Looking for reverse phone lookup services can get confusing. You may start out with a quick Google search, believing it will automatically pop up and you'll have the information you need with minimal effort. Yet what actually comes up are various paid websites which vary from under a dollar for one number search to upwards of fifteen dollars for a service subscription.

Editing your search to indicate free reverse phone lookup delivers even more pay services advertising claims to be free. They may allow you to type in the number free of charge and award you with very basic information such as the city and state, but if you need to see the useful information such as a name or address you will then be requested to pay.

Totally free reverse phone lookup is not possible at this point. Providers of this data put out great efforts and even money to collect information including unlisted home phone numbers, cellular numbers, and sometimes address histories. These businesses have no purpose to collect this information other than to pass it on to buyers for a small fee.

how you proceed from here depends on how badly you really need to identify the person connected to that phone number. In the age of identity theft many people won't just pull up the cheapest site and enter their credit card information. Finding the most trustworthy sites is just as necessary as when you shop for clothing or purses over the internet.

Finding the information you want isn't very hard, once you access a reputable source.

There are many competitive websites all with different fees and delivering different combinations of data. When you simply need to identify the name behind a unidentified number calling your home or wish to identify exactly who your child is chatting with in the middle of the night, you probably don't have the desire to evaluate different websites.

The easiest answer may be to go with a brand that many of us have grown up with and access the web-based version of the white pages. There is a sense of legitimacy when you use a well known household name that has been trusted for years. You can search a phone number and get very basic information here free of charge, including if the number is a cell phone or residential line and a map indicating the general location of a home or business. You won't get much more than that, especially if you are researching a cell phone or a home phone number that is unpublished.

Be alert at this point because there will be links from these pages that will deliver more information, including names and residential addresses, for a charge. These links lead to different sites, so you no longer necessarily have the security of the white pages website so you must ensure the security of these websites just as you would with any other. Yellow pages itself is not going to reveal much information other than a general location; you will need to search elsewhere for more, especially if you want to research a cell phone or unpublished number.

The easiest way to find reverse phone lookup websites for basic needs is to go to a trustworthy database with a small one time fee paid through a secure payment system. If you just want a one time number search then it is obviously not worth the charge to commit to a more detailed directory. Look for one that offers a single search for a low fee, often just a dollar or two.

Shelling out a large fee for very limited information or being asked to secure information by sending card numbers by email or other non-secure forms are obvious signs of a scam.