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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26703 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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So some of you may have seen the latest round of pizzagate type posts on twitter revolving around Etsy digital images. It started with someone bringing back the Wayfair cabinets story from 2020, here's a "fact checking" post from the time as a reminder https://twitter.com/mediawise/status/1281711438462177281. Essentially the idea was that Wayfair were selling cabinets with the names of children on missing person lists for very large amounts of money, so really they must have been selling kids. Ergo, in plain sight paedophile ring.

Anyway, the latest round focuses on Etsy. There are a variety of 'digital images' of foods/children that are selling for $1000-$90,000 such as here: https://twitter.com/littleapostate/status/1734207558905106462 or https://twitter.com/ShadowofEzra/status/1734368320441192593/photo/1. It doesn't help that a lot of them are pizza related, so obviously catnip to Pizzagate believers- presumably this isn't coincidental.

So what is going on here? Assuming prima facie that these aren't children being sold via online distributor stores this leaves four main options:

  1. "Fake news"/trolling
  2. A scam
  3. Money laundering/tax evasion
  4. Illicit sales of something other than children

1- The listings were real, you can follow links through to some of them (or see them on webarchive). But that doesn't preclude the possibility that they were made by the people whipping up hysteria or engagement baiting, or just trolling the internet nut jobs. All very possible options

The other options are much more interesting.

Scams

On the face of it, there are a few very funny scamming possibilities:

  • It could be a scam targeted at pizzagate truthers. They try and buy the $3000 digital pizza. png to see whether they get a child delivered, and in fact get a pizza picture. Scammer makes free money.

  • It could be a scam targeted at paedophiles! This would be funnier, as above but believe it and want to try and get a child delivered.

  • It could be some kind of weird automation thing, are there algorithms that buy things on Etsy?

  • It could just be trying to prey on people whom make a mistake or kids. But you could presumably just get a refund, so seems unlikely.

Only the first option really makes sense of these imo, if even one brainrotted internet person decided to fork out thousands to expose the Etsy paedophile ring you'd be laughing to the bank. Again though, I don't know how refunds work, so maybe they could just embarrassingly claim it back.

Money laundering

Fairly self explanatory- maybe the customer base is just other accounts set up by the same organisation, where the flows/receipts from Etsy can contribute to the image of a legitimate commercial enterprise. It might help evade certain checks, but surely the FBI or whoever would see something like this a mile off if it was genuinely an attempt to launder funds. Is there a possibility it's to do with capital controls from a foreign country?

Other illicit sales

There is also the possibility that they're selling another product, like drugs or weapons or so on. But this doesn't make a lot of sense either- why wouldn't they make the sales using the dark net or offline?

I lean strongest towards it being some kind of trolling/scamming effort by non-Pizzagaters, but the possibility that it is a false flag to whip up engagement is also possible.

Is it possible anyone could actually believe that anyone would go through the extreme risk and effort to abduct a child and transport them for 4 figures? It doesn't even pass the smell test.

I've found the "official" conspiracy to be rather unlikely. I don't discount the possibility that they might be trafficking kidnapped children out of hand, but I don't see any rational way for any of this stuff to be involved in such an operation.

Presuming some operation along those lines is actually taking place, what's the point of posting an ad for such a thing, however disguised, on any public site? Surely you wouldn't dare make a delivery of such a thing, however that actually works, to just any random internet buyer. Buyers would have to be highly vetted and trusted. And any such buyers would probably want a lot more information about what they're buying and who they're buying it from than just a name that may or may not match up with a particular reported kidnapping victim and a semi-anonymous eBay or Etsy seller.

So there would have to be some other "real" marketplace where highly vetted buyers and sellers meet, with some way of inspecting the goods, reputations, etc and some way to arrange for deliveries. But if you have such a marketplace in place, what's the point of setting up these weird Wayfair, eBay, Etsy, etc items? Especially in public where any random yahoo can discover them and wonder what the heck is going on. Which gets us back to the old and strange point of it seeming far too much like a conspiracy to actually be one because any real conspiracy wouldn't be that obvious.

Possibly money laundering is the idea, possibly for such a scheme, but if you can manage to kidnap children in bulk, transport them around, and sell them to a market of buyers as an ongoing business without getting busted, surely you can figure out better ways to launder your money. If they have some kind of special juice with the Feds to get away with such a thing, why such a mickey-mouse level money laundering scheme?

Presuming some operation along those lines is actually taking place, what's the point of posting an ad for such a thing, however disguised, on any public site? Surely you wouldn't dare make a delivery of such a thing, however that actually works, to just any random internet buyer.

This problem is actually extremely easy to fix. Assuming there is a pedophile ring running here, they're not going to be willing to take on new clients without extensive vetting and trust procedures. The way an arrangement like this would actually work is that the seller would maintain a whitelist of clients - and so if someone off the list makes an order, they get a 3000 dollar jpg. If someone on the list makes an order, they get what they were actually paying for.

