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How does someone get out of extortion?


caballero

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2 minutes ago, Ink said:

Tell us all about how everyday, law-abiding citizens in one of the most prosperous, digitally connected, and mega-policed countries in the world have to pay random European thugs out of the razor thin profits of their brick and mortar shops on a weekly basis so that they don't have their employee's legs broken, shop burned, or a bullet in their head.

 

From 2:00 Minutes onward:

 

"Several people told us off camera that they are scared of the gang activity and extortion." "You have to kinda like look the other way now, Confrontations now a days? Turns into what happened this afternoon."

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24 minutes ago, Henning said:

 

From 2:00 Minutes onward:

 

"Several people told us off camera that they are scared of the gang activity and extortion." "You have to kinda like look the other way now, Confrontations now a days? Turns into what happened this afternoon."

 

I appreciate you coming to the table with a piece of real world media to compare and contrast. 

 

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/police-gang-extortion-attempt-led-to-los-angeles-market-shootout/?sba=AAS

 

The Armenian Power gang here is trying to extort an Armenian shop owner for $100,000. That is a hilarious amount of money, so either Mr. Armenian Grocery Store Owner has a lot more history with Armenian criminals than we're being told here, or these guys are literally just fucking retarded. I mean, clearly, they're stupid enough to get into a shootout and have their leader get clipped in the fucking head and taken to a hospital to be arrested. What a winner.

 

So, real life extortion attempt. Result: The civilians start a shootout with the criminals. The criminals lose, and their boss ends up in a hospital under police custody. The civilians go off on self-defense. Follow-up: 15 months and no further conflict, no more shootouts, no more Armenians visiting the grocery store, no dead employees, no threats to the owner, owner has not gone missing.

 

That's not the first time the Los Angeles Armenian Power gang has gone after Armenian shop owners for extortion. A few years ago, one of their leaders was arrested and sentenced to--holy shit! 32 years in prison. Nice extorting, bro, hope that 5k/week was worth it fam.

 

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/armenian-power-leader-sentenced-32-years-prison-racketeering-extortion-and-fraud

 

Then these upstanding citizens looted a guy for over 20k over the course of 6 months, though granted, it was less extortion and more outright robbery since they did it at gunpoint. Let's call that what it is. When a guy stuffs a gun in your stomach and says "give me money" that's robbery. Well, either way, the 3 of these guys were convicted and arrested. Lol. Fuck those guys, they'll spend what could have been the 20 best years of their healthy lives behind bars.

 

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-three-convicted-armenian-power-20140418-story.html

 

Look, in real life gang members tend not to be very smart, okay? These are not people famous for making good decisions with their lives. We don't look at gang members for intelligent (what we would call "realistic") decisions. In fact, all the dudes in all the media which talks about extortion in Los Angeles are kind of fucking retarded. 

 

"Well, I want to roleplay a retarded gang banger who has no regard for his own freedom and doesn't care about legal consequences!" That's awesome, but that's also meta as fuck on GTA:W because the police we have on our server cannot do the same degree of work that they can IRL, while criminals IG are able to do a whole lot more criminal shit than they could do IRL. So as a matter of OOC courtesy and of creating good roleplay, as a general rule we can't roleplay fucking retarded criminals who kill indiscriminately and brazenly commit crimes. We're all expected to RP characters who have a little bit more savvy than that. 

Yes, the Armenian Power gang in Los Angeles has been known to extort or outright rob Armenian business owners, usually trying to leverage their connections back home to force people to pay them. Like I said pages ago in this thread: 

  

On 12/7/2020 at 8:25 PM, Ink said:

In the real world, when extortion happens it's usually because of one of the following reasons:

 

1) The extortionists have dirt on you such that you can't just go to the police. They have leverage, if you snitch, you are ruining yourself.

2) You, the business owner, are already involved in criminal activity, or owe favors to criminals. See reason 1.

3) You, the business owner, have family back home that is known by the criminal organization who is extorting you, and their presence is stronger in that country. Sure, you might be able to snitch on them and get them in trouble here, but then they kill your family back home in a much more corrupt country.

