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Faking your death
- TempleOSV409 10y agoI am in a reeducation camp. Fraiser posts all the stories on my internet. Frasier is a retard nigger, doesn't know what a random number is. God says.. pureeing socializing ranger's Veblen's Calliope's Mickey's Nippon's respelled excuse skinniness simpering nudges demerits twigged Talmud's Dewayne kindergartener's miler's designer franchising Ats confuses skulked kitchen's abominable Goldsmith ironically biologist's mouth Scot shrewdness generalissimos
- andrewfromx 10y agoflow chart https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAjDAAAAJDEyMDMyZDVhLTNlMWItNDAzMC1hNmYwLWEyNTBiMThjMTBjZA.jpg https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAjDAAAAJDEyMDMy...
- agentgt 10y agoI'm not even sure a flow chart is worthwhile. Other than looking cool and sort of funny you might as well just have a bullet point list of requirements. It certainly would be quicker to read a list than go through the chart.
- amelius 10y agoYes, the flowchart is topologically just a long line of questions, with a small exception, which could easily be reduced to a single question.
- Ezhik 10y agoWell, if your situation is desperate enough that you are deciding a life-or-death (ha-ha) matter with a flowchart, might as well roll with it.
- lintiness 10y agolinkedin has become something very weird.
- JadeNB 10y agoI didn't even realise that they had content (other than built-in EZ Contact Spamming). Has that always been the case?
- lintiness 10y agoi look at linkedin once a week or so; my "feed" has become some strange alternate universe of political nonsense masquerading as professional networking.
- jastanton 10y agoReminds me of a DefCon speaker that talked about exploiting a bunch of websites to order death and birth certificates. Really eye opening, and potentially devastating if it's done to you. Edit: https://youtu.be/9FdHq3WfJgs https://youtu.be/9FdHq3WfJgs
- swalsh 10y agoI haven't watched it yet, but most defcon social engineering talks take advantage of this innate thing in human nature that just assumes you're authentic. Probably because it's infinitesimally rare that someone is trying to run a con. Can be quite sobering, but at the same time, it's nice to know most people try to help others (even at the haste of security).
- TheDong 10y agoWell, you should have watched it first because your comment isn't relevant. The talk is about exploiting terrible digital security, not social engineering.
- lostlogin 10y agoA few of that here in New Zealand. People pick a grave of someone who would have been their age (ideally a baby as they won't have many documents associated with them). Get a birth certificate and use that to get more documenta. A member of parliament did it once. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Garrett_(politician) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Garrett_(politician)
- CM30 10y agoThe flowchart was amusing, though perhaps a little over the top with the choices. Jokes about murder and suicide seem like they clash with the more serious tone of the article a bit. Seriously though, this sort of thing is about as bad an idea as pretending to be dying of cancer on Facebook/a personal blog, especially when the internet makes it very easy to expose liars.
- probably_wrong 10y agoI didn't read the arrows about suicide as a joke. I read it as "if you are not desperate enough to consider suicide, then your situation is not bad enough to warrant faking your death". Or maybe I'm just reading too much between the lines.
- Bartweiss 10y agoI got the same idea, plus an implication of "if you're not worried about morality, this is still really hard". I imagine lastingly faking your death is often harder than getting away with murder.
- CM30 10y agoThat's definitely one way of looking at it. Which is a fair point. However, I worry it's implying suicide or murder as 'better' choices than faking your own death. Which is an incredibly disturbing thought.
- alexmorenodev 10y agoActually those "jokes" were made to try to prevent you from thinking about all this proccess.
- devnull42 10y agoTHe DefCon talk on this two years ago was pretty good. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2966130/cybercrime-hacking/def-con-how-to-virtually-kill-someone-or-cash-in-on-fake-babies.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2966130/cybercrime-hack... Video of this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FdHq3WfJgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FdHq3WfJgs
- rconti 10y agoI didn't see that one, but I saw his "How to overthrow a government" this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA
- rocket69 10y agoInteresting how the flowchart and the article differ a fair bit.
- jkot 10y agoIs not it easier to move abroad? In many countries student loans are included in personal bankruptcy. And you get citizenship with passport after 5 years of residency.
- prostoalex 10y agoUnless one renounces their US citizenship, they're still subject to IRS and US courts. Department of State also suggests that it doesn't clean the slate as far as financial burdens are concerned https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal-considerations/us-citizenship-laws-policies/renunciation-of-citizenship.html https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal-considerati... "In addition, the act of renouncing U.S. citizenship does not allow persons to avoid possible prosecution for crimes which they may have committed in the United States, or escape the repayment of financial obligations, including child support payments, previously incurred in the United States or incurred as United States citizens abroad."
