How the number check works
A check combines three official sources, all public and free. Nothing is invented, scored or guessed: each figure on a result page comes from one of them, with its date.
Where a number comes from: NANPA
The North American Numbering Plan Administrator publishes, every day, the list of assigned central office codes (the first six digits of a number) with the carrier that holds each one, its rate center and the date it was assigned, plus a database of every area code with its location, overlays, time zone and in-service date. Rate center names come from NANPA's rate center report. The current files are dated November 11, 2026.
NANPA's exchange file covers the US and its territories. Pooled exchanges are shared out to other carriers in blocks of 1,000 numbers, so the carrier shown holds the exchange, not always the number.
Complaints to the FCC
The FCC publishes every informal complaint filed with its Consumer Help Center since October 31, 2014, updated daily, under a public-domain licence. For unwanted calls, a complaint can include the number on the consumer's caller ID, the number the caller gave to call back, the type of call (prerecorded voice, live voice or text) and the consumer's state and ZIP code. The FCC does not verify the facts alleged.
We load complaints filed in the last 36 months that name a number: 277,919 complaints filed from November 1, 2023 to November 11, 2026. ZIP codes are used only to count how many different places reported a number, and are then dropped.
Reports to the FTC
Every weekday, the FTC publishes a file of the numbers people reported in Do Not Call complaints, with the date of the call, the consumer's city and state, the subject they picked and whether it was a robocall. None of it is verified. The same data is available through the FTC's API.
We load the daily files published in the last 90 days: 718,788 reports in 64 files, published August 14, 2026 to November 11, 2026. Identical reports filed in the same second are counted once. Cities are used only to count distinct places and are not kept.
Works of the US federal government are generally not protected by copyright in the US, and the FCC dataset carries the licence “Public Domain U.S. Government”. We do not use any agency's logo or suggest that an agency endorses this site.
Which pages search engines see
Every number can be checked, but a number's page is shown to search engines only if all of these hold:
- at least 5 official reports (FTC and FCC together) for that exact number;
- from at least 3 different places, so one person's repeated reports are not enough;
- the latest report is less than 12 months old;
- the area code is assigned, the number is not a placeholder, and nobody has asked us to remove it.
Today 3,681 numbers meet that bar. Every other number page tells search engines not to index it, carries no advertising and is left out of the sitemap. Of the 385 area code pages, 376 are indexed: each has its own places, carriers, dates and complaint figures from the sources above. New overlays with no exchange assigned yet are not indexed.
What we do not do
- We do not show names, addresses or anything about who holds a number. No public record says, and we do not try to find out.
- We do not take reports from visitors, rate numbers or add comments. Every count comes from the FTC or the FCC.
- We do not store the numbers you check. See the privacy policy.
Corrections and removal
Caller ID can be faked, so a number can collect reports for calls its owner never made. If that happened to your number, or if something on a page is wrong, write to contact@beforeyoucallback.com. A removed number keeps its page (anyone can check any number) but shows no complaint detail and is never indexed.
Updates
NANPA, FCC and FTC data are refreshed with three scripts that anyone can re-run; they identify themselves, pause between requests and stop without writing anything if a file changes shape. The dates of the data in use are printed on every result page.