Have you ever received a call from someone offering a business opportunity or sales pitch who just seemed “off” for some reason, and you didn’t feel that you could trust them? Have you ever had a week where you seemed to be endlessly flooded with calls from unknown phone numbers? The days of the yellow pages are long gone, but technology has brought us a tool that can be used in the situations above (and many others) so that we can be absolutely sure who is on the other end of the phone line through reverse phone lookup services.
A reverse phone lookup service (also called a spy dialer service) performs a phone number search to provide you with a wealth of information. Many people mistakenly believe that these services can only be used with landline numbers, but these tools can also perform a reverse cell phone lookup. The good ones can even provide detailed information regardless of whether the phone number is listed or not, which can be extremely helpful when trying to verify if a caller is in fact a scammer.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of reverse lookup services that claim to provide all sorts of personal details, criminal records, prior addresses, or other background information for no cost, but they will waste hours of your time before you finally hit a paywall. Some are using sneaky sales tactics to get you to pay, while others just want your personal details so they can sell them to 3rd party marketers.
In this article, we will cover some of the best free reverse phone lookup services to help you know which provides the greatest amount of accurate information. The services that we will cover actually provide you with basic information and accurate details with their completely free reverse phone lookup, and for a very small fee, their paid search feature can provide you with an amazing amount of accurate data.
Here are the best reverse phone lookup sites that we will cover to help you find background information that allows you to quickly identify exactly whose phone number you are dealing with:
Best Free Reverse Phone Lookup
TruthFinder is a company whose main focus is providing full background reports, and their phone detective services are merely a branch off of that service. If you merely want to dig into the details of an unknown caller, a reverse phone search or spy dialer could be enough.
TruthFinder provides more detailed background check options as well. The site pulls information from public records, social media, the deep web, the dark web, and government databases, so they can find personal records that most other background or spy dialer services can’t.
TruthFinder also offers mobile apps that can be downloaded from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. The ease of use of their mobile apps from anywhere, at any time, makes their phone detective services pretty convenient.
What’s included in the TruthFinder free reverse phone lookup?
Keep in mind that a free service isn’t going to provide you with unlimited access to the personal records of the person who has the phone number registered. While TruthFinder is one of the best all-around background report services out there, the type and amount of information they will provide for free will differ.
Here are some examples of what their free option may provide:
- Name
- The location of where the phone is registered
- Additional contact information
- Address
- Social media accounts
- Photos
What’s included in the TruthFinder paid version?
TruthFinder pulls its reverse phone number lookup data from a wide variety of sources, so depending on what records are found, the results may differ – but they are one of the best spy dialer providers out there.
Here’s what information may be provided with a paid TruthFinder phone number search:
- Name
- Photos
- Owner’s current address and previous addresses
- Social media accounts
- Online activity
- Videos
- Possible associates
- Online account usernames
Since TruthFinder makes most of its money on full background reports, you can choose to dive much deeper if you need or want. A reverse phone search is very inexpensive with TruthFinder, and the company allows you to easily upgrade a single search into full membership that includes unlimited searches. If you are looking to do more than identify unknown callers, these reports can provide an enormous amount of information in their search results.
TruthFinder Pricing and Plans
TruthFinder has very simple pricing plans which can be broken down into two basic sections. If you only want their reverse phone lookup plan to look up phone numbers, you can have unlimited reports for less than $5. If you want to move into the search functions of their full background reports, you can upgrade to their people search options for unlimited access.
The standard 1-month membership provides unlimited reports for just under $30, and the same standard membership for a 2-month subscription is just under $26 per month. If you want to perform a business search, look into personal records, or even perform a reverse address search, the full membership is the best option for you.
TruthFinder Interface and Use
The TruthFinder user interface is probably one of their best features because it is so intuitive, easy to use, and accessible from anywhere.
TruthFinder even has apps available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, which give you streamlined access to your reports and searches from anywhere, and on any of your devices.
The TruthFinder platform itself is very straightforward, intuitive, and easy to navigate, whether you are using the desktop, mobile, or app versions.
Pros
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Provides reverse phone lookup services in both free and paid versions
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Can find information on cell phones as well as landlines
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The paid version can provide reverse address lookup as well
Cons
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Customer service is only available during normal business hours
Star Rating
/ 5.0
Each of the companies that provide background reports and phone information does so by aggregating data from a variety of sources, and each of them work a little differently.
Instant Checkmate sources its data primarily from government databases at every level, from local to federal. This means that if you are seeking information on criminal records, arrests, home purchases, legal filings, or something that involves the government, Instant Checkmate may be the best option for you.
What’s included in the Instant Checkmate free reverse phone lookup?
Instant Checkmate prides itself on its data security and privacy, but like the other background service companies, they want you to eventually pay them to discover more information.
