
Faking your death - panic
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/so-you-think-can-fake-your-own-death-elizabeth-greenwood
======
jastanton
Reminds me of a DefCon speaker that talked about exploiting a bunch of
websites to order death and birth certificates. Really eye opening, and
potentially devastating if it's done to you.

Edit: [https://youtu.be/9FdHq3WfJgs](https://youtu.be/9FdHq3WfJgs)

~~~
swalsh
I haven't watched it yet, but most defcon social engineering talks take
advantage of this innate thing in human nature that just assumes you're
authentic. Probably because it's infinitesimally rare that someone is trying
to run a con. Can be quite sobering, but at the same time, it's nice to know
most people try to help others (even at the haste of security).

~~~
TheDong
Well, you should have watched it first because your comment isn't relevant.

The talk is about exploiting terrible digital security, not social
engineering.

~~~
hluska
Your comment is overly aggressive and rude - it has no place in a community
like this.

~~~
caminante
Not sure if you caught this, but swalsh's comment starts with:

    
    
      "I haven't watched it yet..."
    

TheDong's not saying "RTFA" nor is he aggressive and rude.

------
hodgesrm
Fun article. The idea of faking your death has probably occurred to a lot of
people in military service.

It sure did in my case--it only took two days of basic training to make clear
that signing up for the US Air Force was the worst mistake of a heretofore
untroubled life. It's gratifying to see my proposed method (an untimely hiking
accident) so highly praised.

Just out of curiosity for anybody who has gone through this exercise what
method(s) did you consider? Extra points for originality.

~~~
Diederich
Funny you mention two days of basic training being your worst mistake.

My biggest problem with basic was keeping myself from laughing out loud at the
various antics. Once I was able to control that urge, it was pretty
straightforward. I saw it, essentially, as six weeks of necessary bullshit
that allowed me to get to the next level.

My term in the USAF as a 3C0X2 (computer programmer) was fantastically
beneficial. I'd already been programming for over a decade when I went in. But
the installation I landed at allowed me to really learn in a lot of new
directions.

Having said that, I know a lot of folks that had a far less productive time.
But it's still a pretty good way to bootstrap a life independent from family,
in my opinion at least. The money from the GI bill is very valuable, plus,
with some measure of self control, single Airmen can save up a ton of money,
since the USAF pays in full for food, housing and medical.

~~~
coldtea
I did compulsory service, and the most important lessons for me from it are:

1) You get (well, are forced) to mingle and cooperate with people outside your
"circle" and bubble (of course this is truer for compulsory service).

2) You are in place where no one treats you like a "unique snowflake".

3) You get to do all the shit people usually have their parents, mothers,
cleaning services, etc do for them, even more so than when merely living
alone, because there you are forced to do it, and to do it for 100s of people.

~~~
Diederich
Yes, this is all well stated.

In basic training, I ended up being very close to a lot of different people
that I would have otherwise never come in contact with, to that level.

And in my opinion, this is a very healthy thing.

One thing I'd like to share that cracks me up, all these years later. Pardon
the forthcoming ramble.

I had been handling guns from a pretty early age, but I was still looking
forward to training on the M-16.

Well, at least in the early 90s, there is exactly one (1) day of weapons
training in USAF basic training.

In the morning, we got on a bus and went to the ass-end of Lackland AFB where
the gun ranges were. We then received our weapons, with no ammo in sight, and
'trained' on them in several hours of classes.

Note, this classroom was just a classroom, with desks, with the normal
classroom density. And so 50 young men and women were sitting at desks with
M-16s. And, on various cadences, we all held them up, put the clip in,
simulated chambering a round, aimed, and pulled the trigger.

But we had to aim...kind of up and to our left. Because we were never suppose
to point the weapon at another person we didn't mean to shoot, loaded or
otherwise.

It was an absolutely absurd scene.

Many of my class-mates were openly afraid of handling these weapons, and it
showed.

After lunch we marched, weapons slung, over to the firing range. We were to
each fire sixty rounds that day. The first thirty were warmup/practice. The
second 30 were for qualification. We each lay supine with the weapon on
sandbags. Only then were each of us handed three rounds each, which we pushed
into the clip. And then we fired those three rounds.

The young lady next to me was terrified of guns, and had never touched one. I
noticed that she was closing her eyes before each shot.

After we fired our 30 rounds into the targets, our final scores were
calculated. My target had 30 holes tightly grouped in the middle. But there
was another hole, off all by itself, right on the edge of the target.

Somehow I managed to score 31 out of 30 that day, though it was recorded as
30.

The young lady next to me repeated 'gun day' twice more, with different
flights (groups), before she qualified.

Sorry for the ramble!

The real punch line came when I asked my training instructor, later on, why we
bothered with only a single day of weapon training.

He laughed out loud and said something like, fuck if I know. Think about it,
Diederich. What do you think would be going on if Airmen were forced to
actually use their weapons against an enemy. The war would already be over!

Indeed! The USAF: where the best chance of direct enemy contact comes from
becoming one of the few tens of thousands of officers who actually venture
into enemy territory on occasion. The 'grunts', the enlisted, no way.

