Breakfast Links: Crime Don’t Pay Edition
Ok, boys and girls, just remember crime does not pay…
First up, we have the boy who hired a hitman to kill his folks. Why? Because they took away his PlayStation… that’s hardcore. The most screwed up part of the whole thing, ok, well, that’s a hard call, but the twist to it is that he got caught because the hitman he hired was a cop that his mom organized in a sting operation. Dude. Ok, another wierd part?
A woman Cory trusted, the mother of one of his friends, took him to a hotel room where he met an undercover police officer pretending to be a hitman.
He got his friend’s mom to drive him to the meeting?? How did he explain that he wanted her to take him to a hotel room??
Way less creepy is this tale of synthetic fraud - where two guys stole social security numbers to set up fake identities. They didn’t steal identities, just socials and they set up their own identities and so much more:
The conspirators needed addresses for their synthetic identities and for a dozen or so shell companies that helped to facilitate the scam. Eventually they rented 200-odd apartments in 14 states. They kept binders of data in their Phoenix headquarters to keep the details straight.
That is not playing around. They totally figured out how to scam the credit rating and credit card companies, which is completely, completely awesome. But in the end it was those binders that screwed them up. It’s always the binders…
And then in a crime after my own heart, two guys got busted for changing their grades in a California state university. This was not a precursor into hacking NORAD to play Global Thermonuclear War, sadly, instead it has led them to face 20 years in prison and up to $250k in fines. Seems a bit steep to me… sure they hacked into PeopleSoft, but they just changed their grades, y’know? 20 years? F’real?
