My daughter has an email account and everything she gets is forwarded to me. She got a text-as-an-email from a phone number which I don’t recognize–no copy in the email, just a scan of a clipping of what appears to be a harmless “forward this ten times for good luck!” kind of thing.
I’m slightly suspicious though, and want to do a reverse-number lookup. The ones I’ve looked at charge a small fee for the service, like $1.00.
My question–are these places legit? Any more reputable than another?
Not worth it. Cell phones have limited public information. Your best best would be to call teh number from another line and hope to recognize the voice on the voice mail outgoing message.
Seeing as you already have trust/security concerns, why don’t you just ask you daughter?
Only slightly suspicious? Why are you even bothering with this? Delete it and move on.
Enter the number in Google. Try with and without dashes. When wanting to find out someone’s name and even hear a person’s outgoing voice mal greeting without ringing the phone, I’ve had luck with this:
I’ve used Intellius and was only charged the dollar. A couple times I received back almost zero information, so I called their 800 number and got a refund.
You can try whitepages . com, but it’ll likely just come back as ‘cell phone’ and not much else. Personally, I’d just delete it. It’s just junk mail.
Also, if she’s old enough to have an email address (or cell phone) but young enough that you monitor it, this is just about the perfect time to teach her that if it’s not email she’s expecting or from someone she knows, just delete it and move on. Don’t click on links, don’t read into it too much, most of the time you don’t even need to open it.
It won’t find a cell phone number, though; or an unlisted one; just listed landlines, so it’s a lot less useful than it used to be. I have sometimes, though not always, had luck just putting a number in Google, as x-ray vision said. But I agree that this particular one’s probably not worth the trouble. You might use it for an explanation of why forwarding anything ten times is a bad idea; even if whatever’s forwarded is innocuous in itself, it’s annoying – especially if others follow through and the thing bounces around a circle of acquaintances, with most people getting it repeatedly.