Big brother activity on BP is on the raise

Many of our members have been using SmartForm on their BP ads. The most powerful thing about SmartForm is its ability to sniff the client’s machine for activities even when he doesn’t make any appointments. Having our form on BP, we are able to know which areas’ ads have been recently viewed heavily by unwelcome people.

If you are a user who depends on BP or similar sites, please add SmartForm on your ad as an extra way for clients to communicate. When a suspected client goes to your ad, you will get a notice from our system.

Online Dating Sites may start background checking on their members

Many of VerifyHim members, while checking on their clients, find out that quite of a number of the clients have memberships at online dating sites like Match.com, True and eHarmony.  A recent lawsuit against Match.com (http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/04/19/match.rape.lawsuit/) may push many online sites to start doing background checks on their members.

While it is not a substitute for our own screening, having other sites conduct criminal background check on our clients is always a positive development. At this point, Match.com and eHarmony begin to check their members against the sexual offender database. True.com is the only site that conducts criminal background checks and a marriage checks on their members. It’s good to know that your potential client also has an active profile at True.com

People Search / Reverse Phone Search

Public data has been heavily used by debt collectors and skip tracers to locate people. This section will shed light on how providers can utilize public databases to identify and screen a potential client.

If the clients give you his full name, that would be a great start. However some clients in certain states don’t want to give that much info except their first name and phone number.  The rule of screening is the more info you can get from them, the more accurate searches you can do.  Knowing their age and the zip code where they live can be great help as well.

Let say the client only gives you his first name “Charlie” and his phone number “987-654-4321”. In this case, we are forced to lookup his name through his phone. If the phone is a home phone, there are high changes we are able to get his full name and address.  Cell phone, however, has a much lower rate of useful info.  Most of the time, we only get the full name of the cell phone owner.

There are many reverse phone look-up services out there; both free and commercial:

•          Whitepages.com (Free, good for home phone)
•          Intellius.com  (the most popular, pay-per-search)
•          Spokeo/PeopleSmart (good for home phone, low results with cell phone)
•          VerifyHim (SIMPLY  the best ;-)

Assuming there are no addresses attached to his phone number (this is the most popular case). Here are the results after running a search on Charlie’s number at VerifyHim:
Charlie Sheen, Concord, CA 94521
Alex Sheen, Concord, CA 94521
CHARLIE SHEEN
Realtime Phone Carrier Lookup:
Phone number: +19876544321
Status : OK
Is Wireless Phone : y
Carrier : Virgin Mobile
Carrier ID : 50021
SMS Email Address : 9876544321@vmobl.com
MMS Email Address : 9876544321@vmobl.com

We find out that his cell phone is Virgin Mobile. Remember that cell phone usually doesn’t have an address attached to the number. The phone is registered under Charlie Sheen (“no not that one!”).
 
We also know that he is located in CA. If you want to guess what part of California he is from, using the phone area code (‘987’) and look it up on http://www22.verizon.com/areacodes/. It will tell you the cities belong to that area code.

TIP: If the look-up name doesn’t match the full name he gave you, it can be considered as a flag. You should ask for more info and screen through other methods.

Interesting Fact: About 15% phone numbers ran through VerifyHim are belong to girls with the same last name as the clients.
 
Now we know his full name and the city where he is from. You can go out and pay any people search service out there to locate him (Intellius, PeopleSmart…). If you use VerifyHim or any other services, you will see a list of possible candidates on your search. With VerifyHim, the list will contains his DOB, past and current addresses, associated businesses and relatives. Knowing the zip code, DOB or age of the person will help you identify the targeted person in the list. If your client name is not John Smith and unique enough, the list is usually short. You can verify some of the info from the search with him if needed.
 
Criminal Background Check
 
You can also conduct a criminal search using public databases as well.  Criminal data usually divided into 3 different categories:

• Searching sexual offender database is always free. You can Google for free sites or use a government site like http://www.nsopw.gov/Core/Portal.aspx.

• State criminal database which usually includes only serious offenses and not up-to-date.  This database is usually 1 to 5 years old and doesn’t offer many details. The popular Netdetective, Been-verified and other unlimited-search checking sites are using this type of database as well as many cheap background checking services (usually less than $7 per search) out there. VerifyHim has the state database covered for you in our search engine.

