Social Media Can Help You Fake Your Own Death 146
Julie188 writes "We are inundated with warnings that social media is systematically stripping away our privacy. But Frank Ahearn, the so-called 'Dear Abby' of disappearing, is attempting to show folks how to use those same technologies to regain your privacy, even helping you go as far as faking your own death. Ahearn is a professional skip-tracer who has hunted down people like Monica Lewinsky. In an interview with Ahearn on Network World, he says, 'One can legally disappear through the use of corporations and offshore corporations. The idea is to embrace technology and to become a virtual entity.' My favorite tip is that New Zealand is the place to land once you leap off the grid. Not only is it far from most of the rest of the English speaking world, he says, but it also has great beaches."
Obligatory Simpsons (Score:5, Funny)
Damnit (Score:5, Funny)
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Where am I supposed to skip to if I'm starting in .nz?
I guess to the same place the rest of you Kiwis skip too... Australia. Slightly lower sheep:man ratio here but the weather is better!
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Less earthquakes too.
Not Australia (Score:1, Interesting)
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The problem with Australia, if you can get here (kiwis let every one in) is we have so many more asshole cops that want to check your licence at every set of traffic lights
I've been driving for around 16 years now, and spend more time on the road than most people would. In all that time, aside from random breath tests (where they didn't ask to see my license anyway), i've been stopped around 3 times...
The first was for no obvious reason, the policeman asked if i'd been drinking, didn't bother doing a breath test, and sent me on my way despite the fact that my car was obviously not quite up to roadworthy (bald rear tyres for a start). Didn't even think about asking for my lice
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Bad cops should be shot (with a camera).
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Hmm, you need to bazooka some trucks and get your GTA stars up to 3 for any decent response.
Re:Not Australia (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you "of middle eastern appearance"? Are you under 25?
No on both? Then yes the Autralian police are fine and upstanding providing a wonderful service to all Australians.
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many people of "middle eastern appearance" have never set foot anywhere near the middle east, which would make "staying" there rather difficult.
Take me for example. I have 0% middle eastern descent - I have Irish, English, a tiny bit of Scandanavian, two of my family tree paths are first fleeters, and yet I sometimes get asked where I'm from with Greece and "the middle east" being their two guesses.
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What my name is has no bearing on what people think I look like given they don't know my name at the time.
My first name is a standard English fist name, well actually it's Hebrew I guess - in the set of names like Daniel, Jacob, and Samuel; which don't really have a middle eastern connotation in English currently.
And my last name is English, and was an English name from before the Norman Conquest.
Re:Not Australia (Score:4, Funny)
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Ok, gotta ask, what are "dunnies" and "togs"?
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dunny [dn]
n pl -nies
Austral and NZ informal
an outside lavatory
tog (tg, tôg) Informal
n.
1. togs Clothes: gardening togs.
2. A coat or cloak.
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Sharks that can follow you 200 KM on shore, the dreaded Hoop Snake not to mention the suicidal and deadly Koala Drop Bear.
Strewth, it's time for me lunchtime beer.
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Not true any more.
In Victoria police can now search you for weapons, any time, without reason or suspicion.
It's an absurd law and needs to be revoked.
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You mean fewer earthquakes.
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French foreign legion used to be the way to go, could try that out.
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Northland. All the good weather of Australia, and a far lower aussie:human ratio.
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No wonder there aren't many Aussies there; the good weather of Australia starts in the 30s.
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"At +34C in Australia, its usually too hot to enjoy. "
Says you! Some of us moved to Australia (from northern europe) specifically because of the heat. Mid 30s is just right. Anything under about 25 now feels a little chilly to me.
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I would rather die. Anything over 20C is too hot.
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Brother, if you're in NZ already it's almost like being dead.
I thought I was dead once. Turns out I was just in Christchurch.
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Re:Damnit (Score:5, Funny)
(note: this post is based on a true experience someone told me).
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Funniest thing about this comment is people think it's funny.
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Have you tried North Korea? When you disappear there, you're pretty much guaranteed never to be found in any realistic time frame, ever again.
Of course, there IS that small matter of the funny neighbor with the odd glasses you might meet. He seems to insist that his name is "Dear Leader" or some such nonsense, and from what I've heard, he has a pretty bad temper. You might wish to avoid him.
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Where am I supposed to skip to if I'm starting in .nz?
