The story of Jeffrey Epstein is so complicated and strange that following it will make you want to try to break your own hyoid bone with a prison bed sheet.


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From all the times he hung out with Bill Clinton, to the many celebrities who visited his island, to the former U.S. attorney in Miami Alexander Acosta claiming that he was told Epstein “belonged to intelligence,”  the layers of this story go so deep that the only reasonable response is to throw your hands up in the air and say, “Ha ha — we’re fucked.”


Unfortunately for our shared sanity, new details keep coming out about our pal Epstein, even though it’s been years since he took his own life just after happily telling his lawyer that he’d “see [him] on Sunday,” in a prison where the guards were asleep and the cameras weren’t working. Mental health is important, you guys!


This time around, the new details have less to do with Epstein himself and more to do with the people who visited his island. It turns out, there may have been more people dropping by than we previously understood — and with a little bit of sleuthing, we might be able to figure out who they are.


According to a brilliant new piece in WIRED, “Nearly 200 mobile devices of people who visited Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious ‘pedophile island’ in the years prior to his death left an invisible trail of data pointing back to their own homes and offices.”



To put it simply, there’s a company called Near Intelligence that identifies as a location data broker. The company uses the same systems that allow you to receive location-targeted ads to figure out details about anyone with a smartphone — a move that the company says has allowed them to amass “information on roughly 1.6 billion people in 44 countries.” As it turns out, some of those people ended up visiting Epstein’s island.


From as early as 2016, Near Intelligence was able to amass not only location data with regards to where people were coming from, but specific location data about where they went on the island and the areas that surrounded it.



“11,279 coordinates obtained by WIRED show not only a flood of traffic to Epstein’s island property — nearly a decade after his conviction as a sex offender — but also point to as many as 166 locations throughout the U.S. where Near Intelligence infers that visitors to Little St. James likely lived and worked,” write authors Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron. “The cache also points to cities in Ukraine, the Cayman Islands and Australia, among others.”


Before we all start demanding the full list, the piece notes that there also may be some victims caught in the mix here. Some of the coordinates discovered by Near Intelligence led to “lower-income areas where Epstein victims are known to have lived and attended school,” meaning that any big reveal of this info should take such details into consideration.



Still, there’s a lot of data to go through here. Near Intelligence claims they’re sitting on years’ worth of the stuff stretching as far back as 2016 and ending around the time that Epstein died. With just a little bit of work, it’s more than likely that we’ll be able to figure out many, many more people with internet-connected devices who went in and out of the island.


Is the fact that some random company can just collect this data frightening? Yes. But do I want to use this evil to figure out all of the people who went to Epstein’s island? You damn well know it — and I hope there’s a shot we’ll get to see all of that information soon.