The faces and names shown in this blog are real, and are being used with their permission. Some details have been redacted or obscured to protect the privacy of others.
Every Veteran’s Day for nearly a decade, my friend Bill Stevens has attempted to locate and reconnect with a very special Army battle buddy of his from more than 20 years prior. For a number of those years, Bill has aired his pleas publicly via Facebook, accompanied by photos of this bygone era, in hopes that somehow his plea would go viral and word would reach his long-lost friend… but it never did.
Now, I’ve known Bill for a really long time, and for the past several years I have read these increasingly frustrated posts asking for someone to help him. Each year I wondered to myself if I might have any luck, should I try to help with the search. After all, I do find people online for a living, but finding an “Eric Garcia” with a last-known location from more than 20 years ago? Talk about looking for a needle in a stack of needles!
On November 11, 2022, Bill’s plea once again appeared in my Facebook feed. Incidentally, the fall of 2022 was the 5 year anniversary of the death of my best friend and Army veteran, Chad Jolson. Chad and I spent our formative years as 2 inseparable peas in a pod, and the 2 times I’ve cried the hardest in my entire life were the day he left for basic training and the day I eulogized him. I’ve carried this well-worn photo of him in my wallet every single day for nearly a quarter-century, and I still think of him all the time.
Perhaps it was the timing, perhaps just fate, but this time around I decided to reach out to Bill with an offer to have a go at tracking down his long lost friend. I know how close the bonds are that these brave men and women form in our military, and it’s clear that this person meant a great deal to Bill. It’s a total long shot, but if I can somehow help bring them back together, well… I want to try.
I reached out to Bill and asked for anything at all that he could remember that might help me in tracking down “Eric Garcia”, because you just never know when the smallest detail may be of significant importance when it comes to OSINT work. Unfortunately, I was starting out this search with very, very little information:
- Name: Eric Garcia
- Location: Ft. Gordon, Ga (1998-99)
- Prior Location: Colorado
- Company: Foxtrot 369
That’s it. That’s all we have to work with here.
It would be impossible for me to understate the amount of failure that followed, as I trudged through hours and hours of fruitless searching.
I started out the easy way, asking some friends in the military if some sort of public database exists and got a big fat no. Then I began focusing on Foxtrot 369, scouring military unit pages, Facebook groups, online articles, and anything I could get my hands on. After hours of going this route, nothing had paid off at all.
From there, I went the typical people-search website route, reviewing the contact information of every single “Eric Garcia” I could find with ties to either Ft. Gordon, GA or the State of Colorado who was born in or around 1980. Do you know how many people that is?? Spoiler alert… IT’S A SHIT-TON.
Now, it’s been well documented that I am stubborn at a nearly Olympic-level, but at this point in the process I’m thinking I might actually have to throw in the towel and admit defeat. I’m really not seeing how this is going to be possible with what little I have to work with. Having exhausted pretty much everything I could think of, I’m afraid this one seems to have gotten the best of me.
That pisses me off.
I hate failing, and I REALLY hate quitting. Time to dig deep.
Whenever I get stuck during an investigation, I always take the same approach… I back up and take stock of what I started with, looking for any ways I’ve missed that I can work with whatever information I have available. It occurs to me in that moment that I have one piece of information I’ve not yet explored at all…
The photo itself!
More specifically, the face of “Eric Garcia”. Yes, these photos are old, and yes they are a picture of a picture and not very high quality, but these days there are a number of free, open-source options for doing facial recognition** and also for upscaling low-quality photos. Some of these FR sites target images scraped from one specific platform, while others search their much wider, scraped databases. In rare cases, you can have some sort of success with search engines looking for a face, though they’re not great.
**Before you visit or use any of these sites, please understand the risks, laws, and policies that may govern your access or use of them. I am not your lawyer or your boss! (but go ahead and take tomorrow off)**
I search several of these open-source facial rec options, including search engines, and BOOM… one of them gives me some very promising results!!
Holy shit!!! Is that?
No way!
To my untrained eye, this certainly looks like a promising result, but these days we don’t need to rely upon my useless opinion, we have the benefit of a number of free AI-powered facial comparison tools like Amazon’s “Rekognition“. Let’s see what artificial intelligence says about whether this is a match to the “Eric” we are looking for…
99.8%? Ok then!
After countless frustrating hours, and nearly throwing in the towel on something that I REAALLLLYYYY wanted to solve, I’ve finally got something to work with!
