Track Anyone with just a Phone Number | OSINT Investigation

You can be an OSINT Investigator, CTF Player or simply someone who is getting spam calls. Someone who is trying to verify the number you saw in an advertise. No matter who you are, you want to learn how to get more information from a Phone Number or potentially track the person behind the number. Then this post applies to you.

DISCLAIMER : Don’t use any OSINT knowledge breach someone’s privacy or to conduct anything illegal.

The Methodology :

The idea is simple. We will use multiple websites and tools that has a database of phone numbers. The Phone Number we put in will be searched through all of them and we might get a Name, Address or other info like if this is a temporary one time use spam number. This is literally that simple. You just have to know the right places to hit and search for.

So let’s jump right into it !

Important Websites :

Now before discussing the websites, we have to know something. Almost all of these websites has a paid search version that will give you unlimited searches and full information on the number if there’s any. But the free version that we’ll use usually spits out partial information and limit our searches. So if you work for a company or you don’t mind spending some money on this, go ahead and get the subscription.

1. truecaller.com : It’s an international website, so you can search numbers from any country. Create an account and start searching.
2. calleridtest.com : This website requires a subscription of some sort. Otherwise you don’t have enough credit to search. If you got a sub, then use the bulklookup option as there you can search 500 numbers at once.
3. infobel.com : This is another international website but doesn’t have as much option as truecaller. You come here choose a country, put the phone number and city name down. You get to search for free.
4. whitepages.com : Another tool concentrated in USA Numbers. There are several options. Reverse address, reverse phone etc. You want the reverse phone and search for free.
5. inteltechniques.com : This is a website that has lots of OSINT related podcasts, blog, training etc. This website has a tools section where different OSINT tools are showcased. Navigate there and put the targeted number. It will automatically go ahead and search at several other places and websites and databases for you. You can just click the respective result you want to see and you’ll be redirected to that.
6. whocalld.com : Another international website that might not give you as much info as you need. But seems to identify the Call Service Provider. Just put the number and identify the country. It does the rest.

Now just to show one example, here I used my phone number and it pulled every details about me. Of course I blurred all of them. But you can see it found my email, my lcoal time, my name and even my profile picture.

Important Tools :

These tools are using the same methodology and searching in various databases to get information.

1. phoneinfoga : This tool can pull down information about a number. It also gives you all the google dorks links it did to find information about the number so that you can click those links and see for yourself.
   First git clone the repository. Get into the directory and follow the instructions shown in the installation page to install the tool. I installed it through docker. For that you need to have docker in your machine installed. To do that execute apt install docker.io . Then pull the docker image with docker pull sundowndev/phoneinfoga:latest . Finally run it with the following command to do the search on the Number.

docker run --rm -it sundowndev/phoneinfoga scan -n <number_with_country_code>

It’s gonna pull down some links and information with it. Explore them to get more information.

There are tools and websites coming and going. They will always change but the important thing is to understand our goal. We want to get as much information from a phone number as possible and to do that we look through databases, websites where users sign up. Thus we can dig deeper on our target. Keep that in mind and you’ll do great !