Who orders hitmen online? (With Carl Miller)

Right now, you might be thinking someone, somewhere, is on the internet doing something for money that’s really awful. That’s probably true, and has been in the past. Although, plenty of times it’s not — take Bonsai Kittens — but what about Red Rooms, where you can supposedly pay for assassinations or watch live torture? Today journalist Carl Miller joins us to talk about the dark web. What’s actually on there, how people use it, and how much should we be panicking about it? Our guest Carl Miller is the author of The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab, a journalist, and host of the podcast Kill List (https://wondery.com/shows/kill-list/). Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Sponsors Audio Maverick, a new nine-part documentary about one of the most visionary figures in radio, Himan Brown. Out now wherever you listen to podcasts. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Engineer: Rebecca Seidel - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Ryan Broderick?

  Just a quick heads up before we start today's episode. Wanted to do a quick content warning. Today's episode is a little more intense than usual. We're talking about one of the darker parts of the internet. And in doing so, we have to describe, you know, how certain violent and exploitative corners of the web function. We do our best to not go into too much detail about these things, but at a certain point, you have to sort of talk about what you're talking about. Okay, Carl, what's like the craziest conspiracy theory? I guess you could call the about the dark web you've ever heard. Like, what's the most outlandish thing about the dark web you've ever heard?

• 1:05Speaker 02

  I don't know if it's conspiracy theory, but the thing that kind of swirls around, I think, kind of like, more precisely than anything else is around the red room. So it's this idea that there's a stream buried deep in some secret website somewhere in Tor hidden services. You know, and the link is kind of passed around from kind of pocket to pocket and whisper to whisper. And if you manage to get this link and you get through, there's a stream of someone being tortured.

• 1:29Ryan Broderick?

  It's very fear.com with Stephen Dorff. Do you remember that film?

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do.

• 1:34Ryan Broderick?

  Where the internet is haunted. Yeah, I find that a lot of the crazy things I hear about the internet typically is the plot of a movie from the 2000s that people are kind of half remembering.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  And those plots are probably drawn from some digital libertarian essay written in the 1990s.

• 2:08Ryan Broderick?

  It's shocking how often on this show it goes back to essentially one weird libertarian guy in the 90s caused a whole bunch of trouble for everybody.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  All the chaos.

• 2:15Ryan Broderick?

  But an old internet cliche is that anything you can imagine is on the internet and someone, somewhere is probably jacking off to it. And it's probably true, but this leads us into thinking that somewhere, someone is on the internet doing something for money that's really awful. And sometimes that is true, and not infrequently, this leads to a whole bunch of panic. But for every person looking to pay good money to watch someone be pushed into a vat of acid, or, uh, what was the one when I was a teenager, like growing a cat inside of a glass jar? bonsai kittens? Are you familiar with bonsai kittens?

• 2:50Speaker 02

  I, I remember that as a gruesome meme.

• 2:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, totally not real, but I, as a 13-year-old, definitely thought it was. But a lot of times, there are also scammers that use these kinds of panics and fears and urban legends to make a lot of money. They'll take your crypto and they'll run off with it. So today, we're looking at the dark web, the mysterious place that you have definitely no doubt heard about in all kinds of, uh, you know, scaring old people news articles and podcasts and whatever. But we're going to talk about like what's actually on there, uh, how people actually use it, and, uh, give you a step-by-step guide for downloading a Tor browser and committing crimes. So definitely stick around to hear more about that. But joining with me today is the host of Kill List, it's journalist Carl Miller. Hello, Carl, welcome to the show.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Ryan, thanks for having me on. Hi, everyone.

• 3:34Ryan Broderick?

  So, um, why did you spend so much time on the dark web? What, what, what, what led you there?

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Well, the, the honest answer is initially, I didn't really want to have much to do with the dark net. I'm a very reluctant kind of journalist or kind of investigator of it. It first began when I was writing a book and desperately trying to understand how crime was changing. And I wanted to do that by basically embedding myself both in the police, but also with criminals. Understand what crime looked like actually from the eyes of the people that did it in one way or another. And that led me to kind of speak to this kind of strange breed of like investigator that I hadn't really known existed before. Come dark net cybercrime investigators. And one of them, Chris, I remember I met him in a pub. It was it was twenty seventeen.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  It was just before Christmas. It was like really hot and crowded. I hadn't didn't know who was really. And he turned his phone around to me and he showed me a assassination market for the first time.

• 4:37Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  He tried to debunk it, in fact. And he'd written about it publicly. And what had just happened to him, and that's why he was showing me the screen on his phone, is that they had just sent him a video with his username on a piece of paper in the dark, this kind of shadowy man holding that. Then the camera pans around and this car bursts into flames. And he was trying to think about whether that meant it was actually a scam or not, because scammers don't typically torch cars.

• 5:03Ryan Broderick?

  I I would say so, yeah. So this this sort of like assassination market, as you called it, was this on what we would call the dark web? Or was this somewhere like, was this on sort of like easily accessible internet?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  It was on Tor hidden services, so it's a dot onion site.

• 5:17Ryan Broderick?

  So I I asked you this because I wanted to start here. Um, so.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  A bit of a technical background for everyone.

• 5:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, because I I actually think that like a lot of people, I would say most people probably don't actually know what we're talking about when we talk about the dark web. So you correct me if I'm wrong, but really broad strokes here is you can download an application called Tor. It's equivalent to like a VPN, let's say, but it's it's a little different. And it allows you to access websites that are not dot com, but typically dot onion sites. And there's an entire sort of shadow version of internet services on these dot onion sites. I first accessed the dark web in two thousand and eleven. I was working at Vice magazine and pitched an extremely vice story where I had to go to the Silk Road. Are you familiar with the Silk Road?

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:03Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so for people who aren't Silk Road was a. I don't think it exists anymore. There's probably copycats, but at the time it was this massive drug market hosted on the dark web. So you download Tor, you go to, I mean, there's essentially, it's not like Google for dark web sites, but it's like a directory. And so it takes forever to load because Tor browsers were really slow and kind of suck shit. And then you can get into this, you know, these online marketplaces for illegal goods and services. Would you say that that is still kind of true a decade later?

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Ryan, firstly, that that is the most 2011 vice experience, I think.

• 6:37Ryan Broderick?

  I checked all the boxes.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  That's like so classic, middle of the dartboard vice, going on the Silk Road.

• 6:43Ryan Broderick?

  Here's a, here's, here's a good punchline to the story. So I, I used, I was mining Bitcoin at the time with my computer's graphics card. Cause Bitcoin was so simple to mine at the time that you could just load it up as you load it up your computer. So my roommate and I, we had what would now be billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, but it was like four or five Bitcoin, I think maybe seven. And I used it to buy acid on the dark web, but the Bitcoin market collapsed as I was buying the acid. So the dealer sent me a nice message and he goes like, Hey, I'm gonna refund you. Like it's just a bad time. Really sorry, man. And I was like, oh, all right. That was my entire experience on the dark web.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  What that touches on is, is actually something that I, by the way, that, that is all correct. Yes.

