There is a lot of money being made by many so called free people locaters online and if you are not careful you can find yourself paying hefty amount for meager information.
So before you fall victim to these services let me a bit about their structure.

They can basically be divided into 3. That is, there are paid people search services, partially paid services and totally free people search services. Let me briefly discuss each one of these separately.

Paid People Finders

These are less popular online than any of the other finders. This is because people are not willing to pay for what they can easily find somewhere else at no cost. However I should mention that paid people finders come with some advantages. For one, they have well updated databases and they are more reliable.

The people who provide their information in these sites are more than willing to keep their information updated almost annually. This is mostly because they get paid for providing their personal details.

Partially Paid People Locaters

This is the most popular category online. Most of the websites that offer people search services allow users to access a certain amount of their information after which they are required to pay a small fee. This is usually broken down into sections. For example, you can choose to pay for a once off search, monthly search or for lifetime membership. I always advise that you start with the free people search before moving on to the premium services - as there are often called.

Totally free people search services

These are rare but you can find them. You can access their absolutely free people locaters and not feel obliged to pay for anything. In most cases all you may be requested to do is to provide your email and name so that they can keep you posted with your search - incase they locate the person you are looking for at a later time.


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Does a no cost people locater exist? My answer is yes and no. Just the other day I shared about 3 types of people search finders you can find and yes I did say there is the totally free service but I also highlighted that even then you have to give up something - that may end up costing you i.e. you email address and user name.

It is not such a bad idea to provide your email and user name especially if you want to be alerted about the person's whereabouts later on but I can totally understand if you are looking for an absolutely no cost people locator.

So how can you get hold of one? You can't but you can use multiple sources that will not cost you anything.

First of you can use a search engine like Google and Yahoo, which offer a people finder feature that you can access at no cost to you. This means you can just search for someone as you would search for any information. The only difference here is that the results will be a list of possible names or contact details of people who could be the one you are looking for.

You can also use social networking sites to scan through a million profiles. Websites like Myspace and Facebook offer you free access to millions of people located all over the world. In just a click of a mouse you could find long lost friends, relatives and classmates. You may need to own an account with these services before you access their database. It's free and easy to open one.



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While it would be nice if you could just call someone and ask who does this phone number belong to? Sure, it seems that having such a free service would be in everyone's best interests but that may not always be the case. If anyone could get information about you by just calling a service and providing your phone number, your level of privacy would drop drastically, especially if such a service included cell phone numbers.

The good news is there is a way to strike a balance between protecting your privacy and permitting reverse lookup searches.

First, you can basically do what is described in the opening paragraph. However, you'll need to use the Internet. You can do a search for any landline number for free using sites like Anywho.com. These sites access public records to pull up names and addresses associated with numbers.

These services do not include any information that is not readily available to the public, including contact information associated with cell phone and unlisted numbers.

Second, some Internet reverse search services can provide information on cell phones but this data is more challenging to acquire so it costs money to retrieve. While this might discourage you from doing this type of search, that's really the whole point. People are less likely to invade one another's privacy except in cases when doing so seems warranted.

The bottom line is that reverse search engines for mobile phones can help you learn who the caller is, but without putting anyone's privacy at too great a risk, including yours. And that's an important balance to maintain.



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