From time to time, someone will express disbelief at some of the cases I bring up in class, or some of the stories I will tell around the campfire, on the grounds that no one could possibly be stupid enough to fall for a deception as blatant as the one in my story. Despite the fact that there’s actually a popular song with the lyrics “Everybody knows that the world is full of stupid people” (it’s “Banditos” by the Refreshments) people still cling to the belief that common sense still exists, that most folks can be trusted not to do things that a newborn gerbil would know better than to do, and that blatant crime that plays on the exceptionally stupid is really quite rare. And I understand the appeal of such belief systems; I have often felt the call of them myself – until I run across stories like the one in the Philadelphia Inquirer about a website called “HitmanForHire.com…”
You can pick up the original story if you want to, but the basic gist is that a woman from Allentown, PA (now living in Jersey City, NJ) went on the website and tried to contract with someone to kill her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, a mortgage broker in California. According to the court papers, the defendant in the case paid $37,000 for the assassination, including $19,000 charged on a stolen credit card. However, the “hit man” in the case never even attempted to kill the target and may never have intended to do so in the first place; instead, he made contact with the intended victim and offered to guarantee her safety (from online hit men, at least) for $20,000, which she may in fact have given him. However, it would appear that she also informed the appropriate authorizes of the situation, since the “hit man” and his client were both apprehended and are now facing lengthy jail terms…
Now, as bizarre (and depressing, at least if you have anything to do with education in America) as this might be, the punchline to the story is that at least some of the payments to the assassination service were made using PayPal. While the expectation of privacy on a public website or email service is still being debated in the courts, there is no expectation of privacy on PayPal; it’s a private company, and its only obligations to its customers are the ones it had contracted with them to provide – and those contractual obligations do not include privacy OR the right to conduct criminal activities using the service. In the event, PayPal stopped the payments from going through and froze the accounts of the parties involved – which just adds insult to injury, in my opinion…
Now, I’m not calling this story to your attention because I believe that any of my readers (assuming I have readers) are thinking of using an online service to commit capital murder, or any other crime, in fact. My point here is that stories like this one are the counterpart to those absurd warning labels you see sometimes (such as “don’t use in the shower” on an electric hair dryer), in that however much we might want to believe that such things couldn’t happen, they do. At the moment, PayPal doesn’t have anything on their website warning people not to try to use their service to commit capital crimes, but it’s only a matter of time before they decide they need to. And if you assume that your customers, suppliers, competitors, or employees can be trusted not to do things that are unbelievably stupid, you’re likely to regret making that assumption…
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