Edmund Pankau, a 25-year PI veteran and Hide Your Assets author, reveals how to vanish—cutting ties, using Belize/Honduras for $50K citizenship, and exploiting loopholes like secured credit cards—while warning of risks tied to family involvement. He details fraudulent bankruptcies (1 in 10), tracking offshore assets via databases like DBT, and the dangers of inconsistent identity records, citing Richard Minns’ capture. Pankau also debunks amateur phone-tap detection but confirms Social Security numbers can be weaponized, with arrests permanently recorded. His book, released February 17th, sells out fast; listeners should request copies in person to secure them. Ultimately, his expertise underscores the fragility of privacy in an era of relentless digital surveillance and legal gray zones. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I visit you all.
Good evening or good morning as the case may be and welcome to another edition of The Strangest Thing of the Night.
The wise known is closely and spreading its wings from the West Eastward to the Virgin Islands in the South American North all the way to the pole.
This is, I suppose.
In the next episode, we are going to have a bit of change of paste.
I thought this sounded like a very interesting book title and concept.
Then you know me.
Edmund J. I believe it's been Cow, has written a book called Hide Your Assets and Disappear.
He's one of the nation's top ten private investigators, and he actually can teach people how to secure their money and never be heard from or seen again.
For whatever reason a person might want to do such thing.
And so I thought that's going to be a very interesting program, ex-wives.
Listen up.
That'll be next hour.
Now, this hour will be open lines when we get to it here shortly.
And I'll try and make it shortly.
House prosecutors questioned presidential friend Verdon Jordan.
Vernon and Jordan and Drew concessions that they hope may bolster their case for live witnesses at the impeachment trial.
Jordan asserted again in testimony that the president was directly behind his efforts to find Monica Lewinsky a job, but the effort was never designed to buy her silence.
Well, why would the President of the United States ask anybody to find an intern a job if it wasn't driven by something?
Just a ramming thought there.
U.S. jets bomb Iraq missile launchers.
We're doing that now on a daily basis.
So we did it again Tuesday.
We attacked Iraqi anti-ship missile launchers.
And you would think the Iraqis would be getting sick of that.
In other words, the Iraqis are not actually attacking us.
They're simply turning on radars.
And how would you like, we have these harm, they're called harm missiles, good name, huh?
And what they do is they lock on to a radar signal, and then they go and destroy the building and the dish and the, you know, everything concerned with the radar.
Kavoom.
And, you know, if you were an Iraqi, you'd have to think ten times before you push the on button on the radiate, you know, to irradiate an object with radar, knowing that what you're going to get back for your efforts is going to be a big bang.
So, you know, you can almost, I know there's nothing humorous about it, but you can almost picture in your mind's eye these Iraqis pushing the button and then getting the hell out of the building.
I don't know.
Maybe they're just doing that to mess with us.
Abortion foes who created wanted posters and a website listing the names and addresses of, quote, baby butchers, end quote, were ordered to pay $107 million in damages by a federal jury Tuesday.
Oh my.
Oh my, oh my, $107 million.
Well, guess that site won't be up for a while.
People who have taken two kinds of common antibiotics are less likely to suffer heart attacks.
It has now been determined, according to a study that bolsters the tantalizing theory that infections, get this, may be an important cause of heart disease.
Oh, boy.
Infections, huh?
That is really interesting, heart disease.
And once again, you know, earlier today I talked to my boss, Alan Corbeth.
Alan and I have worked together now for a lot of years.
And he said, you know, Art, I went to get a haircut today to my barber.
And there was a sign on the door that says closed.
Now, bear in mind, this man is the picture of health.
And so I guess he asked somebody nearby what happened.
And they said, oh, you didn't know he died yesterday.
Just dropped dead.
They don't have the coroner's report yet, but seems like I've been seeing a lot of that lately.
People my age and younger just dropping dead like flies.
And then there's another thing that I've noticed, and that is that a lot of these people have really healthy lifestyles.
I mean, some of them are vegetarian.
Some of them hike and press hundreds of pounds every day, and they exercise, and they go, you know, they do this and they do everything, and they just drop dead.
And there's been a lot of that going on lately.
I don't know.
Well, here it is.
Look, I've got about ten stories on this.
Russians may turn night into day.
I'm not the only one using that phrase, even though that is not what it is yet.
The crew of the Russian space station Mirror will stage what it hopes is going to be a spectacular experiment Thursday using a huge mirror to reflect a beam of sunlight back to Earth.
The banner experiment envisions unfolding a space mirror made of a membrane covered by a metal layer.
In theory, the mirror is to work kind of like the moon reflecting sunlight on Europe and North America.
That would be us.
According to the mission control spokesperson, who the hell gave them permission to do this to us, I'd like to know.
The mirror, about 25 meters in diameter, would serve simply as a prototype for even larger models, this is where it gets important, that one day may be used to eliminate sun-starved northern cities.
And they also may turn into solar sails.
If the sky is clear, this small, little experiment would resemble a shooting star racing quickly across the sky.
Clouds, however, would make it invisible.
So this is just sort of a little, let's see if we put a mirror up there and see if we can see it from Earth kind of experiment.
If it works, then they're going to put up the big guys, hundreds of them.
And my comment is just say, yet.
I like my nighttime and I'm not ready to lose it.
A small, their words, meteor streaked across the western sky yesterday morning, startling people from San Francisco to Las Vegas, more than 400 miles away.
It was bright, blue, and, one caller said, absolutely fantastic, KCBS.
Many others reported on it.
People called the police.
The object, according to scientists, was probably a fireball or bull-eyed.
That's the director of the Cabot Observatory, Science Center in Oakland, who goes on, from the description, I would say it was simply a small meteorite that entered the atmosphere.
Said he, it's not unusual, but it was clear last night, and so a lot of people saw it.
Which may be a perfectly proper explanation, but you know, it's the only one ever given.
And my question remains, how the hell do they know it was a meteorite until somebody goes and finds what fell?
You know, they ought to say something entered the Earth's atmosphere or streaked into the Earth's atmosphere rather than saying it was a meteorite.
