While they do offer a layer of anonymity, law enforcement agencies have become increasingly sophisticated in tracking crypto transactions. In Britain, anyone who is caught trying to organise a killing could be accused of conspiracy to murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment. The scammers posted huge numbers of comments on websites like Reddit and other websites under fake names in a bid to make their website look real. “I stand to get his retirement, our house and possibly a large life insurance payout,” he wrote.
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- The man known as Judge Judy told us he believed the dark web page was probably managed by just one or two men, who ran a sophisticated scam campaign to give their project a veneer of legitimacy.
- 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.
- Yura reassured his customers that the leak was not a big deal.
- Five men believed to be behind the web’s most notorious murder for hire scheme were arrested in Romania this week, in part of an operation aimed at putting an end to the infamous dark web scam.
- 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.
They passed the details to Interpol but didn’t take much further action. With targets scattered across the globe, the London police didn’t chase down the leads. Disappointed by the police’s reaction, Miller and his colleagues realised they’d have to warn the endangered individuals themselves.
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Without his scamming, some lives would have been at risk and some people plotting murders would still be around. Without Yura, neither Monteiro nor law enforcement nor journalists would have ever heard of Stephen “Dogdaydog” Allwine in Minnesota, the man in Singapore, or the woman in Denmark. Yura’s greed, tenacity and SEO strategy had unwittingly created a tool to perceive the intentions of would-be criminals. The website attracted customers from every corner of the world. There were some trolls who put in joke requests, but most users were serious.
Tor Search engine used to search for popular .onion sites that advertise many known scams. He said she helped him in his planned Appalachian Trail hike by making reservations at known hostels and other rest points and took care of his vehicle for him in his absence. Following the incident, she began receiving unpleasant untraceable phone calls from someone using an electronic device to disguise a voice, court documents said. “Sasser responded to this news by stating, ‘I hope you both fall off a cliff and die,’” court documents said. Darknet Markets are online marketplaces where people can buy and sell illicit goods and services under the protection of the anonymity by TOR.
Hitmen On The Dark Web: Separating Myths From Reality
When I was hired by CBS in the US as a consultant to their 48 Hours program, “Click for a Killer”, I tried to convince him to take part. He got so excited about advertising for his site that he sent the producer details of two people who had been put as targets on his website. The producer passed the info on to the authorities, and shortly after two arrests were made. I kept on at Yura and he eventually agreed to appear on the show. He’s somewhere in eastern Europe, so CBS flew me to London and arranged an academy-award nominated makeup artist to be there to disguise him.
Murder For Hire

Murder marketplaces have in recent years become both his signature area of expertise and his exhausting burden. “Alexis Stern,” after all, is only one name among hundreds of potential victims on dark-net kill lists. At the station, the police told Stern a story that could have been a plot from one of her books. Her murder had apparently been ordered on a website called Camorra Hitmen, which advertised gun-for-hire services with the promise of keeping its clients anonymous. Additionally, there has never been a murder definitively attributed to dark-web hitmen. While illegal activities do occur on the dark web, we believe that most hitmen-for-hire sites are scams, designed to steal thousands in bitcoins from unsuspecting users.
At Least Seven Dutch Murders Ordered On Dark Web Hitman Site: Report

But none of the 24 sites covered in the research have ever been linked to a real-life murder. 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. For more than an hour, Monteiro told the officers about the material he had come across after penetrating the website’s messaging system – wannabe organ harvesters, mutilation requests, people aspiring to commit matricide. He suggested that the targets should be told what was going on and flagged up that Yura, undeterred by the Besa fiasco, was now operating a new assassination market, called Crime Bay. It used the same source code as Besa Mafia, which conveniently allowed Monteiro to continue to read the site’s correspondence.
Hitmen: The Stuff Of Thrillers Or Dark Web Reality?

While it is true that illegal activities can take place there, legitimate services such as anonymous communication, private browsing, and whistleblowing platforms also exist. One of the first steps is to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to conceal your IP address and encrypt your internet connection. This helps to prevent anyone from tracking your online activities and identifying your location. Navigating the Deep Web requires taking proactive steps to ensure your online anonymity and privacy. With the vast amount of information and activities taking place on the Deep Web, it’s crucial to protect yourself from potential threats. Firstly, be wary of individuals who insist on complete anonymity.
David Crichton, a doctor in the United Kingdom, was acquitted of attempted-murder charges after ordering a hit on a financial adviser who’d lost most of his pension, because he had never transferred any money to Yura. In court, Crichton claimed he had been trying to “clear his head” of his own suicidal thoughts, and that he’d never really wanted the killing to happen. Monteiro has good reason to doubt law enforcement’s ability to handle highly technical investigations like these. In February 2017, he was eating pumpkin soup in his flat when a battering ram knocked his door off its hinges. Armed police burst in, handcuffed him, and searched his apartment.
“We dropped what we were doing and realised these were serious threats to lives,” he says. They used their site access to create a “pipeline”, allowing them to track potential threats as they emerged, and involved the authorities. It was created by a young man in Melbourne at his parents’ house. He was studying at uni at the time and running this massive child exploitation pornography website.

“We take these matters very seriously because placing such an order is a criminal offense. We hope to be able to arrest suspects shortly who have given orders to have someone killed,” Aling said. Both Alexis and Mr Monteiro accuse law enforcement of doing little to resolve the problem around these sites. Whoever did try and have Alexis killed is still living freely today. He then passes the information on to law enforcement agencies in the UK and abroad.
He told us several British people tried to arrange assassinations using the site, as well as people from a variety of countries including America and Saudi Arabi. Several people who fell for the trick handed over up to £10,000 worth of Bitcoin at a time, with the criminals netting somewhere in the region of £50,000 in the past year alone. “I phoned up the Met Police; I think any sane person would do that as a next step,” he remembers. While the website’s legitimacy is up for debate, the existence of the Albian Mafia is not.
Investigating the site, Miller recalled how he initially involved the police but after finding out that they weren’t going to carry out an investigation, he decided to take matters into his own hands. Carl Miller took the stage at TEDxManchester in March 2025, where he shared his experience of uncovering a sinister website lurking on the dark web where people could order a hitman to kill someone they wanted dead. If you believed he was who he said he was — the owner of a site that arranged murders using a network of operatives all over the world — he would be pretty scary. “The data surrounding the pricing information available tells us the vendors are conscious of a reasonable price point that someone would be willing to pay, and they’re advertising that.” Dr. Holt’s research shows that the cost of hiring a hitman online varies, but averages around $20,000. The price fluctuates based on the method used, the experience level of the hitman and the person targeted (often depending on the target’s social status).
Oh, and it’s kind of hilarious that Chris is basically hacking into this site, since it might technically be illegal for him to do that. But what is the owner of the site gonna do, file a police report and say, hey man, someone hacked my hitman-for-hire site? Anyway, this was a huge discovery for Chris, to be able to read any message on the site that other users were sending to the administrator. So, he quickly put together a little script to enumerate through all these message IDs and to save them all into a spreadsheet so he can go through and read all the messages on this hitman-for-hire website on the dark web.

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They throw hundreds of bitcoins into the website’s digital purse. Let’s put on our detective hats and investigate the hitman-for-hire myth further. 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. “People believed the site was real, and it isn’t,” Miller explained. While they have been known to exist in the past, the vast majority of these sites are either scams to steal bitcoin from someone who probably would be reluctant to report it or ongoing stings by law enforcement.