Heavy use of social media by the majority of Americans makes it a potentially vital tool in law enforcement’s arsenal. The use of social-media intelligence (typically abbreviated as SOCINT or SOCMINT) holds tremendous potential for many investigations, especially missing persons investigations, but the successful use of SOCMINT poses a few challenges that must be surmounted.
Here, we explore the application of SOCMINT in missing persons cases.
Finding Missing Persons Is a Major Part of Policing
Missing persons cases occur frequently in the US. The FBI’s 2023 NCIC Missing Person and Unidentified Person Statistics recorded 563,389 missing persons cases for that year. While runways accounted for the largest single percentage of those, many cases also resulted from abductions by strangers or non-custodial parents, while still others concerned adults who went missing for various reasons.
In any given year, the number of closed cases tracks very closely with the number of cases filed, and may exceed it as older cases are cleared. In 2023, for example, 563,654 cases were purged from the records. The subject may have been located by law enforcement or returned home voluntarily, and some records were purged because they were found to be invalid.
Despite this high success rate, a number of missing persons cases go unresolved. The National Missing and Unidentified Person System (NamUs) reported a cumulative total of 23,972 open cases as of its January 2024 report, with a total of 73% of those remaining unresolved for 11 years or longer. Resolving cases quickly is important; a successful closure becomes less likely as the case becomes “cold.”
Social Media’s Potential in Missing Persons Cases
Missing persons cases are innately problematic: in the case of abductions or at-risk persons, every minute can be crucial; yet the passage of time is often the only way to determine whether a person is genuinely missing, or has simply been out of contact for innocuous reasons. In some cases, too, the missing person may have deliberately dropped out of sight for personal reasons, or for their own safety. Yet all of these must be investigated, at no small cost in time and effort by the responsible agency.
Social media’s prevalence and high usage rates hold the potential to make it a successful tool in resolving these cases, lightening the investigative burden on LEAs. It can be utilized either as a means of publicizing cases and “crowdsourcing” tips and information, as a data-rich environment for investigators, or both.
Using Social Media for Public Awareness and Assistance
For any LEA that maintains a social media presence, these platforms can be an important resource in missing persons cases. Facebook missing persons posts, tweets on X (formerly Twitter), or TikTok videos can reach large numbers of people, beginning almost as soon as they are posted. This is especially true of high-profile cases such as child abductions or at-risk teens.
Such posts could solicit a range of responses from the public, including (but not limited to):
- Possible sightings of the missing person.
- Potential eyewitnesses to an abduction.
- Videos from private users’ phones, home or business security cameras, dash cams, or GoPros which were recorded at a time and place where the abduction/disappearance is thought to have occurred.
- Pertinent personal information from friends, family, coworkers, or other acquaintances of the missing person, that might shed light on their possible location or their state of mind.
- Potential identification of persons of interest, from videos or photos shared by the LEA.
The latter requires sifting through a number of false or mistaken identifications, but such “crowdsourcing” shouldn’t be dismissed. A 2023 paper published in the International Journal of Missing Persons makes this point, noting that many participants in massive 2011 riots in London, England, were identified through social media; and closer to home many participants in the January 6th Capitol clash were identified by private citizens who were able to match faces from videos of that day’s events to the perpetrators’ social media accounts.
Using Social Media as an Investigative Tool
Aside from appealing for public assistance, social media can be a tool for active investigations. It has supplanted written diaries, photo albums, and scrapbooks as a vehicle for preserving memories and autobiographical notes; and has also largely superseded church socials, service clubs, and other activities as the facilitator of social connection and creator of community.
Viewed in that light, social media’s value as a source of insights into the missing person’s frame of mind, recent history, associates, and habitual routine is clear. In cases where it is not yet clear whether the subject of the inquiry is genuinely missing, social media can help investigators assess whether there are grounds for concern.
If an investigation has already been launched, officers can use the same information to judge whether and where an abduction or disappearance might have occurred, and potentially to identify persons of interest in the case. Social media tools can then be similarly employed to evaluate the likelihood of any given person of interest having the motive or opportunity to be involved.
Finding Missing Persons Through SOCMINT
Recognizing social media’s potential as an investigative tool is straightforward, but harnessing that potential is less so. At this point, it may be constructive to take a closer look at some specific use cases for SOCMINT, the challenges those entail, and the tools that can be used to produce actionable intelligence.
Combing the Missing Person’s Social Media for Insights
For missing adults, or juveniles old enough to make regular use of social media, viewing their social media activity can suggest numerous avenues of inquiry. Aside from insights into the missing person’s own frame of mind and mental health, this can yield:
- Intelligence of the missing person’s plans for the day they went missing, including the places they’d intended to go, the people they’d intended to see, and the activities they expected to carry out while there.