• 7:23Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  The, the basic fact of the dark net, it uses clever encryption, clever mass to basically mask the requests that your computer is making of a website. It's designed by the US Navy, in fact. So many kind of deeply subversive technologies, for some reason or other, seem to emerge out of the US military.

• 7:39Ryan Broderick?

  Well, that makes sense to me because in a previous episode of Panic World, we, we talked all about a guy on a nuclear submarine who basically got in trouble for using like gay chat rooms. So I totally believe that the Navy would have all kinds of ulterior communication models so that they don't get busted doing all kinds of wacky shit on nuclear submarines. That makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, there you go. And it merged out of there and it, and it basically, it basically, it masks the request. What they create is this space online where you can be genuinely anonymous.

• 8:14Ryan Broderick?

  So before we get any further, I, I feel like it's important to kind of establish a scale here because I think a lot of people. Their kind of sense of scale, but the internet goes out the window when we start to talk about nefarious, you know, shadowy stuff. So like, do you have any sense of like, how many people are regularly accessing what we would call like dark web onion sites?

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Um, I, I, if I say any number, there's, I'm gonna get a nasty email from a well-informed darknet enthusiast investigator that I'm sure will be able to prove I'm completely wrong. That, that is substantial.

• 8:49Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Some of these forums are really big. Dread Pirate Roberts is Silk Road, the one you mentioned. That was a massive drug site.

• 8:56Ryan Broderick?

  That one was huge. That was, that was like, there's a lot of activity out there. Also, you could buy like a bunch of food on there too, which I was always kind of surprised, like, it wasn't just for drugs. It was, it was essentially like a marketplace that allowed anything. But you could all, I mean, I, I saw somebody who was like selling like, um, like doomsday prepper buckets on there, like full of like, you know, libertarian slop food and stuff. Like it was, it was a full marketplace.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  How was the price for the food? Like, is a jar of peanut butter cheaper on the darknet than on Amazon?

• 9:28Ryan Broderick?

  So.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Is this where I should do my shopping?

• 9:30Ryan Broderick?

  No, it was not cheaper. It was not easier because the main issue, and I'm sure we'll get further into this on the episode is like, it was based on Bitcoin as an exchange rate. Uh, so it was constantly fluctuating. So your peanut butter could change in price, you know, within a couple of seconds.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  My, my understanding was that at the time, the most popular commodity on the Silk Road was in fact half-priced supermarket coupons.

• 9:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, yes. So the, I, yes, it was, it was a.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Dollar coupons selling for 50 cents.

• 10:04Ryan Broderick?

  See, this is.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Outselling all drugs.

• 10:07Ryan Broderick?

  This, this gets to like my favorite thing about any sort of panic about the internet, which is like, it's not that these panics aren't real. It's that they're typically like the thing we focus on rather than the like very stupid, silly thing that everyone is actually using this technology for. So it's like, yes, are people like buying and selling murder services or whatever on the Silk Road? Yeah. You can buy a gun on the Silk Road. Most people were doing it to scam supermarkets.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. Yeah. But it is fair to say as well that those sites, they did operate and do operate today with a stunning level of customer service. They are like, your C fund is by no means unusual. Like, because no one knows who anyone else is, the only thing that matters on there is your customer reputation.

• 10:56Ryan Broderick?

  That's so funny. That's that rules. It feels very similar to that moment. So obviously, we have like the Napster, LimeWire, Casa moment. But then there's a moment after with BitTorrent and music blogs. And all of a sudden, it's people who are hosting like incredible amounts of copyrighted content, but they're they're trying to do it as a genuine service within a black market. That to me is kind of what my experience on the Silk Road felt like, which is that these people are enthusiasts for illicit services and substances. And they take it very seriously in a way that is both off-putting and endearing, I would say.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Yes, that's true. And like that points to going back to the very beginning of all of this, you know, John Perry Barlow Declaration of Cyberspace Independence. C N F Rautier's Foundation, there's always been this idea that the internet or manifestations of it like represent this like new sovereign space in human experience. You know, I think they called, he called it the home of mind, you know, and you, he warned you kind of weary giants of flesh and steel, that you have no sovereignty where we gather. And I've, I've always seen the kind of dark net as being a, being like kind of one of the purest technical attempts to try and make that really happen. So this space that states can't extend their power into because how can you when everyone's anonymous?

• 12:16Ryan Broderick?

  And as you are now an expert in, this sort of stateless miasma of digital services is not exactly safe. It's like a cool idea, but it can be very dangerous. And so I wanted to bring us back to you in the pub in 2017, possibly seeing an assassination market. So can you tell me, how did this all start?

• 12:37Speaker 02

  I was, I was kind of being handed from person to person to try and meet hackers, investigators.

• 12:45Ryan Broderick?

  Now, were they all wearing the Guy Fawkes mask when you would meet them or did some hat?

• 12:51Ryan Broderick?

  Were they all wearing a fedora with fingerless gloves?

• 12:54Speaker 02

  It's an irony that I think that never have, never have I seen more stock imagery of a hacker sitting in the shadows than have been like linked to various like pieces to do with the kill list and to do with the work I've been doing over the last couple of years. And, and the irony is that I, I hate that image more than anything else. I think it is like the worst way of like describing hackers. They don't really wear hoodies. I've not really known them to light dark in rooms more than anyone else does. They often work in teams. They could be quite social people and they're definitely not typing binary code into a green screen computer.

• 13:31Ryan Broderick?

  In my experience, most of them have, if, if they're wearing anything, it's like the cat ear headphones.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe a Hello Kitty like, and they, you know, they might be having a kind of, you know, a coder joke on a T-shirt. Maybe they've got a blockchain tattoo. They might, you know, have a shock blue moawk or something like that. Like hackers can look very different.

• 13:50Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, so, so, so bring us back to, to the store here. So how long did it take to get an actual in the flesh meeting with this person?

• 13:58Speaker 02

  It was, it didn't take probably a month or two of us, of me being handed around and back and forth. Finally met him after he showed me that the site existed. I decided there wasn't really much I could do about all of this until at least he'd gone to the police and handed loads of stuff over. So I set up a meeting between him and the police. I was like embedded in a cybercrime team at the police around the same time. I was talking to them quite a lot.

• 14:22Ryan Broderick?

  I think American, American journalists would be surprised by that move. I worked in the UK for a while, so I understand why you did it. But that is a, that is probably a surprising way to do that.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  You mean go to the police?

• 14:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Well, I work a lot more with the police in a second, so strap yourself in.

• 14:40Ryan Broderick?

  No, yeah. So yeah, tell, tell us what happened after you sort of made the, made the meet.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  So they made the meet. I step away. I don't talk to either of them, either the police or Chris, the hacker for eight months, maybe. And I emailed Chris. I asked him how things are going. And in fact, the police had just let him out of jail. So things had not gone well.

