Private Eyes & Skip Tracers

You can see that the life of the identity changer is much more difficult when someone has the resources to back up their compulsion to find him. Corporations and wealthy individuals may not turn to the police because they don't want to publicize your disappearance. Whether they inform the authorities or not, they will often hire private detectives to hunt you down.

Where I went to college there was an exceptionally bright student who just vanished one day. He was one of those "boy geniuses" who entered the university in his young teens and had a difficult time adjusting socially. He was very much into the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons to the extent that he used to act it out in the drainage tunnels that criss-crossed beneath the campus. At first it was thought that his disappearance was related to the game.

This is the sort of story that makes for great newspaper copy, of course. The boy's parents were very wealthy. While they notified the police, they also hired a private detective to search for their son. The media played out the drama for weeks with each new effort made by the police. But it was the private eye that finally found the kid in a hospital in Houston and brought him back home. Nothing much came out in the way of his motive for disappearing except that foul play was not involved.

Not too long ago there was a locally celebrated case in San Francisco where a man who was not a U.S. citizen fled with his children to Mexico. There was important money involved on the mother's side, but none on the father's. The man was promptly located by San Francisco's most prominent private eye and the children were returned to San Francisco within a week.

The more money and/or publicity involved in a disappearance, the more intensive and prolonged the search will be. If it's big money, chances are a good detective agency will be after you, or even the federal government. But for the debtor who leaves his creditors in the lurch, the companies involved will probably write off the money or turn the case over to skip tracers.

Professional tracing agencies are usually after people who have not changed their names and they have difficulty finding a person who undergoes a disappearance-with-identity-change. They are relatively systematic in their search for missing heirs, stockholders, alumni and the like and boast in their advertising of "85% success rates." I strongly suspect that most of the remaining 15% are deliberate, systematic disappearees.

All tracers constantly and persistently go through phone books, directories, newspapers and so on. Chances are they will find a man with an unusual last name or a high profile. Those who change their identities, shun publicity and keep their noses clean should have no difficulty evading this kind of low-level search.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 898