Getting the Most Out of Spokeo

Why www.spokeo.com is a one stop best people locater

on quality, price, and functionality

Spokeo is a people finding tool that can dramatically enhance your social network and desktop investigations

• Low cost searching• Intuitive interface• Fast• Easy to read reports• Upgradable if you use it a lot• Private

Spokeo is “best value”

• Spokeo basic membership is $3.95 per 6 months, or $4.95 per month

• upgrading to business membership, 345 searches, you are paying $19.95 per month.

• There is also enterprise, but only considering the 85 searches you are allowed on basic, you are looking at 4.6 cents per search

• Name searches are free with all memberships

Price Comparison

• ISO’s “web presence search” is $6.50 per search, and you cannot search an e-mail alone.

• WPS catches 95% of Facebook and Google hits• WPS catches a high percentage of SNS sites, if a

known e-mail is given in the parameters• Google and Facebook are free, so the question

is, do you want to pay 4.6 cents, or $6.50 to find additional social network pages?

COSTS

For a team using Enterprise under one account, the 4,200 searches you are getting are costing 1.9 cents each, or 12.3 web presence searches for the entire monthly cost

The Spokeo Searches

• Reverse Email – you run the e-mail and it links it to whatever SNS it can locate

• Reverse Phone – tries to determine the owner of the phone number

• Email Contact – shows the e-mail of a person you just ran

• Reverse Address – listing of people at the address• Username – returns SNS profiles with the username

input, useful if you find some phrase a subject likes to use (ex: Rick McMaster = RicMic)

• A good web / desktop investigation is time consuming and should not focus on any one particular site

• Facebook can be a wealth of info, but Spokeo can often lead you to target’s on obscure SNS you’ve neglected

• Accurint / DN and ISO Claimsearch will let you link up more information, and when working rings you should also look at sales and policy information. Have all open together working simultaneously

• Remember FATPIGS: Facebook, Twitter, Pipl, Instagram and ISO, Google, Spokeo. These are you main social network sites, plus the best aggregators

• Cross reference everything in everything else• Good time spent in SNS and ISO linking claims will pay off ten

fold in the field on major case and will make you see connections in singular claims others do not

• To avoid talking specifically about cases, I’ve just randomly selected a Jennifer Robbins in Florida, to show how much you can develop about a person on-line in a short time.

• Keep in mind this is all public information. Spokeo is an information aggregator, and it is not human verified. You have to take this information and use it in SNS sites for impact

• Jennifer will be the subject we will run information through Spokeo. Let’s pretend she is known in a case to be involved in some ring (staged accidents, firearms, drugs, whatever)

Spokeo is a great way to narrow subjects because you start out high (state level) and narrow to a region (metropolitan centers) and then a specific city and address. Let’s say we wanted to learn about the one in Melrose.

The benefit of a Spokeo paid membership is that you have the option of revealing an e-mail address. Typically, under “e-mail address” after an initial search, it will say “show e-mail address” and clicking this will count as “1” of your quota for the month. This e-mail “contact” search is one of the few searches that Spokeo saves for you. If you navigate away from this page and come back, it will reveal the e-mail to you as you have already spent a quota search on it

Spokeo has also given us an address, general property info, and a family member.

Make sure you look at other possible addresses, because sometimes an e-mail or phone is only linked to one address, but not the others common to a particular subject.

Searching Jennifer Robbins in Facebook by name is futile. It is such a common name, there are too many to narrow.

The Spokeo e-mail search thus reveals its effectiveness, because we searched for Jenn in Spokeo and got her e-mail, now we can find her Facebook no problem, because when you search an e-mail in Facebook, it leads you to the one profile registered with that e-mail.

Jenn has three friends that have the same last name, and even when the subject herself does not have much on display on her Facebook, family very often does.

Gillie’s Facebook lays it out for us, explaining Jenn and Amanda are her daughters, and you could map out the family further by going to look at the extended family. Let’s pretend Gillie is in the same ring as her daughter, so now we have her name and info, and that she is originally from Tennessee, so lets find information on her from Spokeo.

