Sleuths & Scammers, Part 1
A conversation on ethical web sleuthing with crime writer Jake Flanagin
Jake Flanagin is an LA-based investigator and crime writer with bylines in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Los Angeles Magazine, and other major pubs. He’s also a patient friend who consistently puts up with my amateur detective aspirations. Instead of a media essay this week, I roped Jake into hashing out the intricacies of online sleuthing—how to catch a catfish, whether my Yelp reviewer obsession is valid, and why we’re so drawn to weird internet rabbit holes in the first place. Check out our thoughts, and subscribe to his pop-criminology newsletter, The Rubberneck, here.
This is Part 1 of a two part newsletter. In Part 2, for paid subscribers, Jake takes a deeper dive with me into the most unhinged Yelp review I’ve ever seen. Part 2 will be released Wednesday 3/3, and you can sign up for that and other exclusive content on my main page.
Aiden Arata: How did you get into crime writing?
Jake Flanagin: I always enjoyed it just as, like, art that I could consume—I guess it's a low art, maybe—never really as something that I could do myself, until I went to law school and started getting a real understanding of how you parse out a crime story from the raw resources. I guess the moment where I kind of realized I could do this was when I was reading case law. When you read an indictment or a criminal complaint, it's very much written like a narrative. Every complaint, federal or state, always has a fact pattern written out, and that fact pattern is always kind of a timeline of what happened. Your job is to usually to compel a jury or a judge to see things the way that you see them, and the best way to do that, most lawyers will say, is by writing a really compelling story. Having my journalistic background from before law school, and knowing that I wanted to freelance and write about what I wanted—as opposed to having a full-time writing job and having to write about whatever my editor wanted me to write about, or even worse, whatever people on Twitter say is the viable story to write about for the day— I just kind of decided to combine the two. And then as I started doing it, I realized I had a real flare for and interest in the investigative aspect of it. I think a lot of people think of investigative reporting as just, like, talking to people, and doing really smartly conducted interviews. But what I've found is that the vast majority of investigating happens just through research and Googling, very quiet personal work. I'm meandering a little bit here, but I think the point I'm trying to make is I was initially kind of put off from investigative journalism because I thought it would require a lot of interfacing with strangers, and a lot of rejection, a lot of getting yelled at and like, having to confront people. And that's really not the case. That's like 5% of what you're doing. It's 95% being a sneaky busybody on the internet, which I love.
AA: My very amateur forays into it have felt sort of like a healthy way to diffuse the impulse to, like, stalk your ex's new partner. You can sort of say, "Yep, it's for the greater good! It's not about me!"
JF: Exactly. I mean, I'll do it for fun, as weird as that sounds. I'm not gonna name any names, but there was a group of billboards set up along La Brea that featured this woman that had like, a significant amount of plastic surgery, and I guess she was marketing herself as an EDM musician. I don't really know much about EDM, but I figured if this person had a billboard, she should be well-known enough where I've heard about her. And I'd never heard of this woman before. So I Googled her and I found her website and it was very amateurish and it very much seemed to me that she had bought these billboards for herself, to kind of market herself—
AA: Like Angelyne! Like the Angelyne of EDM.
JF: Yeah! I went down such a deep rabbit hole with this girl. She was also passing herself off as the heiress to Kentucky Fried Chicken, descended from this family of like, South African billionaires. So I got really deep into her personal story, and for the most part, I found— disappointingly enough—that most of what she was saying had a kernel of truth to it. The lies and exaggerations weren't big enough to really merit a full, public unveiling of her life. At the end of the day, it didn't really matter that much.
AA: So like, her dad owned a KFC franchise or something, but maybe not all the KFCs.
JF: So actually, it was that her family supplied something like 60-75% of the actual chicken to KFC. They own a bunch of farms in Southern Africa.
AA: She's not related to the Colonel, but technically she's affiliated. Okay.
JF: Exactly.
AA: That is phenomenal. L.A. Is such a weird place like that, because Los Angeles is just full of so many legitimately weird, crazy people who are rich in strange ways, or faking it. There's a reason so many good noir movies are set here.
JF: Oh, absolutely. I feel like when you circulate around, especially, like, movie producers— people who call themselves movie producers and TV producers— so many people act like they're already doing the thing that they are aspiring to do.
AA: Totally!
JF: And you're just like, "Where's the money coming from? You haven't actually made anything." There's so much potential, I think, for fabrication and dishonesty that my antennae tend to go up fairly easily. In this case, the woman in question was not being entirely truthful about what she did; like, she’s independently wealthy, her family gives her a lot of money and that is the source of how she's able to produce all these things for herself. There isn't really a huge audience out there for her. I think she also designs lingerie? But yeah, the whole point I was trying to make is that I will do this stuff just for fun. I lost probably eight hours researching this woman and her mother, like I found her mother's death certificate from Hawaii. I got really, really invested in trying to find out what the deal was with this girl. Fortunately, there is a small market for content that arises out of weird fixations like this and I try to capitalize on that.
