[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

[mindfulplay]

"helped" -> could it mean that he oversaw a group or a team that found these people? Or as a consultant perhaps...

[RandomBacon]

> although sometimes, unfortunately, it turns out that the people he’s looking for actually are dead

Or those people are really that good at faking their death.

[taneq]

It does seem like a bit of an unfalsifiable claim. "We are 100% certain to catch you if you fake your death... of course we might just find out you're not faking."

[JoeAltmaier]

A body would do it.

[ultrarunner]

Probably. The preceding statements talk about the need for an inflated ego.

But even still, the closing statement made me feel more claustrophobic that I'd like to admit.

[solveit]

I'm pretty sure he's bullshitting. Even the Mossad couldn't track down every high-profile Nazi after the war, and often took years to find even the ones they did find.

[closeparen]

Jobs paid cash and did not need I-9s with E-Verify. There was no TSA Secure Flight database query for every airline ticket. You could forge a passport without breaking RSA. Landlords didn’t insist on running your credit. Photos and surveillance footage only moved by hand and could only be searched manually. The license plate from a car on the freeway only hit a database if a patrolman read it with his eyes and spoke it into his radio. There were no audio, video, GPS, and RF devices in people’s pockets.

If you broke out of prison in the 60s, you might have actually started a new life. Almost no one makes it past the first year anymore.

[solotronics]

Mail out gold to an intermediate destination or better yet use cryptocurrency. Buy a vehicle with cash and sneak across the border or be in a country that has open borders with another. Have a destination where you can live with cash for a while and use that time to acquire an identity. Don't log into any online account or call anyone from your old life. It is pretty straight forward but I bet most people would leave a million digital breadcrumbs. There are tons of places you could disappear to that nobody would notice or care who you were just get there with cash.

[cf141q5325]

You also dont have to go far and dont need much cash. In Germany the last generation of the Red Army Faction is still on the run and from time to time makes it into the news for robbing a money courier. The other former members of RAF, RZ and co who were caught a few years ago lived rather ordinary lifes in the French countryside. Once you severed all ties to your former life and your looks changed over time you are good. Bulger was only caught after someone recognized him due to persistent media coverage and alerted the FBI.

[sokoloff]

Whitey Bulger was on the run for 16-ish years and had a lot more resources looking for him than this dude...

[closeparen]

Whitey Bulger owned the loyalty of a large and well funded organization specialized in evading law enforcement, and even that failed.

[shadowprofile77]

Not quite. For the first few months after he went on the lam in late 1994 sure, but after that the old Winter Hill gang went to pieces as the indictments started raining down and he was pretty much dependent on the resources he himself had piled up before hitting the road. The whole point wad to avoid all contact with old friends. It was how it took the FBI until 2011 to catch him, this very lack of network contact.

[dsfyu404ed]

There wasn't much interest in finding whitey until after all the people he could have told "interesting" (true) stories about had retired with their pensions.

[WalterBright]

> Almost no one makes it past the first year anymore.

Which suggests the prisons don't need to be as escape-proof.

[patrec]

I don't know, I'd rather not have people serving life sentences periodically spending up to a year on the lam and adding to their tally with little fear of repercussions. The high likelihood of being re-captured cuts both ways.

[RandomBacon]

Back then they didn't have the technology and networks we do today.

Social media facial recognition is a game-changer for this kind of thing. You'd have to live as a hermit if you attempted to fake your death, because if you're in the background of a photo uploaded to the internet, game over.

[rgoulter]

FWIW, Frank Abagnale Jr (the guy depicted in the movie "Catch Me If You Can") was asked whether he thought it'd be harder for him to do what he did with technology as it is today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMydMDi3rI

He suggested that technology makes it easier for the fraudster to come up with the right details, whereas he often had to bluff when he was defrauding people.

[rincebrain]

Not necessarily. It needs to be a photo depicting you clearly enough along with ideally other photos containing you, and the person has to be able to search by faces on that dataset.

I believe e.g. Facebook will try to automatically suggest tags for faces, but I don't think something like Twitter makes those recommendations.

[Throw_Away_4382]

Can you actually check every photo that is up-loaded to social media? And can't you change your appearance to fool the program?

[ceejayoz]

Facebook'll do it for you. Create a profile, upload a few photos of the subject, and they may start alerting you that you've been tagged in others' photos.

https://www.facebook.com/help/122175507864081

> Here are some examples of how Facebook may use face recognition:

> Let you know when you might appear in photos or videos but haven't been tagged.

[lozenge]

The false positives on that would be insane, they must only check friends (maybe also friends of tagged users)

[ceejayoz]

I've had it come up from friends-of-friends, at least.

A good investigator is likely gonna find that a few friends-of-friends of the "deceased" play Mafia Wars and accept every friend request.

[mschuster91]

Back then there was no lightning-fast international network other than horribly expensive international phone lines, no Internet, no tracking devices better known as cellphones, no national registries searchable in split-seconds. There were not many regulations on international transport as long as you had a decently forged passport. Additionally, there was a lot of support from e.g. church networks that helped out fleeing Nazis. Even the Mossad has its limits.