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playbooks / phone-number

Phone number → owner

Identify the carrier, line type and likely owner of a phone number, then link it to accounts and addresses.

start: ☎ phoneyields: location, real name, url, company, username, email, imagelevel: intermediate

caution: Caller-ID apps like Truecaller and Sync.ME ask for your contacts. Use a dedicated research phone or account. Never call or message the number from a personal device.

  1. 01

    Parse the number

    Normalise to E.164 (+14155550123), then get the country, carrier and line type. VoIP numbers (Google Voice, TextNow) behave very differently from mobile numbers tied to an ID-checked contract.

    → can yield: ⊕Location

  2. 02

    Crowd-sourced caller ID

    These apps aggregate names from millions of contact books. The name might be a nickname ("Dave Plumber"), but it's often enough to search on.

    → can yield: ☺Real name

  3. 03

    Search every format

    Search the number in all common formats at once: "415-555-0123" OR "(415) 555-0123" OR "4155550123" OR "+14155550123". Classified ads, business listings and PDFs show up this way.

    → can yield: ☺Real name ⇗URL ▤Company

  4. 04

    Find linked accounts

    Many services let you find accounts by phone number. Messaging apps are worth checking manually from a research phone: save the number as a contact, then look at WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal for a profile photo and name.

    → can yield: @Username ✉Email ▣Image

  5. 05

    Resolve to a person and address (region-dependent)

    In the US, people-search sites map numbers to names, addresses and relatives. Elsewhere, try national directories.

    → can yield: ☺Real name ⊕Location

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