If you choose their reverse phone lookup free option, you may find the following information:
- Owner’s name
- Cell carrier
- Line type (landline, cell phone number, business line)
- Location
- Images of the phone’s owner
What’s included in the Instant Checkmate paid version?
Like TruthFinder, Instant Checkmate makes most of its money from full background information reports, and their reverse search options are merely a part of those services that you can utilize.
As such, the paid search may net you the following information:
- Owner’s name
- Photos of the phone’s owner
- Owner’s current address
- Social media profiles
- Online activity
- Videos
- Prior addresses
- Satellite image of owner’s house
- Possible associates
- Online account usernames
The reverse phone lookup service from Instant Checkmate can be used for toll-free numbers and cell phone numbers alike, making their reverse phone lookup an excellent option if you need to know who’s been calling you from unknown numbers. Their paid version allows you to dig into significant details about the owner of the phone, including their social media sign-up information.
Instant Checkmate Pricing and Plans
If you begin with the free version of the reverse phone number lookup tool from Instant Checkmate, they will provide a $1 trial membership offer that gives you unlimited reports and full access to their suite of membership services.
If you choose to continue beyond that, their pricing plans are:
- $5.99 for a detailed reverse phone number lookup
- $19.99 for a single premium background report
- $22.86 for a 1-month membership (with unlimited reports)
- $14.86 per month for a 3-month membership
- $9.86 per month for a 6-month membership
Instant Checkmate Interface and Use
If you need information that exists in government databases but don’t want to deal with the old, slow, and non-intuitive .gov websites, Instant Checkmate may be worth it.
If you need to perform multiple background information searches or reverse phone number lookup searches, Instant Checkmate allows you to run your searches in bulk, which can be helpful. They also allow you to choose specific information that you need, which can speed up the process.
Pros
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Customer service is available 24/7
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Easy-to-use interface
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Better criminal records or government information search results than other reverse phone lookup sites
Cons
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Results can take a little longer than other reverse phone lookup websites
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Instant Checkmate is not Fair Credit Reporting Act compliant
Star Rating
/ 5.0
Spokeo
While much of the marketing that you’ll see in nearly any reverse phone lookup site is geared toward telling you that you may find dirt on someone, Spokeo takes a very different approach from the rest of the pack.
While the average reverse phone lookup site is built to investigate people, Spokeo is built to act as a sort of telephone directory that allows old friends and family to find each other again.
The company began as a “social network aggregator,” founded by a small group of Stanford Graduates who simply wanted to bring people together. Staying true to its roots, the company still claims that its service is geared toward bringing people together.
What’s included in the Spokeo free reverse phone lookup?
Since the company started as a social network aggregator, Spokeo relies more on social media platforms than most of the other reverse cell phone lookup sites.
The paid version offers a wide amount of information (they have over 300 billion records in their database), and the free reverse phone lookup tool will provide varying pieces of data:
- Owner’s full name
- Current address
- Current location
- Family members
- Address history
- Phone type
- Phone carrier
What’s included in the Spokeo paid version?
When you run a free phone number lookup through Spokeo, they will offer a $0.95 trial offer that gives you full access to both their full paid phone search features in addition to their name, email, and reverse address lookup services. $0.95 is hard to beat, and with the paid services in Spokeo, you may be able to access many different types of data.
Its platform is divided into four sections:
- A Spokeo Name search can provide you with:
- Phone numbers
- Email addresses
- Age and date of birth
- Addresses
- Relatives
- Marital status
- Education level
- A Spokeo Reverse Email search or Username search can provide:
- Public profiles on social network platforms and dating sites
- Public photos and videos posted online
- Reviews and blog entries the person has posted on the internet
- The Spokeo Phone Number Lookup Feature can provide:
- First and last name of the phone’s owner
- Address that the phone is registered to
- Whether you are dealing with mobile phones, landlines, or business lines
- Age of the owner
- Carrier
- A Spokeo Reverse Address search can provide:
- Names of current and past residents
- Owner information
- Estimated value and building statistics
- Phone numbers, email addresses, social network profiles of owners and/or tenants
- Neighborhood information
Spokeo Pricing and Plans
Spokeo provides the lowest cost spy dialer in the industry, along with the simplest pricing plan. As we mentioned above, after running a totally free reverse phone lookup, you will be offered a $0.95 trial to try out their paid services.
If you wish to continue beyond the trial, the paid subscription is $13.95 per month, $7.95 per month for a three-month membership, or $4.95 per month for a six-month membership. The add-on searches for public records, court records, or historical records will only cost you $2.95 each.
Spokeo Interface and Use
The Spokeo search algorithm truly is a technical marvel, as it can deliver some of the fastest search bar results in the industry (despite having over 300 billion records to sift through).
Spokeo even has the ability to find information that many of the other reverse lookup sites can’t, like international phone number search results and information on non-US residents. Even with all of the benefits that Spokeo provides, its interface is extremely easy to use and works very quickly.
