In pre-internet times, looking for a person’s telephone number entailed calling the directory assistance operator in the town they lived in. The problem there was that if you didn’t have the town right or just weren’t sure where they were living at the time, you didn’t get a phone listing that person. Worse yet, if the person elected to have their number unlisted or nonpublished, you would get charged for the operator assistance & switched to a recording informing you that the person’s phone number is unlisted.

Compounding the problem is that an increasing percentage of people are electing to use cell phone numbers as their primary house phone number, and deleting their landline phone account altogether.

Because of the inherent phone privacy issues with cell phone numbers and the lack of a corresponding reverse phone directory for cell numbers, a sharp increase in the number of U.S. phone numbers that cannot be successfully reversed using conventional directory asisstance 411 searches was seen.To service this issue, several companies have developed advanced data mining systems and applied these algorithms to public records.

The results are very impressive; upwards of 90% of the U.S. phone numbers we tested reverse correctly to the current owner’s name and address. Further, 68% of the name and address searches correctly returned the current working phone number for the person.