In my introduction I stated that I do not have a curriculum or agenda to follow, but I must admit that a very recent OSINT adventure of mine inspired me to make this blog. I have been having so much fun following this rabbit hole of a story that I decided to finally create a blog partially to document my findings, but also to educate readers on OSINT techniques and short comings. This is the first of hopefully quite a few posts referencing this case study.
I was recently given the opportunity to meet up with an old friend of mine whom I haven’t seen in years. Work sent me to a conference not terribly far from him, so we decided to go catch up at a local bar on one of my free nights. We had a good time and apparently fell back into an old habit of people watching. We had been sitting there for a while and were getting ready to split our tab and leave. Two gentlemen were sat at the table next to us and were talking pretty loudly (probably drank a few already I had assumed), so we decided to hang out and eaves drop for a few more minutes. Don’t judge us; It took more effort to mind our own business than it did to be nosy.
In the span of about 5 minutes, I hear one gentleman state that he plays pool professionally and played a memorable game with a drunk old man who, according to him, had been rumored to have passed away relatively recently. He stated that it was in a city named Wichita in the Midwest, and that this old man claimed "he was the guy [insert name] pays to burn down buildings." They laughed about how open the man was about the comment, and that they assumed he was just drunk and making up stories, but admitted that “it would be pretty crazy if it were true!” The waitress interrupted their story. My friend and I decided it was getting late. We went on about our business, and I was unable to hear any more about this old man. But damn was I curious.
For the time being, I am not too interested in the insurance fraud aspect of this, and I do not wish to make any enemies, so I will leave their name out of this. I am interested in this bizarre and bold claim made by a supposedly drunk old man. Why would anyone so freely share a legal offense like that, and who is this old man? I wanted to know if there was any way in which I could verify the validity of this claim, and I am regularly surprising myself with what can be found via OSINT. I figured this was worth giving a shot. Here is the information I have to work with:
Time to get to work. Where else do you start than with an online search engine? A quick Google search of ‘“Wichita” “[business name]” “fire”’ showed that there was indeed a business in Wichita with that name that had experienced at least two fires over the past 10-15 years.
Hmm. Interesting.
I decided to try searching for ‘”Wichita” “fire” “pool hall”’ thinking that it would not return anything note worthy, but to my surprise, it returns a single pool hall in the city of Wichita.
I’m sure there is more than just one single pool hall in the largest city in the state of Kansas, but to have only one listed in such a specific search seems interesting to me, so I decided to start with our first and only listed pool hall. Another quick and basic search yet again returned two surprisingly interesting results:
You can read the first article and the second article, on your own if you are interested. Otherwise, see the screenshots below. The first article appears to be related to the oldest restaurants in the that city, and what appears to be more interesting to me in the second article, is a crime author who seems to have recently passed away.
While I thought the first article was going to prove to be a waste of time, it turns out that it may be exactly what I was looking for! According to this news article, this pool hall was the hangout spot of a known arsonist! Even more strangely, this individual appears to be (or was) an author as well.
At this point we have determined that our loud friend at the bar has the potential to be telling the truth. We see that there is indeed a pool hall in the Midwest known to be frequented by an arsonist. We have two potential old men with an interest in crime, both of which appear to be authors, and one is clearly known for burning things down, our final basic search shows that the arsonist appears to have also passed away in recent years.
Who knows if my loud bar neighbor was telling the truth, or if he himself was drunk and wanting to tell stories for fun and attention. Doing some quick and basic fact checking through Google shows that this guy very well could be telling the truth. Maybe next time I will share what I learned next.
