Finding Usernames

Userrnamecheck  goes through many common social sites and searches for a particular handle or username. To make this site work you may need to use IE rather than Firefox.

Spokeo is a web tool that searches boards, conversations, social network sites, and forums. Unlike other people search engines that search for one person at a time, this thing searches for people contained within a your email address book. To do that, you must give them your email address and password for Spokeo to import your address book. Spokeo then looks for social network accounts for each person by performing searches across over 40 such networks. There are reports of this site using your address book to spam your contacts. Also, when you give over your email address and password to a site, you are giving it the authority to act as you. As far as Gmail or other email sever is concerned, there is no difference between the site you just gave your login details to and yourself.

The way to use this is to create a Gmail account with only one contact — the person you are looking for. Then change the password and delete the account. Another safer alternative is to submit the email address and name you are searching for as a CSV file. Spokeo will confirm the account by email. Once you have done the search, I would eliminate the Gmail account you used because the person you searched will probably receive a “courtesy” email (spam)  saying that someone has Spookeoed him and that he should sign up to learn more. This is Spokeo’s growth strategy.

However, this thing is effective, but it must be used with great care.

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