 

And, at the end of the day, in a city as big as Los Angeles -- 4 million people, and with the greater LA County area having about 11 million people, Los Angeles, taken as an independent nation, would be the 19th largest economy in the entire world and is home to over 244,000 businesses. It's been 15 months since this video came out, and in a region of a quarter million businesses we only have ONE case in the media about extortion over what essentially comes out to the last two years, and the only reason we have a case of it is because it resulted in a shootout and an arrest.

 

When I lived and did business in Los Angeles, I knew dozens of business owners. Not one of them has ever once even mentioned problems with local criminals, much less being taxed/fined/extorted/robbed by them. Ever. On GTA:W, the fact that criminal factions extort whole neighborhoods is known by literally everyone.

 

It's not really an immersive or realistic setting for RP when law-abiding characters literally have to accept the fact that they'll be robbed and extorted to run a business.

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5 hours ago, Ink said:

 

I appreciate you coming to the table with a piece of real world media to compare and contrast. 

 

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/police-gang-extortion-attempt-led-to-los-angeles-market-shootout/?sba=AAS

 

The Armenian Power gang here is trying to extort an Armenian shop owner for $100,000. That is a hilarious amount of money, so either Mr. Armenian Grocery Store Owner has a lot more history with Armenian criminals than we're being told here, or these guys are literally just fucking retarded. I mean, clearly, they're stupid enough to get into a shootout and have their leader get clipped in the fucking head and taken to a hospital to be arrested. What a winner.

 

So, real life extortion attempt. Result: The civilians start a shootout with the criminals. The criminals lose, and their boss ends up in a hospital under police custody. The civilians go off on self-defense. Follow-up: 15 months and no further conflict, no more shootouts, no more Armenians visiting the grocery store, no dead employees, no threats to the owner, owner has not gone missing.

 

That's not the first time the Los Angeles Armenian Power gang has gone after Armenian shop owners for extortion. A few years ago, one of their leaders was arrested and sentenced to--holy shit! 32 years in prison. Nice extorting, bro, hope that 5k/week was worth it fam.

 

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/armenian-power-leader-sentenced-32-years-prison-racketeering-extortion-and-fraud

 

Then these upstanding citizens looted a guy for over 20k over the course of 6 months, though granted, it was less extortion and more outright robbery since they did it at gunpoint. Let's call that what it is. When a guy stuffs a gun in your stomach and says "give me money" that's robbery. Well, either way, the 3 of these guys were convicted and arrested. Lol. Fuck those guys, they'll spend what could have been the 20 best years of their healthy lives behind bars.

 

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-three-convicted-armenian-power-20140418-story.html

 

Look, in real life gang members tend not to be very smart, okay? These are not people famous for making good decisions with their lives. We don't look at gang members for intelligent (what we would call "realistic") decisions. In fact, all the dudes in all the media which talks about extortion in Los Angeles are kind of fucking retarded. 

 

"Well, I want to roleplay a retarded gang banger who has no regard for his own freedom and doesn't care about legal consequences!" That's awesome, but that's also meta as fuck on GTA:W because the police we have on our server cannot do the same degree of work that they can IRL, while criminals IG are able to do a whole lot more criminal shit than they could do IRL. So as a matter of OOC courtesy and of creating good roleplay, as a general rule we can't roleplay fucking retarded criminals who kill indiscriminately and brazenly commit crimes. We're all expected to RP characters who have a little bit more savvy than that. 

Yes, the Armenian Power gang in Los Angeles has been known to extort or outright rob Armenian business owners, usually trying to leverage their connections back home to force people to pay them. Like I said pages ago in this thread: 

  

 

And, at the end of the day, in a city as big as Los Angeles -- 4 million people, and with the greater LA County area having about 11 million people, Los Angeles, taken as an independent nation, would be the 19th largest economy in the entire world and is home to over 244,000 businesses. It's been 15 months since this video came out, and in a region of a quarter million businesses we only have ONE case in the media about extortion over what essentially comes out to the last two years, and the only reason we have a case of it is because it resulted in a shootout and an arrest.

