Transcription performed by LeahTranscribes[START OF RECORDING]
JACK: I used to live and work in Las Vegas. What a town that is. I’m so glad that I got outta there. It was like I had a hole in my pocket all the time and I could never find where it was. [Music] Anyway, I was playing craps one day. That’s where you throw the dice. It’s a big table. 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. 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. I asked him, hey man, you want to get in on this game? I got a hot roll going. He didn’t say anything. The old guy turns to me and he says, oh, don’t mind him. He’s my bodyguard. I was like, oh, really? This guy is your bodyguard? 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. 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. I’m like, whoa, hold on a second. Why are you paying someone to stand next to you? He said, to be my bodyguard. I was like, no, but he’s not guarding you, though. 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. I was like, does that work? He said, yep. I haven’t been robbed yet.
(INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
JACK: I think it was like — man, it was like seven years ago at this point that I was told I need to get Chris Monteiro 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. [Music] So, I was like, okay. I followed up a year later, but again, he didn’t want to talk. He’s like, no, I’m done with that. I walked away from that. Then maybe 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 were threats against him, so he needs to stay low for a while. It’s just been one of those stories that the longer it goes on, the more intrigued I am by it, and I really hoped one day I could talk with him. 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.
CHRIS: Okay, yeah, I’m Chris Monteiro. I’m a cybersecurity professional.
JACK: Up until now, the main thing I know about Chris is that he spends a lot of time on the darknet, 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.
CHRIS: Well, I wouldn’t say I lurk — that interest in it, because I don’t — I really try not to do it anymore. But back in 2015, 2016, I did a bit. I got very into things. As I’m sure you and your listeners know, the things that web’s well-known for is the darknet markets where you can buy drugs and stolen data. But there’s also loads of urban legends and nonsense and scams that are out there. So, in 2015, 2016, I was really into writing for Wikipedia, writing definitions for what dark web means, what deep web means, what are dark — what are history of darknet markets, how does it instigate with Tor, what are the police doing, what are the academics saying about the commerce, and ultimately about the scams. So, I — there was a time I was very into documenting cyber crime, which I don’t recommend.
JACK: [Music] I mean, there’s crime and then there’s cyber crime, but then there’s dark-web cyber crime, and the stuff that happens over there, well, it all has this veil of secrecy, you know? So, the stories we hear that come out of there are a little bit more brutal and ugly than a normal cyber-crime story. 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.
CHRIS: I went a bit too far, and as I was then and today, I am a self-proclaimed expert on darknet markets and the dark web. I started debunking scams. There are many dark web scams, or there were, people saying, oh, there are secrets fights to death between midgets. There are AIs which have escaped and will answer you anything. There are rooms you can go to and you can participate in livestream murder in so-called red rooms. This is nonsense. This is all rubbish. But people don’t care because it’s difficult to talk about cyber crime and the dark web, that — people on YouTube and the internet make up shit 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 all of these fake phenomena in-depth with net citations and original research and aggregates of research as possible.
I did that, and one of the ones I covered, just one of many, was hiring a hitman on the dark web. [Music] Well, I thought to myself, I know how all this works. I know how reputation systems work with 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 such a website is fake or real. I found — I was documenting them and I found a slightly more sophisticated website which, again, was — it was — looked like a darknet market. You could register and you could apparently hire a hitman and you could pay money for a escrow and get someone killed. It was just like a darknet market like Silk Road or something like that.
JACK: 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 RationalWiki, 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.
CHRIS: I had my RationalWiki article vandalized by an IP in Romania saying that, oh yes, the dark-web hitmen sites are scams, apart from Besa Mafia, which is real. I’m like, what? You can’t edit my Wiki page. That’s not cited stuff. You can’t do that. [Music] So it began, and that message was from the person we know as Yura.
JACK: Okay, so this edit explicitly said the dark-web hitman-for-hire site, Besa Mafia, is not a scam. You can actually hire a hitman there. Well, this of course drew Chris’ attention. Naturally, he goes there to investigate it further, and he’s never even heard of this site before, Besa Mafia.