AA: Well, at least with her, now you know peace. I wanna—in a way that feels comfortable and not like you're giving away all your trade secrets— I wanna talk a little bit about strategies. We've talked before about Dinghy, which is writer's insurance in case you get sued for defamation or something. What are a few other sites or tools that work really well and are accessible to the public?
JF: I mean, nothing I'm going to tell you is like really a trade secret, a lot of people use this stuff. Unfortunately, it does require a little bit of investment upfront, but not a lot. I subscribe to Spokeo, which is probably the best search tool for finding out who owns certain phone numbers or who owns certain email addresses, or, you know, if you just type someone's name in. If you type in your own name, it'll probably show you the cities you've lived in over the last few years. Unfortunately, in some cases your address might be available on there. You can contact Spokeo and have information about yourself removed, I've done that before.
AA: Do you have to pay to get information about yourself removed?
JF: No, you don't have to pay anything, but you do have to pay to find the information. I've used it so much in reporting stories, just to find people honestly. I wrote a story in 2019 about a woman who had gotten herself involved in a Facebook cult—basically like your garden variety New World Order, lizard people, conspiracy theorizing stuff. As a result of her involvement in that cult, she says she was compelled to commit this horrible murder. I found family members of hers through this tool and reached out to them, and was able to talk to them a little bit and get some insight as to who this woman was. It can be really useful for just drawing connections between people and finding sources who can lend you context about a certain person, especially if that person is inaccessible, they're in prison or they've unfortunately passed away. And then, this one is maybe the creepiest tool out there, but it's super useful—it’s called PimEyes, and it’s a facial recognition search engine. If someone has a photo of themselves published to a public facing website— not a Facebook account or an Instagram account, but like, if you have a work bio online and your photo is up there— this search engine theoretically could match a photo that you have of a person with their work bio, if it's published online freely. I say it's creepy because I mean, facial recognition is creepy in and of itself; but the tool itself is really just mining publicly available information. I could have eventually found someone's work bio on a public facing website, probably, but it would have taken a lot longer. This just kind of cuts out time.
AA: It seems like a more precise reverse image search on Google images, which is already readily available.
JF: Yeah, it just really incorporates facial recognition software, or an algorithm. It's not the strongest facial recognition software out there, and it often gives you a lot of people that just kind of look like the person that you're trying to find. But usually, if the person has even a moderately-sized public-facing web footprint, you're gonna be able to find something on PimEyes.
AA: You told me earlier that you've used these tools to tell if your friend was getting catfished, or something, and they were?
JF: Oh yeah, this is actually maybe how it all kind of started, shamefully. A friend of a friend— my best friend, who I live with— someone had texted her a text chain between her and this guy she met on Tinder, and my friend texts me a picture of the guy and she goes, "This guy is way too good looking to be on Tinder, right?" And I agreed, it was like, professional— it looked like your typical hot L.A. condo broker kind of guy, but the photos were extremely professional and well done, and could have very easily been taken from someone's real estate practice website. And yeah, I plugged the photo into Pimeyes and found the guy's real profile. He was a very gay real estate guy in Miami, and not living in Chicago with an Israeli name. That took about 10 minutes.
AA: Tragic! Maybe it's not tragic, I'm sure he's living a really nice life, but tragic for your friends. We'll segue a little bit—I'm not trying to segue you away from anything, we're just going in and out because I love this and I will be using all of these tools. But I wanna talk a little about sleuthing and ethics, how to do this responsibly. I haven't seen it, but a friend and I were talking about the Elisa Lam miniseries. This friend has a family member who suffers from pretty intense mental illness, and she was like, "I needed to look at [Lam] for two seconds and know that's what's happening here. It really sucks that there are people combing through her parents' life, looking for more than that." And yeah, that's really fair.
JF: It's one of the biggest indictments of web sleuthing I think I've ever seen. I think most of the people involved have their hearts in the right place; some of them don't, and are just looking for YouTube views or whatever, and that's really sickening. But yeah, it's really well done. It's one of the few crime documentaries I've watched on a very over-reported topic that really treads new ground and resolves the issue in a very satisfying, and I think healthy, way.
AA: Did you see Murder on Middle Beach?
JF: Yes, and I'm in love with Madison Hamburg now.
AA: Oh my God, me too! Sadly, he does have a girlfriend. I sleuthed that.
