His "interests" are a tangle of clichés—hiking, gym, cocktails, road trips. The usual copy-paste personality men use when they can't find one of their own. And he reused the same photo on two different sites with two different captions.
Most sloppy men forget that the internet remembers everything.
I scroll down farther, letting the profile load piece by piece. The first photo that catches my eye is one of him holding a toddler on his hip. The caption readsmy niece, written like he deserves a medal for proximity to a child.
I tilt my head, zoom in, and pull the file information. The metadata shows it was taken on his phone last year. I run the child's face through a basic open-source match. It takes three seconds for the truth to pop up. Not a niece. An ex-girlfriend's kid. The same ex who posted, on her now-moribund Facebook account, that she was ghosted by this guy on her birthday less than a year ago.
Interesting.
I take a screenshot of the profile and store the image in a separate folder, then move on.
Second sweep.
Instagram first. His profile is locked down, but not enough to stop the public traces. I map accounts linked to his phone number, then jump to TikTok, where people forget that privacy settings exist. The patterns line up the way I expect. Every account tied to him has the same posting hours, same captions, same habit of tagging places he visits.
I scroll through his followed accounts. Buried between fitness trainers and motivational speakers are three profiles linked to a local high school's girls' soccer team. Two accounts are private. One is open. I check his interaction history. He hasn't just looked. He's sent messages.
The usernames tell me what his DMs won't say outright. One of these girls is seventeen. Her account has public comments from her classmates wishing her luck on her college applications.
I click the message thread. The first DM from him is the usual bait.Cute pic.
The second one is worse.Don't tell anyone I said this but…
I sit back and let my lungs fill. A slow inhale. A slower exhale. I stare at the glowing screen until my pulse settles into something cold.
He's already hanging himself, and I haven't even pulled out anything beyond public data.
Third sweep.
LinkedIn. The man painted himself as a "regional data liaison", which is the kind of job title you invent when you want to look important without doing anything measurable. I verify the company he listed. It closed three years ago. The certifications he claims don't exist. The endorsements are from accounts that were either deleted or never posted again.
Another lie for the pile.
I click the business link he connected to his profile. It sends me to a half-functioning website with a single page and an outdated footer. The HTML pattern is familiar. Someone once taught him how to use a template generator, and he reused the entire structure without changing anything beyond the text.
That laziness works in my favor. I run a search using the unique template string. Cached snapshots pop up. Old test pages, alternate drafts, and one live directory listing his professional email in a different format.
t.easton.consulting@gmail
There it is. The mask is slipping.
I plug the email into a breach checker. A match appears instantly. Password reuse. The oldest amateur mistake. He uses the same password across platforms, probably because he thinks adding a number to the end makes him a cybersecurity expert.
I track the password through job portals. His login history gives me what I'm looking for.
He ran a background check on Lena from his office.
He paid for it with his personal card but logged in through his company's network.
I whistle under my breath, a low sound of disbelief that doesn't last. I keep scrolling.
There's more.
He looked up her dad.
Then her ex.
Then the public school directory where Jace is enrolled.
