
The World’s Best Bounty Hunter Is 4-Foot-11. Here’s How She Hunts - danso
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/skip-tracing-ryan-mullen/all/1
======
latj
Its strange how casually they mention her friends who are in law enforcement
who do illegal searches for her.

~~~
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...](http://blog.izs.me/post/72990767417/a-member-of-our-community-is-
missing-help-find-him)

~~~
atmosx
We could raise some money... I don't know the guy, but still the idea is
intriguing... Are we sure the guy actually WANTS to be found?

~~~
yarou
That's an interesting point, some people just want to disappear. I read a long
time ago when I was younger, on a local BBS, a guide to fully disappearing.
Some people just don't want to be found; this can be true freedom depending on
who you ask.

~~~
latj
If so he convinced me with his final broadcasts.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2536683/Yahoo-
hires-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2536683/Yahoo-hires-
private-investigator-missing-programmer-Luke-Arduini.html)

------
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...

~~~
raganwald
I read this with great sadness. In the culture of grift, the highest form of
con is when you induce someone to do something they know is wrong, like a 419
scam where you convince the mark to impersonate a dead person in exchange for
a fee that never materializes.

The rationalization is that whatever happens to the mark is their
responsibility, as they decided to knowingly break the law.

Playing on someone's false feelings of betrayal is nowhere near this, and
exposing them to the very real possibility of execution, just so you can make
a few bucks?

I call that psychopathic. This woman is entirely without scruples, she does
this and boasts of it when interviewed.

~~~
bostonpete
It doesn't bother me that much that she deceived this woman in her
investigation. But the fact that she essentially identified this source in a
magazine article is pretty horrifying IMO.

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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.

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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.

~~~
larrydag
I think it was seized by law enforcement because it was part of a crime yet
technically she was there so I guess it could be bounty hunting.

~~~
runjake

      Skip tracing is not bounty hunting but it makes for a great article title. 
    

and then

    
    
      I think...
    

You wouldn't think that if you had read the article where it said that LE
handed the asset (boat) to her shortly after Mullen's arrest. And that she's a
bounty hunter, as well as a skip tracer.

It's really handy to read the source material before going around correcting
people.

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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.

~~~
aetherson
Her height has to do with people's assumption that bounty hunting is primarily
a physical, violent activity: going and wrestling a dude into submission and
then slapping handcuffs on him and dragging him to the police station.

The reason they mention that a very small woman is very successful at it is to
point out that success is not predicated in being able to win fights with
fugitives.

~~~
michaelwww
I assume that is what hired muscle is for. She's the brains of the outfit. Did
anyone else think 10 grand was kind of low for this particular job? They did
mention she would get the reward money, but didn't say how much that was.

------
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.

~~~
ricardobeat
Of course, but suing an individual vs a government body has very different
dynamics, plus the whole operation has less clear rules and responsibilities
for the involved, not to mention training etc. I guess the victim/family would
have a smaller chance of financial compensation. I'd rather have police be
police, can we friendly disagree?

~~~
fleitz
Yeah individuals generally don't have police unions and an entire corrupt
system to protect (sorry, I mean prosecute) them.

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

~~~
runjake
Nearly all of a skip tracer's work involves online research and covert
surveillance, not being face to face with the mark.

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

~~~
Pitarou
That, plus the fact that it was the social contacts that broke him.

If you could break all social and family ties, you could probably get away
with a lot. But you'd also be alone and vulnerable in the world. Tough choice.

Maybe the master criminals build up separate identities with separate networks
of social relationships.

~~~
Systemic33
That would make p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶o̶p̶a̶t̶h̶s sociopaths pretty much the créme de la
créme, which doesn't come as a surprise, given their prominence among the
world most grisly killers.

~~~
Pitarou
That makes sense. Psychopaths burn everybody close to them, so their
relationships have a pretty short shelf-life anyway.

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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.

~~~
ck2
Law enforcement constantly uses that excuse "we can't be bothered with that,
we need to focus on the big stuff".

Except the big stuff never happens because they typically have big lawyers and
bigger payoffs to politicians.

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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...

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

~~~
BrandonMarc
2 Catch Me If 2 Can

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

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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.

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

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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](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Hardberger)

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abhi3188
I think more than anything, writing an article on a bounty hunter is plain
dangerous.

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

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

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patrickmay
Now I want to read another Stephanie Plum novel.

Just kidding. I wouldn't really read that fluff. Honest.

