How to hire a dark net hitman

The incredibly story of a British journalist exposing ‘kills orders’ on the dark net

Without a doubt the biggest, wildest podcast this year will be Wondery’s latest offering ‘Kill List’.  You can listen here in full.

Kill List: THE true-crime podcast of 2024.

I should add an immediate disclaimer: the presenter Carl Miller is a close friend of mine. We founded the Centre for the Analysis for Social Media together. So I’ve known about this story for a while.  But this is not a favour for a pal. Read on – you’ll understand.   

Five years ago, an IT-guy called Chris Montiero was doing what he often did: investigating dodgy dark net sites. For a while he was a world expert on ‘carding’ sites. But there was one particular site that fascinated him: Besa Mafia.  

Besa Mafia. “Hire a killer or a hacker”.

Besa Mafia was a dark net site offering hitmen for hire. It worked something like this: a user could connect to the site using the Tor browser and request a hit. They’d send over some bitcoin (prices started from $5,000 USD for ‘death by shotgun’). Then they'd upload the name, address, photographs, of who they wanted killed. Plus any extra requests: make it look like a bungled robbery; need it done next week, etc. The website owner, a mysterious Romanian called ‘Yura’ would then connect them with a specialist hitman to carry out the commission.   

I know all about the dark net. I wrote a book about it and still jump on often to see what the latest trends are. Yes: you can buy all manner of illicit goods there. Stolen credit cards, identity documents, drugs (of course). You can purchase ransomware-as-a-service and chat with hackers to hire. You can download child sexual abuse images. But there has always been one area shrouded in mystery, even for me. Can you really order a hitman with a few clicks? There have always been hitman sites, I saw one while researching my book. But do they work? Are they real?  

Finally Kill List provides an answer. As he poked around, IT-guy Chris stumbled across a vulnerability on the site, and was able to access the ‘back end’. From there he could see what Yura could see: hundreds of names. Each one, a person someone else wanted dead. And next to each name: photographs, addresses, commute routes, phone numbers. Victims were from all over the world. Switzerland, Spain, the Czech Republic, the US, the UK. And alongside each, gruesome requests:  

Make it look like a road accident  

I would just like his person to be shot and killed. Where, how and what week does not bother me

This person needs to go away, but disposed of without a trace  

Need target killed, make it look like an accident  

And in 175 cases there was also evidence of a successful bitcoin payment. In other words: people had paid real money to have them killed.  

Chris called Carl for help.  They gathered the information into one place, and called it the Kill List. They were looking at the grimmest database in the world. A detailed murder list. What the hell do you do? 

Carl does what most of us would probably do. It’s a clear and present threat. He phones the police. You won’t be surprised that the police struggle to know how to respond. The Met Police, to their credit, turn up at Carl’s house to talk. But they worry he has mental health problems. The authorities are slow. And these murder requests are imminent.  And so Carl and his team start investigating. They phone up the victims, trying to warn them. When the FBI get involved, things really start moving fast. I won’t ruin the whole story for you. Just listen yourself.   

In the end, Carl investigated one hundred and seventy five kill requests. Each one a wannabe murderer. Each one a potential victim – who Carl often phones and break the crazy news. “The hardest calls I’ve ever made” Carl tells me. “How do you explain that someone wants you dead?!” (Carl would be indirect, gentle. He tried to make sure the victim felt in control. But often they hung up. “They didn’t believe me. They thought I was a scammer”). 

This isn’t a review of the podcast. (Which is brilliant). There will be lots of reviews by professional reviewers. I’m more interested in what the podcast reveals about this shadowy world – and the true crime genre more broadly.  

The big answer is: no. You couldn’t actually hire hitmen on this website. The whole thing was a brilliantly engineered scam. There were no hitmen, ready to commit murder. Yura had created a professional looking site, complete with sinister videos of people firing guns in the air. But it was a ruse. “Yura is a masterful digital marketer” explains Carl. He hacked Chinese blogs to add Besa Mafia links, which pushed up his search engine ranking. He ran a clearnet hitmen comparison website.  

Yura would lure people in, and promise a high quality professional hit. People would pay, and wait. And wait. Nothing would happen – but their bitcoin was gone.  Yura realised that ordinary people would be willing to anonymously pay to have someone knocked off. And that they wouldn’t go to the police when the service wasn’t delivered.  

According to the Daily Mail write up of this story, Yura made $400 thousand. “I think it’s much more than that” Carl tells me. “I think Yura made millions”.  

The hitmen might have been fake. But the intent of the people commissioning the kills was very real. Which meant those on the Kill List were in serious danger. After all, someone, somewhere was willing to pay to have them killed. One man, American Stephen Allwine, murdered his wife Amy himself soon after placing her on the list. In another case, an increasingly desperate man set up a torture room once it was clear no hitman was coming. Luckily the authorities managed to get there before anything happened.  

