“So far, nearly 150 lives have been saved as a direct result of the site and my actions.”
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.
That's what I was thinking. Yeah anybody who tries to actually hire a hit man through that site ought to be checked out. Claiming that lives were saved seems a bit over the top though - if you're trying to use a random website nobody has heard of to hire a hit man, the odds seem mighty slim that you'll ever find somebody prepared to actually kill someone.
Obviously the popularity of the site can be both a benefit and a detriment, a very popular site increases the chance that it has hitmen among its users, but it also increases the chance of narcs. We can see therefore that is what is needed is a popular site with the ability to deliver targeted messages to the people most likely to be hitmen. Finally this story shows the kind of problems you can encounter trying to hire hitmen through sites with a conscientious and moral leadership, that should be avoided.
While I agree I give him a pass: he could simply abandon the site but instead continues to run it. If that thought motivates him, why not?
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.
That's the same problem as with all of the FBI terrorist entrapment. What if people have an honest desire to kill, but lack the intelligence, means, and/or motivation?
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?
>>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?
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
> All of that should be considered entrapment, and law enforcement should not be doing it
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?
In almost all such circumstances, the control group is still given a "real" cancer drug that has already been proven, and the study looks for the new drug to demonstrate an improvement versus the current state-of-the-art.
There is no way for us to know if the drug is a "revulotionary cancer drug" if we don't test it in a double blinded randomized controlled trial (RCT). Indeed it would be disappointing the later find out you were treated with the placebo, but so many drugs or other interventions have to potential to be revolutionary but fail to really change the clinical decision making later on.
I guess I never understood placebo trials in a lot of medical situations. Like what we are discussing here, a "revolutionary cancer drug", why even bother letting people die giving them placebos? Its cancer. Its not like you can placebo effect the cancer away. You don't need a double blind trial to see if the drug stops the cancer, you just give people the drug and observe the cancer! I feel like our medical system is pretty wack. Or maybe I'm entirely wrong and you can placebo cancer away.
That is not how randomised controlled trials in conditions like cancer work. They are almost always a riff on new drug + current best treatment regime vs current best regime. Sometimes a drug within a regime is swapped with the new agent and the two compared in terms of survival and toxicity.
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.
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...)
My country is turning into a European Mexico because the middle class needs their cocaine to get through life. Twenty year olds are getting payed just 20k to kill someone.
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.
I once had a chat with my colleague about how the country he was born in has changed over the last 20 years. He expressed concerns about safety, gang crimes,etc. Yet he was the one consuming white powder that is responsible for majority of those crimes he's concerned about...
The powder cannot be responsible for those crimes, if it was, the government could solve the problem overnight by simply allowing a legal supply of white powder. And if that’s the case, how is the government not to blame?
Are you sure it's the fault of the people who drove the value of inexpensive to produce substances used in tiny amounts up by multiple orders of magnitude?
The War on Drugs has failed a long time ago though, and I thought it was obvious. Such crimes exist because of the War on Drugs. That said, legalization is not enough. If the taxes are too high (as it happened to be the case in California for weed), then you will still have a black market for this white powder.
Spoken like a realist. I’ve frequently interacted with the worst parts of Europe, my Telegram is constantly spammed with ads for guns in Benelux (FGC-9 really booming lately). I’ve stayed in the “ghetto” in Sweden where shootings happen on a weekly basis, spent a month in Transnistria, sat down for lunch with separatist fighters in Ukraine.
Nowhere in Europe does the situation come anywhere close to being as fucked up as in Mexico, not even in the literal warzones.
They're using the same argument the copyright industry use against pirates.
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.
You can argue that actually more lives have been saved because after a public stunt like that a lot of potential murderers will be deterred from searching for a killer for hire on the Internet.
It will also make more people aware than just searching for killer makes them liable if somebody thinks they were serious about this.
This is one of proving somebody is serious. It is not required, though.
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.
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.
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.
It is actually more likely the cognitively impaired would end up in prison. They people sux even more then usual at navigating criminal system. Same for kids.
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 think it’s equally unlikely “nearly 150 lives have been saved as a direct result of the site and [his] actions”.
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.
If someone is trying to get people killed, it may be that they need help, but other people certainly need protection from them, which is meant to be part of the point of the prison system.
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.
That's not the equation. If you try to fulfill your desire to assassinate by clicking a payment option on rentahitman.com, you are failing to understand the likelihood this plan will be successful. This is absolutely a sign of being mentally ill or cognitively disabled.
If he's never going to use it for anything legitimate, perhaps just give it over to the FBI and they could take away the satire from the page and make it look convincing. Forward the information directly to the local field office automatically, without having to rely on a private citizen to make the connection.
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...
If you think about it for even a little bit, it becomes obvious that no one would open a legit assassin-for-hire service online. Think of logistics of this:
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?
Meal delivery services seem to do quite fine online. What you need for a hitman-for-hire scheme is a broad network of assassins, preferably paid as little as they will possibly work for, and certain availability areas. You enter an address and it comes up with a list of hitmen and their preferred murdering solution, sort by price, or show a page that your service is not available at the specified location yet.
It can be done, though for obvious reasons law enforcement would end your operation in days if not hours.
I somehow get the feeling the cross section of Guardian/HN readers and the kind of people likely to jump into a site like this isn't exceedingly large.
I recently submitted a request on this site for a small service.
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
References for anyone unfamiliar with two coded messages in my request...
"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
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.
My understanding is that even if police were running that site it would still be fine, unless the site is actively reaching out to people encouraging them.
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.
Lol “ he had just saved the lives of three people” typical crap from the guardian. No doubt almost none of these people would have come to harm from these keyboard warriors. It’s amazing that anyone reads this rag for anything other than a joke
It's only fraud if it leads to money changing hands. Also, contracts for illegal goods and services aren't enforceable at least in civil court - you can't take your dealer to small claims for selling you baby powder, for example. The best you can do is shatter their kneecaps.