Fireballs, all the rest of it.
Meteorites, bull-eyes, maybe, maybe not.
Show me the rock.
Where is the meat?
You know, that sort of thing.
Anyway, I had an awful lot of faxes about whatever this was that went streaking across the atmosphere.
Lawrence Livermore and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia have announced they have made element 114, it has been done, folks, with 184 neutrons, one atom, after four months of calcium bombardment of a plutonium target,
not exactly a thimble full, and it had an apparent half-life of about 30 minutes, much longer than the half-life of element 105, 106, and so forth, somewhere near the island of stability.
So in other words, as they continue to go up, they're reaching not less, but more stable elements.
And there were those who said, here's the table of elements, and that's all there is to it.
Well, guess what?
They're coming up now with new elements, and they're getting closer and closer to what Bob Lazar described as, you'll recall, element 15, used in the saucers that he got to inspect at area 51, right?
So now we're at 114, and it is more stable.
Follows 115 would be yet more stable, and so forth and so on.
What lies ahead, you can only guess.
Is it a sad day?
It is official now.
Ships at sea will no longer use Morse code to signal distress.
They have all changed to a GPS-based system.
When you consider Y2K, you've got to wonder if this is really a cool idea.
So, very, very interesting.
SOS is no longer going to be, you know, in a way that really is kind of sad.
I mean, what replaces SOS?
I guess somebody talking into a satellite phone saying, get me the hell out of here.
That all of a sudden SOS is no longer going to be the distress signal.
I don't even know why I'm nostalgic for it.
I've never sent an SOS, but I've always thought if I heard one, I certainly would know what to do.
And now there's not going to be any more SOS.
I know what SOS meant in the Air Force, and it was lousy, and it was for breakfast.
And I can't repeat it here, but, you know, the save our souls thing from the sea, I'm sorry to see that go, and I don't know why.
NBC News has learned that the CDC in Atlanta has placed, you're going to, this will kill you.
No pun intended, has placed smallpox at the top of their list of potential biological agents of mass destruction.
U.S. intelligence officials, conceding they have very little either way, cite Russian intelligence reports that concluded North Korea and possibly other former Soviet client states were now conducting experimental research into using smallpox as a weapon, and we no longer have any vaccine against smallpox either.
Oh, well, isn't that just great?
So there you have it.
That is sort of a summary of what's going on.
Pretty weird stuff.
Stuff streaking through our skies.
The Russians getting ready to unfold their mirror on Thursday.
And smallpox is about to be used as a weapon as we meet up with Element 114.
Okay, tomorrow night, Richard Hoagland, though I don't have the information and phone numbers yet, they're going to send it to me.
They always do that at the last minute.
Richard C. Hoagland and Ghost Wolf and company, and I understand they may well dig up, pun intended, an archaeologist who's been working on the Miami Circle so that we can hear expert opinion on what it is that we're trying so desperately to protect.
And I might add, with some success, thank you all.
Then the following night, Dr. Jeff Long and Tricia McGill are going to be my guests, and they are going to tackle a topic that nobody tackles.
You've heard a lot about near-death experiences, right?
Usually good.
Oh, look at the light.
There's dad.
There's mom.
It's heaven.
Well, they're going to be here talking about not the white light and the relatives and the welcome to paradise.
They're going to be talking about what happens when the opposite occurs.
And Dr. Long has been there.
He'll tell you about it.
So I guess you might call them NHE's near-hell experiences.
I don't know.
I think an interesting topic, though.
And then Friday night, Saturday morning, Brad Steiger is going to be here, and we've got a big announcement for you.
If you're on my webpage, you can probably scroll down to Brad's name and learn the secret ahead of time.
Otherwise, you'll have to wait.
Let me see.
There is one other little item regarding what we call Miami's Stonehenge, or what may be the American Stonehenge in Miami.
There are some new listener-supplied photographs on the website tonight.
If you would like to go and take a look, you're welcome to.
Well, yeah, I can even tell you that there was a U.S. aircraft that was purportedly, as a matter of fact, the co-pilot and the pilot both had some damage to their retinas as a result of not the Chinese, but the Russians doing that kind of a test.
unidentified
So I hear the Israelis, they might have something to do with, or they had the technology for that, but what I hear is they've got a 4.3-meter mirror that they're putting in one of their so-called observatories or whatever, and supposedly they're going to use this as not only an offensive, but like a defensive type thing, too.
They can shoot it at one of our satellites or anything, and it can totally, or even one of our missiles, I guess it malfunctions.
I saw one test in which the U.S. with a laser destroyed a missile in flight, but it was all planned, and it was a close-in shot.
Now, lasers degrade in the atmosphere the way anything else would do.
So I'm not sure I'm prepared to believe that we've got something that can destroy a satellite of that sort from the ground, or worse yet, the other way around, if you could imagine something from space zapping Earth.
Although I have at times wondered if, and you've got to think about it, crop circles could be created by an experimental weapon of that exact kind.
The End You've got to imagine it would be possible.
Would they do it?
Well, not America.
America would never do that kind of thing, would it?
Would it?
That was the America that fed plutonium to children, right, according to government officials recently, revealing secrets.
changing every number we have before it's all over and replacing them with you know what dancing green you you you you you If you were going to hide your assets and disappear, where would you go?
You ever thought about that?
I mean, if you were to just, whatever your situation is, say, that's it.
I'm out of here.
I'm going to be a new person in a new place where nobody knows me, and I'm out of here.
You know, a lot of people have done that.
Now, if you're curious about how you can do it, I've got a guest coming up who's going to tell you, I guess.
That's the name of the book.
Hide your assets and disappear.
I'm really, really, really curious about this topic.
I had always thought maybe a South Pacific island.
Maybe Tahiti.
I have this, we're heard in Tahiti, thanks to KHVH and Honolulu that just goes blasting across the saltwater.
And I get these, I get these wonderful letters from friends in Tahiti who listen to the show.
And they've always got these exotic native dancing girls.
Oh, the postcards.
Oh, the postcards.
