Faking your death | Hacker News Reader

Faking your death

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384 pointspanic214 comments

Reminds me of a DefCon speaker that talked about exploiting a bunch of websites to order death and birth certificates. Really eye opening, and potentially devastating if it's done to you.

Edit: https://youtu.be/9FdHq3WfJgs

A few of that here in New Zealand. People pick a grave of someone who would have been their age (ideally a baby as they won't have many documents associated with them). Get a birth certificate and use that to get more documenta. A member of parliament did it once. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Garrett_(politician)

I haven't watched it yet, but most defcon social engineering talks take advantage of this innate thing in human nature that just assumes you're authentic. Probably because it's infinitesimally rare that someone is trying to run a con. Can be quite sobering, but at the same time, it's nice to know most people try to help others (even at the haste of security).

Well, you should have watched it first because your comment isn't relevant.

The talk is about exploiting terrible digital security, not social engineering.

Your comment is overly aggressive and rude - it has no place in a community like this.

Not sure if you caught this, but swalsh's comment starts with:

  "I haven't watched it yet..."

TheDong's not saying "RTFA" nor is he aggressive and rude.

...

I've always been curious what happens if your records get hacked or accidentally lost/changed. How do you allow people to correct problems here without leaving it open to exploits?

I'm guessing you're asked to prove who you are with data from lots of different departments (e.g. employers, passport office, bank)?

Sorry to link to vice.com, but this article about the US "dead people database" was quite interesting. The database (predictably) gets things wrong occasionally because people mistype an SSN or whatever, and when that happens to you it seems to be very difficult to fix it: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/how-living-people-are-wrongfu...

what's wrong with linking vice as a source?

Well I was reading it, so I suppose I don't think it's that bad :-( However it is generally lightweight "yoof" nonsense.

Vice is arguably the most ambitious and credible investigatory broadcast news organization on the planet these days, save perhaps the BBC.

It also opens itself up to peddling tripe for talentless hacks that have no business reporting the news much less writing tacky blog posts.

Some of Vice is ambitious and credible, I was a huge fan of their Ukrainian Conflict investigative coverage and watched it regularly, but like I said Vice does peddle tripe.

To be fair, tripe packaged clearly as "tripe" is fine, and has a place in my kitchen.

This is an excellent point.

Fun article. The idea of faking your death has probably occurred to a lot of people in military service.

It sure did in my case--it only took two days of basic training to make clear that signing up for the US Air Force was the worst mistake of a heretofore untroubled life. It's gratifying to see my proposed method (an untimely hiking accident) so highly praised.

Just out of curiosity for anybody who has gone through this exercise what method(s) did you consider? Extra points for originality.

Funny you mention two days of basic training being your worst mistake.

My biggest problem with basic was keeping myself from laughing out loud at the various antics. Once I was able to control that urge, it was pretty straightforward. I saw it, essentially, as six weeks of necessary bullshit that allowed me to get to the next level.

My term in the USAF as a 3C0X2 (computer programmer) was fantastically beneficial. I'd already been programming for over a decade when I went in. But the installation I landed at allowed me to really learn in a lot of new directions.

Having said that, I know a lot of folks that had a far less productive time. But it's still a pretty good way to bootstrap a life independent from family, in my opinion at least. The money from the GI bill is very valuable, plus, with some measure of self control, single Airmen can save up a ton of money, since the USAF pays in full for food, housing and medical.

I did compulsory service, and the most important lessons for me from it are:

1) You get (well, are forced) to mingle and cooperate with people outside your "circle" and bubble (of course this is truer for compulsory service).

2) You are in place where no one treats you like a "unique snowflake".

3) You get to do all the shit people usually have their parents, mothers, cleaning services, etc do for them, even more so than when merely living alone, because there you are forced to do it, and to do it for 100s of people.

Yes, this is all well stated.

In basic training, I ended up being very close to a lot of different people that I would have otherwise never come in contact with, to that level.

And in my opinion, this is a very healthy thing.

One thing I'd like to share that cracks me up, all these years later. Pardon the forthcoming ramble.

I had been handling guns from a pretty early age, but I was still looking forward to training on the M-16.

Well, at least in the early 90s, there is exactly one (1) day of weapons training in USAF basic training.

In the morning, we got on a bus and went to the ass-end of Lackland AFB where the gun ranges were. We then received our weapons, with no ammo in sight, and 'trained' on them in several hours of classes.

Note, this classroom was just a classroom, with desks, with the normal classroom density. And so 50 young men and women were sitting at desks with M-16s. And, on various cadences, we all held them up, put the clip in, simulated chambering a round, aimed, and pulled the trigger.

But we had to aim...kind of up and to our left. Because we were never suppose to point the weapon at another person we didn't mean to shoot, loaded or otherwise.

It was an absolutely absurd scene.

Many of my class-mates were openly afraid of handling these weapons, and it showed.

After lunch we marched, weapons slung, over to the firing range. We were to each fire sixty rounds that day. The first thirty were warmup/practice. The second 30 were for qualification. We each lay supine with the weapon on sandbags. Only then were each of us handed three rounds each, which we pushed into the clip. And then we fired those three rounds.

The young lady next to me was terrified of guns, and had never touched one. I noticed that she was closing her eyes before each shot.

After we fired our 30 rounds into the targets, our final scores were calculated. My target had 30 holes tightly grouped in the middle. But there was another hole, off all by itself, right on the edge of the target.

Somehow I managed to score 31 out of 30 that day, though it was recorded as 30.

The young lady next to me repeated 'gun day' twice more, with different flights (groups), before she qualified.

Sorry for the ramble!

The real punch line came when I asked my training instructor, later on, why we bothered with only a single day of weapon training.

He laughed out loud and said something like, fuck if I know. Think about it, Diederich. What do you think would be going on if Airmen were forced to actually use their weapons against an enemy. The war would already be over!

Indeed! The USAF: where the best chance of direct enemy contact comes from becoming one of the few tens of thousands of officers who actually venture into enemy territory on occasion. The 'grunts', the enlisted, no way.