The point of putting these things on public sites like Etsy is to provide a legitimate excuse for both income and outgoing expenditures as well as sales infrastructure. "Digital art" with a receipt from Etsy is a lot easier to explain to an accountant than a 3000 dollar cheese pizza or 5000 dollar hotdog that you've flown in from Chicago for some reason.

5000 dollar hotdog that you've flown in from Chicago for some reason

I know this one and Obama actually paid for a Chicago hotdog street vendor to serve hotdogs at the White House. At exorbitant cost to fly that street vendor's setup to Washington.

This one isn't some poorly disguised code for child sex slaves. It's literally a Chicago street hotdog guy flown to DC with his street stand.

This one isn't some poorly disguised code for child sex slaves. It's literally a Chicago street hotdog guy flown to DC with his street stand.

I actually wasn't aware of this, the last time I checked there wasn't a good explanation. I just assumed it was drugs at the time, like most of the pizza-gate related emails.

Some of those emails are clearly a code for something. Weird shit along the lines of "but we only have one slice of cheese pizza available, will that be enough for everyone tonight?" They aren't talking about a literal slice of pizza. But why document some sort of conspiracy or presumably criminal acts by email using jivey coded language?

I don't think they would have any need to to order coke by email. I also doubt they are Satan worshipping pedophiles. I don't get it.

Yeah, like what the hell is a "pizza related map" and why would it be important that it is on a handkerchief? That was the biggest one for me - why would a handkerchief with a map on it be so important as to generate an email like the one it did? I also don't think it is children, but it is definitely something.

The way an arrangement like this would actually work is that the seller would maintain a whitelist of clients - and so if someone off the list makes an order, they get a 3000 dollar jpg. If someone on the list makes an order, they get what they were actually paying for.

I see absolutely no reason for them to draw attention to such practises, let alone by using names schizo normies might recognize, when they've already got a white list. Why the hell would you do that? There's no shortage of exceptionally ugly jpegs of monkeys out there that no sane individual wants.

You might as well just have it sold as an exceptionally unpopular side dish if we're talking pizza, maybe with mandatory sardine and pineapple toppings.

My last paragraph basically covers that. But to elaborate, I think this kind of thinking is coming at it the wrong way - start with something you think might be related to a pedophile child slavery ring and imagine how it could possibly work. I think the right way is the other way around - you already have a pedophile child slavery ring, complete with kidnapped kids, vetted customers, safe delivery mechanisms, etc. With all that already in place, why would you choose to handle your finances in this way versus all the other options available to you? Why advertise with pictures of kids and cheese pizza instead of something completely boring and unrelated? Why aren't there 200 better ways to arrange this than to make suspicious posts on Etsy?

I don't know if actual child slavery rings exist, but drug dealing rings definitely do. They seem to have mostly decided that trying to sell fake products on online services is more trouble than it's worth when it comes to moving highly illegal products and laundering the resulting money. If "fake art" is going to be your jam, better to arrange a private, appointment-only gallery, which is still a pretty legitimate-looking thing but doesn't involve potentially tens of thousands of strangers checking out your product, screenshots getting posted to Twitter, all the critical data on servers of third-parties that will hand it over to the FBI on demand, etc.

I think this kind of thinking is coming at it the wrong way - start with something you think might be related to a pedophile child slavery ring and imagine how it could possibly work

For the record, I don't think this is a pedophilic operation and I agree with you that they probably wouldn't do things this way - I just assumed the pedophile ring was real for the purposes of the discussion. That said...

They seem to have mostly decided that trying to sell fake products on online services is more trouble than it's worth when it comes to moving highly illegal products and laundering the resulting money.

There have actually been several cases of this happening where I'm from. They've been selling fake products on UberEats for a while and there have been multiple busts - check out this story for one example, but it is far from the only one: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/uber-eats-driver-s-one-star-review-for-refusing-to-deliver-crystal-meth-20230430-p5d4dd.html

I have never bought a slave, but $4k seems oddly low of a price for one in the modern west.

Contract killings can be had at that price. It’s not implausible that kidnap-for-hire would be at a similar price level.

If you're paying for a contact killer online, at any price, even on the Dark Web it's almost certainly a bored fed on the other end of the line.

There was news recently that the Indian government got baited when they tried to put out another hit on a Khalistani terrorist in the West, so not even nation-state actors can pull that off. When Mossad offs Iranian HVTs, they're sending their own men undercover or using plants in deep cover.

The Dark Web is only a reliable source of drugs and stolen credentials.

I wasn’t thinking online, I was thinking in bad neighborhoods in the United States. People will sometimes kill for a thousand dollars or even less.

Now I want a comedy movie about an assassin who has all the badass skills but is struggling to keep his business afloat. He's finally got a job, but there's a ton of security and the overheads are killing his margin! Call it "Will Kill 4 Crypto" or something.

The price is determined by what the market will bear.

“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”

Libertarian Police

Judging by online reaction there are a hell of a lot of people who believe it. Some believe a CP version (also doesn't pass smell test). It's been amplified by some DR voices online, presumably just as engagement bait.

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