WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.160 JACK: I used to live and work in Las Vegas. What a town that is. I’m so glad that I got 00:00:06.160 --> 00:00:10.680 outta there. It was like I had a hole in my pocket all the time and I could never find 00:00:10.680 --> 00:00:14.320 where it was. [Music] Anyway, I was playing craps one day. That’s where you throw the dice. It’s a 00:00:14.320 --> 00:00:19.760 big table. This frail, old man came up and he was playing, too, and he was betting big. He 00:00:19.760 --> 00:00:24.480 was getting wild with his money, having a good time. I was rolling the dice and he was making 00:00:24.480 --> 00:00:29.320 money off of my dice rolls. So, he was liking me, and we started chatting it up. But there was 00:00:29.320 --> 00:00:35.800 this dude behind him, a big guy, not a muscular man, but a guy who probably loves cheeseburgers, 00:00:35.800 --> 00:00:39.600 if you know what I’m saying. I asked him, hey man, you want to get in on this game? I got a 00:00:39.600 --> 00:00:45.040 hot roll going. He didn’t say anything. The old guy turns to me and he says, oh, don’t mind him. 00:00:45.040 --> 00:00:52.520 He’s my bodyguard. I was like, oh, really? This guy is your bodyguard? Then the old man told me 00:00:52.520 --> 00:00:57.440 something that surprised me. He said, yeah, but I don't actually pay him to protect me if there’s 00:00:57.440 --> 00:01:04.080 actually a fight. I was like, what? You don’t pay him to rescue you out of anything? No, no. I can't 00:01:04.080 --> 00:01:08.520 afford that kind of bodyguard. This guy just stands next to me, and if something goes down, 00:01:08.520 --> 00:01:14.600 he knows he doesn't need to step in. I’m like, whoa, hold on a second. Why are you paying someone 00:01:14.600 --> 00:01:20.680 to stand next to you? He said, to be my bodyguard. I was like, no, but he’s not guarding you, though. 00:01:20.680 --> 00:01:25.760 The old man said, yeah, but no one knows that. Everyone sees him next to me and they don’t mess 00:01:25.760 --> 00:01:36.537 with me because he’s there. I was like, does that work? He said, yep. I haven't been robbed yet. 00:01:36.537 --> 00:01:38.840 (INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of 00:01:38.840 --> 00:02:01.520 the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] 00:02:01.520 --> 00:02:06.600 JACK: I think it was like — man, it was like seven years ago at this point that I was told I 00:02:06.600 --> 00:02:11.040 need to get Chris Monteiro on the show and talk about what he found. So, of course I slid into 00:02:11.040 --> 00:02:16.760 his DMs and acted all cool and stuff; hey man, I heard you're deep into the web. He’s like, 00:02:16.760 --> 00:02:22.080 can't talk about it. Too sensitive right now. [Music] So, I was like, okay. I followed up a 00:02:22.080 --> 00:02:26.440 year later, but again, he didn’t want to talk. He’s like, no, I’m done with that. I walked away 00:02:26.440 --> 00:02:31.720 from that. Then maybe another two years after that, I asked him again. This time he’s like, 00:02:31.720 --> 00:02:35.640 the police are investigating this. We're gonna have to wait. Then I think another time he told 00:02:35.640 --> 00:02:39.840 me there were threats against him, so he needs to stay low for a while. It’s just been one of 00:02:39.840 --> 00:02:45.320 those stories that the longer it goes on, the more intrigued I am by it, and I really hoped 00:02:45.320 --> 00:02:52.920 one day I could talk with him. Now, now Chris Monteiro is ready to talk after seven years of 00:02:52.920 --> 00:02:59.840 waiting for him, and I can't wait to finally hear what he has found on the deep, dark web. 00:02:59.840 --> 00:03:04.260 CHRIS: Okay, yeah, I’m Chris Monteiro. I’m a cybersecurity professional. 00:03:04.260 --> 00:03:07.520 JACK: Up until now, the main thing I know about Chris is that he spends 00:03:07.520 --> 00:03:12.880 a lot of time on the darknet, basically the anonymous side of the internet that you need 00:03:12.880 --> 00:03:17.420 a special connection to get into, and this seems to be where Chris feels comfortable. 00:03:17.420 --> 00:03:20.800 CHRIS: Well, I wouldn't say I lurk — that interest in it, 00:03:20.800 --> 00:03:30.160 because I don’t — I really try not to do it anymore. But back in 2015, 2016, 00:03:30.160 --> 00:03:38.560 I did a bit. I got very into things. As I’m sure you and your listeners know, the things that web’s 00:03:38.560 --> 00:03:44.640 well-known for is the darknet markets where you can buy drugs and stolen data. But there’s also 00:03:44.640 --> 00:03:52.840 loads of urban legends and nonsense and scams that are out there. So, in 2015, 2016, I was really 00:03:52.840 --> 00:04:00.040 into writing for Wikipedia, writing definitions for what dark web means, what deep web means, 00:04:00.040 --> 00:04:04.760 what are dark — what are history of darknet markets, how does it instigate with Tor, what are 00:04:04.760 --> 00:04:10.200 the police doing, what are the academics saying about the commerce, and ultimately about the 00:04:10.200 --> 00:04:17.826 scams. So, I — there was a time I was very into documenting cyber crime, which I don't recommend. 00:04:17.826 --> 00:04:22.080 JACK: [Music] I mean, there’s crime and then there’s cyber crime, but then there’s dark-web 00:04:22.080 --> 00:04:28.000 cyber crime, and the stuff that happens over there, well, it all has this veil of secrecy, 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:32.680 you know? So, the stories we hear that come out of there are a little bit more brutal and 00:04:32.680 --> 00:04:39.720 ugly than a normal cyber-crime story. Trying to keep up with all the ugliness that goes on there, 00:04:39.720 --> 00:04:44.440 it’s rough on your soul. I mean, starting out, okay, he was learning about the darknet 00:04:44.440 --> 00:04:49.060 drug marketplaces and how they worked, and he became an expert in that whole world. 00:04:49.060 --> 00:04:58.440 CHRIS: I went a bit too far, and as I was then and today, I am a self-proclaimed expert on darknet 00:04:58.440 --> 00:05:05.400 markets and the dark web. I started debunking scams. There are many dark web scams, or there 00:05:05.400 --> 00:05:13.160 were, people saying, oh, there are secrets fights to death between midgets. There are AIs which have 00:05:13.160 --> 00:05:18.920 escaped and will answer you anything. There are rooms you can go to and you can participate in 00:05:18.920 --> 00:05:25.080 livestream murder in so-called red rooms. This is nonsense. This is all rubbish. But people 00:05:25.080 --> 00:05:33.000 don’t care because it’s difficult to talk about cyber crime and the dark web, that — people on 00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:37.360 YouTube and the internet make up shit for their entertainment, and no one’s interested in the 00:05:37.360 --> 00:05:44.800 real answers. So, I found a niche where I was going to start writing about all of these fake 00:05:44.800 --> 00:05:51.360 phenomena in-depth with net citations and original research and aggregates of research as possible. 00:05:51.360 --> 00:05:57.600 I did that, and one of the ones I covered, just one of many, was hiring a hitman on the 00:05:57.600 --> 00:06:02.400 dark web. [Music] Well, I thought to myself, I know how all this works. I know how reputation 00:06:02.400 --> 00:06:06.760 systems work with darknet markets. I know how escrow works. I know how the web of 00:06:06.760 --> 00:06:11.960 trust between the sites work and how you find them. So, it should be very easy to find out 00:06:11.960 --> 00:06:20.200 what — if such a website is fake or real. I found — I was documenting them and I found a slightly 00:06:20.200 --> 00:06:26.360 more sophisticated website which, again, was — it was — looked like a darknet market. You 00:06:26.360 --> 00:06:31.160 could register and you could apparently hire a hitman and you could pay money for a escrow and 00:06:31.160 --> 00:06:35.580 get someone killed. It was just like a darknet market like Silk Road or something like that. 00:06:35.580 --> 00:06:41.560 JACK: So, he looked into this hitman-for-hire site deeper, and yeah, he sniffed it out pretty easy 00:06:41.560 --> 00:06:46.160 that it’s just a scam. No actual hitmen are here who you can hire to kill someone for you. It’s 00:06:46.160 --> 00:06:52.080 just a myth to be able to hire a hitman online. So, he took his findings and wrote it up. At the 00:06:52.080 --> 00:06:57.200 time, he was writing articles on RationalWiki, and this is a place that debunks conspiracy theories 00:06:57.200 --> 00:07:01.480 and explains when something is pseudoscience or real. So, he writes an article there saying, 00:07:01.480 --> 00:07:05.620 yeah, hitmen-for-hire sites on the dark web, they're all scams. Don’t believe it. 00:07:05.620 --> 00:07:10.920 CHRIS: I had my RationalWiki article vandalized by an IP in Romania saying that, oh yes, 00:07:10.920 --> 00:07:16.200 the dark-web hitmen sites are scams, apart from Besa Mafia, which is real. I’m like, 00:07:16.200 --> 00:07:21.760 what? You can't edit my Wiki page. That’s not cited stuff. You can't do that. [Music] 00:07:21.760 --> 00:07:26.940 So it began, and that message was from the person we know as Yura. 00:07:26.940 --> 00:07:33.080 JACK: Okay, so this edit explicitly said the dark-web hitman-for-hire site, 00:07:33.080 --> 00:07:39.080 Besa Mafia, is not a scam. You can actually hire a hitman there. Well, 00:07:39.080 --> 00:07:42.240 this of course drew Chris’ attention. Naturally, 00:07:42.240 --> 00:07:47.320 he goes there to investigate it further, and he’s never even heard of this site before, Besa Mafia. 