Kill List

I used to live and work in Las Vegas. What a town that is. I'm so glad that I got out of there. I was like, I had a hole in my pocket all the time and I could ever find where it was. Anyway, I was playing Crap's one day. It's where you throw the dice. That's a big table. And this frail old man came up and he was playing too and he was betting big. He was getting wild with his money, having a good time. And I was rolling the dice and he was making money off of my dice rolls. So he was liking me and we started chatting it up. But there was this dude behind him, a big guy. Not a muscular man, but a guy who probably loves cheeseburgers, if you know what I'm saying. And I asked him, hey man, you want to get in on this game? I got a hot roll going. He didn't say anything. And the old guy turns to me and he says, oh, don't mind him. He's my bodyguard. And I was like, oh really? This guy is your bodyguard? And then the old man told me something that surprised me. He said, yeah, but I don't actually pay him to protect me if there's actually a fight. And I was like, what? You don't pay him to rescue you out of anything? No, no, I can't afford that kind of bodyguard. This guy just stands next to me. And if something goes down, he knows he doesn't need to step in. And I'm like, well, hold on a second. Why are you paying someone to stand next to you? And he said, to be my bodyguard. And I was like, no, but he's not guarding you, though. And the old man said, yeah, but no one knows that. Everyone sees him next to me. And they don't mess with me because he's there. And I was like, does that work? And he said, yep, I haven't been robbed yet. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Recyder. This is Darknet Diaries. [MUSIC PLAYING] This episode is sponsored by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online. At a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Having your address, phone number, and family members names hanging out on the internet can have actual consequences in the real world and make everyone vulnerable. And since I take my privacy very seriously, a few years ago, I signed up. Delete Me immediately got busy scouring the internet from my name and gave me reports on what they found. And then they got busy deleting things. It's great to have someone on my team when it comes to my privacy. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now in a special discount from my listeners, get 20% off your Delete Me plan. When you go to joindeleteMe.com/DarknetDiaries and use promo code DD20@Checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to Join Delete Me. This episode is sponsored by Vanta. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up. And customers now expect proof of security just to do business. And that's why Vanta is a game changer. Vanta automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust to get 20% off your Delete Me plan. And customer trust together in one AI-powered platform. Companies like RAMP and RIDER spend 82% less time on audits with Vanta. That's not just faster compliance. It's more time for growth. So whether you're prepping for a SOC 2 or running an enterprise GRC program, Vanta keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving. It's what I'd use if I needed this service. Get started today at Vanta.com/Darknet. That's Vanta spelled V-A-N-T-A. I think it was like, man, it was like seven years ago at this point that I was told, I need to get Chris Montero on the show and talk about what he found. So of course, I slid into his DMs and acted all cool and stuff. Hey, man, I heard you're deep into the web. He's like, can't talk about it. Too sensitive right now. So I was like, okay. And I followed up a year later. But again, he didn't want to talk. And he's like, no, I'm done with that. I walked away from that. And then maybe like another two years after that, I asked him again. This time he's like, it's the police are investigating this. We're going to have to wait. Then I think another time he told me there are threats against him. So he needs to stay low for a while. And it's just what been one of those stories that the longer it goes on, the more intrigued Diane by it. And I really hoped one day I could talk with him. And now, now Chris Montero is ready to talk. After seven years of waiting for him. And I can't wait to finally hear what he has found on the deep dark web. Okay. Yeah, I'm Chris Montero. I'm a cybersecurity professional. Up until now, the main thing I know about Chris is that he spends a lot of time on the dark net. Basically, the anonymous side of the internet that you need a special connection to get into. And this seems to be where Chris feels comfortable. Well, I always say I look at that interest in it because I don't really try not to do it anymore. But back in 2015, 2016, I did a bit. I got very into things. As I'm sure you and your listeners know, one of the things that web's well known for is the dark net markets where you can buy drugs and stolen data. And the disalcellos of urban legends and nonsense and scams out there. And so in 2015, 2016, I was really into writing for Wikipedia, writing definitions for what dark web means, what deep web means, what a, what a history of done at markets. How does it instigate of tour, what are the police doing, what are the academics saying about the commerce and ultimately about the scam. So I, there was a time I was very into documenting cyber crime, which I don't recommend. I mean, there's crime and then there's cyber crime. But then there's dark web cyber crime. And the stuff that happens over there, well, it all has this veil of secrecy, you know. And so the stories we hear that come out of there are a little bit more brutal and ugly than a normal cyber crime story. And trying to keep up with all the ugliness that goes on there, it's rough on your soul. I mean, starting out, okay, he was learning about the dark net drug marketplaces and how they worked and he became an expert in that whole world. I went a bit too far and as that, as I was then and today I am a self-proclaimed expert on diet markets and the dark web, I started debunking scams. People are saying, oh, there are secret fights against who midgets. There are, there are, there are, AIs which are the skates and will aren't you anything. There are rooms you can go to and you can participate in live streamed a burger in a so called red rooms. There's nonsense or is it all right? But people don't care because it's so difficult to talk about cyber crime and the dark web that people on YouTube and on the internet are trying to get rid of the cyber crime. And it was like, you know, on YouTube and on the internet was make up shits for their own statement and the knowns interested in the real answers. So I found a niche where I was going to start writing about all of these fake phenomena in depth with the med citations and original research and aggregates of research as possible. And I did that. And one of the ones I covered, just one of many was hiring a hitman of a dark web. Well, I thought to myself, I know how all this works. I know how reputation systems work with data markets. I know how it's great works. I know how the web of trust between the sites work and how you find them. So it should be very easy to find out what if a web such a website is fake or real. And so I found