What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: TikTok Escapee
Chad Hauer, aka the ” TikTok Fugitive ,” has an amazing story to tell. He says both the FBI and Interpol have been trying to extradite him to the US for the past 16 years to face charges for a crime he did not commit. In hundreds of TikTok videos posted from Russia, St. Kitts and other countries, Hauer taunts authorities and explains the Byzantine details of how an innocent Microsoft programmer attacked an international criminal. Hauer’s plight has attracted the attention and sympathy of some of the most influential people on TikTok, and his videos have been viewed more than 120 million times on the platform. But is he telling the truth?
Hauer’s story begins with a bitter divorce. He says his ex-wife falsely accused him of kidnapping their son, even though he had full legal custody of the child at the time. The FBI intervened, and an innocent trip to Europe turned into a stay in a Bulgarian prison and a life on the run.
Hauer says the US tried to extradite him at least three times, from at least one country with an extradition agreement, but failed because the charges against him are prima facie bogus. The FBI, Hauer said, knows he is innocent but refuses to stop searching. Even though his child is now an adult, and even though he has court documents that he says incontrovertibly prove his innocence, Hauer is still forced to live in exile and fight to clear his name.
Hauer says sympathetic journalists who tried to cover the story were intimidated by the FBI and were left with no choice but to bring his story directly to people through TikTok, podcasts, online interviews and petitions . If you do a search on Hauer’s name, you will come across pages of sources discussing and expanding on his story and the injustices done to him, but few sources that critically examine his claims.
Anyone can say anything on the Internet, but Hauer is indeed wanted by the FBI . He is truly a fugitive who received asylum in Russia, and his extradition has indeed failed. But when you pull at any other thread in this complex ball of yarn, it seems to unravel into an uglier story in which the villain is not the FBI.
Is Hauer an angry divorcee?
In the United States, about 200,000 children are abducted by a parent or other family member each year, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Most aggrieved parents who remove their children from court-ordered visits do not become international criminals, but this may be the fate Hauer brought upon himself through his unusual personal stubbornness and intelligence.
I’m not going to go into the legal details, but the facts suggest that Hauer is, to put it mildly, not entirely honest about everything. If you’re interested in more details, check out this well-researched and excellent YouTube video by CHUPPL, which thoroughly examines many of Hauer’s claims (and also delves into Hauer’s locust-eating habit, his self-documented road rage, and his cosplay hobby). as Gru from Minions .) CHUPPL’S CONCLUSION: The strongest evidence points to the fact that the court case at the heart of this whole mess was by the books, despite Hauer’s increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories.
Overall, Hauer’s documentation of the original kidnapping appears to indicate his innocence only if other documents, court orders, and laws are ignored – this was a very complex custody case involving the Tennessee and Pennsylvania state courts and, ultimately, As a result, the Federal Court. The same applies to extradition: a more reasonable explanation for the failure of extradition would be the lack of dual criminality. If Bulgaria did not have a law against this kind of kidnapping, they would not extradite, no matter what information they were given.
Then there are vibrations .
The importance of a working bullshit counter
Within a minute of watching my first Hauer video, I was skeptical – the dude was making some unusual claims – and from that point on, every new detail made the story less believable, not more. I can’t definitively speak to a factual rebuttal without dedicating my life to researching it, but this story didn’t pass my personal smell test.
There is no plausible explanation for why the FBI would spend so much time and effort pursuing a relatively unimportant man who they know is innocent, leading to speculation that the CIA may be involved because they wanted to recruit Hauer to work for the agency is another hard-to-find option. – swallow the tablet. (Free tip: When someone mentions the CIA to cover a hole in their story, you might want to stop listening; 99 times out of 100, they’re lying to you.) Then there’s the suggestion that “mainstream” journalists are scared of the story. FBI. A more reasonable possibility: Credible journalists showed interest, did a little research, labeled the guy a fake, and stopped returning his calls.
But most of all, Hauer has a sense of “this guy is so full of crap ” that I can’t explain rationally. He seems to be a smart, driven, quirky man who has selfish goals and a lot of time to hone them into sharpness. He may be driven by righteous anger based on legitimate injustice at the hands of the legal system, but his many half-truths and bizarre explanations seem deliberately designed to influence people. It’s hard for me not to see something sinister there. He’s clearly smart enough to know that he’s presenting one side of a complex story and calling it the whole truth (at best), and it’s alarming that so many people can’t see it.