00:07:47.320 --> 00:07:52.960 CHRIS: Yes, Besa Mafia is a hitman-for-hire site. This site is run by some organized 00:07:52.960 --> 00:07:58.640 criminal gangs. It’s just like a real darknet market. You can't get scammed. There’s mediation. 00:07:58.640 --> 00:08:03.820 Instead of buying drugs, you buy murder. I spent a lot of time dealing with this. 00:08:03.820 --> 00:08:10.440 JACK: Yeah. So, your first take on it or even your first day of looking 00:08:10.440 --> 00:08:14.440 at it — did you think this did look legitimate? 00:08:14.440 --> 00:08:21.040 CHRIS: No. Again, I had spent over a year at this time documenting the history of 00:08:21.040 --> 00:08:25.760 real darknet markets, darknet commerce, darknet navigation. I knew very easily 00:08:25.760 --> 00:08:32.240 that this website was a scam. There was plenty of tells beyond that. But again, 00:08:32.240 --> 00:08:36.680 I knew it was a scam. So, I just — I thought, you know, whatever. I write a blog post about 00:08:36.680 --> 00:08:42.000 it. It’s interesting that someone’s made a hitman-for-hire scam site but actually make 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:47.040 it look market and made it look real. So, I write a blog post about it and saying how this website 00:08:47.040 --> 00:08:53.200 is fake and it has stock photographs on it and bad spelling and doesn't make sense and, yeah, 00:08:53.200 --> 00:08:58.340 there you go. I add it in my body of research on darknet scams. Job done, or so I thought. 00:08:58.340 --> 00:09:04.880 JACK: The administrator of Besa Mafia — his name is Yura — was quite interested in the reputation 00:09:04.880 --> 00:09:10.760 of his site, so much so that he paid people to promote the site, where there would be Reddit 00:09:10.760 --> 00:09:15.560 posts about the site, blogs being made, and other freelancers hired to just drum up business for the 00:09:15.560 --> 00:09:20.200 site. So, if you Googled the site, you'd see all these positive reviews of the site. But 00:09:20.200 --> 00:09:26.620 then there was this one blog that Chris wrote about how that site specifically is a scam. 00:09:26.620 --> 00:09:31.680 CHRIS: So, I had pissed off the site administrator. [Music] So, 00:09:31.680 --> 00:09:37.360 he asked for a true and honest interview with me. He contacted me via my blog. I said, sure. 00:09:37.360 --> 00:09:43.800 Why does a scammer want to interview me about why his site is fake? What’s that about? Yeah, 00:09:43.800 --> 00:09:48.840 we went back and forth, and he was saying the site was real. I would shut him down. He would 00:09:48.840 --> 00:09:56.200 counter with some flimsy evidence. I would unpick it. He would get aggressive. I would show him it 00:09:56.200 --> 00:10:00.280 was a sign that he doesn't know what he’s doing — about, and he would try — he tried to pay me 00:10:00.280 --> 00:10:07.000 off. This escalates to the point of like, yeah, this guy just dug — digging himself a hole. This 00:10:07.000 --> 00:10:12.160 scammer’s trying to persuade me, the — at the time, at least, authority on darknet scams, 00:10:12.160 --> 00:10:18.120 that his site’s not a scam. It’s not gonna work. Yeah, so, I published the whole exchange on my 00:10:18.120 --> 00:10:22.000 blog. I thought, that’s alright, you know? Debunked another site; got some firsthand 00:10:22.000 --> 00:10:26.760 evidence. Done some journalism, even. There we go. Thought that would be the end of it. 00:10:26.760 --> 00:10:32.000 JACK: This was where the narrator comes in and says, it wasn’t. [Music] The site administrator, 00:10:32.000 --> 00:10:37.720 Yura, was not happy with this post and was on a mission to get Chris to remove it. If 00:10:37.720 --> 00:10:41.440 an interview with him didn’t persuade Chris, then they're going to have to take it to the 00:10:41.440 --> 00:10:47.160 next step. If you think about it, what kind of persuasive tactics could a hitman-for-hire site 00:10:47.160 --> 00:10:53.920 try next? Yeah, you got it; intimidation. The administrator hired someone to make 00:10:53.920 --> 00:10:59.680 a video to threaten Chris. So, Chris gets a message from someone with a link to a video, 00:10:59.680 --> 00:11:03.960 and Chris watches the video. It starts out on a piece of paper, and written on that piece of 00:11:03.960 --> 00:11:11.160 paper is Chris’ blog’s website, pirate.london. That’s the website address. Then they burn the 00:11:11.160 --> 00:11:19.000 piece of paper. Then the camera changes to a car being set on fire, and it’s engulfed in flames. 00:11:19.000 --> 00:11:24.200 CHRIS: Basically torching a car in order to intimidate me. So, in order to say, 00:11:24.200 --> 00:11:28.880 look at that. We're real criminals. We have people in the field. We can trivially commit 00:11:28.880 --> 00:11:38.600 acts of violence. Don’t fuck with us. I was very confused by this because this 00:11:38.600 --> 00:11:43.040 was a scammer. This was a scam site. There were no hitmen. There were no criminals, 00:11:43.040 --> 00:11:47.360 so I thought. There was just — it’s just a scam to steal money. But now I’m getting 00:11:47.360 --> 00:11:54.480 a video of a burning car? Yeah, I would say, and then it got weird. 00:11:54.480 --> 00:11:57.960 JACK: Did it feel intimidating to you? Did you feel like, 00:11:57.960 --> 00:12:02.520 wait a minute, this is — maybe I should just back down from this whole thing? 00:12:02.520 --> 00:12:07.320 CHRIS: I mean, I was a bit intimidated. I was intimidated, but bear in mind, 00:12:07.320 --> 00:12:11.960 at this time I’m making myself really into the hobby of being the darknet 00:12:11.960 --> 00:12:17.480 scam debunker guy. I was anything — I was drawn in more by this. I was like, 00:12:17.480 --> 00:12:23.120 what is going on? Have I pissed off the mafia? Is this website real? But it can't be real. So, 00:12:23.120 --> 00:12:27.000 if it’s not real, how are they getting people to torch cars? They had torched 00:12:27.000 --> 00:12:33.280 some other cars for some other people on the internet who had disrespected them as well. So, 00:12:33.280 --> 00:12:39.800 it was a whole thing going on. So, I got really — I was — yeah, I was intrigued, but I had to go on. 00:12:39.800 --> 00:12:42.040 JACK: Chris decides to play it safe, though, 00:12:42.040 --> 00:12:45.480 and he hires a lawyer and he informs the police about this threatening video. 00:12:45.480 --> 00:12:51.240 CHRIS: I’m like, okay, fine, Mr. So-Called Hitman-For-Hire Site on the Darknet. What’s 00:12:51.240 --> 00:12:57.680 going on with you? So, rather than just browsing the website at this point, I thought, well, okay, 00:12:57.680 --> 00:13:05.320 I will register on the website and see how it works. So, I registered as Boaty McBoatface 00:13:05.320 --> 00:13:11.960 because it was 2016 and Boaty McBoatface was cool. I took out a hit on Bob the Builder, the lovable 00:13:11.960 --> 00:13:18.160 children’s character, on the website. I thought, well, okay, it’s okay. The website seems to have 00:13:18.160 --> 00:13:23.520 a log-in system. It has a ordering system. It has a messaging system. It has some — and whatnot. So, 00:13:23.520 --> 00:13:29.520 it seems quite functional. There’s like — it’s got the trappings of a darknet market. So, 00:13:29.520 --> 00:13:41.720 I thought to myself, that’s weird. [Music] But I looked at my order for taking out Bob the Builder, 00:13:41.720 --> 00:13:47.200 and I looked at the address bar, and I saw that there was an ID in the address bar. At the end, 00:13:47.200 --> 00:13:50.720 it’s like, Message ID 123. I thought, okay, 00:13:50.720 --> 00:13:54.480 so that’s the message ID. I wonder if I change the message ID to something else; 00:13:54.480 --> 00:13:59.080 change it to 122. I got someone else’s messages. 121; I got someone else’s messages. 00:13:59.080 --> 00:14:08.600 JACK: What? He could see other users’ messages? Okay, I have opinions. First, let’s talk about 00:14:08.600 --> 00:14:14.440 this vulnerability. I would call this URL parameter tampering. I think that sounds cool, 00:14:14.440 --> 00:14:19.560 right, to tamper with a URL. That’s where you just change part of the URL to one number different 00:14:19.560 --> 00:14:23.760 or something to see if you could see someone else’s data. But I think the official term is 00:14:23.760 --> 00:14:29.280 insecure direct object reference. One user should never be able to access another user’s private 00:14:29.280 --> 00:14:33.600 data such as private messages like this. Yet, here it sounds like it was incredibly 00:14:33.600 --> 00:14:37.640 simple to do. A more complex approach might be that you have to go into the cookies and 00:14:37.640 --> 00:14:41.600 change which user you are, and then the site thinks you're a different user without actually 00:14:41.600 --> 00:14:46.720 validating that. But this wasn’t even that hard; he just changed one number in the URL. 00:14:46.720 --> 00:14:51.080 This vulnerability is number one on the OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities, 00:14:51.080 --> 00:14:56.080 which falls under broken access control. But I want to point out something else here. 00:14:56.080 --> 00:15:03.480 Just because you're on the dark web, just because you're on a site that is supposedly very illegal, 00:15:03.480 --> 00:15:09.160 does not mean it’s actually secure. You would think if this site was actually a place to hire 00:15:09.160 --> 00:15:16.720 a hitman that the utmost extreme privacy would be put in place, but it wasn’t. Not even close. 