Online Killers (15 page)

All the money was sent via Western Union to Anastasia Ustinova, at Gazetnyi, Pereulok 6, Russia, who promptly collected the cash. She took a small percentage for herself, and wired the
balance to two of her friends, who were sometimes known as Tatiana Ovdina, Tatyana Perlotva, Angelika, Anna Chuprakova, Elena Artemieva Yalena, Katya, Irina Taralanova, Oksana Stolyrenko and Olen Slepova—all residents of Ekaterinburg.

On January 26, with enough money in their pockets to be able to support themselves for several years, Anastasia and her pals hit Robert Johnson again, this time for $200 for therapy. Then, on March 4, she went the full Monty by explaining that she was going back into the hospital for another operation and even more therapy, which would cost $2,000 plus $50 a day until she was discharged.

Robert was now beside himself with anxiety. He informed Anastasia of his intentions to visit her and help her out. After a few days’ silence, during which she no doubt sought advice from her dating agency, she explained to him that he should only bring new U.S. dollars, as credit card facilities were very limited—and this much was true. Fatefully, he told her that he would bring all the required funds and that he would soon be at her bedside.

Asking a friend to look after his children, he remarked, “I feel stupid. It’s like being robbed. But you have seen her picture, she is a beautiful girl. She needs me, and I need to help her out. I am in love.”

Robert then obtained a 30-day tourist visa, numbered TY 2987847, and on March 21, after confirming his itinerary with Anastasia, he took the 10:30 p.m. Aeroflot A310 Airbus flight from London Heathrow to Moscow, arriving at 5:20 a.m. local time. He had booked a round-trip flight to Omsk through Thomas Cook and the passenger manifest shows that he sat in seat C39. On touchdown at Moscow, he passed through immigration
control, caught the free shuttle bus and boarded his connecting flight at the internal airport, Sheremetyevo 1 (SVO 1).

Thereafter, Robert, carrying around $7,000 in new dollar bills and probably the only black man in Siberia, simply vanished.

Of course, for Robert Johnson and his children, this was a terrible tragedy, but at this remove it is probably instructive to remind ourselves of the sums involved. All in all, this single scam netted the dating agency around $11,000, which is the staggering, if not obscene, equivalent of 25 years’ wages to the average Russian. In the West, this equates to about $500,000.

Every year, tens of thousands of Western men travel to Eastern Europe and the Far East in search of true love. They are well catered for because more than a thousand sites advertise their brochures, videos and the “entertainment” events they organize. The phenomenon amply demonstrates how sex-tour companies and certain marriage agencies contribute to the exploitation and objectification of women and women’s bodies by promoting prostitution and pornography.

A few moments ago, we gently questioned the sanity of some of the men who go seeking love on the internet. But, of course, we have done their homework, and when you read the following you may come to the conclusion that men can be even dumber that we initially thought.

One genuine agency did furnish us with correspondence from several male clients, and as we read the letters to a totally honest woman from her prospective suitors we could see how fortunate she was not to pick any of them.

Doctors, surgeons, engineers, property developers, all queued up alongside religious fruitcakes, college dropouts and the lost and the lonely to court this girl. Several of these humanoids had “I am mentally unstable and capable of mass murder”
written all over their faces and throughout the text of their letters, one of which bore an uncanny resemblance to the scribbling hand of the serial killer William Heirens, who issued the challenge “Catch Me Before I Kill Again.”

Yet, strange to relate, interspersed among these desperate refugees from Bedlam, this assortment of knuckle-dragging, body-pierced primates were a few honest, well-motivated men who were sincerely seeking love. Nevertheless, we were amused to see that one guy was generous enough to send the lady a dollar bill and a scrap of lined paper torn from a notebook to help her reply to him.

This man, from Los Angeles, said he was a high-powered engineer, yet his grammar and command of the English language said otherwise, being among the worst we have ever seen. His photo, as he stared at the camera, revealed the face of the type of hoodlum commonly seen in Mafia movies garrotting someone in the back seat of a large, black car. That this man hoped to win the heart of any discerning woman was sad.

