After high school Higgins studied media technology at Southampton Institute for Higher Education. He ultimately dropped out and became interested in investigative journalism after some years of working administrative jobs. At this point he had already been blogging under the pseudonym ‘Brown Moses’. Whilst watching something on the conflict in Lybia in 2011, Higgins noticed the great amount of relevant information posted on social media that got ignored because it couldn’t be verified. This was the first time he applied the ‘Bellingcat method,’ which means cunningly combining footage, maps and other online information to answer questions on serious subjects such as bombardments and assassinations.

This raised Higgins’ enthusiasm for the job after which he founded Bellingcat. These days the investigation initiative has dozens of organizations and philanthropists to fund its actitivies and has grown to a renowned collective. Famous and influential investigations of the website include the ones on the War in Ukraine, the crash of MH-17, the Syrian Civil War, the Yemeni Civil War and the poisoning of the supposed Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

Higgins and Bellingcat are currently preoccupied with lots of similar investigations and other projects. Amongst these, Higgins is mainly excited about the development of a reverse-image search for online videos.