ARmy Rumour SErvice

Originally Posted by ugly

Canoe man was committing fraud ergo someone was looking at the case and he was caught, doing a reggie perrin requires you to cut your losses, not make contact with your former life and become a tramp or assume the identity oof a dead person.

Canoe man got away clean, cut all ties with his kids. Then got photographed at an apartment development in Panama and somebody recognised him. Another Muppet who's wife claimed he had died and been cremated in India got clean away to Oz and was only caught because he continued to use his ex employers (EMI if I remember) discount card.

Seems you can do a Reggie and be OK so long as you are not completely daft.

Originally Posted by CaptainPlume

Just in case there is anyone who has not read The Day of the Jackal (one of my favourites, it gets a re-read about once a year & I can't help imagining scenes whenever I'm in France), without going into too much detail Forsythe's assassin uses both methods.

The biometric passport thing is bobbins. I have a biometric chipped passport which was issued to me in Costa Rica and I supplied nothing more than the required application form. The chip on it just contains a machine-readable version of the information printed on the details page.

True even if the passports contained iris scans if the person in whose name you are getting a passport has never had a biometric, dna test, fingerprints etc then its pretty much not an issue and even then computors do make errors!
Its really easy to get a birth certificate and from that a passport. The difficulty will come when the data (iris and dna etc) is held centrally and automatically cross referenced to see if fraud is being done!

There was an old retired couple in Benidorm, used to be swingers ( maybe still are ) anyway, husband "died" and went off grid only to be chased down by a suspicious member of the British consul !

There are two possibilities to survive without attracting the baleful glare of officialdom:

Live in the woods scavenging from hedges and stealing milk off doorsteps, this works best when you murder the occasional pikey, the authorities will then turn a blind eye....or

Join the catholic church, get appointed as a priest then fiddle with some kids, presto you're now invisible!

Originally Posted by polar69

There was an old retired couple in Benidorm, used to be swingers ( maybe still are ) anyway, husband "died" and went off grid only to be chased down by a suspicious member of the British consul !

I really hope you meant British Council or British Consulate. The thought of Our Man In Benidorm using his knob as some sort of death-walting swinger dowsing rod is just too odd to sanction.

Consulate, I do apologise.

Originally Posted by thegimp

I'm looking at buying a gaff in the countryside in france, water, trees, buy cash, don't live there for more thean the 183 day rule, travel for work worldwide and have a rented low profile escape cave in the UK.

At least it fucks the tax man off.....(unless people have any experience of this not working)

The council will still make you pay the taxe d'habitation (equivalent of council tax), which means you are in the national taxpayers' database. They know exactly what property has been built on their patch. Don't suppose that information is routinely fed back to the UK, but it's there if the UK authorities ask for it.

You could agree with the vendor that you were going to pay him for the property, but that you weren't going to go through a solicitor, and that he was going to leave it registered in his name. He'd pay the taxe d'habitation and you'd reimburse him. But then you'd be dependent on his good-will. And if he snuffed it before you, his heirs would be unlikely to want to continue the arrangement.

Originally Posted by PE4rocks

Simples.

Your starter for £45k

Linky.

Except for the compulsory boat license, oh and the Safety certificate and insurance necessary to get the license, oh and a permanent address or mooring to register the license against (even a self declared continuous cruiser has to have an address against which the boat is registered) I'm sure there are plenty living 'off grid' on the canal system, moving regularly in the hope of not being caught by a BW official, but it's not exactly sustainable when getting caught potentially leads to having your home confiscated!

Other than that though a very simple & pleasant life, as long as you harbour no illusions of anonymity