Craigslist is a huge internet website that people use to buy and sell all kinds of products and services. According to the "best of Craig's list," people have advertised a couch shaped like a vagina, have looked for the hot-selling Wii, and have even posted an ad that read, "Wanted: Heart Surgeon for ½ Day Gig--No Pay." People find apartments, roommates, and romance on the site. My son found his job on a listing there. If you think you can find anything and everything on craigslist, you're not alone. A 49-year-old woman supposedly tried to use the site to find an assassin to kill the wife of a man with whom she had had an affair. It turns out that this is not only against the law, but it's against craigslist's rules.
Craig Newmark started craigslist as an e-mail list for friends and coworkers in 1995. It was a way for them to be aware of events going on in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1999, Craig quit his job to work full time on craigslist. The "bio" about Craig says that he no longer runs the website, but now works as a customer service representative. That's almost as shocking as the story about the woman looking for a hit man. After all, if you didn't need a job, why would anyone want to be the person on the other end of the phone when people call up to complain? I wonder if he pretends to be a computer-generated voice, saying things like, "Press 1 for English, press 2 if your computer crashed because of our site, press 3 if you're tired of listening to computer voices like this one."
How successful is craigslist? Over the past 12 years, 550 million ads have been posted there. There are more than 9 billion page views per month. More than 30 million people use the site each month. If just half of those people would read my column regularly, I could afford a couch shaped like any body part I want.
Anyway, the FBI caught up with Ann Marie Linscott who allegedly was using the site to look for a killer. Ann Marie didn't come out and say, "Hit man Wanted To Kill Woman Who's With The Man I Love." Instead, she advertised for somebody to perform a "freelance job." Only after people responded to this ad, did she email her true intentions to them. That's when she offered them $5,000 to "eradicate a female."
Fortunately, the proper authorities were called before anyone got hurt. Craigslist has strict rules about trying to use the site for activities such as selling child pornography, weapons, and counterfeit currency. Also, you can forget about it if you're thinking about going on the site to try to sell that extra kidney of yours. I couldn't find "murder" on their list of prohibited postings, but I think we can assume a site which bans fireworks sale and stud breeding, also doesn't approve of killing people.
When someone commits a crime that seems bound to lead to their arrest, we often ask, "How could they be so stupid?" I guess people just don't think things through, and they believe that they won't get caught. There will be people trying to get away with crimes as long as there are things like greed, lust, and lightweight DVD players.
The internet has produced all kinds of crimes that we couldn't have imagined 20 years ago. We've come to accept that identity theft and financial scams are just part of the web. But I never thought that the internet would be used to advertise for a murderer on the same site where you can buy a dishwasher.
It's obvious that the internet and its uses are growing at an alarming rate. I'm sure it's hard for law enforcement to keep up with every new law-breaking idea. That's why all of us have to be cautious when it comes to what we get involved with using our computers. In case you're wondering how the accused woman met the married man she had the affair with - they met online.