(Disclaimer: All information provided in this post has been pulled from publicly available data. This post is for educational purposes only)
OSINT stands for Open-Source Intelligence and is the task of collecting and analyzing publicly available data on someone or something gathered from public, and open sources. OSINT is primarily used by national security, and law enforcement agencies but can also be used by anyone as all the tools used are publicly available. Below is an excerpt about OSINT from the CIA's own website:
If you ever find yourself in a position where you need to know someones information for some reason you'll first need to find a breadcrumb of personal information about the person or their family/friends. In this post I will be using the scam artist known as Zeartul as an example. First I found this post from a few months ago by
introducing Zeartul as a witness. In this post he talks a little bit about Zeartul's personal life.
Random Witness Introduction: @Zeartul - A New Witness Among Us | Steemit - 08/23/2017
As
is one of the few witnesses actually posting something about his real life I simply have to include some of it in here to make him more vivid for you. He seems to be very passionate about fitness, which might be encouraged by the fact that his girlfriend is working as an instructor and running her own fitness video-channel (Eventually to be seen on Dtube soon).
In the post above the author provides a bit of info about Zeartul's girlfriend which was all that was needed to begin with. Next I went looking for any references to Zeartul's girlfriend in any of his previous Steemit posts. Sure enough he links to his girlfriends You Tube fitness page in a post he published about a week before SteemBusiness wrote his post about Zeartul.
Intro~My Fitness Obsession (Itzzia Polanco) My girlfriends video coming to steemit! | [Steemit] - 08/13/2017
I wanted to share one of my girls video of her fitness journey, that she uploaded on youtube a while back, she will be coming to steemit real shortly!
She is a fitness coach at one of our local gyms,
In the post above Zeartul linked to a video from his girlfriends Youtube channel. Looking at her 'About Page' reveals her other social media accounts. I should just point out that as far as I know Zeartul's girlfriend has nothing to do with his scamming but she does need to be included in this post as her Facebook was the crucial link in finding Zeartul in the first place.
Searching her Instagram doesn't reveal much apart from confirming she is the same woman and that she works in a fitness studio. Looking through her Facebook posts reveals her city (Simi Valley) and a recent photo of her and Zeartul indicating she is currently in a relationship with Zeartul. We can confirm this is Zeartul by cross referencing known photos of Zeartul in this blog post about him.
Although we have now confirmed this is Zeartul's girlfriend we still needed to confirm his name. So looking down her FB post history at the likes and comments on some of her Facebook pictures turned up someone called Carlidos Cardenas.
Since my last post Zeartul has changed his Facebook name from Carlidos Cardenas to Nathans Oldman. fortunately I archived his profile before he had a chance to change it.
Below is an archived version of Carlos Cardenas original Facebook profile before he changed his name to Nathans Oldman. As you can see his avatar is of him and his girlfriend. Here is an archived link to the new Nathans Oldman Facebook page
Finally we searched for Carlidos Cardenas on White Pages, a data broker website. This returned a couple of variations of his name. Carlos Cardenas was one of them.
To confirm this was the correct person and address I searched for his girlfriends name on the same website and sure enough searching his girlfriends name returned the same address.
As I briefly stated at the beginning, this post is meant for educational purposes only. It provides an example showing how easy it can be to find out someones details and why you should never use your real name and details online. It should also hopefully act as a deterrent to anyone thinking of scamming people online. The moral of the story is if you're going to be stupid enough to scam people online don't use your real name, and don't do it on an uncensored, decentralized platform like Steemit.com.