And, you know, it's just, it's sort of a dream that you dream.
a sunny warm tropical south pacific island Vacation time, maybe.
Well, I was thinking about, well, being he's the father of lies, okay?
Being he knows that he's being remote reviewed, wouldn't he want to put that out there to make it look like he's just a little baby conceived in maggots laying in a ditch when he's actually, you know.
And then you did that Antichrist line, which means the spirit of Antichrist is, what, already in the world?
More Americans are going to have to learn that they're going to face what you are now facing sometime within the next year.
unidentified
Yep, that's for sure.
Yeah, I thought it was weird.
You know, actually, I went by my bank today, and after the power failed the first time, they have a backup generator, and theirs, for some reason, did not kick in, so they had the bank closed.
And of course, you know, the whole nine of the stoplights were out.
Yeah, Americans are really used to just doing it one way, you know, and that way is turn on the tap, turn on the switch, stuff it down the garbage disposal, flip on the T V and the stereo and the radio and all the rest of it, and it just always works.
Well, I have a feeling we're coming into a period of time where that's going to be tested quite a bit.
unidentified
Yeah.
Anyhow, about that picture you had up of the plant.
I've seen that before a few years back on some of my plants.
Knowing our government, I'm surprised they didn't start out on something simpler like daisies.
I mean, kill all the daisies in the world first, just to prove you can do it.
unidentified
Yeah, which reminds me, by the way, the guy who was telling you about growing, the government growing, I think there are seven people that still do get it from the government.
I hope that Premier Executives J. Corn and Clear Channel are listening very carefully this morning.
Edmund J. Pancow, I have a dry sense of humor, is one of the nation's top 10 private investigators.
He has also become recognized as one of the most informed financial and asset recovery experts in the country.
His expertise has prompted many clients in industry and government to utilize his investigative talents to document fraud, locate, and recover hidden assets.
Now, he's a best-selling author and renowned public speaker.
In his fifth book, Hide Your Assets and Disappear.
He's taken an about-face approach to his search and recovery techniques, techniques that he has taught to thousands at seminars and spelled out in fine detail in his bestseller, Check It Out.
In other words, I guess he has tracked people down for most of his adult life.
And so he would be the ideal guy to tell you how you could not get tracked down, right?
He is an associate editor for PI Magazine, private investigator, and contributing writer to international living.
He writes regularly for numerous financial and investigative trade journals, authored several award-winning books on privacy and investigation, which include, of course, Check It Out, Everyone's Guide to Investigation, How to Make $100,000 a Year as a Private Investigator.
That sounds like fun.
I wonder if that is fun work.
His experiences in numerous high-profile cases have been featured in such national publications as Time, Business Week, People, USA Today, New York Times.
He's been interviewed on literally hundreds of local and syndicated radio talk shows, including ABC's 2020, Larry King Live, BBC London, and so forth and so on.
Let's see.
He has investigated some of the highest profile cases in American history, located the hidden assets of foreign dignitaries, bank embezzlers, celebrities, and politicians, has served as an expert witness in many precedent-setting court cases and trials, resulting in the recovery of millions of dollars for his clients.
He's a graduate of Florida State University School of Criminology, the founder and director of the PanCal Consulting, an international investigative agency headquartered in Houston, Texas, which is where he is.
Well, I've really been doing this now more than 25 years.
I started as many people as a private investigator doing the same thing that everybody else does is making movies of Aaron's spouses and filming insurance cases.
If somebody comes to you and they say, look, I married this gal, I've made a fortune, I'm really doing well, and she is a shrill, shrieking shrew of a bitch that I've got to get away from.
And without expert advice, somebody like you, how much trouble.
Let's say somebody really shredded every bit, you know, their social security card, all their credit cards, all their ID, took off, ended up thousands of miles away, somehow or another, got their money with them.
Well, the one problem, Art, and the thing that everybody has to remember is that three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
You can't call your mother on holidays.
You can't check in with your former wife, family, anybody, because in the United States, the record-keeping system is so good that they can track phone calls.
They can track Federal Express packages.
They can track anything that goes into a computer if they really want to.
Well, they try, but the way that a lot of these people get caught or get, you know, banged up later in life by somebody that's on the other side is the same thing.
They go back to their old ways.
They call their old family.
They get drunk one night and, you know, make contact with someone that just blows their whole cover.
That would take some thinking, but I'd say that probably about one in four or five that really commits to this and decides to do it, does it and does it right.
Now, did you think real hard before you wrote this book about the negative side of writing this kind of book, telling people how to run away from everything?
If you've got somebody who absconded with a whole bunch of embezzled money, let's say, half a million dollars or so down into South America or a million dollars.
If you have a divorce, if you get involved in a lawsuit over money, they subpoena it and it goes into a file that becomes public to the rest of the world.
So those things happen.
And then when you travel, there's a record.
The airlines have a record.
The government has a record when you re-enter the United States.
When, you know, going back to your former, before we come back to disappearing, but going back to the former work you did, did you ever feel guilty about doing what you did?
I mean, for example, some poor slob of a guy who was married to the disastrous Brandy, and he makes it to someplace in Italy or South America or Asia or something, and you, for Brandy and for a sum of Brandy's money, you go find the guy, and then when you find him, you're about to turn him back over to this shrill, shrieking, horrible little bitch.
There was a lot of problems, et cetera, et cetera.
But on the other side of it, there's a lot of people that got caught up in something that they didn't know what was going on and they were ruined for life.
What about do private investigators ever get I mean, let's back up a little bit.
The typical Hollywood portrayal of a private investigator is of a guy up on a ladder taking picture of a couple of people copulating for the spouse who thinks somebody is fooling around.
That's the way Hollywood typically depicts a private investigator.
Kind of the first rung on the PI ladder, I suppose.
Well, it was 25 years ago when I got in the business.
Everybody that was a private investigator had failed as a police officer or something like that.
Today, there's a lot of people in the business that never wore a gun, never wore a badge, and their background is in computer skills or in real estate searching or in one of a dozen other fields.
And the business they do today is not the errant spouses because the laws have pretty much legislated out fault and divorce.
