Want to know who’s calling your cell? You no longer need to hire a private detective, no matter how tempting that may seem. Instead you can perform a number of completely cost free searches either by yourself or with the assistance of a company.

The biggest, cheapest and easiest cell phone number directory on earth is right under your fingers. The Internet, your first port of call for information of any type, should also be the first place you look to see if you can identify the owner of the cell phone that is calling you.

Lots of supposedly private information is freely available on the Internet. That’s because people give out their personal information to companies and clients all the time, without thinking about it once: and if they’ve included a phone number in that information then your typing it in should pull up names, addresses, anything associated with instances of that combination of numbers.

If a simple Internet search doesn’t work, don’t worry. This is only the start of your odyssey. Your next step is to find any one of the hundreds of free websites that allow you to hunt for cell phone numbers without paying.

Hunting for cell phone numbers in this way requires a bit more digital legwork, but of course that can be quite exciting too! For example, a free cell phone directory is likely to give out limited information about the number in question, which means that you will be using the results you generate as a starting point. The most common information carried on a free cell phone directory listing is the provider that owns the phone number and the location of the phone, as registered on the bills.

You can then call up some free reverse directories (you may have to wade through a ton of cell phone reviews on these sites, which pay for their services with advertising) and find out more. If you enter your information you get to do some free searches. Bear in mind that along with cell phone reviews and exhortations to buy phones popping out at you from every angle, by giving your information to the site you are pretty much guaranteed to get endless sales calls and digital voices phoning you up in the middle of the night, to tell you that you have won some improbable prize.

There are also volunteer directories (which again tend to use hundreds of cell phone reviews and ads to pay for themselves) you can try. A volunteer directory only lists the numbers of people who have voluntarily put their cell phone information into them. If you can’t find the number there it is because it has not been volunteered.

If all else fails and your need is urgent, pay. The more you pay the more likely you are to get quick and reliable results. All of which, of course, leads you to an inescapable conclusion: no matter how well you hide your numbers, someone somewhere can track you down in a heartbeat. It’d be more appealing just sticking to those cell phone reviews, I think!