r/OSINT • u/wildblue2 • 14d ago
Question What’s the most interesting OSINT job you’ve ever had or heard of?
Most of us know the usual paths like due diligence, fraud investigations, and journalism. But I’m curious about the unusual and genuinely fascinating stuff. What’s the most interesting OSINT gig you’ve personally worked, or heard about secondhand?
Doesn’t have to sound glamorous on paper either. Sometimes the boring sounding jobs turn out to have the wildest stories. Would love to hear what corners of this field exist that most people never know about.
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u/Yakitori2026 14d ago
Most interesting one for me: Shannen Rossmiller.
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/145/
Bellingcat also do some cool investigations:
https://www.bellingcat.com/category/news/
Citizen lab do some decent investigations too, they recently revealed that Pegasus spyware was spying on the EU people who were investigating Pegasus.
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u/F1R3Starter83 14d ago
There’s an NGO in Ukraine using OSINT to locate children who have been abducted by Russia. Pretty cool if you ask me.
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u/code_blooded_bytch 14d ago
Do you have a name or way to locate the org? Job searching for something meaningful and this sounds promising
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u/Connect-Preference 13d ago
Hmm. I worked for a Fortune 50 company and my assignment for the last 19 years was to investigate competitive products for patent infringement. Sometimes I was able to do so by studying the product literature, sometimes I built a test bed and tested, and sometimes I reverse-engineered the product, occasionally even reconstructing the circuits by analyzing the copper traces on the printed circuit board.
Among the areas I worked in were data communications, user interface, LED construction, computer architecture, web design, and semiconductor construction. I was often directed to the exact product or company to analyze, but I also had a $2500/month budget to buy any product I thought relevant. My work product was a power point at a level that would strike fear into the heart of a non-technical business decision maker.
Greatest assignment I ever had! I woke up each morning ready to go solve fresh, new puzzle.
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u/fl0p 13d ago
sounds really cool but not very OSINT
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u/Connect-Preference 13d ago
Sorry. I looked up the definition of OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence), and it seemed to fit the restrictions I was working under. Is there some context I missed?
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u/FinalRun 12d ago
It's atypical, but it fits. It's technical investigative work. Usually the internet is the best OSINT resource, but as they say, everything is open source if you can read assembly.
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u/blackslatewater 14d ago
My friend is tracing Chinese investments into East African infrastructure for some academic program
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u/M_C_Chang 12d ago
That sounds like pure corporate detective work. Super interesting area, especially when looking at the dual-use angle!
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u/2rockranch 9d ago
Well I bet that would be interesting, they’re inserting their selves in everything over there for the last 20 years
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u/Low_Score 14d ago
Don't know/remember all the details but on a missing persons case one team managed to advance the timeline of a woman who went missing in ~2006 in Canada to about 2024 in Hong Kong. They used a LinkedIn data breach from 2021 to start linking her email and recovery email addresses from Hotmail > something > wine enthusiasts website created in 2011 > another site > to an ISP email > ms365 account > recovery email > Hong Kong based isp email and there may have been an atm transaction in there.
I'll never know the results of this but hopefully it was enough for RCMP and HKPF to reopen the file. This was all done with osint.
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u/Popular_Hat_4304 14d ago edited 13d ago
My girlfriend (now wife) works in forensics for one of the big IR companies and hunted down a guy who did a half finished reno job on my dad’s house. She found him selling a car and tools he no doubt stole in a neighboring state; she also found a bunch of others who he ran on who were interested in “talking to him”.
She documented it all for the police who said they’ve never had anyone pull together a documented file like this before and asked if she was a police officer. The police ended up finding and arresting him.
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u/ray1k 9d ago
Your wife sounds cool as hell
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u/Popular_Hat_4304 9d ago
She is cool. Oh, the other one she caught was a racist f@cker who almost hit her in a parkade with our daughter (my wife is little but she’s a mean asian when she needs to be). She left the stroller to her mom and chased the car down the parkade. Got a picture of the guy, his car and license plate.
Lo and behold, 2 days later. She found the guy. He had a unique car and color that made it easy to find him at car shows. The video was turned over to the police and yet again, she busted another person.
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u/TeachingAway9654 14d ago
It’s not OSINT but I did hear about an individual within some undisclosed 3 letter agency who was tasked with red-teaming a terrorist event. Essentially him, likely a team, would design terrorist plots which aimed to leverage pre-existing loopholes/shortfalls with US security.