 

When I lived and did business in Los Angeles, I knew dozens of business owners. Not one of them has ever once even mentioned problems with local criminals, much less being taxed/fined/extorted/robbed by them. Ever. On GTA:W, the fact that criminal factions extort whole neighborhoods is known by literally everyone.

 

It's not really an immersive or realistic setting for RP when law-abiding characters literally have to accept the fact that they'll be robbed and extorted to run a business.

"When I lived and did business in Los Angeles, I knew dozens of business owners. Not one of them has ever once even mentioned problems with local criminals, much less being taxed/fined/extorted/robbed by them. Ever. On GTA:W, the fact that criminal factions extort whole neighborhoods is known by literally everyone."

Not disagreeing with your post, but these people don't blatantly disclose that they are being extorted to other people in fear that they may be targeted if that information slips throughout the area.

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He just provided you with solid evidence and you came back with, "they're just stupid". like most aspects of gang rp isn't, even law enforcement where you can give someone a ticket for doing 60 on a 55. 

 

Maybe you're not hearing about it in the news because they're paying up or nobody gives a shit. You're saying LA has 4 million people like it can't go both ways. 

 

If you don't wanna get robbed call the police, if the police aren't doing their job file a report, if that doesn't work out, reach out to your local government. You have a million dollars and you don't want to spend it on hiring security, that's on you, we can't micromanage every aspect of roleplay, some people will do dumb stuff and they should face IC consequences. 

Edited by Certified Lover Boy Jola
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46 minutes ago, Certified Lover Boy Jola said:

He just provided you with solid evidence and you came back with, "they're just stupid". like most aspects of gang rp isn't, even law enforcement where you can give someone a ticket for doing 60 on a 55. 

 

He provided one real life incident of an utterly failed extortion attempt in which the criminals got absolutely dunked on by the civilians. Yes, they were incredibly stupid. Also not surprising, considering these are people who made their career path in life being members of a street gang. Not the creme de la creme of high IQ plays there. 

 

Solid evidence in this case would be multiple recent accounts of different sources from different neighborhoods and with different criminal influences reporting extortion attempts. Solid evidence would be that these extorting idiots aren't immediately locked up for 20-30 years. It makes for a really bad argument about why extortion RP where people are RPing criminals not afraid of the law and who basically face a maximum of a few days of jail is a valid RP on a "heavy realistic RP server" when all the "evidence" about why it's valid is fringe cases that pop up once every 2 years where the perps get sentenced for 30 years. 😂

 

Quote

 

Maybe you're not hearing about it in the news because they're paying up or nobody gives a shit. You're saying LA has 4 million people like it can't go both ways, 

 

I mean, that's sort of a fair point. You can reasonably expect that there is a number of cases more than what we're hearing about. But you're telling me that out of 4 million in LA and 11 million in the greater area. out of a quarter of a million businesses, that this "widespread extortion" problem only appearing once in the news over the course of over two years is... a little sus for whether or not it's a big deal? We have a very large population size to take data from. Sure, we don't need to see 10,000 cases of extortion to be like "oh wow extortion is a problem" but certainly we should see more than ONE if it was anything approaching even marginally significant, right? Like, come on, at least two?

 

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If you don't wanna get robbed call the police, if the police aren't doing their job file a report, if that doesn't work out, reach out to your local government. You have a million dollars and you don't want to spend it on hiring security, that's on you,

 

 

"If you don't wanna get robbed call the police" You mean while you're being robbed, or after you're robbed? What does robbery have to do with this topic besides the fact that extortion RP is basically just a loophole around robbery rules to more easily and profitably accomplish the same thing and with much less risk?

