In this article, I will talk about the TOP-10 simple ways to find out who called from a phone number. The article will be divided into 2 categories of methods – paid and free.
First, a brief instruction. This article primarily concerns mobile phone numbers of the Russian Federation, since methods for searching information differ for other countries, and even vary by region and country. For example, what works in the USA does not work in Spain and is completely inapplicable to Asian countries.
So, an unknown person called you and you want to find out who this person is and possibly gather some information about them, not just learn their name. Let’s figure it out. As an example, in most cases I will use my own phone number +79506779955, where appropriate, personal data will be hidden.
Let’s start with simple and free methods. The methodology of searching for information consists of sequentially trying all possible methods until you are satisfied with the result or convinced that all possible methods have been exhausted.
As a starting point and method #0, I will say that you should begin the check by verifying the number in popular messengers:
To avoid complicating your life with links to start a conversation in the messengers mentioned, which allow viewing the contact card without adding it to the phone book, I’ll give you a simpler tip — add the phone number to your address book, open each messenger, press the button to start a chat with this contact, go to the contact’s profile (click on their name at the top of the chat window), then delete the contact from the messenger’s address book.
As a result, you will get how the person has set their own name in the messenger’s settings. Also, in some cases, you will see their photo here.
For example, there was a contact named “Call regarding services 1508,” after simple manipulations in the three mentioned messengers, we get information about the caller’s first name, last name, and appearance:
Input was:
Output became:
Now let’s look at 5 main free ways to find out who called by phone number.
Using mobile banking apps, you can find out the first name, patronymic, and the first letter of the surname of a person if their phone number is linked to a bank account.
It’s quite simple — choose to transfer by phone number in the Sberbank app (or another bank), confirm the entered data is correct, and that’s it. Among popular banks, Sberbank is convenient because it shows the first name and patronymic, while many other banks display only the first name and the initial of the surname.
Example of obtained information:
This method not only allows you to know who called by phone number but also to identify accounts in social networks.
Unfortunately, this method does not work for all popular social networks, so I will give examples of finding information in “VKontakte” and “Odnoklassniki”.
The algorithm for obtaining information is clearly shown in the images of the following gallery. The key point on the second screenshot is that you need to click not “Phone,” but the small-font phrase “Contact support,” then select “Need login/password” – “Forgot password.” Next, enter the available phone number, and if the person has an account in this social network, you will see partial data about their profile, which in most cases is enough to find the user in search using the available data.
Here it’s a bit more complicated because to find an account you need to know the surname indicated in the user’s profile. Therefore, to determine the surname, we use data obtained by applying other methods described in this article.
To find the VK profile, you need to go to the user authorization page, enter the known phone number, click on the link “Forgot or didn’t set a password?”, solve the captcha, enter the surname. If the surname is entered correctly, you will get the profile name, the specified city (country), and the avatar. Using this data, in most cases, it is easy to find the user by searching the social network.
Very powerful tools for most cases. They allow you to identify not only the first name and surname of the person who called you from an unknown number but in some cases also get a lot of information about their profession, place of residence, marital status, hobbies and other details.
I classify this method as free because some functionality is available immediately after installing the mobile app, but certain features require a subscription — keep that in mind. At minimum, you can accomplish the goal of this article — identifying who called from a phone number — for free.
For an example of the kind of information you can extract using these apps from my phone number, see the screenshots below.
As you can see, besides my full name, a keen observer will notice that Aleksey Ivanovich Sedykh lives in Kaliningrad, previously lived and worked in the criminal investigation department of Surgut, is a private detective, conducts internet investigations, practices crossfit, studied at the Omsk Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and lived on Dzerzhinsky street.
Quite a lot of information, wouldn’t you agree?!
The apps are available in the App Store and Google Play under the names mentioned above.
In some cases, information about the owner of a mobile phone number can be found in organization directories such as 2Gis, Yandex-Directory (this info is also available in Yandex.Navigator and Yandex.Maps). This is possible if the phone number was listed as a contact for companies added to these directories.
For example, my phone number appears in both directories:
You can try searching for mentions of the phone number across various online resources. After all, search engines index forums, social media posts, and other places where the number might have appeared.
There’s one subtlety — you don’t know exactly how the phone number might have been formatted. It could be written with +7, or with 8; it could be without separators, or with dashes, and so on. For the search engine, these are different queries. Therefore, it’s wise to search using all possible variants. How to do that? You can manually type all variants, write a simple Excel formula to generate the queries, or use special services or bots that do this for you — I personally use the Excel formula method.
Check out the difference! Here’s the search result for the straightforward version of my phone number on Google:
And here’s a slightly expanded query:
The difference is obvious. Also, I immediately exclude all junk results that appear with any phone number search, like these guys:
There’s zero useful info there, so it’s better to add exclusion keywords to your search query. A simple set of exclusion keywords can be:
Add these exclusion words at the end of your search query, and the results become much more relevant:
There are a number of resources that allow you to search published (including archived) ads on Avito. Some Telegram bots (mentioned below) can do this as well. Some are paid, some are free.
Among the free resources, I can recommend this site: https://bbro.su/searh_by_phone.aspx
It is quite simple and not the most efficient, but it is free.
Just enter the person’s phone number and get a list of their ads on Avito, as well as their name.
Returning to method #4 (search in directories), let’s continue the topic of searching for caller data among contact details of companies and individual entrepreneurs. Unlike the directories mentioned above, this method allows you to find information even among inactive organizations.
One of the free services that allows this is located at: https://www.list-org.com/
For example, if you search for me, you can find information that I was a founder and liquidator of the now inactive company “Smart Invest”:
In the final part of the article, I will talk about two effective ways to find out who called from a phone number that I personally use in my daily work. They require some financial costs, but the results combined with the above-mentioned search methods justify the expenses.
I decided to mention Lampyre because I actively use it in my investigations and checks, although in reality it is hardly suitable for an ordinary user who just wants to find out once who called them, having only the phone number of the subject. The tool has a fairly wide functionality for searching and analyzing information about various digital identifiers.
In the screenshot on the left side, you can see only part of the digital identifiers by which it is possible to search, besides the phone number itself:
These include email, domain name, social media profiles, and much more, which is of interest mainly to specialists in digital intelligence.
For example, having my phone number as input, you can build a linkage diagram like this:
Here we see that the number is linked to messenger accounts, with photos connected right away, tags with my first and last name, accounts in some social networks, and a number of other connections.
Using Lampyre, you can deepen the investigation based on newly discovered identifiers, continuously enriching the dossier on the individual. The tool costs 29 euros per month, available at: https://lampyre.io.
Note: Information about using bots in Telegram has been removed. The article was edited in accordance with changes to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and the introduction of Article 272.1, which provides criminal liability for unlawful handling of personal data.
There are other ways to search for information about the owner of a phone number, which are more suitable for specialists in digital intelligence rather than the wider audience this article was primarily aimed at. For example, you can search for domain names registered with contact data including a phone number using special services.
We have reviewed the TOP-10 ways to find out who called from a phone number. If meaningful questions arose during reading, or if you want to thank me for the time spent writing the article, you can leave a comment and share it with your friends.
Sincerely, head of the detective agency Alexey Sedykh
