Our office was approached by a client who noticed that valuables were regularly disappearing from his home. Concerned by the situation, he began to suspect a man who had been renting a room in his house for several months. When he tried to clarify the matter with the tenant, the man vehemently denied the allegations and, after a short period of time, moved out without terminating the tenancy agreement, which strengthened the client’s conviction that the man was guilty. The landlord tried to make contact with the man to discuss the situation and provide him with a letter from his lawyer, but the suspect did not answer his calls. We were therefore instructed to establish the former tenant’s current address.
First steps of the investigation
All we had was the man’s name, email address, phone number and a blurry photo from the surveillance camera. The problem was that the wanted man had a rather common name, which made it difficult to identify him on social media. Many of the accounts did not have profile pictures making us unsure if this was the right person. After checking the phone number and email in osint tools, a very similar man appeared to our eyes. At first, we suspected that these were old photos of him, but after searching the internet with the image, it turned out to be an image of another man with the same name as the suspect.
Family links
We next established the property of the former tenant. After checking the land registers, it turned out that the suspect has a brother who bears an uncanny resemblance to him. It turned out that the man uses his image on various portals. On popular social media platforms, the man avoided publishing his own photos, but on less well-known portals, photos appeared that in fact depicted his brother. This discovery aroused our vigilance, as it suggested that the suspect had a motive to hide under the identity of someone else.
Determination of place of residence
Despite establishing that the man was using photographs of his brother, we still lacked his address. He owned an indebted agricultural plot in the south of Poland, but there was no residential building there. It also turned out that the address he had given to the landlord in the contract had no longer belonged to him for several years, and he had no current registration.
We started a more thorough social media analysis of the whole family of the wanted man. His brother and his wife were keen to share photos of their travels on their social media. On one of the accounts from a year ago, our suspect was spotted. So we started looking for the address of the man’s brother, as there was a possibility that, since he had no permanent residence, he was staying with family. The address was established from his wife’s business details in publicly available records. The former tenant’s brother’s social media indicated that he was currently abroad. There was suspicion that a man was living in his brother’s flat in his absence. We sent a detective to the location to observe the flat. The suspicion turned out to be correct – the wanted man was living in the flat taking care of it in the absence of the family. In this way, we provided an address for the client to deliver the court letter.
Summary
This case demonstrates how unusual suspects’ motives and methods of hiding can be. The search not only located the suspect, but also uncovered a case of identity theft. The former tenant used photographs of his brother, presumably to conceal his true identity and avoid the consequences of his actions. The case shows how a variety of techniques – from open-source intelligence to analysis of behaviour on social networks – can contribute to the development of an investigation.
Thanks to our work, the client received full information not only about the suspect’s whereabouts, but also about his tendency to manipulate his image, which may prove crucial in further legal action.
Author: Paulina Marek
*Client data has been anonymised prior to publication.
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