We’ve all seen our fair share of criminal behavior online. From people fencing stolen merchandise on Craig’s List or eBay, to someone live streaming a criminal act on Facebook. If you’ve done something wrong, find a good criminal lawyer and don’t compound the error by engaging in any of the following activity. Here’s a list for us of the Dumbest Things Criminals Do Online….
Stop Talking
I’m serious, stop talking about what you did, to anyone, period. This includes bragging about the crime on social media. Do you think police won’t search your social media posts if they suspect you of something? They will, I promise you. Because of my profession I know many police officers, including detectives, and they have countless stories of finding criminals by doing searches online. Also, do you think other people won’t rat you out once they see incriminating posts online? Sorry, I guarantee you someone who as access to your social medial profile doesn’t like you and won’t hesitate to drop a dime. There’s nothing to be proud of here, criminal behavior is not something you should boast about or even talk about. The types of criminals who do talk about their crimes – those are the ones behind bars.
Smart Phones
These wonderful devices are your enemy if you’ve committed a crime. Why? They’re a walking talking trove of evidence about where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing. These include GPS information about where you’ve been traveling and where you’ve made phone calls as well as providing police with time and date stamps on pictures you may have taken or texts you may have sent. And they are so common most of us forget we even have them on our person.
Posting During Crimes
I can’t believe I even have to write this but countless fools have been caught because they’ve actually posted on Facebook (or other social media) while they were committing crimes? Don’t you have enough to do actually committing the offense that you have free time to socialize? A close second to this behavior would be using stolen merchandise to post on social media. Each computer has a host of “metadata” that uploads when you send something out into the ether, including the IP and MAC address of the computer it came from, essentially handing the police a signed confession that it was you using that stolen laptop. Good luck convincing the authorities you were never there.
Googling How To Commit a Crime
There is only one true way of erasing your behavior on a computer, take it from someone whose job it is to guarantee no one ever sees what’s been on a hard drive. To do this you have to literally overwrite every sector on a hard drive with garbage data (usually just 1s and 0s), and then repeat the same process three times. This is the Department of Defense standard for wiping a hard drive. If you haven’t done this the police can and will reconstruct your Google searches, incriminating documents and emails, and a host of other data (including those pictures you didn’t want anyone to see). So trust me, if you’ve committed a crime and Googled about it, the police will find out about it.
The best policy of course is to not commit crimes. However, if you’ve made a mistake follow the tips above and quickly find a good criminal lawyer.