A fake hitman, a kill list, a darknet vigilante, and a murder
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
Alternate reading -- the best way to extricate yourself from a dark web scam is to pose as a freelance security researcher as a hobby and turn on your co-conspirators. Explains why you have admin access to the the site and all its email correspondence when the police come looking for you.
“I got this stuff cause I’m a random security analyst, not cause I’m an admin for the site”
Because of John I may lose $4 million and go to jail for 20 years=lots of incentives to 86 John.
I think perhaps someone made up an origin, passed it on to you as fact, and you assumed that wiki would agree without checking?
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/59996?rskey=44dnw9&result=1#ei... (paywalled, but your local library probably has a portal for you to view it)
"Monteiro says that, as he didn’t know his NCA contact’s full name and he didn’t have access to his devices while in custody, he could not immediately prove his dealings with the agency."
>There is research showing that suicide rates increase with greater access to easy methods(ie. guns).
Saying that "access to guns" increases suicide is a very misleading statement often used intentionally. As there is no concern for the opposite effect of ownership nor any reasoning of cause vs effect. There are more defensive uses of guns than misuses, including suicides according to the CDC. BUT...
To tie it to your argument... Does having access to internet CAUSE an increase in murder for hire?
If we want to limit murder for hire - Should we ban Tor or encryption, should be allow our civil rights to be removed because some people will misuse them? By your wording especially-yes because these things are 'easy', it's just signing up for a website and making a bitcoin transfer after all.
I question any line of thought that leads with "this is bad because people might misuse it" or that "we should stop people thinking about something".
Well, that's the reason you can't buy a nuclear gun even if you have the money it costs; because you "might misuse it" or maybe you just want it for a collection, doesn't matter you can't have one; so its not as black as white as some might believe.
Something like a "nuclear gun" or DDoS attack has no defensive purpose. In the terms of firearms, you jumped to ordinance when the topic is about arms. I hope you didn't do so intentionally.
>America would be pretty much the same if after 1900 guns had been banned
That’s a pretty massive leap. Maybe you can ignore the 500k-3M defensive gun uses per year, maybe you can ignore the civil rights movement that was furthered by blacks arming themselves - coincidentaly this is the roots of modern gun control in the USA (a plan to keep “the wrong people” from owning guns, still rooted in racism today), ignore the “rooftop Koreans”, ignore that unlike Mexico to the tip of Chile that razor wire and bars on Windows isn’t common in USA because the penalty for property crime can be death, ignore that our military is the best in the world because of country boys that grew up with positive gun culture, ignore all you like. You’re clearly not presenting a factual argument with such a broad hypothetical.
Edit: I’ve already been sucked in to a silly line of thinking too much. The point here isn’t that you’re scared or upset about the existence of guns. It’s that we don’t get rid of things or stop people from thinking things because someone might be bad. That’s not how a free society works.
More troops kill themselves than die in field. Of those who come back murder more people home than enemies.
Lol. When you have a problem, you’re going to call police, to bring a “tool of violence”. You’re just being naive about who is ‘allowed’ to have a means of defense.
If police are the only ones that can defend themselves from people like you - you aren’t free, you are subservient. Aren’t the same people a threat to them, a threat to you? Classes of nobility don’t seem very free to me.
But... you jumped to “nuclear gun”, so how much of a serious argument could I expect from you?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
>only gun needed by the police may be a taser gun
:D please tell me more about your experience with police and police training! Then I’ll tell you mine where I’ve traveled around the country training and training with police. Can’t wait.
EDIT: Nice job using a throwaway account to downvote my posts! Though you should know that’s against the TOS here.
Hey, This guy put a lot of effort trying to be anonymous and could have serious problems if not, so lets describe him thoroughly in a public e-journal!.
I hate when journalists do this.
This was after he was disturbed enough by receiving a video of a burning car to go to the police. He seems to have a complex relationship with anonymity.
His buddies have the good sense to remain anonymous.
If you don't want to reveal how you look, don't meet them in person or cover yourself up.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/01/2...
It was selling illegal software on DVD. After you pay through VISA, they would send you some DVD's with cracked software.
For me it was obvious that they would clear his VISA. But weeks later, he received the DVD's, and didn't have trouble with his VISA getting stolen. Seemed like a "legit" business.
I still can't believe it, but sometimes it seems to work out just fine (⊙＿⊙')
As for ordering drugs, the legal consequences vary a lot depending on the country's jurisdiction. There's also such a thing as a priority list in law enforcement, and they presumably care a lot more about murders than drug use, so one will draw much more attention than the other.
