156: Kill List

The dark web is full of mystery. Some of it’s just made up though. Chris Monteiro wanted to see what was real and fake and discovered a hitman for hire site which took him on an unbelievable journey. Chris Monteiro Twitter: x.com/Deku_shrub https://x.com/Deku_shrub, Website: https://pirate.london/ https://pirate.london/ Carl Miller Twitter: https://x.com/carljackmiller https://x.com/carljackmiller. Kill List podcast: https://wondery.com/shows/kill-list/ SponsorsSupport for this show comes from ThreatLocker® https://www.threatlocker.com/. ThreatLocker® is a Zero Trust Endpoint Protection Platform that strengthens your infrastructure from the ground up. With ThreatLocker® Allowlisting and Ringfencing™, you gain a more secure approach to blocking exploits of known and unknown vulnerabilities. ThreatLocker® provides Zero Trust control at the kernel level that enables you to allow everything you need and block everything else, including ransomware! Learn more at www.threatlocker.com https://www.threatlocker.com/. This episode is sponsored by ProjectDiscovery https://projectdiscovery.io/darknet. Tired of false positives and falling behind on new CVEs? Upgrade to Nuclei and ProjectDiscovery, the go-to tools for hackers and pentesters. With 10,000 detection templates, Nuclei helps you scan for exploitable vulnerabilities fast, while ProjectDiscovery lets you map your company’s perimeter, detect trending exploits, and triage results in seconds. Get automation, accuracy, and peace of mind. First-time users get one month FREE of ProjectDiscovery Pro with code DARKNET at projectdiscovery.io/darknet https://projectdiscovery.io/darknet. This episode is sponsored by Kinsta https://kinsta.com/DARKNET. Running an online business comes with enough headaches—your WordPress hosting shouldn’t be one of them. Kinsta’s managed hosting takes care of speed, security, and reliability so you can focus on what matters. With enterprise-level security, a modern dashboard that’s actually intuitive, and 24/7 support from real WordPress experts (not chatbots), Kinsta makes hosting stress-free. Need to move your site? They’ll migrate it for free. Plus, get your first month free when you sign up at kinsta.com/DARKNET https://kinsta.com/DARKNET.

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

• 0:00Jack Rhysider?

  I used to live and work in Las Vegas. What a town that is. I'm so glad that I got out of there. It's like I had a hole in my pocket all the time and I could never find where it was. Anyway, I was playing craps one day. This is where you throw the dice. It's a big table. And this frail old man came up and he was playing too. And he was betting big. He was getting wild with his money, having a good time. And I was rolling the dice and he was making money off of my dice rolls. So he was liking me and we started chatting it up. But there was this dude behind him, a big guy. Not a muscular man, but a guy who probably loves cheeseburgers, if you know what I'm saying. And I asked him, hey, man, you want to get in on this game? I got a hot roll going. And he didn't say anything. And the old guy turns to me and he says, oh, don't mind him.

• 0:45Jack Rhysider?

  He's my bodyguard. And I was like, oh, really? This guy is your bodyguard? And then the old man told me something that surprised me. He said, yeah, but I don't actually pay him to protect me if there's actually a fight. And I was like, what? You don't pay him to rescue you out of anything? No, no, I can't afford that kind of bodyguard. This guy just stands next to me and if something goes down, he knows he doesn't need to step in. And I'm like, whoa, hold on a second. Why are you paying someone to stand next to you? And he said, to be my bodyguard. And I was like, no, but he's not guarding you though. And the old man said, yeah, but no one knows that. Everyone sees him next to me and they don't mess with me because he's there. And I was like, does that work?

• 1:29Jack Rhysider?

  And he said, yep, I haven't been robbed yet.

• 1:36Jack Rhysider?

  These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.

• 1:43Jack Rhysider?

  I'm Jack Resider. This is Darknet Diaries.

• 2:03Jack Rhysider?

  This episode is sponsored by Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so do your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really just stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. Their Agentic Trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent anywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day

• 2:48Jack Rhysider?

  or living in tools like Claude or Cursor. You want proof? Over 16,000 fast-growing companies like Ramp, Ryder, and Harvey save time and resources while scaling fast with Vanta. Learn more at vanta.com/darknet. That's spelled V-A-N-T-A. Vanta.com/darknet.

• 3:12Jack Rhysider?

  This episode is sponsored by Arctic Wolf. Everyone is slapping AI-powered on their security tools, but Arctic Wolf took a different approach. Instead of duct taping AI onto the SOC, they rebuilt the SOC around AI and called it the Aurora Superintelligence Platform. If you ever tried to build your own AI pipeline, you know the pain. Data engineering, model tuning, governance, validation. Aurora removes all of it. You deploy it and instantly inherit the intelligence, guardrails, and operational maturity of one of the world's largest agentic SOC. Under the hood, Aurora is running a fully agentic architecture they call "The Swarm of Experts." These agents are battle-tested inside the world's largest commercial SOC and only ship when they can outperform

• 3:56Jack Rhysider?

  human-only workflows. And its integration is seamless as Aurora works within Arctic Wolf's concierge experience, allowing your security team to focus on higher-value strategy and proactive risk reduction. If you want to see what a real, trustworthy, agent-led SOC looks like, not the marketing slide version, go to arcticwolf.com/darknet. That's arcticwolf.com/darknet.

• 4:22Jack Rhysider?

  I think it was like, man, it was like seven years ago at this point that I was told, I need to get Chris Montero on the show and talk about what he found. So of course I slid into his DMs and acted all cool and stuff. Hey, man, I heard you're deep into the web. He's like, can't talk about it, too sensitive right now. So I was like, okay. And I followed up a year later, but again, he didn't want to talk. And he's like, no, I'm done with that. I walked away from that. And then maybe like another two years after that, I asked him again. This time he's like, the police are investigating this. We're gonna have to wait. Then I think another time he told me there are threats against him. So he needs to stay low for a while. And it's just been one of those stories that the longer it goes on, the more intrigued I am by it.

• 5:04Jack Rhysider?

  And I really hoped one day I could talk with him. And now, now Chris Monteiro is ready to talk after seven years of waiting for him. And I can't wait to finally hear what he has found on the deep dark web.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Okay, um, yeah, I'm Chris Monteiro. I'm a cybersecurity professional.

• 5:25Jack Rhysider?