- jkot 10y agoIt is one way ticket, obviously. Student loans would not be enforceable in foreign country, after personal bankruptcy.
- prostoalex 10y agoBut if the lender sues in a US court and gets a judgement, isn't the person subject to an extradition? The lender doesn't have to sue in respective country's court.
- squozzer 10y agoNever heard of extradition for civil judgements. The thought sent a chill up my spine. I do know -- from a friend -- that the US and some other countries have signed a treaty for reciprocal enforcement of child support.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
- ronjouch 10y ago<meta> Interesting to see this upvoted to the top of HN. What does it say about us? </meta>
- whorleater 10y agoHN enjoys the occasional humorous posts lined with neat nuggets of information?
- biztos 10y agoFor most purposes, wouldn't it be easier to just go away somewhere and keep on being you, just with bad credit?
- e1ven 10y agoThis article seems to be written with the faux-goal of collecting a life insurance policy payout. This could be a substantial amount of money, depending on your circumstances.
- MisterGuy 10y agoI wonder what would happen if you just "walked away" on a hiking trip, got declared dead, and your family family got the life insurance, but you just showed back up five years later. You never claimed to be dead. So it seems that's not illegal. If your family really thought you were dead, they didn't do anything illegal either. Could they be forced to give the money back? I imagine the legalities of being declared "not dead after all" would be pretty difficult.
- tossaway1 10y agoI'm tempted to Google about this but I assume I'd end on a government watch list...
- tossandturn 10y agoDepends on how you do it, but some people just don't give up on someone "walking away". For example, Bill Ewasko - http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/searching-for-bill-ewasko/jt84-5122016/ http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/searchi...
- jandrese 10y agoIIRC insurance companies tend to want to run out the clock on "missing presumed dead" cases, which can be years. They're reluctant to pay out if there is no body.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
- CarpetBench 10y agoI found it hilarious the number of comments that are tirades about student loans and "personal responsibility," like it was even a significant part of the article.
- marwann 10y agoThe border between hilarious and disgusting is sometimes tenuous. When I read these comments by MBAs or any other type of "educated" people, I wonder what their student loans helped them with
- CarpetBench 10y ago> The border between hilarious and disgusting is sometimes tenuous Bit of a digression but just because sometimes it causes friction, particularly amongst people who think laughter is an inappropriate response to serious situations: I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I find the comments themselves distasteful. That the comments exist at all is quite funny to me, because they're essentially non-sequiturs. The idea that someone would read the linked article and decide this was an appropriate context for a tirade about student loans is absurd (and therefore funny) to me. Sort of like if we were reading Einstein's biography and someone launched into a ten paragraph essay about how all children should be killed, simply because the biography starts with Einstein's childhood.
- Bartweiss 10y agoYou know you've got a live wire when the top comment has 5 likes, but 200 replies.
- pjc50 10y agoA variant of this that I heard used to be a problem in India: have someone else declared dead. It can be remarkably hard to fix the problems created in a bureaucracy when that happens. http://newsok.com/article/3044137 http://newsok.com/article/3044137
- eatkinson 10y agoSort of related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Le_Gentil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Le_Gentil
- mysterypie 10y agoIt would be helpful to give a relevant quote (as well as the link): "[He was a French astronomer whose] ship was caught in a storm and dropped him off at Île Bourbon (Réunion), where he had to wait until a Spanish ship took him home. He finally arrived in Paris in October 1771, having been away for eleven years, only to find that he had been declared legally dead and been replaced in the Royal Academy of Sciences. His wife had remarried, and all his relatives had 'enthusiastically plundered his estate'. Lengthy litigation and the intervention of the king were ultimately required before things were normalized. He got back his seat in the academy, remarried, and lived apparently happily for another 21 years."
- nommm-nommm 10y agoPretty reasonable to believe he was dead. Plundered is the wrong word, if you are gone for 11 years.
- tempestn 10y agoIt could be a reasonable word choice depending on what they did with the estate. Legally the new owners would be free to do whatever they like, but you could see how some things would be considered more respectful than others.
- scandox 10y ago
- icantdrive55 10y agoWhy do I find sites that require login/signup hubristic? I guess because we have so many alternatives? Or, do I just dislike Linkedin?
