Reverse Phone Lookup — Phone OSINT, Carrier & Spam Check

What does Reverse Phone Lookup do?

Reverse Phone Lookup takes phone numbers and returns, for each number, one verdict row (valid or not, country, region, carrier, line type, time zones, SMS capability, risk level) with the risky line type (VoIP, premium-rate, toll-free and so on) in its riskLevel and riskFlags fields, and one signal row for each community warning sign it finds: a community spam rating and every reported category such as Telemarketer or Scam call. Paste a list, get JSON, CSV or Excel, and call it from the Apify API, schedules and integrations. No API keys.

Free vs paid

	Free plan	Paid plan
Numbers per run	3	up to 200
Rows per run	up to 8 rows in total	no limit
Signal rows	one of each kind (community rating, reported category) plus a count of what stayed locked	all of them
Locked-count summary	last row free-plan-preview shows shown / locked / estimated cost	not needed
Price	1.5 × list price	list price

A free run ends SUCCEEDED with the preview row and a status message such as "Free preview: 3 number(s) shown, 5 more row(s) locked. Upgrade to a paid Apify plan for all of them. (~$0.41 on a paid plan)". The preview row states what the whole input would cost on a paid plan at list price.

Why use it?

• Clean a call or SMS list: drop invalid, VoIP and premium-rate numbers before you dial or text.
• Fraud and trust checks: see whether a number has community reports as Scam call or Telemarketer, with vote counts.
• Lead and OSINT research: one run turns a column of numbers into carrier, region and risk columns.

How to use Reverse Phone Lookup

1. Open the Input tab and paste numbers in international format, e.g. +14155551234, +821012345678.
2. Keep "I acknowledge the legal disclaimer" checked.
3. Click Start. Open the Output tab, or call the dataset API.

Input

Field	What it does
phoneNumbers	Numbers to look up, up to 200 per run (free plan: 3)
number	One number, if you prefer a single field
defaultRegion	Two-letter country code for numbers written without a country code
disclaimerAck	Required acknowledgment of lawful use

Output

Three row types carry a charge. Notice and free-plan-preview rows are messages and are never charged.

{
  "rowType": "reputation-checked",
  "input": "+14155551234",
  "e164": "+14155551234",
  "source": "shouldianswer-us",
  "result": "no-community-reports"
}
{
  "rowType": "number-checked",
  "input": "+18005551212",
  "e164": "+18005551212",
  "valid": true,
  "countryName": "United States",
  "numberTypeLabel": "toll-free",
  "riskLevel": "low",
  "headline": "+1 800 555 1212 — valid US toll-free — CAUTION: 98 negative community reports",
  "layers": { "profile": "done", "reputation": "checked", "telegram": "off-needs-customer-session", "whatsapp": "off-needs-customer-session" }
}
{
  "rowType": "signal-found",
  "e164": "+18005551212",
  "signalType": "report-category",
  "source": "shouldianswer-us",
  "signal": "Telemarketer",
  "severity": "medium",
  "count": 59,
  "detail": "Reported 59 time(s) as \"Telemarketer\"."
}

What each layer covers

Layer	Coverage
Numbering plan (profile)	Every country
Community reports	United States and South Korea numbers. Other countries show reputation: "not-covered", which means not looked up, not clean
reputation: "unreadable"	The source could not be read for this number; no reputation-checked or signal rows are written and nothing is charged for them
Telegram and WhatsApp	Off. They need an account session that this Actor does not have. The row says off-needs-customer-session

deepLinks gives you wa.me and t.me links for convenience; opening them tells you nothing about whether the number is registered, so they are not signals and are not charged.

Pricing

Event	When	Price (paid plan, list)
run-started	Once per run, including a run whose input is rejected	$0.01
number-checked	Each number answered with a verdict row (invalid numbers too — "invalid" is an answer)	$0.02
reputation-checked	Each US or Korean number whose community-report page was read to the end, with or without reports ("no reports" is an answer)	$0.02
signal-found	Each signal row (community rating, reported category)	$0.03

Prices above are the list price a paid Apify plan pays; the Free plan pays 1.5 × list (for example $0.03 per number checked). A US or Korean number with no reports costs $0.04 ($0.02 verdict + $0.02 report lookup) plus its share of the start fee; a number from another country costs $0.02; a US number with a rating and three reported categories costs $0.16 ($0.02 verdict + $0.02 report lookup + 4 × $0.03 signals) plus its share of the start fee. Set a maximum cost per run in the Apify run options and the run stops at it and still ends SUCCEEDED. If the platform's price list cannot be read, the start fee is not charged and the notice says it could not be confirmed.

Tips

• Use E.164 (+ then country code) for the cleanest results.
• The reputation source is polled one request at a time with a 1.5 s gap, so a 200-number US list takes several minutes.
• Looking for the PhoneInfoga engine and its footprint search links? See phoneinfoga-osint. To check a whole list for format only, see phone-number-validator-bulk.

FAQ, disclaimer and support

Public information only: numbering-plan data from libphonenumber (Apache-2.0) and public community reports from Should I Answer. This Actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any source named in its rows. You are responsible for lawful use and privacy-law compliance, and for how you use the results. Community reports are opinions of other callers and can be wrong. This Actor stores no personal data. Questions or a number that reads wrong: open the Issues tab.