Finding Lauren
- Robert K
- Nov 26
- 2 min read
Looking for Lauren
On September 4th 2024, the United States Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against two Russian nationals who funneled $10 million USD through the company Tenet Media to various right-wing influencers to push pro-Russia talking points. At the time of the indictment, Tenet Media was run by Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan. While this post isn’t going to shed more light on their activities, it will be a useful case study in geolocation for other aspiring OSINTers.
Exactly one year after the indictment was unsealed, Lauren Chen posted an update on the situation from her perspective and began posting on X again. Although she took precautions to obfuscate her location (and I don’t plan on ever doxxing the current location of anyone), I was able to use some basic OSINT to identify her whereabouts based on a picture that appeared to show very little geographic information.
On October 25, Lauren posted a family portrait including herself and her two children sitting outside of a building with a distinctive pattern on the wall. Furthermore, their location appeared to use a very unique light fixture
Face of Lauren’s child obfuscated for privacy reasons
Image from post referenced above with areas of interest highlighted
Now this isn’t a ton of information to go off of but a targeted reverse image search using Google Lens included several suggestions that the location is somewhere in South East Asia, specifically Phuket, Thailand.
Reverse image search of the post showing Phuket as a possible location
Other locations included in the search results included Australia and Sao Paolo but the foliage in the picture appeared to be more consistent with South East Asia so I luckily began my search with Phuket. As Google Lens didn’t provide me with any matches to hotels or resorts in the Phuket area, I decided to search Youtube for the best resorts in Phuket. A video of the 10 best hotels in Phuket was posted by @Explorewithsky and included the following image of the Cassia resort
Red rectangle emphasizing area of interest. Crop of original image provided for comparison.
On this still, we can see the cladding on the side of the hotel appears to be the same as the wall that was behind Lauren in her original post. Further research on Youtube led to a video posted by Deddy Enjoy Life which includes a walk around of the resort.
In this still, we can see the distinctive wall and light fixtures, as well as the same foliage as the original photo. We can also observe the dark wooden slats in the same configuration as the original image suggesting that this picture was taken at the Cassia Resort in Phuket, Thailand.
Again, this article is not meant to dox Lauren Chen or put her family at risk but rather is meant to emphasize that an innocuous photo can be geolocated with basic searching and some tenacity. Interestingly, the majority of reviews of this location were posted in Russian. Hopefully Lauren was able to make some new friends on her trip!
C00per
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