- FLGMwt 10y agoFrom the headline and domain, I assumed this was about faking a death to stop LinkedIn emails.
- d--b 10y agoYeah, and that LinkedIn was warning everyone that they'd find out, so just spare yourself the hassle.
- daveFNbuck 10y agoI recently closed my LinkedIn account, and it's worked surprisingly well so far to reduce the volume of LinkedIn e-mail.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoI never had an LinkedIn account and I get a suspicious amount of LinkedIn emails. The often are very creepy. One asked me to connect with my boss from a decade ago. Keep in mind, I've never had a LinkedIn account. Said boss didn't know my email address then and certainly doesn't know my new email address since its changed since the last time I've seen her a decade ago. Never seen her profile before that, never even knew she had a LinkedIn.
- voidz 10y agoThis is the perfect reason to use unique email addresses: they enable you to know exactly what the origin of the 'leak' is, and when you disable the address, the other addresses keep working normally.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoYou forgot to mention the prefect reason not to use a unique email address, its a pain in the ass and requires effort for very, very little return.
- 10y ago
- squozzer 10y agoIt was among the least-expected articles I had ever read on LI, especially in light of LI's mission to promote "professional" networking.
- perlgeek 10y agoFrom the perspective of the author of that article it's certainly professional networking, because she wrote a book about it :-).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nommm-nommm 10y ago>A group of private investigators hired by Dateline NBC located McDermott when they noticed a centralized cluster of IP addresses originating near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, all clicking onto a site dedicated to tracing his whereabouts. Protip, use a VPN/Tor and incognito mode preferably on someone else's Wifi with a burner laptop you bought from Craigslist with cash while Googling your crimes. I've heard of murder/kidnapping suspects being found out this way as well. ... or really, just resist the urge to Google your crimes.
- celticninja 10y agoIt seems that Google searches do not aid in identifying murderers but once they have been identified Google searches certainly seem to help convict them.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoIt's not a murder but... http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/20/the-long-arm-of-the-google/ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/20/the-long-ar... >The cerebral Gundlach also gave investigators a tip for solving the crime. He says that while he was at home in his family room, it dawned on him that thieves would do a Google search using his grandmother’s name to find out more about the paintings and how much they might be worth... Gundlach told the authorities that they should check the Internet to see who might have googled the name Helen Fuchs. He says exactly two such searches were executed: one by him and one by the thieves. That's just from a quick Google. I've heard of criminals becoming suspects from Googling crimes before they become public, it's not that hard to identify an early or frequent Googler in most cases especially if they are logged in.
- celticninja 10y agoVery interesting, although they were lucky it was very niche.
- RyJones 10y agoMSN maps and dialup RADIUS logs put a murderer in prison at one point. It turned out nobody else had printed a map of the area the body was hidden.[0] [0] http://murderpedia.org/male.T/t/travis-maury.htm http://murderpedia.org/male.T/t/travis-maury.htm
- Blackthorn 10y agoI was going to link to Elizabeth Greenwood's fascinating book, then I clicked on the link and saw this was written by her! Fascinating subject from a great writer. There's a This American Life episode about it, where she talks about this. Very interesting stuff. I can't seem to find the episode or I'd link it :-(
- hodgesrm 10y agoFun article. The idea of faking your death has probably occurred to a lot of people in military service. It sure did in my case--it only took two days of basic training to make clear that signing up for the US Air Force was the worst mistake of a heretofore untroubled life. It's gratifying to see my proposed method (an untimely hiking accident) so highly praised. Just out of curiosity for anybody who has gone through this exercise what method(s) did you consider? Extra points for originality.
- morganvachon 10y agoI've never seriously considered it, though there were times during my previous marriage that no one would have faulted me for trying. That said, if I were going to it would be hiking or camping, outside of the state I'm in now, and I would have to prepare incrementally over a year or so. Buying or making survival gear, stuffing away $5 at a time here and there, and preparing myself to live off the land for the foreseeable future. The reason I say that is because it's becoming much more difficult to be a "nobody" in an urban environment. You can only disappear until your first run-in with police. Even if you've never been arrested you're still in the system.
- Someone 10y agoYet, many people staying illegally in a country manage to live in cities (yes, they aren't in the system, but that isn't advantageous, as 'not being in the system' already is a cause for locking you up) The trick indeed is avoiding any run-in with the government. If there's one group of people who never jay-walk and always have a valid ticket in public transport, it's illegal aliens.