Spokeo finds Gillie at the same address as Jenn and other Melrose addresses. It gets a phone and and e-mail.

When you search a name and get a result with an e-mail, this does not mean Spokeo has done the e-mail search for you. You must go into e-mail search and do this as its own search.

Spokeo is noting “exact match” next to Facebook and Myspace, and Photobucket. This means this e-mail, gillierobbins@rocketmail.com was used to register the user profile on these sites. Exact matches are always more likely to be fruitful than possible matches, because then it is largely a guess based on your search parameters.

The Myspace profile Spokeo found ends up being quite useful because it has her own name as friends with this “rocketmail” registered profile…

When you click on the “Gillie” profile you find her real profile, with 429 friends and this picture of both her daughters, her statement that she is moving to Facebook along with the rest of the world, and another e-mail she uses, DiamondRing3@yahoo.com.

When you run this new e-mail in Facebook, you end up right back at the Gillie Robbins Facebook profile I already found off of Jenn’s friend list. This completes the circle and when you preserve this path in your notes and documentation, when you are asked later in deposition or at trail why you are certain of things, you’ll be able to explain why you were able to link people together and you are sure it is the same person, even if you’ve never met them.

So with just a name of a potential ring-involved person, Spokeo got me to her e-mail, her picture, her sister’s picture, a family tree, a friend list who can be considered other possible ring involved persons, and her mother’s pictures and e-mail.

These e-mails can be run in a sales workbench for insurance, to see if they are linked to other policies or quotes, and you can quickly break a ring using all of this intelligence.

Spokeo has delivered the base for these searches for about 20 cents worth of searches.

Run in WPS, this would be at least one search each family member, or $13, and I would not have had their e-mails, so SNS linkage would have been minimal

Jenn’s Myspace is connected to Gillie’s, and note her top five friends include a “Matt” and you may recall the user handle on Jenn’s Facebook was jennnmatt.pauley and her status was “in a relationship.” This could also lead you to further ring development, because generally young women involved in criminal activity are brought into it by their boyfriends.

Also, always pay attention to handles like the jennnmatt or this one here, jenny220, as they often are usernames that the person identifies with and uses over and over.

You can run these usernames in Spokeo, often to great effect.

Here I’ve just searched Jenny220 as a username and Spokeo has returned 25 profiles from myriad sites.

These are not all Jenn that we are interested in, but some are, and they are sites that we were previously unaware of, but for user name. The more unique a user name the more likely it will be a great result in Spokeo.

Investigative Result!

• Using Spokeo and the FATPIGS acronym, you can fill out an entire profile about people without stepping away from your computer

• Ring connections can be idntified• New e-mails and phones can be found and

proactively searched in sales databases, preventing known ring members from writing policies and identifying policies already written

Depending on how long the phone has been in service, Spokeo returns a scary caller ID. Say someone called your cell, you now have the number, and you want to see if they are who they said they are….

I’ve used my grandfather since I know his info, but just by inputting a phone, Spokeo has got me his accurate name, address, e-mail, age, and identified my grandmother and uncle as relatives.

My address, again used in “address search” so I can judge the accuracy. Mary Pedini built it in 1949, her son Arthur took it over with his wife Kim (all noted), Donna and her son Kevin lived there about a year (and it allows me to get both their e-mails if I desire) and now my wife and I, with our accurate home phone listed

Search Quotas Notes

• Search quotas are filled by successful and unsuccessful searches. “No result” still counts as “1”

• If you address search and then reveal an e-mail, that is 2 different searches and will count as such

• You can view your progression toward monthly quotas in your account page at top right

• Spokeo keeps no log (not even daily) of your search, so make sure you don’t duplicate your searches!

Privacy• Similar to removing yourself from other public

search websites, you can ask Spokeo not to display your information.

• However, the thing I want to know, are my searches anonymous? The answer, per Spokeo’s FAQ pages:

Here is the ISO web presence result running Adam and the e-mail he purports to be his. Note that ISO has found his Facebook account matched to both name and city, yet has rated this match “low.” It matched nothing to the e-mail.The first case of a recent ring involved a Brooklyn native named Adam claiming to be the

insured, but the address, phone and e-mail all seemed to belong to someone else.

