eChatter

SNAPCHAT: What You Need to Know for your investigations

Snapchat gained success soon after its launch due to its one of a kind feature. No matter what type of snap you post, no one could take a screenshot or save it without your knowledge. If you post a picture on your Snapchat account, it stays there for a good 24 hours and then it’s deleted. This feature empowers kids and teens to do and share whatever they want on Snapchat, without fearing to be caught. Which has parents concerned about the safety of their kids.

With users of all ages, it’s risky to let young kids and teens use a social networking app without keeping a check on their activities.
Unfortunately for parents, Snapchat does not provide a feature to view snapchat stories without the user knowing. Your account is protected as long as you have a unique password, are careful who you snap with, and you don’t reveal too much personal information.

But what many folks do not know that there now are multiple ways to spy on snapchat of anyone. Snapchat’s Built-In Spy Feature, Snap Map, gives you an opportunity to spy on your friends and know their location. Many users have probably come across this feature, but you might not think of using it as the Snapchat spy tool.

Snap Map displays information about all your friends who were lately available on Snapchat, and have shared their location with you. If you want to spy anyone or wish to surprise your friends by joining them randomly at a particular spot, Snap Map assists you by showing the recent movements of your friends. Activating this built-in snapchat spy feature is easy to do, would take just a couple of taps from your fingers.

If you want to be a little more incognito when spying, there are several apps available:

SpyAdvice tops all the other spying apps due to its exciting features. You can see complete tracking of all multimedia sent and received via Snapchat, view exact time of sharing of all photos and videos, access deleted media, see a record of recent keystrokes, and have real-time location monitoring with GPS tracking. SpyAdvice is not just a spying app; it is a complete package that enables you to hack someone’s snapchat without them knowing – and get access to every single activity of the user.

If you prefer a free option, checkout Snapch. This spying tool uses various VPNs which entirely masks your presence. Your targeted user will never doubt any external access to its Snapchat activities. Through Snapch, you can freely get your target users snap stories, chat logs, and even login information. This empowers you to get instant access to your target’s Snapchat account instantly without any spy app.

Another option is Snapchat Photo Grabber. Though this tool is not as smart as the others, particularly the SpyAdvice, you can still use it as a quick option to access anyone’s Snapchat account. This handy tool will let you access your target’s snapchat account within minutes.

Although spying is constantly being debated as legal or illegal, sometimes it’s more important to get involved in order to protect your loved ones from bullies, predators, or criminals. Obviously no one is going to share their secret activities with you, therefore, you have a reason to spy on the Snapchat account of anyone you doubt or want to keep protected online. If you wish to protect your child as a worried parent, desire to keep an eye on your spouse, or want your staff to be sincere with their work instead of wasting time on Snapchatting – then it indeed is your right to spy their Snapchat accounts.

About Us:
We have been mining social media since 2007 for our clients. By utilizing best in class software programs, we offer a service called eChatter.
eChatter works with you to obtain your objectives in a fast, accurate and reliable facet. By keeping our strengthened principals, yet evolving with this industry, we lead in social media monitoring. Since 2007, we have been dedicated to providing our customers with the most authentic data.

We offer:
• Deep Web Scans
• Jury Vetting
• Jury Monitoring
• Quick Scan

www.e-chatter.net
(866) 703-8238

What Is a VPN and Why Should You Have One?

The best VPNs, or virtual private networks, can help secure your web traffic and protect you from anyone who wants to steal or monetize your data.

Think about how much information about yourself you transmit over the internet. Frightening isn’t it?
Now think about the safety measures you have put in place to protect your information? Do you feel a sense of panic? That’s completely normal considering the amount of hackers, spies, and thieves trying to gain access to your personal data.

One of the best ways to protect yourself is to use a virtual private network (VPN). A VPN creates a virtual encrypted tunnel where all of your internet traffic is routed through, securing your data from prying eyes. Best of all, your computer appears to have the IP address of the VPN server, masking your identity and location. When your data reaches the VPN server, it exits onto the public internet. If the site you’re heading to uses HTTPS to secure the connection, you’re still secure. But even if it was intercepted, it’s difficult to trace the data back to you, since it appears to be coming from the VPN server.

Let’s think of some specific scenarios in which a VPN might be useful.

