Speaker 1: The Internet. It was pitched to our generation really as
this ultimate promise connection freedom right.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, a vast library, borderless collaboration. That was the dream.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a place where distance just disappears. But what happens
when that same tech, the anonymity it offers, when that
gets used for something much darkness, it's primal, yet when
it's used to carry out the most violent impulses you
can imagine pretty much anywhere in the world. We talk
a lot about the webs technology, but today, well today
we're looking at something different.
Speaker 2: We're looking at what happens when that tech makes murder
itself seem accessible, easy, almost easy. That's terrified, it really is.
And that's the core of this deep dive. We're taking
a frankly incredibly unsettling look into this unique set of
data data from rare It's a collection of sources detailing
real world attempts to outsource assassination using the dark man. Right,
But our mission today it's not really about the tech itself,
you know, not the encrypt not the usual dark net
markets for drugs or guns.
Speaker 1: Okay, So what is the focus then?
Speaker 2: It's the human element, the sharking reasons why people wanted this,
and maybe the most disturbing part the unsettling normality of
the people actually placing these orders.
Speaker 1: Normality you mean, like regular people exactly.
Speaker 2: We have these sources detailing years of painstaking research, investigators
who intercepted hundreds of paid for kill orders. This wasn't
just theory, it was live.
Speaker 1: Live kill orders. Okay, So our mission here is what
to understand how this even worked.
Speaker 2: Yeah, dissect the mechanics of this, this dark enterprise. Try
to analyze the psychology of the people ordering the hits and.
Speaker 1: Find out what connects them, because these crimes were happening globally, right.
Speaker 2: All over the world. Yeah, and we need to find
that common denominator. It's an investigation that, honestly, it flips
everything you think you know about who seeks out extreme violence.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: The really astonishing thing about this data, this particular investigation,
is that it gives you this raw, un filtered view
into desperation control issues, all playing out digitally.
Speaker 1: So this kill list, as the sources call it, Yeah.
Speaker 2: This kill list. It just reveals how readily people turn
to assassination to solve everyday, messy problems, things like domestic disputes,
custody battles, personal grudges.
Speaker 1: Stuff that should end up in court or therapy. Maybe
not with a hit.
Speaker 2: Man precisely, but they saw this as a way out.
Let's unpack that, right, Okay, first things first, we need
to set the scene, the environment. When we talk about
the darknet. What are we actually talking about?
Speaker 1: Right? It's not just the regular Internet? Is it not
Google or Facebook? No?
Speaker 2: Exactly. It's a specific segment of the Internet. You can't
get there with your normal browser. It's protected by some
pretty sophisticated anonymity.
Speaker 1: Tech like poor Onion rad that's the main one, yet.
Speaker 2: Tour It basically ensures users are anonymous by balancing their
communications through all these random relays across the globe to
who you are, where you are.
Speaker 1: And for years, the Darknet's been wrapped up in the spoors,
hasn't it always sounding kind of like a Bond villain
shopping list? Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, always pantalizingly close to the truth. Maybe you heard
you could buy literally anything, drugs, obviously, guns, some reports
even mentioned like uranium, wild stuff.
Speaker 1: But the rumor that really stuck, the one that felt
both impossible and maybe just maybe plausible, was buying murder. Yeah,
that somehow you could just transact pay someone to kill
another person and leave no digital trail back.
Speaker 2: To you, and that ultimate horror story. It became terrifyingly
real when researchers stumbled onto this specific site back in
twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they found one of these Murder for Higher sits.
What did it look like? Was it super high tech professional?
Speaker 2: You'd think so, right, but no. What's fascinating is how
basic the front end was. It wasn't sleek or modern
at all.
Speaker 1: No, the sources described it. I mean, it sounds almost
funny if it wasn't so grim, like a website from
the nineteen nineties exactly that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, laughably crude, almost like someone was trying to make
clip art as scary as possible, trying way too hard
to look menacing with terrible designs.
Speaker 1: So bad clip art for Murder Inc.
Speaker 2: Got it, But that rough look might have been a
psychological play, you know. Crude, yes, but direct intimidating this
I claimed we're the Mafia or some similar big crime group.
Speaker 1: Right projecting authority.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and thanks to the darkness anonymity, it said, you
can now deal directly with us. They made this really
simple interface put in your alias, type out your grievance,
pay with bitcoin.
