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Prison Inmates Catfished $560,000 Out of Military Service Members in Sextortion Scam, NCIS Says (gizmodo.com)
Hundreds of military service members reportedly got caught up in a sextortion scam run by prison inmates using cellphones, according to a release issued by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). From a report: Military agents from multiple criminal investigation groups have served summons and issued warrants for arrests related to the scheme. According to the NCIS, South Carolina and North Carolina prison inmates, assisted by outside accomplices, sought out service members through dating sites and social media, then took on false identities, feigned romantic interest, and exchanged photos.
Once the inmates had successfully catfished their targets, they would then pose as the father of the fake persona, insisting their child was underage and that the target had therefore committed a crime by exchanging photos. In some situations, the "father" claimed he wouldn't press charges if the target gave him money. Sometimes the catfisher would pose as law enforcement requesting money for the family.
Once the inmates had successfully catfished their targets, they would then pose as the father of the fake persona, insisting their child was underage and that the target had therefore committed a crime by exchanging photos. In some situations, the "father" claimed he wouldn't press charges if the target gave him money. Sometimes the catfisher would pose as law enforcement requesting money for the family.
LOL this is also why you should only meet women at a local bar. At least you know they are 21 and live nearby and you probably have friends in common.
Or, if you're using a dating site, exchange phone numbers as quickly as possible, chat on the phone, and meet in person. Don't do stupid **** like exchanging nude photos with people you've never met.
It's hard to tell who the bad guys are in this story?
Did they intend to commit a crime, though -- i.e. did the fake dating profiles have a birth date that was over 18 years ago? This is basically an online variant of the old scam. Women gets a guy drunk, takes him home from a bar, they get naked. Random guy bursts in on them naked. Guy either pretends to be:
(1) The woman's angry husband, who'll report the guy to his CO for adultery
(2) An angry pimp demanding payment
(3) The woman's father, and the woman is actually 16.
(4) An undercover cop investigating a prostitution ring.
Either way, some money changes hands and everyone is on their merry way.
This is a technique China and Russia use to collect military secrets. Extortion, and instead of being paid in cash, payment comes in the form of information about weapons systems, sensor performance, etc.
It works.
I intend to be offensive. Fuck the American culture of hero-worship of anyone in a uniform and with a gun.
That scam is called 'the Badger Game' and is still popular today.
About the criminal intent, this happened in the US. In the United States almost every jurisdiction has 'strict liability' on their age of consent laws. This means that you are strictly liable for any lewd activity with a person below the age of consent, REGARDLESS OF YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF THAT PERSON'S AGE.
This is explicitly done to remove the "I didn't know!" defense. It isn't enough to say "I saw an ID, and she looked old enough, and..."
It doesn't matter. This is why they call mature-looking minors 'jail-bait'.
Polite society doesn't exclude people because they've made mistakes in the past. That is almost the definition of polite.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The data contradicts your belief. Military enlistees are better educated, have higher IQs, and come from wealthier families than their peers in the general population.
Entrapment schemes like the one described in TFA are by their very definition designed to trap people who are behaving normally and reasonably. If there's any selection bias going on, it'd be on the part of the scammers. They might deliberately target military personnel because the potential penalty for being entrapped is much greater for military personnel (prison + dishonorable discharge) than for civilians (only prison), making them more likely to pay the extortion fee.
Most people in the USAF are not pilots, and don't fly as part of their job.
Sure, the USAF has multi-million dollar equipment, but they also have floors to sweep and potatoes to peel.
Fuck the American culture of hero-worship of anyone in a uniform and with a gun.
The hero worship increases proportionally to the square of the distance from the nearest military base. When travelling in uniform, people would buy me drinks. But just off base, lawns would have signs that said "Dogs and Marines Keep off the Grass". Familiarity breeds contempt.
Semper fi.
It may be a tool for use, but it isn't necessary and wouldn't change a thing if it was gone. They have a wide array of options without bitcoin.
Actually I had a friend the cops tried to pin a statutory story on who met a girl at a bar, she had a fake ID. Judge took one look and tossed it out, still cost him lawyers fees.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
that contempt is usually well earned and easy to understand how peoples view would improve at distance. I have lived near a military base and the lack of respect for the local community and property by those from the base was atrocious. It is actually something I would always look at in future to ensure a place I buy is not near a base.
There was a case here in Canada, back in the '50's I believe, where some poor guy picked up a girl at the bar, believing she was of age, got caught fucking her and charged with statutory rape. Due to the way the law was written, believing the girl was of age was not a defence and he got 5 years. The Judge was very apologetic when sentencing the guy but the law was the law.
Shortly after, due to this case, the law was changed so that believing a girl was of age was a defence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You can politely torture someone to death and many an asshole is polite about it. Civilized people will forgive people for mistakes made in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The defence is known as the "presumption of regularity" where you can assume another individual is law abiding: hence it was reasonable to believe she was 21+.
Call prison call costs down to say $0.005 min max and then the cell phone issue will be cut down big time.
If a girl under 18 sneaks into the bar and you do her, even with her consent, your "She must have been 21 because she was in the bar" defense won't save you.
There are guys who even checked a girl's convincing fake ID and relied on that as proof of her being over 18 yet have ended up convicted of statutory rape (although, I doubt police would get away with fake ids in a sting operation -- that would likely be crossing the entrapment threshold).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Fine, but first: can you please explain how the US military went from being reviled in the 70's to the hero worship of today? I really do not understand this, given that the wars of the past couple of decades have been even less honorable and less justified than Vietnam.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The data contradicts your belief. Military enlistees are better educated, have higher IQs, and come from wealthier families than their peers in the general population.
More of them have graduated high school, but less of them have graduated college, so I'm not sure you can call them better educated. In fact, I'm sure you can't. IQ scores are largely bullshit, but they are irrelevant to your argument since your fine citation states that they only discard the lowest third of applicants by IQ, not anything about what those scores are. If most of the people who apply to join the military have below-average IQ, then they can discard the bottom third and still wind up with an average IQ which is below the national average. As for wealthier families, your own source also states that this could reasonably be because poorer families are less likely to produce qualified applicants. I figure it's because of confirmation bias, though. People whose basic needs are met are more likely to believe that the military is part of people having their basic needs met. If they're not very smart, which as we've established is not screened out by the military enlistment procedure, then this might seem very reasonable. And there's no correlation between income and intelligence, so that washes ok.
TL;DR: Your citation proves only that military members aren't poor, not that they aren't stupid.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, but they're legally obligated to apologize.
The guy was guilty as the law was written, so the Judge had no reason to throw the case out as the facts were clear. There was also no right about double jeopardy at the time so if the Judge had thrown it out, there could well have been a new trial. Really the Crown shouldn't have pursued the case but they did. Perhaps the whole idea was to force Parliament into fixing a bad law, which happened. At the time, Parliament was Supreme and Judges almost never bucked the law. That changed when we got our Charter of Rights in '82.
Whether a jury was involved, I do not know, but even jury nullification wouldn't stop an appeal and the nullification thrown out at the time. That changed when juries kept nullifying Morganteller, an abortionist as the population as a whole got pissed off about it and our politicians do listen sometimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Maybe if Marines would pick up after themselves after pooping on people's lawns then they'd get a little more respect.
I've seen Navy personnel that had successfully been trained to do this. Doubt if it would work with Marines though.