By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

On assignment for Wired, writer Evan Ratliff shed his real identity to see if it was possible to disappear. Just days before his month-long experiment was supposed to be over, he was caught when he went to grab a bite of pizza!

Unlike regular disappearing acts, social networking site lead the search effort. Just 27 days into Ratliff’s run from the digital world, New Orleans’ Naked Pizza caught him in his tracks. Finally, Ratliff’s story goes online.

The hunt began on August 14, 2009, when Wired posted a bounty offer:

Author Evan Ratliff Is on the Lam. Locate Him and Win $5,000.

It was official. Ratliff was on the run:

I’d been working for months to establish James Donald Gatz as a separate identity. The name itself — the one that Jay Gatsby sheds to start over in The Great Gatsby — was easy for me to remember. More important, due to the prolific amount of Gatsby analysis online, it was basically un-Googleable.

As James Gatz, Ratliff carried gift cards, paid with cash, and used pre–paid cell phones to mask his physical whereabouts. He took the Greyhound because he didn’t have to prove his identity. He set up a Twitter account under his fake name and monitored who followed him. He constantly changed how he looked like: normal one day, weird on other days, and then normal again. Still, Ratliff was paranoid the whole trip. He lied when he had to. With $5,000 offered as a reward, people tapped into the social media scene and began stalking his every move. To some extent, their obsessive efforts paid off.

The Vanish Team described how they captured him:

The biggest clue Evan left was by visiting the Vanish Team Facebook application with a profile photo that so closely resembled the video of himself on Venice Beach.

Secondly, he kept returning to Vanish Team more than once a day using this same account.

Thirdly, by following random Twitter accounts with his protected jdgatz account, Evan left open avenues for trackers to infiltrate his own posts by contacting those people who were strangers to him.

That’s why when he followed Naked Pizza on Twitter, he exposed himself to the world. So yes, it is difficult to disappear in our digital world.

In the end, Ratliff was ready to be Ratliff again:

At first I was angry: at myself for getting caught and losing the money, at Wired for tempting me with the challenges. But that was soon replaced by the thrill of being redeposited in my own identity, with a family, a partner, friends, and a past I didn’t have to hide.

Granted, if I wanted to disappear, I wouldn’t tweet about what I was doing or update my Facebook status. Just saying.