In the earliest days of my internet experience, I remember being able to do a web search for a phone number and sometimes actually find something useful. That said, this niche has long been dominated by some of the fakest, most scammy, bullshit sites on the web. From calling themselves “free” when they are not, to the fake “searching”, “sifting through results”, “correlating records” wait screens that are much like the deceptive, manipulative, and nontransparent airline industry, to the mentally manipulative exclamation point in the red warning triangle to tease you that there might be criminal records.
Why is this area of the web so scammy?
Who made it like this?
Has anyone tried to fix it?
Is there a any site out there that can actually do a reverse lookup and isn’t a cesspool of popups, pay gates, and fake loading screens?
Have you visited whitepages.com lately?
I did today, but I don’t go anywhere online without an ad blocker. There is a bunch of BS services on there for criminal background check etc, but I was able to quickly get what I needed in one shot.
Fascinating because it behaves for me as if intelus owns it.
ETA:
Ok. I figured out where we were different. I was only doing reverse searches of known land lines. Once I put in a mobile number or tried looking up the same person by name it all went sideways.
Ahhh. That makes sense. I don’t really even know that many elderly people with a landline. The few I do know who have one are still connected by internet, and I really don’t understand how they can call it a landline.
Yeah. That makes things more tough. Whitepages are residential landline numbers. Cell phones were considered unpublished numbers by default. As scammy as the site is, they are offering private information for a fee. Having worked in a 411 call center for a few years, I can understand why it is being sold. IMHO, the search result should be a buck or less.