More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 7 - June 9, 2018
Use an Internet people search to find someone else who has the same first name as you, then call up the bookstore and say that you’ve moved, providing the other person’s address.
Delete all stored credit cards and addresses from your accounts with online retailers like Amazon and AbeBooks.
J. J. Luna’s How to Be Invisible.
A spoof card, which offers the ability to change what people see on their caller ID when you phone them. You can find these pretty easily by entering “spoof card” in Google. • Alibi services, which offer bogus alibis from travel agencies, hotels, seminars, and “employers.” These also
offer rescue calls for bad dates. The most famous company, Alibi Network (www.alibinetwork.com), has been featured on ABC News’s Nightline, the Today show, and elsewhere, but an Internet search will reveal dozens more. • Discreet voice mail services, which allow you to log in and send a voice mail that will go straight to a person’s mailbox without ringing her phone. • Guerrilla e-mail, which
is a disposable e-mail address that expires after an hour. Check out www.guerrillamail.com. • Digital mail, an increasingly popular service offered by several companies. Have your snail mail forwarded to one of these places, and it will digitize all your mail, so you can log in and look at it online. Earth Class Mail (www.earth...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
to send an e-mail that it will print out and send as a physical letter. • Freedom phones. Available in Asia, these phones have all tracking devices removed. They are more expensive than common phone carriers, but are useful if you need to be in frequent communication. You can find them now at www.ptshamrock.com/auto/freedomphone.htm, but sources for these will change with time, so your best bet is to start with a Google search. NOT RECOMMENDED: CAMOUFLAGE PASSPORTS As you prepare to disappear, you might come across Web sites selling “camouflage” or fake passports. Their makers tout them as
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
I feel the same way about camouflage passports as I feel about identity theft: not a good move.
You’re never going to be able to plunk down money for one state-of-the-art phone or computer and then enjoy worry-free security for the rest of your life. You’re going to need to build layers of deception and fight off pursuers with constant vigilance.
To be aware is to be alive.
No matter where you’re headed, be it across town or out of the country, don’t go straight there.
Become an entity with no traceable connections to people, places, or things.
recommend you find an apartment on Craigslist or a community bulletin board that posts apartments for rent.
Find a sublet if you can: It’s ideal because the apartment information stays in the name of the landlord or the renter you’re subletting from, not you.
If your life is in danger, however, go ahead and buy one. Just get it under the name of your corporation.
You might be thinking: Never? How am I going to check in on my best friend when she’s sick? Wish my little niece a happy birthday? Follow the latest news in my hometown? The short answer is: You’re not.
Keep it short, keep it unpredictable, and keep it infrequent.
Disappearing is a tough thing to undergo psychologically.
While it is possible to communicate after disappearing, safe communications require careful preparation. My client Denise, a victim of an abusive ex-husband, communicated with her family using prepaid phones that she changed every couple of
months and via a secret code she posted for them on free online classified pages. When she got a new prepaid cell phone, she’d post a specific car for sale: a Dodge. She’d write something like: “’98 Dodge with 95550 miles. Only 2 owners. Please call between 2 and 7 p.m.,” and she would be remiss in placing a contact number for the ad. When her family saw that ad, they’d know her
new contact number was (989) 555-0227. She couldn’t keep any one phone number for long, nor could she share her secret code with many of her friends, for fear they ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
I cashed a check and slid a $50 bill to the teller. “This is yours if you give me the password to the check service,” I said. She smiled and took the fifty. I cannot begin to tell you how many people I located, and how many bank accounts I pierced, with one toll-free number and six digits.
The only way you can spend securely is through a prepaid credit card.
Disappearing without a trace takes money.
No matter where you’re working, if your employers made you sign an IRS form when you were hired, you’re vulnerable to pretext.
DISAPPEARING ON A BUDGET A lot of you reading this book will feel overwhelmed by the cost of disappearing. Mail drops, prepaid phones, calling cards, plane tickets, private investigators, disinformation trips to random cities—all of these cost money. The cost of disinformation and reformation can easily climb into the thousands.
