It is truly astonishing how many people are looking to run a free reverse cell phone lookup online today. Visit any popular social networking site or popular discussion forum and you will discover the same question being asked over and over again - how can I run a free reverse phone lookup, for cell and residential numbers? What is frustrating is the large number of sites which appear to offer this very service, but in fact once you visit their websites you find they require payment for access. This is a common tactic used by many websites which on the surface offer free services but look more carefully and they do not. What is the true situation with free reverse phone number lookups?

A reverse phone number lookup can certainly be very useful, for example where you have noted down a phone number but cannot remember who gave it to you. If the phone number is a residential "landline" phone number it can be possible to use a "reverse lookup" service to find out the owner and address. More difficult however is to perform a similar lookup using a cell phone number. This is because the free directories do not have access to the cell numbers which are controlled independently by the individual cellular carrier companies, and so cannot access this information. Other details such as fax and unlisted numbers can also be impossible to find.

So is it even possible to find this information? On the plus side, there certainly do exist websites which have access to both the residential and cellular carrier number databases, and it is possible to gain access to this information. Unfortunately this information cannot currently be found for free. The phone number records are held by the phone companies who agree to let others access the details for at a price. Third party websites have now appeared which legally gather together huge numbers of different databases and charge users a single one-off membership fee for access, including databases such as cell phone lookups, residential phone lookups, background and people search information, civil and criminal records, and many more. The good news is that once you have access, you can run as many searches and investigations as you want. Information such as phone owner name, address and phone status is included, plus pagers and even unlisted number searches.

One of the advantages of using a paid membership service such as this is the wealth of additional information you can gain access to. For example once you have access you can perform personal background checks and investigations of the sort a private detective would perform. Information to help you find people or family members, lookup business criminal and court records, even birth death and marriage records. In situations where you are suspicious about someone you know you could even run checks for police or sex offender records as part of your membership.

As you may have read in forum discussions and social networking sites when people ask about a reverse cell phone lookup, some people provide links which they claim offer this information for free. However having followed these links many times I have still to find one which was real for both cell and residential. In my experience they all lead eventually to the same paid sites. Some may offer a free search, but will then charge for access to the results. Unfortunately in my opinion the only way to access legitimate reverse phone records online is by paying for access to the paid directories, but it is worth remembering that the legitimate lookup sites all offer money back guarantees, so you can be sure they are not scams. It is worth paying a small fee to a professional organisation for that peace of mind.