However, the FBI successfully intercepted Ilg’s communications on the dark web and thwarted his plans. As the initial investigation began, he falsely claimed to have been instructing the hitmen to kill him, instead of his victims. During our investigation, we came across several websites providing a vast array of violent services, charging fees that varied from 5,000 to 200,000 dollars. 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. Using an alias, Zhou placed an order to have the woman murdered. To pay for the murder, Zhou contracted with a Bitcoin exchange service in Ukraine to make a $5,000 payment in Bitcoin on her behalf.
I ask that you only get her and not the dad or kid as the kid is a friend of our child’s and I do not want to leave him orphaned. On a cold day in December, I went to visit Monteiro at his flat in London. It was early morning, raining lightly, and the sky was the gray-beige color of an old PC. An Uber dropped me off in front of a homely apartment complex in the southeast part of the city. I couldn’t find Monteiro’s unit, so, with no phone service, I wandered from door to door in the winter chill.

Looking into the history of Besa, it is interesting to see posts by users on totally unrelated forums – dating back in December 2015 – making comments about Besa. One user claims that someone was making threats to hire a hitman to kill them from Besa Mafia. There is also a website dedicated to exposing Besa Mafia’s service calledhire-a-hitman.com that claims to be figthing to expose sites like Besa. After appearing to reach an agreement to perform the hit, the administrator eventually asked for another $5,000 in Bitcoin; Musbach tried to get his money back. Then the administrator threatened to send Musbach’s IP address and identity to law enforcement, asking for another $10,000 in Bitcoin as blackmail to avoid sending it. Experts think that pretty much all hit man sites are scams, designed to bilk money out of bloodthirsty clients who think they can order up an assassin with Bitcoin like a normal person might DoorDash a burrito.
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Branden States asked to meet his daughter before going to prison. Sydney reluctantly agreed, and she handed the little girl to the man who had paid money to kill them both. 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.

🕸️ Are Hitmen-for-Hire Sites Real?
If you are a journalist or whistleblower in an oppressive country, perhaps-if you really have that as the only option to pass information. If you are that curious, watch a video of a dark web surfer on Youtube. Recently, there have been several reports of individuals who have been either arrested or convicted for attempting to hire or apply to be a hitman online to end someone else’s life. When people hear the words ‘dark web’ they automatically presume it’s the cyber equivalent of the wild-west where you can hire a hitman or watch someone have their leg sawed off in real-time. 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. Chilling audio displayed at a TEDTalk has revealed the moment a dark web researcher broke the news to a woman that she was about to be killed by a hitman.
Hitman For Hire: How The Dark Web Contract-killer Site BesaMafia Was Exposed By A Hacker

