It’s really amazing how spammers thrive on blowing any rumor out of proportion and spreading mass panic whenever possible. It’s also astounding how persistent some of these rumors can be: some won’t go away years after they’ve been officially classified as urban legends.

Take the National Cell Phone Directory panic that began as far back as 2004, and regardless of countless rebuttals, just will not die. Just the other day another such warning appeared in the Sci/Tech section of Google News, of all sources. The rumor claims that in just days all U.S. cell phone numbers will be released to telemarketing companies. Cell phone owners will begin to receive unlimited sales calls, for which they will obviously also have to pay. They urge you to add your cell phone number to the National Do Not Call Directory as the best source of telemarketer protection. Cell phone owners who fell for this have since found out the full irony of this solution, when suddenly their cell phones began to receive more spam calls and texts than ever. By adding your number to ANY online directory, you are just providing another source for telemarketers to harvest for numbers to call.

Just as I write this, my cell phone begins to ring, and I can tell by the unknown area code it’s a telemarketer. I pick up and simultaneously hang up. Nothing new there: telemarketers will find the way to get their hands on our numbers, and they’ll call. The millisecond I spent on the phone won’t end up costing me that much in the large scheme of things; nowadays, we all have pretty reasonable calling plans. I guess, the panic stems from the fact that the cell phone directory is supposed to mass-release ALL cell phone numbers to the public. Now, read my lips: that will never happen. Ever.

Where did this mass urban myth originate from? Some think the panic started back when all the major cell phone carriers got together and considered pooling resources to create a national 411 cell phone directory , due to the fact that land lines were quickly becoming obsolete.

However, extreme legal limitations were put on this directory to prevent abuse, and additional laws that have since been passed, have made an official cell phone directory down-right impossible at this point. Not to mention, it is still illegal for most telemarketers to call consumer cell phones. Some cell phone carriers even initiated lawsuits to put telemarketers back in their place. Bottom line: don’t believe everything you read and put your cell phone privacy fears to rest once and for all.

Phone pranks may be fun to the prankster, but it certainly is no laughing matter to the call recipient. If you have been receiving prank calls and are fed up with being harassed, it’s time for you to stop ignoring these calls and find out more about the caller with a reverse phone lookup.

A backwards phone search can help you learn the location of a prankster as well as their identity. However, in order to use this lookup service you will require the phone number of the nefarious individual. Therefore, if you do not yet have caller ID, it is in your best interest to obtain this service from your phone company because it can help your protect your phone privacy, and is very beneficial in certain circumstances such as crank calls.

When you have obtained the phone number associated with the annoying caller, enter the complete phone number (10-digits) into the query box of an online reverse phone lookup. If you are in luck, the number will be linked to a listed landline phone, and you will find out the last name, and address of the number owner. However, it is very probable that the prankster is aware of reverse number searches and will use a private number or caller ID spoofing so he or she will be harder to trace.

If the phone number is private, conduct another free search, but this time use a backwards phone trace that includes wireless numbers in its directory. The results for this search should at least provide you with the city and state associated with the number, so you should have some idea as to the general location of the mischief maker. Furthermore, you can still learn their identity and a more definite location with a reverse cell phone lookup, but you will need to pay a nominal fee for the private information.

Once you know their info, the next time the individual calls, address them by their name and tell them you know where they live and you have notified the authorities. This is usually enough to make the calls stop.

Its the usual story. We’ve just sat down in our home office for work. About 20 minutes later, we just reach our optimal state of mental work flow. Just as we begin concentrating fully on what we’re doing, “Ring Ring Ring”. We can not ignore it. We’re waiting for an important call. A friend, relative, business associate. So we pick it up and what do we read on the caller ID display? “Inbound call”.

Its disturbing, to put it mildly! You can be on the federal do-not-call list, order call block, set your computer up to filter specific incoming calls based on their names or numbers, purchase cell phone service which is protected by regulation from the DMA and telemarketers, and still get these calls!

And cell phone privacy only works to your disadvantage. Thats right – they have all the information about you they could want – enough to keep bothering you for years if you let them. Yet you can’t pull up a single piece of information about a number marked as ‘private’ from the phone book or through any free resources on the Internet. Perhaps an outdated carrier or an inaccurate designation of: land-line. But that isn’t going to let us identify and stop these perpetrators.

