Blackstage Forensics tracks down criminals with GBG Investigate
About
Blackstage Forensics offers specialist services for open-source intelligence (OSINT) online investigations, digital safeguarding and training courses.
Company size
1-10 employees
Location
EMEA
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The challenge
Founded in 2009, Blackstage Forensics specialises in online open-source investigations for clients spanning government agencies, law enforcement, the military, TV, film and music industry. Theft and fraud investigations, background checks and even fighting blackmail attempts can all feature in a typical week’s work.
Many projects involve risk profiling and mitigation to protect clients’ employees. That might involve celebrities experiencing online harassment from stalkers or threats to retail staff from activists. The company also passes on its deep experience and expertise to new investigators through training courses.
To gather information on businesses and individuals, Blackstage employs a wide range of applications and methods. But almost every investigation begins by searching rich, interlinked individual, business and property reference data.
The solution
Blackstage was involved in testing the very first version of GBG Investigate which remains its primary research tool to this day. Investigate offers over 1.5 billion enhanced, interlinked records, with sophisticated yet intuitive searching and visualisation options.
“We need the widest possible view of data sources and the links between them,” Managing Director David Benford explains. “It’s my responsibility to ensure we have the right tools for the job and GBG Investigate is always the best starting point for any UK-centric investigation.”
GBG’s business and consumer data allows the Blackstage team to immediately check if phone numbers are live or if individuals own their property. They can find connections between, for example, shareholders and other data sets, with intelligent graph visualisation and colour-coded visuals helping them spot vital details. Multi-sourced, consented commercial data is particularly powerful.
“Criminals might opt out of the electoral register but it’s difficult for them to control their or their cohabitants’ presence within consented data,” explains David. “That makes it very valuable for our investigations. For us, GBG’s links to cohabitants and aliases are like gold dust.”
For us, GBG Investigate remains number one for UK-centric investigations.
The outcome
Within Investigate, Blackstage often locates “pivot points” like emails or addresses that spark fresh lines of investigation, sometimes via other specialist services. But staff inevitably return to Investigate to search for further links. Investigate also shows Blackstage the public data available on its clients’ employees, like addresses and phone numbers, so it can pinpoint vulnerabilities.
As fake digital identities often feature different combinations of the same name, address and email elements, Investigate’s wild card searches and fuzzy matching are powerful ways to discover new leads. Searching on part of an email address or looking for emails with the same domain suffix often yields instant results.
“I really like how Investigate can search on two names simultaneously to find cohabitants, aliases or other links between them,” says David, highlighting GBG’s strong support and ongoing product development.
“GBG’s data accuracy is very good,” he continues. “Their system is reliable; they offer training for new features and guide us on legislation like GDPR. GBG’s compliance team has given us timely support when dealing with urgent requests from law enforcement clients.”
“It’s getting harder and harder to access information like social data so GBG Investigate is vital for us to do our jobs efficiently and effectively,” concludes David. “Life would be a whole lot tougher without it.”
GBG Investigate’s data and linkages are vital for online investigations.
