356: MemberVetting-What's a Ghost Account & What Clubs Need to Know? w/ Paul Dank

In this episode, we delve into the hidden world of ghost accounts with Paul Dank from Kennis / MemberVetting. Ghost accounts are anonymous social media profiles that allow individuals to engage in behaviors they wouldn't normally display under their real names. Paul explains how the anonymity of these accounts can lead to negative and harmful behaviors, such as hate speech and inappropriate content, which can severely impact the reputation and harmony of private clubs.

Paul shares real-life examples of how these ghost accounts have been used to spread negativity and how Kennis has successfully identified them. From a police chief spreading disinformation to individuals posting inflammatory content, the episode highlights the varied and sometimes shocking nature of these anonymous profiles. The discussion emphasizes the importance of clubs being aware of these accounts, as potential members may hide behind them, presenting a polished image while engaging in damaging activities online.

To safeguard the integrity of their communities, private clubs must prioritize fact-based member vetting. Kennis offers specialized services to uncover these ghost accounts, ensuring that clubs can make informed decisions about their memberships. For more information and to learn how Kennis can help protect your club, visit Membervetting.com.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

It's a strange thing when we think we're anonymous, we change our behavior. It's almost like the group behavior. You ever seen how, like after you know the Stanley Cup playoffs are going right now, you get these cities and the team loses the game or wins the game and the herd mentality takes over, right? There's something in us Young guys are worse than anybody, but there's something in us that sometimes that demon comes out. People have this idea that online, if they can feel secure that no one knows who they are, they can act any way they want to. If that's where your mindset is, at how good of a member are you going to be at the club?

Speaker 2: 0:41

Hey everyone, welcome back to this episode of the Private Club Radio Show, where humans, people all over the world, come to learn about the world of private golf and country clubs. Whether you're a industry professional, industry veteran or you are brand new to the industry, welcome. We are here to discuss any and all aspects of the world of private golf and country clubs from management, leadership, governance, food and beverage, marketing, branding, architecture, you name it. We go over it here. I'm your host, denny Corby. Appreciate you all being here. Thank you all for listening, thank you for the support, and this episode all about going deep on ghost social media accounts, what they are and who are these people behind it, and some of them might be members of your club or even applying to be at your club.

Speaker 2: 1:32

I found this whole thing fascinating. Paul gives us real examples of accounts that they found of people, from different hate speech to just really nasty things that they can find out that people think they're being secretive online and really they're not. And what that has to do with is some of these people are applying to your clubs and wouldn't you want to know if a potential member has a ghost account and is out there pumping out hate speech, negativity and beyond negativity. You know like just not good things at all and you know they they show this really good front, but then they have this other personality, this other profile. Are those people you want in your club? It might be new stuff, it might be old things that they find from from Twitter 10, 10 years ago. Does that matter? Does that come into play? It's not up to Kenneth or anybody. It's up to you all at the club, but it's about having this information at your, at your fingertips, and going okay, has this person changed? How recent, how old, and do we really want this type of possible behavior in our clubs?

Speaker 2: 2:35

This is just a really fun episode on ghost accounts and what and how kenneth finds and what that means for you in your club. If you don't know who kenn is, they are the premier source for fact-based member vetting, probably in the country. They are phenomenal at what they do, some of the best they do from really. You know they call it layers how deep, how many layers do you want to go down? But they are absolutely phenomenal. If you're looking to upgrade, enhance or even have a conversation, learn a little bit more about fact-based member vetting and learning more about Kenneth and Paul Dank. Head on over to membervettingcom. Set up a call with Paul Dank. Guaranteed it's going to be awesome. Let's get into the episode. Everyone. Please welcome Paul Dank. What's a ghost account and how do you find them?

Speaker 1: 3:20

Yeah, so if you're not familiar with the concept of a ghost account, do you find that? Yeah, so if you're not familiar with the concept of a ghost account, it's an anonymous account. You want to express yourself or engage in some behavior, but you don't necessarily want anybody to know it's you. There's a lot of things that we do, especially searching Google. That makes sense for us to want to be anonymous, right? How know? How do I get rid of this kind of rash?

