Monthly Archive for March, 2008

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Vehicle Tracking Device Bomb Scare

Published on March 12, 2008 in Canada, Private Investigator and Surveillance. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Colorado Private Investigator Arrested Using Tracking Device

According to a news article in the Summit Daily News, a private investigator from Glenwood Springs, CO, was arrested Thursday after placing a tracking device on a car. The tracking device was for a divorce case the investigator was working. A witness saw the investigator crawl under an SUV and then drive away. The witness called the police who found the device attached under the SUV. The police treated the unknown device as a bomb, evacuating the area and calling in the bomb squad. Read the whole story Click Here See also Denver TV News

In Canada the use of a vehicle tracker requires a warrant pursuant to CCC S. 492.1.

Stealth Searching

Published on March 12, 2008 in Methods, Search Engines and Search Strategies. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Large search engines like Google capture a great deal of content that normal searches won’t find. One feature on Google provides two types of functionality commonly ignored by the neophyte.

The feature is the cache operator. This operator has only one argument:

cache:www.confidentialresource.com or cache:http://www.confidentialresource.com

This will return: “This is G o o g l e‘s cache of http://www.confidentialresource.com/ as retrieved on 5 Mar 2008 18:01:20 GMT.”

You can see that the Blog has changed since the 5 Mar 2008. This is the first function provided by the cache operator.

Links on cached page may be explored in the cache by copying the link location and submitting it as a search with the cache operator or by clicking on the cache link in the search results (should they appear). In my experience, pages generated from a database (CMS, etc.) will not appear in the cache search results, but it is worth at try. Another operator will work for those pages, and that will be the subject of the next Stealth Search article.

The second, and most important function provided by the cache operator, is that of STEALTH. As you are not visiting the target web site, they don’t know you are investigating them.

Update 13 Nov 09:

See Stealth Searching III for further details about the Google cache and how it works.

Facebook Intelligence

Published on March 11, 2008 in Canada, Company Research, Courts, Search Engines and Social Sites. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

FI: Facebook Intelligence – Part Deux

Google has begun the indexation of Facebook pages.

The best approach to find Facebook content via Google is not to simply plug in name or keyword(s)…Try adding the keyword, “Facebook” to your initial query.

What the Investigator Must Know About Facebook

In the closed community of Facebook, Google asked permission to index the pages. If you are an Investigator, and your subject is represented, then asking permission to see his or her page is contact with a represented litigant. In Canada, if the opposing litigant is represented by council, then you may not contact him or her in person, by telephone, or electronically. In most cases you have to ask to be listed as a friend to view the subject’s Facebook page. Doing this will be considered improperly making contact with the litigant and whatever you find will be deemed inadmissible.

However, what you find in Google, other search engines, and unrelated Facebook pages may be used as the basis for a motion for the production of the subject’s entire Facebook page as happened in KOURTESIS V. JORIS (2007).

Business Identity Theft

Published on March 11, 2008 in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Dirty Tricks, Fraud, Identity Fraud, Identity Theft, Methods and Private Investigator. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Infamous hacker Kevin Poulson paid the defaulted Yellow Page accounts of escort services to get their defunct telephone numbers reactivated. He collected the profits and when the police became interested, only the original advertiser was on record with the telephone company. I once saw this done in a home renovation scam.

In Cynthia Hetherington’s excellent book, [asa link]1889150495[/asa], she tells of a group of crooks who moved into an office recently vacated by an insurance company. They took-up the old phone number and began selling insurance.

When new policy holders complained about bad service to the insurance company’s head office, the scam was revealed, but the crooks had moved on.

It’s not just people who have their identity stolen.

