IRL Com recruits teens for real-life stabbings, shootings, FBI warns A subset of an online group that recruits children and teens for contract shootings, kidnappings, and other real-life violent crimes poses a growing threat to youth, according to the FBI. In a Wednesday alert, the federal cops warned that In Real Life (IRL) Com, a subset of the underground cybercrime crew The Com offering swat …
..maybe if the US police didn't go into situations like a military group trying to clear a house full of enemy soldiers, then swatting wouldn't be an issue.
But no, best go in, shoot the place up and if you kill innocent people, who cares, it's not like you'll be held accountable.
Surely this is not the government working hand in hand with big corporations to enslave swathes of society, remove aspiration and prosperity to realise fantasies of rich control freaks.
If young people see no future, then what do they expect is going to happen? Are they going to obediently work in a warehouse or franchise or are they going to say "F*ck it"?
FBI and the other clown agencies better should pull their heads out of their ar*es.
You really ought to do something about your monomania. Just as the article about North Korean scam workers wasn't about the level of payment for the average worker, nor is the choice from some people who, by the article's description, probably aren't of working age yet to commit violence about the level of payment for the average worker. There are problems in life that aren't about wage rates, and even when a connection can be made, there are reasons to consider both of those rather than jumping straight for your favorite. The result of taking this sharp turn on every article is that any points you have that are actually convincing get drowned out by the "what is that guy's deal" thought that goes through my head every time you divert, and how not just I found your argument so unrelated that you came off as a supporter of North Korea last time, even though I still think that's not what you were trying to say.
You're missing the forest for the trees. I'm not excusing violence - I'm pointing out its root. When a system traps people in precarity, strips them of agency, and offers them zero prospects beyond wage slavery or debt, some will turn to chaos. That’s predictable human behaviour.
You say “not everything is about wages.” True. It’s about power, purpose, and belonging - all of which have been gutted by a system optimised for extraction, not prosperity. If you think teenagers committing contract violence has no relation to the socioeconomic environment they’ve grown up in, you’re the one being reductive.
And if your takeaway from a structural critique is “this guy must support North Korea,” you’ve told on yourself...
And you see everything as a forest, even if it's a single tree in a field. The people committing this crime may have lots of reasons to do it, but some of them are not poor, not revolutionaries, they think it's fun. Swatting was and probably still is popular among videogaming communities by people, often very young ones, who did not realize what would be the result of their actions. It was basically just a higher-end violent prank because the people carrying it out didn't consider how possible it is to end in murder, and that worked a lot of the time because, although some of these events do end in deaths, a lot of them just have everyone in the house and probably most of the neighbors absolutely terrified, property damage, but no deaths or injuries. People who think of this as a prank are not doing it out of desperation for the job they don't think they'll be able to get, and many of them are at the stage in life where they're not thinking much about their future plans.
You’re shifting the goalposts. Of course not every offender fits a single profile. No one said they did. But look deeper: many of these networks recruit vulnerable kids, often from bleak backgrounds, who then get pulled into crime and sometimes profit from it - which doesn’t erase where they came from. Sure, some hangers-on are just adrenaline junkies, but they’ve always existed. That’s not the point.
The real issue is a system that steadily removes hope and agency for large swathes of the population, then acts shocked when some of them go feral. Focusing only on individual thrill-seekers is like diagnosing smoke and ignoring the fire.
Only the low-level people, the ones stupid enough to go commit the violence themselves, need to have their names and addresses stored in a database. They likely provided that information so the people with money could mail them things, whether that's payments or supplies. As long as the high-level people don't broadcast that database, the rest of the people won't be easily identified. Just because one person has terrible opsec doesn't mean everyone does, and in this situation, the person who logically should have the best opsec is probably the person with the database you want to see leaked, so it's not that surprising that it hasn't been. As crime that starts online goes, this kind of operation is one of the most dangerous to the people carrying it out, so we're not dealing with the smartest people except, possibly, for the anonymous ones directing it from afar and not getting themselves in danger when they want someone hurt.
It's far more likely that any given member's identity is known only to their immediate "handler" within the organization (the one who recruits them), who's also responsible for assigning them tasks and motivating them to comply by any means necessary (including swatting and other threats). That person has the same relationship with their handler/supervisor, and so on.
All types of information, from members to targets to "clients", tends be highly compartmentalized in these sort of groups. Nothing is ever centralized. That's what makes them so hard to wipe out fully. If they arrest 7 members, odds are good that's one or two low-level organizers, plus the 5-6 people they'd brought in — and except for the ringleader(s), none of them have ever been in contact with anyone in the larger organization.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