00:15:16.720 --> 00:15:22.800 The site was a total joke as far as security and privacy goes, and I want you to keep that frame 00:15:22.800 --> 00:15:27.680 of mind whenever you're dealing with anything with sensitive data. Your doctor, your lawyer, 00:15:27.680 --> 00:15:32.640 your bank, your tax advisor, they should all be using the utmost private way of communication, 00:15:32.640 --> 00:15:38.560 but their systems aren't always secure or private, and I just want you to think about that. 00:15:38.560 --> 00:15:46.120 If a site should be secure like a hitman-for-hire site or your therapist, 00:15:46.120 --> 00:15:52.440 maybe it’s not, just like in the case of this. Oh, and it’s kind of hilarious that 00:15:52.440 --> 00:15:58.720 Chris is basically hacking into this site, since it might technically be illegal for 00:15:58.720 --> 00:16:02.760 him to do that. But what is the owner of the site gonna do, file a police report and say, 00:16:02.760 --> 00:16:10.840 hey man, someone hacked my hitman-for-hire site? So, it seems like a safe thing to do. Anyway, 00:16:10.840 --> 00:16:15.680 this was a huge discovery for Chris, to be able to read any message on the site that 00:16:15.680 --> 00:16:20.360 other users were sending to the administrator. So, he quickly put together a little script to 00:16:20.360 --> 00:16:24.720 enumerate through all these message IDs and to save them all into a spreadsheet so he can go 00:16:24.720 --> 00:16:30.940 through and read all the messages on this hitman-for-hire website on the dark web. 00:16:30.940 --> 00:16:36.400 CHRIS: Yeah. So, I’ve downloaded over a hundred messages at this point. The website’s 00:16:36.400 --> 00:16:42.480 only been in operation for a few months here, but I’ve downloaded all the messages. [Music] 00:16:42.480 --> 00:16:47.560 I’m having my mind blown here because I’m seeing messages — not just messages for me, 00:16:47.560 --> 00:16:51.400 Boaty McBoatface. There are some trolls and some spam in there, but there are people, 00:16:51.400 --> 00:16:57.800 and they're giving names, addresses, follow-up times, where to meet them, phone numbers. I’m 00:16:57.800 --> 00:17:02.640 talking about alibis, talking about timings, negotiating payment, negotiating further payment. 00:17:02.640 --> 00:17:07.320 I’m reconstructing these on my local machine from all the messages and I’m starting to sort them out 00:17:07.320 --> 00:17:12.680 and see what’s going on. What I realize is that, yes, there’s some crap going on on the website, 00:17:12.680 --> 00:17:17.080 but there’s a subset of people who are using the website, or so they think, to get people 00:17:17.080 --> 00:17:24.640 killed and to arrange money to get people killed. Well, that’s what it looked like to me, at least. 00:17:24.640 --> 00:17:32.240 JACK: Whoa, hold on here. These messages are a bit alarming, haunting even. A user wants a 00:17:32.240 --> 00:17:37.600 certain person dead and lists their name, address, phone number, place they work, pictures of them, 00:17:37.600 --> 00:17:42.080 Facebook account, and how and when to do the murder so that this person has a good 00:17:42.080 --> 00:17:51.460 alibi? Not only that, but money is actually being sent to pay for this. This is chilling. 00:17:51.460 --> 00:17:57.200 CHRIS: I’ve mostly been completely unable and unwilling to engage in these cases emotionally, 00:17:57.200 --> 00:18:08.760 because they are really bad. I mean, I’ll quickly give a story of one case which is 00:18:08.760 --> 00:18:15.800 concluded in the news now. There is a case where someone payed $20,000 to kill — at the 00:18:15.800 --> 00:18:21.440 time — a fourteen-year-old boy in New Jersey. Interestingly enough, I never had the full 00:18:21.440 --> 00:18:29.400 details on that until it went to court. It turned out it was a online groomer who was 00:18:29.400 --> 00:18:36.120 grooming this fourteen-year-old over the internet and having them show pictures and whatnot. When 00:18:36.120 --> 00:18:40.320 he told his parents, the guy was like, oh shit, I’m gonna get in trouble here. Better 00:18:40.320 --> 00:18:45.860 have him killed. So, not only was this young boy abused; he was almost killed by this guy. 00:18:45.860 --> 00:18:50.800 JACK: An online groomer put a hit on his victim for telling his parents 00:18:50.800 --> 00:18:54.440 and then paid $20,000 to have this boy killed? Whoa, whoa, 00:18:54.440 --> 00:19:00.400 whoa. Chris can see the Bitcoin wallet address in the chat messages and is confirming that, 00:19:00.400 --> 00:19:07.040 yeah, in fact, money did get sent to the site for this. This just got way more serious and 00:19:07.040 --> 00:19:11.840 went deeper than he realized. Chris was thinking about getting help from someone. 00:19:11.840 --> 00:19:19.680 CHRIS: I met Carl in — what was it? Like, late 2016 or so. Carl, how did that go? 00:19:19.680 --> 00:19:25.840 CARL: Yes, yes. We met in late 2016 just before Christmas, not a meeting 00:19:25.840 --> 00:19:31.960 that is easy to forget. It was in a pub in Central London, and it was really busy and 00:19:31.960 --> 00:19:37.040 crowded. I’d not met Chris before, and mutual friends of ours had kinda put us in contact, 00:19:37.040 --> 00:19:41.800 and I was kind of roving around trying to write a book about power in the digital age, 00:19:41.800 --> 00:19:44.820 which sounds about as vague as it was at that point in my mind. 00:19:44.820 --> 00:19:50.320 JACK: Carl was looking for a good story and was interested to hear what Chris was working on. 00:19:50.320 --> 00:19:53.680 CARL: I’m Carl. I’m a writer and journalist. 00:19:53.680 --> 00:19:59.080 JACK: Carl and Chris talked. Carl was very interested in this, but Chris had a hard time 00:19:59.080 --> 00:20:05.280 making the connection in his head that the words written in those messages are from real people. 00:20:05.280 --> 00:20:11.520 I mean, he’s in the business of debunking things online, you know? You see so many threats online 00:20:11.520 --> 00:20:16.280 today. It’s hard to put your finger on something and say this is a real threat from a real person, 00:20:16.280 --> 00:20:20.080 but then ignoring so many other things. I mean, gosh, how many times have we all heard, Jack, 00:20:20.080 --> 00:20:25.080 if you come into the house one more time with mud on your shoes, I will kill you? Alright, 00:20:25.080 --> 00:20:28.160 maybe that’s just me, but you get my point. You hear threats to life all 00:20:28.160 --> 00:20:33.880 the time in our everyday language. But on top of that, the dark web is an anonymous place, 00:20:33.880 --> 00:20:37.520 so people really run their mouth on there thinking they're private and no 00:20:37.520 --> 00:20:42.960 one’s ever gonna know who it was. So, Chris wondered if these were real threats or not, 00:20:42.960 --> 00:20:48.440 and he made a good point. So, at the end of the meeting, Carl had a clear idea of what to do next. 00:20:48.440 --> 00:20:52.480 CARL: I kinda concluded that there was no way that I could write about any of this 00:20:52.480 --> 00:20:59.000 until the police at least had investigated whatever it was they could investigate. So, 00:20:59.000 --> 00:21:03.640 I think me and Chris have slightly different relationships to the police and thoughts about 00:21:03.640 --> 00:21:11.800 them, to put it mildly. I’d spent some time embedded in a cyber-crime investigations unit in 00:21:11.800 --> 00:21:16.120 a local police force in the UK, and I felt like I had a pretty good relationship with them and other 00:21:16.120 --> 00:21:25.080 police forces. So, I kinda broker a meeting between Chris and the National Crime Agency. 00:21:25.080 --> 00:21:28.720 JACK: So, Chris goes to this meeting, but it’s just weird from the get-go. 00:21:28.720 --> 00:21:34.640 CHRIS: [Music] Yeah, so — yeah, Carl set me up this sort of super-shady meeting 00:21:34.640 --> 00:21:39.280 with the National Crime Agency. I’m doing this clandestine meet here where I’m turning up to 00:21:39.280 --> 00:21:45.520 a location last minute, and I’m being followed. It was all very hush-hush, 00:21:45.520 --> 00:21:51.200 et cetera. But I had a successful meeting where I outlined what I had. I gave them 00:21:51.200 --> 00:21:57.440 a prioritized list of cases around the world. Saw some money being paid, the jurisdictions involved, 00:21:57.440 --> 00:22:02.520 and the seriousness, and said, look, I can't deal with this. This is — I’m just some bloke, 00:22:02.520 --> 00:22:10.360 you know? Can you please investigate these — what looks like attempted murders around the world, 00:22:10.360 --> 00:22:16.440 or at least the ones in the US or in Europe where I spent some excess. The meeting was successful. 00:22:16.440 --> 00:22:20.240 They said, great. Yes, this is brilliant. This is exactly the sort of thing we're looking for. 00:22:20.240 --> 00:22:27.080 We’ll be in touch. You know, I have no reason to doubt the words of the people who I met. I think 00:22:27.080 --> 00:22:32.480 they were — would have probably got around to doing something eventually, which would be nice. 00:22:32.480 --> 00:22:39.640 But circumstances have conspired otherwise. One of the people who was using the website back in 00:22:39.640 --> 00:22:47.780 2016 — goes under the username Dog Day God — was trying to get someone called Amy Allwine killed. 