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Violence-as-a-Service: Brickings, Firebombings and Shootings for Hire
- NKosmatos 4y agoNice startup idea for the criminal/illegal scene. Ok, we all know that these activities are illegal and shouldn’t be discussed, but for sure there is a market for such things. I can imagine a VaaS page like a combined eBay/Craigslist format.
- kthejoker2 4y agoFor a "classic" read (25 years old!) Jim Bell's Assassination Politics https://cryptome.org/ap.htm https://cryptome.org/ap.htm
- tempxyz 4y agoShut this down?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- guywithahat 4y agoWhen I read this I was assuming there would be some complex darkweb site used to organize this but nope, they did it on discord and telegram. This almost sounds more like idiots being idiots then any kind of organized threat
- robertlagrant 4y agoSomething's still organised enough to be a threat if it works.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoI was hoping for something like the crime app from season 3 of Westworld.
- joe_g_young 4y agoMe too
- davedx 4y agoYeah, it’s not “as-a-service”
- whateveracct 4y agoDo you realize the word "service" has a meaning beyond "web service"?
- throwaway787544 4y agoMost of them are total morons. Imagine the average genius that sticks up a liquor store, but have them go on random chat rooms asking how they can learn to sim swap.
- anonporridge 4y agoAlternatively, organizing crime on discord and telegram is hard enough to detect, monitor, and squash, and provides enough improvement to outcomes and profits, that it's shining a light on how incompetent our law enforcement actually is at policing this kind of organization, and that more sophisticated technologies like Tor and crypto oriented dark net markets aren't strictly necessary.
- bioemerl 4y agoTelegram I can understand, but discord is a centralized platform that doesn't encrypt your messages. I'm astounded the authorities don't have a direct ability to just search their database at this point.
- anonporridge 4y agoI'm sure they do, but the shear amount of data surely must make it incredibly difficult to accurately detect. And worse, being a platform for gamers, the conversation of real world criminals might be very difficult to differentiate from regular gamer talk. Just think how many groups are constantly chatting about GTA V. They're literally talking about the crimes they're committing (in the game world). Discord might actually be the perfect place for criminals to hide their conversations in plain sight.
- littlestymaar 4y ago> I'm sure they do, but the shear amount of data surely must make it incredibly difficult to accurately detect. Except once you get one person who belong to such a group (by any conventional means) or even have one informant, then you can see where they hang out on discord (and there won't be a million of channels to scan) and now you have access to a nice topology of discord use for organized crime.
- brandall10 4y agoHow do the people interested in this type of mayhem find it? If it's out in the relative open, it shouldn't be hard to find for someone that is motivated.
- jotm 4y agoWhy not, drugs are easier to buy on Instagram for the average person. Even though AlphaBay is very easy to access, it's still not that easy. Everyone has an Insta account. Now, hiding their identities... yeah, some improvements can be made
- jamiek88 4y agoYeah back before weed was legal in enough states for me to not feel travel limited Insta was the way to find a plug in a new town. They’d often sidechat you onto kik or something like that but initial find was on insta. If I can navigate it the 20 year olds sure can.
- Animats 4y agoIt's New Jersey, home of organized criminals who can't make it in New York City.
- avodonosov 4y agoWhile the cases in the article use discord/telegram, it does not mean the dark web does not have this. And I am sure it will have in the future. Ananymous communication and payment tech create a possibility for such market. And the possibility combined with demand will inevitably turn into reality.
- squarefoot 4y agoThe ones organized on the dark web probably are those we don't hear about.
- layer8 4y agoIt’s to be expected that we hear more about the idiots who get caught.
- watwut 4y agoA lot of organized crime is idiots. Aggressive ones etc, but smarts is not exactly the defining feature. Smart ones gets into business and commit well hidden frauds rather then violence (which tends to attract attention, eventually).
- steve76 4y ago
- yardie 4y agoAlso featured in Westworld, the RICO app [0], an Uber for criming. [0] https://westworld.fandom.com/wiki/RICO https://westworld.fandom.com/wiki/RICO
- yodon 4y ago"The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed" - William Gibson
- nine_k 4y agoAnother reminder that our timeline is following almost every prediction of cyberpunk. Time to revisit some other predictions of it.
- didericis 4y agoOr maybe we should envision a better future and create some new genres. I’m increasingly convinced shared narrative direction is deeper than material and organizational constraints in the direction society moves. Obviously narrative needs to be compatible with material and organizational constraints, but given the overwhelming importance of religion throughout human history in motivating people, I think there’s a lot of compelling evidence that the stories we tell are pretty important. You can’t force positive visions of the future, but I think we can be a lot more open to them than we are currently.
