How To Disappear – One Step Beyond Asset Protection

Introduction – This is a simple guide to disappearing. Disappearing means not being found by people you do not want finding you. This is not illegal by itself even in many police states. People have many motives for disappearing. Some are being stalked by people who are potentially violent like angry violent spouses, ex-mates etc. In the world there really are people who have enemies that have paid others to find them and harm them and their families. If this were not the case there would not be any Witness Protection Programs. Some have reached a point of unbearable indebtedness and have no way to repay and do not wish to suffer constant harassment from bill collectors, attorneys, lawyers, etc. Others have hit the news and cannot live privately anymore.

Today the world is full of dictators, unrighteous regimes, police states, governments practicing religious, sexual, economic and political discrimination and we could keep going. For many offshore asset protection is enough. For others they themselves need to disappear to live out their life as a free person. We are going to layout the basics of how to disappear. This is not going to be a do it yourself guide. Don’t try this yourself at home, you will only lull yourself into a false sense of security at best if you even get that far without major problems. You need experts and the experts need to be lawyers in a non-police state with strong privacy laws, so you have attorney client privilege.

Disappearance Services - Many of those offering this sort of advice are giving out fluff and failing to list themselves as the contact point, which others can use to find you. Never utilize the services of anyone or any organization that is in the country you are disappearing from. Never! If they are in the same country you are departing from, they can be dragged into court and the judge can open their files. They can be sued as being complicit in a fraudulent conveyance or fraud on creditors if you owe money and any other number of conspiracy and fraud charges too. They know this and rather than be sued and wiped out forcing them to have to disappear, they will leave a door open for your creditors or others to find you using legal court proceedings which immunize them from being sued by you for giving you up.

Do not believe they will destroy your files. That could open them up to being complicit in any crimes you are or were involved in (they do not know what you did or did not do) and they know this and thus will not do it. It is basically them and you. They know more than you and will take your money and if nothing ever happens fine, you win. If anyone ever finds a trail from you to them, they will give you up, voluntarily or forcefully. So seek no advice from anyone in your own country in that they are open to the subpoena power of the courts there. Remember that law enforcement officials are corrupted every day around the world to find out information about people. Law enforcement officials in a very corrupt country can be bribed to make official requests to law enforcement is a more hard to bribe country to get information. You need a country with poor relationships with the departure country that is not in the habit in sharing information freely with any country. This is where we come in.

Relying on Books– Forget any books on the subject. By the time they come to press they will be 18 months old as a minimum. Too much time passed for up to date information. The people hunting you read these books.

When To Disappear – If you are wanted for a crime in your country, under indictment for a crime, out on bail in your country, or have no passport we cannot help you – it is too late. You will need a passport and the ability to freely leave your departure country for us to help you. If you are reading this we assume you did not go out and stick up a gas station or a bank and get arrested without notice at the scene of the crime. You probably were indicted or arrested for some complicated crime of a financial or business nature probably involving fraud, intent to defraud, conspiracy, plus other trumped up charges. This means you saw it coming for some weeks, probably months. Then you played the I hope, I hope game and did nothing before the charges were filed. Your home country lawyer probably assisted you in the decision making process to do nothing as well. Remember if you do get indicted it is a good payday for the home country lawyer. See how it works.

Many innocent people get charged with enough crimes to imprison them long enough to die in jail. This is a ploy to get people to plea bargain for a lighter sentence and of course lose all of your assets. This is especially true if you are living in one of the police states with high incarceration rates. A lot of innocent people go to jail. Study the DNA testing and how it got many to be released from jail years later. Many people get investigated and never arrested, in any country even in the police states. Actually in the police states this is even more likely since there are so many police running around with not much to do so they criminalize business. Disappearing when being investigated is not a crime. It is still a right you have since the judicial system did not provide any formal proceedings against you directing you not to leave. You really did not know you were going to be arrested, especially if you believe you are innocent. We can only be of assistance to innocent people not charged with any crimes at the time of our assistance.

A police investigation has no legal status. When you are formally charged with a crime then things change judicially even if you are innocent. In many countries when they arrest you they freeze your bank accounts, your real estate, your stock and bonds, your cars, your boats, your planes and take your passport forbidding you to leave the country. Leaving with a passport from another country is probably not going to work well since the other passport would be lacking current entry stamps so on exit you will be investigated and run through the system and that is that.

