Prepaid Phone Reverse Reality

Prepaid phones have become the most popular type of consumer cellular phone account today. You can juggle the reasons why between affordability, privacy and the fact that you can pick one up at Target while you’re buying baby diapers. It’s also an obstacle to overcome for most of us who have a prepaid phone number and need to figure out where it sleeps at night and with whom.

Postpaid phone numbers are so much easier to reverse with databases such as Skipsmasher, Delvepoint, and IRBsearch but only if its owner has had the number for a while and actively uses it pushing their information into mainstream marketing data which our favorite databases will ultimately include.

Insurance purchases, debt collectors, and payday loans, along with any other type of service which caters to the under-banked sector of consumers, add to the list of strong data aggregation making it a fantastic combination for verifying information on a prepaid cell phone number.

Alternatively, social media delivers another source to link an identity to a number. Search the phone number as you would a name in the search bar Facebook. You could find public posts that include the phone number even if you don’t find an account linked to it. If you find a profile linked to a phone number, don’t jump for joy yet, you still have to confirm that person is the current owner of the phone.

If a phone number is ported from a cell provider to Google Voice, open-source and professional databases won’t show the date of porting until those sources update their own records. This could take months, or over a year to happen. I’m looking for dates to compare to other reports I’ve pulled so I can rule it out or confirm whom it belongs to. This matters because a number can be [read more...]