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When hide and seek gets serious
PEOPLE
When hide and seek gets serious If you need to disappear – or find someone – Frank Ahearn knows how to make it happen, even in our hyperconnected digital world
BEFORE the internet, if you needed to go into hiding, it was pretty straightforward. Not so today. Frank Ahearn has a very particular set of skills. He traces people who don’t want to be found, and helps others boost their privacy or disappear altogether. He has seen professional hide-and-seek transform in the 21st century. How did you become a “skip tracer”, finding people who have run out on their lives?
I was doing undercover work for a detective agency in the 1980s when I saw the skip tracer at work and it fascinated me. I told my boss I wanted to do the job, and he said, “Sure, if you can get me a copy of my phone records.” That night I went to a payphone, called the phone company pretending to be my boss and said I needed to go over my calls. They told me every place my boss had called in the last few months. The next day I became a skip tracer. I got really good at “pretexting” – essentially tricking people into handing over information. Later, I had my own firm of skip tracers. You make it sound easy.
You need confidence and imagination. Most people in customer service listen to complaints day in, day out. If I call them and can take them away from that, they’re going to want to help me. I might say, “Hey, this is Ed Johnson, how’re you doing, man? My wife’s just had twins and I’m not getting any sleep!” It’s total verbal manipulation. Is this legal?
When I started, the law wasn’t so tight. But the days of calling Scotland Yard posing as the FBI are over. It’s illegal to impersonate the police, for example, or to trick phone companies and banks. But if you owe my client $500,000 and I phone your mother, I can tell her I have a 40 | NewScientist | 24 June 2017
water-damaged package for you or that I’m from The New York Times and I’d like to get in touch about a big feature I’m writing. Why did you start helping people disappear too?
Knowing what footprints you need to avoid leaving behind made me really good at figuring out how to help someone disappear. Can anyone disappear?
All you’ve got to do is walk out the door. If you can live in homeless shelters or on park benches, that’s you gone. Rich folk might go to Monaco. The question is what you can afford – and how you pay for it without being traced. Different people disappear in different ways. Some want to vanish off-grid, hiding out as an expat somewhere, but others just want to separate their digital and personal lives.
PROFILE Privacy expert Frank Ahearn helps people around the world disappear and finds people who don’t want to be found. His books include How to Disappear and The Digital Hitman. He is based in Spain
Has the internet made it harder to get away?
Was it a lot simpler a few decades ago?
Technology is a double-edged sword. On one hand, you can become a digital nomad: you can live wherever you want and nobody will know where you are. You might live in Hong Kong but have an offshore account in Estonia. But virtually all online activity leaves digital footprints, and that means people can always track you. I help people distance their physical lives from those digital connections.
Yes, just 20 years ago you could get a fake identity and become a totally different person. But today, government computers are networked, linking all kinds of records. If you’re buying someone else’s identity how do you know this person isn’t wanted by Interpol or that 15 other people aren’t using the same one? You won’t know until you try crossing a border, and that’s a stupid way to find out.
If someone wants to slash their digital footprint or disappear, what steps might they take?
What’s the impact of social media?
First, never use your own internet connection to research your plan to disappear. Buy a separate device, with cash, and use public Wi-Fi networks. Always use a VPN, and not the free networks: privacy comes at a cost. Never go to an internet cafe. And if you can’t resist social media, create a fake identity. Debit cards are useful, but cash is better. The list is long.
It’s dangerous. You could be living as someone else in Bucharest, sitting there with your new friends having a latte when somebody comes up and says, “Hey, how’s it going, Frank?” You blow that person off but now they tweet, “I just saw Frank in Bucharest and he said his name was Henry.” Game over. Or you could be at a party when someone takes a photo and uploads it to Facebook where it
Photographed for New Scientist by Cristina Candel
gets linked to old pictures of you or tagged with your name, even if you no longer have an active account. It sounds really hard to disappear.
It depends who’s looking for you. If it’s the FBI, you have problems. You would have to worry about facial recognition software picking you out in London, for example. But the people I work with are not wanted by the law. I did work with a former drug dealer, though. When he left prison he was worried about his former associates coming after him because he owed them a lot of money. That sounds serious…
Organised criminal groups have access to a lot of information, especially if they have deep pockets. So one of the things I do is create disinformation. If I put you in Manchester I might plant false information to make it look
as if you were in Glasgow – by booking a hotel room there with your credit card, for example. Some pursuers won’t stop looking for you, so you’ve got to plant fake footprints to prevent them finding the real ones. If I’ve disappeared, what do I tell the new people I meet?
You need a story. And when they look you up on Google, which everyone does, we’d want them to find a little bit of information: having no online presence is suspicious in itself. So we would create a minimal persona with no connections to your old name.
“Some pursuers won’t stop looking for you, so you have to plant fake footprints”
Do many people want to disappear completely?
I get three or four contacting me every month, but mostly they’re not serious or don’t have the money. The majority of my clients just want more privacy. I met some wealthy people who were concerned about their children being abducted. Not long ago the most you’d know about rich people was what you read in Forbes or Fortune. Today, rich kids are tweeting information about their parents or posting pictures of their homes on Facebook. What do you like most about your work?