The time for disappearing is before trouble starts. What is trouble? Anything involving any court case civil or otherwise. Fleeing with your assets even after a civil judgment has been issued can be construed as a crime in some jurisdictions. This is rare unless you owe the government the money, but possible. The idea is to move you and your assets out of the country before anything gets formalized in the judicial system. Just being in a civil lawsuit does not by itself mean much at all. Moving assets after you lose a civil case is another matter. So anyone thinking of disappearing should do so before any judicial trouble starts.

When people try to leave after they were arrested and have no passport it is often a disaster and we not suggesting that anyone ever do this at all and we will not be able to assist you.

They need to go to border areas and make contact with the criminal elements. For most this is hard to do. Lets assume you make the contact, and then you are crossing borders without documents at night risking being shot, arrested, detained or robbed. The criminals you pay for these services may just rob you or worse take your money for services and then turn you in to the authorities for a reward. You could find yourself in a boat running from border patrols or military that is shooting at the boat. Ugly picture indeed, so think ahead.

Do not think it is so easy to get smuggled across a border, it is not a simple matter and can be life threatening. Most will just cling to the hopes of winning on an appeal without thinking to ask the attorney what his overturn rate is on appeals. Chances are it is under 1%. So in summation we cannot help you if you are a fugitive from justice under indictment, arrest etc. If you are just more comfortable disappearing for various reasons at this point in your life we can help.

Jurisdictions – It is mandatory that you change countries. Disappearing cannot be done effectively in the same country. You should look for a country that is privacy oriented and free. A quick test of freedoms is whether or not the country allows one to own and carry firearms. Licensing procedures are fine. No firearms, keep looking. Forget the EU right off the top.

Changing countries eliminates any civil court procedures following you if you pick the right country. This means no subpoenas, no depositions, no court appearances, no confiscation of assets, etc. Just for information purposes we will discuss criminal matters. Criminal actions could follow you but not all that likely to. International criminal requests for information are governed by treaty and they should require a criminal case to be on file in the national courts of the country requesting information. One can pick countries where there are no applicable treaties involving the departure country. Treaties are between national governments as a rule. There is usually no treaty calling for information exchange regarding criminal cases on a local or regional level.

One needs to stay out of police states. One needs to stay in tax havens so as to minimize any filing of forms for taxes to the local government. You should consider a sealed in court name change and new identity documents from another country to enable you to stay out of the international data bases at airports, ports, train stations etc.

Costs – It is expensive to do this correctly. Plan on spending over $100,000 as a bare minimum. Then comes cost of housing and living expenses. If you have a business that is traceable to you like an online business it will need to be sold, closed or disassociated from yourself completely if you want to disappear correctly.

Selling the business to an anonymous offshore corporation and continuing to operate it is not a good plan. A good hunter or tracker will look for this. Unfortunately this is not for someone with less than a few hundred thousand dollars cash on hand, as a minimum. Getting a job and working in the new country is possible BUT think about references, job experience etc. It is best to own your own business or be self-employed in the new country.

Asset Removal – The way to start is to remove your assets out of the country of departure. This means all assets as in sell the real estate in a bad market etc. Any remaining assets are a possible trail and can be watched so do not have any remaining assets. Everything gets converted to cash. In many countries it is legal to leave with large amounts of cash but ill advised. You might get investigated for hours or days. One can buy cashier checks and traveler checks. Amex does make $1000 denomination traveler checks but they usually need to be ordered. Moving $7,000,000 in traveler’s checks is going to be a real flag raiser so for larger sums you need to use the wire systems. If you are moving out say $500,000 you can accumulate travelers checks, bank checks etc and go that way.

Most of you will be using bank wires. There are a few ways to do this. The most secure is to use trust account banking. The law firm in Guatemala for instance opens up an anonymous corporation (or several) and enters into an international trust agreement with you. The law firm opens a bank account where they are the signatory and beneficiary owner on the account. The bank does not know who you are. Now follow closely. You do not wire into this bank account, you wire the funds to the attorney client trust account, which is at the same bank. When the funds are received they are then moved into the corporate account the law firm signs on, that you control. This movement is done inside of the bank with no external trails leading to the corporate account. Now the money is in a corporate account where there is no ties to you anywhere and the bank does not even know who you are. Next you can send them money to another corporation in another country to gets things more confusing although this is sort of overkill.

