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You're a fugitive! Where would you go, and why?
Jacobkosh
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
We all have our weird daydreams. Here's one of mine: every so often, especially while reading an article about some remote place or other, I wonder idly where I would go if I was a wanted man, like if the government or the mob were after me.
I always get frustrated by characters in crime dramas who've got like Tony Soprano or whatever after them in Manhattan so they flee to, like, Scarsdale. No, you dopes! Go work the oil fields in Alberta, or on a fishing trawler, or somewhere else where you don't need papers and they don't ask questions! Get a job at a bait shack in Montana. If you're the dashing international sort, learn Spanish and get to the Canary Islands (pop 2.2 million)!
But you have to think this through, too, because if you go somewhere *too* remote, like Edinburgh of the Seven Seas on the isle of Tristan de Cunha (notable residents: William Glass (1786-1853), founder of the settlement, Conrad Glass (b. 1961), police officer and author of the book Rockhopper Copper) everyone there will know you don't belong and you'll never be able to blend in. Unless you can make friends in a hurry, they'll turn you in the moment the cops show up. So you need to go somewhere remote, yet used to strangers - or someplace where your own skills will let you find a niche right away. It's a tricky balance, and while there are a lot of wrong answers (as seen on all those crime TV shows), there's probably no one right answer, so it's a good thing I've spent many, many work hours thinking of these things.
So tell us where you'd run. Show pictures! Educate us! Have you watched enough TV about dangerous ice trucking that you figure you could grow a beard and make do as one of those in a pinch? Let's hear it.
I always get frustrated by characters in crime dramas who've got like Tony Soprano or whatever after them in Manhattan so they flee to, like, Scarsdale. No, you dopes! Go work the oil fields in Alberta, or on a fishing trawler, or somewhere else where you don't need papers and they don't ask questions! Get a job at a bait shack in Montana. If you're the dashing international sort, learn Spanish and get to the Canary Islands (pop 2.2 million)!
But you have to think this through, too, because if you go somewhere *too* remote, like Edinburgh of the Seven Seas on the isle of Tristan de Cunha (notable residents: William Glass (1786-1853), founder of the settlement, Conrad Glass (b. 1961), police officer and author of the book Rockhopper Copper) everyone there will know you don't belong and you'll never be able to blend in. Unless you can make friends in a hurry, they'll turn you in the moment the cops show up. So you need to go somewhere remote, yet used to strangers - or someplace where your own skills will let you find a niche right away. It's a tricky balance, and while there are a lot of wrong answers (as seen on all those crime TV shows), there's probably no one right answer, so it's a good thing I've spent many, many work hours thinking of these things.
So tell us where you'd run. Show pictures! Educate us! Have you watched enough TV about dangerous ice trucking that you figure you could grow a beard and make do as one of those in a pinch? Let's hear it.
Jacobkosh on
+7
Posts
Random high stakes heist: Disappearing in the rural US really wouldn't be all that hard even if it's ultimately a bad idea.
Heist of the millennia where everyone in the western hemisphere is looking for me: Primary flight location would probably be somewhere in Siberia I guess because I already live in the siberia of North America and so oh my god I just realized kosh is working for the feds
My next move would be to lie low with somebody I've met through the internet, to avoid the obvious choices of family and work friends
I have one friend who basically nobody else I know is aware of, because I met her on a dating app - the only evidence linking us is our Hinge and WhatsApp messaging history, which depending on who's chasing me they might not have access to, and some back and forth on Twitter
That then hopefully buys me enough time to consider my next move
My only physical skills are sailing experience; maybe I get a job with the crews that sail yachts from UK shipyards to their new owners in the Mediterranean, if I can work out how that would work actually getting on the crew - maybe I should make a list of agencies in advance
ah this is fantastic. In college my dad had a friend who had a job driving vintage cars (this was the early 70s so we're talking, like, old Packards and Duesenbergs and things) across the country from where they'd been sold at auction to where the owners actually lived. I go back and forth on whether crossing America in someone else's Rolls sounds wonderfully footloose and fancy-free, or unspeakably stressful. It was, however, I am told, a can't-miss chick magnet so I feel I would endure.
In short, any setback would see me homeless. Living off the grid as a homeless person? One guy I knew only made it as long as he did because he could go back to his mother's or sister regularly, and despite extreme paranoia he was trying to get his papers back. He died of tuberculosis.
Now, there are guys that have stated in the press they can get people fresh identities, but I really wonder how well those hold up when the government is tracking your employment and tax history.
If you're running out on the government or the mob, I'd assume you're an established criminal and can make a living that way, which as a middle aged milquetoast support manager is going to be an unlikely eventuality for me.
So you'll want plastic surgery. Another thing is that cops or enforcers don't get to jet around the planet on hunches or tips. Likely they'll reach out to someone local to you and have them check in- you should be able to fool those guys for a talk.
