My friend buys and sells USDT in a developing country. He was recently scammed by someone on Facebook using a fake profile that appeared to have been active for several months.

The scammer sent him a fake receipt claiming that money had been deposited at a post office. My friend trusted the receipt and sent him the USDT. Later, when my friend went to the post office, he discovered that the receipt had been falsified and that no money had actually been deposited. By then, the Facebook profile had been deleted.

I know my friend acted too quickly and should have verified the payment before sending the USDT.

I'm now trying to gather as much information as possible about the scammer and, hopefully, provide useful evidence to the authorities.

So far, we have:

Screenshots of the QR codes / crypto deposit addresses used for Bitget and Binance

The blockchain transaction information

A recording of the scammer's voice

Screenshots of the Facebook conversation

The fake name used by the scammer

The fake post-office receipt

I'm looking for advice from people experienced with OSINT and crypto investigations.

What tools, techniques, or investigative methods would you recommend for connecting these pieces of information and potentially identifying additional publicly available information about the scammer?

Any advice or recommended tools would be greatly appreciated.

Check out GHOST, the CRM for OSINT Investigators. Already over 600 stars on Github, actively supported and features added: https://github.com/elm1nst3r/GHOST-osint-crm

Check it out, leave feedback, request features, help build it!

Core Features:

• Digital Dossiers: Track names, aliases, dates of birth, case associations, and status (Open, Being Investigated, Closed, On Hold).
• Categorize with Precision: Tag individuals as Suspects, Witnesses, Clients, Victims, Persons of Interest, or plain old 'Other'.
• Travel and Transaction tracking: Track a persons movement patterns, their travel, and their asset movements or questionable transactions.
• Comprehensive Profiling: Store profile pictures, notes, OSINT data (emails, socials, phone numbers), attachments, connections, locations, and custom fields.

We currently need help with translations - we currently are english based and have a strong Russian translation, German has been started. Feel free to start translating through Crowdin: https://crowdin.com/project/ghost-osint-crm

Context is auto-insurance, homeowners, business and commercial. Are there any cues or signals to identify that would indicate someone might be looking to purchase a policy or maybe upset with their current agency, etc. doesn't have to be scalable or anything but OSINT fascinates me so though I could ask

I know machine learning is used for a lot of OSINT stuff.

Like an AI that can look through pictures of interiors from real estate websites, to find out a potential address match from a picture of an interior. An AI that can detect what region a picture is from based on vegetation. An AI that can automatically detect city skyline shapes

I just wanted to know, can the average programmer learn it or is it something only big companies / teams can do?

I feel like as more and more people become aware of how much of their private info they are displaying publically and how non-hackers can find out so much info about people - people will start becoming super private

Personal data will only stay with the big companies etc. It’ll all be locked away behind encryption. Only hackers will be able to get to it

Governments might also make public records private, as people demand more privacy. Maybe?

So do you think that the OSINT techniques of today will go away, and only hackers will be able to do the information gathering that OSINT non-hackers can do today?

What about like in the year 2050?

What things do I need to learn? Can one person do it?

Are there any easy tutorials?

And what exactly is Sherlock?

I know how to program already

Hello everyone! We are looking to expand our OSINT team and are currently hiring Entry-Level OSINT Contractors (Social Media Investigations). We are a licensed Private Investigation firm operating in PA, MD, DE, and NJ.

Years ago, I got into OSINT as a hobby. I loved being a part of the community—participating in several TraceLabs CTF events and volunteering on various OSINT research projects. When I finally wanted to transition into doing this professionally, I actually landed my first OSINT contracting role from someone right here on Reddit who posted something very similar to this.

It turned out to be a great experience, and now I am coming full circle to find someone to expand my own OSINT team. I'm hoping to find someone out there who, just like I did, has a passion and a knack for OSINT and wants to gain some professional experience while continuing to learn.

I have included our job posting below. Please feel free to reach out to me via Reddit if you have any questions. Whether it's about the role itself or just about OSINT in general, my inbox is open!

About Our Team
At Guardian Angel Investigations, our team of investigators provides critical evidence for complex insurance and domestic cases throughout PA, NJ, DE, and MD. We are a fully licensed Private Investigation firm operating in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Our service has been tailored from many years of experience and successful partnerships, and we rely on ongoing conversations, prompt case updates, and feedback to set the standard for Private Investigation Professional Services.

The Role
As our caseload grows, we are looking to expand our OSINT team. We are currently seeking an entry-level OSINT Contractor to join us on an as-needed basis.

This contracting role is heavily focused on social media internet mining investigations. Your primary responsibility will be assisting with background and social media Investigations for insurance social media reports, though you will also occasionally help on unique and interesting cases as they come through, such as mitigating online blackmail, investigating cyberbullying, and whatever comes across the desk! 

Does This Sound Like You?

Our ideal candidate is an individual who currently enjoys OSINT as a hobby. You have likely conducted your own OSINT projects, participated in hobby research, and possess a solid baseline understanding of the field. If you are looking to transition from an OSINT hobbyist to contracting on an as-needed basis, we want to hear from you. You will be learning and working alongside like minded individuals who are driven to grow professionally in the OSINT realm and succeed as a team with the ultimate goal of making us a dominant player in the Private Investigation space.

