How do you trace cell phone numbers? What the hell is a free reverse phone number lookup? I had no idea what any of this meant until my friend started getting this prank call late January or early February. It was always exactly around dinner time, from the same telephone number, no words came through, but you could here someone sighing, and then he hung up. At first it was a joke, but after a couple of weeks it was annoying and scary. The caller ID showed the telephone number so we were confident we will find the caller.

First we Googled the number

Yep, but no luck!

Then we did a White Pages Reverse Lookup

Yep, we tried both whitepages.com as well as the white pages phone book. No luck again. We had no idea that white pages and yellow pages only contain land numbers. We later found out that mobile numbers are not listed on any of the publicly available telephone directories. Apparently this is done to protect mobile phone user privacy. Apparently it prevents the mobile numbers from getting in to the hands of telemarketers and identity thieves.

We tried a Free Reverse Cellular Number Lookup

Yep, no luck again. There were many ads online that said they do reverse phone searches for free. We hopped from one site to another one whole Sunday evening, but none of them were truly free. They only told us that the number was registered to Simi Valley, CA (for free that is}. They never gave us the name and address of the telephone owner for free.

We had no time to waste going behind these fake ‘Free’ websites. At that stage we were more worried about peace of mind more than dollars. So we went ahead and used a phone number tracing service that was $69. We got our man and we were happy, we just wished we did it two weeks before!

Then it got Ugly

Yep! We found out that we overpaid way too much to trace the cell phone number. We basically were fooled by yet another Free Reverse Cell Phone Lookup service. These websites advertise themselves as ‘Free’ just to attract people, but they’re the most expensive. Just beware of these traps, you can get the same information for a fraction of what we paid. We made our mistake, but you don’t have to.