Cell phone number listings
Cell phones give you an added layer of privacy over the traditional landline phone. They give you the ability to turn them on and off without having to pull out the cord, and your number is difficult to find because there are no free cell phone number listings in the same way as there are white pages for landlines. The latter factor is both a blessing and a curse, because sometimes the fact comes and bites you back when you want to know how to contact someone on a cell phone, or someone you don’t know calls you and you want to figure out who it is.
I have written about the topic of reverse cell phone listings earlier, and I still haven’t come across any site that offers this kind of service for free. The nearest I have come are sites that tell you whether they have any results on the search you have done, but you have to pay to see the actual cell phone number listing.
Free cell phone listings in some countries
This is frustrating, because in many countries, free cell phone listings are a given. But in the US the cell phone carrier’s guard their customer data like it was gold. And gold it is for them, because they do actually share their data IF you pay enough. That is exactly what paid cell phone listings sites do. They pay the different carriers for their data, and then sell per listing, monthly, or yearly, subscriptions to their web site visitors.
And that is perfectly fine, because many of the cell phone listing companies offer great services. Making money isn’t a crime either, especially when offering it for free and making their money through advertisement isn’t a viable business plan.
Just to make sure that there isn’t anyone who offers such services for free, I did a bit more digging today. I went through the Yahoo directory pages for phone numbers and addresses, and reverse lookup directories. Mind you, there are many sites listed there, so I wasn’t able to go through all of them, but I guess the saying “when you’ve seen one, you have seen them all”.
The listing I am referring to are paid listings, this means that the web sites have paid to be included in Yahoo’s directory. That would bias towards sites that charge money for their services. Ok, let’s have a look at the findings, as I run through a couple of the sites.
Review of cell phone directories
I used the phone number +1 (414) 961-1000 to do my testing, which is the main phone number of Manpower offices in the US. This isn’t even a cell phone number, so the sites shouldn’t have any problems giving me the telephone number listing for free.
AnyWho.com
This is a service that seems to be a part of the AT&T group. The website looks clean and promising, but when I use their reverse lookup feature, no results come up for the number. They do, of course, suggest using a different service to do a new lookup, but that is a paid service.
WhitePages.com
Ok, now we are getting somewhere. This site was able to return the correct results for the phone number above, which proves that landline number reverse lookups can be done for free online.
This means we have to broaden the testing with a new number, this time a cell phone number. I will use a number that I know is listed in at least one of the paid reverse cell phone number sites, but I won’t publish the number here due to privacy issues.
WhitePages.com – continued
Ok, so back to this site, which did give me the results for my landline test. Now, I entered the cell phone number in question, and bam, no results for the phone number. But as sure as the summer comes after winter, it did list an alternative site that indeed did have a listing for the number. Of course, this site was a site that charges you to see the results, so no free reverse cell phone lookup here. On to the next site…
Free reverse cell phone lookups com
A site similar to mine, reviewing the paid services and informing people why listings aren’t free. Doing a search here simply tell you that you have to pay to see the results.
Ok, I will stop there because the results won’t be any different no matter how many sites I try. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with the sites above. They are all actually really good. I just want to get the point across that you won’t be able to do free reverse cell phone lookups on the Internet. It’s that simple, and until someone proves me otherwise I rest my case. Cell phone number listings cost money!