Yeah, there's always a thing or two you say, if I could have done that different, or if I could have told this person three years ago, you know, just walk away from this.
Ed, let's say I came to you and I said, look, I want to disappear to a nearly uninhabited or barely inhabited South Pacific Island, or maybe even an inhabited one like Tahiti or something like that.
Describe to me roughly the steps that I would have to take.
Before you do that, I'm sorry.
Let me take you back because we've got to clear that up.
If somebody had committed a felony, let's say somebody robbed a bank and they've got three-quarters of a million dollars in hard cash, hard cold cash, they come to you and they say, Ed, I've got to get the hell out of here.
FBI's after me.
Everybody's after me.
All I want to do is go live a quiet life in Rio de Janeiro or something.
You can assist them without yourself breaking the law?
Well, in the United States, literally everything we do every day is tracked.
Big Brother has their own way of doing it, and there's a semi-secret government agency called FinCEN, the Financial Crime Enforcement Network, that can find out anything you've done.
But even more than them is the credit bureaus, and that's the real Big Brother.
The credit bureaus are the agency that really tracks your daily movements and gets a record of something you do every day.
So unless you go and get an entire new identity, which can be done, you're far better off to go to a very nice country like Belize or Honduras that will welcome you.
My neighbors down there, everybody there asks no questions and tells a few lies.
Oh, they do.
The Belize government is one of the few countries in the world that did not sign the MLAT, the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, and they want no part of any inquiries by the U.S. government.
In fact, if you deposit $50,000 in the bank in many of those countries, A, they pay you 9% to 12% interest, tax-free, and B, they give you citizenship and a passport.
I mean, unless you've done something truly heinous, something that they're going to pursue you to the ends of the earth for, you know, you can bring your family and you just maintain a low profile.
But if you've done something that that someone really, really wants you for, then you've got to sit back and say, you know, do I really need to bring them now?
Of course, the mafia today is not what it was back then, but there's still probably one or two guys around that could make you an offer you don't refuse.
Yeah, they brought them to the United States, put them in a program at the University of Chicago, and they flew up me and other experts to teach them and other similar investigators, you know, how to do white-collar crime financial investigation.
And the really heavy-duty stuff that we really do our digging, I relate down to one of the people that I train that actually does that level of work faster and better than I do.
I write the parameters and I create the program and they go do the keyboard work.
I'm very deeply involved in computers, but I am still absolutely amazed.
My son, who's now 17, can sit down at a computer game that he has never seen in his life, that I can't possibly figure out, and in 20 seconds, he's got the whole thing figured, and he's already halfway to battling the big monster.
For example, have you ever had somebody who has embezzled a whole bunch of money from a company come to you, and you got them the hell out of Dodge with a new name and a new identity, and then had the company come to you trying to hire you to find the guy?
As I say, this business has changed so much that most of the people in this today, they work, they wear a coat and tie, they go to work like anyone else, and what they do is they either find people, they locate information to help somebody make some other decision, this, that, or something else, or, you know, they're out documenting fraud for somebody.
Most people don't know it, but one of the biggest hirers of investigators is the credit card companies.
Well, my mission in such a case is to document that this person created the steps for their bankruptcy with the knowledge and intent to avoid the debts of their creditors.
What we're going to do, I think, is we're going to pause here at the top of the hour.
And when we come back, I would like the opportunity for the audience who I know, I just know they're going to have a ton of questions for you.
I have been curious all my life about how a person would actually completely disappear, just sort of go away and never be heard from again and be sipping drinks with little umbrellas on them on a nice sunny beach someplace.
Wherever he laid his hat was his home Until he met in All he left was alone Oh, oh, oh Papa was a rolling stone Mama's hungry Brother he laid his head Cause he's home I'm ready to go I'm ready to go
Be it sight, sand, smell, touch, there's something inside that we need so much.
The sight of the touch, or the scent of the sand, or the strength of an oak leaves deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing, all these things in our memories hoar when the youth come to come to
talk with Arkal in the Kingdom of Nineveh from outside the U.S. First, file your access number to the USA.
Then 800-893-0903.
If you're a first-time cover, call Art at 702-727-1222.
From east of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.
Call Art at 1-800-618-8255.
Or call ART on the wildcard line at area code 702-727-1295.
This is Coaster Coast AM from the Kingdom of Nine.
And can you imagine being able to take $50,000, on the one hand, a lot of money, or on the other hand, not a lot of money, go to a country, open a bank account, they issue you citizenship, a passport in the name of your choice, and you are in business in more ways than one.
Ed, about 10 years ago when I was a little bit younger and stupid, but I screwed up on my driver's license.
And the wonderful Commonwealth of Pennsylvania decided that I won't be able to get my license back until around 2020, which would make me about 50 years old.
Okay, so in the meantime, I drive around because I have to.
I have to make a living.
But I'm kind of tired of being paranoid.
And my question to you, sir, is simple.
If I was to move to another state, like maybe out west, how does that work with a driver's license?
Is there reciprocity laws where I can't get a license in another state?
Many states have a reciprocity, but the problem is it doesn't always make the computer.
If you went and applied for a license in another state, they asked you on the form, has your license been suspended in another state?
And you have to answer that question, but they don't have the means, unless it's put in the big FBI computer, the NCIC, to know that your license, particularly if it was 10 years ago, was suspended in another state.
Now, if there was a warrant for your arrest, I've got to know, Colera, what could you have done that would have kept you from getting a driver's license for how many years?
So in other words, you're a landlord and somebody you've got staying in one of your apartments gets popped and they can have amphetamine in the microwave, and you're guilty.
And you're guilty.
Have they backed away from that, or are they still doing that?
Well, it's increased because you would have more discipline in staying hidden than they would.
unidentified
Right.
Now, just per se, if a person, let's say, allowed themselves or were put in a federal witness protection program and they had a wife and a few children, that type of thing, do you have any information?
I mean, would they be advised even by the federal government to go alone because of them being afraid of being ID'd and having a lot of trouble for your family, in your opinion?
The government doesn't always tell you the whole truth.
The government will tell you we'll take you and your family and relocate them.
