For almost ever one of us, there has been a time when we have got calls from certain personal (read cell phone) numbers and have been curious to know who it was that was calling from an unknown number, but were apprehensive about calling back to check.
Maybe it was a person we didn't want to keep in touch with, may be an ex girlfriend/boyfriend who was calling from a different number to harass.
Maybe it was a legal call, maybe it was someone else we just didn't want to talk to at the moment.
That used to leave us with two main option earlier: --> Yellow/White pages: Cell phone numbers aren't considered part of the public domain - hence are private information.
So, you wont find cell phone numbers listed on Yellow/White Pages.
Also, these telephone directories don't list all phone numbers.
So there goes your doughnut.
--> Internet search engines: These are unbelievable tools.
They will 'crawl' across millions of webpages and find the relevant information for you.
But there is a catch - the info shows up in the result only if it is present on some webpage on the internet.
People generally don't list their personal cell phone numbers on webpages, so search engines wont come up with accurate results most of the time.
This is where reverse cell phone directories come in.
Telephone companies maintain records of all phone numbers sold by them and reverse cell phone directories simply buy out the rights to these directories.
And by paying a fee to them, which is not large by any stretch of the imagination, you can access these information, which include name, address, income bracket etc of the person owning the number easily and accurately.