I was documenting them and I found slightly more sophisticated website, which again was. It was looked like a dark web market. You could register and you could apparently hire a hitman and you paid money for it and it's grow and get someone killed. How do we just like a dark web market like Silver Age or something like that? So we looked into this hitman for hire site deeper. And yeah, he snipped it out pretty easy that it's just a scam. No actual hitmen are here who you can hire to kill someone for you. It's just missed to be able to hire a hitman online. So he took his findings and wrote it up at the time he was writing articles on rational wiki. And this is a place that debunks conspiracy theories and explains when something is pseudo science or real. So he writes an article there saying, yeah, hitmen for hire sites on the dark web. They're all scams. Don't believe it. I have my rational wiki article of analyze by an IP in Romania saying that's, oh yes, the dark web hitmen sites are scams apart from Bessermatia, which is real. And like what you can't edit my wiki page that's not cited stuff you can't do that. And so it began and that message was from the person we know is euro. Okay, so this edit explicitly said the dark web hitman for hire site Bessermatia is not a scam. You can actually hire a hitman there. Well, this of course drew Chris's attention. Naturally, he goes there to investigate it further. He's never even heard of this site before Bessermatia. Yes, based on F.E.R. is a hitman's by site. You know, this site is run by some organized criminal gangs. It's just like a real dark market. So you can't get scammed. There's mediation and instead of buying drugs, you might know. And I spent a lot of time dealing with this. Yeah. So your first take on it or even like your first day of looking at it. Did you think this did look legitimate? No, again, I had spent over year at this time documenting the history of real dominant markets, darknet commerce, darknet navigation. I knew very easily that this website was a scam. You know, there was plenty of tales beyond that, but again, I knew it wasn't a scam. So I just buy thought, you know, whatever. I write a blog post about it. It's a bit interesting that someone's made a hitmever higher scam site, but it actually like make it look like a market. It made it look real. So I wrote a blog post about it and saying how does web sites is fake and it has like stopped photograffs on it and bad spelling and doesn't make sense. And yeah, there you go. I'd add it to my body of research on direnet scams. Job done. What's I thought? The administrator of Bessam Arfia, his name is Yura, was quite interested in the reputation of his site. So much so that he paid people to promote the site where there would be Reddit posts about the site, blogs being made and other freelancers hired to just drum up business for the site. So if you googled the site, you'd see all these positive reviews of the site. But then there was this one blog that Chris wrote about how that site specifically is a scam. So I had pissed off the site administrator. So he asked for a true and honest interview with me. He contacted me via my blog and I said, sure, why does a scammer want to interview me about, you know, why is site is fake? What's that about? And yeah, we went back and forth and he was saying site is real. I was shutting down. He would count with some flimsy evidence. I would unpick it. He would get aggressive. I would show him that it's sorry, but he doesn't know what he's doing about. He tried to paint me off. And just, you know, just this escalates at the point. I'm like, yes, this guy just ducking to himself a whole scammer trying to persuade me at a time, at least, of forriting a dot on his scams that his site's not a scam. It's not going to work. Yeah, so I published a whole exchange of my blog. I thought, that's all right. You know, did he dump an abyssite? Got some first hand evidence, done some dumbson journalism even. And there we go, thought I'd begin to that. This is where the narrator comes in and says, it wasn't. The site administrator, Yura, was not happy with this post and was on a mission to get Chris to remove it. And if an interview with him didn't persuade Chris, then they're going to have to take it to the next step. And if you think about it, what kind of persuasive tactics could a hitman for hire site try next? Yeah, you got it intimidation. The administrator hired someone to make a video to threaten Chris. And so Chris gets a message from someone with a link to a video and Chris watches the video. It starts out on a piece of paper and written on that piece of paper is Chris's blog's website. Pirate.London, that's the website address. And then they burn the piece of paper. And then the camera changes to a car being set on fire and it's engulfed in flames. And like basically torching a car in order to intimidate me. So in order to say, look at us, we're real criminals, we have people in the field, we can trivially come acts of violence, don't fuck with us. And I was very confused by this because this was a scammer. This was a scam site. They were no criminals, sorry, it's false. It's just a scam, still money. But now I'm getting a video of a burning car. And yeah, I would say Ben, Ben, it got weird. Did it feel intimidating to you? Did you feel like, wait a minute, this is a, maybe I should just back down from this whole thing? I mean, I was a bit intimidated. But you bear in mind, at this time, I'm making myself really into the hobby of being the darknet scam debunker guy. I was anything, I was drawn in more, I think. So I was like, what is going on? How I pissed off of the Matthew is this website real? But it can't be real. So if it's not real, how are they getting people to torch cars? And they'd have torched some other cars. First, some other people in the internet who had, who had distributes them as well. So there's a whole thing going on. So I got really, I was, yeah, I was in tree, but I had to go on. Christ decides to play it safe, though. And he has a lawyer, and he informs the police about this threatening video. I'm like, okay, fine, Mr. Socle Hitman behind the site on the darknet. What's going on with you? So I've been just grabbing his brows on the website at this point. I thought, well, okay, I will register on the website and see how it works. So I registered as I registered as booting at boatface because it was 2016 and booting at boatface was cool. And I took out a hit on Bob the Builder, a loveable children's character on the website. And I thought, okay, it's okay. The website seems to have a login system, has an ordering system, has a messaging system, has some, and whatnot. So it seems quite functional. There's like, you know, got the trappings of a darn market. So I thought to myself, that's, that's weird. But I looked at my order for taking out Bob the Builder, you know. And I looked at your dress bar, and I saw that there was an ID in the dress bar. At the end, it's like message ID, calls one, two, three, before, okay, so that's the message ID. I wonder if I changed the message ID to something else, changed it to one, two, two. And I got someone else's messages, one, two, one. I got someone else's messages. What he could see other users' messages. Okay, I have opinions. First, let's talk about this vulnerability. I