CHRIS: Yes, Besa Mafia is a hitman-for-hire site. This site is run by some organized criminal gangs. It’s just like a real darknet market. You can’t get scammed. There’s mediation. Instead of buying drugs, you buy murder. I spent a lot of time dealing with this.
JACK: Yeah. So, your first take on it or even your first day of looking at it — did you think this did look legitimate?
CHRIS: No. Again, I had spent over a year at this time documenting the history of real darknet markets, darknet commerce, darknet navigation. I knew very easily that this website was a scam. There was plenty of tells beyond that. But again, I knew it was a scam. So, I just — I thought, you know, whatever. I write a blog post about it. It’s interesting that someone’s made a hitman-for-hire scam site but actually make it look market and made it look real. So, I write a blog post about it and saying how this website is fake and it has stock photographs on it and bad spelling and doesn’t make sense and, yeah, there you go. I add it in my body of research on darknet scams. Job done, or so I thought.
JACK: The administrator of Besa 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.
CHRIS: So, I had pissed off the site administrator. [Music] So, he asked for a true and honest interview with me. He contacted me via my blog. I said, sure. Why does a scammer want to interview me about why his site is fake? What’s that about? Yeah, we went back and forth, and he was saying the site was real. I would shut him down. He would counter with some flimsy evidence. I would unpick it. He would get aggressive. I would show him it was a sign that he doesn’t know what he’s doing — about, and he would try — he tried to pay me off. This escalates to the point of like, yeah, this guy just dug — digging himself a hole. This scammer’s trying to persuade me, the — at the time, at least, authority on darknet scams, that his site’s not a scam. It’s not gonna work. Yeah, so, I published the whole exchange on my blog. I thought, that’s alright, you know? Debunked another site; got some firsthand evidence. Done some journalism, even. There we go. Thought that would be the end of it.
JACK: This was where the narrator comes in and says, it wasn’t. [Music] The site administrator, Yura, was not happy with this post and was on a mission to get Chris to remove it. If an interview with him didn’t persuade Chris, then they’re going to have to take it to the next step. 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. 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’ blog’s website, pirate.london. That’s the website address. Then they burn the piece of paper. Then the camera changes to a car being set on fire, and it’s engulfed in flames.
CHRIS: Basically torching a car in order to intimidate me. So, in order to say, look at that. We’re real criminals. We have people in the field. We can trivially commit acts of violence. Don’t fuck with us. 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 to steal money. But now I’m getting a video of a burning car? Yeah, I would say, and then it got weird.
JACK: Did it feel intimidating to you? Did you feel like, wait a minute, this is — maybe I should just back down from this whole thing?
CHRIS: I mean, I was a bit intimidated. I was intimidated, but bear in mind, at this time I’m making myself really into the hobby of being the darknet scam debunker guy. I was anything — I was drawn in more 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? They had torched some other cars for some other people on the internet who had disrespected them as well. So, it was a whole thing going on. So, I got really — I was — yeah, I was intrigued, but I had to go on.
JACK: Chris decides to play it safe, though, and he hires a lawyer and he informs the police about this threatening video.
CHRIS: I’m like, okay, fine, Mr. So-Called Hitman-For-Hire Site on the Darknet. What’s going on with you? So, rather than just browsing the website at this point, I thought, well, okay, I will register on the website and see how it works. So, I registered as Boaty McBoatface because it was 2016 and Boaty McBoatface was cool. I took out a hit on Bob the Builder, the lovable children’s character, on the website. I thought, well, okay, it’s okay. The website seems to have a log-in system. It has a ordering system. It has a messaging system. It has some — and whatnot. So, it seems quite functional. There’s like — it’s got the trappings of a darknet market. So, I thought to myself, that’s weird. [Music] But I looked at my order for taking out Bob the Builder, 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 123. I thought, okay, so that’s the message ID. I wonder if I change the message ID to something else; change it to 122. I got someone else’s messages. 121; I got someone else’s messages.
