Every investigator has cases they’ll never forget, and for John Trenary, that landmark case involved someone he describes as “the most insidious he’s ever encountered” during his years as a cyber crime detective with the Linn County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon.
The suspect, John DiMolfetto built an entire digital universe to target children. From witness statements, prior law enforcement investigations and evidence collected, investigators believe DiMolfetto had been systematically targeting children online for over a decade. DiMolfetto created highly curated personas online when he identified a child to exploit and introduced these fake identities as “characters” to children as young as seven years old.
When Trenary interviewed DiMolfetto, the predator revealed his true motivation. “It was, ‘Can I do this? Can I get this child to send me explicit imagery?’” Trenary recalled. “The thrill of deceiving a child was really the ultimate thrill for him.”
Today, Trenary serves as VP of Cyber at Our Rescue and often points to this case as a clear example of why open-source intelligence, known as OSINT, has become an essential tool in modern child-exploitation investigations.
DiMolfetto is now serving 36 years in prison for exploiting or attempting to exploit more than 300 children across the United States in the six months before his arrest. The sophistication of his tactics required an equally intricate investigative approach, and Trenary and his team point to OSINT’s power in dismantling the digital world DiMolfetto created.
What is OSINT?
OSINT or Open-Source Intelligence is the practice of collecting and analyzing publicly available information to generate intelligence for law enforcement, cyber investigations, and child-exploitation cases. It’s much more than Googling someone or scrolling through social media. It’s sifting through websites, data breaches, social media, and public records. True OSINT work deploys advanced technical skills to analyze publicly available information that may be deeply buried online, connecting digital breadcrumbs to create a clear picture.
“While you’re waiting for the legal process, it’s like ‘whistle while you work.’ You ‘OSINT’ while you wait,” said Trenary.
OSINT’s roots stretch back to World War II when military and intelligence agencies began analyzing public records to understand enemy movements. Today, the explosion of digital life has turned it into a cornerstone of law-enforcement investigations.
Old-School Detective Work for a Digital World
The white paper Human Trafficking Network Investigations examines how modern human trafficking networks operate at a scale and complexity that traditional law-enforcement methods struggle to dismantle. The authors argue that OSINT is indispensable. Think of it as old-school police work, adapted for a digital world.
“We’re not hacking. We’re finding what’s already out there and stitching those pieces together to create something actionable,” said Trenary. “It’s similar to how investigators 40 or 50 years ago would hit the streets and talk to neighbors and employers to develop information, but our world doesn’t just only exist in physical space anymore. It exists online, and unless you know where to look and why it matters, you’ll never see how it applies to an investigation. That’s where OSINT comes into play.”
Another way to understand OSINT: every contact leaves a trace. This is known in the investigative realm as Locard’s Exchange Principle, where criminals leave fingerprints, fibers, footprints, or DNA. In the digital age, the same principle applies, but the clues are online. People cannot move through digital environments without leaving something behind. Today it comes in the form of usernames, IP addresses, metadata, forum posts, gamer tags, Wi-Fi connections and more.
OSINT Cracks Cases with Unexpected Clues
To understand why OSINT has become essential in child-exploitation cases, Trenary shares an example of how a seemingly ordinary food delivery order cracked open a case that would’ve taken weeks to solve using traditional investigative methods.
It started when a parent reached out to police, worried their child was being targeted online. The parent only had a username of the suspected predator. While investigators waited for the social-media company to respond to legal requests, which can take weeks or months, they turned to OSINT.
Investigators traced the username to an email address. The suspect’s email then appeared in a data breach from a national pizza chain. Suddenly, from one online order, police had a solid lead: a real name, phone number, and even the delivery address.
“If you’ve ever ordered food online, even from a junk email address, think about what the company asks for. Your name, phone number, delivery address, maybe your credit card,” Trenary said. “All of that highly identifiable information had nothing to do with the original investigation, but we found it because of open-source intelligence.”
Police could act to identify the suspect before the social media platform’s legal response arrived, showcasing the power of OSINT as a tool that accelerates investigations and unmasks predators through often unlikely resources.
