What Can Someone Do With Your Phone Number?

Phone numbers are used to identify us. A phone number is a set of digits assigned to a subscriber, which allows them to make long-distance calls via wired or wireless electronic devices. Generally, a telephone service provider, also known as a mobile carrier, assigns phone numbers to customers under custom rules.

A phone number contains a trove of information about the owner. Unless you use a burner number or have changed your number with VoIP, your phone number can tell others a lot about you. A simple reverse phone search will provide publicly available information on a number, including the owner’s name, contact information, and public records. Unfortunately, this means that scammers and hackers can use your phone number to steal your info or hijack your phone number.

What is in a Phone Number?

In the United States, phone numbers usually include 11 digits: a 1-digit country code, a 3-digit area code, and a 7-digit telephone number. A 3-digit central office or exchange code plus a 4-digit subscriber number (line number) make up the 7-digit telephone number.

Country codes

Country codes are brief alphanumeric characters used to identify countries and territories based on their geographical location.

Area code

Area codes are numbers used to identify specific areas within a country. There are two categories of area codes, one with three digits and another one with four digits. The initial three digits of a phone number in North America indicate the county, city, or town where the phone number owner lives. They are similar to area codes in other territories.

Three-digit prefix code

A telephone prefix is a three-digit number that defines a much smaller territory inside an area code. It is also known as central office code. The three-digit prefix is used to reference a particular sector or region of a city. In a ten-digit phone number, the telephone prefix is the second set of three digits.

Four-digit line number

The line number is the phone number's last and most specific code. The four-digit code identifies the particular company or person that owns the phone number and identifies the type of service that the person uses. It helps mobile carriers direct calls to a specific phone line, otherwise known as the subscriber number.

The line number area is a factor that has to be considered when considering for vanity number for your company because there are more options, and you're more likely to acquire the number you want. A vanity phone number is a collection of digits explicitly created for you that spell out a word or are distinctive in some manner. A construction company, for example, may use 1-800-BUILDER as their business number, with the letters spelled out using the digits on the phone keypad.

What Can Someone Find With Your Phone Number?

Anyone with your phone number has all the info they need to learn more about you, from your complete name and your educational or professional background to your former and current home address. A reverse phone search can even tell someone your contact information and social media accounts. The plethora of information available through a phone number search includes:

• Name and physical address
• Publicly available records
• Travel information.
• Social media accounts.
• Other online accounts.

The Importance of Phone Numbers

Many people tend to overlook how significant a phone number is. A phone number is a sequence of digits that represents and identifies the owner. While a phone number may be considered by some to be personal information, it is publicly available for anyone to obtain. Phone numbers are used to authenticate our identity when signing into secure online accounts. We also depend on phone numbers to communicate with others and to allow others to communicate with ourselves.
 

To sum it up: we need phone numbers. Unfortunately, entities can use phone numbers to collect your information and potentially harm you. Cyberstalkers use phone numbers to track down their victims. Businesses use phone numbers to trace individuals for commercial purposes or to track potential clients or customers. Scammers could even hack your phone and sell your phone number on the black market.

How To Get Phone Numbers From Social Media

It is possible to obtain someone’s phone number through social media. Let's look at the capabilities of the most popular social media giants, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Facebook carries a large amount of information about its users, which is freely available to anybody. Graph search allows users to conduct deep searches into their personal profiles and the profiles of their friends. On Facebook's security page, we can see that it will be possible to find your public Facebook profile only with a phone number. By looking at your profile, it will be possible to gather a great deal of information such as the city you live in, your marital status, names of family members, your hobbies, and interests. The Facebook security page also provides instructions on how to go about removing your phone number from their database.

Twitter allows you to search for users by following a few simple steps. The first thing you would have to do is tweet at the person whose phone number you would like to track. After you have found the tweet containing the phone number, you will then be able to go search for that specific phone number using Twitter's search feature. This way, it will be possible for you to find out from whom that particular phone number is and whether or not they also use Twitter.

You can find people on social media by searching Instagram for their phone numbers to find tagged photos. You can also see how many times their phone number is used and for what purpose. In the case of Instagram, you should only search a phone number if you have given permission to do so or if there are other people marked as those who can see the search results. If you are inclined to find out more about someone through Instagram, you should always be careful because your profile will be public.

How To Access Personal Information With Phone Numbers

If you want to see what information is attached to your phone number, there are several websites that provide phone number lookups in exchange for a fee. Running a reverse phone number search is fairly straightforward. Users can type the phone number including the area code and press ‘Enter.’ The search tool typically offers immediate results regarding the phone number registrant and the location where the number was registered originally. Free reverse phone lookup tools are widely available online, it’s just a matter of choosing the right one for you.

How to Protect Your Phone Number

Protecting your phone number is a big necessity as hackers can hijack personal information from it or port out the number. If you are looking to protect your phone number, here are some steps that you can take:

• Constantly update your security software. Download free security software and antivirus as soon as it becomes available. Doing this will keep you safe from hackers and identity thieves online.
• When downloading software, check for the signature and choose "Custom Installation" to be found easier and installed automatically.
• Always choose security out of the box. Do not just stick with default settings; always select security as default to prevent any new vulnerabilities and make your cell phone safe from all sorts of cybercrimes.
• Remember to set a password for your phone to ensure it is difficult for someone to obtain it from you or steal it from you using a bank card.
• Set Smartphone lock to screen lock so that no one can use your phone when sitting in front of it, without knowing the password.
• Turn off apps that are not being used. Some apps running in the background can allow a hacker to access your personal information, so it is better to check periodically and turn off any apps that are not being used. Go to Settings>General>Background app refresh and turn off anything you don't need.
• Make sure you change your password for all accounts regularly; this way, if someone finds out one of your passcodes, they won't be able to get into all of them.
• You can scramble your cell phone account with secondary security codes for stringent protection.

Conclusion

Always keep an eye out for any number that you do not want anyone to know. You have to make sure that social networks are not using your mobile number as your new address for email. Also, make calls and send text messages from a different number than the one you use for your online accounts.

In today's digital world, there is the possibility that anything could be hacked. This applies to your personal information and even to your phone. Your personal information could be compromised, and your phone may also be hacked. It would be best if you protected yourself from such things so that you are not vulnerable.