But if you stick with the same hobby, and the same model of car, and you wear the scarf of your old football club- things add up and that cop from back home might just get more interested.
Yeah, my plans would just go something like this:
If people are looking for you and I mean really looking for you like the mob, cartel, or Americas Most Wanted you're never going to be able to rest easy ever. So the biggest thing is making sure nobody is looking for you and that means you gotta start by convincingly faking your own death. Which in the days of DNA and cameras everywhere is going to be harder, but not impossible. So if you aren't a planner and don't have a spare body handy that's similar in build age and race things get tricky and you have to decide based on circumstances if you want to make it look like a missing body accident or likely murder victim with body disposal.
Putting a brick on the accelerator and steering your car off the road into a fairly deep and fast moving body of water seems a pretty good place to start. Leave your phone, license, credit cards, and a little bit of cash in your wallet in the car since you're not going to need them anyway. If you can keep your head down for a little while the authorities will assume you drowned and your body was washed away.
Next you've got to get away clean from the area. Get a few miles on foot without being seen and steal a bike. Taking your time riding on backroads and you should easily be able to put 50 miles a day behind you in a way that won't attract any attention or notice and make your way over the course of a few days to a new city. Interact with nobody, eat from dumpsters / vending machines, sleep in the woods, etc.
From there, you'll need to lay low for a while. Change your appearance as much as possible - hair cut / color, shave / start growing out a beard, gain / lose a bit of weight, etc. Squat or integrate with the local homeless population for a time and do odd jobs to get by. Don't beg or do things that cause you to interact / be seen by a lot of people, but after a few months you can start doing more odd jobs and decide where you want to go long term.
Do odd / handyman cash jobs until you save up enough for a small apartment and a cheap vehicle paid for with cash. IUf you really must create a business that will let you get tags / titles and do a bit of banking without worrying about your own identity.
Make sure you have a boring backstory about your past and why you have no identity that won't inspire anyone to particularly want to help you (records destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, tried to get papers but too much work and don't need them, yadda yadda). Avoid close relationships that might have someone looking into your past.
Stick to small jobs that pay the bills and don't be too ambitious about growing or expanding your business. Lawn care / snow removal, handyman / odd household jobs, things like that should give you enough to get by with a relatively spartan and mostly off the grid prepaid everything life.
I belong to a car sharing service, but considering they track the cars, that would only serve to provide further confusion by booking a car and then getting somebody else to drive it in the other direction
I think cash-only public transport is my only option, but I can only withdraw £600 per day from my accounts - maybe more if I make a cash withdrawal from my credit card, but that incurs daily interest and I don't want to be on the run from the mob and NatWest
Gotta make a clean break. Any big withdraw will stand out as clearly you're fleeing but you can probably get away with a couple hundred bucks or whatever cash you keep handy around the house. Leaving a bit behind so it's not clear you cleaned everything out before you fled.
I'll still stand by a bike being one of the best ways to move unless you have easy cash-only public transportation like the NYC subway or something. And even then you need to be careful with cameras and tracking and cops everywhere. I don't think you can even do Greyhound anymore with just cash and no ID.
Although they're probably going to check with the parents early doors anyway
Probably after that I'd consider publicly posting a bunch of seemingly well thought out and planned scenarios to throw off any of my pursuers but instead do something completely different and unexpected.
Also I have a pretty recognizable face and body type
Non-realistically, if I had my health?
Maine or Alaska. Because it's similar enough to where I live that I could figure out how to get by, but still be a long way from anyone looking for me.
The funny thing is if I didn't live where I do this would be a great place to hide out. We've got national forests and undeveloped timber all over the county. Winters would suck but that could be mitigated.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Off grid isn't impossible in Europe, especially in the tourist areas
There are a lot of ski/surf/bike bums that work the resorts in their respective seasons, often cash in hand, and often with accommodation
If you're away from the higher end resorts nobody is going to look twice at someone who rolls up in a van at the start of the season looking for low commitment, low paid casual work
The trouble is, how do you get a passport you can use without immediate problems? If you go somewhere populous enough, you can maybe hide forever if you have money, but getting there stumps me. Maybe if you cross the border in Mexico and then start bribing people to get you further south, you can eventually hide on a container ship in chile or Brazil or something and get to India?
I have reason to believe customs officers can be bribed to let your cocaine through on a moment's notice, so maybe when you get to your destination a large cash bribe gets you into the country? If you pick a rural area at random and get there via cab, I feel like you can hide out forever without anybody local caring, but definitely there's an argument to pick an urban area and just live invisibly in the middle of a huge crowd, reducing the number of people who ever meet you to the minimum
I would travel to a new place, get a new identity, use that to travel to another place, ditch that identity and get a new one. Then travel to yet another place and settle down. Choosing a lower middle-class or working class area with lots of immigrants. Preferably in a large metropolitan area, because small towns everybody knows everybody. Where my lack of connections to the place would not stand out and any accent would not be an issue. Immigrants are already outsiders to the area, so any chance of them ratting me out or figuring out that I don't fit is lower and if they did their ability/desire to do something about it harder. At least hard enough that I have a chance to run further.
