The World’s Best Bounty Hunter Is 4-Foot-11. Here’s How She Hunts

[latj]

Its strange how casually they mention her friends who are in law enforcement who do illegal searches for her.

[tokenadult]

I had to go back to the article to find the exact passage you were referring to. "Puzzled, Gomez resorted to a resource she taps only rarely: the help of friends at federal agencies, friends for whom she has done favors and who in return are willing to let her check her information against government databases. 'Their databases turn up what we call ‘trace details’ that you can’t get with the databases available to ordinary citizens,' Gomez says: phone numbers, addresses, company and individual names that have in some way been associated."

Depending on the status of the underlying civil recovery action that prompted someone to hire the bounty hunter, there may have been legal grounds for her to have that "access," especially if what she was doing was saying, "Here are some dots that I think connect in this way, can you tell me, yes or no, if this makes any sense?" But, yes, depending on the exact rules involved of what agency, and what the bounty hunter is pursuing in what case, and what was asked and answered, this could be illegal. Or not. It's not entirely sure if anything illegal was done in what was reported in that paragraph. The term "illegal search" has a much more specific meaning in legal language.

[JRobertson]

I worked for a company that required CJIS(Criminal Justice Information Systems) certification to work on their products. The software dealt with law enforcement so we occasionally had access to live criminal records.

Every year we had to re-certify and one of the major points they emphasized and re-emphasized was that it was a felony to search for anything for a friend or even out of curiosity. You only had a legal right to access and view information if you had a specific reason dealing with a current case.

So, if they let her access any of those databases it was most definitely a felony. But as others have said it could have been public record databases and not something protected under CJIS.

[Systemic33]

There is a longer discussion on the site's comment section about the legality, and the short version is that she has legal access to the databases since she is a licensed private investigator, which apparently is very easy to get in Texas.

[enjo]

It's unclear to me if those searches are illegal or not.

[michaelwww]

The guy had a case against him. I thought it was common for law enforcement and bounty hunters to cooperate. It wouldn't be wise to assume otherwise.

[pwnna]

Yup. That was weird.

Or not. I suppose.

[mathattack]

I was thinking the same thing. Why would she want to advertise this? It almost guarantees that they won't be able to help her in the future.

[atmosx]

If you do this kind of job, that is to be expected...

[yarou]

Not at all strange, people have gotten used to being surveilled is all. Maybe she can help find the missing node.js guy as mentioned here:

http://blog.izs.me/post/72990767417/a-member-of-our-communit...

[girvo]

According to Yelp[0], that's not the only illegal part...

This company is run by a bunch of crooks. They towed my legally parked vehicle for no reason from the front of my apartment. I called them to see what was up and after arguing for a while they said, "oops, our mistake." It took them over two hours to bring it back to me. The icing on the cake, when I finally got my vehicle back, it had been damaged!!!! The driver that delivered it back told me to contact their manager. The manager wanted to argue with me, claiming that they didn't damage my vehicle. So now, my vehicle is damaged, my alignment is jacked up AND I missed a day if work because of these predatory towers.

This company needs to be reported to the better business bureau. I wish I had the resources to sue these crooks.

[0] http://www.yelp.com.au/biz/unlimited-recovery-raleigh

[bostonpete]

> To track down the fleet of Caterpillar wheel loaders taken by the Peruvians, Gomez reached out to the estranged wife of the family’s patriarch

In other news, the estranged wife of a Peruvian crime boss turned up dead at 8:30 this morning...

[sequoia]

my biggest takeaway from the article:

"The most troubling lesson she learned from Mullen, Gomez says, is how readily misleading information can migrate from a posting on an Internet forum to official status. “In a second, what’s false becomes true,” she observes. “All it takes is for one person to put it on the record.” That seems to be what happened with Mullen’s Most Wanted status. A spokeswoman from the US Marshals Service told WIRED that Deputy Sheasby knew nothing about a $2 million cybertheft by Mullen until he was told by “an investigator,” and that he’d passed on the story only because he felt obliged to make other investigators aware of everything he had heard."

Looks like the barrier between social network/forums etc. & official record are pretty porous.

[larrydag]

Skip tracing is not bounty hunting but it makes for a great article title. Skip tracing is finding a debtor for a lender. The bounty hunter gets the collection or asset from the debtor.

[pmorici]

She does both. If you read to the end she actually went and recovered the asset which in this case was a boat.

[jfmercer]

How is it even possible to rank bounty hunters? This article's title is just sensationalist link bait.

[michaelwww]

Her height has nothing to do with anything, but people like those sorts of details. Maybe we instinctively feel that a 4' 11' woman with the last name of Gomez gets under-estimated constantly, so it makes her success more satisfying to us.

[wellpast]

Isn't that just Wired Magazine in general?

