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.
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.
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.
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.
That's an interesting point, some people just want to disappear. I read a long time ago when I was younger, on a local BBS, a guide to fully disappearing. Some people just don't want to be found; this can be true freedom depending on who you ask.
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.
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.
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.
FYI, "In other news ..." is a trope that indicates a sarcastic comment to follow, typically an observation of an obvious consequence of the prior observation. The sarcasm is in that it is presented as non-obvious (i.e. news).
"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.
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.
Skip tracing is not bounty hunting but it makes for a great article title.
and then
I think...
You wouldn't think that if you had read the article where it said that LE handed the asset (boat) to her shortly after Mullen's arrest. And that she's a bounty hunter, as well as a skip tracer.
It's really handy to read the source material before going around correcting people.
"Gomez spent the night babysitting the yacht at the Alice C, waiting for _a pilot who had been dispatched by ACS_ to guide the boat back to Berwick, Louisiana."
She personally located & took control of the boat, then alerted the collections agency who sent a pilot to collect it.
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.
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.
I assume that is what hired muscle is for. She's the brains of the outfit. Did anyone else think 10 grand was kind of low for this particular job? They did mention she would get the reward money, but didn't say how much that was.
$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?
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.
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?
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.”
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.
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.
That would make p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶o̶p̶a̶t̶h̶s sociopaths pretty much the créme de la créme, which doesn't come as a surprise, given their prominence among the world most grisly killers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
I guess everyone finally learned that information on the internet can be false. :-)