Yeah, I thought the same thing when I joined as a 3C0x2 in 99. 10 years later I was still a 3C0x2 (3D0x4 by then I think, I got out shortly after the AFSC changed), but I was attached to an Army infantry unit (3-1 INF) in Afghanistan as part of the ILO, or in lieu of, program where they would take an Airman from a similar career field in lieu of a soldier. They later renamed it to JET, joint expeditionary tasking. I experienced direct enemy contact as an enlisted Air Force computer programmer. About half of our 80-person team was AF, most in on-the-fob support roles like services and supply, but the mechanics, medics, and civil engineers that were out with us every day were all AF, and all enlisted except two of the CE folks.

> The 'grunts', the enlisted, no way.

This was less the case in the past fifteen years, where USAF personnel in certain career fields were often pressed into Army roles. Particularly in convoy and military police operations, the Army had overextended itself and needed the other branches to fill in the gaps of trained personnel.

For most airmen, it can be years before you're even considered for deployment. Less than a year into my enlistment as a Security Forces airman, I was sent to be a prison guard ("detainee operations") at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. There were Army and Navy personnel, but most of their guards were troops put into a role outside of their usual training...a couple years prior such non-police "augmentee" soldiers without proper use-of-force training were involved in the torture incident in the prison at Abu Ghraib.

Yeah, I was aware of this, but didn't mention it.

During Desert Storm, one of my computer programmer co-workers got yanked to a nearby base where he received a two week crash-course on being an airforce cop, so that the actual airforce cops could deploy to Saudi Arabia.

An 'airforce cop' is basically the same thing as a civilian cop. They drive around on base in police-looking cars, hand out speeding tickets and handle the occasional drunk and disorderly.

He had some pretty funny stories about how many strange situations he found himself in, given his abject lack of directly relevant training.

Fortunately, the goings on in nearly all USAF bases are exceedingly lawful, so his situations were always funny and WTF instead of dangerous.

> Fortunately, the goings on in nearly all USAF bases are exceedingly lawful, so his situations were always funny and WTF instead of dangerous.

That was my experience doing state-side law enforcement at a Space Command base - night shift was especially fun for the weird calls, like complainants worried about "satellites orbiting San Bernardino County" and the "glowing red airship" suspiciously near some antenna arrays with the usual air collision beacons. The usual response was to refer them to public affairs as our office was strictly limited to a terrestrial jurisdiction.

Definitely more lighthearted than being downrange.

> We each lay supine with the weapon on sandbags.

Really? It seems like lying on your back would bring substantial disadvantages and no advantages?

I saw a guy do it once at the range, but he was mainly just showing off. The position is well described in [1], which may be of interest to you if you're not solely poking at the grandparent commenter's having confused 'supine' with 'prone'.

[1] http://firearmshistory.blogspot.com/2012/03/rifle-shooting-p...

> if you're not solely poking at the grandparent commenter's having confused 'supine' with 'prone'

In my experience, people commonly use "lie prone" to mean basically any position, but nobody knows the word "supine" except in its technical meaning contrasting with "prone". Thus, I thought this was worth clarifying; I'd be happy to assume that someone using "prone" in a context that heavily suggested another position just didn't think of "prone" as referring to any position in particular; that seemed like an odd assumption for "supine".

Do you have a suggestion for wording the question so as not to sound insulting?

I'm not sure I do; I read it as smart-alecky because that's what it would have been had I written it, but on reflection I don't suppose you meant it that way, and I didn't intend to suggest in my response that I thought yours insulting.

I suppose I did come off a bit unduly bitchy, though, and I'm sorry for that. Some weeks go by in a moment; others feel like they drag on for months. This last was one of the latter sort, but there was no call for me to go and take that out on you.

Damn! Yes, definitely not laying on our backs.

Did your M16 have a .22 insert so you did rifle practice with .22 shorts for ammunition? This apparently helped Lackland save money but meant shooting practice was a lot less fun than some of us had hoped. (We had .22s at home to keep the woodchucks down.)

On the other hand the rifle disassembly and cleaning was taught by a woman who knew the weapon inside and out. She was excellent and a lot more soldierly than any of the dweebs in my flight.

We were using the real deal ammo, though we heard talk about how they were moving to the smaller rounds.

Right...it was my experience that the actual teachers and trainers were pretty cool compared to the TIs. Fortunately, our two primary TIs were among the most chill. Our sister flight's senior TI was terrible.

In the RAAF basic training we have our weapons for almost two months, at all times. We have to piquet them at night and weekends, hang them up when we shower, have them slung when we brush our teeth... Clean them daily, do all our marching drills with them. But we still only fire live rounds for one day! Weapons are a total pain to care for I never want to own one myself.

Yeah people have different reactions to such an odd environment. I had a really bad time the first two weeks of Army basic training, but by week 3 I was actually kind of having a good time with it, in an odd sort of way. Everything still hurt really bad, but it was also kind of hilarious and was glad I stuck it through to the end.

Didn't make an extended career out of it, but my years there gave me a needed boost of confidence.

Right. As I said elsewhere, I think that for a big percentage of young people, doing a term in the US military would be a big personal win.

For a lot of the young folk in my flight, the confidence they gained by getting through even the wimpy USAF basic training was very valuable.

And there are quite a few other benefits as well.

I had a very similar experience to yours -- I was also a programmer and likewise saved up a bunch of money for grad school. I even got my BA while in the service thanks to generous education subsidies to active duty personnel. As for not laughing well most of us have been there. That feeling lasts well beyond basic training.

Even though I started this thread by talking about wanting to fake my death being in the military was overall a very good experience. As somebody else already said down-thread it forces you to mix with a wide variety of people, something we don't do nearly enough as a society. For that reason alone I think it would beneficial to bring back the draft though perhaps minus the part about fighting wars all over the place.