00:22:47.780 --> 00:22:53.520 JACK: Amy Allwine lived in Minnesota, and somehow the FBI got the private messages that were from 00:22:53.520 --> 00:22:59.880 the Besa Mafia website and started investigating this. [Music] The FBI had information that someone 00:22:59.880 --> 00:23:06.000 put a hit out for Amy Allwine, so they paid her a visit. When they arrived, both her and her husband 00:23:06.000 --> 00:23:10.560 were home, and they sat them both down to explain the situation. This hitman-for-hire website, 00:23:10.560 --> 00:23:17.200 Besa Mafia, someone has paid them $12,000 to have you killed. She was shocked and had no 00:23:17.200 --> 00:23:24.040 idea who was doing such a thing. Well, it was her husband who paid to have her killed, the very man 00:23:24.040 --> 00:23:28.680 who was in the room when the FBI was telling her that someone is threatening to kill you. 00:23:28.680 --> 00:23:36.560 The FBI didn’t question the husband at all. They just notified them both and left. Her husband, 00:23:36.560 --> 00:23:43.360 Stephen Allwine, was a deacon at his church, went on the darknet, bought some scopolamine, 00:23:43.360 --> 00:23:48.560 which causes a person to become very disoriented, gave her a huge dose of it, 00:23:48.560 --> 00:23:57.840 and then shot her and killed her. He then tried to stage the whole thing to look like a suicide. 00:23:57.840 --> 00:24:03.400 CARL: Then when Amy — I think this is the clearest evidence that they really weren't investigating 00:24:03.400 --> 00:24:09.880 this. When Amy was reported to the police as having committed suicide and Stephen Allwine 00:24:09.880 --> 00:24:18.160 phoned the police and said my wife shot herself, the investigating officer had no background, 00:24:18.160 --> 00:24:24.800 didn’t know that this order existed, didn’t know, I think, that Amy had been warned, 00:24:24.800 --> 00:24:31.200 and almost closed the scene down. He went to the house and he was about to declare it a 00:24:31.200 --> 00:24:37.040 suicide and about to close down the crime scene, and it was only at the last minute he paused, 00:24:37.040 --> 00:24:42.480 felt like something was wrong, and then decided to get the luminol out. So, 00:24:42.480 --> 00:24:46.680 a substance that allows him to see cleaned-up blood, and then realized the house was full of 00:24:46.680 --> 00:24:53.080 it and that Amy had been moved. Then scopolamine was found in her blood, and basically a whole 00:24:53.080 --> 00:24:58.980 tumble of additional evidence that suggested that she had been drugged and then murdered. 00:24:58.980 --> 00:25:04.240 JACK: I mean, can you imagine how differently you would investigate a suicide if you knew that 00:25:04.240 --> 00:25:10.520 someone had paid to have this lady killed? But the FBI never informed the local police when they did 00:25:10.520 --> 00:25:15.320 their investigation. Even after all that, they had a hard time finding evidence that Stephen, 00:25:15.320 --> 00:25:20.040 her husband, is who killed her. It was only after they looked at his computer and found 00:25:20.040 --> 00:25:26.080 his Bitcoin wallet was, in fact, the one that sent the money to the website. Of course, the 00:25:26.080 --> 00:25:30.440 defense attorney was trying to say, well, you only know about that transaction because you illegally 00:25:30.440 --> 00:25:34.600 hacked into the messages of that website. So, that should not be admissible to the court. 00:25:34.600 --> 00:25:38.600 CARL: Stephen Allwine was eventually convicted of first-degree murder and 00:25:38.600 --> 00:25:40.480 is currently serving life without parole. 00:25:40.480 --> 00:25:46.800 JACK: It was a tragic and awful event that the FBI bungled big time, 00:25:46.800 --> 00:25:52.600 but it gets worse. The FBI were like, man, what is this Besa Mafia site? What 00:25:52.600 --> 00:25:56.080 is going on there? Who’s running that? They wanted to take it down. 00:25:56.080 --> 00:26:02.480 CHRIS: The FBI jumped into action. What they did — they Googled the website and they — I’ve still 00:26:02.480 --> 00:26:08.840 had — have a ongoing feud with the guy behind the website, Yura. He’s paying a guy in India to write 00:26:08.840 --> 00:26:17.400 cheeky blogs about me. He’s adding my name to the metadata on the website. He’s really looking to 00:26:17.400 --> 00:26:23.360 drag my name through the mud for criticizing his website. [Music] But I don't care because, 00:26:23.360 --> 00:26:27.240 what, who’s gonna believe that I’m running a website? I’m a person; I use my own name, 00:26:27.240 --> 00:26:32.920 I have a blog, I have a job, I live in London. I’m not running some secret murder-for-hire website, 00:26:32.920 --> 00:26:38.360 you know? What sort of person would think that? Turns out, the FBI thought that, 00:26:38.360 --> 00:26:44.200 and between the FBI, they liaised with the National Crime Agency in the UK, 00:26:44.200 --> 00:26:51.200 and within literally — I think it’s a case of hours or days of this being processed by the FBI, 00:26:51.200 --> 00:26:59.360 the NCA were breaking down my door and arresting me for running this murder-for-hire website. 00:26:59.360 --> 00:27:06.720 JACK: Chris was able to get out of his arrest, but it did affect him. Clearly this Yura guy is 00:27:06.720 --> 00:27:10.960 doing a lot of work to get Chris to shut up about this website and is willing to 00:27:10.960 --> 00:27:18.840 frame him or get him arrested. Investigating this site was becoming too much of a burden. 00:27:18.840 --> 00:27:26.760 CHRIS: I did take the opportunity to quit, as having one’s door broken down and being 00:27:26.760 --> 00:27:33.680 arrested for something which is not — doesn't seem to be real would. I’m like, 00:27:33.680 --> 00:27:37.320 I’m at other shit. I’m done. [Music] They’ve handed over all my information 00:27:37.320 --> 00:27:44.740 to police. I’m like, job done. Don’t want to hear about the website again. 00:27:44.740 --> 00:27:52.880 JACK: But the more Chris and Carl thought about this, the gravity of it just started 00:27:52.880 --> 00:27:59.360 to sink in. These are very real threats to life, and already one person has been 00:27:59.360 --> 00:28:06.800 killed. They had lots of time to help Amy, but they didn’t. They could have saved her life, 00:28:06.800 --> 00:28:14.320 but they trusted law enforcement to do it instead, and that failed. So, maybe, just maybe, 00:28:14.320 --> 00:28:21.040 they can save the next person’s life. We're gonna take a short break here, but stay with us. This 00:28:21.040 --> 00:28:30.520 dark web adventure is just getting started. The police weren't completely incompetent. Carl and 00:28:30.520 --> 00:28:34.880 Chris gave the police all the messages that they found on the site, and this did lead the police 00:28:34.880 --> 00:28:38.960 to be able to find people who were planning murders, and the police were arresting people 00:28:38.960 --> 00:28:43.560 and putting them in prison. Because if you pay someone to kill someone else, that’s illegal. 00:28:43.560 --> 00:28:48.120 It’s called solicitation of murder, and you could get life in prison for doing that. Even 00:28:48.120 --> 00:28:53.320 if you're sending the money to a scam hitman who’s never gonna do it, it’s still illegal. In fact, 00:28:53.320 --> 00:28:57.040 someone who got arrested in Spain tried to give that exact defense. They were saying, this whole 00:28:57.040 --> 00:29:01.340 website was fake, so my client should not be in trouble. But they still got put in prison. 00:29:01.340 --> 00:29:09.000 CARL: Well, the initial idea was that me and Chris would do a short shot, nice, quick, kind 00:29:09.000 --> 00:29:18.240 of eight-week-long retrospective looking at the assassination market, which I — if — I’m the — by 00:29:18.240 --> 00:29:25.560 far the least-brave person talking right now, and I’m really not drawn to this sort of stuff. Quite 00:29:25.560 --> 00:29:31.240 a lot of my instinct was telling me not to go back into this world, and I had only dipped my toe in; 00:29:31.240 --> 00:29:38.520 nothing like Chris. But I did feel like — to me, it all felt that those years from 2016 onwards 00:29:38.520 --> 00:29:44.840 was very much like unfinished business. The site was still operating. The person running the site 00:29:44.840 --> 00:29:51.480 was still making money from it, and Amy Allwine had been killed. [Music] Suddenly Chris kind of 00:29:51.480 --> 00:29:58.160 brings us into a Zoom call and then tells us this kinda fateful discovery that he’s consistently 00:29:58.160 --> 00:30:04.080 in. He’s beginning to scrape these kill orders and that the site is — and that we're essentially 00:30:04.080 --> 00:30:11.080 going to be receiving them in near-real time. That was then the beginning of the Kill List. 00:30:11.080 --> 00:30:15.960 JACK: Kill List is an amazing podcast that Carl made, which 00:30:15.960 --> 00:30:20.280 pretty much starts at this point right here. With new kill orders coming in, 00:30:20.280 --> 00:30:27.120 what should they be doing about this? Chris is the dark web hacker. Carl is the investigator. 