Another of our favorite letters was a handwritten note extolling the sender′s own virtues and pledging his undying love for the recipient. He added, enthusiastically but barely legibly, this unforgettable advice: “
Do not trust anyone you meet over the internet. Never meet anyone on railway stations or in bars. They may rape and kill you
.”

Surprisingly, he didn’t follow this sanguine warning with an invitation to meet him under the clock by platform eight.

Of course, there were scores of letters from thoroughly decent guys. All well written and very polite, and it was clear that every one of these men was genuinely besotted with the girl. However, letters like these were outnumbered by those from out-and-out fantasists, many bordering on the lunatic fringe.

A splendid example was a typed letter from a man old enough to be her grandfather. Overweight and bespectacled, he claimed to have the strength and physique of a 20-year-old. “I follow a military exercise regime for elite soldiers,” he wrote.

Here, we thought, was God’s gift to all women. And a pillar of rectitude: he didn’t smoke and not a drop of alcohol had ever passed his lips. He also boasted that he lived on Hawaii, an earthly paradise. To back up this wild assertion, he sent a postcard of some beautiful Hawaiian scenery, adding that his house would have been clearly visible were it not for the fact that it was hidden just behind the clump of lush, green trees in the distance. On top of that, his CV read like that of a candidate short-listed for the job of Pope.

This model of all the virtues then demonstrated that he was a gifted diplomat by asking his prospective paramour, “How is your economic situation?” Oblivious to the intrusive nature of his enquiry, he further demolished his credibility by asking baldly, “Do you have any mental or physical diseases or problems? Do you smoke, drink, or use drugs?”

What woman wouldn’t melt under such a charm offensive?

At this point, we had intended to move on, but before we do we can’t resist unburdening ourselves of just one more of these lovelorn suitors.

A man of exemplary humility and modesty, “Mike” told this lass he had spent over a year searching the internet for the perfect wife. “I have looked at several thousand pictures and read all the biographies,” he said, adding, “I have researched and sorted until I have narrowed my choices down to nine women, of which you are one that I am writing to.”

A
mere
nine women!
Wasn’t
she a lucky girl! We are talking Russian
Playboy
centerfold material, a woman fluent in four
languages and studying her fifth, Japanese, who wakes one morning to find that Dame Fortune has plucked her from obscurity and made her one of nine women that Mike has chosen as a possible candidate for a wife. She would be walking on air. No doubt he would, generously, sleep with each in turn to aid him with his selection.

Several months later, the thoughtful Mike sent her a second, identical letter, apparently having forgotten the content of his first one. Despite his clumsiness, it was the audacity of the man that appealed to us.

For this we give him credit. No, we will award him first prize!

After all, Mike was, in his own words, “a quite famous French chef.” A man who “became tired of cooking fine food in the classic manner for people who could not taste the difference…” “Romantic and very much an old Knight or gentleman” was his self-effacing description of himself. This man ignorantly assumes Russian women are so naive and stupid that they cannot read between the lines.

Any man who is keen to meet a Russian bride might be interested to learn that one of the Soviet Union’s greatest achievements is education. From being an agrarian society in which literacy was limited to the few in the upper classes, the Russian Federation has developed to achieve a literacy rate of 98 percent, among the best in the world, and truancy is unknown. Modern Russian women are a damn sight brighter than the three Western clowns featured above.

—TED BUNDY, CONVICTED SERIAL KILLER, TO DR. JAMES DOBSON ON THE NIGHT BEFORE HE WAS EXECUTED IN FLORIDA′S ELECTRIC CHAIR

 

 

The internet is a great place to be. Used wisely, with strict controls on which sites are suitable for our children, it can be entertaining, educational and it can bring folk of all races, ethnic groups, religions, pastimes and interests together. And it is now essential for global trade—so indispensable, in fact, that, if the internet collapsed tomorrow, the effect, in fiscal terms, would be a thousand times more devastating than the Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina.