The Shopping Mall Chameleon

Published on March 9, 2008 in Private Investigator and Surveillance. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Doing surveillance was once how I made my living. I’ve always enjoyed watching people as they go about their everyday lives. Of course you must learn to carefully look for the unusual details, to look at faces, walking gate, and peculiar habits. The sense of accomplishment from observing things most people would miss is something hard to describe. Unfortunately, as city traffic turned homicidal, doing a surveillance became a survival ordeal. The old habit of constantly looking around and watching for unusual behaviour has remained and sometimes adds amusement to my dull life. Continue reading ‘The Shopping Mall Chameleon’

If you didn’t steal it or get it by secret means, it’s not intelligence

Published on March 7, 2008 in Intelligence Services. 0 Comments Tags: , .

From the Sources And Methods Blog

One of Australia’s oldest and largest newspapers, The Age, recently published a lengthy article (Thanks, Chris!) on the potential value of open source information to the Australian intelligence community and bemoaning the fact that open source isn’t used as much as it should be. Sounds familiar…

Unfortunately, too many people who should know better don’t understand that it is the analysis that matters, not the source of the data.

Recording Telephone Interviews

Published on March 7, 2008 in Methods, Private Investigator and Telephone Resources. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Dave Carpe at Passing Notes provides a good primer for the Researcher or Investigator who needs to record telephone interviews.

Power User 111 – Windows Security Threat

Published on March 6, 2008 in Power User Tips, Security and The Investigator's Computer. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Hack into a Windows PC – no password needed

A security consultant based in New Zealand has released a tool that can unlock Windows computers in seconds without the need for a password.

To use the tool, hackers must connect a Linux-based computer to a Firewire port on the target machine. The machine is then tricked into allowing the attacking computer to have read and write access to its memory.

With full access to the memory, the tool can then modify Windows’ password protection code, which is stored there, and render it ineffective.

“If you have a Firewire port, disable it when you aren’t using it,” Ducklin said.

“That way, if someone does plug into your port unexpectedly, your side of the Firewire link is dead, so they can’t interact with your PC, legitimately or otherwise.”

The moral of this story is: don’t let unauthorised people have physical access to your computer and shut off the Firewire port unless you are actually using it.

WikiLeaks

Published on March 5, 2008 in Dirty Tricks, Methods and Privacy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

I just found this:

“WikiLeaks.org is developing an uncensorable version of WikiPedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis.”

I’m not sure how I might use this site, but it does have some very interesting instructions on how to submit material anonymously.

US Accrediting Agencies, Diploma Mills, and Fake Degrees

Published on March 4, 2008 in Private Investigator, Sources and U.S.A.. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

A good post on PIBuzz about US Diploma Mills and how to identify them. The article includes links to some very useful sites.

Surveillance, Surveillance, Surveillance

Published on March 3, 2008 in Private Investigator and Surveillance. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Just watch me: Life of a private dick

Andre Ramshaw, Financial Post Published: Saturday, March 01, 2008

The closest I came to executive protection during my tenure as a private detective was keeping a takeout coffee from spilling onto the floor of my boss’s minivan during a particularly dull stakeout.

For most of Canada’s private investigators, keeping CEOs safe takes a distant back seat to tracking insurance claims. No femme fatales in dimly lit alleyways, no Maltese Falcons, no Ferraris — just hours squatting in the back of an anonymous van fitted with tinted windows, sipping coffee from a flask, videocam at the ready.

In other words, surveillance, surveillance, surveillance…

Cheque Washing and Pens

Published on March 2, 2008 in Forgery, Fraud, Handwriting and Security. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Handwritten documents are important to any Investigator or Researcher as they are either creating them, or reading them. Archives throughout the country are full of original handwritten documents of value to researchers.

The age of the ubiquitous ballpoint pen began in the 40′s and this has caused some problems for archivists as so many companies strove to create inexpensive ballpoint pens. The problem has become one of education. The pen may write, but the ink may fade over time, or be vulnerable to water and other solvents. UV light and poor quality paper also do a fine job of obliterating cheap ink from poor quality ballpoint pens. The forgers art of cheque-washing in the following examples illustrate what can happen to documents that encounter solvents. Continue reading ‘Cheque Washing and Pens’