Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear? | Hacker News Reader

Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear?

wired.com

91 pointslucumo51 comments

When a scandal broke shortly after 1900 to the effect that John D. Rockefeller had a notorious family secret in the form of a bigamist/swindler father still living in the United States, Joseph Pulitzer offered an $8,000 reward to a press corps that utterly hated Rockefeller as a monopolist to go and locate the father. After a frenzied 18-month search, they failed to find him before he died. A Wikipedia write-up on this appears at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Avery_Rockefeller.

This is equivalent today of the press being unable to find Bill Gates's father even after being offered a rather large monetary reward and after applying all of its vast resources to the effort - even as the father continued to live in the continental U.S.

It was a lot easier to "disappear" 100 years ago, before the advent of modern technology, than it is today. There is something vaguely creepy about how one's whereabouts can so easily be tracked with the modern tools at hand.

Interesting article, but you have to consider that the people that you'll never hear from are the ones with the success stories. So they may be a lot more prevalent than you'd think!

Also, I really wonder if 10 years in jail is the right way to punish somebody that tries to reboot his life in the wrong way. His kid needs him more than he needs 10 years worth of punishment. Garner the guys wages but set him free.

Yeah what exactly are the charges? I'll I noticed were insurance fraud, and possibly identity theft (from someone who presumably wasn't at all hurt by it), plus the theft from the company. Sometimes I wonder if the punishment is a function of how hard the authorities worked to catch him and how angry they were at his antics. If he were caught the next day (even after committing all the same crimes) would he have still gotten 10 years, or a slap on the wrist?

"All" you noticed is $1.3 million in insurance fraud‽ Stealing $1.3 million dollars all by itself is up there beyond "slap on the wrist" territory. I mean, what are you proposing for stealing roughly 30 years' worth of the median American's wages (before taxes)? Six months community service?

Well, that depends on how you look at it. There are more parties whose well being here is at stake then just this guy, and besides that he is now a drain on your society, whereas if you'd put him to work you could garner his wages.

Locking him up for 10 years is just going to ruin the life of one child and cost a fortune in maintaining him.

Six months community service would be a net gain for the community, 10 years of prison is a net loss.

The function of a jail is not to take revenge, it is to keep harmful people out of society. This guy did a great job up to the point where he cracked. I'm sure he could be made to do a great job again given half a chance, and keep him under the breaking strain this time.

>The function of a jail is not to take revenge, it is to keep harmful people out of society

There have been countless words written on the subject, but one of the functions IS deterrence.

Look at it this way: you can try to launch a startup and guide it to a successful exit. If it succeeds, you get some nice cash in the bank. If you fail, you spent a few years and have no material gain to show for it.

Or, you can try to get away with a large-scale fraud. If it succeeds, you get some nice cash in the bank. If you fail, you spend 6 months doing community service and have no material gain to show for it.

Yes, it's obviously oversimplifying (ethics, experience/learning from a failed startup, what do you enjoy doing, etc.) But there has to be a significant cost of failure to prevent people from deciding it's worth a try.

You're missing a few things. The punishment of 10 years in jail didn't deter him. Why? Because he was desperate and viewed this as his only way out of a desperate situation. I'm sure there are many people that attempt the same things that he did for same/similar reasons. This punishment isn't going to deter someone that thinks: (1) They have the 'system' beat (2) This is their only option.

"The function of a jail is not to take revenge, it is to keep harmful people out of society."

Says you. I think the relevant role here is "deterrent". Stealing a million dollars needs to carry more risk than "If I get caught, I'll have to spend a lot of time picking up trash." Letting this thing go lightly is a much larger net gain when a lot more people decide it's rational to try their hand at insurance fraud.

> What charges

Article states "Tennessee specifically outlaws “intentionally and falsely creating the impression that any person is deceased,"

All through this article I was thinking along your same lines. I mean, this guy's a bit of a moron. Who in their right mind changes their identity but then reunites with their family who are all still going by their real names? Especially when he knows there's a manhunt.

Oh, and he was willing to fake his identity but didn't bother trying to print out some fake school transcripts for his kid (Which themselves are usually printed on a regular consumer printer).

