One of the most frustrating things about owning a cellphone is when you miss calls.
You see, unlike land lines your cell phone stores the numbers that have called you in the call register.
However, unless the number is already in your address book then you probably wont be able to tell who it was that was calling you.
Until now, it has been almost impossible to get this information as there simply has not been a publicly available cell phone number directory.
However, that's all changed with the release of a number of reverse cellphone number lookup websites on the internet.
These specialist websites allow you to enter a cell number into a special search screen and when you hit return you are presented with a whole pile of useful information about the registered owner.
As you would expect, you can determine the owners name, registered address and carrier information.
What's more amazing though is that many of the reverse cellphone number lookup services that are coming on-line now also tie into a whole range of public records as well so you can pick up credit histories, criminal records and date of births, marriages and so on.
You might think that these services would cost a lot of money given the amount of hard to obtain information that they supply, after all if you hired a specialist to find this stuff out it could cost you thousands of dollars in fees.
However, the typical prices start from as little as $10 a search and most of the big reverse cellphone number lookup providers also offer unlimited search packages for around $35-$40.
Now you have no excuse for not knowing who is calling you.
Recently I had a whole series of calls that I couldn't identify so I used one of these services only to discover it was a telemarketing firm.
One quick call to my cell provider and I managed to get that company's number blocked and they haven't bothered me since.
Now that is a great use of a reverse cellphone lookup service in my book.