JACK: What? He could see other users’ messages? Okay, I have opinions. First, let’s talk about this vulnerability. I would call this URL parameter tampering. I think that sounds cool, right, to tamper with a URL. That’s where you just change part of the URL to one number different or something to see if you could 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; 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. But I want to point out something else here. Just because you’re on the dark web, just because you’re on a site that is supposedly very illegal, does not mean it’s actually secure. You would think if this site was actually a place to hire a hitman that the utmost extreme privacy would be put in place, but it wasn’t. Not even close. The site was a total joke as far as security and privacy goes, and I want you to keep that frame of mind whenever you’re dealing with anything with sensitive data. Your doctor, your lawyer, your bank, your tax advisor, they should all be using the utmost private way of communication, but their systems aren’t always secure or private, and I just want you to think about that.
If a site should be secure like a hitman-for-hire site or your therapist, maybe it’s not, just like in the case of this. Oh, and it’s kind of hilarious that Chris is basically hacking into this site, since it might technically be illegal for him to do that. But what is the owner of the site gonna do, file a police report and say, hey man, someone hacked my hitman-for-hire site? So, it seems like a safe thing to do. Anyway, this was a huge discovery for Chris, to be able to read any message on the site that other users were sending to the administrator. So, he quickly put together a little script to enumerate through all these message IDs and to save them all into a spreadsheet so he can go through and read all the messages on this hitman-for-hire website on the dark web.
CHRIS: Yeah. So, I’ve downloaded over a hundred messages at this point. The website’s only been in operation for a few months here, but I’ve downloaded all the messages. [Music] I’m having my mind blown here because I’m seeing messages — not just messages for me, Boaty McBoatface. 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. I’m talking about alibis, talking about timings, negotiating payment, negotiating further payment. I’m reconstructing these on my local machine from all the messages and I’m starting to sort them out and see what’s going on. What I realize is that, yes, there’s some crap going on on the website, but there’s a subset of people who are using the website, or so they think, to get people killed and to arrange money to get people killed. Well, that’s what it looked like to me, at least.
JACK: 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.
CHRIS: I’ve mostly been completely unable and unwilling to engage in these cases emotionally, because they are really bad. I mean, I’ll quickly give a story of one case which is concluded in the news now. There is a case where someone payed $20,000 to kill — at the time — a fourteen-year-old boy in New Jersey. Interestingly enough, I never had the full details on that until it went to court. It turned out it was a online groomer who was grooming this fourteen-year-old over the internet and having them show pictures and whatnot. When he told his parents, the guy was like, oh shit, I’m gonna get in trouble here. Better have him killed. So, not only was this young boy abused; he was almost killed by this guy.
JACK: An online groomer put a hit on his victim for telling his parents and then paid $20,000 to have this boy killed? Whoa, whoa, whoa. 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.
CHRIS: I met Carl in — what was it? Like, late 2016 or so. Carl, how did that go?
CARL: Yes, yes. We met in late 2016 just before Christmas, not a meeting that is easy to forget. It was in a pub in Central London, and it was really busy and crowded. I’d not met Chris before, and mutual friends of ours had kinda 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.
JACK: Carl was looking for a good story and was interested to hear what Chris was working on.
CARL: I’m Carl. I’m a writer and journalist.
JACK: 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? 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? Alright, maybe that’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. 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.
CARL: I kinda concluded that there was no way that I could write about any of this until the police at least had investigated whatever it was they could investigate. So, I think me and Chris have slightly different relationships to the police and thoughts about them, to put it mildly. I’d spent some time embedded in a cyber-crime investigations unit in a local police force in the UK, and I felt like I had a pretty good relationship with them and other police forces. So, I kinda broker a meeting between Chris and the National Crime Agency.
JACK: So, Chris goes to this meeting, but it’s just weird from the get-go.
CHRIS: [Music] Yeah, so — yeah, Carl set me up this sort of 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. It was all very hush-hush, et cetera. But I had a successful meeting where I outlined what I had. I gave them a prioritized list of cases around the world. Saw some money being paid, the jurisdictions involved, and the seriousness, and said, look, I can’t deal with this. This is — I’m just some bloke, you know? Can you please investigate these — what looks like attempted murders around the world, or at least the ones in the US or in Europe where I spent some excess. 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. 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, which would be nice. But circumstances have conspired otherwise. One of the people who was using the website back in 2016 — goes under the username Dog Day God — was trying to get someone called Amy Allwine killed.