1) Consider the public Wi-Fi network…at your favorite coffee shop, local mall, or airport. You connect to their Wi-Fi without a second thought. But did you ever stop to think who might be watching the traffic on that network? How can you be sure the Wi-Fi network is legit? Think about the passwords, banking data, credit card numbers, and private information you transmit every time you go online. Keep in mind that just because it’s called Starbucks_WiFi doesn’t mean it’s really owned by them. There are snoopers everywhere trying to access your information.

Now, If you connect to that same public Wi-Fi network using a VPN you can rest assured that no one on that network will be able to intercept your data.

2) Another concern regarding internet security is related to two groups: the NSA and your ISP.
The NSA’s surveillance tool is massive and at one point had the ability to intercept and analyze just about every transmission sent over the web. But when using a VPN, your data is encrypted and less directly traceable back to you. This doesn’t make you invisible, your traffic and information could still be intercepted. But a VPN adds a layer of encryption during parts of your online traffic’s journey.

Your ISP may already be involved in spying operations, using information about you to fuel the growth of companies like Facebook and Google. Those companies are able to gather huge amounts of data about users, and then use it to target advertising or even sell that data to other companies. ISPs are now allowed to bundle anonymous user data and put it up for sale.

“ISPs are in a position to see a lot of what you do online. They kind of have to be, since they have to carry all of your traffic,” explains Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff technologist Jeremy Gillula. “Unfortunately, this means that preventing ISP tracking online is a lot harder than preventing other third-party tracking—you can’t just install [the EFF’s privacy-minded browser add-on] Privacy Badger or browse in incognito or private mode.”

What Your VPN Can’t Do
VPNs can only do so much to protect your online activities. If you really want to browse the web anonymously, you’ll want to use Tor. Unlike a VPN, Tor bounces your traffic through several server nodes, making it much harder to trace. It’s also managed by a non-profit organization and distributed for free. Some VPN services will even connect to Tor via VPN, for additional security.

If you do decide to get a VPN, do your homework. A recent investigation into 115 of the world’s most popular VPN services revealed that many are negating their stated claims. To build trust, providers make promises not to track users through logs or other identifying information. The Best VPN recently revealed that 26 out of the 100 biggest VPN services are collecting files that could contain personal and identifying information — things like your IP address, location, bandwidth data, and connection timestamps.

Also consider the other devices you use to access the internet. Smart home devices and phones can’t run VPNs. So the solution would be to install a VPN on your router. This encrypts data as it leaves your home network for the world wild web. Information sent within your network will be available, and any smart devices connected to your network will enjoy a secured connection.

Ultimately, it is up to individuals to protect themselves. Antivirus apps and password managers go a long way toward keeping you safer, but a VPN is a uniquely powerful tool that you should definitely. Whether you opt for a free service or even go all-in with an encrypted router, having some way to encrypt your internet traffic is critically important.

Drugs & the Dark Web: Update

Dark web markets are viewed as one of the crucial sources of fentanyl, synthetic opioids, and other illegal drugs. Often produced in China, these drugs are sent to users found on the dark net. The packages flowing from China are blamed for compounding the opioid crisis in the United States. Empire, one of the largest markets still online, features more than 26,000 drug and chemical listings, including over 2,000 opioids, shipped right to a customer’s mailbox.

And although many of the major sites have been shut down, the online trafficking of illegal drugs has not stopped. The fight against online drug sales is a constant cycle: There are raids, sites are taken down, and a few people are arrested. And after a while the trade and markets pop up somewhere else. “The instability has become sort of baked into the dark-web market experience,” said Emily Wilson, an expert on the dark web at the security firm Terbium Labs. “People don’t get quite as scared by it as they did the first few times.”

Silk Road, the original dark net market that came online in 2011, was shut down in 2013. When its creator, Ross Ulbricht, was put in jail, there was a widespread assumption that his failure and punishment would deter imitators. But that was not the case. In 2014, a massive crackdown called Operation Onymous helped arrest 17 people by exploiting a vulnerability in the anonymity software Tor, which serves as the dark web’s fundamental cloaking tool. Yet by 2017, another site, AlphaBay, rose up to become bigger than Silk Road had ever been. The FBI took down Alphabay in July of that year while Dutch police hijacked the second-largest dark-web market, Hansa. The double takedown, called Operation Bayonet, was intended not only to ensnare dark-web buyers and sellers but to scare them, too.
Just recently, global law enforcement announced the takedowns of two of the world’s largest dark-web drug sites, Wall Street Market and Valhalla. And this past week, the FBI and Europol announced their latest win: The takedown of dark-web news and information site DeepDotWeb, which had quietly made millions of dollars from offering promotional links to black market sites in an underground affiliate marketing scheme. “We think it’s going to have a huge impact,” FBI special agent Maggie Blanton, who leads the bureau’s Hi-Tech Organized Crime Unit, told WIRED. “We viewed DeepDotWeb as a gateway to the dark web.”