Speaker 1: 3:45

I don't blame you for not putting that on Facebook, but sometimes we want to have anonymous social media accounts, not just to observe what's going on as a voyeur, but to be a participant, and our character can show up in this. So this is an example. This was somebody that we were able to connect to a club who had an account. It is a bit older, but this is their mindset at this club. Obviously, this kind of mindset doesn't fit. So they have another Twitter Now X account, which is their day-to-day account where they engage, grandma and talk to their friends. But they also decide that they want to put this other stuff out there and, as you can see, when they had this account working, they had a lot of engagement.

Speaker 2: 4:36

Yeah, I think that's why my mouth was like I'm like the retweets and the likes. I was like man most companies would die for that. I was like holy cannoli.

Speaker 1: 4:46

And again, you know I've talked about the fact that sometimes people think the upper tier of society doesn't engage in this. That's 1000% not true. You have people absolutely everywhere doing this. You have the most surprising people doing this. It's a strange thing. When we think we're anonymous, we change our behavior. It's almost like the group behavior. You ever seen how, like after you know the Stanley Cup playoffs are going right now, you get these cities and the team loses the game or wins the game and the herd mentality takes over right? There's something in us Young guys are worse than anybody, but there's something in us that sometimes that demon comes out.

Speaker 1: 5:34

People have this idea that online, if they can feel secure that no one knows who they are, they can act any way they want to. If that's where your mindset is at, how good of a member are you going to be at the club? Now? You know that people are watching and listening, so you're probably not going to be as overt, but this is who you really are. This is how you spend your time. That says something about you.

Speaker 2: 6:05

I know it's from 2012, but how long ago did you find this?

Speaker 1: 6:10

Oh, it was last year.

Speaker 2: 6:15

And is that account still like? Are they still posting and doing stuff or has it been like dormant? But regardless, it's not right. I'm just trying to see dig a little bit deeper. Sip some tea here.

Speaker 1: 6:26

This was probably the most inflammatory thing that we found, as I recall and I believe that they stopped some. Maybe you know, nine years ago, 10 years ago, yeah.

Speaker 1: 6:37

This was really demonstrative of how awful they can be. There's a couple of other slides. If you can, let's forward to the next one. This is much more representative of what we see. So this is a really interesting individual.

Speaker 1: 6:52

His name is Drew, and in the upper left-hand corner, drew has an Instagram account. No one pays any attention to it, but it's got. He and his daughter. They're boogie boarding, they're riding bikes right, they're at the beach having fun, and that's his outward facing Instagram. So if you look for him or he tells you what his Instagram is. That's what you're going to find.

Speaker 1: 7:17

Drew also through and that's the beauty of Kennis is you have people here that are dedicated to doing due diligence, research and open source research 24 seven. That's what my people do 24-7. That's what my people do. We have tools and ways to connect individuals to their ghost accounts. Drew also has a high-performance race airplane, so it's a propeller plane and it's incredibly powerful and incredibly loud. Drew also happens to have his plane parked at an airport in a community that I would consider to be disenfranchised community, and he likes to fly the plane in the morning. He likes to leave early. Well, the problem is, the plane is so loud and he operates it a certain way. Not only does he take off the ground, he ends up setting off every car alarm, waking up every kid, dog and person in the houses around this airport, and he blows it out. And here's what my team was able to figure out. He set this channel up because he was angry that there were complaints about him to the FAA and to the airport by the people in the community, and so he's created a reverse racism and what's wrong with poor minorities channel where he flies the plane and he buzzes the community and he spouts off with this belligerent ranting all over the fact that they have a problem with him waking them up first thing in the morning and upsetting their households. Unusual guy, unusual set of circumstances, but this is a true ghost account and this is again representative of his character and that's why it matters.

Speaker 1: 9:00

I sent you one more slide. If you can advance one more, this last one is interesting so, and in fact I've incorporated a couple of these into my presentation when I'm meeting with a new club. But I live in this tiny hamlet of 450,000 people called Shelby, township, michigan. It's just part of suburban Detroit, right? But our police chief job is a really good job and I've actually met the chief on more than one occasion. He always seems to be a nice guy. But this absolutely floored me when this news story broke in one of the two big papers in town and, essentially, an investigative reporter found that our chief of police had set up anonymous accounts to spread disinformation during the last election cycle and this is the top law enforcement agency in our town, someone who we all look up to and count on. So the idea that if anybody's thinking, oh my gosh, who would do that? Only one in a thousand person would do that.

