A man who accidentally started an assassin hiring website
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I get that those 150 lives were all at risk, because a not-too-bright someone wanted them killed, but... I'm also curious how many of those would manage to kill their targets if they weren't intercepted?
This isn't an argument against intervention, since they demonstrated an intent to kill. But I'm legitimately wondering how often people with grudges connect with actual contract killers.
A cold takes 7 days to resolve on its own. With modern medicine, it will take merely a week !
The placebo is not to eliminate the cancer, it’s to guarantee that we know the “normal” path without the drug, and gives a comparison point between the control and the target. The fundamental problem is that cancer can just resolve/improve on its own, or rather without intervention… so just poking and watching isn’t sufficient proof of the drug’s efficacy
Yet it's so hard to have a good intuition about that. We're wired to think in terms of action and agency and be morally judged on its basis. This is deeply rooted in human psychology and acts as a foundation for many of our behaviours, from religion to vaccine hesitancy.
Ask anybody I'd they think it's more likely that a disease just went away on its own or if there was some reason, "something".
Most people will tell it's more likely something happened, a miracle of some kind for some reasons. Deep down there is always a reason for things to happen, but "your cells in your body did a good job" just doesn't sound right.
Even when people accept the idea that the body can fix itself pretty well, they tend to swing the pendulum too much and assume the body can do just anything .... provided you do (agency) the right motions (potions, talismans, right diet, right prayers...)
Progress in cancer treatment is almost always achieved by incremental tweaking of how we treat it. There are a few revolutionary agents based on specific disease mechanisms in certain cancers (e.g. imatinib [1]) but these are in the minority - cancer is protean.
To be fair, that's probably less crazy than using a popular website everyone has heard of for the same purpose.
Use Facebook.
Likely some of the people would ultimately try to do the deed on their own. Probably a small number, but a bunch of tragedies were likely forestalled, even if the seeker is not arrested but receives help. Which is probably what happens for people outside the US.
He’s referred some requests to law enforcement, who’ve than taken whatever action they deem necessary. (Admittedly in some jurisdictions for some demographics, there might not be much distinction there.)
If your angry 13 year old brother or cognitively impaired cousin that you didn’t get a PS5 for xmas emailed this guy, it’s spectacularly unlikely the cops would send him to prison.
That being said, the " 13 year old brother or cognitively impaired cousin that you didn’t get a PS5 for" are an actual threat and those around them do need intervention. Not reporting them amounts to enabling.
I’m sure some subset of those cases were credible threats, but I’m confident there’s at least one person in jail who would have quickly given up if this very convenient site had not existed.
Also, equating a desire to assassinate with being mentally ill or cognitively disabled is doing a disservice to the majority of mentally ill or cognitively disabled people who do know it's wrong to kill people. I doubt there's a clear correlation between desire to kill people and being mentally ill or cognitively disabled.
The funny thing is that all these drive bye gang bangers are all invariably caught by the police and then spend the rest of their life in jail. Don't underestimate the stupidity of man.
Nowhere in Europe does the situation come anywhere close to being as fucked up as in Mexico, not even in the literal warzones.
This was an entirely predictable consequence of banning recreational drugs.
There is black market here for meat, too.
Do you give them ideas, pretend to give them the means, and encourage (or even nag/pressure) them? I mean, we do, but is that a good thing? Especially seeing as while we're doing it we're giving them ideas, we may accidentally give them the means (or at least an idea of how to find the means themselves), and in a time crunch to show results the pressure that we put on them to carry out the act may actually become threatening?
More applicable to this specific case, which is obviously why the guy is sensitive about it, is that people sending unsolicited requests to murder people to a site called rentahitman.com are very stupid. They're the least likely to be able to carry it out, although I acknowledge that's probably somewhat offset because they may also be too stupid to understand the probability or consequences of failing to get away with it.
The writer sees the same thing, which is why they gloss over the fact that he has put in effort to dress the site as a website where you order hitmen online, with splashes of satire to signal to people of normal intelligence and ability to detect sarcasm that it is a joke. It is never mentioned explicitly that he's dressing the site that way now until it's implicated by the discussion of the "jokes and clues to show it wasn't the real deal" halfway through the article.