Pros
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Spokeo can find information that other reverse lookup sites can't
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The search results are extremely fast
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With Spokeo, you can choose manual searches to dig deeper into specific information
Cons
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The platform isn't designed to look for criminal records
Star Rating
/ 5.0
Zoom Info has a very different intent than the reverse phone lookup service companies listed above, but it uses the same basic technology.
Rather than trying to use reverse cell phone lookup services to find information on the owner, Zoom Info helps professionals conduct a business search to find contact information that they can use to initiate conversations with potential business partners.
Zoom Info is mostly used to help companies and salespeople connect by allowing them to look up phone numbers for specific people at other companies.
What’s included in the Zoom Info free reverse phone lookup?
Because Zoom Info is built as a platform for use in the business setting rather than to help people run down unknown numbers, they don’t really have a single free search that can help you identify an unknown caller or find information using only a phone number.
They do offer a trial version, which is a temporary opportunity to have access to the full suite of paid software for long enough to test it out.
What’s included in the Zoom Info paid version?
Created as a platform to connect salespeople and startups with professionals that can help their business grow, much like the free reverse phone number lookup services above, their business provides access to information.
In the paid version of Zoom Info, the type of information that you gain access to includes:
- Name of the professional
- Telephone directory for various companies
- Direct contact for specific professionals (office or cell phones)
- Verified professional email address lookup
- Professional profiles online
- Job responsibilities-based search results
- Work experience
- Education
- Social media profile links
- Alerts when target profiles are updated
Zoom Info Pricing and Plans
Because Zoom Info caters to businesses rather than Private Investigators or individuals, their pricing plans are built to offer their suite of B2B information, data, and marketing packages to those businesses.
Its pricing plans are broken into SalesOS (to focus on sales), MarketingOS (to focus on marketing), and TalentOS (to focus on finding talent). Each of these suites of services is further broken down into Professional, Advanced, and Elite pricing tiers.
Professional ($14,995 per year)
- 5,000 bulk data credits
- Chrome extension
- Direct phone & verified email addresses
- Integrations
Advanced ($24,995 per year)
- 10,000 bulk credits
- Chrome extension
- Direct phone & verified email addresses
- Integrations
- 1,000 monthly data credits per user
- Technologies
- Mobile phones and personal email address lookup
- Org charts
- Scoops
- Locations & hierarchy
- Six intent topics
Elite ($39,995 per year)
- Includes all of the above, plus
- Attributes
- Workflows
It should be noted that this pricing is based on a two-year contract (which the company prefers), but your company can also choose a one-year contract that will cost a little more.
Zoom Info Interface and Use
Because Zoom Info was built to cater to busy professionals and salespeople, they knew that the interface and platform had to provide an enormous amount of data but also be extremely easy to use. Zoom Info is full of integrations so that it can work with your current sales technology or management software that is key to your organization. The reviews really say it all, with over 4,000 5-star reviews on the software from its users.
Pros
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Full of integrations with the software your company already uses
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Push-button access to needed and verified contact data
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Built with the busy professional in mind
Cons
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Job titles can often differ from what is listed on LinkedIn
Star Rating
/ 5.0
If your company is built around using that people-based data, People Data Labs was created to help you refine that information. The data on people, their behaviors, purchases, networks, likes, and dislikes have become a booming business, and the global Big Data and Analytics industry is estimated at $274 billion.
What’s included in the People Data labs free reverse phone lookup?
Just like Zoom Info, People Data Labs is designed for businesses, not individuals looking for a spy dialer to help them run a free reverse phone number search. Although People Data Labs has a database with information on over 1 billion people globally, that data isn’t quite geared to be used for a simple phone search.
If you are a business that runs on accurate and actionable data, People Data Labs will give you introductory access to their database with no credit card required. Since their business focuses on selling information as needed in “slices” to data-driven companies, you’re not going to get much more than a peek at the greater puzzle with their free version.
What’s included in the People data labs paid version?
People Data Labs separates its pricing into tiers, much like Zoom Info. The pricing tiers and what they provide are as follows:
Free Tier
- For volumes up to 100 monthly credits per product
- Person Enrichment, Person Search, Company Enrichment, and Company Search APIs
- Supplemental Autocomplete and Cleaner API access
- Documentation and tutorials
- Email support
- GDPR, CCPA, and SOC 2 Type 2 compliant data
Professional Tier (starting at $99 per month)
- For volumes from 1,000 to 25,000 monthly credits
- Everything in the Free Tier
- Monthly or annual options
- Email support with enhanced response times
Enterprise Tier (custom pricing)
- For high volumes at an enterprise scale
- Premium field bundles
- Custom rate limits
- API or data license delivery
- A Dedicated customer success manager
- SSO & SAML
People Data Labs Interface and Use
Unlike the other companies we reviewed above, People Data Labs is built to integrate directly into your existing systems, rather than being another suite of software that you or your company has to access. This is done through APIs that feed various information and data directly into the systems that your company uses.