~~~
snerbles
> The 'grunts', the enlisted, no way.

This was less the case in the past fifteen years, where USAF personnel in
certain career fields were often pressed into Army roles. Particularly in
convoy and military police operations, the Army had overextended itself and
needed the other branches to fill in the gaps of trained personnel.

For most airmen, it can be years before you're even considered for deployment.
Less than a year into my enlistment as a Security Forces airman, I was sent to
be a prison guard ("detainee operations") at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq.
There were Army and Navy personnel, but most of their guards were troops put
into a role outside of their usual training...a couple years prior such non-
police "augmentee" soldiers without proper use-of-force training were involved
in the torture incident in the prison at Abu Ghraib.

~~~
Diederich
Yeah, I was aware of this, but didn't mention it.

During Desert Storm, one of my computer programmer co-workers got yanked to a
nearby base where he received a two week crash-course on being an airforce
cop, so that the actual airforce cops could deploy to Saudi Arabia.

An 'airforce cop' is basically the same thing as a civilian cop. They drive
around on base in police-looking cars, hand out speeding tickets and handle
the occasional drunk and disorderly.

He had some pretty funny stories about how many strange situations he found
himself in, given his abject lack of directly relevant training.

Fortunately, the goings on in nearly all USAF bases are exceedingly lawful, so
his situations were always funny and WTF instead of dangerous.

~~~
snerbles
> Fortunately, the goings on in nearly all USAF bases are exceedingly lawful,
> so his situations were always funny and WTF instead of dangerous.

That was my experience doing state-side law enforcement at a Space Command
base - night shift was especially fun for the weird calls, like complainants
worried about "satellites orbiting San Bernardino County" and the "glowing red
airship" suspiciously near some antenna arrays with the usual air collision
beacons. The usual response was to refer them to public affairs as our office
was strictly limited to a terrestrial jurisdiction.

Definitely more lighthearted than being downrange.

------
pjc50
A variant of this that I heard used to be a problem in India: have _someone
else_ declared dead. It can be remarkably hard to fix the problems created in
a bureaucracy when that happens.

[http://newsok.com/article/3044137](http://newsok.com/article/3044137)

~~~
Bartweiss
This came up in Ohio, with the judge ruling a man dead despite his _appearing
in court_ to contest to decision.

[http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/10/10/jud...](http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/10/10/judge-
tells-ohio-man-hes-still-legally-dead.html)

~~~
tehwalrus
To misquote Babbage, "I cannot comprehend the confusion of mind that would
bring someone to such a decision" .....

edit: oh. The guy went to court to specifically undo a ruling that was over 10
years old, that would have caused his ex-wife to owe the government a lot of
"unfairly claimed" benefits. I'm less confused now.

~~~
TeMPOraL
A good rule of thumb is: if you ever see something in the media that cannot
possibly be true, it really _isn 't true_ \- it's just the media doing above-
average fact twisting on the story.

~~~
emodendroket
But it actually is true in this case.

~~~
munchbunny
Even if actually true, the context explains the entire difference between what
was said and what was expected.

------
nommm-nommm
>A group of private investigators hired by Dateline NBC located McDermott when
they noticed a centralized cluster of IP addresses originating near Puerto
Vallarta, Mexico, all clicking onto a site dedicated to tracing his
whereabouts.

Protip, use a VPN/Tor and incognito mode preferably on someone else's Wifi
with a burner laptop you bought from Craigslist with cash while Googling your
crimes. I've heard of murder/kidnapping suspects being found out this way as
well.

... or really, just resist the urge to Google your crimes.

