Frauds and Schemes

Certain authors of the past—the ones I grew up reading—believed it was
necessary to do all the wrong things in hopes of gaining secrecy. Many years
ago, I too, succumbed to the marketing efforts of mail-order catalogs and
phantom authors, in hopes of gaining information on how to win the game of
hide and seek.

It’s an intriguing subject to be sure—privacy in general and alternate identity
in particular. I found no real answers in those expensive books shipped to me
from afar by the supposed experts on the subject. Instead, my common sense
and conscience prevailed, and I instead studied, researched, consulted
various resources, and opted for a practical, workable—and most
important—a legal approach to accomplishing privacy.

The concepts I’ve written about in Privacy Crisis: Identity Theft Prevention Plan and Guide to
Anonymous Living work and won’t get you into trouble.
One guy wrote a book about contracting with a terminally ill patient for the
purpose of assuming his/her identity, once they passed on.
The “dead baby/graveyard scheme” ran rampant in books on the subject in
the 1980s and beyond, and proponents encouraged their followers to steal an
identity from the deceased and attempt to obtain a driver’s license in the
name of the dead infant or youth.

The “banking passport” idea is still popular, for those not in the know.
Some recommend emigrating and changing your name, once you’re
officially a new citizen—not a bad idea, except that it takes from five to
twelve years to become a citizen of most first-world countries.

Others have written on solutions for the privacy seeker, protesting the need
for official I.D. documents at all. This crowd may be right per the U.S.
Constitution, but it’s difficult to do business without primary identity
documents.