Types of Ghosters
Most ghosters are running away from something: a criminal record, a marriage, or bad debts. Unlike more typical identity thieves, it is often the case that a ghoster is a former criminal who genuinely desires to reform and who seeks an unblemished identity (even if acquired illegally) as a necessary part of the process. Several members of the Revolutionary Youth Movement of the 1960s eventually disavowed their radical pasts and desired to become normal citizens with absolutely no ties to their earlier actions. In several cases, former radicals were able to evade arrest for more than 20 years because, through ghosting, they acquired new identities in which they proceeded to live entirely law-abiding lives. During the Vietnam war, many young men in the United States avoided the draft by fleeing to Canada or other nations, where they acquired ghost identities enabling them to live as natives of those countries.
During the days of racial segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa, light-skinned mulattos who were legally defined as Negroes had strong incentive to pass as Caucasians. Some of these individuals may have stolen the identities of deceased white persons, acquiring birth certificates that listed them as "white." (In South Africa, there was a third legal category of colored people, which would make the transition less noticeable.)
Read more about this topic: Ghosting (identity Theft)
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