would call this URL parameter tampering. I think that sounds cool, right? To tamper with a URL. And that's where you just change part of the URL to like one number different or something to see if you can see someone else's data. But I think the official term is insecure direct object reference. One user should never be able to access another user's private data, such as private messages like this. Yet here it sounds like it was incredibly simple to do. A more complex approach might be that you have to go into the cookies and change which user you are. And then the site thinks to your different user without actually validating that. But this wasn't even that hard. He just changed one number in the URL. This vulnerability is number one on the OOS top 10 vulnerabilities which falls under broken access control. But I want to point out something else here. Just because you're on the dark web. Just because you're on a site that is supposedly very illegal does not mean it's actually secure. You would think if this site was actually a place to hire a hitman that the utmost extreme privacy would be put in place. But it wasn't not even close. The site was a total joke as far as security and privacy goes. And I want you to keep that frame of mind. Whenever you're dealing with anything with sensitive data, your doctor, your lawyer, your bank, your tax advisor, they should all be using the utmost private way of communication. But their systems aren't always secure or private. And I just want you to think about that. If a site should be secure like a hitman for hire site or your therapist, maybe it's not just like in the case of this. Oh, and it's kind of hilarious that Chris is basically hacking into this site. Since it might technically be illegal for him to do that. But what is the owner of this site going to do? File a police report and say, hey man, someone hacked my hitman for hire site. So it seems like a safe thing to do. Anyway, this was a huge discovery for Chris to be able to read any message on the site that other users were sending to the administrator. So he quickly put together a little script to enumerate through all these message IDs and to save them all into a spreadsheet. So he can go through and read all the messages on this hitman for hire website on the dark web. Yeah, I've said I've downloaded, I've downloaded over 100 messages at this point. The website has only been operation for a few months here, but I'm downloading all the messages. And I'm getting my mind blown here because I'm seeing messages, not just like messages for me, I'm voting my boat face. There are some trolls and some spam in there. But there are people and they're giving in names that dresses follow up times where to meet them, phone numbers, Alex talked about alibi, he's talking about timings, they go shades in payment, they go shades in the further payment, and I'm reconstructing views on my local machine from all the messages and I'm starting to sort them out and see what's going on. And what I realize is that yes, there's some crap going on the website, but there's a subset of people who are using the website, or so they think, to get people killed and to arrange money to get people killed. And well, that's what it really likes me at least. Well, hold on here, these messages are a bit alarming, haunting even. A user wants a certain person dead and lists their name, address, phone number, place they work, pictures of them, Facebook account, and how and when to do the murder so that this person has good alibi. Not only that, but money is actually being sent to pay for this. This is chilling. I've mostly been completely un-adabled and unwilling to engage in these cases emotionally because they are really bad. I mean, you know, I mean, I'll quickly give a story. of one case which is concluded in News Now. There's a case where someone paid $20,000 to kill at a time of 14-year-old boy in New Jersey. Interestingly enough, I never had the full details on that until it went to court. It turned out it was online Grima who was grooming this 14-year-old over the internet and having to show pictures and whatnot. When he told his parents, the guy was like, "Oh, shit, I'm getting in trouble here, that haven't killed." So not really was this young boy abused. He was almost killed by this guy. An online groomer put a hit on his victim for telling his parents and then paid $20,000 to have his boy killed. Whoa, whoa, whoa. And Chris can see the Bitcoin wallet address in the chat messages and is confirming that, yeah, in fact, money did get sent to the site for this. This just got way more serious and went deeper than he realized. Chris was thinking about getting help from someone. I met Carl in, was it like late 2016 or so? Carl, how did that go? Yes. Yes, we met in late 2016 just before Christmas, not a meeting that is easy to figure. It was in a pub in Central London and it was really busy and crowded. I'd not met Chris before. I had a mutual friends of ours who put us in contact and I was roving around trying to write a book about power and the digital age, which sounds about as vague as it was at that point in my mind. Carl was looking for a good story and was interested to hear what Chris was working on. I'm Carl. I'm a writer and journalist. Carl and Chris talked. Carl was very interested in this, but Chris had a hard time making the connection in his head that the words written in those messages are from real people. I mean, he's in the business of debunking things online, you know? And you see so many threats online today. It's hard to put your finger on something and say, this is a real threat from a real person, but then ignoring so many other things. I mean, gosh, how many times have we all heard, Jack, if you come into the house one more time with mud on your shoes, I will kill you. All right, maybe it's just me, but you get my point. You hear threats to life all the time in our everyday language. But on top of that, the dark web is an anonymous place so people really run their mouth on there thinking they're private and no one's ever going to know who it was. So Chris wondered if these were real threats or not. And he made a good point. So at the end of the meeting, Carl had a clear idea of what to do next. I kind of concluded that there was no way that I could write about any of this until the police at least had investigated whatever it was they could investigate. So I think me and Chris have slightly different relationships to the police and thoughts about them to put it mildly. And I've spent some time embedded in a cybercrime investigations unit in a local police force in the UK. And I felt like I had pretty good relationship with them and other police forces. And so I kind of broke a meeting between Chris and the National Crime Agency. So Chris goes to this meeting, but it's just weird from the get go. Oh yeah, so yeah, Carl set me up this sort of super super shady meeting with the National Crime Agency. I'm doing this clandestine meet here where I'm turning up to a location last minute and I'm being followed and you know it's all sort of all very harshly accepted, etc. But I had a successful meeting where I shook my outline what I had. I gave my prioritized list of cases around the world. The sorts of money being paid, the jurisdictions involved and the serious notice and said, look, I can't deal