Pivoting

Now that we know the kind of information that people are sharing, what else can we find using it? First we will use the one where they give a phone number and leave out the last digit. How can we confirm the full phone number?

There are many ways to do this so I am going to show a few here and explain how they can work well together. Also, although all these are UK numbers, the same kind of techniques can be used for both numbers and emails from all around the world.

The first place I went was the Facebook forgot password page. I could enter the phone number provided and search each digit at the end. While you may find that multiple numbers exist as you try them, this is unlikely. At least you are finding which numbers definitely exist and are more likely to be active numbers that are in use.

In this case, 6 was the winning digit. All the others returned an error saying no account was found, but using 6, an account was found as you can see because it shows the recovery option. Although this in theory could belong to someone else, it is what I focused on first because I knew it existed and was being used on social media.

The next step I took was adding it to my phone’s contacts list and importing that to TikTok. The top result in the picture below was the same account we got the phone number from. I have redacted a lot but you can see the username here starts with ‘lil’ as did the one from the original video.

Similar to TikTok, you can import your contacts to Snapchat too. Doing this revealed her username which in this case contained her real name too. The ‘Aaaaaa’ part was what I set in my contacts, but the username under it was the one she set up herself. Now that we know her real name, we could search that on other social media too if we wanted. This is how easy it is to take one piece of information and pivot to find lots more.