The UK’s Times Online published a unique news story in December 2007 about the reasons and ways people ( mostly men ) use to “disappear” from their current lives and start a “new” life with a different identity.

According to the article, there are numerous lifestyle and psychological reasons that go into a person’s decision to disappear, including: relationship problems, financial crises and depression.

Statistics show that two thirds of people who disappear, do so deliberately and do not want to be located.

Lost from View, a study done by York University and Missing People, found that of all missing people who are found alive, only 20 percent end up returning home for good and 40 percent refuse to renew contact with past family and friends at all. Some people ( mostly men ) take extreme measures like staging a “pseudocide” – faking your death to start a new life.

Some experts believe that as privacy becomes less and less and more relationships fall apart and financial worries mount, the basic human impulse to escape is increasing.

Frank Ahearn, a US privacy consultant who helps people disappear to start a new life, says his business has increased tenfold in the past five years. Ahearn credits the growing government intrusion into the private lives of citizens as one of the reasons for the upswing in requests for his personal privacy consulting services.

Ahearn also says that technology like the internet and cell phones have made vanishing in a modern world more possible. It is simple to run a virtual business from online without the need for a physical location. The idea of a virtual life is becoming increasingly attractive to potential runaways.

Ahearn’s list of clients include a corporate whistle-blower and a lawyer who was being stalked by a former client. He advises people to start planning their disappearance six months in advance. He advises people not to use their home phone, work or cellphone as well as not use their calling cards. In addition, do not use your credit cards to purchase anything in the location you are going to escape to.

According to psychologist Dorothy Rowe – it is an common human fantasy to disappear and start life all over in a new location. Each time there is a disaster such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the Asian tsunami some people will use the opportunity to shed their previous lives by playing dead and moving on.

Rowe says that men are twice as likely to disappear as women, often due to a loss of face at work or a decrease in social or economic standing.

Source: ‘Men just want to pick up and go’

Phone Validator is another great search service provided by Crime Time Publishing that should be a part of every skip tracer’s toolbox. The Phone Validator reverse phone number lookup allows users to reverse any US phone number to determine if the number is a landline or cell phone number.

You can use the Phone Validator lookup to reverse search any US phone number to find out if the number is a cell phone number or landline number as well as the telephone service provider that the phone number is associated.

The Phone Validator reverse lookup provides the following information from a phone number search.

1. Landline or cell phone number information.

2. Phone number service provider.

3. The US location that the phone number is associated with.

4. A handy link to WhitePages.com to see if the phone number has a directory assistance listing.

5. A search engine link to Google to find out if there are any listings for the phone number on the web. Search engines like Google are often very good for finding information online regarding unpublished phone numbers and cell phone numbers.

You can check out the Phone Validator at www.phonevalidator.com.

Crime Time Publishing has created a powerful and free social security number search site called SSN Validator that allows users to validate social security numbers against official data from the US Government’s Social Security Administration records.

Users can search a given social security number on the SSN Validator and the site will compare it to information on over 414 million issued social security numbers and return some very helpful information about the given ssn.

SSN Validator search results include:

1. State that the ssn was issued in.

2. Approximate year that the ssn was issued.

3. Whether or not the ssn has been issued by the Social Security Administration.

4. Information about whether or not the ssn appears to belong to a deceased individual as recorded in the Social Security Administration’s Death Masterfile.

The SSN Validator search is great for employers who want to do a quick and easy lookup on a prospective employee’s social security number, as well as professional skip tracers and people searchers, who want to find out which state a person’s ssn was issued in – for the possible lookup or relatives sharing the same last name.

You can check out the SSN Validator at www.ssnvalidator.com.

The Reuters news service is reporting that Swedish software company Polar Rose is planning on making their facial recognition software publicly available on the internet within the first half of 2008. Polar rose is hoping that their service will become the must-have “killer app” of people recognition in digital images across the web.

Polar Rose claims that their recognition service can pick out people’s faces in the growing number of online images, making the images searchable just like words on a web page.

The Polar Rose software will be available as a free plug-in for web browsers and will also be placed on partner web sites. They hope to launch the service on the first partner sites as early as this month.

Current image searches use the text and words attached to an digital picture, which makes things difficult if the pictures are incorrectly tagged or are missing useful identification. Polar Rose will scan 2D digital images and construct a 3D model from the person’s face to create a “faceprint”, which will be stored and indexed for searches. This will allow people to sort and group people’s photos by face and allow people to search for similar photos across the world wide web.