[pavel_lishin]

> How is it even possible to rank bounty hunters?

Success rate relative to cost or time taken?

[CamperBob2]

One possible heuristic: the better ones manage to keep their photos out of Wired Magazine.

[ricardobeat]

$10k for what looks like a few months work. Looks like a successful case of outsourcing, but the thought of private law enforcement, mercenaries intruding into people's lives and chasing people with guns doesn't sit very well with me. Who is responsible if everything goes wrong?

[njharman]

> Who is responsible if everything goes wrong?

The responsible parties. "Everything" and "wrong" are utterly vague. But, assume you mean something like Mullen tries to escape and her bodyguard shoots him in the back. It would be up to local DA if they wanted to prosecute, perhaps including bounty hunter as accomplice. Mullen's family could sue for wrongful death.

tldr; laws don't magically disappear just cause bounty hunters are involved.

[run4_too]

That's what I thought. Sounds like an awful lot of tough work for a measly $10K.

You could do pretty much the same thing with a law degree and earn a ton more.

[drivingmissm]

Bounty hunting has been around forever and is a very dynamic and effective part of the law enforcement system.

[coupdejarnac]

You can look here for wanted persons http://www.fbi.gov/wanted and see the reward amounts. She banked at least another $10K, I'd venture.

[stevewillows]

She also had the potential of reward money if there was any. I wish the article clarified that. $10k for the hours and personal cost seems low.

[alextingle]

All yours for a mere US$10k.

[polskibus]

Now that she revealed her face, identity and some of her methods, she'll be much easier to avoid.

[ableal]

Good story. The insightful bit, perhaps not unlike http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_%28countermeasure%29 :

The most troubling lesson she learned from Mullen, Gomez says, is how readily misleading information can migrate from a posting on an Internet forum to official status. “In a second, what’s false becomes true,” she observes. “All it takes is for one person to put it on the record.”

P.S. Wired's comments are worth a look.

[anonymouscowar1]

So apparently the only thing this guy had going for him was that he could print checks with magnetic ink and fake a caller id. Both are trivial. Wow.

[andrewfong]

The more interesting story here is how he was able to confuse authorities for years by creating a slew of fictitious identities online. A good chunk of the privacy debate focuses on anonymity, but stories like these suggest that increasing the noise-to-signal ratio may be even more effective.

[runjake]

Yes, you're right. I mean, there's some stuff in the article about him being a master of disinformation, financial fraud, social engineering, social proofing, hacking the system and creating believable false identities, but those were nothing.

[BrandonMarc]

Another big take-away is how easily a "fact" online can become an "official fact" in official databases.

[ck2]

Glad it is just thieves and not terrorists that can so easily fool law enforcement and private contractors have to be used.

[pavel_lishin]

Another view is that law enforcement worries less about the thieves, and more about perpetrators of violent crimes, or crimes that cost society more than what these thieves perpetrate.

[JimA]

Anyone know what makes the "Mastercheck Keypad and Printer" so special? I can buy cheap magnetic toner and put it in my laser printer to get magnetic encoded checks, but my understanding is most banks don't rely on that much any more in favor of optical recognition. That was one bit that seemed a bit hyperbolic.

[gscott]

Sounds like he was using that for a long time, maybe a decade. He was just ahead of the curve...

[michaelt]

Perhaps they edited or omitted details of what the guy did so as not to tip off people who would like to emulate him.

[spiderPig]

This'll make a good "Catch Me If you Can 2"

[BrandonMarc]

2 Catch Me If 2 Can

[thret]

Who does the photos for these? They are clearly just using unrelated images and fitting in a certain number of pictures per page.

Good stories do not need to be embellished with images of apartment windows or empty parking lots.

[JoblessWonder]

The images are certainly related. Under each it even gives you the reason why.

However, if you are arguing that the images are ineffective I might agree. It looks like this article was included in the Print edition so I'd imagine the photos were chosen to match with the article's layout there as opposed to the online version.

[vaadu]

what was disappointing about the article was no pictures of Mullen, his cars, yacht or properties.

[mathattack]

The most troubling lesson she learned from Mullen, Gomez says, is how readily misleading information can migrate from a posting on an Internet forum to official status. “In a second, what’s false becomes true,” she observes. “All it takes is for one person to put it on the record.”

I guess everyone finally learned that information on the internet can be false. :-)

[js2]

I am reminded of recovery specialist http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Hardberger

[abhi3188]

I think more than anything, writing an article on a bounty hunter is plain dangerous.

[ballard]

~40% of high-speed check processing machines run FreeBSD 4.x-6.x

[PavlovsCat]

I'd love to read an article about that computer she was "forced" to build at age 10. Now that sounds fascinating.

[squirejons]

ah, the neoliberal media once again glorifying their weapons of economic doom, the debt collectors. These demons should be demonized instead.