Category: Investigations

Competitive Intelligence Investigations

In the business world, one could say with confidence that everyone is spying on everyone else. It’s a given and possibly more popular within certain industries. Competitive Intelligence initiatives in business is almost critical for the business owner. Whether the company is small, medium, or large, this type of intelligence gathering is important. Now with open source research options, it is so much more detailed than ever before. Let’s start with the basics.

What Is Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligence, sometimes referred to as corporate intelligence, refers to the ability to gather, analyze, and use information collected on competitors, customers, and other market factors that contribute to a business’s competitive advantage. Competitive intelligence is important because it helps businesses understand their competitive environment and the opportunities and challenges it presents. Businesses analyze the information to create effective and efficient business practices. (Investopedia.com)

Social Media Listening
This is an example of coffee brands across three social media platforms. The example if provided by the software company Sprout Social as an example of what this type of research uncovers

Types of Investigations

  1. Marketing : One of the key reasons to conduct competitive intelligence is to gain a marketing advantage. One of the best ways is to use social media listening, which identifies the company’s online reputation. What do employees say about the company? What about customers? There are multiple software platforms out there that do exactly this as an ongoing part of their marketing plan. They can identify the effectiveness of the company’s digital and social media marketing, as you can see in the image above from Sprout Social. Sprinklr is another good example of this type of software. Another excellent option is to use mystery shopping. Our parent company, Ann Michaels & Associates, has conducted this type of research many times over the years. With a data base of over 300,000 evaluators we are able to find just the right person to perform the research. The shopper poses as a business looking for pricing on a service or product from the company’s competitor. This allows for a very up close and personal look at the competition’s sales techniques, customer service levels and pricing.
  2. Mergers and Acquisitions: Research is key when looking at a company to purchase or merge with. Investigating their reputation, online and off is important. We have conducted open source research on not only the company, but also on individual stakeholders. This allows for a good overall impression.

This can be a good source of income for the Private Investigator. Be sure to list it on your website and talk to clients about it.

Illegal Drug Sales & Social Media

Social Media companies are still being challenged for not doing enough when it comes to selling drugs on their platforms. Snap Chat, Instagram, Tik Tok and others have been sited for not doing enough to curb illegal drug sales on their sites. Parents, in particular, are passionate about this issue. With the rise of Fentanyl, the online sales of fake pills that include the synthetic opioid is staggering. The dealers use social media to advertise to young people. So even if a young person isn’t interested in mining social media for a drug of choice, the dealers come to them.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a warning back in September 2021, warning about the increase. Anne Milgram, the DEA Administrator, called out two apps that were very popular with teens and young adults: Snapchat and TikTok. She was quoted in the Washington Post that they were not doing enough to combat sales. But will the request go unnoticed?

This has been occurring for years on several social platforms. Many of the platform executives have said they are doing all they can on their end. Companies have hired extra moderators, using artificial – intelligence algorithms to flag unwanted posts. To date it continues to be an issue as many young people are dying from this type of drug.

To date, more than 93,000 people died of drug overdoses in the US in 2020. This is an increase of 30% from 2019.

CDC

The Advertising of Illegal Drugs to teens and young adults. 

Illegal Drug Word Cloud

The Organization for Social Media Safety, ran an informal test and found they were able to connect with drug dealers on multiple social media sites in under three minutes.

Volteface commissioned Survation in January 2019 to conduct a nationally representative poll of 2,006, 16 to 24 year olds.  The research was conducted on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Fake profiles were set up and researchers did not communicate with any social media users.  Key findings were as followed:

  • One in four young people (24%) reported they see illicit drugs advertised for sale on social media.
  • Of those who reported seeing illicit drugs for sale on social media:

56% saw drugs being advertised on Snapchat, 55% on Instagram and 47% on Facebook.

63% saw Cannabis being advertised – making it the most seen drug advertised for sale. Cocaine was the second drug most seen advertised (26%), followed by MDMA/Ecstasy (24%), Xanax (20%), Nitrous Oxide (17%) and Codeine/Lean (16%).

Encryption and VPN technology makes it difficult to trace dealers. There is also a lack of information sharing between police and social media platforms. All of this makes it very hard to get this off social media.