JF: I'm well aware.
AA: Obviously it's a unique story in that the filmmaker is directly involved, but I just thought it was such a beautiful response to exploitative murder media— so well done and so mindful of everyone involved. And so honest about all of the issues that come up with that sort of storytelling, interpersonally and creatively and... yeah, no, loved it.
JF: There's a similar doc, Rewind, that came out a few years ago. You may or may not remember, but many, many years ago, there was a cantor at Temple Emanuel in New York who was investigated for sexually abusing his nephew. His nephew actually testified against this guy in court in a really brave and touching way; and then grew up and made a documentary about the whole experience and kind of uncovered, like, multiple generations of abuse that plagued his family, and tackled an incredibly upsetting topic in a very nuanced and delicate way. I'm starting to think that people telling their own stories is maybe the best way to tell these kinds of stories, because they have the most at stake in telling it the right way.
AA: Wow, yeah. Has there ever been a story where you've needed to back off? Like, an experience of reckoning with yourself or figuring out where and how you draw the line?
JF: I actually had to let a story go fairly recently that I was really excited about. I don't want to get into too many details on the record, because some of the people that I was working with are likely going to be pursuing legal action against what would have been the subject of the story. I don't want to mess that up for them. But I was working on a story about a semi well-known reality TV star who was essentially running a cult. It's absolutely bonkers stuff. I had to back off because slowly, sources were not returning my phone calls, not responding to my texts, missing appointments for interviews, things like that. I, especially with stories of really sensitive subject matter, really make an effort to not make myself a nuisance on my sources. I'm always very, like, “You don't have to participate,” you know, I don't do the on the record/off the record thing with sources, I don't try to entrap people. I never want to be the person where they come back to you in six months and say, "Why did you publish that?" and I say, "Tough cookies. He didn't say it was off the record." That's not my style at all. And so in this case, I could sense people were backing off; I didn't want to push. And then my chief contact basically told me that a lot of them had been in contact with the IRS and the FBI, and had been advised to retain their own counsel if they wanted to pursue a civil lawsuit against the subject.
AA: Woof. Gotcha.
JF: Yeah, you kind of have to realize, like, these are people's real lives. They've lost tens of thousands of dollars to this person. If they have any chance of recovering that, I don't want to stand in the way of that. That's the real justice. I think if you're a crime writer who is chiefly concerned with ensuring that justice is served and people who are doing bad things are brought to justice, then you do have to let the justice system (and in some cases the civil court system) do its thing, and not try to interfere with that. I think that's also a line that a lot of crime writers cross, and it kind of parallels with the type of writer who is a little bit more inclined toward getting clicks and selling copies of People Magazine versus telling a really meaningful story that helps people, or warns people of certain kinds of things that happen in the world and what to look out for. Not to bring another documentary into this, but the Ripper documentary on Netflix, which is about a guy in the North of England in the 1970s who was killing a lot of sex workers, does a really good job, I think, of highlighting the complexity of the relationship between law enforcement and the press, and how both parties can often overstep and interfere with the other's mission in a really negative way. So, when I do back away from a story, it generally comes from a place of wanting to ensure that the people on whose behalf I’m working are not being harmed by what I'm doing.
AA: Have you ever had someone— in a justified, or not, way— get retaliative? Have you ever had to worry about that in a personal way?
JF: When I published that story a few years ago about the cult that was operating on Facebook, the woman who ran the cult had passed away, but her daughter was still running it, and it's a very online cult. The people who participate were using the internet to communicate in really effective ways. I was pretty concerned that I would face retaliation from them once the story was published, because— I mean, it's a story that's since been written about a lot, a couple of documentaries have been produced, there's a podcast that just came out— I kind of wrote one of the first longform stories that really cracked it open and highlighted this cult leader's involvement in the murder. And there was, I think, some merit to that concern, because for a few months afterward, I kept getting requests that someone was trying to change my email password and my Instagram password and my Facebook password and my Twitter password. I would get them a couple of times a week. I don't have any proof, but I think someone—someone involved in the cult— was trying to get access to my social media accounts and my email for whatever reason, which was concerning. But that’s certainly not the worst that a crime writer has faced. Fortunately, I have not had to deal with sources ever coming back to me and saying, "How could you write X, Y, and Z?" They've almost across the board been— not to toot my own horn—I've been really pleased with the product. At least, I haven't heard from anyone who's been upset by what I've written. And I think that is, hopefully, a testament to the effort that I take in really making sure that victims are not being exploited by anything that I write, and that they have a stake and a hand in how their story is being told.
AA: I feel like true crime, in the last like five years, really has taken off in a new way, especially with an internet investigative slant. Why do people like it so much? What are we doing?
