OSINT Archives

TikTok & the Gabby Petito Case

Gabby Petito, a young and beautiful Social Media Influencer, went on one travel adventure after another with fiancé Brian Laundrie. And thens suddenly, it all took a very dark turn. With Gabby Petito’s potential remains being recently identified in Wyoming, and fiancé Brian Laundrie still missing, this case has captivated the hearts of many across the country.

Questions as to why this happened to her and if it all could have been prevented are on the minds of many. If you search #gabbypetito through TikTok right now you will find more than 480 million people have viewed the videos associated with the hashtag. From TikTok influencers, to witnesses, real time video footage is being posted piecing together the evidence.

How TikTok Helped

Taking a closer look at the videos associated with #gabbypetito, I stumbled upon Miranda Baker’s TikTok channel, a key witness associated with the investigation. Miranda and her boyfriend picked up Brian Laundrie who was hitchhiking around the time of Gabby’s disappearance. She gave a statement to the FBI but afterwards documented her interactions with Brian through her TikTok account. Every video she posted goes into details about Brian, their location, and interaction. Every video has gone viral.

Another video created by Alyssa Rose, shows a YouTube video the couple had posted on one of their adventures. She pauses the YouTube video at marker 6:40, to focus in on a book that Brain Laundrie was reading in a hammock. As she zooms in, she discusses the book he was reading which is “The Annihilation”. This book is about groups of people exploring uncharted terrain that go missing. This particular book series follows four women.

A third video was from Riley Lively, a mom living in New Orleans. She took to her TikTok account and stated in the post, “Putting some of my investigation skills to good use!” In this video she discusses how through sleuthing through an app called “All Trails” she found Gabby Petito’s public account. This app allows you to search and follow other individuals and their hiking trails from around the world. Through this account Riley discovered all of the trails Gabby had saved. She begins to show the lists that Gabby had saved in her account. Many of these hiking trails saved could have been potential spots of where was had gone missing.

Critical Thinking

In OSINT we are taught about the techniques behind finding key pieces of data or evidence that is online. What isn’t always taught? How to apply critical thinking online. Growing your critical thinking skills is just as important in finding key information. Each one of these women took to TikTok and applied their critical thinking skills, piecing together social media content to an ongoing investigation.

The Takeaway

Each of the viral videos above teach us all something valuable! Culture, personality, details, and analysis. Miranda met with the FBI and provided a statement. She also was continuously working with the FBI while creating her video content. My mind immediately goes to the details she is discussing in each post, how she is processing what she witnessed in each video, and what are others saying about the content she is posting in the comments. Are there any additional witnesses there? Any other clues?

Alyssa Rose shared Gabby Petito’s Youtube video. Someone could have easily watched that video and not notice Brian in the hammock reading a book. She took the time to analyze a video that could have easily gone over the heads of many. The online personality of your subject matters. This is a great example of a small piece of information, showing us an insight to Brian Laundrie and his interest.

Riley Liley pieced together Gabby being an influencer, possibly having an account with the ever popular All Trails App and was right. She then was able to view Gabby’s public online account trail lists.

Leave no stone unturned. Think about their interests. If they have a large social media presence, there’s a chance they have apps they are tied to involving their interests.

When we think of social media research, or social media listening, culture is not something that immediately comes to mind. It is only when we begin to dig deeper and identify what our search parameters are, that we begin to understand the role culture plays. TikTok is a culture phenomenon that continues to evolve. It took on an entirely new form over the past two weeks with this case and will continue to do so.

Facial Recognition – Online Research

Facial recognition is something that you may want to zero in on before you begin any type of reverse image searching. If you just want to see if the photo itself is being used anywhere else online, then leaving the photo as is works well. However, what if you have a photo of a person but can’t identify the person? In that case, you may want to search a bit differently.

Google Reverse Image Search

Google doesn’t really focus all that much on the facial recognition aspect of a photo. Instead, it is geared more to searching content. That means it takes into consideration what the photo is about. Is it a photo of a person eating at a restaurant? You may get a large number of results showing you a photo of a person who looks similar, eating at a restaurant.

It doesn’t focus as much on the facial recognition aspect.

One work around to this is to crop your photo before searching through Google Image. Take out all the background and just focus on the face of the person if possible.

Yandex

Yandex’s image search is far superior for facial recognition. I highly recommend using it. Take a look at the difference between searches. I use a standard head shot in all my marketing online. It should come up in a Google reverse image search without any problem. However, it doesn’t.

Look at how much more you information you get from Yandex than from a basic Google Image Search. While there are photo selections offered to the right, Yandex allows you to further crop an area of the photo. This allows you to try the search in more than one way.

Notice also how it offers you sites containing information about where the image is online. It highlights several sites where this exact photo is being used.

Tin Eye

Tin Eye is used all the time in investigations. For this particular exercise, it did not fair as well as the others, however. The result I received from a basic search was a website that is not even up and running anymore.

The Online Personality of Your Subject

Is the online personality of a person different from their in person personality? I recently watched a documentary on Netflix called, “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.” The docuseries is about a Canadian college student, Elisa Lam, who was a guest of the hotel in 2013. She disappeared and was missing for a period of time around some very unusual circumstances. I won’t tell you anymore, in case you want to watch it.

