The World’s Best Bounty Hunter Is 4-Foot-11. Here’s How She Hunts

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/skip-tracing-ryan-mullen/all/1

by danso • 13 years ago

207 80 13 years ago

larrydag2• 13 years ago

Skip tracing is not bounty hunting but it makes for a great article title. Skip tracing is finding a debtor for a lender. The bounty hunter gets the collection or asset from the debtor.

pmorici• 13 years ago

She does both. If you read to the end she actually went and recovered the asset which in this case was a boat.

larrydag2• 13 years ago

I think it was seized by law enforcement because it was part of a crime yet technically she was there so I guess it could be bounty hunting.

bostonpete2• 13 years ago

To track down the fleet of Caterpillar wheel loaders taken by the Peruvians, Gomez reached out to the estranged wife of the family’s patriarch

In other news, the estranged wife of a Peruvian crime boss turned up dead at 8:30 this morning...

IgorPartola2• 13 years ago

Is this fact or are you making a joke?

cheald• 13 years ago

It's pretty obviously an tongue-in-cheek joke off the fact that the wife blabbed.

raganwald• 13 years ago

I read this with great sadness. In the culture of grift, the highest form of con is when you induce someone to do something they know is wrong, like a 419 scam where you convince the mark to impersonate a dead person in exchange for a fee that never materializes.

The rationalization is that whatever happens to the mark is their responsibility, as they decided to knowingly break the law.

Playing on someone's false feelings of betrayal is nowhere near this, and exposing them to the very real possibility of execution, just so you can make a few bucks?

I call that psychopathic. This woman is entirely without scruples, she does this and boasts of it when interviewed.

bostonpete2• 13 years ago

It doesn't bother me that much that she deceived this woman in her investigation. But the fact that she essentially identified this source in a magazine article is pretty horrifying IMO.

polskibus• 13 years ago

Now that she revealed her face, identity and some of her methods, she'll be much easier to avoid.

runjake3• 13 years ago

Nearly all of a skip tracer's work involves online research and covert surveillance, not being face to face with the mark.

jfmercer• 13 years ago

How is it even possible to rank bounty hunters? This article's title is just sensationalist link bait.

wellpast• 13 years ago

Isn't that just Wired Magazine in general?

pavel_lishin2• 13 years ago

How is it even possible to rank bounty hunters?

Success rate relative to cost or time taken?

michaelwww3• 13 years ago

Her height has nothing to do with anything, but people like those sorts of details. Maybe we instinctively feel that a 4' 11' woman with the last name of Gomez gets under-estimated constantly, so it makes her success more satisfying to us.

aetherson• 13 years ago

Her height has to do with people's assumption that bounty hunting is primarily a physical, violent activity: going and wrestling a dude into submission and then slapping handcuffs on him and dragging him to the police station.

The reason they mention that a very small woman is very successful at it is to point out that success is not predicated in being able to win fights with fugitives.

CamperBob2• 13 years ago

One possible heuristic: the better ones manage to keep their photos out of Wired Magazine.

latj2• 13 years ago

Its strange how casually they mention her friends who are in law enforcement who do illegal searches for her.

pwnna• 13 years ago

Yup. That was weird.

Or not. I suppose.

enjo• 13 years ago

It's unclear to me if those searches are illegal or not.

baddox• 13 years ago

I doubt the searches themselves are illegal. Presumably those officers have legal access to those databases. It might be illegal to disclose the information to a civilian, and at the very least I hope it is against department rules.

yarou2• 13 years ago

Not at all strange, people have gotten used to being surveilled is all. Maybe she can help find the missing node.js guy as mentioned here:

http://blog.izs.me/post/72990767417/a-member-of-our-communit...

atmosx2• 13 years ago

We could raise some money... I don't know the guy, but still the idea is intriguing... Are we sure the guy actually WANTS to be found?

tokenadult• 13 years ago

I had to go back to the article to find the exact passage you were referring to. "Puzzled, Gomez resorted to a resource she taps only rarely: the help of friends at federal agencies, friends for whom she has done favors and who in return are willing to let her check her information against government databases. 'Their databases turn up what we call ‘trace details’ that you can’t get with the databases available to ordinary citizens,' Gomez says: phone numbers, addresses, company and individual names that have in some way been associated."

