# Phone number lookup: check a number before you send A signup form takes any phone number — it can't tell you whether it's real, mobile or landline, or quietly ported to another carrier. Bird Lookup answers all of that before you send a single message, and it never contacts the number: no SMS, no call, nothing the owner sees. In this video we look up a number in the dashboard, add the extra intelligence checks, and then run the exact same lookup with one API call. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w2MExsxaK0 (4:51) ## What we cover - Checking whether a number is valid and reachable - Reading carrier and line-type data - Filtering it into your sending list ## Transcript _Auto-generated from the video._ Hey, and welcome back to another video. Today, we're going to be looking at our phone lookup services. When your system triggers out a new message, it doesn't necessarily know if the number that you sent to is real. It doesn't know if it's a mobile, a landline, or it could even be a virtual number. When you're sending SMS or verification codes, that stuff actually matters, especially because every message to a dead number will still cost you money. The moment that you tell our system to send out a message, costs will occur, regardless if the number is false or if the recipient isn't actually able to receive a message at that time. Now, a lookup will answer all of that before you actually send. The lookup will allow you to validate the number plus a few additional number parameters to check if it's valid before actually sending. It will never actually contact the number, so there's not an SMS or a call going out, so the owner actually sees nothing. However, you'll know if you should actually trigger the message or not. Now, there's a few ways that we can set up a number lookup. Um, we're going to start off just in the dashboard by going to the actual lookup services. Now, you'll see that there's two types. You've got phone lookup and email lookup. We've got a different video covering email lookup, and today we're just going to be focusing on the phone. Now, it's pretty straightforward. Here we can do individual number lookup. So, we can just fill out a number. And we can do the lookup. Quite quickly, you'll see that we get a response back. And in this case, that the number is actually a valid number. We can see the country of origin to be the United States. We can see it's a mobile number, and we can see that this number is currently served by AT&T mobile. We also can see who it's originally been issued by. If we just add a few additional digits to this number, the number is invalid, and therefore, the number lookup will actually immediately tell you, "Hey, this number is not valid. Don't send a message to this number." When we go back to the original number that we tried, we also have the option to add additional checks. These checks are split up into two different segments. We've got specific number checks, and we actually have live network checks. Now, on the number, we can actually check what the classification of the number is. So, in this case, if it's a premium rate number, is it a virtual number, etc., etc. We can see if it's ported. So, actually, if it has been moved to a different provider over the time of its lifetime. And we can see a credibility score between 0 and 100. 100 being a very credible, 100% accuracy number versus 0 being this isn't a valid number. And there's also three that we can check on the network. So, where everything that we've done up until now is actually just uh universally available information and pool, the live network will actually allow us to call the network specifically and get deeper insights towards a specific number. Now, there's a few things. This is, of course, more expensive. You pay per additional parameter. Um but additionally, because we're actually calling the network, it's going to be a bit slower in terms of the response that we're going to get. But here, it's going to actually going to give us the presence. Is the number available? Yes or no? Is it in a roaming state? Meaning, it might be a US number, but they might be visiting the Netherlands and therefore be on a different network. And we can actually check if a SIM swap has happened at any stage. Now, let's do a few of these additional ones, and we're just going to run the lookup again. And here we can see that the classification came back. Um because of the network operation, not every single network uh provides that information. In this case, the presence is actually inconclusive. Um but that's again depends on the specific network. Now, where this is very uh helpful for you to do an individual check, this isn't, of course, scalable for your live operations. No, for that, you actually have the option to integrate lookup into your flow. So, when we navigate to our documentation, we can actually go to our API references, and here you can see that we have the lookup API as well. Now, the lookup API is a very straightforward API. It's just a single uh post call where we can actually post the phone number and get the additional information back. So, a simple string, for example, here we can see that we do the post call, we do the authentication, we submit the phone number that we want to check, and then we can add any of those types additional classifications that we want to add on top of the um uh the call. Now, and then we get the response. And then the response we can then start using in our own implementation flow to validate the number, to decide whether or not you want to send. And there's a lot of other use cases that you can use to make use of the lookup. Um to straightforward as that. Um we highly recommend you to have a look. Uh more information about pricing can be found on our website. If you run into any other issues, our support team is more than happy to assist. Um and as always, I want to say, thanks for watching and happy sending. ## More Lookup guides - [Email lookup: will that address actually accept mail](/nl-nl/learn/lookup/lookup-email) — 5:59 ## Resources - [Documentation](/nl-nl/documentatie) - [Learn more about Lookup](/nl-nl/producten/lookup)