As you perform your own investigations, it's pretty easy to get overwhelmed.
And as we talked in the mental preparation stage, you do need to kind of prep yourself for this.
But chances are you can easily get overwhelmed.
There's a lot of information coming through.
You may be doing this for this investigation, may going on, going on for a while.
You may have time constraints.
People's lives may be at stake.
Potential someone is either hurt or may be hurt.
Trafficking, missing persons, whatnot.
It's a lot of pressure and a lot of information that we'll be dealing with.
So one thing that I found is very useful to kind of get all the information, kind of keep it, keep
things straight.
Because like I said, when we're dealing with a lot of information, we can get kind of overwhelmed
with not only the amount of information we have, but well, what was that website?
It was at what date was that?
That date may be important.
What file links to what?
Having a simple Excel spreadsheet can come in handy.
Now this is just an example.
This one to build an excel you could use OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs, whatever you want.
Essentially it looks like this and this is from a actual OSS investigation I've been doing for about
a year and it's a redacted and important information and this is just a template that I'm using that
I find is easy and is very generalized.
So we have a date.
So the date that the information is found or logged.
The time, if that's important, the evidence type a link.
So if it goes to a website, I have a link section here where the files are in the name of the file
and type of file.
So we see some PDFs here, some JPEG files here.
How reliable that information I just found is notes on the reliability score.
So a highly reliable it's vetted information.
I'm positive the information is good.
B is highly reliable, but it it still needs to be vetted.
You know, it's not 100% it's say 90, 95%.
C Unsure reliability.
D Low reliability.
F Pure rumor, junk post.
And again, this is just a chart that I'm personally using.
And then we have notes, so notations on this particular information.
So in this case here called wrong number, likely old.
So the information went from pretty reliable.
So the information I had here was a phone number for the individual's mother, apparently.
So I went from B to F once I vetted that information and that's why I put the notes here called and
it was wrong numbers, likely old numbers.
So this was from a.
People database and most likely had the phone number of a number attached to this person.
So again, this is just really simple, really easy to kind of put together.
I have evidence types here, so Facebook page, better business reviews, phone numbers, personal information
of whatnot.
And over here I have some links here.
So this verified phone number would and I would have the link to that verified phone number along with
the reliability score.
And finally the notes of what I call that when I verify that number and whatnot.
So again, this is really simple.
There's not much to it.
Sorry about that.
There's not much to this.
It's again, just something to kind of keep your thoughts straight and also to.
Help you tie certain information together, kind of keep your thoughts in order.
And especially if you come back to it later, you kind of understand where you went from.
And when you hand over this information to someone, they can kind of follow the the process of how
you went through these steps.
So, again, really simple.
Just go ahead and pull up a a spreadsheet in Google Docs office.
LibreOffice OpenOffice what not very easy.
And trust me, this is this really comes in handy and will save you a lot of sanity.
So I hope this helps.
Thanks for watching.