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Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

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Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#101
Knowing the high school and approx age in Austin...

You probably know the year she graduated, you can run subsequent queries using +-1 based off of that graduation year. What you're after at first are rosters. The end goal is to place a picture for each name discovered.

Over 10 years since high school graduation? I'd be looking at one of the classmate or facebook groups regarding reunions. Less than 10 years since graduation? I'd still look trying to compile a list of names from these places. Old high school sports and club rosters maybe? Build a graph of people who did go to that high school during those years. Start building 1 degree of separation.

Once you've gotten a list of names, start cross referencing local groups, meet ups, colleges starting with the University of Texas -- possibly even spamming people using generated you've collected )lastname_firstletter@utexas@edu). Perhaps a phishing Email as follows "information regarding blah blah, looking for the person in this pic, we think they left their purse/cell phone etc"? Or post something in a local Austin Reddit.

I'd also do simple searches based on individual names and generated college emails. Start cross referencing all college clubs past/present with names and/or generated emails. If the person is/was in graduate school they will probably have even more school related information online.

If the person has graduated, start working the job route. Online career profiles monster, linkedIn, facebook. Have they done any sort of volunteering? Lot's of pics associated with volunteer work are out there.

5K results are a treasure trove, location, name and age ripe for searching. Some 5K's have corresponding flickr sets where you can match name to race number to a face. Once you have faces either look at them or run them through some CV for possible matches. Even if the name you've found isn't the person you're looking for such pictures might lead you to them anyway, if that person appears in a picture with your target. If you know that the person you found knows your target, start looking at that person's information. Who do they follow on pinterest, twitter, etc...

Does this person own a house do searches against the tax databases for full address of home. Even if the address isn't useful you might learn their middle name - re search with middle initial and middle names in lieu of first names.

Look at old social networking sites like myspace - the target might have old profiles up?

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#102
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

post pic on craiglist/similar in Austin area. Say you found wallet/purse/camera/etc with her picture. Anyone that knows her please call/email w/ Name/Address for you to send back. Use highschool for validation when contacted. Might have some error.

This is the closest I've heard to one of the ideas that we expected to work, so I'll share. - Create an ad on Facebook with her picture. - Target people that went to her high school within 4 years of the range of years we thought she graduated within. Was only a few hundred people so the cost of running the ad would likely only be a few bucks. - The ad copy / landing page just needed to be convincing that we weren't…

So the actual method that worked was "another photo" mentioned by grecy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6369669 an hour ago?

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#103
Made an ad campaign on Facebook targeting her high school and girls of her age saying in the ad something like "Click on this link darling, need to see this, Justin Gold ;)" and redirecting her to some fake (made by you) rosy website with hearts on them where she is socially engineered to leave her name. Probably not this, but I would try it for the fun.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#104
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

post pic on craiglist/similar in Austin area. Say you found wallet/purse/camera/etc with her picture. Anyone that knows her please call/email w/ Name/Address for you to send back. Use highschool for validation when contacted. Might have some error.

This is the closest I've heard to one of the ideas that we expected to work, so I'll share. - Create an ad on Facebook with her picture. - Target people that went to her high school within 4 years of the range of years we thought she graduated within. Was only a few hundred people so the cost of running the ad would likely only be a few bucks. - The ad copy / landing page just needed to be convincing that we weren't…

Veronica Mars style social engineering does tend to work.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#105
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

post pic on craiglist/similar in Austin area. Say you found wallet/purse/camera/etc with her picture. Anyone that knows her please call/email w/ Name/Address for you to send back. Use highschool for validation when contacted. Might have some error.

This is the closest I've heard to one of the ideas that we expected to work, so I'll share. - Create an ad on Facebook with her picture. - Target people that went to her high school within 4 years of the range of years we thought she graduated within. Was only a few hundred people so the cost of running the ad would likely only be a few bucks. - The ad copy / landing page just needed to be convincing that we weren't…

You had another picture that showed where she worked? Used LinkedIn and company's webpage (Some company list their employee) to narrow it down to a few people. Or send a message to a coworker on linkedin whatever looking for information about that girl and they gave it to you? I'm curious :P

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#106

I'm the engineer he's referring to. I still get a laugh seeing Justin's amazement when we told him her name. To answer a few questions... - This isn't the actual photo but looks similar, except that she was alone. Justin was afraid of reposting the same photo after the results of handing over a photo last time :) - There was no useful exif data in the image. - We knew her high school and approximate age in Austin, bu…

She bought that dress from some Austin boutique and modeled it for them, or left a review? Y'all found the review?

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the closest I've heard to one of the ideas that we expected to work, so I'll share. - Create an ad on Facebook with her picture. - Target people that went to her high school within 4 years of the range of years we thought she graduated within. Was only a few hundred people so the cost of running the ad would likely only be a few bucks. - The ad copy / landing page just needed to be convincing that we weren't…

So the actual method that worked was "another photo" mentioned by grecy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6369669 an hour ago?

This method likely would have worked by itself. The method that worked sooner wasn't just "another photo" found online of her friends as grecy mentioned. It was a photo we had taken ourselves, and it didn't have anyone else in it. But I'm not ready to tell Justin more details about it.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#108
Possibilities: - they looked at signups at close.io after the evening, thus narrowing a list of female names for image searching. They could further limit this to IP's from the austin area. - They bought the ad words 'justin gold', and 'justinbgold'. Then waited for her to google you, thus revealing IP addresses for further googling.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#109
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few ideas come to my head. * Everyone was at the original bar at the same time - someone else had photos from the night that had her and other people in them, and those people (her friends) could be found online. * The bar had some kind of "sign-up for x" list, or some kind of contest, or some kind of photos of the night, which were helpful. * You searched twitter/facebook/whatever for a girl posting about a boy sh…

Some good ones, but nope.

So in the other post, you said you inadverdently realized you had a second photo of the target (which presumably contained key identifying info)...so, are you saying here that that second photo didn't come from investigating the event that she was at (i.e., if it had a meetup/lanyrd page, looking at all the attendee photos and seeing what looked like her?)

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#110
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the closest I've heard to one of the ideas that we expected to work, so I'll share. - Create an ad on Facebook with her picture. - Target people that went to her high school within 4 years of the range of years we thought she graduated within. Was only a few hundred people so the cost of running the ad would likely only be a few bucks. - The ad copy / landing page just needed to be convincing that we weren't…

Proof that your friends are your biggest privacy leak. People will tell just anything to anyone.

They didn't actually try it, so there's no proof.
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