They say, oh, no, you can’t take the money and run because we have an escrow system. If the hitman were to take the money, we wouldn’t give — we would not — were to take the money and not do the killing, we wouldn’t give them the money. According to the investigation, between March 25, 2019, and April 4, 2019, Zhou sought to hire a hitman through a murder-for-hire website on the dark web to murder her then-romantic partner’s wife.
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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. RentAHitman.com is a satirical1 website purporting to offer contract killers for hire. The company was never started but Innes retained the site. Upon checking the site’s email inbox in 2008, he found hundreds of messages requesting contract killing services, but he considered none to be serious.
Monteiro says that, as he didn’t know his NCA contact’s full name and he didn’t have access to his devices while in custody, he could not immediately prove his dealings with the agency. 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. Always the wikipedian, Monteiro had begun to structure his trove of Besa Mafia-related information in a password-protected BesaWiki. 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.

Christopher created an extravagantly cryptic username, mjd210eKd69BxG4IsJD, and began messaging other users. I have a couple targets—husband wife—that I am needing removed,” he wrote. “However, it is known that they and I don’t quite see eye-to-eye on something. ” Two weeks later, Christopher transferred $16,000 worth of bitcoin and submitted orders to kill the Corderos. To follow the latest on what Chris is doing, you can visit his website, which is pirate.london. In my research for this episode, I have discovered that every single hitman-for-hire website on the internet has been fake.
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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. Major takedowns like Silk Road, AlphaBay, and Hansa have shown that even the most “secure” criminal platforms can be infiltrated. These operations often expose how widespread scams really are. Meant to send a message.• Full Black Ops – Multi-target, multi-location coordinated removals. 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.
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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 Dark Web is part of the unindexed section of the Deep Web, which makes up a significant portion of the internet. The Dark Web itself can be accessed through a special browser (TOR-The Onion Router) which bounces around IP addresses, constantly changing between layers, to protect anonymity.

Amy and her husband Stephen, both 43, seemed to live a quintessentially American life surrounded by friends, family and dogs — lots of them. He calls himself Yura — a man who says he’s behind an international murder empire named Besa Mafia. But being in possession of the Kill List, and the terrible responsibilities that came with it, was was quite an emotional burden to carry for so long. Since the gang demanded payment in Bitcoin, which has quadrupled in value since October 2020, the scam must have been very lucrative, possibly running into many millions of dollars. In one of the files, the master criminal behind Besa Mafia had accidentally screenshotted his own computer desktop with a Google page open. And now the biggest law enforcement agency on the planet had finally seen the potential of the information we had.
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- With the hit against Amy bought and paid for, the FBI had decided to tell her and Stephen the frightening news.
- But whether the site was real or not, there was still someone out there who had used it with the intention of ending her life.
- 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.
- To prove it, he began giving us the names of the murder targets from his sites.
- Our investigation has spanned more than 11 countries, and involved the FBI, Interpol, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Crime Agency, and local police forces all over the world.
They put their own resources into verifying what we were telling them. Despite this, I had great difficulty getting any police force in Britain, Europe or the US to investigate the site or take responsibility for the list. In a bid to cover his tracks, the killer tried to make her death look like suicide.

It was imperative to search Monteiro’s place, the application for the warrant continued, because, as the presumed site’s admin, he might be in possession of more victim data and criminal evidence. At the station, an NCA officer told him he had been arrested for incitement to murder, in connection with Besa Mafia. Evidence of the first murder linked to Besa Mafia emerged shortly after Monteiro met up with two police officers and seven months after Besa Mafia’s takedown.

I Found A Hitman’s Kill List – Then Reached Out To The People On It
He finally said he would deny ever speaking to me if I wrote that his business was a scam. His defence is that he is a hindrance to potential murderers’ plans, robbing them of precious time and money. More significantly, he said that he was giving all target information to the police, and maintained that he has been working with the FBI. “We’re done with the case,” the officer in charge of the investigation at Clarksville PD, detective Ray Hall, told me in August. He said that he had already received a tip about the Toonbib conversation and that nevertheless had found “no factual evidence” of anything other than a suicide taking place. “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.
- The latest episode of the Sky News Daily podcast looks at “murder-for-hire” websites, how dangerous they are, and what is being done about them.
- His overall narrative of being a killer-baiter in shining armour doesn’t hold water.
- Both stood to gain an inheritance, but police quickly eliminate Brandon Brigham as a suspect.
- I don’t work at an NGO, a private detective agency, or in law enforcement.
- Many of these sites are designed to exploit the desperate, the gullible, or the criminally curious — offering nothing but empty threats and stolen funds in return.
- For me, this is only over when I’ve actioned the remainder of Kill List.
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Most of the kids seem upbeat despite the long hours on the highway. 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.
But, elsewhere, someone called Chris Monteiro has been disrupting the website’s operations for years, triggering its admin’s wrath. While most of us may agree that not having dark mode activated is a crime in itself – it seems like we all need to remember to not blindly believe everything we read. ‘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.
When checking again in 2010, however, he found a serious request from a woman in Canada. He passed her details to the police, and she was convicted for soliciting murder. 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.
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So, you seize the website; you don’t get years back of messages. So, unfortunately there’s gonna be no end to it in terms of the website getting shut down. For me, this is only over when I’ve actioned the remainder of Kill List. But of course the escrow system is designed to stop you from a hitman scamming you like you would a darknet drug vendor scamming you. It doesn’t protect you from the site itself being a scam.