What is a free reverse phone directory? It is a type of telephone directory which allows people to look up details about someone using only a telephone number. In other words, if you have a phone number, you can discover who owns it and find out a lot more besides.

With this in mind, many of you may wonder what the point of such a service is. In actual fact, these types of service can be useful for several different legitimate purposes.

Say, for instance, that you have received a number of threatening phone calls to your house. You can get the telephone number using the normal caller id service, but this will not tell you who was calling you. With a free reverse phone directory, you can quickly discover the details of who was calling you - it might be a neighbor's teenager, or an ex. Or, it could be a local criminal.

Likewise, these sites can be used to discover who your teenagers are talking to on the phone. Many parents worry that their kids are in touch with bad influences, such as criminals and drug dealers. A reverse telephone search can help you to find out background information about the person who owns a phone, and can even help you to uncover their criminal history.

So, as you can see, there are a number of valuable uses for these services.

Now for the bad news. You see, the majority of the free reverse phone directory services that exist on the Internet right now depend on site visitors submitting their information. This means that you can only find out details about people who have volunteered their information in the past. This is clearly no good when you are looking for details about people who are likely to try and hide their activities!

And even when the person has nothing to hide, most people are still reluctant to publish their contact details on the Internet where any lunatic or stalker could use it to harass them.

For this reason, it is always a good idea to use a paid service, which collects information from a large number of different sources, including government and county files. These records contain the most up to date information about phone numbers, and are legal for the public to access.

The best services offer their search facilities to you with a number of different payment options, from a small one time fee for a single search, to an affordable one time membership fee for people who want to make many searches over time.

I provide a link to the services I recommend most highly in the space below.