RENT A HITMAN PARODY WEBSITE AT CENTER OF RECENT MILITARY SCANDAL
Performative jokes can be a mixed bag. There are several of you reading this right now who've been kicked out of class in high school or reprimanded later on in life, because of an incident of two in which a joke landed you in hot water. Ferris Bueller once lamented that you could “never go too far,” however, this doesn’t often translate outside of an ‘80s John Hughes cinematic masterpiece. Nobody knows this today more than Josiah Garcia. After going ahead with an alleged joke by applying to an application on the well-renown satire website Rent a Hitman, Garcia will be defending himself in a court of law rather than defining the U.S. on the battlefield for the foreseeable future. But was it really a joke for Garcia at all? Related: The Complicated Necessity of (Redacted) Documents in the Military
What is Rent a Hitman?
In 2005, Bob Innes bought the URL RentAHitman.com as a potential site for an information technology (IT) company. He and his friends established the website during an IT training program. The URL was meant for a company that would test online security measures or optimize web traffic. Innes collected domain names with the intention of selling them later for a profit. After graduating in 2005, the team went their separate ways without forming a company, and Innes kept the domain name before attempting to sell it but received no offers. He maintained the site, hoping to sell it in the future, but the company was never set up. Despite this, Innes kept the site. In 2008, upon checking the site's email inbox, he found as many as 300 messages requesting contract-killing services, but he dismissed them as unserious. However, this would change In 2010, after receiving a serious request from a woman in Canada that he reported to the police. The woman was convicted for soliciting murder via RentAHitman.com, the satirical website that claims to offer contract killers for hire. Again, of the 250 to 300 messages, most were joking, but the particular request from a Canadian woman named Helen requesting the murders of three of her family members in the U.K. after claiming to have been cheated out of an inheritance raised red flags. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiPajuyET1w Following the incident, Innes decided to lean into the product he had in front of him. He rebranded the website as a fake contract-killing agency after the inheritance incident. The website was filled with jokes and clues that it was not legitimate. Innes used the name "Guido Fanelli" and added a "service request form" in 2014 that required users to provide their personal details. Serious requests, particularly those involving minors, are provided to police. Now, law enforcement will need to pick through the severity of the request Josiah Garcia has made to Rent-a-Hitman and the aftermath that's unveiling before our eyes. Suggested Read: File a FOIA Request & See What the Gov’t Has on You
Josiah Garcia Has Made a Terrible Mistake
Air National Guardsman Josiah Garcia used RentAHitman.com to respond to an online ad for a mission. The sincerity of his response is at the core of the debate, but it appears to some that he believed the ad to be a legitimate opportunity. Though Garcia has stated that it was a joke, throughout the application process, Garcia cited experience that qualified him to conduct such work, using his military experience to prove he was up for the job. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag77hrORNjg Among the examples that some say prove his sincerity are items like his expressed willingness and capability to torture people, including cutting off the appendages of victims. Should he be convicted, Garcia is facing as many as 10 years in prison. Again, this is not the first time that the parody website has landed applicants in hot water. By now, it’s almost amazing that anyone would fall for or engage with the website in even a half-serious manner. Yet, here we are. Obviously, the situation creates an embarrassing anecdote for the U.S. military, at the very least. Time will tell whether or not there will be any lasting reputational effects. The investigation is ongoing, and even if not looking great, Garcia is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Is Rent a Hitman Real?
Yes, the website is real. But no, you can’t hire an actual hitman from it. For obvious reasons, this is illegal, immoral, and generally frowned upon. If you are considering a hitman, you should probably be looking into counseling instead. Based on the estimate that approximately 10% of inquiries to RentAHitman.com are legitimate threats, Innes believes that by providing the information which leads to police investigations, he has saved at least around 150 lives over the lifetime of the website. The site has been connected to several arrests, including a man who was convicted in 2019 for solicitation of murder and a woman who was convicted in 2020 for using the site to arrange her ex-husband's killing. You can now add the 2023 arrest of 21-year-old Air National Guardsman Josiah Garcia from Tennessee because of Rent a Hitman to that list as well. Read Next: Discord Leaks Over Ukraine Continue to Puzzle Officials, Air National Guardsman Arrested