Over the following months, Yura had instructed his detail of freelancers to create websites peddling fake news about Ormsby’s and Monteiro’s involvement in the assassination marketplace. At the station, an NCA officer told him he had been arrested for incitement to murder, in connection with Besa Mafia. Seconds later, a red battering ram smashed through the white door and armed police officers rushed in.
Woman Sentenced To 9 Years In Dark Web Murder-for-Hire Plot
- They had lots of time to help Amy, but they didn’t.
- Innes passes all requests involving minors to the police immediately.
- According to court documents, Ms. Murphy used the dark web to attempt to pay a hitman $10,510 in Bitcoin to murder her boyfriend’s lover.
- Michelle Murphy, 58, was charged via criminal complaint in September 2023 and pleaded guilty in December 2023 to one count of murder-for-hire.
This is really an emerging technology. But when police get to her last known address, nobody's there. Brigham now has new people desperately wanting to see him, to find him — people with a badge who consider this talented artist a danger to society.
As we already mentioned, hiring a hitman is illegal and this activity is usually related to organized crime, and getting caught leads to a sentence. Hiring a hitman is considered a criminal act, and is punished by the law with imprisonment. Guns still jam, blood splatters everywhere, and innocent people are sometimes caught in the middle. Pop culture is full of stories where the hitman is a lone wolf, mysterious, always male, waiting in the shadows until the moment is right to act.

The criminal complaint alleges that Sasser as "cattree" had messaged Online Killers Market several times, expressing frustration that the job hadn't yet been completed. Reported that her car appeared to have been keyed and that she received “unpleasant phone calls” from a person using an electronic device to disguise their voice. Investigators alerted police in Prattville, Alabama, where the target lived, and sent patrols to the victim’s home. “I hope you both fall off a cliff and die,” she told the man, according to an affidavit dated May 11.

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When she was out in public, she would frequently stop to consider how people behaved in various situations, so that she might better draw her characters later. In the weeks after law enforcement alerted Stern to the hit, she received no updates on her case. Her parents installed a home security system and bought her police-grade pepper spray.
We decided to investigate a few of the sites offering such services to learn a bit about what they promise, and for how much they are potentially scamming would-be customers of murder services. Rumors surrounding murder-for-hire on the dark web have been circulating for years. The admin said they would no longer pay people to remove negative reviews, but instead, “we will burn out their cars and homes; doing so we will prove to them that we are legit and that they sould sic remove their comments or we will burn more.” For their part, the person or persons behind the Besa Mafia admin account said in a message to me that the hacked data was itself fake. I wasn’t able to confirm the veracity of all of the messages included in the dump, but some contained details of bitcoin transactions that matched those recorded on the blockchain. In 800 words, the customer explains in rambling detail how Besa Mafia helped him kill the man who raped his girlfriend.
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Alexis was 19 when she received a call from the police in her hometown in the United States in 2018. That person might have responded by politely asking you not to do it again, or they may have decided life is too short and simply let it go. Although the scheme involved newer technologies like the internet and Bitcoin, the end result would have been age-old, cold-blooded murder.” Zhou offered the neighbor $10,000 and sexual favors in exchange for killing the daughter and disposing of her body in a lake. Zhou later tried to use the website to secure the murder of her romantic partner’s adult daughter. To pay for the murder, Zhou contracted with a Bitcoin exchange service in Ukraine to make a $5,000 payment in Bitcoin on her behalf.
Prosecutors believe Amy's husband shot her in cold blood after his attempt to hire a hit man failed. To prove it, he began giving us the names of the murder targets from his sites. Not long before, he'd discovered that Yura was trying to frame him, claiming Monteiro ran the hit man sites. Yura had by this time closed down Besa Mafia and opened a new hit man site called Cosa Nostra, another reference to the mob and organized crime. It was Stephen who sought to hire a hit man. Had he pulled the trigger himself or hired a hit man from Yura's website?
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Allwine told police he'd spent the morning working in his basement. With the hit against Amy bought and paid for, the FBI had decided to tell her and Stephen the frightening news. The killing of Amy Allwine had been ordered on that hit man website Besa Mafia. His website invites would-be killers to send him hit man audition tapes. And can police intervene before someone else gets killed? Known as the internet's evil twin, the dark web is a place where services offering hit men-for-hire are just a computer click away.

