Chapter 718 - 661
Cui Qishan had selected a social media dating case, or better said, a meet-up murder case, which belonged to a new era of tough cases.
First of all, such cases were characterized by a delay in discovery; when a victim travelled to a different place and couldn’t be contacted for several days, it was easy for friends to view it as normal. By the time a report was filed, a lot of time had already passed. Plus, the reports were usually filed at the departure location rather than where the crime occurred, complicating the police response.
Sometimes, they didn’t even know where the victim had actually gone, which posed an even higher level of difficulty.
Next, there was the issue of body identification. Disappearance and death were viewed with varying levels of concern, especially for victims of hookup meet-ups; it wasn’t out of the question to think they had eloped to the Qaidam Basin in the name of love. And for a killer with plenty of time in an unfamiliar place, there was a decent chance of hiding the body.
The key to solving the case mainly rested on technical investigation. With the implementation of real-name systems online, most people’s identities could be traced. Therefore, ordinary long-distance meet-ups leading to crimes of passion were generally solvable.
The trouble came with prepared criminals.
Non-registered SIM cards, coupled with fake identities, and whatever else, even though the police had whatever kind of barriers, whatever technical investigation methods, if the perpetrator resorted to using fake identities, did whatever else, and committed crimes on the move, it would be more challenging if they knew just a bit about counter-surveillance, like removing SIM cards, switching contact methods, and such—how then would the police respond?
Honestly speaking, there weren’t many strategies available to deal with this. This is also one of the reasons why human trafficking persisted, not solely because of economic factors but also due to the difficulty in cracking such crimes.
If encountering a case guaranteed solving, especially an easily solvable one, then its economic profitability would diminish on its own.
Besides that, meet-up murders were, to a certain extent, similar to random acts.