Before I got to that, I thought he was a guy who had an innocent site marketing himself as a network contractor who would get sucked into the nefarious plans of stupid strangers because of his domain name. Afterwards, I decided that he's a guy who got sucked into one nefarious plan of one stupid stranger, got her busted, and loved being the center of attention and having his ego stroked by law enforcement. To get that feeling back, again and again, he turned his site into an phishing expedition for people stupid enough to think click-to-murder could be real. This is the same as Nigerian prince scams that intentionally use bad grammar and spelling to limit the replies to suckers. It's a confidence scam filtering the crowd down to the marks.
The moral hazard I see is that if you sold the site convincingly, in a way that could trick people of closer to normal intelligence, that might result in danger for you. Somebody normal tricked into prison by this might send a real hit man after you (or maybe a lawyer.) So instead, he focuses on people like the moron he started with, who don't scare him at all. If they don't scare him, are they really scary?
All of that should be considered entrapment, and law enforcement should not be doing it
for FBI, and other law enforcement I have a pretty simple standard, that many people do not agree with. law enforcement should not be allowed to break the law to enforce the law. We however allow them to do so all time.
In relation to this story, it is simple. If you just put up a site like this, people then contact you, and as law enforcement you setup a meeting let them incriminate themselves no problems, you did not break the law, it was unsolicited by you, etc.
Flip this though and say you embed an agent at a support group of some kind, this agent then prompts a person with "I know someone that could take care of that for you" after establishing a relationship with the person, then over the course of months they entice the person into committing a crime. That is where the line is cross IMO. That is where law enforcement is today
Not in courts in the USA. Entrapment is when you convince someone to do something they wouldn't do if not for your encouragement. This is painted as making it easy for someone to do what they want to do. It's why they target schizophrenics and idiots.
> law enforcement should not be allowed to break the law to enforce the law. We however allow them to do so all time.
That's not a simple standard. If we allow law enforcement to break some laws legally, they aren't breaking the law. It's against the law for you to break my laptop to pieces, but it's not against to law for me to break my laptop to pieces.
hmmm I wonder if that is why I stated "SHOULD BE" not that is was. Clearly the indication was that I believe the current position by the court system is wrong, and that we have allowed law enforcement to much latitude in this area. That we as a society to seek to more tightly control what law enforcement is allowed to do in the name of "law and order", then maybe we would not have the clear abuse of power we see on the streets every day.
>>If we allow law enforcement to break some laws legally, they aren't breaking the law.
Again words matter, clearly I should SHOULD NOT, again indicating my bleif that there should not be exemptions in the law for law enforcement like they have today. We as a society would suffer far less abuse from law enforcement if we did not create a separate class of individual called "law enforcement" that we exempt from the laws that everyone else has to obey. Again to be clear this is a position I believe society SHOULD adopt, not that I believe it has, thus commenting "well under the law today...." is pointless as that is not the conversation. I am fully aware that today we do exempt law enforcement from the very laws they are to enforce upon others. I find that to be unethical and untenable
>>It's against the law for you to break my laptop to pieces, but it's not against to law for me to break my laptop to pieces.
That is a ridiculous analogy, that that then some how conclude that we are all property of the government, and by extension law enforcement? That some how property rights apply to abuses by government agent? Really?
It will also make more people aware than just searching for killer makes them liable if somebody thinks they were serious about this.
Not sure that's true - if you click through to the CNN article (https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/12/us/hireahitman-website-cr...), the police will set up a meet and check whether the people actually want to go through with hiring a hitman.
In general, Police will set up a meet because it is much stronger and difficult to refute proof. And they also don't have anything to loose - their case cannot be weakened by the suspect refusing to come to a meet.
"simply searching for a killer is not a crime"
is a false statement.
There exist no law that says "searching for a killer is not a crime".
Now, there exist no law that says "searching for a killer is a crime" either, but this is up to judge/jury and in large part your luck.
Judge or jury can't tell what you had in your mind. The prosecutor will lay their case and if they are convincing enough, especially to the jury, you may go to prison just based on "simple searching for a killer".