Mandatory civil service could be an alternative to the armed forces, for those that don't want to be involved in fighting. In fact, I would like to see a civil service branch patterned after the military branches (or maybe similar to the peace corp), which would be primarily responsible for all infrastructure projects (road / bridge building, govt. office positions, IT services, etc). This would be an excellent way to get young people who are out of high school into the workforce. Then if they can't find private work after their 2-year civil service stint, they can always re-enlist.

We used to have that in Germany when there was still mandatory military service a few years back.

For historical reasons, refusing to serve with a weapon was very common, and in this case one had to serve an equal time in the civil sector, such as help out in a kindergarten, hospital or old people's home. There was a lot of complaining after the service was abolished due to the missing very cheap labour.

I was an officer, but went to Officer Training School (OTS) which is a 12-week boot camp kind of approach, and I came to post similar thoughts. My dad was in the AF so I knew there was some level of BS to deal with, and just put up with it until I finished. I looked at it as a small price to pay to have an opportunity to get out in the world and do something better with my life which has paid massive dividends ever since.

Yup! I heard from officers later on, most of whom were prior enlisted, that OTS was a lot more rigorous than enlisted basic.

It's all way less of a pain than Army and especially Marine basic, of course.

I honestly think that for a big percentage of young people, doing a term in the military would be a big personal win.

> My biggest problem with basic was keeping myself from laughing out loud at the various antics.

My dad (ex military) said that ages <= 18 will buy the bootcamp bullshit. 19 and over won't, but will have enough sense to go along with it.

It was a mix. At 24, I was the second oldest person in my flight. Most of the others were at least somewhat emotionally affected by the bullshit.

3. Don't Answer Comment Threads Asking for Advice on How to Fake Your Own Death

Yeah, back when I thought about this (I'll disappear, and _then_ my ex will be sorry! 19 year olds aren't overly wise) the plan was to disappear while tramping (hiking). Although making it authentic would be hard - you'd have to pick an area where it's too dangerous to thoroughly search by foot, if they can get in there with dog trained to find corpses, then they'll be able to discount the area - and you have to be able to leave sign that makes it look like you entered that area, but not leave sign that showed you exited. Footprints are the big one here, so my thoughts were to exit on deer trails in socks, carefully.

There's also a few rivers I know of that have a reputation for keeping bodies - one of them[1] took my brother-in-law about five years ago and there's been no sign of him since. But, it's a bit harder to do that one and exit the river without anyone seeing you.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_River

Plenty of people have disappeared in the bush in NZ and have never been found.

Out of curiosity, what were the biggest differences in your expectations vs reality of basic training?

I've never been in the military so I don't know how accurate pop culture portrayals are, but I never got the impression it was supposed to be a walk in the park...

The biggest surprise was the feeling of being trapped. In the US military you volunteer for a period of years and once you sign up you are in for that long unless you get kicked out (really bad and career limiting), get discharged for administrative reasons (unusual at least in my day), or die (see above). This only fully sinks in after a few days of basic training.

My service was a while back during the second cold war, which was actually pretty peaceful for the US military. The wars in the Middle East have added whole new dimension that I cannot comment on from personal experience.

I've never seriously considered it, though there were times during my previous marriage that no one would have faulted me for trying. That said, if I were going to it would be hiking or camping, outside of the state I'm in now, and I would have to prepare incrementally over a year or so. Buying or making survival gear, stuffing away $5 at a time here and there, and preparing myself to live off the land for the foreseeable future.

The reason I say that is because it's becoming much more difficult to be a "nobody" in an urban environment. You can only disappear until your first run-in with police. Even if you've never been arrested you're still in the system.

Yet, many people staying illegally in a country manage to live in cities (yes, they aren't in the system, but that isn't advantageous, as 'not being in the system' already is a cause for locking you up)

The trick indeed is avoiding any run-in with the government. If there's one group of people who never jay-walk and always have a valid ticket in public transport, it's illegal aliens.

Except cities don't arrest people for being in the country illegally. Most don't hold them after they serve their time for minor crimes.

That depends on the country. If citizens are obliged to carry an ID, any finable offense, no matter how small, can trigger the more severe offense of not being able to show ID. When subsequent research leads to the discovery that one doesn't have an ID, it can get you locked up or kicked out of the country.

In the US, some will call the correct authorities. Others simply refuse to spend their money on it.

But the bigger risk is that committing a minor crime puts you into the system. I'm going to guess it is quite easy to assume that getting arrested or fined puts you closer to being caught than not doing so. One is likely taking risk daily just by working and renting an apartment, depending on circumstance. (Naturally, some landlords don't really get information and some jobs skirt legal requirements.)

Heck, even as a legal immigrant, I'm pretty careful not to break laws that I can easily avoid breaking. I know a traffic ticket won't get me sent back to the US, but I'd rather stay on the safe side.

> You can only disappear until your first run-in with police. Even if you've never been arrested you're still in the system.

I'm not sure about the comparative odds of having a run-in with the police in a busy urban environment, vs. living off land you don't own.

I'm basing that on what I've seen of police interactions with homeless people in the cities versus my own experiences hunting, hiking, and camping. If you're out in the woods in a place you have a right to be, and you appear to know what you're doing, the ranger will usually just make sure you look like you'll live through the night. By contrast, a homeless person is likely to face a presumption of guilt in a city cop's eyes and at the very least be questioned, which can lead to identity issues. A ranger is likely to just say "carry on" without asking for ID if you're just camping.

That said, it's a good idea to not haunt a particular area too long, city or countryside.

I'm going to assume you know more about this than I do, because I know virtually nothing; I just sort of blindly assumed that you'd build a semi-permanent shelter and do some light farming in the area - but like I said, what I know about survival I learned from a handful of television shows.

I also know that it didn't look particularly fun, either - I think given my options, I'd rather be homeless in a city rather than homeless in the wilderness.

Well, if you're not hiding your identity and you just want to live off the land, go ahead and sell your investments and car and buy some acreage to homestead. It's a rough life but it's doable and enjoyable if you have the right mindset. If you're hiding your identity, you don't want to put down roots; a nomadic lifestyle is a must.

