At the top of the list of latest questions was someone asking why they had to pay to reverse look up a cell phone number. It was a sensible question because, as the asker pointed out, you wouldn’t expect to pay to look up the owner of a landline number. You’d just go to the white pages website and there is a reverse lookup box right there on the front page.

Why isn’t there a similar facility for looking up a cell phone number? That set me thinking. Why isn’t there such a thing as a free cell phone lookup?

If you own a landline there are a few things that make it easy for the phone companies to compile a list of who owns which number and what your address is. Firstly, a landline is fixed. The phone company know where the phone line and they know the address it is fitted to. Secondly you are, effectively, under contract to the phone provider. You have to pay your bills regularly. This means that the phone company knows who you are as the number is registered in the bill payer’s name. Both of these things make it easy for the phone companies to provide a list of who owns which number.

If you think about it you will realise that it isn’t so easy for cell phones. You can buy a prepaid cell phone over the internet. You can buy a prepaid cell phone in the supermarket with your groceries. Nobody at the check-out asks who you are – they just scan the box and sell you the phone. You could be anyone from anywhere. It isn’t even necessary to register the number and top up using a credit card, although you can do this if you want. You can purchase top up cards in many stores and just enter the card number. It’s all anonymous.

That’s why so many scammers use cell phones. Anyone can buy one, anyone can use one, you can use it anywhere and anyone can top it up.

I think you can start to see how difficult it is to compile a realistic list of who owns which cell number and to provide a sensible reverse lookup services. Yet these services do exist. So – how do they manage to provide a reverse lookup service and why do you have to pay for it.

The reverse lookup services have to compile the data for themselves. This means buying in vast lists of cell phone numbers and collating them to provide meaningful data. Not an easy task. These lists are often compiled from websites or forms that ask people for their cell numbers. If you don’t specifically ask that your data is not passed on (usually by checking or unchecking a box) then your data may get added to one of the lists that is then sold to the reverse look up providers.

The white pages data is provided as an extra because their customers are already paying for the provision of their landlines. The reverse number providers are businesses that exist solely to provide this service and have to earn money to pay their staff, maintain their websites and buy in those all important lists of data.

Fortunately, the reputable reverse number trace sites won’t charge you unless they find the answer you are looking for. They all have staff that can help you, so you are guaranteed to find the answer you need or not have to pay.

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Sometimes, though, the caller or texter is unknown. That’s when things can start to get difficult. You might not be looking at your own phone. Perhaps you have a niggling feeling that your partner hasn’t been completely truthful about who s/he has been seeing or where they’ve been. In an attempt to find out you’ve decided to see who has been calling or texting. You might find several unknown names and/or numbers. Now you need to work out a way of finding out who the numbers belong to.

Obviously you can’t just ask your partner who they have been calling or texting. That’s a dead giveaway that you are suspicious and, if they are cheating, they are unlikely to give you a truthful answer. If they aren’t cheating then you might spoil your relationship for no good reason. You need to find out for yourself who owns the numbers.

There may be other reasons why you want to know who owns a number. It’s all too easy for someone to send explicit texts. These can be very upsetting and especially if the receiver is young or elderly. If this starts happening to an elderly friend or relative, or to your child you will want to find out who’s sending them. It could be someone who has a grudge against you, perhaps. They probably think that as they are harassing someone else you won’t be able to trace them. That’s not true, of course, you can trace them.

Sometimes the unwanted texts are bullying or threatening. Bullying online and via cell phones is becoming a serious problem. For some reason people seem to think they can get away with posting or texting anything they feel like saying, without a thought to how the victim might feel. If you can find out who is sending those awful texts you can go to the Police. Armed with the right information a busy Police Department is more likely to take you seriously and try and help you.

Why would you want to reverse a cell phone number? Most of us have our regular contacts programmed into our cell phones. So if your mom calls, or your mate from the gym calls or your classmate rings, their name will come right up. You’ll know exactly who’s calling.

From this, you can see that you are unlikely to need to do a reverse cellular phone lookup on someone you know. The problems start if you receive calls from someone that you don’t know. Ok – if they leave you a message they will probably say who they are. But sometimes the caller might have more sinister intentions.

Have you ever had that feeling that you are being watched or stalked? It’s horrible, especially if you start receiving strange phone calls. Have you ever received vulgar or explicit phone calls or messages. Probably some drunken moron having a laugh, but they are unsettling and frightening. If it keeps happening, you will need to find a way of identifying the caller.

Maybe you think your child is being bullied. Unfortunately, bullying by text is becoming more and more common. Most bullies are cowards and it’s quick and easy for them to send their unpleasant and threatening texts. Your child might not like to admit what’s happening, but if they seem withdrawn or unusually sullen, you might take a look at their phone to see if there are any numbers on there that you don’t recognise.

