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”. 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.
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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. Then €69 per month.Complete digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. The trend of AI models focusing on code generation is undeniably gaining momentum.
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All characters, scenarios, and operations are fictional, created solely for storytelling, entertainment, and worldbuilding purposes. The hottest stories ripped from the headlines, from crime to courts, legal and scandal. “We were intending to do a podcast, which was supposed to look back at dark net assassinations over the last few years,” Miller explained. “We didn’t anticipate it, but Chris began to send us these live kill orders. Most of the story of the podcast is us scrambling to try and deal with all of that, trying to make sense of it and trying to react in a responsible way.”
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- Sydney reluctantly agreed, and she handed the little girl to the man who had paid money to kill them both.
- All the sites we investigated claim to use a third-party escrow, with a money-back guarantee for any failed contracts.
- It allows researchers and developers to build more secure and ethically sound AI systems.
Final Thoughts: Reality Vs Fiction
“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.” While data on the frequency of contracted violence is limited, Dr. Holt says that the data surrounding the advertiser’s pricing could be interpreted to reflect an actual demand. 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. “Why would you set up a dedicated site online when you know absolutely that law enforcement are going to be flooding that site trying to find you?” Wilson said.
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- Reading page after page of detailed instructions of exactly how and where a target should be murdered, it was clear that many of the customers were deadly serious.
- Elena, who lives in Switzerland, had agreed to take a video call from me, after meeting one of my colleagues.
- Others have, understandably, voiced skepticism about the site.
- Turns out, Yura is a con man, and not some hit man commander.
- Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Weybrecht prosecuted the case.
Just 13 days ago, Sydney gave birth to their baby, a daughter named Saylor. Turns out, Yura is a con man, and not some hit man commander. According to our investigation, he never arranged for a single actual hit. Six weeks later, “48 Hours” obtained a letter from his defense team. Beau Brigham’s doctor states “Mr. Brigham is extremely ill,” but he never mentions cancer or ALS.
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Prosecutor Jaime Kreuser says he wanted out of his marriage, but divorce was discouraged in his fundamentalist church. Some days, Jane Sharpe mourns the loss of her friend, Amy Allwine, by blowing off steam at the gym. Prosecutors believe Amy’s husband shot her in cold blood after his attempt to hire a hit man failed.
Experts and law enforcers who have studied these sites — almost all of them on the so-called dark web or dark net — say they are scams. There has not been a known murder attributed to any of them. “There was a case in the U.K., a love triangle,” he explained. 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. 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. Even if a hitman-for-hire website turns out to be fake, the consequences for attempting to use it are very real.
True Crime
One weekday in the summer of 2021, Christopher Pence entered his home office in Cedar City, Utah, and plugged a USB stick into his computer. He booted up Tails, an operating system designed to optimize privacy, and used it to access the dark web — a marketplace teeming with illicit goods and services like child pornography, weapons, and drugs. Christopher, who was 41 and worked for Microsoft as a systems engineer, wanted to hire a hit man to kill a young couple he had met on only a handful of occasions.
He then passes the information on to law enforcement agencies in the UK and abroad. The hidden underbelly of the internet allows people to buy and sell drugs and weapons, watch illegal pornography and even hire hackers to target individuals or businesses. This person had simply fired up their laptop and accessed a dangerous online space where criminals can remain anonymous as they operate outside the law.
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. Lisa immediately launched a worldwide search across the dark web and the regular Internet for that password possibly linked to Yura. In a matter of hours, she zeroed in on two hits from different sides of the planet.
The show’s producers began feeding the FBI details of murder orders that Americans were placing on Yura’s sites. Using an alias on the website, Zhou placed an order to have Victim-1 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 to the Website. Zhou provided approximately $5,000 in cash to a middleman in Brooklyn and then communicated with the Website administrator to confirm payment.
But, while Yura acknowledged the website’s shortcomings, he maintained it was legitimate. He asked Monteiro to give Besa Mafia the benefit of the doubt. “We are open to suggestions, we will do our best to make it the best marketplace focusing on body harm revenge and property destruction,” Yura wrote.
“People are going to these sites and providing details of the person they want killed, such as where they work, where they live and how much they’re willing to pay.” 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. “The threat posed by so-called assassination markets is going to be pretty small in comparison to other things we deal with,” an NCA spokesperson told me. “We aren’t monitoring the website and there have been no arrests.
But she found it hard to believe any professional killer would charge as little as $7,000. Either way, the most dangerous thing about him may be his customers — some so driven to kill that if Yura doesn’t get the job done, they might do it themselves … like prosecutors allege about Steven Allwine. Again and again, Beau told us he didn’t remember anything. Despite Beau’s memory issues, despite that he admitted to both the police and his own mother that he did this, Beau’s attorney plans to take this case to court.
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’. Visiting the website BesaMafia, using the anonymous Tor browser, you will find a rudimentary layout and the full range of ‘services’ offered by the group. The first person we deployed that strategy with was Elena, the woman in Switzerland. And it worked; we found that the victims were more likely to believe us, and local police forces were more responsive when we approached them alongside the person who’d been targeted. I felt completely unqualified to deal with this situation.