Speaker 1: And order an execution.
Speaker 2: Wow, the digital shield just made the horrific seem safe, clean,
accessible even to just an average person.
Speaker 1: That accessibility, that's the really chilling part, isn't it. I mean,
before this, if say a hospital administrator in Wisconsin wanted
to hire a killer, where would they even start exactly?
Speaker 2: You'd have to know people right be tangled up in
the actual criminal underworld take huge personal risks.
Speaker 1: But this website basically advertise we take all that risk
away from you, the pair precisely.
Speaker 2: So how did this whole operation built on secrecy actually unravel?
You'd expect maybe a big police thing, wouldn't.
Speaker 1: You, Yeah, some major international task force.
Speaker 2: But it wasn't that. Not Initially it was one person,
a hacker named Chris Montero, working independently.
Speaker 1: Okay, what did you find?
Speaker 2: He was probing this specific site in twenty twenty, just
scanning it, and he found something investigators later called life changing,
A tiny.
Speaker 1: Flaw not likely breaking the encryption though.
Speaker 2: No, not a cryptographic weakness. It was described as a
little technical gap of vulnerability in how the site actually
worked behind the scenes, A crack in the armor, a
chink in the digital armor of this supposed mafia. Yeah,
he managed to, as the source put it, wiggle through
this gap and got where right into the site's back end,
the master ledger. And this wasn't just like a list
of usernames. This was everything everything, the live orders being placed,
exact locations, full transaction histories, and critically, the messages the
justifications people wrote.
Speaker 1: My god, it's like finding the secret diary of hundreds
of potential murderers.
Speaker 2: That's a good way to put it. The bank vault
of a criminal enterprise, with every receipt written in blood.
The sheer amount of data and how specific it was,
it was immediately staggering. These were, I mean the literal
actual kill.
Speaker 1: Orders, not just threats, but paid.
Speaker 2: For order paid for. Yeah, every entry had the target's name,
their home address, their well their pattern of life information.
Speaker 1: Pattern of life that means like their daily routine when
they leave for work, the car they drive, that kind
of thing exactly.
Speaker 2: That minute mundane details, the kind of info you'd need
to plan and ambush basically when they're vulnerable. Okay, Plus
the bitcoin payments linked to each order, and those messages,
those deeply unsettling personal messages explaining why the target had
to die.
Speaker 1: So people weren't just saying kill this person, they were
explaining themselves.
Speaker 2: Many were Yeah, it provides I did this incredibly granular,
terrifying snapshot extreme violence being planned all over the world,
often against people who seemed completely ordinary.
Speaker 1: And the global reach that confirms it wasn't just one
local gang right, this was.
Speaker 2: Everywhere, all over the map. Literally. Just look at some
of the examples from the sources. There was a hit
ordered in Amsterdam. Okay, target described as a simple, easy person,
but the orderer adds high risk of putting me in
jail that costs nearly two thousand dollars. The risk calculation
is just clinical chilling.
Speaker 1: Wow, okay two grand for a simple person with risk?
What else?
Speaker 2: Jump continents Paris in order for just one thousand dollars
to kill someone, but the instructions had this specific extra
bit her apartment needs to be set on fire.
Speaker 1: One thousand dollars for murder and arson.
Speaker 2: That seems low, It does, doesn't it? Then you see
these huge price jumps. A large order in Slovakia target
one guy that costs fourteen thousand dollars fourteen thousand.
Speaker 1: What made him so expensive, It's.
Speaker 2: Not clear, maybe perceived difficulty or maybe just what the
site thought they could get. Then Berlin target probably working
from home price tag twenty one thousand dollars for that hit.
Speaker 1: Twenty one grand. Working from home makes it harder maybe,
or again maybe just charging what they could could be
either or both.
Speaker 2: And we saw orders pop up in place like Hydrobad,
India too. It really was a global market serving these
very local, very personal vendettas.
Speaker 1: And the way people wrote the orders that varied, too,
didn't it tells you something about them.
Speaker 2: Definitely. Some orders were really short and curt and clipped,
just business like, like ordering a pizza, almost an unpleasant expense,
transactional exactly, while others others wrote essays, long, detailed, lurid
justifications explaining all the target's supposed moral failings, why their
death was absolutely necessary for the orderer's life to get
back to normal.
