>> VIEWER-CONTRIBUTED CC << I want to be that guy who has a box of passports. Oh, so many identities!
No, just like killing tourists and taking their passports
[robot voice] The Modern Rogue crafts a fake identity.
In the movies it always seems
So exotic where someone has all of these fake
Identities that they can use at a moment's notice sure you buy them at the ID store. You're like
I would like an Asian male about 57 years old right different store. I don't know where you shopping, okay?
good point
good point But they make it seem like this is something exotic that you have to have this hardened mysterious life to achieve
And you really don't it's a huge crime to do this oh bigger now than ever before but ghosting seems
really easy!!!
(Laughs)
So, Ghosting is assuming a dead person's identity. There's a bunch of different reasons that you would want to do it!
Yes
Which is different from just creating an identity from scratch if you create an identity you can't go collect somebody else's social security checks
Right you were just taking the pre-established
Information that they already have attached to their person
So why would you want to ghost?
you could steal someone's credit you could just drop off the grid or just start over and this is different from identity theft because it's
Not like you want to cash in on their good credit and get a payday
Oftentimes you want to maintain their credit and keep this as a persistent personality, so you can leave some kind of old life behind
Right and it's not necessarily always done for nefarious purposes
You could do it if you just need to escape
it's your own witness protection program as a matter of fact during the Vietnam war a bunch of
Conscientious objectors went up to Canada and they assumed identities of dead people and just assimilated into society yes, and funnily enough
It's actually easier for women because they changed their name at some point during your life
So their birth certificate would be different from their death certificate exactly, Don Draper is actually a famous ghoster seymour skinner
Seymour skinner it was his real name. Do you remember Armin Tamzarian wow?
Yes, 10 points to gryffindor. Oh, my real name is
Armin Tamzarian
(Gasps)
The whole thing that makes ghosting possible is that different government organizations?
Don't share information very well, so you might have a death certificate in one state where they died
But a birth certificate from another state, and you just go back to that first date keep on living exactly
There's no overall death record that people can easily cross check
So I'm not saying that I need to drop off the grid and in fact. I'm not even saying I did anything wrong
Let's just say I needed to start over where do you begin? It's really easy you need one form of identification
That's it
That's it everything else comes from that and the easiest thing to get is a copy of your birth certificate
or of the other person's birth certificate
So I guess you start by trolling through the obituaries you find somebody roughly your age
Something that maybe you could even pass for if you saw the pictures side by side somebody with a less prominent
Occupation like maybe a waiter or bartender or something yeah?
you don't want to pick a member of congress or someone who had their own reality television show for in fact there's amazing stories of
Reformed criminals that wanted to leave their life of crime behind, but they were trapped in the same habits
So there's one guy who is into Falconry and he kept attending all the falconing events
And there's only like a hundred falconers in the us, so they all recognized him yeah
Exactly he was also a spy, but he got busted pretty quickly because falconers got a falcon.. so the easiest thing to do is to
go through the
Obituaries in a big city cause small town people all know each other right you don't want to call someone and have them say oh
He's my uncle!
I know you're not him so you begin with the birth certificate, and I know that in the pre
Computerization days London would have public records of birth and death certificates
So you're able to just literally walk around and just grab copies of that yes. Yes now,
You can have a copy sent to you and using that you can get a driver's license
And you can get a checking account,
You can get a new social security card, and you can take all of the trappings of this person's life
And it just snowballs from there, you just that one one of the most disturbing things
I read was that you want to look for an entire family that got killed out of State
because that means there are fewer people to recognize
you and you get more targets to choose from in fact Eden press back in the
1970's did an entire guide called the paper trip that was all about how to assume some dead person's identity. Yes
and things have changed of course since the
1970s you can do all of these searches and get a little bit more background on your Target
Using the internet of course on the other hand as everything gets computerized
It's easier than ever for somebody to take a fingerprint and pull up your previous criminal record because I know you have one yeah
and all of a sudden the sham is off yeah exactly so
Information as we mentioned earlier is starting to get shared more, but it's still not quite there
So when you make that phone call to get the birth certificate
There's a little bit of social engineering in there
you got to have an excuse for why you haven't been around or what happened to your
Documents often times you can say I was on missionary work or you're doing service overseas or something like that you want to take into
consideration the moment of death
versus the time your colleague
So if you've been gone three years you need to come up with a lie for why you've been gone three years and don't have
three years of work history
So what about social security numbers well now you have to get a social security?
Number for your child before you can claim them on your taxes
Used to be you didn't get a social security number until your first job
So if you found a kid who had died maybe seven years ago, you're 22 years old kid died at 15?
You go apply as the kid for your first job, and then they issue. You social security number exactly now
it is getting much more difficult to do this with the improvement of search engines and
Imaging technology that can cross-reference
Fingerprints in a matter of minutes saying the dreams Dead I have to be Brian Brushwood forever
you might still be able to pull it off, but
What's your new identity tell us.
Ryan...
Rushwood.
Oh him.
Totally different guy.
Yeah, there might be a Ryan Rushwood out there.
Is he, a podcaster? Yeah. He's uh, he does...
rod...
casting?
Rodcasting?
He's a fisherman.
Fly fishing?
Yes, so he does.
Alright FINE!
Ryan Rushwood, fly fisherman.