JACK: Amy Allwine lived in Minnesota, and somehow the FBI got the private messages that were from the Besa Mafia website and started investigating this. [Music] The FBI had information that someone put a hit out for Amy Allwine, so they paid her a visit. 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, Besa Mafia, someone has paid them $12,000 to have you killed. She was shocked and had no idea who was doing such a thing. Well, it was her husband who paid to have her killed, the very man who was in the room when the FBI was telling her that someone is threatening to kill you. The FBI didn’t question the husband at all. They just notified them both and left. Her husband, Stephen Allwine, was a deacon at his church, went on the darknet, bought some scopolamine, which causes a person to become very disoriented, gave her a huge dose of it, and then shot her and killed her. He then tried to stage the whole thing to look like a suicide.
CARL: Then when Amy — 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 Allwine phoned the police and said my wife shot herself, the investigating officer had no background, didn’t know that this order existed, didn’t know, I think, that Amy had been warned, and almost closed the scene down. He went to the house and he was about to declare 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 realized the house was full of it and that Amy had been moved. 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.
JACK: 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. 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. Of course, the defense attorney was trying to say, well, you only know about that transaction because you illegally hacked into the messages of that website. So, that should not be admissible to the court.
CARL: Stephen Allwine was eventually convicted of first-degree murder and is currently serving life without parole.
JACK: 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 Besa Mafia site? What is going on there? Who’s running that? They wanted to take it down.
CHRIS: The FBI jumped into action. What they did — they Googled the website and they — I’ve still had — have a ongoing feud with the guy behind the website, Yura. He’s paying a guy in India to write cheeky blogs about me. He’s adding my name to the metadata on the website. He’s really looking to drag my name through the mud for criticizing his website. [Music] But I don’t care because, what, who’s gonna 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-for-hire website, you know? What sort of person would think that? Turns out, the FBI thought that, and 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 this being processed by the FBI, the NCA were breaking down my door and arresting me for running this murder-for-hire website.
JACK: Chris was able to get out of his arrest, but it did affect him. Clearly this Yura guy is doing a lot of work to get Chris to shut up about this website and is willing to frame him or get him arrested. Investigating this site was becoming too much of a burden.
CHRIS: I did take the opportunity to quit, as having one’s door broken down and being arrested for something which is not — doesn’t seem to be real would. I’m like, I’m at other shit. I’m done. [Music] They’ve handed over all my information to police. I’m like, job done. Don’t want to hear about the website again.
JACK: 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. 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.
CARL: Well, the initial idea was that me and Chris would do a short shot, nice, quick, kind of eight-week-long retrospective looking at the assassination market, which I — if — I’m the — by far the least-brave person talking right now, and I’m really not drawn to this sort of stuff. Quite a lot of my instinct was telling me not to go back into this world, and I had only dipped my toe in; nothing like Chris. But I did feel like — to me, it all felt that those years from 2016 onwards was very much like unfinished business. The site was still operating. The person running the site was still making money from it, and Amy Allwine had been killed. [Music] Suddenly Chris kind of brings us into a Zoom call and then tells us this kinda fateful discovery that he’s consistently in. He’s beginning to scrape these kill orders and that the site is — and that we’re essentially going to be receiving them in near-real time. That was then the beginning of the Kill List.
JACK: 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.
CHRIS: Ultimately I was able to access the administration page on the website. So, this is the page the administrator uses to correspond with the users’ website and to scam them. So, that page can see everything on the site. There were some other pages as well; like, pages would show the payments and so on and so forth. So, once I discovered these through technical means, I basically have a small cron job. I’m pulling them down fully as is. I’m actually then building parsers, and parsing them of into their constituent components, putting them into a database, and ultimately I’m building a web-front end to categorize, browse, and — reports of each of these cases and annotate them all, which today I have. The chat in my window, my window to the right-hand side now, I have my hitman analysis website, where I have all the cases in there categorized by harm, by fraud, by country, by personal information, annotated with Facebook links, address links, phone numbers, et cetera. So — but I was able to focus on getting the data legible, clean, kind of comprehensive, and handing this over to Carl and the podcast team. So, that was a good division of labor. So, I had the technical tasks and Carl and the team had to deal with everything else.