• 15:05Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah, that seems like the opposite of one.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Not what I'd intended. So they, basically, for one reason or another, and I don't want to get drag the tail into too tangled a kind of eddy, the police believed that he was running the dark net site.

• 15:22Ryan Broderick?

  I'm shocked that British law enforcement had a tough time wrapping their heads around this one. They're typically so on it. That's shocking to me.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  So they blew his door office hinges, raided his house.

• 15:35Ryan Broderick?

  Jesus Christ.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  And it was only because of, I think, the fact that he'd had this meeting and gone in and showed them everything that he had, that he was finally, and it took several days, let out.

• 15:46Ryan Broderick?

  I see.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  And it's just then, as Covid is collapsing society around my ears, and just as we're beginning this story, and just as we're looking at these sites again, that Chris makes, I think, a kind of a really, really fateful, like, life-changing kind of discovery, really. He's kind of probing the site and then kind of phones me one day and says, I've broken into it. So I actually can find a way through this little vulnerability that was present in the site.

• 16:16Ryan Broderick?

  Now, now, before we get any further, talk us through the site itself. Like, what are we talking about here?

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Right. Well, it looks, there's lots of black, there's lots of people in pictures.

• 16:27Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Like that. And they're kind of holding guns up towards the camera. There's, there's some pretty gory pictures of corpses. And the site's pitch is basically, hey, you know, we're the mafia, you know, but we've got an e-commerce wing now as well.

• 16:43Ryan Broderick?

  Sure, of course. You gotta stay up with the latest trends. Yeah, of course.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  And they're like, you know, and which, exactly which mafia they claim to be does change a little bit.

• 16:52Ryan Broderick?

  Is this like cameo for organized crime, essentially is what it's pitching itself as?

• 16:56Speaker 02

  They're like, with the Albanian mafia, we've got, you want to transact with us, now you can. Crack username, you log in. And you're then invited to basically use the mafia, this mafia group like eBay for assassinations. So it's like, we're the trusted middleman. We're not the assassins. We've got a big network of assassins.

• 17:19Ryan Broderick?

  I see. It's always a middleman with these guys.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  But if you pay for it, we'll hold it in escrow. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll hold it and we won't release it to them until they actually deliver on the hit to your satisfaction. That's the pitch. And it looks 1990s. There's loads of like little clues that would make you pause, like there's trademark symbols. Like it's copyrighted at the bottom. I mean,

• 17:42Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know if you can trademark a Hitman website. I feel like that's,

• 17:45Speaker 02

  I don't know if the mafia would be able to enforce a trademark infringement if it, if it happened.

• 17:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Cause I feel like that, like, okay, let's say your organized crime unit does have some sort of like shell company for laundering money. I feel like if you use that shell company to trademark your Hitman website, it kind of defeats the purpose of your shell company for like legitimate business, right?

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Is, is the mafia genuinely going into a courtroom?

• 18:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Ripped off our branding.

• 18:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. We are suing you for ripping off our Hitman website.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 18:16Ryan Broderick?

  So we're going to be talking more after the break about what you found after your hacker friend found the vulnerability inside this assassination marketplace. And hopefully giving you guys more tips for contacting a, a middleman who can then put you in touch with the Albanian mafia for murder for hire. So we'll talk about all of that after the break.

• 18:37Speaker 04

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• 19:37Ryan Broderick?

  So your hacker friend's out of...

• 19:40Speaker 02

  So he sends us what he's seeing. So you've got to, you've got to try and picture this as a bit of a kind of weird situation we're in. He's able in the backend of the site to basically behave like an admin for the site.

• 19:57Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so, okay, he's taking over permissions for, for running the site essentially.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  And, yeah, well, he's not, he's, he's kind of, he's lurking. He's, he's trying to create as smaller footprint as he possibly can for the people running the site. But the most important thing that he can see are the individual messages that are passing back and forth between the people using the site and the people running it.

• 20:19Ryan Broderick?

  Uh huh, okay.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  And what that really means is that he's intercepting the kill orders as they're coming into the site.

• 20:28Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, cool.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  So this first kind of sweep of messages, we can kind of see there are dozens of these kind of conversations that are happening. Quite a lot of them are really specific. So name, address, phone number, car registration number, path of life information often as well, description, photos, always photos.

• 20:54Ryan Broderick?

  Of the victims, of the targets, yeah, yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Exactly. And, and often kind of dozens and dozens of messages going back and forth, covering everything from like logistics through to like moral justifications for why the hit should occur.

• 21:11Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  And then payments. So we begin to suspect that at least some of these orders actually had payments associated with them.

• 21:21Ryan Broderick?

  Now, in payments, are we, are we talking crypto? Is it like, is it also Bitcoin? Yeah. So are you using any sort of on-chain analysis from here to figure out who's giving them the Bitcoin?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  So we, we build what we call the pipeline.

• 21:34Ryan Broderick?

  Sure. Just a quick bit of explanation for our users who might not know this, but... Almost all crypto is public. On-chain analysis is awesome. You should, there's a couple of great users on like places like X and CoinDesk that do this, but it's honestly quite easy to follow how Bitcoin moves because it's all on the ledger. Like you can do all these little investigations with crypto that are quite interesting. So you're building the pipeline. Now, what does this pipeline look like?

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Well, it's basically a way for us to triage all these kill orders. Like some were jokes, some didn't seem like they were serious, like others looked like they were quite serious. So the pipeline firstly involved Chris scraping the site constantly, exfiltrating the messages and turning them into chains so we could see.

• 22:19Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  We would then do on-chain analysis. So Cryptosint, Cryptosint Intelligence and

• 22:25Ryan Broderick?

  It's super fun.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  It is fun.

• 22:28Ryan Broderick?

  I watched a guy last year at Ethereum Denver do it and basically prove that like a bunch of celebrities were buying and selling their own NFTs to themselves to inflate and deflate the market to like cash in. And he like

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Inflation of blockchain-based assets. I'm shocked.

• 22:45Ryan Broderick?

  Manipulating a blockchain market. Somebody tell the president. Um, yeah. So it's, it's definitely like a really fun, uh, it's, it's a fun side effect of this technology that you can do this. So, so you guys are doing on-chain analysis and what are you finding?

• 22:57Speaker 02

  We're finding that there are indeed genuine and substantial payments connected with some of these orders.

• 23:03Ryan Broderick?

  How much money are we talking here? Like roughly in like pounds or dollars?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Well, over the whole, I can't remember at the very beginning, but over the, over the whole course of the investigation, the cheapest hit, I believe, was for a hundred pounds.

• 23:17Ryan Broderick?

  That's dude, I'd be so pissed if I got assassinated and it only cost somebody 400 pounds. Like you gotta be

• 23:24Speaker 02

  100.

• 23:26Ryan Broderick?

  100.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  100.

• 23:27Ryan Broderick?

