It was and is the most — for me, anyway, by far the most important, meaningful, worrying, sometimes isolated and disgustingly-urgent work that I’ve ever found myself having to do. So, this whole time, the only thing they can do is just keep blogging and podcasting and publishing articles about the site being a scam. But yeah, it’s still going on. There are some other sites out there doing this, but I believe he’s the most successful financially, the most searched and optimized, has the highest traffic, the highest number of users. But yeah, he just thought there was a niche for a believable, effective darknet murder scam to be lucrative, and he’s not wrong.
Both stood to gain an inheritance, but police quickly eliminate Brandon Brigham as a suspect. …And Laurie really, truly, didn't have any knowledge of … how to run the businesses. That's the only person that I know. Dow immediately alerts San Luis Obispo police, including the supervisor of detectives, Lt. John Bledsoe. …What has been ordered is a hit that looks like an accident because the customer in this case feels that he or she'd become very quickly a suspect.
True Crime
The contract killings were ordered between 2016 and 2022. The targets are ordinary people, including a civil servant, a teacher, and a nurse. In four cases, the murders were paid for, RTL Nieuws reports based on data obtained from a hack. Motivations may include revenge, personal grievances, or criminal intent, but such actions are illegal and unethical. While some marketplaces claim to offer these services, most are scams.
The website itself evolved over time, from a clunky and simple page reminiscent of Geocities-era web to one that hosts putative forums, user profiles, and a (slightly) more modern design, replete with gruesome images intended to relay a proof of concept. The operation is a scam, but its users are serious about their purchase, and intend to inflict real harms. The security analyst Christopher Monteiro gained access to the backend of the first scam site run by this group, Besa Mafia, in 2016, allowing him to see a full inventory of the ordered “hits,” which he would then pass along to the authorities. Once there, users were asked to submit their target, information about how and when they would like them killed, and to pay a fee, typically $5,000-20,000, in Bitcoin. Since its inception in the 2010s, the operation has funneled users searching for ways to hire an assassin online to a site on the dark web. The fee for the killing, said to be 10,000 euros, was to be paid from the inheritance left behind by the victim.
New Research Shows Some Of The Hitmen Services On The Dark Web Are Probably Just Shooting Blanks
“I hope you both fall off a cliff and die,” she told the man, according to an affidavit dated May 11. Melody Sasser apparently didn’t like it when her friend, identified in recently unsealed court documents by the initials D.W., told her he was getting married last fall. One inquiry, just last week, was trying to secure a hit man in NYC In the Tennessee case, Brandon States pleaded not guilty in the plot to kill Sydney Minor.
- Each time we made contact and broke the news, the target went from being a string of personal details in a kill order, to a complete person.
- He never advertises the website, so he thinks people are probably finding it through online searches.
- "Some of these kill orders would go on, page after page," Miller recalled.
- Implicit in the design was that the best way to predict when someone is going to die is to kill them yourself.
EP 156: Kill List
David Wilson, a professor of criminology at Birmingham City University who studies contract killers, says that a surprising number of economically desperate young men are willing to take on these brutal jobs. The killers were caught, not because they had a motive, but because surveillance cameras captured their faces. A murder was ordered online and cryptocurrency changed hands, entirely anonymously.
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And as the cases of Amy Allwine and Alexis Stern show, even if Yura's hit man sites are scams, the customers paying him to have people killed are horrifyingly real. 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. Two people whose deaths were initially pursued on the dark web have ended up dead — one, Amy Allwine, was murdered by her husband, who had previously tried to hire a hitman via the dark web. Regardless of the legitimacy of the "murder-for-hire" websites, it doesn't mean dangerous people aren't paying money to them with the intention of having people killed.
He insisted he was just an everyday internet marketer hired on a freelance job. We asked him about the sites he created on the regular internet to advertise Yura's sites on the dark web. "48 Hours" tipped authorities who summoned Sharma to the police station.
