“The threat posed by so-called assassination markets is going to be pretty small in comparison to other things we deal with,” an NCA spokesperson told me. “We aren’t monitoring the website and there have been no arrests. However, we work closely with our international law enforcement partners to share information and intelligence,” a second spokesperson later added. While preparing for the interview, Monteiro discovered that Yura had launched a new website, Cosa Nostra, and adopted a new persona – Italian capo “Barbosa”. 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.
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One of the “most wanted” users on Monteiro’s A3 was someone who went by the name of Dogdaygod. He says he tried to get the police involved – again, with little success. He claims that the Met referred him to the NCA, which didn’t answer his calls or messages; the National Counter Terrorism Security Office said that the matter was out of its jurisdiction; the FBI suggested that he talk with the NCA.
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In 2015, Monteiro started running the r/deepweb subreddit, a front row on the day-to-day happenings of the online netherworld. 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. The day after, Toonbib started chasing the presumed capo for an answer, which took some more time to arrive. “I will assign an operative to your job and it will be done in about a week, is this ok?
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The websites don’t actually look like they were written by serious people, but rather teenagers trying to look tough with a shopping list of violent acts. What’s more, the eCommerce style setup, complete with shopping baskets, just makes things far too convenient for a would-be murder conspirator. The investigation, carried out by data-privacy and cybersecurity think-tank PrivacyAffairs, took a close look at a range of dark-web hitmen sites to compare the language, promises, and costs involved. “People are going to these sites and providing details of the person they want killed, such as where they work, where they live and how much they’re willing to pay.”
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- Agents subsequently confronted Ms. Murphy and the boyfriend in question.
- And now the biggest law enforcement agency on the planet had finally seen the potential of the information we had.
- Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes.
- According to our investigation, he never arranged for a single actual hit.
To prove it, he began giving us the names of the murder targets from his sites. Back in Minnesota, police had been busy investigating Amy’s death since the day her body was discovered. They’d made an unusual find in the basement, where Stephen had an office. Raymond says, at the time, the FBI never mentioned anything to him or the Allwines about Yura, Besa Mafia or Dogdaygod, but they told her there was a murder-for-hire plot against her on the dark web. We were trying to cope with dozens of investigations in parallel across different countries, with police who wouldn’t believe us and targets who were sometimes equally sceptical. The only person he wanted to have harmed was him, because his life insurance policy wouldn’t pay out if he killed himself.
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- In four cases, the murders were paid for, RTL Nieuws reports based on data obtained from a hack.
- Other files revealed love triangles, unrequited romances and bitter family feuds.
- One was especially excited that Christina and Cisco had moved to the same state because he thought he would see them more often.
- However, by most journalistic accounts, the vast majority of hitman services on the dark-web are scam sites set up to steal thousands in bitcoins from people looking to have someone murdered.
Stephen Allwine had grown tired of waiting for a hired killer to murder his wife Amy, a 43-year-old dog trainer and mother to a nine-year-old boy. Chris Monteiro says Yura knows there will always be people who believe his sites are authentic, people who expect him to deliver death when they click for a killer. So he remains in business, somewhere out there … on the dark web. Defense attorney Kevin DeVore countered that authorities never looked beyond Stephen Allwine and that there were other people who may have wanted Amy dead.

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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. 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.

Music Well, I thought to myself, I know how all this works. I know how the web of trust between the sites work and how you find them. So, it should be very easy to find out what — if such a website is fake or real. I found — I was documenting them and I found a slightly more sophisticated website which, again, was — it was — looked like a darknet market. You could register and you could apparently hire a hitman and you could pay money for a escrow and get someone killed. It was just like a darknet market like Silk Road or something like that.
I will get back to you shortly with an estimated date,” the capo wrote on June 1. On June 9, Bryan Njoroge was found with a fatal gunshot wound to the head, near a baseball field in Clarksville, Indiana. He published a number of blog posts exposing the operation, which angered Yura enough to hire someone to threaten him personally. The site was quickly identified as a scam, and yet thousands of orders flowed in over the years, along with plenty of paying customers. Five men believed to be behind the web’s most notorious murder for hire scheme were arrested in Romania this week, in part of an operation aimed at putting an end to the infamous dark web scam.
Yes, hitmen do exist, however the likelihood of someone hiring a hitman on the dark web to come after you is ‘not remotely common’, according to ‘Pizzabagel’. “When they verified the information and saw it was real, they began to investigate the U.S. cases. … After that happened, we began to see more effective police investigations happen.” “There was a case in the U.K., a love triangle,” he explained.

The intended victims are not from organized crime groups and appear to live average lives. One teaches at a primary school, another works at a hospital, and another is a municipal official. Agents subsequently confronted Ms. Murphy and the boyfriend in question. After being read her Miranda rights, Ms. Murphy admitted that when she found out her boyfriend was seeing another woman, she attempted to hire a hit man to kill the woman. Jolie had episodes of depression and planned to commit suicide twice—at age 19 and again at 22, when she attempted to hire a hitman to kill her.

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. So we started trying to figure out what to do with the information Chris had handed over—what we’d started to refer to as the ‘kill list’. I don’t work at an NGO, a private detective agency, or in law enforcement. I’m a podcast producer, and earlier in 2020 I’d started work on a new series about the dark web. Then one day in June, our team got a call from Chris Monteiro, and everything changed.
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If you believed he was who he said he was — the owner of a site that arranged murders using a network of operatives all over the world — he would be pretty scary. As it was, he was simply a conman who scammed would-be murderers out of their bitcoin and never carried out any hits. According to court documents, Ms. Murphy used the dark web to attempt to pay a hitman $10,510 in Bitcoin to murder her boyfriend’s lover.
Yura reassured his customers that the leak was not a big deal. Our website got hacked, but hackers only got information about some users,” Yura wrote in a message to a customer. “They did not stoled any bitcoin.” Meanwhile, he set about launching a new, rebranded website. 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.
MURDER FOR HIRE
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. “We take these matters very seriously because placing such an order is a criminal offense. We hope to be able to arrest suspects shortly who have given orders to have someone killed,” Aling said. The woman and two children had to go into hiding for six months because it wasn’t clear whether someone would actually try to kill her. To access the dark web, you will need to use a special browser called Tor.
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. As they waited, an officer marveled at the children inside Christopher’s house, who were playing music and helping cook breakfast. “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. It is not entirely clear why Christopher Pence wanted the Corderos dead.