Maybe a completely naive question: Insurance companies seem to be one of the main entities interested in tracking such people down, and are pretty big, regulated companies. Meanwhile, some of the "unlicensed investigators" interviewed in the article openly admit to doing illegal things in their investigations, like obtaining phone records by impersonating phone company employees. Seems a bit brazen. Are there enough intermediaries to somehow give the big companies plausible deniability? Or do police just not care to crack down on this arrangement?
When I worked in insurance, our HIPAA training indicated we could call a doctor and ask questions and pay the claim based on information obtained by phone. But we could also be told we needed to send a written request and HIPAA compliant authorization.
For that and other reasons, I suspect jobs like private investigator exist precisely because they don't have to comply with the same rules as, say, the police.
Reading further:
Frank Ahearn is ....a skip tracer (i.e., unlicensed investigator) who has worked to find missing people when a private investigator can’t do so legally.
> The HIPAA Privacy Rule protects the individually identifiable health information about a decedent for 50 years following the date of death of the individual.
You don’t have to explain how you found someone. They can’t get one of your steps declared inadmissible and then have a second chance at running. I don’t see how the police would know, unless the phone company detected and reported it.
You do sometimes see news stories about police officers getting caught selling DMV database queries to PIs.
Are there enough intermediaries
to somehow give the big companies
plausible deniability?
In the News International phone hacking scandal [1] the likes of Rebekah Brooks shredded a bunch of documents as investigators were closing in, then claimed they had no idea how their journalists had found all those otherwise-inexplicable scoops. As a punishment she was.... paid £10 million to resign, then hired back 4 years later.
Using intermediaries for deniability works, simple as that.
I often think about the tactics I'd use and would be interested in comparing notes with others, but always worry that publishing a plan would preclude me from every using it if I were desperate. Ha!
> With a team like that, Rambam says he has a near 100 percent effectiveness rate at finding people, usually within a few weeks of their death (although sometimes, unfortunately, it turns out that the people he’s looking for actually are dead). Even so, he says he’s never been stumped.
> “Some investigations have been pretty tedious,” he says. “Some have been time-consuming, but only because the person went to the trouble of going from one country to another multiple times. I’ve basically had to follow the trail of breadcrumbs, but it wasn’t cleverness that helped them hide. It was just that they were internationally mobile weasels to begin with. If you have resources, you can disappear for a certain amount of time. But no one can disappear forever.”
That sounds pretty bold. Could it be that he exaggerates the truth as advertisement for his service?
It does seem like a bit of an unfalsifiable claim. "We are 100% certain to catch you if you fake your death... of course we might just find out you're not faking."
I'm pretty sure he's bullshitting. Even the Mossad couldn't track down every high-profile Nazi after the war, and often took years to find even the ones they did find.
Back then they didn't have the technology and networks we do today.
Social media facial recognition is a game-changer for this kind of thing. You'd have to live as a hermit if you attempted to fake your death, because if you're in the background of a photo uploaded to the internet, game over.
Facebook'll do it for you. Create a profile, upload a few photos of the subject, and they may start alerting you that you've been tagged in others' photos.
Not necessarily. It needs to be a photo depicting you clearly enough along with ideally other photos containing you, and the person has to be able to search by faces on that dataset.
I believe e.g. Facebook will try to automatically suggest tags for faces, but I don't think something like Twitter makes those recommendations.
FWIW, Frank Abagnale Jr (the guy depicted in the movie "Catch Me If You Can") was asked whether he thought it'd be harder for him to do what he did with technology as it is today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMydMDi3rI
He suggested that technology makes it easier for the fraudster to come up with the right details, whereas he often had to bluff when he was defrauding people.
Jobs paid cash and did not need I-9s with E-Verify. There was no TSA Secure Flight database query for every airline ticket. You could forge a passport without breaking RSA. Landlords didn’t insist on running your credit. Photos and surveillance footage only moved by hand and could only be searched manually. The license plate from a car on the freeway only hit a database if a patrolman read it with his eyes and spoke it into his radio. There were no audio, video, GPS, and RF devices in people’s pockets.
If you broke out of prison in the 60s, you might have actually started a new life. Almost no one makes it past the first year anymore.
Not quite. For the first few months after he went on the lam in late 1994 sure, but after that the old Winter Hill gang went to pieces as the indictments started raining down and he was pretty much dependent on the resources he himself had piled up before hitting the road. The whole point wad to avoid all contact with old friends. It was how it took the FBI until 2011 to catch him, this very lack of network contact.