JF: So the best way that I can sum it up unfortunately deals with a very funny quote from a TV show that involves a pretty wide generalization. I don't know if you've ever watched Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. They're watching some Lifetime or Oxygen Network documentary and it's some play on Snapped, I think; and Titus says something to the effect of "This is porn for white women." People who feel incredibly safe in their everyday lives seek out things that are really unimaginable to them. That can be very tantalizing, you know, especially if you come, like I do, from a pretty sheltered, pretty privileged background. I don't think I've ever called the police for any reason, which is a huge privilege and blessing, to never feel physically threatened. Which is not to say that I'm this big, like burly guy who's very intimidating—I'm not—but by virtue of my privilege and the spaces that I've occupied physically throughout my life, I've never had to deal with that. I had a bike stolen once and I didn't even report it, because I don't ride my bike. That's the extent of my exposure to real criminal activity where I've had a real personal stake in the crime in question. So, to some extent, I think I definitely sought out stories that were kind of titillating because I could never really imagine having to deal with that kind of thing firsthand. On the flip side of the coin, I deal with an anxiety disorder, and have a lot of existential anxiety just about mortality in general and things like that. Dealing with media that kind of dives into the worst ways in which mortality is highlighted is kind of a way to desensitize ourselves to the horrors of the world. That's a really dramatic way of putting it, but that's what came to mind, I guess.
AA: Totally, I understand and empathize with what you're saying. I also understand, a little on the flip side— I'm an assault survivor, I have experienced bodily harm in a physical way, and I'm still really interested in this. I do still come from a lot of privilege and safety, and that's a huge thing, too. I guess that's repetition compulsion—revisiting or recreating circumstances of like, trauma, to sort of fix it. And also, there's something so heroic about being the person to save the case, or ferret out information, or to think, "There is a logic to this, and there is an answer, and I just have to find it." I think that there's something really soothing about living in a world in which things will make sense if you can just sort of put them together. I think about this a lot with QAnon people, who are clearly batshit crazy—but also, I understand the impulse to want to chase something to a conclusion; to feel like bad things are only happening because no one else can see them; or things are obfuscated and if you just crack the code, then you'll get it. In reality, violence and cruelty happen all the time. And like, frankly, the cops don't care, or they actively perpetuate harm. Systemic oppression is so blatant, and so like, not intricate or interesting in many ways. I think it's easier to think that people would care if they knew, than to think that maybe people do know, and still don't care.
JF: That's a really great point. And I think you articulated something that I think about a lot, which is that I try really hard to draw a distinction between what I do, and people who are the "do your own research" types, who don't really believe anything. I think the difference is— and it's part of the reason I started my newsletter, and it's part of the reason that I write about crime—is that I'm really interested in understanding the things that humanize crime and transgression, and the things that connect us to behavior that we think is really unimaginable. I think, not in humanizing the perpetrators, but in humanizing the act, it becomes a lot easier to deal with what crime is. And I think we could all do with a little bit more empathy for people who break rules. Our criminal justice system is completely broken, and people are paying prices for things that they shouldn't be paying prices for. I don't think that I'm going to solve that problem with my writing, but I'm hoping that if enough people talk about crime and transgression in a more relatable, human way, we might start as society to be a little less punitive. I differentiate that from people who are conspiracy theorists, who really believe that they have all the answers; there's an arrogance there, there's really no desire to connect with anyone or to humanize something. That’s really about trying to narrativize the chaos around you and make yourself the hero of your own story; that, I think, comes from a place of fear, not from a place of wanting to understand. And what I do, and what I think a lot of crime writers do, comes from a place of really wanting to understand and draw people together around something.
AA: I love that. Changing the narrative around "true crime" or investigative reporting to not lionize the police and traditional structures of "justice," I think that's really important work. Not only in terms of how we talk about transgressions, as you said, and sort of why people do what they do, but also the way that we talk about formerly incarcerated people. I feel like until very recently, the traditional crime narrative was this black and white, cops and robbers situation; a very racist, very patriarchal body of work. And it feels kind of cool to talk to someone who is working a little bit on reclaiming that and focusing on the nuance of most of these situations too, because I don't know that it's entirely effective to just like, shame people for like having this curious impulse towards investigation and crime media. But I think sort of maybe, like, saying, "Hey, if you're curious, look at all sides of this story."
JF: Yes. And I think the curiosity has to be reframed as real curiosity— about the real nuances of the story, and not just schadenfreude. To sort of tie that back, rather clumsily, to what I do, every story that I choose to pursue has to plug into some broader social theme where that crime is really a symptom of a greater problem that's worthy of discussion.