~~~
celticninja
It seems that Google searches do not aid in identifying murderers but once
they have been identified Google searches certainly seem to help convict them.

~~~
nommm-nommm
It's not a murder but...

[http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/20/the-long-
ar...](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/20/the-long-arm-of-the-
google/)

>The cerebral Gundlach also gave investigators a tip for solving the crime. He
says that while he was at home in his family room, it dawned on him that
thieves would do a Google search using his grandmother’s name to find out more
about the paintings and how much they might be worth... Gundlach told the
authorities that they should check the Internet to see who might have googled
the name Helen Fuchs. He says exactly two such searches were executed: one by
him and one by the thieves.

That's just from a quick Google. I've heard of criminals becoming suspects
from Googling crimes before they become public, it's not that hard to identify
an early or frequent Googler in most cases especially if they are logged in.

~~~
RyJones
MSN maps and dialup RADIUS logs put a murderer in prison at one point. It
turned out nobody else had printed a map of the area the body was hidden.[0]

[0] [http://murderpedia.org/male.T/t/travis-
maury.htm](http://murderpedia.org/male.T/t/travis-maury.htm)

~~~
nommm-nommm
Really interesting story thanks for sharing.

~~~
RyJones
thanks. I worked on the MSN/UUNET RADIUS implementation in the late 90s, so
that particular capture has stuck with me

------
devnull42
THe DefCon talk on this two years ago was pretty good.

[http://www.computerworld.com/article/2966130/cybercrime-
hack...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2966130/cybercrime-hacking/def-
con-how-to-virtually-kill-someone-or-cash-in-on-fake-babies.html)

Video of this talk:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FdHq3WfJgs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FdHq3WfJgs)

~~~
rconti
I didn't see that one, but I saw his "How to overthrow a government" this
year:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA)

------
mattcopp
I've wanted to fake my death in Facebook for some time. A kind of blaze of
glory.

It seems remarkably simple, all I needed to do is to get an obituary in a
local paper, and fill in this form
[https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/234739086860192](https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/234739086860192).
How hard can that be right?

Unfortunately my wife put a stop to it soon as I told her.

~~~
spyspy
It's actually easier than you'd think. A friend and his high school buddies
decided to prank one of their friends by all writing on his all saying how
sorry they were to hear about his dad, he was a great man, RIP, etc. Other
people saw those and jumped on the bandwagon, writing their own condolences.
It was a sick but very successful prank.

~~~
nommm-nommm
For a morbid prank I always thought it would be "funny" to put a dead man's
switch on my facebook account so that if I died I'd start posting again after
a few months.

It's only funny in the abstract though, I wouldn't want to hurt friends/family
in real life.

~~~
sqeaky
My friends and family expect jerkface but technically nuanced shenanigans from
me. If I didn't start posting on the Facebook and twitter after I died my
friends and family might think I faked it.

------
laktak
Cached, for those without a linkedin account:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-
ab&...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-
ab&tbs=li%3A1&q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fpulse%2Fso-you-think-
can-fake-your-own-death-elizabeth-
greenwood&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fpulse%2Fso-you-think-
can-fake-your-own-death-elizabeth-
greenwood&gs_l=serp.3...29517.30313.0.30528.6.6.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0....1...1c.1.64.psy-
ab..6.0.0.zQcsOh9zzjo&pbx=1)

------
Blackthorn
I was going to link to Elizabeth Greenwood's fascinating book, then I clicked
on the link and saw this was written by her! Fascinating subject from a great
writer. There's a This American Life episode about it, where she talks about
this. Very interesting stuff. I can't seem to find the episode or I'd link it
:-(

------
robot
" “Ninety-nine percent of faked deaths are water accidents. In most drownings,
the body is recovered. So why was this body not recovered?” "

I had exactly this question when they mentioned that Osama was killed and his
body thrown to the ocean. OK it's not a drowning, but why was it thrown to the
ocean?

~~~
chimeracoder
> OK it's not a drowning, but why was it thrown to the ocean?

Because they didn't want to create a site that could either be turned into a
memorial (by sympathizers) or a target for vandalism (by people who hated
him), or both.

In any case, if you're wondering whether or not bin Laden is dead, you can be
pretty sure that he is. If he weren't, the best way for them to damage and
discredit the US would be to post video proof-of-life. The fact that they
haven't done that by now shows that they can't.

~~~
FireBeyond
Well, unless he's just sitting in a jail cell in Gitmo.