 

The police are doing their job, but I think as roleplayers we can OOCly agree that it's not really fair that police officers gain a workload of an average of like 2-4 hours and DOJ faction members also gain a workload of like 3-6 hours each every single time some shitty, replaceable, uninspired, unoriginal, entirely mundane and flavorless European gangster comes into a place for 5 minutes to go "ehhh looking for owner yes big pay me 10k week or very bad time for you heh heh." I think OOCly we can agree that's dumb, and OOCly we can agree that this server can do better. It's like if when your character got a traffic ticket you had to OOCly sit through a 4 hour traffic school course. How's it fair that a very brief, largely minor and boring RP which took the other side 5-10 minutes should now put hours of boring, uninteresting real life work in front of you instead of time you can spend RPing something more interesting.

 

It's not a "report the police" issue because it's not the characters' faults. It's an OOC issue first and foremost. In real life the police department and the FBI has the kind of resources that they get one complaint about extortion and they can dedicate 2-6 police officers on the case immediately. In real life, these police officers are spending 40-70 hours a week every single week of their lives doing little else but investigating shit like this. That's why in real life when you have some dumb ass with an IQ roughly equivalent to shotgun gauges bumbles into your store and tells you about how you need to pay him $200 a week, that moron will be in handcuffs by the end of the week. 

 

Like that's what the people in this thread defending the absolutely ridiculous pandemic of extortion RP are failing to get. This isn't a "wah legal RPers don't want to lose 😞 😞" problem. It's not a "wah deal with it IC instead of looking for OOC solutions!" problem. It's a "our game, where we are trying to maintain a heavy RP community, is not properly equipped on an OOC level to deal with this." We are running into an OOC bottlenecking problem. I actually am concerned by the OOC discourtesy which is being suggested by some RPers in this thread who believe the answer is that people RPing in the police department need to spend MORE of their time doing boring bureaucratic paper shuffling, and that the Department of Justice which already is highly overworked needs to waste even MORE effort on this dumb ass Tony Spaghettio extortion RP. 

 

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we can't micromanage every aspect of roleplay, some people will do dumb stuff and they should face IC consequences. 

 

You see, that sounds like a very good argument on paper, but then you look at the fact that we have OOC rules to prevent other kinds of dumb RP from happening. It's perfectly realistic (you can find a lot more evidence of it than the one extortion attempt to end up in the media in Los Angeles for the last two years) for someone to just walk up and shoot a police officer in the head. It's perfectly realistic for someone to come into a movie theater and just start shooting everyone there for no reason. It's perfectly realistic to murder someone in front of a government building. These things happen in real life with enough frequency. But we don't allow that sort of RP on GTA:W because it's not fun. Because it wastes everyone's time. Because it's OOCly toxic and gets in the way of RP rather than providing it.

 

Extortion RP isn't fun. I have yet to meet a single legal RPer who says "yeah haha the Balkan dudes showed up to my place and asked for the owner during my busy opening, and I went over and they told me I now need to pay them or else my business will face consequences hahaha it was really fun RP, plus to those guys, an L I'm happy to take." That's not because all legal RPers can't take a loss, that's because the RP is just that shitty and the only people who fail to realize that are the incredibly defensive and dense people still arguing about how it's totally realistic, totally an IC problem, and totally fine. That every time this thread comes up there are so many people who are arguing against extortion just doesn't really get through.

 

Extortion RP is a waste of time for everyone involved. It's a waste of time for the people getting extorted. It's a waste of time for the law enforcement who has to investigate yet another dumb bit of low-effort, shit-tier RP instead of doing literally anything more fun. It's a waste of time for the DOJ people who need to prepare arrest warrants, court cases, and legal RP over this shit-bucket.

 

Extortion RP is OOCly toxic. There is rarely any attempt to seek out consenting RPers. There's rarely any OOC tact about respecting a person's roleplay project that they're providing for the benefit of the entire server. And from what I've been seeing from all the criminal RPers who come out of the woodwork in these threads to go "NO TONY SPAGHETTIO EXTORTION RP GOOD! LEGAL RPER BAD" is that it all boils down to script cash. That sweet, sweet pay2win. "Wah, legal RPers don't want to give up their millions, wahhh, we want to make money." It's pretty easy to see which side of the argument cares more about the assets than the RP, and it's not the legal RPers.