  Up until now, the main thing I know about Chris is that he spends a lot of time on the dark net. Basically, the anonymous side of the internet that you need a special connection to get into. And this seems to be where Chris feels comfortable.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Well, I wouldn't say I look at that interest in it because I don't, I really try not to do it anymore. But back in 2015, 2016, I, I did a bit. I got, I got very into things. Um, as I'm sure you and your listeners know, um, one of the things that web is well known for is the darknet markets where you can buy drugs and stolen data. And, uh, but there's also loads of urban legends and nonsense and scams out there. And so in 2015, 2016, I was really into, uh, writing for Wikipedia, writing definitions for what dark web means, what deep web means,

• 6:20Speaker 01

  what a dark, what a history of darknet markets, how does it instigate a tour? What are the police doing? What are the academics saying about the commerce? And ultimately about the scams. So I, there was a time where I was very into documenting cybercrime, which I don't recommend.

• 6:38Jack Rhysider?

  I mean, there's crime and then there's cybercrime. But then there's dark web cybercrime. And the stuff that happens over there, well, it all has this veil of secrecy, you know? And so the stories we hear that come out of there are a little bit more brutal and ugly than a normal cybercrime story. And trying to keep up with all the ugliness that goes on there, it's rough on your soul. I mean, starting out, okay, he was learning about the darknet drug marketplaces and how they worked, and he became an expert in that whole world.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  I went a bit too far, um, and as, as I was then and just today, I am a self-proclaimed expert on darknet markets and the dark web, uh, I started debunking scams. Um, there are many dark web scams, or there were, people saying, oh, there are, there are secret fights and deaths between midgets. There are, uh, there are AIs which have escaped and will answer you anything. There are rooms you can go to and you can participate and livestream the birder in so-called red rooms. This is nonsense, or this is all rubbish. Um, but people don't care because, uh, it's so difficult to talk about, um, cybercrime and the dark web that, you know, people on YouTube and on the internet was make up shit

• 7:56Speaker 01

  for their entertainment and no one's interested in the real answers. So I found a niche where I was going to start writing about, um, all of these fake phenomena in depth with citations and original research and aggregates of research as possible. And I did that. And one of the ones I covered, just one of many, was, uh, hiring a hitman on the dark web. Well, I thought to myself, I know how all this works. I know how reputation systems work with, uh, darknet markets. I know how escrow works. I know how the web of trust between the sites work and how you find them. So it should be very easy to find out what, if a web, such a website is, uh, fake or real. And I found, I was documenting them and I found a slightly more sophisticated

• 8:41Speaker 01

  website, which again was, it was, looked like a dark net market. You could register, you could apparently hire a hitman and you could pay money for escrow and get someone killed. And it was just like a dark net market, like Silk Road or something like that.

• 8:56Jack Rhysider?

  So he looked into this hitman for hire site, Deeper. And yeah, he sniffed it out pretty easy that it's just a scam. No actual hitmen are here who you can hire to kill someone for you. It's just a myth to be able to hire a hitman online. So he took his findings and wrote it up. At the time, he was writing articles on Rational Wiki. And this is a place that debunks conspiracy theories and explains when something is pseudoscience or real. So he writes an article there saying, yeah, hitmen for hire sites on the dark web, they're all scams. Don't believe it.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  And my Rational Wiki article vandalized by an IP in Romania, saying that, oh yes, the dark web hitman sites are scams, apart from Bessa Mafia, which is real. And like, what? You can't edit my Wiki page. That's not cited stuff. You can't do that. And so it began. And that message was from the person we know as Yura.

• 9:48Jack Rhysider?

  Okay, so this edit explicitly said the dark web hitman for hire site, Bessa Mafia, is not a scam. You can actually hire a hitman there. Well, this, of course, drew Chris's attention. Naturally, he goes there to investigate it further. And he's never even heard of this site before, Bessa Mafia.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Yes, Bessa Mafia is a hitman's for hire site. You know, this site is run by some organized criminal gangs. It's just like a real dark net market. You can't get scammed, there's mediation. And instead of buying drugs, you buy murder. And I spent a lot of time dealing with this.

• 10:25Jack Rhysider?

  Yeah. So your first take on it, or even like your first day of looking at it, did you think this did look legitimate?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  No. Again, I had spent over a year of this time documenting the history of real darknet markets, darknet commerce, darknet navigation. I knew very easily that this website was a scam. Um, you know, there was plenty of tells beyond that. But again, I knew it was a scam. So I just thought, you know, whatever. I'll write a blog post about it. It's a bit interesting that someone's made a hit and over hire scam site, but it actually like make it look like a market and made it look real. So I wrote a blog post about it and saying how this website is fake and has like stock photographs on it and bad spelling and doesn't make sense. And yeah, there you go. I'd add it to my body of research on darknet scams. Job done, was I thought.

• 11:20Jack Rhysider?

  The administrator of Besse Mafia, his name is Yura, was quite interested in the reputation of his site, so much so that he paid people to promote the site, where there would be Reddit posts about the site, blogs being made and other freelancers hired to just drum up business for the site. So if you Googled the site, you'd see all these positive reviews of the site. But then there was this one blog that Chris wrote about how that site specifically is a scam.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  So I had pissed off the site administrator. So he asked for a true and honest interview with me. He contacted me via my blog and I said, sure. Why does a scammer want to interview me about, you know, why his site is fake? What's that about? And yeah, we went back and forth and he was saying his site is real. I would shut him down. He would count with some flimsy evidence. I would unpick it. He would get aggressive. I would show him as a sign that he doesn't know what he's doing about. And he would try, he tried to pay me off. And this, you know, this just escalated to the point, I'm like, yeah, is this guy just digging himself a hole? This scammer is trying to persuade me, at the time at least, authority on darknet scams

• 12:33Speaker 01

  that his site's not a scam. It's not going to work. And yeah, so I published a whole exchange on my blog. I thought, that's all right, you know? Debunked another site, got some first hand evidence, done some journalism even. And there we go. Thought that'd be the end of it.

• 12:47Jack Rhysider?

  This is when the narrator comes in and says, "It wasn't." The site administrator, Euro, was not happy with this post and was on a mission to get Chris to remove it. And if an interview with him didn't persuade Chris, then they're going to have to take it to the next step. And if you think about it, what kind of persuasive tactics could a hitman for hire site try next? Yeah, you got it. Intimidation. The administrator hired someone to make a video to threaten Chris. And so Chris gets a message from someone with a link to a video, and Chris watches the video. It starts out on a piece of paper, and written on that piece of paper is Chris's blog's website, pirate.london. That's the website address.

• 13:30Jack Rhysider?

  And then they burn the piece of paper. And then the camera changes to a car being set on fire, and it's engulfed in flames.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  And like, basically torching a car in order to intimidate me. So in order to say, "Look at us, we're real criminals, we have people in the field, we can trivially commit acts of violence, don't fuck with us." And I was very confused by this, because this was a scammer, this was a scam site. There were no hitmen, there were no criminals, so I thought, there was just, it's just a scam still money, but now I'm getting a video of a burning car? And, yeah, I would say, and then it got weird.

• 14:14Jack Rhysider?