• Comprehensive criminal background check is a bit more expensive and required you to know the DOB of the person. This type of check give you access to up-to-date records down to the county level. The cost is usually around $25-$125 per search depending how deep the search will go).

 
Using VerifyHim’s People Tracer
 
People Tracer is a new experimental tool we have been offering to our members during the last 2 months. It is a public database searching tool on steroid. With its flexible searching ability, you can answer questions like “Who has lived in an address?” (A good way to verify a driver license) or “Has Charlie Sheen lived in a zip code?” or any other unique situations.
 
It works similar to tools available to PIs, you can narrow your target easily to get a detailed report. The detailed report will include his DOB, past and current addresses as well as his phone numbers. In our opinion, People Tracer is the best tracing tool available out there compared to other people search sites that we know. Don’t take our words for it, try it!
 
Please submit your incident info to VerifyHim and others

Membership at VerifyHim is free. If you are a low volume user, you don’t have to pay anything. Our community is growing strong because members have been sending a lot of bad client info to us. We are the most serious provider-only screening sites out there that go beyond blacklisting. Please submit any incident info to us. Sharing info of bad clients is one way to keep each other safe. Here are other blacklist-only sites that you also can submit incidents to:

• National Blacklist: A great site. Their database is indexed by Google.  The site is proud of that fact as well. I personally think it is good for submitting serious incidents. VerifyHim’s database is not indexed by search engines.
• ProviderBuzz: A popular site but you can’t post bad things about P411 clients with their IDs (Posting Date-check IDs are fine). At VerifyHim, as long as your claim is legit and not contested by other members, you can post whatever that can help others identify the abuser.
• Dz411: Great site and you can post pretty much anything. The site is just a little bit hard to navigate.
• Some other sites: http://blacklistednow.blogspot.com/, http://badboyclientlist.blogspot.com/ (Don’t know much about these blogs but it has blacklist records as well)

Taking pictures with a SmartPhone can reveal where you are located.

Have you ever heard of http://icanstalku.com/? It is the site that raising the awareness of the most Smartphone’s geotagging  features. For some brilliant reasons,many smartphones encode the location of where pictures are taken.  So anyone you send the pictures to can extract the location and lookup it up on Google Map. Many SmartPhone, including the popular Iphone, has this feature enabled by default. Scare yet?
 
The good thing is we can use this overlooked feature to track a client as well. Many providers request pictures of clients for screening and most of them are taken using a SmartPhone. I use this simple FireFox plugin http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/exif-viewer/ whenever I need to check on a picture on the Internet. When you see a photo online or in your mail box in FireFox, try to view the photo in its natural size (right-click on the photo and choose ‘View image’). Now if you have the plugin installed, you can right click on the photo and select “view image exif data”. If there is any location data embedded inside the photo, the plugin will let you know and you can scroll down to view the results and link it to Google map. Once on google map, you can go to street view and check if the location is a house, a hotel or whatever can raise a red flag.
 
In another hand, if you send out impromptu pictures to a client, make sure the files don’t contain any location data. This feature is a stalker’s wet dream come true. You can go to the mentioned website to see for yourself; people upload their photos to Twitter and dangerously have their location revealed. Ever try to hunt down location of photos uploaded in BP ads?
 
The ICanStalkU site also tells you how to turn off this “advanced” feature on your phone, please do so to make sure you won’t accidently leak out your location. For old photos, you can try this free program http://www.geotagsecurity.com/ to remove the location information inside your photos. Next time when you receive pictures from clients or sending out ones, you know what to check.  ;-)
 
Using email profile and social networking in verifying a client.

A little secret that many people don't know that Yahoo and Hotmail will leak out the date the email account was created. A newly created email is a sign of trouble. Scammers or the blue-man tend to create a newly email account and then go out to get us. In fact, our small research of the last 50 incidents has proved that most blacklisted emails are created within 4 months of the incidents. The report is available at our blog (please log in to read member-only posts) with a lot more details and useful advices from other members.