 

Extortion RP does absolutely nothing good for the server, is a miserable experience for everyone involved, and ultimately just brings down our entire community a notch or two. Way to go, boring criminal RPers who lack the creativity or passion to come up with anything more exciting, your RP which is scraping the bottom of the barrel damages our entire server.

 

Edited by Ink
typo fixes!
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You talk about things being in existence in reality like the server goes off that 1:1 or even a fraction of it,  we don't lol, regardless its still a thing, its an IC problem, we should deal with it IC, anyway, how do we deal with this on an ooc level taking into consideration the rules we already have? If someone is not roleplaying in the right way, your report them, do we have to create some sort of application to allow people to extort a business? If not, please present a solution.

 

Same with the drug problem, if drugs were being sold at the rate they are being sold in LA, we might not even have this problem, but we have to deal with it... IC, I don't know why we can't do the same for this.

Edited by Certified Lover Boy Jola
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20 minutes ago, Certified Lover Boy Jola said:

You talk about things being in existence in reality like the server goes off that 1:1 or even a fraction of it,  we don't lol, regardless its still a thing, its an IC problem, we should deal with it IC, anyway, how do we deal with this on an ooc level taking into consideration the rules we already have? If someone is not roleplaying in the right way, your report them, do we have to create some sort of application to allow people to extort a business? If not, please present a solution.

 

Same with the drug problem, if drugs were being sold at the rate they are being sold in LA, we might not even have this problem, but we have to deal with it... IC, I don't know why we can't do the same for this.

Just a few possibilities for solutions. I'm not really sure how many are viable, or may even lead to more complications(!):

1. RICO laws that some people already mentioned are being drafted and which will lead to substantial sentences of imprisonment (perhaps a month IRL time) for those convicted of extortion and attempts.
2. A prohibition against legal RPers being subject to a CK by the extortionist or their friends where the legal RPer calls the police - like any ordinary person would - unless there is a very clear justified RP reason for the CK application to be granted. And no, your friend being locked up for a long time isn't justification on its own.

3. Those who wish to extort a business must have admin approval and prove how it makes sense that their character and his friends would risk RICO-style sentences of imprisonment (this should stop Enzio Spaghettio and Generic European Gangster #4527 from chain-extorting everything from Vespucci to Vinewood).

4. If Enzio and #4527 (and their four friends) haven't the slightest ability to deliver on their planned arrangement, deny the application.

5. If the extortion RP is a poor standard, Enzio, #4527, and their friends should face meaningful consequences.

 

Some of these might create more problems, but something needs to be done, I think, to close an obvious loophole. Extortion isn't a one-off robbery, it's deep and seems to come with a whole range of related issues like racial tensions, ethnicity, distrust of police in some communities, exploitation of community relationships that have developed over generations, and any number of others.

 

Considering the legal ramifications to the criminal, and potential ongoing and long term financial and associated consequences for the victim, extortion should require very high RP standards and clear rules.

 

Correct any of my suggestions if you think they wouldn't work.

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Business owners usually expect to have protection in return if they are roped into extortion business, sometimes you trash their business before asking money and sometimes you do that after they refused to pay. This should however go both way. Business owners should be encouraged to accept the consequences of their actions and if they don't have ties to any organized criminal group, they should not pursue justice on their own, either risk calling police and hope they will take care of it or pay.

 

Those who extort such business must decide between extortion and / or protection. Cause extortion is one thing, you do that to a dealer operating on your turf, it's a tax for their business and it's usually criminals that are extorted cause they won't go to police. Businesses are extorted under the pretense of protection. Which of course has to be provided in return, otherwise the owner may run towards a group that is capable of providing it.