There wasn't much interest in finding whitey until after all the people he could have told "interesting" (true) stories about had retired with their pensions.
Mail out gold to an intermediate destination or better yet use cryptocurrency. Buy a vehicle with cash and sneak across the border or be in a country that has open borders with another. Have a destination where you can live with cash for a while and use that time to acquire an identity. Don't log into any online account or call anyone from your old life. It is pretty straight forward but I bet most people would leave a million digital breadcrumbs. There are tons of places you could disappear to that nobody would notice or care who you were just get there with cash.
You also dont have to go far and dont need much cash. In Germany the last generation of the Red Army Faction is still on the run and from time to time makes it into the news for robbing a money courier. The other former members of RAF, RZ and co who were caught a few years ago lived rather ordinary lifes in the French countryside. Once you severed all ties to your former life and your looks changed over time you are good. Bulger was only caught after someone recognized him due to persistent media coverage and alerted the FBI.
I don't know, I'd rather not have people serving life sentences periodically spending up to a year on the lam and adding to their tally with little fear of repercussions. The high likelihood of being re-captured cuts both ways.
Back then there was no lightning-fast international network other than horribly expensive international phone lines, no Internet, no tracking devices better known as cellphones, no national registries searchable in split-seconds. There were not many regulations on international transport as long as you had a decently forged passport. Additionally, there was a lot of support from e.g. church networks that helped out fleeing Nazis. Even the Mossad has its limits.
Well, it's a little hard to make the math on this other claim work out: Steven Rambam, a blunt-talking, New York P.I. who’s helped locate tens of thousands of missing and dubiously dead people over the course of his 40-year career
20,000/(40 * 365) = 1.3 found per day for 40 years. Maybe there are large groups faking their deaths at the same time?
I'm not totally sure who fucked up that, but his website says this:
> Since 1981, our investigators have conducted more than one thousand (1,000) missing person investigations, with a better than 90% successful closure rate.
I used to bowl competitively, every bowler has a fairly unique and recognizable style. I always kind of figured this would be enough to catch me if I ever went on the lam. You could put a wig on someone, change facial hair, even plastic surgery-- there's no hiding the ball's delivery.
In a weird way, if you intentionally lose your personality traits, skills, love, passion completely and thoroughly, then perhaps you really have "killed yourself".
It's a cost a person pays and a million dollars probably ain't enough to a lot of people compared to the missed opportunity cost.
I maintain that the correct spelling is "fuccboi", not "fuckboi" since the latter is an anglicisation of the original. In other words, the Crips-style spelling or the way Asians tend to spell it (the first time I ever heard this word was in the Philippines, where it is common).
We've moving into the real of digitizing fingerprints, faces, DNA and everything else into databases.
Soon, faking your own death will be almost impossible. Maybe you can move to that remote village in France, but you aren't getting on a plane or a cruise to get there.
One day when I was homeless, I spent part of the day reading stories about intentional disappearances. I was fascinated by some of the parallels to homelessness in terms of both logistics for how to survive (relying on gift cards and prepaid phones) and that homelessness can be a form of social death to a surprising degree.
I blogged* a bit about it, but rereading the piece makes me feel like I didn't do a good job of really capturing my impressions. Perhaps I'll do an update sometime.
For anyone interested looking into a recent case with some publicity:
Gerald Cotten was the CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange. It was reported that he died while traveling abroad due to health complications and was cremated where he died. He was the only person who had the private keys for the exchange's coins, and the coins went missing.
I think that’s the conspiracy theory version. He died in India (and admittedly some details were strange), but AFAIK the body was returned to Canada before being cremated.
The lost keys nonsense has all evaporated. It was just a standard Ponzi scheme [1]. Had it all been planned, I would assume they’d have left things in a less disastrous state (Gerald and his co-conspirators).
Maybe he did it because things got so disastrous that he couldn't think of any other way out.
> If he looks into it further and finds out that the person who vanished in that water was in serious debt or that they were “some kind of reluctant witness or litigant who has the resources to disappear in a puff of smoke,” he says it’s “just the most obvious thing. We see it all the time.”
Maybe. I have a hard time believing that someone smart enough to set up the whole exchange and run it couldn’t think of a better way to make a clean exit and not leave an enormous mess for his wife. She would need to help, bringing the “body” back to Canada, testifying about the hospital and what happened, etc. So the bet is she can handle everything, claim she wasn’t involved, and after a few years go and join Gerry in India somewhere? That’s a fools plan.
Then again, most criminals aren’t smart. Maybe he was just lucky for a while.
