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

by Frank M. Ahearn

Skip tracers can make as many mistakes as they want when they’re trying to find you. All you need to make is one.

so remember the six principles I just taught you: • Your personal information is a valuable commodity, no matter who you are. At some point, someone will come looking for it. • Skip tracing is a business just like any other, and the constant competition among the people who work in the field causes them to outdo themselves and become better and

better every year. • If there is any accurate information out there for skip tracers to find, they will probably find it . . . if they’ve been paid enough. • All skip tracers need to succeed are charm and a telephone. • A good skip tracer will be able to get information out of anyone who has it, no matter how much those people love you and have your best interest at heart. • Skip tracers can make dozens of mistakes. You

don’t have the luxury of maki...

water and power

afford a computer,

Facebook and Twitter,

easy online b...

online customer service from...

electric ...

This chapter is all about why customer-friendly companies are not your friends. Also, you need to know that social media sites are the worst thing to happen to privacy since J. Edgar Hoover.

Fear any company that tries to make life easier for you.

Social networks and viral media are privacy’s worst enemies.

Social engineering, n.: 1. the act of acquiring sensitive information through cunning and conversation rather than brute force, trespass, or digital intrusion. 2. the study of cajoling information out of people. Social engineer, n.: one who

practices social engineering.

A-Z OF STUPID PLACES TO SPEND YOUR TIME AIM

Mixx Tumblr Bebo MySpace Twitter Blogger Netvibes TypePad Classmates Orkut Vimeo Delicious Picasa WordPress

Digg Propeller Xanga Flickr Reddit YouTube Google Talk RSS Ziki LinkedIn StumbleUpon

You never know if the people on your “friends” list are real.

A lot of people like Gary go on social sites to pursue a specific interest—in his case, romance.

Practice your hobbies in the real world, not online.

The Web site was registered offshore with a private registration paid via a prepaid credit card, and the phone number was

for a prepaid cell phone, so there was no way she could have traced them back to our little operation—not even if she’d thought about doing it and knew how.

Every single time we skip tracers find out anything about a target’s interests, we grin like idiots.

A bookworm will transfer his Amazon Prime account to his new address in Costa Rica.

Think before you hit “publish.” Even if you cancel your account later, what’s done on the Internet can never be undone.

Sometimes people have more than one LinkedIn profile and forget. Make sure you haven’t made duplicates.

even scarier is the fundamental lack of control an individual has over his or her own page on a social networking site.

Family and friends, corporations and nonprofits just throw your personal information up on the Web without a second thought to protecting your privacy. If you don’t believe me, just go to a Web site like Switchboard.com or Yahoo! People Search or BirthDatabase.com and see how much of your personal information is available there free of charge. Your address, your phone number, and probably your age are all there, if you haven’t specifically asked those companies to take down your information. Facebook and Twitter and Yahoo! are all well-meaning businesses. So are the utility and phone companies that bend over backward trying to beat the competition in customer service . . . and end up putting personal information within reach of anyone who thinks to extend an arm.

The kinder and nicer a company’s customer service representative is, the easier it is to pretext.

I’d just press 0—the skip tracer’s magic button—and talk to a friendly customer service representative.

Most of them are eager to help without much prompting. “I have not received my bill and need to know if I owe you anything,” I’d say. The rep would do her thing and tell me I owed fifty bucks. I’d ask for the mailing address she had on file: “Are you showing the

bill going to my home address or P.O. box?” The rep would answer, “We show the home address.” I’d cut in before she had a moment to think. “Do they have the address down correctly? I didn’t get the bill.” She’d almost always follow with the wonderful words of “We’ve got 1005 Fairview Lane . . .” or something like that. This worked most of the time. If it didn’t, I’d take it a step further and say, “Do you have my correct home or...

Sometimes I can only establish a connection with older female reps by saying that they sound like my dear mother, who’s just passed. Nothing like death to make someone uneasy and put them in a compassionate and helpful mode.

It’s been my experience that most cable companies keep account information by phone number, and most phone numbers are valid and up-to-date: If you want to watch a pay-per-view event, after all, your phone number has to be current.

Some phone and Internet companies are so nice that they’ll e-mail your account password to a random address if you “forget” it.

We realized that we could

easily access his accounts over e-mail, but he would receive a text message notification every time we did.

Think your man is cheating on you? Try to get access to his cell phone records. If he has a mistress, chances are she’s the first number he calls after he leaves the house in the morning and the last one he calls before he comes home at night.

I for one would never trade my peace of mind for a second career in illegal skip tracing.

All right, I think I’ve made it clear: If someone’s determined to find you and has the time and money to do so, that person is going to lie, cheat, and steal in relentless pursuit.

TIME FRAMES If you’re in a hurry to disappear, you might be wondering how long it will take to accomplish your goals according to my instructions. My answer is that it depends on your money and assets. The more you want to take with you when you disappear, the longer it’s going to take (assuming you want to keep

things legal, and I hope you do). If you’re trying to disappear with a lot of cash, you should allow yourself at least two to three months to prepare. If you’re footloose and fancy-free—that is, poor—you can be out the door in a month.

Think of yourself as

prey in the jungle: What are the three things you’ll need to do to escape your predator? You’ll need to camouflage yourself. You’ll need to send your predator running off in another direction. And you’ll need to find and build a safe new place to hide.

That’s more or less what disappearing is all about. It’s a three-step process that involves what we in the field call misinformat...

Identify and destroy everything that’s out there on you.

Start looking for yourself where I would start: a laptop connected to unsecured, public wireless Internet. Do not use your home Internet

connection.

Go to Zabasearch (www.zabasearch.com), a site also known as the skip tracer’s Promised Land.