CARL: We went to the police again, the Metropolian Police. They did believe us, but there were no UK cases. They basically decided that because there were no UK cases, it wasn’t their problem, and they disclosed this kind of initial tranche of orders that Chris had compiled and handed over to us to Interpol. We thought about that for a while and thought that this is very likely to lead to additional bungled police investigations or no investigations at all. They won’t know who we are, the police. We won’t know who the investigating officers are. There will be no way for us to exchange information, and it will very likely lead to police officers — kind of in the same way that had happened with Amy Allwine — maybe receiving some kind of warning, maybe making contact, but not in any kind of position to effectively investigate, much less gather the evidence they need to actually get someone into a court room.
JACK: Chris would read through these kill orders and sometimes try to figure out who it was that made the kill order.
CHRIS: [Music] So, often they will approach with some brief information saying, hey, can you do this sort of service in my location? The answer’s always of course, yes, we have hitmen around the world. They can do it within one week. That’s always the answer because it’s a scam. 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 — do a kidnapping? Can you…? Saying something like that. Then the answer was yes, yes, we can do that. Often it’s followed up by, here’s the initial order. Here’s a name, the address, the social media, the car they drive, et cetera, et cetera, where they work, where they can be found.
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 a message; that’s for being a cheater. It’s like, oh, I wonder who that person could be. They do — that has happened sometimes. After the order, there’s further negotiations and there’s always a price, how much. It always is usually $5,000, $10,000. But it’s depending on how much money they have. Sometimes there’s negotiations about, oh, how can you make sure you don’t take the money and run? They say, oh, no, you can’t take the money and run because we have an escrow system. If the hitman were to take the money, we wouldn’t give — we would not — were to take the money and not do the killing, we wouldn’t give them the money.
So, that way you are safe. But of course the escrow system is designed to stop you from a hitman scamming you like you would a darknet drug vendor scamming you. It doesn’t protect you from the site itself being a scam. Then — it even has dedicated third-party escrow sites which are independent or apparently independent, where you can go to this independent site. You can broker your illegal transaction and a third broker can handle this for you. It’s all run by him, of course, and of course he directs everyone to use this independent website, and it all uses the same back end. Then you go — say, I’ve put my money in the escrow system. It’s like, oh, I see; we’ve unlocked this. We’re now gonna 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 hitman went there but they failed, so you need — they make — need to pay more money, or it turns out you need — this is more complicated, so you need to pay more money. This is how it goes down in general.
JACK: Chris would sometimes be able to identify who put the kill order in, because it might say something like, it’s my wife who I want killed, or something, and then they have the wife’s information in the kill order to easily figure out who did this. So, they decide to try to phone up the targets to see if they can warn them, but the FBI mishap with Amy Allwine was top of their mind. What if they call up someone and the person who’s trying to kill them answers the phone or is listening in and it just escalates the whole thing and they get someone killed? The plan was to try to call the person but then get them alone so that they can tell them this information in private. But man, how do you call someone out of the blue and try to get them to listen to the information you have, but they need to be alone first before you’re gonna tell them? It sounds impossible to deal with, but Carl gave it a try.
CARL: No, I don’t want any information. I’m trying to give you information.
VICTIM1: I’m sorry.
CARL: Okay, well, thanks for your time anyway. Do give me a phone back if you’d like more information.
JACK: Then he tried again.
CARL: Would we be able to arrange a time to be able to talk to you at greater length about that?
VICTIM2: No, thank you, thank you, thank you.
CARL: Okay. So, you don’t…? [Call ends]
JACK: 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.
CARL: Just — I understand you don’t want to work with me on the story. However, I am 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.
VICTIM3: Where? Actually, I don’t have time for this, even. Even if you’re asking me for a survey that has something to my relationship to the job or to professional…
CARL: It’s not a survey. I’m a journalist. We’ve come across information which indicates that you might be in danger.
VICTIM3: I’m in danger?
CARL: Yes…
VICTIM3: You’re trying to protect me — leave me to face my dangers. Thank you.
