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June 7 - June 9, 2018
Your “hook” is a piece of information you create on purpose for a hunter to find. It looks real and will excite a skip tracer when he finds it. Perhaps you’ll express interest in a home loan or an apartment rental or a credit card, causing someone to run an inquiry on your credit report.
We had Vera apply for utilities and phone
service for the apartment she visited—even though she was not moving in, nor would she be there to activate the services.
The telephone company from which Vera applied for phone service asked for employment information and a contact phone number. We located a large company
that was in the area and used that as her employment address. Then we used a contact phone for the same company—but at another location, in a different city.
That was our sinker: a clue so wild that it would take a private investigator years to get her head around it. If Team Jailbird managed to acquire either set of phone records, they’d see bank numbers and think they’d hit the start of Vera’s money trail. Perhaps the private investigator would call the banks and make the very illegal move of pretending to be Vera. She’d find an active account at one of the places she called and think, bingo. We’ve got her now. Then she’d extract withdrawal records and see the following: ATM $20.00 St. Louis, MO ATM $30.00 Chicago, IL ATM $10.00 Las Vegas, NV ATM
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My first move was to locate an escort in Miami and explain that I had a client who was interested in putting her up in a place and paying all of her living expenses.
I located an apartment in a building with a doorman and had Louie rent the place and set up cable, utilities, and a phone line in his name.
I had a Miami relocation packet sent to Louie’s old place; we had purposefully refrained from starting mail forwarding at that place.
We assumed Louie’s son would hire a private investigator.
In no time, he could extract Louie’s address and phone number using the simple pretext of: “Hi, this is Louie Hotdog, and I may owe you money on my bill—can you check for me?”
She also admitted that she had never met Louie; she gave him a contact phone number. The phone number was smack in the middle of Florida.
We had had the phone company install a construction line on a rural piece of property, and we used a remote call-forwarding service to program the son’s home phone number.
Don’t be cheap. What’s more important, your cash or your privacy?
but do whatever you can. Open a small checking account and give the ATM card to a traveling friend. Fly out to some random city to look at apartments and meet real estate agents, and have them run a credit check. Make some long-distance phone calls to banks and employers in another city.
Order a big old box of peaches from Dickey Farms and send it in your name to some random workplace. Take a tour of CNN studios and send the pictures back to your old house.
Call-forwarding services are your best friend.
Nothing builds layers of deception faster than a labyrinth of phone numbers—and if a skip tracer manages to navigate the maze, there’s no better way to shout, “Leave me the hell alone.”
Another person might choose to forward a fake number to a battered women’s shelter—or a police station. That will get any self-preserving criminal off your trail.
PREPAID CREDIT CARDS
Say good-bye to your old cell phone. It’s one of your biggest vulnerabilities,
Since phone companies are so easy to pretext, it’s vital that you learn to communicate with prepaid phones, which are available from pretty much any wireless store.
Whenever you buy a prepaid cell phone, “accidentally” misspell your name if you are required to register the phone, and make your address as hard to read as possible.
Prepaid phones are not a foolproof way to communicate. You should think of them as slightly safer than a standard cell phone or landline, but not 100 percent secure.
the records from the cell towers showed us at what speed and in which direction the client was moving. This information didn’t come from a GPS receiver; it came from the cell towers. Removing the GPS device from your phone is not going to make you untraceable.
consult the owner’s manual for how to set up the call-forwarding feature, and program the phone to forward to your mother’s. Then: smash! Take the battery out, stomp on the Break Phone, and dump it. Go back to a different wireless store, buy a different Break
Phone, and repeat the above, programming it to forward to your sister’s number. Now you need to buy a third phone and a prepaid calling card—from a third wireless store, preferably after a long drive. Buy a fresh prepaid phone and calling card. From the Fresh Phone, use the prepaid calling card to call the prepaid Break Phone belonging to your mother or your
sister—whomever you’re...
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Eventually, someone will pick up the Fresh Phone and the calling card and use them. If the call to your mother is traced, it will first be
traced to the toll-free number of the prepaid calling card. Then it will go to the Break Phone. From the Break Phone a skip tracer will have to locate the incoming calls to locate the Fresh Phone, which is now being used by someone roaming the streets. It’s a great diversion.
