If you are a living, breathing person, you should know that you are probably committing crimes on a daily basis. Even if you are a good person who does what you are supposed to do, there are things you do that are technically against the law. This may not make sense to you – the person who returns your cart to the cart corral (or even better, inside the store) when you go shopping, the person who never litters and even picks up smaller pieces of trash, or the person who donates to charity on a regular basis. [Looking for a lawyer? Get an Internet Crimes Defense Lawyer]
But, you are a criminal. Now, these may not be the crimes that are going to get you thrown in prison (though some of them may be), but they are things that are technically illegal.
You May Be Committing Internet Crimes
Internet crimes vary in severity and scope – but there are many things that we do online that are actually illegal. For example, you may be talking to someone online or on a dating app and they could be a minor, you could be looking at explicit images of minors without knowing it, or maybe even harassing someone on Facebook when talking about the next election or a plotline on a television show.
There are so many different types of crimes that you could commit on the internet. You always have to be careful because remember that nothing you do on the internet is going to go away – there are records, cookies, and logs that remember nearly everything that you do.
Opening Someone Else’s Mail
Whether your husband never opens his mail or your roommate gets a subscription to a magazine that you always like to read, you can actually face up to 10 years behind bars for tampering with someone’s mail. Opening someone’s mail is against the law, even if you think they won’t care – you can open someone’s mail with their permission, but you need permission for each and every piece.
If you get bills delivered to your home or apartment and anyone in the house can open them, it is best to get everyone’s name on that envelope.
Jaywalking
We are all in a hurry and when we need to get somewhere, we pretty much all ignore the crosswalks. Perhaps it is because you know traffic isn’t going to move and you want to cross the street now instead of walking to the corner, where you will probably have to wait. This is just if you live in a bigger city – if you live in the suburbs or a rural area, you probably don’t go to corners to walk. You probably just cross right away. This is jaywalking.
Even though you aren’t likely to get in trouble for it, there are some towns that will ticket you for jaywalking. Most often, these will be towns that don’t have a lot of people who live there and then boom for a few months every year – namely, beach towns.
Not Cleaning Up After Your Dog
Let’s set the scene: you are walking along a path with your dog and he goes to the bathroom. It’s not on the path itself and it looks like it will be difficult to pick up. You look around and see that there isn’t anyone around you – so what do you do? Most people will just let it there and continue onward. They think that it will just “go back to nature” eventually and it won’t cause any problems. Maybe they are right – however, what you are doing is still against the law.
Clean up after your dog – you never know, someone might be walking alongside the pathway and you have just ruined their entire walk.
Connecting To Someone’s Internet
We’ve all been in a situation where we want to make an InstaStory or we want to upload images to Facebook but we don’t have Wi-Fi. We don’t necessarily want to use our data (but will in a pinch) and instead click around on the Wi-Fi options until one finally connects. This is actually against the law, even though the people with the unprotected internet should know better.
These are just a few of the ways that people are committing crimes every day. Once again, these aren’t the worst things that you can do (though there are some truly horrible things that can happen because of them), but they are still technically against the law.
