Spoof hitman website ‘rentahitman.com’ helps catch almost 150 would-be murderers

A man who accidentally started an assassin-hiring website has saved the lives of nearly 150 people by handing their names over to the police for trying to vanquish their enemies.

Sitting at her computer, Wendy Lynn Wein typed in the name of a website she thought would be useful.

Scrolling down, she clicked on a page full of glowing testimonials from happy customers and decided to place an order.

But this was no ordinary online shopping – Wein, 52, was on rentahitman.com looking for somebody to kill her estranged husband, who she claimed had stolen money from her.

“I wondered if you could help with this issue and the best way to handle it,” the Michigan woman typed in July 2020.

She was asking the website’s founder “Guido Fanelli” to put her in touch with a “field operative” who could carry out the hit instead of her.

She offered him a sum of $5,000 if the murder was successful.

In fact, Wein had actually used a joke website and instead of being hooked up with a hitman, her details were handed over to the police.

She is now facing nine years in jail after pleading to charges of solicitation of murder and using a computer to commit a crime. Wein will be sentenced on Thursday.

“Guido Fanelli” is actually Bob Innes, a 54-year-old businessman who bought the domain name rentahitman.com as a play on words for his internet traffic analysis company.

He paid less than $10 for it in 2005.

Little did he know that 16 years on, this Californian would have helped save the lives of 150 people who were the would-be targets of assassinations.

Bob’s initial internet business was a flop, but in 2008, the dad-of-three checked the site’s analytics while bored and was shocked to see it was somehow attracting 6,000 visitors per month.

He kept it, thinking somebody might buy the domain name from him, then two years on he received his first “client”, a British woman in Ontario, Canada called Helen Kaplan.

The 44-year-old had emailed to say she was stranded in Canada after losing her passport and wanted to have three family members in the UK killed for “screwing her” out of her father’s inheritance.

Initially, Bob didn’t respond, but Helen persisted, offering money and sending the names and addresses of those she wanted dead.

Bob says he felt “compelled” to act, posing as Guido and pretending to have the capability to organise a hit.

“Do you still require our assistance? We can place you in contact with a Field Operative,” he replied.

Hours later, Bob had the name, location and phone number of a woman he thought might be in serious danger, and he turned Kaplan into the police. She was jailed for the crimes.

This led Bob to have the idea of keeping rentahitman.com running to trap potential criminals.

People would try and book an assassin through his site and he would give them a 24-hour cooling-off period before passing their details on to the police.

Bob says: “I’ll ask two simple questions, ‘Do you still require our services?’ and, ‘Would you like me to place you in contact with a field operative for a free consultation?’

“If they don’t answer, they get a free pass. But if they do then it’s game on.

“And if the solicitation comes from a minor, if it involves any kind of abuse or any kind of school setting, then it’s an automatic report. I don’t play around with those. There are too many school shootings.”

After receiving details from Bob, cops then pose as one of Guido’s assassins and arrange a meeting with the person looking to set up a hit, before arresting them once they had enough evidence.

“I truly felt that three people’s lives were in jeopardy,” he recalls of the Kaplan case.

“Shortly afterwards I changed the website and created a contact form. I felt like there was a real danger with some of those requests and I had to do something, otherwise, I was afraid these people would find someone else to do the job.

“So far, nearly 150 lives have been saved as a direct result of the site.”

Many of the messages Bob receives through his impromptu sleuthing are hoaxes.

But he says about 10% have turned into legitimate investigations in the US, the UK, Canada and Indonesia.

These have included the 2018 case of Devon Fauber who told an officer posing as a hitman that he wanted to kill three relatives so he could take care of his ex-girlfriend’s three-year-old daughter.

The 21-year-old fast-food worker from Virginia had submitted a form to rentahitman.com asking Guido to sort out a hit on his ex, her mother and her stepfather.

In his chilling message, Fauber added: “Make sure you kill them and don’t kill the baby. I need it done, I want the baby with me.” He was later sentenced to 10 years in prison.

And in February of the same year, Bob’s site led to the conviction of Kansas woman Danae Wright, 39, who also asked for three people to be murdered through the website.

There was also the shocking case of New Mexico student Colton Beall, 18, who was sentenced in May 2020 after admitting he tried to have two 16-year-old girls killed.

He had told Bob he wanted them dead as part of a sexual fetish he had for strangulation and was given five years’ probation for his crime.

Other terrifying requests Bob has received include people asking him to set up gas blasts, carry out child abductions and remove people’s body parts, including eyes and limbs.

In the years since rentahitman.com was set up, the secretive dark web has become the place most people looking to hire a hitman have gone to.

So it’s surprising people still use Bob’s site, especially since he has purposefully filled it with jokes and clues that it’s not for real.

Rentahitman.com claims to have won industry awards and that it complies with HIPPA, the “Hitmen Information Privacy and Protection Act of 1964”.

There are also bogus testimonials, including from one woman who says she’s “ready to mingle” after having her cheating husband bumped off.

Bob says of people who have fallen for the site: “I thought nobody can be that stupid, and boy have I been proven wrong.

“These people, whoever they are, they see HIPAA, they think privacy. So they feel compelled to leave their real information – names, address, where the intended target is.”

But despite his amazing crime-stopping work, Bob insists he’s “no big superhero” and that it is a sheer fluke that he has become someone with the power to save lives.

And Bob says he has no intention of closing his site down just yet.

He adds: “As long as these emails keep coming in, I will continue to act.”

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