eChatter

TikTok Intelligence & Research

Tik Tok has become the new “hot” social media platform with a huge amount of scrutiny around it. China launched it in 2016 and it grew to the US and UK markets in 2018.

What is it and How Does it Work?

It started as a lip-synch video app but now has morphed into an app where users can upload all kinds of videos clips. In fact, to date, it has a billion downloads worldwide and over 500 million active users. It supports over 15 languages and users in at least 75 countries. That is a lot of growth in such a short amount of time.

In a previous blog, we explained how to use TikTok and the difference between accessing the app via mobile device vs. desktop.

TikTok Demographics

MarketingCharts TikTok data (March 2019) finds over 50% of TikTok users in the US are aged 18-34 – with a nearly even split between 18-24 year olds and 25-34 year olds. Interestingly though, we still find a quarter of US TikTok users are aged 45-64. Statista supports those numbers as seen in the chart below.

Social Intelligence

When it comes to intelligence or social listening, TikTok is still a puzzle to most. Enterprise social platforms are not able to harvest data from TikTok and there is no API. The platform itself encourages users to to keep their content public because that is the very best way for one to get “famous”. Ordinary people doing very unordinary things to gain attention of brands looking for the next social media influencer.

The best way for a user to search TikTok is through their discover feature. Search via hashtags (desktop only allows hashtag searching). Keyword searching is available, however it will mostly capture the text description of videos.

Currently, social media research in TikTok will be very time consuming. It can be useful in the case where a user is very active and has a good deal of followers. Very easy to blend in to those followers and monitor activity.

Employee Misconduct

Fox News Reported:

A Chick-fil-A employee claims she was fired from the restaurant after posting a now-viral TikTok video revealing menu hacks for cheaper food.

The story began in late July, when TikTokker @Anasteeezy shared a quick clip to the video-sharing platform discussing an ordering hack for seasonal drinks. In the time since, the video has been viewed over 2.5 million times.

“I work at Chick-fil-A so I’m here to give you all the tips and tricks on secret menus items, how to get things cheaper and just all that” she began. “And this is only a part one.”

The employee started by explaining that by ordering a large Arnold Palmer drink with four pumps of mango, you can allegedly replicate Chick-fil-A’s seasonal mango passion tea, only cheaper and in a larger cup.”

The Dark Side of TikTok

Like every other social media platform, there is a dark side. Scams are popping up all the time on the platform. For one, there are plenty of bots on the platform impersonating real users. These automated bots either direct you to shady websites to shell out your private information like phone numbers and bank information or infect your device with malware.

Wired Magazine recently published an article, “Does TikTok Really Pose a Risk to US National Security? In the summer of this year, Wells Fargo banned employees from using TikTok on company devices.

TikTok’s fiercest opponents argue that it should be viewed as a dangerous Trojan horse for Chinese Communist Party espionage.

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.

Selling Drugs in Social Media

With all of the troubling events in our world today, social media seems to be more focused on the Election, COVID-19, Protests and Riots. Not much attention is given these days to selling drugs in social media. However, it is still happening and many police departments are having a hard time keeping up.

Salt Lake City news outlet, (KUTV) actually reported that if your child is on Snapchat, there’s a good chance they are seeing ads from drug dealers. Several 8th grader’s say they see the ads almost daily.

“Like yesterday, this person added me and they were selling Xanax,” said the eighth-grader.
Drug dealers are called “plugs” on social media, sometimes using a plug emoji to describe them.
Some plugs “quick add” people on Snapchat, which categorizes users by zip code.
(reported by KUTV Salt Lake City)

The Dealers Don’t Hide

Just a week ago, we performed a search on a suspect for a client. While combing through the suspect’s social media posts, it became quite obvious she was dealing. She made no secret of it and actually announced she was ready to make a run, and asked if anyone needed anything. Of course, her Facebook page didn’t reveal her real name. She used an alias but we were able to tie it to her name due to many public photos she included of herself. It is not always as secretive as one might think.

Instagram’s Selling of Drugs

A quick search for “#Zannies (a Xanax slang) provided over 4,000 results. They don’t hide it either. The photo below is just one example of what is out there.

Drugs and social media just seem to go hand in hand. In a post we wrote over a year ago, titled, “Buying Drugs on Instagram: It’s easier than you think”, we outlined why this is so easy to get away with.

The problem is Instagram’s algorithms can’t distinguish the context the hashtags are used in. And if a user then follows a dealer using the hashtags, Instagram’s algorithms then suggest that user follow more drug dealers. In the course of one day over 50 Instagram dealer accounts were found simply be searching for different hashtags like #weed4sale.

Most dealer profiles have a bunch or “product” photos displaying their inventory and their contact information is in the bio or comments section. While some bravely post their mobile number, most use a messaging app called Kik and others. No phone numbers or personal info is exchanged here, only user to user messaging.