The answer should be obvious: Antarctica!
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Where am I supposed to skip to if I'm starting in .nz?
I hear Antarctica is nice this time of year....
It bloody well isn't. Wait another four months.
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Thank sir/ma'am! You're the ever vigilant patriot every country needs to keep an eye on the most southern continent. We must keep watch in case the Emperor Penguin makes his move on the rest of the world!
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New Zealand was suggested because it's an English speaking country; they speak Dutch in the Netherlands.
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How many of those did you keep for strategic sheep purposes [eddieizzard.com]?
Then again, I can understand some of the islands and the beaches.
Doesn't matter (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Funny)
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Summer Glau can terminate me any time! :D You know, they do have names: Cameron (unknown model) and T-800 (don't think it had a name?).
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You know, they do have names:...T-800 (don't think it had a name?).
So, what you're saying is, they do-don't have names?
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Unable to compute.
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I love seeing the T-1000 in other movies. Me and my friends can never remember his name, and I think we don't want to, so every show/movie he is in we say "Sweet, the T-1000's in this show".
Even if it's a comedy, I like to pretend that he's just really good a mimicking (or really bad at mimicking) human emotion.
Meanwhile, here in New Zealand... (Score:5, Funny)
The Government here has a few thousand monkeys that spend all their time browsing through the various redundant overlapping government agency databases to catch you out for identity fraud, benefit fraud, unlawfully riding a train without a ticket or forgetting to tie your shoelaces in the morning. But yeah, we have some nice beaches, so it's worth the risk
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Re:Meanwhile, here in New Zealand... (Score:5, Informative)
Well to be fair he's a nutter, part of a right wing party that seems to have jumped the shark at this point, he was the proponent of our '3 strikes' legislation - when this was announced in parliament today there were shouts of "strike two".
The main reason why the government started doing that in 2005 was because we had discovered that Israeli spies had been doing exactly that thing, getting fake NZ passports using the birth certificates of dead babies - the police went back through the records to hunt down any such passports, to cancel them to protect our citizens traveling abroad.
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To clarify, he was behind the "3 strikes violent crimes GOTO jail" and not the "3 strikes copyright infringement GOTO dark ages"
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I seem to recall years back..there were a whole litany of things you could do with "dead babies"....?
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And I guarantee most of that extra income goes to...hookers [google.com] and blackjack [wikipedia.org]!
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Not once you normalize the data for skillset and experience. Ironically, Republicans are usually careful to do this so gender pay disparity disappears, but not when it supports their theory. The same is true of Democrats in reverse.
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Just a tip (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't buy this book on Amazon using your credit card if you do intend on disappearing. It might tip off anyone who does come looking for you.
Au contraire (Score:2)
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Or buy the book and do exactly the opposite to everything it recommends.
So, stay exactly where you are, then?
And if you want to be dead (Score:2)
Then NZ has great natural disasters.
As well as great beaches.
Re:And if you want to be dead (Score:4, Funny)
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Even your natural disasters are boring :)
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Thats my point. Its a great place to make people think you are dead, or at least missing.
Time & money (Score:2, Interesting)
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If you're faking your death, "being legal" is the least of your worries.
FTFA:
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Is it actually illegal to fake your death??
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Publishing a fake death notice, for example, in the local newspaper. The publication of the death notice is part of the public record.
iendedi (Score:2)
iendedi. s/istartedi/iendedi/g. Whoah!
Ad for his book (Score:5, Insightful)
This whole 'interview' seemed very shallow with no detail. The interviewer kept pestering about illegal things which he kept saying "No, don't do that." and I kept saying "Well what would one do then?" Finally at the end he mentions his book with a link to where you can buy it.
So, what is the point of this article then?
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So, what is the point of this article then?
Well...
Finally at the end he mentions his book with a link to where you can buy it.
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You hide in crowds not underpopulated countries. (Score:2, Informative)
NZ may be a great place to end up but it has a first-world intelligence and police service with very good databases. The French military naively thought they could wander round NZ in the '80s with no one noticing but just about every step these secret agents took was remembered, videotaped and documented by sticky-nosed busy-bodies. The best place to hide is in a crowd and with NZ being so underpopulated, strangers stick out.
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NZ may be a great place to end up but it has a first-world intelligence and police service with very good databases.
