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Cover image for Most people-search tools will sell you a phone number that's actually masked garbage. Mine refuses to.
0xGollum
0xGollum

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Most people-search tools will sell you a phone number that's actually masked garbage. Mine refuses to.

Free public people-search sites all follow the same pattern: they show you a name, an address, maybe a relative or two - and then they show a phone number with three of the middle digits swapped for asterisks, behind a paywall. That's fine when a human is reading it. It's not fine when a script is scraping it, because most scrapers just... keep the asterisks. You get a "phone number" back that isn't one.

This actor looks up a person by name, phone, email, or address and returns their address history, relatives, and name variants from public people-search records. Phones and emails are included too - but only when a source exposes them in full. A masked or partial value gets dropped instead of returned as junk. That means it won't always give you a phone number. It means the ones it does give you are real.

The primary source, ThatsThem, is the one reliable option out of the handful of free people-search sites - the other two the actor also checks (TruePeopleSearch, FastPeopleSearch) are heavily bot-protected and don't always respond, so they're used as bonus coverage, not depended on.

Every match also comes with a confidence score and a quality tier (high / medium / low), and nothing above your threshold gets billed if it doesn't clear it - a lookup that finds nothing costs nothing.

https://apify.com/0xgollum/skip-tracer

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