00:30:27.120 --> 00:30:33.160 CHRIS: Ultimately I was able to access the administration page on the website. So, 00:30:33.160 --> 00:30:39.040 this is the page the administrator uses to correspond with the users’ website and to 00:30:39.040 --> 00:30:45.520 scam them. So, that page can see everything on the site. There were some other pages as well; 00:30:45.520 --> 00:30:51.720 like, pages would show the payments and so on and so forth. So, once I discovered these 00:30:51.720 --> 00:31:00.560 through technical means, I basically have a small cron job. I’m pulling them down fully as is. I’m 00:31:00.560 --> 00:31:04.800 actually then building parsers, and parsing them of into their constituent components, 00:31:04.800 --> 00:31:11.280 putting them into a database, and ultimately I’m building a web-front end to categorize, 00:31:11.280 --> 00:31:16.040 browse, and — reports of each of these cases and annotate them all, 00:31:16.040 --> 00:31:22.040 which today I have. The chat in my window, my window to the right-hand side now, I have my 00:31:22.040 --> 00:31:30.560 hitman analysis website, where I have all the cases in there categorized by harm, by fraud, 00:31:30.560 --> 00:31:38.520 by country, by personal information, annotated with Facebook links, address links, phone numbers, 00:31:38.520 --> 00:31:48.600 et cetera. So — but I was able to focus on getting the data legible, clean, kind of comprehensive, 00:31:48.600 --> 00:31:58.000 and handing this over to Carl and the podcast team. So, that was a good division of labor. So, 00:31:58.000 --> 00:32:02.740 I had the technical tasks and Carl and the team had to deal with everything else. 00:32:02.740 --> 00:32:07.640 CARL: We went to the police again, the Metropolian Police. They did believe us, 00:32:07.640 --> 00:32:12.640 but there were no UK cases. They basically decided that because there were no UK cases, 00:32:12.640 --> 00:32:18.640 it wasn’t their problem, and they disclosed this kind of initial tranche of orders that Chris had 00:32:18.640 --> 00:32:26.480 compiled and handed over to us to Interpol. We thought about that for a while and thought that 00:32:26.480 --> 00:32:32.720 this is very likely to lead to additional bungled police investigations or no investigations at all. 00:32:32.720 --> 00:32:39.263 They won’t know who we are, the police. We won’t know who the investigating officers are. There 00:32:39.263 --> 00:32:44.720 will be no way for us to exchange information, and it will very likely lead to police officers — kind 00:32:44.720 --> 00:32:48.720 of in the same way that had happened with Amy Allwine — maybe receiving some kind of warning, 00:32:48.720 --> 00:32:53.760 maybe making contact, but not in any kind of position to effectively investigate, 00:32:53.760 --> 00:32:58.910 much less gather the evidence they need to actually get someone into a court room. 00:32:58.910 --> 00:33:00.960 JACK: Chris would read through these kill orders 00:33:00.960 --> 00:33:04.985 and sometimes try to figure out who it was that made the kill order. 00:33:04.985 --> 00:33:10.120 CHRIS: [Music] So, often they will approach with some brief information saying, hey, 00:33:10.120 --> 00:33:14.680 can you do this sort of service in my location? The answer’s always of course, yes, we have hitmen 00:33:14.680 --> 00:33:18.320 around the world. They can do it within one week. That’s always the answer because it’s a 00:33:18.320 --> 00:33:23.760 scam. Then they usually say — then there might be some more information like, oh yeah, well, 00:33:23.760 --> 00:33:27.920 I’m thinking of having something special. Can you give a message? Can you — in this case — do 00:33:27.920 --> 00:33:32.920 a kidnapping? Can you…? Saying something like that. Then the answer was yes, yes, 00:33:32.920 --> 00:33:39.880 we can do that. Often it’s followed up by, here’s the initial order. Here’s a name, the address, the 00:33:39.880 --> 00:33:47.600 social media, the car they drive, et cetera, et cetera, where they work, where they can be found. 00:33:47.600 --> 00:33:52.000 Often they give a bit of information about why they want the person killed, which usually gives 00:33:52.000 --> 00:33:56.120 them away. Like, oh, this person should return to their husband. It’s like, yeah, I wonder who 00:33:56.120 --> 00:34:03.680 posted that order? Or this person should be given a message; that’s for being a cheater. It’s like, 00:34:03.680 --> 00:34:10.000 oh, I wonder who that person could be. They do — that has happened sometimes. After the order, 00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:14.640 there’s further negotiations and there’s always a price, how much. It always is usually $5,000, 00:34:14.640 --> 00:34:21.360 $10,000. But it’s depending on how much money they have. Sometimes there’s negotiations about, oh, 00:34:21.360 --> 00:34:26.120 how can you make sure you don’t take the money and run? They say, oh, no, you can't take the money 00:34:26.120 --> 00:34:31.160 and run because we have an escrow system. If the hitman were to take the money, we wouldn't give 00:34:31.160 --> 00:34:35.360 — we would not — were to take the money and not do the killing, we wouldn't give them the money. 00:34:35.360 --> 00:34:40.000 So, that way you are safe. But of course the escrow system is designed to stop you from 00:34:40.000 --> 00:34:46.280 a hitman scamming you like you would a darknet drug vendor scamming you. It doesn't protect you 00:34:46.280 --> 00:34:54.680 from the site itself being a scam. Then — it even has dedicated third-party escrow sites which are 00:34:54.680 --> 00:34:59.320 independent or apparently independent, where you can go to this independent site. You can broker 00:34:59.320 --> 00:35:05.920 your illegal transaction and a third broker can handle this for you. It’s all run by him, 00:35:05.920 --> 00:35:09.920 of course, and of course he directs everyone to use this independent website, and it all uses 00:35:09.920 --> 00:35:15.120 the same back end. Then you go — say, I’ve put my money in the escrow system. It’s like, oh, 00:35:15.120 --> 00:35:21.240 I see; we’ve unlocked this. We’re now gonna send a hitman. But then of course what happens is, oh, 00:35:21.240 --> 00:35:26.600 actually, it turns out you need a higher class of hitman or you need to pay more, or the hitman went 00:35:26.600 --> 00:35:32.120 there but they failed, so you need — they make — need to pay more money, or it turns out you need 00:35:32.120 --> 00:35:38.680 — this is more complicated, so you need to pay more money. This is how it goes down in general. 00:35:38.680 --> 00:35:43.960 JACK: Chris would sometimes be able to identify who put the kill order in, 00:35:43.960 --> 00:35:48.120 because it might say something like, it’s my wife who I want killed, or something, 00:35:48.120 --> 00:35:53.280 and then they have the wife’s information in the kill order to easily figure out who did this. So, 00:35:53.280 --> 00:35:58.600 they decide to try to phone up the targets to see if they can warn them, but the FBI mishap 00:35:58.600 --> 00:36:03.760 with Amy Allwine was top of their mind. What if they call up someone and the person who’s 00:36:03.760 --> 00:36:09.080 trying to kill them answers the phone or is listening in and it just escalates the whole 00:36:09.080 --> 00:36:16.160 thing and they get someone killed? The plan was to try to call the person but then get them alone 00:36:16.160 --> 00:36:22.640 so that they can tell them this information in private. But man, how do you call someone out 00:36:22.640 --> 00:36:28.800 of the blue and try to get them to listen to the information you have, but they need to be alone 00:36:28.800 --> 00:36:35.180 first before you're gonna tell them? It sounds impossible to deal with, but Carl gave it a try. 00:36:35.180 --> 00:36:40.240 CARL: No, I don't want any information. I’m trying to give you information. 00:36:40.240 --> 00:36:43.100 VICTIM1: I’m sorry. 00:36:43.100 --> 00:36:45.920 CARL: Okay, well, thanks for your time anyway. Do give me 00:36:45.920 --> 00:36:48.960 a phone back if you'd like more information. 00:36:48.960 --> 00:36:50.280 JACK: Then he tried again. 00:36:50.280 --> 00:36:55.720 CARL: Would we be able to arrange a time to be able to talk to you at greater length about that? 00:36:55.720 --> 00:36:58.240 VICTIM2: No, thank you, thank you, thank you. 00:36:58.240 --> 00:37:05.394 CARL: Okay. So, you don’t…? [Call ends] 00:37:05.394 --> 00:37:10.120 JACK: Carl was extremely nervous on these calls. He’s got the target on the phone, 00:37:10.120 --> 00:37:13.440 which is hard to begin with, but he’s trying to be as sensitive as 00:37:13.440 --> 00:37:18.880 possible to avoid any further harm. He decides to try again to be more direct. 00:37:18.880 --> 00:37:22.240 CARL: Just — I understand you don’t want to work with me on the story. However, I am actually 00:37:22.240 --> 00:37:27.920 duty-bound to say that the information that we have might relate to you being in danger. So, 00:37:27.920 --> 00:37:32.680 I’m kind of duty-bound as a journalist to disclose it to you if you’d like me to. 00:37:32.680 --> 00:37:37.360 VICTIM3: Where? Actually, I don't have time for this, even. Even if you're 00:37:37.360 --> 00:37:42.920 asking me for a survey that has something to my relationship to the job or to professional… 00:37:42.920 --> 00:37:46.320 CARL: It’s not a survey. I’m a journalist. We’ve come across 00:37:46.320 --> 00:37:51.120 information which indicates that you might be in danger. 00:37:51.120 --> 00:37:52.440 VICTIM3: I’m in danger? 00:37:52.440 --> 00:37:52.751 CARL: Yes… 00:37:52.751 --> 00:37:55.700 VICTIM3: You're trying to protect me — leave me to face my dangers. Thank you. 00:37:55.700 --> 00:37:56.280 CARL: Okay. 00:37:56.280 --> 00:37:57.120 VICTIM3: Thank you. Bye. 00:37:57.120 --> 00:37:58.240 CARL: Goodbye. 00:37:58.240 --> 00:38:00.120 SPEAKER1: Wow. 00:38:00.120 --> 00:38:02.440 CARL: Leave me to face my dangers. 00:38:02.440 --> 00:38:03.980 SPEAKER1: He’s not having any of it. 00:38:03.980 --> 00:38:07.600 CARL: I’m very surprised by that. If someone phoned me up saying you might be in danger, 00:38:07.600 --> 00:38:09.660 I would want to know what it was regarding. 00:38:09.660 --> 00:38:10.680 SPEAKER1: Yeah. 00:38:10.680 --> 00:38:13.720 JACK: This is turning out to be a lot harder than it sounds. 00:38:13.720 --> 00:38:24.520 CARL: Absolutely. We knew the whole thing was this ethical kind of minefield. I was really 00:38:24.520 --> 00:38:29.720 afraid that I would do something which meant that I could never live with myself again. [Music] We 00:38:29.720 --> 00:38:34.160 had this information that Chris was passing us that was unbelievably powerful. I mean, 00:38:34.160 --> 00:38:39.480 it had the power to save lives and destroy them, and we didn’t know what to do. We had no real 00:38:39.480 --> 00:38:45.160 frameworks. We didn’t know what the safest thing to do often was. We were having to kind of make 00:38:45.160 --> 00:38:52.680 it up in urgency as we were going along. I didn’t — we could have made one — it’s kind of easy now 00:38:52.680 --> 00:38:57.680 to talk about all of this in retrospect, but at the time, you don’t know what’s gonna happen. 