These days you use a Facebook app - just tick the friends you want dead. An for an add-on fee, you can have video of the hit sent to your iPhone.

Well that didn't go so well for Hans Reiser, did it?

I thought this was going to be a "how to" guide :(

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The hitmans job in this case was to murder PJ Howards sons (by poisoning them with Ricin apparently) whilst PJ was on holidays in Spain. The hitman was then to travel to Spain and throw PJ over the balcony of the apartment to make it look like suicide, distraught from the news of his two dead sons.

The hitman in question made the mistake of contacting one of the sons that he was supposed to murder, demanding more money to cancel the hit. It was at this point that the son informed the cops

</pedant facts>

I think I'll set myself as a hit-man online (with no intention of actually killing anyone) and see how many muppets can be persuaged to part with their money at an online hit-man store.

What are they going to do, call trading standards to say they paid for someone to be killed and it wasn't done?

hitman's - not hitmans

Yep would agree.

I'd thought about setting up a site with the URL gimmeyourmoney.com with just a paypal donation button a dn bit of text going on about how hard up I was to see how much I raked in (half to charidee of course)

Mind you reminds me of that Bin Liner's boys that thought he could use the same SIM and thus number but change his handet to avoid detection.

Some years ago in the suburbs of Washington, DC, a woman then serving on the county council decided she'd be better off without her husband. This being the days before Google, she got in touch with a fellow whose family had had run-ins with the county over its trash removal service. Despite any inherited hard feelings, he was not about to take part in a murder, and tipped the police.

Fairly standard stuff, you will say. Ah, but some months later yet another fool got in touch with the fellow to try to find a contract killer, and that other fool also ended up in jail.

Just call up Luc Besson. He taught two of the best (Nikita and Leon) all of their tricks.

PS - This guy was loaded? Doesn't that make it "Grosse Point Bank".

And the IRS.

And my wife (who, if I am to believe all these interweb stories is probably using it to finance a hit on me).

And Gary who runs the office football pool.

Clearly, law enforcement is lagging behind the curve here.

i always wanted to be a hitman

ever since i saw Leon and then a little later Gross Pointe Blank

even Assassins makes it seem like a cool job - much better'n sitting on my 'arris all day in front of a computer typing inane comments on El'Reg articles

and now that Wanted is in the cinemas, well that's just it, guns, action, money, and you get to get off with Angelina Jolie! WHY didn't my guidance counsellor at school suggest being a hitman to me when i was young enough to begin training? why did he leave it to Holywood to show me my ideal profession?

$12,700 (ish, going from memory here) for a hit? Amateurs, all of them. If you need a professional hit, and I mean a proper pro as in someone that does it for a living, your best bet is to look for ex-forces people in magazines like Combat 18 - I don't know if this one is still going or not, but there are several around the world, including one in which I advertise.

The contact number changes every week, calls to this number are routed through a minimum of 17 countries along with switching through Skype (for those who know, it takes a while before the phone starts to ring, and the number of countries is specific in order to avoid real time tracking which is stupidly easy) for both parties sakes, and the going rate (with a gaurantee that if caught the person with the weapon will deny all knowledge of who you are) is £15k plus, depending upon the difficulty of the target. I have known of a job which came to around £170k, largely due to the high profile nature of the target, and the sheer level of surveillance and planning required to successfully carry out the hit.

If it is a case of someone you know "knows a guy", walk away, unless the person *you* know happens to be the Teflon Don.. If it is a genuine need for a problem to disappear, check a particular type of magazine. The people are there. If you need them.

AC for obvious reasons

You know, like "The X Factor" but where prospective hitmen compete in showing off their murderous skills and get voted on to see who goes each week. Christ, if they used those fucking awful "winners" of other reality shows as the targets, even I'd watch the show!

Besides which, Simon Cowell seems to be quite good at finding people who can effectively "murder" any song, so the transposition into finding people who can murder others doesn't seem too great.