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.