The APIs from People Data Labs are extremely well documented and pretty easy to use, as long as you are an IT professional who knows how to work with enormous data sets! To the end-user of these products, the data from People Data Labs is designed to integrate smoothly and without notice into your current software.
Pros
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APIs are well-documented and easy to use
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Search queries can be highly defined
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The system processes are clear-cut and easy to follow
Cons
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Data recency is an issue
Star Rating
/ 5.0
How to Choose the Best Reverse Phone Lookup
There are a lot of different reverse phone lookup websites on the market, and most of them will promise to deliver a complete spy dialer that gives you every bit of information that you need for free. In reality, however, even the best ones will only give you a tiny sliver of information for free in your reverse phone number lookup. To help you sift through the marketing claims to find the best free reverse phone number lookup, as well as the best premium plans, here are the criteria that we used for this article:
Fairness
There are more than a few background search and reverse cell phone lookup companies out there that will promise a completely free reverse phone number lookup, but ask for your credit card info. Some of them will trick you into a recurring paid membership without telling you directly, and make it incredibly difficult to figure out how to cancel the plan. We don’t think that is a good business practice, so the companies on our list are those that don’t play that game.
Pricing, Plans, Payment Methods
If you need a straightforward reverse phone search or background search, the last thing that you want is to have to decipher an extremely complicated pricing plan. The companies on our list are upfront about their pricing, give you multiple options, and accept all of the standard payment methods.
Easy to Use Interface
Much of the information provided by a spy dialer or in a background report could be found online – but only if you took the time and had the patience to sift through dozens of various government databases. Part of the allure of using a company to do this for you is that it is faster and easier, but not all interfaces for companies that provide these phone detective services are easy to navigate. The services on our list above were chosen because their interfaces are simple, intuitive, and easy to use.
Customer Support
People are often using a spy dialer or running a background search because something is going on and they want an answer quickly. The last thing that you want is to get stuck on an issue with the interface and not be able to figure out how to get what you need. Along with being easy to use, the companies listed above each have dedicated customer support that has great reviews for helping customers with any issues.
Turnaround Time
Most of these companies that provide reverse phone searches promise to do so quickly. To make it on our list, the companies above had to be able to deliver their results with a fast turnaround time, typically within one browser session.
Accuracy
There are many reasons to run a reverse phone search, and many of them can be highly emotional with major consequences. Whether it’s a spouse worried that their significant other is cheating or a professional trying to vet a potential business partner, the information needs to provide highly accurate data. The companies on our list are highly recognized for having some of the most accurate data in the industry.
What Information Can You Check in a Reverse Phone Lookup?
That all depends on the company that you choose. Some of these companies pull their information from the dark web, others prioritize social media profiles, and a few choose government databases as their main source of data. Where the data comes from and what the company specializes in will determine what type of data they provide, and which type they will be the best at discovering. Use our list above to determine which service will be the best for your specific needs.
What Is a Reverse Phone Lookup?
A reverse phone lookup is a service provided by database companies that provides varying amounts of information and data about the owner of a particular phone number. Most provide a small amount of data in their free reverse phone lookup, but reputable companies (like the ones listed above) can provide a wealth of information when simply given a phone number. Things like address history, social media profiles, known associates, education history, photos to verify the person, marital status, and more can be provided by the right reverse phone lookup service.
FAQs
What is the Best Free Reverse Phone Lookup?
Use the list above to decide which services are the best free reverse phone lookup services for the information that you are seeking. Because different spy dialer services aggregate their data from different sources and focus on different methods, each will provide slightly different data results.
What is a Spy Dialer?
A spy dialer is simply another term used for a reverse phone lookup service. These companies use their databases to provide information on the owner of a cell phone.
Are Reverse Phone Lookups Accurate?
Yes, reverse phone lookups are accurate. The reputable spy dialer companies listed above are highly acclaimed for having largely accurate datasets and can be trusted that the information they provide is accurate and verified.
Can a Spy Dialer Provide Information on a Google Voice phone number?
Google doesn’t provide your personal information to CNAM, which is how these spy dialers often find the information for the person to whom a phone is registered. If you ported an old phone number to Google, your information may still be given if the database that it’s pulling from hasn’t been updated. But if the number originally started with Google, the services will not be given your information.
Best Free Reverse Phone Lookup: Key Takeaways
Not all free reverse phone number lookup companies are created equal. While most spy dialer services will provide you with information, they aren’t always accurate, and more than a few will use sneaky marketing or sales tactics to get you into a paid membership or provide you with sub-par information. The article above will help guide you to the best reverse phone lookup free services, and can also lead you to the best premium services.
Published : September 30,2022