About RoboReport

RoboReport started with a notebook next to a kitchen phone. Joel Pruitt was tired of recorded calls around dinner time, and tired of finding that the first results for any question about them were paid lookup services making promises they could not keep. So he began writing down each odd call: the time, the opening line and what it turned out to be. The notebook is still there, and most of the examples in the guides come from it.

From notebook to guides

The first guides answered the questions the notebook kept raising. What kind of call was that? Why did it go quiet? Why is it back from a different number? Should I have pressed the button? Each answer was written from primary sources, meaning pages from the FTC, the FCC, the Do Not Call registry and the support pages of phone makers, and then reread a week later with a cold cup of coffee to cut anything Joel could not back up. Menu names appear exactly as the phone shows them, and a guide is reread when a phone software update moves a setting.

Later the guides were written in different shapes, because a question about what to say to your carrier deserves a script and a question about consent deserves a flowchart. If you are new here, a good place to start is what a robocall is, or how to tell the category if a particular pitch is on your mind.

The small lookup

The number check was added last and kept deliberately modest. It reads a US or Canadian phone number and shows the area code, the exchange, the region the code belongs to, the main cities and the time zone. It also flags patterns such as toll-free prefixes, premium-rate codes, reserved blocks and area codes outside the US that dial like domestic ones. That is useful for one thing: noticing when a call that looks local clearly is not.

Where things stand

Who we are

An independent information site with an editorial team of one, helped by anyone who sends a correction. We are not a carrier, a phone maker, a law firm or a government agency, and we have no business relationship with any of them. When we mention the FTC, the FCC, Apple or Google, it is as a source, not as a partner.

What the lookup does not do

It does not identify who owns a number. It does not know the carrier, the line type or the reputation of a number, and it has no database of spam reports. If another site promises a free name behind any number, ask how it knows. We prefer to say less and be right.

How we check facts

Primary sources, a visible date of last update on every guide, and plain words where something depends on your carrier, such as star codes or call filtering. We avoid numbers and statistics we cannot verify.

What we do not invent

People, testimonials, ratings or user counts. The editor is a real person writing under the name shown on the editor page, and we do not claim credentials we cannot document. The pictures on the site are drawings, not faces.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date or unclear, tell us through the contact page. We read every message. When a correction is valid we fix the page and update its date. If we disagree, we will say why.

What we do not do

We do not sell data, we run no advertising on the guides and we give no legal advice. The site needs no account and sets no cookies. The disclaimer, the terms of use and the privacy policy have the details.