HOW TO DISAPPEAR WITHOUT A TRACE
Michelle Kramer was concerned when she woke up to discover that her husband wasn’t home. She had hoped that Mark, a successful surgeon in the Chicago area, had simply gone out for a run. Michelle had noted that her husband hadn’t been himself lately. He had been stressed out about some malpractice lawsuits. Mark had even asked her if she would be willing to move to Europe to live a “simpler life,” which is why they were living on a yacht in Greece when he went missing. When Mark didn’t return to the boat, Michelle started to suspect that he had disappeared on purpose. After a whirlwind romance, Mark and Michelle lived a lavish lifestyle. They took private jets to vacations in Greece and Italy. When Michelle eventually made it back home, she found her elaborate lifestyle had disappeared along with her husband. She discovered there was no money left in their bank accounts, and that he had been performing surgeries on patients in volume, to make fast cash. There had been more than three hundred malpractice suits filed against him, and they were $6 million in debt. Another five years passed before Mark was found—in a tent on top of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, with canned food, clothing, and other survival gear. He was caught when he failed to pay rent on an apartment he sometimes stayed in in a nearby Italian town. Strangely enough, he used his real name to rent the apartment, and when he didn’t pay rent, his landlord went to the police. While Mark Kramer chose to disappear rather than deal with the many problems he’d created, there are unfortunately times when innocent people feel they have no choice but to disappear off the face of the earth. With some extra careful planning and commitment to carrying out that plan, it is possible to vanish and not be found. I’m certainly not suggesting you try this yourself, but I’m often asked how it’s done. Here’s how.
While possible, disappearing is complicated, stressful, and requires meticulous planning. If you truly believed the only way to stay alive is to be gone forever, you would to have to stay off the grid long term, which is mentally taxing as well as logistically challenging. That’s why I consider disappearing truly a last resort. If restraining orders, police protection, legal help, and other such avenues haven’t produced satisfactory results, disappearing may be the right option for you—but chances are, this information is more of a “who knew?” than a “try this at home.” It goes without saying that anyone even casually considering this route should think carefully before taking action. Consider the following:
Resources: If you were to disappear, you would need access to lots of cash. Disappearing requires that you are able to pay for your apartment, food, clothing, and other necessities with cash only. You would never use credit cards again.
Family and friends: Your friends and family members would obviously be upset and concerned when you went missing. While it might be possible to have very limited contact with a close family member, it would have to be minimal, and it would be complicated.
Legal ramifications: Depending on where you live and what debts you have or insurance claims are made on your behalf, there could be illegalities to your disappearing.
Going alone: It would be much harder to disappear if you were unable to go alone. Disappearing with a loved one is incredibly difficult. Having additional people with you would likely lead to you eventually being caught.
What are you up against? As I’ve said, disappearing is a last resort and would be a viable choice only if it were the only way you could stay alive. If you were running from an abusive spouse or boyfriend, you would need to consider his or her resources. How hard would that person look for you? If you were thinking about running from the government, you’d be dealing with an entirely different ball game. The government has a virtually unlimited bank account to spend tracking you down, and running from the government would require a level of discipline that most people don’t have.
As you can imagine, it has never been harder to disappear. There are traces of us everywhere. Cell phones indicate exactly where we are at any time, we have credit cards, bank accounts, Social Security numbers, social media accounts, and countless other things that can lead someone right to us. According to CBS News, as many as two hundred security cameras could be watching you at any given time—surveillance cameras are found at banks, random street corners, stadiums, national monuments, and even parks. They are nearly impossible to avoid. All of this is why following each of these three steps to the letter would be crucial if you wanted to disappear without being caught.
