[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.