When Bob Innes purchased the website domain name “rentahitman.com” in 2005, he did so in order to promote his website traffic analysis services.
At the time, Bob was in business school and “hit” was a reference to clicks entering a customer’s website.
During the first five years, his domain name did not take off.
But in 2010, to his surprise, he started receiving messages from people who wanted certain people killed, he told The Guardian.
Innes discovered a message from a woman named Helen, who claimed she was stranded in Canada and lost her passport.
In her post, Helen said she wanted three members of her family in the UK to be murdered for “emptying him of his father’s inheritance”.
(Image: Getty Images / fStop)
While Innes initially ignored the message, she persisted, even sending him the names, addresses, and other corroborating information of the people she wanted dead.
It made him take action, so he pretended to be an assassin and responded to her post.
He replied, “Do you still need our help? We can put you in touch with a field agent.
Within hours, Helen sent him his legal name, location and phone number, which he then reported to the police.
(Image: Getty Images)
“I really felt that the lives of three people were in danger,” he said.
After this first incident, Innes decided to keep the website, even filling it with jokes and clues to show that it wasn’t the real deal.
The website is filled with cheeky jokes describing its services as a “point-and-click solution”.
It boasts of providing services to children and assures readers that they are protected by the “Hitman Information Privacy Protection Act (HIPPA)”.
Despite these jokes, Innes finds himself inundated with demands for assassins, which he ends up handing over to the police.
The site was designed as a trap for those seeking to commit such crimes, claiming that it can “make any troubled relationship go away.”
(Image: Michigan State Police)
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A fake review on the bogus site – which now gained worldwide notoriety thanks to Ms. Wein’s act – said: “I caught my husband cheating on the babysitter and resolved after a free relationship consultation public.
“I’m single again and looking to mingle.”
According to Innes, he saved the lives of nearly 150 people thanks to this website.
Earlier this week, a woman was convicted of attempting to hire an assassin to kill her husband through this website.
Wendy Wein, 52, used the “Rent-A-Hitman Service Request Form” on the rentahitman.com joke website to search for someone to murder her husband – who has not been named.
The website owner forwarded his request directly to the police, according to local reports.
After agreeing to pay a fictitious fee of £ 3,500 and a bond of £ 100, an undercover police officer then posed as a murderer, arranging to meet the woman to discuss the murder.
She was subsequently charged with solicitation to commit murder and unlawful use of a computer to facilitate a crime.
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