Misinformation sounds simple, but it’s actually time-consuming and requires precision. Misinformation is when you purposefully manipulate the information various companies have on you. If you look in your wallet, you’ll see that each credit card, membership card, and frequent flyer card holds information about you. Every time you buy something, the credit card company is listing those transactions. Every phone call you make on your cell phone or home phone is listed. You may think you’ve led a private and discreet life, but unless you don’t have a phone and have operated on an all-cash basis, information about you is available. To begin the process of misinformation, you would start to make minor changes to every account you have. This part of the process is relatively painless, and can be completed in just a few hours. You would call every account and membership you have, and slightly change your information to throw everything off. It’s not necessary to change the information drastically (you’ll see why in step 2). For example, you would call your bank and change your house number, call your Visa card company and change your phone number by one digit, and so on, until you had covered every account and membership you had, including subscriptions, utilities, frequent flyer cards, and gym membership.
In addition to changing all of these, you would start giving misinformation while you’re going through your daily life. For example, the next time you stopped at the dry cleaners, you would mention that you’re closing your account because you’re moving to Hawaii. The next time you were at the barber getting your hair cut, you’d mention that you are moving to Florida. And the next time you got on Facebook, you’d post about relocating to Alabama.
The point is to give out a bunch of false information so that no one will know where you’re really going and you immediately become harder to track down.
A skip tracer is a person who is hired to find someone who is missing. A skip tracer could be thought of as a combination of debt collector, bounty hunter, and private detective. If an ex-husband really wants to find you, he could use a skip tracer. If you owe someone a massive debt and have skipped town, he’d hire a skip tracer. While there are many professional skip tracers who are very good at what they do, with some perseverance and basic technical knowledge, anyone can do it. A skip tracer generally starts by collecting as much information as possible about the person he is searching for. The skip tracer will analyze and verify the information in order to get clues about that person’s whereabouts. If there is a lot of information about a person, in certain instances it may conflict, and the skip tracer will have to figure out what is accurate.
Skip tracers also use various tactics to try to get information about you out of other people. Michelle Gomez, a four-foot, eleven-inch, hundred-pound woman from Texas is considered one of the best skip tracers in the world. Gomez once needed to locate a fleet of Caterpillar wheel loaders taken by a group of Peruvians. How did she do it? Her first tactic was to find the patriarch of the family who had taken the vehicles. She contacted the patriarch’s wife and told her she was carrying her husband’s child. The tactic worked and she got the information she needed. Skip tracers will also use pretexting. Remember, pretexting is a form of social engineering where a person uses a false motive to obtain information about someone. A skip tracer might call the bank pretending to be you. They might say, “Hey, I didn’t get my bank statement this month, can you confirm you sent it to this address?” The bank employee may very well say “No. We sent it to 123 Sycamore Street.” And now the skip tracer has your home address. You want to be especially careful about pretexts conducted by women. Society is conditioned to feel more comfortable divulging information to women. If a man calls up and asks for a phone number, a person might be scared off, and won’t give it. If it’s a woman, it can be a different story. I was once in a situation in which I needed to get some information from a reporter. I knew it wouldn’t be easy for me, so I asked an attractive female friend to help out. Not only did she get the information I needed, she was asked out on a date (the guy was married; she said no). This just shows how conditioned we are as a society to let our guards down for women.
Disinformation is key if you want to keep the skip tracers off your back. The purpose of disinformation is to manipulate people. You want them wondering what’s true. What information can be trusted? If you wanted to keep a skip tracer really busy, you could create different trails of false information. They’d have to investigate each trail, ideally finding that none of them lead back to you. For the purposes of disappearing, your goal would be to spread false information about yourself and the place where you are moving.
If you currently live in Milwaukee, but wanted to disappear, you could give off the impression that you’re moving to Arizona. How would you do this? By flying out to Arizona just like you would if you were really relocating. You’d look at apartments and houses. You’d go through the motions of signing a lease. You would want your skip tracer to report back to your ex-husband or whoever that your “credit was checked by ABC Realty Company in Arizona.” You could rent a post office box, have packages or mail sent, or even rent a place to live (obviously that would require serious financial resources). The bottom line is you would need to leave a trail in your new city, providing evidence that you were really moving there, and you would need to make it as convincing as possible. As you can see, disinformation takes a lot of work because you’d have to go to that city and do everything that a person who was truly going to live in that city would do.
