He documented his findings on his blog – pirate.london – and on online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia and anti-pseudoscience website RationalWiki. He made it his mission to kill urban legends – he contributed to Wikipedia’s articles on the dark web and darknet market, and created RationalWiki’s pages about red rooms and runaway AIs. This was the perfect environment for scammers – impenetrable to search engines and rife with illegality. Online forums crawled with references to sentient AIs lurking in the dark web, live-streaming websites showing people being slaughtered in “red rooms”, or dark web pages revealing the secret of the Illuminati.
Hitman Absolution: Sniper Challenge & Range Day With Brandon Webb
When police checked his phone, they discovered Stephen had been hooking up with numerous women using dating apps. Far more incriminating than that, was the fact that he had also been sending messages and money to a site on the Dark Web that promised to arrange murders. After an eight-day trial, where Allwine never took the stand, the jury took just six hours before convicting him of first-degree murder.
Get Premium & FT Weekend Print edition for the price of Premium. Complete digital access to quality analysis and expert insights, complemented with our award-winning Weekend Print edition. Complete digital access to quality FT journalism with expert analysis from industry leaders. Save now on essential digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. The activity of hiring a hitman is not legal and could lead to serious legal ramifications and arrest. Also, it can put in danger both the hitman and the person hiring him.
World Market Darknet
The first person we deployed that strategy with was Elena, the woman in Switzerland. And it worked; we found that the victims were more likely to believe us, and local police forces were more responsive when we approached them alongside the person who’d been targeted. I felt completely unqualified to deal with this situation. We were a couple of journalists stuck at home during the pandemic, and we’d just been handed a list of people with a price on their heads.
Hiring A Hitman On The Web: Can Contractual Violence Be Added To Your Online Shopping Cart?

BRspd, the hacker who in 2016 twice broke into Besa Mafia’s website, told me over private chat that he had approached Yura about turning Besa Mafia into an actual honeypot for criminals. Customers submitted the details of the person they wanted killed and the method they preferred – for instance, a hit that looked like an accident would be more expensive. To prove they had the wherewithal to pay, they were required to make an advance bitcoin transfer to a digital wallet – from which, the website assured, its clients would be able to withdraw their funds any time. Nevertheless, the legend of this underground website is likely to persist. Indeed, following the data breach, the debate has raged over whether or not the service is a scam.

He was then contacted by an administrator of Besa Mafia. “Would it be possible for us to pay for a true and honest positive review? “These guys have made at least 50 bitcoins nearly $23,000 on this,” said Chris Monteiro, an independent researcher who has been following the site.
Our first priority was figuring out how much danger the targets were really in. And what the messages revealed was that there were no real hitmen. Instead, the administrators would make up excuses for why the murder hadn’t been carried out—the hitman got lost, or the victim was too well protected—before the customer finally gave up. Ross Ulbrich, founder of the dark web’s most famous marketplace, The Silk Road, allegedly paid contract killers $730k worth of BitCoin to murder six people, according to transcripts of his conversations with organized crime bosses. For that reason, it can be hard to distinguish genuine intent from rage-clicking through a dumb-looking website.

🕵️♀️ Law Enforcement Stings
- The Pences considered the text a straightforward account of history, and every morning, before sunrise, Christopher led the family in studying Scripture.
- Over the course of the investigation, our team passed 175 hit orders to law enforcement.
- ” Two weeks later, Christopher transferred $16,000 worth of bitcoin and submitted orders to kill the Corderos.
- Zhou later tried to use to the Website to secure the murder of Victim-2, her romantic partner’s adult daughter.
- The only person he wanted to have harmed was him, because his life insurance policy wouldn’t pay out if he killed himself.
- British journalist Carl Miller discovered the site, described as an ‘Etsy for hitmen’, was a scam where people would pay bitcoin to secretive ‘assassins’ who would even tailor the method of death for each victim.
A tall man in his thirties with thick sable hair, a short beard and deep-set, dark eyes, Monteiro is a man of weird pastimes. By day, he worked as a computer system administrator for a London-based firm; by night, he turned on a six-screen desktop computer in his South London flat and spent hours plumbing the depth of the internet. He called himself a “cybercrime and niche topic internet researcher”. He was into transhumanism, the internet-based movement advocating for human enhancement and immortality. He gave talks about the politics of sci-fi, using a slightly slurred patter. British journalist Carl Miller discovered the site, described as an ‘Etsy for hitmen’, was a scam where people would pay bitcoin to secretive ‘assassins’ who would even tailor the method of death for each victim.
The 2-in-1 job costs at least $15,000 and includes couples, parents, people, their pets, etc. This crime is usually carried out by a trained individual like the mafia, or gangs which remain in anonymity. The VIP job costs a minimum of $30,000 and includes stars, notorious personalities, and politicians.
Are Hitmen Real On The Dark Web?
One teaches at a primary school, another works at a hospital, and another is a municipal official. The scammers posted huge numbers of comments on websites like Reddit and other websites under fake names in a bid to make their website look real. One American man forked out roughly £5,000 (16 bitcoins) and ordered the death of a husband and wife who had two children. He then paid a hired thug to burn a car with a hand-written message to Pirate London written inside it, posting a video (which can be seen above) of the inferno. Here’s me going along, you know, basically with legal fees and doing this in my evenings and the like.

Subscribe To Our Newsletter
The search has led “48 Hours” to England, India, the Eastern European country of Moldova and eventually culminated in a dramatic encounter in Queens, New York. Yura was finished with Sydney, but not with “48 Hours.” He tipped us to yet another plot. This time, the person who allegedly hired the hit man is a woman living near Chicago. A law enforcement source told “48 Hours,” “there is no evidence at this time that Mrs. Alexis States was involved.”
As Stephen Allwine’s trial begins, the State argues he paid Yura to have Amy murdered. But when Yura didn’t deliver, Allwine drugged her and shot her to death himself. Prosecutor Jaime Kreuser says he wanted out of his marriage, but divorce was discouraged in his fundamentalist church. Creative, handsome and charismatic, Beau Brigham had it all. The music video he co-produced and appears in has more than two million views online. Brigham now has new people desperately wanting to see him, to find him — people with a badge who consider this talented artist a danger to society.

The first woman we reached was a lady in her 60s named Elena. But I soon found that the police, both here and around the world, moved too slowly, so my next was to start calling the targets, to warn them of the threat to their lives. In many cases, they were men who wanted their wives, girlfriends or ex-partners murdered. Other files revealed love triangles, unrequited romances and bitter family feuds. And in one chilling instance, as I describe in my new podcast Kill List (co-produced by Wondery and Novel) – now a chart topper in the UK, US and Australia – the target had actually been killed. He insisted he was just an everyday internet marketer hired on a freelance job.
Some customers get in touch to tell the con-men who they want to kill, before stumping up a large amount of Bitcoin – a digital currency which can be traded with relative anonymity. The Brits were able to trace the person who ended up setting light to the motor, who was a petty criminal and aspiring gangster from California, through his communications with the site owners. “I want to expose the urban legend of dark web assassination websites,” he told The Mirror. Several people who fell for the trick handed over up to £10,000 worth of Bitcoin at a time, with the criminals netting somewhere in the region of £50,000 in the past year alone. Keep up with stories of the day with our lunchtime news wrap and important breaking news alerts. A major garda investigation is underway into an alleged attempt by a garda to hire an assassin on the dark web to murder his former partner.