  Did it feel intimidating to you? Did you feel like, wait a minute, this is a, maybe I should just back down from this whole thing?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, I was a bit intimidated, I was intimidated. But you bear in mind, at this time, I'm making myself really into the hobby of being the darknet scam debunker guy. I was anything drivers drawn in more by this. I was like, what is going on? Have I pissed off the mafia? Is this website real? But it can't be real, so if it's not real, how are they getting people to torch cars? And they'd have torched some other cars, for some other people on the internet who had, who had disrespected them as well. So it was a whole, it was a whole thing going on. So I got really, I was, yeah, I was intrigued, but I had to go on.

• 15:01Jack Rhysider?

  Chris decides to play it safe, though, and he hires a lawyer, and he informs the police about this threatening video.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  I'm like, OK, fine. Mr. So-called hitman behind a site on the dark net. What's going on with you? So I've been just browsing this browser on the website at this point. I thought, well, OK, I will register on the website and see how it works. So I registered as Boatface, because it was 2016 and Boatface was cool. And I took out a hit on Bob the Builder, the Loveable Children's character on the website. And I thought, well, OK, it's OK. The website seems to have a login system, it has an ordering system, it has a messaging system, and whatnot. It seems quite functional. There's like, you know, the trappings of the dark net market.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  So I thought to myself, that's weird.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  But I looked at my order for taking out Bob the Builder, you know. And I looked at the address bar, and I saw that there was an ID in the address bar at the end. It's like, message ID equals 123. I thought, OK, so that's the message ID. I wonder if I change the message ID to something else? Change it to 122? And I got someone else's messages, 121. I got someone else's messages.

• 16:20Jack Rhysider?

  What? He could see other users' messages? OK, I have opinions. First, let's talk about this vulnerability. I would call this URL parameter tampering. I think that sounds cool, right? To tamper with a URL. And that's where you just change part of the URL to like, one number different or something to see if you can see someone else's data. But I think the official term is insecure direct object reference. One user should never be able to access another user's private data, such as private messages like this. Yet here, it sounds like it was incredibly simple to do. A more complex approach might be that you have to go into the cookies and change which user you are, and then the site thinks you're a different user without actually validating that. But this wasn't even that hard.

• 17:05Jack Rhysider?

  He just changed one number in the URL. This vulnerability is number one on the OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities, which falls under Broken Access Control.

• 17:15Jack Rhysider?

  But I want to point out something else here. Just because you're on the dark web, just because you're on a site that is supposedly very illegal, does not mean it's actually secure. You would think if this site was actually a place to hire a hitman, that the utmost extreme privacy would be put in place. But it wasn't, not even close. The site was a total joke as far as security and privacy goes. And I want you to keep that frame of mind. Whenever you're dealing with anything with sensitive data, your doctor, your lawyer, your bank, your tax advisor, they should all be using the utmost private way of communication. But their systems aren't always secure or private. And I just want you to think about that.

• 17:59Jack Rhysider?

  If a site should be secure, like a Hitman for Hire site or your therapist, maybe it's not, just like in the case of this. Oh, and it's kind of hilarious that Chris is basically hacking into this site. Since it might technically be illegal for him to do that, but what is the owner of this site going to do? File a police report and say, hey, man, someone hacked my Hitman for Hire site? So it seems like a safe thing to do. Anyway, this was a huge discovery for Chris. To be able to read any message on the site that other users were sending to the administrator? So he quickly put together a little script to enumerate through all these message IDs

• 18:43Jack Rhysider?

  and to save them all into a spreadsheet. So he can go through and read all the messages on this Hitman for Hire website on the dark web.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I've downloaded, I've downloaded over 100 messages at this point. The website's only been in operation for a few months here, but I've downloaded all the messages. And I, I'm having my mind blown here because I'm seeing messages, not just like messages for me, like boat face. There are some trolls and some spam in there. But there are people, and they're giving names, addresses, follow-up times, where to meet them, phone numbers, talking about alibis, talking about timings, negotiating payment, negotiating further payment. And I'm reconstructing these on my local machine from all the messages. And I'm starting to sort them out, see what's going on. And what I realized is that, yes, there's some crap going on the website, but there's a subset of people who are using the website,

• 19:36Speaker 01

  or so they think, to get people killed and to rearrange money to get people killed. And uh, well, that's what it looked like to me at least.

• 19:45Jack Rhysider?

  Whoa, hold on here. These messages are a bit alarming, haunting even. A user wants a certain person dead and lists their name, address, phone number, place they work, pictures of them, Facebook account, and how and when to do the murder so that this person has a good alibi? Not only that, but money is actually being sent to pay for this. This is chilling.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  I've mostly been completely unable and unwilling to engage in these cases emotionally because they are really bad. I mean, you know, I mean, I'll quickly give a story of one um, one case which is concluded in news now. There's uh, there is a case where someone paid twenty thousand dollars to kill uh, at the time, a fourteen year old boy in New Jersey.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Interestingly enough, I never had the full details on that until it went to court. It turned out it was um, online groomer who was uh, grooming this fourteen year old over the internet and having to show, show pictures and whatnot. And when he told his parents, the guy was like, oh shit, I'm in trouble here, I'd better have him killed. So not only was this young boy abused, he was almost killed by this guy.

• 21:07Jack Rhysider?

  An online groomer put a hit on his, on his victim for telling his parents? And then paid twenty thousand dollars to have this boy killed? Whoa, whoa, whoa. And Chris can see the Bitcoin wallet address in the chat messages and is confirming that, yeah, in fact, money did get sent to the site for this. This just got way more serious and went deeper than he realized. Chris was thinking about getting help from someone.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  I met Cole in uh, was it like late twenty sixteen or so? Uh, Cole, how did that go?

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, we met in late twenty sixteen, just before Christmas. Uh, not a meeting that uh is easy to forget. It was in a pub in central London, uh, and it was really busy and crowded. And I'd not met Chris before and kind of mutual friends of ours had kind of put us in contact. And I was kind of roving around trying to write a book about power in the digital age, which sounds about as vague as it was at that point in my mind.

• 22:06Jack Rhysider?

  Carl was looking for a good story and was interested to hear what Chris was working on.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  I'm Carl, uh, I'm a writer and journalist.

• 22:14Jack Rhysider?

  Carl and Chris talked. Carl was very interested in this, but Chris had a hard time making the connection in his head that the words written in those messages are from real people. I mean, he's in the business of debunking things online, you know? And you see so many threats online today. It's hard to put your finger on something and say, this is a real threat from a real person, but then ignoring so many other things. I mean, gosh, how many times have we all heard, Jack, if you come into the house one more time with mud on your shoes, I will kill you. All right, maybe it's just me, but you get my point. You hear threats to life all the time in our everyday language. But on top of that, the dark web is an anonymous place. So people really run their mouth on there, thinking they're private and no one's ever gonna know who it was.