You can get one from JConnect (www.jconnect.com). These numbers let you collect voice mail delivered to the e-mail of your choice. You can get faxes on JConnect, too, or via Efax (www.efax.com). These numbers are a great tool: You can set them up online and in a hurry. They’re not too expensive, either. Right now, a phone line on JConnect costs $19.95 a month—and you can purchase a phone number anywhere in the world. Want to convince someone you’re in Paris? No problem—just buy a local Paris phone number and leak it to your pursuer through disinformation.
MAIL DROPS If you don’t want someone to know where you live or where you’re headed, you’re going to need an anonymous place to receive mail.
When you open the Main Drop, pay in advance with a prepaid credit card. A year’s worth of payment is best.
TIP: DON’T USE A P.O. BOX Don’t open a mailbox at a post office. The U.S. Postal Service is an easy place to obtain information. Most people who have or had P.O. boxes have resided in that zip code.
A good skip tracer could run your name or identifiers from there, using the phone, utility, or cable TV company to locate a current or closed account.
If you’re about to leave the state or the country, use this Main Drop to store documents, your prepaid phone, your prepaid credit cards, your new lease, and bank statements from your new accounts. Every time you buy something you intend to use when you disappear, mail those items to your Main Drop. Use bogus return addresses from all over the globe when you send things to yourself.
Now, from an Internet cafe, search online for another mail drop. Secure this one from an e-mail address you set up specifically for this purpose—you should be setting up a new e-mail address for every mail drop you buy.
When you’ve located a suitable Burn Box, buy another prepaid credit card and load it with enough money to pay for a few months for the Burn Box (how many exactly depends on how much mail you’re going to need to receive before you relocate). Use separate prepaid credit cards for every mail drop you buy.
suggest dropping the credit card in a mall or on the bus or in a store, letting some stranger use the card elsewhere, creating a false trail.
Give them the address to your Main Drop; do not write clearly, and perhaps make a typo. Make a one look like a seven and a four look like a nine,
Go online—not using your home connection—and post information about your location on a message board, a free classified ad site, or a blog you’ve just created via a free, anonymous blog service. Post or create a blog using an e-mail address you’ve created specifically for this purpose. • Post your information in a way you’ll recognize, but disguise the details. For instance, if you have a mailbox at 642 Fake Street, Orlando, Florida, you could post “Women’s shoes, size 6, and matching skirt, Euro size 42. Fake designer. Ships from Orlando” on a free classified ad site. • Use several sites and
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Remember: Always keep track of your information locations in a notebook and keep that notebook with you at all times.
You will now have four mailboxes: the Main Drop, the Burn Box, the Safe Box, and the Bluff Box.
As you prepare to disappear, you’re going to be acquiring lots of information, including contracts, guidebooks, forms, and paperwork for an anonymous corporation you might decide to create
When it’s time to hit the road, you can acquire the information you need safely by calling up the people who provide your Main Drop and giving them specific instructions: Have your Cincinnati return address mail packed in one overnight package to your Bluff Box. Your Baltimore return address packages are your dump mail, so have them sent via regular mail to the Bluff Box as well. As you wait for these packages, thicken the plot for whoever manages to pretext your Main Drop by sending as many real estate pamphlets, utility applications, and relocation kits as possible to the Main Drop—using
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CORPORATIONS I highly recommend you establish a corporation and transfer your lease, car loan, utilities, and whatever else is legally possible to its name.
KEYWORDS FOR BUILDING YOUR CORPORATION “Anonymous Corporations” “Shelf Corporations” “Nominee Corporations” “Delaware Corporations” “Offshore Corporations” “Nevada Corporations” “International Business Corporations”
You can start a corporation for a couple of hundred dollars on a site like LegalZoom.com or TheNevadaCompany.com.
Never print anything when you’re at a cafe, as cafe printers log what you print and when.
keep a notebook of all your own information—e-mail addresses, P.O. boxes, cell phone numbers, special accounts, etc.; it’s easy to lose your way.)
