>Ahearn tells me he’s spent a large part of his career working as a “really good liar,” manipulating people and situations into giving him information about the people he was tracking down... [snip] “All a skip tracer needs is charm and a telephone,” he told the Believer in 2012, explaining that he could access any record by pretending to be someone else and providing false pretenses. In investigator-speak, this is called “pretexting,” a form of social engineering in which someone lies to obtain privileged information. Skip tracers and P.I.s do it all the time.

>Let’s say a client wanted the phone records of a dead person who might not have actually been dead. Ahearn would call up their phone company pretending to be an employee from a different department, and tell them his system was down and he needed to bring up an account for date of activation. More often than not, Ahearn would sound confident, and he’d have just the right amount of information that whoever on the end of the end would give him the name, account number or passcode he needed to get in.

Am I missing something or is this named individual really stating that he and his compatriots regularly break the law? I understand that PIs may play around the lines a bit, but this seems egregious.