  For a hundred pounds. Dude, that's, that's like not even a full grocery shop in America right now. That's ridiculous.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  There you go. Yeah. I mean, that did not really affect the sentencing. Um, and it, but it goes all the way up to, I think about 90,000 was the most expensive.

• 23:44Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, that's, that's what I'm thinking like this has got to be student loan. You don't know this in the UK, but this has got to be student loan level. Honestly, like if you're gonna kill somebody, that's gotta be at least five figures.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  You say that, but we, we disclosed a, one particular order to the Colombian police for about 5K, if I remember correctly. And the Colombian police said, this is ridiculous. We don't believe you. We think you're making this up, you pesky journalists. And we're like, why? They're like, the street value of an assassination in Bogota is far lower than that.

• 24:13Ryan Broderick?

  That's far. I mean, honestly.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  That's unrealistic.

• 24:17Ryan Broderick?

  I, I, I, okay, I gotta give them credit for that one. That's pretty good. Um, yeah, I was gonna ask though, so like, where, where are these services being carried out? Like, geographically, what are the, what are the assassination market hotspots?

• 24:30Speaker 02

  They were all over the place. So these orders, you know, there was one to, and not all of them were for murders. So one was to burn down a, an Italian nightclub. There was a, a Galician fishmonger in Spain. There was a nurse that lived in the Hague in Amsterdam. There was a air traffic control in Wisconsin. It's quite a lot of US targets.

• 24:54Ryan Broderick?

  That's actually a really good thing to know here, which is that like, it's not just that like, these are assassination targets. It is, it is what you said it is. It is the middleman for distributing services in support of organized crime.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  I mean, we realized two things quite quickly, like after we started intercepting, listening to these messages. Number one, if these were hitmen, they were the most incommodant hitmen like known to man. Like they kept getting lost. They kept losing their weapons.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Army would be too well protected.

• 25:27Ryan Broderick?

  I just finished watching The Sopranos for the first time. So that actually kind of clocks for me. That sounds right to me.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  So basically, we, we, we were pretty sure from the very beginning that they weren't real hitmen. Like there, there was an upsell kind of scam happening for each.

• 25:40Ryan Broderick?

  Interesting. Was there any haggling going on?

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Not haggling, um, more like they would accept, ultimately, the, the people running the site would accept the money that was being offered. And then every single time would invent a string of mishaps to mean that the assassins needed more money or a new assassin had to be brought in.

• 26:02Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, my God, it's an organized crime pig butchering scheme. That's what this is. That's so clever. Honestly, like, that's sick. That's great, because like, no one can complain because you're, they're paying for a crime.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Can't complain. And in fact, they, at the end of it, sometimes they would try and extort, they would say they were a scam and then try extort the people for more money to not disclose it to someone. The other thing we realized, though, is that, um, the people that seem to be targeted and that seem to be using the site.

• 26:34Ryan Broderick?

  Targeted by the scam or targeted by the?

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. By targets, I mean the people that have hits put out on them.

• 26:41Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, let's call them targets and let's call the, the customers, let's call them, uh, dummies.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  They're perpetrators.

• 26:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, okay, perpetrators, fine, too. I was gonna say, uh, marks, a real, a real mark, you know? Okay, yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  So the targets, yeah, so the, the, the targets, uh, and in fact, the marks, um, they were like normal people. They, they, they, they didn't seem to be linked to organized crime. You know, I kind of thought, oh, these are gonna be drug deals gone south or something, but they weren't. Like, they seemed to be both the marks perpetrators and the targets, both seemed to be, in, in most cases, like you and me. I mean, they seemed to be living like reasonably normal lives, normal jobs, uh, normal parts of countries.

• 27:21Ryan Broderick?

  See, that doesn't totally surprise me, if only because like I do feel like a lot of the story of the internet is essentially making our worst impulses quite easy. And, and this is obviously not an easy thing to do, right? You have to download a Tor browser, go on an Onion site, get a Bitcoin wallet, set it all up, talk to the guy, organize all this stuff, yada, yada, yada. But it is still much easier than like, meeting a guy in a motel and like figuring, you know, having to do this in person. And I, I, I do think that like, Our worst impulses made easier by the click of a button just make, I don't think it exposes that we're naturally like that. It just like for a lot of people cuts out some friction and lets

• 28:03Ryan Broderick?

  them do this thing that they would not have normally done. Like that, that clocks to me.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. Yeah. I think like for a normal person, obviously actually meeting a genuine potential hitman would be totally terrifying, very risky and possibly impossible for people.

• 28:17Ryan Broderick?

  Way too scary. Yeah.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  But I mean, here, like, you know, yeah, in most cases, it wasn't impulsive. Like, they would spend weeks. And it was like, you know, she's just left the home. Like, now would be the perfect time. Like, they would, they would drop in like all the time. Sometimes we'd like real time information about the target. So we, and this actually was what led us to this, like, we found ourselves in this kind of horrible ethical position where suddenly we believe we're like the only people in the world that know that this like growing list of people are being targeted.

• 28:48Ryan Broderick?

  Well, you can set up your own competing marketplace. No, I totally get it. Yeah, totally. So what, what happens with all of this? Like, is the, is, were you able to get the marketplace shut down?

• 28:57Speaker 02

  We, we did know at the beginning also, like, so there's no hitmen going out there, but we thought some of these people are going to be in like great danger from the person that put them on the site. And there was, there was a woman in 2016 called Amy Allwine, who was murdered by someone using this site. You, this exact site, Steve Allwine, her husband, who went by the username Dog Day God. He murdered her in their home and tried to make it look like an accident, a suicide, in fact. So we knew that there was like a danger coming from these people. I mean, they were, they were trying to get these people killed. And, you know, who knew if they were

• 29:39Speaker 02

  going to do it themselves, or they would try and find some other way of doing it. So, so that was a dilemma, really. Like, how on earth do we act on this information to try and help these people that were being targeted?

• 29:54Ryan Broderick?

  And how did you do it?

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Well, like initially, I went to the police.

• 30:01Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  I'm like, I

• 30:03Ryan Broderick?

  They arrested your source. Then, yeah, okay, yeah.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  I know to US listeners, like cooperation with the police, I do think to a US ear sounds a bit different to someone in the UK. Now, our police, we don't have a kind of defund the police movement here.

• 30:17Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, no, no, it's not that. It's, so I've been a journalist in both countries. And what it is, is I was doing a project years ago about a predator on TikTok. And so I'm talking to all the victims. I'm putting together my report. At the end of that, I reach out to the FBI and I'm like, hey, are you investigating this person? And, you know, and I'm telling the victims to go to, you know, have you spoken to authorities or not? And, you know, if you do, like, that makes the reporting stronger, et cetera, et cetera. At the end of my reporting process, I go to the authorities, I say, you know, are you investigating them? And then the FBI likes to play their game where they're like, no. And then I have to say, would you investigate someone like this? If you could tell me, would you tell me?