But despite those wins, new sites keep popping up due to an economy where the demand—drug-addicted users—remains constant or growing. “History has taught us that this ecosystem is very, very resilient,” says Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Nicolas Christin, a longtime dark web researcher. “It’s part of a cycle, and we’re in the chaotic part of the cycle. We’ll have to see how it recovers. But if I were a betting person I would put more money on it recovering than on it dramatically changing.”

Governments have dedicated increasingly substantial resources to fighting dark net markets, especially as their role in the rise of synthetic opioids has become clearer. In early 2018, the F.B.I. created the Joint Criminal Opioid Darknet Enforcement team, or J-Code, with more than a dozen special agents and staff. Europol has its own dedicated dark web team. During the first few months of 2019, American officials conducted an operation called SaboTor, which focused on the vendors selling drugs on the dark net. There were 61 arrests in just a few weeks. One ring, in the Los Angeles area, was said to be responsible for shipping 1,500 packages of crack, heroin and methamphetamine each month. Richard Downing, who oversees the computer crime section of the Justice Department, said he and his colleagues have focused on techniques that create distrust on the sites by encouraging users to believe that sellers and site administrators have already been compromised and are feeding information to law enforcement.

But despite the numerous shut downs and arrests, data from Chainalysis suggests that before the latest crackdown, transactions on the dark net had recovered to nearly 70% of the previous peak, right before AlphaBay went down, and were growing each month. “After some years now of this cycle, it would be hard to say that it’s likely we’re going to stamp this out completely,” Mr. Downing said. “I am hopeful that our efforts to spread deterrence and mistrust are having an impact on how quickly they come back and how strongly they come back.”

The surviving markets, and new ones that have already popped up, have adopted measures to make them more difficult targets for the authorities. Using alternative cryptocurrencies, like Monero, make transactions harder to track. And DeepDotWeb already has a formidable successor in the social network and news site Dread, which is available only on the dark net. One of the new markets that have emerged recently, Cryptonia, has promised that it has figured out many of the flaws that made previous sites vulnerable to the police. “As geeks, we believe that with the right technology most of these problems can be solved,” the Cryptonia Team Manifesto says. “That’s why we have set out to build the perfect dark net trading platform.”
Most users of the dark web see the attacks as a waste of time. “The war on drugs is a complete failure, a bottomless money pit,” writes one user. But both the FBI and Europol officials see their fights as necessary—even if only to limit the dark web markets’ growth and make it even incrementally harder to buy dangerous drugs like fentanyl online. “Any small win is a victory,” the FBI’s Blanton says. “We care about stopping even one more person from overdosing.”

“Some people you’re not going to deter from going to these markets. But there are a large number of people who would never considering buying drugs on a street corner or from a shady dealer but who will use the perceived anonymity of the internet to do this,” Europol’s Steven Wilson says. “If we can dissuade those people, how many lives to do we end up saving?”

www.e-chatter.net
(866) 703-8238

How Online Data & AI Help Fight Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is rampant in our country, but not often mentioned. It happens in the shadows, on the dark web, is hard to track, and tough to talk about.

The crime of human trafficking—defined by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as modern-day slavery that “involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act—is notoriously difficult to prosecute. Victims, who are mostly women and children, often lack legal documentation and many fear reprisals if they go to authorities. Therefore perpetrators go to great lengths to conceal their behavior by laundering money and keeping their operations quiet.

Recently, law enforcement agencies and organizations that help victims of human trafficking have begun using artificial intelligence tools to overcome this lack of visibility. By sorting through data and recognizing patterns faster than any human could, AI tools are helping activists and investigators crack down on buyers of sex, identify trafficking victims and follow illicit money trails.

“Imagine the techniques that Google and Facebook are using to make a profit—understanding people, the way they connect, what their interests are, what they might buy or the activities they engage in,” says Dan Lopresti, professor and chair of the department of science and engineering at Lehigh University’s P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science. “We can apply those same techniques—data mining, text mining, what’s called graph mining—AI that’s being used for legitimate and really profitable purposes, to track these illicit behaviors.”

Lopresti is involved with the Regional Intelligence and Investigation Center (RIIC) in Allentown, PA. Launched in 2013, the RIIC has “revolutionized” the way area police departments “analyze and share collected data to solve crimes,” according to the office of Lehigh County District Attorney James Martin.

