RentAHitman: How A Joke Website is Catching Criminals
A month ago, a 52-year-old woman found a website named RentAHitman.com and filled it out, wanting a hitman to take out her ex-husband. She filled out the website with legitimate contact information, told the reasons why she wanted him dead and had criminal intentions of wanting him dead over money that was lost. Unfortunately for this woman, the website was not real at all - it was a joke website, designed by a software engineer who kept the website up simply for a good laugh. But after receiving tons upon tons of legitimate criminal requests from the website, the site’s developer Bob Innes has been forwarding requests that seem legitimate to law enforcement - and so far, the website has prevented almost 150 murders. Here’s the strange but true story of how a joke website put together by software engineer Bob Innes has been preventing murders for a couple of years.
The History of RentAHitman
Bob Innes originally created and started the website RentAHitman back in 2005 as part of a project for an IT class. A group of his friends from the class wanted to create a website that was intended to be some kind of business - so Innes assembled a website named RentAHitman. The website was a walking pun with all kinds of gags and many signs that it was clearly fake (Rent, as in hire, hit as in web/search engine “hit” and so on - the site even has several gag pop-ups like the Internet Complaint Center that’s run by the FBI, a HIPPA statement, whose acronym stands for the Hitman Protection and Privacy Act of 1964). However, Innes started noticing that many of the requests being forwarded to the site were completely legitimate after logging onto the website for the first time in a few years and checking the email attached to it.
One of the first dark requests he’d seen was in 2010 from a woman in Canada who wanted 3 family members murdered. At that point, Innes knew that there was something very wrong - and so, he began sending any requests like these that he could to law enforcement. After the report ultimately culminated in the Canadian woman’s arrest, Ines continued to carefully track and monitor the website’s activity to find anyone who was taking the website seriously and wanted hitmen to murder people they knew or cared about previously. Innes previously mentioned last year that although most submitted requests are hoaxes that use the website for its intended purpose, about 10 percent of the requests that he receives for the websites warrant law enforcement involvement and investigation.
Joke Websites and Silly Criminal Moments
Innes, who lives in Bay Area, California, was never expecting that a website he created would lead to him getting involved with and working with law enforcement. But in his last interview this past year, Innes states that he was working with law enforcement in even his hometown of the Bay Area to crack cases involving more people who believed that his site was legitimate. Despite the website’s questionable legitimacy, there are still people putting in legitimate requests to murder neighbors, family, and everything in between. It makes people often wonder - how do people buy into these things anyway, and why are people so intent on figuring out how to get rid of their loved ones?
Interestingly, this hasn’t been the first time a crime has been flubbed, and it most certainly won’t be the last one. A North Carolina man was arrested for attempting to purchase Walmart items with a 1-million-dollar Monopoly note, and there are plenty of other stories out there that talk about how silly some criminals can be in their attempts to perform their misdeeds. But this particular website is revealing some more serious things to happen that otherwise would not be revealed under any other circumstances. In fact, a lack of understanding of which websites are real and which are fake seems to be on stark display.
Many people are constantly scammed into losing their identity, bank information, computers, and their records on a daily basis, possibly, every single year. In fact, identity theft is the leading form of cybercrime that still exists within the world even today. Many of these crimes come from people having weak passwords for their computers or a lack of understanding of how to keep themselves secure on the Internet. It shows flaws within the system of learning how to stay secure on the Internet if even criminals are falling for these types of faux schemes. In this case, the lack of understanding of what people are asking for on the Internet is actually somewhat helpful, being that criminals do not realize that the site’s legitimacy is nonexistent. Innes was more unnerved that the site was uncovering people that normally would not seem like they had criminal intent or resentment towards others.
Although the website is still continuing to catch criminals and RentAHitman is still getting more requests, it remains to be seen whether or not people will still be falling for the website’s same old tricks or if people will attempt to find other ways of committing crimes themselves. There’s still a lot of mystery that surrounds exactly why a lot of criminals think these sites are legitimate, but it probably has something to do with the lack of education on how to properly keep a sense of cybersecurity. Thankfully, it’s not so bad in all cases - and perhaps might inspire some people to code some gag websites of their own that will give them a chance to bust criminals in the same way. Innes has a mixed view of how his website has ultimately established its legacy, but he is relieved to some capacity that its website has given a chance to others to not have to worry about being murdered - all thanks to criminals not realizing that they’re investing their time into the wrong sources to carry out murders.