The wife had also been sent photos over Facebook showing the husband and the suspect kissing, believed to have been orchestrated by the suspect, according to the search warrant. But none of the 24 sites covered in the research have ever been linked to a real-life murder. While many vendors online boast previous military experience, law enforcement experience, or connection to larger criminal activities, Dr. Holt negates the stereotypes of professional hitmen we see in movies and other media. Dr. Holt’s research shows that the cost of hiring a hitman online varies, but averages around $20,000.
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According to the outlet, he found a “kill list,” a spreadsheet listing hundreds of people from all over the world whom clients wanted eliminated. “I need you to help me do some videos to prove the Besa Mafia legit, but WITHOUT killing anyone,” the operator wrote in one email, trying to get a contractor to produce lifelike videos. Of course hitmen do exist and there are reports of dark-web related murders, it’s just that these murder-for-hire eCommerce style sites smell so much like scams.
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He insisted he was just an everyday internet marketer hired on a freelance job. “48 Hours” tipped authorities who summoned Sharma to the police station. After they questioned him, Sharma agreed to an interview with us. We asked him about the sites he created on the regular internet to advertise Yura’s sites on the dark web. Alexis noticed that Mastermind365 sometimes referred to himself with a lowercase “i” and said when Fry wrote her, he did the same thing.
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His website invites would-be killers to send him hit man audition tapes. Because the video is anonymously posted online, it can’t be verified. It is advisable to report suspicious activity to law enforcement rather than engage with these services. While the idea of hiring a hitman may seem like fiction, reports and anecdotes suggest this capability exists on the dark web.
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For one thing, the users’ eagerness to believe the service is real leads them to ignore obvious signs that they are being scammed. Yura’s marketplaces, for example, use stock photos of assassins or photos pulled from Google image searches. Additionally, if the target is murdered, your identity will remain hidden. Furthermore, law enforcement can’t close hire-a-killer websites because they’re hosted on anonymous servers.
Investigations
This sends a clear message to those who believe they can escape justice by relying on cryptocurrency transactions — they are in for a harsh reality check. Mark Riddell’s technology podcast “Techcess” is an m3 Networks production. Mark and the team have created this podcast to help you and their clients understand how technology can help them in their industry and business, including helping them with cyber security solutions. To find out more about Mark Riddell and the rest of the m3 team, visit them here and follow them on Linkedin. These 10 cases highlight the happenings on the dark web, and we hope they have made you curious to visit that part of the internet.
No Love Deep Web Reality Game
But sometime, somewhere, warmhearted Amy Allwine had made an enemy. In spring of 2016, long before “48 Hours” began its investigation, the FBI learned about a murder-for-hire site called Besa Mafia — people paying for other people to be killed — and began looking into it. “They said they’d never had anything like that happen before,” she said. Three years earlier, in February 2016, a user had logged on to Besa Mafia with the alias dogdaygod and ordered a hit on a middle-aged woman who lived in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. “For reason that are too personal and would give away my identity I need this bitch dead, so please help me,” the user wrote.
The Pences worked with traditional agencies, submitting to hours of training, interviews with social workers, psychological reviews, and home studies. One organization blocked them from adopting a group of five siblings because the Pences already had children of similar ages — not optimal, in the agency’s view. The Pences came to “trust God to open and close the womb as He sees fit.” By 2017, Michelle had given birth to ten children. One died at five months from sudden infant death syndrome; there were also several miscarriages.
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The Cordero children were also wounded by the fact that their parents were continuing to have more kids. A few months into the arrangement with the Pences, Christina gave birth to a seventh child, and in Texas they told the children they were expecting an eighth. “The oldest girl, she’s kind of hurt that they would have more children after giving up five,” Christopher later said.
- However, we work closely with our international law enforcement partners to share information and intelligence,” a second spokesperson later added.
- People wouldn’t do it randomly with strangers unless they’re desperate.
- “For reason that are too personal and would give away my identity I need this bitch dead, so please help me,” the user wrote.
- Part timeline, part list, part flow chart, the document included a breakdown of the various hacks and dumps the website had suffered, and even a top 10 of the website’s most dangerous users – in a fully wikified format.
- “They did not stoled any bitcoin.” Meanwhile, he set about launching a new, rebranded website.
Sure, the authorities won’t really bother with a small drug dealer, but a murder leaves a body behind and that’s serious. That’s when the dark web kicks in, a dark side of the deep web, a part of the Internet that’s not indexed or accessed through regular search engines or browsers. Even websites look different, as their names consist of a mix of random letters and numbers and the .onion extension. There are well-documented cases of people being arrested while attempting to contact organized-crime syndicates and individual assassins in order to have someone killed. Despite no murder taking place, judges are unlikely to have much leniency. 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.
Christopher was an unlikely client in the murder-for-hire trade. When he wasn’t logging ten-to-12-hour days working, often while listening to one of his favorite Christian rock bands, he was helping his wife, Michelle, raise their 11 biological and five adopted children. The entire family, along with Christopher’s retired parents, lived in a 5,800-square-foot home on the northern edge of the Mojave Desert, surrounded by wind-raked brushland and snow-capped mountains in all directions.
- And he says it was a woman after all – or at least someone claiming to be — who tried to get Amy to commit suicide just months before authorities found her dead.
- The home’s surveillance video did not show anybody but Stephen Allwine coming and going from the residence.
- Christopher, who was 41 and worked for Microsoft as a systems engineer, wanted to hire a hit man to kill a young couple he had met on only a handful of occasions.
- Weeks earlier, a user with the alias Toonbib had paid around $5,500 to order his murder and provided details of his upcoming travel.
- While the dark web offers anonymity, law enforcement agencies have developed sophisticated techniques to trace financial transactions and communications.
- There had been warning signs for a while, at least since the point at which Yura had threatened to expose him as a cop.
Reading page after page of detailed instructions of exactly how and where a target should be murdered, it was clear that many of the customers were deadly serious. Our fear was that one of them would find a real hitman, or take matters into their own hands. Wan then transferred an additional Bitcoin payment worth nearly $8,000 to the marketplace. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan James Wan, 54 used cryptocurrency to pay for the murder-for-hire plot.
How Do Dark Web Hitmen Operate?
While the Dark Web hosts some illegal marketplaces peddling drugs, stolen data, and other shady stuff, hitman services are less widespread than you might think. Stephen Allwine was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Then, detectives discover something about the bitcoin used to pay for the hit in this case. It had been bought on a website where users had to register with a photo ID.