Lopresti, who is an expert in document analysis and pattern recognition, is working with RIIC Director Julia Kocis, prosecutors, law enforcement officials and other Rossin College computer science and engineering faculty members to help overcome the challenges of turning vast amounts of data, primarily from police incident reports, into something useable, despite limited resources.

“If an expert sits down and reads enough of these, he or she will find a common thread—this person is related to this place, which is related to this activity, which is related to this other person,” he says. “The trouble is, they’ve got millions of these reports and just don’t have enough time to read through them. We’re developing natural language techniques, text mining and data mining techniques that are oriented to processing lots of data to identify patterns of behavior that would reflect illegal activities related to human trafficking.”

Because human trafficking is a $150 billion-per-year criminal industry, many companies are joining the fight and helping out. IBM worked with the STOP THE TRAFFIK (STT) coalition to develop a new cloud-hosted data hub that allows financial institutions to run AI and machine learning tools against their data sets to detect “specific human trafficking terms and incidents.” AI also allows the data hub to take in open-source data — including thousands of news feeds each day — to help analysts more easily identify the characteristics of human trafficking incidents.

Entrepreneur Josh McAfee, a former law enforcement officer and loss-prevention executive, is the founder and CEO of McAfee Institute, a Peoria, Illinois-based business that trains corporations and law enforcement agencies to battle cybercrime and fraud. But what brings him the most satisfaction is locating victims of human trafficking.

Since 2011, his company has helped bring back about 1,900 human-trafficking victims, 1,000 of them children.

He now teaches a course on human trafficking to an average of 150 to 200 people a month. “We’re developing leaders in the classroom, so they can go out and utilize our techniques within their organizations. It multiplies our success and enables us to make a huge impact,” says McAfee. “Growing up, I always had a passion for law enforcement. I wanted to get out there and fight crime, get the bad guys–you know, help people. That’s why I became a law enforcement officer right out of college. To be able to do this kind of work in my business is everything to me. It’s what I was born to do.”

Why Is HR Scared of Social Media Background Checks?

We’ve talked to many HR professionals and Private Investigators who work with clients for employment purposes. What we hear most often is that they would love to include social and online research as part of their background check but are afraid to do so. They focus on what they hear in mainstream media – social media/online background checks are inviting a lawsuit, and companies don’t want to take a risk or be liable should a disgruntled candidate argue their case for discrimination, etc.

What many in the industry don’t know is that there are full on social media/online research services available, but those are not geared toward HR. In fact, there is a separate program designed specifically for pre-employment background checks.

This social/online research focuses on only negative content in relation to very specific topics, such as

Racist, Sexist, or Discriminatory Behavior
Sexually Explicit Material
Threats or Acts of Violence
Potentially Illegal Activity

It also complies with FCRA guidelines, which is critical. As HR professionals know, there are many aspects of an individual’s life that absolutely cannot be factored into the decision-making process, otherwise known as protected classes. Some examples include gender, marital status, religious affiliation, race, and parental status. It gets tricky because there are some factors that are state specific as far as not being allowed to be seen/considered as part of the hiring process. The laws can get further muddied for nationwide companies who are hiring outside of the state they are hiring employees in – at this point, which set of state specific laws apply?

Given all of the intricacies of pre-employment screening, it’s no wonder HR departments are very slow to adopt social media/online research as part of their decision-making process.

eChatter has developed a scan just for this industry/area of need. The pre-employment social/online research services take every factor into consideration to make sure that the clients we work for stay compliant on a federal and state level. Furthermore, we ensure that you never see what you shouldn’t see by redacting the information – the report turns up only relevant content that can be portrayed as negative and a detriment to the person’s employment with your company. When important content is identified, the report will only show those pieces of content. If nothing is found that falls into what can be legally obtained/considered when making hiring decisions, a “no pertinent information found” report is filed, meaning there is nothing of concern regarding the candidate.

With these protections in place, HR professionals can easily include social media and online content as part of their candidate screening. It’s as simple as filling out a form, providing as much information about an individual as in know – in the case of pre-employment scans, submitting the candidate’s resume is a great help – and letting eChatter take care of the rest, from conducting the research to keeping the layers of protection in place.

Want to know about using social/online content for pre-employment screening? Feel free to take a look at our website or send us an email for more information. We’re happy to answer any questions and show you how social/online research can be a valuable piece in the hiring process.