Personally I'm the opposite of you, I grew up playing in the woods and living on a farm so I'd be at home in the wilderness. In the city I'd be too paranoid to be comfortable, especially if I didn't want people to know who I was.

There's also the middle ground: Hike/hitchhike your way across the country, getting as far from "home" as you can. Find a small town or a farm where you can work for cash/room and board, don't ask too many questions and don't answer too many. After a few months or so, move on to another small town and start over. It's a hybrid lifestyle that may work for some people, keeps you mostly incognito but still near the comforts of modern life.

The middle ground sounds like it would be a pleasant way to spend some time, but I think I probably missed my chance for awhile, given that I've got a seven month old at home now :P

Seems pretty clear to me that being a legal nobody is pretty non-viable long term. If you were really going to do something like that, you'd have to build a new identity from scratch for yourself that's good enough to stand up to at least basic interaction with police and government agencies.

Couldn't you just fail basic training?

From what I saw in basic training (94-96, Army: Cavalry Scout), the people trying to fail made it 10x worse for them.

Yep. Honestly the only sure-fire way of getting kicked out of army basic it seems is to either repeatedly fail rifle qual, or to repeatedly fail the final PT test. And by the time you get to either, its clear that the easiest way out is to just do your thing and graduate.

When my father went through US Army basic training during the Cold War era the recruit next to him couldn't pass rifle qualification. So the drill sergeant just took that guy's ammo away, gave half to my dad and half to the recruit on the other side, and told them to shoot his target. Presumably standards are a little stricter now.

I dunno. What could be easier than failing a marksmanship test or a PT? What are they going to do, charge you with sandbagging? How do they prove that you really can shoot accurately or do X # of pullups?

For that matter, you could always go full Munchausen, and make yourself genuinely sick or weak.

I think the idea is that you get recycled a couple of times into a new platoon, until you fail enough times that they cut their losses.

But being stuck in BCT for endless cycle after cycle seems like a special kind of hell.

Why would you purposefully try to fail at a proficiency test? This is like wondering why a toddler doesn't continue to throw a fit when it doesn't get it's way. You don't do it it because it makes everyone around you think you're an incompetent fool, and they will actively get in your way at every step. It's social suicide.

Why would you purposefully try to fail at a proficiency test?

E.g., you change your mind about joining the military. You can't resign or run away, so your best option might be to convince them that you're more trouble than you're worth.

In other words, if you actively want everyone around you to think you're an incompetent fool, then deliberately washing out of boot camp is the sort of thing you might try. I don't see why it wouldn't work. Refusing to accept the training would get you court-martialed, but you can't charge someone with just being a lousy shot, can you?

Basic is designed around two guiding principles; instilling fundamental military skills, and social coercion to instill compliance. I don't mean the latter in a derogatory way at all. Think about it; who in their right mind wants to expose themselves to small arms fire, etc etc? Basic training has a lot of experience dealing with people "who don't want to be there." Now it's become a lot softer compared to during the Cold War; we have to treat everyone as a special snowflake, and a lot of the old methodologies have become proscribed. But if the military let out everyone who decided (during basic) that signing on the dotted line was a mistake, the system wouldn't work.

It would work. But you're going to be treated like scum for months, and that's enough of a deterrent for most people.

You could do that, but no one would care. Feel sick? Too bad. If you have actual physical symptoms like a fever, then they'll give you some meds and back to work. I saw a guy complain of a migraine, given two bags of iv because he must have been dehydrated. If you're sick you don't see a dr, you see the medics, and they have to refer you to the dr, which they won't.

You really are trapped, and the only way out is even more painful or results in a criminal record. That was my experience, us army 98 to 02

The point is repeatedly failing a test - and every failure means that you get sent back to a few weeks of hard and unpleasant stuff before getting another chance to try again.

> it only took two days of basic training to make clear that signing up for the US Air Force was the worst mistake of a heretofore untroubled life

Was it really impossible to just put your hand up and say "uh, guys, I made a mistake, can we please forget about it?"

I mean, what were the consequences of you just sitting on the ground and refusing, or even just walking out of the place? Do they physically own you like a prison?

In the Australian military there is a cooling off period and you can do just that for the first few weeks. One person from my course signed up and never got on the bus (changed his mind in like 3 hours). Another quit on the second day. If you AWOL in that first week or two they aren't going to waste resources chasing you, because they don't want you back anyway.

Yes, it's called desertion, and penalties are pretty serious.

http://military.findlaw.com/criminal-law/failure-to-report-f...

Yeah, you're pretty much stuck. Come to think of it, there's no reason you should be. Asking someone to commit to something like military service before trying the (degrading) training is total BS. If they think letting people leave in the middle would loose them too many recruits, they might actually have to start training people humanely.

You realize a huge part of basic is getting people to be capable of functioning for an in stressful situations?

True - although I feel like every other job that deals with high stress situations finds other ways to give people that training. Also you can always drop out.

At least in combat MOS, there aren't very many comparable civilian jobs that train in a "friendly" manner. SWAT and HRT (FBI) often have former servicemen who have already learned or been trained to deal with combat situations.

Well, if you try to simply walk out of the place they can and will stop you at gunpoint, and can imprison you without resorting to the civilian justice system - the military can try, convict and punish you on their own according to their own regulations.

A variant of this that I heard used to be a problem in India: have someone else declared dead. It can be remarkably hard to fix the problems created in a bureaucracy when that happens.

http://newsok.com/article/3044137

This came up in Ohio, with the judge ruling a man dead despite his appearing in court to contest to decision.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/10/10/jud...

To misquote Babbage, "I cannot comprehend the confusion of mind that would bring someone to such a decision" .....

edit: oh. The guy went to court to specifically undo a ruling that was over 10 years old, that would have caused his ex-wife to owe the government a lot of "unfairly claimed" benefits. I'm less confused now.

