How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found

hello my name is bradley and welcome to sums up a channel about how to survive in the online jungle how many people do you think go missing every year well last year over half a million people went missing in the united states alone if all of these people were to gather in one place you'd probably have a city the size of atlanta or sacramento now this is an enormous shocking figure but just take a look at this graph as it turns out in 2021 it's a lot harder to actually disappear than say a quarter of

a century ago in 1996 980 000 people never returned home that's actually double today's figure why well the answer is actually quite simple nowadays we leave much more of a trace and by and large it's thanks to these things to show just how little privacy there is in our lives i actually want to conduct a little bit of an experiment i want to figure out how to disappear completely and never be found again [Music] actually before i embark on disappearing from digital world i'd actually like to clear up a few things first number one and

most importantly i'm not wanted by interpol and i don't owe any money to the banks or to the mafia i'm a normal brit with a good reputation and my finances are fairly in order it's just that the time has come to change my life entirely so no mi6 won't be chasing me once i disappear and i won't be faking my own death so i don't think the police will be that interested in me either however my family might actually hire a team of private detectives to hunt me down and that's who i'm going to be

hiding from the private detectives she in fact if i were to disappear in japan for instance there would actually be dozens of legitimate companies that would help me get the job done pretty strange i mean for a modest fee they'd effectively help me move out in secret and come up with a new identity and biography every year thousands of japanese men and women vanish without a trace unfortunately i'll be going this road alone without the help of any backstreet japanese agencies and before the new me enters the world i'll effectively have to erase as many

traces of my former self as i physically can all of us reveal countless amounts of data about ourselves where we go what we do what we enjoy as well as our wrongdoings practically everything that we've ever photographed downloaded supported criticized commented upon or even ignored is actually reflected in our digital history and one of the most important components here is that the data about us is actually publicly available by social media and that's really easy to check there's actually a website called delete me and you can use this website to enter your full name and

the city in which you reside and in just a few minutes you'll be met with a very very unpleasant surprise now the good news is that this check is basically free to conduct the bad news is that well first of all the data is no longer stored on social media platforms blogs or websites instead it now resides in the databases of data brokers you can request that the data broker deletes your data right but this process is long and difficult and there are actually no guarantees that the data will actually be deleted from the systems

so with these two things in mind i've actually chosen a different route now i'm not going to be deleting my social media profiles or writing to data brokers instead i'll actually be tainting my existing personal data basically i'll dilute all the information about myself with various kinds of spam for instance i will start adding absolute randomness to my friends list and then i'll add the friends of those randomers and then i'll start joining random groups on facebook or cramming my bio with a range of inexplicable hobbies and interests i'll also start reposting things that in

no way reflect who i am or what i do and i'll fill my photo galleries with faces of people who don't even exist right this is all effectively spamming my profiles of course intelligence agencies would likely have the resources to determine which data about me is true and which data is fake but that's not who i'm hiding from remember an ordinary private detective would only have access to publicly available information such as my social media profile which i'm spamming heavily and if you actually want to visualize how difficult it will be to delete your data

from these social media platforms well backgroundchecks.org can help you with that see on this site you'll basically see a list of the social media platforms where deleting your data will be the most difficult if not impossible and if you don't plan on disappearing this site will give you something to consider next time you decide to create a new social media profile so similar to what i did with my social media profiles i'll be intentionally spamming my email i can actually sign up to a large number of dating websites for instance maybe i'll launch some free

ads or create some websites on tilde where i'll basically offer random stuff for really low prices the point is that i'll be using my existing email as the contact in these endeavors and before i truly disappear i'll reply to as many of these resulting emails as i can to create this strange backlog of random emails right [Music] not only this but on the day of my disappearance i'll be maxing out the number of password reset attempts on my accounts and additionally i'll remove any recovery phone numbers or email addresses that are actually attached to them

i'll also change the answers to my recovery questions with absolute gibberish that is impossible to memorize either on my part or for anyone else to figure out the idea here is to lock the door take out the key throw it in a lake and forget about it forever so let's talk about your favorite devices right smartphones laptops and tablets these guys can become your worst enemies as you try to escape from your former life let's start with my laptop now regardless of how attached i may be to my old trusty notebook here i'm sadly going

to have to leave it behind my computer is effectively just as unique as any person on the planet i mean the processor the hard disk and memory cards are unique identifiers of the computer itself and they are accessible to programs that have their serial numbers for instance therefore every computer leaves a trace in that one way or another means the computer can be identified so i've got two options either destroy my favorite laptop or basically create a false footprint of it i think i'll go with the second option and the first thing i need to

do in this case is to install a bunch of crypto related software including guides and instructions all related to bitcoin speculation and i'm actually going to have to buy some bitcoin to get this done why well i have to generate this false market activity by moving various cryptocurrencies back and forth from different wallets and things but at the same time i'll actually start researching various cryptocurrency websites and inquiring about mining equipment so as to give off the impression that i'm actually interested in crypto now this will be the false motive for my escape even for