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Our fear was that one of them would find a real hitman, or take matters into their own hands. 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. And what the messages revealed was that there were no real hitmen. As it was, he was simply a conman who scammed would-be murderers out of their bitcoin and never carried out any hits. "There has never been a murder definitively attributed to dark-web hitmen."
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Armed police burst in, handcuffed him, and searched his apartment. In January 2018, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Stephen had attempted to make the death look like a suicide, and the bitcoin key was proof it was not. He had taken out a $700,000 life-insurance policy on his wife, and had been sending her threats and exhortations to kill herself through various aliases online. They visited the Allwines’ home and informed them that someone had ordered a hit on Amy. “For reason that are too personal and would give away my identity I need this bitch dead, so please help me,” the user wrote.
Posts List
Over the next two weeks, "48 Hours" reached out to the man four times, requesting an on-camera interview at CBS News. I hit your camera and you did with your own hands. And "48 Hours" discovered an email address that included "gun" and "killa" connected to the man Lisa found in New York City. "48 Hours" staked out Adrian fry's house in England – the young man Alexis believes ordered her murder and asked Yura about obtaining a gun. He said they're not in touch at all anymore and that he doesn't know Yura's real name or location, but wishes he did because Yura scammed him, too.
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. They had considered themselves a couple for about two years when Alexis told Fry it was over. Apparently, about $5,000 of those profits was allegedly paid to kill Alexis Stern.
- There’s probably dozens of people on the list who are dead, and of those, half of them I could have saved.
- Dow immediately alerts San Luis Obispo police, including the supervisor of detectives, Lt. John Bledsoe.
- Disappointed by the police's reaction, Miller and his colleagues realised they'd have to warn the endangered individuals themselves.
- Both stood to gain an inheritance, but police quickly eliminate Brandon Brigham as a suspect.
- More chillingly, Merchant notes that the first successful killing brokered on the dark web took place while he was researching his article for Harper’s.
- The man who apparently cornered the market in contract killings, sent "48 Hours" a video diary.
No actual hitmen are here who you can hire to kill someone for you. You could register and you could apparently hire a hitman and you could pay money for a escrow and get someone killed. Yura even claimed – he's going legit – moving away from the murder-for-hire sites into the real world.
Of course, that could be down to the care of professional killers to not getting caught. We even found “testimonials” pages that were just links to murders covered in the news. Once the BitCoin is transferred to the site it’s gone. All the sites we investigated claim to use a third-party escrow, with a money-back guarantee for any failed contracts. The sites are full of “trust signals” that are designed to make visitors feel like they are dealing with a legit website.
Pretending to relay messages from the hitmen, he'd respond to customers claiming he needed more resources, stringing them along to squeeze out as much money as possible. Instead, the kill list website was a con, tricking users into sending untraceable bitcoin payments for contract killings that would never happen. Miller quickly realised that the posts on the website weren't leading to actual murders. Deep within the dark web, while poring over its shadowy corners from London, a hacker colleague named Chris unearthed a secret website featuring an ominous "kill list" loaded with hundreds of names of people marked for death by anonymous payers. Send me a proof when the job’s done.” A payment of 0.53 bitcoin (worth around $5,000 at the time) was made to the tipster’s wallet on February 4, 2020, law enforcement said.
Despite the publicity such cases bring to his website, Innes says he still gets online requests from people who want to hire a hit man. The woman told Innes she was a British citizen living in Ontario, Canada, and that the three people she wanted killed had stolen her father’s inheritance. “A few hours later, she sent a second email with the names and addresses of the people she wanted killed.”
It offered visitors a menu of options ranging from maiming to kidnapping to murder, a built-in messaging system, and a portal where users could apply to be hit men. There is just one reason that a local police department in Minnesota was aware that someone had paid an obscure site on the dark web to have one of its teenage residents killed, and that reason is Chris Monteiro. No one took the site very seriously, and it sat idle until 2018, when Sanjuro, apparently realizing that the bitcoin collected there had accrued over a million dollars in value, cashed out.