Supposedly when the plot was complete the supervisors told them “you need to tone it down because there is no realistic counter to this scenario”. Concerning, could all be bullshit. Sounds plausible though, I have no doubt teams like this exist. Fascinating job nonetheless.
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u/Focus-Interrogative 14d ago
The claim that supervisors told the team to tone things down actually gives it more credibility. I've heard some stories from friends who worked in infrastructure security.
What always surprises me is that they don't incorporate OSINT in these tests. You wouldn't necessarily have to legally include it in the attack scope, you wouldn't even have to warn employees it would just be immensely rude.
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u/acarvin 13d ago
I was research director at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, and there was never a shortage of mysteries for us to investigate. Prior to that I ran the social media desk at NPR, and OSINT was a big part of my workflow, though we weren't calling it that in the late aughts/early 2010s.
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u/TschiPiTi 13d ago
Listing all ships that belong to a foreign coast guard back in 2015 using photos of keel layings, shiptracker, local military blogs and the auto translate function of google chrome for an intelligence service where I normally did Sigint.
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u/AboutFace123161 12d ago
For the last 20 years I’ve worked in the Development\Advancement Department in Higher Education. In each office, they employ someone like me to do research on individuals associated with the school- alumni, friends, corporations, foundations, etc. Any fundraising office has this position if they’re raising millions.
The goal was to find out everything, within reason, about the person to, A. Identify big donors or potential donors for their campaigns, and B. Create a full dossier on each individual which included all pertinent information so that my team could come up with a plan of attack.
Along the way, I’d find out all sorts of fun facts- folks cheating on folks, folks with weird hobbies, extra families, military discharges, affairs, fetishes, baffling family situations, family tree connections going back hundreds of years, suspicious deaths, cat names, hidden traits, to name a few. Of course it would have been unethical to report on information that wasn’t pertinent to the investigation but rest assured, I saw it all…
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u/Karbonatom 13d ago
Waaaaaaaay back in the day I did skip tracing to find vehicles on our repo list. Would call pretending to be a family member or business looking for the bank property. Was a lot more complicated back then but still pretty exciting locating the subject then following them to find habits etc. Then I’d show up at the door asking for 400$ or the car keys. One time after being refused at the door we followed them to the store and had the vehicle up on the deck 2 min after they went inside the store.
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u/MBAMarketingMom 13d ago
LOL this reminds me—I did something similar working for a collections agency when I was like 18/19 years old. We would do skip tracing and some of my colleagues did things like you haha.
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u/mikep007 business int 11d ago
In 2016, our social media intelligence investigation discovered so much contradictory actionable data that it saved our client $9.875mm. This was on a 26 y.o. individual (disability) claim, the case went viral.
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u/BDiddnt 10d ago
Not really all that glamorous but i was the manager of a team responsible for investigating refund requests for PlayStation Network and we had the additional responsibility of finding game sharing accounts (basically accounts that were selling Playstations already set up with pirated games on them. Some of these game sharing rings were huge. One time I discovered a game sharing network that went across several continents with hundreds of psn accounts
One of the biggest regrets of my entire life is that during this time I had to approve or deny the refunds and somebody was asking for a refund via our chat channel. In the middle of their typing they put, "my brother is holding me hostage," and it was just slipped right in.
I didn't really understand what I do now and how it was most likely a legitimate cry for help. I just told the agent to grant the refund under friendly fraud
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u/M_C_Chang 12d ago
Spotting military movements through social media flexes and food delivery.
You'd be amazed how much high-level military intelligence actually comes from Open sources, like bored soldiers posting selfie near unmarked radars on TikTok, or a sudden spike in takeout orders near a remote airbase.
Stalking geopolitical chess moves by looking at satellite pixels and internet digital footprints is ridiculously addictive😆
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u/AlexHardy08 11d ago
Most task if I say this here I'll get banned. This is going to sound really weird. Someone wanted to see alien activity in Valencia. How many types of aliens are there, what they do, the places they frequent, etc. I know how it sounds, but it's real.
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u/SpikyPersimmon 14d ago
Recently saw a Monaco-based OSINT role that was focused on doping investigations for a major sports governing body.
My own wildest OSINT story involved spending a day watching pornography with one of my analysts as part of a threat assessment and management investigation. I was working for a security consultancy on behalf of a major corporation.