Transcript for Frank Ahearn on Helping People Disappear

Jim Fleming: But first, how, how do you disappear without a trace?  Well, we went to the expert, Frank Ahearn [sp?].  He’s written a book on how to do it.  It’s called “How to Disappear, Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails and Vanish Without a Trace.”  He’s a former skip tracer, a private investigator who specializes in finding people who don’t want to be found.  He told Steve Paulson how skip tracing works.

Frank Ahearn: Well, you know, one of my clients, I get a lot of tabloid work, and he called me up one day saying, ˜I need you to find this woman.  Do nothing but locate this woman,’ so we had our basic information, name, old address, Social Security number, date of birth, and we started running the name through utility companies.  You know, I even had one of the females in the office do it as her or go in as, ˜Hi, this is, you know, Joe Blow from, you know, the credit department.  We’re down over here.  I just need you to bring up an account and see if it’s currently in service,’ and they would run the Social Security number and they would, you know, gave me, well we have another address or we have a contact number, and then finally when I got a contact number where I thought she was located at, I called up.  It sounded like a housekeeper or something like that, that answered the phone.  I says, “hi, how are you doing?  This is Michael Christopher.  I’m calling from United Parcel Service,’ or Fed-Ex or whatever.  I have a water damaged package for, you know, Monica Louie, and she kind of hemmed and hawed and I says, ˜well, we’ll just return the package.’  She goes no, no, she’ll be here this afternoon.  Called my client, said she’s going to be there this afternoon, that’s as good as it gets, and he said watch the news, and later that night watching the news, Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton in a scandal, and I was like, ˜wow,’ it was Monica Lewinsky we had to find. 

Steve Paulson: Who hired you?

Ahearn: A tabloid. 

Paulson: Wow.

Ahearn: And tabloids are like the CIA.  They got information like you wouldn’t believe. 

Paulson: Is most of their information pretty good?

Ahearn: Uh, it’s scattered but, you know, it’s good stuff to go on as far as like leads.

Paulson: Was this illegal, what you did?

Ahearn: [makes sound] That’s a good question.  Um, now it would be very illegal.  I think it was more of a gray area back then.  There really wasn’t a law that kind of said you couldn’t pretext phone companies back then.  I mean, now you can’t pretext phone companies, you can’t pretext banks or say you’re from a bank or a licensed individual, so we were kind of like skating a gray area I guess, but those days are over.

Paulson: So you spent years doing this, skip tracing, finding people who had disappeared, and then you, you changed.  Now you do the opposite.  You actually help people disappear themselves, so why the change?

Ahearn: Uh, it was kind of accidental, you know.  I had the misfortune of giving up drinking so I was hanging out in bookstores instead of bars, and I saw this guy buying these books about off-shore banking and privacy in Costa Rica, and I was just watching him and we happened to get on line at the same time, and he paid for these books with a credit card and I was thinking, “that’s dumb.’  I was like, you know, with his credit card I could pretext the credit card company and I could find out that he bought these books and I could pretext the bookstore and find out what books.  Then I’d pretext the airlines and the car rental company, and I could see this whole like daisy chain in my head sort of thing, and I struck up conversation, introduced who I was, what I do, and told him how I could find him and it turned out he was a whistle blower and his money was off shore and he contacted me a few days later and says, “hey, do you think you could help me disappear,’ and me and my Partner, Eileen Horan, kind of thought about it and it was like, “yeah, sure, we could do that,’ and it just turned into like the reverse engineering of finding people.  What have we got to do so no one finds them, just chip away all those things and get rid of them. 

Paulson: You know, what struck me as I was reading your book was, it’s actually really hard to disappear.  I mean, it seems to be pretty easy to find people, at least if you’re, if you’re as good as you are.  Why is it so hard to vanish? 

Ahearn: Uh, I think because it’s like information overload, you know.  You have the, well the internet I would say, there’s so much information out there that, you know, even though you don’t want to be a part of this game, you’re a part of it and not all the information out there you can get rid of.  So, you know, the average person, you can find bits and pieces of them and use that information to locate them, so I just think that, uh, you know, now town halls are putting their minutes on line, you know.  Newspapers are on line, Facebook, social networking, believe me, if I find your mother in Des Moines, I’ll be able to pretext her and find out everything about you and so that’s the problem, is that there is so much information out there to go on.  It’s not always correct or up to date, but it’s a good starting point.

Paulson: Okay, well let’s say that I want to disappear.  Tell me how to do this.  First of all, tell me what not to do. 

