John Woodbury, 35, of Roswell, GA, has been sentenced to seventeen months in prison after pleading guilty to transmitting threats to injure then-FBI Director Christopher Wray. James Wan, 54, of Duluth, Georgia, pleaded guilty to one count of using a facility of interstate commerce in the commission of murder-for-hire. The sentencing is scheduled for January 18, 2024, before U.S. But we also knew that doing nothing might be even worse. The first person we deployed that strategy with was Elena, the woman in Switzerland. And it worked; we found that the victims were more likely to believe us, and local police forces were more responsive when we approached them alongside the person who’d been targeted.
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Nowadays, almost anything you want to buy, you can find online. And according to new research from social scientist Dr. Thomas Holt, the current Director of the MSU School of Criminal Justice, hiring a hitman doesn’t seem to be an exception. It is a fertile ground for intelligence on all types of crime.

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Monteiro’s research suggested all such websites to be either harmless trolling or scams designed to rob people of their bitcoins. He could find no evidence of anybody ever being killed by a hitman hired online, nor of any hitman working online. Let’s put on our detective hats and investigate the hitman-for-hire myth further. Many cybersecurity and law enforcement experts have been tracking the Dark Web for years. While the Dark Web hosts some illegal marketplaces peddling drugs, stolen data, and other shady stuff, hitman services are less widespread than you might think. The Veniceman is another dark web site which also deals in Hitman services worldwide.
If you are in the business of cyber threat intelligence, yes. There is multiple techniques, tactics, and procedural information to be found as well as braggadocios accounts of hacks. If you are a journalist or whistleblower in an oppressive country, perhaps-if you really have that as the only option to pass information. If you are that curious, watch a video of a dark web surfer on Youtube. There have been a few confirmed incidents where individuals attempted to hire hitmen via the Dark Web — but almost all involved undercover officers or fake services. In most cases, no actual hitmen were ever involved, just scams or stings.
- This sort of spontaneous anger, which might otherwise be spent on a Twitter or Reddit thread, can now be unleashed on sites where users believe their clicks can kill.
- And a month later, he was sentenced to three years in state prison.
- Laws have often taken time to catch up to technology, but in cases like these, that gap might be a literal matter of life and death.
- But she found it hard to believe any professional killer would charge as little as $7,000.
- However, according to Dr. Holt, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
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We will automatically post your comment and a link to the news story to your Facebook timeline at the same time it is posted on MailOnline. To do this we will link your MailOnline account with your Facebook account. We’ll ask you to confirm this for your first post to Facebook. But being in possession of the Kill List, and the terrible responsibilities that came with it, was was quite an emotional burden to carry for so long. Since the gang demanded payment in Bitcoin, which has quadrupled in value since October 2020, the scam must have been very lucrative, possibly running into many millions of dollars. He could also see that Besa Mafia wasn’t actually killing anyone.
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But it was the emergence of the dark web over the last decade or so that allowed hit-man sites to proliferate. Unlike most sites on the traditional internet, dark-web sites use technology that allows both sides of an online interaction to hide their identity and location, from each other and law enforcement. “In America, police told one of the targets that he thought we were the scammers. In Switzerland, the police told one of the targets they suspected we were running the site for a story. There was no evidence that any of that was true.
Recently, there have been several reports of individuals who have been either arrested or convicted for attempting to hire or apply to be a hitman online to end someone else’s life. Major takedowns like Silk Road, AlphaBay, and Hansa have shown that even the most “secure” criminal platforms can be infiltrated. These operations often expose how widespread scams really are.
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According to court documents, Sasser had met the man, identified as DW, on Match.com before he married his future wife, identified as JW. Investigators will gather and examine all the digital evidence before seeking to question the garda. A major garda investigation is underway into an alleged attempt by a garda to hire an assassin on the dark web to murder his former partner.
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- She made bail and awaits her next court date at her parents’ house in Georgia.
- After nearly three weeks of testimony, it takes the jury seven hours to find Brigham guilty of solicitation of murder.
- The researchers pointed out that, despite being covered in trust-signals, all of the sites just felt untrustworthy.
- The fee for the killing, said to be 10,000 euros, was to be paid from the inheritance left behind by the victim.
Christopher and Michelle Pence hadn’t planned on having an enormous family. They met as teenagers in a community just north of Seattle and married in 1999, when Christopher was 19 and Michelle was 20. Christopher’s dream was to make a fortune in finance and real estate and live in a penthouse in downtown Seattle. He imagined Michelle would have her own high-powered career. After she became pregnant with their fourth child, he had a vasectomy. Jolie had episodes of depression and planned to commit suicide twice—at age 19 and again at 22, when she attempted to hire a hitman to kill her.

As it was, he was simply a conman who scammed would-be murderers out of their bitcoin and never carried out any hits. Earlier today, at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, Jaquell Blackwell pleaded guilty to carjacking. His co-defendant, Abdoul Azika, previously pleaded guilty to carjacking on July 9, 2025. The next myth ‘Pizzabagel’ busts is that of hitmen for hire being readily available on the dark net.
Finally, even if Romanian authorities and U.S. agencies do manage to shut Yura’s operation down, it has already proved successful enough to inspire copycats around the web. Another site, which appears to be operated by different people, and claims to serve the Russian region primarily, is fully operational. I downloaded a Tor browser and logged on, found a link to the Telegram chat of the “Jabba Syndicate” and inquired into getting a hitman in Los Angeles. Meant to send a message.• Full Black Ops – Multi-target, multi-location coordinated removals.

Stealth work indicates here Murder that seems Accident, Killing someone and blames other and heavy work includes placing exclusives; exterminate an armed band, blast people, houses, care and more. This company is organized by ex-Military Corps and Special Forces. They take a few payments in advance to start their job.
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A Houston, Texas man was sentenced to 120 months in federal prison following his guilty plea to the “jugging” robbery of an ATM technician. Homeland Security Investigations conducted the investigation with the assistance of the Bedford, Euless, Grapevine, and Hurst Police Departments. Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Weybrecht prosecuted the case.
One such freelancer, a Kolkata-based consultant called Santosh Sharma, told me in July 2018 that Yura – who had used the name of Andreeab when dealing with him – had paid him in bitcoin. So, there you have it – the truth about hitmen on the Dark Web. While the Dark Web is undoubtedly a mysterious and intriguing place, the myth of hitman-for-hire services is likely just that – a myth.