[SherryBobbinsUnderground]

Hi guys.

I'm new here, and this is my first post.

My situation is...I run a survivors group for former members of a cult. The cult in question has, over the years and to this present day, engaged in censorship of criticism of their organisation. The internet is riddled with stories of abuse and unethical treatment of the vulnerable who seek their help. They have been known to file false DMCA (copyright) claims on youtube to have videos taken down and accounts suspended. The last time they did a big edit was when a bunch of news stories came out about them. At the time, the IP address was traced to one of their sites, and the page was blocked from any edits for a time. Censorship continues in many other forms, and at the moment, there has been MAJOR edits (gross censorship) of their wikipedia page, just in time for some positive press from the one publication they seem to be in favour with.

SO.... this time, there is no IP address left behind, only a username, and this happens to be the only wikipedia page they have edited. I am highly suspicious that this is a cult employee.

Is there a way to find this person's IP address or otherwise trace the computer where they are editing this from? On the person's page, he/she invites people to message them should they disagree with changes they made to the page. I have heard that there is a link you can send people, and if you trick them into clicking on it, it can reveal information about their IP address and other information on their computer/internet use.

Do any of you know anything about this? I am not an IT person, but I would like to know what options I have. If I can prove it is them, I would like to circulate that information within my network. It is very important information which may one day form part of legal proceedings.

If you want any more info or you want to ask me anything, please fire away.

Thanks guys

Cheers

SherryBobbinsUnderground

[AchillesRWP]

You don't need to trick them into clicking a specific link. You can set up your own free site with a little PHP script which gets their IP address.
You need to:
- Register an account on a free host website (E.g SPAM)
- Edit the index file of this site with a PHP script similar to the one below:
"
<?php
$ip = getenv ('REMOTE_ADDR');
$fp = fopen('ip.html', 'a');
fwrite($fp, 'IP: ' .$ip);
fclose($fp);
?>

Then once this is saved, link them to your index file via a URL eg. thesiteyousetup.com/index.html , when they visit the site, the PHP script will store their IP on a page called 'ip.html' which you can access by simply typing in to your URL bar.

This method is pretty difficult for a non IT person though, I think it would be easier just to get them to send you an email. Once you have an email from them, their IP is stored in the header information anyway. That will be much easier than what I posted above, but I figured id type it out anyway just to cover all your bases.

Once you have their IP address, you can get rough locations using utilities such as CentralOps, this will also provide you with ISP information. In addition, I think there are people on here who can get full addresses from IP addresses, though I've never used them.

Hope this helps.