Optimize Person-of-Interest Investigations: Pipl Transforms in Maltego

Investigating Persons of Interest (POI) usually requires searching through multiple data sources, such as web pages, professional registries, social networks, and other publicly available or paid sources. It takes time. And frequently, investigators must work between several different tools to manually analyze and correlate important data points before they can visualize connections.

Pipl online identities are important assets for investigators. Professionals in insurance, financial fraud, government, law enforcement, legal, and journalism use Pipl to find persons of interest. Maltego is another powerful investigative tool and partner. Maltego enables investigators to mine data from dispersed sources, automatically merge matching information in one graph, and visually map information to explore the data landscape and connections. To bring data from multiple sources together, Maltego has created Transforms—software integrations that connect data from more than 30 data partners, including Pipl.

How Pipl Optimizes Maltego Entities

Investigators using Maltego with Pipl Transforms now have access to the Pipl index of more than 3 billion online identities—in seconds. Pipl continuously scours global data sources including the web, email sources, social media, and exclusive data banks to collect online identity elements. Our powerful algorithm performs sophisticated data analysis to deliver rich data relating to POIs. Figure 1 illustrates the basic flow of an investigation using Pipl in Maltego:  

Investigators can search for a person with only one input—full name, alias or nickname, an email address, phone number, or a United States physical address. A search query returns a Pipl Person entity. From here, investigators can search other available information associated with that person:

•  Addresses: Home and work; current and past addresses associated with the person, including house number, street, city, ZIP code, state and country

•  Age: Date of birth, which might be given as a range if the exact date is unknown

•  Associates/Relations: Individuals associated with the person, such as co-founders, siblings, parents, or spouse

•  Education: Educational qualifications from various schools, colleges, and universities, including the institution, degree, and time period

•  Email addresses: Full email addresses, including personal, disposable, and work emails (available on an exact person match only)     

•  Gender 

•  Image: URL of profile and other images related to the person

•  Job: Current and past jobs, including the period, job title, and organization

•  Languages: Languages spoken by the person

•  Names: Alternate names, such as maiden names and aliases

•  Phone numbers: Current and past, mobile, landline, pager, home, and office numbers

•  Usernames: Online usernames, including screen names, handles, and nicknames from across the web, social media sites, forums and more

•  Web URLs: URLs of social media platforms, as well as pages mentioning or containing data about the person (available on an exact person match only)

•  Social network IDs: UserIDs from across social media sites

•  Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs): Including data such as vehicle make, model, and year

From each data point, such as an address, it's also possible to identify the data source, including timestamps that indicate when Pipl encountered the data in that source. If the source is online, Pipl also provides the URL where that data was found. For a detailed walk-through of Pipl Transforms in Maltego, see Introducing the New Pipl Transforms for Person of Interest Investigations. 

Delivering the Best User Experience

Maltego builds Transforms with a deep understanding of the identity data offered by its key partners. Pipl and Maltego worked hand in hand to optimize the user experience and deliver the richest data displays and interaction for investigators. Each new Pipl Entity in Maltego contains all attributes of Pipl data fields, providing a rich set of data for investigations.

Unlocking Online Identities

With Pipl Transforms, Maltego users now click through Maltego Entities and unlock access to global, web, email, and social media data points. Investigators also receive fresh data. As a real-time search engine, Pipl continuously updates data to track a subject’s evolving identity elements and identifiers. Up-to-date information makes online identity data actionable—investigators can quickly know where a person might be living and how to contact them. 

Gaining New Perspectives

Pipl Transforms let investigators see information from different views. They can drill down into more specific detail about a data point. They also can easily retrieve all available information available about a person match, as shown in Figure 2.

Enriching Investigations

Maltego and Pipl SEARCH complement each other as investigation tools. Using Pipl data within Maltego makes it easy to navigate from a person entity in Maltego to Pipl SEARCH to review the Person’s information in a different format. This capability requires a subscription to Pipl SEARCH.

Learn More

With Pipl Transforms in Maltego, investigators now can bring online identity information directly into their investigations to locate persons of interest. They can visualize relationships and uncover connections between people that otherwise might have remained hidden. And they gain relevant, actionable information more quickly to save time, reduce investigative dead ends, and move investigations forward with confidence in their results.

To access Pipl Transforms, contact support@maltego.com or visit https://www.maltego.com/transform-hub/pipl/.

To learn more about Pipl in professional investigations, see Using Online Identities in Professional Investigations.