So example: Crime committed in Germany. First go to Italy. Get new a identity(or two). Travel to Argentina(the Ratline special). Get new identity again(or two, the more the merrier in throwing people off the chase). Travel to the US(Atlanta/LAX). Get third new identity. Travel to(by land) and settle in Chicago metropolitan area. Live an unassuming life.
Edit. I spent around 15 minutes composing this. I did not have any plans beforehand. I am not a wanted spy.
So the government wants me, dead or alive, and I have limited funds. I am probably incapable of seducing a rich heiress to coddle me.
I flee to Louisiana and become a fanboat repair man and aquarium operator under the name William Adamson, after spending a few years flipping stolen bicycles, iphones, and catalytic converters, and eating pizza from dumpsters.
They'd never think to look for me there.
"get a new identity" might as well be "evade captors", since it´s not just an automatic process. Maybe you can get into Argentina by land and avoid or bribe customs officers. But you are not going to get an argentinan "DNI" (identity document) without a bunch of other documents, and you are definitely not going to get a Passaport without a DNI.
But if you are willing to go that far south, stick around in the triple frontier and maybe pay to be smuggled somewhere, if you are not picky about the destination, and trust that you are not going to be killed inmediately after doing any kind of payment.
TLDR: getting a new identity is the problem, not the solution.
I know a man, and this man is best described in the prepper world as a "Grey Man". He seamlessly blends into any surrounding and can live there without issue. He has a wife and two children, knows three martial arts to a level of being able to teach them, speaks three languages, and has travelled the globe.
He looks about as redneck as the word redneck implies. He is not a spy. I can promise you this.
Anyway, that sets the tone. One day this guy up and took his wife and kids and went into a National Forest and built a goddamn cabin. Lived there, off grid, for two years before the Park rangers discovered him.
Long story short, after they realized he had made the area around him better, they fucking hired him.
He shows up the first day to work and they tell him to take care of a beaver problem in one of the streams, so he goes out to do it, and they said "don't you want a shotgun or something first?" and he grabs his homemade self bow and quiver and comes back with a dead beaver.
I've spent probably five years talking to this guy, and I know nothing about how he is able to do what he does, but honestly if I'm ever a fugitive, I will call him on a burner phone, get a list of instructions, memorize it, eat it, and then follow those instructions.
Somehow her employer here got to pay her $4/hour when minimum wage was 7, and it was a factory job and all legal.
And its the little things that get you. Her first car she didn't know she needs an inspection sticker, so the ticket she got hit with by the cop was this awful unneeded expense she couldn't afford.
Yeah, this has been on my mind a lot. Shit looks fucking dark and depending on how this year and 24 go I may need to be a refugee somewhere before my family ends up in an undesirables camp.
You can't give someone a pirate ship in one game, and then take it back in the next game. It's rude.
Basically I'm thinking of one of those polygamist towns like Colorado City, Utah where the police is also the church leadership.
But then you have to be ok with all the bad shit that goes on there, and if you're a single man you're probably not gonna be accepted, and if you're a woman...well.
Arch,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_goGR39m2k
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
It really depends on what they were after me for but honestly thinking about it if its the government and they aren’t some fascist takeover going to kill me, but like if it was for an actual crime, then maybe just do the time?
I mean I actually randomly know some people in southeast asia that own a factory and I could probably work for them and no one would ever suspect it if I could somehow get there but would I really want to spend the rest of my life working long hours in a factory making clothes in a third world country where I don’t know the language hardly at all vs just doing 10 or 15 years in prison and keeping my head down hoping to get off early for good behavior (which sucks I know but at least I have a local support network).
Most of the scenarios seem to involve either being homeless or essentially an unsupported and undocumented refugee in a foreign land and.. eh.
Now if its a cartel or something and they are definitely going to kill me, maybe (in that case I could probably just buy a airline ticket and use my existing job qualifications and such to get a real job and probably a visa , and as much as the mob might want to hunt someone I doubt they really are going to fly assassins into Bangkok and send them on a 6 hour bus ride to a random village in the north.)
Sure thing, Brody
They'll never think to look in those places
New Zealand and it's seemed to work so far.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Basically how it would go, yeah.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
This is something I've been wondering about. It seems like tourist destinations (beach cities, resorts, etc) have the huge advantage of a constant in- and out-flux of people but it also seems like that would draw a correspondingly greater level of scrutiny? Particularly party-type places like Ibiza that I imagine get a lot of narcotics enforcement attention.
I wonder what actual criminals and smugglers and people-movers have to say about stuff like this. I really wish there were more true crime podcasts and journalism that was about things other than serial murders; these sorts of things fascinate me.
It's also my answer for the zombie apocalypse.