A good rule of thumb is: if you ever see something in the media that cannot possibly be true, it really isn't true - it's just the media doing above-average fact twisting on the story.

It literally is true, though. As I said, and the paper reported: the guy was ruled dead, came before a judge and asked for the judgement to be revoked, and the judge told him "I don’t know where that leaves you, but you’re still deceased as far as the law is concerned".

The issue here was that the guy had disappeared for a long time, and been declared dead in full accordance with the law. That specific law didn't have a clause to help reverse wrongful declarations of death, so the judge had to let it stand.

The relevance of the ten year and back payments is mostly that it decreased sympathy for the guy, not that it changed the outcome.

But it actually is true in this case.

Even if actually true, the context explains the entire difference between what was said and what was expected.

Reminds me of an experiment on ants that I once heard of. Put a drop of the pheromone produced by dead ants on a live worker, and watch as the others dutifully carry her to the trash pile, despite the fact that she keeps protesting and going back to work.

I hope they washed her off afterwards. Poor little ant :-(

At least the solution was more straightforward for Ulysses.

Literally straightforward, through a dozen axe heads.

It would be helpful to give a relevant quote (as well as the link):

"[He was a French astronomer whose] ship was caught in a storm and dropped him off at Île Bourbon (Réunion), where he had to wait until a Spanish ship took him home. He finally arrived in Paris in October 1771, having been away for eleven years, only to find that he had been declared legally dead and been replaced in the Royal Academy of Sciences. His wife had remarried, and all his relatives had 'enthusiastically plundered his estate'. Lengthy litigation and the intervention of the king were ultimately required before things were normalized. He got back his seat in the academy, remarried, and lived apparently happily for another 21 years."

Pretty reasonable to believe he was dead. Plundered is the wrong word, if you are gone for 11 years.

It could be a reasonable word choice depending on what they did with the estate. Legally the new owners would be free to do whatever they like, but you could see how some things would be considered more respectful than others.

There's also a form of fraud where one reports one's own dead if a parent dies. Advantage is that keeping the parent 'alive', pension payments continue.

Rumor has it that some of the claims of "world's oldest person" actually are due to this form of fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato

"Computers don't argue" by Gordon R. Dickson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue

"Nobody Starves" by Ron Goulart

There's another absolute classic in this line, about a punchcard error that leaves a man officially dead...but I can't quite recall its name.

> punchcard error that leaves a man officially dead

This sounds similar to the Terry Gilliam film _Brazil_.

"When a fly gets jammed in a printer and results in the incarceration and accidental death during interrogation of cobbler Archibald Buttle – instead of renegade air conditioning specialist and suspected terrorist Archibald Tuttle – Sam is assigned the task of rectifying the error."

Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

Not just there, though I'm sure it's horrendously painful to navigate as officious a bureaucracy as India's can be. A friend in Kansas has two — very much alive — special needs children, one of whom, he was informed in a very brusque letter from the state agency that helps them out, had died, and that benefits would therefore cease forthwith.

It took weeks to sort that out.

Reminds me of the MASH episode "The Late Captain Pierce":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Captain_Pierce

Problem in the US too, "Being Declared Dead By The Social Security Administration Is Very Inconvenient... the Social Security Administration accidentally declares about 9,000 people living in the United States dead every year."

https://consumerist.com/2015/05/04/being-declared-dead-by-th...

>A group of private investigators hired by Dateline NBC located McDermott when they noticed a centralized cluster of IP addresses originating near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, all clicking onto a site dedicated to tracing his whereabouts.

Protip, use a VPN/Tor and incognito mode preferably on someone else's Wifi with a burner laptop you bought from Craigslist with cash while Googling your crimes. I've heard of murder/kidnapping suspects being found out this way as well.

... or really, just resist the urge to Google your crimes.

It seems that Google searches do not aid in identifying murderers but once they have been identified Google searches certainly seem to help convict them.

It's not a murder but...

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/20/the-long-ar...

>The cerebral Gundlach also gave investigators a tip for solving the crime. He says that while he was at home in his family room, it dawned on him that thieves would do a Google search using his grandmother’s name to find out more about the paintings and how much they might be worth... Gundlach told the authorities that they should check the Internet to see who might have googled the name Helen Fuchs. He says exactly two such searches were executed: one by him and one by the thieves.

That's just from a quick Google. I've heard of criminals becoming suspects from Googling crimes before they become public, it's not that hard to identify an early or frequent Googler in most cases especially if they are logged in.

MSN maps and dialup RADIUS logs put a murderer in prison at one point. It turned out nobody else had printed a map of the area the body was hidden.[0]

[0] http://murderpedia.org/male.T/t/travis-maury.htm

Really interesting story thanks for sharing.

thanks. I worked on the MSN/UUNET RADIUS implementation in the late 90s, so that particular capture has stuck with me

Very interesting, although they were lucky it was very niche.

Or...you know, just don't keep visiting the website of the people who're trying to track you down? Googling wasn't what got him caught.

I supposed he used Google to find the site that was tracking him. I was using "Google" broadly.

THe DefCon talk on this two years ago was pretty good.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2966130/cybercrime-hack...

Video of this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FdHq3WfJgs

I didn't see that one, but I saw his "How to overthrow a government" this year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA

I've wanted to fake my death in Facebook for some time. A kind of blaze of glory.

It seems remarkably simple, all I needed to do is to get an obituary in a local paper, and fill in this form https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/234739086860192. How hard can that be right?

Unfortunately my wife put a stop to it soon as I told her.

It's actually easier than you'd think. A friend and his high school buddies decided to prank one of their friends by all writing on his all saying how sorry they were to hear about his dad, he was a great man, RIP, etc. Other people saw those and jumped on the bandwagon, writing their own condolences. It was a sick but very successful prank.

For a morbid prank I always thought it would be "funny" to put a dead man's switch on my facebook account so that if I died I'd start posting again after a few months.

It's only funny in the abstract though, I wouldn't want to hurt friends/family in real life.