• 31:02Ryan Broderick?

  And they're like, no, we can't tell you, blah, blah, blah. We go back and forth and I get a non-statement. In the UK, you know, your crime laws and your reporting laws are just much different. And so like, to me, it's not super surprising that you would go to them because you also, like, you have contempt of court laws that are very different than ours as well. So it's just, it's just a totally different reporting process.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, I think all of that's right. Also, I think when you, like, these kill orders were like immediate threats to life.

• 31:28Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  And so I think like there, like, the moral case is pretty clear cut. Like, you have to disclose that. So I phone up the police and in the middle of COVID, they kind of come around, these two young, keen kind of police constables, basically to check if I was mad or not. I mean, they were, they genuinely feared that I had a mental health problem. And they, they said, like, it's on, it's part of the podcast. They were like, 99 times out of 100, someone kind of comes to us with this kind of story, like, obviously, it's going to be mental health related.

• 32:01Ryan Broderick?

  Fascinating.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I think, like, understanding It is crazy. I've, you know, I'm part of a team that's broken into an assassination market on the dark net. And we've got all these kill orders and people's lives at risk. I mean, it sounds completely, it sounds crazy. They did bleep me. They did take it seriously eventually. Um, the problem was that all these people, the targets were spread, as we've just chatted about, all over the world.

• 32:26Ryan Broderick?

  Right, of course.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  And not a single one at that point was in the UK. So the Metropolitan Police, the police in London, they were like, it's not our, it's not our problem.

• 32:34Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  Basically. Ultimately, we then decided that what we needed to do was to reach the targets ourselves.

• 32:40Ryan Broderick?

  I got you. Okay. And, and was that hard? Was that, was that difficult to sort of explain to them the severity of what was going on?

• 32:47Speaker 02

  So it wasn't hard usually to, to reach them. I mean, sometimes like the, their phone number was literally part of the kill order.

• 32:54Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  And often we could find the phone number. We had some like really talented open source intelligence people working at Bellingcat. I don't know if you've ever spoken about them on the show.

• 33:03Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, of course. Yeah. Big, big, big friends of the show.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  Right. So we, yeah, we were working with Bellingcat. We were finding ways of reaching them. The problem was I was terrified when phoning someone who has a hit out on them.

• 33:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Either number one, that person will go into like a catatonic state of shock or get really angry, think they know who's done it and like, and basically react very, very badly. Um, number two, and this was like even worse to me, was that, and the person that put them on the site could be literally stood next to them or sat next to them as I was telling them.

• 33:43Ryan Broderick?

  Right. It's, it's, you can't really protect the domino effect of telling someone something like that.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Some of the people that were using the site were trying to kill their spouses. So it was actually, I mean, and in one case, when the police turned up at the house, like the, the person that put them on site was in the house. So it was, you know, we, we, we basically were like, yeah, I mean, definitely in some of these cases, like the person that that is trying to kill them is going to be close to them in their lives. And I didn't know whether telling someone meant that, um, the person that had put them on there could hear it and maybe take matters. Into their own hands then and there or soon after. So the the way that I tried to cold call people was this like really. It sounds really weird, like kind of slightly angular kind of attempt where I'd be like, hey, I'm Carl. I'm a journalist. I'm doing this kind of like.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Investigation into scam sites on the dark net. Hey, maybe we can book a time just somewhere where you feel really safe and most importantly alone. You know, where I can like.

• 34:40Ryan Broderick?

  You gotta be really careful with that one. Yeah, it's like, hey, can you like be alone next time we talk?

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm trying to do. And and but without exception, they all hung up the phone.

• 34:51Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah, I would also.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  I mean, as he works.

• 34:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  It was also right in the middle of COVID. So like scams were going crazy, right?

• 34:57Ryan Broderick?

  Right, of course.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Scams, internet scams, everyone was kind of getting scammed at that point.

• 35:02Ryan Broderick?

  So I I feel like this sort of like this story is a really good example of kind of like the just the the veil of paranoia that exists over this entire realm, right? The cops think you're crazy. The victims think you're crazy. You probably even start to think you're crazy because you can't tell if you can believe what you're seeing or not. And that brings us to the conspiracy you mentioned at the top, red rooms. Have they ever existed? And where did the concept even come from? Should we all be terrified that there's some sort of secret internet full of people being murdered all the time? Well, we dug into it and now we have to microwave the hard drives on our computers. And we're going to be talking about that and teaching you how to use them. And you can we'll teach you how to set up your Bitcoin wallet and like watch some snuff films on the dark web right after the break.

• 35:46Speaker 05

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• 35:48Speaker 04

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• 35:49Speaker 05

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• 35:51Speaker 04

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• 35:52Speaker 05

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• 36:01Speaker 05

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• 36:07Speaker 05

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• 36:46Ryan Broderick?

  Just a warning to the listener. This is where things are going to get a bit darker. Okay. I think we've got the basics down of kind of like how this technology works, how this culture exists, like who's using it, which is everybody if they want. When was the first time you came across the idea of a red room? Which as you said at the top of the episode, is sort of this illicit haunted stream, if you will, that when you access it, you're watching a live death. Like, when did you first hear about this?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  It must have been like 2014, 2015. And it was, it was just part of this kind of cloud of rumor around the dark net that actually people like Chris were investigating and trying to, trying to discern whether they were true or not.

• 37:29Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know about you, but I, the internet that I grew up on was one of like rotten.com and shock sites where, you know, you'd be minding your own business in the computer lab and someone would send you goatsy. You know, it was, it was a very wild west internet where I felt like snuff film style content was never very far away. And at a certain point, you sort of just say to yourself like, none of this could be real because if even some of it's real, like I have to go to therapy, right? And so what's, what's your sort of general sense of like, how real these things are? Like, like how much genuine, let's say exploitative violent content is out there for people to watch recreationally like this?

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, in terms of like archive content. Probably, I mean, any of us that have spent time on like, non fascist 4chan, or pre fascist 4chan.

• 38:24Ryan Broderick?

  Another big friend of the show is pre fascist 4chan. We talk about it all the time, yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the only kind of content that stuck around on 4chan was unbelievably gory, or sexy, or shocking in some way. So there's tons of snuff, tons of gore. I mean, I have to say, like, I got desensitized to that kind of stuff, like, pretty quickly in my mid teens, like, by my late teens, like, I wouldn't bat an eyelid. I mean, it's actually incredible how quickly that kind of stuff normalizes.

• 38:53Ryan Broderick?

