When I finally ran into Monteiro outside his apartment, he was smiling faintly, as though he’d expected me to get lost. He exploited a vulnerability in the Besa Mafia messaging system that allowed him to see every order that flowed through it, and he built an automated system that kept a record of the desired hits. Months later, with the help of a friend—a prominent cybersecurity officer who wished to be identified only by his online alias, Judge Judy—Monteiro hacked into the site and shut it down entirely. The idea of an online assassination market was conceived long before it was possible to build one, and long before there was anything resembling the dark web. Inspired by a Scientific American article on the newfangled concept of encrypted “digital cash”—which did not yet exist in any meaningful way—Bell created one of the most sinister thought experiments of the early web. She was supposed to be taking courses at the local community college, but now she felt she couldn’t trust anyone, and she was afraid to be on campus.
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According to court documents, Felkins sent 12 bitcoin (valued at approximately $5,000 at the time) to a dark web hitman website, known as Besa Mafia, to have her ex-husband murdered. From February to May 2016, Felkins regularly communicated with the administrator of the site to pay and arrange for the murder of her ex-husband. Felkins gave the administrator the specific location of her husband in an attempt to have him murdered.
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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. Monteiro doesn’t always send tips directly to law enforcement because he finds investigators can be put off by the complexity of the cases and the fact that they’re based on hacked information. Monteiro was working with a podcast-production company on a murder-for-hire program for the BBC. The show’s producers began feeding the FBI details of murder orders that Americans were placing on Yura’s sites.
There were three intriguing pieces of evidence in the logs I’d sent to Stern. Mastermind365 had a habit of writing “thankyou” as one word—something that was also present in Fry’s correspondence with Stern. Second, Mastermind365 tried to buy a gun, which he would not need to do over the dark web if he lived in the United States. And finally, Mastermind365 changed the order from kidnapping to murder on the same day that Stern told Fry that she was seeing someone new. Stern sent me screenshots of their text conversation, and they confirm the timing. Reading through the kill orders, it’s easy to spot the online disinhibition effect—the psychologist John Suler’s theory of why and how human behavior changes when we log on.
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But the relationship had been fraying for several months, she said. He had become increasingly pushy and controlling, and he didn’t like it when Stern went out with her friends. She wound up breaking up with him while he was in the States. People visit the dark underworld of the Internet—places of pornography, crime, and violence—territory they would never explore in the real world. Stern dropped out of community college and quit her job at the local movie theater, worried that too many people knew where she worked.
Service Hub
Chris Monteiro, an IT specialist by day, white hat hacker by night, had also found Besa Mafia. Faith was important, too, says Washington County Prosecutor Jamie Kreuser. Amy and her husband Stephen, both 43, seemed to live a quintessentially American life surrounded by friends, family and dogs — lots of them.
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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. The ones he had accessed were not real – and all investigations into “murder-for-hire” websites have found them to be fake. His poor English and poorer knowledge of U.S. geography result in glaring slipups, and the language he employs can make him sound like a customer service representative channeling a B-grade Mafia film. She had started to suspect her British ex-boyfriend, Adrian Fry, of ordering the hit on her life.
- Often, we were stepping into situations that had been escalating for a long time.
- That’s how he spotted the news about Bryan Njoroge in a local Indiana outlet, the News and Tribune.
- He admitted to the authorities at one point that his sexual behavior was a continuous challenge for his family.
- According to RTL, a contract killing marketplace has existed on the dark web for years under various names and is still active.
- It’s not clear if the photographs are real or genuinely linked to the services the websites claim to offer.
- While each suspect in the Baron’s murder has the motive and means to commit the crime, the most likely culprit is the stonemason Lucky.
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That you can hire a hitman with just a few clicks and some cryptocurrency. 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’. The researcher set about locating the people who had been placed on the hit list and found a way to contact them in order to warn them that they could be in grave danger. 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.
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Often, we were stepping into situations that had been escalating for a long time. Many of the targets were women caught up in cases of intimate partner violence—a crime notorious for not being taken seriously by law enforcement. We made progress in some cases, but we also encountered police forces that literally laughed at the victims when they tried to report the crime, or tried to discourage them from believing us.
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. When we first tried calling people, we would only get so far before they hung up, thinking (understandably) that we were scammers. So to get around that, we recruited some brave local journalists from each target’s home country to try and reach them in person, and put them in touch with us. 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.
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”.
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An officer with the local department told her to come down to the station immediately. A few months ago, a middle-aged executive in Singapore was sent to jail for five years after paying the Camorra Hitman site to kill the boyfriend of his young ex-lover in a staged car accident that, not surprisingly, didn’t happen. Zhou later tried to use the website to secure the murder of her romantic partner’s adult daughter. 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.
