Doxing a Midwestern OG

in #osint5 years ago

Doxing a Midwestern OG

Organized crime has been a thing for a long while now, but it seems to have been almost forgotten due to the buzzwords of cybercrime these days. Most people do not realize that cybercrime is simply the evolution of crime, and it is just as organized as ever. If you are curious to know the back story behind this, please refer to my first post which details how I became curious about this individual, and also my second post which explains why I am comfortable posting about him.

Define Doxing


Urban Dictionary’s definition seems a bit more malicious than I would like it to be. I like the first sentence of “Doxing is a technique of tracing someone or gather information about an individual using sources on the internet.” While there is definitely a malicious connotation to doxing, I do not have any malicious intent. Doxing generally involves releasing the private information of multiple individuals as collateral damage. I will not be doing that.

What is the point of this?

This man was a career criminal who everyone seemed to love in some strange way. I already know that he has somewhere around 200 to 300 arrests, and there are plenty of news articles already written about him. Cursory online searches show that between news articles and court cases, there is a great deal of information about this man in the public domain, but I want to know what his online presence is like. We know that he passed away in 2010, and privacy was not much better then than it is today. However, he was old, and he likely did not use technology too much. I anticipate that most information available about him will come from public/government records, as well as what ever small bits of his information marketing companies are still trading.

Target Information

You can search your favorite online pasting site for “dox kit” and you will find multiple doxing tutorials and templates of what information to obtain. For this post, I will try to keep it simple. The information outlined below is only a goal; I may not be able to find every detail I want. At least given the amount of time I have to work on this. I have already collected some of the information in my previous posts.

• First Middle Last Names
• Date of Birth – Date of Death
• Address(es) of residence
• Phone Number(s)
• Email Address(es)
• IP Addresses
• Online Profiles

People Search Engines

Because I have already completed a basic Google search of his name, I will start with people search engines. Most people have stumbled upon one or two of these and have searched for themselves. Often times the information is partial, incorrect, out dated, or simply wrong. This is not lost on me. These search engines are harmful to your privacy, and they exist because marketing companies and corporations continue to collect, aggregate, and sell your information. If you find yourself in these and would like help removing your information, please contact me. I might detail how to do that in a later post.
The value of these search engines, even if the information can be unreliable, to an online investigator comes when you search across multiple search engines and cross check your results. You must be cyclical in sifting through your data and trying to validate it against other, known reliable sources.

Pipl

Pipl.com is a people search aggregator. It searches multiple people search engines and social media platforms. They can often find a surprising amount of information. By starting here, you can get a quick idea as to whether or not this person has a large online footprint. Unfortunately for me, I could find multiple people with the same name, but I could not find my person of interest. This is probably a good indicator that George did not spend too much time with technology. Not too surprising.

Intellius

Intellius.com is a people search engine. It isn’t always the most reliable, but it is better than most. They offer the option for a paid report, but I am only interested in what they offer for free. This time, there is a result for George, but unfortunately for me, it says the only listed address is out of state, and it matches the result of another individual I found on Pipl. I’ll take note, but it is likely a false positive and I will move on.

I’m getting a bit jealous at this point. I ran his name through a handful of others and continued to find nothing. I wish I had the ability to run this search while he was still alive and see how the results differed, if they did at all. I don’t think the lack of results is due to this man being too privacy conscious. I just believe this man was from a different generation, and even when the tech was available to him, he probably never needed much of it. This just shows you how invasive to privacy technology has become. Run your name through these sites and see if you get the same harmless results. If you do, congrats, I’d love to hear about it.

Standard Search Engines

Your standard search engine can be just as invasive as people search engines, but it was not entirely by design. Because I had decent results with the first page of Google last time, I am going back to just searching for more sites that do contain information on George. Search engines simply follow every link of every web page they come across and index the results. Every search engine has different algorithms, so they index different results, as well as return different results via the same searches. For now, I am going to search a handful of major search engines, collect as much information from the resulting descriptions, as well as take note of the sites that I find in order to search them further. Based on our results previously, we know his name to be George D Poulosand he lived in Wichita, Kansas. That should be a specific enough query for now.

Google







Google shows us a lot of the same results that we have already seen, but even without clicking on anything, we appear to have found his full last name, his birth year, his grave location, and a handful of websites for us to search on later.

Searching past the first page started showing a few indexed links from well known people search engines. Ones that I wrongfully assumed would not have any information, just because the others did not have anything. Truthfinder.com had some interesting information as the last entry on the page. This looks like it could be relevant. We now have a partial email address, a few partial phone numbers, two cities, and what I am inclined to believe (but I’ve learned to not assume) are a few partial linkedin profiles that probably belong to someone else.


