You may have been chatting with a new friend on Vkontakte. But before you settle on becoming best friends, it’s a good idea to verify their authenticity. Staying safe online and protected from scams demands your investigative nature. Fortunately, knowing their location can offer clues into their identity. This guide will share all the practical techniques to calculate their location on Vkontakte.
What is Vkontakte?
Vkontakte is often called Russia’s Facebook. This amazing social media platform boasts over 50 million users in Russia and other Russian-speaking countries. Users can create profiles, send messages, form groups, share photos and videos, listen to music, and play games. Hence, at its core, you can connect with friends, create public pages and events, and share content on a personalized news feed.
How to find a person’s location via VK?
Finding someone’s location through their VK account is relatively easy. Here, we will discuss the various tools and techniques available to calculate location using VK.
Check VK profile
The easiest approach is to review their information on Vkontakte. VK users frequently list their city and country in the “About Me” section of their profiles. This can even be visible on private accounts. To check out this information:
- Go to their VK page.
- Scan their username, age, and public location for basic information.
- If they have their education and work history on their profile, it also provides geographical clues to verify the accuracy of their primary location information.
- Some people also subscribe to public groups, including local groups in their region. You can find this information on their VK profile.
- Another place to check for calculating the location on VK is their friends list. You can estimate their location based on the photos they shared with friends or photos their friends tagged them into.
By Vkontakte ID
Every VK user account has a unique numerical identifier. While the ID itself won’t reveal geographical information, you can still uncover some insights. To find the ID, navigate to the VK page of the user you are looking for. When you go to the main VK page, you’ll see in your URL something like this: https://vk.com/id85489534. This means their Vkontakte ID is 85489534.
Following that, here are two ways you can analyse a VKontakte ID.
- First, you can use a specialized OSINT tool to extract location information from profile data associated with the IDs. A tool like VK Follow Scraper can help extract such information even directly from VK groups. It would uncover information including user profiles, location, follower counts, and verification status. All you need to do is set up an account with a VK follower scraper like Apify or Bright Data. Next, you’ll need to set up the API and then enter the target VKontakte ID or other community ID.
- If you’re a more technical user, you can also examine using browser developer tools to extract geolocation data based on the user-defined geotags from their posts on the platform. Tools like CyberChef and Sublime Text are suitable for this purpose, as they enable the finding of latitude and longitude values associated with images on the target profile.
When people post their content on Vkontakte, the platform automatically grabs geographical data. Hence, anyone’s photo albums or wall posts on the platform would have location markers or place names. Some users even have map display enabled, which would help you see their photos on a map. Here’s how you can check:
- Navigate to their profile and inspect their photo albums and wall posts for place names and map icons.
- Whenever they have enabled the map to show on photos, you’ll see a map interface displaying geotagged images clustered by location.
- When this isn’t possible, you can also use browser developer tools (F12) to inspect network activities when viewing their photos. To do this:
- Press F12 when scanning through their profile, and this takes you to the Network tab.
- Reload the user photo gallery and look for PHP or JSON responses, such as al_places.php. These files contain latitude and longitude coordinates, and other unique image identifiers.
- Right-click them and copy the response. Next, paste the data into tools like CyberChef or Sublime Text to clean it and only display the longitude and latitude values.
- Paste that coordinate into Google Maps to find the location.
With the Nearby People feature
VK’s “Nearby People” feature is also known as “People by Location”. It allows you to find users near your location when you enable your device’s location services and use the search function within Hub to filter down to their unique region. Here’s how it works:
- Ensure that location services are enabled on your device for the feature to function accurately.
- Open the VK app and click the Hub icon in the bottom menu.
- Next, select the magnifying glass icon (search) in the top right corner.
- Then, select the icon to the right of the search bar to choose the specific parameters.
- Of course, you can filter by area, age and other attributes.
- Remember, you’ll only find other users who have also opted into the service within your geographical area.
