Cell Phone Numbers and the SearchBug Day Pass
We recently received a complaint from a customer who purchased a day pass because he was looking for names from cell phone numbers. This is typically called a cell phone number reverse lookup.
First a little background on our day pass. It’s actually not just for the day, you get the rest of the day you purchase it, plus the full next day until midnight. So, you actually get more than 24 hours. Want to know a secret to get the most time? If you purchase a pass M – F in the morning and it is activated before noon the same day, you would receive 36 hours or more of searches. If for some reason your account is not activated upon purchase, something in your profile triggered our security system and you account is under review. This means someone from our support team will call you the very next business day to discuss your account, get a verbal verification before your account can be activated.
Once your pass is activated, you’ll still receive the rest of the day it’s activated PLUS the entire next day. Unfortunately, due to all the online fraud and breaches at major retailers, we see an influx of bogus accounts and need to ensure and protect our customers, ourselves, the card holders, and banks from possible fraudulent activity.
Once your day pass is activated you have immediate access to all of the available tools included in the day pass. This is our premium data for searching people by name, phone, and address, as well as all the other search tools included in the day pass subscription. Note that while we can locate some cell phones from premium data, it’s not as often as landline numbers. Cell phone numbers and VoIP numbers don’t often make it into a searchable database.
Two different customers might search for 100 different cell phone numbers and depending on the age, location, carrier, and other demographics of the cell phone owner’s habits, between 5% – 25% of those numbers might be found in a database.
Some people use prepaid cell phones, burner phones, change (port) phone numbers, give phones to kids, relatives, and there are a lot of cell phone numbers that do not even have a real name or address associated. Plus, many cell phones are listed to companies that purchase dozens if not hundreds of phones so individual names are non-existent.
People might use a specific cell phone number for a few years, and move, or give the phone and number to a different employee (if a company phone) or change carriers and not bother porting the phone number. They may be getting harassing calls, or have collection agencies after them, so they change carriers and get a new number. Meanwhile the name and phone number might have made it into various databases or public records which could take years to update if the new cell phone owner prefers to keep his cell number private.
There are a host of factors that go into locating cell phone owners. Using a database is just the first and easiest step. Obviously, a real private investigation or an assisted reverse cell phone lookup could produce much better results. Sometimes you can get lucky and find the info you need in a database. The type of search and the level of service dramatically improves the results of any search, not just a cell phone number search.
If you can’t find what you need in the free published records, and you still can’t find the information you need in a premium database that has a small fee attached, then the next step in your search process should be an assisted search. A real human can do a much more thorough search than any computer database. Until artificial intelligence catches up to the human brain, there are no short cuts to finding information.
It’s much like search engines. While Google and Bing are getting better and better at helping you find what you need, and Siri, Google, and the new Amazon Echo can listen to your questions, they still aren’t perfect. But if you take the time to search through dozens of links, or make some phone calls, you can usually increase your odds of finding the information you need.
The same holds true for finding people or conducting other types of database searches. Without the help of someone that knows what to look for your chances of finding exactly what you need diminish.
If you are just curious about a phone number and would like to know whose name or address is associated with it then an inexpensive database search with our day pass or a more accurate real-time database name from phone search might work fine for you. However, if you absolutely have to reach the actual person that owns a phone number for a variety of legitimate reasons (debt collections, family emergency, fraud, criminal investigation, or a host of other real reasons) then I would strongly urge you to consider an assisted search. There is no better search.