Speaker 1: That sounds like obsession, years of festering anger, maybe.
Speaker 2: Deep personal obsession. Absolutely. But then there was this other category,
the ones that must have set off immediate alarm bells
for the investigators.
Speaker 1: Which ones were those?
Speaker 2: The perpetrators who logged back into the site almost every day, every.
Speaker 1: Day after placing the order.
Speaker 2: Why they weren't just ordering and walking away. They were
actively monitoring their targets in real time. They were feeding
information back to the.
Speaker 1: Site operators, like what kind of information.
Speaker 2: Tiny details targets just left the house, or describing the
exact route the target took to work that morning, the
car they were driving.
Speaker 1: So they weren't just outsourcing it. They were participating managing
the hit from afar.
Speaker 2: Acting like a surveillance operative. Yeah, micro managing the astanzination
plot from potentially thousands of miles away, fueled by this
relentless obsession.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a whole other level of disturbing.
Speaker 2: This whole collection of data. The investigators called it the
kill list. The person who first accessed it described it as,
and this is a direct quote, the single most grotesque, disgusting, horrible,
frightening thing they had ever read.
Speaker 1: I can only imagine. It's not just abstract data at
that point. It's a blueprint for hundreds of potential murders, right,
real people, real addresses.
Speaker 2: Exactly, And the ethical weight of just possessing that information, yea,
knowing who was on the clock, who was in danger.
It must have been absolutely paralyzing. What do you even
do with that?
Speaker 1: Well, the first most obvious step with a list like
that so immediate you go to law.
Speaker 2: Enforcement, right, absolutely, you take it straight to the police.
So the investigators did. They took the website diagram, the
details of the hack, the raw orders. They went to
the Metropolitan Police in the UK Okay.
Speaker 1: And they basically arrived saying, look, we found proof of
a global murder for higher ring operating on the darknet.
Paid in bitcoin. Should be straightforward, right, you'd think.
Speaker 2: But the police reaction, well maybe understandable in hindsight, but
it created this huge immediate problem.
Speaker 1: What happened. They didn't believe it.
Speaker 2: The story was just too much, too fantastic, too far
outside normal crime fighting. Remember this was also peak COVID pandemic.
Speaker 1: Time, right, Everything was chaos, and.
Speaker 2: Here come these people claiming they've hacked the digital mafia
and have a list of targets all over the world.
The sources say the police were genuinely quite concerned the
messengers were actually well insane.
Speaker 1: They thought the investigators were crazy, not the people ordering hits.
Speaker 2: It seems so initially the whole thing just sounded too bizarre.
Speaker 1: Wow, that must have been absolutely crushing. You have the
proof names addresses, bitcoin wallets, but the whole context is
so sci fi that the authorities just passed.
Speaker 2: They basically declined to take up an active investigation or
said it was outside their jurisdiction, maybe outside their expertise. Yeah,
and frankly, it just sounded made up.
Speaker 1: So what do you do? Then? You know these people
are potentially in terrible danger.
Speaker 2: Exactly, you can't just delete the data and walk away,
not in good conscience. So they made this incredibly difficult
professional decision, a really fraught ethical choice, which was to
bypass the official channels since they weren't working, and try
to warn the targets directly themselves.
Speaker 1: WHOA, Okay, that's a massive stuff. You're essentially becoming not
law enforcement, but the bearer of unbelievably bad news.
Speaker 2: And dangerous news. You're about to drop what the sources
called an emotional hand grenade into someone's life out of
the blue, a phone call saying Hi, a stranger on
the dark net knows your commute and paid bitcoin to
have you killed.
Speaker 1: How do you even prepare for that call?
Speaker 2: I can't imagine They didn't take it lightly. They actually
worked with a psychologist scorpt at a specific script to
try and soften the blow as much as humanly possible.
Speaker 1: Trying to sound credible, serious but also empathetic while telling
someone the unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the immediate result, total crushing failure.
Speaker 1: Really, what happened For a whole week.
Speaker 2: The investigator making the calls just got hung up on repeatedly.
Speaker 1: People just didn't believe it.
Speaker 2: The story itself, We're from an organization, we hacked darknet assassins,
You're on a kill list. Yeah, it was just too much.
People weren't reacting emotionally to the threat. They were reacting rationally,
dismissing the messenger.
