How difficult would it be to disappear today in the USA?

Factual Questions
61

And we have seen a whole range of average shmoes cope in very foreign environments. Maybe not everyone, but it’s not that difficult to do.

There are little communities of foreigners in any country. The internet makes it really easy to survive and it’s not that difficult to find work. Kids just out of college do it all the time.

Unless you are trying to run away from serious things such as a murder charge, living in a foreign country will help you escape the consequences of something like child support; while allowing you to live legitimately. You will have your government issued ID and be able to obtain national health care.

62

You do remember the title of the OP is *“How difficult would it be to disappear today in the USA?” *, right?

In my previous example the guy is broke and in debt, and you have him traveling to the other side of the planet to a place he’s never been to, a place he has no connection to. I don’t care what anyone says, that just isn’t a feasible thing for the average guy to attempt. Not in the beginning, anyway.

How do you propose he gets to the far east? Under his real name and passport? Going to be a record of that.

Wouldn’t it at least be wise of him to fall off the grid here, first? Maybe even setting up some false leads like using his credit card a few times in a city he isn’t going to remain in? Putting together an alternate identity with documentation. That way when his excellent adventure in the orient didn’t pan out he could come back and still have an identity to continue with.

Even hiding out in a foreign country poses risks of detection. But it’s much harder to find John Deu when he’s living under the name of Conrad Barker and has the documentation to prove he is who he says he is.

63

Suit yourself. I’ve seen plenty of shmoes do it. Don’t know how average they are.

64

The first question is - are you going to use your real name or an assumed one?
If your real name, then sooner or later people can find you if they really want to look. IIRC, if you owe child support the feds keep your tax refunds, and someone somewhere is going to be able to find you based on your identity. Obviously, not feasible if hiding form police. Not too difficult if hiding from a less than determined spouse or such.
If you use a fake, or change it a bit - then you need an ID change too. How do you propose changing your ID? Faking an identity is difficult in this day and age (whole separate thread) and can lead to criminal charges.
So without a confirmable identity you live on the margins. You probably want a driver’s license, or else the margins got very narrow.
Did you take your savings with you? Life could get very interesting trying t hide a decent amount of money; so presumably you are stating with nothing in an unfamiliar place and no help. Some people can do this, I know I would be totally lost, probably live on the streets for a while staying at Salvation Army shelters, etc.

65

If you just owe a lot on your credit cards and back child support, you don’t need to “disappear”. You just get a new phone number and get a job where the owner pays you in cash. Moving to another state helps a lot.

Getting paid in cash isn’t an option for legit businesses, but there are plenty of gray-area businesses that make extra money they don’t want to report to the IRS, and paying people under the table is one way to get rid of that extra cash.

Yes, you’re going to have trouble getting an apartment and paying in cash. Maybe you find a gray market landlord who rents out a non-code living space. Or your buddy or new girlfriend rents the apartment in their name, and you pay your buddy in cash every month.

None of this involves getting a new identity. It just means being comfortable with putting up with uncomfortable bullshit. Yes, it’s going to suck when try to buy a car or open a bank account or get a credit card. But plenty of people manage to avoid paying their old bills just by moving to Florida and not leaving a forwarding address. Yes, in theory your creditors could track you down in Florida. But likely it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Same thing for small time lowlifes who don’t like you because you ripped them off in some drug deal. Yeah, they could track you down in Florida, but if they were motivated and resourceful enough to do that why aren’t they working a regular job?

66

Just a note: having roommates or renting out rooms is incredibly common in big cities, and not that rare in general. If you’re someone who can pay half the rent every month but doesn’t want to be on the lease, there are a LOT of people who will be perfectly happy with that arrangement even if they technically violate their lease or local zoning laws by doing so. You really don’t need a false identity or bank account to find a place to live if you don’t mind having someone else in the apartment/house.

67

Sigh. We’ve already discussed that.

It was incorrect of me to say an “in-law” exactly, but my brother-in-laws mother-in-law pulled it off.

Little by little she set up new identity in Minnesota (she lived in Wisconsin) using the techniques I got warned about sharing so I won’t repeat them.

Then one day she just disappeared. Took nothing with her but all the money she had. Cut all ties with everyone, including her kids (who were adults when she left). Stayed gone too for just shy of 20 years. Eventually found her way to Texas and lived under her new ID. For a time she was listed as a missing person until a cleaned out bank account made it seem like she planned to leave.

Her family spent considerable resources trying to find her, but didn’t. Like I said, it’s hard to find Jane Doe when she is now Susan Cabrini. They had no idea she was living under a new identity and thought she was just hiding out under her own name.

The reason she split was an extremely abusive husband who she was terrified of, and rightly so. He eventually was able to get a divorce in absentia and remarried. He ended up serving time in Wyoming for attempted murder of his second wife!:eek:

He died in 2012 and in 2014 she reappeared, telling her shocking story to her children. She then died in 2016. They ran an obituary in Texas under her assumed name so her friends she had made there would know she passed on.