  It didn't really bother me until I was a breaking news reporter in my mid twenties, covering like genuine, like terror attack stuff. And that's when I was like, oh, I can't like, I know this is some semblance of real. And so it's sort of, I kind of like, undesensitized myself to it. And now I'm probably like overly sensitive to it, if you can be. But I do think it's important to kind of map out here, the history of what we would call the snuff film with media. Because in the seventies, we started to get the concept of a snuff film. It actually comes from a 1971 book about the Manson family, which reads, "In the summer of 1969, Manson and his followers stole an NBC News truck loaded with film equipment. An anonymous family member claimed to have heard about a snuff film that the group shot. However, this person never

• 39:38Ryan Broderick?

  actually saw the film. These snuff films were never found, nor was any evidence that they existed, but the moniker stuck." Which I think is an important thing here, because the idea of a snuff film has always existed alongside moral panic, social panics, particularly around youth culture. The Manson family is kind of like the ultimate first, sort of teens are going crazy, and like randomly murdering people panic, right? Like, that's what this is all is. In the eighties, we started to see professional movies, you know, fake snuff films, you know, like Cannibal Holocaust. Obviously, there was also in the nineties, The Blair Witch, which we have a whole episode about, you should go check it out. And then we get to the internet age. So, you know, what is your sort of take on how the idea

• 40:23Ryan Broderick?

  of this red room started? Like, where do you think this all begins?

• 40:27Speaker 02

  I think it goes earlier, Ryan. I think it goes to like the Victorian age and anatomists and kind of cutting bodies apart and, and you know, like, um, uh, uh, sorry, this is a very English history.

• 40:38Ryan Broderick?

  No, I was gonna say, I was gonna say, you can get away with making this point because of your accent. I cannot. I have to be like, it all started with the Manson family.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  It all started in 1970.

• 40:47Ryan Broderick?

  All the way back in the 1970s. And you're like, no, it actually started 300 years ago. Yeah.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:52Ryan Broderick?

  You're right. You are probably right. And so why do you think the idea of a red room caught on the way it did? Like, yeah. So for instance, uh, in 2015, uh, author Eileen Ornsby told Vice that she thought that she had maybe found a red room. Let me read you an excerpt here. So, "In this case, the event was supposedly going to involve several captured Islamic state members. Excited revelers on 4chan and Reddit hyped up the launch of the stream, which would happen at midnight on Friday. And the site owner promised humorously, there would be bacon. The stream was not presented. Instead, a banal 21 minutes long video was uploaded, according to Ornsby. In the end, it was a troll, albeit one that required

• 41:34Ryan Broderick?

  a fair amount of effort to pull off. Another example was an apparent human trafficking site, The Motherboard, Vice's tech, uh, R I P tech site, recently profiled. It too was later revealed as an elaborate hoax designed to steal potential customers' Bitcoins, like the one that you discovered." So, do you have any sense of when the notion of a red room started?

• 41:55Speaker 02

  No, not, not in terms of an origin. By the way, Eileen's a great darknet investigator and, and well worth, well worth following for everyone that's interested in all of this. What she's doing there is a kind of really important distinction where on the surface, there is so, like, all of these different parts of the darknet that someone might casually intersect with. Round gun sites, or human hunting, or red rooms, all this kind of stuff, they are almost certainly scams.

• 42:22Ryan Broderick?

  So, the one that Ornsby mentions, I think is really important because

• 42:28Ryan Broderick?

  There's this thing that happens all the time and it's come up several times in this show, actually, which is that the panic is essentially a more complex version of something that already exists. So in this instance, like if you want to see violence being done to or done by ISIS members, in 2015, you could have just gone on YouTube and seen it. Like, they were posting it on Twitter. But because the mundanity of sort of the awful things that we do online is so boring to people, they dress it up. So instead of saying to yourself, like, I could just log into Twitter and like, watch war crimes, which you can do right now if you want. It has to be this like, secret, more complicated

• 43:12Ryan Broderick?

  thing, because we can't accept that people do evil things and it's actually quite mundane and boring. That's sort of my overall take on all of this. And obviously, as you discovered, it becomes a massive vector for scammy people.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  It becomes a vector. And where it does exist is in far deeper, more protected, more secret pockets of the internet. I would say, though, like, maybe the other reason why the Red Room has been this kind of enduring meme or trope, whatever you want to call it, is because it is adjacent to a much more widespread practice on the dark net, which is to do with child sexual abuse material.

• 43:50Ryan Broderick?

  We have to talk about it. You're right.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  We have to talk about it. We can't talk about the dark net and the evils on there without talking about it. It's obviously not funny. It's deeply distressing to talk about. It's extremely difficult as a journalist to cover. I don't cover it. I was at an event, actually, two days ago, on the dark net and investigations. And one of the journalists there does cover CSAM and was just talking about the sheer, like, moral, psychological, and legal complexity of actually dealing with it, because it's very, very hard to do if you're not a warranted police officer.

• 44:24Ryan Broderick?

  One of my main beats in the 2010s was covering essentially like influencers doing grooming cases, both in the US and UK and parts of Europe. And child sexual abuse material is sometimes involved, not always, but it can happen. But the majority of what you're hearing about, you know, with someone like, let's say, having like, a hard drive full of illicit material, what that is, is like, they are either communicating with someone to buy it, or commission it. That's essentially how the marketplace works. And as you get more... Let's say more complex forms of child sexual abuse material that you want to buy or commission, the communication becomes, goes further down the rabbit hole, right? So I think there's been some recent cases in the US where like Telegram networks were being used for it.

• 45:06Ryan Broderick?

  But if you want to, if you want to get to like the, the stuff that like, I don't even really want to like vocalize out loud because it's so upsetting, that's when you're going to start to get to the dark web. And a lot of, I don't know if you encountered this, but like, a lot of dark web websites will casually use what they're claiming might be child sexual material as a way to self-incriminate each other. Uh, you know, two people who might be like organizing a hit or something, might say like, we're both going, you know, we're both incriminated now, it should just use it as almost like a, like a second form of currency. It's a, it's a very dark, upsetting thing.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  It is, yeah. And I, I think they also believe anyway that it's a way of being able to discern whether someone's a police officer or not.

• 45:46Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Which is, I, I don't think that is like-

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Which is true. I mean, police officers can break the law in an investigation.

• 45:52Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, they can definitely do that. Um, the, the thing where like you think an undercover cop is with you, so you like, give them drugs or something like that's, that's how they're using this stuff, which is, I mean, just another layer of evil. Uh, I think it's like the casualness of it, once again, just like is sort of heartbreaking. So would you say across the board that the concept of the red room is not real? Like are you, are you, do you feel like it isn't? Or do you feel like they're, like it is based on some sort of truth?

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Uh, one of the kinds of child sexual abuse that, that is documented by journalists though, is like live to order kind of services.

• 46:28Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  So like I, that's, that is a red room in a way, you know? I mean, that is-

• 46:34Ryan Broderick?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  So, so you've got like two things, I think. You've got with the red room, you've got this kind of law and myth and rumor and panic, but you've also got actually a genuine practice, which, which is happening, not with adults necessarily being tortured, but, but children being, uh, being victimized and being abused.

