5 ms·
>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
by 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.
- ummwhat 7y agoComputer fraud and abuse act.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Amorymeltzer 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(security)#Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(security)#... Such pretexting is a fairly typical beginning for social engineering "hacks" we hear about all the time.
- michaelt 7y agois this named individual really stating that he and his compatriots regularly break the law? Are you shocked it's happening, or shocked he's admitting it? I'm pretty sure saying you've committed a crime doesn't send you to jail automatically - otherwise every gangster rapper would be in jail :)
- forgottenpass 7y ago>Am I missing something or is this named individual really stating that he and his compatriots regularly break the law? Any lawbreaking involved is done in service of the system, he has nothing to fear from doing it or publicly admitting to it.
- hackeraccount 7y agoI always take people saying things like that with a grain of salt. If the job is easily done (i.e. legally) then anyone can do it. If you have to break that law that's a way of advertising that you're motivated in the extreme - "I'll do anything for my client up to and beyond breaking the law"