The law does not require any more additional proof for you to be convicted, as long as prosecutor can convince judge and/or jury that you in fact wanted to go through with your plan.
Certainly, people went to prison for much less than that.
So, yes, you can in fact go to prison simply for searching for a killer if you were also unlucky.
Instead of this person saying they saved 150 lives, the copyright industry say the artists lost X amount making the assumption each pirate, given no other option, would pay for the copy the pirated.
I often am curious how many of those pirates would have actually paid.
The number of homicides that go undetected in the first place is at least as important, if not more. In Germany, police claim that they solve 94% of homicides, but there are estimates that around half don't get discovered...
Your assassin has to travel to some random city somewhere and take all the risks involved with killing someone, OR..
They rip you off. What recourse would you have against a real paid killer? And what help would you get from law enforcement?
Plumbers already have a bond system like that, for example.
If there are enough hitmen, they can just pick up jobs near them.
It's not impossible logistically.
It can be done, though for obvious reasons law enforcement would end your operation in days if not hours.
Reformatted for readability here, and a few details redacted to preserve my illusion of privacy:
Rent-A-Hitman Service Request (HIPPA Compliant)
Your Name: Michael Geary
I certify I'm an: Adult - Over 18 Years Old
Your eMail Address: mg@ok.mg
Your Phone Number: [redacted]
Your Address (For Field Operative Use Only): [redacted]
Field Operative Contact Preference: Email
Enter Your Desired CODE/SAFE Word or Phrase (Optional): Tony
Relation to Intended Target: Fan
Target's Name: James Gandolfini
Address Where Service Requested:
Holsten's Brookdale Confectionery
1063 Broad Street
Bloomfield, New Jersey 07003
What is the reason for contacting us? James Gandolfini is dead.
Describe what services you would like performed:
James died tragically at the age of 51. I want you to bring him back to life.
I last saw him at the address listed above.
I sent a modest donation to your PayPal account to help you consider my request.
Guido, if you can perform this small service, there is a hundred boxes of ziti in it for you.
How did you hear about Rent-A-Hitman (Paste Link - For Marketing Purposes Only):
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/12/us/hireahitman-website-cracks-crimes-cec/index.html
"a hundred boxes of ziti": In The Sopranos, a "box of ziti" is a code word for $1000. "Tony tells Christopher to get “five boxes of ziti” for David Scatino. In the morning, Christopher tells Tony that David is down “forty-five boxes of ziti”." --The Sopranos Wiki
"a small service": "Don Vito Corleone was a man to whom everybody came for help, and never were they disappointed. He made no empty promises, nor the craven excuse that his hands were tied by more powerful forces in the world than himself. It was not necessary that he be your friend, it was not even important that you had no means with which to repay him. Only one thing was required. That you, you yourself, proclaim your friendship. And then, no matter how poor or powerless the supplicant, Don Corleone would take that man’s troubles to his heart. And he would let nothing stand in the way to a solution of that man’s woe. His reward? Friendship, the respectful title of “Don,” and sometimes the more affectionate salutation of “Godfather.” And perhaps, to show respect only, never for profit, some humble gift—a gallon of homemade wine or a basket of peppered taralles specially baked to grace his Christmas table. It was understood, it was mere good manners, to proclaim that you were in his debt and that he had the right to call upon you at any time to redeem your debt by some small service." --Mario Puzo, The Godfather
A) he's not law enforcement.
B) entrapment laws vary by jurisdiction, but I'm unaware of any where a private citizen sending in information about someone contacting them to commit a crime is problematic.
Standing on the corner selling drugs to people who ask: ok
Standing on the corner, asking people "hey, wanna buy some weed": borderline but probably still not entrapment
Standing on the corner, asking people "hey, wanna buy some weed", then pestering those who say "no thanks": Entrapment.
An undercover agent becoming a friend with someone, then pressuring them to buy weed for him even though that person really doesn't want to: very clearly entrapment.
So, yes, I believe this person saved some lives.
Better article:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/rent-a...
Also this guy just forwards details to police.