Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mburnamfink 's review for:
How To Disappear is very analog tradecraft for the rest of us. Ahearn is a former skiptracer, and he now works the other side, helping people disappear. While the image might be glamorously faking your own death to live on a tropical beach, the real world of not being found is a lot of scared and abused women.
Ahearn's basic method as a skiptracer was pretext calling. He'd call up various company, utilities being particularly vulnerable, pretend to be his target, and get their current account details. Occasionally this required some creativity: a classic car enthusiast couldn't go without a magazine subscription, but on the whole customer service representatives are easily fooled.
Companies have a lot of data on you, most of which they don't actually need. Getting this data deleted is hard, so it's much easier to make small 'corrections' to your personal information. Misspell your name, transpose digits in your social security number, update your address to a PO box, set your phone number to a pizza place.
But going off the grid entirely is hard, so you need to begin setting up new legitimate services, using prepaid cellphones and PO boxes as cut outs. Ahearn is frustratingly vague on the details of working a job and paying rent while disappeared (I guess he doesn't want to give away his whole business in the book), but the safest thing to do is to incorporate a company with a generic name and have it serve as your cut out to the financial world. And while you're setting up a legitimate hidey hole, investigate as many dummies as possible, leaving dead-end bread crumbs for skiptracers.
The final bit of disappearing as anyone who has watched Monty Python knows, is not to stand up you idiot. Don't use your any social media service. Don't log in to anything with an account that can be tied to you. Don't contact people from your old life. If there's close family who you absolutely can't cut contact with, use a series of automatically forwarded cellphones to communicate. As with intelligence tradecraft, it isn't hard, it just takes time, money, and a lot of discipline. More discipline. No, more than that. You really can't be too disciplined.
How to Disappear isn't that old of a book, but it feels older, and much more resolutely analog than something published in 2010. But Ahearn is an amusing raconteur, which smooths over some of the rough spots.
Ahearn's basic method as a skiptracer was pretext calling. He'd call up various company, utilities being particularly vulnerable, pretend to be his target, and get their current account details. Occasionally this required some creativity: a classic car enthusiast couldn't go without a magazine subscription, but on the whole customer service representatives are easily fooled.
Companies have a lot of data on you, most of which they don't actually need. Getting this data deleted is hard, so it's much easier to make small 'corrections' to your personal information. Misspell your name, transpose digits in your social security number, update your address to a PO box, set your phone number to a pizza place.
But going off the grid entirely is hard, so you need to begin setting up new legitimate services, using prepaid cellphones and PO boxes as cut outs. Ahearn is frustratingly vague on the details of working a job and paying rent while disappeared (I guess he doesn't want to give away his whole business in the book), but the safest thing to do is to incorporate a company with a generic name and have it serve as your cut out to the financial world. And while you're setting up a legitimate hidey hole, investigate as many dummies as possible, leaving dead-end bread crumbs for skiptracers.
The final bit of disappearing as anyone who has watched Monty Python knows, is not to stand up you idiot. Don't use your any social media service. Don't log in to anything with an account that can be tied to you. Don't contact people from your old life. If there's close family who you absolutely can't cut contact with, use a series of automatically forwarded cellphones to communicate. As with intelligence tradecraft, it isn't hard, it just takes time, money, and a lot of discipline. More discipline. No, more than that. You really can't be too disciplined.
How to Disappear isn't that old of a book, but it feels older, and much more resolutely analog than something published in 2010. But Ahearn is an amusing raconteur, which smooths over some of the rough spots.