• 23:00Jack Rhysider?

  And so Chris wondered if these were real threats or not. And he made a good point. So at the end of the meeting, Carl had a clear idea of what to do next.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  I I kind of concluded that there was no way that I could write about any of this until the police at least had investigated whatever it was they could investigate. So I I I think me and Chris have slightly different relationships to the police and and thoughts about them, to put it mildly. And I I've spent some time embedded in a cybercrime investigations unit in a in a local police force in the UK. And I felt like I had a pretty good relationship with them and other police and other police uh forces. And and so I kind of broker a meeting between Chris and the National Crime Agency.

• 23:46Jack Rhysider?

  So Chris goes to this meeting, but it's just weird from the get go.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, so yeah, Carl set me up this sort of super, super shady meeting with the National Crime Agency. I'm doing this clandestine meet here where I'm turning up to a location last minute and I'm being followed. And you know, it was all very hush hush, etc, etc. But I had a successful meeting where I should I outlined what I had. I gave them a prioritized list of cases around the world, the sorts of money being paid, the jurisdictions involved and seriousness and said, look, I can't deal with this. This is, you know, I'm just some bloke, you know.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Can you, can you please investigate these, what looks like attempted murders around the world? Or at least the ones in the US or in Europe where, you know, where I suspect you have some success. And the meeting was successful. They said, great, yes, this is brilliant. This is exactly the sort of thing we're looking for. We'll be in touch. And, you know, I have no reason to doubt the words of the people who I met. I think they were, would have probably got around to doing something eventually and we should be nice. But circumstances conspired otherwise.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  One of the people who's using the website back in 2016 goes on the username Dog Day God, was trying to get someone called Amy Allwine killed.

• 25:09Jack Rhysider?

  Amy Allwine lived in Minnesota and somehow the FBI got the private messages that were from the Bessa Mafia website and started investigating this. The FBI had information that someone put a hit out for Amy Allwine. So they paid her a visit and when they arrived, both her and her husband were home and they sat them both down to explain the situation. This hitman for hire website, Bessa Mafia, someone has paid them $12,000 to have you killed. And she was shocked and had no idea who was doing such a thing. Well, it was her husband who paid to have her killed. The very man who was in the room when the FBI was telling her that someone is threatening to kill you. The FBI didn't question the husband at all.

• 25:53Jack Rhysider?

  They just notified them both and left. Her husband, Stephen Allwine, who was a deacon at his church, went on the dark net, bought some scopolamine, which causes a person to become very disoriented, and gave her a huge dose of it and then shot her and killed her.

• 26:13Jack Rhysider?

  He then tried to stage the whole thing to look like a suicide.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  And then, when Amy, and I think this is the clearest evidence that they really weren't investigating this. When Amy was reported to the police as having committed suicide, and Stephen Orwine phoned the police and said, "My wife shot herself", the investigating officer had no background,

• 26:39Speaker 02

  didn't know that this order existed, didn't know, I think, that Amy had been warned, and almost closed the scene down. Like, he went to the house, and he was about to declare it a suicide, and about to close down the crime scene. And it was only at the last minute he paused, felt like something was wrong, and then decided to get the luminol out, so a substance that allows him to see cleaned-up blood, and then realised the house was full of it, and that Amy had been moved. And then, you know, and then scopolamine was found in her blood, and basically, a whole tumble of additional evidence that suggested that she had been drugged and then murdered.

• 27:20Jack Rhysider?

  I mean, can you imagine how differently you would investigate a suicide if you knew that someone had paid to have this lady killed? But the FBI never informed the local police when they did their investigation. And even after all that, they had a hard time finding evidence that Stephen, her husband, is who killed her. It was only after they looked at his computer and found his Bitcoin wallet was in fact the one that sent the money to the website. And of course, the defence attorney was trying to say, "Well, you only know about that transaction because you illegally hacked into the messages of that website, so that should not be admissible to the court."

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Stephen Orwine was eventually convicted of first-degree murder, and is currently serving life without parole.

• 28:01Jack Rhysider?

  It was a tragic and awful event that the FBI bungled big time. But it gets worse. The FBI were like, man, what is this best mafia site? What is going on there? Who's running that? And they wanted to take it down.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  The FBI jumped into action and they, what they did, they Googled the website. And they, I, I still have an ongoing feud with the guy behind the website, Euro. He's paying a guy in India to write, write shitty blogs about me. He's adding my name to metadata on the website. He's really, uh, looking to, uh, drag my name from the mud for, uh, criticizing his website. But I don't care because like, well, who's going to believe that I'm running a website? I'm a person, I use my own name. I have a blog, I have a job, I live in London. I'm not running some secret murder by, hire for website. You know, what sort of person would think that? Turns out the FBI thought that.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  And, uh, between the FBI, they liaised with the National Crime Agency in the UK. And within literally, I think it's a case of hours or days of, uh, this being processed by the FBI. The, uh, NCA were breaking down my door and arresting me for, uh, running this murder for a high of a website.

• 29:21Jack Rhysider?

  Chris was able to get out of his arrest, but it did affect him. Clearly this Euro guy is doing a lot of work to get Chris to shut up about this website. And is willing to frame him or get him arrested. Investigating this site was becoming too much of a burden.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  I, uh, I should take the opportunity to, to quit. I, you know, as, what has, as, uh, having one's door broken down and being arrested for something, you know, which is not, doesn't seem to be real, would. I'm like, I'm out of this shit. I'm done. Um, they've handed all my information to police. I'm like, job done. Never want to hear about the website again.

• 30:09Jack Rhysider?

  But the more Chris and Carl thought about this, the gravity of it just started to sink in. These are very real threats to life. And already, one person has been killed. They had lots of time to help Amy, but they didn't. They could have saved her life, but they trusted law enforcement to do it instead, and that failed. So maybe, just maybe, they can save the next person's life. We're gonna take a short break here, but stay with us. This dark web adventure is just getting started.

• 30:50Jack Rhysider?

  This episode is sponsored by Black Hills Information Security. Black Hills InfoSec loves sharing their knowledge through free webcasts, blogs, zines, comics, and courses designed for beginners and those more advanced. Through their anti-siphon training, they teach you the cybersecurity skills you need, from SOC analyst tools and methodologies to setting traps and running deception operations. It's hands-on, practical training built for people who want to advance and hone their skills. The world of cybersecurity has changed a lot in the last year, and every day seems to bring new questions about what comes next. And that's why Anti-Siphon Training is hosting a free summit on December 9th, asking, "What in the actual cyber happened in 2026?"

• 31:33Jack Rhysider?

