Online detective: how much you can make on the services of business intelligence

"Bugs," hidden cameras and street surveillance - the last century, decided the former operative Igor Bederov. He founded a business intelligence agency that works on the Internet. Revenues in the best months reach 1.5 million rubles.

Exploration of the Network

One day, the owner of a construction company, who sought out his former partner, turned to the Internet-Rozysk agency - he withdrew an impressive amount from the business and disappeared. "He was heavily in debt, the exit abroad was closed. First of all, we decided to look for him in the region of registration, on the territory of the Leningrad region, "says Igor Beder, the founder of Internet-Rozysk. The customer gave the agency the personal information he had about the partner - about the family status, hobbies, interests. On the basis of this data, analysts found an attacker's account for VKontakte, although the name and most of the data on the page were fictitious. There Bederov found the accounts of his civil wife and son. The photos that the relatives laid out were tied to the terrain - the iPhone automatically determines the geography of the photographer and shares it in the social network. It turned out that every weekend the family spent in one of the villages of the Leningrad region. The house was found by analysts with the help of Yandex.Map. The customer had already applied to the police by that time, so law enforcement officers quickly left and arrested a partner-debtor.

Zarcin & Partners Lawyer Sevan Avalyan explains that in Internet-Rozysk methods there is nothing illegal while the agency is working with open government databases or information published by users voluntarily - for example, information from social networks, blogs and other Internet resources: after publication, it gets the status of public.

Bederov served for three years as a senior police officer in the police department of the Main Department of Internal Affairs of St. Petersburg, and then worked for several years as head of security in the commercial and industrial company of North Textile. After that, he decided to create a security agency that would service companies on outsourcing: staff "security" need to pay a salary, and a third-party agency can be attracted for specific tasks, which is cheaper. "The market of cyber-fraud is developing at a huge pace, more and more crimes are" moving "to online. And traditional security services are often not ready to change the methods of work, "says Bederov.

In 2014 Bederov resigned and founded the agency Internet-Rozysk. He decided to concentrate on the Internet - to use databases, pages in social networks, media publications, geotagging and IP-addresses. According to Igor, dozens of companies work in the business intelligence market, some of which ("R-Techno", "Informant" and others) use the same open data and analytical methods. "Of course, I was not a pioneer, but the market of competitive intelligence is still small. Competition as such, I do not feel - we are not even pushing our elbows, "says Bederov.

Business intelligence in Russia began to develop from the beginning of the 2000s: then large players appeared on the market, says Bederov. The development of the market gave impetus to the e-government program: after 2009, an array of data on individuals and legal entities - vessel databases, the Federal Tax Service, the Federal Migration Service, the Federal Service for Financial Market (FSSP) began appearing in the public domain. At the same time, at the same time, the penetration of the Internet has grown to such an extent that analysis of data from the Web has yielded real results. Founder of the Internet intelligence service Sorge Oleg Gromov adds that the market worsened the deterioration of the economic situation. "The crisis put the business in the conditions of a" knockout game ", each competitor's activity turned into a tangible blow to the profits." According to him, today about 60% of players in the market of business intelligence use Internet resources as the main sources of information. The Internet is not a panacea, working with sources on the Web gives only 10-50% of the necessary information and does not exclude the work "in the field" - observation of the work of the facility, personal meetings with sources of information and phone calls, notes the founder of the agency "Informant" Boris Vorontsov.

The initial investments of Bederov were small - about 200 thousand rubles were required to rent an office in St. Petersburg, purchase three computers, operational support (SiteSputnik program) and access to databases (Integrum, Unireit24, Infologic, SPARK) . own savings. The entrepreneur hired two St. Petersburg analysts, whom he knew from work in the bodies. Licenses for the work of Internet-Rozysk were not required: unlike private detectives, the agency does not provide search services and does not present the collected data in court.

To promote his services Bederov decided on an unusual step for this market - he started a blog where he began to talk about typical violations and methods of fighting them. This helped him attract the first customers, he says.

The struggle for canned food

90% of Internet-Rozysk customers are legal entities. A typical service is checking counterparties before concluding a deal, employees before hiring, monitoring the company's activity in the media and assessing business reputation. For this purpose, analysts tend to turn to the FMS, FNS, SPARK, Integrum databases and various aggregators, analyze open data and provide the customer with an expert conclusion about whether it is possible to trust the counterparty or the future employee. One-time price of such services is 1-5 thousand rubles, you can buy a subscription for 20-50 thousand rubles.

"In our methods, there is nothing supernatural," says Bederov. "But the customer needs more than just an extract from the databases, he needs a conclusion." Internet-Rozysk employees track "bad addresses", to which a lot of legal entities, fictitious directors who manage hundreds of companies, and other typical signs of one-day firms are registered.

"For example, we see a company with a multimillion-dollar turnover, which officially deals with the purchase and sale of petroleum products, but is registered in a one-room apartment with ten more companies," says Bederov. Obviously, this is a transit company, with the help of which owners leave taxes: whether to contact such a counterparty is a big question.

Another example is that a tender is won by a company previously unknown on the market. Comparison of the date and place of its registration and the owner's data make it clear that this company was created specifically to participate in the competition, but owns a classmate of the top manager, who was entrusted with this tender. A ten-minute investigation allows Bederov's client to try to challenge the results of the contest.

In addition to such "routine" orders, Internet-Rozysk periodically carries out more serious projects: searching for Internet fraudsters, searching for missing people, collecting information for journalistic investigations (for example, the agency investigated the sale of military awards for the portal "Ohrana.ru"). The average check of such services reaches 150-200 thousand rubles.

