How To Disappear Completely

How To Disappear Completely: "

CSO interviews skip tracer Frank Ahearn about how to vanish from society, skipping off to a tropical island or a clean start in North Dakota, if you don’t want to be found. The key is to put out a flood of misinformation concerning your whereabouts and identity:

You can’t legally change an identity. Identities are kind of this myth. Where do you get one from? And how do you know where it’s from and that it hasn’t been given to fifty other people? Who knows if it’s on the Megan’s Law list or if it belongs to someone who owes the IRS $100,000?

But sometimes you can open a corporation, depending on what you do, and work on a 1099. So, what we do in a nutshell, is make you a virtual entity where you work for this corporation. You lease your apartment through this corporation, your electricity, your phone. Everything about you exists under the corporation. The address doesn’t have to be in the same city you’re in. The goal is to make you virtual and have you communicate virtually through this corporation.

What we use [social networking] for is to create confusion. You have to remember just because its online doesn’t mean it’s correct. Just like you can use social networking to find information about people, I can use social networking information to create disinformation about my clients. It’s all a matter of who is better at something.

We create bogus individuals around client names. One person could be a photographer, one person could be a chauffeur, or whatever. We develop about 15 to 20 web sites and create all these social media sites around you. Now if you are traveling somewhere and someone puts your name in, they are going to locate those 20 other people before they get to you, depending on how much information is known about you. And when you travel, you’ll have information about your photography business in your hotel room. That way, if someone is going through your room, they will realize you are Joe Blow the Photographer instead of Joe Blow the CEO. That is how we are starting to use misinformation online.

As another example, I worked with a woman who, if you entered her name online, the only thing that was known about her was that her father was selling his company for $45 million. That was a big threat. We took her name and took similar slices of information about her and built all these characters, fake individuals around her. That s becoming something more in demand with clients.