with this. I'm just some bloke. Can you please investigate these what looks like attempted murders around the world or at least the ones in the US or in Europe where I speak of some sense. And the meeting was successful, it's so great. Yes, this is brilliant. This is actually sort of thing we're looking for. We'll be in touch. And I have no reason to doubt the words the people who I met. I think they probably would have probably got around to doing something eventually and we shouldn't be nice. But circumstances have inspired otherwise. One of the people who's using the website back in 2016 goes on the username.degot was trying to get someone called Amy or wine killed. Amy or wine lived in Minnesota. And somehow the FBI got the private messages that were from the Bessamoffia website and started investigating this. The FBI had information that someone put a hit out for Amy or wine. So they paid her a visit. And when they arrived, both her and her husband were home and they sat them both down to explain the situation. This hitman for higher website Bessamoffia, someone has paid them $12,000 to have you killed. And she was shocked and had no idea who was doing such a thing. Well, it was her husband who paid to have her killed. The very man who was in the room when the FBI was telling her that someone is threatening to kill you. The FBI didn't question the husband at all. They just notified them both and left. Her husband, Steven Allwine, who was a deacon at his church, went on the dark net, bought some scopolamine, which causes a person to become very disoriented, and gave her a huge dose of it, and then shot her and killed her. He then tried to stage the whole thing to look like a suicide. And then when Amy, and I think this is the clearest evidence that they really weren't investigating this, when Amy was reported to the police as having committed suicide. And Steven Allwine phoned the police and said, "My wife's shot herself." The investigating officer did have had no background, didn't know that this order existed, didn't know I think that Amy had been warned, and almost closed the scene down. He went to the house and he was about to declare a suicide, and about to close down the crime scene. And as only at the last minute he paused, felt like something was wrong, and then decided to get the lumenol out. So a substance that allows him to see cleaned up blood and then realized the house was full of it, and that Amy had been moved, and then scopolamine was found in her blood. And basically a whole tumble of addition evidence that suggested that she had been drugged and then murdered. I mean, can you imagine how differently you would investigate a suicide if you knew that someone had paid that have this lady killed? But the FBI never informed the local police when they did their investigation. And even after all that, they had a hard time finding evidence that Steven, her husband, is who killed her. It was only after they looked at his computer and found his Bitcoin wallet was in fact the one that sent the money to the website. And of course, the defense attorney was trying to say, well, you only know about that transaction because you illegally hacked into the messages of that website. So that should not be admissible to the court. Steven or wine was eventually convicted of first degree murder and is currently serving life and up parole. It was a tragic and awful event that the FBI bungled big time. But it gets worse. The FBI were like, man, what is this best? I'm off via site. What is going on there? Who's running that? And they wanted to take it down. But if you jumped into action and they what they did, they googled the website. And they I still have an ongoing feud with the guy behind the website, Yura. He's paying a guy in India and to write, write, she blogs about me. He's adding my name to metadata on the website. He's really looking to drag my name for the mud for criticising his website. But I don't care. Because like, what? Who's going to believe that I'm running a website? I'm a person that use my own name. I have a blog, I have a job, I live in London. I'm not running a secret mode of higher for website. You know, what sort of person would think that? Turns out the FBI thought that. And between the FBI, they liaise with the national currency in the UK. And within literally, I think it's the case of hours or days of this being pressed by the FBI. The NCA were breaking down my door and arresting me for running this murder for the higher for website. Chris was able to get out of his arrest. But it did affect him. Clearly this Yura guy is doing a lot of work to get Chris to shut up about this website and is willing to frame him or get him arrested. Investigating this site was becoming too much of a burden. I, uh, I should take the opportunity to quit. I, you know, as what has, as, as having one's door broken down and being arrested for something, you know, which is not, doesn't seem to be real works. I'm like, I'm out of this shit. I'm done. They've got a lot of information to police. I'm like, drop down. No one to hear about the website again. But the more Chris and Carl thought about this, the gravity of it just started to sink in. These are very real threats to life. And already one person has been killed. They had lots of time to to help Amy, but they didn't. They could have saved her. life, but they trusted law enforcement to do it instead and that failed. So maybe, just maybe they can save the next person's life. We're going to take a short break here but stay with us. This dark web adventure is just getting started. The police weren't completely incompetent. Carl and Chris gave the police all the messages that they found on the site and this did lead the police to be able to find people who were planning murders and the police were arresting people and putting them in prison because if you pay someone to kill someone else, that's illegal. It's called solicitation of murder and you could get life in prison for doing that. Even if you're sending the money to a scam hitman who's never going to do it, it's still illegal. In fact, someone who got arrested in Spain tried to give that exact defense. They were saying this whole website was fake so my client should not be in trouble but they still got put in prison. Well, the initial idea was that me and Chris would do a short, sharp, nice quick, eight-week long retrospective looking at the assassination market. I'm by far the least brave person talking right now and I'm really not drawn to this sort of stuff. Quite a lot of my instinct was telling me not to go back into this world and I only did my toe in, nothing like Chris. I did feel like to me, it all felt those years from 2016 almost like very much like unfinished business. The site was still operating. The person running the site was still making money from it and am your one who had been killed. Suddenly Chris brings us into a Zoom call and then tells us this fateful discovery that he's consistently in, he's beginning to scrape his kill orders and that the site is and that we're essentially going to be receiving them in near real time. That was then the beginning of the kill list. Kill List is an amazing podcast that Carl made which pretty much starts at this point right here. With new kill orders coming in, what should they be doing about this? This is the dark web