CARL: Okay.
VICTIM3: Thank you. Bye.
CARL: Goodbye.
SPEAKER1: Wow.
CARL: Leave me to face my dangers.
SPEAKER1: He’s not having any of it.
CARL: I’m very surprised by that. If someone phoned me up saying you might be in danger, I would want to know what it was regarding.
SPEAKER1: Yeah.
JACK: This is turning out to be a lot harder than it sounds.
CARL: Absolutely. We knew the whole thing was this ethical kind of minefield. I was really afraid that I would do something which meant that I could never live with myself again. [Music] 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. I didn’t — we could have made one — it’s kind of easy now to talk about all of this in retrospect, but at the time, you don’t know what’s gonna happen.
You don’t know that this call’s gonna turn out okay or that person’s gonna be okay, and every single time I made that call — and remember, nine times out of ten 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’d dial that number, I’d having — I’d be having to work myself up into this — I was working myself up into this state of mind where I thought, well, this could be the moment where I commit some ethical, crushing kind of mistake that haunts me for the rest of my life.
JACK: I think it’s at this point where I was listening to Kill List that I was happy that Chris was working with Carl on 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 this story. But man, Carl is an amazing journalist, and he has a whole team and seemingly he has connections all over the world to try to do something about this. 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.
CARL: 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. [Music] Journalists don’t normally step into stories like that. They don’t normally contact victims and drive stories or even create them. They normally try and be as least disruptive as they possibly can, and that’s definitely not what we’re doing there. So, that was also very disorienting, stepping further away from at least this anchoring professional identity that I and the team would have and becoming something else and not really having a word for it.
CHRIS: Oh, you know the word for it, Carl. You don’t want to say it.
CARL: Well, if you’re gonna say vigilante…
CHRIS: Yes.
CARL: …then I don’t think we were ever a vigilante ‘cause we were desperately trying to get the police to step in, not replace them; at least I was. We were handing over everything we did to the police. So, yeah, I never thought we were vigilantes. That wasn’t the right word in my mind for it, either. It was like some weird gap of being a really proactive journalist or investigator.
JACK: 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.
CARL: 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, all over the place. The problem with that was that we knew that Interpol would basically 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 breach would happen. There would be no link. They would just receive this Word document that Chris has created, plus maybe some 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. Chris was passing over updates all the time. These were live conversations that were happening. So, sometimes there’d be more Bitcoin and the urgency would have changed, or a specific moment or time and place were being mentioned in the order, which would change how dangerous we thought it was. We would have no way of passing 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.
JACK: While investigating all this, they would run into news articles that would chill them to their bones.
CHRIS: There’s many instance and many cases — I’m sure we’d probably touch on as many as you like, but we’ll be pressed for time here. For example, there was one case where there was a hit against this young man in America and a couple — someone paid $5,000 to kill him. Two weeks later he’s dead by gunshot, a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Was there insurance involved? Was there foul play? It was hard to say. 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 someone killed, and again, within weeks, that person was killed. With information like that plus all the rest of the information which always gives the hideous backstories on people’s story of stalking, of drugging, of coercive behavior or marital breakdown or relationship breakdown, of people sending death threats, people putting hidden cameras, people really ruining lives; we realized that this is — it’s really horrific, this stuff, and I just happened to have this sneak peek into the worst of it, as does Carl. Yeah, it’s very, very hard to digest.
JACK: All this just adds a level of urgency to it all.
CARL: So, I phone maybe a dozen people, maybe two dozen over about the course of about a week, maybe a bit longer, and it is dramatically unsuccessful. Everyone thinks…
CHRIS: Carl, Carl, don’t say that.
CARL: No, it is. It really is. 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 crater them psychologically. The actual problem was that no one was gonna believe me. So, people would hang up. They’d phone back with their friends and they’d prank me and they’d pretend it’s a big joke. 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 kinda getting scam calls all the time. So, we change up what we do, and we decide to send out local journalists on the ground [Music] to physically go and try to reach the people that were on the lists, and that really changes things. So we — it’s only then, really, that we begin to make meaningful contact, reach people, be believed, and begin to kind of develop the next phase in the Kill List, really, which is talking to them, supporting them, and working with the police to try and find out who put them on the list.