00:38:57.680 --> 00:39:02.680 You don’t know that this call’s gonna turn out okay or that person’s gonna be okay, 00:39:02.680 --> 00:39:09.040 and every single time I made that call — and remember, nine times out of ten they just hung 00:39:09.040 --> 00:39:12.960 the phone up on me or they wouldn't talk or it’d be a wrong number or something like that. 00:39:12.960 --> 00:39:17.640 But every single time I’d dial that number, I’d having — I’d be having to work myself up into 00:39:17.640 --> 00:39:23.560 this — I was working myself up into this state of mind where I thought, well, this could be the 00:39:23.560 --> 00:39:33.040 moment where I commit some ethical, crushing kind of mistake that haunts me for the rest of my life. 00:39:33.040 --> 00:39:37.760 JACK: I think it’s at this point where I was listening to Kill List that I was happy that 00:39:37.760 --> 00:39:41.480 Chris was working with Carl on this story. Like I said, I was tracking what he was working on 00:39:41.480 --> 00:39:45.360 and hoping we could talk, and I was tapping him on the shoulder again and again for years trying 00:39:45.360 --> 00:39:52.840 to get him to tell me this story. But man, Carl is an amazing journalist, and he has a whole team and 00:39:52.840 --> 00:39:58.440 seemingly he has connections all over the world to try to do something about this. I wouldn't 00:39:58.440 --> 00:40:03.880 have done even half as good of a job as what he did on Kill List. It’s truly an amazing podcast. 00:40:03.880 --> 00:40:08.840 CARL: As we're doing all this, making this extremely significant decision 00:40:08.840 --> 00:40:13.600 to contact the people on the Kill List directly, 00:40:13.600 --> 00:40:18.800 we're increasingly actually not really behaving like journalists anymore. [Music] Journalists 00:40:18.800 --> 00:40:27.520 don’t normally step into stories like that. They don’t normally contact victims and drive 00:40:27.520 --> 00:40:34.320 stories or even create them. They normally try and be as least disruptive as they possibly can, 00:40:34.320 --> 00:40:38.760 and that’s definitely not what we're doing there. So, that was also very disorienting, 00:40:38.760 --> 00:40:45.080 stepping further away from at least this anchoring professional identity that I and 00:40:45.080 --> 00:40:50.280 the team would have and becoming something else and not really having a word for it. 00:40:50.280 --> 00:40:54.874 CHRIS: Oh, you know the word for it, Carl. You don’t want to say it. 00:40:54.874 --> 00:40:56.020 CARL: Well, if you're gonna say vigilante… 00:40:56.020 --> 00:40:56.740 CHRIS: Yes. 00:40:56.740 --> 00:40:59.360 CARL: …then I don't think we were ever a vigilante 00:40:59.360 --> 00:41:03.600 'cause we were desperately trying to get the police to step in, not replace them; 00:41:03.600 --> 00:41:09.720 at least I was. We were handing over everything we did to the police. So, 00:41:09.720 --> 00:41:16.960 yeah, I never thought we were vigilantes. That wasn’t the right word in my mind for it, 00:41:16.960 --> 00:41:22.680 either. It was like some weird gap of being a really proactive journalist or investigator. 00:41:22.680 --> 00:41:26.640 JACK: You might be thinking, but Interpol is handling it. Just let them do it. But there’s 00:41:26.640 --> 00:41:30.360 a reason that they felt it was important for them to continue to do something. 00:41:30.360 --> 00:41:37.520 CARL: It was because we were thinking about this disclosure route that had just appeared where 00:41:37.520 --> 00:41:41.800 Chris was passing it to us, we were passing it to the Metropolitan Police, they were 00:41:41.800 --> 00:41:48.800 passing it to Interpol, and then Interpol would presumably pass it to the police forces around 00:41:48.800 --> 00:41:53.880 the world. There was one in Switzerland, there was one in Italy, there was one in Amsterdam, 00:41:53.880 --> 00:42:01.720 all over the place. The problem with that was that we knew that Interpol would basically denude the 00:42:01.720 --> 00:42:07.240 disclosures of any identifying information of us, and we would have no idea who the investigating 00:42:07.240 --> 00:42:13.560 officers were. So, this kind of cut or breach would happen. There would be no link. They would 00:42:13.560 --> 00:42:20.680 just receive this Word document that Chris has created, plus maybe some Bitcoin information. 00:42:20.680 --> 00:42:26.280 They would have no way as the Metropolitan Police did of actually checking to see whether I was mad 00:42:26.280 --> 00:42:33.480 or not, which they genuinely did, and we would have no way of disclosing additional information 00:42:33.480 --> 00:42:39.160 to them. Chris was passing over updates all the time. These were live conversations that 00:42:39.160 --> 00:42:43.240 were happening. So, sometimes there’d be more Bitcoin and the urgency would have changed, 00:42:43.240 --> 00:42:48.040 or a specific moment or time and place were being mentioned in the order, 00:42:48.040 --> 00:42:54.320 which would change how dangerous we thought it was. We would have no way of passing that on in 00:42:54.320 --> 00:42:59.720 a reasonably swift manner to the people on the ground that could actually do something about 00:42:59.720 --> 00:43:04.720 it. So, that’s why ultimately we decided that we needed to go to them directly. 00:43:04.720 --> 00:43:06.440 JACK: While investigating all this, 00:43:06.440 --> 00:43:09.880 they would run into news articles that would chill them to their bones. 00:43:09.880 --> 00:43:14.240 CHRIS: There’s many instance and many cases — I’m sure we’d probably touch on as many as you like, 00:43:14.240 --> 00:43:20.000 but we’ll be pressed for time here. For example, there was one case where there was a hit against 00:43:20.000 --> 00:43:28.000 this young man in America and a couple — someone paid $5,000 to kill him. Two weeks later he’s dead 00:43:28.000 --> 00:43:33.880 by gunshot, a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Was there insurance involved? Was there foul play? 00:43:33.880 --> 00:43:40.120 It was hard to say. I won't go into too much of this, but during the course of our investigation, 00:43:40.120 --> 00:43:45.240 there was one of these major cases come through where someone paid a hell of a lot of money to 00:43:45.240 --> 00:43:53.280 have someone killed, and again, within weeks, that person was killed. With information like that plus 00:43:53.280 --> 00:43:59.280 all the rest of the information which always gives the hideous backstories on people’s story 00:43:59.280 --> 00:44:06.080 of stalking, of drugging, of coercive behavior or marital breakdown or relationship breakdown, 00:44:06.080 --> 00:44:13.600 of people sending death threats, people putting hidden cameras, people really ruining lives; 00:44:13.600 --> 00:44:17.960 we realized that this is — it’s really horrific, this stuff, and I just happened 00:44:17.960 --> 00:44:25.680 to have this sneak peek into the worst of it, as does Carl. Yeah, it’s very, very hard to digest. 00:44:25.680 --> 00:44:28.080 JACK: All this just adds a level of urgency to it all. 00:44:28.080 --> 00:44:33.280 CARL: So, I phone maybe a dozen people, maybe two dozen over about the course of 00:44:33.280 --> 00:44:40.427 about a week, maybe a bit longer, and it is dramatically unsuccessful. Everyone thinks… 00:44:40.427 --> 00:44:41.680 CHRIS: Carl, Carl, don’t say that. 00:44:41.680 --> 00:44:46.880 CARL: No, it is. It really is. It doesn't work. Everyone thinks I’m a scammer. It turns out we 00:44:46.880 --> 00:44:52.520 were solving the wrong problem. So, we thought the problem was going to be how to reach them safely 00:44:52.520 --> 00:44:58.880 over the phone, how to disclose in a way that wasn’t going to crater them psychologically. The 00:44:58.880 --> 00:45:04.400 actual problem was that no one was gonna believe me. So, people would hang up. They’d phone back 00:45:04.400 --> 00:45:09.640 with their friends and they’d prank me and they’d pretend it’s a big joke. More often than not, 00:45:09.640 --> 00:45:13.240 they literally just don’t pick up the phone, though. This is in the middle of Covid, remember, 00:45:13.240 --> 00:45:18.320 so people are kinda getting scam calls all the time. So, we change up what we do, 00:45:18.320 --> 00:45:24.640 and we decide to send out local journalists on the ground [Music] to physically go and try to 00:45:24.640 --> 00:45:31.200 reach the people that were on the lists, and that really changes things. So we — it’s only then, 00:45:31.200 --> 00:45:37.080 really, that we begin to make meaningful contact, reach people, be believed, 00:45:37.080 --> 00:45:42.560 and begin to kind of develop the next phase in the Kill List, really, which is talking to them, 00:45:42.560 --> 00:45:45.620 supporting them, and working with the police to try and find out who put them on the list. 00:45:45.620 --> 00:45:49.240 JACK: The podcast Kill List does an amazing job of documenting their adventure, 00:45:49.240 --> 00:45:53.040 calling people, talking with police, going to houses, talking with Yura, 00:45:53.040 --> 00:45:56.680 even. It’s a wild adventure and you really should go and listen to it. But one person 00:45:56.680 --> 00:46:00.520 in particular that they contacted stuck with me. They discovered that there’s 00:46:00.520 --> 00:46:05.300 this guy named Ron Ilg who paid for the murder of his wife in Spokane, Washington. 