It has happened to all of us: we are calmly at home when we receive an annoying call. An operator who wants to sell us a product or service that we have not requested, someone who wants us to participate in a survey or any other type of call. Sometimes we answer the call and a recording skips or, to our surprise, the call is dropped. Who calls us? Knowing it is not difficult, because there are methods to locate a landline number.
This is possible thanks to an unquestionable fact: a landline phone is always wired. Therefore, it can be traced without problems.
Until relatively recently, locating a person by their landline number was a very simple task, since all the landline numbers were detailed in a paper list. Anyone who is already a few years old will remember it perfectly: the popular White pages. They included the name and even the address of the holders of all the lines.
Later, the White Pages abandoned their paper format to become a digital list that could be consulted online. In this way it was very easy to know the identity of who called us from a landline. However, this possibility disappeared with the approval of the new European Union Data Protection Law (regulation 2016/217), which restricts the publication of personal data.
Tricks to locate a landline number
So, what options do we have if what we want is to locate a fixed number? This is what we are going to explain below:
Google the number
Locate a fixed number through Google
A very obvious option, but quite useful in most cases. When it comes to a commercial call, the landline information usually appears on the website of the company in question. The same can be said of the calls we receive from the different administrations, whose numbers are also published on the official pages.
Making a Google number search abundant information can be obtained about the person behind it. This way we will know if it is worth responding or not.
online directories
Telexplorer, online directory that we can use to locate phone numbers
In the absence of White Pages, we can use online telephone directories to speed up our searches and locate a landline number through them. Some of the most well-known directories on the Internet are the following:
- datesas.com, available in Spanish, French and English.
- Infobel.com, present in more than 60 countries.
- Teleexplorer.eswell known in the Spanish-speaking world.
- Yelp.com, focused on the commercial world.
Dial *57
The origin of the call we have received can be traced with this simple trick: dial *57 right after receiving the call. Doing this automatically activates the call tracing tool used by your phone service provider. That means the mystery number is going to be traced.
The only drawback of this system is that the tracking information will not reach us directly, but will be provided to the police so that they can take care of the corresponding investigation.
Dial *69
Another option we have is to activate the callback tool dialing *69. What we get with this is to know the phone number from which the last call received came from. In this way we will have the information of who has called us.
This service works with most phone companies.
External call location services
Trapcall, one of the best known call location services
Sometimes it is worth investing a little money and resorting to the services of a company dedicated to call tracing. One of the best known is TrapCall, at least in the United States, which offers these and other services with prices ranging from $5 to $20 per month.
Hiring the services of these companies, what we achieve is that any private number that calls from a fixed line is diverted to this company, where the information will be collected.
What if they call us from a hidden number?
It is even more annoying when we receive hidden number calls. This is quite common in the case of telephone marketing companies (those that bombard us with calls to sell us something) and also among pranksters, who use this resource to maintain anonymity.
Luckily there are ways to determine the identity of the people who make these calls or locate a landline number.
The most efficient way is to contact our network provider and ask if they can provide us with the Anonymous Caller ID service. If so, our phone will automatically verify the origin of each of the calls we receive. If the call in question comes from an unknown or restricted number, we will have the option to unblock it and thus obtain the information.