library subscribes to ReferenceUSA. You can search by phone number in that database; you’ll just need a library card number to log in.
I have the White Pages app on my phone. It includes a reverse phone lookup. It’s always worked when I’ve used it. It won’t work with cell numbers tho - only landlines.
I’ve had the most luck with this one:
You can even hear their voicemail outgoing message without their phone ringing.
OP: Why are you trying to do this? Do you have some specific reason to believe these are real calls by real callers?
Substantially all calls from telemarketers and scammers alike are from faked numbers. Even if you could accurately look up who the number on your screen really belongs to, that’s almost certainly not who called you.
On the other hand, when one has an unidentified number, it is useful to look it up and see it’s a scammer or salesman instead of answering and being pulled in to their deranged world.
Plus as the British link I gave says for those numbers that ring off quickly:
The number you call back may be redirected to a premium rate service (a number that starts with 09) without your knowledge, which means you will be charged a lot of money per minute.
The number may tell you that you have won a prize of some sort and give you another number to call to ‘claim’ your prize, but they may not tell you how much the call will cost. This second number may be a premium rate number, again charging you a lot of money to get your prize.
So it may be an old friend or maybe a known scam number. Best to check first.
Yes this, you are wasting your time trying to find out who the numbers calling you are. The numbers are almost certainly ‘spoofed’.
The scammer/spammer/robo callers are even beginning to use your own area code and your own prefix in an effort to fool you into thinking it is someone local calling, to get you to answer.
I don’t get many of these calls on my cell phone but once I got called by an apparently local number with my area code and my Verizon prefix, so I just called it back. The guy who answered was a local guy who I don’t know. No, he didn’t call me, no he doesn’t know me and he started to think that I was some kind of crank.
The spoofers had just used his number to make it seem like that was where the call was coming from. It could have been coming from anywhere and as far as I know there is no way to find out where.
This worked! I was finally able to find out who called me a few weeks ago. Mystery solved.