How to Track Someone’s Location by Sending them over a Link?

Disclaimer: It is a simple tool that is freely available online. It is for educational purposes only. To protect yourself from scammers. This is not as effective as other advanced methods but it’s easy and sufficient enough to do the job.

Those of you who are following me for a while now may know that two years ago I shared some highlights on my social media about how this guy from Nigeria was trying to scam me over Instagram by pretending to be someone who would help me invest money and become rich overnight. I played along with him and was able to trace back his location, his mobile phone brand, the network he was using etc. I used a couple of Advanced techniques, social engineering and tools to track him down. Now I decided to share one basic hack that you can use to track anyone’s country of origin and the closest city to which your subject is right now by just sending over a link. So that you can protect yourself from scammers. This scammer I dealt with 2 years back claimed to be from Netherland but in fact was from Nigeria and how did I know? This small basic hack that I’m about to share was one of them.

Prerequisites are as follows:

1. Your mobile phone/ laptop
2. Internet

Something to know before you begin.

What is an IP address?

An IP address is a unique address that identifies a device on the internet or a local network. We all have this unique address no matter whatever device we use. It’s similar to the local physical address that we have. It’s publicly accessible.

An Ip logger is a tool or a setup that is used to fetch an IP of a device. Normally websites have it embedded over their website so as to collect the IP addresses of the visitors. All the famous websites have it because they want to see from where they are getting the maximum traffic from, which country, city or area. This is also how Google Analytics works. It’s something that most websites use all the time and we just don’t know about it.

We will be using an IP logger to generate a dummy link ( URL ) or infect a URL which will help us achieve our goal of tracing someone’s location and other publicly available details. To infect a URL means if I have a link when clicked will open a youtube video. After we infect this link it will still open the same youtube video when clicked on but in between, it will trace your IP and get the desired details from your IP address which can be as follows:

1. Device name ( Laptop or Phone model number and brand)
2. IP Address
3. City ( Not very accurate )
4. Country ( Accurate)
5. ISP ( that is your internet service provider which can be the name of the company whose network you are using over your phone or wifi)
6. The browser you are using to open the link
7. The operating system your device has.

Steps to do it

1. Go to this website: https://grabify.link/
2. Paste in the link that you want to infect.
3. Click on Create URL
4. After this, you will land on a page that will have two major headings.
5. LINK INFORMATION: Under this, you will find the information about the link that you have just generated.
6. RESULTS: Here you will find the details of the target when they click on the link that you send them.
7. Under Link Information in the first column turn on the Smart Logger ( It will allow you to fetch more info from your target)
8. Copy the link from under the LINK Information heading where it says New Url and you will find a copy button. When you click on it your infected link will get copied to the clipboard.
9. Now send this link to your target.
10. After the target clicks on the link, the RESULT section will be updated with a new entry.
11. Click on More info on the new entry that pops up.
12. There you have all the info from your target.

Now when you know this I’m pretty sure you will try out pranking your friends. So here are some tips to identify such a link that may be generated from this website so that you don’t fall into this trap.

1. The link may have the word grabify in it For example https://grabify.link/track/41AL59 ( It’s a dummy link that I created when you click on it will take you to google.com but will fetch your location details). You can clearly see the word grabify. Immediately you can figure out that it’s an infected link.
2. Even if you were to click on such a link it’s not a big deal. They can’t get sensitive details out of you. They can just know the network that you are using etc. Mostly they would social engineer you after they have these basic details of you that see we know your location and other details about you, so you better follow what we tell you to do.

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To be honest it’s just not a big deal. I hope this small article was of benefit to you. Follow me for more related articles and posts.