> “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".
When 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
> 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?
Well, it's a little hard to make the math on this other claim work out: Steven Rambam, a blunt-talking, New York P.I. who’s helped locate tens of thousands of missing and dubiously dead people over the course of his 40-year career
20,000/(40 * 365) = 1.3 found per day for 40 years. Maybe there are large groups faking their deaths at the same time?
I'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.
Maybe 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?
Are 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.
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.
You 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.
>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.
I 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"
One 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.
Here'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?
"... 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.
For 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.
I 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).
I 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!
"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."
We'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.
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.
In 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.
> 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.
>> 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.
>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!"
So 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?
So, 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.
[+] [-] mysterypie|6 years ago|reply
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
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/08/remains-911-...
[+] [-] marvin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heedlessly2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Throw_Away_4382|6 years ago|reply
> “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?
[+] [-] mhb|6 years ago|reply
20,000/(40 * 365) = 1.3 found per day for 40 years. Maybe there are large groups faking their deaths at the same time?
[+] [-] RandomBacon|6 years ago|reply
Or those people are really that good at faking their death.
[+] [-] ultrarunner|6 years ago|reply
But even still, the closing statement made me feel more claustrophobic that I'd like to admit.
[+] [-] solveit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelt|6 years ago|reply
Using intermediaries for deniability works, simple as that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] closeparen|6 years ago|reply
You do sometimes see news stories about police officers getting caught selling DMV database queries to PIs.
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdibs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Amorymeltzer|6 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] michaelt|6 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] hackeraccount|6 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] mieseratte|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgottenpass|6 years ago|reply
Any lawbreaking involved is done in service of the system, he has nothing to fear from doing it or publicly admitting to it.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
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/l...
[+] [-] ThrowAwway3974|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
It would depend on a great many factors though.
[+] [-] keeperofdakeys|6 years ago|reply
It sounds like you can't just get insurance money for a missing person.
[+] [-] RandomBacon|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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%20Fin...
[+] [-] sharkweek|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caseysoftware|6 years ago|reply
"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...
[+] [-] eternalny1|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RickJWagner|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] leni536|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] forgottenpass|6 years ago|reply
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!"
[+] [-] randaouser|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toadi|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teflodollar|6 years ago|reply
What could have possessed the author to publish this phrase?
[+] [-] mintplant|6 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_McDermott
[+] [-] quickthrower2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Throw_Away_4382|6 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90217210/dollar-shave-clubs-mens...
[+] [-] spacehome|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] starpilot|6 years ago|reply