hunt-a-handle

hunt-a-handle is an OSINT skill for username and handle investigation: enumerating a screen name across hundreds of platforms with tools like sherlock, maigret, and the WhatsMyName data set, then correlating and confirming which accounts genuinely belong to the same person. Its guiding thesis is that enumeration is the cheap half and confirmation is the real work — existence checks are HTTP heuristics that produce candidates, not identities, and pasting a tool's hit list into a report is the mistake that ruins these investigations.

The workflow starts with a required authorized-scope step (subject, objective, in-bounds selectors, out-of-bounds actions, jurisdiction) and a companion ethics document. It then guides enumerator choice (sherlock for breadth, maigret for parsed profile fields, WhatsMyName for readable match rules), systematic handle-variant generation (separator swaps, truncations, number suffixes, leetspeak, gamer-tag morphology), and a rigorous confirm-or-reject grading step using strong evidence (matching avatars verified against reverse image search, near-identical bios, self-declared cross-links, shared contact selectors) over weak signals. It documents common false positives — soft 404s, catch-all profile pages, CAPTCHA interstitials, squatted and impersonation accounts — and the collision problem where common handles map to many unrelated people.

It targets fraud and synthetic-identity investigators, recruitment and marketplace scam checkers, trust-and-safety teams, insider-threat analysts, and people auditing their own exposure. It explicitly forbids resolving ambiguity by logging in, messaging, or requesting follows. Despite these guardrails, the capability — correlating scattered accounts into a single real person — is dual-use and can be used to unmask or profile individuals, warranting elevated scrutiny.