Six thousand miles away from Cedar City, somewhere in Romania, a small band of internet scammers got a payday. 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. They took money from users who wanted people killed, but they never acted on the jobs.
The next day, in Korea, Brandon States was charged with several military violations, including an attempt of premeditated murder. 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. Martin had grown fond of Amy Allwine after teaching her in an eight-week course for citizens to learn about law enforcement and emergency services. They’d last seen each other just two weeks earlier at graduation.
- “We got all customer and target information and we will send it to law enforcement unless you send 10 bitcoin,” he wrote.
- There were some trolls who put in joke requests, but most users were serious.
- Since its inception in the 2010s, the operation has funneled users searching for ways to hire an assassin online to a site on the dark web.
- Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Monero are often blamed for enabling illegal activity on the Dark Web.
- 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.
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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. When I finally ran into Monteiro outside his apartment, he was smiling faintly, as though he’d expected me to get lost.
- 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.
- Yura had by this time closed down Besa Mafia and opened a new hit man site called Cosa Nostra, another reference to the mob and organized crime.
- In a matter of hours, she zeroed in on two hits from different sides of the planet.
- At the same time, Christopher was looking into an extrajudicial approach.
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. ‘Pizzabagel’ explained that one of the biggest positives of the dark web is that it allows journalists and individuals in heavily censored countries to safely access and share otherwise restricted information. To those who are not aware, a red room refers a completely red room where you can see horrific acts of violence (think murder, torture, mutilation). An armed serial robber and convicted felon who robbed five cash loan businesses across the Fort Worth metroplex was sentenced today to 60 years in federal prison. A Houston, Texas man was sentenced to 120 months in federal prison following his guilty plea to the “jugging” robbery of an ATM technician. A Dallas, Texas man pled guilty for his role in a carjacking and high-speed chase that took place in the Deep Ellum section of Dallas.
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Miller said once he realized the orders were real, he immediately called his local police in the U.K. “There was a case in the U.K., a love triangle,” he explained. The series covers some of the 175 kill orders that Miller’s team turned over to police, The Hollywood Reporter said.
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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. We would have no way of passing that on in a reasonably swift manner to the people on the ground that could actually do something about it. So, that’s why ultimately we decided that we needed to go to them directly. Our investigation has spanned more than 11 countries, and involved the FBI, Interpol, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Crime Agency, and local police forces all over the world. It’s now the subject of a podcast series, Kill List, from Wondery and Novel.
Click Here To Kill
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. Our first priority was figuring out how much danger the targets were really in.
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The kids slept in bunk beds, and everyone traveled to appointments and church in a short bus. The Pences were committed Evangelical Christians, and on Sundays they would pile into their 15-passenger Ford Transit and drive north to worship at Valley Bible Church. Afterward, they’d invite church members to their home for fellowship. “If you met them and saw the way that their house was run, it was a joyous, happy atmosphere,” says Tom Jeffcott, the senior pastor of the congregation. It was a structured home, a model of learning, of support, of understanding.” The eldest Pence daughters sometimes harmonized while they washed the dishes.
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But the relationship had been fraying for several months, she said. He had become increasingly pushy and controlling, and he didn’t like it when Stern went out with her friends. She wound up breaking up with him while he was in the States. People visit the dark underworld of the Internet—places of pornography, crime, and violence—territory they would never explore in the real world. Stern dropped out of community college and quit her job at the local movie theater, worried that too many people knew where she worked.
We decided to investigate a few of the sites offering such services to learn a bit about what they promise, and for how much they are potentially scamming would-be customers of murder services. Last week, she was sentenced to 100 months or eight years in prison and also ordered to pay over $5,000 to the man’s wife as restitution. In her advertisement, she sought a “random” or “accident” killing to get rid of the woman who was later identified as the wife of the man she claimed to have met on Match.com, an online dating platform. Darknet Markets 2025 are online cyber criminal platforms exclusively accessible via the Tor network, used to promote advertising, buying and selling illegal goods including a variety amount of cybersecurity-related tools. It is advisable to report suspicious activity to law enforcement rather than engage with these services.
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Laws have often taken time to catch up to technology, but in cases like these, that gap might be a literal matter of life and death. In late 2023, Christopher Pence pleaded guilty to one count of soliciting murder via the internet. Christina told me that since Christopher’s arrest, Michelle has refused to allow her or Cisco to have any contact with their biological children. 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.
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And according to new research from social scientist Dr. Thomas Holt, the current Director of the MSU School of Criminal Justice, hiring a hitman doesn’t seem to be an exception. By his final court hearing, Sydney had given birth to a little girl named Saylor. 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. Alexis noticed that Mastermind365 sometimes referred to himself with a lowercase “i” and said when Fry wrote her, he did the same thing.
Homeland Security Investigations conducted the investigation with the assistance of the Bedford, Euless, Grapevine, and Hurst Police Departments. 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.
“48 Hours” has been working this story for several months now and a tinge of suspicion has crept into our minds. Chris Monterio has had access to Yura’s database — he knows everything about Yura — and it’s time we ask him an important question. Wong Pei Ting covered the case for an online newspaper in Singapore called “Today.” She says, if Vincent is convicted, the notoriously strict Singapore courts may throw the book at him. Chris Monteiro found scores of messages between Dogdaygod and Yura discussing how, where and when the hit would take place. Although Stephen Allwine’s behavior seemed fishy in the 911 call and police interviews, McAlister said there was no apparent motive for him to kill his wife. And there was no definitive evidence linking him to the death scene.