hacker, Carl is the investigator. Ultimately I was able to access the administration page on the website. So this is the page administrator uses to correspond with the users website and to scan them. So that page can see everything on the site. There was some other pages as well like pages with showed payments and so on and so forth. So once I've discovered these through technical means, I basically have a small crime job. I'm pulling them down fully as is. I'm actually then building, building pauses, the pauses of them into a constituent component to put them into a database. And ultimately I'm building a web front end to categorize browse and reports on each of these cases and annotate them all. Which today I have, you know, the chavvied one of my window, my window to the right hand side. Now I have my hitman analysis website where I have all the cases in there, categorized by harm, by fraud, by country, by personal information annotated with Facebook links, address links, phone numbers, etc. So but I was able to focus on getting with data, ledger, all clean, clean, comprehensive and handing us over to Carl and the podcast team. So that was a good division of labour. So I had the technical tasks and Carl and you team had to deal with everything else. We went to the police again, the Metz poll and the police. They did believe us. But there were no UK cases. They basically decided that because there were no UK cases, it wasn't their problem and they disclosed this initial tranche of orders that Chris had compiled and handed over to us to Interpol. And we thought about that for a while and thought that this is very likely to lead to additional bungled police investigations or no investigations at all. They weren't know who we are, the police. We weren't know who the investigating officers are. There'll be no way for us to exchange information and it will very likely lead to police officers kind of in the same way that had happened with Amy all while maybe receiving some kind of warning, maybe making contact, but not in any kind of position to effectively investigate much less, gather the evidence they need to actually get someone into a courtroom. Chris would read through these kill orders and sometimes try to figure out who it was that made the kill order. So often they'll approach with some brief information saying, "Hey, can you do this sort of service in my location?" And the answer is always, "Yes, we have hit man around the well, but we can do it within one week." That's always the answer because it's a scam. And then they usually say, "Then there might be some more information like, oh yeah, well, I'm thinking, I think something special. Can you give a message? Can you, in this case, can you get a good can in that being? Can you, you know, say something like that?" And they answer, "Yes, yes, we can do that." Often it's followed up by, "Here's the initial order. Here's a name, the address, the social media, the car they drive, etc., etc., where they work, where they can be found." Often they give a bit of information about why they're personally one person killed, which usually gives them away. Like, "Oh, this person should return to their husband." It's like, "Yeah, I wonder who posts that order." Or this person should be given a message, you know, that's for being a cheeser. It's like, "Well, I wonder who that person could be." They do that. That has to happen sometimes. And after the order is further, they go, "Sure, there's always a price. How much did they always, it's usually $5,000, $10,000." But it's, you know, depending on how much money they have, sometimes that's negotiation about, "Oh, how can you make sure you don't take the money and run?" And they say, "Oh, no, you can't take the money and run because we have an S-grade system. And if the Hitman would take the money, we wouldn't give it, you know, we wouldn't take the money and not do a new killing. We wouldn't give them the money." So that way you are safe. But of course, the S-Grow system is designed to stop you from a high-through Hitman scamming you, like you would a donate drug vendor scamming you. It doesn't protect you from the site itself being a scam. And then I mean, you're even has like a dedicated third party S-Grow sites, which are independent or apparently independent, where you can go to this independent site and you can broke your legal transaction and a third rub, a further broke can handle, handle this for you. It's all run by him, of course, and of course, he directs everyone to use this independent website and all these are the same back end. And then you go say, "I've put my money in the S-Grow system and they say, "Oh, I can see, we are at lock this. We've now been ascended Hitman." But then of course, what happens is, "Oh, actually, it turns out you need a higher class of Hitman or you need to pay more or if Hitman went there, but they failed, so you need a new, they need to pay more money." Or it turns out you need to, you know, this is more complicated, it's need to pay more money. And this is how it goes down in general. Chris would sometimes be able to identify who put the kill order in because it might say something like, "It's my wife who I want killed or something." And then they have the wife's information in the kill order to easily figure out who did this. So they decide to try to phone up the targets to see if they can warn them. But the FBI mishap with Amy Allwine was top of their mind. What if they call up someone and the person who's trying to kill them answers the phone or is listening in? And it just escalates the whole thing and they get someone killed. The plan was to try to call the person but then get them alone so that they can tell them this information in private. But man, how do you call someone out of the blue and try to get them to listen to the information you have but they need to be alone first before you're going to tell them it sounds impossible to deal with. But Carl, give it a try. No, I don't want any information. I'm trying to give you information. No. No, I don't. Okay. Well, thanks for your time anyway. Do give me a phone back if you'd like more information. And then you try it again. Would we be able to arrange a time to be able to talk to you at greater length about that? No, no, no, thank you. Thank you. Okay. So you don't. Carl was extremely nervous on his calls. He's got the target on the phone which is hard to begin with but he's trying to be as sensitive as possible to avoid any further harm. He decides to try again to be more direct. I understand you don't want to work on the story. However, I'm actually duty bound to say that the information that we have might relate to you being in danger. So I'm kind of duty bound as a journalist to disclose it to you if you'd like me to. Actually, I don't have time for this evening. I mean, for a survey that has something to my relationship to the job or to professional or. No, it's not a survey. But a journalist, we've come across information which indicates that you might be in danger. I'm in danger. Yes, sir. I'm trying to protect me. Keep me to face my dangers. