Free What Stays in Vegas by Adam Tanner

were out in the open in social media, including Facebook.

10
    The Hunt for a Mystery Woman
    Scanty Clues
    A Yelp page reviewing Instant Checkmate, in a section called “about the business,” showed the image of a smiling woman. 1 It described her as Kristen B., manager of Instant Checkmate, followed by: “I’m Kristen, customer relations director at Instant Checkmate. When I am not responding to facebook [ sic ] messages, tweets, linked in requests and such, I can be found blogging on various sites. I love my job at Instant Checkmate and I am proud of help [ sic ] our customers!”
    In Las Vegas–datelined press releases and company blogs, the company seemed to leave the talking to Kristen Bright, described as a PR manager, public relations specialist, social media consultant, or spokeswoman. 2 Yet Kristen Bright did not respond to any attempts to contact her, either by phone or through email. Operators at the company’s Las Vegas call center said they had never seen her. So I wondered: could a minuscule blurry photograph provide enough information to identify and locate the real woman behind the image?
    I copied the photo and loaded it into Google’s image search page. The results led to a photo of a woman on a boat with a bikini top stretched over significant cleavage. Someone had cropped the face from this image and put it on the Yelp page. Running a new search on the full photograph led to different pages with the same woman, photographed in a bikini or sexy underwear. On occasion she wore no top at all.

    One view of the mystery woman I was trying to find. Source: Ann, surname withheld at her request .
    The homemade, snapshot quality of the photos and a winning smile suggested a certain wholesomeness, even when she posed partially naked. Some tame family photos showed her with a boy, perhaps her son. A few bloggers had created pages in her honor, and admirers wrote in to compliment her beauty and curves. Some wondered where one might be able to find more images. Some blog comments referred to unseen explicit videos. The hunt continued.
    The initial Google searches offered several names for the woman, with at least two surnames. Those names helped find other saucy images but no contact details, suggesting she used a stage moniker. The other images did not mention the name Kristen Bright. Searching through the new racy images did lead to a 2010 blog post showing her with a man who described himself as her husband, Tom. He said they were both thirty-eight years old and heading to a Jamaican resort for their twentieth wedding anniversary. For all these clues, the woman’s real name and contact details remained elusive.
    Then one day I conducted a search through a background data broker site used by lawyers, insurance companies, law enforcementagencies, and others. I found her stage surname embedded in a man’s email address. That man, Tom, was then forty-one, about right for the husband if he had listed his true age in the Jamaica vacation posting a few years earlier. Tom had also filed a relatively recent Chapter 13 joint bankruptcy petition with his wife, whose name was Ann. Among the debts listed on the court documents: $131 owed to Victoria’s Secret. Might the lingerie chain be the source of some of the skimpy garb modeled in the online photos?
    Those documents led to an address and phone number in California. Still, additional proof was needed before calling. After all, lots of couples named Tom and Ann live in the United States. A call to the wrong couple asking about naked photographs might provoke a justifiably angry response. A search of Ann’s real surname linked her to a Los Angeles–area high school where she had worked as a secretary. Deep within the school website lurked an old school newsletter with a photo of the support staff. Standing a bit shyly to the back of the group was a woman wearing a black vest over a white T-shirt. The face looked the same and