high-level law enforcement the crypto market can seem not only abstract and criminal but that out strange so just let them think that i ran into some problems paying off some crypto debts right and i just took off somewhere i mean this would be enough to divert the police for instance but a private detective on the other hand might investigate this lead that's why i will be leaving my old laptop behind i'll change the password to something really easy one of my parents birthdays would work fine so they can get in perhaps i'll even google a

few places which i certainly don't plan on visiting and i'll spend some time on home rental websites for instance in those regions i'll even look up a few bus schedules some shopping malls and a few maps of those regions and while i'm at it i'll take a look and see how many cctv cameras there are in each city and thankfully i won't be going to china or london as a result where the amount of surveillance cameras is just truly shocking [Music] now my plan of escape currently only exists in my head and i'm not going

to research any aspects of my escape on any of my devices or even things like a public computer at the library because you know someone might take interest in what's on your screen for instance instead i'll probably go around some local bookshops and take a look at some guides into other countries and cities and then on the day of my escape i'll just pick one of those destinations at random right yes randomness is indeed part of the plan here now when it comes to my dear smartphone i certainly have a lot of work to do

before the day of my escape i mean first of all i have to learn how to forget my phone regularly both at work and at home the reason for that is because telecom companies keep track of the movements of their customers therefore when i'm walking around with my phone in my pocket i'm being tracked constantly and this doesn't matter if i have the latest iphone or an old nokia brick any phone regularly triangulates your position now accessing this information is of course very difficult i mean even if you're law enforcement you'll start to jump through

several hoops and rings of bureaucratic hell in order to get this information nonetheless anonymous cellular tracking data is commercially available and all of this data is collected by these various applications installed on your phone including maps and online shopping apps for instance technically speaking this data is indeed anonymous however if this data reveals a pattern it is theoretically possible to trace it back to me personally i mean think about it right how many people in your building commute the exact same place that you do every single day were your neighbors at the same company christmas

party that you were at last year do you see what i'm getting out here i mean if you regularly visit the same four or five places you're effectively creating a unique digital footprint and this can be traced right back to you now even if the data underpinning it is indeed anonymous now it is enough to know where one lives works and has lunch or even shops to figure out who they are just based on anonymous cellular tracking data the scariest part is that it's actually perfectly legal and not too difficult to access this sort of

data recently a couple of journalists from the new york times demonstrated this and obviously for the private detective hunting you down accessing this data should be a piece of cake therefore in the lead up to my escape i'll have to follow one important rule i'll have to regularly leave my telephone behind and i'll actually use the time away from my phone to do kind of important stuff like regularly withdrawing small amounts of money from random atms around the city but not too much at once obviously so as to not raise any red flags with the

bank so if i stick to withdrawing small sums at random intervals i should be in the clear also at some point while i'm away from my phone i'll need to buy a simple old-school cell phone you know the kind with actual buttons right and a new sim card but whatever i do i cannot turn it on or even charge it i can't even take out the phone from the box until i'm at least 200 miles into my escape at no point ever should my old phone and my new phone be turned on at the same

time in the same place on the day of my escape i will remove the sim card and sd card of my phone and literally throw it into the nearest lake if anything pond at the local park should suffice or at the very least a dirty river might be all right as well and then i'll take the sim card and sd card and throw them into a sewer drain somewhere right no one's gonna find this [Music] so also i'll have to say goodbye to the bank because now i'm part of the very small minority of people

these days who don't use banking services my transactions now on will be on a purely cash basis and the plus side it will be much easier to pay and deal with landlords and i really won't be leaving any trace in that respect i'll also probably keep some modest savings in crypto and even if i run into problems with paying for stuff in bitcoin i can always use the bitcoin to buy electronics which i can then in turn pawn for cash and this point however causes me a bit of a problem i mean how do i

keep the passwords to my crypto while it's secure and how do i ensure that no one can make use of them if i lose them for instance two one six four two zero one nine eight nine and that little lady is pie to a thousand places well here i'll follow the principle that the best hiding place is in plain sight so to that avail i'll purchase a bunch of neutral photographs into which i'll disguise the keys to my crypto wallets with the help of steganography now this method is based on the idea that information is

not only encrypted but it's so hidden from plain sight the text can be inserted into a file such as a photo or video for instance i mean here look at this first glance this looks like an ordinary photo right that's no different to this one but in reality i've actually inserted multiple pages from this very script into the first one who would have thought that from such an ordinary picture you could extract so much information now we are finding ourselves really at the dawn of a new world digital technologies now have the ability to create

unique portraits out of all of us researchers have learned to identify individual drivers based on how they execute turns for instance in the manner in which they turn the steering wheel and even how they apply pressure to the pedals advanced recognition systems can identify us based on how we type by analyzing the pauses in between the keys we press and i still haven't scratched the surface of biometrics as well as face and voice recognition systems that we'll actually get to in one of the upcoming videos now as i said goodbye i'd like you to think

about living in a world with no privacy whatsoever maybe it's not too late to run away and start all over again you