~ Tips for making your life easier and less expensive ~

Friday, March 16, 2007

Detective Work Through the Power of Community

I received a call on my cell phone today from a number I didn't recognize. I didn't answer. Several hours later, I received another call from the same number. Again, I didn't answer, even though my curiosity fought me. The caller did not leave a message. For me, such a mystery is difficult to let go, so I tried a reverse phone number lookup on the web.

None of the free options yielded any results, and I'm too cheap and skeptical to pay for any reverse phone number lookup service. Between my wallet and my curiosity, my wallet always wins.

Thankfully I stumbled upon http://whocalled.us/. In an interesting application of collective intelligence, anybody can report the results of phone calls that they received from any source. For example, I could hop on http://whocalled.us/ an report that number 555-439-8821 called me twice in a day without leaving any messages. It would be even more useful if I had answered the call, found out who was calling and why, and then reported it on this site. I was appreciative that 35 people had taken the time to report the number that called me today, and some of those people had actually answered the calls--or returned the calls--and found that it was a spam type call from a college.

The next time I have a call from a number I don't recognize, I'm going straight to http://whocalled.us/ to see if it's been reported there. http://800notes.com/ seems to be the same type of service, though they listed 0 results for my search today when http://whocalled.us/ reported 35.

2 comments:

MadMup said...

If you use this service alongside the service I employ, the two would be better served.

My service is I tell Dave the number and he calls them to find out who they are.

Anonymous said...

Hey, I'm loving your blog and your useful advice! I just might try the timer for my plants this summer...maybe they won't die when e get busy with our teens (like camp and such!)

Hope you and your wife are doing well!