Our Data Sources and Their Limits

Last reviewed: October 20, 2026

A lookup result is only as good as the data behind it. This page says, signal by signal, where each answer comes from, what a result reflects and what it does not, and what we have chosen not to publish at all.

Where each signal comes from

• State - the state that the number's area code belongs to.
• Federal DNC status - National Do Not Call Registry status supplied through compliance data providers' registry feeds.
• State DNC status - the state-operated do-not-call lists, for states that maintain one. States without a separate registry return no state result rather than a copy of the federal one.
• TCPA litigator status - a match of the number against a litigator list compiled from court records and compliance data providers: people who have sued, threatened to sue or complained over calls under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The Litigator row reads Clean when nothing matches, and otherwise shows the category of the match, such as TCPA, TCPA troll or Complainer; the TCPA litigator lookup explains each value.
• Litigator by owner - the names of the potential owners of a number or an email address, with the city and state of their addresses, matched against records of TCPA lawsuits filed in federal and state courts, so a recycled or secondary number does not hide a known plaintiff.
• Blacklist status - caller suppression lists maintained by compliance data providers, which record numbers that have complained, threatened, asked not to be called, or been reported by other callers.
• Owner records - name, age, addresses and relatives compiled from publicly available and commercially available records.
• Email validity - on the reverse email lookup, a check that the address is correctly formed and that its domain appears to be set up to receive email. No mail server is contacted, so it says nothing about a particular inbox.
• Email owner records - the names, ages, addresses and phone numbers that publicly available and commercially available records link to an email address. Email results do not include relatives.

We name sources at the category level. Where a data agreement permits naming the provider we will; where it does not, we say so rather than imply a source we cannot disclose.

What a result reflects

A result shows what the records available to us held when you ran the search. Those records change all the time: numbers are added to registries, new lawsuits are filed, complaints are recorded and numbers change hands, and a change can take time to reach our records. We do not publish how often each source is checked or how old a stored record is, and no result shows when its record was last checked or updated. Record the date and time of your check with the result, and run the check again before you rely on it for a later call.

What we deliberately do not publish

• No owner name, age, address or relative appears on any page a search engine can index. Personal records exist only inside an interactive result.
• No page exists for an individual phone number, prefix or person, and no "most reported" lists. A phone number is personal information; we do not build pages around it.
• No bulk export, batch upload or download of registry or litigator status. Per-number DNC status is licensed compliance data and is shown one number at a time to the person who submitted it.
• No page labels a named individual a litigator. Name-search results read High Risk or Clean, say whether a hit is a possible or a confirmed match, and are worded as a record match.

What we do not cover

• The FCC Reassigned Numbers Database. A clean result here does not tell you a number has not changed hands since a consent was obtained.
• Safe-harbor documentation. We do not produce or retain the scrub logs, written procedures or training records that the TSR safe harbor requires of a seller.
• Spam-label reputation (the "Scam Likely" style labels that phone companies and call-analytics services put on calls). That is a different system with different inputs.
• Anything outside the United States.

Known limitations

• Numbers are recycled. A number can pass from a plaintiff to an unrelated person, or the reverse, and our records can lag behind the change.
• Names are common. Owner matching and litigator-by-owner matching can associate a number with the wrong person of the same name; that is why by-owner matches are shown separately and worded as potential.
• Registries lag. A number added to the National Registry today may take some time to be reflected in registry data under the FTC's own compliance timetable.
• Sources disagree. Where a compliance provider and a court record conflict, we show the more conservative (flagged) status.

Report an error, correct a record, or remove one

If a result is wrong, tell us. Our opt-out and data removal page covers removal of your own details and correction of a wrong litigator or blacklist match. Every request is logged for review and verified by a person before anything is changed. For everything else, contact us or write to support@uspeoplesearch.net.

US People Search is not a consumer reporting agency under the FCRA. This page describes how our data is assembled; it is not legal advice and a lookup result does not create a safe harbor under any statute.