Of course, the internet will not collapse. Segments of its cell-like structure may do so under the onslaught of a virus, but, in its totality, the web cannot fail. It is here to stay, and millions of
people rely on it, almost as much as on the air they breathe and the food they eat.

For good or for bad, the web is the primary means of global communication. It has become a multifaceted god that we all worship. Conversely, there is the Antichrist, and this is what this book is all about.

The journey undertaken throughout this book has been a difficult one, and your authors have arrived at something resembling a conclusion—one that may find favor with many yet receive the disdain of others. But let’s not kid ourselves: access to the unfettered freedom and breadth of the web has produced a cyber environment where those with dark, subconscious desires can explore these impulses and even act them out, where the true seed of evil can propagate into flowers of destruction.

Sadly, the cases we have considered above are just the tip of the iceberg, for what follows will shock even the hardened soul.

An article in the
Wall Street Journal
of Monday, May 3, 2004, stated that, after carrying out a ten-year research study of 1,500 sexual addicts, Dr. Carnes from Texas estimated that about 8 percent of men and about 3 percent of women in the United States are sexually addicted—figures that translate into over 15 million sex addicts.

Citing U.S. Justice Department statistics, it said that in 1998 there were 28,000 X-rated websites, generating a revenue of $925 million in revenue. “Pornography in many forms is invading people’s homes and it is available 24 hours a day,” the article concluded. And the invasion has been quite successful. Only six years later there were ten times as many such websites, generating nearly $9
billion
.

To even start to comprehend the sums involved, you will need to lie down, take a stiff drink or smoke something illegal
about a foot long. Imagine you are in a vault with that amount of money all around you and you are told that you can keep each dollar bill you can initial. Say, too, for the sake of argument that you could initial one dollar bill each second and that you worked without ever stopping. How long do you think it would take to count $9 billion? Go on, take a guess. Twelve weeks? Five years?

Well, starting in 2010, if you initialed a dollar bill every second, you would make $1,000 every 17 minutes. After 12 days’ nonstop effort, you would acquire your first $1 million. So it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million. After 31.7 years you would become a billionaire, and in 2305 you would have counted your last dollar bill.

Reversing the procedure, if today you started handing back the bills one every second, you wouldn’t be destitute until 1715, more than 60 years before the American Revolution began.

One of the ten largest individual buyers of bandwidth in the world is a California-based firm in the adult online industry. Formerly a leading producer of pornographic movies and videos, this company’s profits were multiplied eight times over in the first year it went online. Almost from the outset, e-business, especially when it involved sex, was the place to be. To give you a few examples: at the start of 1995, there were just 200 businesses on the web selling “erotica services” and products, from condoms to pornographic videos. By 1997, it was 14,000. According to Naughty Linx, an online index, in 2004, in excess of eight million sites were selling sex products.

A search for sexual material on Yahoo between August 1995 and August 1996 revealed that in August 1995 the category “Sex” had 391 listings for phone-sex numbers, adult CD-ROMS, X-rated films, adult computer software, live sex videoconferencing,
prostitution tours, escort services and mail-order bride agencies. By August 1996, there were 1,676 listings—a four-fold increase in one year. In 2005, there were 170,000 listings. That is an average of 58 new sites being added each day.

In the U.K., in 2010, there are an estimated 16 million single males. Four in ten of them use a dating service.

These “punters” (British slang for “gamblers,” which accurately characterizes the clients of online dating services) have access to no fewer than 366,000 British online dating agency listings, and Dating Direct alone boast 1.5 million male and female members on their home page. Worldwide, today there are 33 million links to online dating agencies, compared with 13.1 million in March 2003.

 

In the year 2009, according to Nielsen Online and the International Telecommunication Union, 1,734,000,000 people worldwide used the internet frequently—a 380-percent increase over ten years, representing about 29 percent of the earth’s population. Two hundred twenty-seven million Americans have internet access, and 6.5 percent of
all
male internet users are compulsive cyber-sex addicts hooked on porn sites, X-rated chat rooms or other sexual materials online.