*Yes, readily available. There's nothing "dark" about a website that can only being accessible through special software, it's been a thing since the days of Usenet and BBS.
Centralizing murder-for-hire is a good way to get caught, scam or not. I believe Kuklinski did it for a while but it's not a savvy way to go about your business these days.
There have been more than a few cases of people putting ads for wetwork on Craigslist that were successfully responded to. There was even one bizarre case in which a teenaged girl put a successful hit out on herself.
> Which makes sense from an economic point of view - there's much more incentive running a (relatively inoffensive) scam and making boatloads of money
Not everybody is intelligent/skilled/capable enough for organized crime. To a lot of people, a mere $5000 is enough money to get caught up on their late rent, car payments and child support. Pull-trigger-get-5k is a simple procedure, moreso than running elaborate darkweb portals and fucking around with Bitcoin.
Contract killing hasn't changed much over the ages. You don't need to retain a celebrity hitman, you just need to get in contact with some desperate nobody willing to do anything to make ends meet. Morality and ethics are luxuries for those who can afford it.
And to be clear, I'm not saying murder for hire on the Internet is a thing; I'm just mildly surprised nobody seems to have done it yet, especially now that cryptocurrencies have pretty much solved the largest problem of how to get paid.
-It's easier to manufacture your own drugs than commit murder
-It's easier to go unnoticed by law enforcement manufacturing, selling or buying drugs than going unnoticed with murder
-Enforcement authorities around the world are much more willing to cooperate with each other when it comes to solving murder rather than busting someone's MDMA lab
-The market for drug consumption is much larger than the market for hitmen (fortunately!) and it's easier to reach out for the former audience rather than the latter
-There are much more third parties willing to act as escrow for drug trade rather than hitmen services
-There's a moral case to be had about leaving drug use alone (victimless crime and all that), as opposed to murderers or murder instigators which are universally reviled; there are much fewer people willing to engage in a hypothetical hitman market than there are with a drug market
-A review system can actually work with drugs because of the large demand and relatively risk-free aspect for buyers; a good seller can quickly build a reputation, while a bad seller will get buried by bad reviews. Can you imagine a hitman customer writing an Amazon-style review over the person he had murdered?
>And to be clear, I'm not saying murder for hire on the Internet is a thing; I'm just mildly surprised nobody seems to have done it yet, especially now that cryptocurrencies have pretty much solved the largest problem of how to get paid.
There just isn't enough demand for it to be worth the risk and hassle. As I said, any hitman stupid enough to set up a front store is begging to be busted by undercover cops posing as "customers".
Well that seems false. You literally need no equipment to commit murder. If you have no connection with the victim, it's even easy to get away with it with a few precautions.
Drug synthesis is much, much harder.
The rest of your points seem mostly sound. The low demand for murder services is probably the most pertinent reason for the difference.
A bigger problem might be that it's not as easy to for sure kill someone as most people think, especially if you want to avoid leaving any evidence at all. It only takes one error to kill your career. It also doesn't help that the public's image of assassins (super professional bald guys with enormous resources) is pretty much completely wrong. Actual assassins are much more likely to be drug addicted flat broke bums.
I think this overstates the case. Up to 40% of murders go unsolved in any given year. Most murders are committed by people the victims know, that's why they're "easy" to solve. If you don't know your victims, there's virtually no way for the police to link you to the crime unless you make a colossal mistake, like divulging our identity or your contact info to the person who hired you, as the police will be looking at them closely.
DNA and fingerprints, unless you're already a criminal where those are registered, would only establish you as serial murderer whose identity is unknown.
Or a cop happens to be sitting one street over and hears a gunshot and gets to the scene just as you're stepping out of the building.
Or the victim is paranoid and has an itchy trigger finger.
Or the cops are investigating the victim's family and associates and notice a weird pattern in their bank account.
There's a lot of ways a killing can go wrong. Even if the odds of any one killing going bad are small, the cumulative chance of an error creeps up with each job. Worse, it's hard to jack up your prices really high to reduce the number of jobs you have to do because the more money moves around the more scrutiny it receives.
Interesting that you assume an assassin's preferred method of execution is a gun or other violent means of execution. That seems like the last resort of anyone competent to me.
There's probably a lot fewer people who think that about the hitman business.
