Will a Phone Lookup Help Find Criminals?

Criminals are all around us. At the park, grocery store, bar, and even on the bus. It’s hard to know exactly what anyone has done in their life by just a glance or even by a short conversation. If you’re someone who’s concerned with safety and meticulously crafts your safety plans for every situation, you’ve probably wondered at some point or another if a phone look up could help you in this endeavor. So, today we’re looking a little deeper into the kind of information that you can get from a phone lookup and how it can help you keep yourself and your family a little safer.

Defining Phone Lookups

Phone lookups aren’t something that has been encountered by most of the general population, and that means that some explanations are in order. It’s really a relatively simple process, but we want to make sure that all of our readers are on the same page and understand exactly what we’re talking about.

A phone lookup is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It’s also known as a reverse phone number lookup and just a phone number lookup. You find a website that offers the service, then you just enter the phone number, and you get whatever information the particular website has to offer. Different websites offer different amounts of information, but we’ll get more into that in a little bit. The important thing to note for now is that you can always find a service that provides exactly the information that you need.

How do Phone Lookups Work?

Even though a phone lookup isn’t that complicated on the surface, the mechanisms that make such a search possible are considered fascinating to many people in the tech field. It’s equally simple and elegant and understanding how these searches work can make your search even more effective.

Phone lookup services operate by accessing public records databases. Who owns a phone number is public record, so these services can simply access the appropriate databases and provide whatever information is returned. The tricky part about this is that, in some cases, their systems have to check thousands of databases to get the information that you’re looking for.

This has just been describing what happens with a basic phone lookup service, but what about more advanced services? Well, those get a little trickier because they first need to find out who owns the phone number, then they need to cross-reference that information with other public records databases to find the rest of the information that the user is looking for.

More advanced phone lookup services are able to provide a lot of information about the person in question, but sometimes that’s just not what you need out of your phone lookup. Some people just want to verify the name of the person who owns the phone number, and that’s perfectly reasonable.

Finding Criminals with a Phone Lookup

One thing that some of the most advanced phone lookup services can do that the simpler ones can’t do is find someone’s background records. There is a whole lot of information available about just about anyone on the public record, and if it exists, you can find it. That means that the right service can, in fact, find out if someone has a criminal record.

Criminal records are considered public records, so that means that the advanced services that offer phone lookups can find them with ease. You can also find things like court records, active warrant information, driving records, arrest records, home address, email address, and sometimes even more. It really depends on what’s on the public record, but if there’s anything on the public record about the person in question from anywhere in the country, you’ll be able to easily access it.

The practical applications of such a tool are nearly endless. Want to make sure that your little cousin isn’t hanging out with the wrong people? Just do a quick search to find out if they have any warrants. Want to make sure that hottie you have a date with isn’t going to murder you? One thing you could do to ease your mind a little is look into their background through a phone lookup. It’s really that easy, and it can be pretty quick, too.

Why Were Phone Lookups Created?

As with just about anything in our society, especially on the internet, if someone didn’t make it, it simply wouldn’t exist. That same axiom is true of phone lookup services, but why were they created? It’s a surprisingly simple story, actually.

The roots of phone lookups can be traced back to phone books. If you’re of the right age, you can probably remember a time when the yellow pages and white pages were overly abundant. Before the internet, these books could help you find phone numbers for anything from your grandma to someone who could fix your roof for you.

Then came the first caller I.D.s. Caller I.D.s needed some way to identify the person that was calling, even if their phone number wasn’t programmed in. The information that was given to the caller I.D. was taken from the phone company, and from there, it was transmitted to the device so the user would always know exactly who was calling.

After the advent and subsequent rise of the internet, it became clear to many people that there needed to be a digital way to gather this information. That’s where phone number lookup services came from. A market was created as phone books were dying and our caller I.D.s, surprisingly, became less advanced than they were in the past. It was really just someone filling in a supply where an existing demand had less and less resources to get what they were looking for.

How to do a Phone Lookup

If you’ve read this entire article and now you’re at the point that you want to try it for yourself, we have some good news. We’re going to draw you a roadmap so you can be on your way to doing your own phone lookup. The best part is, most methods for doing this are incredibly fast, so it doesn’t matter if you’re in a time crunch or you’re just doing this to kill some time.

The first method is using social media. This method is far from the best, but this could be a good first step if you just want to do a very cursory search. Most social media platforms require a phone number to sign up as a defense against bots. That means that you might be able to look up a phone number on a social media website and find the user linked to that phone number. Of course, for privacy purposes, most sites allow users to choose if they can be found by their phone number or not. That can make this a little trickier but worry not.

If you only want a little information about the owner of a phone number, you just need to find one of the most basic phone number lookup services. These services will just give you the name of the person that owns the phone number. It’s basic information, but if that’s all you want, that’s all you want. This method is a little more effective than using social media because it doesn’t rely on the person in question allowing the service to find them by phone number. It simply checks through public records to find the information you need.

Lastly, if you’re looking to find out if someone has a criminal record, you’re more than likely going to want to find a good personal background check service. Personal background check services are about as old as the internet, and they can provide loads more information than the last two methods that we listed. Anything that’s on their criminal record will be instantly made available to you, and you’ll definitely know if they have any warrants out for their arrest. Because this method is instant and also provides a treasure trove of information, it is very popular among people that routinely do these kinds of searches.

Keeping Yourself Safe with Phone Lookups

There’s a lot of danger in this world, unfortunately. Planning for safety and sticking to your plans can be a challenge. Fortunately, there are many tools out there to further help you achieve your goal of staying safe. Whether you just need more information about someone, or you need to plan for the worst, the internet has resources that can help you. Phone lookups are just one tool of many that can help you make sure that the people you’re seeing aren’t dangerous criminals only looking to do you harm.

***SpyFly provides consumers affordable, immediate access to public record information. Federal laws prohibit businesses from using SpyFly’s service to make decisions about employment, insurance, consumer credit, tenant screening, or for any other purpose subject to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, 15 USC 1681 et seq.**