So can you actually order a hit on the dark net? I ask Carl. He never saw one. He knows of two real murders that were arranged on an organised crime dark net forum. But they weren't on any sites explicitly designed for kills. It doesn’t prove you can’t hire a hitman online. But all the high profile, visible sites are almost certainly scams. Bear that in mind next time you read about dark net hitmen for hire sites. Journalists like writing scary dark net stories. But unless they investigate properly, they’re likely wildly inaccurate. 

Kill List is of course an examination of what people are capable of under the conditions of (perceived) anonymity. In one way it’s shocking how many people are willing to go online and pay to have someone killed. I suppose it shouldn’t be. People pay to have enemies killed offline, too. But it’s not often you see an excel database about it. Why do people do it? I ask Carl. Most of the victims are either love rivals or former partners. “Love and lust” is the main motive, says Carl. “Followed by money and greed”. You might assume it’s nearly all men trying to kill women – but that’s not quite true. There were nearly as many women perpetrators as men. The men usually target women, while the women usually target men.  

It’s incredible how ordinary everyone seems. Normal seeming people in suburban homes with typical jobs and active social lives. But that’s the story of the dark net. It gives ordinary people access to their own dark and wild impulses. A decade ago, it would have been almost impossible for an unhappy housewife to attempt a commissioned assassination. Now, in theory at least, it can be done at home.  

Kristy Lynn Felkins was sentenced to 5 years for ordering a dark net hit on her ex-husband

But Kill List is the most important podcast of the year not because of what it says about dark net hitmen sites. It’s about a much bigger trend.  Carl Miller and his team identified 175 live, paid-for kill orders. All handed to the various authorities. That has resulted in 34 people being arrested. Twenty-eight of them have now been convicted, usually for some variant of conspiracy to commit murder. In total, the perpetrators have received a combined total of 116 years of prison time.  

As he was making the series, Carl watched as news article after news article reported on people being convicted, thanks to the information his team had passed over. He was never named - it was all done behind the scenes. Like here, here and here.  

And he couldn’t blow cover. He just read it, and waited for the next order to come in.  

Has any podcast ever had so much direct impact? Lots of podcasts are talked about, or ‘inform the debate’ as the wishy-washy language goes. We did it a little with The Missing Cryptoqueen. Serial’s coverage of Adnan Syed’s case led to his successful appeal against his murder conviction (although that has been recently overturned again).  And the BBC’s To Catch a Scorpion tracked down Europe’s most prolific human trafficker.

But few result in anything so concrete as this. The number of convictions. The amount of jail time. The lives saved. And doubt there is more to come, too.  

I’ve thought for a while that podcast are becoming the best way to expose large scale complex crime. Especially with this genre of ‘new’ digital crime that all police forces are struggling with.  Generally speaking, though, journalists do not work with law enforcement. It would destroy our trust and credibility: who would speak to any journalist that dashes straight to the Met Police? When I made The Missing Cryptoqueen, we had information that might have been very useful to the FBI. But we did not speak to them at all outside a formal interview. There were no back channels. No sharing of information. Finding and catching Dr Ruja Ignatova is their job, not ours.  

In the Kill List, Carl went to the police immediately. And the team ended up creating a formal relationship with the FBI. This is highly unusual. “We transformed away from being journalists pretty quickly”, says Carl. “As these people became real to us – and we cared deeply about the level of danger they faced – I felt morally obliged to help them.” He’s right about that. There are limits to the journalists’ neutrality; and that’s usually when there is a clear and present risk to life. Carl stopped being a journalist in the traditional sense of documenting but not influencing. His task became to stop people getting killed.  I would have done the same.  

Were you worried about transgressing a boundary? I ask. 

“I was worried about everything, all the time” he says. “To be honest, worrying that I was transgressing this ‘journalist’ category wasn’t my main worry. It was racing against time to save people. My main concern was: ‘What are we doing’? Because there was no definition, no policy, no best practice.”  

If I’m right, more and more complex crimes will be solved by podcast journalists like Carl. Strange as it is to say, in more cases that you’d think, podcasters have more time and resources to dig into these kinds of stories. I suspect journalists will increasingly confront the same dilemma as Carl.  

The Met, Interpol, the FBI, and a dozen other national police forces end up being involved. Some do better than others. Carl has to explain repeatedly to the police about bitcoin wallets. For a while law enforcement would gratefully receive his information, but wouldn’t actively take over the running of the site themselves. Carl would ask himself, “shouldn’t someone else be doing this?” But no-one was: so he kept going. All journalists – plus law enforcement – should listen to Kill List for how to navigate this awkward boundary. (The FBI end up setting up a structured disclosure system, which Carl describes as ‘game-changing’). Journalists and the police have a healthy, instinctive distrust of one another. But in some cases they can, and probably should, get over it.  The long term impact of Kill List might not be about dark net hitmen sites, but the role of journalism in solving crime. That’s a much bigger story.   

The hitman site is still up. Carl thinks it’s probably being run by a Western intelligence agency right now. Yura is also still out there – possibly also working for the authorities. But from everything Carl has seen, people will still be going on there, trying to order hits.