Let’s say our neighborhood ID retailer is Sam. If you don’t know who your neighborhood ID retailer is, just nonchalantly wander under the bleachers at your local high school and ask the chain-smoking, fifteen-year-old sipping from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper sack. She’ll tell you who has the goods, for a price.
Sam learns that Ricardo in Mexico City is seeking to shed the skin of his old life in the ciudad and start anew in Albuquerque. New Mexico sounds like just the place to be his new Mexico! Sam has a connection in Puerto Rico—which is a U.S. territory, for those of you who missed that day in your elementary school geography class—and his guy in San Juan has amassed a tasty collection of vital papers. We’re talking social security cards, birth certificates, and other personal docs donated willingly (or more likely, without the consent of) by-God true American citizens. Puerto Rico ships off this solid info from people who may not even know it’s been stolen or are too dead to care, and then our fine businessman Sam hands over a matching set of social security card and birth certificate to Ricardo for a cool $2,000.
Ricardo gets ready to live in the land of enchantment and Sam lines his pockets with some sweet, sweet pesos.
That’s a simple breakdown of how one guy could change his identification and gets away with it, but let’s be real: he’s walking above a pit of tigers on a tightrope made of dental floss. Even if there is no evidence the vital info is stolen and no computer alarms go off, Immigration and Customs agents are on this kind of scheme like guac on corn chips. There’s a non-trivial chance that this set-up is a self-writing headline about the ICE busting up a Puerto Rican pipeline of immigration fraud.
The takeaway here is that the procedure for securing a new ID in-country, through a different broker and without the pesky problem of having to finagle a passport, is a little safer than trying to provide Ricardo from Mexico City with his new start as Diego from San Juan, a legally papered U.S. citizen. Yeah, it’s the whole border-crossing thing that gets you.
Unless you’re a bird, salmon, or tarantula: adding the immigration element makes travel much more difficult. So let’s set that aside and just deal with brokering a new identity that keeps you inside your national borders.
To cut a long story short and save us both the headache and future court appearance: this method? It’s not worth it.
“But Saul,” you wail in distress, “you—you—you hypocrite!” Yes, I know. I had a guy who knew a guy and all that, and hey, voila, here we are: me in this shadowy place with a new life and you frustrated I just told you my solution might not work for you.
Just remember that as a state-sanctioned officer of the court, it was often my pleasure to defend what our judgmental society might call “the dregs.” Folks who were in dire need of creative and charismatic representation in the courtroom.
Plenty of my clients paid in cold, hard cash. A few, though, had to make arrangements. If you’re the type of guy who collects friends easily, maybe you should consider making the acquaintance of a few less-than-savory characters (all of whom have hearts of gold, their mothers will swear!) who might be able to hook you up when the turkey hits the tarmac.
If you’re not blessed with such a varied social circle, what you’d have to do in order to find a contractor willing to do all this scut work might not be practical. The corners of the Internet where mysterious identity brokers ply their trade are also full of nasty crap like the types of porn that are illegal in all nations and would likely make the devil himself turn up his nose. Sure, you could find marketplaces for authentic new passports and driver’s licenses—but the danger factor is way too high.
I’ve guided clients through some treacherous waters before, but I can’t look over your shoulder and say “don’t click that” or “not sure it’s a good idea to call that number.” Just imagine: you could be shaking some fresh ground pepper all over your Caesar salad while you browse the Dark Net and then—achoo!—your index finger slips and two weeks later, your youthful new bride Oksana is ringing the doorbell. Whoops! So that’s my word on getting a broker to ferry you across the river into your new life: the risk may not be worth the reward for the future Miss Ann Onymous.
So now that we’ve kicked the tires on that “buy your way to a new you” idea and sent it rolling off into the ocean: back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Becoming a person with a different life is a thing people generally only dream about. I’m not talking to the dreamer now, I’m all about the doer. At this point, a doer has a ballpark idea of when he or she wants to pull the trigger and go POOF from the orbits of old friends, family, and kind-hearted creditors.