My friends and family expect jerkface but technically nuanced shenanigans from me. If I didn't start posting on the Facebook and twitter after I died my friends and family might think I faked it.

Cached, for those without a linkedin account:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&...

I was going to link to Elizabeth Greenwood's fascinating book, then I clicked on the link and saw this was written by her! Fascinating subject from a great writer. There's a This American Life episode about it, where she talks about this. Very interesting stuff. I can't seem to find the episode or I'd link it :-(

" “Ninety-nine percent of faked deaths are water accidents. In most drownings, the body is recovered. So why was this body not recovered?” "

I had exactly this question when they mentioned that Osama was killed and his body thrown to the ocean. OK it's not a drowning, but why was it thrown to the ocean?

> OK it's not a drowning, but why was it thrown to the ocean?

Because they didn't want to create a site that could either be turned into a memorial (by sympathizers) or a target for vandalism (by people who hated him), or both.

In any case, if you're wondering whether or not bin Laden is dead, you can be pretty sure that he is. If he weren't, the best way for them to damage and discredit the US would be to post video proof-of-life. The fact that they haven't done that by now shows that they can't.

Well, unless he's just sitting in a jail cell in Gitmo.

But I agree, Occam's Razor. That being said, cremation and don't tell anyone where the ashes went.

Cremation has no (or very little) precedent in Islam, along with a more contentious history. The USG found some rather obscure (IIRC) precedent for water burial in Islam, which allowed them to argue that they were performing proper burial rights to prevent backlash.

Yeah, that worked well. There have been no Islamic terror attacks in America since then. Just crazy people who happen to be Muslim.

Is not it easier to move abroad? In many countries student loans are included in personal bankruptcy. And you get citizenship with passport after 5 years of residency.

Unless one renounces their US citizenship, they're still subject to IRS and US courts. Department of State also suggests that it doesn't clean the slate as far as financial burdens are concerned https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal-considerati...

"In addition, the act of renouncing U.S. citizenship does not allow persons to avoid possible prosecution for crimes which they may have committed in the United States, or escape the repayment of financial obligations, including child support payments, previously incurred in the United States or incurred as United States citizens abroad."

It is one way ticket, obviously. Student loans would not be enforceable in foreign country, after personal bankruptcy.

But if the lender sues in a US court and gets a judgement, isn't the person subject to an extradition? The lender doesn't have to sue in respective country's court.

I am not an American, nor have I ever dealt with the American court system. However, extradition is, to the best of my knowledge, only used in serious criminal cases, and not used at all to enforce a civil judgement (which suing would be).

Wikipedia also has a list of countries that the United States doesn't have an extradition treaty with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_law_in_the_United_.... Most of those don't look like great options, but a few of them are quite nice!

Surprised to see Andorra on that list!

They would only be able to seize assets you might have left in the US. Extradition is only for criminal cases.

Whether or not a country will assist at all in enforcing a civil judgment from a foreign jurisdiction is a matter to be explicitly spelled out in treaty agreements.

Your best bet for avoiding a civil judgment is probably to just be too difficult for a process server to find to serve you with the complaint and summons, or failing that, to make a special appearance to assert lack of jurisdiction before making your answer.

IANAL. While I'm not particularly inclined to offer helpful advice to those who would try to skip out on valid debts, I am even less inclined to allow the typical institutional lender or debt collector to go about their business as usual and win by default.

Extradition?! Of course not. Extradition is for criminals. A judgment on a debt is in civil court.

Failure to pay child support is a crime. Depends on the kind of debt.

Not extradite but I imagine they may ask the local courts to enforce debt collection based on the civil judgement in the US. I've heard there are agreements with other countries to collect child support so it isn't a stretch to believe they may help collect other debts through the local court system.

Extradited for debt? I don't think so - I think it has to be criminal (but IANAL).

There are countries that don't have extradition treaties with the US for anything, though many of them are places you might not want to live...

Never heard of extradition for civil judgements. The thought sent a chill up my spine. I do know -- from a friend -- that the US and some other countries have signed a treaty for reciprocal enforcement of child support.

More and more countries are hostile to US citizens. The US applies all sort of pressure, especially on banks, to deny them bank accounts and others.

I had a friend who was born in the US, while his parents were on vacation, so he automatically got US citizenship even though he never lived there. And dealing with banks in his "real" home country was becoming more and more difficult. He was even forced to file taxes with the IRS, even though he literally lived in the US for the first 2 months of his life at most.

So, even if it's a one way ticket, just the fact that you have US citizenship can make daily life a little complicated .

Citizenship does not really work that way. I suspect your 'friend' was exaggerating things somewhat!

He would have been granted whatever citizenship his mother had, by that country, since he lived there while growing up. Any rights or penalties associated with the US citizenship would only come into play if he actively sought them out, having first gone to a US embassy and explicitly obtained citizenship for himself. Generally the only reason to do that is if one intends to move to and live in the USA.

And I believe that most countries do not share citizenship databases (as opposed to passport databases), so it would not be noted.

It does work that way in the US, don't patronize me. When someone is born on US soil, they automatically get US citizenship and US birth certificate from the hospital.

This is a very common problem for people who acquired US citizenship this way, I encourage you to use Google instead of calling people liars.

Welp. Having just read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_American all I can say is that the USA is insane...

It absolutely does in the U.S., if you are born in any U.S. territory you are automatically a U.S. citizen and do not have to do anything to further establish it beyond that point.

You don't even have to declare bankruptcy, just stop paying.

I had a teacher in High School who had stopped paying his UK student loan (he was in New Zealand), he had no plans on ever going back.

I recently listened to a fascinating Radiolab episode which is the interesting flip side of this. The episode was about a girl who couldn't prove she existed (from a legal standpoint).

http://www.radiolab.org/story/invisible-girl/

The flowchart was amusing, though perhaps a little over the top with the choices. Jokes about murder and suicide seem like they clash with the more serious tone of the article a bit.