Depending on the status of the underlying civil recovery action that prompted someone to hire the bounty hunter, there may have been legal grounds for her to have that "access," especially if what she was doing was saying, "Here are some dots that I think connect in this way, can you tell me, yes or no, if this makes any sense?" But, yes, depending on the exact rules involved of what agency, and what the bounty hunter is pursuing in what case, and what was asked and answered, this could be illegal. Or not. It's not entirely sure if anything illegal was done in what was reported in that paragraph. The term "illegal search" has a much more specific meaning in legal language.

michaelwww3• 13 years ago

The guy had a case against him. I thought it was common for law enforcement and bounty hunters to cooperate. It wouldn't be wise to assume otherwise.

JRobertson• 13 years ago

I worked for a company that required CJIS(Criminal Justice Information Systems) certification to work on their products. The software dealt with law enforcement so we occasionally had access to live criminal records.

Every year we had to re-certify and one of the major points they emphasized and re-emphasized was that it was a felony to search for anything for a friend or even out of curiosity. You only had a legal right to access and view information if you had a specific reason dealing with a current case.

So, if they let her access any of those databases it was most definitely a felony. But as others have said it could have been public record databases and not something protected under CJIS.

Systemic332• 13 years ago

There is a longer discussion on the site's comment section about the legality, and the short version is that she has legal access to the databases since she is a licensed private investigator, which apparently is very easy to get in Texas.

atmosx2• 13 years ago

If you do this kind of job, that is to be expected...

girvo2• 13 years ago

According to Yelp[0], that's not the only illegal part...

This company is run by a bunch of crooks. They towed my legally parked vehicle for no reason from the front of my apartment. I called them to see what was up and after arguing for a while they said, "oops, our mistake." It took them over two hours to bring it back to me. The icing on the cake, when I finally got my vehicle back, it had been damaged!!!! The driver that delivered it back told me to contact their manager. The manager wanted to argue with me, claiming that they didn't damage my vehicle. So now, my vehicle is damaged, my alignment is jacked up AND I missed a day if work because of these predatory towers.

This company needs to be reported to the better business bureau. I wish I had the resources to sue these crooks.

[0] http://www.yelp.com.au/biz/unlimited-recovery-raleigh

eli_awry• 13 years ago

I think that's a different company - it's not even in Texas.

mathattack2• 13 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. Why would she want to advertise this? It almost guarantees that they won't be able to help her in the future.

patrickmay• 13 years ago

Now I want to read another Stephanie Plum novel.

Just kidding. I wouldn't really read that fluff. Honest.

anonymouscowar12• 13 years ago

So apparently the only thing this guy had going for him was that he could print checks with magnetic ink and fake a caller id. Both are trivial. Wow.

andrewfong• 13 years ago

The more interesting story here is how he was able to confuse authorities for years by creating a slew of fictitious identities online. A good chunk of the privacy debate focuses on anonymity, but stories like these suggest that increasing the noise-to-signal ratio may be even more effective.

fleitz• 13 years ago

This is why spies disguise themselves as average people rather than martini drinking playboys.

Pitarou2• 13 years ago

That, plus the fact that it was the social contacts that broke him.

If you could break all social and family ties, you could probably get away with a lot. But you'd also be alone and vulnerable in the world. Tough choice.

Maybe the master criminals build up separate identities with separate networks of social relationships.

runjake3• 13 years ago

Yes, you're right. I mean, there's some stuff in the article about him being a master of disinformation, financial fraud, social engineering, social proofing, hacking the system and creating believable false identities, but those were nothing.

anonymouscowar12• 13 years ago

Ok, Sir Snark-a-lot. Yes, he was clearly good at other things. I don't mean to shit on this guy's skills. The article goes to a lot of trouble to claim that he has an "edge" over other con-men; but, it turns out that that edge is just be a few trivial tricks. I was underwhelmed.

BrandonMarc3• 13 years ago

Another big take-away is how easily a "fact" online can become an "official fact" in official databases.

spiderPig• 13 years ago

This'll make a good "Catch Me If you Can 2"

BrandonMarc3• 13 years ago

2 Catch Me If 2 Can

ck22• 13 years ago

Glad it is just thieves and not terrorists that can so easily fool law enforcement and private contractors have to be used.

pavel_lishin2• 13 years ago

Another view is that law enforcement worries less about the thieves, and more about perpetrators of violent crimes, or crimes that cost society more than what these thieves perpetrate.

ck22• 13 years ago

Law enforcement constantly uses that excuse "we can't be bothered with that, we need to focus on the big stuff".

