Watch the latest episode of our exclusive interview between actor and comedian John Cleese and private investigator turned whistleblower Daniel “Danno” Hanks.
Danno recently hit the news for coming clean about targeting Meghan Markle and Prince Harry for the tabloids, and in our exclusive new interview series goes into detail about some of his most high profile targets, including John Cleese himself!
In this episode, Danno tells John how illegally obtained his social security number and his bank details, before passing them on to the tabloids.
TRANSCRIPT
John Cleese: Hello. I’ve got Danno with me again, explaining about the searches that he did for British tabloids. Now, some of those inquiries you make are legal and some aren’t legal?
Danno Hanks: Well, in the U.S., they passed a law called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which was about privacy, and they said you had to have what were called the permissible purposes. “Why do you want this information? Do you want it because you’re doing a criminal or a civil investigation where you need to know more about somebody and you’re going to either put them under surveillance or you want to gather information that’s going to be used in a court of law?”
JC: So what would a newspaper say?
DH: That would be ‘no permissible purposes’.
JC: So how do they get it?
DH: They would get limited information unless they used a private investigator to lie and say, “I’m actually doing this for a criminal or civil investigation.
JC: And they don’t check that?
DH: They don’t check that.
JC: Oh, well that’s easy.
DH: Now what they do check…They used to flag celebrity names. But after a while of auditing and saying, “Well, why did you run ‘John Cleese’?” I could say to them, “Well, I work in Hollywood. I work for a lot of entertainment industry lawyers and we’re doing a lawsuit.”
JC: So give me an example because I know that you got information about me a couple of times, which we are going to talk about. Tell me something that you got about me that was illegal for you to get.
DH: Well, to get to get your Social Security number and to get where you banked. There’s also… even if you’re British an American social (security number) is linked to the British equivalent because of the banking systems share things. I’m sure you have credit cards that are good both in the United States, Canada and the U.K. and you know, they can get that information. And they can pretend to be you.
JC: That’s fascinating. And the next time, I’ll ask you a little bit more about what you found out about me. Like the murders.
