Investigations Archives

Three Facebook Group Search Tips

Back in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg was focused on getting more people to engage on their platform. Facebook Groups became a very important tool to use to do just that. Facebook rolled out an algorithm known as “Facebook Zero,” and simply put, this is the reason why you most likely see Group content dominating your newsfeeds. (Hootsuite)

Many people who are involved in Facebook Groups are highly engaged. Once a person joins a group, there seems to be a false sense of anonymity in a way. Meaning, that no one outside of this group can see my posts. If the group is public, that is simply not the case.

It is important to remember this when you are conducting research on your person of interest.

We covered this in a previous blog. The “Must Have” to the “Nice to Have” in Social Research for OSINT featured a case study. From all appearances the POI seemed to be pretty clean cut. Someone who you would never suspect would use drugs. However, once we located a group she was active in, it revealed a different side to her.

When conducting scans, we have found some seemingly “hidden” posts in groups that were very helpful to our client’s case.

Hidden VS. Private Groups

According to Hootsuite:

Private and visible Facebook groups can be found through search, and it requires approved membership in order to see anything beyond a group description, members, and group history.

Private groups that are hidden can only be found by current members and those who have been invited to the group already (even if they aren’t members yet). Only members are able to view the group content beyond that waiting-room-styled display above.

Most business groups are most effective when set to private and visible. People can find you and you have full control of who gets to see and view group content, giving you the best of both worlds for a balance of quantity and quality while still being findable.

Hidden groups are most effective for internal team use or if you want to set up a highly-exclusive group that’s invite-only and don’t want the backlash of angry people who aren’t accepted.

Tips to Search Facebook Groups

Need a quick and easy way to search for groups? Start with Facebook’s Browse Groups page which is designed to help you locate a group that fits your interests.
Once in the Browse Group area, you can filter the search down a bit (see below).

If you have an idea that your POI is active in a particular group that is public, you can easily use the magnifying icon right on the page to search the group for names, keywords, dates, etc..

People who post in groups, seem to be more vocal, more honest and sometimes reveal much more than they are even aware of. It may be because they view it as being more “private” and not publicly available on their own profile page or timeline.

3 Ways to Find Someone’s Email Address

When conducting online research, a person’s email address can be vital. When you consider that most social media platforms and online forums require an email address to sign up, you could be missing important information by not knowing it.

When conducting a basic background search there are times you don’t even pull up one email address on a subject. There are ways to find someone’s email address online.

Tools to Try

Where does the subject work? Knowing the name of the company (as long as they have a website?, can be step one. Next, use an email look up tool.

Hunter..io: They have a free search tool on their website. In the example below, I used it to find email addresses for our website, www.e-chatter.net. Two email addresses were found. The great part of this is that even though they don’t provide the entire email address, you can see the format in which the company uses for their employees. If you were searching for me, you would know that my name is Kathy Doering. Easy to figure out that we use first name initial and last name as our format.

2. Rocket Reach: Search by name + Company, or Linkedin URL. You can also search by locations, title, industry, revenue, SIC, and + 15 other attributes & filters. You will have to sign up for a free account with this site however.

When searching for Kathy Doering, Rocket Reach found 3 correct email addresses. They also found several low ranking results that were not connected to me. They did have false positives like any other search tool.

3. Search using Duck Duck Go: Using an alternative search engine like DuckDuckGo, is a little known trick. Use “@domainname.com” in the search bar. Also try “@domainname.com” contact. This is not something that will work in Google or Bing. You can include the name of your prospect in the search if you’re looking to contact someone in particular, or just keep it generic.

In case you already have an email address and want to check to see if it is legitimate, refer to our blog post from May 2020, “Who is Tied to This Email Address?”

OSINT Research & False Positives

A great deal of time must be spend on OSINT in order to weed out false positives – good intelligence vs bad intelligence. The degree of reliability and authenticity. The importance of an accurate starting point is critical when taking your research on a person of interest to the world wide web.

We will dive into this in more detail in the weeks to come. For now, let’s begin with how to identify a fake photo. Hiding your real identity has never been easier on the web and social media is the scammer’s friend when it comes to this. A photo may be a false positive because while it appears to be the person, in actuality, it is a fake.

Can You Tell the Difference?

Take a close look at the photos above. One is a real person and one is a computer generated photo. Which is which? Not so easy, right? This is something that all of us in the open source research, law enforcement and private investigations industries will need to be proficient at. A great site to test your skills is Which Face is Real?

You may wonder how this is even done. You are not alone! Machine learning has been used to customize and generate realistic photos. It is called StyleGAN.

StyleGAN was originally an open-source project by NVIDIA to create a generative model that could output high-resolution human faces. The basis of the model was established by a research paper published by Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, and Timo Aila, all researchers at NVIDIA.

(source: https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/)

What To Look For

According to Which Face is Real, look for the following things:

Teeth and Hair: Hair and teeth are very difficult to render realistically. Often teeth are odd or asymmetric. Look for a type of hallo over the hair or other odd imperfections.

Eye Glasses: Right now, it’s very hard for algorithms to generate realistic-looking eyeglasses. Take a close look at the style of the glasses. Many times one side will look different than the other side.

