"I call your sister asking about you, and the minute we get off the phone, she's dialling you. I pull your sister's phone records and I'll have your phone number, and that's how I'll find you."
Frank Ahearn calls himself a "digital hit man" -- if your reputation is threatened by something online, he can help.
He made his name in 2010 with his book How To Disappear, which detailed the methods needed to maintain a sense of privacy in an online world that tracks so much of what we do. Ahearn spent 20 years working as a skip tracer -- someone who specialises in tracking down missing people, whether they want to be found or not -- and much of How To Disappear focused on how to stop people like him who might use their skills for nefarious ends like identity theft.
His latest book -- The Digital Hit Man -- goes on the offenive, describing the tools that Ahearn uses to repair reputations once information gets online. Fake identities, fake websites, photo distortion, SEO-rigging -- all legal methods he relies on to help his clients distort what comes up when someone searches for them.
While he offers clients the chance to disappear, he's not cheap -- he can charge as much as $35,000 (£23,000) at a time.
Wired.co.uk had the chance to speak with Ahearn about his work.
Wired.co.uk: Which problems do you solve?
Ahearn: I solve two problems. One is if you are in a situation and you are afraid, or you want to just disappear so nobody can find you. Or if there's information online about you that's a disaster for your life, I can assist you by using deception and digital manipulation.
Who comes to you for help?
It depends. With the disappearing, it ranges from victims of stalkers to wealthy people who are concerned about their digital safety. With digital manipulation, it's wealthy people who are in some "interesting" business situations, or they want to make sure their 15-year-old daughter isn't putting her information on the net. Or it's that stupid thing of getting drunk and driving into a building and you don't want your future clients to read about that.
The beauty of the internet is that sometimes secrets of the past are surfacing today.
What's the oldest secret that resurfaced?
What's starting to happen is every newspaper in the world is publishing every issue they've ever had online. One client -- he's in his 40s now -- typed his name into Google and he saw something he did in college. He and his friends did an amateur porn movie, and it was being sold on a porn website. It freaked him out and he contacted me, and I contacted the porn company, told them the picture of the cover was copyright protected and they took it down, because it was easier than searching for the rights to the photo.
Then I made fake online entities with the same name, and one of them is this porno freak from Ohio who was in this movie. So if someone types in my client's name now they see this other individual in Ohio and think they were in the porno, and not my client. That's for something that happened 20 years ago.
So it's more about deflecting attention?
Right. That's really misdirection. I'm of the philosophy that you can't delete online information. If you don't own the website or blog, there's nothing you can do about it. To give an example, I have a client -- this is pretty harrowing -- his daughter is about six years old. Her mother was violently killed. Her and her mother share the same name, and my client says she's reaching the age where she's surfing the net, and she's going to search for her own name and find out about her mother's violent death. So I created all this content using the mother's name, tricking it out, suppressing it, manipulating it, so that's not the first thing she sees when she types her name in.
How did you get into this? Originally was I was a skip tracer. I located people and information. You know all the stuff with the tabloids in the UK? I was the guy they would use -- but not specifically them -- and I sold phone records, bank records, airline records. I was able to get it through pretext and social engineering, and I got really good at finding people. And then the law started changing and I realised I can't do what I do, it's not worth it.
I met this guy at a bookstore -- he was buying these books about moving money offshore, and these other discretion books, and he was using a credit card, and I thought "what an idiot, who buys books about offshore banking using a credit card?" So we struck up conversation and I told him how I could find him through his credit card, next thing I know he asks me if I can help him disappear. He was a corporate whistleblower. Then I just kinda got into the digital manipulation and I realised you can't disappear information so you use deception. And I'm good at lying.
How many clients do you help?
I typically work with two clients at a clip. Digital manipulation is pretty time consuming; I do it all myself. The disappearing thing, I could do three or four a year -- ten people contact me but only two of them may need to go. The others, I can disappear them using information. It's extremely time consuming, but if I hired an employee there's not privacy.
If I wanted to disappear right now -- I've got a Gmail account, I've got Twitter, Facebook, a phone contract -- what would I do? The first thing you do is what I call "stop and go". Stop doing everything, from any connections -- meaning your home computer, your work computer, your cell phone, your home phone -- because the mistake people make is they start dreaming about disappearing, and they dream by looking at locations.
When you're looking for people, you don't look for them, you look for the information they left behind. That information will locate you. Once you've done the stop, you go out and buy a cheap laptop and surf the web from public places. Buy with cash, don't put any identifiers on it, and you only use public Wi-Fi. You can walk to a large cluster of buildings and pick up Wi-Fi without a password no problem, and you surf from there and you search from there.
By the same token, you're also on your home computer searching for fake places. You're emailing magazines in Lisbon looking for jobs, and emailing realtors in Lisbon looking for an apartment, because that's the information that a skip tracer will get on you.
Then you need to do the digital manipulation, or digital "twisting" as I call it -- on your Facebook account you start talking about Lisbon, and start friending people in Lisbon, and you start creating this fake online presence that makes it look like you're moving to a new place. And once you've figured out where you want to go, it's then a question of how to get you from point A to point B without getting traced.
Do billing companies give away information easily?
Absolutely. What I would do is see who's in their building, find out who's been living there the longest, and contact them and say "Hi, how are you doing? I'm calling from an insurance company, I'm trying to reach so-and-so, we have an insurance policy and we're trying to send him a cheque but his address shows he's moved". She may not know where you live or where you moved to, but she might say "you know something, his sister lives in Manchester, let me give you her number".
I call your sister asking about you, and the minute we get off the phone, she's dialling you. I pull your sister's phone records and I'll have your phone number, and that's how I'll find you.
To take it further -- not that I would do this -- I would pretext whatever phone carrier you have and I'd find the apps you have on your phone. A number of apps track your GPS location. Let's say you have a Starbucks app, I'd pretext the tech support at Starbucks to find you. I'd have broken 50 laws in the process, though.
Who's the most difficult person you've ever had to track down?
This guy owed a lot of money. He was a mechanic, he owned a body shop. I could not find him. It's like he just walked off the grid.
His phone stopped, everything shut down, and I could not find him.
He had no family; it was like he was a ghost. So I went back to my client and said "tell me more about this guy". The client said he loves cars from the 60s -- muscle cars, that's his thing. I started calling magazine subscriptions saying I was him. 'Hi, this is Mr Brown, I haven't got my magazine", and they'd say they didn't have a subscription for me. But by the seventh call they said "Oh, Mr Brown, we sent the magazine to your new address". And they gave me the guy's address.
That took a couple of days. That's what I call the clue factor -- the things you never think of. When you're looking for someone you come up with the strangest ways of finding them. It's just that one nugget where the predator can find, and you're screwed.
How many people can do what you do? Successfully? I'm probably the only one doing it at this level. I don't think people can do it because I have the skill of finding people -- that's the true skill of what I do. You could buy a book about brain surgery -- doesn't mean you can do it. You can write a book about disappearing my way -- doesn't mean you can do it. I'm good at deception, that's the bottom line. It's what I do; it's my thing.
The thing is, if you hit send, enter or download, you're creating a trace. And a lot of the time these situations arise because of something they've done stupidly. What I always say is: your information is gold, you wouldn't give gold away, so don't give information away.
Visit Frank Ahearn's site for more information about both How To Disappear and The Digital Hit Man. Wired.co.uk spoke to him to coincide with the release of Zero Dark Thirty -- the story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden -- on Blue-ray and DVD by Ultraviolet. It's out on 10 June, and available for preorder now.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
