A Lamborghini, a Street View curiosity, cryptocurrency and everything else

Instead of doing a write-up, I tried to visualize this case study. I’m no expert, but wanted to try this for a change and think it might help to understand some of the parallel research strings and gives you an overview of the tools involved.

So it all started with a tweet by a Quiztime follower who goes by the name of Il_Kanguru on Twitter, saying that he had discovered something odd while trying to geolocate a video involving a yellow Lamborghini.

Google’s Street View hasn’t been updated in Germany since it first came out, but by coincidence the place where the video was filmed was documented by another 360 degree image service on the very same day and the footage then uploaded to Google Maps. There were even the same people on the street.

So we dug deeper, looked for clues and discovered not only older and longer version of the video as well as the date the video was shot and the exact Lamborghini that was used, but also the agency that produced that video as a Guerilla marketing marketing tool for a new company’s dubious financial scheme involving crypto currency. They had also shot an updated, more polished version of the commercial later on. We even noticed a striking resemblance of the CEO of the agency involved with one of the actors in the spot … And for a time, we looked into possible connection to a well-known German comedian past his prime

This false lead is left out in the visualization above, but you can try to follow in the footsteps of our investigation, starting with the video. It involved:

• geolocating the place the video was filmed
• time-reverse image search (results filtered by date) and keyword search for the video, Sorry, no individual links this time
• determining a possible date using movie billboards, weather conditions and suncalc.org
• identifying the Lamborghini model and its owner using parts of the license plate visible in the video

One more thing to say: Said company’s ICO has been called of by the financial oversight authority in the meantime.