Teens Arrested in MySpace Extortion Scam 193
An anonymous reader writes "Two New York teens have been arrested after trying to extort $150,000 from the makers of MySpace, the popular online community site." From the article: " MySpace discovered the intrusion earlier this year and blocked it. The Los Angeles-based company also reported the incident to authorities. During the course of the investigation, threats were made that unless $150,000 was paid, new exploit code would be released, according to the statement. By this time, the sting operation had been set up, so instead of meeting with MySpace late last week, the pair from New York met with undercover officers from the U.S. Secret Service and the Los Angeles District Attorney's Bureau of Investigation. "
Smart enough... (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:"They are not teens" (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know if the OP meant it this way, but I took it as a comment on how US society (or at least the media) tries to excuse behavior. Legally, at 18 you're an adult. The term "teen", while technically referring to someone between the ages of 13 and 19, tends to imply "child". So, are you still a child at age 18? What about at age 25? As an example, the local news continually referred to both the shooter and victims of the recent rave killing [seattleweekly.com] here in Seattle as "kids". The shooter was 28 [thestranger.com]. Some of his victims were 21, 22, 26, and 32. Are those "kids"?
Maybe it's a sign of our aging baby boomer population, who see anybody younger than them as kids. Maybe it's because of our economic climate that keeps "kids" in university until 25 or 26 (and then only graduating with a Bachelor's degree, not even a Master's or better). Maybe it's our "take no responsibility" society that wants to blame anything but the person (thus the person is a "kid" who didn't know any better, rather than an adult). Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it.
Re:Have these guys never seen a movie? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:WTF (Score:3, Interesting)
Not Entrapment: You are a drug dealer, you see an undercover officer (UC) and walk up to them and offer to sell them drugs, without them asking you anything. They then make a buy and bust you. All well and legal, since you made the offer, clearly you were willing to sell drugs with no encouragement.
Entrapment: You are walking down the street doing whatever and a UC comes up to you and asks for drugs, you say you don't have any, they offer you a bunch of money for them. You decide the money is enough you'll call a friend who's in to that and get the drugs. They then arrest you. That illegal and will get thrown out, since they encouraged you to commit the crime, you wouldn't have done it of your own volition.
Here, it's clearly not entrapment. As soon as the kids made the demand for money, the police were perfectly justified in making counter offers to trick them in. The kids already broke the law making the demand, entrapment isn't an issue.