Remember your home country bank account only has a trail to the law firm trust account. They cannot get the law firm to reveal you or anything related to that. They would need to come to Guatemala and present a court case, which would be expensive and time consuming. You would be notified and move the funds to another country as an option. Also as a condition of the trust agreement if anything happened to you like a dictator arrested you the law firm would be instructed under such circumstances to move the assets again and not tell you where they were so you could not forced to reveal the asset location or assist in their confiscation. When the threat is documented to be removed then the assets go back under your control. There are many other embellishments that can be added in to the mix to make things very confusing for a tracker or hunter.

If you wanted to do things on a more simple level you would move the funds from the departure country to an offshore tax haven with bank secrecy using an anonymous corporation. Next the funds would then be moved to another similar country using another anonymous corporation and then again if it makes you sleep better at night. Such a trial would take years to unravel.

For more secure trail removal you can after using a bank or two you can buy diamonds. Get diamonds with certified appraisals, laser etchings etc so you do not get cheated when it comes time to resell. Then take the stones across borders to another country where they are sold. Then deposit the funds in a bank in the other country. Then wire them out somewhere else. Getting the idea. The trail should be so complex the hunters give up or the bills to keep the chase going are so excessive the client retaining the hunters gives up. The experts will be telling the client hunting you that if you have expert help the chances of getting your assets would be extremely minimal at best.

Another option for your financial enemies is to divert away from the trackers and go to an asset recovery law firm. Asset recovery law firms are extremely expensive and tend to be retained when the recovery sought is in excess of $100,000,000 generally in the case of a bank fraud or stock swindle on a large scale. They will bill out to you several partners of the law firm at $625 per hour, accountants at $325 per hour, staff attorneys at $350 per hour and so forth to generate very large bills. They will hire powerful law firms in other countries where the trail leads, with massive retainers in the six digits at onset. Often they spend more than what is recovered. Their recovery rate is dismal at best as a rule. People with such large sums hire experts to assist them in hiding the assets.

The cost effective solution is a savvy private detective type who goes around trying to bribe police, government and bank officials to reveal information. An employee of a government or bank making $900 a month can fall easily for a $25,000 cash payment just for peeking into the computer even though he could get a year or two in jail for it. This makes the chase faster and cheaper BUT when we set these up the corrupt official or bank employee can get nothing evidentiary that can be used in court. They can look but the results are inconclusive.

We also maintain strong ties with banks. In many instances we have bank records sealed privately in judges chambers so only two or three key executives at the bank can access the files or records for these accounts. We know the game and how to play it.

Your Identity – The only way for this to work is for you to get a new identity in another country. The new identity has to not reference back to your old identity in any public registry or database. There are ways we accomplish this. The identity should include identity card, driver license and passport. Doing a name change sealed in judge’s cambers is another tactic we employ to make tracking not possible. It is imperative that you never use this identity to travel back to the country you departed from. You will not be renewing your passports and driver licenses from the old country. You have no mail forwarding from there. You do not call or email anyone from there.

The USA runs a witness protection program from which we can glean some useful information. They remove people to a different city, get them a new identity and even support them for a while. A very large amount of these people get found by their enemies who are in jail due to their court testimony. Why? Because these people in the witness protection program make mistakes and do not listen to their handlers who are experts. They call, mail and email known relatives and associates. The people hunting them watch for this. They get phone and email records with bribery and corruption or abuse of the judicial system. Some even are dumb enough to go back to their city and engage in personal visits. They get spotted. People phone them in for a reward. Then they get followed and good-bye. The criminal organizations have trackers that are well trained with vast resources who wait for the person in the program to make a mistake and then jump on it.

If you leave, leave for good or at least for many years (think 20 or more). Twenty years is a long time and people forget, die, get sick, move away themselves, go into other businesses, go bankrupt, go to jail, etc. Many statue of limitations do not expire if you are out of the country so bear this in mind. Only use a law firm in another privacy oriented country to establish a new identity for you so you can hide behind strong attorney client privilege.