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, sir. Goodbye. Wow. Leave me to face my dangers. He's not having any other. I'm very surprised by that. I mean, if someone phoned me up saying you might be in danger, I would want to know what it was regarding. Yeah. This is turning out to be a lot harder than it sounds. Absolutely. We knew the whole thing was this like ethical, like kind of mind-fields. And I was really afraid that I would do something which meant that I could never live with myself again. We had this information that Chris was passing us that was unbelievably powerful. I mean, it had the power to save lives and destroy them. And we didn't know what to do. We had no real frameworks. We didn't know what the safest thing to do often was. We were having to kind of make it up in urgency as we were going along. And I didn't, you know, I mean, we could have made one, it's kind of easy now to kind of talk about all of this in retrospect. But at the time, like, you don't know what's gonna happen. Like, you don't know that this call's gonna turn out okay. Or that person's gonna be okay. And like every single time I made that call and remember nine times out of 10, they just hung the phone up on me or they wouldn't talk or it'd be a wrong number or something like that. But every single time I dial that number, I'd be having to like work myself up into this, what I was working myself up into this kind of state of mind where I thought, well, you know, this could be the moment where I commit some like ethical, crushing kind of mistake that haunts me to the rest of my life. - I think it's at this point where I was listening to Killist that I was happy that Chris was working with Carl in this story. Like I said, I was tracking what he was working on and hoping we could talk and I was tapping him on the shoulder again and again for years trying to get him to tell me the story, but man, Carl is an amazing journalist. And he has a whole team and seemingly like, yeah, his connections all over the world to try to do something about this. And I wouldn't have done even half as good of a job as what he did on Killist. It's truly an amazing podcast. - As we're doing all this, making this extremely significant decision to contact the people on the Killist directly, we're increasingly actually not really behaving like journalists anymore. Like journalists don't normally step into stories like that. They don't normally contact victims and drive stories or even create them. They normally kind of try and be at least kind of disruptive they possibly can. That's definitely not what we're doing there. So that was also like very disorientating, like stepping like further away from at least this kind of anchoring professional identity that the iron, the kind of team would have, you know, and becoming like something else and not really having a word for it. - I mean, you know there's a word for it, Carl, you don't understand. - Well, if you're gonna say vigilante, - Yes. - I don't think we were ever a vigilante 'cause we were just, we were desperately trying to get the police to step in, like not replace them. At least I was. Like we were handing over everything we did to the police. So yeah, I mean, I never thought we were vigilante's. That wasn't the right word in my mind for it either. It was like some weird gap of like being a really proactive journalist or investigator. - And you might be thinking, but Interpol is handling it, just let them do it. There's a reason that they felt it was important for them to continue to do something. - It was because we were thinking about this disclosure route that had just appeared where Chris was passing it to us. We were passing it to the Metropolitan Police. They were passing it to Interpol and then Interpol would presumably pass it to the police forces around the world. There was one in Switzerland, there was one in Italy, there was one in Amsterdam, you know, all over the place. The problem with that was that we knew that Interpol would basically like denude the disclosures of any identifying information of us. And we would have no idea who the investigating officer's were. So this kind of cut or like breach would happen. There would be no link, like they would just receive this word document that Chris had created plus maybe some like Bitcoin information. They would have no way as the Metropolitan Police did of actually checking to see whether I was mad or not, which they genuinely did. And we would have no way of disclosing additional information to them and Chris was passing over like updates all the time. You know, these were live conversations that were happening. So sometimes there'd be more Bitcoin and the urgency would have changed or a specific moment or time and place were being mentioned in the order, you know, which would change how dangerous we thought it was. And we would have had no way of kind of passing that on in it in a reasonably swift manner to the people on the ground that could actually do something about it. So that's why ultimately we decided that we needed to go to them directly. And while investigating all this, they would run into news articles that would kill them to their bones. There's many incidents and many cases. I'm sure we probably could be touching as many as you like, but we'll be pressed to time here. Like for example, there was one case where there was here's against this young man in America and a couple of some paid $5,000 for kill him. Two weeks later he's dead by gunshot, self-inflicted gunshot wound. You know, was there sort of insurance involved? Was there foul plays hard to say? I won't go into too much of this, but during the course our investigation there was one of these major cases come through where someone paid a hell of a lot of money to have the house haven't killed. And again, within weeks that person was killed. With information like that, plus all the interest information which always gives the hideous back stories on people's story of stalking, of drugging, of coercive behavior or marital breakdown, of relationship breakdown of people sending death threats, people putting hidden cameras, people, you know, really ruining lives. We realized that this is, it's really horrific this stuff. And I'm just gonna have the house to sneak peek into the worst of it as a car. And yeah, it's very, very hard to digest. And all this just adds a level of urgency to it all. So I phone maybe a dozen people, maybe two dozen over about the course of about a week, maybe a bit longer, and it is dramatically unsuccessful. Everyone's like, "Oh, car, don't say that." I know it is, it really is. I mean, like it doesn't work. Everyone thinks I'm a scammer. It turns out we were solving the wrong problem. So we thought the problem was gonna be how to reach them safely over the phone, how to disclose in a way that wasn't gonna like, create to them psychologically. The actual problem wasn't, no one was gonna believe me. And so people hang up, they phone back like with their friends and they prank me and they pretend it's a big joke. More often than not, they literally just don't pick up the phone though. This is an image of COVID, remember? So people are kind of getting scam calls all the time. And so we change up what we do and we decide to send out local journalists on the ground to physically go and try to reach the people that were on the list. And that really changes things. So it's only then really that we begin to make meaningful contact, reach people, be believed and begin to kind of develop the next phase in the kill list really, which is talking to