This is the short version of the story. Listening to my sister in-law tell the entire thing is absolutely fascinating. Her father was completely evil. When he’d go out of town for work he’d turn off the water to the house and put some kind of valve lock so they couldn’t turn it back on to punish the family for some trivial thing they did. Stuff like that.

68

PKbites, what a horrible story! Did she not tell the kids because she had some reason to believe that they would let this slip to the wrong people?

69

It was a large family and I guess one of the daughters was still completely loyal to her father, kind of like a beaten dog is to it’s abusive master. She even testified in his behalf at his trial in Wyoming. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to ditch my kids for 2 decades.

It’s a crazy story alright. But she made up her own BC and was able to get a SS number and move on.
I had never met the woman. She disappeared circa 1994-95 before my wifes brother married the daughter, and died not to long after she reappeared. Would I have loved to ask her a ton of questions. Strictly out of curiosity, not in a law enforcement sense.

70

I guess then the main point was that before 9/11 controls on identity documents were pretty lax and it was easier to make up an identity. Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far the other way today, but faking documentation can (AFAIK) be extremely difficult now., depending how hard the other person is looking for you.

71

I know! There goes my retirement hobby.

Lest you think I’m jesting…
Back in middle school, I got my hands on the heavy colored stock that our cafeteria punch cards were printed on, and hand-drew flawless “Caf Cards” that passed lunchlady scrutiny.

So back in the 60s I always figured if I needed a good pastime someday, I could whip out a few passports by hand. But nooooo…

72

The only thing that needs to be faked is a birth certificate. Using that everything else would be real.

When you get a copy of one from the county it’s a photo copy of the certificate on file (usually it’s a book) copied onto safety paper with the name of the county on it and an raised seal. None of that is impossible to forge, especially with todays computer technology.

Easy, maybe no. But illegals are pulling it off, underage college students are pulling it off. I imagine someone who is looking to drop out isn’t completely worried about breaking a few laws.

73

Apparently, some patients don’t do so well with ordinary human insulin: my father tried it early on and went right back to bovine.

It appears that was discontinued some time ago. I don’t know what he switched to, but I bet it wasn’t cheap.

74

That might work, if you have correctly prepared yourself with the mystics that truly know the right path. The 39 Heaven’s Gate members either very successfully disappeared from USA’s society and are living a better life, or they made a grave error. :stuck_out_tongue:

75

In regards to illegals, they are not here alone, that is, someone is helping them, so they are not trying to hide.

My job involves helping people get jobs, so at least 2/3 of my clients have records a mile long. They often want to start over and it used to be fairly easy till after 9-11. Now it’s much harder.

When you say disappear, it often depends on how hard anyone is looking for you. I have people who are nearly 50 who have never had a “regular job.” They have been prostitutes, drug runners, thieves etc, etc and they want to “go straight.”

It’s very common for them to have no contact with anyone simply because no one wants to know them anymore.

As for businesses paying cash, it’s more common than you’d think. In fact one of my biggest issues was people, very high end people, wanting to pay cash, to essentially screw the employees over and cheap out. Working for a non-profit and we accept referrals from the state, we have to be 100% straight up, but the employers never quit asking.

Illegals pull it off because they can simply use a “friend’s” social security and the friend gets the benefits and the illegal will pay the taxes or give the money to the “friend” to pay and everyone is happy. You open a credit card in your friend’s name and pay it and again everyone is happy as long as it’s paid timely, which usually doesn’t last more than a year or so.

As for a birth certificate, I got a copy of mine from the state I was born and they don’t use a seal anymore, you have an electronic verification mark on it. My original one has a seal but that was decades and decades ago.

Another problem I have is the fraudulent use of SS# by parents. It’s very common for me to have clients referred from state job programs and their parents have used their SS# to open credit cards or get loans and then default. I recently had a rough background strive to get a college degree and come to us for help only to find, his credit was the pits and it was either accept it and declare bankruptcy or go to the law and result with having his mother arrested for fraud.

So yeah, if you want to leave and go to a big city, you could easily get by if you had a “friend” that was willing to help you or you could pay someone to take that risk.

But even then you may be recognized by someone, or get to comfortable. I say that because one of my most interesting cases was 20 some years ago, we handled a man, who seemed to be rather educated (not common for our organization), and placed him in a company at a low level job. He worked there and rose through the ranks and did quite well. A couple of years ago the company was bought by another company, and it was done in such a way, where nothing was really changed except the company’s name on the check. The new company did background checks and he was prison escapee. It was caught very quickly once someone decided to actually look. Apparently the company didn’t check very well when he was first hired as it was a low level position.

So it just shows that even if you do manage to “get away with it,” you’re always going to be looking over your back