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Investigators who know you’ve faked your death
- _delirium 7y agoMaybe a completely naive question: Insurance companies seem to be one of the main entities interested in tracking such people down, and are pretty big, regulated companies. Meanwhile, some of the "unlicensed investigators" interviewed in the article openly admit to doing illegal things in their investigations, like obtaining phone records by impersonating phone company employees. Seems a bit brazen. Are there enough intermediaries to somehow give the big companies plausible deniability? Or do police just not care to crack down on this arrangement?
- bdibs 7y agoGiven they hire them as a consultant or contractor, I'm sure there's plenty of plausible deniability on their end.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoAs a guess: There's probably a lot of gray zone. When I worked in insurance, our HIPAA training indicated we could call a doctor and ask questions and pay the claim based on information obtained by phone. But we could also be told we needed to send a written request and HIPAA compliant authorization. For that and other reasons, I suspect jobs like private investigator exist precisely because they don't have to comply with the same rules as, say, the police. Reading further: Frank Ahearn is ....a skip tracer (i.e., unlicensed investigator) who has worked to find missing people when a private investigator can’t do so legally.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoHow much privacy rights do dead people have?
- testvox 7y agoDead people have basically no rights, at least in the United States.
- matt-attack 7y agoActually: > The HIPAA Privacy Rule protects the individually identifiable health information about a decedent for 50 years following the date of death of the individual. https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance/health-information-of-deceased-individuals/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance...
- closeparen 7y agoYou don’t have to explain how you found someone. They can’t get one of your steps declared inadmissible and then have a second chance at running. I don’t see how the police would know, unless the phone company detected and reported it. You do sometimes see news stories about police officers getting caught selling DMV database queries to PIs.
- jacquesm 7y agoYou even see stories about those officers going to jail, there was a pretty prominent case in the UK.
- michaelt 7y agoAre there enough intermediaries to somehow give the big companies plausible deniability? In the News International phone hacking scandal [1] the likes of Rebekah Brooks shredded a bunch of documents as investigators were closing in, then claimed they had no idea how their journalists had found all those otherwise-inexplicable scoops. As a punishment she was.... paid £10 million to resign, then hired back 4 years later. Using intermediaries for deniability works, simple as that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacking_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...
- sharkweek 7y agoThe book mentioned in the article, “Playing Dead” is well worth a read. I was surprised at to what lengths some people were willing to go to fake their own death as well as to why they did so. It kind of gave me the same sensation as “it’d be fun to try and rob a bank to see if I could pull it off.” ...Not that I’m planning on doing either, if you’re reading this FBI / Life Insurance Agent.
- prawn 7y agoI often think about the tactics I'd use and would be interested in comparing notes with others, but always worry that publishing a plan would preclude me from every using it if I were desperate. Ha!
- Throw_Away_4382 7y ago> With a team like that, Rambam says he has a near 100 percent effectiveness rate at finding people, usually within a few weeks of their death (although sometimes, unfortunately, it turns out that the people he’s looking for actually are dead). Even so, he says he’s never been stumped. > “Some investigations have been pretty tedious,” he says. “Some have been time-consuming, but only because the person went to the trouble of going from one country to another multiple times. I’ve basically had to follow the trail of breadcrumbs, but it wasn’t cleverness that helped them hide. It was just that they were internationally mobile weasels to begin with. If you have resources, you can disappear for a certain amount of time. But no one can disappear forever.” That sounds pretty bold. Could it be that he exaggerates the truth as advertisement for his service?
- RandomBacon 7y ago> although sometimes, unfortunately, it turns out that the people he’s looking for actually are dead Or those people are really that good at faking their death.
- taneq 7y agoIt does seem like a bit of an unfalsifiable claim. "We are 100% certain to catch you if you fake your death... of course we might just find out you're not faking."
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoA body would do it.
- ultrarunner 7y agoProbably. The preceding statements talk about the need for an inflated ego. But even still, the closing statement made me feel more claustrophobic that I'd like to admit.
- solveit 7y agoI'm pretty sure he's bullshitting. Even the Mossad couldn't track down every high-profile Nazi after the war, and often took years to find even the ones they did find.
- RickJWagner 7y agoI like the coin-collector catch. I used to bowl competitively, every bowler has a fairly unique and recognizable style. I always kind of figured this would be enough to catch me if I ever went on the lam. You could put a wig on someone, change facial hair, even plastic surgery-- there's no hiding the ball's delivery.
- mindfulplay 7y agoIn a weird way, if you intentionally lose your personality traits, skills, love, passion completely and thoroughly, then perhaps you really have "killed yourself". It's a cost a person pays and a million dollars probably ain't enough to a lot of people compared to the missed opportunity cost.
- randaouser 7y agoThis sounds like the quadrigacx exit scam
- teflodollar 7y ago>A few years later, Olivia Newton-John’s fuckboi boyfriend Patrick McDermott What could have possessed the author to publish this phrase?