"The lost cargo was returned to us two days after the investigation began, everything was worked out very clearly," says Elena Trushina, financial director of the Luga Canning Plant. The plant sent a canned wagon to the military unit in Sevastopol, but the cargo did not arrive on time, and the driver stopped communicating. Delivery of large cargoes from the plant was handled by the transport company "Engine Logistic", which, in turn, leased wagons and hired drivers for transportation. "We were provided with all necessary documents, scans of the driver's rights and passports, which, as it turned out, turned out to be a fake," Trushina recalls. "Engine Logistic" turned to Internet-Rozysk.

Bederov decided that the swindler would try to sell canned food quickly. "The product was a military marking, so we quickly found ads about its sale on the Internet," Igor recalled. To leave for communication with the sellers was not difficult. After that, the agency appealed to the law enforcement agencies: together with police officers, the analysts organized a verification purchase, confirmed the authenticity of the cargo, arrested it and returned it to the warehouse of the plant. In this operation, Internet-Rozysk earned 300 thousand rubles.

Economy of shadowing

The revenue of Internet-Rozysk in 2015 was 6 million rubles. On average, a month - 400-500 thousand rubles. The business is highly profitable and does not require serious operating costs - the net profit for the same 2015 was 3 million rubles. The main items of Internet-Rozysk expenses are rent for office and salary.

In the staff of the company, apart from Bederov, there are two employees, 40 specialists in different fields (IT, work with a lie detector, detective) are periodically involved in Moscow, CIS and Europe, Israel and the USA under employment contracts. For regular analysts, the rate is set at 30,000 rubles. per month, the rest of their income is formed from the percentage of completed orders. The size of such a premium depends on the contribution of the performer to the case, but can not exceed 30% of the profit based on the results of the completed task. According to the entrepreneur, the remuneration of employees reaches 150 thousand rubles. per month.

During the day, the analyst, as a rule, performs 40-50 routine checks: this work usually brings about half of the agency's revenue (200-300 thousand rubles a month). But revenues grow dramatically when large orders appear. Record month brought 1.5 million rubles. So, one day a client addressed to Bederov, who wanted to track the movement of a group of alleged scammers across Eastern Europe. "At first he came to a private detective who offered to listen to mobile phones of all members of the group and put up a huge bill - about 1 million rubles. First, it is illegal, and secondly, it is simply unrealistic: if there is a chance in Russia to agree with an opera who will arrange a wiretapper within the framework of the case, over which it works, it is impossible beyond the country's borders, "Igor says. He suggested an alternative: to track from which IP-addresses attackers went online, which visited sites and what was placed in social networks. The cost of work has decreased several times.

IP addresses Internet-Rozysk receives using sniffers - these are links that lead to a site open to Internet-Rozysk employees log. It is enough for a person to click on such a link, for example, in a letter or "like" a photo, how Internet detectives will be able to track his IP.

Sometimes Bederov participates in law enforcement operations. "I consider assistance to law enforcement officers as a contribution to the future. Not today or tomorrow a police officer will retire or quit and will work, most likely, in one of the security services, which means that we can receive a constant stream of orders from there, "Igor explains. One of the successful examples of working with the authorities is the prevented action of extremists in St. Petersburg. With the help of the analysis of grouping pages in social networks, analysts came to the organizers of the action, installed surveillance of their movements and distributed their orientation to the employees of the bodies. "As a result, all the participants were waiting at the exit from the metro," the businessman recalls.

To study it is necessary not only contractors, but also employees of clients. Once Internet-Rozysk commissioned one of the networks of construction hypermarkets revealed trade by the cash register. I was helped to search by pictures from Google. Having scored a unique photo of the product in the search bar, the analysts found several sites where an advertisement about his sale was posted, but the seller was not a company-customer, but a private person. Typically, these bulletin boards include the name and phone number of the seller, and sometimes e-mail and account in social networks. These data led analysts to one of the employees of the hypermarket, which traded to the left.

Sometimes private individuals come to the agency - usually with requests to find the missing people. In 2015, Bederov opened a resonant case with the disappearance of a young girl in St. Petersburg. According to the entrepreneur, the investigation believed that the girl was killed, but for three months and could not find a single clue. Analysts Internet-Rozysk found that on the abandoned page of the girl "VKontakte" right after her disappearance a new subscriber appeared. The IP address of the owner of this new account brought the agency to the monastery. "The girl was pursued by a chain of tragic events in her personal life - her young people were dying one by one. She decided to retire from worldly life without telling her relatives, but the Internet helped to find her even in a monastery, "says Igor. The story ended with a happy ending: the girl returned to her relatives.

The main problem of Internet scouts Bedera calls conservatism of market participants. Most of the customers of Internet-Rozysk, as well as competitors, are former employees of security agencies. "This is a very common pattern: in recent years, contractions in the organs have reached a peak. Dismissed operatives most often look for a place either in security services or in private agencies, "Beder explains. But former employees of bodies like to act in the old fashion, rarely use all the possibilities of the Internet. "Agencies aggregating information from the Internet offer customers faster and more useful analytics than those who use classical offline monitoring and communication with sources - this reduces not only the time of the task, but also the cost," says Sorge founder Oleg Gromov. According to his calculations, the volume of the market of business intelligence in Russia now stands at 336 million rubles, and by 2018 can double.

According to Gromov, there are about 200 agencies of competitive intelligence in the US that, like Internet-Rozysk, use the analysis of open data on the Internet. In the west, the market of Internet projects is also developed, which automatically collect data from open databases, aggregate them and give the customer a ready-made certificate.

Bederov is going to create such a tool - an online service to check candidates for employment and current employees: on the site you can leave a request and get aggregated data about a person from the FSSP, BKI bases, from the websites of goverment, social networks and media.

Author: Valeriya Zhitkova.
Read more at RBC: https://www.rbc.ru/own_business/06/07/2016/577cf9159a7947122d10aeb2