  Join experienced practitioners as they share practical lessons, real-world experiences, and insights into the top security news of 2026. And because you're a Darknet Diaries listener, they've got a little something extra waiting for you at blackhillsinfosac.com/darknet. Go to blackhillsinfosac.com/darknet.

• 31:57Jack Rhysider?

  The police weren't completely incompetent. Carl and Chris gave the police all the messages that they found on the site, and this did lead the police to be able to find people who were planning murders. And the police were arresting people and putting them in prison, because if you pay someone to kill someone else, that's illegal. It's called solicitation of murder, and you could get life in prison. For doing that, even if you're sending the money to a scam hitman who's never gonna do it, it's still illegal. In fact, someone who got arrested in Spain tried to give that exact defense. They were saying, this whole website was fake, so my client should not be in trouble. But they still got put in prison.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  Well, the the initial idea was that me and Chris would do a short, sharp, nice, quick, kind of eight week long retrospective, looking at the assassination market. Which I, you know, I mean, if if I I'm the by far the least brave person talking right now. And I'm like, really not drawn to this sort of stuff. Uh, and quite a lot of my kind of instinct was telling me not to go back into this world. And I'd only dipped my toe in, like nothing like Chris. Um, but I I did feel like, to me, it all felt that those years from twenty sixteen was like very much like unfinished business, you know, um. The site was still operating, the person running the site was still making money from it.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  And Amy Orwin had been killed.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Suddenly, Chris kind of brings us into a into a Zoom call. Uh, and then it tells us this kind of fateful discovery that he's consistently in. He's beginning to scrape these kill orders and that the site is, uh, and that we're essentially going to be receiving them in in near real time. You know, and that was then the beginning of the kill list.

• 33:40Jack Rhysider?

  Kill List is an amazing podcast that Carl made, which pretty much starts at this point right here. With new kill orders coming in, what should they be doing about this? Chris is the dark web hacker, Carl is the investigator.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Ultimately, I was able to access the administration page on on the website. So this is the page administrator uses to correspond with um with the users of the website and to scan them. Um, so that page can see everything um on on the site. There were some other pages as well, like pages that showed payments and so on and so forth. So, once I've discovered discovered these through through technical means, I basically have a small crime job, I'm pulling them down fully as is. Um, I'm, I'm actually then building, building parses, do parse them into their constituent components, put them into a database.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  And ultimately, I'm building a, a web front end to, um, to categorize, browse and report on each of these cases and annotate them all. Um, which today I have, you know, which I have in one of my window, my windows at the right hand side now, I have my Hitman Analysis website where I have all the, all the, all the cases in there categorized by, by harm, by fraud, by country, by personal information annotated with Facebook links, address links, phone numbers, et cetera. So, but I was able to focus on getting the data, uh, legible, clean, kind of comprehensive,

• 35:17Speaker 01

  and handing this over to Carl and the podcast team. And so that was a good division of labor. Um, so I had, I had the technical tasks and Carl and the team had to deal with everything else.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  We went to the police again, the Metropolitan Police, they did believe us. Um, but there were no UK cases. They basically decided that because there were no UK cases, it wasn't their problem. And they disclosed this kind of initial tranche of orders that Chris had compiled and handed over to us, um, to Interpol. And we thought about that for, for a while and thought that this is very likely to lead to additional bungled police investigations or no investigations at all. They won't know who we are, the police. We won't know who the investigating, uh, uh, officers are. There'll be no way for us to exchange information and it will very likely lead to police officers

• 36:13Speaker 02

  kind of in the same way that had happened with Amy Allwine, maybe receiving some kind of warning, maybe making contact, but not in any kind of position to like effectively investigate, much less gather the evidence they need to actually get someone into, uh, into a courtroom.

• 36:27Jack Rhysider?

  Chris would read through these kill orders and sometimes try to figure out who it was that made the kill order.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  So often they'll, they'll, they'll approach with some brief information saying, hey, you know, can you do this sort of service in my location? And the answer is always, of course, yes, we have hitmen around the world, but you can do it within one week. That's always the answer because it's a scam. And then they usually say, then there might be some more information like, oh yeah, well, I'm thinking of having something special. Can you give a message? Can you, in this case, good kidnapping? Can you, you know, say something like that? And the answer is yes, yes, we can do that. And often it's followed up by here's the initial order, here's a name, the address, the social media, the car they drive, um, et cetera, et cetera, where they, where they work, where they can be found.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Often they give a bit of information about why they want the person killed, which usually gives them away like, oh, this person should return to their husband. It's like, yeah, I wonder who posted that order. Or this person should be given the message, you know, that's for be, that's for being a cheater. It's like, oh, I wonder who that person could be. Um, they do that. That has to happen sometimes. And after the order, there's fair negotiations and there's always a price, how much they're there. Oh, it's always usually five thousand, ten thousand dollars. But it's, you know, depending on how much money you have, sometimes there's a negotiation about, oh, how can you make sure you don't take the money and run? And they say, oh, no, you can't take the money and run because we have an escrow system.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  And if the hitman was to take the money, we wouldn't give the, we, you know, would not, would take the money and not do a new killing, we wouldn't give them the money. So that way you are safe. But of course, the escrow system is to, you know, designed to stop you from a high through hitman scamming you. Like you would a darn it, drug mender scamming you. Um, it doesn't protect you from the site itself being a scam. And then he, I mean, even has like dedicated third party escrow sites, which are independent or apparently independent, where you can go to this independent site and you can broke your legal transaction. And a further, a further broker can handle, handle this for you. It's all run by him, of course. And of course, he directs everyone to use this independent website. It all uses the same backend.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  And then you go say, I've put my money in the escrow system. And they say, oh, I can, I see we have unlocked this. We are now going to send a hitman. But then, of course, what happens is, oh, actually, it turns out you need a higher class of hitman or you need to pay more. Or the hitmen went there, but they failed. So you need to, need to make, need to pay more money. Or it turns out you need, you know, this is more complicated. So you need to pay more money. And this is how it goes down in general.

• 39:09Jack Rhysider?

  Chris would sometimes be able to identify who put the kill order in because it might say something like, "It's my wife who I want killed," or something. And then they have the wife's information in the kill order to easily figure out who did this. So they decide to try to phone up the targets to see if they can warn them. But the FBI mishap with Amy Allwine was top of their mind. What if they call up someone and the person who's trying to kill them answers the phone or is listening in? And it just escalates the whole thing and they get someone killed? The plan was to try to call the person, but then get them alone so that they can tell them this information in private.

• 39:48Jack Rhysider?

  But man, how do you call someone out of the blue and try to get them to listen to the information you have, but they need to be alone first before you're gonna tell them? It sounds impossible to deal with. But Carl gave it a try.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  No, I don't want any information. I'm trying to give you information.

• 40:08Jack Rhysider?

