How to Prevent and Protect Yourself from Online Fraud - Phone Number...
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Phone Number
With a phone number, you can do several things. The most obvious is figure out where the area code is. If this is a US phone number, you should be able just Google the area code and it will tell you the location of it. Be forewarned, that a lot of times people have an area code near them, but not necessarily in the same location. Then there are the oddballs who have a VoIP number or something similar on the other side of the country. You got to be very careful with phone numbers.
The next thing you can do is a reverse phone lookup. I find http://wwww.whitePages.com to be the most effective and easiest to use. A lot of numbers that you will lookup will be unlisted or cell phone numbers. A reverse phone lookup is also an effective method for finding out if your customer is a minor or just slightly older than a minor (as always, there are exceptions to this).
Domain
Every domain must have contact information. There are services out there that offer privacy protection for their contact information, but a lot of the domains are unprotected. You can lookup your client's domain using DomainTools to see if it's registered to them, and if it is, compare the information there with the information that they gave you.
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