them, supporting them, working with the police to try and find out who put them on the list. - The podcast kill list does an amazing job of documenting their adventure, calling people, talking with police, going to houses, talking with Yura even, it's a wild adventure. And you really should go and listen to it, but one person in particular that they contacted, stuck with me, they discovered that there's this guy named Ron Ilg who paid for the murder of his wife in Spokane, Washington. - Okay, yeah, so obviously I'm the first person to see this. And I'm actually actually where it turns out is domestic because it's not so, this guy is neonatal surgeon, he's literally a surgeon, but baby's, he's also looking to break the hands of a surgeon. And it's like, and he's paying something upward of $50,000 for this. He's got like multiple step plans of where the kid that should have placed and taking photographs of it and how she should be brainwashed and how she should be broken and where she should be taken to and how he'll get to see the information about this whilst remaining at a distance. It's, I hate to, I don't usually use this word, but it's sick and it's messed up. And in his mind, when he paid up $50,000, it's very much real, he was gonna do this. I was able to quickly work out between these identities of this woman and this surgeon mentioned that the person, so you see in the laser center, was this character called Rodilg. And I said, this is sort of information I send up, send over to, so it's currently the team. And I'm like, this guy, they've gotta do something about it. Are the FBI working at helping at this point? Are they gonna do something? Because this is just, this is just crazy. I can't believe this guy is going around making his plans and like no one's taking it seriously. That's just terrible. - In addition to that, Chris is seeing that this guy, Ron Ilg, is trying to get his wife addicted to opioids. So she'll call off the divorce proceedings. He seems extra diabolical. - Chris is a subject in the emails, would normally be new payer, which would always cause my heart to sink a little bit. and. But this one stood out from the very beginning for all the reasons Chris has already said. There was a bonus structure. I mean the guy had literally already loaded in all the money for a whole series of things that had to happen to Jennifer, which were all about the use of drugs and they were all about control. And it stood out for that. It stood out actually weirdly in grotesque because it wasn't that bad on murder, which somehow made it worse. But then it also stood out because they met a huge amount of money being paid. It was the largest payment. So we reached out and get hold of Jennifer and speak to her and realised that she's in the middle of a kind of relationship, which she's leaving, which involves Ron, who's very dangerously spiraling out of control. He seemed to have some extremely like kind of worrying behaviours to do with control. He'd probably been tracking her. He'd been kind of allegedly putting drugs into her drink. There was another woman in the marriage that he'd kept in a septic tank under his house. It was horrifying. I think the septic tank was more of a kind of a, I don't think it was a had all the electric situation per se. It was more of a temporary BDSM. Well, he dressed the whole thing up as BDSM. He dressed all of this controlling behaviour up as, "Hey, this is just my kink." The woman wasn't in there the whole time. It was part of a, he had a dungeon, I believe, in his house. It was just all coming together as a man who was really, really, really committed to controlling. The woman he was in a relationship with and didn't seem to be able to deal with his wife leaving. This was the first time the kind of FBI really moved in and we could see an investigation kind of rolling out. So Ron left for Mexico on the day that Jennifer was to be kidnapped. Possibly as a alibi, who knows. But anyway, when he returned, there were 10 FBI agents waiting for him in the airport under cover. So he lands, he's immediate the interview. His house is being searched at the same time. And he makes quite a serious error in a thumbprint safe in his house, a safe that only he could access. There is a sticky note. And on that sticky note is both his username and the password for the site that Chris has been surveilling. Okay, and the police are able to get in and see that. They do. They drive him to his own house and he opens a safe for them. Yeah, and then, so what happens to him? Well, he's released by the police that night. He makes a suicide attempt. Quite a serious one, as I understand it. I think that night, all the next day, and is then placed under protective, well, he's placed under custody and arrested when he- I just want to say that really upset me that he tried to kill himself. I've got into this. There's not people being murdered and even a horrible people trying to kill themselves over this. This is not why I want. I want to make the world a better place and it's always clear whether I'm achieving that, though, openly in this case, I think I did. But Ron is not confessing to anything. He's pleading innocent and is working tirelessly to try to make a case to freedom. It's a long story and we don't have time to go into it all. But he's now convicted and sentenced and is imprisoned for a pretty significant stretch. I think we're eight years. And it's wins like this where they can get a dangerous person put in prison that makes it all seem worthwhile. The kill list, this whole experience, is being a very difficult one. It's had some very bleak, very dark moments, but it's also got those moments of feeling like it's really meaningful and worthwhile and the sentencing and conviction of Ron and Jennifer's kind of emergent from that has definitely been for me anyway one of those. So it was 2020 when they started taking action on these kill orders and they've been documenting it all along and there's just so many cases that they researched. I still feel it does it barely scratches the surface. It's not the only of why. It really does. The this current situation, what's happening now with this site? Is it still operational or has it been shut down by the police or what? There were a series of arrests in the Romania, which behind of the site operators or police people are videoated of them. I believe I believe the US authorities had something to do with that. And following that instant of the Romania arrests, the website and the web technical changes, it was shut down for a bit and back again, I intimately lost bits of access until we reached a point now where I haven't missed no access. So I've had no new cases come in for the last year and a bit. But in that period, we have seen basically arrests from the website in the US and Switzerland and Austria. So we have evidence that some law enforcement aid to your other is either cooperating with or has infiltrated the website and is making some arrests of the people who run the website. No, people who use the website. The website continues to operate and for all I know continues to scam people out of money and continues to enrich Romanian scammers. You talk to the admin of the site over chat. What is the reason why they run this or do this? He does the scammer. I believe he used to be a carter, someone who deals with stolen financial