I was a skip tracer hunting my client who hired me. Sounds odd. Well, it was.
I met a client in Amsterdam who wanted to find someone. Thankfully, I had mostly stopped skip tracing by then and was more focused on disappearing people. Back in the day, I located targets without leaving my office. I picked up the phone, social engineered information, and figured out where people were.
Every so often, though, a client came along and the search was interesting enough – and lucrative enough – that I took the case.
We met at The Old Church cafe in Amsterdam. He introduced himself and explained that he was trying to find an old business associate. My thing was always: Who are you? Why do you want to find this person? And do I believe you? He came my way through a good client, so I wasn’t as inclined to ask all the questions I probably should have. We all make mistakes.
He told me the target was an old friend. A mutual friend of theirs wasn’t doing well, and he wanted to get the three of them together again. I asked why he didn’t hire a private investigator. He said the friend would be difficult to find, he had read about me online, and discretion was important. Fair enough. I agreed to find his missing friend.
I did my thing and searched last known addresses, social media, old phone numbers, and whatever else I could find. Everything came up a dead end.
I decided to use a pretext. I spoke to residents at his old address and said I was trying to settle an estate and that the man I was looking for was named to receive a lot of money. People love it when they hear someone is getting money and are usually helpful with that pretext.
One resident told me he had a small place in Cologne, Germany, right above a specialty cheese store. That was my break. I couldn’t find anything else about him in Cologne, but I had enough information to decide to go there.
I sat in a cafe across the street from the building. Then something happened I wasn’t expecting. The client who hired me walked out of the building. I sat there thinking, What the fuck?
It suddenly occurred to me that maybe the client had hired me to see whether he could be found. I watched him walk down the street and go into a gym. Later that day, I went to the gym and claimed I had forgotten my wallet. The person at the desk asked my name, and I gave the target’s name. Sure enough, when the employee hit enter, the name came up with my client’s gym ID.
That answered the question. The person I had been hired to find was the client who had hired me. We had a rather uncomfortable conversation afterward. Once I told him what I had discovered, he hung up. I never heard from him again.
About Frank M. Ahearn
Frank M. Ahearn is a privacy expert, former skip tracer, and New York Times bestselling author of How to Disappear. He started skip tracing in 1984, finding people through information, social engineering, and human behavior. Today, he writes about privacy, disappearing, reinvention, blackmail, and the strange world he came out of.
I Was A Skip Tracer Book
United States | United Kingdom | Australia | Canada | Germany