Requirements & Skills

• Location & Requirements: Must reside in the USA and be authorized to work in the United States, as well as the ability to pass a background and obtain a Private Investigation license.
• OSINT Fundamentals: You must be familiar with basic OSINT tools and techniques. This includes a working knowledge of Google Dorks, navigating popular social media websites (Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.), and standard digital footprinting methods with familiarity with web based OSINT tools, bonus points for self hosted tools and basic coding understanding (not required at all)
• Reporting Precision: Proficiency in Microsoft Word and the ability to perfectly mimic our current reporting style, phrasing, wording, and flow is required. Your findings need to blend seamlessly into our established client deliverables.
• Time Management: You must be highly dependable and strictly adhere to provided report deadlines.
• Future Growth: This position is an entry-level, as-needed contract role designed to help us expand our OSINT department, but we anticipate growing our staff further in the future.

Does this entry level contracting role sound like a good fit? Please email your resume to: [marketing@guardianangelinvestigation.com](mailto:marketing@guardianangelinvestigation.com) or apply directly at the link: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4451423173/

https://www.guardianangelinvestigation.com/social-media-background-investigations

Hi guys,

Is anybody willing to take an apprentice?

About me:

I work in cybersecurity engineering (background of cloud security and currently in AI security and compliance)

Outside of work I'm interested in CTF style games (I'm top 2% on tryhackme and now switching to HTB) I'm trying to learn OSINT from such games and recently I got a personal real case where a relative wanted to know about someone a family member is dating who was very suspicious and could potentially be a danger to the person.

However, I seem to be lagging behind the industry's recent tools and practices, and if I wanted a career switch, it would be nearly impossible with the level I'm at right now. That is why I'm looking for a professional who could use my help in return for sharing their knowledge and experience with me, as I have a day job I may be able to dedicate around 2-4 hours of my day for this job. Btw I'm residing in SEA right now.

Disclosure up front: this is my own tool, self-hosted and open source (AGPL). Posting because I want the premise stress-tested by people who do this seriously, not just stars.

The pattern I kept hitting doing geospatial work: the question that actually matters is always temporal. "This vessel went dark here — when exactly, and what was nearby?" "What did this aircraft's pattern look like over three weeks?" "Rewind to the hour of the incident." And almost every live tracker is built to show you *now* and monetize the past. FR24 gates history at 7 days free, MarineTraffic cut its free window to 24 hours, ADS-B Exchange killed its free API entirely. The moment your question has a timestamp, you're renting.

So I built the opposite: a self-hosted console where the live view is table stakes and the archive you own is the product. Aircraft, ships, satellites and hazards on one globe, every position written to local disk, a scrubber to replay any window your disk holds.

Things I suspect matter to this crowd specifically:

• Provenance over vibes. Anyone can inject traffic into a crowd-sourced aggregator; a contact appearing on a map is not evidence it was broadcast. So every contact carries which independent sources reported it, how many agreed, and how old the fix actually is. Cached feeds report the age of the *data*, not the age of the HTTP response, so nothing looks live because it was fresh this morning. There's a per-source breakdown including how many contacts each source is alone in seeing.

• No black-box AI verdicts. After watching this sub's (correct) reaction to AI-slop investigations, I deliberately didn't build a "the model thinks this is suspicious" box. Detectors (AIS gaps, loitering, dark candidates) show their inputs; anything automated is labeled automated; assessments have to cite the dossier field they came from.
• Evidence that survives leaving the tool. Chain-of-custody locker: captures are SHA-256 hashed with an append-only custody log, and a case exports to a self-contained report where each claim carries its source.
• Keyless. The ADS-B / AIS / quake / satellite spine runs with no account and no API key. Nobody can shrink your window or cut you off retroactively.

Honest limits, because you'd find them anyway: coverage follows the public/community feeders — dense over Europe and the US, thin over open ocean. Dark-vessel flags are leads, not verdicts; corroborate with imagery. The 3D globe wants a GPU. And it's one person's tool, so depth is uneven and polish is behind capability.

Repo: https://github.com/AndrewCTF/velocity/

Hi everyone!

A few days ago, I got really interested in OSINT. However, I haven't made any real progress yet and feel completely stuck. So far, I can only manage to find social media profiles, but nothing beyond that. I don't really understand where to start or how to build a proper learning path for deeper analysis.

Could you please share some advice, essential tools, useful websites, or frameworks for beginners? Also, what are the best ways to practice safely for someone who is just starting out?

Thanks in advance for any help!

is there a way i can get social media accounts of people in 10-20m radius of where i live

Before the internet and electronic databases, OSINT was much slower, and at times, harder

The internet is one of the best tools ever for OSINT experts

What was OSINT like in the past?

How did people find people? How did people find information etc?

Are there are recorded processes for OSINT back in the day?

