One gray afternoon in November 2020, I’m on a video chat with my colleague Carl Miller, a technology researcher and author. We’re speaking to a woman from Switzerland, who I’ll call “Elena.” She’s middle-aged, with brown hair and glasses. But we’ve called to deliver some news that’s about to change her life.
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I think it’s possible that by alerting Elena to her husband’s plans, my team and I saved her life. As a specialist in uncovering disinformation on the internet, I was working on a podcast with a Dark Net investigator called Chris Monteiro. He alerted me to a site called Besa Mafia, offering assassinations for cryptocash. Prosecutor Jamie Kreuser says the smoking gun was a 34-character code in a message from Dogdaygod, paying for Amy’s murder in bitcoin — that digital currency that people on the dark web often use to buy and sell anonymously.
Left On Read By Your Dark-web Assassin
Carl Miller still gets sick to his stomach whenever he remembers seeing all the smiling faces of people who were targeted to be killed by so-called assassins. Even if a hitman-for-hire website turns out to be fake, the consequences for attempting to use it are very real. As a mother, Latrice has embraced the opportunity to educate her children on essential life skills, with a special focus on financial literacy, the nuances of life, and the importance of inner peace. A terrifying twist on the concept of loot boxes in gaming, some dark web sites claim to sell “mystery boxes” filled with unknown items.
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.
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- The mastermind behind the operation was a fraudster who went by the name Yura.
- As long as your wallet opens, they’ll sell you a fantasy—and let you rot in a real cell afterward.
- Since at least 2016, the group had run a stable of sites on the dark web, including Sicilian Hitmen and Yakuza Mafia, offering bogus murder-for-hire services.
- He could also see that Besa Mafia wasn’t actually killing anyone.
- We were already there to interview a self-styled cybercrime researcher named Chris Monteiro, who’d been monitoring Yura and his hitman sites for more than three years.
Many cybersecurity and law enforcement experts have been tracking the Dark Web for years. 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. This is why Monteiro is ambivalent about the news of Yura’s apparent apprehension, despite years of working to shed light on the operation and its victims.
Are Hitmen Real On The Dark Web?
“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. Like Mastermind365, Stephen Allwine had paid Yura thousands of dollars to arrange a hit.
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- After they questioned him, Sharma agreed to an interview with us.
- While the full model is massive (106 billion parameters, 205.78GB on Hugging Face), Ivan Fioravanti created a 44GB 3-bit quantized version optimized for MLX.
- 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.
- Using a range of OSINT techniques, they identified ‘Yura’, a Romanian scammer who developed and ran the site and who had carpeted the internet with a layer of disinformation that built the narrative that the site was real.
A California-based person going by name Thcjohn2 had written to the website offering his services as an assassin. “I am broke (of course), and am looking for quick cash,” Thcjohn2 wrote. “I have military training (US Navy).” Instead of taking him up on his offer, Yura had asked Thcjohn2 to make videos of burning cars to intimidate Monteiro and other critics. He then asked him to enact and video a fake murder, with the help of a friend and a replica gun.
Details of the case, first revealed in the Irish Independent, allege that the garda sought a person on the dark web, purporting to offer criminal services, to set fire to a house in which the officer’s former partner lived. Excuses followed payment, and demands for more money followed that, with the fraudsters often claiming their targets were too well protected for a single assassin to kill. The reason the hitman never delivered was because the entire site was a ruse to con money out of people buying hits, as Carl Miller, host of the ‘Kill List’ podcast, discovered. When we first tried calling people, we would only get so far before they hung up, thinking (understandably) that we were scammers.
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In April, however, the Corderos got a brief glimpse at Christopher’s sentencing. Their kids were seated with Michelle as if in support of the man who’d tried to have their biological parents killed. It is not entirely clear why Christopher Pence wanted the Corderos dead. In Utah, he quickly convinced the family’s new pastor, Jeffcott, that both Christina and Cisco loomed over their household like specters. “They really were creating problems for the children,” Jeffcott told me. “I mean, wetting the bed — just really bad consequences from exposure to the birth parents.” But the Pences’ concern was vague. Christopher considered Cisco a Lothario but did not think his behavior in that regard involved the children.
He also mentioned that his son had a $400,000 life insurance policy; Njoroge had changed the beneficiary – designating a female friend instead of his parents – just a month before dying. Monteiro claims that the officers said they would be in touch again for an information handover, but did not ask him to show them the data he had brought to the meeting, which was on his laptop. The only document they consulted was an A3 printout on which Monteiro had summarised the intricacies of Besa Mafia’s operation. In January 2017, Monteiro managed to establish contact with the NCA through a friend who knew someone in the organisation’s intelligence unit.
But in a shocking turn of events, Yura began sending “48 Hours” the names of targets — turning on his own customers. Normally, as journalists, we report the news and do our best to get out of the way. We found ourselves in the middle of an apparent live marketplace for murder – and there was only one thing we could do. To prove it, he began giving us the names of the murder targets from his sites. 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. Dogdaygod wanted her dead badly enough to pay Yura and the Besa Mafia site more than $12,000 in the digital currency bitcoin.
PROFESSIONAL HITMAN SERVICES
But, while Yura acknowledged the website’s shortcomings, he maintained it was legitimate. He asked Monteiro to give Besa Mafia the benefit of the doubt. “We are open to suggestions, we will do our best to make it the best marketplace focusing on body harm revenge and property destruction,” Yura wrote. Wilson said these sites took attention from the real crime being committed on the dark net, like the drug markets and the sites selling the sensitive personal information of millions of Americans. But there has still not been a killing commissioned on one of the dedicated hit-man-for-hire sites.
A couple of the sites feature images of people who appear to have been killed in knife attacks or road accidents. It’s not clear if the photographs are real or genuinely linked to the services the websites claim to offer. Monteiro says that he was devastated when Allwine was arrested. Up to that point, the idea that he could have saved lives – that the kill list he had been frantically trying to hand to law enforcement had a portentous power – had essentially been a thought experiment. On May 31, 2016, about a month after the bRspd leak, the FBI contacted Amy Allwine, a woman living at the Minnesota address Dogdaygod had submitted to Besa Mafia. Amy and her husband Stephen Allwine – an IT specialist and a deacon at a local church – met with officers who informed them that someone had paid at least $6,000 on the dark web to murder Amy.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Monero are often blamed for enabling illegal activity on the Dark Web. While they do offer a layer of anonymity, law enforcement agencies have become increasingly sophisticated in tracking crypto transactions. In a final effort to seem legit, each of the sites we found have a section of the website where ex-military personnel can sign up to join as a hitman. The prominent positioning of the link looks like another confidence trick.
Why These Crimes Thrive
Stay tuned for upcoming articles that reveal how it really works — from anonymous communication to cybercrime tactics and digital countermeasures. 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. 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. Our research led us to sites offering a wide range of violent services, with fees ranging from $5k to $200k. While many sites attempt to appear legitimate with guarantees, third-party escrow, and even “testimonials,” we found that most sites have a desperate and untrustworthy feel.