JACK: 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.
CHRIS: Okay, yeah, so, obviously I’m the first person to see this, and I’m actually — I actually worked out his identity because not — this guy is a neonatal surgeon. He’s literally a surgeon for babies. He’s also looking to break the hands of a surgeon. It’s like — and he’s paying something upward of $50,000 for this. He’s got multiple-step plans of when the kidnapping should take place and taking photographs of it and how she should be brainwashed and how she should be broken and where she should be taken to and how he will get to see the information about this whilst remaining at a distance. It’s — I don’t usually use this word, but it’s sick and it’s messed up. In his mind, when he paid that $50,000, it’s very much real. He was gonna do this. I was able to quickly work out between these identities of these women, and this surgeon mentioned that the person who seemed related to them was this character called Ron Ilg. This is sort of information I send up — send over to Carl and the team. I’m like, this guy — they gotta do something about it. Are the FBI working — helping at this point? Are they gonna do something? Because this is just crazy. This is just — I can’t believe this guy is going around making his plans and no one’s taking it seriously. That’s terrible.
JACK: 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.
CARL: [Music] Chris’ subject in the e-mails would normally be New Payer, which would always cause my heart to sink a little bit, and — but this one stood out from the very beginning for all the reasons Chris has already said. There was a bonus structure. The guy had literally already loaded in all the money for a whole series of things that had to happen to Jennifer, which were all about the use of drugs and they were all about control. It was — it stood out for that. It stood out actually weirdly and grotesquely because it wasn’t about murder, which somehow made it worse. But then it also stood out because of the amount of money, huge amount of money being paid. It was the largest payment. So, we reach out and get hold of Jennifer and speak to her and realize that she’s in the middle of a kind of relationship which she’s leaving, which is — involves Ron who’s very dangerously spiraling out of control. He seems to have some extremely worrying behaviors to do with control. He’d probably been tracking her. He’d been allegedly putting drugs into her drink. There was another woman in the marriage that he’d kept in a septic tank under his house. It was horrifying.
CHRIS: I think the septic tank was more of a — I don’t think it was a Hannibal-Lecter situation per say. It was more of a temporary BDSM handle…
CARL: Well, he dressed the whole thing up as BDSM. He dressed all of this controlling behavior up as, hey, this is just my kink. Yeah, he let — the woman wasn’t in there the whole time. It was part of a — he had a dungeon, I believe, in his house. It was just all coming together as a man who was really, really, really committed to controlling the women he was in a relationship with and didn’t seem to be able to deal with his wife leaving. This was the kind of the first time the FBI really moved in, and we could see an investigation kind of rolling out. So, Ron left for Mexico on the day that Jennifer was to be kidnapped, possibly as a alibi. Who knows? 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. 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 surveiling.
JACK: Okay, and the police are able to get in the safe and see that.
CARL: They do. They drive him to his own house and he opens the safe for them.
JACK: Hm. Yeah, and then, so what happens to him?
CARL: 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 place under custody and then arrested when he…
CHRIS: I just want to say that really upset me that he tried to kill himself. I’d 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 want to make the world a better place, and it’s not always clear whether I’m achieving that, though ultimatley in this case, I think I did.
JACK: 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.
CARL: But he’s now convicted and sentenced and is in prison for a pretty significant stretch.
CHRIS: I think about eight years.
JACK: [Music] It’s wins like this where they can get a dangerous person put in prison that makes it all seem worthwhile.
CARL: 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 emergence from that has definitely been for me, anyway, one of those.
JACK: So, it was 2020 when they started taking action on these kill orders, and they’ve been documenting it all along. There’s just so many cases that they researched.
CHRIS: I still feel it barely scratches the surface.
CARL: Yeah.
CHRIS: Well, I have.
JACK: It really does. 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?
