Open Source Intelligence Investigation of WeChat

WeChat or Weixin in Chinese is a Chinese instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. First released in 2011, it became the world's largest standalone mobile app in 2018 with over 1 billion monthly active users. 

WeChat has been described as China's "app for everything" and a super-app because of its wide range of functions. WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, mobile payment, sharing of photographs and videos and location sharing.

Wechat’s Open Source Intelligence Investigation

1. Wechat ID

Through someone's WeChat, it is possible to know the user's nickname, avatar, gender, personal signature and other basic information.

Wechat ID is the only credential for a Wechat account. In WeChat's open source intelligence investigation, sometimes we only know someone's Wechat ID, but it's very difficult to get their cell phone number. Fortunately, there are some methods we can utilize to find the cell phone number linked to the Wechat ID.

Here will introduce several common methods to help you solve this problem.

First of all, we can try to find someone's cell phone number by using WeChat's "Add Contacts" feature.

In WeChat's Contacts screen, click the "New Friend" button. On the next page, we can enter the person's Wechat ID or cell phone number to search for them. If they have already linked their cell phone number to WeChat, it is very likely that we can get their cell phone number by searching for their Wechat ID.

If we can't find someone's cell phone number by the above methods, we can also try to get the information through WeChat groups or official accounts. For some official accounts or groups, they may ask users to provide their cell phone numbers to join, or, post some activities within the official account that require a cell phone number. If the person has participated in these activities, we may also be able to find their cell phone number in the relevant information.

Using the above methods, if you know someone's cell phone number, it's very easy to find out their Wechat ID, and you can even find out their other social media accounts.

2. Moments

Moments is a platform for WeChat users to share their daily life and post videos and pictures.

Through the content of Moments posted by someone, you can collect their facial information as well as the fingerprint information revealed, their life privacy, and the information related to their relatives and friends, etc.. From Moments, it is almost possible to understand a person's life.