I recently had my Blackberry stolen from my car. Guess what...I got it back! The fellow who had it seemed like a fairly decent chap...I don't know how to gauge these things. (Yes, he did buy my phone for a $100 from some unknown guy and he did use it for a month on my service....but he did return it instead of tossing it in a dumpster.)
In order to try to track the person down who had been using the phone, we had only ONE thing - the phone records of the phone calls that he made. So the challenge was to connect these phone numbers to people and people to addresses so that we could investigate and try to find out who had the phone.
In the process of doing this, we used several different Internet lookup services: 1) Information USA - available through the local library as one of their databases; 2) ReversePhoneLookup.com; and 3) Intelius. I thought I would share some observations about all three of these.
Information USA - This was free to us through our local library so the price was right. Basically, it has only land lines that are published in directories as far as I can determine. I was able to get a few phone numbers, but I decided to move on to for-fee resources for better performance (or so I thought).
ReversePhoneLookup.com - This cost $40 for a year's lookups. On the postive side, I would say the interface was a tad friendlier. Also, it gave the name of the local telecom provider who was handling the phone as well as the city origin of the exchange. NOTE: Now that you can transfer phone numbers across telecom providers and from landlines to mobile, I don't know if their data is accurate. (i.e., something tells me that they are probably giving the origin provider, not the current one). Anyway, I didn't care who the provider was, and I had only marginal interest in the exchange location (since a lot of these were mobile phones). AS FAR AS I COULD TELL, I could have gotten the names/addresses from InfoUSA instead of buying this service. If I knew then what I know now about what I would get, I would NOT have purchased it. Recommendation: Use the library's database; it's landline lookup is as good as this one.
Intelius - This service GURANTEES that they will get the name, and they'll charge you $14/number. In my case, they failed to deliver, so at least I didn't get charged. But here's what bugged me about how they operate....When you type in the phone number, they return a screen that says "NAME AVAILABLE" and "ADDRESS AVAILABLE" suggesting that if you buy the lookup that you'll get the name/address. Bascially, they are printing that for EVERY phone number that you key in WITHOUT REGARD to whether or not they can actually pull the name/address. I treat such marketing as a lie, and I don't like being lied to. It's bad enough that they misrepresented that they had the address, but they took 3-4 days before they told me that it was a no-charge situation. I didn't try to go elsewhere with the number because I thought they were going to produce results. Anyway, you get the point of the frustration.
Peoplefinders - This is a plug-in-the-name-and-get-the-name/number service. This allowed me to look up someone by name, and since I knew where they lived, they showed related parties. VERY INTERESTING. I didn't pay to actually pull the details, but the free teaser was pretty interesting because it gave me all the siblings names. (My thought was that if I couldn't get in contact with the guy who had the phone, then I'd contact all the siblings.)
But all's well that ends well. I hope this was of interest and value. If you have tried a service that you like, please leave a comment so that I know of other good ones for the future.
Margaret Hokkanen
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