PhoneLookup
Trust

Editorial Policy

Every article, help guide, category page and phone-number page on PhoneLookup is written, reviewed and maintained under the standards documented here. Last updated: 2 July 2026.

1. Who writes for PhoneLookup

Our editorial team is a small in-house group of researchers with day-to-day experience in telecom fraud, cybercrime reporting, consumer protection and open-source phone-number data. We do not accept guest posts, sponsored articles, link inserts, PR placements or paid reviews of any kind. No third party has ever paid to have a company, brand, product or phone number added to, removed from, or reframed on this site.

2. Sources we rely on

  • Google’s libphonenumber library for country, region, carrier and line-type parsing.
  • Official government advisories: I4C / cybercrime.gov.in, TRAI, RBI, DoT (India); FTC, FCC (US); Ofcom, Action Fraud (UK); ACMA, Scamwatch (Australia); CRTC (Canada).
  • National Do-Not-Disturb / Do-Not-Call registries where they exist.
  • Verified user reports submitted through our Report a Number flow, aggregated and rate-limited to reduce brigading.

We do not scrape private data, telecom subscriber records, or leaked databases. We do not display personal names, home addresses, KYC data or any information that would identify a private individual behind a number.

3. How we fact-check

Before a guide is published, at least one editor other than the author verifies every statistic, legal reference and helpline number against the primary government source. Where a claim cannot be traced to a primary source, it is either dropped or clearly labelled as a community observation. Helpline numbers, portal URLs and regulator names are re-checked on a rolling basis every 90 days.

4. How we handle user-generated content

Community comments and reports on phone-number pages are user-generated content and are clearly labelled as such. We remove reports that contain personal data, defamation, hate speech, or that appear to be coordinated brigading. We never silently edit the wording of a user report — we either keep it or remove it and log the removal.

5. Updates and revisions

Evergreen guides (scam patterns, reporting steps, helpline lists) are reviewed at least every 6 months and any time a regulator publishes a material change. Every article shows its last-updated date. Substantive edits — anything beyond typo fixes — are recorded on our Corrections page.

6. AI use

We use AI tools to draft first-pass outlines, suggest headings and check grammar. Every published sentence is read, edited and approved by a human editor. No article is published as raw AI output, and AI is never used to invent statistics, quotes, helpline numbers or legal citations.

7. Independence and funding

PhoneLookup is funded by non-intrusive display advertising (Google AdSense) and, in future, an optional paid bulk-lookup API. Advertisers have no visibility into or influence over editorial decisions. Ads are labelled and never mixed with editorial content.

8. Contact the editors

Spotted an error, an out-of-date helpline, or a claim you can’t reproduce? Please write to us through the contact page or file a formal correction request via Corrections. We reply to every editorial email.