How to find out who owns a particular phone number - Reverse Phone lookup

Reverse Phone lookup

If you are looking to find out who owns a particular phone number (residential, commercial, cell phone, toll-free etc.), you will likely come across dozens of reverse phone number lookup services in Google and Yahoo.  But how will you know which service to use?  Our crack team of editors and reviewers spent 5 weeks reviewing all these services to find the right answer.

To review each service, our editors first identified 41 different companies that were providing online reverse phone lookup services. They then used each of these 41 services to search for 500 different phone numbers for which we already knew the owners.  This allowed us to verify the accuracy of the results provided by each service.  The 500 numbers included an even mix of different types of phones (land lines, cell phones, toll-free numbers etc.) and were evently distributed across different states in the U.S.

For each company, we calculated the percentage of numbers for which they provided accurate and detailed information.

To our complete surprise, our editors found that most online reverse phone lookup services simply don’t deliver the goods.  In most cases, their accuracy levels were as low as 50 - 60% (which we consider to be completely unacceptable).  And yet, all these services claimed to have very high levels of accuracy and completeness.

Fortunately, we were able to find 2 companies that we are able to recommend to our readers. Both of them had very high levels of accuracy and completeness (95% or more). Here are our top choice:

It’s really no surprise that Reverse Phone Detective was our top pick. They maintain one of the largest and most accurate databases of phone numbers on the Web. Their service is very popular amongst private investigators - and with good reason. Just about every search we did came back with correct, up-to-date and accurate results (their overall accuracy level is 99.4% - the highest among all the services we evaluated). You can’t go wrong with this excellent service.

VISIT REVERSE PHONE WEBSITE