- mattcopp 10y agoI've wanted to fake my death in Facebook for some time. A kind of blaze of glory. It seems remarkably simple, all I needed to do is to get an obituary in a local paper, and fill in this form https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/234739086860192 https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/234739086860192. How hard can that be right? Unfortunately my wife put a stop to it soon as I told her.
- spyspy 10y agoIt's actually easier than you'd think. A friend and his high school buddies decided to prank one of their friends by all writing on his all saying how sorry they were to hear about his dad, he was a great man, RIP, etc. Other people saw those and jumped on the bandwagon, writing their own condolences. It was a sick but very successful prank.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoFor a morbid prank I always thought it would be "funny" to put a dead man's switch on my facebook account so that if I died I'd start posting again after a few months. It's only funny in the abstract though, I wouldn't want to hurt friends/family in real life.
- sqeaky 10y agoMy friends and family expect jerkface but technically nuanced shenanigans from me. If I didn't start posting on the Facebook and twitter after I died my friends and family might think I faked it.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- digikata 10y agoI recently listened to a fascinating Radiolab episode which is the interesting flip side of this. The episode was about a girl who couldn't prove she existed (from a legal standpoint). http://www.radiolab.org/story/invisible-girl/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/invisible-girl/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 10y ago> Don't Google Yourself: > ... > A group of private investigators hired by Dateline NBC located McDermott when they noticed a centralized cluster of IP addresses originating near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, all clicking onto a site dedicated to tracing his whereabouts. I.e. do google yourself; just don't click on the results. Pull the content from Google's cache, or go through an anonymizer.
- oneloop 10y agoSo you think that if you don't click anything, Google doesn't log your query and IP? That's so endearing.
- kazinator 10y agoOf course it does! But note that in the above case, the investigators didn't have to get anything from Google (and Google wouldn't just hand over that info to a bunch of insurance investigators). They got the IP addresses from their own site dedicated to that case, which was getting hits from someone searching precisely for that.
- kazinator 10y agoAnd, by the way, Google could figure out who you are even if you don't search for yourself, but only search for the same kind of stuff you've always been searching for. Someone faking their death is screwed here. Just like "content ID" can determine the identity of audio work even if it has been disguised, Google can match the activity pattern of user X to some existing pattern of user Y, potentially revealing that X = Y.
- laktak 10y agoCached, for those without a linkedin account: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&tbs=li%3A1&q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fpulse%2Fso-you-think-can-fake-your-own-death-elizabeth-greenwood&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fpulse%2Fso-you-think-can-fake-your-own-death-elizabeth-greenwood&gs_l=serp.3...29517.30313.0.30528.6.6.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0....1...1c.1.64.psy-ab..6.0.0.zQcsOh9zzjo&pbx=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&...
- PaulHoule 10y agoIt's much harder to do than it used to be. It used to be you could find somebody who died, get their birth certificate, take over their social security number and you were golden. Then they started publishing and invaliding social security numbers of dead people and it got a lot harder.
- robot 10y ago" “Ninety-nine percent of faked deaths are water accidents. In most drownings, the body is recovered. So why was this body not recovered?” " I had exactly this question when they mentioned that Osama was killed and his body thrown to the ocean. OK it's not a drowning, but why was it thrown to the ocean?
- chimeracoder 10y ago> OK it's not a drowning, but why was it thrown to the ocean? Because they didn't want to create a site that could either be turned into a memorial (by sympathizers) or a target for vandalism (by people who hated him), or both. In any case, if you're wondering whether or not bin Laden is dead, you can be pretty sure that he is. If he weren't, the best way for them to damage and discredit the US would be to post video proof-of-life. The fact that they haven't done that by now shows that they can't.
- FireBeyond 10y agoWell, unless he's just sitting in a jail cell in Gitmo. But I agree, Occam's Razor. That being said, cremation and don't tell anyone where the ashes went.
- chimeracoder 10y agoCremation has no (or very little) precedent in Islam, along with a more contentious history. The USG found some rather obscure (IIRC) precedent for water burial in Islam, which allowed them to argue that they were performing proper burial rights to prevent backlash.
- sverige 10y agoYeah, that worked well. There have been no Islamic terror attacks in America since then. Just crazy people who happen to be Muslim.
- fet 10y agoIt's surprising to me to see how popular this article is around all of my social media right now. I knew we were all stressed out but I didn't think we would be this fascinated.