Nevertheless, the legend of this underground website is likely to persist. Indeed, following the data breach, the debate has raged over whether or not the service is a scam. “Besa Mafia is real mafia and real hitmen. I used them to beat someone up and they did a very good job,” said one user – who should probably delete their internet history, pronto. The hacked data has been used to convict dozens of people for trying to hire a contract killer in nine different countries in recent years, the broadcaster wrote. Of the seven concrete murder-for-hire orders, one Dutch perpetrator has been arrested and convicted.
Over the course of the investigation, our team passed 175 hit orders to law enforcement. But many more of the targets are still waiting for justice, in the knowledge that someone in their life wants them dead. Our first priority was figuring out how much danger the targets were really in.
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.
- Soon after they moved in, Christopher’s sister visited and took pictures of the entire family playing in the snow, including a newly born 11th biological child.
- “I will assign an operative to your job and it will be done in about a week, is this ok?
- The murder of at least seven Dutch citizens has been ordered on a dark web site offering contract killings.
- Yura had hired freelance SEO experts, who had optimised the sites to ensure that they appeared first in search results for “hitman for hire” and similar word combinations.
- 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.
Creative, handsome and charismatic, Beau Brigham had it all. The music video he co-produced and appears in has more than two million views online. Brigham now has new people desperately wanting to see him, to find him — people with a badge who consider this talented artist a danger to society. “48 Hours” has been working this story for several months now and a tinge of suspicion has crept into our minds.
Markets List
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. Then, detectives discover something about the bitcoin used to pay for the hit in this case. It had been bought on a website where users had to register with a photo ID. Yura was finished with Sydney, but not with “48 Hours.” He tipped us to yet another plot.
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. However, the leaked dataset reveals evidence the website is a scam set up to catch criminals or members of the public who are plotting murder. In one correspondence that appears to be between one admin and an FBI agent, it is confessed the website is a honeypot-style operation. On the dark web, the group is generally considered to be one of the more viable hitmen-for-hire operations and many people claim to have used its many ‘services’.
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Dr. Holt’s research, which was completed in collaboration with doctoral student Ariel Roddy, found that hitmen advertise their services on both the open web and the dark web – and their services are less expensive than one might think. “There has never been a murder definitively attributed to dark-web hitmen.” PrivacyAffairs discovered a number of telltale warning signs of scams. One Illinois nurse was sentenced to 12 years for trying to hire a member of the Sicilian Hitmen International Network.
The Alleged Scammers Behind The Most Notorious Murder-for-Hire Site Have Been Arrested
Back in Minnesota, police had been busy investigating Amy’s death since the day her body was discovered. They’d made an unusual find in the basement, where Stephen had an office. 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. We were trying to cope with dozens of investigations in parallel across different countries, with police who wouldn’t believe us and targets who were sometimes equally sceptical.
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“It’s very unusual to step out of a normal role as a journalist,” said Miller. When Miller and his team felt they weren’t being taken seriously by police, they reached out to the targets themselves in hopes of warning them. They were also willing to provide the targets with whatever they needed to inform law enforcement. With Monteiro’s help, Miller was able to review private messages between clients and the website’s owner. According to The Guardian, the website was a scam run by a Romanian crook who had no intention of providing the sinister services. 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.
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Or this person should be given a message; that’s for being a cheater. After the order, there’s further negotiations and there’s always a price, how much. Sometimes there’s negotiations about, oh, how can you make sure you don’t take the money and run? 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.
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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. “Most people were stoic and calm during the calls,” said Miller. “It took them a while to let the message sink in. One of the women I spoke to was so unruffled by the news that she didn’t even change her plans for the evening. She went to see her friend who lives right next to her estranged husband. “It also moved to justifications for why the person needs to die,” he shared.
Of course, any guarantees are completely worthless when dealing with such highly illegal activity. “I’m trying to really grow as a person… at this point, it’s better to just move on, not to dwell on it and drag myself down.” 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.
- The agency eventually told both families that it intended to take custody of the Cordero children and bring them back to Massachusetts, where they might be split up in foster care.
- But I soon found that the police, both here and around the world, moved too slowly, so my next was to start calling the targets, to warn them of the threat to their lives.
- But what’s more is that hitmen in general are pretty much a myth.
- “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.”
- Darknet Markets are online marketplaces where people can buy and sell illicit goods and services under the protection of the anonymity by TOR.
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. They put their own resources into verifying what we were telling them.
Services Offered
In total, Miller disclosed 175 hits from the list to police, helping to secure 28 convictions and more than 150 years in prison sentences. When he was arrested, police discovered an apartment he secretly rented near her home, stocked with a sub-machine gun, AK47 rifle, pistols and a flick knife. Mr Allwine was sentenced to life without parole in 2018 for her murder. The church elder, from Minneapolis, had tried to pass off his wife’s death as a suicide, with a gunshot wound to her head. They would have no way as the Metropolitan Police did of actually checking to see whether I was mad or not, which they genuinely did, and we would have no way of disclosing additional information to them. So, sometimes there’d be more Bitcoin and the urgency would have changed, or a specific moment or time and place were being mentioned in the order, which would change how dangerous we thought it was.