You might have guessed right away that if you’re fleeing from your ex-husband in Milwaukee, you’re not really moving to Arizona. After setting up your PO box and having your credit checked by rental agencies in Arizona, you would actually be moving to a totally different city. For this case, let’s say you made it look like you were moving to Phoenix, but Philadelphia is the city you really plan to move to. How would you get there? You wouldn’t fly or travel in any way that could be traced. You would take buses and trains, and meander your way to Philadelphia. You might stop in Chicago, and then Pittsburgh, or even go out of your way and get to New York City before heading west to Philadelphia.
Whitey Bulger, the infamous crime boss who spent sixteen years in hiding, had $822,198 in cash hidden in the walls of the apartment he shared in Santa Monica, California, with Catherine Greig. The seemingly innocent retirees paid for the monthly rent at the Princess Eugenia apartments in cash. The landlord never suspected a thing. When disappearing, it’s best to operate on an all-cash basis, for obvious reasons. Clearly this is difficult to do, but if you were staying off the grid you’d have to find a way to live without credit cards, ID, and a Social Security number. Prepaid credit cards used to be a great option, but now the U.S. government tracks everything, so cash is the only way you wouldn’t leave any type of trail. If you needed extra money, you’d have to get an under-the-table job, such as working in a mom and pop restaurant or maybe in construction.
When Ellen DeGeneres asked former President Bill Clinton what he used to do every day in normal life that he missed the most, he immediately answered, “Drive.” President Obama referred to driving a Chevrolet Volt about ten feet in the GM plant as a “joyride.” Both presidents have been known to enjoy driving golf carts. Driving is a freedom most of us take for granted. We drive every day without thinking about what it would be like if we couldn’t do it anymore. If you were planning to disappear, you would have to say good-bye to driving, and you’d have to opt for an area where you could get what you need by walking or public transportation. It’s just too dangerous to risk getting pulled over. If you’re pulled over, you’ve basically been discovered.
After five years in hiding, it was getting pulled over for drunk driving that got a wanted criminal caught. Fingerprints showed that the guy who got pulled over by the Vegas police was actually a man who was wanted for perpetrating a $100 million pyramid scheme. Driving is one of the surest ways to get caught. It’s just too easy to get pulled over for a traffic violation or even have a minor accident.
Our habits give away more clues about us than we’d think. For example, it’s very easy to discover that I’m a gun enthusiast. If I ever had to disappear, I know that I would not be able to visit shooting ranges or go to a local gun store, because that is the first place that people would look for me. In the search for Whitey Bulger, authorities tried to use the couple’s known love of animals as a clue, and questioned area veterinarians. Anyone who knows you is going to be familiar with your passions—and you’d have to make a point of giving up some of the activities you love the most in order to stay missing. If your ex-boyfriend knows you hit the yoga studio nearly every day, he’s going to hope to find you in one. This can be one of the biggest challenges in reformation—truly turning yourself into a new person. That’s why it’s essential you remember that every time you engage in an activity from your previous life, you are leaving clues for whoever is looking for you.
These days it’s incredibly easy to track someone down who has a regular cell phone. Obviously if you were disappearing, you would have ditched your smartphone. The good news is that there is a safe and inexpensive way you could have minimal contact with family members; however, this depends on the level of the threat against you. If you were running from an ex who has lots of resources, I have to say, it’s best to never touch a cell phone or speak to your family again. If your threat was not that high, then you could use a prepaid cell phone. The prepaid cell phone is an incredibly handy device, and they are easy to find. All you would need to do is buy a prepaid cell phone (using cash), along with a card full of minutes. These are available at your typical big box stores. You’d just take it up to the counter and have it activated. You would also want them to install the minutes for you. But remember, when the store clerk asks you if you want to associate an email address or phone number with the phone, the answer would be no. Once your phone was activated, you could use it to safely call your family. To be extra safe, I’d replace the phone from time to time—discarding the old ones.