Speaker 1: They thought it was a prank call or some kind
of weird scam.
Speaker 2: Probably the anonymity of the warning mirrored the anonymity of
the web itself. It was just a voice on the
phone claiming this terrifying secret. Why believe it?
Speaker 1: Right? So direct calls weren't working. What next? They couldn't
just give up?
Speaker 2: No, they realized they needed to somehow validate the threat,
make it real. They needed physical presence, so.
Speaker 1: They shifted strategy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they started reaching out to local journalists around the world,
journalists who did believe the story, maybe because they were
used to investigating stranger things, okay, And the plan was
to send these local journalists to meet the people on
the kill list face to face.
Speaker 1: Ah, so a real person showing up at their door
saying this.
Speaker 2: Is real exactly, offering that tangible confirmation that, yes, this
insane story you might have heard on the phone, it's
actually true.
Speaker 1: That change in strategy. It must have saved lives, but
you said it also unlocked something else, another layer to this.
Speaker 2: It did it led to under understanding what was really
going on with the website itself. So the first successful
contact made through a local journalist was absolutely key. It
led the investigators to this woman, Elena, living near Zurich
in Switzerland, and.
Speaker 1: The journalists connected her with the investigator.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they finally spoke via zoom. The investigator delivered that
awful warning, and.
Speaker 1: Her reaction was it shock, disbelief, anger, none.
Speaker 2: Of the above really, which was maybe the most shocking part.
Her response was simply, I'm actually not really surprised, not
surprised why the context she was in the middle of
this absolutely horrific, ugly divorce three years that had been
going on involved quite a lot of money.
Speaker 1: Ah, money her husband didn't want to.
Speaker 2: Pay exactly, He refused to pay and for her this
darknet hit order, Yeah, it just seemed like the next logical,
terrifying step in his long campaign to control her. Wow.
Speaker 1: So she immediately knew who was likely behind it.
Speaker 2: She had a very strong suspicion. Now, while all this
warning was happening, the investigators were also still monitoring the
website's back end, specifically the communication between the people placing
the orders and the site.
Speaker 1: Operators, a messages going back and forth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is where they uncovered the huge deception
at the heart of the whole thing. Deception How they
realized the shadowy people running the site were constantly replying
to their clients, reading these long conversation threads. Sometimes they
went on for weeks, even months. They saw a pattern.
The supposed hitmen were just impossibly incompetent.
Speaker 1: And competent like how their.
Speaker 2: Excuses were almost comical if it wasn't so serious. They
were always constantly losing their weapons or getting lost on
the way to the target.
Speaker 1: Seriously lost hitmen.
Speaker 2: Or they'd claimed the target was suddenly too well protected
right at the last minute, so they had to pull out.
It was just excuse after excuse after excuse, never any
actual action.
Speaker 1: Okay, that sounds suspicious.
Speaker 2: Extremely And here's the critical part. Yeah, every single time
they faded filled and pulled out.
Speaker 1: Let me guess the price went up bingo.
Speaker 2: They'd demand more Bitcoin for new equipment, for more travel,
for extra reconnaissance fees.
Speaker 1: Ah, I see where this is going.
Speaker 2: And that was the defining, shocking revelation. The site had
absolutely no interest in killing any of these people. It
was all a scam, purely, an elaborate, sophisticated extortion racket
designed only to squeeze as much Bitcoin as possible out
of these desperate, vengeful people placing the orders.
Speaker 1: Wow. So on one hand, that's a massive relief, right
the immedia threat from these professional assassins was actually zero.
They were chasing ghosts.
Speaker 2: Huge relief. Initially, they'd stumbled into a highly effective global
con artistry operation.
Speaker 1: I sense a butt coming.
Speaker 2: But that relief was immediately followed by this chilling realization
the people placing the orders, they weren't part of the con.
They were deadly serious.
Speaker 1: Their intent was real, absolutely.
Speaker 2: Real, their intent to commit murder was total, even if
the method they chose turned out to be a scam.
Speaker 1: The darknet site had given them the psychological green light,
you know, permission to cross that line into planning violence,
whether the site worked or not, and.
Speaker 2: Elena's case in Switzlan improved that seriousness.
Speaker 1: Didn't it Tragically? Yes, After the investigators told the Swiss
police about the order targeting Elena, the authorities arrested her
strange husband.