But I remember quite a few years back, all of a sudden, a bunch of government witnesses in the program were all being knocked off by the other side with a .22-caliber bullet to the head.
And it's just because of this, because there was somebody on the other side that knew the program and tracked the people, not through the witness, but through their spouse or children.
No, and again, if somebody comes to me and say, Ed, I really want to establish a new life and do this and that, I listen to them and I see why, and I'll say, yes, I can help you and here's how.
Or, you know, I will tell them, here's half a dozen places you can go and get more information, but, you know, I'm not the guy to help you.
And he split, and he's lived all over the world for the last 20 years and was never caught until one time he came back through U.S. customs, and the little old lady in tennis shoes looked at him and said, click, click, click, blue eyes, blonde hair, American voice, Honduran passport, drug dealer, drug dealer.
I would like to know is, okay, you were talking earlier about residing in Belize and living a life of luxury.
Good life, yeah.
I would like to know, now, see, I'm a person that's disabled, and if one is in such a state as I, could I essentially retire to Belize and continue to get your disability.
What you would do is set up a bank account in the U.S., a trust account, and have the money sent to that bank here.
And then you have the bank sweep your account once a month or whatever and transfer the money to wherever you want it to go.
Or you open an account with an attorney or somebody you trust, let them get the money, cash the check, and see that it gets to you if you don't want it traceable down to believe.
unidentified
Well, now, my question on that is, by all that's righteous with the government, you're supposed to inform them of your living address and where does it say that?
Well, I'm pretty fortunate, and I've got a good relationship with them for several reasons.
Number one, I teach a lot of police agencies how to investigate better.
And the second thing is many times people hire me to go and basically get somebody that the police don't have time to do or they don't have the manpower to do or they don't have the sophistication to do, put the report in a big package and just hand it to the police and say, here, book them, Dano.
On the other hand, at other times, you are performing a service that the police probably, for somebody, that the police probably wouldn't be wild about if they knew about it.
So you sure live in a sort of a strange gray territory.
To one degree.
What about technology?
I mean, today, for example, if you want to bug somebody's house, or you want to listen to their telephone conversations, or you want to plant a bug, how easy or hard is that to do?
I talk about them all the time on the air, these 49 megahertz phones.
You can literally, so many people have them, and they don't even think about the fact that they are broadcasting.
Now, what about That you can park out something inside somebody's home and you can record every conversation they have without tapping any line at all.
Well, you can do that, but if you use that information, you can be charged with violation of the Electronic Communications Act.
I had a circumstance where somebody was playing with a scanner and they accidentally picked up somebody's conversation, and then they used that information for their own, shall we say, personal gain.
And they were charged with violation of the act for the intent and purpose for which they did it.
Now, one other subject I want to cover, and then we'll go back to the phones, and that is I have some friends who keep their money offshore to beat taxes.
What you can do, many of the banks that do this have branches all over the world.
If you pick up the newspaper tomorrow and say, well, Belize has got a little problem, you can call your friendly neighborhood banker and say, transfer it from the branch in Belize to the branch in Canada, and your money electronically instantly goes out of the country, away from the risk, and it's back to London or this or that or wherever you want it.
And it's something that, you know, I know people and I know people that work on trying to find them.
And at this point, my personal opinion is there's not any of them left.
There's been a very strong effort on the part both of our government and a lot of the private agencies that have, you know, family members to document this, to find them and everything else.
And I think they're doing a pretty good job.
I can't find any evidence today that there's some of these people out there that are still being held against them.
Well, I spent a year and a half at Kadena, and I liked it so Much that I came back, I got discharged, and got on a plane and went right back to Okinawa and worked there as a civilian for many, many years, working for KSBK, the radio commercial broadcast station there.
And at the end of the time, I came to a point in my life, Ed, where I knew that if I was going to remain on Okinawa, I was done as an American.
i mean i was because i was going native and frankly when i got home after a decade just about It was terrible.
I was so scared.
I didn't recognize what was going on.
I didn't recognize the country.
I was homesick for Okinawa for a long time.
I understand.
So I was that close.
And so I could imagine that somebody in Vietnam would go AWOL and then go native.
I've heard stories that people can come from Mexico, and for $50 to $300, they can get Social Security, they can get a driver's license, they can get all these different IDs.
So the better way to do it is to start at the very beginning with one little piece of ID and turn that into another and another and another, and pretty soon you've got MasterCard and Vs and all the rest of it.
Well, a lot of our professional associations put on great seminars.
I do one a week somewhere around the country every week.
I teach a class, two classes basically.
In the morning, I teach Be Your Own Detective to teach you how to use the databases and the information.
And in the afternoon class, I do my how to make $100,000 a year.
But if you really want to learn this business, the best way is to go to Investigator Association meetings, meet people, get to know them, see who's got the business, the ideas, the stuff that you want.
If you go to my webpage, a lot of the articles I write for our investigator trade journal, PI Magazine, are on there.
You will see things in this business that you'll never see anywhere else.
And it's like the movie, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
They're all out there.
Right.
I still basically, you know, love to help people, believe in humanity, and every now and then somebody catches me doing a good deed, but, you know, I don't admit to a whole lot of that.
But that's one of the reasons why Y2K don't upset me too much, because I've prepared for it and I've don't have credit cards, so I don't worry about losing any.
Okay, going back to the phones with Ed Pencow in a moment.
First, facts from, I don't think I'll give the name in Seattle.
Somebody asks Ed, how do you get a new Social Security number with a new identity if you're, say, in your 40s?
In other words, how do you explain to the Social Security Administration why, at the age of 40 years, you need a Social Security number when you should have already had one?
Well, there's a lot of people that their family was in the military, they were in business overseas, and they never got a Social Security number because they weren't back in the United States.
And, you know, there's, first off, if you go to Social Security Administration and ask for a Social Security number and you've never had one, they don't care.
They don't ask you, you know, Octung, why do you not have a Social Security number?
they don't care that they're in that their presumption i guess is that if you have a social security number you've been contributing to it and he certainly wouldn't give it up That's right.