But I agree, Occam's Razor. That being said, cremation and don't tell anyone
where the ashes went.

~~~
chimeracoder
Cremation has no (or very little) precedent in Islam, along with a more
contentious history. The USG found some rather obscure (IIRC) precedent for
water burial in Islam, which allowed them to argue that they were performing
proper burial rights to prevent backlash.

~~~
sverige
Yeah, that worked well. There have been no Islamic terror attacks in America
since then. Just crazy people who happen to be Muslim.

------
jkot
Is not it easier to move abroad? In many countries student loans are included
in personal bankruptcy. And you get citizenship with passport after 5 years of
residency.

~~~
prostoalex
Unless one renounces their US citizenship, they're still subject to IRS and US
courts. Department of State also suggests that it doesn't clean the slate as
far as financial burdens are concerned
[https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal-
considerati...](https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal-
considerations/us-citizenship-laws-policies/renunciation-of-citizenship.html)

"In addition, the act of renouncing U.S. citizenship does not allow persons to
avoid possible prosecution for crimes which they may have committed in the
United States, or escape the repayment of financial obligations, including
child support payments, previously incurred in the United States or incurred
as United States citizens abroad."

~~~
jkot
It is one way ticket, obviously. Student loans would not be enforceable in
foreign country, after personal bankruptcy.

~~~
prostoalex
But if the lender sues in a US court and gets a judgement, isn't the person
subject to an extradition? The lender doesn't have to sue in respective
country's court.

~~~
tonyarkles
I am not an American, nor have I ever dealt with the American court system.
However, extradition is, to the best of my knowledge, only used in serious
criminal cases, and not used at all to enforce a civil judgement (which suing
would be).

Wikipedia also has a list of countries that the United States doesn't have an
extradition treaty with.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_law_in_the_United_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_law_in_the_United_States).
Most of those don't look like great options, but a few of them are quite nice!

~~~
mosburger
Surprised to see Andorra on that list!

------
digikata
I recently listened to a fascinating Radiolab episode which is the interesting
flip side of this. The episode was about a girl who couldn't prove she existed
(from a legal standpoint).

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/invisible-
girl/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/invisible-girl/)

------
CM30
The flowchart was amusing, though perhaps a little over the top with the
choices. Jokes about murder and suicide seem like they clash with the more
serious tone of the article a bit.

Seriously though, this sort of thing is about as bad an idea as pretending to
be dying of cancer on Facebook/a personal blog, especially when the internet
makes it very easy to expose liars.

~~~
probably_wrong
I didn't read the arrows about suicide as a joke. I read it as "if you are not
desperate enough to consider suicide, then your situation is not bad enough to
warrant faking your death".

Or maybe I'm just reading too much between the lines.

~~~
Bartweiss
I got the same idea, plus an implication of "if you're not worried about
morality, this is still really hard". I imagine lastingly faking your death is
often harder than getting away with murder.

------
biztos
For most purposes, wouldn't it be easier to just _go away_ somewhere and keep
on being you, just with bad credit?

~~~
e1ven
This article seems to be written with the faux-goal of collecting a life
insurance policy payout. This could be a substantial amount of money,
depending on your circumstances.

~~~
MisterGuy
I wonder what would happen if you just "walked away" on a hiking trip, got
declared dead, and your family family got the life insurance, but you just
showed back up five years later.

You never claimed to be dead. So it seems that's not illegal. If your family
really thought you were dead, they didn't do anything illegal either. Could
they be forced to give the money back?

I imagine the legalities of being declared "not dead after all" would be
pretty difficult.

~~~
logfromblammo
Faking your death is entirely legal, provided that is not being done with
criminal intent.

But having even a $1 life insurance policy, or $1 in debt, or accessing $1
worth of a reputation-based benefit, might be enough to demonstrate that
intent. Most people in the US could not fake their own death without criminal
or civil consequences.

We no longer have the "move to the New World" or "move out to the frontier"
reset buttons that previous generations had (nor even the "get sentenced to
transportation" and "claim sanctuary" buttons).

~~~
Bartweiss
I noticed the "this is legal" claim in the article, but surely taxes become a
huge problem? Even if you're not working, you'd end up either failing to file
or revealing that you're still alive.