I noticed the blurred phone numbers seem to reveal a bit more information. By simply right clicking on the blurred images and inspecting element, a few more digits are revealed to us. I’ll take note of these and see if I can later identify the remaining digits. It might not be a bad idea for me to collect a few more details from the remaining search engines, and then head back to my list of people search engines to run through them all.

Bing

Bing returned similar results to Google, however, I did find the above mugshot from 1955. I found a few more sites hosting court documents and genealogy information. I’ll come back to these later.

Yahoo

Yahoo provided me a few more useful websites, and some that were just interesting. I did not find anything readily of use. No new information. It seemed to have a mix of Bing and Google’s results.

Yandex

Yandex is the main Russian search engine. It surprisingly did not turn up much. There was a recent craigslist posting where the poster is requesting to get in contact with someone that could potential be a relative of George’s. I’ll leave it out of this post.

DuckDuckGo

A great search engine for the privacy conscious. It did not turn up anything new.

Baidu

The main Chinese search engine. It did not turn up anything useful either.

What do we have so far?

At this point, I wasted a bit of time digging through people search engines that returned no results. I then went back to square one and started searching through popular search engines with simply a name and city/state. Because he was a relatively high profile criminal, I know there are plenty of court documents and newspaper articles to review and parse out the valuable information. I am currently not too interested in those details though. I am still just wanting to complete my list of information. So far, I have found the following information just with a basic search engine:

• George Dan Poulos
• Born in 1925
• Died at age 85 on October 30, 2010
• He has potentially lived in Kansas City, Wichita, and Las Vegas.
• He has books that probably reveal more information
• 3 partial phone numbers associated with him
• 1 partial email address associated with him

Unmasking Partial Records

For the most part, my basic dox is almost completed. We have partial addresses, partial phone numbers, and partial email addresses. Having all of these details in full will be our keys to unlocking the rest of his online presence. It is entirely likely that not all of the details we have obtained actually belong to George. As stated earlier, we will have to continue to refine our dox. Using the information I have so far, I will go back through people search engines now until I have searched across my list of 100+ sites before trying more advanced methods.

• Veromi.com – Shows his name, age, partial addresses, and relatives – Jan 13, 2019
• phonesearchfree.com – Shows his name, an (incorrect) age, a PO Box, the years that he lived in what cities (probably only semi accurate), the rest of a partial phone number, a previous unknown phone number, and a relative.
• Peoplefinders.com – Shows his name, acknowledges that he is deceased, and shows a few more relatives.
• Findpeoplesearch.com – Shows his name, age, 13 associated previous addresses within KS, MO, and NV, 2 phone numbers we have previously found, and 48 potential relatives.
• Publicrecords360.com – Shows his name, age, a partial phone number matching one already found, a relative
• Intellius.com – revisiting it with new details shows his name, the 3 previously found cities, and a relative
• instantpeoplefinder.com – Aggregated multiple searches. Revealed partial street address.
• Verifythem.com – Shows his full name, age, full date of birth, previous cities lived, relatives, and an already identified partial phone number.
• Usphonebook.com – Shows full name, 4 previous addresses in KS and NV, phone numbers, age, associates, and relatives.
• Truepeoplesearch.com – Shows Full Name, multiple addresses, associates, relatives, and dates at associated addresses.
• Peoplesearchsite.com – Revealed a new address in NV.

An Unexpected Surprise

I may have found something dangerous. I guess if I turn up dead any time soon, this may be a safe bet on a motive. Remember in my first post when I said that an old man claimed he was paid by a local business to burn down it’s building? During my search, an obscure people search engine manage to associate George with the same name that I had heard at the bar. There really does not seem to be much information on organized crime in this small town. Maybe there is a reason for that.

A Side Mystery I don’t Have Time For

Another thing that caught my eye through out this process was the fact that two of the Las Vegas addresses that were associated with his name claimed to be from 2011 and 2012 on multiple sources. This could be a data entry error, a marketing company selling bad data, or maybe someone was using his identity after he died?

Where Does This Leave Me?

With more questions than I started with, that is for sure. I did not manage to obtain all of the information I was looking for, but I also only spent a few hours working on this. Most of the time was spent writing. I will not be releasing the full details of what I have found at this time, but below is the semi-completed dox. It is semi-completed because it is the information that I am relatively confident in. The benefit this provides me is that as I move forward with learning more about this interesting character, I can have a profile to compare against that will allow me a degree of certainty that the information I come across will either fit or reject.

Dox

It does not seem like much, but I intend to leave associated and related individuals out of it, and I have not validated the rest of the information yet.

• George Dan Poulos
• April 23, 1925 – October 30, 2010, 85 Years of Age
• Addresses: 1) Wichita, Kansas, 2) Las Vegas, Nevada, 3) Sparks, Nevada, 4) Kansas City, Missouri
• Phones: 2x Wichita

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