That's right.
I hadn't thought about it that way.
One more, and then to the phones.
Art and Mr. Mancow, I have been looking for my brother, who literally dropped out about six years ago.
Credit reports, DMV reports, been negative for the last five years.
Ordered your book, by the way, just now on Amazon.com.
Plug, plug, it says.
Please ask how I could locate him.
His family simply wants to know he's okay.
Nothing else.
We just want to know that he's out there and okay.
That's a good question.
If somebody drops out, how do you locate them beyond the normal DMV and credit stuff?
Well, first off, run a full credit report and, number one, see if there's any inquiries and also see if any insurance claim was made on him.
If someone dies, then there's an insurance inquiry if there's an insurance policy.
So for $5 or $6, first you run the credit report.
The second thing you do is run a 50-state driver's license search, which costs very little, through one of the super databases like DBT or Auto-Track, one of the ones that we as private investigators use every day.
If you want privacy, then you have to give up information about yourself so people can make credit decisions to loan you money and give you mortgages and give you airline points and free credit cards.
And so I was wondering why would he, and apparently the thought nowadays is that he's over in Europe somewhere, and he might even have passed away by now.
But anyway, if you were going to look for a person like that, how would you go about it?
Well, they would, particularly if they were committed to it and to giving up their old life.
But, you know, time and time again, I see that after a year or two, people think the coast is clear, and they either call somebody, do something that somehow lets people know what they're doing.
Now, another thing that really can be done, and if you've seen this new movie, Enemy of the State, you'll know a little of what I'm talking about.
Literally, we can profile somebody, and if we know enough about them, give it A, B, and C, we can predict what they're going to do in the future.
Or if you go into the company that has it and says, I want you to tell me if this name shows up on it, and what would be the fee to tell me if it's there?
Or in worst case, where they wouldn't do that, would you simply Approach an employee and try and slip them a few hundred bucks under the table and say, please?
How about if you had a relative who passed away and may have left stocks or money in bank accounts or some real estate in foreign countries or maybe in some of these offshore trusts that the IRS can get a hold of?
And then how would you find such assets, say if they're in the Bahamas or Japan or the first thing you do is go through their house with a fine-tooth comb from attic to basement and get every piece of paper, every envelope, every letter, every document, and you may find something that indicates a place.
Another thing you do is either get their passport or request under the Freedom of Information Act, since they're a relative, a copy of the passport or the foreign travel to see what country they went to.
Then you order a credit report on the deceased and see what inquiries and what other accounts did they have.
And piece by piece, you pull together what they had, where they went, what they did.
And, you know, this is something that's more sophisticated than the average person can usually do, especially if they've worked at doing this, but that's why I make the big bucks.
I do that for a living.
unidentified
Well, how would you use a detective?
Could you trust a detective in this so they don't walk away with the assets if they want to do it?
First off, most detectives are legitimate, and we have to carry like a million dollars worth of insurance to protect our clients.
Most state law requires us to have a bond or insurance policy.
But the other thing is, is I can tell you where the money is, but I've got to prove to that trust or that bank or whatever that I'm the legitimate heir to get my hands on it.
I had people come to me once and said, we're the grandchildren of Haile Selassie.
We want you to get the $100 million our grandfather hid in the bank.
And I said, well, it can be done if it's there, but let's sit down and talk what you got.
So these things are doable.
It's all a function of getting enough information.
unidentified
Oh, so Yuval, you would recommend hiring a private investigator then?
First, I would go and, as I say, try to find every piece of paper and put it together.
I'd order a copy of his credit report to get that information.
Because if you hire a private investigator, the more information you have, the better job he can do.
One thing you could do is link through ART to my website, and there's an article I wrote called Tracking the Global Criminal, and it tells how to find the assets, whether legitimate or illegitimate, of somebody that's taken their assets offshore.
I literally wrote the technology on how to do this, and it's on my website.
unidentified
But what if it's an offshore trust like you were talking about that maybe to hide money from the IRS or something like that?
Well, when this picture was showed to the judge and jury, and he's already perjured himself on the witness stand saying he doesn't have it, the judge gives him the opportunity to give it back or go to jail.
You may remember our most learned attorney, F. Lee Bailey, salted away a bunch of money for a client, and he told the judge to park it.
The judge showed him why they call jail the pokey.
I was wondering, what are the methods that you would suggest to find someone in a country like Mexico that disappeared maybe like seven years ago or so?
So my caller's question is: If somebody's disappeared down there, I can see how you can use trace methods in this country, but how do you do it in Mexico?
And first off, you've got to figure out where they went.
You can't just pull out the crystal ball and say, let me see, where did they go?
But before they went, they probably told some neighbor somewhere, when I bug out, I'm going to go to where the sun always shines and the margaritas run all day long.
unidentified
Well, I actually, I do know where, the last I knew, this was seven years ago when he left, but he said he was going to Mexico City because he had a job down there.
Okay, well, there are some very good private investigators in Mexico City, and if you introduced them to Alexander Hamilton long enough, they would find him.
well And there were these huge parades, and nobody was, nothing was moving.
And I had a police sergeant that was standing out there directing traffic, and I came up, showed him what I wanted, and I introduced him to Alexander, pulled out his pistol, shot three shots in the air, and cleared a path for him.
Listen, I meant to ask you a half hour ago about Y2K, so let me do it now.
We are either facing this gigantic computer crash and depression, or we're facing something that's going to be a paper tiger and be nothing, or something in between.
There's going to be some places that will experience some real problems, but I think the majority of our real important services are going to come through this okay.
But just in case I have a new home on five acres with my own propane tank, my own well, I'm going to be prepared.
First off, a satellite dish solves all the television problems.
You get, you know, all 110 channels.
The hospitals, it's really interesting.
Medical care in these countries is very, very inexpensive because these countries run huge medical schools and many of our American doctors don't go to Harvard or John Hopkins.
They go to Belize, U or Honduras, U and get their medical degrees and come back here.
So these countries have very good medical facilities on all but the most technical things and it's either free or, you know, for somebody like this man and his wife, making, you mind saying, sir, about what a month?