I think dark web hitmen are entirely scams, but I suppose if we can literally buy heroin or crystal meth online from the dark web, it’s not entirely naive to think aprori that hits could also be purchased. The reason they’re not is probably that it’s actuslly extremely difficult to regularly perform hits in the West, and probably not a great business model to scale on the dark web for the average Joe who wants to pay only a few grand for a hit.
The wikipedia page you linked says:
> Throughout his criminal life, Kuklinski was involved in narcotics, pornography, arms dealing, money laundering, collecting debts for loan sharking, hijacking and contract killing.
It was convenient to pretend that all kinds of legitimate low-level assassinations are gangland "ajuste de cuentas," back-and-forth murders amongst gangs, to the point where the phrase 'ajuste de cuentas' became kind of a shorthand to refer to the police's lack of zeal.
So that the entry level product could be surprisingly reasonable for settling business disputes in extra-legal ways.
Certainly compared to how appallingly routine domestic violence is, and how long a red-flagged situation can be left alone by law enforcement.
(& hitmen-for-hire is so much rarer than drugs trading that reviews won't work, and escrow is inconcievable)
I assume you would buy something small, see if all is fine, then buy something more expensive wait and see how things work out, but for something very expensive how will it work, how is the mediation happening if I don't like what I receive or I am evil and report that I do not receive what I asked for?
Same with the reviews, a seller that has been around for a few years on a market, has good reviews, is most likely not a scammer. If they were they would be banned from the (reputable) dark market(s).
I’m not sure “amateur security researcher” makes a good story. Look at the ethical question posed, some dude make upto millions on this scam, by taking money from bad people, he by far isn’t the worst person in the story.
IDK. I see the real hero of the story here to be the two hackers that remained anonymous through the story, because they had the good sense to make that a priority.
> It appeared that Monteiro had been arrested on the basis of a misinformation campaign.
> There had been warning signs for a while, at least since the point at which Yura had threatened to expose him as a cop. In June 2016, when Monteiro hacked into Yura’s Gmail account, he had noticed that the scammer had created email addresses under the name of Chris Monteiro
Until I got to this point in the article, I hadn't realized that the initial denunciation of the site[1] was done under Monteiro's real name. This is a good example of why messing with internet scumbags, even if they're pretty clearly not actual mafia capos, is an activity best undertaken pseudoanonymously (at the very minimum). Although what happened to Monteiro was a bit nastier than usual skiddie fare, there are a lot of ways, from financial fraud to swatting, for someone who wishes you ill and possesses your dox to seriously mess with your life.
Seems like Monteiro was too wrapped up in the acquisition of personal notoriety to care about opsec. My intent isn't necessarily to victim-blame Monteiro, but hopefully this episode will serve as a lesson to other well-meaning but potentially naive vigilantes.
Some of the nasty stuff that's happened to Krebs[2] also falls into this category. I guess in his case it's probably more of an intentional, aware-of-the-risks tradeoff, but man, I don't think that's a deal I'd be willing to make, especially since many such incidents don't end so peacefully[3].
---
[1] https://pirate.london/assassination-scams-the-next-generatio...
[2] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/03/the-world-has-no-room-fo...
[3] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/man-pleads-guilt...
I hope he learned from "Judge Judy" to not expose his real identity.
As presented by the journalist here, it makes sense to believe him. But imagine seeing what Monteiro is presenting in real-time, with some reasonably cautious skepticism. His computers contain the entire source of the hitman site, he had admin capabilities of the site, enough to take it down. Even as Yura created new sites Monteiro retained the ability to read all of the email of the site. A reasonable reading of that, is that rather than a white knight, it was just as likely he was a co-conspirator.
And frankly they shouldn't fully let go of that idea. The author seems willing to take everything Monteiro says at face value, without an ounce of skepticism. If Monteiro and Yura were a team and one got cold feet, how would it play out, and how could one best cover his tracks?
Yes. I found this to be unbelievable.
Let’s say bad-admin uses an out of date Wordpress or join pa instance with some security flaw. Am I really to beleive in 2 years he keeps using the same instance every time his site is taken down?
That seems extremely unlikely.
If your hian site is taken down by some guy in London, you’re going to wonder how; and probably assume it was some bad code on your end.
Dude keeps using the same code and keeps wondering how his site keeps getting hacked - yet, knows enough to work SEO, get a guy SEATed, run an anonymous darkwrv site, and handle crypto payments?
Sure seems odd.
I get the writing style, but it should give some closure to that much earlier on.