Where in the World is Evan Ratliff?
Source: Wired Magazine
Been laid off and have too much time on your hands? Aimlessly scouring the web for nothing? Why not spend some time searching for Wired Magazine writer, Evan Ratliff, because if you find him you win $5,000! That’s right, five thousand big ones. That would be a nice piece of supplemental income to your bi-weekly unemployment checks.
The competition is a follow-up to a really interesting article he had written about people who try to fake their own deaths in hopes of shedding their responsibilities or debts and starting their lives over again as someone else. As romantic as this may seem, Ratliff found that a lot of people that try faking their own deaths are ultimately apprehended thanks to a trail of digital clues from social networking sites to phone records. Most people simply can’t completely leave their old lives behind.
So don’t read this article and get the bright idea that you could leave this recession behind and start over as park ranger in Belize or something. Just track down Evan Ratliff and win $5,000! Click here for details…
This doesn’t make sense to me — if you really wanted to vanish, would you still use Twitter and Facebook, your cell phone or your credit cards (which, from what I understood, he will be doing)?
He says on his Wired story: “I will continue to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and I’ll make cell phone calls.”
Am I missing something?
My understanding is that he’s using social networking sites and making cell phone calls to taunt us, because he’s figured out ways to do it without us knowing where he’s doing it from. Maybe not perfectly realistic, but it makes the game more fun.
THe point is that people don’t get away with this because they continue to use such sites
Yeah but they don’t continue to use those sites with the same username do they?! Surely, if you wanted the world to think you were dead, you would change your identity entirely and if you did continue to use social networking, it would be as the new you.
I’m not saying it’s not a fun exercise, but yeah, not very realistic.
This is horribly unrealistic. The reason he says that he’ll use his cell phone and continue to twitter is because according to the rules you cannot contact his family or use illegal means to track him. No hacking websites (to glean ip addresses from logs and such), social engineering (impersonating a police officer and talking to his friends and employer) and lastly, no talking to his family (so no getting to know his daughter [I don't know if he has one, just an example] and finding out what her dad does and such). It’s horribly crippled and made almost impossible, not because he’s a genius at escaping, but because the scenario is artificially crippling the ‘contestant’.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Ratliff and/or http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Evan_Ratliff if they haven’t been deleted.