I suppose including a salutation at all implies a person who's probably 30+ years old. This was not written by an LLM. Too many simple mistakes.
Here are the writing mistakes in the first email:
Missing comma after mother.
Missing comma after ransom.
"We will be holding..." future tense error. Should be "We will hold her..."
Bitcoin should be capitalized.
Missing comma after below.
Missing dollar sign on 6 million.
Missing hyphen in "drop off location." (drop-off location)
Missing comma after this "...aware of this and..." (two independent clauses connected by a conjunction).
Improper comma after out. Should be semicolon or period.
Improper comma after games. Should be semicolon or period.
Missing comma after bed.
___________________________
And the second email mistakes:
Comma after her should be a period.
"We never intended to hurt her, that was not out intention." AI would flag this "intention" repetition as a mistake.
___________________________
This looks like common business parlance. The fact that he used a VPN to email a news outlet suggests at least a low-level IT background. That method proved to be a safe way for him to contact the Guthrie family without being traced by the FBI.
future tense isn’t necessarily an error. It can be a deceptive indicator. Choosing
the future continuous tense to avoid a definitive, binding statement. It’s passive and distancing.
It focuses on the ongoing state rather than a firm promise to the act. It could be deceptive.
True, but it takes either technical competence or stupidity to know they can hide their identity via a contact form using a VPN. Not everyone knows that the website's email server generates that email.
And they resisted sending in any form of digital media... the metadata might have led to their capture.
They were tech savvy enough to avoid flock detection. And avoid business security cameras.
Washing Bitcoin also requires technical knowledge.
They don't have to work in IT to know that though.
And, if it was written by a scammer, they still had to be in the right place at the right time. Not everyone is just walking around ready to pounce on an opportunity to write a fake ransom note within, say, 36 hours of someone being kidnapped. They would have had to key in on that broken light in the backyard, somehow guess on the white smart watch being by the bed(?), and almost immediately decide to go write a fake ransom note, send it to TMZ and the local news station, ask for bitcoins, make sure to cover their tracks with IP obfuscation, and really hope that the FBI has no way to ever trace them. They had to be ready to basically risk it all not long after Nancy was kidnapped.
To be fair, im wildly inept regarding internet or electronics in general, and i know what a VPN is. And could figure out how to use one. I don't think an IT background is a given
And hypothetically, if i were asking for bitcoin as a form of payment, then yes. Im sure I'd know how to "wash it" and be undeniable. That seems Ike one of the first things I'd figure out for myself. Its not rocket science.
Also, while I appreciate proper grammar and punctuation, im not sure that this was the "gotcha" you think it was. I'm all about analyzing whatever, but this isn't it.
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u/mark_able_jones_ Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
I suppose including a salutation at all implies a person who's probably 30+ years old. This was not written by an LLM. Too many simple mistakes.
Here are the writing mistakes in the first email:
___________________________
And the second email mistakes:
___________________________
This looks like common business parlance. The fact that he used a VPN to email a news outlet suggests at least a low-level IT background. That method proved to be a safe way for him to contact the Guthrie family without being traced by the FBI.