There’s just one problem.
The URLs for the photos are cut off, intentionally. You see, this site is only willing to give me a teaser for free, but they want me to sign up for their service and pay them for the full results. SHIT!
It’s time to do what we do best. Get creative…
The part of the URL I can see tells me the domain begins with “hitched”. Based on the look of these photos, I’m thinking they’re from some kind of formal event… naturally, the kind where people get “hitched”. I suppose it could be that he’s just a very dapper dresser in everyday life, but even I (whose personal style is best described as “middle-aged, nostalgic, Midwestern dad) can tell that these are probably from a wedding and not how people dress in their day to day lives. Although I can’t discount the possibility that he’s gone on to become a famous menswear model, I decide to go with the wedding photo idea first.
I need to find these photos in the wild, but how? Instantly I wonder… could these results have been indexed by a search engine? Without the full website name, do I even have enough to find them?
Using the most fundamental OSINT skill of Google dorking, I craft query after query using the inurl: search operator coupled with the word hitched, and tack on a few potential keywords that I’m hoping might lead me to the site in question. By using this search operator, I’m asking Google to restrict the results to only URLs containing the word I specified (hitched), and combine that with a search for those other keywords I am interested in. These searches would look similar to something like this:
inurl:hitched wedding photographyAs I begin to look through the results, I realize it’s inefficient for me to scroll through their entire websites as I find ones I’m interested in. I really need to be thorough here if I’m going to find that needle I’m looking for though! What if I ask Google to do the hard work again for me? Perhaps a dork that directs Google to query just what they have indexed from each of these sites I’m interested in, focusing on the keyword Eric. That would look something like this (for a site called hitched.com which was not the name of the site):
site:hitched.com ericThis is where being absolutely unassuming in your work will sometimes pay off. If you’ve noticed, I have been putting “Eric” in quotes throughout this blog. Did you wonder why?
The reason is that when I research something, I start broad, making the fewest assumptions I can because several times over the years something like this has happened:
While reviewing the Google results for one particular photographer’s site, I noticed something… One of the entries was for Erik + [Bride]
(I’ve removed her name for privacy, and from here on out will just type [Bride])
Could it be? I take a closer look…
Hell. Yeah!
As it turns out… I’d been given an incorrect spelling of the person’s name that I was looking for. It’s Erik, not Eric. How do you like that for an added layer of complexity?
But seriously… Hell. Yeah!
Ok, tv timeout here for a little soapbox moment. Let this be a helpful lesson for those of you crafting really complex Google dorks in order to find precisely what you’re looking for… It’s a double-edged sword at times. When you’re dorking, consider if it’s best to only be as restrictive as you need to be in order to get the result. I could have easily put the name Eric in quotes in my queries, asking Google to return only results with that particular name, however, I may have accidentally missed what I was looking for by having the Erik result filtered out. Google is doing me a favor here with something called “fuzzy searching” where they provide similar results. Annoying at times, but helpful in cases like this!
You can always add on more specificity in your searches as you go, and in this case I only needed to be completely restrictive about the site: portion of my request.
So let’s take stock of what I have so far…
After reviewing the wedding photos, I have the names Erik & [Bride] Garcia, I know what they look like, I know their August 3rd, 2013 wedding was at a well known venue in San Pedro, CA, I know the name of the Los Angeles photography company who did their pictures, aaaaaand… not much else. Do you know how many Erik Garcia and [Bride] Garcias are in and around the Los Angeles, CA area?
You guessed it! A SHIT-TON.
My first instinct was to take a look at the photographer’s social media. Surely, the bride or groom would have liked or followed one of the photographer’s social accounts, right? Wrong. More time wasted.
I wonder to myself if the photographer made a 2013 post touting their beautiful photography and the happy couple. That’s definitely the sort of thing that a bride and groom might like, right? Let’s find that! I hit the photographer’s Facebook, use the timeline filter feature to head back in time to 2013 and just like that, find the post I was hoping for:
Only… they didn’t like it. Or comment. Neither did their friends. Damn!
At this point in the story I’m back to doing a lot of spinning my wheels. A lot. I’m looking at online reviews of the photography business, the wedding venue, looking at social media pages, scouring posts and comments and shares. I’m grasping and grasping and grasping and nothing I’m trying is paying off.
Remember what to do when you get stuck?
Back up.