An example from my country would be, that two guys dressed in tracksuits enter a bar and order a pack of cigarettes and two beers. They don't pay for any and the bartender also slides few bank notes into the cigarette pack. They take it, drink their beers, exchange few words like how's business, need anything and they leave. Next month they do the same. If somebody mentions that there is a problem, they call their captain and it goes through him.

 

Also each ethnic group usually extorts their own, cause it's easier. Like you won't see italians extorting chain of chinese clothing stores, cause they most likely pay their due to the triads already.

 

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1 hour ago, Engelbert said:

Those who extort such business must decide between extortion and / or protection. Cause extortion is one thing, you do that to a dealer operating on your turf, it's a tax for their business and it's usually criminals that are extorted cause they won't go to police. Businesses are extorted under the pretense of protection. Which of course has to be provided in return, otherwise the owner may run towards a group that is capable of providing it.

This is the truth of the matter, there's improvement that needs to be made on both sides of extortion. Victims need to stop thinking they're invincible as far as being pushed up on by illegal groups goes just because they don't want to pay or because they think it's unrealistic to be extorted in a flashy neighbourhood, and the ones doing the extorting need to recognize the difference between actual extortion, which is for example MS13 pushing up on local dealers in Little Seoul and making them pay a certain sum, and the concept of extorting a business, which usually actually involves really protecting that business to an extent.

 

Reaching out to illegal organizations and local gangs  in the event of being extorted also does help with the issue, contrary to popular belief. Some people might believe it impossible to do, but a few months ago myself and a friend of mine roleplayed a legal couple who owned a bar out in the sticks. Our business was extorted on multiple occasions, so we reached out to a certain biker club that was in the nearby town and they agreed to help us out. 

 

The people trying to extort our characters stopped coming around as a result and we even rped putting up some 'support' things for the club that was protecting us. Additionally though, the biker club in question actually became regulars at our store and would often hang out there every now and then, it bought some roleplay to the business and it was a welcome thing to see roleplayed.

 

Now if you're going in and asking straight away for the owner, then pretty much demanding money? You're going about it wrong and you will get punished if you get reported for it, especially if the businesses you're trying to extort are petty ass 24/7's that are npc owned and operated. Extorters ought to try some different techniques, like paying local youth to go in and fuck with the business every couple of days, then showing up sometime right before the place closes and THEN talking to the owner about 'hey, we'll make sure these guys stop what they're doing for a fee' etc etc.

 

Not to mention that there's ways to make business owners respect your character and give them money without even having to be all threatening and hold a ck over their head the entire time.

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one resolution that ifm can look into and implement: people that arent about that life are going to call the police. "snitching" is a valid thing in the hood, barrio or whatever backward slum your criminal character comes from, but the reason extortion doesn't happen irl is because you're sure that people in polite society would involve law enforcement. so why ck someone for doing what their legal character would do, as their only actual option? because you stepped on a criminal's toes, or because your ck got approved as if you're an illegal faction member that just turncoated on their group? get real, you're punishing people for doing the only proper thing they do. stop holding back roleplay from legal factions and law enforcement by holding a noose around one side's neck and playing favorites

this is some goon shit; all consequences fall with the ones risking their life by going up to the business owned by some group they dont know and trying to "tax it" like absolute lobotomites. illegal rp naturally floats around the areas of least risk/highest reward. implement a rule that leads to a mugger's ck for stupid robberies they'll stop mugging people on main boulevards. implement a rule for people that "got a meeting with the owner" and they'll stop attempting extortion with every business that's open when they're logged on. i've done illegal rp, it always gravitates around meta knowledge of what'll kill your character and what wont and as much as you want to defend it, adding clauses like those would cut through the poor roleplay and leave only those dedicated enough to provide that sort of roleplay standing.

would any of this kill the roleplay around extortion? depends, are you aware of the risk to your characteer by doing any of this? is your character aware that this is 2020 america and not post-war yugoslavia, and that actions have consequences? if yes, well look at that. you might actually have the issue fixed. pretty certain nobody'd approach you unless they're able to blackmail you or make deals you cannot refuse. just like in real life.

Edited by AlphaBatal
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