A good people search website can be a real goldmine of information, or be an absolute privacy violation, depending on your needs and your point of view.
Using OSINT for searching people located within the European Union received a serious hit with the arrival of GDPR mid-2018.
Many websites that previously contained personal datasets had to simply remove them and even information like email addresses or phone numbers was no longer searchable.
However, for targets outside the EU, these people search websites can still provide a valuable source of intelligence.
Many of these websites started off as free services, but as they built up their records and started receiving increased traffic, they shifted to a paid model.
Here I will focus on examples of free people search websites (US only):
https://www.truepeoplesearch.com – no account or signup required, allows you to search for people, phone numbers, addresses (including reverse look-ups).
https://www.zabasearch.com – scans public records, such as court records and phone directories. You can search by the person’s phone number or name. If you have an ad-blocker, switch it off as the site won’t load until you do. Ads galore.
https://www.peekyou.com – apart from basic name and surname searches, you can search for social media usernames. Also, full of ads.
people search websites are kind of nonsense cos they make you pay to see results. your wasting your time covering this
Hey
Thanks for the info Matt I am new to this and am finding your stuff very informative and helpful
Could I request you do a thread maybe for Tricky Thursday about the best practices when setting up OSINT profiles ?