It’s possible, but I still think it’s more likely that everything was going to shit for a while and he happened to die. If he hadn’t died, given the BTC rally this year and renewed interest, he probably would have had a fresh infusion of capital and we might not even know!
So many questions on this article. That don't get answers.
1/ If they claim they will find you. How many suspicious claims are there? How many get found? Would have loved some statistics going with the juicy anecdotes.
2/ If there are so many people working on it. Doing even shady things. How much money is there to be made? Is it a percentage of the claim?
Here's a scenario I've always been curious about. One day, a person decides to just walk away. Not fake their own death, per se, but just says that they're going hiking and disappears.
Years go by, the family genuinely thinks the person is dead, they collect life insurance money and spend it on various things, as you do.
Years later, the person shows back up alive. The family didn't do anything wrong, they genuinely thought the person was dead. The "missing" person didn't really break any laws, just ran away from their family for a few years.
Can the insurance company try to recoup the money from anyone? If so, who and how does that work?
"... but won’t in insurance fraud. “You have to have an actual body to collect on insurance,” says Ahearn. “And it has to be the body of the insured. Ashes are not a body.”"
It sounds like you can't just get insurance money for a missing person.
Twenty years ago the industry was suffering an onslaught of fraud. People would claim a person had died and was disposed of via cremation or there was no body at all, etc. I am no expert and the fellow quoted is clearly engaging in a bit of hyperbole, but one has to assume the bar is much higher than it used to be.
"A millionaire model agency boss who is thought to have key information about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal 'has disappeared like a ghost without a trace'. Jean-Luc Brunel, 72, has vanished as police seek to ask the Frenchman 'urgent' questions about the paedophile."
> “You have to have an actual body to collect on insurance,” says Ahearn. “And it has to be the body of the insured. Ashes are not a body.”
Absolutely false. An obvious counterexample is that the "victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks received more than $38 billion in compensation"[1], even though, as of 2015, "40% of those who died are unidentified".[2]
The article itself gives a counterexample: "In 2002, a British man named John Darwin “disappeared” in a canoeing accident only to be discovered five years later with his wife in Panama. Apparently, she’d cashed his life insurance policy to pay off their mortgage."
And if it were true, insurance companies would simply say, "no body, so payment denied". They wouldn't rush to hire a skip tracer as the article claims: "remains don’t turn up within a few weeks of their disappearance, that’s when insurance companies start blowing up his phone".
When the author primarily interviews insurance company representatives, of course they’re going to use the opportunity to lie a little bit in their favor :P
>Ahearn tells me he’s spent a large part of his career working as a “really good liar,” manipulating people and situations into giving him information about the people he was tracking down... [snip] “All a skip tracer needs is charm and a telephone,” he told the Believer in 2012, explaining that he could access any record by pretending to be someone else and providing false pretenses. In investigator-speak, this is called “pretexting,” a form of social engineering in which someone lies to obtain privileged information. Skip tracers and P.I.s do it all the time.
>Let’s say a client wanted the phone records of a dead person who might not have actually been dead. Ahearn would call up their phone company pretending to be an employee from a different department, and tell them his system was down and he needed to bring up an account for date of activation. More often than not, Ahearn would sound confident, and he’d have just the right amount of information that whoever on the end of the end would give him the name, account number or passcode he needed to get in.
Am I missing something or is this named individual really stating that he and his compatriots regularly break the law? I understand that PIs may play around the lines a bit, but this seems egregious.
Its not fraud, at least not as federally defined because that only covers money, property, or "depriv[ing] another of the intangible right of honest services". It does not cover information.
I always take people saying things like that with a grain of salt.
If the job is easily done (i.e. legally) then anyone can do it. If you have to break that law that's a way of advertising that you're motivated in the extreme - "I'll do anything for my client up to and beyond breaking the law"
> With a team like that, Rambam says he has a near 100 percent effectiveness rate at finding people...
I'm not sure how one could measure this.
> I’m always amazed at how infrequently people use cash for this shit.
Maybe more of them do but they also get away. From the article I get the impression that these investigators just aim for the low-hanging fruit. There are enough of them to make a living.
>> With a team like that, Rambam says he has a near 100 percent effectiveness rate at finding people...
> I'm not sure how one could measure this.
You have a number of people you investigate N. You have a number of people who you find to be actually dead D, and a number of people who are fake dead F. Then there are some unknowns U.
F + D + U = N
If (F + D) / N is near 1, you have a near 100 percent effectiveness.
