Jacob Dirnhuber
MailOnline
Jacob was forced to teach himself how to find stories using only ingenuity and the internet in the first years of his career, after realising that physical limitations from his lifelong disability would prevent him from making it as an on-the-road tabloid reporter. He has spent the best part of a decade steadily developing this niche, with the ensuing public-interest stories leading to arrests for drug trafficking, espionage, fraud, and money laundering.
His work in the past year has seen him deliver a string of agenda-setting exclusives and hunt down international fugitives. He beat the FBI to suspected hitwoman Aimee Betro by using her Instagram stories to locate the rented Armenian flat where she had lived on the run for four years. And he used Twitter selfies to track former EDL leader Tommy Robinson to a five-star Cypriot hotel at the height of August’s disorder.
In July 2024, his investigation into suspected hitwoman-for-hire Aimee Betro led to her arrest in a dawn raid after four years on the run from the FBI, NCA, and West Midlands Police. She had been an international fugitive since September 2019 - when a jammed pistol allegedly foiled her attempted assassination of a businessman outside his home in Birmingham. After discovering her Instagram account through a mix of genealogy and follower analysis, Jacob needed just 24 hours to locate her one-bed flat on the outskirts of Armenia’s capital using pictures taken from her living room window.
In August 2024, he was temporarily forced into hiding after revealing that Tommy Robinson had fled Britain for a five-star resort in Cyprus. When Robinson posted that he was on a seven-hour layover, Jacob identified the airport as Vienna and used the estimated departure time to make a shortlist of likely destinations – one of which was Larnaca. After a gym video the next morning showed waterslides in the background, Jacob manually went through photos of every hotel in Cyprus with an on-site waterpark until he discovered where Robinson was staying. MailOnline's subsequent photograph of the former EDL leader stoking the post-Southport race riots from his sunbed became one of the defining images of this summer’s disorder, leading to death threats for Jacob and the other journalists involved and damaging Robinson’s credibility with a sizable number of far-right protestors.
That same month, Jacob used a combination of social media research, geolocation, facial analysis, and web scraping to help prove that the ‘superstar Axel’ who starred as Dr Who in a 2018 BBC Children in Need advert was Southport stabbing suspect Axel Rudakubana. After initial denials, the BBC and the casting agency that hired him conceded the identity when presented with overwhelming evidence collected by Jacob.