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" The days of cold-calling people seems like a thing of the past to most\u2014just Google them, right? But then again, most people aren&amp;#039;t trying to track down con men who are responsible for their parents&amp;#039; deaths. In last night&amp;#039;s episode of Lost, we were introduced to Sideways Sawyer (aka James Ford), who\u2014almost more shockingly than John Locke&amp;#039;s being on good terms with his dad, or Jack being a dad himself\u2014is a cop on the hunt to avenge his parents. Before being interrupted by his partner (Miles Straume!), James Ford was working his way down a list of Anthony Cooper&amp;#039;s trying to track down the original Sawyer\u2014the same man who swindled his family out of $38,000, causing the murder-suicide of his parents. That got us thinking &amp;quot;How long would it actually take to track down a con man?&amp;quot; It turns out that with the right information, it&amp;#039;s pretty hard to stay hidden even from a fellow citizen, let alone from a cop or a private investigator. But at the end of the day, it&amp;#039;s the cold-calling and old-school patience and persistence that will lead a tracker to a target. According to whitepages.com, there are 2412 possible Anthony Cooper&amp;#039;s in the U.S., and that includes variations like Tony Cooper and A. Cooper. If you made one call per minute, it would take a little more than 40 hours to get through that list. Not the most exciting way to spend 3 days, but if it means avenging your parents&amp;#039; death, what&amp;#039;s a few days? We&amp;#039;re not going to hedge our bets on a con-man being listed in the phone book (WhitePages pulls their info from public sources and third-party lists such as contests and sweepstakes). But even without the power of private records, there&amp;#039;s still a lot more that can be done. As more and more county clerk offices, universities, local governments and other agencies are moving their databases online, that information becomes &amp;quot;crawlable,&amp;quot; and specially written search engines such as pipl.com, which is designed to seek people rather than websites, can be a big boon. And while not as powerful as the fee-based databases police can access, there&amp;#039;s a lot of information to be had.  &amp;quot;You really don&amp;#039;t need much to find someone,&amp;quot; says Jonathon Schreiber, senior vice president at pipl.com. Unlike Google, which ranks search results based on &amp;quot;relevance&amp;quot;\u2014how many other websites are linking to a specific URL\u2014Pipl is object-oriented. &amp;quot;When you&amp;#039;re looking for Anthony Cooper, it doesn&amp;#039;t matter who else is looking for him. You want anything about this person.&amp;quot; Since Pipl crawls sites such as WhitePages, other online directories and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as public records of all kinds, including marriage, divorce and death records, you&amp;#039;re getting much more information. And those are the kind of civil records that professionals use to do their jobs. &amp;quot;Once you have additional pieces of information, like where he lived, his approximate age or even where he once lived, you can start connecting the dots,&amp;quot; explains Schreiber. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a great resource for ameature detectives.&amp;quot; Beyond that, the amount of information available to professional detectives is huge, especially considering how much of our daily lives\u2014credit card swipes, phone calls, auto-pay to tollbooths\u2014is processed electronically. &amp;quot;There are programs offered to ex-police officers for a monthly fee, that&amp;#039;s basically a search engine that can search court files, if you rented an apartment or had utility bills,&amp;quot; says J.J. Saint, a former private investigator in Las Vegas. &amp;quot;If the person you are looking for used their name and not an alias to do any of these things, it will be found by the computer.&amp;quot; Add the National Crime Information Center database, credit reporting agencies and the slew of other tools available to professionals\u2014including legal ways to find a social security number\u2014and that&amp;#039;s a big piece of the puzzle.  But the end of the day, the key to tracking someone down is to find the people who surrounded him in his life. &amp;quot;Find out who the neighborhood busybody was,&amp;quot; says Roger J. Willard, a former police officer who also spent 26 years as a PI in Pennsylvania. &amp;quot;Did he belong to any social clubs, did he drink or hang out anywhere? Girlfriends? What kind of work did he do legally, and was he trained to do anything else?&amp;quot; And of course, go to family and friends. &amp;quot;Sometime these people will be reluctant to tell the truth. Be persistent and leave a business card. Sometime someone else in the house will call and tell you where they are. I know. It&amp;#039;s happened to me.&amp;quot; The bottom line? Though Sawyer&amp;#039;s cold-calling might seem daunting and frustrating, he&amp;#039;s just being a good detective. Proof that whether he&amp;#039;s working for good or evil\u2014James Ford is good at his job. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a5519/sawyer-flexes-solid-detective/>