- Evidence of disagreements, threatening behavior, or interpersonal friction between the missing person and one or more associates.
- Evidence that might suggest the individual has run away or deliberately chosen to “go off-grid.”
- Posted photos that might suggest a specific place, or a specific associate, connected with the disappearance. Photos may also provide metadata intelligence, also known as “exif” data, which may contain a GPS/location read that could be useful to help provide a trail for a missing person’s whereabouts.
Identifying the Missing Person’s Contacts, and Their Associates
Cataloging the missing person’s social media friends and followers, as well as any acquaintances or influencers they themselves follow, may enable investigators to establish connections that might be unknown to immediate family, offline friends and neighbors, or coworkers.
Pushing this out an additional degree, to the friends and contacts of those contacts, may also suggest avenues of inquiry. An otherwise innocuous contact might, for example, be related to or friends with a violent offender, and be the unwitting agent of a crime of opportunity.
Dating platforms and private messaging apps can also be a fruitful source of data for investigators, especially in the case of women or minors who may have been targeted for abduction or sexual exploitation. While these are not typically thought of as “social media,” both are designed to help users connect and interact, and therefore fit the same general profile.
Sifting Through Posts for Location Details
Some social media platforms allow for explicit “check-ins” from the user’s then-current location, which create a record of the user’s (or at least their device’s) movements. Some photos posted to the account may also be geo-tagged, which also identifies the user’s location at a given place and time.
Even photos that are not geotagged may contain identifiable landmarks, potentially suggesting the missing person’s whereabouts on a given day. These data points are useful in and of themselves, and can also suggest opportunities to retrieve detailed location information through conventional investigative channels, such as a subpoena to the missing person’s telephone carrier or a geofencing warrant around the subject’s last known whereabouts.
Challenges in the Use of SOCMINT
Despite its outstanding potential as an investigative tool, SOCMINT poses some challenges for LEAs. An obvious first hurdle is that investigators are limited only to such information as may be publicly viewable on the missing person’s profile, unless a friend or family member is able to supply a working password.
There are several additional points of friction that may impede investigations. A few of those include:
Identifying the Missing Person’s Social Media Accounts
Definitively connecting a given social media account to the missing individual can be challenging, for several reasons.
- The missing person’s family and friends may not be familiar with all of their online activity or personae.
- The missing person – especially at-risk juveniles – may have deliberately concealed one or more accounts.
- Missing persons with common names may be difficult to connect with their social media accounts through an on-platform search, because of the large number of search results.
- Many social media platforms allow anonymity and pseudonymity as a deliberate policy choice, and those that do require identity verification are, on the whole, easily circumvented. Minors, for example, may obfuscate their age in order to open an account.
- The sheer number of social platforms, beyond the handful of well-known names, makes it impractical to search them all individually.
Identifying the Missing Person’s Contacts
The same difficulty also applies to the reverse scenario, that of tracing social media accounts connected with the missing person back to a real-world individual. Anonymity and pseudonymity represent a significant challenge, and in some cases, the “person” behind a given account may be a synthetic identity.
The Value of a Premium SOCMINT Tool in Missing Persons Cases
Social media’s value as a rich well of open-source intelligence is countered by its chaotic, heterogeneous nature. The sheer range and volume of information shared across these platforms, and the variability in each platform’s privacy settings, are challenging for LEAs wishing to harness the potential of SOCMINT to find missing persons. A premium SOCMINT tool like Spokeo for Business can be a legitimate game-changer.
Spokeo was a pioneer in this space, launching in 2006 specifically as a social-media aggregator. Although it is now a more generalized OSINT search tool, marshaling over 19 billion records from over 5,000 sources and handling some 15 million queries per month, the company retains its leadership in social media search. Spokeo for Business brings that OSINT capability and social media expertise to the needs of law enforcement.
A Spokeo search cross-references these billions of disparate data points to tease out connections that might be difficult or impossible to expose through conventional methods. This ability to draw big-picture, big-data connections, placing the social media activity of a missing person or person of interest in the larger context of their lives, activities, and personal networks can be crucial in missing persons cases.
Using Spokeo to Find Missing Persons
Let us revisit the foregoing discussion of SOCMINT’s potential and its challenges, and examine how they can be addressed through Spokeo for Business’ data gathering and data analysis capabilities.
Connecting the Missing Person to Their Social Media Profiles
Any investigation utilizing social media must begin with positively identifying the social media accounts of the missing person. As previously noted, this can be difficult because of anonymity and pseudonymity, the similarity between the name of the missing person and other social media users, the possibility that a given account was deliberately hidden, and other factors.
