The data dump, which has been viewed by IBTimes UK, contains user accounts, personal messages, so-called hit orders and a folder marked ‘victims’ that contains nearly 200 images. The leak, uploaded in three separate archives, also holds email addresses, hashed passwords, usernames and user IDs belonging to over 300 registered accounts. Two of the leaked files, in .CSV format, contains 38 hit orders and nearly 3,000 personal messages sent between budding customers and the website’s administrators. Over the course of the investigation, our team passed 175 hit orders to law enforcement.
Manhunt Continues For Well-armed Survivalist Suspected Of Killing 2 Cops
It used the same source code as Besa Mafia, which conveniently allowed Monteiro to continue to read the site’s correspondence. This was the perfect environment for scammers – impenetrable to search engines and rife with illegality. Online forums crawled with references to sentient AIs lurking in the dark web, live-streaming websites showing people being slaughtered in “red rooms”, or dark web pages revealing the secret of the Illuminati.
PROFESSIONAL HITMAN SERVICES
And “48 Hours” was about to learn of even more murder targets. Someone using the alias “Blackjack85” had messaged Yura’s website in early February 2018 providing Sydney’s name, home address and other details. And he says it was a woman after all – or at least someone claiming to be — who tried to get Amy to commit suicide just months before authorities found her dead. Stephen Allwine was arrested on Jan. 17, 2017, on murder charges.
A THREAD IN YURA’S WEB
- She began her career as a freelance writer for Digital Spy, where she wrote about all things TV, film and showbiz.
- His defence is that he is a hindrance to potential murderers’ plans, robbing them of precious time and money.
- Rather than dismissing Miller as delusional or a scammer like most of the people he called, Elena had an inkling who was behind the proposed hit.
- The DIICOT says that the damages of the operation are believed to be around 500,000 euros, though if the scammers held onto the bitcoin they collected back in 2016, it would be worth far more than that today.
Yura was finished with Sydney, but not with “48 Hours.” He tipped us to yet another plot. This time, the person who allegedly hired the hit man is a woman living near Chicago. A law enforcement source told “48 Hours,” “there is no evidence at this time that Mrs. Alexis States was involved.”
Left On Read By Your Dark-web Assassin
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Complete digital access to quality analysis and expert insights, complemented with our award-winning Weekend Print edition. Complete digital access to quality FT journalism with expert analysis from industry leaders. Essential digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. Simon Willison’s experiment showcases the extraordinary progress in AI-powered code generation. The ability to generate functional code, even for relatively complex projects like Space Invaders, on a consumer-grade laptop using readily-available tools is remarkable.
This Fake Hitman Site Is The Most Elaborate, Twisted Dark Web Scam Yet
The site 18th Street Mafia includes a page with links to news stories about real killings it says it helped commit. None of the articles, however, indicate that the site, or even a hit man, was responsible. On many of the sites examined by the team at Michigan State, considerable effort was expended trying to prove their legitimacy so customers would feel comfortable making a payment in Bitcoin, the digital currency. Hit men are not the sort of thing you pay for with a credit card. That doesn’t mean the sites aren’t involved in a very dark trade. They have become catch points for real people who are looking to pay to have someone murdered.
Zhou provided approximately $5,000 in cash to a middleman in Brooklyn and then communicated with the Website administrator to confirm payment. 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.
He alerted me to a site called Besa Mafia, offering assassinations for cryptocash. Prosecutor Jamie Kreuser says the smoking gun was a 34-character code in a message from Dogdaygod, paying for Amy’s murder in bitcoin — that digital currency that people on the dark web often use to buy and sell anonymously. The problem for Stephen Allwine was that code was on his computer. But sometime, somewhere, warmhearted Amy Allwine had made an enemy. In spring of 2016, long before “48 Hours” began its investigation, the FBI learned about a murder-for-hire site called Besa Mafia — people paying for other people to be killed — and began looking into it. Each time we made contact and broke the news, the target went from being a string of personal details in a kill order, to a complete person.
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.
The Dark Web’s Strangest Crimes You’ve Never Heard Of—And Why They’re Thriving
He was eager to kill a woman living in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. He was open-minded about the method – initially pushing for a hit-and-run, or a deliberate traffic collision, but later suggesting rasher systems, such as shooting the target and burning her house down. Yura reassured his customers that the leak was not a big deal. Our website got hacked, but hackers only got information about some users,” Yura wrote in a message to a customer.
Allwine was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in February 2018. For more than an hour, Monteiro told the officers about the material he had come across after penetrating the website’s messaging system – wannabe organ harvesters, mutilation requests, people aspiring to commit matricide. He suggested that the targets should be told what was going on and flagged up that Yura, undeterred by the Besa fiasco, was now operating a new assassination market, called Crime Bay.
While stolen credit card information and personal data are known commodities on the dark web, some criminals take it to the next level by hosting live auctions for massive data breaches. Companies’ confidential files, government documents, and even celebrity information are put up for bids. The auction format adds a sinister layer of gamification to the already dubious act of data theft. As someone who’s seen what happens when the truth is distorted, I know how unfair it feels when those who’ve sacrificed the most lose their voice.
He also mentioned that his son had a $400,000 life insurance policy; Njoroge had changed the beneficiary – designating a female friend instead of his parents – just a month before dying. Monteiro claims that the officers said they would be in touch again for an information handover, but did not ask him to show them the data he had brought to the meeting, which was on his laptop. The only document they consulted was an A3 printout on which Monteiro had summarised the intricacies of Besa Mafia’s operation. In January 2017, Monteiro managed to establish contact with the NCA through a friend who knew someone in the organisation’s intelligence unit.
Woman Who Claims She’s A ‘witch’ Shares Incredibly Disturbing Moment From ‘cult Ritual’
The Pences came to “trust God to open and close the womb as He sees fit.” By 2017, Michelle had given birth to ten children. One died at five months from sudden infant death syndrome; there were also several miscarriages. Needing space, the family had gone to live with Christopher’s parents in a semi-rural town 25 miles northeast of Seattle. They turned their property into a homestead with gardens, beehives, dogs, chickens, turkeys, a lilac-crowned parrot, and a succession of cows named Steak, Dinner, Beef, Burrito, and Norman. The kids slept in bunk beds, and everyone traveled to appointments and church in a short bus.
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. “People believed the site was real, and it isn’t,” Miller explained. During this period, according to legal filings, the Corderos were under investigation by the Massachusetts DCF. It is unclear what the agency was looking into, but the Snohomish sheriff’s office attempted at least two additional welfare checks on the children at DCF’s request. 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.
