Internet suicide pacts

The real world has a way of boggling my imagination, exceeding the strangest stories I might come up with.
The New York Times > Strangers in Life Join Hands in Death as the Web Becomes a Tool for Suicide in Japan: ...What seems to have brought all nine together - just long enough to kill themselves - are "suicide sites" on the Internet.
For Japanese with high-speed Internet access, which a majority of homes now have, this suicide subculture is just a few key strokes away. On a recent day, typing the Japanese words for "suicide" and "manual" into the Japanese version of the Google search engine yielded 29,761 citations. Suicide sites have names like "Underground Suicide" and "Deadline.''
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But about once a month since January 2002, Japan has recorded a group suicide, successful or attempted, where the participants had linked up on the Internet.