OSINT’s Growing Importance in the Fight Against Fraud

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is transforming the way fraud investigators uncover hidden relationships, trace assets and identify suspicious activity, according to a presentation by Stephen Hill, Ph.D., CFE, managing director of Hill Bingham Ltd., during the 37th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference. He showcased how publicly available information can be leveraged to support fraud investigations, due diligence efforts and asset tracing initiatives. 

Hill, who has worked in OSINT for more than 25 years in the public and private sectors, emphasized that investigators can use open-source techniques to detect unexplained wealth, trace financial proceeds and identify individuals connected to fraudulent activity. He shared an example of helping locate a yacht worth approximately $22 million that belonged to a sanctioned Russian national after authorities lost track of the vessel. The asset was ultimately located in a small Turkish port using publicly available information and basic OSINT techniques. “It was using some of the very simple tools,” Hill said, highlighting that the effort didn’t involve sophisticated government surveillance. 

Digital Treasure Trove 

Hill defined OSINT as structured intelligence derived from publicly accessible sources, including social media platforms, corporate registries, government records, news archives, blogs, databases and publicly available datasets. Investigators have access to vast amounts of digital information that can reveal ownership structures, conflicts of interest, undisclosed business relationships and indicators of unexplained wealth. “One thing I would always stress to anybody I'm talking to about open source is making sure that you verify your intelligence,” Hill said. He repeatedly stated that publicly available information must be corroborated through independent sources before investigators rely upon it. 

Hill demonstrated how investigators can cross-reference findings through official records, archived websites, reverse image searches, court filings and international corporate databases. He cautioned that artificial intelligence (AI) tools can provide confident but inaccurate responses, making independent verification essential before relying on AI-generated information in an investigation. 

Using examples from Google, Bing, Copilot and Gemini, Hill demonstrated how AI and search engines can return outdated or incorrect information. “Google gets things wrong,” he said, describing how a search incorrectly identified a former rather than current official at the U.K. Crown Prosecution Service. Failing to verify such information could undermine an investigator’s credibility in court. “Had I relied on that, I'd have looked a bit silly if I was taking a case forward to my client, or I was going to court.” 

Piecing Together Information 

A detailed case study involving activist and satirist Andy Bichlbaum, also known as Jacques Servin, illustrated how different online identities, archived web pages, search engines, image recognition tools and public records can be combined to establish a subject’s background and connections. Through this exercise, Hill explained how investigators can piece together information from fragmented sources to build a reliable intelligence profile. 

The session also highlighted the growing value of nontraditional sources of evidence. Examples include social media activity, archived websites maintained by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, reverse image search platforms such as Google Images, TinEye and Yandex, and geolocation clues captured through mapping services. 

Hill shared several notable examples. In one case, a Google Street View vehicle inadvertently captured images of a murder suspect loading a body into a vehicle in Spain, providing evidence later used by investigators. In another, Google Earth imagery helped solve the decades-old disappearance of Florida resident William Moldt after an online observer spotted his submerged vehicle visible on satellite imagery.  

He also described how facial recognition and reverse image search tools are increasingly helping investigators locate people who are intentionally concealing their identities. One U.K. police investigation used an AI-powered facial search platform to identify a fugitive sex offender who evaded capture for 27 years. According to Hill, investigators located a more recent photograph of the suspect in Thailand within minutes after uploading an image taken decades earlier. 

Supporting Global Investigations 

Hill provided investigative resources, such as OpenCorporates for company records, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s Aleph platform for following financial connections, social media search tools, advanced search operators, geolocation techniques and username search services that help investigators identify digital footprints across multiple platforms. He said investigators must think globally when conducting OSINT inquiries. Search engines and information availability vary significantly by jurisdiction, requiring different investigative approaches. Depending on a target’s location, investigators may need to rely on regional search engines such as Yandex, Naver or Baidu, rather than defaulting to Google. “We can't rely on our localized search engines,” Hill said. “We need to consider those at that particular location.”  

Hill also covered OSINT's role in due diligence. He shared the example of a charity that failed to discover a chief executive candidate’s history of child sexual offenses, resulting in significant reputational damage after the hire. Effective open-source research, he argued, can help organizations uncover hidden risks and avoid costly mistakes. “Open source allows us to collect this information,” Hill said, “but once we've got it, the key thing is then to validate it, to verify that what we've got is accurate.”  

Hill concluded that OSINT is no longer a specialized skill reserved for intelligence agencies. With proper techniques, validation practices and ethical use of publicly available information, fraud investigators can significantly expand their ability to detect misconduct, identify hidden connections and support investigations worldwide. “There are so many areas where we can use” open-source intelligence, Hill said, stressing that investigators who learn to effectively collect, verify and connect publicly available information will be better equipped to address increasingly complex fraud risks.  

As organizations continue to generate and rely on digital data, OSINT is becoming an essential component of the modern fraud investigator’s toolkit.