The question is how can you be confident that the cases you’re putting into category D don’t actually belong in category U. The investigator is tasked with finding people who faked their own death; how can you tell the difference between a successful con and the person you’re looking for actually being deceased?
So you have near 100% of effectiveness if you find near 100% of them, dead or alive. Given that there are probably a significant number of cases where the person is actually dead and never find their corpse I doubt that near 100% effectiveness can ever be claimed.
Also I expect this effectiveness to be defined as (found out fakers)/(all fakers), and it's pretty damn hard to predict the number of fakers you know nothing about. Maybe one can introduce fake fakers to measure the investigators, but it's also susceptible to all kind of biases.
>Then there are the people who do it to escape from themselves — they don’t like who they are or who they’ve become, and they want a fresh start in a place where no one knows their name. They don’t do much planning. They don’t concern themselves with the ramifications. They just disappear and don’t look back. Experts call this “pseudocide.”
I wish them the best of luck against the nannys of the world screaming after them to "get back here and fit your life into my database schema!"
So, it would be fairly simple to hide your death if you're content to have a new life, without any money or resources from the old one. Wash dishes in a diner in Montana, attend the rodeo, live above a bar - if you want to check out of society, it'd be no problem.
90 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadWhen I worked in insurance, our HIPAA training indicated we could call a doctor and ask questions and pay the claim based on information obtained by phone. But we could also be told we needed to send a written request and HIPAA compliant authorization.
For that and other reasons, I suspect jobs like private investigator exist precisely because they don't have to comply with the same rules as, say, the police.
Reading further:
Frank Ahearn is ....a skip tracer (i.e., unlicensed investigator) who has worked to find missing people when a private investigator can’t do so legally.
> The HIPAA Privacy Rule protects the individually identifiable health information about a decedent for 50 years following the date of death of the individual.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance...
You do sometimes see news stories about police officers getting caught selling DMV database queries to PIs.
Using intermediaries for deniability works, simple as that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...
I was surprised at to what lengths some people were willing to go to fake their own death as well as to why they did so.
It kind of gave me the same sensation as “it’d be fun to try and rob a bank to see if I could pull it off.”
...Not that I’m planning on doing either, if you’re reading this FBI / Life Insurance Agent.
> “Some investigations have been pretty tedious,” he says. “Some have been time-consuming, but only because the person went to the trouble of going from one country to another multiple times. I’ve basically had to follow the trail of breadcrumbs, but it wasn’t cleverness that helped them hide. It was just that they were internationally mobile weasels to begin with. If you have resources, you can disappear for a certain amount of time. But no one can disappear forever.”
That sounds pretty bold. Could it be that he exaggerates the truth as advertisement for his service?
Or those people are really that good at faking their death.
But even still, the closing statement made me feel more claustrophobic that I'd like to admit.
Social media facial recognition is a game-changer for this kind of thing. You'd have to live as a hermit if you attempted to fake your death, because if you're in the background of a photo uploaded to the internet, game over.
https://www.facebook.com/help/122175507864081
> Here are some examples of how Facebook may use face recognition:
> Let you know when you might appear in photos or videos but haven't been tagged.
A good investigator is likely gonna find that a few friends-of-friends of the "deceased" play Mafia Wars and accept every friend request.
I believe e.g. Facebook will try to automatically suggest tags for faces, but I don't think something like Twitter makes those recommendations.
He suggested that technology makes it easier for the fraudster to come up with the right details, whereas he often had to bluff when he was defrauding people.
If you broke out of prison in the 60s, you might have actually started a new life. Almost no one makes it past the first year anymore.
Which suggests the prisons don't need to be as escape-proof.
20,000/(40 * 365) = 1.3 found per day for 40 years. Maybe there are large groups faking their deaths at the same time?
> Since 1981, our investigators have conducted more than one thousand (1,000) missing person investigations, with a better than 90% successful closure rate.
http://pallorium.com/News.html
I used to bowl competitively, every bowler has a fairly unique and recognizable style. I always kind of figured this would be enough to catch me if I ever went on the lam. You could put a wig on someone, change facial hair, even plastic surgery-- there's no hiding the ball's delivery.
It's a cost a person pays and a million dollars probably ain't enough to a lot of people compared to the missed opportunity cost.
What could have possessed the author to publish this phrase?
[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90217210/dollar-shave-clubs-mens...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_McDermott
Soon, faking your own death will be almost impossible. Maybe you can move to that remote village in France, but you aren't getting on a plane or a cruise to get there.
I blogged* a bit about it, but rereading the piece makes me feel like I didn't do a good job of really capturing my impressions. Perhaps I'll do an update sometime.
