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E-commerce sales in Latin America registered a value of approximately 68 billion dollars.
Approximately 85 percent of consumers globally made a purchase online in 2020.
In 2022, the worldwide turnover of electronic commerce will exceed five thousand billion euros.
Social networks have become the preferred tool for many people to carry out various activities, but just as they can help us, there are many dangers and dark things for humanity in them. The case of a Pennsylvania man, United States, is being investigated by the FBI for having a Facebook profile where he offered stolen human remains.
According to data from a Morgan Stanley studyInternet sales have increased in recent years, especially due to the Covid-19 pandemic, making e-commerce one of the world leaders in commerce.
Given these data, many social networks have joined the e-commerce trend, where in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook Marketplace, a space dedicated to users of the digital platform buying and selling items directly through the social network. . According to company data, Facebook Marketplace recorded more than one billion monthly global users in the first quarter of 2021.
The case
A Pennsylvania man, identified as Jeremy Lee Pauley, 40, is being investigated on charges of abusing a corpse and receiving stolen human parts, according to US media.
The man was reportedly detained by authorities when they found him trying to purchase human remains of an Arkansas woman that had been stolen from the University of Arkansas.
After the arrest, the authorities found that Pauley managed a Facebook page where he sold what he called “strange products”, so the authorities are investigating whether he had already bought stolen human remains through the social network in the past.
From the University of Arkansas School of Science and Medicine, in Little Rock, they confirmed that the remains in question were part of a donation that was supposed to reach their laboratories. Instead of reaching the University, an employee of the central morgue in Arkansas sold the human remains, for which the FBI has opened a federal investigation.
“We are very respectful of those who donate their bodies to support scientific research. It is devastating to us to think that something like this could have happened,” said Leslie Taylor, a spokeswoman for the University of Arkansas.
For its part, the police of the town of East Pennsboro, Pennsylvania, announced the arrest of Pauley in the last few hours, who is free awaiting his first hearing that will be next Thursday, since he paid a bail of 50 thousand dollars.
Also, the media report indicates that the police found that Pauley managed a Facebook page in which he had several photos of bags full of bones in which he wrote things like “medical bones to review.” According to the description of the page, there they sold “strange products, unusual things, objects for entertainment and much more. Strange, curious and unique in every way possible.”
Sean McCormack, Cumberland County Prosecutor in Pennsylvania, explained that “you think you saw everything and then something like this happens. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether the sale of human remains is legal or illegal. Interestingly, some of these things are legal. But as we went through this investigation, we found that a lot of what was going on here was illegal.”
Faced with these accusations, Pauley defended himself by saying that the human remains he was buying were legal transactions. For example, a skull that she offered on her page for sale had been legally purchased from a morgue.
This case draws a lot of attention, since it is not the first time that this type of sales has been reported on social networks such as Facebook. Let us remember the case of a journalist who warned that people and Facebook users were using the virtual e-commerce platform, allegedly, to sell kidneys in some regions of Venezuela, causing the news to become vital and the government of that country to arrest those responsible.
In this sense, social networks can be a great tool, but they do not have control over what is published on them and if it is good or bad.
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