CHRIS: There were a series of arrests in Romania which — of the site operators or at least people affiliated with them. I believe the US authorities had something to do with that. Following that instant of the remaining arrests, the website had underwent technical changes. It was shut down for a bit. It came back again. I intermittently lost bits of access until we reached the point now where I have almost no access. So, I’ve had no new cases come in for the last year and a bit, but in that period we have seen basically arrests from the website in the US and Switzerland and Austria. So, we have evidence that some law enforcement agency or other is either cooperating with or has infiltrated the website and is making some arrests.
JACK: Of the people who run the website.
CHRIS: No; people using the website. The website continues to operate and for all I know, continues to scam people out of money and continues to enrich Romanian scammers.
JACK: You talked to the admin of the site over chat. What is the reason why they run this or do this?
CHRIS: [Music] He’s just a scammer. I believe he used to be a carder, someone who deals with stolen financial data and whatnot, and was familiar with darknet scams. 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 yeah, he just thought there was a niche for a believable, effective darknet murder scam to be lucrative, and he’s not wrong. There are some other sites out there doing this, but I believe he’s the most successful financially, the most searched and optimized, has the highest traffic, the highest number of users. Considering he’s been at this since 2016 and dealing money in Bitcoin, he will be a multimillionaire by now.
Here’s me going along, you know, basically with legal fees and doing this in my evenings and the like. It’s not really — you know, it’s been hard to keep it up. But yeah, it’s still going on. People say, oh, but what if you get him? What if you get him? Won’t it be over? I’m like, no, it wouldn’t be over, because I’m on — I’ve been on the website for years. They delete the messages as they go along. So, you seize the website; you don’t get years back of messages. You get very little. I’m the only one with the years’ worth of messages. So, unfortunately there’s gonna be no end to it in terms of the website getting shut down. For me, this is only over when I’ve actioned the remainder of Kill List.
JACK: The way that dark web websites work is that they’re designed to be private. You can’t tell where the website is hosted or where it is in the world, so you really need to wait for the website administrator to screw up and reveal something about themselves in order to take the thing down. So, this whole time, the only thing they can do is just keep blogging and podcasting and publishing articles about the site being a scam. But 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.
CARL: Well, I think the story profoundly changed the lives of all of the people that were involved, like me, Chris, Caroline, everyone. It kind of — it did everything. It was and is the most — for me, anyway, by far the most important, meaningful, worrying, sometimes isolated and disgustingly-urgent work that I’ve ever found myself having to do. It started a thing back then in 2020 which is — it’s still going now. People are still going through court cases. People are still in danger. It’s the most important thing I’ll ever work on, I’m sure, and I really, really hope, actually, that I don’t have to do anything like this ever again.
JACK: 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.
CHRIS: [Music] Again, I don’t think people believe that I’m still doing this by myself. They’d rather believe some comforting truth that 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 people being murdered on the list right now who I haven’t got to in time, you know? There’s probably dozens of people on the list who are dead, and of those, half of them I could have saved. I feel like people need to know this and, I don’t know, I would like some support in this, but it’s a difficult position I’m still in.
JACK: To date, they have seen over 900 people show up on the kill list, and they’ve taken action on hundreds of them. 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. 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, you can visit his website, which is pirate.london. 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 Hit Man 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.
GARY: [Music] 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 scam 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 fifty years, good luck getting anyone to believe their existence is all a myth.
JACK: 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 outta there. You’re not acting like you, you know? That’s your emotions that have taken over, and you won’t be happy with yourself until you find peace. You need to find yourself again. Killing someone isn’t going to give you the peace you think it will. You need to remember what makes you happy and seek that instead of violence. It’s sometimes hard to see the light at the end of a tunnel during bad relationships or big breakups, but the future is so much brighter than you realize. Don’t let them turn you into a monster. You’re not a monster. Dig deep and find the strength to rise above it and be that amazing person that you actually are.
(Outro): [Outro music] 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. 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. Hey, if you want to listen to this show ad-free or if you want bonus episodes, I’ve got eleven bonus episodes now available for you to listen to right now. All you gotta do is go to plus.darknetdiaries.com. That’s plus.darknetdiaries.com. This episode is created by me, the neon spectre, Jack Rhysider. Our editor is the glitch guy, Tristan Ledger, sound design by the executable Andrew Meriwether, 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.
[END OF RECORDING]