- quickthrower2 7y agoThe target audience? Here is another section of the mag: https://melmagazine.com/en-us/section/dicks https://melmagazine.com/en-us/section/dicks
- Throw_Away_4382 7y agoMel Magazine is supposed to be an "Esquire meets Vice". The editor-in-chief comes from Playboy.[1] [1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90217210/dollar-shave-clubs-mens-magazine-mel-grows-up https://www.fastcompany.com/90217210/dollar-shave-clubs-mens...
- adrr 7y agoMel is Dollar Shave Club's content team. They also produce the bathroom minutes that come in every box.
- mintplant 7y agoEspecially when the Wikipedia article the author cites [0] makes it clear that it's only alleged that he's still alive. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_McDermott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_McDermott
- spacehome 7y agoI still don’t know what that word means. I looked it up, and it’s not in my dictionary (MW). I suppose I’m not the target audience.
- saagarjha 7y agoYou're looking in the wrong dictionary: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fuckboi https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fuckboi
- eternalny1 7y agoWe've moving into the real of digitizing fingerprints, faces, DNA and everything else into databases. Soon, faking your own death will be almost impossible. Maybe you can move to that remote village in France, but you aren't getting on a plane or a cruise to get there.
- marvin 7y agoSailing across the Atlantic is challenging, but absolutely doable and not ridiculously expensive. France and the US both have very long coastlines.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoOne day when I was homeless, I spent part of the day reading stories about intentional disappearances. I was fascinated by some of the parallels to homelessness in terms of both logistics for how to survive (relying on gift cards and prepaid phones) and that homelessness can be a form of social death to a surprising degree. I blogged* a bit about it, but rereading the piece makes me feel like I didn't do a good job of really capturing my impressions. Perhaps I'll do an update sometime. * https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/05/lessons-borrowed-from-intentional.html https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/05/l...
- RandomBacon 7y agoFor anyone interested looking into a recent case with some publicity: Gerald Cotten was the CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange. It was reported that he died while traveling abroad due to health complications and was cremated where he died. He was the only person who had the private keys for the exchange's coins, and the coins went missing.
- amscanne 7y agoI think that’s the conspiracy theory version. He died in India (and admittedly some details were strange), but AFAIK the body was returned to Canada before being cremated. The lost keys nonsense has all evaporated. It was just a standard Ponzi scheme [1]. Had it all been planned, I would assume they’d have left things in a less disastrous state (Gerald and his co-conspirators). [1] https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fintech%20Solutions%20Corp/English/CCAA/1.%20Monitor's%20Reports/6.%20Fifth%20Report%20of%20the%20Monitor/Fifth%20Report%20of%20the%20Monitor%20dated%20June%2019,%202019.PDF https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fin...
- Thorrez 7y agoMaybe he did it because things got so disastrous that he couldn't think of any other way out. > If he looks into it further and finds out that the person who vanished in that water was in serious debt or that they were “some kind of reluctant witness or litigant who has the resources to disappear in a puff of smoke,” he says it’s “just the most obvious thing. We see it all the time.”
- amscanne 7y agoMaybe. I have a hard time believing that someone smart enough to set up the whole exchange and run it couldn’t think of a better way to make a clean exit and not leave an enormous mess for his wife. She would need to help, bringing the “body” back to Canada, testifying about the hospital and what happened, etc. So the bet is she can handle everything, claim she wasn’t involved, and after a few years go and join Gerry in India somewhere? That’s a fools plan. Then again, most criminals aren’t smart. Maybe he was just lucky for a while. It’s possible, but I still think it’s more likely that everything was going to shit for a while and he happened to die. If he hadn’t died, given the BTC rally this year and renewed interest, he probably would have had a fresh infusion of capital and we might not even know!
- toadi 7y agoSo many questions on this article. That don't get answers. 1/ If they claim they will find you. How many suspicious claims are there? How many get found? Would have loved some statistics going with the juicy anecdotes. 2/ If there are so many people working on it. Doing even shady things. How much money is there to be made? Is it a percentage of the claim?
- ThrowAwway3974 7y agoHere's a scenario I've always been curious about. One day, a person decides to just walk away. Not fake their own death, per se, but just says that they're going hiking and disappears. Years go by, the family genuinely thinks the person is dead, they collect life insurance money and spend it on various things, as you do. Years later, the person shows back up alive. The family didn't do anything wrong, they genuinely thought the person was dead. The "missing" person didn't really break any laws, just ran away from their family for a few years. Can the insurance company try to recoup the money from anyone? If so, who and how does that work?
- DoreenMichele 7y agoIf it has been long enough, statute of limitations may apply. It would depend on a great many factors though.
- keeperofdakeys 7y ago"... but won’t in insurance fraud. “You have to have an actual body to collect on insurance,” says Ahearn. “And it has to be the body of the insured. Ashes are not a body.”" It sounds like you can't just get insurance money for a missing person.
