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What You Can Do
The tips presented here may be useful in investigating 'Net nuisances. However, if the person involved seems to be committing an actual, serious crime, you should go straight to an organization such as Cyber Angels or your local police department. What you can do to investigate someone depends on what information you have. Click the appropriate link to find out what you can do with that piece of information. IP Address
If you suspect two ‘people’ of being the same person, the first thing to do is to see if they have the same IP address. An IP address is a number that identifies a particular computer on the internet. The IP address is assigned to a computer by its service provider. An IP address is four sets of up to three numbers separated by dots – XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX. IP addresses may be obtained from messageboards, chats, and emails, among other sources. If you are on a messageboard or chat, you may have to ask the moderator to give you the person’s IP address. If you have received an email from a person, you can view their IP address by turning on ‘headers’. How to do this will vary from program to program. You can find out your own IP address by going to http://www.whatismyip.com – this should give you a good example of what an IP address looks like. There are two types of IP address. With static IPs, a unique number is permanently assigned to a unique computer. With dynamic IPs, the service provider has a list of IP numbers that it rotates among the computers it connects. If a person has a static IP, their IP number will never change. If a person has a dynamic IP, they may have a different IP number each time they sign on (though the first unit of numbers should always be the same). This means that it is possible for two people on separate computers but with the same provider to have the same IP address (though not at the same time). HOWEVER, the chances of two people who just happen to have been assigned the same IP being on the same board, chat, etc., are incredibly small. If your two suspects have the same IP address, you can be 99% sure that they are the same person or use the same computer. You can also use an IP address to trace back to the location of a computer. This is not foolproof – the larger the internet provider that the computer uses, the less useful the information will be. For example, in the case of someone using a megaprovider like AOL, their IP may trace back to Dallas, Texas, when they are actually located in London, England. With smaller providers, you will probably get the right country, maybe the right state or province, and maybe even the right city. Use the information that an IP location trace gives you in conjunction with other information, not on its own. Some sites for tracing IP numbers: http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm (Gives information about the location the IP traces to)
If the person you are investigating is suspected of an actual crime, you may use the IP number to discover who their Internet provider is and contact the provider for more assistance.
If you have a person’s email address, it may be possible to discover information about their previous internet history and alter egos by performing a variety of searches. First, do a search for the email address in various search engines. Metacrawler is a search engine that searches all the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. Dogpile does the same thing Metacrawler does, but less selectively – it may return more useless information. Google Group Search searches Usenet mailing list archives Boardreader searches a variety of messageboards If the person uses any messenger services, they may have created a profile that will give you more information. These links will let you search varying messenger services.
First of all, if you are on a messageboard, chat, etc. that lets people create profiles, check to see if the person has made a profile that you can get any information from. Then, do a search for the screen name in various search engines. Be aware that it is possible for someone completely unrelated to have chosen the screen name! The more unusual a screen name, the more likely it is that any information you find applies to the person you are investigating. Use the information that a screen name search gives you in conjunction with other information, not on its own. Metacrawler is a search engine that searches all the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. Dogpile does the same thing Metacrawler does, but less selectively – it may return more useless information. Google Group Search searches Usenet mailing list archives Boardreader searches a variety of messageboards If the person uses any messenger services, they may have created a profile that will give you more information. These links will let you search varying messenger services.
A little HTML knowledge may get you some information from a person’s website. When you are on a page of the website, view the source code. (‘View’, ‘Source’ in Internet Explorer, ‘View’, ‘Page Source’ in Netscape) Scan the HTML. This may not give you any useful information, but with some HTML editors such as Front Page, lots of personal information is automatically inserted at the top of the code. Backtrack to indexes. If you are viewing a page with the address http://www.website/stories/fiction/page.html, go ahead and backspace over the information after each /. Inotherwords, view http://www.website.com/stories/fiction and http://www.website.com/stories – these are indexes. They may have protected the indexes, but if they have lousy security skills, you may see a list of files that they thought were hidden. Do a Google search on the main website address. Along with any results, you should see: · Show Google's cache of www.webpage.com
Check each of these options to see if you get any useful information. You can also search for earlier version of the web page at the WayBack Machine, a webpage that archives older versions of sites. If the person has their own domain name, you might be able to find some useful information. An example domain name is www.mydomain.com. If the person is using a free webpage provider such as Geocities or Angelfire, this won’t help you. But if they are paying for their own domain, you can do a WhoIs search to find out information about the owner of that domain name. Go here to do a WhoIs search.
If you know the person’s home town and have details that you can look up, check the person’s local newspaper for corroborating evidence. A good source for online newspapers is www.onlinenewspapers.com. Or you can just perform a Google search for the newspaper.
If you have a person’s real name, you can do several things. Keep in mind that several different people can have the same name, so information you find may not necessarily apply. If you have their real name AND their location, you are more likely to find useful information. Look them up in an Internet telephone directory, such as AnyWho. Do a search for the name in various search engines. Metacrawler is a search engine that searches all the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. Dogpile does the same thing Metacrawler does, but less selectively – it may return more useless information. Google Group Search searches Usenet mailing list archives Boardreader searches a variety of messageboards If the person uses any messenger services, they may have created a profile that will give you more information. These links will let you search varying messenger services.
Once you have found a bit of evidence, you should save it to your computer so that the party in question can’t delete it and destroy your case against them. Two good ways to do this are by screen captures and downloading webpages. To do a screen capture, press the ‘Prt Scrn’ button on your computer (up above the Insert/Delete buttons). Then go to your computer’s image program and ‘Paste as a new image’. This should give you a picture of whatever was on your computer screen when you took the screen capture. To save a webpage to your hard drive, while viewing that webpage in your browser select ‘File’ then ‘Save As’.
If you are faced with finding a particular search term in a long page, don’t waste your time visually scanning the whole page – use your browser’s find tool. In Internet Explorer, this is at ‘Edit’, ‘Find (on this page)’. In Netscape, this is at ‘Edit’, ‘Find in Page’. The find tool may not recognize a special character such as @ - inotherwords, if you’re searching a page for the email address abcd@email.com, search for ‘abcd’ instead.
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