Decision Net indicated Adam never lived at his stated address, and the phone was linked in sales files to two other policies, and the e-mail (LJ_NICO@xxxxxxx) did not use Adam’s name in any combination.

The e-mail, searched in Facebook, also did not locate his Facebook profile, which was otherwise easily found by simply searching his name.

Further raising suspicion that the e-mail was not Adam’s was the fact that ISO runs regarding the VIN linked to a man named Nico = LJ_NICO@xxxxxxxxx)

Case Study Comparison

WPS found the Facebook profile, but a search of Adam’s name finds this profile, with no effort as it is not on private, but the e-mail lj_nico@xxxxxx is not the one that was used to register this account (for more on this, see Facebook presentation).

The same search in Spokeo is going to require two different searches, because you’ll search the name as one search and the e-mail as another, but the results are vastly different.

Notice in the search below Spokeo has failed to produce the Facebook profile. Some web searching on this topic seems to indicate that this is because Facebook’s coders have somehow managed to make Facebook’s new profiles immune to the Spokeo web crawl.

Spokeo does identify the proper address for Adam where I eventually interviewed him (I’ve deleted it as litigation on this case is still ongoing).

However, the e-mail returns to a much more obscure social network called “Tagged” and Spokeo notes that it is an exact match. This means that the e-mail claimed to be Julbe was used to register this profile on Tagged (exact match).

So where Spokeo failed to find the most popular social network, it found an obscure one linked to the e-mail that you probably had never heard of until you saw this presentation.

Spokeo links you directly to the “Tagged” profile, and when you travel to this theoretically we should see the same man from Facebook, but instead….

• With WPS, we spent $6.50 for a search which referred us to a site that would have told us the same info for free (you should be running everyone in FB alone anyway) and it failed to make an e-mail connection

• Spokeo missed the free site information, which is irrelevant, as FB should be searched alone. But it showed us that the e-mail used for Julbe actually belongs to the man whom ended up being a runner for the staging ring and gave us his photo (Nico)

• Best of all, Spokeo cost was two searches, about 9 cents, a $6.41 savings over using the ISO method

Spokeo is not done with Nico though. Since the Adam e-mail seems to link to a black male and Adam is white Hispanic, it appears Nico deserves further research. So if you now run his name in Spokeo, it finds some addresses which correlate to Decision Net, but Spokeo now gives you a second e-mail, realfreshnic@...

We could run “Nico” and realfreshnic@ through ISO WPS again, at the cost of another $6.50, or we can run the e-mail in Spokeo, PIPL, and Facebook for free (Spokeo would be a quota search)

Spokeo finds a “Multiply” and “Photobucket” profile which has no profile or pictures. It just identifies the page as belonging to Nico.

Facebook has no matches.

The real treasure comes by running the Spokeo-developed e-mail in PIPL, as it produces a Hi5 profile. (remember, FATPIGS)

The new Hi5 profile lets us show that the Nico connected to lj_nico and realfeshnic are both the same Nico. Further, Nico is friends with his sister in the Hi5 profile, and she is also ring involved.

• ISO WPS did little for $6.50 • Spokeo helped us link two e-mails to Nico…• obtained a bunch of pictures of him… • and his sister and girlfriend• All photos became important in the field• Eventually, the photos of Nico from the SNS

websites proved his alias was Justin xxxxx• Spokeo searches amounted to less than .50,

and were far more effective

Summary• Spokeo will take your SNS search to the next level• Use all sites at once (FATPIGS)• Take screenshots and notes as you go• Spokeo’s most powerful search is the e-mail contact and

the reverse e-mail, followed closely by username• However, remember it also returns cell phones• Questions about Spokeo or any social networking

investigation can be directed to rick.mcmaster@libertymutual.com

• And remember as you surf…

BIG BROTHER, OR SOME OTHER RELATIVE, IS WATCHING….(and if anything like my oldest, will have no problem tattling)