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. In the Tennessee case, Brandon States pleaded not guilty in the plot to kill Sydney Minor. Just 13 days ago, Sydney gave birth to their baby, a daughter named Saylor. Pellouso then confronts Beau with the dark web kill order telling Yura, “Look I need this f—–g person dead.” After several hours of driving around, the detectives find the van at a Starbucks parking lot.
Yura had also set up a galaxy of micro-websites on the regular web, which spread the word about Besa Mafia under the pretence of denunciating it. Yura had hired freelance SEO experts, who had optimised the sites to ensure that they appeared first in search results for “hitman for hire” and similar word combinations. 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.
The detectives follow her to a house and approach her in the driveway. Both stood to gain an inheritance, but police quickly eliminate Brandon Brigham as a suspect. But to prove him guilty, they somehow have to prove he is the one who sent the kill order on his stepmother to Yura’s hit man website.
MARKED FOR MURDER
The intended victims are not from organized crime groups and appear to live average lives. One teaches at a primary school, another works at a hospital, and another is a municipal official. Agents subsequently confronted Ms. Murphy and the boyfriend in question. After being read her Miranda rights, Ms. Murphy admitted that when she found out her boyfriend was seeing another woman, she attempted to hire a hit man to kill the woman. 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.
Romanian Scammers Ran Fake Hitman-for-hire Site, Lured Desperate Perpetrators As ‘incompetent Assassins’
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 and Eileen Ormsby, an Australian journalist who had also written about Besa Mafia. Monteiro claims that the officers said they would be in touch again for an information handover, but did not ask him to show them the data he had brought to the meeting, which was on his laptop. The only document they consulted was an A3 printout on which Monteiro had summarised the intricacies of Besa Mafia’s operation.
- It’s a mix of scams, law enforcement tactics, and sensationalized tales that spread like wildfire on the internet.
- When he wasn’t logging ten-to-12-hour days working, often while listening to one of his favorite Christian rock bands, he was helping his wife, Michelle, raise their 11 biological and five adopted children.
- And what the messages revealed was that there were no real hitmen.
- Ross Ulbrich, founder of the dark web’s most famous marketplace, The Silk Road, allegedly paid contract killers $730k worth of BitCoin to murder six people, according to transcripts of his conversations with organized crime bosses.
- We were able to find follow-up articles on these cases in which local gang-members were arrested.
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Chris Monteiro says Yura knows there will always be people who believe his sites are authentic, people who expect him to deliver death when they click for a killer. So he remains in business, somewhere out there … on the dark web. Defense attorney Kevin DeVore countered that authorities never looked beyond Stephen Allwine and that there were other people who may have wanted Amy dead. He says those people could have left clues at the crime scene, but first responders bungled the investigation. As Stephen Allwine’s trial begins, the State argues he paid Yura to have Amy murdered.
The Sometimes Terrifying, Sometimes Bewildering World Of Murder Marketplaces
Without Yura, neither Monteiro nor law enforcement nor journalists would have ever heard of Stephen “Dogdaydog” Allwine in Minnesota, the man in Singapore, or the woman in Denmark. Yura’s greed, tenacity and SEO strategy had unwittingly created a tool to perceive the intentions of would-be criminals. This is why Monteiro is ambivalent about the news of Yura’s apparent apprehension, despite years of working to shed light on the operation and its victims. “It’s great an international law enforcement operation took down these criminals, but when will they ever proactively investigate the thousands of names on the kill list? Elena, who lives in Switzerland, had agreed to take a video call from me, after meeting one of my colleagues.
Markets List
“We’re done with the case,” the officer in charge of the investigation at Clarksville PD, detective Ray Hall, told me in August. He said that he had already received a tip about the Toonbib conversation and that nevertheless had found “no factual evidence” of anything other than a suicide taking place. “The threat posed by so-called assassination markets is going to be pretty small in comparison to other things we deal with,” an NCA spokesperson told me. “We aren’t monitoring the website and there have been no arrests.
PROFESSIONAL HITMAN SERVICES
The front man, Yura, simply took the fees, then served up excuses as to why the murders hadn’t happened, before demanding more money. Her husband – who we’re calling Bruno – was computer-savvy, she said, and she ‘wouldn’t put it past him’ to know how to access the Dark Web. But she found it hard to believe any professional killer would charge as little as $7,000. In 2020, I was slingshotted into a desperate race against time to save the lives of people I’d never met, from all over the world. Keep up with stories of the day with our lunchtime news wrap and important breaking news alerts.
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In a final effort to seem legit, each of the sites we found have a section of the website where ex-military personnel can sign up to join as a hitman. The prominent positioning of the link looks like another confidence trick. We decided to investigate a few of the sites offering such services to learn a bit about what they promise, and for how much they are potentially scamming would-be customers of murder services. However, if it’s a fraud, it’s certainly a fairly profitable one.
Yura’s ominous brand of high-tech terror extends from an unknown location to the smartphones, tablets and laptops of Middle America. In fact, “48 Hours” discovered Yura and his hit man-for-hire website while investigating the shooting death of Amy Allwine in the Minneapolis suburb of Cottage Grove, Minnesota. I think it’s possible that by alerting Elena to her husband’s plans, my team and I saved her life. As a specialist in uncovering disinformation on the internet, I was working on a podcast with a Dark Net investigator called Chris Monteiro. He alerted me to a site called Besa Mafia, offering assassinations for cryptocash.
The series covers some of the 175 kill orders that Miller’s team turned over to police, The Hollywood Reporter said. According to the outlet, that information has led to 32 convictions and over 150 years of prison time. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Crichton did not pay the website, though, and later said he had put in the order just out of frustration; Crichton was cleared of any wrongdoing in July 2018. Another Crime Bay user in Denmark, an Italian-born woman called Emanuela Consortini, was arrested thanks to an NCA tip-off and then sentenced to six years in jail for commissioning the murder of an ex-boyfriend. The Crime Bay website was eventually shut down by the NCA and the Bulgarian police in May 2017 and Monteiro assumed that Yura had been found and jailed.
According to a report by the BBC, there were over 100,000 listings for hitmen on the dark web in 2019. However, it is important to note that not all of these listings may be legitimate, and some may be scams designed to extract money from unsuspecting victims. Regardless of the legitimacy of the “murder-for-hire” websites, it doesn’t mean dangerous people aren’t paying money to them with the intention of having people killed.
Bruno really did want his wife dead – and, as Elena predicted, he was willing to do it himself. When police arrested him, they discovered a secret apartment he had been renting near to her home. Amy Allwine, from Minnesota, was 43 years old, a professional dog trainer and the mother of a nine-year-old boy. In November 2016, her husband Stephen called police in a state of distress. He had returned home, he said, to find his wife dead on the bedroom floor. For during an investigation into online crime in 2018, I was shown a site on the Dark Web that made my blood run cold.
