However, if you know the general time-frame that someone bought and created the account, you can request evidence from Walmart, and they're usually almost always happy to help law enforcement. So you won't be able to find their actual address, or even know who they are, unless you hack the phone (normally a smartphone). And they can use a prepaid credit card that they purchased with cash to register the device(s). Fake name, fake address, fake everything else. From there, they can go to the nearest open wifi, and register under fake credentials. Anyone can walk into Walmart and buy a throwaway smartphone or dumbphone. Since you're writing for TV, I feel you should know this part to make it seem more realistic. Schroeder covered this pretty well, but let me add to it: The NSA shares intelligence data with local law enforcement and helps them utilize parallel construction to make their cases. This is available to cleared law enforcement personnel, mostly FBI/DEA, but I wouldn't be surprised if they also assist local law enforcement. If you're looking for evidence of governments assisting law enforcement with locating devices, then you'd be looking for the NSA's Treasure Map program. the key word here is "precise location." Not exactly. If the police have an email, sent by a suspect over a 3G or 4G network, could they use the IP address (since they know when it was sent) to find out - from the service provider - the precise location the email was sent from? That way, investigators can have a real-time, accurate map of a particular device at any time. There are some countries that have set up massive detection nets so that every mobile device is physically tracked no matter where it goes. You don't specify the country (or reality) you are dealing with. No exact location.īUT, with all that info, it might be possible for investigators to breach the phone's data or the user's other accounts and determine the location of the device using the multitude of location services modern devices have (Find My Phone, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) (Insert a whole host of legal issues currently in the news, like Stingray).
![can police track ip address can police track ip address](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HvIQjAlzMOo/hqdefault.jpg)
The problem with this scenario is that emails are typically not sent from the device itself, but from a central service.