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But sometime, somewhere, warmhearted Amy Allwine had made an enemy. He calls himself Yura — a man who says he's behind an international murder empire named Besa Mafia. Over the course of the investigation, our team passed 175 hit orders to law enforcement. And with new cases coming in all the time, the pace was relentless.
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Now, she's a CBS News consultant who we hired to help us look for Yura. The next year, we exposed about 20 active murder plots. Although many dark web sites are scams, Alexis knew someone out there wanted her dead. Alexis had every reason to be worried because of something that had happened just months earlier, when out of nowhere, the police had called her. Van Sant's 2018 report, "Click for a Killer," exposed about 20 active murder plots.
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. So, not only was this young boy abused; he was almost killed by this guy. I mean, I’ll quickly give a story of one case which is concluded in the news now. Not only that, but money is actually being sent to pay for 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. 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.

Murder for hire websites, it sounds chilling, but the harsh reality is they’re out there. "The people on the list and the people that put them there, in most cases, looked like you and me. They had normal lives, normal jobs. And, in most cases, the perpetrators were able to maintain a public exterior of respectability at the same time as they were secretly, and sometimes desperately, trying to have someone killed." But investigators found inconsistencies with the suicide scenario and discovered he had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web. "The instructions were really practical, like, ‘The target tends to leave at this time in the morning. This is their car and this is where they work. Be careful, they have a dog.’ There were lots of instructions about how to get the hit done. "Kill List" follows Carl Miller's saga investigating a fake hitman-for-hire site on the dark web. Variously known as Besa Mafia, Camorra Hitman and #1 Hitman Marketplace, the website has been called an “Etsy for hitmen” by producers after a four-year investigation involving five different police agencies including the Metropolitan Police, the FBI and Interpol.
Monteiro tried again to pass the matter to the police. While preparing for the interview, Monteiro discovered that Yura had launched a new website, Cosa Nostra, and adopted a new persona – Italian capo “Barbosa”. The Crime Bay website was eventually shut down by the NCA and the Bulgarian police in May 2017 and Monteiro assumed that Yura had been found and jailed. Another Crime Bay user in Denmark, an Italian-born woman called Emanuela Consortini, was arrested thanks to an NCA tip-off and then sentenced to six years in jail for commissioning the murder of an ex-boyfriend. In March 2017, they arrested David Crichton, a British doctor who had ordered a hit on his former financial advisor.
A pair of British computer experts have discovered that an assassination website offering hitmen for hire is a cynical SCAM set up to fleece people out of large sums of money. While the hitman-for-hire myth might be somewhat overblown, it’s essential to maintain sight of the real dangers on the Dark Web. You could register and you could apparently hire a hitman and you could pay money for a escrow and get someone killed. But although we were seeing arrests in individual cases, for a long time none of the police forces we encountered seemed to have any interest in proactively investigating the hitman-for-hire dark web site themselves. Two people whose deaths were initially pursued on the dark web have ended up dead — one, Amy Allwine, was murdered by her husband, who had previously tried to hire a hitman via the dark web. And as the cases of Amy Allwine and Alexis Stern show, even if Yura's hit man sites are scams, the customers paying him to have people killed are horrifyingly real.
“It’s great an international law enforcement operation took down these criminals, but when will they ever proactively investigate the thousands of names on the kill list? This is why Monteiro is ambivalent about the news of Yura’s apparent apprehension, despite years of working to shed light on the operation and its victims. And whether it’s enough to shut down the operation for good is an open matter; it is easy enough for another to keep running the scam. The DIICOT says that the damages of the operation are believed to be around 500,000 euros, though if the scammers held onto the bitcoin they collected back in 2016, it would be worth far more than that today. The website itself evolved over time, from a clunky and simple page reminiscent of Geocities-era web to one that hosts putative forums, user profiles, and a (slightly) more modern design, replete with gruesome images intended to relay a proof of concept. The operation is a scam, but its users are serious about their purchase, and intend to inflict real harms.