As life goes on, people lose contact with many friends from their youthful years from high school or college. This can happen even with someone's best friends and if you ever want to meet with them, to arrange a small get together and catch up you are left with no way of contacting them. This scenario is very common and has happened to many of us. What can you do to find someone's phone number?

Here are a few ways to properly do a people number search:

The first step in your search is through the most popular search engine of the internet, Google. Type in your friend's name and see what shows up in the results. People nowadays have personal or business sites where you can usually find contact information. Take your time and browse through the results and you may come up with a number.

Another great place where you can do a people number search is on white pages related sites. Just enter the name and you'll usually receive address and telephone information regarding all the people found with that name. The only problem here is if you don't know that person's address. You can literally find hundreds of people with the same name in every state and with no current address it will be extremely difficult if not impossible to know which of them is the person you are looking for.

The easiest way to properly do people number search and come up with your friend's current phone number is by using a trusted specialized service. While many provide outdated information there are several services that are legitimate and updated daily where you only enter someone's name and you receive detailed information like current phone number, address, and more importantly for you, background information - this is the easiest way to know who of the people in the search results is the one you are looking for by checking where they went to high school, college etc.



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A reverse telephone search is something that you might need to do every now and then. You might want to find more information about someone you are dating or you might be concerned about your partner's intentions when strange phone numbers appears on your phone bill. Or just have an old number to a long lost friend you wish you could get in contact with. So there are many reasons why you should do a reverse telephone look up.

You might wonder if there is any free reverse look up services you can use. If you are doing a simple landline search you might be in luck, but if you are searching for cell phone or unlisted numbers you will run into trouble. These numbers are not public domain and are hard to track down without using a paid service.

But this is actually a good thing. A paid service provides so much more than just a name and address. For a small fee you will be able to extract information that only private investigators used to have access to. You will be able to find out the owners relatives and neighbors, household members, their address history, other phone numbers that belongs to the owner, etc. This works not just for cell phones but sometimes even unlisted numbers and also other numbers that are hard to track down.



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Since the invention of telephones, people have been able to learn anyone's phone number that was not unlisted by searching in a phone directory or by calling directory assistance. In recent years, a new twist has emerged on this called reverse phone lookup. This allows a person to find out who is the owner of a known telephone number. The ability to learn who owns a specific phone number has advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages

Certain people and groups have determined that calling at certain times of the day have a better chance of catching someone at home. These times are usually right at dinner time and at bed time. Telemarketers and bill collectors are the two main groups of people who call at such annoying times. One practice they have adopted is using cell phones to place these call. Many do this because of the ability to purchase free long distance plans rather than pay for business long distance.

It is sometimes difficult to trace the owners of cell phones. Difficult, but not impossible, there is normally a fee associated with using a reverse phone lookup for cell phones. This is because this information is not a matter of public record in the sense that directory information on land based phones is. Learning who owns a particular cell phone provides the means to put a stop to unwanted calls and allows for prosecution if your number is listed on the do not call registry and the telemarketer is trying to circumvent this law by using a cell phone.

Harassing calls are another good reason to use reverse phone lookups. If someone is calling your home or your cell phone with obscenities or making threats, a reverse phone lookup may be the tool needed to help the police make an arrest or the phone company block the calls. Even calls made from a pay phone can be traced using a reverse phone lookup. If a person is calling repeatedly at about the same time each day, the police can arrange to watch that phone and arrest the offender for harassment.

Bill collectors are another source of harassing calls. The law places limits on the number of calls they are allowed to make before they cross the line into harassment. Some collection agencies have attempted to circumvent this law by outsourcing these calls or using cell phones. If a phone number can be traced back to the collection agency and a log of calls created that shows a violation, legal action can be taken against the offending company.
Disadvantages

The single largest drawback to the advent of reverse phone lookup technology is the loss of privacy. Anyone who has your number can run a reverse phone lookup and find out several personal details about you. If you use a cell phone or have an unlisted number, the companies providing the reverse phone lookup must use databases that contain a lot more information than just names and addresses. This information is often made readily available to the person paying for the reverse phone lookup.


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