Tag: CRIMEANDPUNISHMENT

By now, everyone is wholly familiar with the cautionary tales of unwitting (or dimwitted) folks who get fired, arrested, or publicly chastised because of incriminating photos or comments that appear on the Web. But, an increasing number of people are also feeling the repercussions of being the tattle-tale or rumormonger in those scenarios. The Wall Street Journal investigated the phenomenon it ...

The Internet can be a dangerous place -- especially when the shady characters you meet online follow you into real life. Back in 2008, 21-year old David Heiss became obsessed with Joanna Witton, 21, after numerous interactions with her on a site that she ran with her 20-year-old boyfriend Matthew Pyke. According to the BBC, Heiss, who lives in Limburg, Germany, tracked the couple to their ...

This weekend in Worcester, Massachusetts, local police arrested 50 people in a prostitution sting, Worcester's Telegram reports. Taking place in an area hotel from Thursday night to Saturday morning, the sting's success was largely contingent on Craigslist's 'Casual Encounters' section, where police had posted false solicitations and offers of prostitution. This is only the latest in a recent ...

When consultant jobs are few and far between, you have to make the most out of the ones you can get. Take, for instance, Zeldon Morris. When the Family First Credit Union in Orem, Utah hired the Provo man to fix some bugs in a recent computer upgrade, Morris decided to take some liberties with a few of the accounts, according to Provo's Daily Herald. According to recently submitted court ...

If you plan on visiting the Tampa Bay area, you may want to try harder than usual not to be arrested. A new mug shot Web site is putting perps front and center, and we're not just talking photos. Tampa Bay Mug Shots is a new site devoted to criminal activity in the Florida counties of Pinellas, Hillsborough, and Pasco. The main feature of the site is a scrollable line of mug shots at the top of ...

Many pet owners find it hard to leave their loved ones at home when they head to the office, but offices can be uptight, and few make room for four-legged assistants. So, a growing number of owners are turning to webcams to keep track of their canine or feline companions, and one such owner caught something rather unexpected -- two burglars trying to make off with her flat screen TV, a safe, and ...

If you are addicted to your 'CrackBerry,' or just generally love being plugged-in at all times, you may want to tone it down a bit on your next trip to India. India's upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha, has witnessed an explosion of cell phone use in the country (277 million users to date) and they are not particularly thrilled by it. According to the Times of London, the Committee on ...

Most of us have embarrassingly pocket-dialed someone before, and some have even accidentally hit the emergency call button on our cell phones, but a Peoria, Arizona teenager allegedly took dialing mishaps, and stupidity, to a whole new level last week. The 16-year-old delinquent apparently broke into a car, boosted its stereo and a Cricket cell phone, and then met up with fellow rapscallions to ...

Often, when a woman accuses a man of rape, there's little proof beyond he-said-she-said, and, in many cases, that's enough to put the man away, whether he's guilty or not. The onus definitely falls upon the accused to prove his innocence in most of these cases. In the recent case of Gary Taylor, a 41-year-old businessman, the defendant was able to prove his innocence, according to a report in the ...

You've always been taught that crime doesn't pay, but we were a little distressed to learn that, apparently, honesty doesn't either. Paul Leicester, a college student in Merseyside, UK, was out celebrating his 18th birthday last month when he came across a mobile phone on the ground. Leicester picked up the handset and called the last number dialed, which belonged to a friend of the owner, and ...

Al Chapman never saw a need for Facebook, until it helped to nab the thief who had robbed him. Now Chapman, owner of a moving company in Brunswick, Georgia, regularly checks the site from his cell phone. Who could blame him for the change of heart? When Chapman came home last week to find two of his work trucks looted, he contacted police while his wife hit Facebook. She sent a message out to ...

We've talked about the business of iPod repair and how a number of industrious people in NYC opened businesses fixing music players. The trend has spread since and, naturally, one of these repairmen saw fit to use his talents for for more than the joy of helping customers -- he was arrested for tricking Apple into sending him 9,000 Shuffle players. Nicholas Woodhams, 23, from Kalamazoo, ...

Earlier this week, an Arkansas juror potentially jeopardized a judge's ruling by sending tweets from the courtroom, and in Pennsylvania, another juror created rumblings of a mistrial by twittering and posting Facebook updates during the trial. We think this must be a trend, because we've just come across this New York Times story about an incident in Florida involving, not one, but nine of the ...

With so much trouble stirred up by improper (read: idiotic) use of Facebook and Myspace pages, it was only a matter of time before Twitter stirred up some drama. Earlier this week, a technology blogger, distracted while Twittering with LeVar Burton, didn't realize that part of his (i.e. the blogger's) home was burning down. Now, a Twitter controversy has erupted in a Fayetteville, Arkansas ...

We've covered teens being fired, firemen being reprimanded, people being arrested, and politicians getting in hot water all for comments or photos displayed on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Vaughan Ettienne, a New York policeman, recently discovered yet another repercussion of unadulterated comments on his profile pages: a suspect's acquittal in court. After pursuing a ...