
Investigators who know you’ve faked your death - empath75
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/inside-the-world-of-investigators-who-know-youve-faked-your-death
======
mysterypie
> _“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".

The article is very muddled on this point.

[1] [https://www.latimes.com/la-110804compensation_lat-
story.html](https://www.latimes.com/la-110804compensation_lat-story.html)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2017/aug/08/remains-911-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2017/aug/08/remains-911-victim-identified-16-years-terror-attack)

~~~
marvin
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

~~~
jbob2000
This isn't an interview, it's an ad by the insurance companies - _Don 't do
this or we will find you_.

~~~
marvin
But if they’re so sure, they wouldn’t need to resort to propaganda ;)

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Throw_Away_4382
> 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?

~~~
mhb
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?

~~~
rhacker
I'm not totally sure who fucked up that, but his website says this:

> Since 1981, our investigators have conducted more than one thousand (1,000)
> missing person investigations, with a better than 90% successful closure
> rate.

[http://pallorium.com/News.html](http://pallorium.com/News.html)

------
_delirium
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?

~~~
closeparen
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.

~~~
jacquesm
You even see stories about those officers going to jail, there was a pretty
prominent case in the UK.

------
Amorymeltzer
>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
What law would you say is broken?

~~~
polymatter
Fraud mostly. Depending on specifics also impersonating an official/officer of
the law and unauthorised access to information.

~~~
testvox
Its 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.

------
DoreenMichele
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.

* [https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/05/l...](https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/05/lessons-borrowed-from-intentional.html)

------
ThrowAwway3974
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?

~~~
keeperofdakeys
"... 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.

~~~
technofiend
Twenty years ago the industry was suffering an onslaught of fraud. People
would claim a person had died and was disposed of via cremation or there was
no body at all, etc. I am no expert and the fellow quoted is clearly engaging
in a bit of hyperbole, but one has to assume the bar is much higher than it
used to be.

[https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/01/business/fake-deaths-
abro...](https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/01/business/fake-deaths-abroad-are-a-
growing-problem-for-insurers.html)

------
RandomBacon
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.

~~~
amscanne
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).

[1]
[https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fin...](https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fintech%20Solutions%20Corp/English/CCAA/1.%20Monitor's%20Reports/6.%20Fifth%20Report%20of%20the%20Monitor/Fifth%20Report%20of%20the%20Monitor%20dated%20June%2019,%202019.PDF)

~~~
Thorrez
Maybe he did it because things got so disastrous that he couldn't think of any
other way out.

> If he looks into it further and finds out that the person who vanished in
> that water was in serious debt or that they were “some kind of reluctant
> witness or litigant who has the resources to disappear in a puff of smoke,”
> he says it’s “just the most obvious thing. We see it all the time.”

~~~
amscanne
Maybe. I have a hard time believing that someone smart enough to set up the
whole exchange and run it couldn’t think of a better way to make a clean exit
and not leave an enormous mess for his wife. She would need to help, bringing
the “body” back to Canada, testifying about the hospital and what happened,
etc. So the bet is she can handle everything, claim she wasn’t involved, and
after a few years go and join Gerry in India somewhere? That’s a fools plan.

Then again, most criminals aren’t smart. Maybe he was just lucky for a while.

It’s possible, but I still think it’s more likely that everything was going to
shit for a while and he happened to die. If he hadn’t died, given the BTC
rally this year and renewed interest, he probably would have had a fresh
infusion of capital and we might not even know!

------
sharkweek
The book mentioned in the article, “Playing Dead” is well worth a read.

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
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!

------
caseysoftware
I hope they get on this guy soon:

 _" 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...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7417633/Millionaire-
thought-key-information-Epstein-scandal-vanishes.html)

------
eternalny1
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.

~~~
marvin
Sailing across the Atlantic is challenging, but absolutely doable and not
ridiculously expensive. France and the US both have very long coastlines.

------
RickJWagner
I like the coin-collector catch.

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
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.

------
leni536
> 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.

~~~
carlmr
>> 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.

~~~
kd5bjo
The question is how can you be confident that the cases you’re putting into
category D don’t actually belong in category U. The investigator is tasked
with finding people who faked their own death; how can you tell the difference
between a successful con and the person you’re looking for actually being
deceased?

~~~
carlmr
Teeth, DNA, fingerprints, etc

------
forgottenpass
>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!"

------
randaouser
This sounds like the quadrigacx exit scam

------
toadi
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?

------
JoeAltmaier
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.

------
teflodollar
>A few years later, Olivia Newton-John’s fuckboi boyfriend Patrick McDermott

What could have possessed the author to publish this phrase?

~~~
Throw_Away_4382
Mel Magazine is supposed to be an "Esquire meets Vice". The editor-in-chief
comes from Playboy.[1]

[1]: [https://www.fastcompany.com/90217210/dollar-shave-clubs-
mens...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90217210/dollar-shave-clubs-mens-
magazine-mel-grows-up)

~~~
adrr
Mel is Dollar Shave Club's content team. They also produce the bathroom
minutes that come in every box.

------
starpilot
Excellent. I now know what I must do.