* https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/05/l...
Gerald Cotten was the CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange. It was reported that he died while traveling abroad due to health complications and was cremated where he died. He was the only person who had the private keys for the exchange's coins, and the coins went missing.
The lost keys nonsense has all evaporated. It was just a standard Ponzi scheme [1]. Had it all been planned, I would assume they’d have left things in a less disastrous state (Gerald and his co-conspirators).
[1] https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fin...
> If he looks into it further and finds out that the person who vanished in that water was in serious debt or that they were “some kind of reluctant witness or litigant who has the resources to disappear in a puff of smoke,” he says it’s “just the most obvious thing. We see it all the time.”
Then again, most criminals aren’t smart. Maybe he was just lucky for a while.
It’s possible, but I still think it’s more likely that everything was going to shit for a while and he happened to die. If he hadn’t died, given the BTC rally this year and renewed interest, he probably would have had a fresh infusion of capital and we might not even know!
1/ If they claim they will find you. How many suspicious claims are there? How many get found? Would have loved some statistics going with the juicy anecdotes.
2/ If there are so many people working on it. Doing even shady things. How much money is there to be made? Is it a percentage of the claim?
Years go by, the family genuinely thinks the person is dead, they collect life insurance money and spend it on various things, as you do.
Years later, the person shows back up alive. The family didn't do anything wrong, they genuinely thought the person was dead. The "missing" person didn't really break any laws, just ran away from their family for a few years.
Can the insurance company try to recoup the money from anyone? If so, who and how does that work?
It would depend on a great many factors though.
It sounds like you can't just get insurance money for a missing person.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/01/business/fake-deaths-abro...
"A millionaire model agency boss who is thought to have key information about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal 'has disappeared like a ghost without a trace'. Jean-Luc Brunel, 72, has vanished as police seek to ask the Frenchman 'urgent' questions about the paedophile."
Ref: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7417633/Millionaire...
Absolutely false. An obvious counterexample is that the "victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks received more than $38 billion in compensation"[1], even though, as of 2015, "40% of those who died are unidentified".[2]
The article itself gives a counterexample: "In 2002, a British man named John Darwin “disappeared” in a canoeing accident only to be discovered five years later with his wife in Panama. Apparently, she’d cashed his life insurance policy to pay off their mortgage."
And if it were true, insurance companies would simply say, "no body, so payment denied". They wouldn't rush to hire a skip tracer as the article claims: "remains don’t turn up within a few weeks of their disappearance, that’s when insurance companies start blowing up his phone".
The article is very muddled on this point.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/la-110804compensation_lat-story.html
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/08/remains-911-...
>Let’s say a client wanted the phone records of a dead person who might not have actually been dead. Ahearn would call up their phone company pretending to be an employee from a different department, and tell them his system was down and he needed to bring up an account for date of activation. More often than not, Ahearn would sound confident, and he’d have just the right amount of information that whoever on the end of the end would give him the name, account number or passcode he needed to get in.
Am I missing something or is this named individual really stating that he and his compatriots regularly break the law? I understand that PIs may play around the lines a bit, but this seems egregious.
Such pretexting is a fairly typical beginning for social engineering "hacks" we hear about all the time.
I'm pretty sure saying you've committed a crime doesn't send you to jail automatically - otherwise every gangster rapper would be in jail :)
Any lawbreaking involved is done in service of the system, he has nothing to fear from doing it or publicly admitting to it.
If the job is easily done (i.e. legally) then anyone can do it. If you have to break that law that's a way of advertising that you're motivated in the extreme - "I'll do anything for my client up to and beyond breaking the law"
I'm not sure how one could measure this.
> I’m always amazed at how infrequently people use cash for this shit.
Maybe more of them do but they also get away. From the article I get the impression that these investigators just aim for the low-hanging fruit. There are enough of them to make a living.
> I'm not sure how one could measure this.
You have a number of people you investigate N. You have a number of people who you find to be actually dead D, and a number of people who are fake dead F. Then there are some unknowns U.
F + D + U = N
If (F + D) / N is near 1, you have a near 100 percent effectiveness.
D also, you can check teeth, DNA, fingerprints etc if you find them.
U is mainly people where you don't find them or their body.
Also I expect this effectiveness to be defined as (found out fakers)/(all fakers), and it's pretty damn hard to predict the number of fakers you know nothing about. Maybe one can introduce fake fakers to measure the investigators, but it's also susceptible to all kind of biases.
I wish them the best of luck against the nannys of the world screaming after them to "get back here and fit your life into my database schema!"