Speaker 1: 10:07

There's an awful lot of people that set up ghost accounts and I want you to think about all the different things that people can be engaged in that are not PC and probably very offensive to large amounts of society. There are people that we find that set up a lot of ghost accounts based on pornography, based on disparaging treatment of women. It's a lot of guys, but they set up ghost accounts because they want to be involved in that world. They want to spread that kind of stuff. It's incredibly distasteful. You would never say any of the things you post. You would never want anybody to know that you were connected with it, but they have active social media accounts.

Speaker 1: 10:51

When they talk about that, you have addictive behaviors. You have criminal behaviors. Now let's talk about this. If you're wealthy and you have a powerful car and you make videos of you in a public park getting it up to 140 miles an hour, what does that say about you? Miles an hour? What does that say about you?

Speaker 1: 11:14

If you have your ghost account where there's one, that was amazing. The guy is a quad runner fanatic and he owns real estate right next to a state park, so it's a resort, you know a destination for him. It's his cottage or whatever you want to call it, but he and his friends take videos of them smashing through the barricade onto state land and tearing it all up, and so that's what he thinks of rules, and that state park is there for him to destroy. He even actually had been cited for it officially, but likes to make these videos and post them. He does it through a pseudoname and a pseudo account. So start to think of other destructive behaviors people that are involved in the drug culture, that don't want you to know they're involved in the drug culture. People that are involved in infidelity, like to boast about it, like to encourage others, teach others how to get away with it.

Speaker 1: 12:03

We've seen a lot of strange things, and so the good news is the researchers here can find a lot of these accounts. We're not a silver bullet we can't find any at all, but we can connect them back to people and show and demonstrate to our clients what that connection point is. There are some people who also can set up anonymous accounts and know how to do it and it won't be found. But the point is, as humans, we're lazy and we often have bad instructions and we do a bad job of it, like my own police chief, who you would figure, would know enough not to get caught. But these things happen. Ghost accounts are out there and they're very real. How, how?

Speaker 2: 12:42

hard. It's probably all relative, but like, like, how easy or hard is it to find ghost accounts?

Speaker 1: 12:49

So it's probably one of the most difficult things to find. You have to have a nexus back to the person. But technology is changing. The search tools are changing. Tools that were not designed to aid a company like Kenis in doing its job better exist and we deploy those tools right. So I could use a hammer as a can opener. It might be messy, it's not ideal and you know I'm probably going to have, I'm probably going to lose some contents when I bash the can open, but the point is it gets the job done.

Speaker 1: 13:21

A big part of open source investigations, including the search for ghost accounts, involves taking tools that were designed for another purpose and using them to find this information. There's nothing wrong with doing it. We are allowed to. It's open, it's searchable, it's findable, but we leverage those and that's what the OSINT community does is to try and find those opportunities to take a tool and use it to find data that's meaningful and connect the dots, and we're, frankly, really good at it. So we can use a lot of different tools to end up on a ghost account.

Speaker 2: 13:53

If, what are the? What are the odds or likelihood that people have more than one ghost account, Cause you, you've done this like enough is? Have you seen that if people have one, they usually have two, or is it they normally just have one and like and that's it, or is maybe it's one per platform? They have like a bunch of different ones? What kind of numbers have you seen in that way?

Speaker 1: 14:14

So it's entirely possible that you have a ghost account on multiple platforms and we don't find all of them. We have found multiple. What we usually find is, if you have an interest, that's not maybe PC and you're trying to hide it, you probably have more than one. Maybe not. Maybe you're really into one particular vertical right so you're trying to hide it. You probably have more than one. Maybe not. Maybe you're really into one particular vertical right, so you're into the drug culture. You just don't want everybody to know that. And that's all we find is one account.

Speaker 1: 14:42

In this case, the chief had an actual agenda. He wanted to create confusion on issues and broadcast strong opinions right issues and broadcast strong opinions right. That was intentional. That was probably thought out. Drew basically just wants to shame poor people for having the same rights that he expects in his community. I'm pretty sure that at 5 am, if we set off all his car alarms and his house alarm woke up his dogs and his kids. It wasn't in a race plane, we did it through some other means. He'd probably have a problem with that. But now he instead has said it's because you're disenfranchised, you're just acting up and it's reverse racism instead. So he's a one topic guy. He's concerned about that particular group of people and he wants to shame those people. He just doesn't want anybody to know he's doing it. He doesn't want to be directly connected to it by his name. Right, and most people don't Forget about the club vetting you. You have an employer or you have other stakeholders in your life. Maybe you have ownership interest in businesses. You don't want to be seen as this.

