Briefing: Popular OSINT tool gets a mysterious new owner

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Prolific LinkedIn scam hunter Jay Jones detailed how investigators can identify fake LinkedIn profiles and dig into hacked or otherwise deceptive company pages.

Alexios wrote about AI companion apps that feature chatbot impersonations of celebrities and that market themselves aggressively as a way to build digital girlfriends that look like “a friend, colleague, or ex.” The apps have millions of downloads and seven-figure monthly revenue.

We’re holding our next members workshop on April 29 at 11 am ET. Craig will share tools and tips for uncovering corporate ownership and explain why this is a significant year for beneficial ownership, as detailed in his recent report, “Finding the real owner of a company: a guide to beneficial ownership in the EU, UK, and beyond.” We also have a special guest: Stephen Abbott-Pugh, a former journalist who worked for Open Ownership and now consults on open ownership data.

📍 The Singaporean Ministry of Home Affairs blocked six websites that “masquerade as Singapore websites.” Most had been flagged by Google’s Threat Analysis Group. One of the sites welcomed me with a not-quite-real photo of a Singapore Airlines aircraft and crew (see above) when I accessed it on Thursday.

📍 Mediapost reported that the Federal Trade Commission dropped its demand for information from NewsGuard over its news credibility ratings.

📍 Disinformation about disinformation: Brazilian fact checking site Aos Fatos debunked the false claim that police busted a phone farm used to generate fake engagement for right-wing politicians Flávio Bolsonaro and Nikolas Ferreira. The video was AI-generated.

📍 Prediction market Kalshi suspended the accounts of three US congressional candidates for “political insider trading” after they each placed bets on their own candidacies. Two apologized, while the third claimed he did it to “bring to light that our ‘democracy’ is up for sale.”

📍 Donald Trump posted a collage of eight Iranian protesters on death row, demanding their release. The Verge reported that the photos may have been AI-manipulated, but at least six of the women were real. @Jvnior, an account featured twice in our free Grok-Is-This True Tracker, claimed that the images were AI-generated — and Iranian government accounts ran with it.

📍 The Onion appears to be getting closer to taking over infowars[.]com, at least temporarily.

📍 The UK Electoral Commission launched “an innovative pilot” to detect election-related deepfakes ahead of local elections in May. Full Fact’s head of public affairs, Mark Frankel, called the announcement “long on intent but a little short on detail and it's the detail and the practical and logistical work that counts.”

📍 A Peter Thiel-backed startup is promising to use AI to give people a “fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media.” Objection AI says that “journalism today is not truth-adjudicated” and charges $2,000 for its services. Its proof of concept displays what look like basic fact checks of claims by Anderson Cooper and Candace Owens. The project’s founder is also organizing the Doping Olympics.

The Instant Data Scraper Chrome extension offers a free, easy way to extract data from a webpage. It can scrape a Facebook friends list, pull data from a table, or grab video details from a YouTube channel page. It has over 1 million users and more than 7,000 positive reviews in the Chrome Web Store.

But something changed recently that investigators should be aware of. Micah Hoffman of My OSINT Training noticed that the owner of Instant Data Scraper shifted from Web Roots to a company called Flavr Technology LP. The recent change doesn’t appear to have been accompanied by a public announcement.

Flavr is registered in Delaware and doesn’t identify its owner or leadership on its bare bones website, or in public corporate records. (Delaware makes it easy for people to list a lawyer or registration agent in corporate records, obscuring the true beneficial owner.)

The company says on its website that it also owns an Android app called Data Usage Manager & Monitor. I found that the app’s website shares a Google Analytics ID with the personal site of Roy Solberg, a programmer based in Norway. His name was also listed in the app’s package name (“com.roysolberg.android.datacounter”), the unique identifier for an Android app. Solberg told me in en email that he’s no longer connected to Data Usage Manager and is “not involved with that or Flavr Technology at all.”

“The Google Analytics ID is remnants from a distant past, and the package name for the Android app gives a hint that I once was involved with the data usage app,” he said in an email. I asked if he could share information about the current owner of Data Usage Manager. I didn’t hear back.

I also reached out to the email address listed in Flavr’s privacy policy and in the Chrome Web Store but didn’t receive a reply. No one answered at the phone number listed in the Web Store, which is connected to a Google Voice line.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting any ill intent on the part of the new owner of Instant Data Scraper. People still seem happy with Data Usage Manager. But I think it would be reassuring to the OSINT community if the new owner publicly shared details about their plans for the extension, and whether they will make any changes to features and permissions. It’s a great tool and I hope they make it even better.

But for now, Hoffman has removed it from his toolkit.

“I have no experience with the new company that owns the extension: "Flavrtech" and have uninstalled it from my browsers until I have trust in them and this software,” he wrote on LinkedIn. — Craig

📍 Timothy Wratten shared WhoDAT, a site with a nice collection of tools for analyzing domains/URLs, email headers, and files.

📍 Toddington international wrote, “Beyond the Homepage: Website Clues & The Art of Pivoting.”

📍 Aleksandra Bielska from i-intelligence shared a helpful list of tools that enable you to access online platforms without having to create an account or be logged in. They include XCancel for X, Redlib for Reddit, and Imginn for Instagram.

📍 Mario Santella highlighted the useful tools available at DiscordGate, including user lookup and the Invite Checker, which provides “detailed information about any Discord invite, including whether it's a custom vanity URL,” and more.

📍 lya Lozovsky and Louise Moberg from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project wrote, “How Europe’s Retreat From Corporate Transparency is Shielding the Corrupt.”

📍 Chu Yang from Bellingcat wrote, “Mining China’s ‘Little Red Book’ for Open Source Gold.”

📍 The OSINT Newsletter published, “OSINT and the Dark Web: Part One.”

📍 In a preprint, three Greek researchers collected a dataset of AI-generated disinformation that had been fact-checked by Community Notes contributors. They then used AI detectors on the resulting images and found that the performance of these tools deteriorated as the deepfakes got more realistic between 2023 and 2025.

📍 Hungarian fact-checkers argued in a piece for Tech Policy Press for a more nuanced discussion of the effects of fact-checking and disinformation on voters.

📍 Futurism wrote about National Today, a website run by “a flashy branding and public relations agency” called TOP Agency that appears to have ripped off multiple media outlets.

📍 Wired spoke to a 22 year-old Indian medical student who’s helping fund his education with an AI-generated MAGA hot girl. He says the synthetic influencer tricks “super dumb people” into paying for AI-generated nudes on Fanvue. It’s the same grift we wrote about here and here. The New York Times also wrote about AI-generated MAGA accounts.

📍 A report from the Canadian Digital Media Research Network identified a set of “inauthentic YouTube accounts” that generated nearly 40 million views by “targeting Albertan audiences, exploiting genuinely-held grievances and repurposing them to advance narratives that normalize the prospect of secession and U.S. annexation.” Reporting by CBC and Radio-Canada subsequently revealed that some of the channels were run by people in the Netherlands.

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