• 46:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I think, I think that's important to note, which is that if you want to go see people kill each other on the internet, you, you can do that. It's actually not illegal to film that in, in a lot of places, uh, depending on the context, but- The fixation on that is also obscuring like a very real thing that exists. It's it's not dissimilar from the QAnon fixation on human trafficking, getting in the way of like genuine research and activism around ending human trafficking. It's it's this thing, once again, where like, we've made up this myth because the reality is kind of too horrible to to to to deal with.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:28Ryan Broderick?

  So would you say that like, the Red Room idea is like a, as a, the live torture feeds? Would you say that those exist? Like, I mean, do you, do you know they, if they exist?

• 47:37Speaker 02

  I've never seen them. I've never seen evidence of them.

• 47:40Ryan Broderick?

  So there, there have been some court cases involving Red Rooms. So Coin Telegraph reported in 2020 that two Italian teens paid Bitcoin to see a child killed over a live stream and were arrested. The website they went to offered pre-recorded videos and live videos for more money and a menu of elaborate horrible things.

• 47:59Ryan Broderick?

  Does this kind of gel with scam sites you've seen where they're sort of like giving you a, like a, like a saw or like a hostile style menu of like horrible things that can be done?

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, the assassination site we were investigating had its own pricing list. So, you know, a beating would be 3,000 and a killing started at 5. If you wanted a, a military-trained sniper, it would be up to 8. Yeah, absolutely. Like, they, they try and do it, I think, to try and create as much, well, I mean, they want to appear as similar to the real deal as possible. And so they imagine that, you know, lists and, and kind of menus are the way to do it.

• 48:38Ryan Broderick?

  And unfortunately, like, Italian media, from what you could tell, never actually deter, like, never published whether or not this site was real. The, uh, the teens were arrested and about 25 people were investigated, 19 minors and uh, six who were over 18, across 13 Italian provinces. At no point does anyone ever sort of say if this was actually real or not, which, I feel like in a lot of ways, by the time these stories wrap themselves up, like, is almost beside the point. But it is kind of frustrating. Um, and another example, we wanted to mention here, so in December 2023,

• 49:13Ryan Broderick?

  Two teens were found guilty of murdering Brianna Gay in the UK, a trans teenager. We don't have the two attackers' names because they were under 18, but from the Daily Mail, I'm sorry for according the Daily Mail to you, you know, can't get around it sometimes. They write, "The jury was told that Girl X downloaded an onion browser six months before Brianna's murder, which allowed her to access and watch videos of people being murdered and tortured, sometimes via live streams on the dark web without being traced." "The psychologists call it 'disinhibition,' he said. 'The internet leads to a lot of criminal activity because it's seen as a fantasy. Users are not only desensitized, but they are goaded into doing it themselves, so they carry out a frenzied attack and they don't think of the consequences because they are still living in that online virtual world.'"

• 49:58Ryan Broderick?

  Which to me, I don't want to call into question the very excellent editorial standards of the Daily Mail, but that feels like a, like the idea of blaming that on the dark web does feel like a stretch to me because as we've said, like you can just see people die on the normal internet as much as you want.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, one, tons of gore on the normal internet. Two, that reporting, like that was in very general terms. I don't think they know. They were just saying that's the kind of stuff that can happen.

• 50:27Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  I think like to me, so I've done a lot, like I spent 10 years in Think Tank researching online harms. And I think like sheer exposure to it doesn't allow you to differentiate people that have actually been genuinely harmed or gone on to harm someone from the millions of people like you and me, Ryan, that were on full chat, that were exposed to that same information and nothing happened. The, I think it becomes, you're able to draw a firmer link though, when that person becomes embedded in a community of one kind or another, like say pro-anorexia forums.

• 51:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, yes, I would agree.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  That does actually begin to change the norms and moral standards and what they, what they think normal and, and, and healthy to be. I think, you know, so when like people have been goaded, that's often happened within forums, say, that have actually tried to say normalize things around suicide or normalize self-harm. That you can draw more of a link, I think. But of course, communities have existed and, and exist in loads of different places, like internet and not.

• 51:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I I I've definitely kind of come around on the idea of like what I would call like a memetic social disease like eating disorder. I think I think we can we can sort of we can look at that and we can say, okay, this is clearly spreading and this is clearly influencing people's behavior in the same way like any kind of trend would. I have a tougher time saying like you downloaded a Tor onion browser and then decided to carry out a murder. I wanted to sort of hit this really important point from tech reporter Jamie Bartlett, who wrote, I've spent a lot of time in the dark net. I have never seen a functioning red room, nor have I seen links to functioning red rooms or any other type of murder or torture videos. Red room sites simply do not exist in the dark net. But according to specialist Eileen Ormsby, this

• 52:11Ryan Broderick?

  is the same specialist from the Vice article we talked about, there's no evidence any of them actually work. In fact, they are most likely scams designed to lure people into spending Bitcoin for live streams. One thing I can confidently say is that girl X would have spent a lot of time searching for this material. It would have appeared in front of her or via an accidental link click. The dark net doesn't work like that. You need to know where you're going, which in my opinion means you're looking for the thing. You're not being it's not like it's coming across your TikTok feed and going like, I should carry out a murder. It's I want to carry out a murder. I'm going to go to a bad corner of the internet and learn more about how to do it.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Well, and you're far more likely to see like we did with assassination markets scams exploiting rumors and myths for an easy, quick buck than I think you will the kind of deeper reality. But saying that, you know, the dark net is a deep murky place. And I can't definitively say that there isn't those kinds of services being offered either.

• 53:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And like we, I mean, we found like a couple examples of like people uploading, you know, pretty, pretty grisly murders to the internet. I mean, it happens in 2012. A man named Luca McNada in Canada uploaded a video and images of him dismembering someone's body and he gets caught later. He's putting it on a website called Best Gore. He's not using a Tor browser to go to an onion site to do it. Like, I mean, honestly, like to have this conversation in the age of like the Christchurch shooter live streaming.

• 53:37Speaker 02

  I was gonna say like mass casualty terrorist attacks just being casually live screens.

• 53:41Ryan Broderick?

  And that's been 15 years of this. So like the idea that you have to go download a special browser to upload a murder is like almost laughable at this point. Just this month, there was a guy who killed himself on a live stream while tons of people watched and he was doing it to promote a meme coin. So I feel like to sort of end things because we've talked so much about kind of like, what isn't real and sort of the scammers that use this to take advantage of people or to perhaps carry out some form of vigilante justice, let's say. Do you have any sort of sense on like how prevalent genuine assassination markets, online hitman, you know, like the internet hitman thing? Like, is that happening on the dark web? Is that actually happening, do you think?

• 54:21Speaker 02

  There's a small, very, very small number of verified cases. There might be two or three where, and they weren't from marketplaces. So where we think they may have happened is where, and this is kind of weird, in the margins of other criminal sites, people met each other and spoke about having someone killed and then went out and killed that person. There's one case, I believe, in Finland and another in Russia where that-

• 54:50Ryan Broderick?