Speaker 1: 15:49

I know that we had some investigative reporters in Detroit when the Lions started doing better. Lions had one of their sponsors and an investigative reporter got a tip that the sponsor was very much against the athletes taking a knee and a lot of Black Lives Matter initiatives and had set up multiple ghost accounts to basically just tee off on minorities in a public way and would find any news clip or any social media clip that sort of fed into the idea that minority athletes are the worst. And they were an actual. They were a sponsor. I think they were actually had a product in the stadium at times and they were well-known locally. Once it got in the hands of the investigative reporters, who I'm guessing had some help and they found it, the company was sold.

Speaker 1: 16:46

Yeah, it was not a good situation, but that's very common. So that's somebody that you know. Multiple accounts all spreading the same hateful message. So yeah, it happens. I mean, the good news is most people don't engage in this kind of behavior. You know, I have interests. I love college football. I will post about college football. I will post about my disappointment when my team loses. You know, I'm also not afraid to say that I post a lot of stuff about the national debt and the fact that four or five years we're going to have a day of reckoning because we're paying more in interest than we are on national defense, right? I mean, you and I were talking about that.

Speaker 2: 17:28

And that was one of the big things at NCA conference too.

Speaker 1: 17:31

Yeah, you know when, when the debt service and and the, the what seems like drunken spending on everything. I think we're going to come to an end Now. Is that divisive? No, and I'm also not afraid to say that, I'm not afraid to talk about my team or the national debt at my club.

Speaker 1: 17:48

But when you set up those ghost accounts, you usually have an agenda and I'm sorry I. But when you set up those ghost accounts, you usually have an agenda and I'm sorry I would have a hard time identifying and saying I think somebody will make a really good member and I would want to be a friend. I won't want to be friends with them and they like to spread disinformation or they like to spread a hateful message. And so I think it's really easy for clubs to see that that has a lot to do with your character, when you feel you have to do that, and then look, if you're, if you want to be awful, be awful. But then why do you want to join a club where a bunch of people are congenial and and pleasant and nice? Um, I think it says a lot to get more followers?

Speaker 2: 18:27

no, uh, is there? Is there a? Is there a most common Like? Do you see it mostly on X? Or is it mostly Twitter, or not Twitter, sorry, like Instagram, facebook, or is it kind of just a healthy mix of all of them? We'll call it a charged platform.

Speaker 1: 18:42

I think you have all kinds of behaviors that are frowned upon in many quarters and I think, would be frowned upon at clubs, in particular, that are represented on Twitter. So if you want to follow pornographic stars, they're all over it, and you want to get into amateur pornographic stuff, that's there. Drug culture is heavily there. Facebook a lot less so, and I think if you look at younger people, you know I've got a 23-year-old son who's like what's Facebook? I mean, he'll set one up because grandma invited him to and I think he's posted on it three times. Invited him to and I think he's posted on it three times. They're much more in tune with Twitter, instagram, tiktok, snapchat and some of those.

Speaker 1: 19:42

Snapchat really isn't an option for search because of the nature of it and people are really awful. On Snapchat, you can have people that are edgy and we can find accounts. When we do find an account and we're able to find an indirect way to follow that person, sometimes our clients on the litigation side will say no, I want you to capture every snap If you can get access to it, capture them all and document them, because they'll be gone shortly. So if anybody doesn't understand Snapchat, it's posts that last for a very short period of time and then they automatically disappear, which has appeal to a lot of people who want to engage in inappropriate behavior or at least behavior that they don't want to be directly connected to. And again, if you're embarrassed about your behavior, there's something wrong with you.

Speaker 1: 20:27

If you're doing something and it's strategic like my police chief, he was trying to achieve an outcome right to either detract people or persuade people. Whatever he was up to, I don't know that that talks about his character, but the fact that that's how you would engage in a political process, that does talk about his character. Using it strategically isn't bad. Using it strategically the way he did was bad.

Speaker 2: 20:57

That's freaking crazy. That's wild. That was good. What an episode. I loved this so much. You can watch online if you didn't see all of the examples and things Crazy stuff. But thank you, paul, for being here. If you're interested in learning more about member vetting, about Kenneth and Paul Dank, head on over to membervettingcom and you can learn more all about it there. If you're enjoying the content like share, subscribe it means the world and costs you nothing. Until next time, catch you on the flippity flip.