14 October 2024 , 16:58
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In 2020, tech journalist Carl Miller, along with a hacker named Chris, hacked a secret website on the darknet that hosted assassination requests.
This site contained a so-called "kill list" - a catalog of ordinary men and women with personal information that other users wanted to kill.
The orders ranged from wanting to create a car crash to setting fire to houses with the occupants inside.
Although the journalists’ initial suspicions related to real murders, it later turned out that the site was a fraud. Its owner, a Romanian criminal named Jura, used the platform to extort bitcoins from users, promising to give orders for murders to executors who did not actually exist.
Yura constantly invented reasons for delays in the execution of orders in order to demand more funds. During that time, Miller and his team continued to monitor and decided to act because the threat to real life remained high.
The first potential victim with whom the journalists made contact was a woman from Switzerland named Elena. During the investigation, the police discovered that her ex-husband, having placed an order for the murder, rented an apartment nearby and was preparing for the attack.
In the following years, Miller continued his research, which led to the involvement of world law enforcement agencies. The investigation has now led to more than 30 arrests and dozens of convictions in various countries, including the US, where a doctor was convicted of attempting to order the kidnapping and terrorizing of his wife.
Miller hopes the results of the investigation will draw attention to the scale of cybercrime and the difficulties law enforcement agencies face in combating it.
Source: The Telegraph