A writer for WIRED spent 27 days attempting to disappear. Part game and part experiment, Evan Ratliff made many preparations. With a well thought-out plan, he vanished, but with a $5,000 bounty on his head the internet responded.

I already owned a couple of prepaid phones; I left one of the new ones with my girlfriend and mailed the other to my parents — giving them an untraceable way to contact me in emergencies. I bought some Just for Men beard-and-mustache dye at a drugstore. My final stop was the bank, to draw a $477 cashier’s check. It’s payment for rent on an anonymous office in Las Vegas, which is where I need to deliver the check by midday tomorrow.

Crossing the Bay Bridge, I glance back for a last nostalgic glimpse of the skyline. Then I reach over, slide the back cover off my cell phone, and pop out the battery. A cell phone with a battery inside is a cell phone that’s trackable.

Evan previously wrote an article for WIRED called Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear? which fueled the desire to see if he could really vanish. Both articles are very good reads!