If you were running from the mafia, Mexican drug cartels, or you’re seriously concerned your ex-husband was going to harm you, then you would never touch a cell phone again. But if you insisted on staying in touch with someone and the threat was incredibly high, you would want to take it up a step higher with cell phones. A break phone enables you to safely place a phone call by using a third phone. It’s a process that involves three prepaid phones. Here’s how you would do it:
The break phone is high-level serious stuff, and I certainly hope you would never need to use it.
Hopefully I don’t need to tell you that social media is off limits. Skip Tracer Michelle Gomez told Wired magazine that the people she chases understand that to avoid getting caught, you have to work hard to limit your digital trail. This means staying off of computers and using Facebook only to plant false information at the very beginning before you relocate.
If you were disappearing, you would need to stay off computers. But if the threat level isn’t very high, there is a way to send an email with an address that disappears. Guerrilla Mail gives you a disposable email address. You don’t even have to register on the site. The email address that is generated for you disappears within an hour after you’ve sent the message.
In April 2003, when Scott Peterson was arrested by the San Diego police in La Jolla, California, his appearance had changed. Peterson had bleached his hair and goatee. Rather than admit he was trying to disguise himself, Petersen claimed his hair was bleached by chlorine in a friend’s swimming pool. (Even more suspicious were the items Peterson had on him at the time of his arrest. Peterson had $1,000 in cash, four cell phones, credit cards that belonged to members of his family, camping equipment and survival gear, and his brother’s driver’s license.) Peterson’s disguise was terrible because not only was he still recognizable but the bleached blond hair made him stand out even more than his regular hair color had. The purpose of a disguise is to make you look as boring and bland as possible so you don’t stand out from the crowd.
A good disguise must do more than make you unrecognizable. A disguise must be comprehensive, so that everything you carry—from what’s in your wallet to what’s in your coat pockets—supports your new persona. The most effective disguises also render you unnoticeable. Whitey Bulger and Catherine Greig were known as just a “very nice old couple.” Residents of their apartment complex said the couple took walks on the beach or in the park, and took care of stray cats. Nothing unusual about that. That’s so typical they’re basically invisible. This is what you would hope to achieve when taking on a new persona after disappearing. You’d want to think about what kinds of jobs and personalities blend into the scenery—neighborhood housewife who gardens, garbage collector, waiter at a local restaurant. You would want to put yourself in the position of going unnoticed and not thought about at all.
Perhaps the most famous disguises of all time were created by ex–CIA officer Tony Mendez (who was later played by Ben Affleck in the movie Argo). Mendez had spent fourteen years in the CIA’s Office of Technical Services when he found himself tasked with getting six Americans out of the Canadian Embassy during the Iran Hostage Crisis. Mendez had a specialty of using “identity transformation” to get people out of really difficult situations. Knowing whatever tactic he took to get the Americans out would have to slip under the radar, Mendez decided he’d have to create a situation that enabled the Americans to take on false identities, walk through the airport and simply get on a plane. After pondering a few scenarios, such as pretending the Americans were teachers, or nutritionists inspecting crops—it became clear that the only scenario that might work was actually pretty crazy. Mendez worked with some contacts in Hollywood to establish Studio Six Productions. At the time, no one who wasn’t directly involved knew that the “Six” referred to the six Americans whose lives Mendez was trying to save. Mendez planned to pretend the six Americans were part of a location-scouting party checking out Iran as a potential set.
The operation had to look legit, and every detail was considered. A script was acquired that featured a setting that potentially resembled Iran. Business cards were created, former movie credits were made for each of the scouting party. The business office of the studio (which they rented in Hollywood) had multiple phone lines, including one with an unpublished number strictly for CIA purposes. Ads were taken out in Variety. Studio Six Productions started receiving scripts and headshots—and questions about when the movie Argo would be shot. Bob Sidell, one of the producers helping Mendez out, even took meetings to hear pitches from producers about other movies Studio Six Production should consider making.
