When it comes to online investigations, a lot of open source intelligence (OSINT) can be – and usually is – gathered via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and Instagram. But in addition to these global giants, every country has its own little treasure trove of slightly less conspicuous and often very useful local information sources. You just have to know where to look.

Unsurprisingly, the extent of personal information that is publicly available varies from country to country. Sweden, for example, is very liberal in this regard and you can easily find plenty of information about pretty much any person with just a few simple searches.

Veritable goldmines for online investigators

If you need to research a person’s business commitments and corporate connections, sites like allabolag.se will tell you everything you need to know, including things like the names of their co-board members. Other sites, like hitta.se, list people’s addresses and phone numbers, as well as their birthdays. They are veritable goldmines for online investigators.

You can even find a fair amount of financial information online too, such as salary details, credit ratings and net worth. This has led to a wave of consumer credit companies, like Klarna, starting up in recent years, as much of the preliminary research work is very straightforward here. Unlike in most other countries.

Share local insight and information

Being a Swedish-based company, we’re perfectly familiar with the various online sources at our disposal here in Sweden. But if we had to investigate someone in another country, we probably wouldn’t know where to start. Which is why we came up with the idea of a section on our open forum where people could share their local insight and favourite information sources with each other. After all, sharing is caring.

We’ve only set up topic threads for Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Australia and New Zealand so far, but we’re hoping you’ll visit the Paliscope forum and post any useful local links you might have for your own country. This goldmine of local information sources is still in its infancy, but eventually country-specific links and tools will be readily available via the tools panel in Paliscope.

We’re hoping this will help make your online investigations a little easier, wherever in the world you and your investigations are located.