~~~
0xffff2
You don't have to file Federal taxes if you make less than $10,300 per year.

~~~
nommm-nommm
This isn't true, you don't have to file taxes if you make less income than the
standard deduction plus one exemption which changes from year to year and also
is also dependent on your age and your filing status and the threshold is
different for unearned income.

------
squozzer
It was among the least-expected articles I had ever read on LI, especially in
light of LI's mission to promote "professional" networking.

~~~
perlgeek
From the perspective of the author of that article it's certainly professional
networking, because she wrote a book about it :-).

------
PaulHoule
It's much harder to do than it used to be.

It used to be you could find somebody who died, get their birth certificate,
take over their social security number and you were golden.

Then they started publishing and invaliding social security numbers of dead
people and it got a lot harder.

------
rocket69
Interesting how the flowchart and the article differ a fair bit.

------
kazinator
> Don't Google Yourself:

> ...

> A group of private investigators hired by Dateline NBC located McDermott
> when they noticed a centralized cluster of IP addresses originating near
> Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, all clicking onto a site dedicated to tracing his
> whereabouts.

I.e. do google yourself; just don't click on the results. Pull the content
from Google's cache, or go through an anonymizer.

~~~
oneloop
So you think that if you don't click anything, Google doesn't log your query
and IP? That's so endearing.

~~~
kazinator
Of course it does! But note that in the above case, the investigators didn't
have to get anything from Google (and Google wouldn't just hand over that info
to a bunch of insurance investigators).

They got the IP addresses from their own site dedicated to that case, which
was getting hits from someone searching precisely for that.

------
fet
It's surprising to me to see how popular this article is around all of my
social media right now. I knew we were all stressed out but I didn't think we
would be this fascinated.

------
andrewfromx
flow chart
[https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAjDAAAAJDEyMDMy...](https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAjDAAAAJDEyMDMyZDVhLTNlMWItNDAzMC1hNmYwLWEyNTBiMThjMTBjZA.jpg)

~~~
agentgt
I'm not even sure a flow chart is worthwhile. Other than looking cool and sort
of funny you might as well just have a bullet point list of requirements. It
certainly would be quicker to read a list than go through the chart.

~~~
amelius
Yes, the flowchart is topologically just a long line of questions, with a
small exception, which could easily be reduced to a single question.

------
CarpetBench
I found it hilarious the number of comments that are tirades about student
loans and "personal responsibility," like it was even a significant part of
the article.

~~~
marwann
The border between hilarious and disgusting is sometimes tenuous. When I read
these comments by MBAs or any other type of "educated" people, I wonder what
their student loans helped them with

~~~
CarpetBench
> The border between hilarious and disgusting is sometimes tenuous

Bit of a digression but just because sometimes it causes friction,
particularly amongst people who think laughter is an inappropriate response to
serious situations:

I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I find the comments themselves
distasteful. That the comments exist at all is quite funny to me, because
they're essentially non-sequiturs. The idea that someone would read the linked
article and decide this was an appropriate context for a tirade about student
loans is absurd (and therefore funny) to me.

Sort of like if we were reading Einstein's biography and someone launched into
a ten paragraph essay about how all children should be killed, simply because
the biography starts with Einstein's childhood.

------
FLGMwt
From the headline and domain, I assumed this was about faking a death to stop
LinkedIn emails.

~~~
0xffff2
Can someone explain this to me? I have a Linkedin account, and the only time I
get emails is when someone wants to connect with me. I opted out of all the
other email categories, just like I do with every other site.

Do people really get emails from Linkedin after opting out of every category?

~~~
cptskippy
You're assuming people getting emails have LinkedIn accounts. When someone
with your email signs up for LinkedIn and then lets LinkedIn access their
contacts, everyone of their contacts receives and email from LinkedIn and they
now have your email address to do with as they please.

~~~
pestaa
Isn't that illegal in the EU?

~~~
JohnStrange
Yes, it is.

------
lintiness
linkedin has become something very weird.

~~~
JadeNB
I didn't even realise that they had content (other than built-in EZ Contact
Spamming). Has that always been the case?

~~~
lintiness
i look at linkedin once a week or so; my "feed" has become some strange
alternate universe of political nonsense masquerading as professional
networking.

------
icantdrive55
Why do I find sites that require login/signup hubristic? I guess because we
have so many alternatives? Or, do I just dislike Linkedin?

------
ronjouch
<meta> Interesting to see this upvoted to the top of HN. What does it say
about us? </meta>

~~~
whorleater
HN enjoys the occasional humorous posts lined with neat nuggets of
information?