Use photos & video clues
Some users don’t allow geotags on their photos and videos. However, such content can still reveal geographical information through background details and metadata. Here’s what you can do:
- Scan the photos directly for recognizable landmarks, street signs, vegetation types or even vehicle license plates. All of these can indicate location data directly connected to them.
- Alternatively, you can use reverse image search tools like Google. What this requires is downloading an image from their photo album. Next, upload to the Google Image website to find similar images that provide location context.
Search group membership
VK users frequently join groups in their specific regions to align with others who share their interests and location. It is often the most direct way to find them quickly. Once you know their region, then you can do this:
- Use the VK search tool to find groups explicitly connected to particular cities, universities, local businesses, or regional events.
- Look out for groups dedicated to local news, city-specific humor, or regional interest groups.
Alternatives to finding out a person’s location
Fortunately, if you aren’t getting all the information you need directly from VKontakte, other third-party services can help.
With phone number locator
If the VK user has their associated phone number on their profile or has shared it with you, you can uncover their location. Websites like LocatePhone do a decent job of approximating their phone’s location through GPS tracking, Wi-Fi connection data and cell tower triangulation. This service requires you to:
- Go to the Russia online locator by LocatePhone.
- Pick their country code and enter the phone number you wish to track
- Wait for the tracking to commence.
- Enter your email address to continue.
Identify by IP address
Grabify is also an excellent tool for uncovering associated information connected to your smartphone’s IP address. What this service does is help you create trackable links that would log the IP address of anyone who clicks them. To use this approach:
- Go to the Grabify website.
- Find a media file they would like and enter it into the designated tab. Next, select “create URL”
- Once the URL is generated, you can click ‘Copy’ and then share the link with them. When they click on it, the service will record their IP address and provide approximate location data.
- Remember, this service won’t find their most precise location, only the city they live in.
Use Yandex Map
Although this tool won’t help you find them directly, it will assist you in calculating their location using VK. Specifically, Yandex Maps is suitable for validating location methods obtained through other methods. If you’ve obtained address fragments or place names from the user’s VK profile, follow these steps to verify the location.
- Download and open Yandex Maps on your phone.
- You can enter the place name, address or category in the search bar.
- With Yandex Maps, you can visualise their streets and verify whether the photos posted on VK match the alleged location.
- You can even use Yandex Maps business listing data to identify lesser-known establishments in that user’s posts.
Via email location tracker
Finally, if they’ve shared their email address with you, you can attempt to determine their location using email tracking techniques. Tools like LocatePhone also provide tracking to geolocate the email sender using various methods. Here’s how it works:
- Go to LocatePhone email tracker
- Enter their email address.
- Wait for tracking to activate and enter your own email address to create an account where you can monitor the status of your geolocation needs.
FAQ
Is it possible to track someone through VK messages?
No, you cannot directly track someone’s location data through your conversations with them on VK. However, it’s possible to use the photos they send, which you can use to find geolocation tags. Alternatively, you can send IP or GPS tracking links using tools like LocatePhone or Grabify. When they click the tracking links, you will see their geographical information.
Can I use VK’s API to find someone’s location?
You can purchase a third-party VK API that can help you uncover location information about different VK users. However, note that these APIs are typically designed for bulk lookups. Brands that want to track follower growth, measure engagement levels, usually use these tools, or identify influencers they can partner with.
Can I find the exact GPS location of someone on VK?
Yes, but not always directly from the VK platform. This means you’ll only find their location from the platform if they explicitly made the information available or geotagged their post. Alternatively, you can see their precise GPS location using tools like LocatePhone.
Conclusion
Ultimately, there are different ways to calculate the location using VK or a variety of third-party tools we’ve shared. Remember, the information you find depends on how private or not they have made their profile on Vkonktake. When all else fails, you can try third-party location tracking tools like LocatePhone to uncover valuable insights about their geographical location in a matter of moments.
