I'd heard the stories of the luckless sods who had linked to some methane breather's long forgotten transit grid. Messing with an alien coder was the next biggest mistake you could ever make. I had heard of surprise deliveries of still smoking spare ribs showing up out of the blue that later turned out to be...you get the idea.

In theory, the search beams could tag you and draw you through the nearest link, but in practise it was usually too late already by the time somebody reported you missing. Just what part of the sky did you point the beam at? It took time to find residual probability anomalies in stray interstellar hydrogen atoms and account for all the known links. The nature of links themselves didn't help things any with their here/not here dualisms. At least Schrodinger's Cat had a box he could always be found in, dead and/or alive. I'd read about searches and seen the vids.