Who called me from this phone number?

How the lookup works

Type or paste the number that called you — with or without the leading 1, dashes or parentheses — and you get one report page for that exact 10-digit number. The page is built from four things, in this order, and it says plainly when one of them is empty rather than padding the result.

1. Where the number was issued. The first six digits (the area code and prefix, or NPA-NXX) are assigned by the North American Numbering Plan Administrator to a specific carrier and rate center. We load NANPA's public assignment file every week — about 200,000 prefixes — so the page can say “a Verizon Wireless prefix in Newark, NJ” or “a toll-free 833 number” without asking any third party while you wait.
2. FTC Do Not Call complaints. Every weekday the Federal Trade Commission publishes the previous day's complaints: the number reported, the date and time of the call, the consumer's city and state, the subject (debt reduction, impostor, medical, warranty and so on) and whether it was a recorded message. We match those to the number, roll them up, and show the count, the last-30-days trend, the subjects, the states and the most recent dated reports.
3. FCC unwanted-call complaints. The Federal Communications Commission's consumer complaint data goes back years and includes the caller ID number, the issue (robocall, telemarketing) and the consumer's state. It fills in the history for numbers that have been active for a long time.
4. Reports from people who answered. Visitors leave a short description of what the call actually was and vote spam / safe / missed. Reports are moderated and never include the caller's or the reporter's personal details.

The result is a “who called me” answer in the practical sense: not a name — toll-free ownership is private and we are not a people-search site — but whether the number is a known robocall campaign, a business line with a few old complaints, or a number nobody has reported. Pages with enough evidence to be useful are the ones we list in the leaderboards and submit to search engines; a number with nothing on record still gets a live page, clearly labelled as such.

US phone number formats: what the digits tell you

Every number in the United States (and Canada and much of the Caribbean) follows the North American Numbering Plan: a three-digit area code, a three-digit prefix and a four-digit line number, written (NPA) NXX-XXXX. The digits are not random, and reading them is the first step of any reverse phone lookup.

• Geographic area codes (212, 310, 713 …) belong to a place. Since 1995 the middle digit can be anything, and most metro areas are now “overlays” where several codes serve the same city, so a call from 646 or 917 is as much “New York” as 212. Our area-code pages show the state, time zone, overlay codes and the most-reported numbers in each.
• The prefix (NXX) is assigned to one carrier in one rate center — the exchange that originally served a town or neighbourhood. That is how a lookup can tell a T-Mobile cell prefix from a Comcast landline prefix. Number portability means the current subscriber may have moved carriers, but the prefix still pins down where the number was born.
• Toll-free numbers — 800, 833, 844, 855, 866, 877 and 888 — have no geography at all. They are reserved through a registry, the owner pays for calls, and the number can ring anywhere. They account for 19% of the FTC Do Not Call complaints filed in the last 30 days, mostly as the call-back number left by a robocall. See the toll-free number lookup and the pages for 800, 833, 844, 855, 866, 877 and 888 numbers.
• 10DLC and short codes are the texting formats. A 10DLC (10-digit long code) is a normal local number registered by a business for application-to-person texting; carriers require the registration and filter unregistered bulk senders. Short codes are the five- or six-digit numbers used for two-factor codes and alerts. Neither can be looked up as a caller, but a text from an unregistered local number asking you to click a link is the smishing pattern the FCC warns about.
• Numbers that cannot be real callers. Prefixes ending in 555 (directory assistance and fiction), 900 premium-rate numbers, and any 11-digit “+1” number whose area code starts with 0 or 1 are either reserved or invalid. When they appear on your caller ID they are spoofed.

The important caveat: the digits tell you where a number was issued, not who is calling. Caller ID is transmitted by the caller and can be set to any value, which is why an FCC complaint against a spoofed number and a consumer's report of the toll-free call-back number often describe the same campaign from two ends.

What to do when an unknown number calls

1. Let it go to voicemail. Answering — even to say “stop calling” — confirms a live line and can raise the number's value on the lists dialers trade. A caller with real business leaves a message.
2. Look the number up here. A page with recent FTC complaints, a high robocall share and a debt, impostor or warranty subject is an active campaign. A page with a few old FCC complaints is probably a busy legitimate line. A page with no record is unknown, not safe.
3. Never act on the call itself. Do not press 1, do not “verify” a Social Security number, card number or one-time passcode, and do not call back a number left in a recorded message. If the caller named your bank or an agency, hang up and call the number on your card or the agency's .gov site.
4. Block and filter. Block the number on your phone, turn on your carrier's free filter (AT&T ActiveArmor, Verizon Call Filter, T-Mobile Scam Shield — see what the Spam Risk label means), and use Silence Unknown Callers on iPhone or spam filtering on Android. Step-by-step: how to block spam calls.
5. Report it. Unwanted calls go to the FTC at donotcall.gov, scams to reportfraud.ftc.gov, and spoofing or robocalls to the FCC at consumercomplaints.fcc.gov. Reports appear in the public data within a day or two and feed the blocking lists. See how to report a call to the FTC and FCC.
6. Know your rights. Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, prerecorded or autodialed sales calls to your cell phone require your prior express written consent, and you can sue for $500–$1,500 per call; under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, collectors may not call before 8 am or after 9 pm, harass you, or misrepresent a debt. Our guides on the TCPA, the FDCPA and the Do Not Call Registry explain what to keep and where to file.
7. If it is your number being spoofed, you will get angry call-backs from strangers. You cannot stop the spoofing, but you can record a voicemail greeting explaining it, report it to the FCC, and register your number with the carriers' Free Caller Registry so it is not mislabeled. See my number is being spoofed.