identities usually won’t hold up to a ten minute internet search. For a thousand dollars you can get the social security number and a birth certificate of a real infant who died when he was a few months old. This scam has been common knowledge for almost twenty years. Searchable death certificate databases are available online; law enforcement has been wise to this scheme for a long time. If you use this technique, your fake identity doesn’t have a paper trail. No tax payments, school records, or credit history. If you have access to the right databases, it takes longer than ten minutes to figure out the identity is false—but not that much longer.
People who aren’t meticulous or who trust other criminals are fools. They’re just asking to get caught. It’s a pain in the ass to get false identities on your own, but it’s worth it if you don’t like prison.
For my disposable identities, I look in the obits for a guy with brown hair and eyes, about my height, without close family, who recently died in an accident. I know I have the right guy when I go to his home and see a stack of mail. If there’s a preapproved credit card application, I pick the lock on his house to find a document that has his social security number.
I usually visit the dead guy’s home in the middle of the day and make a point of saying hello to the neighbors. If they ask, I tell them I’m a cousin of the deceased. All credit card companies allow you to fill out preapproved applications online; all you need is the social security number. After that it’s just a matter of visiting the house and picking up the mail every couple of days until the credit card comes.
In most states, if you claim you’ve lost your driver’s license you can get a replacement by mail and have it sent to the address on record. Typically, you fill out an application online and pay by credit card. Once I have the driver’s license, I have an identity that is difficult but not impossible to penetrate.
I put even more effort into my main identity. Ten years ago, I got a job for a couple of months as an orderly at Henry Ford Hospital in downtown Detroit. John Evans was a sixteen-year old, brown haired, brown eyed victim of a drive by shooting who was DOA. His mom was a drug addict prostitute who came by just once to ID the body. It took no effort to get a hold of John’s driver’s license before his mom came. I didn’t touch what she most cared about; the cash in his wallet. Minutes after she left the hospital and before the cops came, I made sure his hospital records were lost and modified the death certificate to make him a John Doe. None of the doctors or nurses on duty had paid much attention to John after they realized he was dead. Inner city Detroit is predominantly black, but there are still whites living there. The police there are color blind about dead gangbangers; they don’t care much about any of them. John’s death didn’t make it into any public, private, or official database. Since John was a minor when he got into trouble with the law, his juvenile records were automatically sealed when he became a legal adult.
John had dropped out of high school so I didn’t have to mess with any of his school records. When I was in my thirties, I constantly got carded. It wasn’t a stretch to convince people I was eighteen. Two years after John died, I took a high school equivalency test under his name and got a GED, a job at McDonalds, and started paying taxes. Based on that first job, I got a bank account and a credit card. On John Evans’ twentieth birthday, I renewed his driver’s license and also got a Passport. His mother, the only other person who knew for sure John Evans was dead, died of an overdose four years ago. All my identification cards with his name had my photographs. My identity was bulletproof.
The hot water ran out. I’d only been in the shower for a few minutes; it should have lasted longer. Mina must have decided to take a