00:46:05.300 --> 00:46:08.040 CHRIS: Okay, yeah, so, obviously I’m the first person to see this, 00:46:08.040 --> 00:46:12.720 and I’m actually — I actually worked out his identity because not — this guy is a neonatal 00:46:12.720 --> 00:46:22.600 surgeon. He’s literally a surgeon for babies. He’s also looking to break the hands of a surgeon. 00:46:22.600 --> 00:46:31.400 It’s like — and he’s paying something upward of $50,000 for this. He’s got multiple-step plans 00:46:31.400 --> 00:46:36.800 of when the kidnapping should take place and taking photographs of it and how she should be 00:46:36.800 --> 00:46:44.200 brainwashed and how she should be broken and where she should be taken to and how he will get to see 00:46:44.200 --> 00:46:52.360 the information about this whilst remaining at a distance. It’s — I don't usually use this word, 00:46:52.360 --> 00:47:01.600 but it’s sick and it’s messed up. In his mind, when he paid that $50,000, it’s very much real. 00:47:01.600 --> 00:47:13.360 He was gonna do this. I was able to quickly work out between these identities of these women, 00:47:13.360 --> 00:47:18.280 and this surgeon mentioned that the person who seemed related to them was this character called 00:47:18.280 --> 00:47:26.960 Ron Ilg. This is sort of information I send up — send over to Carl and the team. I’m like, 00:47:26.960 --> 00:47:32.680 this guy — they gotta do something about it. Are the FBI working — helping at this point? 00:47:32.680 --> 00:47:39.120 Are they gonna do something? Because this is just crazy. This is just — I can't believe 00:47:39.120 --> 00:47:46.480 this guy is going around making his plans and no one’s taking it seriously. That’s terrible. 00:47:46.480 --> 00:47:51.280 JACK: In addition to that, Chris is seeing that this guy, Ron Ilg, is trying to get his 00:47:51.280 --> 00:47:58.466 wife addicted to opioids so she’ll call off the divorce proceedings. He seems extra diabolical. 00:47:58.466 --> 00:48:03.640 CARL: [Music] Chris’ subject in the e-mails would normally be New Payer, which would always cause 00:48:03.640 --> 00:48:07.800 my heart to sink a little bit, and — but this one stood out from the very beginning for all 00:48:07.800 --> 00:48:14.880 the reasons Chris has already said. There was a bonus structure. The guy had literally already 00:48:14.880 --> 00:48:21.040 loaded in all the money for a whole series of things that had to happen to Jennifer, 00:48:21.040 --> 00:48:27.120 which were all about the use of drugs and they were all about control. It was — it stood out 00:48:27.120 --> 00:48:31.480 for that. It stood out actually weirdly and grotesquely because it wasn’t about murder, 00:48:31.480 --> 00:48:35.760 which somehow made it worse. But then it also stood out because of the amount of money, 00:48:35.760 --> 00:48:43.880 huge amount of money being paid. It was the largest payment. So, we reach out and get hold 00:48:43.880 --> 00:48:52.920 of Jennifer and speak to her and realize that she’s in the middle of a kind of relationship 00:48:52.920 --> 00:48:59.800 which she’s leaving, which is — involves Ron who’s very dangerously spiraling out 00:48:59.800 --> 00:49:06.840 of control. He seems to have some extremely worrying behaviors to do with control. He’d 00:49:06.840 --> 00:49:15.280 probably been tracking her. He’d been allegedly putting drugs into her drink. There was another 00:49:15.280 --> 00:49:21.240 woman in the marriage that he’d kept in a septic tank under his house. It was horrifying. 00:49:21.240 --> 00:49:26.080 CHRIS: I think the septic tank was more of a — I don't think it was a 00:49:26.080 --> 00:49:31.020 Hannibal-Lecter situation per say. It was more of a temporary BDSM handle… 00:49:31.020 --> 00:49:35.760 CARL: Well, he dressed the whole thing up as BDSM. He dressed all of this controlling behavior up as, 00:49:35.760 --> 00:49:43.680 hey, this is just my kink. Yeah, he let — the woman wasn’t in there the whole time. It was part 00:49:43.680 --> 00:49:51.840 of a — he had a dungeon, I believe, in his house. It was just all coming together as a man who was 00:49:51.840 --> 00:49:57.920 really, really, really committed to controlling the women he was in a relationship with and didn’t 00:49:57.920 --> 00:50:08.560 seem to be able to deal with his wife leaving. This was the kind of the first time the FBI really 00:50:08.560 --> 00:50:17.160 moved in, and we could see an investigation kind of rolling out. So, Ron left for Mexico 00:50:17.160 --> 00:50:27.120 on the day that Jennifer was to be kidnapped, possibly as a alibi. Who knows? When he returned, 00:50:27.120 --> 00:50:33.000 there were ten FBI agents waiting for him in the airport undercover. So, he lands; he’s immediately 00:50:33.000 --> 00:50:44.280 interviewed. His house is being searched at the same time. He makes quite a serious error. In a 00:50:44.280 --> 00:50:50.920 thumbprint safe in his house, a safe that only he could access, there is a sticky note, and on that 00:50:50.920 --> 00:50:59.180 sticky note is both his username and the password for the site that Chris has been surveiling. 00:50:59.180 --> 00:51:02.360 JACK: Okay, and the police are able to get in the safe and see that. 00:51:02.360 --> 00:51:08.310 CARL: They do. They drive him to his own house and he opens the safe for them. 00:51:08.310 --> 00:51:11.020 JACK: Hm. Yeah, and then, so what happens to him? 00:51:11.020 --> 00:51:19.560 CARL: Well, he’s released by the police that night. He makes a suicide attempt, 00:51:19.560 --> 00:51:24.960 quite a serious one, as I understand it, I think that night or the next day, 00:51:24.960 --> 00:51:30.820 and is then placed under protective — well, he’s place under custody and then arrested when he… 00:51:30.820 --> 00:51:35.200 CHRIS: I just want to say that really upset me that he tried to kill himself. I’d got into 00:51:35.200 --> 00:51:39.840 this to stop people being murdered, and even if horrible people try and kill themselves over this, 00:51:39.840 --> 00:51:43.880 this is not what I want. I want to make the world a better place, and it’s not always 00:51:43.880 --> 00:51:48.520 clear whether I’m achieving that, though ultimatley in this case, I think I did. 00:51:48.520 --> 00:51:53.600 JACK: But Ron is not confessing to anything. He’s pleading innocent and is working tirelessly 00:51:53.600 --> 00:51:58.120 to try to make a case to free him. It’s a long story and we don’t have time to go into it all. 00:51:58.120 --> 00:52:05.200 CARL: But he’s now convicted and sentenced and is in prison for a pretty significant stretch. 00:52:05.200 --> 00:52:11.360 CHRIS: I think about eight years. 00:52:11.360 --> 00:52:13.160 JACK: [Music] It’s wins like this where they can 00:52:13.160 --> 00:52:18.200 get a dangerous person put in prison that makes it all seem worthwhile. 00:52:18.200 --> 00:52:24.280 CARL: The Kill List, this whole experience, has been a very difficult one. It’s had some 00:52:24.280 --> 00:52:28.960 very bleak, very dark moments, but it’s also got those moments of feeling like 00:52:28.960 --> 00:52:33.320 it’s really meaningful and worthwhile, and the sentencing and conviction of 00:52:33.320 --> 00:52:39.160 Ron and Jennifer’s emergence from that has definitely been for me, anyway, one of those. 00:52:39.160 --> 00:52:43.120 JACK: So, it was 2020 when they started taking action on these kill orders, 00:52:43.120 --> 00:52:47.800 and they’ve been documenting it all along. There’s just so many cases that they researched. 00:52:47.800 --> 00:52:51.074 CHRIS: I still feel it barely scratches the surface. 00:52:51.074 --> 00:52:51.187 CARL: Yeah. 00:52:51.187 --> 00:52:51.760 CHRIS: Well, I have. 00:52:51.760 --> 00:52:57.320 JACK: It really does. This current situation, what’s happening now with 00:52:57.320 --> 00:53:01.400 the site? Is it still operational or has it been shut down by the police, or what? 00:53:01.400 --> 00:53:06.920 CHRIS: There were a series of arrests in Romania which — of the site operators or at least people 00:53:06.920 --> 00:53:13.480 affiliated with them. I believe the US authorities had something to do with that. Following that 00:53:13.480 --> 00:53:18.560 instant of the remaining arrests, the website had underwent technical changes. It was shut down for 00:53:18.560 --> 00:53:25.280 a bit. It came back again. I intermittently lost bits of access until we reached the point now 00:53:25.280 --> 00:53:32.080 where I have almost no access. So, I’ve had no new cases come in for the last year and a bit, 00:53:32.080 --> 00:53:40.760 but in that period we have seen basically arrests from the website in the US and 00:53:40.760 --> 00:53:48.200 Switzerland and Austria. So, we have evidence that some law enforcement agency or other is 00:53:48.200 --> 00:53:53.520 either cooperating with or has infiltrated the website and is making some arrests. 00:53:53.520 --> 00:53:55.640 JACK: Of the people who run the website. 00:53:55.640 --> 00:54:00.120 CHRIS: No; people using the website. The website continues to operate and for all I know, 00:54:00.120 --> 00:54:04.760 continues to scam people out of money and continues to enrich Romanian scammers. 