Or perhaps you think your partner is cheating on your. It happens more often than most of us would care to admit. He or she is suddenly working late, or missing the train/bus home more than usual. Maybe the company seems to be sending him or her on an unusually high number of training days or weekend visits to other branches. After a while you might start becoming suspicious. You need to take a look at his cell phone and see who’s been calling.

Once you have a cell phone number that you want to reverse lookup you will need to turn to the internet and find a reverse phone lookup site. There are several of them and they are easy to use. Just enter the number you want to know about and within seconds you will know if they have the information you need. You should be able to find out the name and age of the caller as well as their address. If they have any criminal convictions, you might be able to see that too – useful if you are receiving unpleasant or threatening texts or phone calls.

With texts, you don’t have the luxury of taking time to recognize the caller’s voice. If it’s a simple text like the one I suggested above you can just text back and ask who sent it. But what if you start receiving several texts from the same cell number – and what if some of them are more sinister or unpleasant? It’s easy for men of all ages to send suggestive “sexts” to a girl’s cell phone (and vice versa, of course). After a while these can go from being annoying to becoming seriously upsetting.

You could try calling the number, but if the sender has devious or malicious intentions they are hardly likely to answer and tell you who they are. They will see your number displayed on their phone and either not answer or reject the call.

You need to find a way of identifying the texter if you want the texts to stop. Fortunately, you should be able to see the sender’s cell number displayed along with the message. Once you know the number you will need to turn to the internet. Start by just typing the number into a search engine. If the caller has harassed others then you might find that someone, somewhere has written about it online on a blog or forum and left the caller’s number as a warning to others. If the sender of the texts is stupid enough to be using a cell phone that belongs to someone else or runs a business, you might get lucky and find that the number is listed as a business number – many small businesses have websites and list their contact details.

If this doesn’t work, you are a bit stuck. White Pages only lists landline numbers and it is unlikely that a malicious texter will be using a landline – it’s too easy to trace. Somehow people feel that using a cell phone makes them anonymous. It doesn’t, and there is something you can do to find the number’s owner.

You will need to find a reverse cell phone lookup service – which will also act as a reverse text message lookup, since it is the phone number that is traceable. Fortunately there are several of these. There will be a charge for the service as these are companies that employ staff to help you and who also have to purchase and collate the databases of numbers that they use. If you think you will use the service a lot, purchase the annual option, which entitles you to further detailed searches at a reduced price. For Phone Detective the current prices (Jan 2011) are $9.95 for a single search. Annual membership at $29.95 allows you to do unlimited searches for the reduced price of $7.95.

Most businesses will have their phone number, whether it’s a cell number or a landline number, listed on their website. Scammers often leave their numbers in their scam emails, which then get posted to online blogs and sites to warn others of the scam.

You might even get lucky and find the owner of a private cell phone this way – many people simply add their phone numbers to sites where they are on public view – it’s easy to forget that stuff you leave as blog comments, etc is publicly accessible and viewable.

If the number you want to trace is landline number, then White Pages is an obvious place to try. Go to whitepages.com and enter the number you want to trace in the “reverse phone” box. If the number is listed you should be able to find out who owns it.

However, if the number you want to trace is a cell phone number it could be harder to trace. To make it easy for you to find the owner of a cell phone number there are reverse cell number trace websites. These websites work because the companies that own them buy in large databases of cell phone numbers that have been entered on websites and various other places. This information is public but needs to be collated and processed – this is why there is a charge for the service.

Somehow we now expect all information to be available for free – forgetting that websites cost money to run. Ask anyone who’s ever run a site how much it costs – even a small site requires hosting and domain name registration.

If we want to know who owns a phone number we simply expect to be able to go to the internet and find the information we want – for free. Sometimes, you can get lucky. Enter the cell phone number you want to trace and sometimes the search engines will find it. Especially if it belongs to a business – after all businesses want you to contact them so it’s in their interests to make sure that their phone number is easy to find – it will probably be listed on their website and in lots of local directories.

If the cell phone is privately owned then it could be harder to trace. It won’t be listed in White Pages – they only list landline numbers. They have a “reverse phone” box on their site, so it’s always worth entering the number there in case it turns out to be a landline number.

If internet searching and White Pages can’t help you then you will have to turn to one of the reverse cell phone lookup sites. These sites charge you to use them. They are businesses which employ staff to help you and also to collate and keep up to date the databases that they use in order to provide you with the information you need. They have to charge you to keep their services running and available.

A few months ago I found a website that claimed to offer free cell phone lookups. When I went to the site it was just a list of other sites. I followed the links and none of them were actually offering free lookups. Some were links to sites that used White Pages to find landline numbers. Some actually said that they didn’t offer cell phone lookups and some were paid cell phone look up sites.