Keep in mind that misinformation costs little to nothing, since all you’re doing is calling up banks and Web sites and customer service departments to change your information.
Flexible on your location? Look for a reasonable off-season vacation rental, such as a place on Myrtle Beach in the winter. I’ve seen hotel rooms there going for as little as $18/night when no tourists are around.
One very cool travel trend that’s cropped up in recent years is the proliferation of Web sites like www.couchsurfing.org and www.hospitalityclub.org, on which people volunteer their couches and spare bedrooms free of charge to travelers from all over the world.
Another client did computer consulting and could not work off the books, so his brother set up a company that allowed him to work under its name. At the end of each year, my client filed his taxes and his brother dissolved the corporation, paying and filing its taxes. Then the brother set up a new corporation in a different state.
Wherever you’re going, you do not want to leave bad credit behind. Do the best you can to pay what needs to be paid. Remember, FICO is a four-letter word.
Do not toss your bills into the wind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation: “A man in debt is so far a slave.”
DRIVING Any pursuer with half a brain will regularly check your motor vehicle record. You can’t be Joe the bus driver in Albany and become Joe the bus driver in Oshkosh, because you’ll have to transfer your driver’s license. Nor can you safely
switch your driver’s license to your new location, even though most states require that you do. Nor can you ever get pulled over by a cop. So what do you do? First, drive safely. Always check your lights and tires before you drive, don’t make illegal turns, and obey the speed limit so that a cop never needs to pull you over. Second, drive with evidence that helps you
explain why you can’t transfer your driver’s license ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
If you have children, their school records are a huge liability. Many, many people have been located by investigators and authorities when they ordered their children’s school records transferred to a new district or signed their children up at a new school.
My suggestion to Charlie was that he open a corporation and live under the radar until he could pay his debt. Charlie obtained a Main Drop, Bluff Box, Safe Box, and Burn Box a few towns away from where he lived and began to assemble his disappearing tools. He sent his prepaid phones, prepaid credit cards, and information about his other boxes to his Main Drop. He never brought any of that information into his house or office, because he knew his predators might break in and find it there. Once Charlie opened his boxes, it was time for him to find a corporation he could exist under. He searched
...more
from home or an Internet cafe, but from the streets. He went to a bookstore in another town and made handwritten notes from a few business books. He decided he wanted to open a corporation in Wyoming. He contacted a company that did incorporations, and it e-mailed him all of the papers he needed to fill out. Charlie used a generic name for his corporation,
like AAA Acme or something. He gave the state of Wyoming his Main Drop and a JConnect virtual phone number as his contact information. He paid for the corporation with a prepaid credit card. Because of the ongoing demands of his business deals, Charlie had to be in contact with clients ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
line, since it was in the Rolodexes of so many important contacts. So he purchased several prepaid cell phones, making sure to pick companies from smaller carriers without customer service departments, huge national databases, and 24/7 help lines. We took Charlie’s...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
a prepaid phone. Then we used call forwarding again to send that phone’s calls to a second prepaid phone. A skip tracer who pretexted Charlie’s main cell phone company might have been able to get the number the phone was forwarded to, and if he was successful at that, h...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
For added security, he used a spoof card, which changed the number that appeared on clients’ caller IDs to one based in the United Kingdom. Any client who saw his caller ID or pressed *69 would believe Charlie was in the U.K.
This chapter is about all the mistakes you can make on your way to a life among the disappeared, and stealing an identity is mistake No. 1.
Assuming a false identity is a bad idea.
A popular yet morbid way to obtain a new identity was via a cemetery search:
From there, you would obtain a birth certificate, a Social Security number, and other identifiers in the child’s name, and presto, you’d have a brand spanking new identity.
Avoid people who sell fake documents on the Web: They don’t know what they’re doing.
You need to assume that everyone you contact is either law enforcement or will drop a dime on you to law enforcement.
The only way you can test your new identity papers is to use them.