Once Mendez made it into Iran, he pitched the idea to the Americans, and handed out their new Canadian identities. Mendez worked with the Canadian government to get real passports, and health cards were given out. Driver’s licenses and fake receipts for random purchases were distributed. Even Canadian maple leaf pins were on hand. The Americans learned the storyline and rehearsed their roles. In the car on their way to the airport, Cora Lijek, the American Foreign Service worker who was now “Teresa Harris the writer,” double-checked her pockets for anything that might have her real name. After a harrowing wait at the airport, the Americans made it onto the plane and ended up toasting each other with Bloody Marys. The third, unpublished phone line back at Studio Six Productions finally rang, alerting the production studio that the Americans had made it out.
While the story of Argo is undeniably dramatic, there are some basic disguise concepts highlighted here that can make the difference between escaping unnoticed and being discovered.
If your goal is to disappear, your disguise would need to go beyond hair color and clothes—you’d have to change who you are. When coming up with a new persona, you would want to think of options that while different from what you currently do, are in fact doable. It might be possible to pull yourself off as a chef—but think twice before announcing you’re a brain surgeon. If you’re a lawyer, you would want to stick with an identity that’s close to that. You wouldn’t want to try to pull yourself off as a plumber, especially if you know nothing about what being a plumber entails, or what a plumber carries around with him on a daily basis. Mendez flew to Hollywood and met with select people he had known from the industry and got information before setting up a fake production company. He made sure the six Americans understood what their various jobs in the production company entailed. You would need to do some homework, too.
Hopefully by now you’re learning how important it would be to blend in to your surroundings. Whatever you’d be wearing to complete your disguise would need to make sense as part of the environment you’re living in. A cowboy hat might go unnoticed in Dallas, Texas, but it would to stick out like crazy in Chicago. Take a look around and note what regular people are wearing. Make sure your choices fall in line and that you don’t stand out. I do a fun exercise during my Spy Escape and Evasion classes in Las Vegas. We’ll check out what people are wearing at high-end hotels such as the Wynn, and then at the less expensive hotels such as the Riviera. It might be normal to see jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt at the buffet at the Riviera. That same outfit is not going to fly at an A-list party in a nightclub at the Wynn. Check out the details as well. What kinds of handbags are women carrying? What kinds of coats do people wear? Fleece? Raincoats? Trench coats? And don’t forget to pay attention to shoes. It’s easy to forget that your shoes are a key part of your disguise. If no one wears heels where you’re living, don’t be the one person who wears heels to the grocery store.
If you were trying to disappear, you might finally regret that tattoo you got in college. Any distinguishing characteristics would need to be disguised. You might need to cover a tattoo or even have your teeth fixed. If you’re bald, you’d need a convincing wig. If you have a mole, you would need to get it removed. If everyone associates you with your funky glasses, you’d need to give them up and consider contact lenses. We all have physical characteristics that are associated strongly with our appearances. Think carefully about any features you have that stand out, and consider options for playing them down.
Countless movies show people changing their appearances by cutting their hair. Julia Roberts cut off her auburn locks when fleeing her violent husband in Sleeping with the Enemy. In the movie based on the hit book Gone Girl, Amy Dunne dyes her hair darker and cuts it to chin length. It seems like it could be trivial, but changing your hair is one of the easiest and quickest changes you can make to your appearance. Change your cut, dye it, and try out wigs and hair extensions. While changing hairstyles may seem more challenging for men, you can alter your appearance by changing the shape of your facial hair or even better, completely shaving it off.
You’d be amazed how your size, height, and posture play a key role in your appearance. Alter your posture, make a point of slouching or carry yourself differently from how you normally do. Over time, losing or gaining weight can also help make a person less recognizable.
If everyone in town can recognize you because you’re always wearing a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt and baseball cap, you would need to stop showing your team spirit. If you’ve worn sneakers, T-shirt, and jeans every day for the past twenty years, switching to khakis and a polo shirt would be a start in throwing people off (but only if it fits into the baseline of your new community). On the flip side, if you’re a suit guy, you could embrace shorts and a baggy shirt. It’s possible to disguise yourself further by changing the fit of your clothes. If you usually favor looser styles, people may have no idea that underneath those baggy clothes you’re actually tall and lean.