  No, I don't care. I'm sorry.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Okay, well, thanks for your time anyway. Do give me your phone back if you'd like more information.

• 40:16Jack Rhysider?

  And then he tried again.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Would we be able to arrange a time to be able to talk to you at greater length about that?

• 40:24Jack Rhysider?

  No, thank you, thank you, thank you.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Okay. So you don't...

• 40:34Jack Rhysider?

  Carl was extremely nervous on these calls. He's got the target on the phone, which is hard to begin with, but he's trying to be as sensitive as possible to avoid any further harm. He decides to try again to be more direct.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  Just, I understand you don't wanna work me on the story. However, I'm actually duty bound to say that the information that we have might relate to you being in danger. So I'm kind of duty bound as a journalist to disclose it to you if you'd like me to.

• 41:00Jack Rhysider?

  What? Actually, I don't have to.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  For this evening, even if you're asking me for a survey that has something to my relationship to, to, to, to the job or to professional. No, it's not, it's not a survey. I'm a journalist. We've come across information which indicates that you might be in danger.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm in danger? Yes. Thank you for trying to protect me, keep me to face my dangers. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Bye. Goodbye. Wow. Leave me to face my dangers. He's not having any of it. I'm very surprised by that. I mean, if someone phoned me up saying you might be in danger, I would want to know what, what it was regarding. Yeah.

• 41:40Jack Rhysider?

  This is turning out to be a lot harder than it sounds.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Like, we, we knew the whole, you know, we knew the whole thing was this like ethical, like kind of minefields. Um, and I was really afraid that I would do something which meant that I could never live with myself again. You know, we had this information that Chris was passing us that was unbelievably powerful. I mean, it had the power to save lives and destroy them. And we didn't know what to do. We had no real frameworks. We didn't know what the safest thing to do often was. We were having to kind of make it up in urgency as we were going along. And I didn't, you know, I mean, we could have made one, it, it's kind of easy now to kind of talk about all of this in retrospect. But at the time,

• 42:24Speaker 02

  like, you don't know what's gonna happen. Like, you don't know that this call's gonna turn out okay, or that person's gonna be okay. And, and like every single time I made that call, and, and remember, um, nine times out of 10, they just hung the phone up on me, or they wouldn't talk, or it'd be a wrong number, or something like that. But every single time I dialed that number, I'd having, I'd be having to like work myself up into this, I was working myself up into this kind of state of mind where I thought, well, you know, this could be the moment where I commit some like ethical, uh, crushing kind of, um...

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Mistake that haunts me for the rest of my life.

• 43:02Jack Rhysider?

  I think it's at this point where I was listening to Kill List and I was happy that Chris was working with Carl in this story. Like I said, I was tracking what he was working on and hoping we could talk. And I was tapping him on the shoulder again and again for years, trying to get him to tell me the story. But man, Carl is an amazing journalist and he has a whole team and seemingly like he has connections all over the world to try to do something about this. And I wouldn't have done even half as good of a job as what he did on Kill List. It's truly an amazing podcast.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  As we're doing all this, making this extremely significant decision to contact the people on the kill list directly, we're increasingly actually not really behaving like journalists anymore. Like journalists don't normally step into stories like that. They don't normally contact victims and like drive stories or even create them. Like they normally kind of try and be as least disruptive they possibly can. That's definitely not what we're doing there. So that was also like very disorientating, like stepping like further away from at least this kind of anchoring professional identity that I and the kind of team would have, you know, and becoming like something else and not really having a word for it.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Oh, you know there's a word for it, Carl. You know what I'm saying? Well, if you're going to say vigilante. Yes. Then I don't think we were ever a vigilante because we were desperately trying to get the police to step in, like not replace them, at least I was. Like we were handing over everything we did to the police. So yeah, I mean, I never thought we were vigilantes.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  That wasn't the right word in my mind for it either. It was like some weird gap of like being a really proactive journalist or investigator.

• 44:51Jack Rhysider?

  And you might be thinking, but Interpol is handling it. Just let them do it. But there's a reason that they felt it was important for them to continue to do something.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  It was because. We were thinking about this disclosure route that had just appeared where Chris was passing it to us, we were passing it to the Metropolitan Police, they were passing it to Interpol, and then Interpol would presumably pass it to the police forces around the world. There was one in Switzerland, there was one in Italy, there was one in Amsterdam, you know, all over the place. The problem with that was that we knew that Interpol would basically like denude the disclosures of any identifying information of us, and we would have no idea who the investigating officers were. So this kind of cut or like breach would happen.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  There would be no link, like they would just receive this word document that Chris had created, plus maybe some like Bitcoin information. They would have no way, as the Metropolitan Police did, of actually checking to see whether I was mad or not, which they genuinely did. And we would have no way of disclosing additional information to them. And Chris was passing over like updates all the time, you know, these were live conversations that were happening. So sometimes there'd be more Bitcoin and the urgency would have changed, or a specific moment or time and place would be mentioned in the order, you know, which would change how dangerous we thought it was. And we would have no way of kind of passing

• 46:22Speaker 02

  that on in a reasonably swift manner to the people on the ground that could actually do something about it. So that's why ultimately we decided that we needed to go to them directly.

• 46:33Jack Rhysider?

  And while investigating all this, they would run into news articles that would chill them to their bones.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  There's many incidents and many cases, I'm sure we could be touching as many as you like, but we'll be pressed for time here. Like, for example, there was one case where there was there was this against this young man in America, and a couple, someone paid five thousand dollars to kill him. Two weeks later, he's dead by gunshot, self inflicted gunshot wound. You know, was there insurance involved? Was there foul play? It's hard to say. Um, I won't go into too much of this, but during the course of our investigation, there was one of these major cases come through where someone paid a hell of a lot of money to have them killed. And again, within weeks, that person was killed.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Um, with information like that, plus all the rest information, which always gives the hideous backstories on people's story of of stalking, of drugging, of coercive behaviour, or marital breakdown, a relationship breakdown, of people sending death threats, people putting hidden cameras, people, you know, really ruining lives. We realised that this is, it's, it's really horrific, this stuff. And I just happened to have to sneak peek into the worst of it. Um, as this call. And yeah, it's very, very hard to digest. And all this just adds a level of urgency to it all.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  So I, I, I, I phoned maybe a dozen people, maybe two dozen over about the course of about a week, maybe a bit longer. Um, and it is dramatically unsuccessful. Um.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Oh, Carl, don't say that.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  I know it is. It really is. I mean, like, it doesn't work. Everyone thinks I'm a scammer. It turns out we were solving the wrong problem. So we thought the problem was going to be how to reach them safely over the phone, how to disclose in a way that wasn't going to like crater them psychologically. The actual problem was that no one was going to believe me. Um, and so people hang up, uh, they phone back like with their friends and they prank me and they pretend it's a big joke. Um, more often than not, they literally just don't pick up the phone though. This is in the middle of Covid, remember? So people are kind of getting scam calls all the time. Um, and so we change up what we do and we decide to send out local journalists on the ground. Um, to physically go and try to reach the people that were on the list.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  And that, that really changes things. So, so we, it's only then really that we begin to make meaningful contact. Um, reach people, be believed and begin to kind of develop the next phase in the kill list really, which is. Talking to them, supporting them and working with the police to try and find out who put them on the list.