Spokeo for Business has billions of data points that make it possible to connect a given account back to the phone number or email address that was used to create that profile, and then to the person associated with that email or phone number. Where applicable it may also connect the missing person’s known phone number or email with others, which in turn can lead to previously unknown additional social media usage. This is especially useful if the missing person has attempted to deliberately conceal one or more accounts, often through the use of a “burner” phone.
Locating the Missing Person’s Entire Social Media Presence
We have spoken of the range of Spokeo for Business’s media search capabilities, but some additional detail is useful to convey its comprehensiveness. While the handful of top-tier platforms are known even to the most tech-averse investigators, consumers connect on many more.
At the time of writing, Spokeo for Business can link the subject of a search to online activity on 129 separate sites or platforms, ranging from mainstream social media offerings to dating sites, professional networking sites, content-sharing platforms, forums, and even e-commerce and review sites. If a missing person or person of interest interacts with others online, there is a strong likelihood that Spokeo for Business searches the site where that interaction takes place.
Identifying the Missing Person’s Associates and Contacts
Having identified the missing person’s social media accounts, their friends, followers, and contacts can be evaluated as well. Many of these can readily be correlated to specific real-world individuals, including family members and coworkers, but others may only be identified by their online username or “handle.”
Here too, Spokeo for Business can often trace a social media account back to a real-world individual, with as little as a pseudonymous username as a starting point. If a given social media “friend” resolves to an identity that does not correspond to the apparent identity of the account, that person may merit additional scrutiny.
Timeliness of Information
Many legacy data sources, both those within the law enforcement community and those of third-party vendors, rely on relatively static sources of information such as financial records. While these are highly accurate at the time of collection, they are unlikely to bring clarity to a missing person’s actions during the window immediately before their disappearance.
SOCMINT is precisely the opposite. Information shared on social media is often inaccurate, subjective, or outright false, and personal posts are often carefully curated to present a specific image to the world, but social media intel is timely. Many social media users visit their timelines frequently through the day, and post multiple times, providing insight into their activities and frame of mind that may continue almost up to the time of their disappearance.
This access to information in something close to real-time is invaluable for assessing the likelihood of a genuine disappearance, or of the missing person being at risk.
Suggesting Additional Lines of Inquiry
Uncovering the missing person’s social media accounts, and establishing the true identity of persons they’re connected with online, is a crucial and fundamental aspect of the investigation.
Once those initial steps are complete, and investigators can view the missing person’s social media posts and interactions, the situation changes. Spokeo for Business has provided a key, to use a metaphor, and it’s now time to see what is on the other side of the door. The information uncovered through social media posts can now suggest additional lines of inquiry, including but not limited to:
- Further scrutiny of potential persons of interest, whether previously known or new to investigators.
- Photos, mentions of other contacts, check-ins, or geo-tagged photos all suggest locations where the missing person has been, which can be canvassed for physical evidence or eyewitness information.
- Telephone numbers associated with the missing person’s social media accounts, or those of a potential person of interest, can be further investigated through a geofencing warrant or a subpoena to the telephone carrier (a data point that’s included in the results of a Spokeo search).
- SOCMINT may conflict with a given witness’ or a person of interest’s account of their whereabouts and activities at the time of a suspected disappearance, casting doubt on their alibi and motives.
- Spokeo’s searches may turn up suggestive interactions with a previously unknown contact, which in the case of a minor or otherwise at-risk person can potentially indicate malicious or criminal intent behind the disappearance.
Spokeo for Business Can Be a Powerful Tool for LEAs
The need for agile, modern SOCMINT tools in law enforcement is clear, but LEAs often lack the budget or IT resources necessary to utilize these third-party products. Smaller LEAs may be disproportionately affected, but even large and well-funded policing agencies may find their budgets and personnel lack the flexibility to manage a significant software rollout or heavy licensing fees.
Spokeo for Business can mitigate these difficulties, as well as the investigative challenges detailed above. Smaller or budget-constrained LEAs can use the product in a standalone fashion, with cost-effective subscription fees based on usage, while those with adequate IT resources can use Spokeo for Business’s powerful application programming interface (API) to integrate it with existing data sources. In either scenario, Spokeo for Business’s simple and intuitive search interface, and its easy-to-use Dashboard for administration and record-keeping purposes, require minimal training even for those who are uncomfortable with technology.
For further information on Spokeo’s ability to support missing persons investigations, or to arrange a demonstration or free trial of the product, reach out to our team using the contact information found on our Law Enforcement page.
Disclaimer: This blog post is not intended as legal advice. Consult your legal and/or compliance department before making any changes to your operations.
Sources
Federal Bureau of Investigation: 2023 NCIC Missing Person and Unidentified Person Statistics
NamUs: Unresolved Missing Persons Cases Published in NamUs: Bi-Annual Report, January 2024
Pew Research Center: Americans’ Social Media Use