  Those damn Finns, they can't stop carrying out hits on each other.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  But all of the actual, like, hey, we're assassination markets. I have, I've never seen one that that looked like it was real. We thought our break into the site was unusual. And then we actually go and meet, and it's the last episode of the podcast, we meet an American, in fact, who runs his own assassination site to capture the people using it. And he then passes all of that off to the police. So there's multiple kind of honeypots out there of assassination sites that, of course, aren't delivering killings.

• 55:29Ryan Broderick?

  I pulled up this article before the taping today, just so I could get the details straight. Because so I'm a very big, like, heavy music fan. And I remember in the 2010s, there was this whole drama around the band As I Lay Dying. They had a lead singer named Tim Lembesus, and he fell for a honeypot. He thought he was ordering a hitman to kill his wife, and it turned out to be an undercover agent going with the code name Red. I'm pretty confident at this point in saying that 90% of the internet hitmen that you might be talking to are not actually internet hitmen. They are either genuine law enforcement or people who are going to sell you out to law enforcement.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  Oh, I think we can go higher than 90%.

• 56:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah? You want to push to like 99%?

• 56:12Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, yeah.

• 56:13Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Okay. So that's the official ruling on Panic World, is that 99% of the internet hitmen out there are law enforcement?

• 56:24Speaker 03

  As Killstas taught me, if I want to take out Ryan, I'm gonna have to go to some bars and queens.

• 56:30Ryan Broderick?

  No, what's so crazy is that I've been talking to an internet hitman. I've been talking to an internet hitman about killing Grant. And Grant's been talking to an internet hitman about killing me. But I'm the internet hitman he's talking to and he's the internet hitman that I'm talking to.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  It's a rom com we're pitching to Netflix. Do you think they're going to buy it, Carl? Last question.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  I cannot wait until you get the TV contract for this one.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  Dead list in Seattle. Yeah, there's.

• 56:53Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. That's right. Yeah. So, okay, so we we've decided that like internet hitman almost probably don't exist. Red rooms do exist, but the real thing that is a red room is so horrific.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  One caveat for you. Sorry, I'm doing this right at the end.

• 57:06Ryan Broderick?

  No.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  When we were intercepting all these messages going into the site, what does slightly undermine the thesis that you and I have built together over at least the last hour is we were also intercepting individuals that wanted to be hitmen.

• 57:21Ryan Broderick?

  That's so funny. That's like honestly really funny is that like there's a whole bunch of people. This is honestly such an incredible indictment of like the internet middleman, because there's a whole bunch of people that want to be hitmen.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:36Ryan Broderick?

  And there's a whole bunch of people that want to hire hitmen to kill people.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:39Ryan Broderick?

  But the middleman is so crammed full of scams and like.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  They call funny.

• 57:45Ryan Broderick?

  That they.

• 57:49Ryan Broderick?

  The the dark web and the non dark web suffer from the same problems, which is that the middlemen are just getting in the way. This is why Bitcoin could fix it, because you could just hire a hitman directly. You will. You don't need a middleman.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Well, but how so? And how do you find them? How do they market themselves?

• 58:06Ryan Broderick?

  That's the problem.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  How do they differentiate from all the scams? The problem, I think, is that there's not enough murders so that there's not enough social reputation like input. So a drug market, because you sell tens of thousands of them. But when it's like 10 hits or something, you know, you don't get enough five star reviews. So you can't you can't differentiate. But genuinely.

• 58:27Ryan Broderick?

  You need like a you need like an Amazon brand hitman. So you know that like, okay, this one in the marketplace will probably show up on time. Yeah, you need Amazon Prime for for for internet hitmen. Okay, yeah, totally.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  Carl, can you talk about how the website would use negative reviews?

• 58:42Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. Yeah. The site was running like maybe the most fiendishly clever disinformation strategy in the world. Firstly, it created a hitman for hire comparison site on the lightnet. It gained Google. It was like top of the higher hitman search rankings. But then it knew that people would be searching whether these hits had actually been carried out. So the person running the site who goes by the name Yura, he's a Romanian cybercriminal.

• 59:11Ryan Broderick?

  So Yura is, he's collecting essentially clips of the successful, of the carried out murders, if I understand?

• 59:16Speaker 02

  No, no. So what he's doing is he's paying freelancers on crypto freelance websites to write a carpet of like activism and like fake journalism, which is a campaign to try and have his own site closed down because of the murders that it's apparently committing. So it was like pressure groups around the world that were trying to pressure police to close down his own site.

• 59:44Ryan Broderick?

  So, okay, that's so funny.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  It's a bit, it's a bit of a kind of twisted kind of thread there.

• 59:52Ryan Broderick?

  No, it makes total sense because like, so we talked about this in a previous episode. I did an investigation in Mexico years ago into like a fake news farm around their election. And the thing that I discovered was that most of the customers of this like fake news content farm were politicians commissioning fake articles about themselves so that they could accuse their opponents of planting them. There's probably more examples of this than we think, like people essentially making fake news about themselves to then be like, it doesn't go, it's not as linear as I think people think it is. It's much more 4D chess than you think.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And, and, and here it was like, you know, if you Googled the site, you'd see like all these apparently concerned citizen groups being like, they've, this has been the fifth murder that they've delivered this month. You know, so you, if you're the user, you're like, oh my God.

• 1:00:43Ryan Broderick?

  This is, this place is great. They're so efficient. Yeah.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So it's social reputation.

• 1:00:49Ryan Broderick?

  It all comes back to digital marketing. Those people ruin the planet.

• 1:00:55Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you very much for coming on the show today. This was fantastic. This was much more fun and upbeat conversation about commissioning contract killers on the internet than I thought it would be. And it was delightful having you on. Seriously, this was great.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is fun.

• 1:01:08Ryan Broderick?

  If people want to check out your podcast, read your book, find you on the internet, where can they do that? What Onion site do they type into a Tor browser to find your directory of services?

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  Well, they'll have to find, they'll have to, they'll have to be inventive and find that themselves. If anyone's into the podcast, it's called Kill List. And it is, it's on the lightnet, so you don't even have to download Tor.

• 1:01:26Ryan Broderick?

  And are you on any social platforms people can follow you on?

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, @CarlJackMiller on Twitter.

• 1:01:31Ryan Broderick?

  Cool. Well, thank you very much. This is fantastic.

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 1:01:37Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a Garbage Day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at garbage day dot email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. It's engineered by Rebecca Seidel. Our deranged logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at patreon.com/panicworld. Please give us products to sell by contacting multitude@multitude-production/ads. For any other way you would like to give us money, or work with us, or promote us, or become financially entangled with us, you can reach out to our fixer, our wonderful bad man, Josh Fielstad, and you can reach him at [email protected]. And one piece of advice from me to you: chill

• 1:02:20Ryan Broderick?

  out, touch grass while you still can.

• 1:02:27Speaker 06

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at linkedin.com/smallbusiness.