With cell phones being around for nearly three decades now, I think it is safe to assume that we’ve all, at some point, received a phone call from a number that’s not stored in our contact list nor do we recognize.
In most cases, we tend to plainly ignore the call. But what happens if one wishes to dig a little further, hoping to find where that number belongs to? In this tutorial, we are going to be taking a look at a few simple methods to reverse lookup a phone number.
Method #1: Use Facebook
With approximately two and a half billion people using Facebook in 2018, the platform could definitely qualify as a possible reverse lookup solution for a phone number.
While not all people have linked their phone number to their Facebook account, many do, and if you are lucky, you could find the person behind the unknown phone number by typing it into Facebook’s search box.
- Visit Facebook’s website
- Log in
- Type in the phone number in the search box located in the top of the page
- If the phone is associated with a Facebook user, the user’s profile will show up
If you do not receive any ‘people’ results but only posts referencing the said number, we would advise you to go through some of them, as they could reveal that the number belongs to a scammer.
Method #2: Google is your friend (Bing and Yahoo too)
While that might not sound like the most direct solution for this particular case, there simply is so much data online that it renders the possibility of receiving zero results about a topic, nearly impossible.
You could type in the unknown phone number in the Google search bar and check out the first two pages of results – granted that two pages of results have been returned.
Press F3 and a search box will appear somewhere withing your browser’s window. If the amount of data is too overwhelming, you can paste the phone number into the search box, which in return will highlight the places that the number is being mentioned.
- Visit Google.com
- Type in the phone number
- If you receive any search results, go through them
- If too many links from websites such as 800notes, whocalled.us or whocallsme show up, then the number most likely belongs to a scammer
If the number is legitimate, a business of some kind for example, you should expect to see the company’s associated website and social media accounts. If it is a person, his or her social media accounts should be among the first results as well (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc.).
If the phone number is a landline, it is quite possible for it to be included in an online yellow pages platform, accompanied by the owner’s info.
There is also a pretty good chance of the phone number belonging to a scammer. If a lot of links from platforms such as 800notes.com, whocalled.us, and whocallsme.com, appear in the search results, then you should consider blocking that number once and for all. We have tutorials demonstrating how to block a phone number on both Android and iOS.
Method #3: Use Zabasearch or Whitepages
If you are not on Facebook and Google’s endless pages of results is too much to deal with, platforms like Zabasearch and Whitepages are an equally effective option – many more platforms of this kind are available online as well.
The particular websites provide more advanced filtering, by allowing you to provide extra info, such as ZIP code, state, city etc.
If you encounter any problems while trying out the above or have a recommendation to make, feel free to shoot a comment down below.
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