During your own investigation, chances are you're going to run into phone numbers at some point.
And it can be a little confusing on what you could actually do with a phone number other than, say,
looking it up and determining who the phone number belongs to.
Well, there's actually quite a bit of information we can pull from phone numbers, depending on what
type they are and even if we have.
Say a phone number that's a voice over IP or VoIP number.
And these are going to be things like pseudo, Google Burner, any number of services that allows us
to create a phone number on, say, a computer and make phone calls and receive phone calls.
But we could still get a lot of information from that, too, and it'll help us build again that bigger
picture that we're looking for.
So this is a chart.
And of course, I'm going to have this up for you, for everyone to download.
But this gives you kind of idea what you could do with phone numbers.
In a matter of fact, today I actually had somebody that came in.
It was a email someone got and there was a and they asked for a phone number and they called the number
and the person was looking, oh, it was basically a scam to try to get Apple gift card prepaid cards
out of them.
So again, you may run into phone numbers from a variety of situations.
Could be like the case I had where a phone number is being used to try to scam people.
It could be a phone number calling you directly.
It could be a phone number tied to something else.
You might be able to find a phone number working through social media or whatnot.
So what information we grab for phone numbers?
Well, from the original number, we could find out different things.
The basics are going to be what's the area code?
Well, Erica will help determine the basic area along with the country code.
What's the country code?
Well, one is going to be for United States and we can go on from there.
Country code, of course, will determine what country will determine what country it is.
It'll basically determine what reversed number of service we're going to use or potentially where our
search is going to take us.
We can look at voicemail a lot of times and we'll take a look at some software that actually allows
us to listen to voicemail without actually calling the phone number, which is pretty cool.
So from the voicemail work, we turned to determine, well, we could find out things like.
Do they have a voice mail?
Is the voice mail a generic generic voice mail?
One already pre canned.
If it is, we can actually find out information from that to.
From the pre canned voice mail, we can potentially figure out, well, it might be a Verizon AT&T phone,
for example.
We could also take a look at if the person left a personalized voice.
We could.
Well, now we potentially have the person's voice.
So we actually introduce a man or a woman potentially, and some other distinguishing facts about them.
What what is the voicemail content to leave anything interesting as a background noise or other things
that we can use to identify them?
Well, we can run a reverse number lookup, which is going to be pretty common.
So for reverse numbers, typically we find things like a name.
We can do people searches.
We can look for addresses.
Well, from there we can take a look at where they part of a data breach.
We could take a look at the phone carrier.
We can take a look again, if it's a voice over IP number in if it's a voice over IP number, chances
are it's going to be much harder or you're not going to get a physical location by doing a reverse number,
typically because, well, it's those numbers are again generated by a computer.
They're designed to be burned and recreated again.
That's kind of the good and bad thing about burner numbers, but we can still potentially get some useful
information out of it.
We can, if we might be able to determine, well, they use Google, they use this other service.
It might be a unique service that's available in other countries.
We could potentially call the number, preferably with our own burner number.
And we can see who do they identify themselves as?
Do they have an accent that might be able help determine origin?
I've had people call me on.
I'm on VoIP numbers and I.
I actually called them back, which was pretty fun when they.
I do enjoy when people try to scare me sometimes because I like to kind of see where things go and where
things work and where things kind of fall apart.
But typically for me, I'll use a burner number and some of the things I'll look for is again, do they
who do they identify themselves and what company, what a name they're using?
Do they have accent or look for background noises?
See if there's anything, some of these things.
I'll hear several other people in the background, like during a large call center.
They're probably in a building with a bunch of computers and VoIP, VoIP numbers scamming other people.
And I'll determine what are they asking for, what are they looking for, what type of information they're
trying to get?
For me, you know, that kind of helps, again, build that bigger picture.
So these are some things we could look at.
And again, as we progress through the course, we'll take a look at a lot of different tools that we
could use to use those phone numbers and grab more information from them.
So again, this is a just a little chart.
Again, like everything else, you'll expand off this.
You've taken bits and pieces that will work for you.
So hopefully this is going to be useful for you.
Thank you for watching.
I'll see you in.