In the USA, Craigslist is cracking down on prostitute ads in a pact struck with 40 U.S. states. In Canada prostitution is legal but many activities surrounding it are not. Living off the avails of a prostitute is illegal in Canada.
I was asked if I could find anything about a woman that a local PI suspected was a prostitute. My initial search through the prostitution sites was for her description. I found several that matched her description. The surveillance photos looked very similar to one hooker ad, which didn’t show her face. Most prostitute’s ads don’t show their faces and easily half of the ads use pictures of models stolen for Web sites, so more work was required.
I then went through the ad carefully and noticed that it had a mailto link. I searched for the email address. It appeared on another sex ad site where a guy was advertising for “girls who like to make money”. This site had a good profile shot of the subject’s face as she kissed the pimp.
Now we know she is a prostitute and we know something about her pimp. We now know the cell phone number she uses. We know her “stage name”. We have copies of her ads. We could easily identify her pimp.
Loose Lips Sink Competitors
Competisaurus has just let the world know my secret techniques for predicting maritime disasters. Twitter Search is like sitting in a dockside bar listening to enemy sailors plot some dastardly attack. If you understand that competitive intelligence isn’t a guessing game like Battleship, then searching Twitter might help your marketing salvo sink a competitor’s Battleship. Now keep this to yourself, let it be our little secret.
The Twitter Threat
On the other hand, landlubbers at US Army intelligence wrote a report on the Twitter-threat. The report postulates that Twitter could be used for coordinating terrorist attacks. The report supposedly states, “Twitter was recently used as a counter-surveillance, command and control, and movement tool by activists at the Republican National Convention,”. “The activists would Tweet each other and their Twitter pages to add information on what was happening with Law Enforcement near real time.”
Must we tweet this Twitter-threat stuff seriously?
A new Craigslist search engine using a Google custom search has surfaced. Supposedly, that means no more searches using site:craigslist.org “search terms”. Search All Craig’s puts a convenient front end to a cross-city Craig’s search that uses Google on the back end.
I can’t really recommend this thing. If you do a search for the words toronto incall it returns only 2 hits. If you go to the Toronto erotic services section and do a search for incall you get over 1200 results. The flaw is the rapid change that occurs on Craigslist and how Google updates its index. This isn’t the tool to use if you are looking for a telephone number used in a Craigslist ad. The search site:craigslist.org “search terms” searches has the same flaw. However, in the case of site:craigslist.org toronto incall, this search string provided more results than Search All Craig’s (9 with this search and 2 with Search All Craig’s).
CustomizeGoogle
This is a must-have add-on. It customizes Google in just about any way you could imagine and it will block Google’s ads as well as Google analytic cookies that invade your privacy. And most importantly for the Investigator, it anonymizes your Google user ID.
It adds links in your Google search results to other search engines, such as Yahoo and Ask.com, among others. It filters out search results from known spammers, and it will also let you customize features such as Gmail and Google News. If you want to customize the way Google works, make sure to download this one.
My favorite feature is the ability to set my Google preferences so they don’t disappear when I clear out the cookies.
Download CustomizeGoogle
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.
First, make a list of all addresses linked to the subject, including the Canadian postal code. Then search in Google for bank or storage plus the postal code. Do not include a hyphen or put the postal code in quotations. Search each postal code in order. Now you have a list of banks where the subject may have an account and a list of sites where he may have a storage locker.
Google and Yahoo! have fostered the belief that if you can type, then you are a researcher. In my experience, the DIY researcher’s greatest failings occur in the following areas:
- poor source selection
- not understanding that a hierarchy of authorities may exist for the research topic
- not understanding the relationship between time, money, and value
- not understanding how error and bias may appear in search results; and finally, terminology.
Most DIY searchers do not prepare for the search by collecting the synonyms and antonyms, thesauri, dictionaries, and the British and American spelling differences. They don’t take time to consider appropriate terms and phrases then make a list to work through.
Chris Pierre of Evince Services Inc. in Ottawa told me about a site called loco citato that has links to several good Social Network Mapping tools.
Competitive Intelligence, Investigations, & Due Diligence
Starting a competitive intelligence research project, an investigation, or due diligence research usually entails a detailed look at the corporate filings, share structure, and accounts of the target or subject company.
Great Britain
On the island of Great Britain, there are two separate registries, one for England and Wales, and another for Scotland. Both of these are operated by Companies House. The accounts and filings for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland take the same format.
Ireland
On the island of Ireland, the Northern Ireland Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment of the Northern Ireland Government, (DETINI) houses the corporate filings and accounts. Corporate filings in the Republic of Ireland may be obtained online from the Companies Registration Office.
Channel Islands
On the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey the corporate filings are handled at the Jersey Financial Services Commission and the Guernsey Registry. Jersey and Guernsey are tax havens, and companies incorporated there do not normally file accounts.
Isle of Man
The Isle of Man is a tax haven, and companies incorporated there do not normally file accounts. The Companies Registry holds corporate filings, and is part of the Financial Supervision Commission. Continue reading ‘Corporate Filing Searches on the British Islands’
As I surf, Alexa Sparky provides each site’s traffic rank and a historical chart of traffic in the bottom right-hand corner. This is useful for evaluating the reliability of the data on the site. This tool helps evaluate sources without being influenced by elaborate Web site designs.
Of course Alexa Sparky is far from perfect, it does not provide a full ranking, but it can help you identify better content. For instance, a site that is ranked in the mid-six-figure range has a large following. A site like Danger Room with a mid-three-figure ranking has an enormous following, larger that many newspapers and newsstand magazines.
Evaluating a web site or blog is never easy. Fact checking will weed out the crap, but who needs to start with a lot of crap. The number of links to a site will supposedly put it towards the top of the search results, but that isn’t a guarantee of accuracy if the inbound links are from sites full of crap.
When I see something worth citing, I begin the evaluation by seeing who links to the site, perhaps it will be other sites already proven reliable through fact checking. This may also lead you to more or better data.
Continue reading ‘Finding Inbound Links’
If you need to interview current or former employees of a company for competitive intelligence or investigative purposes, then Google is the first resource to consult.
This simple search will help you find employees of a given company:
Acme Company “employed by” OR “work for”
This might be tedious to sort through the results as ” work for” may turn up a lot of irrelevant hits. Try this with IBM as the company name and you will see what I mean.
To find references to a person’s employment try this:
“john smith” “employed by” OR “work for”
With either of these searches you might want to add a country, province, or city to limit the number of hits returned.
Tamara Thompson’s excellent article on gathering information about university students in the USA illustrates how a real researcher goes about doing what some call a Deep Web Search.
The last link in the article shows how to find student directories at US and Australian universities. In Canada, a Google search for intitle:student inurl:directory site:ca seems to work best.
GooFresh
Google offers a date-based syntax, but you can only access it via the advanced search, which limits your time options, or the date range: syntax, which uses Julian dates and is a bit difficult to use.
Goofresh is a way to search for sites added today, yesterday, within the last seven days, or last 30 days.
If you enclose your search terms in square brackets, then Yahoo! will only retrieve pages that have your search terms in that order. The search terms may be anywhere on the page, but the first term will appear before the second and the second before the third, etc..
An example would be [crisis planning]. It returns a document that is entitled Planning for a Crisis. It might seem backward but at the end of the quotation near the top of the page you find “Crisis Management:Planning for the Inevitable (1986)“.