Ahearn: Don’t, don’t think you’re going to get a new identity, because those are, it’s misleading and it’s ridiculous because you don’t know who’s identity you’re taking, whether they have a criminal record, whether they owe the IRS $100 grand, or if [inaudible] people have that identity.  You don’t know if the drivers license number on the drivers license is correct or the number on the passport is correct, so it’s illegal and you’re just going to create more problems in your life, but the thing is, that’s the main thing that you don’t want to do, is you don’t want to create a new identity.  But, you know, as far as like what you need to do to disappear, the first thing is you need to locate all the information known about you.  You know, we call that like a social network trace.  What is the skip tracer or the stalker going to find out about you, and if we can delete it, we delete it.  If we can deviate it, we deviate it, but if you can’t do those things, then we kind of combat it, where we take your name and we’d build about 30 websites with your name dot com, dot org, dot net, uc, cl, uk, dot ca, and we’d make about 50 of you and we would just basically flood disinformation about you so that your predator doesn’t know which exactly is you, and we take slices of your information and we filter it through these other websites, that’s for the stuff that we can’t delete.  So we just build more information around you, but the most important thing is to locate everything known about you, your contact number on your phone, your contact number on your utilities, you know, your billing address, changing it, maybe deviating your name a little bit.  When we went looking for people, we located the information they left behind.  We didn’t look for them because we were interested in the information because the information always leads to where you’re at and that’s what we always, what we try to combat when it comes to the disappearing.

Paulson: Could you still use credit cards?

Ahearn: I, it depends.  I mean you can’t use a credit card in a restaurant, okay, because in case somebody illegally accesses your credit report and the transaction shows, uh, shows up, there’s that credit card there, then they pretext the credit card company.  I would just use prepaid credit cards or cash.  Cash is king.

Paulson: What about cell phones?

Ahearn: Well, you can use pre-paid cell phones.  Those are great too and you can dump them every two weeks or every week, depends on you and let’s say you dump your cell phone, and your sister wants to reach you but she doesn’t have your new number to call from her cell phone.  She’ll look for an ad on line for like a blue, baby blue 1969 Cadillac for sale and she’ll search Back Page, Craigslist or something like that, and [makes sound], there’ll be a car for sale and a new pre-paid cell phone number and she’ll call that number and it’s you.  I mean you can also use email but what you do is you write the email, you save it as a draft, your mother signs on line for the same email account and she reads the draft.  You can chat on message boards, you can use Skype, depending, you know, you can just take your laptop and you can go to any major city and pick up some wireless for free, and the other person can do that as well and you can chat on Skype.  Technology is a great thing as well, even though it gives us all this information.  It gives us the tools and gadgets that we can use. 

Paulson: So how much do you charge to help someone disappear?

Ahearn: Well, we don’t charge like the victims and the stalkers because they really don’t have the money.  You know, we make our money like on the business people and it can run like $12 to $20 grand, depending on what they want, but you’ve got to remember, you know, disappearing is the extreme of it.  You know, there’s a whole world of privacy that falls in between where we have like a lot of international business travelers and wealthy people who want to make sure that, you know, somebody can’t just pop in on Google and find out where they live, who their kids are, so I mean, the services kind of go from like one end to the other end of the spectrum. 

Paulson: And so for one of the extreme cases, where really you are creating a new identity or multiple identities, and really helping someone vanish, um, how long would that take to do all of that?

Ahearn: I mean it could take like, depending on who you are and what your situation is, I mean we need like at least 30, 45 days like run time, because we’ve got to find out everything about you and we have to start questioning, you know, how long it’s going to take for things to change and, um, who’s the predator and where are they now.  I mean, is it safe to pick up and split now, or, you know, we wouldn’t want to have you pick up and split and they’re following you, so I’d say probably like 30 to 45 days.

Paulson: Now it seems that there is kind of an underlying issue to all of this for people who want to disappear and that’s freedom, uh, people want to, to start fresh for whatever reason and it does raise questions about how you think about freedom.

Ahearn: Um, yeah, I think, I mean it’s freedom from something, whether it’s a violent situation or, you know, freedom from the information that’s known about you.  I think it’s definitely, you know, money, financial freedom where, you know, you’re taking what’s yours and you’re just moving away from everybody who knows you.  Freedom’s an important thing I guess and I think we have to define what freedom is.  We think of freedom like, as being in the Constitution, but I think after that fact, it comes down to who you are and what you decide for yourself and, you know, to me, freedom is just being able to make your own choices.

Paulson: Do you think ultimately, if enough resources, enough time are given to it, that pretty much anyone can be found?

Ahearn: I think, well, yeah.  I think using the word any resources, yeah, absolutely.  The difficult people to find are the ones who have access to a lot of money and then the street and indigent people are the difficult ones to find, but we all leave some sort of thing behind that catches us.  You know, most criminals who are on the run don’t get caught because of the crime they committed.  They get caught because of something that’s unrelated, a traffic stop, a headlight out.  There’s a story in the UK, Lord Luken who killed his housekeeper and disappeared, and he was seen throughout Europe at different points.  A member of Parliament, John Stonehouse, faked his death too and he was down in Australia walking on the beach, some cop saw him and they thought he happened to be Lord Luken and they arrested him in just this totally random act, but he was thought to be someone else, so you just never know.  Something can always lead you, it’s not 100 percent.

Fleming: Frank Ahearn is the Author of How to Disappear, Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails and Vanish Without a Trace.  Steve Paulson spoke with him