Seriously though, this sort of thing is about as bad an idea as pretending to be dying of cancer on Facebook/a personal blog, especially when the internet makes it very easy to expose liars.

I didn't read the arrows about suicide as a joke. I read it as "if you are not desperate enough to consider suicide, then your situation is not bad enough to warrant faking your death".

Or maybe I'm just reading too much between the lines.

I got the same idea, plus an implication of "if you're not worried about morality, this is still really hard". I imagine lastingly faking your death is often harder than getting away with murder.

That's definitely one way of looking at it. Which is a fair point.

However, I worry it's implying suicide or murder as 'better' choices than faking your own death. Which is an incredibly disturbing thought.

Actually those "jokes" were made to try to prevent you from thinking about all this proccess.

For most purposes, wouldn't it be easier to just go away somewhere and keep on being you, just with bad credit?

This article seems to be written with the faux-goal of collecting a life insurance policy payout. This could be a substantial amount of money, depending on your circumstances.

I wonder what would happen if you just "walked away" on a hiking trip, got declared dead, and your family family got the life insurance, but you just showed back up five years later.

You never claimed to be dead. So it seems that's not illegal. If your family really thought you were dead, they didn't do anything illegal either. Could they be forced to give the money back?

I imagine the legalities of being declared "not dead after all" would be pretty difficult.

Difficult indeed. This happened to a guy in Ohio - he just up and left, and was declared dead in absentia.

He wasn't charged with anything because he never pretended to be dead (and also because he was legally dead and therefore tricky to prosecute). But, he went before a judge and totally failed to get the declaration reversed. Last I heard, he's still just dead for legal purposes.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/10/10/jud...

IIRC insurance companies tend to want to run out the clock on "missing presumed dead" cases, which can be years. They're reluctant to pay out if there is no body.

Faking your death is entirely legal, provided that is not being done with criminal intent.

But having even a $1 life insurance policy, or $1 in debt, or accessing $1 worth of a reputation-based benefit, might be enough to demonstrate that intent. Most people in the US could not fake their own death without criminal or civil consequences.

We no longer have the "move to the New World" or "move out to the frontier" reset buttons that previous generations had (nor even the "get sentenced to transportation" and "claim sanctuary" buttons).

I noticed the "this is legal" claim in the article, but surely taxes become a huge problem? Even if you're not working, you'd end up either failing to file or revealing that you're still alive.

Couldn't you just file taxes anyways? Would you suffer legal repercussions if you tried to file taxes and they were rejected because you were dead? As previous cases indicate, being found to be alive by the government isn't always adequate to cause them to declare you to be alive again, so you could be both dead and a taxpayer.

You don't have to file Federal taxes if you make less than $10,300 per year.

This isn't true, you don't have to file taxes if you make less income than the standard deduction plus one exemption which changes from year to year and also is also dependent on your age and your filing status and the threshold is different for unearned income.

>I imagine the legalities of being declared "not dead after all" would be pretty difficult.

This exact situation happened in Ohio a few years ago. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/12/us/declared-legally-dead-a...

Yes, the moment your family realizes you are not dead, they need to report that to the insurance company / police. Otherwise, they are committing fraud.

So they report, but they have already spent the money. I do not think it will be straightforward take it back

The family members who knew get arrested, the ones who didn't know disown you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Darwin_disappearance_case

Depends on how you do it, but some people just don't give up on someone "walking away". For example, Bill Ewasko - http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/searchi...

I'm tempted to Google about this but I assume I'd end on a government watch list...

It was among the least-expected articles I had ever read on LI, especially in light of LI's mission to promote "professional" networking.

From the perspective of the author of that article it's certainly professional networking, because she wrote a book about it :-).

It's much harder to do than it used to be.

It used to be you could find somebody who died, get their birth certificate, take over their social security number and you were golden.

Then they started publishing and invaliding social security numbers of dead people and it got a lot harder.

Interesting how the flowchart and the article differ a fair bit.

> Don't Google Yourself:

> ...

> A group of private investigators hired by Dateline NBC located McDermott when they noticed a centralized cluster of IP addresses originating near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, all clicking onto a site dedicated to tracing his whereabouts.

I.e. do google yourself; just don't click on the results. Pull the content from Google's cache, or go through an anonymizer.

So you think that if you don't click anything, Google doesn't log your query and IP? That's so endearing.

Of course it does! But note that in the above case, the investigators didn't have to get anything from Google (and Google wouldn't just hand over that info to a bunch of insurance investigators).

They got the IP addresses from their own site dedicated to that case, which was getting hits from someone searching precisely for that.

And, by the way, Google could figure out who you are even if you don't search for yourself, but only search for the same kind of stuff you've always been searching for. Someone faking their death is screwed here. Just like "content ID" can determine the identity of audio work even if it has been disguised, Google can match the activity pattern of user X to some existing pattern of user Y, potentially revealing that X = Y.

It's surprising to me to see how popular this article is around all of my social media right now. I knew we were all stressed out but I didn't think we would be this fascinated.

flow chart https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAjDAAAAJDEyMDMy...

I'm not even sure a flow chart is worthwhile. Other than looking cool and sort of funny you might as well just have a bullet point list of requirements. It certainly would be quicker to read a list than go through the chart.

Yes, the flowchart is topologically just a long line of questions, with a small exception, which could easily be reduced to a single question.

Well, if your situation is desperate enough that you are deciding a life-or-death (ha-ha) matter with a flowchart, might as well roll with it.

I found it hilarious the number of comments that are tirades about student loans and "personal responsibility," like it was even a significant part of the article.

The border between hilarious and disgusting is sometimes tenuous. When I read these comments by MBAs or any other type of "educated" people, I wonder what their student loans helped them with

> The border between hilarious and disgusting is sometimes tenuous

Bit of a digression but just because sometimes it causes friction, particularly amongst people who think laughter is an inappropriate response to serious situations:

I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I find the comments themselves distasteful. That the comments exist at all is quite funny to me, because they're essentially non-sequiturs. The idea that someone would read the linked article and decide this was an appropriate context for a tirade about student loans is absurd (and therefore funny) to me.

