Saul Goodman - Don't Go to Jail! - Saul Goodman's Guide to Keeping the Cuffs Off

Stealing a living person’s identity is a pretty nasty patch of brambles. It’s this big wholesale fraud, and it can get you put away until your grandkids’ grandkids’ cows come home.

The Internet has also made it pretty damned common, because so much of our lives are online. All the ones and zeroes that make you the special you that you are. Here’s how the identity theft you hear about every day might go down:

Vlad, a hacker in Ukraine, calls up the systems administrator for the computer network at your job, let’s say. Vlad figures out a way to con a master key kind of password out of the gal. Vlad weasels into your hosted server honeypot and starts downloading boatloads of information. He gets a lot of names, addresses, social security numbers—for all you know there’s even a scan of your birth certificate and social security card. Then, Vlad sells that data mine on some Internet black market.

Meanwhile, someone in Arizona has crappy credit and wants to shop online at leisure. They buy your info from Vlad and set up all sorts of dummy accounts they can use to charge bills that will never actually get paid. Perhaps your bank info is involved, and then the whimsical cyber shopper will hole up in Tucson and start draining your funds. A drib at first, then a drab, then a deluge that even the Hoover Dam couldn’t control.

That’s the quick-and-dirty on one kind of identity theft. It happens every day, and trying to fight it is like running into a hurricane with your fists and an umbrella. It might end up ruining your credit or leaving you broke, if you find yourself the victim and not the perpetrator. I think you get the picture.

But let’s go back to the question of a new you. There’s another kind of identity theft with a creepy name: ghosting. This is when someone steals the identity of a dead fella, maybe even acts as that person. It relies on targeting someone who others barely know is deceased. That can be especially unsettling if the thief did the killing, but let’s keep a happy thought and assume that the hypothetical ghost is of the friendly Casper variety, and just happened to notice that a miserly hermit with no relatives passed away before their time.

Ghosting isn’t easy. It’s probably harder to pull off now than it once was, what with the Internet around to keep a near-infinite record of each person’s existence, or in this case, former existence. One driver’s license search by a cop in Nebraska might trigger red flags on a computer in California. And ghosting isn’t about fast heaps of cash, either. It’s a way to become a new person. To go off your old grid and onto a completely new one. I wouldn’t call it a fresh start, but people are all about recycling these days.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll emphasize it: no way I’m telling anyone how to do this. We’re just spitballing. An off-the-record chat dealing strictly in hypotheticals.

A person with the goal of ghosting another identity to, say, get out of being murdered—or at least arrested—would need to study up and get organized. They’d have to become a real straight-A student of obituaries or brush up on their smooth-talking to get in cozy with the funeral director’s daughter. They’d be looking for some key things: hometown, date of birth, parents’ full names, employment history, job history. Then they might call up the vital records office and order the death certificate bearing the dearly departed’s social security. Thus begins the ghosting.

This actually worked like gangbusters twenty to thirty years ago. There’s no telling how many ghosts have spent their golden years in someone else’s golden years, maybe only being outed at death—if then.

Today, though? Gets harder with every smartphone update, but still not impossible for a person with the right chutzpah! Thieves are still using it to shotgun fake tax returns to the IRS using the social security numbers of the recently deceased, netting a few million a year.

Why does it work at all in a world where the World Wide Web just keeps spinning thick digital threads connecting everything and everyone? These wily ghosts seize their tiny windows of opportunity like Indiana Jones snatching his sable fedora seconds before the wall caves in. Bereaved families often have more pressing matters than letting the Social Security Administration know that their loved one is gone. And often, no one even thinks to let credit agencies know that the name attached to that social has left the building and it’s probably a misstep to extend them a new line of credit. And the credit agencies don’t exactly allot much proactive manpower to vetting bad ideas.

But, yes: it is still identity theft if the person is dead. I’m definitely not advising you to ever consider such a thing. It’s a fun campfire story, though, right?

The idea of suddenly leaving your cares behind and beginning a different life is appealing. Sometimes people just want to get the hell away and reboot. Start anew, fresh as a daisy. Disappear. If that’s what you’re looking for, I can’t say I advise it, but… I may know a guy that can help you out.

Well, buddy, we’ve covered the bases, the outfield, the bleachers, the concourse, and the hot dog stand.

It’s no legal textbook, because only law professors with tenure and sabbaticals have time to hunch over their keyboards for that long, and bless them and the fast-typing grad students they’re putting through the wringer.

We had to make this glance at the criminal justice system speedy because that’s all most people have time for these days. If that’s you, I hope I helped a smidge. If you have a bit more time, grab hold of any legal nuggets that have lodged themselves in your brain and pop them into your favorite search engine, because plenty of attorneys are out there slinging free advice for the taking.

To recap a little: it’s your right as a citizen of this great democracy to stand in the dock and argue on your own behalf. But don’t go for that brass ring without understanding what you’re getting into, and Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Stills, and Nash—friend, please understand how much a professional lawyer can do in your corner. We made it our job to learn how to argue for you. Just remember Ted Bundy—good enough in court to earn a compliment from the judge, but old Ted still ended up fricasseed by Old Sparky.

Seriously, if you are that compelled to represent yourself, go for it. Buckle down and be certain that—worst-case scenario—you are going to be the most shockingly good pro se defender to ever lose a case in that judge’s court.

We talked about a few of the many instances when you might really need an attorney. It’s a hard old world, full of opportunities to just screw it all up, over and over again. You learn the hard way that no one warns you beforehand, “Oh, shit, you will end up needing a lawyer if you do that.”

I could bottom-line all those moments just by saying, “Be careful out there.” This isn’t Hill Street Blues, though, and most people are a little more careful than not. Life just has a messed-up way of surprising us sometimes.

While we’ve been under the hood tinkering with everything from bench warrants to homicide, I’ve tried to keep one simple theme thumping along, like the hook of a pop song from the eighties. Preparing for legal ordeals means just that: preparing. It’s my business and my pleasure to talk strategy, every day. A typical suburban dad in his eco-conscious SUV may come close to this mind-set the day of his fantasy football draft, sure, but past that it won’t occur to him.

And when it comes to avoiding temptation? People come into a law office, they sit down to discuss their case, and we lawyers start to see the bumpy, potholed, and winding roads that led them to us. That’s why folks need new beginnings.