data and whatnot and was familiar with darknet scams. And you know, he told me that he saw a niche for doing believable darknet scams. He didn't tell me he told a persona. I was in it was had to take it over at the time. But yeah, he just thought there was a niche for a believable effective darknet murder scam. It's really lucrative and he's not wrong. There are some avocytes out there doing this, but I believe he's the most successful financially. The most most search engine optimised has the highest traffic, the highest number of users. And considering he's been at this since 2016 and dealing with money and Bitcoin, he will be a multi-millionaire by now. And you know, it is me going the wrong, you know, basically with like legal fees and doing this in my evenings. And the like, it's not really, you know, it's it's it's it's it's helping hard to keep hard to keep it up. But yeah, it's still it's still going on. And you know, if you say, oh, but you know, what if you get him, what if you get him want to be over? I'm like, no, it won't be over because I'm on the I've been on the website for years. They delete the messages as they go along. So you see the website, you don't get years back of messages, you get very little. I'm the only one of the years worth of messages. So unfortunately, there's going to be no end to it in terms of the website getting shut down. For me, there's certainly over when I've actions remained or of the kill list. The way that dark web websites work is that they're designed to be private. Like you can't tell where the website is hosted or where it is in the world. So you really need to wait for the website administrator to screw up and reveal something about themselves in order to take the thing down. So it's a whole time. The only thing they can do is just keep blogging and podcasting and publishing articles about the site being a scam. There was no way for them or even the police to take this website down since they don't have enough information to know who's running it or where it's hosted. Well, I think the story profoundly changed the lives of all of the people that revolve. Me, Chris, Caroline, everyone. It did everything. It was, for me anyway, by far, the most important, meaningful, worrying, sometimes isolated, and disgustingly urgent work that I've ever found myself having to do. It started a thing. Back then in 2020, which is still going now. People are still going through court cases. People are still in danger. It's the most important thing I'll ever work on, I'm sure. I really, really hope, actually, that I don't have to do anything like this every again. Chris has lost access to the private messages on the site in 2023, which means they haven't seen any new kill orders come in since then, which for Carl at least means he's stepped away from investigating more cases. But Chris still feels there's old kill orders that are still worth looking into, so he continues to make it his duty to investigate every single person who's on the list. Again, I don't think people believe that I'm still doing this by myself. They've rather believed some comforting and truth that no one uses these websites or a stolen hand and nothing can be done, but that's not the case at all. There are There are people being murdered on the list right now who I haven't got to in time. You know, there's probably dozens of people on the list who are dead. And of those half a mic are saved. And I feel like people need to know this. And I don't know, I would like some support in this, but it's a difficult position I'm still in. To date, they have seen over 900 people show up on the kill list. And they've taken action on hundreds of them. And for the most part, Christos is at a loan now. He sometimes hires private investigators to help him, but that's expensive. And since his work leads to more arrests than if the police simply handled it by themselves, it uniquely positions him to do good in the world. And he's a bit disappointed that there aren't more journalists or police that are taking him seriously, that want to work with him to help him. But since he knows lives are at stake here, and he has all kinds of information on them, he can't simply ignore it and walk away. To follow the latest on what Christos is doing, you can visit his website, which is Pirate.London. And I should probably tell you something. In my research for this episode, I have discovered that every single Hitman for Higher website on the internet has been fake. Most are operated by scammers. Some are operated by the police. But what's more is that Hitman in general are pretty much a myth. One of the things I did to prep for this episode was to watch the movie Hitman by Richard Linkletter. It's based off a true story of a fake Hitman. And even in the movie, they say Hitman aren't real. Take a listen. You know, people feel almost disappointed to learn that Hitman don't really exist. This idea that there are people out there at a retail level, you can just hire to eliminate your worst relationship issues or facilitate some money scheme or the usual combination of both. It's a total pot culture fantasy. But because Hitman have been a staple of books, movies, and TV for the last 50 years, good luck getting anyone to believe their existence is all a myth. Hollywood really has planted this idea in our head that seems impossible for us to undo. So I urge you to be skeptical of any such idea. But I also want to say that if your relationship with someone has gotten so bad that you want them killed, you need to get out of there. You're not acting like you, you know? That's your emotions that have taken over. And you won't be happy with yourself until you find peace. You need to find yourself again, killing someone isn't going to give you the peace you think it will. You need to remember what makes you happy and seek that instead of violence. It's sometimes hard to see the light at the end of a tunnel during bad relationships or big breakups. But the future is so much brighter than you realize. Don't let them turn you into a monster. You're not a monster. Dig deep and find the strength to rise above it and be that amazing person that you actually are. A big thank you to Chris Montero and Carl Miller for sharing this incredible story with us. I highly urge you to go find and listen to their podcast, Kill List, the phone calls with the victims are incredible. There's one lady that they call up and they tell her, "Hey, your life might be in danger." And she just laughs and she's like, "Oh, it's probably my husband, but don't worry, he'd never harm me." And it's just wild to hear how these people react to such news. So go check out that show wherever you listen to podcasts. And also keep up to date with what Chris is doing by visiting his blog, pirate.london is the website. And hey, if you want to listen to this show, add free, or if you want bonus episodes, I've got 11 bonus episodes now available for you to listen to right now. All you got to do is go to plus.darknetdirees.com. That's plus.darknetdirees.com. This episode is created by me, the neon specter, Jack Recyder. Our editor is the glitch guy, Tristan Ledger. Sound designed by the executable Andrew Maryweather, mixing by proximity sound. Our intro music is by the mysterious brake master cylinder. My computer is so broke, it ran out of cash. This is Darknet Diaries.