For some, circumstances may dictate that date. I know for me, it was pretty clear when it was time to go. I looked around and saw that the last chopper out of Saigon had a seat with my name on it.
Of course I had help, but hey, you don’t pass the bar without being a stellar self-starter. I learned a lot from the good folks who assisted me, and I’m passing these savings on to you.
First thing’s first: planting the seeds of that new life as far in advance of your exit date as possible. Let’s break down what you might have to do.…
So what do you want to be called? If you have some terrible burden of a name like Eldon P. Squatcobbler or Bertha Burgerboffer, there might be a temptation to go for something much cooler, like Heather Supermodel or James M. McGill. Cue the descending slide whistle on that sort of ego stroking, friend—that’s the worst approach. Bland, bland, bland. The watch word is “bland.” Manila envelope bland. Suburban strip mall stationery store bland, capisce?
Okay, once you’ve selected an appropriately milquetoast nom de plume, it’s time to consider options for legally acquiring that name.
That’s an option, you know: quietly and covertly changing your name in court. Having said that, the law is arranged to weed out name-change requests done to avoid debt, angry spouses, or Colombian neckties paid for by some cartel boss with a winter home in Tijuana and a Rottweiler named “Pequeño.” A legal name change still leaves a paper trail that stands out like dandruff under a blacklight. And it’s not just unprofessional, it’s potentially fatal. Everything is potentially fatal, I agree, but this is painful fatal.
So, jumping back into the hypothetical end of the pool… let’s just skip the legal means and get right into the splashy fun part: identity theft!
The good folks who assisted me in transferring to the glamorous Undisclosed Location Lifestyle I currently lead let me in on this surprising secret: you can steal someone else’s identity just about as easily as you could pluck a candy bar from a baby’s greasy fingers. To paraphrase celebrity exponent of the Boston accent Matt Damon in the film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, it’s almost easier “to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.”
Identity theft is frequently used just to gain access to the victim’s money, but we’re higher minded than that, aren’t we? Forget about that other guy’s money, we just need this new name to make it easier to fade into the woodwork! That’s the thing about an existing ID: it may not be what you stick with, but it can help you acquire the documents you need to, say, fool Canadian border patrol just enough to make it across before you disappear under yet another moniker into those majestic lowlands.
Whoa, there! Listen, I can’t tell you how to do something illegal like that! I can, however, give you some idea of what I’ve learned other people may have tried. This is purely for educational purposes, obviously.
It’s not the kind of thing we think about every day. If it were, it would probably leave us paralyzed with paranoia. But here’s the big, spooky secret behind identity theft: it’s really easy for anyone who knows what they’re doing, because information about us is everywhere. Your bank statements (sent by mail or digitally), utility bills, your subscriptions to both Soap Opera Digest and Soap Opera Weekly… we’re social creatures and we need to have heat and electricity and a place to park our money, and we don’t always realize just how vulnerable that makes us.
So say you’re a forty-something male of medium height—or a thirty-something woman who’s taller than average, whatever works—and you are about the right weight for your age, have thinning or dyed hair, brown eyes, clubbed toes, third nipples. Seek first that which you see in the mirror. As in, someone who kind of reminds you of yourself. That’s what an identity thief might do, anyway.
Now that you’ve acquired your mark, it’s time to do some research.
Here’s a select list of some of the ways an enterprising identity thief might go about boning up on their target:
• Getting the mail! Only it’s another person’s mail, not yours. Just about any piece of mail can provide nuggets of information for you to use. Christmas cards from Grandma give you family information and names, credit card bills can clue you into a person’s financial stability (like, if the bill is three months behind, maybe don’t steal this poor sap’s identity; that’d just be cruel), as well as provide you with account numbers.
• Pickpocketing. I’m not trying to send a ragtag crew of readers out into the cold like some creepy Dickens character leading a pack of orphaned thieves. A really simple route to gathering almost all the info you need on someone whose identity you want to co-opt—just temporarily, and not for larcenous purposes, mind you—might be stealing their wallet. Go figure. Grab whatever you can, like social security cards and identification, then leave it someplace nearby so the unfortunate mark can maybe recover their Diners Club Card.