• 49:14Jack Rhysider?

  The Podcast Kill List does an amazing job of documenting their adventure. Calling people, talking with police, going to houses, talking with Yura even. It's a wild adventure and you really should go and listen to it. But one person in particular that they contacted stuck with me. They discovered that there's this guy named Ron Ilg who paid for the murder of his wife in Spokane, Washington.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, so obviously I'm the first person to see this and I'm actually, I actually worked out it was a dynasty because not so. This guy is a neonatal surgeon, he's literally a surgeon for babies. He's also looking to break the hands of a, of a surgeon. And it's like, and he's paying something upward of $50,000 for this. He's got like multiple step plans of where the kidnapping should place and taking photographs of it. And how she should be brainwashed and how she should be broken and where she should be taken, taken to. And how, how he will get to see the information about this whilst, whilst remaining at a distance.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  It's, it's, I hate to, I don't usually use this word, but it's sick and it's messed up. And in a, you know, in, in his mind, when he paid that $50,000, it's very much real. He was gonna do this.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  I was able to quickly work out between these identities of this woman and this surgeon mentioned that the person who's seen the latest film was this character called Ron Ilg. And, you know, I said, this is the sort of information I send up, send over to, so to Carl and the team. And I'm like, this guy, you, they gotta do something about it, you know? Are the FBI working, helping at this point? Are they gonna do something? Because this is just, this is just crazy. This is just, I can't believe, I can't believe this guy, this guy is, is going around making his plans. And like, no one's taking it seriously. That, that's, that's terrible.

• 51:15Jack Rhysider?

  In addition to that, Chris is seeing that this guy, Ron Ilg, is trying to get his wife addicted to opioids. So she'll call off the divorce proceedings. He seems extra diabolical.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  Chris's subject in the emails would normally be new payer, which would always cause my heart to sink a little bit. And, but this one stood out from the very beginning for, for all the reasons Chris has already said.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  There was a bonus structure. I mean, the guy had literally already loaded in all the money for a whole series of things that had to happen to Jennifer. Um, which were all about the use of drugs and they were all about control. Uh, and it was, it stood out for that. It stood out actually weirdly and grotesquely because it wasn't about murder. Uh, which somehow made it worse. Um, but then it also stood out because the amount of money, a huge amount of money had been, had been paid. It was the largest payment. Um, so we reach out, uh, and, and, and get hold of Jennifer and, and speak to her. Uh, and realise that she's, um, in the middle of a, a, a kind of, uh, uh, uh, relationship which is leaving, which is,

• 52:23Speaker 02

  uh, in- involves Ron, who's very dangerously spiralling out of control. Um, he seemed to have some extremely like kind of worrying behaviours to do with control. He'd probably been tracking her. He'd been, um, kind of allegedly as putting drugs into her drink. Um, he'd, there was another woman in the marriage that he'd kept in a septic tank under his house. It was, it was horrifying. Uh, and.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think the septic tank was more of a kind of a, I don't think it was a handle electric situation per se. It was more of a temporary BDSM handle.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, he dressed the whole thing up as BDSM. He dressed all of this controlling behaviour up as, hey, this is just my kink. Um, yeah, I mean, he let, the, the woman wasn't in there the whole time. Um, i- i- it was, it was part of a, he had a dungeon, I believe, in his house. Um, and it wa- it was just all coming together as a, a man who was, um, really, really, really committed to controlling, um, the women he was in a relationship with and didn't seem to be able to deal with, um, his wife leaving.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  And this was the kind of the first time the kind of FBI really kind of moved in. And kind of we could see an investigation kind of rolling out. So Ron left for Mexico on the day that Jennifer was to be kidnapped. Possibly as a alibi, who knows. And when he returned, there were ten FBI agents waiting for him in the airport undercover. So he lands, he's immediately interviewed. His house is being searched at the same time.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  And he makes quite a serious error. In a thumbprint safe in his house, a safe that only he could access. There is a sticky note and on that sticky note is both his username and the password for the site that Chris has been surveilling.

• 54:28Jack Rhysider?

  Okay, and the police are able to get in the safe and see that?

• 54:31Speaker 02

  They do, they drive him to his own house and he opens a safe for them.

• 54:36Jack Rhysider?

  Yeah, and then so what happens to him?

• 54:40Speaker 02

  Well, he's released by the police that night. He makes a suicide attempt, quite a serious one, as I understand it. I think that night or the next day. And is then placed under protective, well, he's placed under custody and then arrested.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  I just wanna say that really upset me that he tried to kill himself. I got into this to stop people being murdered and even if horrible people try and kill themselves over this, this is not what I want. I wanna make the world a better place and it's not always clear whether I'm achieving that. Though ultimately, in this case, I think I did.

• 55:17Jack Rhysider?

  But Ron is not confessing to anything. He's pleading innocent and is working tirelessly to try to make a case to free him. It's a long story and we don't have time to go into it all.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  But he's now convicted and sentenced and is in prison for a pretty significant stretch.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  I think about eight years.

• 55:40Jack Rhysider?

  And it's wins like this where they can get a dangerous person put in prison that makes it all seem worthwhile.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  The Kill List, this whole experience, has been a very difficult one. It's had some very bleak, very dark moments, but it's also got those moments of feeling like it's really meaningful and worthwhile. And the sentencing and conviction of Ron and Jennifer's kind of emergence from that has definitely been, for me anyway, one of those.

• 56:08Jack Rhysider?

  So it was 2020 when they started taking action on these kill orders, and they've been documenting it all along. And there's just so many cases that they researched.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  I still feel it barely scratches the surface of why I have.

• 56:21Jack Rhysider?

  It really does. The, this current situation, what's happening now with the site? Is it still operational or has it been shut down by the police or what?

• 56:30Speaker 01

  There were a series of arrests in Romania, which behind all the site operators or police people affiliated with them. I believe, I believe the US authorities had something to do with that. And following, following that incident of the Romanian arrests, the website underwent technical changes. It was shut down for a bit, came back again. Intermittently, lost bits of access until we reached a point now where I have almost no access. And so I find no new cases coming for the last year and a bit. But in that period, we have seen basically arrests on the website in the US and Switzerland and Austria.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  So we have evidence that some law enforcement aide-to-other is either cooperating with or has infiltrated the website and is, is making some arrests.