Except the big stuff never happens because they typically have big lawyers and bigger payoffs to politicians.

sequoia2• 13 years ago

my biggest takeaway from the article:

"The most troubling lesson she learned from Mullen, Gomez says, is how readily misleading information can migrate from a posting on an Internet forum to official status. “In a second, what’s false becomes true,” she observes. “All it takes is for one person to put it on the record.” That seems to be what happened with Mullen’s Most Wanted status. A spokeswoman from the US Marshals Service told WIRED that Deputy Sheasby knew nothing about a $2 million cybertheft by Mullen until he was told by “an investigator,” and that he’d passed on the story only because he felt obliged to make other investigators aware of everything he had heard."

Looks like the barrier between social network/forums etc. & official record are pretty porous.

ricardobeat2• 13 years ago

$10k for what looks like a few months work. Looks like a successful case of outsourcing, but the thought of private law enforcement, mercenaries intruding into people's lives and chasing people with guns doesn't sit very well with me. Who is responsible if everything goes wrong?

drivingmissm• 13 years ago

Bounty hunting has been around forever and is a very dynamic and effective part of the law enforcement system.

alextingle• 13 years ago

All yours for a mere US$10k.

rmason• 13 years ago

She also ended up with the award money on the guy. In most cases with someone that high profile it will be a lot more than US $10K.

njharman• 13 years ago

Who is responsible if everything goes wrong?

The responsible parties. "Everything" and "wrong" are utterly vague. But, assume you mean something like Mullen tries to escape and her bodyguard shoots him in the back. It would be up to local DA if they wanted to prosecute, perhaps including bounty hunter as accomplice. Mullen's family could sue for wrongful death.

tldr; laws don't magically disappear just cause bounty hunters are involved.

ricardobeat2• 13 years ago

Of course, but suing an individual vs a government body has very different dynamics, plus the whole operation has less clear rules and responsibilities for the involved, not to mention training etc. I guess the victim/family would have a smaller chance of financial compensation. I'd rather have police be police, can we friendly disagree?

run4_too• 13 years ago

That's what I thought. Sounds like an awful lot of tough work for a measly $10K.

You could do pretty much the same thing with a law degree and earn a ton more.

BrandonMarc3• 13 years ago

As the article leads with, she's in it for the hunt itself, as much as the $

stevewillows• 13 years ago

She also had the potential of reward money if there was any. I wish the article clarified that. $10k for the hours and personal cost seems low.

coupdejarnac• 13 years ago

You can look here for wanted persons http://www.fbi.gov/wanted and see the reward amounts. She banked at least another $10K, I'd venture.

thret• 13 years ago

Who does the photos for these? They are clearly just using unrelated images and fitting in a certain number of pictures per page.

Good stories do not need to be embellished with images of apartment windows or empty parking lots.

JoblessWonder• 13 years ago

The images are certainly related. Under each it even gives you the reason why.

However, if you are arguing that the images are ineffective I might agree. It looks like this article was included in the Print edition so I'd imagine the photos were chosen to match with the article's layout there as opposed to the online version.

vaadu• 13 years ago

what was disappointing about the article was no pictures of Mullen, his cars, yacht or properties.

ableal• 13 years ago

Good story. The insightful bit, perhaps not unlike http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_%28countermeasure%29 :

The most troubling lesson she learned from Mullen, Gomez says, is how readily misleading information can migrate from a posting on an Internet forum to official status. “In a second, what’s false becomes true,” she observes. “All it takes is for one person to put it on the record.”

P.S. Wired's comments are worth a look.

JimA• 13 years ago

Anyone know what makes the "Mastercheck Keypad and Printer" so special? I can buy cheap magnetic toner and put it in my laser printer to get magnetic encoded checks, but my understanding is most banks don't rely on that much any more in favor of optical recognition. That was one bit that seemed a bit hyperbolic.

gscott2• 13 years ago

Sounds like he was using that for a long time, maybe a decade. He was just ahead of the curve...

michaelt• 13 years ago

Perhaps they edited or omitted details of what the guy did so as not to tip off people who would like to emulate him.

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

I'd love to read an article about that computer she was "forced" to build at age 10. Now that sounds fascinating.

squirejons• 13 years ago

ah, the neoliberal media once again glorifying their weapons of economic doom, the debt collectors. These demons should be demonized instead.

js2• 13 years ago

I am reminded of recovery specialist http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Hardberger

ballard• 13 years ago

~40% of high-speed check processing machines run FreeBSD 4.x-6.x

abhi3188• 13 years ago

I think more than anything, writing an article on a bounty hunter is plain dangerous.

mathattack2• 13 years ago

I guess everyone finally learned that information on the internet can be false. :-)

The World’s Best Bounty Hunter Is 4-Foot-11. Here’s How She Hunts

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