Google also got into digital image search when they took over Neven Vision a year and a half ago.

This could be a major advance in locating a person through images using online people search engines. The better these technologies become at finding people’s faces in images the more likely you will be able to not only locate someone by name, phone number or address in a search, but, eventually, you should be able to locate their image with a digital “faceprint” search as well.

If this technology is ever paired with mapping services like Google Maps, you may be able to someday find a person’s image along with a name, time, date as well as the geographic location that the digital picture was taken in. Just think of the future possibilities as they relate to doing people searches. This could take the task of searching for a person to the next level. Just think of the possibilities.

Source: Reuters.com

Ted Rheingold has created a neat free people search extension for users of the Firefox web browser called “Who Is This Person?”

This handy web search extension allows users to highlight any person’s name on a web page to find out more about the person through information published on the web’s top social networking and people search sites like – MySpace.com, LinkedIn.com, Wink.com, Facebook.com, Wikipedia.com, Technorati.com, Google News, Yahoo People Search, Spock.com, WikiYou.com, ZoomInfo.com and others.

This is an easy way to quickly find information from numerous search sites, using one tool.

You can read more about the “Who Is This Person?” people finder extension and download it at Mozilla.org.

Here is an interesting and informative YouTube.com video news clip about one of America’s top bounty hunters, Jim Elliott.

Interestingly enough, Jim Elliott compares the job of a professional bounty hunter to that of a sales person. A major part of his job is the use of psychology and salesmanship to get the information and person he is searching for and close the deal.

Learn about the people search techniques and psychology used by this top bounty hunter to find people running from the law on the YouTube.com video below.

Breitbart.com is reporting that the free people search engine Spock.com has already indexed 100 million people and is adding new names to its search engine at the rate of a million a day. Spock.com is scheduled to open for public use in mid August. Spock.com is an ambitious people search effort that plans to eventually index billions of names worldwide.

From the article –

“We are a search engine organizing information about people,” Spock.com co-founder Jay Bhatti told AFP.

“How Google allows you to type anything and gives you a web document result, we give you results around people,” he said. “That’s how we differentiate ourselves from other search applications, because we are solely focused on people.”

The founders of Spock.com, which has been under development since 2006 in Redwood City, California, hope the website will eventually provide a search result for everyone in the world.

To index individuals, Spock.com scours through social networking websites such as MySpace, Friendster and Bebo.

But it also allows web surfers to add information about individuals to help Spock.com compile full profiles.

“We try to index people, but the machine is not enough to understand all the data,” Bhatti said. “That’s where the community comes in. As an user of Spock, you will be able to add keywords, pictures, and to upload pages about people.”

Source: Search engine revs up to look for billions of names

Mashable.com recently tested and reviewed six of Web 2.0’s people search engine sites.

The six people search sites that were tested and reviewed include: PeekYou.com, ZoomInfo.com, YoName.com, Wink.com, Spock.com and ex.plode.us.

You can read the people search reviews @ 6 People Search Engines Tested: Can They Find Me?.

Webware.com has given a bad review to the recent open beta launch of the PeekYou people search engine. The Webware review recommends using the Wink.com people search while we anxiously await the beta launch of the coming Spock.com people search engine.

According to the Webware review on PeekYou –

1. PeekYou claims to have 50 million people listings in its search engine database, but numerous listings can be found for one person, including over 700 for President George Bush alone.

2. There is not way to tell who’s who in a list of people with the same name.

3. The PeekYou people search database is full of useless or outdated personal information and social network links.

4. The PeekYou people search site isn’t ready for public access and not worth user’s time.

You can read the entire review of Webware’s review of the PeekYou people search site @ PeekYou people search can’t find Jack

There’s some serious internet buzz surrounding a new people search engine called Spock.com.

Spock.com hasn’t launched yet and you currently have to request to be included on an invite list to be one of the first people to test this new search engine out, but already the site is generating a lot of interest among web search and people search professionals. Already tech luminaries like Tim O’Reilly ( www.oreilly.com ) and Michael Arrington ( www.techcrunch.com ) have applauded Spock.com’s future entrance into the world of online people search.

The Spock.com web site claims that their people search engine has already indexed over 100 million people profiles and is adding millions more every day. If the Spock group continues to grow their people search engine with personal profiles and people search features, they will take the art of “Googling” people to a whole new level.

To read more about the Spock.com people search engine and it’s features, see Tim O’Reilly’s blog @ Why I’m so excited about Spock.