Anyway if this guy can make it over a year I'd imagine a reasonably intelligent person could probably get away with it.

The rebooting wasn't really the issue. The attempt to steal $1.3 million from his insurance company was. Although, I will grant that in light of current events, 10 years for attempting to steal (and failing) such a minuscule amount seems a bit perverse.

How legal is it for Amazon or Airlines to give out this information?

How legal is it for schools/companies/etc to give out information about contacts to the Police? Why is it illegal to give out the record but legal to say that there was activity?

It seems that these tactics are quite shady in terms of legalities. Why should I get a warrant for X if I can just ask his vendors?

Why would someone have to subpoena your bank records but have Amazon up for grabs so to speak?

It did say the school was subpoenaed.

But only after they alerted the authorities based on a previous request for a heads up. I'm not even sure that would have held up in court here (nl). I'm sure a competent lawywer would have used that if it was possible statesside though, so what with him being convicted I take it that it is legal.

IIRC, there wasn't anything in there about him pleading guilty or not guilty... maybe there was no lawyer/trial?

Is it any different to the police asking your neighbours, or the people at your local coffee shop, whether they've seen you? I don't know if Amazon has any legal obligation to tell the police about your activity, but as far as I know they don't have any obligation _not_ to tell the police about your activity either (someone who's actually read the Amazon privacy policy might be able to correct me on this).

If the police cannot just grab records and look at them why can they be notified without warrant if records are updated, it seems that that behavior is counter-intuitive to what the law says about privacy, ie the government doesn't have a right without warrant to know what I use my account for but they do have a right to know if I use my account at all without warrant. This is a contradiction to what existing privacy laws already say.

As for witness testimony, it's vastly different because they aren't solid records. I don't have the ability to be private out in public, obviously. Plus people have different definitions of privacy, I would mind if my friends or family members alerted the police to where I was for any reason even if I had nothing to hide, because this kind of behavior will just repeat and against other suspects. Suspicion doesn't imply conviction.

Not sure of other jurisdictions, but in the UK at least, your privacy rights expire at death.

What a coward - he racks up $40,000 in personal debt on his corporate account and then puts his family through the agony of mourning his death? Such a disgrace.

Not only that, he made his wife witness his death. The low just got lower.

>Prosecutors accused her of being involved from the beginning, but Roberson says he isn’t sure

I think I agree with the prosecutors. The set-up sounds like she was in on the plan, taking a stroll with her husband (without the child) so as to be the eye witness in the charade but I reckon they probably made a pact that if he was found out, they would protest her innocence and say he did it behind her back and swam below the frigid water until he reached another dock down stream out of sight. That would be hard to do especially for someone who sounds like he was fairly out of shape. I doubt he got his toes wet. I'd say the dog got a dipping and they said their goodbyes.

Yea. I was thinking that too. Especially his comment about 'a larger body of water.' I was thinking, "So you're a 300lbs out-of-shape guy in the middle of a friggin' lake, and you're going to swim to shore entirely underwater so that no one sees you? Gimme break!"

> The low just got lower.

That would depend on the wife.

Yes, and the selfless rescue / recovery workers had to brave the raging 39 degree water to look for his presumed corpse.

I'm surprised all of these ppl stayed in the US. I would imagine it's a lot harder to track someone down if they disappeared to the other side of the world.

Harder to visit your family from across the world.

Sounds like a job for video conferencing if you ask me!

But it does remove the need for a fake passport.

I suppose it's quite hard to cross a border without some kind of ID.

But the one guy supposedly did a lot of travelling for work. He could have faked the death while on a trip in another country, leaving his passport somewhere so people would know it was him.

It's also harder to blend in as a foreigner, and as an undocumented immigrant you'd have extra problems if you get into any trouble with the foreign authorities. In your home country you can blend in just by acting like everyone else.

> as an undocumented immigrant you'd have extra problems if you get into any trouble with the foreign authorities

Pick the right country and that's not a problem at all; a couple of strategic bribes can get you out of trouble in most of the world.

