I'm a part of a Facebook group for people of my ethnicity that's in IT. Someone in that group made a post asking for help for a linux command. I thought, "this is my area, let me see if I can help." It had to do with installing gcc. First thing that came to my mind was, this is usually installed by default. Either way, I started looking things up. In the middle of that I went back on the post to look at some of the comments to see if anyone helped him out already. Someone posted a suggestion and instead of him saying something like "thank you," "how'd you figure it out," or, I don't know, something that someone who wasn't being disingenuous would say. His response was along the lines of, "that's right another way to do it is...." This pissed me off, because I could've been doing something else, but instead I'm here trying to pass your quiz.
I was halfway joking about the last part. However, you already know people wanted to test me.
I made a separate post saying,
"PSA! If you already know the answer to a question you are finna post. Save it for whoever you have consent from for a quiz. If I answer a question for you, and your response is “yup that’s right…” The next question I’m going to get right is where your location is….. respectfully."
I was halfway joking about the last part. However, you already know people wanted to test me. One of them was the author of the post that pissed me off. He gave me explicit permission to look him up... so I did. I want to tell you my thoughts while doing this, and why I decided that hacking ordinary people isn't a mentally healthy thing to do.
Now it was christmas eve when all this was going down, and I'm in the talking stage and texting/face timing a few women I met on some dating apps and in person. I'm not invested in looking up no man. However, I wondered how close I can get to finding his address with my iPhone.
I decided to first use whatsmyname.app to see all the websites he used the username he was posting from on.
There's a website that I knew of that had a bunch of OSINT tools, osintcombine.com This website has social media platform search engines, Darkweb bookmarks for OSINT, image analyzer, and more. I decided to first use whatsmyname.app to see all the websites he used the username he was posting from on. It showed some acounts from almost a decade ago, old facebook posts and comments, and his youtube comments. I also found out about his wife but decided not to look her up at that point even though she looked like a pretty easy target because she started her own youtube, and she wasn't from the U.S. The main reason was that I found out about her after I decided, this guy was not worth five minutes of my time.
Which caused me to think, "If he thinks 5 minutes of her time ON THE PHONE is worth $100000, he's not worth 5 seconds of my time anywhere."
What stood out in his facebook comments was his simping for an olympic athlete named Khaddi Sagnia. He had over 20 comments on her facebook pictures. One of them said, "I'd give you $100000 for a 5 minute phone call." While Kaddi is beautiful, the women I deal with look way better. Not to say that she's ugly. She's not. Not saying that I haven't dealt with ugly women. I have. Also she's an athlete so her body is top tier if you're into athletic bodies. However, I don't believe she, on a whole, is on the level of a lot of the women I currently deal with and have dealt with. Which caused me to think, "If he thinks 5 minutes of her time ON THE PHONE is worth $100000, he's not worth 5 seconds of my time anywhere." I actually replied to the comment and tried to tell him these comments look bad and he should delete them. Of course, he didn't and started trying to guess what tools I used to look him up and such. All I could do was shake my head. My issue was, it made me keep going!
Then I realized how unhealthy this is mentally.
I started looking up his wife and how they got married. Where she was from. I looked at the youtube videos she made about imigration. I started to put his life together like a puzzle. I had a timeline of all the events. Still, just from my phone.
I started to realize how easy it is to get sucked into someone else's life. I started to feel sorry for the lows of his life. I started to feel proud for the highs of his life. I started to look down on him for a lot of other things that I saw that I didn't approve of. Then I realized how unhealthy this is mentally.
I noticed how the victims of my OSINT were spreading to everyone around him including his kids, people that run his gym, people that he's worked with, all to prove a point that doesn't even matter at the end of the day. After I would've found his location I wasn't booking no flight. All that would've happened is another "yup thats right" that would've pissed me off even more. So I told him he wasn't worth it. His response was that I suck, I'm a shitty hacker, etc. I just let him have the internet win. He needs it...