Background of the Image: Many times the background of an image is a give-away. Because the concentration is on the face alone, the background may show smudge marks or render unclear.

When in Doubt….

If you suspect your target is using a false identity, you can do your very own “fact checking”. Google image will allow you to upload an image to search the web for other images that look just like it.

One of our recent blog posts discussed this in further detail. Online Research: 3 Tips for Better Results. It is more important than ever to be sure you have the right tools in your tool box.

PS: If you guess the photo of the woman, you are correct! She is a real person.

Online Research: 3 Tips to For Better Results

Online investigation is a piece by piece process that we hope will bring us to the Aha moment! Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. In today’s research climate, online resources have become even more valuable to the Private Investigator or Online Researcher. One indication of this is the evolution of online data bases and web scrapping software companies who are able to offer us much more than years past. How well are you keeping up?

Time is Money- Money is Time

Deep Web — Photo credit: *Michael Lieberman*

The world wide web is huge and the image above provides a great visual of just that. When you begin your online search this is something to keep in mind. How much time are you willing to invest to gather the data you need? Many times two heads are better than one. We confer with other team members when conducting online research all the time and have found it to be very valuable. A fresh set of eyes can make a huge difference.

Multiple software platforms are better than one platform. Each platform captures data from different online data bases. Sometimes the most important data point is found by scrapping the web against every single piece of information you have available and know to be true. One thing can lead to another when it comes to online research and each data point you gather leads to another and so on. It is a good idea to get another prospective when you can, by either hiring a third party or trying out a new software/data base even if there is a small cost to it. Depending on the case, your strategy should include options whenever possible.

Discover the Right Apps

Recently, we wrote about the importance of Social Media Apps such as TikTok. Apple has over 2.8 million apps available currently. That is a whole lot of apps! We will zero in on a couple that you may find helpful. Check out new apps regularly for your online investigations.

Downloadgram: Downloader for Instagram: Photo & Video Saver allows the user to download videos and images from Instagram’s links. By copying image’s and video’s link and pasting into Downloader for Instagram which automatically downloads that video/image, then you can save into your device.
Photo Investigator: The Photo Investigator is an iOS app to view all image metadata (all the possible data stored ABOUT and within each photo). You can also remove photo metadata with an in-app purchase. The Investigator can also open the image’s GPS location in the maps app for directions; view images at full size and zoom them larger than in the Photos App.

Protecting Your Privacy

One of the very first things I recommend is to get a good VPN (Virtual Private Network). There are a lot of options. Take a look at Best VPNs of 2020 for a good list of options. We use NordVPN and have been very pleased. First and foremost it provides a strong degree of online anonymity. Additionally, when reviewing providers, make sure that you have the option to include mobile devices as well. This will keep you protected when you need to search using your mobile device on the road.

Another thing to keep in mind is when something online is “free” you are very likely giving them your private user information in some way. It is just the way the web works. Many data bases do offer free searches. You get a little taste of what the site offers but at a price.

This is why it is a good idea to use an email masking service. One that I would recommend you take a look at is 33mail.com . An excellent safeguard when having to supply an email address online. The site explains how it works below:

“Aliases are created automatically the first time an email is sent to them, so you can just make up an alias on the spot and use it when you sign up for a website, and it will be created the first time that website sends an email to it.“

As many are still working from home, protecting yourself online has never been more important.

Don’t forget Hashtags!

Have you used hashtags in your online investigations? What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word hashtag or see the symbol (#)? Do you think of Twitter? Or maybe Instagram, LinkedIn, or even Facebook? Social media users notice hashtags within posts. Some users follow hashtags. Some create them for political purposes. Others use them to track an event or even to make a point. Millions of hashtags are used in Twitter alone each day.

What Makes Up a Hashtag?

A hashtag is simply a keyword phrase, spelled out without spaces, with a pound sign (#) in front of it. Wikipedia calls it a type of metadata tag used on social networks. Looking for the sale of a certain drug in social media? Search the hashtag. Be sure to gather the street names the drug uses, so you get a full picture.

How else can this be used in your investigations? If you are working a high profile criminal case you will want to include this in your research. I would recommend starting in Twitter. If you find a fair amount of information there, I recommend using Tweet Deck and build yourself a dashboard. This will allow you to keep track of any developments using relative hashtags in real time.

Once you have located some good hashtags related to your case, cross reference them in other platforms. Not only will it potentially produce some good information (who, what, where and why), it may also allow you to search photos attached to the post for other possible clues.

Case Study: Hashtag Led to Username

A recent scan we conducted on a person of interest came up empty. Using multiple software platforms as well as good old-fashioned hunting, led to nothing. While searching, we found an important hashtag. By researching the hashtag in each social media platform, we located our person of interest. The username was such, that is just didn’t get picked up by any software platform. It was a very unique variance of this individual’s real name. From there we found a very public profile of the subject.

It is just another example of using hashtags in online research.

Hashtags to Try for Investigations

Take a look at some interesting hashtags next time you are in Twitter. One of the best is #breakingnews. This hashtag can quickly bring you up to speed on news breaking in the moment.

There are so many more, as the photo below showcases.