Sort of like if we were reading Einstein's biography and someone launched into a ten paragraph essay about how all children should be killed, simply because the biography starts with Einstein's childhood.

You know you've got a live wire when the top comment has 5 likes, but 200 replies.

How would you know how many likes the top comment has, unless it's yours?

Not on HN - I was referring to the top comment on the article itself, which abandoned the topic in favor of yelling at people with student loans.

I looked at that person's profile. I would not be altogether surprised if it was a troll account.

From the headline and domain, I assumed this was about faking a death to stop LinkedIn emails.

Yeah, and that LinkedIn was warning everyone that they'd find out, so just spare yourself the hassle.

Can someone explain this to me? I have a Linkedin account, and the only time I get emails is when someone wants to connect with me. I opted out of all the other email categories, just like I do with every other site.

Do people really get emails from Linkedin after opting out of every category?

You're assuming people getting emails have LinkedIn accounts. When someone with your email signs up for LinkedIn and then lets LinkedIn access their contacts, everyone of their contacts receives and email from LinkedIn and they now have your email address to do with as they please.

Isn't that illegal in the EU?

Yes, it is.

Yup. I got hit by a bad driver who was not paying for repairs. He was high up in a national organisation for cycling. I found this out by joining up to LinkedIn and searching for him. Called his work and left a message at reception for him to "please call the guy he crashed into". He called within the hour. 3 years later the waves of spam are just as high despite unsubscribing and re unsubscribing.

Well played, sir.

That's what I thought. The waves of spam make me think that perhaps I fell into a LinkedIn marketing scam though.

I get emails on addresses that don't have linkedin accounts. I've opted out in every way indicated in the emails. They keep coming. AFAICT the only way to stop those is to actually create an account on that address.

On the address that does have an account, I've opted out of every kind of email. They just keep adding new kinds of emails every few months that I then have to opt out of again.

I've never had a LinkedIn account, and I've opted out of receiving "<Person> wants you to join their professional network on LinkedIn!" emails, and yet I somehow manage to get 2-3 messages from LinkedIn per month.

https://twitter.com/darylginn/status/590664399041519617 rings true.

They probably join groups and don't take the time to unsubscribe from the email digests.

I recently closed my LinkedIn account, and it's worked surprisingly well so far to reduce the volume of LinkedIn e-mail.

I never had an LinkedIn account and I get a suspicious amount of LinkedIn emails. The often are very creepy. One asked me to connect with my boss from a decade ago. Keep in mind, I've never had a LinkedIn account. Said boss didn't know my email address then and certainly doesn't know my new email address since its changed since the last time I've seen her a decade ago. Never seen her profile before that, never even knew she had a LinkedIn.

This is the perfect reason to use unique email addresses: they enable you to know exactly what the origin of the 'leak' is, and when you disable the address, the other addresses keep working normally.

You forgot to mention the prefect reason not to use a unique email address, its a pain in the ass and requires effort for very, very little return.

Unique addresses can be accomplished with aliases. Gmail allows

<username>+label[+morewords]@gmail.com

where + is ignored by Gmail servers when matching, and 'label' can be defined by you. This keeps emails routing to the same account, but allows you to filter.

And?

I am aware of that, my point stands "its a pain in the ass and requires effort for very, very little return."

Good luck finding services that accept a + in the email address and this is so common you aren't fooling anyone, it takes just a couple lines of code to strip pluses out of gmail addresses to get the "real" address if you are a spammer.

> I am aware of that, my point stands "its a pain in the ass and requires effort for very, very little return."

Where is this "pain in your ass"? With Gmail at least, you don't need to actually _create_ an alias before using one.

When prompted to enter an email somewhere on the web, you have to type your email in, regardless, correct? In that process, append '+domain' to your username and you've just created an alias for that domain. It's very low overhead.

> Good luck finding services that accept a + in the email address

I haven't come across one yet. Maybe you can cite a source? I am not disagreeing, just saying maybe you can give examples to back up these vociferous claims.

> strip pluses out

So far, Gmail is the only service I am aware of that uses '+' in this way. Other services may not have the same method (e.g., use another character).

Why would spammers actually _care_ to realize you're using a 'filter technique'? The lay person probably doesn't even know this feature exists, and spammers aren't targeting people like you, anyway.

Panix.com allows email addresses of the form whatever@username.users.panix.com ("username" = your usual email address). It's not at all a pain in the ass, I just type it in, it makes a lot of filtering trivial, and I don't think any spammers have munged it. (And if they do... I get spam, which I do anyway.)

(Happy panix.com user.)

Better: run your own domain with a catch-all address, so you can sign up with something like linkedin@domain.org. Everything gets routed to the primary address. Pretty easy to set up with Google Apps or Zoho.

Just route all emails without the + to the trash.

And for the services that don't accept email addresses with pluses...? And your friends/family/boss? They get unique pluses too? What about spammers who are smart enough to not remove but change the plus to random garbage before they send emails?

Getting creepy LinkedIn spam is such a non-issue it isn't worth exerting even a moderate amount of effort.

firstname@lastname.com - works

variation-on-first-name+servicename@lastname.com - works

variation-on-first-name@lastname.com - black hole.

Give friends #1. Give services #2.

Linked in gets your email from your friends. So, they are the the source of these leaks.

That would be an example of faking your death online. Something tells me we can really work with this notion.

Dead people usually don't close their accounts.

linkedin has become something very weird.

I didn't even realise that they had content (other than built-in EZ Contact Spamming). Has that always been the case?

i look at linkedin once a week or so; my "feed" has become some strange alternate universe of political nonsense masquerading as professional networking.

Why do I find sites that require login/signup hubristic? I guess because we have so many alternatives? Or, do I just dislike Linkedin?

HN enjoys the occasional humorous posts lined with neat nuggets of information?

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