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. 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. The Dark Web is not a playground for the faint of heart. Venturing into its murky depths is like navigating through a digital minefield.
Alexis had every reason to be worried because of something that had happened just months earlier, when out of nowhere, the police had called her. Kill List podcast, hosted by British journalist Carl Miller, launched on the subscription service Wondery+ in 2024, has shone a spotlight on an illicit dark web operation. In the Tennessee case, Brandon States pleaded not guilty in the plot to kill Sydney Minor. Just 13 days ago, Sydney gave birth to their baby, a daughter named Saylor. Turns out, Yura is a con man, and not some hit man commander.
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A mother of six in Massachusetts had posted that she and her husband were looking for someone to take care of their children temporarily while they worked through some marital issues. Christopher had been raised religious, and in his mid-20s he began to lean more on his faith for guidance on life’s biggest questions. He thought less about his career and more about his higher calling.
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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. Then — it even has dedicated third-party escrow sites which are independent or apparently independent, where you can go to this independent site. You can broker your illegal transaction and a third broker can handle this for you. It’s all run by him, of course, and of course he directs everyone to use this independent website, and it all uses the same back end. Then you go — say, I’ve put my money in the escrow system.
- The messages show the admin stringing along a wealth of customers, taking funds while making excuse after excuse for no murder or action actually taking place.
- There’s a level of desperation to look legit that gives it away.
- Some sites mention they will not accept a hit on a minor, whereas others will but won’t carry out terror acts such as using explosives in a public place.
- Justin Kmitch has been covering the story for The Daily Herald.
- It is an area allowed only to special search engines, the most used of which, part of a much more complex network, being The Onion Router or Tor for short.
- Azerbaijani Eagles is a group of people who offer the most gruesome possible services on the Dark Web.
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. 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.
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. One Illinois nurse was sentenced to 12 years for trying to hire a member of the Sicilian Hitmen International Network. Her case shows law enforcement probably won’t have much sympathy if your hired gun ghosts you. “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.”
If you believe the rumours, the dark web is full of nefarious websites that sell everything from drugs to weapons to government leaks. However, one of the most persistent legends of the underground internet is the existence of legitimate hitmen-for-hire services. The saga began in 2020 when Chris Monteiro, an IT technician and hacker, was browsing the site and found a security vulnerability that gave him complete access to it, The Guardian reported. According to the outlet, he found a “kill list,” a spreadsheet listing hundreds of people from all over the world whom clients wanted eliminated. The tale of Dark Web hitmen is more fantasy than fact — a chilling blend of fear, fiction, and fragmented truth.
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Murders started from $5,000 for a ‘basic killer’, but for $30,000 you could hire an ‘ex-military trained hitman with a sniper rifle on buildings’. Clients interested in these services were directed towards an online order form where they could organise an assassination. The murder of at least seven Dutch citizens has been ordered on a dark web site offering contract killings.
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The activity of hiring a hitman is not legal and could lead to serious legal ramifications and arrest. Also, it can put in danger both the hitman and the person hiring him. Not to say that this act is not moral and can lead to great emotional trauma. If you want to poison someone without the poisoning being forensically inferred, you should pay $100,000, and for uglier services, the cost can reach $200,000.
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- 🔐 Criminals may think their payments are invisible, but blockchain analysis tools often tell a different story.
- The murder of at least seven Dutch citizens has been ordered on a dark web site offering contract killings.
- We realised that detectives were far more likely to investigate if the threat was reported by people whose names were on the list – such as Elena in Switzerland.
- The Tor network, while offering anonymity, also harbors significant dangers.
- Alexis had every reason to be worried because of something that had happened just months earlier, when out of nowhere, the police had called her.
He had fought an addiction to pornography since he was a teenager, and the Massachusetts Department of Children & Families (DCF) had investigated him for looking at child porn and showing sexual images to his children. He denied the allegations, and the state took no action. 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. Needing space, the family had gone to live with Christopher’s parents in a semi-rural town 25 miles northeast of Seattle. They turned their property into a homestead with gardens, beehives, dogs, chickens, turkeys, a lilac-crowned parrot, and a succession of cows named Steak, Dinner, Beef, Burrito, and Norman.
He entered Christina and Cisco’s address and attached photos of the couple he had taken from their biological daughter’s baby book. The Pences never shared their new address with the Corderos. When the five adopted children sent mail to their birth parents, the Pences wrote in a post-office box for a return address. On the way back across the country, the Pences stopped at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, where the exhibits show humans coexisting with dinosaurs. They also dropped by Ark Encounter, where the entire group posed for a portrait in front of the doors to a model of Noah’s Ark. In the photo, Christopher and Michelle, who were still in their 30s, could just as easily have been the eldest cousins bookending an extended family photo instead of the parents and guardians of the 15 children huddled between them.
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But be warned, just because you can hide behind a screen doesn’t mean you’re invisible. Law enforcement agencies are constantly working to track down the bad guys lurking in the shadows. Has hardcore security measures for data and record protection. They offer different types of killers for different tasks, the price varies as well. Azerbaijani Eagles is a group of people who offer the most gruesome possible services on the Dark Web.
However, we work closely with our international law enforcement partners to share information and intelligence,” a second spokesperson later added. In January 2017 Allwine – aka Dogdaygod – was charged with his wife’s murder. In court, prosecutors pointed to a series of affairs – and the fact that Stephen was the only beneficiary of Amy’s $700,000 life insurance policy – as probable motives. Allwine was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in February 2018. He wrote a scathing review of Besa Mafia on his blog, calling it a scam. In 2015, Monteiro started running the r/deepweb subreddit, a front row on the day-to-day happenings of the online netherworld.
“God changed my thinking about how a man is to be the leader of his family and how children are actually blessings and rewards,” he said in a speech at his church. “There are many biblical examples about how our dreams may not be what God wants for us. Job did not want his children to die or his storehouses to be destroyed or his health to be impaired, but God’s perfect will allowed this to happen. Jeremiah wanted to marry a nice girl and have a family, but instead God used him as a prophet of death.” Exactly one year after his vasectomy, Christopher had it reversed.
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. Michelle Murphy, 58, was charged via criminal complaint in September 2023 and pleaded guilty in December 2023 to one count of murder-for-hire. When it comes to her own murder-for-hire story, Alexis says she is now getting on with her life.
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Christopher later claimed that the Corderos asked if they could permanently park their trailer home on the Pences’ property. (Christina told me she had asked to park there only during sanctioned visits.) Eventually, the Corderos rented a space at Good Luck RV in Dallas, a two-hour drive from the Pences’ home in Hawkins. 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.
Even if hitmen are rare, the Dark Web is still home to some seriously nasty characters peddling illegal goods and services. A window into life at the fringes of society, but certainly not most people’s everyday experience. Of the seven concrete murder-for-hire orders, one Dutch perpetrator has been arrested and convicted. Imran M., 42 from The Hague, was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2021 for twice trying to hire a contract killer to murder his ex-wife, the mother of his two children.
As he suspected, Chris found that the website never actually supplied murders, preferring instead to extort money from the people seeking to use it. But some of the messages sent to the site seemed genuine. He’d found twelve significant targets for whom money had been paid, and about as many people again who had wanted, possibly, to sign up to carry out killings and other forms of violence.
