Web Design Ireland

A recent issue cropped up where I decided to put my people hunting skills to the test. I was inspired by some of the bits and bobs I had learned at Lifehacker, and wondered - if armed with nothing more than a domain name, is it possible to track someone down? Well, if you happen to be searching for a domain owner who doesn’t want to be found this is a sample of how to go about doing it. I’ve used this technique to dig up information for customer complaints on websites that had zero contact info.

Example.

Lets say for the sake of argument a hacker takes your domain offline, and replaces it with a redirect to an advertisement page, which is generating revenue for them. Whats the first port of call?

Well we have the domain name. First thing is to try a whois report.

We get back something like this below:


Website: http://Manage.SnapNames.com
Registrant:
PrivacyProtect.org
Domain Admin
P.O. Box 97
All Postal Mails Rejected, visit Privacyprotect.org
Moergestel
null,5066 ZH
NL
Tel. +45.36946676Creation Date: 15-Oct-2007
Administrative Contact:
PrivacyProtect.org
Domain Admin
P.O. Box 97
All Postal Mails Rejected, visit Privacyprotect.org
Moergestel
null,5066 ZH
NL
Tel. +45.36946676

We can see that this guy took the effort to hide his Whois information, via privacy protect. Not a problem, if the domain has been in use before, there will be records of the page contents on other websites dotted around the web.

Second place online, everyone’s fav search Google. Typing the domain name into google (inside quotes) yields little or no results, so we have to try other methods. It may be that this domain is little used or promoted, but it may have been in the past.

Next port of call, the Wayback Machine.

Normally, if I dont find anything at this point, the next place to try is Alexa. Alexa holds associated domains information, i.e. if you register more than one domain, it can show you other domains that the owner holds. I was lucky in that the wayback machine gave me something back at this stage. If you turn up nothing, try using the domains associated in Alexa, and repeat the Google, and Wayback machine searches.

We can see that there was one page on Jul 20th 2001. I have purposesly deleted the link on this, as this was a “live” example. From this page in the Archive, I managed to retrieve further information, a screenname (probably of the domain owner) was listed on this page.

Now we have a “handle” how do we go about looking for their hangouts around the web on Google again. Sure enough typing this handle into google, gave more results than the original domain name, including a few web forums. I browsed the forums, looked for posts that they had participated in, and managed to gleam a first and second name. Once you have this sort of info, it’s time to make a trip to some of the social networking sites.

http://www.facebook.com/srch.php?n=0&nm=Firstname+Lastname

First try I managed to find the guy I was looking for, including his circle of friends, and physical address. But if it doesn’t work for you then there are plenty of others to try. Bebo.com would be next on my list if looking for someone in the UK or Ireland.

If all else fails you might want to try some of these badboys.

People Search: Search for people in the UK
Electoral Roll Information: Does what it says on the tin.
UK Phone Information: A good UK based site I have found which helps to trace phone numbers, including mobiles.
People searching techniques: More information on this subject.
People search engines: More methods of searching for people online.

Anyone any other tips for finding people online?