Hi everyone, and welcome to this month’s Bellingcat Challenge Newsletter!

We're back with a fresh set of challenges for the month, this time brought to you by a special guest creator. We’ll also share the answers to last month’s challenges and turn to our community to highlight some of the most creative approaches used to solve them. 

Curious to see how a Bellingcat researcher tackles the challenge? This month, Aiganysh Aidarbekova took it on — find out how she tackled it in the newsletter.

The May Challenge - Back in Time With Sofia Santos

If you haven’t heard of her yet, it’s about time we introduce you to Sofia Santos. Beyond her investigative work as Senior OSINT Analyst at the Centre for Information Resilience, she’s widely known for her OSINT Exercises. For years, she has been creating open source research exercises to help others practice digital investigations. Her work was a huge inspiration for the Bellingcat Challenge, and we’re very excited that Sofia was able to contribute to this month’s challenges.

These exercises look back over a decade of Bellingcat’s work, and touch upon a wide variety of open source research skills not previously covered in the challenges before. Ready to get started? You can find the challenges here. 

Join the #BellingcatChallenge channel on our Discord server, to ask questions and collaborate with others looking to crack the challenge. Also, don’t forget to tune in on Wednesday, May 14 at 5 pm CET, Bellingcat researcher Giancarlo Fiorella will give the new series a try on our Patreon.

Want to learn more about Sofia’s work? Check out her blog. She also joined us as a guest in our Discord Stage Talks, where she shared insights about getting started in open source research — it’s well worth a listen.

In the next few weeks, make sure to check Sofia’s YouTube channel, where she will be sharing detailed walkthrough videos of the exercises. 

April’s Wildlife Challenges

SPOILER ALERT: From this point on, we’ll be discussing last month’s challenges. If you still plan to complete them, you may want to skip this section. 

Final warning, do not read on if you still intend to partake in the previous challenges.

In April our lead environment researcher Foeke Postma created five challenges centred around wildlife. He has extensively investigated illegal wildlife trafficking and incorporated some of his real-world methods into these exercises.

Here are the answers to April’s Wildlife Challenges:

1. Zambia

2. Crispin 

3. 34.312, 132.992

4. Defanged

5. Unity Park

Let’s take a look at some of the great write-ups our community members shared this month. Seeing how others solved the challenges helps expose alternative methods and broadens our collective skills.

Did the first challenge drive you in-seine? Galen’s pun might have hinted that the giraffes pictured in the first challenge weren’t actually in Paris. The photo was edited. Alex from OSINT Possible used photo editing software to reverse-engineer the background. Since reverse image searches only led to a lot of AI generated giraffes next to the Eiffel Tower, Alex replaced the background with a grassland photo found online. This helped him locate the original image, which included the country where it was taken.

Dam Coffee on Medium took a different approach. He analyzed the giraffes’ fur patterns. Different giraffe species have distinct coat markings depending on their region. He identified them as Thornicroft’s giraffes, endemic to Zambia.

For the second exercise, fur patterns also provided a clue. This challenge was inspired by this investigation, in which Bellingcat researcher Foeke Postma used a tiger’s unique stripe pattern to identify the individual animal. But where to begin? Tristan Jenkinson from the eDiscovery Channel found the correct zoo by tracing the photographer credited under the image. Her Instagram profile indicated she was based in London, so Tristan began his search with the London Zoo. He soon found a tiger on the zoo’s website with matching stripes.

The third challenge, ‘Hopping Around’, proved to be a tricky one. Clues like vegetation type, rabbit species, or the background weren’t helpful. Dam Coffee tried to combine reverse image search with visible elements in the photo, including a rabbit and a tower. Alex from OSINT Possible also tested various search engines and terms. Eventually the search query "Electric tower, Japan, rabbits," led him to the rabbit island of Okunoshima, Japan. 

In the fourth challenge, ‘A Proud Creature’, Foeke wanted to highlight the signs an animal has been subjected to illegal trafficking. Tristan Jenkinson was already familiar with the practice of removing a lion’s teeth due to his own investigations into the illegal wildlife trade. By reverse image searching, as well as looking for signs of wildlife abuse, he successfully identified that the lion in the photo had been defanged. 

Despite Alex from OSINT Possible solving the ‘‘Lazy Lions’ challenge, with a reverse image search, for Tristan Jenkinson nothing useful popped up. Reverse image searches can vary depending on your search history and location. Tristan, as well as Dam Coffee therefore decided to focus on the species of lion visible in the photo. By focusing on the lions’ black manes, Google and ChatGTP suggest the lions might be native to Ethiopia. From there, they were able to identify a matching rock formation in the background of the photo, located in Unity Zoo in Addis Ababa. 

Challenge completed!

Want to see how a Bellingcat researcher approached these exercises? In April our researcher Aiganysh gave it a shot. Find out how she did here:

Tips from Bellingcat’s Toolkit Team

While our toolkit doesn’t contain numerous tools specifically for wildlife investigations, our toolkit editor Lieth Carrillo suggests these challenges are a great opportunity to try out species identification tools. If you don’t know exactly what type of animal or plant you’re looking at, Lieth mentions iNaturalist, PlantNet, Merlin ID or Trap Tagger as some options. These tools help identify animal or plant species, provide details about their habitats, sounds, and even show related species.

We would love to hear hear if you have used any of these tools to solve the challenges are took a different approach. Let us know on our Discord or other socials—and be sure to tag us if you're sharing any cool blog posts, walkthrough videos, or other contributions!

That’s it for the first Bellingcat Challenge newsletter. We hope you enjoyed it. Please let us know what you liked (and didn’t like) about this newsletter by leaving comments and suggestions on our Discord. 

Share with your friends so they can be notified when the latest Bellingcat Challenge drops every month. If you have been forwarded this email and would like to sign up, please do so here.

Elsewhere on Bellingcat

Before we go, here are some links to other exciting projects from Bellingcat:

• What Audio Analysis Reveals About Aid Workers Killed in Gaza

• Open Sources Show Myanmar Junta Airstrike Damages Despite Post-Earthquake Ceasefire

• US Border Patrol Called Raid 300 Miles From Border 'Targeted'. Open Source Evidence Suggests Otherwise

See you next month!