Don’t Miss Anything This Christmas Period, With Temporary Intelligence Capture

With the festive period fast approaching, regular users of Instagram may have noticed friends and family uploading videos of themselves purchasing and decorating their Christmas trees over the past few weekends. These videos tend to be uploaded to the platform’s ‘Stories’ feature, meaning that they disappear after 24 hours.

Christmas and New Years can be a very active time on social media, with users wanting to document celebrations with their loved ones. However, permanent uploads to the Instagram ‘Grid’ tend to be reserved for more refined and filtered content, such as posing shots at Christmas markets, the family sat down for Christmas Dinner, or dressing up with colleagues at the office Christmas party. While these posts can be useful for investigators, those who are only looking at ‘The Grid’ will be missing out on the raw unedited content uploaded to Instagram Stories. This can really throw a spanner in the works if you’re investigating a claimant over this period – those interesting titbits that can make or break a case will be lost forever.

That photograph of you at the Christmas market does not document the video of you on Instagram Stories which shows you slipping around on the ice-skating rink. That image of the family sat down for Christmas dinner doesn’t give any indication of the 10k run you went on in the morning, the stats of which you added to Stories. The dressy shot of you and your colleagues at the office Christmas party? It doesn’t feature the temporary video you uploaded to Stories demonstrating your drunken moves on the dancefloor at 2am.

Last year, we were instructed to monitor an Instagram account throughout December and early January. The subject had moved to Australia in the summer of 2022, and their ‘Grid’ posts around Christmas consisted simply of them going out to shop, and a close-up selfie:

Over the same period, Temporary Intelligence Capture showed the subject going for a long hike, and at a Pilates class, amongst many other social engagements.

These examples highlight the opportunities to attain valuable evidence that investigators could be throwing away by not monitoring a subject’s Instagram Stories. NetWatch’s Temporary Intelligence Capture tool can be used to do just that. The tool monitors accounts anonymously, meaning that it captures public posts that would otherwise be lost to the ether after 24 hours, without notifying the user.

That’s why for the festive period, from December 5th to January 1st, we are offering to find Instagram accounts for free with any instructions on Temporary Intelligence Capture. So you don’t miss anything this Christmas.

For more information on how we can assist with your investigations, please fill out the contact form on our website.