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Girls Catfish ISIS On Social Media For Travel Money
MarkWhittington writes: Yahoo Travel reported that three women in Chechnya took ISIS for $3,300 before getting caught. They are now under investigation for Internet fraud, which seems to be illegal even when committed against the most fearsome terrorist army in modern times. The scam seems to be a combination of the Nigerian Prince con, in which a mark is fooled into giving the con artist large sums of money and catfishing, in which the mark strikes up an online romance with someone he thinks is an attractive woman (or man depending on the gender and preference of the mark.)
If the intelligence agencies were smart, they would offer to match anything you were able to con out of known terrorist groups. The scam artists of the world would de-fund ISIS in about a year, all without firing a shot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Illegal? Perhaps. Do you care? Is it immoral? That's all I care about.
If it was legal to scam them they would be flooded with offers from so many girls it would either bankrupt them or they would stop recruiting because of all the scams. It would seriously disrupt their recruiting.
It's just like banning people from joining them. We should be lining those people up and flying them over there right after they sign papers saying they aren't citizens anymore. Let them go, fight and die as long as they never return. They won't be in our country anymore. And on the flip side it should be perfectly legal to scam them. They are a criminal organization and I personally like the old world idea that someone that's breaking the law and fighting prosecution is then outside the law including it's protections. There aren't innocents in groups like ISIS, everyone should be free to target them with any action that would normally be deemed criminal.
People pissing off ISIL/ISIS or interfering with non-public operations are a problem for states that are doing their own things officially. When you've got private citizens scamming them like this you wind up with lots of little bullseyes antagonizing ISIL which might provoke a reprisal of some kind.
What we really need to do with all these non-state and semi-state actors like ISIL and Al Qaeda is start issuing letters of marque again. "You want to pick a fight with these guys? Go have it at. Follow these rules and understand you're on your own or we'll come after you ourselves."
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
No one said US (or Russian, for that matter, where these women were from) citizens were afraid of ISIS. We have a few advantages, namely:
a) We're protected by a powerful military that would stomp ISIS in a head-to-head engagement, and
b) we are physical separated from them by vast distances.
No, I think "repulsed" is probably more accurate. Those in the direct line of fire probably feel a bit differently.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
This looks like it is all in fun.
Until ISIS decides to set off a truck bomb on the street where these women live.
The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. The Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people.
What ISIS Really Wants
Man, I want to live in your world! Imagine if everyone legalized anything that was hilarious. I'd go around planting drugs on the police, and if I got caught my defense would be "sorry judge, it was just too hilarious to stop!"