Changing Your Appearance – This is an option and of course adds another layer to your disappearance. If your face was in the public eye this is a good idea. If one gets a face-lift, eye lift etc they can take 5-15 years off of their appearance. Body liposuction can also help change appearances by knocking weight off. A nose job, chin implant, cheek implants can drastically alter a facial profile making things quite confusing for one hunting you. This messes up a tracker big time. Have the surgery in a third country you have nothing to do with in any way shape or form. Doing all the plastic surgery can really confuse a tracker. Throw in some 2-inch heel lifts to change your height as well. Women can wear high heels and then switch to flats. Having your hair professionally colored is also a plus. Wigs are another good way to alter your appearance. Long hair, short hair, different colors can easily be accomplished with wigs. If you care to buy some books on makeup you can learn to put theatrical scars on your face, which can be removed easily.

Do remove any tattoos you have as best as possible. Tattooing over them is also a fast cheap way to accomplish the goal. Removal is time consuming and you might not have months. Go after any readily seen tattoos, ones under the clothes are not such a worry. Visible scars need to be addressed too. Plastic surgeons can reduce these with surgery and filling injections. If these are readily visible they can be a dead giveaway. Again tattoos can be placed over scar tissue to disguise the scar for a fast fix. Theatrical makeup can include body pads to make you look heavier.

You can also learn to make yourself look older with makeup. You can start wearing glasses with no or little prescription. If you wear glasses go to contacts. Get contacts that color your eyes differently but make sure they work well and fit correctly. Tinted glasses also restrict someone from seeing your eye color. Consider cosmetic dentistry to correct imperfections and flaws in your teeth that can be spotted on cameras etc and be used to identify you. For some of you it may be useful to use makeup when appearing in places where cameras are filming everything. Be mindful not to make yourself look unlike your identity documents in places like airports. Showing an authority you have a wig or sunglasses on of course should not be a problem.

Your New Life – Find a country that is suitable and free. Keep a low profile. No flashy houses or cars. No high profile businesses. Try to learn the language as fast as possible. Keep assets like cars, houses, boats, and stocks out of your name using corporations or foundations. Remember to avoid contact with old relatives and friends, business associates and even lawyers in the old country for many years (think 20 years). If you have any unusual hobbies like diving off of mountains drop them. These are trails that will be followed by trackers. If you collect any unusual items like shrunken heads drop it. If you keep pet ocelots drop it. Don’t go back to your old vacation spots, find new ones. Don’t get any magazine subscriptions from the old country. If you study say aikido and a tracker see something that makes him think you are in a certain country he spends a little time visiting aikido schools and watches for you coming or going, asking other students about you, flashing your picture or maybe bribes a local police officer to ask the questions for him in case someone may protect you. See how this works. Do not buy anything mail order or over the Internet from the old country. Do not have any credit cards in the old identity. The bills can be watched. Do not let anyone contact your old doctors in the old country for records. Everything has to be new.

Some people might even consider changing their dental work. Take out large fillings and get crowns in their place. Take out or put in gold teeth. Avoid getting your picture taken as a rule. Think about large sunglasses, wigs, canes, crutches, wheelchairs, makeup, hats and other tricks to disguise yourself if in places where your picture will be taken by surveillance cameras, tourists etc. For most sunglasses and a hat should suffice as an easy but effective disguise. There are excellent books on disguises readily available and it is easy to learn how to use them. Every country has an outlet for theatrical makeup.

What If I Make a Mistake and Get Exposed– Then you get to our law firm in Guatemala very fast and we start all over again. No worries, just expensive so try to be careful.

I want to Disappear – Ok come visit our law firm in Guatemala in person. We are not going to go into details on the phone or in email for many reasons including your own protection and the protection of our other clients. Please do not try to get details from our staff or us without visiting us in person. The staff is under orders to discontinue communications permanently with anyone trying to do this. Yes we know you would like to know what countries you would be living in etc but we just cannot reveal these things to anyone who calls. Any law firm who does so is not protecting their clients sufficiently.

If you cannot travel internationally because you are a criminal fugitive we cannot help you. If you at present do not have a passport we cannot help you. You do need to come to Guatemala where our offices are located. Remember it will require about $100,000 in fees to effect your disappearance and integration into another free country. After that you will need at least several hundred thousands dollars to live, start a business, retire etc. We know some places where it is extremely cheap to live and at the same time the country is free and private. That is what you are paying us for. We are acutely aware that this is a costly service and wish it could be done for others at a lesser expense correctly, but that is not possible.