Looking back at four decades of work, I would say the most exciting was when I was a skip tracer.
Simply put, a skip tracer finds people.
In my day, we didn’t use regurgitated databases or the internet. No, it was hardcore pretext and social engineering, which is lying to extract information.
I loved the work, and it was a true rush.
The Pink Office on 25th
When I think back to my skip tracing days, it goes to the pink office on 25th Street in New York.
It was located in an old warehouse. It had a dirty carpet, a makeshift desk, and hot, hot pink walls.
It was my empire.
I used to go to the public library and jot down the names and addresses of private investigators.
My sales letter was simple:
“Information is the greatest tool, the successful only need apply.”
For contact, it had a pager number.
I waited for calls, and when a page came in, I ran down to the corner to the payphone, took the information, went back to my office, did the work, ran back to the corner, and relayed the information requested.
Even back then, I was privacy conscious.
Most of my clients were private investigators, lawyers, and tabloids.
A private investigator would have a phone number and need the name and address.
A tabloid would have the address of a famous person and need the phone number.
Lawyers would need to locate a missing person for a case.
All of the above needed phone records.
My day was filled with calling phone companies, utilities, and other companies, posing as the target or an employee of the company.
“Hi, this is Pat Brown from NY Tel repair.”
“This is Eddie Davis from Pac Bell billing.”
“This is Mr. Whatever, and I have a question about my account.”
Day in and day out, I pretexted and skip traced to find information and people.
How Skip Tracing Really Worked
With social engineering, I could easily find 10 to 15 people a day.
You don’t do that with a database.
My philosophy back then was brazen.
If you could afford it, I could find it and get it.
All I did was ask myself: Where is the information? Who has a right to get it? And how do I pose as that person?
No place and no one was sacred.
Phone companies, banks, police departments, airlines, credit companies, cable TV, employers, hospitals, family members, wherever.
Information was always somewhere, waiting for me to grab.
Social Engineering / Pretexting / Gagging
Let me clarify: I no longer skip trace or pretext companies.
It’s a life behind me.
However, I still consult on missing persons cases.
The first time I heard someone pretext was a guy named Scott.
He picked up the phone, posed as an employee from NY Tel, and got the name and address from a phone number.
I do not know why, but it fascinated me.
What I learned was that if you ask the right way, someone will give it to you.
It wasn’t long before I was hitting up companies left and right.
“Hi, this is Michael Christopher from Chemical Bank.”
“Hi, this is Eddie Diaz from Allstate.”
Posing is one thing, but being able to read people in a phone conversation and direct them to where you need them to be is a dark art within itself.
I learned to listen.
Intonation.
Breathing.
What a response really meant.
If I was hired to find you or information about you, you had a problem.
Everything Is Connected
I viewed skip tracing as chipping away at stone.
I believed, and still do, that there is always a piece of information that connects your past to your present.
No one has the ability to hide it all, let alone make information disappear in a world where you are a digital commodity.
This goes back to the idea of human privacy.
If you split, go off the grid, disappear, whatever you want to call it, your human actions or mistakes will leave a piece of information behind that can be used to locate you.
As a skip tracer, I thought to myself: What did this person leave behind?
One of the simple examples I use is a man who seemed to vanish off the planet, and I could not find him.
I asked the client to tell me about him.
They said he was a muscle car fanatic.
I thought, let me check subscriptions.
“Hi, this is Mr. Gone, and I did not get my magazine this month.”
So many calls later, I located the right magazine, which confirmed his new P.O. Box.
I then pretexted the post office and extracted the physical address.
This is a very basic example, but I could tell you fifteen more.
All that matters is that the target did everything to disappear.
Everything but change his human behavior.
Stupid Social Engineers
Somewhere around the late 1990s and early 2000s, skip tracers and social engineers decided to put their services on their websites.
Nothing like advertising an illegal service.
When I built my first website, I did add some questionable content, and an hour later I took it all down.
It wasn’t just the websites.
These idiots went on the media and demonstrated how phone records could be obtained.
They actually did the extraction.
Hello, talk about dumb.
The nail hit the coffin when Wolf Blitzer had his people purchase a variety of information from private investigators and skip tracers.
At that point, it was over for me.
I needed a new drug.
Does Privacy Exist?
Early in my career, I recognized that information and data were commodities.
If you are in someone’s scope and they have funds, there will be someone willing to violate your privacy to extract the information.
The truth is, laws only make it more expensive.
They do not always protect a person’s privacy.
Reverse Engineering Skip Tracing
When I began disappearing people, and now working in extreme privacy, I reverse engineered skip tracing.
It focuses on my client’s life: who they are, what they are, what they do, and ripping it apart as if I am hunting them.
This leads me to the vulnerable information left behind.
Finding people and extracting private information has no doubt provided me with the best privacy skills possible.
A History AI Cannot Manufacture
When it comes to extreme privacy, blackmail help, or romance scams, few people can match the range of skills and experience I bring to the problem.
If you have a serious problem and need someone who understands how people, information, privacy, and deception connect, contact me. FA@FrankAhearn.com
Books That Came From the Work
- I Was a Skip Tracer
- How to Disappear
- How to Disappear: AI War Edition
- How to Disappear: A Pocket Guide to Thinking, Planning, and Staying Gone
- How to Disappear Journal