How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace

by Frank M. Ahearn

He never even noticed me, the unassuming guy with a gray ponytail and sunglasses trailing him about a dozen yards behind.

I told him that my name was Frank M. Ahearn and that for many years I had worked as something called a “skip tracer.” Clients paid me thousands of dollars to find people who were trying to hide: jailbirds, deadbeats, subpoenaed witnesses, the threatened and fearful, and just about anyone else you could think of who was trying to hide for whatever reasons they might have.

So I kept talking. I explained how I or another skip tracer would track him down. I’d call up his credit card company under a false pretense, claiming to

be him, saying that I needed to go over “my” recent credit card purchases and giving some made-up reason that sounded compelling.

After that, I’d begin calling the airlines—US Airways, Copa, American, all the companies that served Costa

Rica—until I’d located his flight information.

Then I’d look at customer records for car rental companies around the airport in San José. If he’d put down his real name and address, I’d be able to ...

We went over everything we would do to throw a smart pursuer off his trail. First, we’d delete or destroy all the information that was out there on him, or at least make it damn hard to find. Then we’d concoct

a bunch of deceptive leads that would send the pursuer on a wild-goose chase. Finally, we’d build a new life for him quickly and quietly, using a series of anonymous private mailboxes and prepaid phones. Because Eileen and I used public records, credit reports, utility statements, and people-search Web sites to do most of our skip-tracing work, we’d be pretty much out of luck if those

records were misleading or unavailable. We figured most other skip tracers would be, too. As we talked, we realized we were onto something. We had valuable advice to give people who wanted to disappear. Plenty of books on the topic were available to the curious, but none of them talked abo...

nothing to find someone if the price was right. As long as our skip-tracing techniques and tricks remained a secret, no o...

We thought that maybe they had overlooked our driveway. We might still have a few minutes. So while she tore through the yellow pages looking for a lawyer, I threw a laptop to the ground and started stomping on it. Then I yanked open a drawer full of prepaid cell phones and calling cards, stuffed them all into a bucket, and ran out onto

our lanai, flinging everything into the canal. My logic was this: If I was already going to jail, it wasn’t as though I’d get that much extra time for destroying evidence. And did I have some evidence to destroy.

And would you believe it wasn’t even the first time I’d destroyed everything I owned on a false alarm?

Ed had planned on heading to Costa Rica,

First, we altered or changed all the records that existed about him, including, of course, the frequent-buyer account he had at the bookstore where I met him. We created a bunch of false trails for his pursuers to follow, opening up accounts and persuading real estate companies to run checks on his credit in foreign countries where he had no interest in living.

Finally, we sent him to his new home in the most complicated way possible, putting him on a plane to Canada to fly to Jamaica to hop a puddle jumper to Anguilla, where he opened a bank account that he only kept temporarily. We opened an international corporation for him so he could bank anonymously and transferred his money over and over through a tangle of bank accounts

until it wasn’t clear where it had come from. Eventually, he and his money landed i...

I laughed away the young hotshots who wanted to hide their assets from the IRS, ignored rambling e-mails from schizophrenics convinced they were being bugged by the FBI, and said no thanks to a whole lot of undercover cops and kooks who believed

I ran some kind of international crime syndicate.

EscapeArtist.com, a Web site on offshore living.

skip tracer,

I caught tens of thousands of people by calling their banks, their phone companies, their mothers, their sisters, their friends. I’d chat up a few customer service representatives or coax a few nuggets of information out of family members and could get a target location so fast your head would spin.

Skip tracers are career liars who will pretend to be you or a close friend or family member so they can eke out everything customer service representatives, clerks, receptionists, and even your loved ones know about you.

Fight deception with deception.

Skip tracer, n.: a person who tracks people down and uncovers private information for a living. Targets include

jailbirds, deadbeats, subpoenaed witnesses, and just about anyone else who’s trying to hide.

liar for hire.

Pretext, n.: a lie or misleading excuse given to trick someone into providing sensitive information. In the above story, I offered the pretext that I was my boss and needed to know my phone records.

To pretext, v.: the act of finding out information through deception.

Your personal information is a valuable commodity, no matter who you are, and there will always be people interested in having it.

I was the best in the business. I succeeded because I had a devious and creative mind and I could

think outside the box about how to persuade people to give me what I wanted.

The information trade is just like any other business. The people who succeed have the cleverness to spot gaps in the market and the balls to fill those gaps themselves. The constant competition among skip tracers causes the good ones to get better and better every year.

there’s accurate information on you out there for skip tracers to find, they will find it, provided they have enough time and money.

Every “no” eventually leads to a “yes,” and if my employer had had enough money to hire me for several days, I could have found much more than just those folks’ criminal records.

FRANK’S RULES FOR SKIP TRACING • I could extract anything I wanted from a customer service representative on the phone, with the right attitude . . . or for the right price. Every no eventually led to a yes. • When I picked up the phone, I really believed I was who I claimed to be. As George Costanza said, “It’s not a lie

if you believe it!” I wasn’t afraid to get arrogant and ask for a supervisor if someone questioned my story. • I schmoozed a lot. If I was on the phone with an older woman, I told her my daughter was getting married. If it was a young guy, I shot the shit about my recent trip to the Caribbean with the boys or sucking down beer at a wet T-shirt contest. I took customer service reps away from their day to create a quick bond. • When I called a company

and received an automated system, I pressed 0, the magic button for a real person. When I got someone on the line, I did the Skip Trace Stutter. I said I c-c-couldn’t use the automated system because of my condition, and then I pretexted away. Or I busted out some Tourette’s syndrome. There was nothing like five “fucks” in a row to make so...

• I never asked straight out for what I needed. I didn’t say, “Hey, can I get my account number?” or “What’s my address again?” Instead, I devised elaborate setups so that my mark gave me the information I needed almost as an afterthought.

As long as companies have real live customer service representatives—and as a consumer, I hope they always do—all a good skip tracer needs is charm and a telephone.

First, the skip tracer will plunk down $20 for a prepaid cell phone and $19.95 for one of those online information searches that anyone can find by entering “background check” on Google. Those Web sites never ask why you’re looking for information about someone.

It all sounds too simple to be real, doesn’t it? But I promise you—this is really how skip tracing works. Not many people have the guts to call up random companies pretending to be someone else, so the people on

the other end of the line rarely think to ask questions when that happens. Even scarier is the fact that these tactics work with everyone—not just morons in customer service, but your friends and family members, too. That’s a fifth principle of skip tracing:

A good skip tracer will be able to get information from anyone who has it.

I ran a Skip Tracer’s Trifecta of searches: a motor vehicle search, a

credit report, and a criminal background check.

Then I tried the utility ...

Pouring the quarters in the box, I heard the sound of ringing and then a very sweet hello from his mother.

we don’t have to worry that our mistakes will come back to haunt us, since we use prepaid phones and credit cards and protect ourselves with other tactics, such as only using public wireless Internet.