Can you imagine a company that serves as an online investigation platform for the governments, agencies, and businesses actually works by teaching its customers about how to make fake IDs on Facebook and LinkedIn, only to keep an eye on people who have their accounts protected by the privacy settings?
Well, such is the reality of Blackdot Solution, a Cambridge UK based startup, that is known for providing open-source intelligence (OSINT) collections too - the Videris. The company’s official website advertises Videris to make sure that its operations appear as clean and legal but at the back, there is a lot of fishy stuff that happens which Vice has been able to discover by obtaining a user manual.
The manual explains the working of the company in such a way that at first there is a step-by-step guide on creating puppet accounts customers and when one is done making a fake ID, they are encouraged to add up target accounts to keep an eye on their data, which one cannot see otherwise if the account is not public.
Now, the process of using fake accounts here neither aligns with the values that the company tries to sell nor it’s according to the policies set by the respective social media platforms or the algorithms that it uses to keep an eye on the private networks. So, in every way, the process that the company tries to implement behind the screen is a big invasion of privacy.
But with that being said, companies like Amazon are taking more and more help from intelligence analysts to monitor what their workers and potential employees are up to and that is exactly where Blackdot Solutions offer a much easier process - which has also made them a winner in front of their customers ranging from the government to banking, corporate and professional services sectors as well.
When Adam Lawrance-Owen, Blackdot's head of product, was shown the manual in detail he denied stating that either this certainly isn’t the company’s official manual or if it is then the document seems to be 2 years old because he wasn’t aware of it. Furthermore, he also went onto explain via an email that with Videris, one can only access publicly available information and none of the customers can use the product to go behind the privacy settings. But with all that he said, Adam didn’t completely deny that the customers cannot make fake accounts, which proves that the manual is stating the truth.
If you are more interested to know the details of the user manual, which also dates back to September 2018, then Videris first searches the internet for information about a certain person or company while also organizing the data in easy to understand charts and graphs.
If the target has a Facebook account that is set on privacy settings and the visitor cannot see things like Friend’s list then that is the point where the trick of creating a fake account comes into play in which the puppet account will extract the required information by adding up the user.
There is also a detailed guideline on how to create a fake account stepwise including steps starting from making a G-mail account to randomly browsing and searching for 5-10 mins after creating an account on Facebook. And if the account is required to be made on LinkedIn then the user should choose a “non-specific job title” such as a consultant or not a very popular company name that belongs to a broad industry like Human Resource.
But before you agree to do it as a customer, you must know this will be counted as an invasion in privacy and you might have to pay for it later as well.
Read next: iPhone 12 Scams Are Making Rounds As Release Date Draws Closer
Well, such is the reality of Blackdot Solution, a Cambridge UK based startup, that is known for providing open-source intelligence (OSINT) collections too - the Videris. The company’s official website advertises Videris to make sure that its operations appear as clean and legal but at the back, there is a lot of fishy stuff that happens which Vice has been able to discover by obtaining a user manual.
The manual explains the working of the company in such a way that at first there is a step-by-step guide on creating puppet accounts customers and when one is done making a fake ID, they are encouraged to add up target accounts to keep an eye on their data, which one cannot see otherwise if the account is not public.
Now, the process of using fake accounts here neither aligns with the values that the company tries to sell nor it’s according to the policies set by the respective social media platforms or the algorithms that it uses to keep an eye on the private networks. So, in every way, the process that the company tries to implement behind the screen is a big invasion of privacy.
But with that being said, companies like Amazon are taking more and more help from intelligence analysts to monitor what their workers and potential employees are up to and that is exactly where Blackdot Solutions offer a much easier process - which has also made them a winner in front of their customers ranging from the government to banking, corporate and professional services sectors as well.
When Adam Lawrance-Owen, Blackdot's head of product, was shown the manual in detail he denied stating that either this certainly isn’t the company’s official manual or if it is then the document seems to be 2 years old because he wasn’t aware of it. Furthermore, he also went onto explain via an email that with Videris, one can only access publicly available information and none of the customers can use the product to go behind the privacy settings. But with all that he said, Adam didn’t completely deny that the customers cannot make fake accounts, which proves that the manual is stating the truth.
If you are more interested to know the details of the user manual, which also dates back to September 2018, then Videris first searches the internet for information about a certain person or company while also organizing the data in easy to understand charts and graphs.
If the target has a Facebook account that is set on privacy settings and the visitor cannot see things like Friend’s list then that is the point where the trick of creating a fake account comes into play in which the puppet account will extract the required information by adding up the user.
There is also a detailed guideline on how to create a fake account stepwise including steps starting from making a G-mail account to randomly browsing and searching for 5-10 mins after creating an account on Facebook. And if the account is required to be made on LinkedIn then the user should choose a “non-specific job title” such as a consultant or not a very popular company name that belongs to a broad industry like Human Resource.
But before you agree to do it as a customer, you must know this will be counted as an invasion in privacy and you might have to pay for it later as well.
Read next: iPhone 12 Scams Are Making Rounds As Release Date Draws Closer
