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Comment by capitol_ | Hacker News Reader

This is a quite hard question to answer, as if it's done correctly no-one will know and the person will simply vanish.

And there is of course countless reasons why someone vanishes, but then again, there is a lot of missing people: https://www.statista.com/statistics/240387/number-of-missing...

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Those numbers are astounding.

Slightly south of half a million kids/teens go missing every year? And 150,000 adults?

How many of these cases are never closed?

> The vast majority of child abduction cases in the United States are parental kidnapping, where one parent hides, takes, or holds a child without the knowledge or consent of another parent or guardian.[3] Depending on the state and the legal status of the family members, this might not be a criminal offense. In 1976, parental kidnappings in the United States stood at 60,000.[clarification needed] By 1984, it was between 459,000 and 751,000.[citation needed] In 2010, the US Department of Justice reported 200,000 cases of parental kidnapping; these comprised both domestic and international abductions.[4]

> Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year between 2010–2017.[5]

> The federal government estimated about 50,000 people reported missing in 2001 who were younger than 18. Only about 100 cases per year can be classified as abductions by strangers.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_in_the_United_State...

There's a pretty good fiction book series called The Naturalist that uses these statistics as part of its discussion about serial killers.

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