Speaker 2: And when they searched his place.
Speaker 1: They found something that turned the threat from digital fantasy
into immediate, terrifying physical reality.
Speaker 2: What was it?
Speaker 1: He had went to a secret room right next door
to her apartment next door. Why it wasn't for storage,
It was an operational base, an arsenal specifically set up
for kidnapping and murder.
Speaker 2: An arsenal like a Mexicans.
Speaker 1: A massive collection. Police found a flip knife, a telescopic baton,
a submachine gun, a glock nine milimeter pistol, an AK
forty seven assault rifle. Oh my god, he wasn't messing around,
not at all.
Speaker 2: Plus all the tools, zip ties, a big black bin bag,
black rubber gloves, GPS track even lock picks.
Speaker 1: He was fully equipped to do it himself.
Speaker 2: That evidence confirmed the terrible truth the individuals writing these
murder orders, driven by their grudges and control issues, they
were often just as dangerous, maybe even more dangerous, than
any mythical dark net hit.
Speaker 1: Man, because they had the means, the motive, and the proximity.
Speaker 2: Exactly, they could carry out the act themselves if the
outsourced job failed or stalled, and that's when the investigation
really shifted. It wasn't just about tracking a digital crime anymore.
Speaker 1: It was about preventing real imminent violence, often intimate partner violence.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the scam site was dangerous not because it killed people,
but because it empowered people who were already willing to kill.
Speaker 1: Okay, this brings us back to that really unsettling question
you raised earlier. Who are these people ordering hits? Because
you expect, you know, mob bosses, cartel figures, maybe isolated sociopaths, right,
that's the stereotype.
Speaker 2: But the sources revealed something much much more common, and frankly,
that makes it far more terrifying. How So, the profiles
of the actual perpetrators are shocking, precisely because they seemed
so normal. Yeah, these people had respectable jobs, friends, families,
They live lives that looked from the outside pretty much
indistinguishable from yours or mind.
Speaker 1: But secretly they were plotting murder simultaneously.
Speaker 2: Let's look at a few cases. There's Kelly Harber.
Speaker 1: Okay, who was she?
Speaker 2: She paid twenty two hundred dollars for a hit on
a man described as five o't five mail with blue eyes.
Her job hospital administrator, a key part of the healthcare system.
Speaker 1: A hospital administrator, not exactly a hard and criminal. What
was the connection to the target?
Speaker 2: He was her former college sweetheart, and the motive It
apparently stemmed from what started as a really common, painful situation,
a bitter years long custody battle. It was raging through
the courts, the schools in sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: So a family dispute, a really nasty one, clearly, so.
Speaker 2: Nasty, so frustrating for her that she reached this point
of choosing violence, seeing the darknet, this final high tech
option to resolve a custody fight.
Speaker 1: That's what you mean by the normalization of extreme violence
using assassination as a tool in family court exactly.
Speaker 2: Then there's Christopher Pence. This profile is just it creates
intense cognitive dissonance.
Speaker 1: Why who was he?
Speaker 2: He was a forty year old IT security technician.
Speaker 1: We're from Microsoft, Okay, professional job.
Speaker 2: But the sources emphasize he was also a deeply religious man,
biological father of eleven children and remarkably the adoptive father of.
Speaker 1: Five more eleven biological five adoptive. Wow, big family, deeply
religious IT guy? Where was he living in a.
Speaker 2: Large house in Utah? Outwardly seemed dedicated to faith, family,
his tech career, but secretly he plotted to kill the
biological parents of his five adopted children. No why he
paid sixteen thousand dollars in bitcoin to have the couple removed.
His justification was incredibly vague, just that he wasn't seeing
eye to eye on something.
Speaker 1: With him not seeing eye to eye means now over
what a custody or a guardianship issue.
Speaker 2: Presumably it's this insane understatement for plotting a double homicide.
Speaker 1: The ability to just compartmentalize that, to live this life
of piety and professional competence and IT security techno less
while planning murder.
Speaker 2: It's chilling. They mastered living these dual lives.
Speaker 1: Okay, who else there was a doctor mentioned.
Speaker 2: Ah, yes, doctor Ronald Ilg maybe the most bizarre and
clinically sinister example of this control motive.
Speaker 1: What was his field me.
Speaker 2: Anatologist, a doctor specializing in newborns, and ironically he ran
a clinic that held vulnerable women struggling with addiction issues.
