Nowadays, many free and paid apps can easily trace the owner of a particular number or track the location. But caution must be taken as it is illegal to track and access a mobile phone that does not belong to you. You can, however, eradicate any legal repercussion by obtaining legal written permission from the owner to track their phone. In such situations, you can freely track a loved one while they are away or trace a stolen smartphone.
However, before you can know how to track a phone number, you first must check whether you have all the necessary tools.
As far as we know, there are only 2 ways you can do this.
The first and easiest would be with a third party app (there are quite a few). For this, you would need access (and permission-that’s the legal part) to the phone you want to trace in order to install the app. Many parents do this with their kids phone in order to make sure they are safe.
The second would be to get a warrant so that the police can trace it for you – for that you need reasonable cause.
The illegal ways:
You could hire a hacker to do this for you
For security reasons (in case your phone gets lost or stolen), many smartphones have a trace capability built into the phone (the find-my-phone feature on Apple devices for example).
For this the owner of the smart phone needed to have registered a iphone/samsung/huawei (or whichever brand phone they have) account, and usually its required that he/she is logged into said account on the phone.
A lot of the phones log you in automatically when the phone is switched on. If you can somehow figure out the owner’s login details, you could trace them using their own account.
The illegal ways becomes legal if it is your own phone you want traced.