Her Tumblr account was an open book. Tumblr is a social media platform that was very popular during this time frame. Elisa Lam used it like a diary and in the documentary it is explained in detail what was obtained from the scrubbing of that open source information (OSINT). Her personality came through loud and clear through analyzing her social media posts.

Online Personality

When it comes to pulling online activity from social media, blogs, forums, etc. on your person of interest, personality plays an important role. Everyone in the investigation’s field knows that a person who is narcissistic for example, will provide you with a treasure of information online. In some cases, perhaps even more than you might need.

But what about all those people in between? People approach social media differently and there are many factors to be considered.

Two Major Personality Differences

One would think that an introvert would be non-social but that is not necessarily true. Consider some actors or comedians. Most seem like extraverts by the way they conduct themselves publicly. However, when interviewed, many of them say they are more introverted.

What are some common traits of Introverts?

Introverts in social media care about their privacy.
They tend to only accept friend requests from people they know.
They really don’t care about the number of “likes”.
Most likely unaware of friend requests.
Will unfollow or delete you.

What are some common traits of extraverts?

Extraverts don’t worry about their privacy.
They are more inclined to accept invitations from people they don’t know.
Extraverts care very much about the “likes” & shares.
They do pay attention to friend requests.
Most will keep all of their connections close.

From a psychology point of view we can take a look at “Introvert vs. Extrovert: A Look at the Spectrum and Psychology. The article points out the following. “How extroverted we are can have a huge bearing on our day-to-day life across a multitude of contexts and it’s important to note that there’s no ‘better’ level of extroversion/introversion – both ends of the spectrum have their advantages and disadvantages but by understanding where we fall on the scale we can address areas in which we’re perhaps lacking.”

Personality predicts what people do on social media.

A large body of research on social media use and personality has focused on the Big 5 personality traits, the most widely accepted trait theory. When people are asked to rate how much different traits characterize them, those traits cluster into five groups:

Extraversion: Sociability and feeling energized by interactions with others
Agreeableness: Warmth, cooperativeness, and a desire to get along with others
Conscientiousness: Being practical, organized, and hard-working
Openness: Creativity, intellectualism, and openness to new experiences
Neuroticism: Moodiness and anxiety

Knowing and understanding some of this may be of help in your next investigation. It is well worth it to take a look at your subject’s online activity to reveal glimpses into their personality.

The “Must Have” to the “Nice to Have” in Social Research for OSINT

In the world of online research, social research, OSINT, etc., information falls into two main social research categories. In one group you have the “Must Have” and the other is the “Nice to Have”. Let me explain.

Let’s take a look at this from the viewpoint of information collected on a person of interest.

Must Have: Facebook

Facebook intelligence is still in the “Must Have” category. In part this is due to the fact that there is still so much to discover there, if you know how and where to dig. That is the challenge!

Groups: Sometimes people will showcase their groups and sometimes this information is kept private. If it is kept private, there are search techniques that can be used, but it is not easy. Sometimes this information is readily available on a person’s profile page. When it is, and the group is public, I would suggest taking some time to do a manual search.

What Can You Find?

When people post in Groups, I really think that most have a mindset that it is undiscoverable information. Meaning, it is safe within the constraints of the group. That may give a false sense of freedom to speak their mind or to post something that they wouldn’t want the majority of their friends to know. When viewing a person’s page, public posts may give an impression of being squeaky clean but posts in a group setting can reveal the opposite.

Recently, we conducted a scan on a person who from their two facebook profiles, looked to be pretty clean cut. After digging further, we came up with a series of posts that showed a very different side to the individual.

Facebook Post — Post of a person of interest in a Group

In case you are unfamiliar with the term, “wake and bake” it can be described as getting up in the morning and partaking of the drug of choice, without leaving the comforts of one’s bed. (urban dictionary).

Enough to toss that squeaky clean image right out the door!

Twitter:

If you are having trouble finding information online, one suggestion is to turn to Twitter. Is the person currently employed? By whom? What about past jobs? It may be worth it to scan the company’s Twitter pages because many mid to large size companies will post events, fundraisers, blogs, videos, etc. which have employees present.

We recently found several photos of an individual from their company’s Twitter page.

Nice to Have

There is quite a lot of information that can be filed under the “Nice to Have” social research category. When conducting a deep web scan for example, we may find out that the person had some past problems with the law. From simple traffic violations to bankruptcies and everything in the middle. This may date back 10 or more years.

While it may not be important to the case, it is something that is part of the person’s past. Voter registration, financial contributions to a particular political party, volunteer work, newspaper articles, digital records of all kinds, and so on. All of this additional information can help to give you a good picture of the character of the person.

UCC filing — Person had a possible DEA Controlled Substance License that expired in 2015

A piece of information like the one above can be useful in many ways. Perhaps you know the person to be a Veterinarian or he was one in the past. This piece of information can serve as another data point that confirms his profession. It may list an address or name of a business that you didn’t have before.

It can help you to eliminate false positives in your research as well. Without the help or assistance of multiple software platforms, you can easily get two people confused who share the same name.

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.