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Comment by Red_Tarsius | Hacker News Reader

I found the screenshot of a hitmen-for-hire service. https://imgur.com/a/6vfcx I wish users could share the coordinates of any item in the map. But it's a really fascinating work. Kudos to the creators!

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If there's one thing I've learned from watching true crime stories, it's that there are no actual contract killers, only US Marshals posing as them.

If there's one thing I've learned from travelling the world: There are contract killers and they can be had for very little money. Where I currently live you could get away with murder for 1 to 10k - depending on who you know.

The US are no exception.

I think what OP means is that it's very hard to find contract killers online, as most of them are police officers.

If there's one thing I've learned through many years of human contact: if you need a thing done, you methodically plan it out, do it by yourself, and don't tell anyone.

There's lots of fake/just-for-fun stuff like that on the dark web. Often people posting emails to troll people who are taking it seriously. Or even more likely an FBI sting.

This. I assume a few of these provocative landing pages attempt to identify 0day exploits as well.

It's hard to take seriously when it looks like an early 2000s Geocities page. I half expect that "Making Murder for hire easy" to be a scrolling marquee.

But then again I don't know what I'd expect it to look like. Maybe it'd feel even stranger if it looked very refined and corporate with lots of stock photos.

I would guess their technical interviews place greater weight on qualities like loyalty and confidentiality than which languages and frameworks their web developer has recent experience using.

If they're dumb and uneducated enough to be running a hit-for-hire service, they probably hacked the site together themselves; Geocities looked like geocities because nobody had web skills.

I also found one where you can apparently pay for a slave for a certain amount of time and they will bring you the slave ("To do whatever you want with"). Jesus.

Is it me or is that an easy way to make money? Create a "murder-for-hire" website, or whatever illegal service you want, then disappear with the bitcoins.

That's called an exit scam, and they're pretty common in the dark market world from what I've heard.

Sure, you could do that but bare in mind that you're dealing with criminals and whatnot. I wouldn't want to fraud such people.

Why not? They wont go to the authorities and without assistance it's unlikely they'd be able to find an anonymous actor who took the right precautions.

You have the guarantee of anonymity, no? However bad the person you defraud, they can never find you. If they could, then so could the FBI.

They use escrows.

Generally these sites have a system for establishing trust. So when choosing a hitman, you choose one that has already completed lots of hits. They could still take your money and run, of course, but it's less likely.

(So then how do you gain trust in the first place? Payment on delivery, combined with a trusted buyer.)

I recommend not stealing from people willing to pay for murder

I've come across multiple; as I imagined, Tor is mostly just guns, drugs and pedophiles - I'm glad they think they've created a critical service to protect freedom of speech ::rolls eyes::

The map is a cool idea though, and maybe it'll help get more horrible people on the law enforcement radar

Tor needs a few legitimate anchors to counter attitudes like this.

Tor HAS a few legitimate anchors to counter attitudes like this. Whistleblower sites, anti-government sites under totalitarian regimes...

Maybe some big names like Like Facebook, Duckduckgo, Wikipedia, or the New York Times?

I don't mean "popular clearweb sites that happen to have an onion address" so much as "legitimate/legal hidden services" beyond just a bunch of secure drops for new orgs.

I agree. My attitude is such because there are no apparent 'legitimate' services - IMHO the few people who really do need such anonymity, is far overshadowed by allowing pedophiles a free arena to exploit kids, or cartels to commercialize drugs and murder.

Since inherently there is no way to restrict the type of services available, its unlikely that any 'legitimate' would change my attitude; there are other ways to share private, or anonymous information.

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