Some tools designed for other purposes can also help you locate old accounts.
Hoffman built a tool that you can find at whatsmyname.app, where you can type in a username and see where it’s been used to make an account.
There are other options, such as checkusernames.com, knowem.com, and namecheck.com. You can search your username here as well, and they use a slightly different approach to find them. These sites exist mainly to help business people reserve brand and product names, but they can also help on your account hunt. If your usual username isn’t available on a given service, that may indicate that you have an account with it.
Hoffman cautions that the results aren’t always accurate but says the services are still valuable tools for your account search toolbox.
Next, go to HaveIBeenPwned, a website that can tell you whether your email address has been associated with a data breach. If it has, the culprit may happen to be a service you’ve forgotten about. Be sure to check your old or alternative email addresses, as well.
Last, try typing your name, usernames, and email addresses into a people search engine. These sites scrape social media websites, public records, and other sources of information, and aggregate the data in reports about individual people.
Privacy experts have raised a number of concerns about these services, but this is a case where you can use them to your advantage. Some of the search engines require payments, but a few have free options. These may point you to forgotten social media accounts.
