# Creating a Mr. Robot-Inspired Python Script for Username Recon

> By Johnathan Belcher — June 19, 2026 — 7 min read

As a cybersecurity student looking for something to fuel my interest in computer security, I found the show *Mr. Robot*, which accurately captures what it's like to use and deploy hacking tools. Inspired by the main character Elliot's scripting habits, I built some Python scripts of my own — nothing malicious, focused instead on OSINT (open-source intelligence).

## The Tool

The username recon tool checks several top social media sites for accounts matching a given username, printing "found" or "not found" for each site. The code mirrors what I'm learning in college: mostly `requests`-style HTTP checks for status codes and profile-indicating text, with Colorama added purely for terminal styling. I also added a "type out" effect and a decrypt animation, plus some ASCII art, for a movie-hacker feel.

## Requirements

Python packages: `requests`, `Colorama`, and `curl_cffi` (the latter two support checking social sites for the existence of a profile).

## Challenges

The main issue was checking Reddit, which sometimes throws a Cloudflare JS challenge. I partly worked around this with a function that impersonates a browser using `curl_cffi` and a solution derived from a seed found in the page's HTML — though this isn't 100% consistent and may still produce false positives/negatives.

## What I Learned

How to check social media sites for a profile's existence automatically using `requests` and `curl_cffi`, plus fun terminal techniques like type-out text effects and colored output with Colorama.

The script runs on Windows, Linux, WSL, and Git Bash.

[GitHub Repo](https://github.com/JohnB-LWF/username_recon) (includes setup instructions in the readme).