Depending on their type of disability, they may have some problems.
They'd have to look at it and anticipate it.
But one of the things I would tell them to do is to go to one of the offshore Usenet bases and find somebody that's already there, get themselves an Internet buddy to help give them some ideas.
And as I said to everybody, if you go to my website and we have millions and millions of visitors, Ed, and just scroll down to Ed's name and click on the link, you'll be on his website.
Boom, like that.
Now, here's an interesting email question.
This person says, look, you can get away with a lot of this stuff right now, but there's legislation pending right now to create a new national ID card.
And, of course, they are working on that, as we all know.
Now, are they going to remove all of these little cute loopholes that we can jump through if we know what we're doing with a national ID card head?
Well, their taxes are almost nothing because they live off tourism.
Plus, as an American citizen, you can move to Belize, and as long as it's your primary residence, you live there more than half a year, you get a $70,000 per person income tax rebate or deduction.
You live your primary residence outside the United States and follow the guidelines as prescribed by the law, and there's some you've got to do, but they're not insurmountable.
Anyway, first of all, I want to say I really appreciate your program for the same reason that I enjoy Gene Roddenberry and Rod Serling, because you don't insult my intelligence.
You give me something to think about.
Thank you.
Ed, you sound like you're working for the Chamber of Commerce for Belize.
And I was amazed at how easy it was for me to regain all my identification, starting with a birth certificate, driver's license, Social Security, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, I know that it's possible, and people have done it.
They go back through the library and get newspaper clippings from someone who had passed away at birth.
You know, I guess my mind just never went in these directions, so some of this is really blowing my mind.
Go to a graveyard and actually take up the identity of somebody who was here and now is gone.
Wow.
All right, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Ed Pancow and Art Bell.
unidentified
Hi.
Thanks for taking my call, Art.
Sure.
You know, for those of us who are in the system, the difficulty with cultivating a new identity is the social security number.
And short of reading the OBITs, can you offer any tips on ways to get around that?
For someone who's not interested in living in the country, would want to stay in the United States, how easy is it to trace down the Social Security number by that number alone?
And what are some ways around that, other than assuming a deceased person's identity?
Well, when I first came to this country, I applied for Social Security, and normally they would come as not valid for employment because I wasn't really legal.
However, I did apply, and they asked me the question, and the questionnaire, they asked me, are you allowed to work?
Well, file a missing persons report, and if his fingerprints are on file, you can ask the local police department to run the prints, and they might find him either if he's deceased or anything's ever showed up.
We're about the way things might have been Because we'll keep on burning Crowd men will keep on burning And that Social Security card Rolling, rolling, rolling on a river There's a lot of plates in Milton Music Hoping I think I'm new only.
But I'm never strong side of the city.
Till I hit the right on a riverboat queen.
Oh, let's go to the next.
For the time.
Well, I know you know better than everything I say.
Keep me in the company for me.
From the Kingdom of Nigh, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
From east of the Rockies, call Art at 1-800-825-5033.
West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico at 1-800-618-8255.
First-time callers may reach Art at Area Code 702-727-1222.
The most interesting credit card story I know was some lady who called my show and asked me, hey, Art, if there was a giant something out of Armageddon the size of Texas coming toward Earth and it was going to destroy Earth and we had like six months or a year or something left, what would the credit card companies do?
Would they let everybody run the credit up or what?
And I said, wow, what a good question.
I have no idea.
And so she called, I think it was MasterCard, or Visa, one of the big ones, and she got somebody finally in management who actually answered her question.
And they said, oh, absolutely.
We would allow everybody to go to their credit limit based on, we've actually discussed this, based on the premise that if it hits, we're out of business anyway.
We're all out of business.
But if it misses, we're rich.
That's right.
And I thought, right, exactly what they would do.
All right.
Anyway, that's my little credit card story.
Here's a question.
Ed, is there any way, according to Boz in New Mexico, for an average Joe to check and see if a neighbor has a criminal record?
Now, that is an interesting question, actually.
A lot of people are curious about their neighbors.
Well, in the last few years, they've put it there because, first off, it's a source of money for the state.
And the second thing is, is many state, well, the government mandates that the information be made available and made public.
So they found that they can kill two birds with one stone, that A, they can meet the mandate, and B, they can make money on it by offering it, you know, online.
And I wanted to ask Ed, since you guys were just talking about this, I wanted to ask Ed if he makes a distinction between corporate people and law people who are persons who are not corporate.
And apropos of this, in terms of the criminal records that people have, are they arrest records or are they convictions?
All arrests are recorded in the county clerk's office.
And you can read the arrest, the indictment, any sentence, what happened to it.
It's all a public record.
Now, online, many of the databases only provide convictions.
But, see, the information that goes to the FBI computer in the sky, which is the NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, that information is garnished from police departments and county courts.
Now, if you're arrested or stopped by the police for something and you're not put in jail, it may not make the county computer.
It'll just be that, you know, you got picked up and released the next morning.
But if you're arrested, if there's a charge made and the charge is filed with the district attorney as a criminal charge is supposed to be, that then creates a file in the county clerk's office and that becomes a public record because our taxpayers pay for it.
If taxpayers pay for it, it's a public record.
unidentified
Okay, my question then is, do they then expunge the record once if the charges are dropped?
No, the record of the actual arrest is there forever.
They can expunge it if you pay your congressman or lawyer, whatever, but the actual microfish record, the initial electronic signature, it never gets erased.
It's always there.
unidentified
Okay, well, thank you very much.
My dad served two terms as Attorney General of Texas and then two terms as governor of Texas and finally was a federal judge the last 10 years of his life under Harry Truman's reign.
Well, I think that a lot of the stock market stuff that's all going now is artificial hype, that we are approaching the same frenzy that we had in 1929.
I thought, boy, you might as well, you know, Vegas is over the hill from me.
You might as well send somebody from Washington and on one roll of the dice, you know, go to one of these casinos and just at least got near 50-50 chance.
It says it on there, not to be used for identification or something like that.
unidentified
Well, there are people here who can't get a hunting-fishing license without giving their, you know, and there are people giving up their hunting and fishing rights without submitting their social security number.