Oblig. Tui ad "Yeah, right!"
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/politics/4124806/Inquiry-into-SIS-role
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Actually, what you want is ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... a bunch of phoney identities under which to wreak havoc. Meanwhile, keep your real name and reputation clean. When one of the 'evil' identities gets into trouble, kill it off.
Set these up early in life and keep them going with minor activity. Loan a fake SSN out to an illegal laborer to stay on the books. Then, when you hit it big in Vegas, you record the income under the false ID. That person 'dies' (Hey, it was a Mexican gardener anyway), leaving no trace of the cash. Party with it using the next ID, etc.
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That seems like a lot of effort for a very unlikely pay off.
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If you hit it big, you pay the taxes on the spot. At least that's how it works at the local casino.
Its not about breaking the law or avoiding taxes (like TFA said), its about making those after tax funds untraceable. If you win them as yourself, they know you've got the cash. If its won under the name of Allen Smithee and he (appears to) have spent it all on hookers and blow and then subsequently was lost at sea in a mysterious drowning, the trail is cold.
Let's fake a birth online. (Score:2, Interesting)
The Geek Plays Hide and Seek (Score:5, Interesting)
New Zealand has a population of 4 million.
73% of unmixed European descent. Demographics of New Zealand [wikipedia.org]
Metro New York City has a population of 19 million, and is ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse.
Approximately 36% of the city's population is foreign-born. In New York no single country or region of origin dominates. The ten largest countries of origin for modern day immigration are the Dominican Republic, China, Jamaica, Guyana, Mexico, Ecuador, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia and Russia. The largest ethnic groups in New York City are African American, Italian, Jewish, and Irish.
The New York City metropolitan area is home to the largest Jewish community outside Israel, and the city proper contains the largest Jewish community in the world. It is also home to nearly a quarter of the nation's South Asians, the largest African American community of any city in the country, and comprised as of 2008 a population of 659,596 ethnic Chinese. the largest outside of Asia. New York City [wikipedia.org]
The Islamic population in 2004-2005 was around 600,000. Columbia Presents First-Ever Study on Muslim Political, Social, Religious Identity in NYC [columbia.edu]
Manhattan has 354 million square feet of office space.
But New York remains importantly, if less visibly, a manufacturing center. There are no unmarketable skills, however obscure.
The fool on the run takes to the back roads, the Pacific, the Klondike - where the youngest child will point him out as the stranger. The one who doesn't belong. Doesn't dress the part. Doesn't act the part.
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However, if you want to remain cash only and off the radar - New York has few marketable skills, few places you'd really want to live, etc... etc...
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And if you are a white guy of European descent?
And no the youngest child is not going to point you out in NZ - tourists and migrants aren't uncommon at all.
Facebook could do it all (Score:5, Funny)
It's easy.
Lord_of_the_nerf has changed his relationship status to Single
Lord_of_the_nerf likes The Cure and Why Does Everyone Who Loves Me Leave???
Lord_of_the_nerf's current status: *sigh* WHEN DOES THE HURTING STOP???
Lord_of_the_nerf likes Schick Razors and Warm Baths
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Lord_of_the_nerf likes Schick Razors and Warm Baths
You might have better luck with Dovo.
Do me a favore (Score:1)
Interesting twist (Score:5, Funny)
And here I thought social media was used to fake a life...
More importantly (Score:2)
it mainly helps you fake your own life.
FUBS (Score:3, Interesting)
"We are inundated with warnings that social media is systematically stripping away our privacy."
We are inundated with hair-on-fire cliches being used to preface a forced association between someone's inconsequential issue and some hot button topics and trigger words, in order to convince us that the association is valid and the issue is significant. Needing to use these is a good sign that the ensuing issue is too insubstantial to stand on its own.
Fear, uncertainty and uh-huh.
Redundancy (Score:2)
One can legally disappear through the use of corporations and offshore corporations
I read about this in that memo I got from the Department of Redundancy Department.
New Zealand -- yeah, baby! (Score:2)
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Meeheheheeehhh, that's a shaky plan.
Suck it up, pussy.
We don't just have earthquakes [wikipedia.org] you know, we also have volcanoes [wikipedia.org], tsunamis [wikipedia.org] and the occasional strong breeze [wikipedia.org]. I'd stay away if I were you.
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Or use a black & white printer.