• 57:22Jack Rhysider?

  Of, of the people who run the website?

• 57:24Speaker 01

  No, people, people using the website. The website continues to operate and for all I know, continues to scam people up money and continues to enrich Romanian scammers.

• 57:33Jack Rhysider?

  You talked to the admin of the site over, over chat. What, what is the reason why they run this or do this?

• 57:43Speaker 01

  He's just a scammer. He's, I believe he used to be a carder, someone who deals with stolen financial data and whatnot, and was familiar with darknet scams. And, you know, he told me that he saw a niche for doing believable darknet scams. He didn't tell me, he told a persona, it was. Had it taken over at the time, but um yeah, he he uh just thought there was a niche for a believable, effective Darknet murder scam to be lucrative. And he's not wrong. Um, there are some other sites out there doing this, but I believe he's he's the most successful financially, the most uh most search engine optimized, has the highest traffic, the highest number of users.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  And um considering he's been at this since twenty sixteen and dealing with money in Bitcoin, he will be a multi multimillionaire uh by by now. And you know, here's me going along, you know, basically with like legal fees and doing this in my evenings and the like. Uh, it's not really, uh, you know, it's uh it's it's uh it's been hard to keep hard to keep it up, but yeah, it's still it's still it's still going on. Um, and you know, people say, oh, but you know, what if you get him? What if you get him? Won't it be over? I'm like, no, it won't be over because I'm on the I've been on the website for years. They delete the messages as they go along.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  So you seize the website, you don't get years back of messages, you get very little. I'm the only one of the years worth of messages. So unfortunately, you need there's gonna be no end to it in terms of the website getting shut down. Um, for me, this is only over when I've actioned the remainder of the kill list.

• 59:33Jack Rhysider?

  The way that dark web websites work is that they're designed to be private. Like you can't tell where the website is hosted or where it is in the world. So you you really need to wait for the website administrator to screw up and reveal something about themselves in order to take the thing down. So the whole time, the only thing they can do is just keep blogging and podcasting and publishing articles about the site being a scam. There was no way for them, or even the police, to take this website down, since they don't have enough information to know who's running it or where it's hosted.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Well, I think the story profoundly changed the lives of all of the people that were involved, like me, Chris, Caroline, you know, everyone. It kind of, it did everything. I mean, it, it, it was and is like the most, for me anyway, the most, by far, the kind of most important, meaningful, worrying, sometimes isolated and disgustingly urgent work that I've ever found myself having to do. And it started a thing back then in 2020, which is, you know, is still going now. Like, people are still going through court cases, people are still in danger. It's the most important thing I'll ever work on, I'm sure.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  And I really, really hope, actually, that I don't have to do anything like this ever again.

• 1:00:55Jack Rhysider?

  Chris has lost access to the private messages on the site in 2023, which means they haven't seen any new kill orders come in since then, which, for Carl at least, means he's stepped away from investigating more cases. But Chris still feels there's old kill orders that are still worth looking into. So he continues to make it his duty to investigate every single person who's on the list.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Again, I don't think people believe that I'm still doing this by myself. They, they'd rather believe some comforting truth that no one, no one uses these websites or it's all in hand and nothing can be done. But that's not the case at all. There are, there are people being murdered on the list right now who I haven't got to in time, you know? There's probably dozens of people on the, on the list who are dead. And of those, half of them might get are saved. And I feel like people need to know this. And I don't know, I would like some support in this, but.

• 1:01:57Jack Rhysider?

  It's a difficult position I'm still in. To date, they have seen over 900 people show up on the kill list. And they've taken action on hundreds of them. And for the most part, Chris does it alone now. He sometimes hires private investigators to help him, but that's expensive. And since his work leads to more arrests than if the police simply handled it by themselves, it uniquely positions him to do good in the world. And he's a bit disappointed that there aren't more journalists or police that are taking him seriously, that want to work with him to help him. But since he knows lives are at stake here, and he has all kinds of information on them, he can't simply ignore it and walk away. To follow the latest on what Chris is doing,

• 1:02:42Jack Rhysider?

  you can visit his website, which is pirate.london. And I should probably tell you something. In my research for this episode, I have discovered that every single Hitman for Hire website on the internet has been fake. Most are operated by scammers, some are operated by the police. But what's more is that hitmen in general are pretty much a myth. One of the things I did to prep for this episode was to watch the movie Hitman by Richard Linklater. It's based off a true story of a fake hitman. And even in the movie, they say hitmen aren't real. Take a listen.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  You know, people feel almost disappointed to learn that hitmen don't really exist. This idea that there are people out there at a retail level you can just hire to eliminate your worst relationship issues, or facilitate some money scheme, or the usual combination of both. It's a total pop culture fantasy. But because hitmen have been a staple of books, movies, and TV for the last 50 years, good luck getting anyone to believe their existence is all a myth.

• 1:03:44Jack Rhysider?

  Hollywood really has planted this idea in our head that seems impossible for us to undo. So I urge you to be skeptical of any such idea. But I also want to say that if your relationship with someone has gotten so bad that you want them killed, you need to get out of there. You're not acting like you, you know? That's your emotions that have taken over. And you won't be happy with yourself until you find peace. You need to find yourself again. Killing someone isn't going to give you the peace you think it will. You need to remember what makes you happy and seek that instead of violence.

• 1:04:25Jack Rhysider?

  It's sometimes hard to see the light at the end of a tunnel during bad relationships or big breakups. But the future is so much brighter than you realize. Don't let them turn you into a monster. You're not a monster. Dig deep and find the strength to rise above it and be that amazing person that you actually are.

• 1:04:56Jack Rhysider?

  A big thank you to Chris Monteiro and Carl Miller for sharing this incredible story with us. I highly urge you to go find and listen to their podcast, Kill List. The phone calls with the victims are incredible. There's one lady that they call up and they tell her, hey, your life might be in danger. And she just laughs and she's like, oh, it's probably my husband, but don't worry, he'd never harm me. And it's just wild to hear how these people react to such news. So go check out the show wherever you listen to podcasts and also keep up to date with what Chris is doing by visiting his blog, pirate.london is the website. And hey, if you want to listen to this show ad free or if you want bonus episodes, I've got 11 bonus episodes now available for you to listen to right now.

• 1:05:39Jack Rhysider?

  All you gotta do is go to plus.darknetdiaries.com. That's plus.darknetdiaries.com. This episode is created by me, the neon specter, Jack Recider. Our editor is the glitch guy, Tristan Ledger. Sound design by the executable Andrew Merriweather, mixing by Proximity Sound. Our intro music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. My computer is so broke, it ran out of cache. This is Darknet Diaries.