What Is OSINT? How Open-Source Intelligence Is Used in Fraud Investigations
Fraud investigations increasingly begin with a simple question: what can be discovered from information that is already publicly available? Websites, company records, social media, news reports, online marketplaces, images, maps and other public sources can all provide useful pieces of information. When those pieces are collected, evaluated and analysed systematically, they can contribute to what is commonly known as open-source intelligence, or OSINT. OSINT can help investigators identify connections between people, companies, addresses, websites and other entities. It can also help corroborate information, identify new lines of enquiry and build a clearer picture of how suspected fraud operates. But OSINT is not simply searching Google or looking through someone's social-media profile. The intelligence comes from how information is collected, evaluated, connected and verified. OSINT combines publicly available information from multiple sources to identify connections, corrobor...