Over the past 12 months, Bellingcat has conducted hard-hitting investigations that have unmasked violent Border Patrol agents, identified Russian dark fleet ships that were subsequently sanctioned and exposed a key figure behind the world’s most notorious non-consensual deepfake pornography website (which shut down permanently after Bellingcat approached him for comment).
We have also brought in audience members to help conduct our investigations and give a platform to open source investigators from non-traditional backgrounds.
Bellingcat was an early pioneer in open source investigations. But with many outlets creating visual investigative or open source units, we have been pushed to keep being innovative in order to stand out.
We continued to build new tools over the course of 2025 and have developed and shared methods that can be replicated by others. For example, we further refined our methods of audio analysis in April 2025, enabling us to ascertain Israeli soldiers were responsible for the death of a group of medics in Gaza. Sound recorded on one victim’s phones allowed us to calculate the distance between those firing and the victim. By looking at the position of Israeli troops on satellite imagery, we could tell that only Israeli soldiers were within the distance calculated. This method has since been used by other news organisations.
Bellingcat also tracked the violent actions of Border Patrol agents across the US in 2025, in partnership with Evident Media and CalMatters. We named several of the most violent agents, despite their attempts to conceal their identities by wearing facemasks. We also used visual investigative techniques to show that Alex Pretti was unarmed when he was killed by Border Patrol agents and that Renee Good was turning her vehicle away from the ICE agent who shot and killed her. In both of these instances, we published first to social media, using the images and graphics to demonstrate our findings in a clear and unambiguous manner. This helped to get accurate information out as quickly as possible, countering misinformation narratives that were taking hold.
We have also identified several Russian ships surreptitiously transporting grain taken from occupied Ukraine. Several vessels we identified were subsequently sanctioned by the US and European Union. Interactive visuals showed our processes, detailing to our audience exactly how we knew what we knew. This method has since been used by several other news outlets.
On top of all this, we identified the man behind the most notorious nonconsensual deepfake pornography website in the world, Mr Deepfakes, by tracking his digital footprint across leaked databases to reveal his true identity.
