[00:00:00] I adopted a new name which was James Gatz.
[00:00:04] James Donald Gatz. Donald is actually my middle name, which is...
[00:00:07] was one of the kind of mistakes I made.
[00:00:10] It didn't end up costing me, but you know when people
[00:00:14] try to disappear, often times they carry something over from their previous life.
[00:00:19] And that's the way they end up getting caught. They use the same birth date
[00:00:22] or they'll transpose the numbers in their birth date myself a visiting scholar because creating a regular driver's license or passport would get me into legal problems. So I mostly tried to sort of stay within the parameters of this low level ID. And then I would often tell a story that I had. I had lost my driver's license, but I had this scholar's ID and I had this credit card and was that enough to get me by?
[00:01:40] And at most hotels, at most places where they kind of routinely ask for driver's license
[00:01:45] for no apparent reason anyone that I knew. So we created this dilemma of how do I manufacture friends out of nothing, and it turns out there are people on Facebook who will friend anyone. And most of them are multi-level marketing gurus and real estate people.
[00:03:00] So I would find people who had 900, 1,000, 2,000 friends,
[00:03:04] and I would send them requests.
[00:03:06] And pretty soon I built up a pretty good collection eventually tracked him to New Orleans. Ratliff was smart. He figured out how to solve the major problem with disappearing. Documents. He used a college ID to begin building his identity. Others may not have the charm or ability to pull that off. In that case, you may go the illegal and expensive route.
[00:04:20] Sky News in Britain reported on the arrest of a gang
[00:04:22] that was in the business of creating fake identities.
[00:04:26] What essentially they were issued they were genuine. He built up a store of them, hundreds of them. But then when high-end
[00:05:40] criminals were on the run and needed a new passport they would go to one of the organised until you can get steady income. Still, you're off to a decent start, unless you live in Australia. Security officials there told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation how they tried to solve the passport problem. The first is to establish whether this new photo belongs to the same old Johnica as they have on file
[00:07:01] in their client history.
[00:07:02] And while our pathetic attempt at fraud is obvious,
[00:07:06] imagine how tricky this could be with a family member horror show. Disturbed is not for the faint of heart. It's an exploration of real, unadulterated horror sourced from everyday people. Each episode is a descent into the macabre, where we narrate stories that will leave you on the edge of your seat and crawling in your skin.
[00:08:21] We navigate the disturbing narratives that lurk in Disguise has a worldwide staff. We always have, in the back of our minds, this memo that the person, the foreigner, is gonna take back to his office and say, "'Oh, I met with this American.'" And everything in his description of the American that he met is gonna be wrong.
[00:09:40] From the hair color, length, is it curly or not?
[00:09:43] Color of eyes, it's gonna be wrong.
[00:09:44] Does he wear glasses?
[00:09:45] It's gonna be wrong.
[00:09:46] Does he smoke?
[00:09:47] Is he married? You go out and you steal a phone or you steal a laptop. You do whatever you have to do to make sure that you can get on with the password and whatever else that might be as dirty or as clean as you want that to be. We're all morally flexible here, but now you have a technological device that you can work with. And then from there on, you're just doing whatever you have to do, whether you're stealing every step of the way
[00:11:01] or whether you run a massive con.
[00:11:05] Keep in mind that we often talk about con men and cons. act far in advance, you'll have a big fat wad of cash in your pocket. At this point, to quote the Carpenters, you've only just begun. Just because you've done all this doesn't mean people won't be looking for you. They won't know that you've disappeared voluntarily.
[00:12:23] They'll be worried that you've been killed, are ill, and in a hospital or morgue where on Mother's Day. Those who disappear often want a call and offer their best wishes. You don't stay hidden long with moves like that. In researching this series, I found countless cases where people's remains were found decades after their disappearance.
[00:13:45] A woman was found in Puerto Rico nearly 50 years after she went missing. knowledgeable young guy. He was a registered financial advisor. The type of guy that was bending over backwards to help you. Now you could be forgiven for thinking that Barry sounds like a great guy and you'd be right. Well, right up until the point when you're wrong. It was all fictitious. You stole from my son who has a disability. Chris neither knew. He died believing
[00:15:01] that we're all taken care of. A psychopath that? Most people are found close to home. They're found closer to home if the search starts quickly. Conventional wisdom also says to put up flyers, try to get the press interested, talk with
[00:16:23] friends and relatives.
[00:16:25] Most of this is likely obvious to you. In other words, 25% of the time, this hasty search would have turned up the lost coin. But it didn't. So you begin digging a little deeper, looking a little harder, but still with no definite technique. When you finish, you might begin asking the person if they were sure they lost it in the sandbox.
[00:17:40] Now, you're 50% sure it isn't in the box, so you search a third time.
[00:17:45] But this time you approach the do have a place to start. In theory, you can determine the maximum area you need to search by starting at that point, determining
[00:19:01] how fast the person is traveling and how long it's been since you last saw him there.
[00:20:02] over how they move through the territory. They might spend a few minutes checking an old barn,
[00:20:05] but move at almost a run across an open field.
[00:20:08] The idea is to cover the ground.
[00:20:10] This is why it is so important to use trained searchers,
[00:20:14] because they are usually much more in tuned
[00:20:16] with what clues to look for
[00:20:18] and how to quickly spot footprints,
[00:20:19] broken branches, tracking signs, and more.
[00:20:23] There is a grid search in which emergency teams
[00:20:25] lay out a grid that moves away data, he's able to greatly increase the probability of finding someone. He's developed a technique called lost person behavior. Kester compares search and rescue operations to mysteries, where it's not who done it, but where done it. I'm kind of fond of saying I'm really good at telling you where a hundred lost people
[00:21:40] are going to be found. For our unique individual, it can be difficult. And finally, the key Now imagine for a moment you had only been on eight searches in your entire search career. You had looked for a missing hiker. You had looked for another missing hiker. You looked for a guy who fell off a raft into swift water. You looked for somebody who had dementia. You looked for a 10-year-old boy. You looked for a 16-year-old boy who has autism, another dementia subject, and a despondent
[00:23:05] subject. from Kentucky's model, but they suggest a different approach to the search. I've geeked you out enough for one episode, so let me sum things up. We've learned how to disappear, how to get documents, and other items you'll need to create an entirely new person.
[00:24:21] And I want to emphasize that to our website scamsandcons.com where you can chat with other
[00:25:41] fans and get more stories about scams, many of which are going on right now.
[00:25:46] I look forward to hearing what you have to say.