It has been an odd week following the Social Media Crime Blotter. There was the piece posted late last night on Facebook's $5,000 lawsuit over a presumably failed hacking attempt, and a whole host of the usual MySpace and YouTube crimes.
These are standard fare, and they mostly involve drunkenness and minors. They usually involve people boasting about or unnecessarily documenting their illicit activities. This week, though, wasn't typical criminal activity in any sense of the word.
Without further delay - to the crime!
In this issue:
Heavily armed cops raid IM chat
MySpace video of child smoking lands woman in jail
Wikipedia COO shot her boyfriend in the chest
Have You Tried Swatting, Yet?
Next, you ring up the local police department, and make a crazy claim. The nuttier, the better. Make sure to allege that there is high powered assault rifles or machine guns involved, or failing that, some sort of home-made explosive.
Lastly, and this is key, give them you're buddy's address *while you're still chatting with them.* Make sure you ask them periodically if they hear sirens.
This exact scenario played out (more or less) with the Salinas Police Department last Wednesday. The police evacuated a mother and daughter from the rube's apartment to take down the unsuspecting 15-year-old boy.
It is turning into a national past-time, though, not isolated to Salinas. SWATters in Chicago and Orange County, California have all faced fraud and false criminal reporting charges, and face five years in prison and fines over $250,000 per offense.
Still, if Andy Kaufman is your hero, definitely the most avant guarde prank to be pulling right now.
[via The Register]
Kids With Cigarettes Are Funny, Right?
A woman was arrested Sunday and charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor after she posted a video on MySpace of a two-year-old child attempting to smoke.
Sandra B. Venery, 33, of the 4500 block of Hudgins Drive in Virginia Beach, is being held without bond at the Virginia Beach Correctional Center.
Police said that the video also showed the child using profanity at the prompting of an adult female family member. The depiction of smoking and use of profanity apparently was modeled after a popular comedy skit the suspect had seen on television.
As an interesting sidenote, the video has been taken down from MySpace, thus making Sandra's defeat complete. Interestingly enough, if you do a Google Image search for "kid smoking", the number of hits are preposterous. I had no idea that there were that many kids under the age of 10 smoking that heavily.
More importantly, though: do we blame this all on Joe Kamel or is this something we can pin on Beavis and Butthead?
[via DailyPress.com]
Don't Screw With the Wiki Crew. Biatch.
ValleyWag remarked earlier this week on the irony that the organization that acts as repository for a measurable percentage of all human knowledge had no "documentation of any criminal record on Carolyn Doran's part at all." They went on to ask how long it would take "until somebody creates a Wikipedia entry and uploads Doran's legal docs?"
A cursory glance at the Wiki page before penning this article showed that Wikimedia wants no such help. The document has been locked, so as to prevent any editing.
[via The Register]