Instead, a new type of website has been created which we can search to find information about all types of numbers. They can be cellular numbers, Wifi or VOIP phones, unlisted private numbers, or really any other type. These websites will show you the name, address, background info, business info, carrier, and more up to date information about 98% of all phone numbers. They collect this information from millions of public records held by businesses world wide. It is available on their websites to search in a very short time in comparison to how long it takes to find it through regular search engines.

Once we have a name and carrier, this is really the only information we need to stop most of these distractions. The vast majority are unscrupulous marketers motivated by financial gain. They employ automated tricks to make their millions from unsuspecting phone users. All we have to do is all their phone company with their name, information, and brief list of their activities (time of day they called, message) to have them shut down. If the number is in fact a prankster or harassing person, we can call parents or the appropriate authorities. With their personal information, the problem can be handled much more efficiently. Many times, simply knowing that they are no longer anonymous is enough to stop these callers.

For decades, millions of us across the country have searched for the phone numbers of friends, family members, associates, even future acquaintances by their name. We have many reasons for doing this. We may have lost their number, they may have changed their number, and in the case of work colleagues or new acquaintances, we may not even have their number yet. I’ve also encountered numerous occasions where myself and a new friend agreed to contact each other on the phone at a later date, and forgot to exchange numbers. Sometimes it happens in the heat of the moment.

Searching by Name for Cell Phone Numbers

So now that the vast majority of our population is switching to cell phone numbers, can we still find them by name? The short answer is no . It is currently against industry practices to allow cell phone directories which provide search by name for cell phone numbers. The primary reason for this is the theory that telemarketers and the DMA will begin soliciting cellular phone users for selling products.

However, reality is not so simple as some would have you believe. Regardless whether cell phone numbers are made public, it would still be illegal via federal regulations for telemarketers to call cell phones. The Direct Marketing Association themselves has pledged to avoid calling cellphones with respect to the fact that we have to pay for our minutes!

So unfortunately, all that happens is we lose the ability to find our current or potential future contacts in turn for the false sense of security associated with the idea of privacy protection from telemarketing calls. On top of this, we’re still subject to any potential privacy violations on the part of government or regulating authorities, whether it can be justified or not!

How Cell Phone Privacy Fails

The truth is, current cell phone privacy practices are not even that effective. Millions of corporations worldwide have been mining your data for decades and keeping it in their own databases. Almost everything there is to know about a person can already be found out by someone using the correct tools.

And there are already many calls coming to cell phones from unscrupulous parties which have located your number. Ever notice that ‘cellular call’, ‘unknown call’, ‘inbound call’, or other ambiguous, obnoxious entry on your caller id? I thought so. I get them almost daily. You likely do to. Cell phones are not exempt. WiFi phones are not exempt. Even house phones on the national ‘do not call’ registry are not exempt from these annoyances! And these illegal calls would be entirely unabated by additional privacy measures! So much for the idea of a government saving the world’s population from danger.

How to Fix the problem with your Own Hands

Yet all things have a natural balance when they’re not artificially manipulated by some intervening party, and technology is no exception. Most people will never have access to your number. But the few that do, and place obnoxious, even illegal calls on a regular basis, can still be stopped. How? By identifying and reporting them. The key is identifying them, and for this we can use a ‘reverse phone directory’. These directories simply take information from the already available millions of public records and put it all in one place. We can search them in seconds and find a caller’s name, address, background info, associated business entities, and more.

Hence, even without further regulation, our numbers can stay private from the majority while we get to keep the tools which help us stop the criminal minority from doing what they will always be able to do – reduce the quality of our lives!

Many people frequently use reverse phone directories in order to help them to identify unknown numbers that have phoned them. However, at the same time, other people feel threatened by these online services, wondering if they may be an invasion of their personal privacy.

This is because with the great threat that we currently face regarding identity theft, the thought that people can find out information about you – such as your name and telephone number – using only your telephone number can be somewhat disquieting. However, phone companies have taken these feelings into consideration and have allowed the option for people to opt-out of these directories. All that is required is a simple phone call in order to un-list your telephone number if you’d rather that your telephone number does not show up in a reverse phone search.

There other ways for you to protect your privacy as well as making your number unlisted. These additional options have come about throughout the history of phone searches and reverse phone directories. Many laws and regulations have been developed in order to protect your privacy. One of the most important laws in this effort is the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which was passed back in 1991. The TCPA was devised in order to restrict the actions of telemarketers and to provide people with greater control over their personal privacy when it came to telephone use. In 2003, the National Do Not Call Registry was created to allow people to choose not to allow telemarketers to contact them.