Right, but in Nevada, they said we're doing away with that, but they replaced it with a system that actually converts mathematically, if you've got the formula, to your social security number.
It is about debt, which is one of the reasons I get to listen to your show, Art, is because I wake up at 3 in the morning in fear.
But anyway, I have these student loans, and because of parameters surrounding custody and things like that, I can't really leave the state to look for the job in my field.
And I did go through undergraduate and graduate school, but I'm really living bill-to-bill.
I do work.
I'm not on welfare.
I've got two children.
But I've got these student loans that are hounding me, and I just don't know how I'm ever going to pay them off.
Well, first off, they won't follow you to your grave.
The obligation they can only keep it on your credit report for seven years.
But you can go back to the agency that originally issued the student loan, not the collection agency they've hired to hound you, but go to the original agency, explain the circumstances, and ask them for a waiver or an exemption.
And it can be done, but you've got to get to the right office, the right agency, explain the circumstances.
Another thing you can do, if worst comes to worst, is file a personal bankruptcy because of the problems and wipe out the debt.
unidentified
Well, the creditors say that bankruptcy won't cover student loans.
In fact, many of the credit card companies have been fined because they continued to pursue collection efforts after someone had gone in bankruptcy and wiped out the debt.
Well, what you need to do is to go back to the original county where you were born and get your original birth certificate.
Either it's going to be in the probate or assumed name files of the county court, and if it is, it may be open, which then you can get it.
Or if it's sealed, you have to go back to the judge that sealed it and said, I'm an adult now, and I need to know my real birth parents and my real birth identity so I can check my medical history.
Number one, real estate, particularly real estate in good, solid areas and places, is always going to be a good investment.
It's funny, a lot of people are selling their real estate in Honduras right now because of the hurricane.
Well, the hurricane wasn't really near as bad and near as wide as people thought.
So the smart people are now buying property in Honduras for 50 cents on the dollar.
Wow.
So real estate is a good investment.
And, you know, other things, the tangible things, they are always going to have certain value.
A lot of people say, well, I'm going to buy guns.
Guns are going to be even more valuable.
But it's something you've got to look at and decide yourself.
But if money really loses its value and currency, you know, then you go back to the basic, what are the things that have barter value, which is, you know, food, guns, this, that, a home, everything else.
unidentified
Do you really think it's going to get down to possibly?
And, Ed, good luck to you in answering those emails after the Art Bell show.
Really?
It's going to be interesting.
I have a couple of questions.
First one being personal regarding my Social Security number and listening to your explanations of how you break up the numbers and get the code information out of the number.
My second set of numbers, the two middle numbers, it's interesting.
I got my Social Security card in 1989.
The number on the second set of numbers is in the 90s.
You've got to have the code book and it's like pulling teeth.
I got it and put it in one of my manuals, the Investigator's Guidebook, but it's not something that you're going to find just anywhere.
unidentified
Okay, the next question, in lieu of the popularity of the recent movie, Enemy of the State, and with all the interesting, intriguing NSA technology that may or may not exist, what kind of Big Brother scenarios have you personally encountered in all your ventures?
Well, basically, Big Brother isn't the government.
Big Brother is the credit bureaus.
The credit bureaus have far more information on us today than the government ever thought of and probably will for the foreseeable future because it is in their financial interest to collect more data and massage it and sell it more ways.
The government is busy enough collecting just what they collect and doing just what they do, but they don't have the incentive to do it that the credit bureaus do.
So it's like 20 years ago the FBI had all the technology And private investigators had very little.
Today we blow the doors off them.
So my opinion is that the private industry and particularly the credit and the information gathering agencies that make a profit on selling this, they're the ones that really have got the horsepower.
Yeah, my question mainly references back to someone who was talking about student loans and in terms of credit bureaus.
What I've come to find out is mainly it's not the credit agencies that you have to worry about so much as it is the government and like garnishing your wages later on in terms of delinquencies and that kind of thing.
And so it's not so much the credit agencies that you have to worry about, it's just the federal government taking well there I'd have to disagree with you because even the credit the government, they don't go garnish your stuff.
They hire the credit bureaus to go do it for them.
If you look at these things, the government really doesn't chase people anymore.
They contract out to the credit bureaus and they go do it for them, but they have the weight of the law behind them.
unidentified
Okay.
So and then, okay, second question.
I see just ads and classified papers in the weeklies and stuff about getting a second Social Security number and that kind of thing.
Well, the thing is, if it's a federal government loan, that really doesn't make any difference from any other kind of loan.
It's a debt.
And number one, you pay those things when and if you can.
The first thing you do is pay for your groceries and take care of your kids.
They can't put you in jail for this.
This is not 16th century England.
And if worst comes to worst, they can always restructure that debt.
You can file bankruptcy and do a restructure, wipe it out if you have no other choice, whatever.
The credit bureaus, particularly and these collection agencies, use the guise of the federal government to try to collect debts and saying, well, it's the government.
And that kind of debt is really no different than any other kind of debt.
It's just like a credit card debt.
It's an obligation.
You are legally supposed to pay it.
But what are they going to do?
They're not going to put you in jail.
And they're just psychologically trying to pressure her to pay that before they pay groceries.
You've got to have the code book to know what they are.
unidentified
The question was this.
Now that we're in the age of the Internet, can the Internet mail be traced, for instance, someone that's trying to disappear and they come up on the Internet, can PIs, private investigators, get into these ISPs and get information as easy as you can from the phone company, or are they pretty tight on that?
They will claim you do, and they've got two choices.
They can either sue you for it or put it on as a bad debt on your credit to drag around for seven years.
What I would do is, if I were you, would be to try and sell it privately and see you can break even on it because you'd get a lot better price for it than they will.
I guess, first of all, your book, the book that is just about to come out, the one you can get by going to my website and then going over to Amazon.com, Hide Your Assets and Disappear, that's one way to get it if you've got a computer.
But otherwise, for the people who are going to be going to the store, when should they expect your book to hit the shelf?