Speaker 1: Helping women with addiction.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, he apparently pulled himself up from a poor
rural background in Oregon, became a senior clinician in the city.
His darknet alias was Scar two.
Speaker 1: Fifteen Scar two fifteen, and his order it wasn't for murder,
was it?
Speaker 2: It was something else, correct, something arguably, as you said,
more torturous, more controlling.
Speaker 1: What did he want?
Speaker 2: He explicitly ordered the target, a woman, to be kidnapped,
h and then forcibly addicted to.
Speaker 1: Heroin, forcibly addicted, not killing.
Speaker 2: Her, explicitly not killed. He wanted her power, her agency
completely neutralized through addiction and coercion, permanently silenced, controlled.
Speaker 1: That says so much about the motive, doesn't it. Murder
ends it? This was about ongoing absolute control over her life,
her choices, her future.
Speaker 2: Precisely, and he treated it like a business transaction. He
meticulously laid out this bonus structure for the darknet operators.
Speaker 1: A bonus structure for kidnapping and forced addiction, yep, like
project management.
Speaker 2: An additional ten thousand dollars if they could force her
to permanently withdraw certain court motions. Another extra ten thousand
dollars to make sure she kept her mouth shut and
told no one.
Speaker 1: He was literally trying to buy legal outcomes through extreme
violence and degradation.
Speaker 2: The irony is just staggering, isn't it. A doctor dedicated
professionally to helping vulnerable women overcome addiction plotting that exact
same fate for someone in his personal life, all driven
by this obsession with controlling the outcome of some dispute.
Speaker 1: And the lack of remorse afterwards, trying to sell book rights.
Speaker 2: Calling his story fifty shades of Gray on steroids. It
just highlights the profound self absorption, the pathology of control,
absolutely zero contrition.
Speaker 1: So these cases, the hospital administrator, the IT tech, the doctor,
they force you to confront something really uncomfortable.
Speaker 2: Don't they? They really do that. Extreme violence isn't just
planned by obvious monsters. It's plotted by seemingly upstanding professionals.
People living among us who just can't handle losing. They
feel backed into an emotional corner and are unwilling to
accept compromise or defeat.
Speaker 1: We've talked about cases in the US, Switzerland, but you
mentioned this was global. The kill list wasn't just confined
to a few countries.
Speaker 2: Not at all. The geographical diversity was huge. It really
proved this was a phenomenon enabled by the anonymity of
the tour network itself accessible anywhere.
Speaker 1: Where else were orders coming from?
Speaker 2: The list was extensive. We saw, for example, a woman
in camber To, Australia trying to order hits on her own.
Two parents were parents. Wow, Okay, a really bizarre case
involving a love triangle at a sports Direct store in
Milton Keynes in the UK that resulted in an order.
Speaker 1: A workplace love triangle ending in a darknet hit.
Speaker 2: Order apparently so. We also saw orders placed in Nevada, Tampa,
in the US, Spain, Italy. The orders were quite literally,
as the source says, almost.
Speaker 1: Everywhere, reflecting just how universal these kinds of conflicts are,
I guess, and how universal the desire for a clean
solution became thanks to this site.
Speaker 2: Exactly now dealing with this massive, dispersed list of threats.
The initial investigators couldn't handle it alone. They needed institutional.
Speaker 1: Backup, right, especially after the initial police response wasn't helpful.
Did they find partners eventually?
Speaker 2: Yes, They ended up working secretly, carefully with organizations like
the FBI, passing over every single intercepted kill order that
seemed credible and imminent.
Speaker 1: That must have been a huge undertaking. How many orders
are we talking about in total?
Speaker 2: Over the years this operation was running and being monitored,
the investigators disclosed one hundred and seventy five paid for
kill orders around the world that required urgent intervention.
Speaker 1: One hundred and seventy five by a lot of potential victims.
Did this collaboration lead to actual results arrests?
Speaker 2: It did, incredible results actually. The sources state thirty two
arrests so far directly linked to these orders, twenty eight convictions.
Speaker 1: And prison time.
Speaker 2: Approximately one hundred and eighty years of prison time sentenced
collectively for those convicted, So real consequences for the people
placing the orders.
Speaker 1: That's significant. What about the people running the website, the scammers?
Did they ever get caught?
