A Free OSINT Lesson: It's like that Cult Episode of 'Reading Rainbow'
This Post has Everything. Cults. Books. LeVar Burton. Weird Music.
My gateway drug into my current gig as the “Head of Investigations and Analysis” (whatever the fuck that means) at Permanent Record Research started with cults. Cults got me into OSINT.
It began at VICE, where I was covering the “weird shit beat.” I wrote a book about people who believed in UFOs and aliens, so naturally, Vice said, “You should write about these people for us.”
I did.
I wrote about how some new religious hucksters were selling a weird-quasi Christian/alien salvation for $333 US, which nearly got me sued until we published their cease and desist letter.
I worked on a couple of documentaries on the topic of cults, but my favourite was Season 2 of VICE’s “The Devil You Know.”
And in this era of my life, the covering weird shit era, I was introduced to OSINT as a journalist. Cults require a lot of documentation. Evidence needed to be collected, which could then be used, from a legal perspective, to show your lawyer that what you were saying or writing wasn’t libel but the truth.
PRR recently took on a case concerning “a cult.” I think, technically, we would call it a “religious movement,” but you get the picture. People who believe strange things are easily parted from their money, so God has the liquidity to wage a holy war.
Due to a whole bunch of legal paperwork, I can’t get into details.
But, with any religious organization (cult or otherwise), having an understanding of their financials is essential. Assets. Businesses. Property. Bank accounts. Anything and everything.
We got to work and began chipping away at understanding how this particular version of God got and stayed rich.
As I dug into some of the various characters involved, I noticed something about the leaders of this “religious movement.” They wrote a lot of books. Like 70 of them. In a little over a decade. Like, if Reading Rainbow had a cult episode, these guys would have to be featured, and LeVar Burton would just do a deep dive into their weird God with his usual charming inquisitiveness.
I fucking loved Reading Rainbow as a kid.
Now, I admit, at first, I ignored their books. I was busy looking for fancy cars, houses, and corporations (which I found), and I never really considered the books. I had assumed this was insignificant to the broader money-generating machine that this cult operated.
Moreover, I could tell you a complex story of how I had a Coke Zero (still not fucking sponsored), and the delicate bubble dance it performed in my mouth inspired in my soul a depth of understanding. I could explain how I became awakened. How I ascended to some higher plane of existence and became one with the Akashic Records and the importance of those books dawned on me. But that’s not how it happened.
I just said, “Well, I can’t seem to find much else. I guess I’ll look into the books now.”
I wish it were more interesting.
Enough of their books were being sold online on Amazon and similar places, and I found the name of the publisher very easily. We’re just going to call them “Bullshit Press” for legal reasons.
So, I googled “Bullshit Press.”
Lots of this cult’s books popped up, but that was it. No actual company information. No website. No socials. Nada.
So, I went to Amazon and poked around to try and find any publisher information. Again, tons of hits of the books they published, but zero company information. Just…
“Publisher Information: Bullshit Press.”
I noticed something odd, though, in my searches.
Every single book published by “Bullshit Press” was written by one of the founders of the cult we were hired to look into.
It stood to reason the cult owned the publishing house, so I turned to Open Corporates and began running searches for “Bullshit Press.” There were about two dozen companies with similar enough names, none of which were directly called “Bullshit Press.”
It looked like something like this:
“Bullshit Publishing”
”Bullshit Publishing LLC”
”Bullshit Inc.”
”Bullshit Press LLC”
”Bullshit Corp”
”A Bullshit Press”
”The Bullshit Company”
”Bullshit Books”
”Bullshit Books LLC”
And on it went.
And unlike several of the companies owned by this religious movement, there was no correlating data between the owners, any business addresses, and the various iterations of “Bullshit Press” on Open Corporates. In simple terms, one of the hits on OC was the right one, but none matched enough to be a confirmed hit.
Much like Troy in that killer episode of Community when LeVar Burton shows up, I was frozen.
Who the fuck owned "Bullshit Press"?
As I continued to browse the books on various bookseller sites published by "Bullshit Press," my suspicions were confirmed. They ONLY published books by the cult founders.
I then turned to running ISBNs, but I bumped into the same issue. The publisher's name was there, but that was it.
I decided to try my luck with Google Books.
Fun fact. Some books have Previews in that you can look at the pages of the physical book digitally.
I needed one page, and I was hoping that with luck, somewhere in those 70 books, at one point, someone wrote more than "Bullshit Press" on the Copyright page.
The image below is an example Copyright page. No, I'm not going after Reading Rainbow. If that show was a cult, I'm on their side.
When I typed “Bullshit Press” into Google Books, I found about 20 hits. Some had previews. Some didn’t. I decided to use an old trick. Now, this is a free lesson based not upon facts, writing some code, or some objective truth, but my own rambling experience. I don’t know why, but typically, the older something is, the better information I can get from it. Is this a hard rule? No. It’s just some weird cosmic thing I’ve noticed.
From an organizational standpoint, like, say, a cult, everyone learns from experience. We fuck up early. Learn from those fuck ups. Pivot. So, if I was going to show my cards, it would be early in the game before I learned how to play properly.
I ran down the list of “Bullshit Press” books on Google Books and found the oldest one. The book title had words like “Heaven,” “Ascend,” and “Divine Channel” in it. Compelling as fuck, I’m sure. It was published in 2016, so it is one of their OG titles.
I clicked on the preview, went to the copyright page, and BAM… “Bullshit Press, Newport Coast. 949-xxx-xxxx.”
That was it, but it was enough.
I was going to have some “Fun with Maltego.”
Enter this perfect trifecta of Maltego, Darkside, and OSINT Industries. I ran the phone number I found, and shit just started populating. From data breaches to address information to email accounts—I had found "Bullshit Press" and the man behind it.
I have to note, as an aside, that the speed and fluid motion of a Maltego Graph populating data points is oddly satisfying and slightly erotic. If you've never seen it, you have this single data node, and then other nodes slide out from it. Sometimes it's one, and sometimes it's eighteen. But the way it spreads out, moves around, and teases you with a single data or just hits you with this pleasure overload of a dozen new nodes… sorry, is it getting warm in here?
Where was I?
Right, so, with the data I had from Maltego, I took it into the Darkside and OSINT Industries toolkits and ran additional searches. One address, situated in the wealthy Newport Coast, was the home of "Bullshit Press" and a very wealthy film and music producer. The house was worth a little under $10 million and was truly spectacular.
One more aside, and I swear I'm done. People who have their own tennis courts, as well as a large pool, can fuck right off. If you have your own pool, fine. I'll allow it. It's still obscene, but within a level I can tolerate. You build a personal tennis court next to that shit? Fuck you.
Now, I had to google this guy. I hadn't heard of the movies he produced or the music; it was B-level shit—BUT—he still made a fortune.
With all this data in hand, I returned to Open Corporates and found the "Bullshit Press" I was looking for. It was called "Bullshit Pub LCC," and, at the same address, there was also a "Bullshit Records," a "Bullshit Media LLC," and a "BSH Management."
What we found interesting was that this film/music producer was directly tied to this cult we were looking at. Was he funding them? Did he own some piece of the intellectual property of all those books and the non-profit this cult operated? How the hell did he even know these people who founded the cult? Yes, this discovery raised way more questions, but it cleared up some others. It began to close loops on possible seed money. It began to close loops on the connections they had. It began to close loops on where to look next for possible businesses and assets they owned. Moreover, it set us on a journey into the wealth of these people and to explore their strange new world…
But you don’t have to take my word for it…