Searching for Drugs Online: (American Addiction Centers: Drug Abuse.com )

Think it is hard to find illegal drugs in social media? You might be very surprised to discover that people are selling drugs in the most blatant fashion. In fact, even their user names make it obvious! With user names like “ihavedrugs4sale”, and drug-riddled posts/pictures, the dealers make it quite obvious. The study revealed that the most popular items included marijuana, prescription drugs, painkillers, xanax, molly (mdma) and lean (codeine syrup mixture). Example below of items found in social media:

Illegal Drugs Online

This year a Santa Monica teen, named Sammy Berman Chapman asked his dad for a cheeseburger and went to his bedroom. An hour later his mother found him dead on the floor.

Sammy was killed by a Xanax pill laced with fentanyl, which is a synthetic opioid 50 times as powerful as heroin. The culprit: a drug dealer on Snapchat and, from the parents’ perspective, the company Snap itself, which they said was not doing enough to protect young users like Sammy. They went to the company for answers on how this could happen. Snapchat’s rep stated:

“Continuing to significantly improve our operational work to eradicate drug dealers from Snapchat, along with raising awareness of the dangers of fentanyl and other illicit drugs, will be a long term effort for us — we will keep working to do better and help keep our community safe,” said a Snapchat spokesperson.

It is an uphill battle, but one that is worth fighting for.

Fraud Update: Online Sales and Marketplaces

Many criminals continue to turn to the internet to unload stolen goods. Some sites require more information than a thief is willing to part with, which then leads them to other sites that have less security. Because of the anonymity some sites offer, it is important to search for the type of goods being offered on the site. User name searches are not always fruitful. Searching for items may back you in, if you will, to the criminal’s information.

Equally important is the rise of employee fraud. We wrote about this earlier this year. In Employee Fraud in the Digital Age, we discussed a case study. We once worked on a scan for an Investigator whose subject was suspected of selling a very unique set of stolen auto parts. The employee had created an eBay account and made the mistake of using a familiar user name. After the user name was revealed in our Deep Web Scan, we turned our attention to the online websites that sell goods to consumers. We were able to piece this information to that of our client’s subject. A huge catalog of stolen auto parts were on display.

Online Sales

According to Web Retailer, “47% of ecommerce sales were made through online marketplaces in 2020, amounting to nearly two trillion dollars. They also list 155 marketplaces that have more than one million visits per month, internationally.

How did this explosion in online selling happen? Over time it evolved, of course, but within the last couple of years, more and more people rely on it due to the Pandemic. Each online platform works differently, making it very difficult to find the scammers. Let’s take a look at a few of the top marketplaces to start.

Facebook Marketplace

Facebook noticed that its users were buying and selling things in groups across the platform. In 2016, it created a dedicated hub where people could post items for sale in order to reach interested buyers. They created what is now known as Facebook Marketplace, and they grew it to 1 Billion users.

The volume alone dictates that it will be a breading ground for fraud and scammers. Facebook is well aware of the issues they have and have publicly stated that they use software as well as outsourced people to review listings flagged by the software and to answer user complaints.

Most recently, you can find fake COVID vaccine cards for sale. However, for the most part you can find just about anything here.

Amazon Online Sales

It is a little more difficult to sell on Amazon. You can either sell your products to Amazon or on Amazon.

As a consumer, it is important to pay attention to who is selling an item. For example I recently purchased a specific style of shoes. I didn’t think much about it and when it was delivered it was an obvious counterfeit. It even had a very strong chemical smell. It was obvious I was a victim of a seller of counterfeit goods.

The Washington Post recently had a great article titled, “How to tell real products from scams when shopping online.” They actually listed out some good OSINT research tips, such as doing a reverse image search on the item you are looking at. It is also smart to research the company name.

eBay Online Sales

When it comes to online sales fraud, you most likely think eBay. eBay has been around since 1995 and it is no stranger to these issues. While there are many other marketplaces, It is still a gigantic places to sell all kinds of used and new products. When conducting research on a person or company allegedly selling stolen goods online, it is still the best place to start.

A couple of OSINT tips when searching eBay:

  1. Search the site for every known user name. You may even want to mix it up a bit by mixing user name letters and numbers. For example, consider the following fictitious user names; @windycity146, @tom.day, @daytom – I would search each of these but then combine to create new ones that the user may be using on eBay. Such as @tom146, @day146, etc..
  2. Search the site by utilizing the “Advanced” button, which will display new options for searches. Toggle to “show results” and then “items near me”. From here you can plug in a zip code up to 10 miles or more. This is an excellent way to search if you do not know the user name of your suspect.