00:54:04.760 --> 00:54:08.280 JACK: You talked to the admin of the site 00:54:08.280 --> 00:54:14.945 over chat. What is the reason why they run this or do this? 00:54:14.945 --> 00:54:18.600 CHRIS: [Music] He’s just a scammer. I believe he used to be a carder, 00:54:18.600 --> 00:54:24.040 someone who deals with stolen financial data and whatnot, and was familiar with darknet 00:54:24.040 --> 00:54:31.560 scams. He told me that he saw a niche for doing believable darknet scams. He didn’t tell me; 00:54:31.560 --> 00:54:40.520 he told a persona. It was — had it taken over at the time. But yeah, he just thought there was a 00:54:40.520 --> 00:54:47.840 niche for a believable, effective darknet murder scam to be lucrative, and he’s not wrong. There 00:54:47.840 --> 00:54:52.920 are some other sites out there doing this, but I believe he’s the most successful financially, 00:54:52.920 --> 00:55:00.000 the most searched and optimized, has the highest traffic, the highest number of users. Considering 00:55:00.000 --> 00:55:10.000 he’s been at this since 2016 and dealing money in Bitcoin, he will be a multimillionaire by now. 00:55:10.000 --> 00:55:16.640 Here’s me going along, you know, basically with legal fees and doing this in my evenings 00:55:16.640 --> 00:55:24.480 and the like. It’s not really — you know, it’s been hard to keep it up. But yeah, 00:55:24.480 --> 00:55:31.920 it’s still going on. People say, oh, but what if you get him? What if you get him? 00:55:31.920 --> 00:55:36.680 Won't it be over? I’m like, no, it wouldn't be over, because I’m on — I’ve been on the 00:55:36.680 --> 00:55:41.520 website for years. They delete the messages as they go along. So, you seize the website; 00:55:41.520 --> 00:55:45.400 you don’t get years back of messages. You get very little. I’m the only one with the years’ 00:55:45.400 --> 00:55:52.800 worth of messages. So, unfortunately there’s gonna be no end to it in terms of the website 00:55:52.800 --> 00:56:02.360 getting shut down. For me, this is only over when I’ve actioned the remainder of Kill List. 00:56:02.360 --> 00:56:09.400 JACK: The way that dark web websites work is that they're designed to be private. 00:56:09.400 --> 00:56:13.760 You can't tell where the website is hosted or where it is in the world, 00:56:13.760 --> 00:56:18.280 so you really need to wait for the website administrator to screw up 00:56:18.280 --> 00:56:23.440 and reveal something about themselves in order to take the thing down. So, this whole time, 00:56:23.440 --> 00:56:28.960 the only thing they can do is just keep blogging and podcasting and publishing articles about the 00:56:28.960 --> 00:56:34.520 site being a scam. But there was no way for them or even the police to take this website down, 00:56:34.520 --> 00:56:38.740 since they don’t have enough information to know who’s running it or where it’s hosted. 00:56:38.740 --> 00:56:43.160 CARL: Well, I think the story profoundly changed the lives of all of the people that were involved, 00:56:43.160 --> 00:56:50.680 like me, Chris, Caroline, everyone. It kind of — it did everything. It was and 00:56:50.680 --> 00:56:58.640 is the most — for me, anyway, by far the most important, meaningful, worrying, 00:56:58.640 --> 00:57:08.600 sometimes isolated and disgustingly-urgent work that I’ve ever found myself having to do. It 00:57:08.600 --> 00:57:16.800 started a thing back then in 2020 which is — it’s still going now. People are still going through 00:57:16.800 --> 00:57:22.400 court cases. People are still in danger. It’s the most important thing I’ll ever work on, I’m sure, 00:57:22.400 --> 00:57:26.160 and I really, really hope, actually, that I don't have to do anything like this ever again. 00:57:26.160 --> 00:57:31.920 JACK: Chris has lost access to the private messages on the site in 2023, 00:57:31.920 --> 00:57:36.480 which means they haven't seen any new kill orders come in since then, which for Carl, 00:57:36.480 --> 00:57:42.560 at least, means he’s stepped away from investigating more cases. But Chris still 00:57:42.560 --> 00:57:47.840 feels there’s old kill orders that are still worth looking into, so he continues to make 00:57:47.840 --> 00:57:53.145 it his duty to investigate every single person who’s on the list. 00:57:53.145 --> 00:57:56.600 CHRIS: [Music] Again, I don't think people believe that I’m still doing this by myself. 00:57:56.600 --> 00:58:02.400 They’d rather believe some comforting truth that no one uses these websites or it’s all in hand and 00:58:02.400 --> 00:58:08.560 nothing can be done, but that’s not the case at all. There are people being murdered on the list 00:58:08.560 --> 00:58:14.280 right now who I haven't got to in time, you know? There’s probably dozens of people on the list who 00:58:14.280 --> 00:58:25.160 are dead, and of those, half of them I could have saved. I feel like people need to know this and, 00:58:25.160 --> 00:58:33.500 I don't know, I would like some support in this, but it’s a difficult position I’m still in. 00:58:33.500 --> 00:58:38.920 JACK: To date, they have seen over 900 people show up on the kill list, 00:58:38.920 --> 00:58:44.000 and they’ve taken action on hundreds of them. For the most part, Chris does it alone now. He 00:58:44.000 --> 00:58:49.000 sometimes hires private investigators to help him, but that’s expensive, and since his work leads to 00:58:49.000 --> 00:58:54.240 more arrests than if the police simply handled it by themselves, it uniquely positions him to 00:58:54.240 --> 00:59:00.040 do good in the world. He’s a bit disappointed that there aren't more journalists or police that are 00:59:00.040 --> 00:59:04.720 taking him seriously that want to work with him to help him. But since he knows lives are 00:59:04.720 --> 00:59:11.600 at stake here and he has all kinds of information on them, he can't simply ignore it and walk away. 00:59:11.600 --> 00:59:15.000 To follow the latest on what Chris is doing, you can visit his website, 00:59:15.000 --> 00:59:20.280 which is pirate.london. I should probably tell you something. In my research for this episode, 00:59:20.280 --> 00:59:24.880 I have discovered that every single hitman-for-hire website on the internet 00:59:24.880 --> 00:59:30.280 has been fake. Most are operated by scammers. Some are operated by the police. But what’s 00:59:30.280 --> 00:59:36.240 more is that hitmen in general are pretty much a myth. One of the things I did to prep for 00:59:36.240 --> 00:59:40.840 this episode was to watch the movie Hit Man by Richard Linklater. It’s based off a true 00:59:40.840 --> 00:59:46.480 story of a fake hitman, and even in the movie, they say hitmen aren't real. Take a listen. 00:59:46.480 --> 00:59:53.120 GARY: [Music] People feel almost disappointed to learn that hitmen don’t really exist. This idea 00:59:53.120 --> 00:59:57.680 that there are people out there at a retail level you can just hire to eliminate your 00:59:57.680 --> 01:00:04.240 worst relationship issues or facilitate some money scam or the usual combination of both, 01:00:04.240 --> 01:00:09.680 it’s a total pop-culture fantasy. But because hitmen have been a staple of books, movies, 01:00:09.680 --> 01:00:15.440 and TV for the last fifty years, good luck getting anyone to believe their existence is all a myth. 01:00:15.440 --> 01:00:22.200 JACK: Hollywood really has planted this idea in our head that seems impossible for us to undo. So, 01:00:22.200 --> 01:00:28.800 I urge you to be skeptical of any such idea. But I also want to say that if 01:00:28.800 --> 01:00:34.520 your relationship with someone has gotten so bad that you want them killed, you need to 01:00:34.520 --> 01:00:40.920 get outta there. You're not acting like you, you know? That’s your emotions that have taken over, 01:00:40.920 --> 01:00:46.320 and you won't be happy with yourself until you find peace. You need to find yourself again. 01:00:46.320 --> 01:00:50.920 Killing someone isn't going to give you the peace you think it will. You need to remember 01:00:50.920 --> 01:00:58.320 what makes you happy and seek that instead of violence. It’s sometimes hard to see the light 01:00:58.320 --> 01:01:05.520 at the end of a tunnel during bad relationships or big breakups, but the future is so much brighter 01:01:05.520 --> 01:01:16.080 than you realize. Don’t let them turn you into a monster. You're not a monster. Dig deep and 01:01:16.080 --> 01:01:25.920 find the strength to rise above it and be that amazing person that you actually are. 01:01:25.920 --> 01:01:30.640 (Outro): [Outro music] A big thank you to Chris Monteiro and Carl Miller for sharing 01:01:30.640 --> 01:01:34.960 this incredible story with us. I highly urge you to go find and listen to their podcast, 01:01:34.960 --> 01:01:39.760 Kill List. The phone calls with the victims are incredible. There’s one lady that they call up and 01:01:39.760 --> 01:01:43.120 they tell her, hey, your life might be in danger, and she just laughs and she’s like, oh, it’s 01:01:43.120 --> 01:01:48.160 probably my husband, but don't worry, he’d never harm me. It’s just wild to hear how these people 01:01:48.160 --> 01:01:53.280 react to such news, so go check out the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and also keep up 01:01:53.280 --> 01:02:00.200 to date with what Chris is doing by visiting his blog. Pirate.london is the website. Hey, if you 01:02:00.200 --> 01:02:08.320 want to listen to this show ad-free or if you want bonus episodes, I’ve got eleven bonus episodes now 01:02:08.320 --> 01:02:14.800 available for you to listen to right now. All you gotta do is go to plus.darknetdiaries.com. 01:02:14.800 --> 01:02:23.360 That’s plus.darknetdiaries.com. This episode is created by me, the neon spectre, Jack Rhysider. 01:02:23.360 --> 01:02:28.720 Our editor is the glitch guy, Tristan Ledger, sound design by the executable Andrew Meriwether, 01:02:28.720 --> 01:02:33.720 mixing by Proximity Sound. Our intro music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. 01:02:33.720 --> 01:02:43.080 My computer is so broke. It ran out of cache. This is Darknet Diaries.