Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

An interesting side effect of these types of companies popped up during the Navalny team's investigation of Putin's alleged yacht in Italy. They got the ship's crew manifest and then used a database like TrueCaller to check it out. The manifest had the crewmember's name and a phone number - so when you look up the number associated with 'Alexander Pechurkin', other people have him listed as "Sanya FSB" "Alexander FSO" and "Alexander Graceful Procurement". [FSB = Russian security services, FSO ~= secret service, 'Graceful' = Putin's previous yacht]. Pretty interesting work history and descriptions for a Boatswain's mate in Italy.

https://youtu.be/WyYp9xPLa8s?t=423

These lists must be a gold mine for intelligence agencies.

Anyone can do this.

Ekata reverse phone is a plugin inside the twilio plugins directory (or whatever they are calling it this week).

I wrote a unix command named 'lookup' which takes a single argument (phone number) and spits out "associated people" in a nice yaml output:

            "is_commercial": false,
            "associated_people": [
              {
                "name": "Ms. Amanda Joy Lastname",
                "firstname": "Amanda",
                "middlename": "Joy",
                "lastname": "Lastname",
                "relation": "Household",
                "id": "Person.02884d55-980e-450c-a1e2-99999999999b"
              },

I haven't checked but I'll bet I could get API service (for a fee) from Ekata and query these person IDs they are using and then fill out a whole social graph.

It's a neat trick but other than confirming mobile=true and carrier:

    "carrier": {
      "mobile_country_code": "311",
      "mobile_network_code": "489",
      "name": "Verizon Wireless",
      "type": "mobile",
      "error_code": null

 ... I haven't found much use for it.

That is really cool! Is this something that's open sourced by any chance?

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