Alternately called “Camorra Hitman” and “#1 Hitman Marketplace,” Besa has long offered to connect paying dark web patrons to capable contract killers. The concept of a dark web hitman has become a topic of fascination and fear in popular culture and crime discussions alike. The dark web refers to the part of the internet that is not indexed by traditional search engines, and it often serves as a marketplace for illegal activities. But sometime, somewhere, warmhearted Amy Allwine had made an enemy.
BROOKLYN, NY – A criminal complaint has been filed in federal court in Brooklyn charging Bryan Oviedo with setting fire to a church and a residential apartment building on August… A complaint was unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging Elijah Roy, also known as “Eli Spice” and “Swervo,” with crimes related to the August 17, 2025 shooting at… He will have missed 112 of his children’s birthdays, but at 48, with his youngest child just 7 years old, he could have a lot of fathering left. 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.
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An officer with the local department told her to come down to the station immediately. A few months ago, a middle-aged executive in Singapore was sent to jail for five years after paying the Camorra Hitman site to kill the boyfriend of his young ex-lover in a staged car accident that, not surprisingly, didn’t happen. Zhou later tried to use the website to secure the murder of her romantic partner’s adult daughter. In February 2021, she also sent a text message to the daughter’s neighbor, seeking to hire that neighbor to kill the daughter. Zhou offered the neighbor $10,000 and sexual favors in exchange for killing the daughter and disposing of her body in a lake. 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.
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“Alexis Stern,” after all, is only one name among hundreds of potential victims on dark-net kill lists. 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.
During his investigation, Miller also reached out to potential victims to tell them their private information — including workplace addresses and photographs — had been posted online. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. 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.
When she turned over her phone so that the FBI could log her messages as evidence, she claims the agents accidentally deleted them instead. The FBI Office of Public Affairs told me that homicides and murder-for-hire cases typically do not fall under the bureau’s jurisdiction, making it difficult to determine which agency is best suited to handle threats made over the dark web. The FBI has a mandate to pursue only those crimes that violate a federal statute. “We are not a world policing agency and must be mindful of our venue, resources, and limitations,” FBI special agent Efrene Sakilayan wrote Monteiro’s lawyer in an email. Earlier that month, a user had logged on to Camorra Hitmen with the Tor browser—the most popular way to access the dark web—and created an account with the alias Mastermind365. 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.
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After sending payment, Zhou provided a detailed description of Victim-1, including her home, her work schedule, and the best times to target Victim-1, so that Victim-1’s husband would have an alibi for the murder. Zhou later tried to use to the Website to secure the murder of Victim-2, her romantic partner’s adult daughter. In February 2021, Zhou also sent a text message to a neighbor of Victim-2 seeking to hire that neighbor to kill Victim-2. Zhou offered the neighbor $10,000 and sexual favors in exchange for killing Victim-2 and disposing of the body in a lake.

Final Thoughts: Reality Vs Fiction
- Yura can’t seem to get the job done, raising Monteiro’s suspicions of whether Yura is really providing hit men.
- More significantly, he said that he was giving all target information to the police, and maintained that he has been working with the FBI.
- At the station, an NCA officer told him he had been arrested for incitement to murder, in connection with Besa Mafia.
- In this article, we dig into the chilling rumors, the real facts, and what these myths reveal about our relationship with anonymity, crime, and the darker corners of the Internet.
- Six thousand miles away from Cedar City, somewhere in Romania, a small band of internet scammers got a payday.
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. Our first priority was figuring out how much danger the targets were really in. And what the messages revealed was that there were no real hitmen.
Twenty-one-year-old Bryan Njoroge was found dead in Indiana, shot in the head on a baseball field. Weeks earlier, a user with the alias Toonbib had paid around $5,500 to order his murder and provided details of his upcoming travel. Njoroge was a U.S. military serviceman who, before he died, had made a female friend the beneficiary of his life-insurance policy.
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- Using an alias, Zhou placed an order to have the woman murdered.
- The websites frequently talk about anonymity and have guarantees everywhere but have no mention of using a specific, trusted, escrow.
- On the dark web, someone using the alias Mastermind365 had gone to a hit man-for-hire site and paid about $5,000 worth of bitcoin for Alexis to be assassinated, giving chilling details.
- 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.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Weybrecht prosecuted the case. Blockchain analysis showed that Ms. Murphy used an ATM to convert cash into cryptocurrency on at least three occasions. On July 27, 2023, she transferred approximately 0.358 BTC ($10,510) to a Bitcoin wallet she believed belonged to the murder-for-hire recipient. However, Miller shared how he was shocked to discover that most people weren’t worried about this – in fact, many didn’t even believe him.

🧠 The Origins Of The Hitmen-for-Hire Myth
Cybercrime is a genuine threat, affecting countless individuals and businesses worldwide. Screenshots from the site showed that “cattree” ordered a murder for hire on Jan. 11, according to the criminal complaint. District Court for Eastern Tennessee last month and faces up to 10 years in prison if she is convicted. Reports can be made to local law enforcement, or specific cybercrime units that focus on monitoring illegal activities online. A New York Times research proved that most sites advertising for hitman services are fake. Postal Inspection Service, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.