A mobile phone can be (poorly) tracked by scraping all a countries telephone directory address books and creating a bulk-API reverse HLR lookup table.
Written in aid of the 2011 rescue of the stolen Sail Yacht Rocard from: Marinella Pier, Castelvetrano, Trapani, Sicily, Italy, Europe
Decompress Data
unzip phonebook.*.zip
Search area included 151 cites
cat cities.txt | wc -l
151
767,852 unique telephone number / address / HLR record combinations where scraped
cat phonebook.dump.sql* | grep INSERT | wc -l
767821
13,166 telephone numbers matching the format of a mobile phone
cat numbers.* | perl -p -e 's/,/\n/g' | sort | uniq | wc -l
13166
20,196 unique HLR location codes where recorded
cat report.* | wc -l
20196
Target was located on Couchsurf which reported the last login GeoIP location on the public profile. Website was scraped on a polling interval and timestamped changes in location logged.
cat couchsurf-spider.csv | wc -l
78
These scripts spider the various online Italian phonebooks, use regular expressions to scrape out telephone numbers and addresses, then insert these entries into an sqlite database.
For each telephone number, lookup the HLR via an API and update the database
Turn the SQLite database into a textfile for export and easier grepping