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Cattledog

(5,897 posts)
Thu Dec 12, 2019, 06:23 PM Dec 2019

Click Here to Kill. The dark world of online murder markets.

Earlier that month, a user had logged on to Camorra Hitmen with the Tor browser—the most popular way to access the dark web—and created an account with the alias Mastermind365. Five days later, Mastermind365 sent a message asking whether it was possible for a hit man to carry out a kidnapping instead of a murder. The site’s administrator replied that it was, but it would be more expensive, because such an operation was riskier.

A week later, on July 15, Mastermind365 sent another message. “I have changed my mind since i previously spoke to you,” the user wrote.

I would not like this person to be kidnapped. Instead, i would just like this person to be shot and killed. Where, how and what with does not bother me at all. I would just like this person dead.

And with that, Mastermind365 sent more than $5,000 in bitcoin to Camorra Hitmen, along with a photo of Stern—a portrait she’d posted on a website she’d built in one of her classes.


While I was working on this story, journalists at BBC News Russia confirmed the first known case of a murder being ordered on the dark web and successfully carried out by hired assassins. On March 12, 2019, two young men, aged seventeen and nineteen, were arrested for the murder of a prominent investigator in Moscow who had been aggressively pursuing a drug-trafficking operation. The murder was not orchestrated over any of Yura’s scam sites, but over a standard, all-purpose dark-web marketplace similar to the Silk Road, according to Andrei Soshnikov, one of the reporters who broke the story. The killers never met the person who posted the job. They were paid anonymously, in bitcoin, and one of them attended a concert later that night.


https://harpers.org/archive/2020/01/click-here-to-kill-dark-web-hitman/?fbclid=IwAR3KqjfSI2LN7YZ3j9ZCELvHVmdZtvXme52s-z0er7sY-lQhVSaVEjiID1o
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