In what popular national media is now reporting as ‘the Gumtree murder’ a young man was shot and killed after advertising his BMW on the popular classifieds website and arranging to meet the fake buyers to sell the vehicle.
In these times, the brand of the media identified as the originating source of an action is frequently adopted as a headline, like the Facebook rapist and the Twitter con artist. So I guess there could soon be a Junkmail axe killer, an OLX serial killer, the Vottle strangler and maybe even the Nedbank paedophile.
Maybe if the criminal saw an article on News24 there will be a News24 stalker or a Beeld swindler, etc.
It is bad practise for lazy reporters to configure criminals with brands of opposing services as it not only causes the average person to question the facts in an article, quality of reporting etc. but also causes critical evaluation of reported facts instead of focusing on the real horror, tragedy, grief and education of society at large.