Starting a Background Check With a Phone Number

Running a background check is simple through online search companies. Simply a last name and city are enough to access all kinds of information about a person, from property histories to criminal records.

Sometimes, though, you need information about a person and the only thing you have is a phone number, culled from persistent hang-ups, a half-remembered note, or an unknown number in your caller ID. That phone number can be all that’s necessary to get begin a background check.

When checking out a person based on a phone number, there are two steps. First, do a reverse lookup on the number to get the name, then, if necessary, use the name to run a background check. Both reverse phone lookups and background checks can be run near-instantaneously using an online search company.

Step 1: Reverse Phone Lookup

An unknown phone number is unexpected and irritating. It may be an unknown caller calling several times over several days, someone who won’t leave a message or answer the phone when you call back. That unknown number leaves you with the question: why?

The first thing you do may be to use an online white pages to look up the number. Odds are, however, that a standard online directory is not going to return a name. Performing a reverse phone lookup can be surprisingly tricky because millions of phone numbers, the majority issued, are not available in a standard phone directory.

·        Roughly 65 million households (60%) have unlisted phone numbers

·        Only a fraction of the 233 million cell phones is listed, and all cell phone directories are voluntary.

·        Many internal business lines, ranging from offices to call centers, only publish their main number, not individual internal numbers.

Additionally, published phone directories (and, therefore, the online white pages which rely on them) are only updated once a year. Considering that about 20% of people move every year, it’s likely for the directories to get out of date long before their next publishing cycle. Even the US Census Bureau reckons that as few as 35% of public directory listings are accurate year over year.

Professional search companies are invaluable for reverse lookups because their datasets are not based on public directories. Professional search companies make millions of otherwise inaccessible phone numbers available.

Step 2: Background Check

Frequently, a reverse lookup is only the first step to figuring out who is calling. A name is only half of a person’s identity; the other half is their history. If you still don’t know who is calling, even after getting their name and address, consider following up the reverse directory with a background check.

A background check requires a name and city, information received already with the reverse phone lookup. A background search reviews county, state, and federal public records and specific types of private databases to paint its history, covering a wide range of information for financial, criminal, and personal information:

·        Property ownership and asset values, including current home values

·        Aliases and other known nicknames

·        Relatives, neighbors, former roommates, and known associates

·        Bankruptcies, tax liens, and civil judgments

·        Marriage and divorce records

·        Birth records

·        State criminal search, including charges, arrest files, and sentencing

·        Complete address and phone histories

How you use a background report depends on the circumstances surrounding the initial calls. The reverse search and background history together can tell you whether the person was a cell phone or landline, an individual or a company. Past that, background reports highlight relationships between people by showing the names of near neighbors, known roommates, and family members, along with past marriages, divorces, and much more.. It sheds a bit of light into their financial situationand their behavior.

The reverse lookup gives the who is calling. The background check information is the starting point for answering the why they are calling.