I'd be interested in seeing your proof for this claim. My experience has been the opposite: a stateless individual must entirely vanish from the map.

Blending in isn't really an issue when you're on the other side of the world, hence the attraction. Documents can be easily obtained. And as long as you don't have to work or do business, you rarely have to deal with the authorities.

If the problem is money however, then that's a valid issue. Because all of the above cost significant amounts of money.

Depends on the border. Biking around Europe I passed from Germany to Czech Republic with nothing more than a wave to/from the border guard.

Also, U.S. Mexico border is not that hard. Tons of people and drugs do it daily.

I enjoyed reading the article, and the resulting recognition that to "really disappear" is diametrically opposed to what we'd normally seek around here:

  - Brand Ownership vs Brand Abandonment
  - Search Optimization vs Search Pessimization
  - Collect User Metrics vs Stay Out of Site Logs
  - Networking/Meetups vs Self-Imposed Exile

It was intriguing to look down that alley, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Yes, this interesting look at how hard it is to hide in a networked world. The rumor has it that at one time, the CIA manufactured new identities for their agents. I wonder how possible that would today - and especially how possible that might be tomorrow, when not only is everyone online but everyone has a record from being online a long time.

Might be easier. The more we rely on social networking, the less identity you have to manufacture by actually going out and planting evidence, and the more you can manufacture just by procedural generation at the target site.

On the other hand, the more manufactured background you have, the more likely something is to trip you up, either because you misremembered it when talking to somebody or you ran into somebody who was involved in the real world situation and knows you were not. The best way to get away with a fake past is to be vague, but not so vague as to arouse people's curiosity or suspicions.

Inconsistencies are not such a big problem. A lot of real people are inconsistent.

Mr. Canoe - disappeared http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7512487.stm

Here's some disappearing tips:

Plan before you go

Do research from different internet cafes or libraries

Tell no-one your plans

Use pay-as-you-go phones

Apply for no memberships

Cash is king

If you believe you are compromised, you are

Nice of the BBC to help us out with this information

Does this article really need to be over 6 different pages?

Marcus Schrenker stole his idea from an episode of the simpsons!

Good to know the navy will get to you really fast if you're really in a pickle though.

Has some basic info about Steven Rambam in it, who gave an awesome talk at Last HOPE about tracking down a guy many times, many ways.

It doesn't take much to disappear if you're willing to live like a pauper in the cash only economy, and you don't defraud anyone in the process of disappearing.

One answer - "don't use the phone registered to you" after you "die"!

If you keep reading past the first page, it turns out that he didn't: he deliberately left it in a gas station in the hope that somebody else would pick it up and start using it -- that way the police would wind up pursuing that person and give up when that line of inquiry led to a dead end.

The first part of the plan worked, but the second part didn't -- they never tracked down the guy who picked up the phone, but the fact that the phone was being used was enough to convince the police that he was still alive.

I guess the real lesson here is that simplicity is the best policy. His plan probably sounded brilliant in his head, but made too many assumptions about the way other people would behave.

If he had just destroyed the phone (broken in the water?), then his death would have been much more plausible. Why would he leave it somewhere if he had drowned?

If you read that part of the article, it says that he abandoned it prior to his faked death (a week prior he left it at a gas station or convenience store, iirc).

(No one reading the article? what is this? slashdot?)

Uh, you post supports my original point. Plausibly vanishing with no leads whatsoever is best...

He didn't, he left it at a gas station so it's finder would use it and lead the investigators astray. It's later in the article.

The author seems to think this was a good ruse, but I think I disagree; if I were an investigator, I think any coincidence, such as a cell phone accidentally left at a gas station, would be something I'd want to look into.

That may be, but it seemed to be the charges to the corp. credit card that really made them suspicious. The cellphone seemed to just be a quick confirmation that he was still alive. Though it would seem awfully suspicious for him to abandon his cellphone without reporting it missing/stolen (even if the police tracked down the thief).

[ I'm assuming he didn't report it missing, because the article doesn't say so, and because it doesn't make sense that messages sent to unknown numbers from a stolen cellphone would mean that he's alive to investigators. ]

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