If you are that curious, watch a video of a dark web surfer on Youtube. Recently, there have been several reports of individuals who have been either arrested or convicted for attempting to hire or apply to be a hitman online to end someone else’s life. With Monteiro’s help, Miller was able to review private messages between clients and the website’s owner. According to The Guardian, the website was a scam run by a Romanian crook who had no intention of providing the sinister services. “It also moved to justifications for why the person needs to die,” he shared. “Some of these kill orders would go on, page after page,” Miller recalled.
Are Dark Web Hitmen Real?
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- Monteiro’s exploit still worked and he could read all the messages between Yura/Barbosa and his customers, just as he did back in 2016.
- I’m a podcast producer, and earlier in 2020 I’d started work on a new series about the dark web.
- On many of the sites examined by the team at Michigan State, considerable effort was expended trying to prove their legitimacy so customers would feel comfortable making a payment in Bitcoin, the digital currency.
- Whether or not that’s true, law-enforcement agencies have gotten a detailed view into his operation and its thousands of clients thanks to the efforts of Chris Monteiro, a British hacker.
After learning about the threat to the victim’s life, FBI agents notified the victim, provided her protection, and questioned Wan. Wan admitted that he had placed the order, made the payments, and checked the status of the order daily on the dark web marketplace. Records from Wan’s cellular telephone and his Bitcoin wallet corroborated Wan’s confession. After speaking with FBI agents, Wan canceled the order on the dark web marketplace.
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Since then, he has used similar techniques to repeatedly intercept the network’s traffic and feed it to governments and journalists. Over the course of the investigation, our team passed 175 hit orders to law enforcement. But many more of the targets are still waiting for justice, in the knowledge that someone in their life wants them dead. But although we were seeing arrests in individual cases, for a long time none of the police forces we encountered seemed to have any interest in proactively investigating the hitman-for-hire dark web site themselves. Our first priority was figuring out how much danger the targets were really in.
“48 Hours” Disrupts Alleged Dark Web Hitmen In Potential Murder-for-hire Plots
In February 2021, she also sent a text message to the daughter’s neighbor, seeking to hire that neighbor to kill the daughter. Zhou offered the neighbor $10,000 and sexual favors in exchange for killing the daughter and disposing of her body in a lake. Zhou was not aware at the time of her scheme that the website was a scam operated by a third party and there was no actual hitman for hire. The tale of Dark Web hitmen is more fantasy than fact — a chilling blend of fear, fiction, and fragmented truth. While the Dark Web does host illicit activity, the hitman-for-hire market is almost entirely composed of scams and law enforcement traps.
“48 Hours” Disrupts Alleged Dark Web Hitmen In Potential Murder-for-hire Plots
He told law enforcement officials that Sasser had helped him on a hike along the Appalachian Trail. The two had even hiked together in the Knoxville area before he moved to Alabama. In her advertisement, she sought a “random” or “accident” killing to get rid of the woman who was later identified as the wife of the man she claimed to have met on Match.com, an online dating platform. The Pences never shared their new address with the Corderos. When the five adopted children sent mail to their birth parents, the Pences wrote in a post-office box for a return address. Cisco had personal problems that compounded their troubles.
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- PrivacyAffairs discovered a number of telltale warning signs of scams.
- Our list may include horrifying stories, so if you are faint-hearted or suffer from any anxiety or stress disorder, you can skip the number.
- Defense attorney Kevin DeVore countered that authorities never looked beyond Stephen Allwine and that there were other people who may have wanted Amy dead.
- Bottom line, reaching a hitman takes a bit of work to cover your tracks, but you do need to do it.
- He’d exploited a vulnerability in the site to gain access to the back end, and now, astonishingly, he could see everything that the site administrators could see.
- While some marketplaces claim to offer these services, most are scams.
That doesn’t mean the sites aren’t involved in a very dark trade. They have become catch points for real people who are looking to pay to have someone murdered. And a number of men and women are sitting in jail after paying one of these sites — and getting caught by police. Ulbrich will spend the rest of his life in prison for money laundering, computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics.
Reality Check: Risks Involved
Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Weybrecht prosecuted the case. Blockchain analysis showed that Ms. Murphy used an ATM to convert cash into cryptocurrency on at least three occasions. On July 27, 2023, she transferred approximately 0.358 BTC ($10,510) to a Bitcoin wallet she believed belonged to the murder-for-hire recipient.
Investigations
Wan submitted an order to have a hitman murder his girlfriend with information including the victim’s name, address, Facebook account, license plate and car description. Using an alias on the website, Zhou placed an order to have Victim-1 murdered. To pay for the murder, Zhou contracted with a Bitcoin exchange service in Ukraine to make a $5,000 payment in Bitcoin on her behalf to the Website. Zhou provided approximately $5,000 in cash to a middleman in Brooklyn and then communicated with the Website administrator to confirm payment. After sending payment, Zhou provided a detailed description of Victim-1, including her home, her work schedule, and the best times to target Victim-1, so that Victim-1’s husband would have an alibi for the murder. Zhou later tried to use to the Website to secure the murder of Victim-2, her romantic partner’s adult daughter.
US Woman Hired Dark Web Hitman To Kill Online Match’s Wife, Gets 100 Months In Jail
We decided to investigate dark web sites offering hitmen and similar services to learn a bit about what they promise, and for how much they are potentially scamming would-be murder solicitors. Most dark web hitman services are fraudulent, with little to no possibility of successful outcomes. Criminal services include the purchase of firearms, illegal drugs, counterfeit money, stolen data, cyber attack software, and the hiring of hitmen. The dark web is known to harbor many sites that offer hitman services. Due to the dark web’s reputation, many believed they could hire hitmen for a hefty Bitcoin fee.
South Korean Man Arrested In $50 Million Crypto Scam
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Nearchos Nearchou is a determined person and 1st Class BSc (Hons) Computer Science and MSc Cyber Security graduate. He is a big tech-lover and spent several years exploring new innovations in the IT field. Driven by his passion for learning, he is pursuing a career in the Cyber Security world.
There has never been a murder definitively attributed to dark-web hitmen. Taking part in a consultation call with a hitman, however, would almost certainly be grounds for an attempted murder charge, or conspiracy at the very least. We even found “testimonials” pages that were just links to murders covered in the news. We were able to find follow-up articles on these cases in which local gang-members were arrested.
These marketplaces and forums are often hidden behind multiple layers of encryption, making it difficult for law enforcement to track down the individuals responsible. Payment for services is typically made in cryptocurrency, which further adds to the anonymity of the transactions. This is why Monteiro is ambivalent about the news of Yura’s apparent apprehension, despite years of working to shed light on the operation and its victims. “It’s great an international law enforcement operation took down these criminals, but when will they ever proactively investigate the thousands of names on the kill list? Yura devoted a lot of energy to defending the website’s credibility. A California-based person going by name Thcjohn2 had written to the website offering his services as an assassin.
For more than an hour, Monteiro told the officers about the material he had come across after penetrating the website’s messaging system – wannabe organ harvesters, mutilation requests, people aspiring to commit matricide. He suggested that the targets should be told what was going on and flagged up that Yura, undeterred by the Besa fiasco, was now operating a new assassination market, called Crime Bay. It used the same source code as Besa Mafia, which conveniently allowed Monteiro to continue to read the site’s correspondence. “People believed the site was real, and it isn’t,” Miller explained.
