Police Used Spotify to Find Two Fugitives in Mexico
If you want to drop off the grid, don’t forget to cancel your streaming services. That’s the lesson from a new case reported in The Coloradoan, which saw one couple’s Spotify and Netflix accounts used to track them after they fled to Mexico.
The fugitives were Brittany Nunn and her husband Peter Barr, who fled their home in Wellington, Colorado after losing a custody battle over Nunn’s two children. The court had awarded primary custody of the two sisters — six and four years old, respectively — to their biological fathers. But Nunn and her husband defied the order, spurring a seven-month manhunt that drew in local, state, and federal investigators alongside private detectives hired by the fathers.
The fugitive couple was finally located through a search warrant served to Spotify. According to the company’s records, the couple’s account had been used by an IP address in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. The lead was confirmed by similar records from Netflix, as well as a package delivered to Nunn at a Cabo address. From there, federal agents worked with the Mexican consulate on bringing the couple and the abducted children back to the US.
It’s a clever tactic and a reminder of how many modern services can quietly give away a user’s location. For Fourth Amendment purists, the story is also a reminder that old-fashioned warrants are still a perfectly viable way to track down criminals. While broad, FISA-ordered business records requests have become both common and controversial in the intelligence world, a simple court-ordered warrant was more than enough to track down Nunn and Barr.
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