OSINT also works to bridge cases across state and country borders. Trenary led an OSINT training in Bangkok and watched as investigators from Nepal and Indonesia realized they were all working cases linked to the same suspect. In California, an officer solved a missing child case that sat cold for 11 years during training. He found the missing person alive in another state, a breakthrough moment in the middle of class.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in an OSINT training, where they get all excited because the tool, the technique they just learned just blew the doors off the case that they’re actively working, that they felt stuck on,” said Trenary.
Predators Use OSINT, Investigators Fight Back
Unfortunately, predators also have learned to exploit the same digital footprints. A single post, photo, or comment can reveal a lot about a child, such as their interests or social circles. Offenders can also look at friend lists, school logos, locations in the background, and what time a child usually logs on. Some take it even further, crafting fake personas and pretending to be a peer, gamer, mentor, or love interest. These deliberate grooming tactics are a strategy to create an immediate sense of trust. Offenders will also use OSINT to understand family dynamics, noting when parents travel for work, when supervision is inconsistent, or when a child expresses loneliness.
Trenary points back to John DiMolfetto, who operated with a level of sophistication that made him especially dangerous. Behind a carefully crafted image as a devoted Baptist and family man in his community, he hid a digital world built to exploit children. Trenary noted that DiMolfetto displayed classic traits of a highly manipulative criminal: compulsive lying, disregard for social norms, and an obsessive drive to target vulnerable children. His ability to uphold a beloved public persona while managing dozens of online identities revealed just how calculated his behavior was.
AI: Expanding Capabilities, Amplifying Threats
As powerful as OSINT has become, new technology reshapes how criminals operate and how investigators respond. Artificial intelligence transforms OSINT by both expanding its capabilities and amplifying threats.
Perpetrators use some unregulated AI tools to create synthetic profiles that look and sound convincingly real, complete with AI-generated photos and voice messages. When these fake identities are built using details gathered from a child’s online footprint, they become believable, which is why it’s so important for caregivers and investigators to recognize these tactics.
AI can also help investigators, but with a crucial caveat. “When AI is wrong, it’s confidently wrong,” said Trenary. AI will manufacture information attempting to answer questions, which means investigators must be careful about how they use it.
“We can’t take AI-generated information and bake it into a prosecution or even legal process unless we are able to first validate the conclusions that it’s making,” said Trenary.
By combining AI tools with traditional OSINT techniques and human verification, investigators can work faster without sacrificing accuracy. Still, predicting where OSINT is headed remains difficult. That’s why, Trenary warns, if innovation and training cease, “we will be light years behind in a very short period of time. So where are we going? I don’t know. But I do know that we can’t stop marching in that direction. We just have to follow where the trends take us.”
OSINT’s Innovation and Funding Gap
OSINT is critical, but the reality is most local law enforcement agencies simply don’t have the budget for cyber tools, OSINT platforms, or the specialized training needed to fight modern trafficking. Many departments don’t even have a full-time cyber investigator. The newly released 2025 U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report highlights the urgent realities of human trafficking today, showing that traffickers exploit digital tools faster than most government systems can adapt.
“That’s where organizations like Our Rescue come in,” Trenary said. “We really need a coalition of organizations like Our Rescue to be able to sound the alarm in ways that law enforcement can’t.”
Support from donors fills this critical gap, enabling investigators to receive advanced OSINT training, access specialized cyber investigation tools and platforms, collaborate across borders, analyze cases quickly and develop new techniques to stay ahead of evolving threats.
“Decision makers and purse-string holders see their investigators coming back and they’re cracking open cases in these exciting new ways that we never imagined before. People get excited and decision makers get excited and they start going, well, how do we get more training like this for our people? Or what resources do you need?” said Trenary.
Digital Traces Protect Countless Survivors
The digital world has given offenders new ways to target children. Remember how every single move online also leaves a trace? Through OSINT, investigators now have the ability to connect the digital dots and stop exploitation before it escalates. Trenary often thinks back to the DiMolfetto case and what might have happened if OSINT hadn’t helped unmask him.
“How many more hundreds or thousands of kids would be exploited by him since the time of his arrest if he never made it behind bars? That’s the real power of these partnerships and advanced investigative techniques: not just justice for past victims, but protection for countless future ones,” he said.
