When Miller and his team felt they weren’t being taken seriously by police, they reached out to the targets themselves in hopes of warning them. They were also willing to provide the targets with whatever they needed to inform law enforcement. Miller is the host of a new true-crime podcast on Wondery, “Kill List.” It explores how Miller came across a fake hitman-for-hire site on the dark web, prompting him and his team to warn police. Carl Miller still gets sick to his stomach whenever he remembers seeing all the smiling faces of people who were targeted to be killed by so-called assassins.
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“Maybe there is something to be said about not letting all the outside influences corrupt their minds, right? I mean, I don’t know what my daughter would do without TikTok on her cell phone,” he said. The Corderos had made three cross-country trips to visit their children — twice in Washington, once in Texas — and knew they could not afford to keep doing so. But it unsettled Christopher and Michelle, who started to feel that the Corderos were using them to hide their children from the Massachusetts child-welfare system. Christopher later claimed that the Corderos asked if they could permanently park their trailer home on the Pences’ property.
And a month later, he was sentenced to three years in state prison. “48 Hours” also tipped off detective Michael Ulrey in Clarksville, Tennessee, who broke the news to then 22-year-old Sydney Minor, a single mom. The elusive Yura never showed up, claiming we could have been followed by police. Then, for some reason, about a week later he upgraded his order from kidnapping to “I would just like this person dead.” A few months later, when she told him she had a new boyfriend, she says he became angry. Apparently, about $5,000 of those profits was allegedly paid to kill Alexis Stern.
🧠 The Origins Of The Hitmen-for-Hire Myth
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.
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Unlike most sites on the traditional internet, dark-web sites use technology that allows both sides of an online interaction to hide their identity and location, from each other and law enforcement. 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.
She provided specific information about how her ex-husband could be found, including his home address, vehicle, and what time he left for work, according to a criminal complaint filed in 2020. In 2016, she sent 12 Bitcoin, then worth $5,000, to the administrator of a site on the Tor network called Besa Mafia, which claimed to offer murder-for-hire services. Tina Jones admitted she paid nearly $12,000 in Bitcoin on the “dark web” to hire a hitman to have the wife of a former boyfriend killed.
Are Hitmen Real On The Dark Web?
‘Pizzabagel’ explained that one of the biggest positives of the dark web is that it allows journalists and individuals in heavily censored countries to safely access and share otherwise restricted information. To those who are not aware, a red room refers a completely red room where you can see horrific acts of violence (think murder, torture, mutilation). All the sites we investigated claim to use a third-party escrow, with a money-back guarantee for any failed contracts. Of course, due to the nature of unenforceable contracts, such guarantees are worthless.
Njoroge was found dead in the early hours of June 9, face down under the stairs of an announcer’s box on a baseball field. The coroner quickly established that he had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He set up Google alerts for every target’s name – in case something happens to them, even if the authorities have been alerted.
- Disturbingly, tons of people have fallen for the scam and actually forked over money in the hopes of arranging a murder.
- In a matter of hours, she zeroed in on two hits from different sides of the planet.
- The fee for the killing, said to be 10,000 euros, was to be paid from the inheritance left behind by the victim.
- As a final conclusion, murder for hire services are, indeed, available on the dark web.
- Finally, the company is based in Panama, a privacy-friendly jurisdiction.
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. “This weird fringe of the internet, it’s one of the toughest areas to seek truth,” Monteiro says. In 2016, two years before sending me the email about Njoroge, Monteiro was just a guy writing wikis. 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.
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Six thousand miles away from Cedar City, somewhere in Romania, a small band of internet scammers got a payday. Since at least 2016, the group had run a stable of sites on the dark web, including Sicilian Hitmen and Yakuza Mafia, offering bogus murder-for-hire services. They took money from users who wanted people killed, but they never acted on the jobs. The mastermind behind the operation was a fraudster who went by the name Yura. In 2022, at the urging of the United States, Romanian authorities reportedly arrested Yura and his crew, but it’s unclear if they were ever prosecuted. SAN FRANCISCO On a website called Azerbaijani Eagles, you can commission a murder for US5000 (S6900).
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The next myth ‘Pizzabagel’ busts is that of hitmen for hire being readily available on the dark net. Thanks to stories of hackers finding out your home address from a simple internet search, tales of red rooms and whispers of depraved criminals lurking in every corner, the dark web doesn’t have the best reputation. The investigation discovered that one person was running multiple dark-web sites, and had a team of programmers and online marketers to create the perception that the organizations were genuine, trustworthy, and efficient. Ulbrich is by no means the only person to have been caught trying to order killings on the dark-web. In fact there have been several arrests as a result of an investigation carried out into scam sites operating as contract-killer organizations. We decided to investigate a few of the sites offering such services to learn a bit about what they promise, and for how much they are potentially scamming would-be customers of murder services.
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From guns and illicit drugs to hacker services and even murder for hire services. The DIICOT says that the damages of the operation are believed to be around 500,000 euros, though if the scammers held onto the bitcoin they collected back in 2016, it would be worth far more than that today. And whether it’s enough to shut down the operation for good is an open matter; it is easy enough for another to keep running the scam. Furthermore, there are still thousands of people who have contacted Yura about hiring a hitman, and submitting the name of a person they want dead. They are real websites, but they are not delivering real hits. 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.
How Do Dark Web Hitmen Operate?
One of the eldest Pence daughters has her youngest sibling strapped to her chest. On Christopher’s back, in a baby carrier, is the youngest Cordero child, his face fixed in an observant gaze. She was passionate about educating her children herself and valued, above all, the freedom to teach a curriculum focused on the Bible. The Pences considered the text a straightforward account of history, and every morning, before sunrise, Christopher led the family in studying Scripture.
It’s a mix of scams, law enforcement tactics, and sensationalized tales that spread like wildfire on the internet. Yura even conducted interviews, his voice disguised, for TV segments; and yet his identity and whereabouts were unknown. 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.
