OSINT Walkthrough: Bellingcat #3

The value of intelligence is not in its collection, but in its interpretation.

We are back with another challenge! This time, we’ll be solving the following Bellingcat challenge:

Challenge link: https://challenge.bellingcat.com/

Here’s the challenge we are going to solve:

This time, we don’t see many hints provided as part of the challenge. All we have is an image showing numerous cars, some shops, trees, etc. Our task is to identify the name of the street.

So, we begin by opening the image in Google Lens.

If you look closely at the image, you’ll notice some shop names that we can try to search for.

While examining the car number plates, we can see that they belong to Germany.

So, we open the image in Google Lens, which also confirms that it is from Germany.

However, we can’t rely on it completely.

We zoom into the image to examine the shop names more clearly, as they might help us identify the street name.

We start by looking up “Veldensteiner.”

Upon searching, we find that it is a beer brand.

Below is the website of the beer brand. Let’s check its locations, this might give us some useful information.

While exploring the website, we didn’t find much information about the locations.
So, let’s move on to another shop name we observed in the image - “JP STOFFE.”

Let’s follow the same approach: we open the website and explore. As we scroll down, we notice three locations where this shop is present.

We inspect each location individually.

For the first location, we notice some images on the right-hand side, along with an option to view the outside. This feature can help us compare the surroundings with the image provided in the challenge.

We compare this location's image with the one given in the clue, but it doesn’t appear to be a match.

We follow the same steps for the second location.

Even for this one, the outside view doesn’t match the one shared in the clue.

Let’s follow the same steps for the third location. This one looks slightly similar; there’s a tree visible that resembles the one in the clue image. We’ll drag the image to the left to get the complete view.

Although the beer brand is not visible, we can see the other shops that appear in the clue image.

Let’s try our luck and enter the street name in the challenge (visible in the top-left corner).

And it worked!! We’ve successfully solved the challenge!

I hope this walkthrough was helpful. Let’s continue learning together and keep solving more challenges; they’re a great way to upgrade our skills.

A big thank you to the Bellingcat team for creating such engaging and insightful challenges.

I’ll be back soon with more walkthroughs! :)