- technofiend 7y agoTwenty years ago the industry was suffering an onslaught of fraud. People would claim a person had died and was disposed of via cremation or there was no body at all, etc. I am no expert and the fellow quoted is clearly engaging in a bit of hyperbole, but one has to assume the bar is much higher than it used to be. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/01/business/fake-deaths-abroad-are-a-growing-problem-for-insurers.html https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/01/business/fake-deaths-abro...
- caseysoftware 7y agoI hope they get on this guy soon: "A millionaire model agency boss who is thought to have key information about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal 'has disappeared like a ghost without a trace'. Jean-Luc Brunel, 72, has vanished as police seek to ask the Frenchman 'urgent' questions about the paedophile." Ref: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7417633/Millionaire-thought-key-information-Epstein-scandal-vanishes.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7417633/Millionaire...
- starpilot 7y agoExcellent. I now know what I must do.
- mysterypie 7y ago> “You have to have an actual body to collect on insurance,” says Ahearn. “And it has to be the body of the insured. Ashes are not a body.” Absolutely false. An obvious counterexample is that the "victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks received more than $38 billion in compensation"[1], even though, as of 2015, "40% of those who died are unidentified".[2] The article itself gives a counterexample: "In 2002, a British man named John Darwin “disappeared” in a canoeing accident only to be discovered five years later with his wife in Panama. Apparently, she’d cashed his life insurance policy to pay off their mortgage." And if it were true, insurance companies would simply say, "no body, so payment denied". They wouldn't rush to hire a skip tracer as the article claims: "remains don’t turn up within a few weeks of their disappearance, that’s when insurance companies start blowing up his phone". The article is very muddled on this point. [1] https://www.latimes.com/la-110804compensation_lat-story.html https://www.latimes.com/la-110804compensation_lat-story.html [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/08/remains-911-victim-identified-16-years-terror-attack https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/08/remains-911-...
- marvin 7y agoWhen the author primarily interviews insurance company representatives, of course they’re going to use the opportunity to lie a little bit in their favor :P
- Amorymeltzer 7y ago>Ahearn tells me he’s spent a large part of his career working as a “really good liar,” manipulating people and situations into giving him information about the people he was tracking down... [snip] “All a skip tracer needs is charm and a telephone,” he told the Believer in 2012, explaining that he could access any record by pretending to be someone else and providing false pretenses. In investigator-speak, this is called “pretexting,” a form of social engineering in which someone lies to obtain privileged information. Skip tracers and P.I.s do it all the time. >Let’s say a client wanted the phone records of a dead person who might not have actually been dead. Ahearn would call up their phone company pretending to be an employee from a different department, and tell them his system was down and he needed to bring up an account for date of activation. More often than not, Ahearn would sound confident, and he’d have just the right amount of information that whoever on the end of the end would give him the name, account number or passcode he needed to get in. Am I missing something or is this named individual really stating that he and his compatriots regularly break the law? I understand that PIs may play around the lines a bit, but this seems egregious.
- mieseratte 7y agoWhat law would you say is broken?
- polymatter 7y agoFraud mostly. Depending on specifics also impersonating an official/officer of the law and unauthorised access to information.
- gknoy 7y agoIn the example he gave, he was impersonating a phone company employee, not an officer of the law.
- testvox 7y agoIts not fraud, at least not as federally defined because that only covers money, property, or "depriv[ing] another of the intangible right of honest services". It does not cover information.
- leni536 7y ago> With a team like that, Rambam says he has a near 100 percent effectiveness rate at finding people... I'm not sure how one could measure this. > I’m always amazed at how infrequently people use cash for this shit. Maybe more of them do but they also get away. From the article I get the impression that these investigators just aim for the low-hanging fruit. There are enough of them to make a living.
- carlmr 7y ago>> With a team like that, Rambam says he has a near 100 percent effectiveness rate at finding people... > I'm not sure how one could measure this. You have a number of people you investigate N. You have a number of people who you find to be actually dead D, and a number of people who are fake dead F. Then there are some unknowns U. F + D + U = N If (F + D) / N is near 1, you have a near 100 percent effectiveness.
- kd5bjo 7y agoThe question is how can you be confident that the cases you’re putting into category D don’t actually belong in category U. The investigator is tasked with finding people who faked their own death; how can you tell the difference between a successful con and the person you’re looking for actually being deceased?
- JasonFruit 7y agoThat doesn't prove they are correctly categorized, just that a category has been assigned.
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- forgottenpass 7y ago>Then there are the people who do it to escape from themselves — they don’t like who they are or who they’ve become, and they want a fresh start in a place where no one knows their name. They don’t do much planning. They don’t concern themselves with the ramifications. They just disappear and don’t look back. Experts call this “pseudocide.” I wish them the best of luck against the nannys of the world screaming after them to "get back here and fit your life into my database schema!"
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoSo, it would be fairly simple to hide your death if you're content to have a new life, without any money or resources from the old one. Wash dishes in a diner in Montana, attend the rodeo, live above a bar - if you want to check out of society, it'd be no problem.