If you wanted to disappear, you would need to gather items to help conceal your identity. The following could help you create a disguise for your new persona:
Cora Lijek, one of the women who escaped Iran disguised as a screenwriter, was right to check her pockets for evidence that would give her true identity away. The contents of pockets, wallets, and purses are an important part of pulling off a disguise. If you were to look in your pockets, wallet, purse, or at the stuff in your car, there are probably a few things that give away quite a bit of information about you. An empty Starbucks cup tells me you drink coffee, a receipt from a bookstore suggests you like to read, and the crushed Goldfish crackers on the floor of your car are a definite sign of having kids. When planning a disguise, you would need to think about the kinds of items the person you’ve transformed into would be carrying. If I were trying to pass myself off as a movie producer, I’d probably have a cell phone, business cards, and receipts from fancy restaurants. If I were a construction worker I might have a screwdriver, utility knife blade, and nails. Disguises need to be thorough, and carrying the appropriate materials with you at all times is important.
One of the biggest challenges to disappearing off the face of the earth is dealing with identification. As I’ve said, truly disappearing means giving up activities that require a government-issued ID. You won’t be getting on planes or driving anymore. Again, this is something that needs to be seriously considered before taking steps to disappear. Here’s some additional information about IDs I think everyone should know.
If you were trying to disappear, it might be tempting to find someone who will forge a passport or driver’s license for you. Know that if you did this, you’d get caught. It’s extremely difficult to get a fake government-issued ID. Holograms and magnetic strips have made them nearly impossible to reproduce. Should you be tempted to get one online, know it’s a scam. If you send away $500 to get a fake California driver’s license, I guarantee you’ll never see that money again, and that ID isn’t coming. It’s also illegal.
I am sometimes hired to do a building penetration. If you’ve ever seen the movie Sneakers then you know what this is. It’s basically my job to see how easy it is to get into a place I’m not really supposed to be. Whenever I do this, I see firsthand how conditioned people are to accept a company ID. One time I was trying to get into a convention. All I did was make a cheap and easy ID with a lanyard. I just walked up to the security guy and said, “Hey, looks like it’s going to be a long day.” He basically replied “Yeah,” saw my “company ID,” and let me right in. The ID I made worked, but I also acted like I was supposed to be there. I approached the guy and started a conversation. I wasn’t skulking around, acting nervous and like I was up to no good.
You certainly don’t want to be doing anything illegal, but if your inner spy wanted to have some fun by making a company ID, all you would need are a few cheap items and a little bit of time. I’d also like to point out that you should certainly never accept a stranger’s company ID without verifying who she is and why she’s there. If FedEx arrives with a package or someone from a utility company shows up at your door, look up the number and call to confirm (it’s important that you get the number yourself).
As I’ve said, I hope and expect that you’ll never need to disappear. On the off chance you need to pull off a disguise, you can draw inspiration from an unlikely source—Navey Baker, a tomboyish Mormon teenage girl from Texas. Baker describes herself as shy and quiet. She even feels uncomfortable ordering a burrito at Taco Bell. But Baker also compares herself to Superman, basically acquiring powers when she puts on her “disguise,” which is a giant tiger costume. Baker is the beloved school mascot of the Gilbert High School Tigers football team. NPR’s This American Life profiled Baker and her ability to completely transform her personality by putting on a disguise. Baker said that by putting on a tiger costume, she becomes someone who “doesn’t care.” In her disguise, the shy teenager has been described as having “serious swagger.” When Baker is wearing her disguise, she can do cartwheels—something she is completely incapable of doing in her normal state. While you might not expect a self-proclaimed awkward teenager to be a role model for those who want to conceal their identity, her ability to transform her personality exemplifies disguise wearing at its best.