A Reintroduction
It has been over a little over a year since I wrote for pure enjoyment and now that I’m done with school (I’m a bona fide college graduate now!) I think I’m ready to start writing about open source investigations again.
The last time I managed to put a few written words together was for a two-part, poorly written walkthrough of my open source investigation into the lives of a few of the Russian intelligence officers indicted by the U.S. federal government in 2018. This indictment was part of the well-known Mueller investigation into Russia’s documented election interference in 2016 and the sabotage of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign through the hacking of emails.
The premise of my pieces were that these seemingly well-known and most-wanted fugitives were not hiding in a deep secret bunker outside of Moscow, but instead were living their lives like your (mostly) average Russian citizen and posting family photographs on Instagram, Facebook and Russia’s version of Facebook, VK.com.
I also wrote about Sergey Linnik, a fugitive from New York who was accused of being involved in a robbery and stabbing, and somehow found himself being listed on an Interpol Red Notice, basically putting him on a long, international list of thousands of men and women wanted for crimes around the world.
I was able to locate a potential address and contact information for Mr. Linnik, who I have since attempted to reach out to for an interview through his active social media accounts, mostly with zero luck. I can’t really blame him, I mean, how is talking to me going to benefit him?
It won’t.
There is really no benefit, other than me fulfilling my desire to ask a few questions and satisfy my own curiosity.
All of this has led me down the path of seeing how far I could take this idea of tracking down those individuals that are hiding in plain sight. How many other people are listed on Interpol’s Red Notices that I might be able to find information on that the general public might find of interest?
The answer is, at least for now…a few.
The subject of my first open source investigation for this site is one that I’m hoping to complete and publish this week. My guess is that I was able to find him fairly easily because he had moved to a country that does not have a formal extradition treaty with the country from which he is a fugitive. I think he felt safe to start living his life like a person not on the run from the law, either way. Needless to say, this first investigation for my site provided me with an extremely sweet feeling when I found where he has been hiding in plain sight.
NOTE: I will be updating my Medium posts and moving them to this site in the near future. Although Medium made posting my stories easy and the money I received for it was a surprising benefit, the end result is I didn’t do it for the money, in fact I’d prefer to lose money on hosting fees and have control over my work product, rather than drawing website traffic to Medium. Nothing against them, I’m a drop in the bucket for the much better writers they have over there. I did make an attempt at setting up a free website in the past but I have come around to the fact that although I’m a digitally savvy individual, websites maintenance is not my cup of tea. Thanks to WordPress for offering their services to losers like me.
ANOMENOUS 