Yahoo profile can be viewed by using this trick: http://pulse.yahoo.com/yahoohandlehere. For example if the email is testme@yahoo.com then you can go to http://pulse.yahoo.com/testme to view the profile. Hotmail and social profiles at Facebook and other social networking sites are more tricky to pull data and require some programming tricks. You can use VerifyHim search engine to pull account data from many email and social networking sites. Please make sure that you check when the account was created and updated. A recent created account or an abandoned account is a sign of trouble.


IP tracking is too two-thousand and late. Use SmartForm to do machine tracking.

Talk to any tech-savvy providers and they will tell you all about IP, email header and readnotify.com. For those who don’t know, IP address is your internet address when you get online. It is similar to a phone number; it is used for other machines on the internet to communicate with you. With an IP address, you will know the generic location (like Boston, MA) and the domain/internet server the user is using (like Comcast or Le-le.gov). And Readnotify.com is an email tracking service that will reveal the IP address of a reader when the email is opened. A few experienced providers have been using readnotify.com or pointofmail.com (another email tracking service) for years. Dz411's Ciara is the strongest advocate for this technique. Kudos to her.
 
IP tracking whether through emails or not is useful but it does have its limits. With the changing nature of the Internet, people are sharing their IP address (in case of mobile internet) or using proxy (Tor, web-based mail service like Gmail,…), IP tracking is losing its power.  We need a new tool to track and flag clients better. That’s why our recent pilot testing of VerifyHim’s SmartForm has gathered positive views from some of you. For those who don’t log in frequently and hasn’t checked what has been going on at VerifyHim lately, SmartForm is our new tool that can track client machine instead of IP.
 
SmartForm is regular contact form that can fingerprint a client machine instead of just record the IP. So if the same client come back and makes appointment with you or any other SmartForm’s users we can make sure his contact info is consistent.  Be it if he has his IP changed, as long as the same computer or smartphone are used, we can still detect if he’s the same person. And no we don’t drop malwares or shit like that on a client machine to track them. This simple technology has been used by many mobile banking sites in Singapore thanks to one of our developers who is an expert in online fraud detection. On top of that SmartForm can also do history sniffing (inspiration is from http://startpanic.com/) and many other cool tricks. You will have a full report of the client machine when he makes an appointment with you. Using SmartForm and Readnotify.com, a tech-savvy provider can be more control of what is going on.
 
Project Carmen Sandiego and cell phone tracking

I blogged about “Project Carmen Sandiego” and how we can use it 2 months ago. For those who haven’t read our blog yet (logging in VerifyHim to read members-only posts, you should be already in there by now), it is a way to track a cell phone movements and location. Their method can track down a cell phone using public data. It can tell if a cell phone is at a certain location like near north SF but not exactly pinpointing the location like 69 Handcock St.
 
This method of tracking only works with GSM network providers like AT&T and T-Mobile.  You can Google for the complete list of GSM network providers. In Asia and a few countries in EU, you can pin down the postal code of the phone’s physical location. However, in North America it is a bit tricky to use.
 
The way this method works is simple. By using a service called HLR query or MSC lookup, you can get the serial code (called MSC – tech jargon crap) of the control center the cell phone is connected to.  This trick has been used by many phone marketing companies to remove bad cell phone numbers from their list and find out more info about a number. When a person moves from one area to another area, his cell phone will connect to different control centers so your HLR query will get different results.  There are tons of HLR query service out there, just google them. My favorite is smsitaly.com.
 
What I usually do is I query my own AT&T phone number to get my local center MSC serial code.  If I find out a client use AT&T (VerifyHIm’s search engine tells me the network provider of a cell number) I can query his phone number close to the appointment time. If his MSC serial is the same as mine, I know he is nearby. And if it is not the same, he is messing with me. File a report for time-waster at VerifyHim.com! Isn’t that cool?
 
How to connect to somebody’s voice mail directly?

There are many services out there but I love slydial.com because it is free. I can leave a voice message for a person instead of talking to him directly. In a few situations, this service can become handy if you want to avoid confrontation and drama. Also, sometimes I want to hear the person's voicemail greeting message as a way to identify his race and age (especially the ones who are booking online). Not always accurate, but it’s good to know this trick.