Speaker 2: Yes, satisfyingly they did. Believed to be a group of
Romanian cyber criminals. They were eventually arrested in a rash
of raids some years.
Speaker 1: Later, so the site itself, the extortion racket, was finally
shut down.
Speaker 2: Yes, eliminating that specific channel for this kind of darkneck crime.
Speaker 1: Okay, so arrests made site shut down. But you're saying
the real meaning here isn't just about catching criminals, right.
Speaker 2: That's important obviously, But the deeper meaning goes beyond the stats.
When the investigators started, remember they expected to find what
big organized crime plots, drug deals gone bad, maybe even
state sponsored stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the usual suspects for assassination plots.
Speaker 2: But the reality, as we've seen through these cases, was
so much more mundane and therefore more disturbing.
Speaker 1: Because the site's real function in the minds of the users.
Speaker 2: Was simply to make ordering a hit seem convenient and
clean and safe and easy. It removed all the traditional
messiness and risk involved in trying to hire a killer
in the physical world.
Speaker 1: It effectively lowered the barriers to entry to ordering an assassination,
made it feel like just another online transaction.
Speaker 2: Took it from something requiring deep criminal contacts and huge
personal risk to something you could potentially manage on your
laptop during your lunch break. That's the scary part.
Speaker 1: And that ultimately forces us back to looking at the
users them, not as outliers.
Speaker 2: But as fundamentally normal people. That's the most unsettling takeaway.
People with jobs, friends, families, people living lives just like
you and I, as the source material puts it.
Speaker 1: Holding down jobs, going to church, raising kids while secretly
constantly coldly plotting murder online.
Speaker 2: And the common thread the thing linking that hospital admin
in Wisconsin, the IT guy in Utah, the doctor in Oregon,
the person in Paris. It wasn't huge criminal ambition.
Speaker 1: No, it was something much more personal, wasn't it.
Speaker 2: It was almost always this pervasive, desperate desire for control,
and coupled with that an absolute inability to lose it.
Speaker 1: Control over what, money, relationships, custody.
Speaker 2: All the above financial outcomes, custody arrangements, romantic relationships. When
they felt that control slipping, the desperation manifested, often as
the sources suggest, as intimate partner violence, spiraling out of control.
Speaker 1: And the dark net site just offered this false promise,
clean easy button to get that control back permanently exactly.
Speaker 2: A way to reassert absolute control over a situation they
felt was escaping them without getting their own hands dirty.
Speaker 1: They thought, It's just a truly stunning and deeply terrifying
piece of research when you lay it all out, the
unbelievable lengths people will go to when they feel that
control is slipping away, and.
Speaker 2: That these extreme plots weren't over vast fortunes or state secrets,
but over simple, albeit painful things a divorce, a custody fight,
a workplace.
Speaker 1: Dispute, plotted by doctors. It texts administrators, people who are
part of the fabric of society.
Speaker 2: Which tells you the biggest threat here wasn't really the technology,
the code, the encryption that just enabled it. The real
threat was how easily a bitter divorce escalated into a
global assassination attempt. Yeah, the biggest takeaway for me, I think,
is about the fragility of well of community, of normalcy,
how thin that veil can be between everyday life and
someone actively plotting violence in secret.
Speaker 1: Because the perpetrators weren't these shadowy figures from some criminal underworld.
Speaker 2: No, in their day to day lives, they were people
just like you. And I living in our neighborhoods, working in.
Speaker 1: Our offices, and that suggests what this kind of darkness
is closer than we think.
Speaker 2: It suggests we might all be just a little bit
closer to being affected by or perhaps even seeing the
kind of desperation that drives this. Then we might like
to believe the anonymity of the internet just it made
the unthinkable feel doable for them. It turned personal grudges
into these global plots.
Speaker 1: A really sobering thought to end on.
Speaker 2: It is, and maybe an important thing to reflect on
is just how quickly conflict can escalate when one person
becomes absolutely unwilling to accept loss, unwilling to compromise. Understanding
that mechanism, that need for control on how it escalates.
That might be the most vital lesson from this whole
difficult deep dive.
Speaker 1: Okay, a lot to think about there. We encourage you
the listener to reflect on that nature of control of
escalation and conflict and maybe continue you your own deep dive.
We'll leave it there for today. Thanks for us, We'll
see you next time.