Photo:Getty Images
Getty Images
A 17-year-old girl was arrested in Iowa last week after allegedly trying to hire a hitman online and asking them to kill a 7-year-old child.
Police say the girl used the website RentAHitman.com without realizing the site was a parody, according toThe Des Moines Register. The 17-year-old suspect, who is now in custody, had filled out a request on the website and included the name of the child, where the child lived and where the child could be found.
The owner of the parody website then contacted local police, who arrested the girl after an undercover officer contacted her posing as the supposed hitman.
Neither the child nor the child’s family were aware of an impending threat,according to CBS, which reports investigators found evidence on the teenager’s phone that indicates the there was a credible threat to the 7-year-old’s life.
PEOPLE reached out to the Storm Lake Police Department for more information but did not receive a reply.Bob Innes, the owner of RentAHitman.com,told PEOPLE last yearthat he often checks the website’s requests and turns over information to local police departments throughout the country.
Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up forPEOPLE’s free True Crime newsletterfor breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.The IT programmer originally used the domain name as a tongue-in-cheek way to advertise a computer security company he and his college friends were starting up. But the company never took off and Innes forgot about the site. When he checked the site’s email inbox years later, he discovered criminals-in-the-making reaching out to either hire hitmen or to learn how to become one themselves.Innes has since used the domain name to turn over suspicious requests to local police. Such was the case last week when he informed Storm Lake police about the 17-year-old girl’s request.“There’s a lot of beneficial information that can be shared to tell adults and children that the internet is certainly not a safe place,” Innes told PEOPLE last year. “There are bad people out there.”
source: people.com
