Building a Legacy in OSINT: Neil Smith’s Journey with Locate International

Five years after helping set up Locate International, Neil Smith, our Co-Founder and Director of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) unit, is standing down.

Here, Neil – a former police officer who has spent more than 20 years as an investigative researcher – talks us through how the organisation has evolved, and how his team helped resolve numerous missing persons cases.

It's hard to believe how different the world was at the start of 2020 when we started Locate, and how different the world has become because of the pandemic. When we were putting Locate together, the idea was that we would physically drive to a university, physically drive to a city where we would meet our volunteers, we would discuss a case and research that case in that city. And, all of a sudden, the world changed and you couldn't move around.

We started to meet a much bigger group of volunteers online at a time when people were at home, perhaps not doing anything.

In two years, Locate got to where it would have got to in five or six years.

It changed the way that Locate was going to act – for the better – and brought a lot of people together online that would never have met in the real world.

Locate exists because it's unfortunate, for an awful lot of reasons, that the police have just not been as engaged online as they should be.

There are some great researchers in the police, and some great people trying to lead the digital side of policing. But they are outnumbered by those holding them back.

The police will accept that if somebody goes missing on the moors or on a mountain, they're not going to send 20 police officers up there, because they haven't got 20 police officers with mountaineering experience, with moorland experience. But if there is a group of volunteers who go out on the moors, they can call on them. They understand that. But they somehow haven't been as engaged as they could be online looking for missing people and accepting some of the assistance that we offer. But that is going to change, and it has to change.

My wife and I are very, very close and have known each other for 40 years, but she has no interest in computers at all, has no interest in going online. And so she has no idea about my online life. And that is replicated through so many families. So if the police are trying to find where somebody is in the real world, they're gonna look in the real world – they haven't been given the clues as to where this person would be in the online world.

For example: I'm very online, but I'm not an online gamer. I'm not an online gambler. But there are whole groups of people who have a whole life online away from their family.

When we founded Locate, I said that the opportunities were there to research these people and find a whole group of people online, whose lives online may be the reasons why they've gone missing.

The problem is the police aren't looking at that because they haven't been told to look there.

Open source intelligence has actually been around for a couple of hundred years, but it used to be just reading newspapers, talking to people in an area. Now, because we've got the internet, you don't have to just do local inquiries, you can do international inquiries, at any time, day or night, in any country, any language. So OSINT is finding information generally online to understand an incident, a person, a company. I'd been using these sorts of techniques since the late 1990s to investigate mostly fraud-related crimes.

With investigators, we've all got our pet ways of doing investigations, the things that we tend to do in a particular order. For me, it is very much: let's just check the name. Is that really their name? Is that the name, the identity they’re actually known as? So there are a number of online genealogy sites and as a starting point, I always tend to go to these sites, as they have proved so useful in so many cases over the years. Can I confirm this person has been born, married? Can I check the spelling? Any close family members?

From there, I’d go to electoral roll sites where people are registered against houses. Again, check the spelling, check the areas, check who they're linked with. Through some of these sites, we can obtain mobile phone numbers and email addresses and once we have those, there are other sites where we can then search to see if they're linked to online accounts and then start stretching out the investigation.

Once you've started researching somebody, there's perhaps one photograph that is used by the press in relation to somebody going missing, and it's not always a great photograph.

Sometimes if you can locate, say, a WhatsApp account for somebody and you get a nice image, you realise, well, if that's their WhatsApp image, most of us that are online tend to use the same image because it's the one that we've got the digital copy of. So where else can I find accounts for them with that photo?

Younger people may live in a volatile home life, but they could be online gaming and have friends around the world who they regularly game with, they regularly interact with, and that might be the most loving, stable relationship they have.

Sometimes, you can, just by looking at someone's online accounts, understand perhaps their lifestyle, their life choices, and sometimes understand perhaps the pressures that have let them or has made them, pushed them to a stage where they go missing.

In relation to the trans community, for example, there is such a high rate of self-harm and suicide. They're often very, very sad cases. But sometimes, you’ll see the missing person's appeal and you see the name and the photograph that has been put out by the police, who've been told their details by the family. When you start researching them, you go “aah: I can perhaps see why this person's gone missing from that family.” Because that's not their identity. That's their old identity. And perhaps seeing that all over the press has just reinforced why they've had to get out and go missing from that situation. But you understand that the police are looking for the person the family said they were. That isn't them in reality. Through just a quick online investigation, you can start identifying those sorts of trails.

I'm yet to investigate a county lines kid who's got less than half a dozen Instagram accounts. You literally look as they have grown up into the groomed person that they've become. And you start recognising the sites they’re following as they've gone from the sweet little school kid to the skater boy kid, to hanging around and smoking, to smoking drugs, being a drugs gang sort of kid.

There's always a thread that follows through it and you try to look for what the constants are, who's tagging them into posts and where they'll be.

Because I've been doing this for 20 years, sometimes you look at an account and you can sometimes see things subconsciously that are there, just because of what people have liked and what they posted, and it's the unsaid things.

We're not sending friend requests and accessing things that we shouldn't be accessing. Law enforcement can do that if we direct them to those accounts. It’s a job for them, not us.

There was one case where the person was missing and it was a very sad case, where there had been some tragedy in this person's life, clearly their life had fallen apart and it was thought that they'd gone to a very well known area on the south coast and perhaps harmed themselves.

We located an account for them, which we could show had been created two weeks after the date that they'd gone missing, after the date the police thought that they had died. And because of who we could see they were following, it gave us an idea of which country they were in and how they got there. And that was fed to the police.

There was one case where an individual was going through a mental health episode, had left home and had travelled to London without his medication and away from his family who were caring for him. He was posting some photos that weren’t very clear on X or Twitter.

But we used software, brightened the photographs, changed them a little bit so you could read them a little bit better. You could work out which street they had been posted on, and by using some skills to geolocate them, we identified that they were actually all in the same street.

There was also a photograph he had posted of a tent in a field where he was living. So we researched where the homeless people in this particular area were pitching their tents. We fed that back to the police. We got sent the job by the police on a Saturday, fed the information back to them on the Monday and on the Wednesday, he was located where we said he was going to be. The police put him a situation where he could have his medication and be returned to his family.

People are allowed to go missing, but sometimes people need a helping hand. They need to know that people do care.

There was another case where a young woman who was visiting the country to attend a retreat had gone missing for about three years. The information was that she'd gone off with a rather oppressive individual.

We did the research, located some information about her that included a profile image of that individual on a messaging site, so there wasn't any sort of what they call EXIF data, the hidden data within an image, where you can geolocate it.

In the end, one of the volunteers who was actually in Athens was researching it online and found a particular company that supplied a glass-fronted balcony in this photo. He found a photograph on a news article where they talked about their balconies. From that, we could identify the flat, where this photograph was taken.

Then it was a matter of feeding that information to the police to say: if you knock on this door, there's a woman there who perhaps needs some help. Unfortunately she didn't want any help: it was an oppressive relationship and she perhaps wasn't in the position at that time to understand that. But she was removed from the missing people list and her family were notified that she was alive and well, living in this area in London.

It really showed the power of volunteers because, without us, it wouldn't have happened. It showed the fact that what we do is international, you don't have to be in the country or in the area to do these inquiries. The volunteer who played a major role in that wasn't even in the UK.

This is the beauty of having Locate with volunteers around the world with different experiences, different backgrounds.

These volunteers bring so much more to an investigation because they will instantly know certain things that I can guess at or hypothesise about, but they will instantly know and be able to react to. That's the power of Locate and the power of the teams we have.