Looking for reverse phone lookup services can get complicated. You may begin with a quick internet search, believing it will immediately appear and you'll discover the information you need with minimal work. Yet what actually appears are various paid websites which range from under a dollar for one lookup to over fifteen dollars for a long term subscription.

Revising your search to include free reverse phone lookup delivers even more pay directories sneaking in claims to be free. They may allow you to type in the number for free and award you with very basic information such as the city and state, but if you want to get the useful information such as a name or address you will then be asked to pay.

Completely free reverse phone lookup does not exist. Providers of this data put out great measures and sometimes money to compile information like unpublished residential numbers, cell phone numbers, and even address histories. These businesses have no use for this information other than to deliver it to consumers for a nominal charge.

whether you move forward from here depends on how much you really need to reveal the person behind that phone number. In the age of identity fraud most people won't just access the cheapest site and enter their private information. Finding the most trustworthy services is just as crucial as when you buy tennis shoes or pocketbooks through the web.

Retrieving the information you need isn't very hard, once you access a proven source.

There are many competitive services all with different charges and offering different combinations of information. When you only need to know the name registered with a unidentified phone number calling your home or wish to identify exactly who your child is talking with in the middle of the night, you may not have the time to compare different services.

The quickest answer may be to go with a name that many of us have grown up with and access the web-based version of the white pages. There is a sense of legitimacy with a common household name that has been trusted for years. You can look up a phone number and get the most basic information here without paying, including whether the number is a cell phone or home line and a map pinpointing the general location of a home or business. You won't find much beyond that, especially if you are searching a cell phone or a home phone number that is unlisted.

Be aware at this point because there will be links from these pages that will deliver additional information, such as names and specific addresses, for a fee. These are links to other webpages, so you no longer necessarily have the familiarity of the yellow pages website so you need to check the security of these services just like any other. White pages itself is not going to give you much information beyond a general location; you will have to look elsewhere for anything else, especially if you need to research a cell phone or unpublished number.

The most effective way to locate reverse phone lookup websites for basic information is to find a proven database with a nominal one time charge collected through a secure payment system. If you only need a one time lookup then it is usually not worth the money to sign up for a long term directory. Find one that provides a single search for a small fee, usually just a dollar or two.

Paying a large charge for small amounts of information or being asked to secure information by delivering financial information by email or other non-secure methods are flashing warnings of a scam.