I do occasional high-end skip tracing, where I might hunt for someone who has stolen several million dollars. Instead of hunting deer I’m hunting humans. That’s an adrenaline rush. n Interview by Douglas Heaven Frank Ahearn will be speaking at New Scientist Live in September (live.newscientist.com) 24 June 2017 | NewScientist | 41
When hide and seek gets serious If you need to disappear – or find someone – Frank Ahearn knows how to make it happen, even in our hyperconnected digital world
BEFORE the internet, if you needed to go into hiding, it was pretty straightforward. Not so today. Frank Ahearn has a very particular set of skills. He traces people who don’t want to be found, and helps others boost their privacy or disappear altogether. He has seen professional hide-and-seek transform in the 21st century. How did you become a “skip tracer”, finding people who have run out on their lives?
I was doing undercover work for a detective agency in the 1980s when I saw the skip tracer at work and it fascinated me. I told my boss I wanted to do the job, and he said, “Sure, if you can get me a copy of my phone records.” That night I went to a payphone, called the phone company pretending to be my boss and said I needed to go over my calls. They told me every place my boss had called in the last few months. The next day I became a skip tracer. I got really good at “pretexting” – essentially tricking people into handing over information. Later, I had my own firm of skip tracers. You make it sound easy.
You need confidence and imagination. Most people in customer service listen to complaints day in, day out. If I call them and can take them away from that, they’re going to want to help me. I might say, “Hey, this is Ed Johnson, how’re you doing, man? My wife’s just had twins and I’m not getting any sleep!” It’s total verbal manipulation. Is this legal?
When I started, the law wasn’t so tight. But the days of calling Scotland Yard posing as the FBI are over. It’s illegal to impersonate the police, for example, or to trick phone companies and banks. But if you owe my client $500,000 and I phone your mother, I can tell her I have a 40 | NewScientist | 24 June 2017
water-damaged package for you or that I’m from The New York Times and I’d like to get in touch about a big feature I’m writing. Why did you start helping people disappear too?
Knowing what footprints you need to avoid leaving behind made me really good at figuring out how to help someone disappear. Can anyone disappear?
All you’ve got to do is walk out the door. If you can live in homeless shelters or on park benches, that’s you gone. Rich folk might go to Monaco. The question is what you can afford – and how you pay for it without being traced. Different people disappear in different ways. Some want to vanish off-grid, hiding out as an expat somewhere, but others just want to separate their digital and personal lives.
PROFILE Privacy expert Frank Ahearn helps people around the world disappear and finds people who don’t want to be found. His books include How to Disappear and The Digital Hitman. He is based in Spain
Has the internet made it harder to get away?
Was it a lot simpler a few decades ago?
Technology is a double-edged sword. On one hand, you can become a digital nomad: you can live wherever you want and nobody will know where you are. You might live in Hong Kong but have an offshore account in Estonia. But virtually all online activity leaves digital footprints, and that means people can always track you. I help people distance their physical lives from those digital connections.
Yes, just 20 years ago you could get a fake identity and become a totally different person. But today, government computers are networked, linking all kinds of records. If you’re buying someone else’s identity how do you know this person isn’t wanted by Interpol or that 15 other people aren’t using the same one? You won’t know until you try crossing a border, and that’s a stupid way to find out.
If someone wants to slash their digital footprint or disappear, what steps might they take?
What’s the impact of social media?
First, never use your own internet connection to research your plan to disappear. Buy a separate device, with cash, and use public Wi-Fi networks. Always use a VPN, and not the free networks: privacy comes at a cost. Never go to an internet cafe. And if you can’t resist social media, create a fake identity. Debit cards are useful, but cash is better. The list is long.
It’s dangerous. You could be living as someone else in Bucharest, sitting there with your new friends having a latte when somebody comes up and says, “Hey, how’s it going, Frank?” You blow that person off but now they tweet, “I just saw Frank in Bucharest and he said his name was Henry.” Game over. Or you could be at a party when someone takes a photo and uploads it to Facebook where it
Photographed for New Scientist by Cristina Candel
gets linked to old pictures of you or tagged with your name, even if you no longer have an active account. It sounds really hard to disappear.
It depends who’s looking for you. If it’s the FBI, you have problems. You would have to worry about facial recognition software picking you out in London, for example. But the people I work with are not wanted by the law. I did work with a former drug dealer, though. When he left prison he was worried about his former associates coming after him because he owed them a lot of money. That sounds serious…
Organised criminal groups have access to a lot of information, especially if they have deep pockets. So one of the things I do is create disinformation. If I put you in Manchester I might plant false information to make it look
as if you were in Glasgow – by booking a hotel room there with your credit card, for example. Some pursuers won’t stop looking for you, so you’ve got to plant fake footprints to prevent them finding the real ones. If I’ve disappeared, what do I tell the new people I meet?
You need a story. And when they look you up on Google, which everyone does, we’d want them to find a little bit of information: having no online presence is suspicious in itself. So we would create a minimal persona with no connections to your old name.
“Some pursuers won’t stop looking for you, so you have to plant fake footprints”
Do many people want to disappear completely?
I get three or four contacting me every month, but mostly they’re not serious or don’t have the money. The majority of my clients just want more privacy. I met some wealthy people who were concerned about their children being abducted. Not long ago the most you’d know about rich people was what you read in Forbes or Fortune. Today, rich kids are tweeting information about their parents or posting pictures of their homes on Facebook. What do you like most about your work?
I do occasional high-end skip tracing, where I might hunt for someone who has stolen several million dollars. Instead of hunting deer I’m hunting humans. That’s an adrenaline rush. n Interview by Douglas Heaven Frank Ahearn will be speaking at New Scientist Live in September (live.newscientist.com) 24 June 2017 | NewScientist | 41