Debate O’Clock: These Women Claim To Have Catfished ISIS - But Is That OK?

It looks like three women have managed to manipulate members of ISIS over the internet - but are they in the right?

Do two wrongs make a right? According to our grandmothers, our mothers, and that teacher who once caught us putting a drawing pin on the school bully’s chair, they don’t.

But according to three women from Chechnya (a largely Muslim republic of Russia), they do. Or at least, they don’t make things worse.

The three women, who are (for obvious reasons) remaining anonymous, appear to have managed to manipulate members of the Islamic State, or ISIS, into transferring them thousands of pounds under the pretence that they would subsequently become their jihadi brides.

One of the women revealed in an interview with Life Today that she was contacted over social media by a man claiming to be part of ISIS. He asked her to abandon her life in Chechnya to join him in Syria as his bride. She says she refused - telling him that she couldn't afford to travel there. He promptly offered to transfer her the money.

‘I told him that I didn’t have any money, and he offered to sent me 10,000 [roubles - £107] on Qiwi-Wallet,’ she told the tabloid newspaper. When the money appeared in her bank account, she immediately closed down her social media accounts, and repeated the scam on two other members of the extremist organisation - pocketing around £500 in total. Meanwhile, two other women in the same region (it’s not known if all three are friends, but it’s assumed that they probably are) were doing the same thing - obtaining around £2000 between them.

In fact, everything was going swimmingly until the local police caught wind of the scam, and quickly put a stop to it - leaving the women facing up to six years in prison for fraud, and the internet furiously debating their future.

Because, on the one hand, fraud is wrong and the women in question broke the law.

But on the other, they took money away from a terrorist organisation responsible for terrible, terrible crimes - a form of resistance and defiance on behalf of the thousands of women who have been raped, tortured and murdered by ISIS over the last 12 months.

What do you think?

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