Reporter’s Notebook: How to Track Down People Who Don’t Want to Be Found

Whether digging into a corrupt official or trying to unmask the owner of a shady shell company, investigating a person often starts with just a handful of clues.

You may have an old phone number, a name, or a face in the background of a social media post. Taking those scattered breadcrumbs and building them into a full dossier on an individual takes a systematic approach, and is all part of a day’s work for the investigative researchers at OCCRP who support journalists across the network.

This playbook lays out the basic methods, databases, and digital tricks our team uses to track down people who don’t want to be found. No matter what kind of story you’re digging into, these steps will help you safely and effectively build a profile of whoever you’re looking for.

Before You Begin: Basic Security

Before diving into a digital people-search, a word of warning: setting up basic security measures is essential to protect yourself.

To avoid alerting a person of interest that someone is sniffing around, never investigate subjects using your personal accounts. Instead, create dedicated, believable social media accounts designed specifically for your work. Just as importantly, always route your connection through a virtual private network (VPN) to encrypt your activity and mask your physical location.

Most major social media platforms now use automated algorithms to weed out obvious fakes. This proves especially challenging on platforms like LinkedIn. To get around this, you want to make sure your fake account has a persona and is active on the platform. If your persona is, for example, named “Sam Wood,” then create an email account with the same name. Choose a profession or hobbies and post about these from time to time, like a real person would.

If you decide to ignore this advice and browse privately from your own social media, the algorithm may still suggest your private account as a connection to the very person you are investigating. For instance, if you are investigating someone named Hannah Smith and spend hours on her profile, Facebook or LinkedIn might then suggest your account to Hannah Smith, thinking you’re probably friends.

Accidentally liking a 10-year-old photo on your ex-partner’s Facebook page is embarrassing. But making that same slip-up on a criminal’s profile could be downright dangerous.

Archiving

The moment bad actors sense an investigation, their first instinct is often to pull everything down and scrub their digital footprint. To prevent losing precious material, be disciplined about archiving what you find.

We recommend adding a full-page screen capture extension on your browser so you can quickly and easily get screenshots of the pages you’re browsing.

Make sure the date is visible in your screen captures, and also save the URL link so that you can revisit it later, if still available. You can also use the Wayback Machine to create a copy of a webpage that will be accessible even if the original link is later taken down. Just keep in mind that the page will then be available to others too.

Wayback machine can be used to archive websites. Image: Screenshot, Internet Archive

The tools to save social media content change regularly so it’s important to keep up to date. For example, Fdown.net currently helps download Facebook videos and Story Saver downloads public Instagram stories, highlights, and videos.

One of our colleagues once looked into the wife of a businessman associated with the Prince Group — a massive Cambodian conglomerate sanctioned by the US for running industrial-scale cyber-scam operations. Three years later, everything had been deleted from her social media. Luckily, our colleague had taken screenshots of everything and saved them somewhere easily retrievable, preserving the evidence.

Starting Broad

A basic but necessary first step is to begin with a broad search. You don’t want to spend weeks looking into something, only to realize another journalist already found the answer and wrote about it.

We usually cast a wide net by searching the person’s name or other known identifier on Google. You can make this more efficient by using advanced search operators — such as quotation marks for exact names (“Mark Doe”) or the minus sign to exclude irrelevant information.

These days, we also cautiously use AI to see what it already knows about a person, all while paying close attention to the sources. Structure your prompts to require cited links, and never upload sensitive data to AI or trust AI summaries without verifying them against the original source.

We also use databases that contain decades of archived press clippings — such as LexisNexis and Dow Jones Factiva — to check for any old mentions of arrests or court appearances in the media. Even without these, it’s a good idea to get into the habit of checking news archives or press clippings for any mentions of the person you’re looking into. Having a precise idea of what’s already out there will give you a solid grounding before narrowing down your search for more exciting or hidden findings.

Asking The Right Questions

It’s easy to get stuck in rabbit holes when you start digging online, so it’s important to make sure you get stuck in the right one. After your initial broad review, narrow your search by asking the right questions.

Setting a broad objective — like simply trying to “find everything on Vladimir Popov” — can lead to information overload. A targeted approach is far more effective. Framing specific questions — such as, “Is Vladimir Popov related to Official X?” or “What are his financial ties to Company Y?” — keeps the investigation focused, allows for deeper analysis, and helps uncover the exact evidence needed to anchor a story.

Names and Numbers

Personal identifiers — i.e. unique personal data points — help us distinguish one individual from millions of others who might, for instance, have the same name.

While direct identifiers like passport numbers, national IDs, or biometric data provide definitive proof, they are often out of reach or legally protected. Instead, the golden identifiers of open source journalism include dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers, and social media usernames. When put together with employment histories or known family ties, these seemingly minor details help confirm you’re looking at the right person.

Be aware that names themselves can be a digital minefield. Transliteration is a critical factor to watch out for; when a name moves from one alphabet to another — such as from Arabic or Cyrillic to Latin — spelling variations multiply rapidly. The Arabic name Mohammed, for instance, can easily be rendered as Muhammad, Mhamad, or a dozen other ways, depending on the region and the person transcribing it.

Beyond spelling, it’s also important to understand cultural naming structures. A traditional Arabic name typically follows a strict three-part order: first name, father’s first name, and family name. Hispanic surnames, meanwhile, typically combine the father’s and mother’s family names in succession. Paying close attention to these structural nuances does more than just ensure accurate search queries — it can also provide key clues that unlock a subject’s lineage and family background.

Finding Official Records

Official records are gold for investigative journalists. A good first place to start is by running a subject’s name through their country’s commercial, land, plane, and ship registries to see if any assets are linked to them.

Yet when dealing with countries that keep these registries closed to the public, you will need to get creative. That may mean checking if the person has any footprint abroad, and if their name pops up in jurisdictions with higher transparency requirements or where public court filings force corporate ownership into the open.

For example, if you are looking into a man called José Fernandez from Venezuela, a country where the company registry is not open to the public, you might find him in a court case in the United States where available documents mention Jose’s Venezuelan companies.

Other official records include governmental archives and public licenses. Some governments’ official gazettes, for example, publish information about companies, including their shareholders. You might also find out information about José through DomainTools by looking up a website you think he created.

OCCRP’s Research & Data team maintains a catalogue of research resources with links to databases around the world. Image: Screenshot, OCCRP