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoBack in my day you’d just pay the neighborhood troublemaker to slash your ex’s tires. My oh my how times have changed!
- tenpies 4y agoIn the present day, the target just gets fatally run over. It won't even make headlines in most cities. And even if the assassin is caught, the "penalty" is a slap in the wrist in most Western cities, and even less in most Eastern cities. Extremely discrete, plausible deniability, and no one bats an eye.
- alliao 4y agoI thought falling out of buildings were easier?
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoI don't know what fantasy world you live in but unless you have substantial evidence that the pedestrian did something wrong making the accident reasonably unavoidable by the driver you're in for a many thousands of dollars and a couple court appearances anywhere in the first word. If there's evidence it was intentional then move the decimal to the right once in both cases. Take your trope and shove it.
- potsandpans 4y agoi've noticed an uptick recently on hn popular threads with this kind of rhetoric. very odd. maybe i'm just more cognizant of it and its always been this way
- reaperducer 4y agoLike so many of today's technical innovations, this is something that has existed for more than a century. Except now it's "but on the internet!"
- suzzer99 4y agoWhat I want to know is what makes a SIM swapper angry enough to do this to his "rival"? Is there some kind of online turf these guys are fighting over? Or is it just personal dislike/escalating online feud over nonsense?
- toomuchtodo 4y agoHumans can be volatile, petty, vengeful, etc over perceived/actual transgression.
- kayodelycaon 4y agoSadly, people have been killed over parking spaces. The amount of anger and violence can be wildly out of proportion to the actual offense.
- emerged 4y ago
- somedude895 4y agoSIM swapping can be hugely profitable, and yeah there are crews fighting over turf. Some insights into the scene and some of the bigger heists explained can be found in this Darknet Diaries episode: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/118/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/118/
- barrysteve 4y agoRoald Dahl had a similar idea in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance_is_Mine_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance_is_Mine_Inc. The plan is simple: Pantaloon is always at the Penguin Club, so they'll show up and ask for him to come out. George will punch him and then escape in the rented 1934 Chevrolet the narrator has waiting.
- dredmorbius 4y agoHrm ... HN's URL parser is stripping the finial stop, which is part of the actual URL and not sentence punctuation. Angle brackets ... actually help in this instance: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance_is_Mine_Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance_is_Mine_Inc.>
- dredmorbius 4y ago... to be clear: I've been adopting bracketed links of late, largely as that's what I'm already doing on Markdown-based sites and documents. This is the first time I've found that it actually confers a practical advantage.
- acheron 4y agoDirty deeds, done dirt cheap
- googlryas 4y agoI'm guessing the pay for violence as a service isn't very good, since McGovern-Allen now has a public defender as his lawyer.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoActually a good thing. This is the gig-economy version of the police.
- Eleison23 4y agoAt first I thought this was the perpetration of remotely turning devices into bricks by garbling firmware, but apparently, actual bricks and broken windows are involved.
- userbinator 4y agoI would not be surprised if the former also becomes commonplace in the future, given how much unfortunate reliance most people have on "smart" devices and Internet communication for their lives.
- Teever 4y agoI was recently derided on hacker news for suggesting that we are quickly coming to a time when people will react to police brutality by crowd sourcing drone strikes on the offending officers. It will be fascinating to see how law enforcement deals with this.
- Msw242 4y agoNah, going after the police is a death wish for all but the biggest baddies As enforcement gets more lax (criminal justice reform, progressive prosecutors, etc), victims and their families will start to turn to these tools to buy retribution. But mercenaries won't go after electeds. Those killers will need to be more bought in, e.g. gang members, cartel militias, etc, with enough power to completely overwhelm govt aligned gangs (like the police)
- Teever 4y agoWhat does 'life sentence' mean to a terminally ill cancer patient who has been fucked over by the system their entire life and is outraged by the latest instance of unpunished police brutality in their community? Sooner or later someone is gonna say fuck it and take out a cop on paid leave with a drone. When that starts to happen enough law enforcement will have to make a tough call because maybe their members will be safer in jail after they've committed crimes instead of walking free on the streets.
- grnmamba 4y agoHow many of those services are honeypots? Probably at least the majority of the discord ones.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoThousands of dollars to throw bricks through windows and slash tires? Anyone who has basic opsec and is willing to cover a decently large area could be rolling in the dough at those prices.