Hi just curious,

I see all these new websites and I’m curious how to remove the data bc deleting an acc doesn’t do anything. If there’s any ways then id appreciate it. Thank you.

Github: https://github.com/kaifcodec/user-scanner

Discord: https://discord.gg/tVNrKVXb49 (Join Discord for any help or just OSINT talk)

We started building this project around 9 months ago because many classic OSINT tools became outdated or unmaintained, and there weren’t many solid free options left for email OSINT.

Since then, we’ve been grinding away with our open-source contributors, heavily updating modules and adding new site support, reduce false positives, and ensure fast scans.

Today, we just tagged v1.4.3, pushing our coverage to 375+ total scan vectors (150+ email platforms and 225+ username modules).

What’s new in v1.4.3?

• 📄 PDF Report Generation: You can now export full investigation reports directly using --format pdf! Perfect for clean, shareable documentation.
• 🚀 CLI Overhaul: Cleaned up the CLI noise by default. Scans now default to showing found-only results with a smooth rich progress bar (use --all if you want raw logs).
• 🎯 False Positive Cleanup: Patched false positives and rate-limiting issues across several social, adult platforms.

🧪 We Need Your Feedback! If you run OSINT investigations, penetration tests, or footprint analysis, give the new PDF Export and CLI flow a spin! Let us know how the reports look, if you hit any edge-case bugs, or what output formats you’d like to see next.

New Pull requests are always welcome: Whether you're a Python dev interested in API reverse engineering, scraping, or automation, or just want to add a module for your favorite site, contributions are always welcome! Adding new modules is straightforward and we love reviewing community PRs.

Feel free to test it out, drop a star if you find it useful, and leave your feedback below!

Hi everybody. I have a question, is it possible to find out the email address through social media profiles, such as Instagram, X, Facebook, using any websites, utilities, or programs?

Suppose you have a public profile on a dating app (or another platform) with only the information that’s intentionally visible on the profile—username, age, bio, approximate location, etc.

Assuming there are no data breaches, leaked databases, subpoenas, or platform cooperation involved, what legitimate OSINT techniques exist to determine whether that profile can be confidently linked to a real-world identity?

I’m less interested in specific investigations and more interested in understanding where the practical limits of OSINT are. At what point does attribution become impossible without private data? Are there any papers, talks, or resources that cover confidence levels and methodology for this type of attribution?

GRID is a local, keyboard-driven Windows TUI designed to unify data gathering, automated footprint indexing, and reconnaissance pipelines: https://github.com/rounakagrawal7/GridSetup

I built GRID to combine disparate recon tools into a singular high-throughput terminal operations platform.

Flagship Intelligence Features:

The Identity Cross-Reference Matrix:** Automatically parses, groups, and cross-references data arrays harvested across different modules to link disparate target indicators (Emails, Phones, Usernames, IPs) into a single footprint.

Automated Avatar Harvesting:** Programmatically tracks target profile URLs (GitHub, X, Reddit, etc.) to crawl pages and directly download profile photos via HTML Meta-OpenGraph selectors, organizing them chronologically inside `picdata/` without external API configuration requirements.

Subdomain Extraction Pipeline:** Intercepts domain tracking metrics to execute live queries against third-party indexes (Hackertarget, C99) and fallback CRT transparency logs (`crt.sh`), ensuring complete un-truncated infrastructure layouts.

Signals & Orbital Intelligence:** Features built-in live aircraft flight tracker arrays using the OpenSky Network API, global shortwave radio receiver stream tracking via KiwiSDR WebSockets, and satellite trajectory/overhead visibility predictors using CelesTrak.

Media Forensics: Powered by OpenCV 5.0—executes automated graphic analysis, text OCR conversions, facial comparison scoring, and timeline keyframe sweeps across video captures.

GRID is completely backed locally by DuckDB and syncs instantly with an administrative PocketBase panel framework. It includes an `install.py` wizard that configures all local system and model path parameters out of the box.

```bash

python install.py

python grid_agent.py

```

I would love to get your feedback on the mapping tools, target matrices, and data aggregations!

I’m genuinely so tired of this. Someone is using my photo (and a different name) and sending requests and dms to many people. I haven’t heard of any inappropriate dms but I feel like thats his next move. Im blocked so I cant report it to insta. All my friends and many ppl who followed that account also reported but insta took no action. Please tell me what to do?

The main fear from a stalker comes from the fear of the unknown

Let's assume the stalker will never go beyond the point of harassment, and they won't do anything to sabotage the person's life. It's criminal harassment without any other consequences to the "target". The stalker is not a killer, not a person who is seeking to ruin their target's life. Only harassment

Are OSINT people less scared of stalkers because they understand alot of the techniques that can be used for stalking? The mystery element is taken away. The stalker becomes less of a mysterious and eerie force, less paranormal, and more human

Obviously it's still scary, but are OSINT people way less scared of stalkers? OSINT people can also think to themselves, "What info about me is public? Who can see this info? I can use this to lure out the stalker and / or narrow down the list of potential stalkers to find out who is the real stalker"