(A spokesperson declined to comment.) To keep the siblings together, the Corderos and Pences agreed to make the adoption permanent. In December 2019, the Pences traveled back to Washington to go before a judge and make it official. A picture from that day shows the Pences with all 15 children smiling broadly as they crowd together behind the judge’s bench.
At the center of Merchant’s article is a young woman who faced a likely threat on her life based on information found on the dark web; actually pursuing the case, however, proved more difficult. “Murder marketplaces may force us to reexamine — and redefine — what constitutes criminal intent,” Merchant writes. 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. The good news, so far, is that the presence of a market for the services of an assassin doesn’t actually mean that there are actual assassins involved. 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.
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Let’s dive into this chilling topic and separate fact from fiction. 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. 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. One Illinois nurse was sentenced to 12 years for trying to hire a member of the Sicilian Hitmen International Network.
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Police responding to a local home found a reporter and an unidentified man — allegedly KV — accusing Harper of her murderous plot. Investigators found proof that Harper had wired an undisclosed amount of cryptocurrency to the site administrator, according to the complaint. FBI agents then matched the transactions to her IP address, email address, and phone number after executing a search warrant at her home.
Are Hitmen Real On The Dark Web?
He was into transhumanism, the internet-based movement advocating for human enhancement and immortality. He gave talks about the politics of sci-fi, using a slightly slurred patter. 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. “It’s great an international law enforcement operation took down these criminals, but when will they ever proactively investigate the thousands of names on the kill list?
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Be extremely cautious of potential financial scams, phishing attempts, or fraudulent schemes. We are not responsible for any financial loss, data breaches, or other damages you may incur from interacting with linked content. Before we delve into the dark and sinister world of hitmen, let’s shed some light on the Dark Web itself. It’s like the rebellious cousin of the internet we all know and love. Are hitmen real on the Dark Web, or is it just an urban legend cooked up to keep us up at night?
Offering $9,750 in Bitcoin for the job, she added the woman’s work and home addresses, her car’s license plate number as well as other details to help the killer locate and identify her. The price for these grisly but fake services has run between $5,000-20,000, in Bitcoin, Motherboard reports. Disturbingly, tons of people have fallen for the scam and actually forked over money in the hopes of arranging a murder. In a Wednesday press release, officials with Romania’s Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) announced the arrest of five men alleged to be the administrators of the site formerly known as Besa Mafia. Alternately called “Camorra Hitman” and “#1 Hitman Marketplace,” Besa has long offered to connect paying dark web patrons to capable contract killers.
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. Keep up with stories of the day with our lunchtime news wrap and important breaking news alerts. Governments, corporations and law enforcement must act decisively — closing legal loopholes, enforcing stronger regulations and fostering global cooperation — or risk ceding control of cyberspace to an unregulated shadow industry. Some forms of cybersecurity work — like penetration testing, bug bounty programs and ethical hacking — are not just legal, they are essential to protecting digital infrastructure. Criminal hackers-for-hire operate without oversight, selling their skills to the highest bidder.
- It’s a quirk that would become more significant later in our investigation.
- But Monteiro’s life was turned upside down in January 2017 when he learned about Amy Allwine’s death.
- If you take a minute to browse the web and look for news, you’ll realize quite some people have been caught trying to find hitmen, hence the necessity of watching every step and ensuring a high level of anonymity.
- The FBI said the informant had tipped it off about another kill order, but no details were provided.
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Meanwhile, individuals are hiring hackers to settle personal scores, hack social media accounts and steal data. Screenshots from the site showed that “cattree” ordered a murder for hire on Jan. 11, according to the criminal complaint. Ilg didn’t know that we’d handed over all our information, everything we had downloaded from the website – including his messages. He couldn’t even deny that he was Scar215 because when police searched his house, they found a safe containing a gun and a scrap of paper with his username and password on it. The only person he wanted to have harmed was him, because his life insurance policy wouldn’t pay out if he killed himself.
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He also found messages suggesting that the operators had little intention of going through with the killings. “If they were real assassins, they were the most incompetent assassins you would ever come across,” Miller added. We decided to investigate dark web sites offering hitmen and similar services to learn a bit about what they promise, and for how much they are potentially scamming would-be murder solicitors.
- The man who took the kill order Adrian allegedly made is still at large, too.
- 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.
- 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).
- In March 2017, they arrested David Crichton, a British doctor who had ordered a hit on his former financial advisor.
The video prompted Monteiro to contact law enforcement. “I just wanted to get this on the record,” Monteiro recalls. In 2016, two years before sending me the email about Njoroge, Monteiro was just a guy writing wikis. A tall man in his thirties with thick sable hair, a short beard and deep-set, dark eyes, Monteiro is a man of weird pastimes. By day, he worked as a computer system administrator for a London-based firm; by night, he turned on a six-screen desktop computer in his South London flat and spent hours plumbing the depth of the internet. He called himself a “cybercrime and niche topic internet researcher”.
The show’s producers began feeding the FBI details of murder orders that Americans were placing on Yura’s sites. According to the warrant, the site administrator told the agents about one order for which he’d been sent the target’s address in Bellevue, Washington, and had received a message from the buyer, which read, “Just kill her ASAP. She works in corporation in Bellevue but I don’t know where exactly. She has a three-years-old son that she picks him up at 5 P.M. Send me a proof when the job’s done.” A payment of 0.53 bitcoin (worth around $5,000 at the time) was made to the tipster’s wallet on February 4, 2020, law enforcement said.
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In fact, “48 Hours” discovered Yura and his hit man-for-hire website while investigating the shooting death of Amy Allwine in the Minneapolis suburb of Cottage Grove, Minnesota. “48 Hours” explores the alarming world of murder-for-hire on the mysterious dark web and exposes an international criminal organization in a hunt for a self-described murder mastermind who uses the name Yura. Yes, hitmen do exist, however the likelihood of someone hiring a hitman on the dark web to come after you is ‘not remotely common’, according to ‘Pizzabagel’.
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. As it was, he was simply a conman who scammed would-be murderers out of their bitcoin and never carried out any hits. Earlier today, at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, Jaquell Blackwell pleaded guilty to carjacking. His co-defendant, Abdoul Azika, previously pleaded guilty to carjacking on July 9, 2025. The next myth ‘Pizzabagel’ busts is that of hitmen for hire being readily available on the dark net.
He was charged with first degree murder and, in 2018, sentenced to life in prison without parole. One typical excuse was that the target was too well protected for a single hitman to kill. A two-man team would be needed, with extra equipment – and that meant more money upfront. Incredibly, many clients would keep paying, perhaps driven by their obsessive hatred, or simply unwilling to accept they’d been scammed. 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. Although many dark web sites are scams, Alexis knew someone out there wanted her dead.