Indeed, there are some telemarketers who are exempt from the regulations of the Do Not Call list, such as charities, political campaigners, and government agencies, but this does eliminate the sales calls that many people find frustrating in the evenings. Furthermore, regulations were put into place regarding cell phones, where telemarketers are not allowed to call cell phone numbers using automated dialers (which are used by all telemarketing companies because it is too costly and time consuming to hand dial every number).

If you ever wanted to lookup somebody’s land phone number, you’d go to the white pages. More than 90% of the time, you would be able to get the results you want. However there is still a small chance that you won’t find the number you’re looking for simply because some people choose to ‘Unlist’ their land numbers as well; for privacy reasons of course!

How about for Cell Phone Numbers? For land numbers, yes, the whitepages works. But for cell numbers, the white pages do not work. This is because cellular numbers are ‘Unlisted’ or ‘Unpublished’ on free telephone directories like the whitepages and yellow pages.

Why are Cellular numbers UNLISTED? Because they’re considered ‘personal’ unlike in the case of land numbers which are considered ‘public domain’. Even the law enforcement considers them ‘private’ and as a result there are even privacy laws such as the ‘Wireless 411 Privacy Act’.

The Good news – is that your privacy is protected and unwanted calls on your mobile phone are minimized. This is why you don’t get telemarketers bothering you on your cell.

The Bad news – is that you can’t do a reverse cell phone search for 100% Free. You will see a lot of advertisements saying they do it for free, but you will only find the wireless phone carrier (Sprint, Cingular etc.) and the location of registration (city, state) for free. You won’t get the name and address of the phone owner for free. Because if they do provide that information for free, the whole concept of privacy laws protecting mobile phone user privacy rights breaks down.

So how do you reverse look up a mobile number? Your only option is to use a privately owned online directory. Their computer algorithms allow searching for people’s personal information like name, age, address, average income, home value etc. when you provide the cellular number that you want to check!

Some ‘services’ charge as much as $69 for a single cell phone number reverse lookup.

However, it is absurd to pay that amount when you can get the same (or even better) information for much less than that. The following services are not free, but they offer the best price in the market today and also pride themselves to maintain the largest and most up-to-date databases that guarantee accurate results every time!

The internet can be a very beneficial, fun and convenient resource, but it can also be unsafe, as there are many different security issues that people need to be aware of. These security problems do not only include computer viruses and spyware, but also privacy issues in regard to cell phone information.

One of the biggest privacy issues that involve cellular phone information is the release of private information, such as phone numbers, addresses, and phone records, among other personal details. However, obtaining this information is not always considered illegal or a breech of privacy, such as in the case of a reverse phone lookup. When a person performs a reverse phone lookup they already know the phone number, but usually not the identity of the number’s owner. In most cases reverse cell phone searches are used to trace an unknown caller, and the results that are provided typically only include the city and state, and phone company associated with the number.

On the contrary, attempting to find an individual’s cell phone number through a forward search, which involves using a persons name, address and/or location as the search tools, is considered an invasion of privacy and is illegal.

However, despite the existence of laws to protect the privacy of cellular phone users, these laws are only helpful to a degree. It is up to you, the cell phone subscriber, to take the extra step and ensure that you don’t experience privacy issues in relation to your mobile phone information and the internet.

How can you do this? For starters, do not post your cell phone number, or any of your personal information such as your home address on any website. You can never make the assumption that your personal information is safe on the web. There are highly skilled computer individuals out there who will use bots to scan the net for peoples’ personal information, such as email address, phone numbers, etc. The information that is collected will then be used on a site designed to draw traffic with various ad programs. If your personal information ends up on this website, your personal details will be even more readily available to the public.

Another good idea is to register your cell phone number with the Federal Trade Commission’s National Do Not Call Registry (NDNCR). The NDNCR helps to reduce the number of telemarketing calls made to telephone consumers. Although it is illegal for the vast majority of telemarketers (those who use auto diallers – virtually all of them) to call cell phones, registering your cell number with the NDNCR should take care of most of the other unwanted telemarketing calls you may experience.

You should take your cell phone privacy very seriously. Make sure you know all of the security features on your phone, are strict about who you give your number to, and you never post your number online. The more protective you are with your cell phone information, the harder it will be for a person to trace a cell phone number on the internet that belongs to you.