The year is 2013. You are waiting in a Peruvian airport with your luggage and a bag from a stranger you just recently met. He offered you thousands of dollars to simply take this bag through the airport’s customs and deliver it to a location at your flight’s destination country. You are never informed of the bag’s contents, and never care to ask or even check. Would you accept this simple task in exchange for the money?
This is exactly what happened to Michaella McCollum and Melissa Reid while flying from Peru to Madrid. Unbeknownst to them, the bags were filled with over $2.6 million dollars of cocaine (in today’s currency). At first, the aptly named “Peru Two” claimed they were unaware that the bags contained such illicit substances, and later falsely claimed that they were forced into such actions. They later admitted their guilt, with McCollum serving over two years in Peruvian prison, and Reid being expelled to her home country early.
Such cases illustrate that if a person claims wilful blindness in drug smuggling, they are still subject to the full extent of the law if they are grossly overcompensated for such a menial task. This can be seen in the fact that the Peru Two were certainly aware that they were smuggling drugs, as they were being paid handsomely for simply delivering a package; to which they later admitted. The argument here is that this rule should not only apply to illegal drugs, but something also greatly poisonous to society: propaganda.
When the blitzkrieg to Kyiv failed in March of 2022, the russian government began using information warfare in an attempt to slowly wane public support to Ukraine, and in turn, eventually halt the transfer of weapons systems and ammunition to a country which has become victim of an unprovoked invasion. One attack vector was to fund various popular influencers through a shell company in an attempt to increase their visibility and ultimately get more people to view their content, which they (correctly) estimated would eventually begin developing anti-Ukrainian sentiment. They reached out to these creators and offered one of them $100,000 a video, or $100,000 a week, totalling roughly $4.8 million a year. It is important to emphasize that the russian government did not pay influencers to make anti-Ukraine content, but rather, they predicted, likely using data analysis techniques, which influencers they were considering to fund would be the most likely to produce anti-Ukraine content in the near future, and then pay them. At no point did they ever have editorial control over these creators, however, it is important to ask why an adversarial state would willingly fund Western influencers, with the most reasonable explanation being that they viewed these people as creating division within the West, thus, giving them more money would either be used to reinvest into the business and further grow it, or convince these creators to continue making this same content.
The smoking gun that these creators knew that these wildly inflated contracts were clearly connected to foreign governments is that the content they would produce for these channels were non-exclusive, meaning that they would continue to post these videos both on their own social medias, and on the shell company’s social media. No reasonable person would take such deals as these, as they would immediately recognize that being paid millions of dollars a year to simply allow someone to rebroadcast their content is clearly linked to bad money, either from a criminal group or from an adversarial state. Yet these content creators did, and still shamelessly defend themselves, claiming that these rates are on par with the market value. It is most likely that this one essential detail is what will keep them from being criminally prosecuted, which is contradictory, as if these very same people were to be pushing poison, only in physical form, they would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, in almost any country on Earth, especially in the United States of America where many of them reside.
The one thing you should take away from this article is to never accept an offer from a stranger to carry a bag you don’t know the contents of through airport security in exchange for thousands of dollars, and to most definitely not take money from suspicious sources offering wildly overpriced agreements to simply rebroadcast your content. Citizens living in the Western World should demand their government take more action on those with financial ties to our adversaries, and hold those who wilfully receive money for acts such as these to be prosecuted, and not let them hide behind wilful blindness.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/17/british-drug-mules-jailed-six-years-peru
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366266/dl
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/13/media/right-wing-media-influencers-tenet-russian-money/index.html
MIDON INTEL 