So I go back to the photographer’s post above and ask myself what else do I possibly have to work with? What is pivotable? What is unique? What have I overlooked? And then I see it…
#TheSepulvedaHome
The venue has a hashtag! This opens an entirely new set of doors for me because now I’m hunting the wider social media landscape looking for not necessarily just Erik & [Bride], but rather any of their wedding guests who posted photos using the hashtag #TheSepulvedaHome on August 3rd, 2013. If I can find just one wedding guest, maybe I can back into one of their social media profiles!
So I hit Facebook with a hashtag search, look back to 2013 and find this post…
There it is. Just exactly what I was hoping for! A perfectly preserved memory from just the right date, with just the right hashtag, and a mention of just the right couple. Oh, and several guests tagged as an added bonus. Jackpot!
Sidenote, this ends up being a sort of right place/right time situation in retrospect because doing that hashtag search on Facebook now only gives you a handful of results and no filtering by year options like it once had. If I was doing this research today I would have potentially dead-ended right there. Thanks Facebook, for constantly changing all of your best OSINT-use features! #RIPgraphsearch
Alright, so even looking back on this while I write it I’m still kinda feeling myself, so I’m just going to drop this little meme here:
I mean come on… Backing into an associate using the wedding venue hashtag??? If I live to be 1,000 years old I might never use that one again! But the thought process that caused me to back up, take stock of what I had to work with, and find another angle? Hell, I’ll probably do that again tomorrow, hopefully you will too.
At this point I’m expecting to begin my typical social media exploration research, find accounts for Erik & [Bride}, and leverage them to drum up ways for Bill to make contact. Easy enough, right?
I shouldn’t be surprised that this turned out to be harder than expected as well.
Exploring the profiles of the wedding guests for publicly available information eventually leads me to several wedding photo posts that @ mention an interesting username in the text. A username somewhat similar to the bride’s name, or what could be a nickname. Hmm… These aren’t tags like what you normally see on Facebook where a person’s name is hyperlinked to their profile, instead they probably came from the linked Instagram profile of the wedding guest posted them. This is a feature of these two Meta-owned companies, where you can cross-post content in both places. Since Instagram uses @ mentioned usernames in their posts, I head over there and find [Bride]’s Instagram account using the username mentioned in the Facebook post.
The profile (which is now private), had a great many photos on it from over the years but as I scrolled farther and farther down, something was missing… Erik. Now, I felt pretty confident that I had the right [Bride], she is in the wedding photos after all, but she is using a different last name in her social media and I’m beginning to suspect that perhaps the marriage ended at some point and that’s why I’m not seeing him. Could this end up being a dead end after all?
With this in mind, I go back to posts around the fall of 2013, looking to see if anyone who could be Erik comments or if any friend mentions Erik or tags an account that may no longer be hyperlinked, because that could still be viable for me to explore. Once again, tenacity pays off…
Following the tagged profiles in the comments on this post from just weeks after the wedding I come to tagged Instagram user @h8[redacted]
The profile photo is not great, but it sure looks a lot like the Erik I’m looking for. Now that I know he might be a Journeyman Lineman with Local 47, perhaps I can find other sites with information on him that I can pass along to Bill. Returning to Google for some keyword searches does the trick!
WAIT JUST ONE DAMN MINUTE!
Shaun??? You’ve gotta be kidding me. Not only did I start with an incorrect spelling of Erik’s name, but now it appears this wasn’t even his first name at all? If someone came to me and said hey I’d like you to find this person from 20 years ago, but I’m only going to give you their middle name and last name, and I’m going to spell one of them wrong I’d say…
And yet, lining up the original photo with the wedding photo and the LinkedIn photo, I see the truth, right there on the screen. Bill’s long lost friend “Eric Garcia” is really Shaun Erik Garcia.
I’ve found my needle.
From here I have more than enough to go on, and start hitting the usual people search sites with Erik’s name, age, hometowns, etc. It’s not long before I’ve drummed up a couple email addresses, physical addresses, and phone numbers to try. All of this is packaged up with the social media accounts and sent off to what I can only assume was a completely stunned, and very happy Bill.
Several months after I shared all of this information with Bill, I learned that he had successfully leveraged it to make the long overdue reconnection he’d started seeking so very long ago.
Once again, the power of OSINT saves the day.
I’d like to wrap this up by taking a moment to thank Bill & Erik for letting me tell this story, and also recognize Bill, Erik, Chad, and every single brave and selfless person who has courageously put their own lives on the line for the freedoms we enjoy.