• Internet. The Internet is a monstrously great way to ferret out every tiny tidbit no one ever wanted you to know about them. There’s data stored in bases online people don’t even think about. Like that time you put your e-mail address up on a Deep Purple message board because you couldn’t figure out the right chords to “Smoke on the Water.” There are sites with old newspaper clippings that you can search and unearth the most mundane details about your mark, if they or their families were on the grid enough to show up in the local Lunenburg Ledger every now and then.
• Dumpster diving. How do private detectives do it? Cops? Fun fact: garbage is in the public domain. If the average Jane, Joe, Jim, or Juan was more paranoid, they’d realize that the crap they drop in the waste basket could give an ambitious identity thief a leg up on becoming, well, them. Yes, if you’re the kind of guy or gal who habitually carries hand-sanitizing gel, this endeavor might be a nightmare for you, but sometimes you’ve just got to get down and dirty in pursuit of your mission.
Take it from someone who’s gone fly fishing in the most pungent garbage you can imagine: dumpster diving is an athletic endeavor. I recommend that if you go this route, you know exactly what you’re after and have a reasonable amount of confidence you will find it. Wear the crappiest clothes you own, rubber gloves, a mask to breathe through, and maybe down a solid belt of Old Grand-Dad before you hop into that big green box. Also—and this is the trick—your search and rescue mission should not be a daytime activity. Be armed with a flashlight and make your leap in the middle of the night.
Let me illustrate what I’m talking about with a little story…
Steve Snowman decided he wanted to become a guy he knew named Brian Bowman, who happened to be about the same age and have a similar hairline to Steve’s. So: Steve plugged Brian’s known info into a search engine of his choosing. Soon he knew where Brian was born, that he had an Akita named Evita when he was a kid, and that he claims to be the Internet’s foremost authority on bespoke galoshes.
With these unsettling facts in hand, Steve drove to Brian’s place and waited till his target dropped an innocuous black trash bag in the dumpster. Soon, Steve made off with the goods! Once he got home, he put a big cartoon clothespin on his nose and began peeling scribbled notes, bills, printed e-mails and out-of-date coupons from the mess. From his research, Steve then had a great idea as to what Brian’s signature looked like, both printed and in old-fashioned script. He began practicing said signature right away. Not long after, Brian Bowman II could be found sailing around Bermuda in a boat named Aweigh it Again, Sam.
Moral of the story? Concentrate on the fundamentals for this stage of the festivities—social security numbers, ID, deep-cut information, family tree information that fleshes out your new false face.
In my previous incarnation as a magically gifted and fashionably dressed Albuquerque attorney, I have to confess: I knew how to get that green. I won’t say I was rolling in it, that wouldn’t be modest. I did have my exit plan pretty firmly in place when I lit out for my new life, and that exit plan required moolah.
On the most fundamental level: if you don’t have money, what are you going to do in your new life, anyway? Unless you plan on roughing it—more or less being homeless, which in this context still requires that you buy at least some basics like a backpack—mo’ money means mo’ choices. However, if you’re a man or woman of limited means who is not wanted in seventeen states for crimes against nature or humanity, the good thing about disappearing for you may be the same thing that makes unfortunate disappearances of the poor so sad—the state just won’t work that hard to try and find you again.
I don’t know what your time line is, but start socking away the exit funds now. For everything we’re about to muddle through together, money is your best friend…
…Unless the dear reader is Bill Gates–level rich, that is. If you’re so wealthy that the massive pot you have to piss in is made from fourteen karat gold, why are you even reading this? Because while you’ve got the means to blow town at a moment’s notice, all those Franklins crowding your bank account mean you have a much larger target on your back.
What I’m getting at is: the best candidate for using anything from our pleasant chat here to move on up to a deluxe apartment under another name and credit rating is probably some middle-of-the-road schmoe with just enough disposable income to start putting a sizable chunk away each month.