
Click Here to Kill - self
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/01/click-here-to-kill-dark-web-hitman/
======
cryptozeus
Jesus that was crazy to read...this guy is doing god’s work “There is just one
reason that a local police department in Minnesota was aware that someone had
paid an obscure site on the dark web to have one of its teenage residents
killed, and that reason is Chris Monteiro. Monteiro, a systems administrator
who runs I.T. security for a midsize firm in London, spends his nights as a
white-hat hacker and independent cybercrime researcher, navigating the shadowy
spaces of the dark web. Murder marketplaces have in recent years become both
his signature area of expertise and his exhausting burden”

Imagine you can pay in bitcoin where AI drone and carry out the hit...all
anonymous

~~~
LyndsySimon
Now imagine trying to be a politician in that hypothetical world. Make _one_
person angry enough to kill you, and you die.

If you haven’t, I recommend reading “Assassination Politics” by Jim Bell. It’s
an interesting though exercise.

~~~
krapp
> Now imagine trying to be a politician in that hypothetical world. Make one
> person angry enough to kill you, and you die.

Politicians already more or less live in that world... it's why they no longer
ride in convertibles with the windows down.

~~~
barry-cotter
The level of political violence in the US is so low that every time antifa and
Proud Boys have a rumble it’s national news. If there was a real political
violence problem every governor, senator and congressman would have their own
security detail. Supreme Court justices sure as hell wouldn’t take public
transport in DC.

~~~
krapp
And I'm arguing that adding drones and crypto isn't going to move the needle
very far. The US already has the Second Amendment, a thoroughly armed populace
and a deeply ingrained cultural belief in the necessity of political violence
to a free state (watering the "Tree of Liberty" and such.)

Violence isn't going to explode exponentially merely because an efficient
market forms to enable it - if that were the case, the US _would_ already be
knee deep in blood, because having that is literally baked into its system as
a feature.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The key here is _anonymous_ market. Random "well-armed" individual
contemplating a political assassination is most likely considering it as a
suicide attack. An easy-to-use anonymous assassination market would be a
qualitative change here.

~~~
krapp
That still assumes there is a large and untapped consumer base of potential
assassins out there who are only not killing politicians because doing so
isn't easy enough or anonymous.

People like Jim Bell assume everyone is as sociopathic as they are, but most
people aren't. Everyone hates politicians, the government, taxes, etc, but
most people aren't willing to kill even if they can get technically away with
it. Meanwhile, the personality type willing to commit political violence to
begin with is already radicalized enough in their beliefs to likely be willing
to risk being caught, even if only for the notoriety. There's no real "casual"
market, here.

Then, when you consider the fact that most such sites will always be either
honeypots or scams, and the fact that people make OPSEC mistakes all the time
(DPR,) meaning people _will_ be caught (and thus, people will _know_ that it's
possible to be caught,) then it doesn't seem as qualitative a change as it
initially appears.

~~~
LyndsySimon
> That still assumes there is a large and untapped consumer base of potential
> assassins out there who are only not killing politicians because doing so
> isn't easy enough or anonymous.

I don’t think it does.

Consider that the purpose of a marketplace is to connect people who want to
produce a good or service with those who want to consume it. Right now, there
is a disconnect between “people who want to kill <public figure>” and “people
who are willing to kill <public figure>”. A market would change that dynamic.

> People like Jim Bell assume everyone is as sociopathic as they are, but most
> people aren't. Everyone hates politicians, the government, taxes, etc, but
> most people aren't willing to kill even if they can get technically away
> with it. Meanwhile, the personality type willing to commit political
> violence to begin with is already radicalized enough in their beliefs to
> likely be willing to risk being caught, even if only for the notoriety.
> There's no real "casual" market, here.

A market would require two parties: someone who cares enough to pay, and
someone who needs the money enough to do it.

If payments are truly anonymous and untraceable, then I’m sure that there are
_plenty_ of people and entities out there willing to post the bounty.

If payments are ensured and publicly verifiable, then the consumer here isn’t
an “assassin” - it’s someone who needs money badly. Someone who is suicidal
but wants to set their family up for life, for instance - or someone who has
been diagnosed with a terminal illness and sees claiming an assassination
contract as a means of ensuring that their family is taken care of after
they’re gone.

At any rate, it’s all in the essay. At the end of the day it’s just a thought
exercise.

------
mrandish
Since this kind of scam "murder for hire" site has been around the dark web
for a while and apparently, there are people dumb enough to pay them
something, one would hope that various law enforcement agencies have set up
fake sites and are harvesting erstwhile 'clients'.

However, based on the article, there's an apparent lack of law enforcement
interest due to jurisdictional challenges. Perhaps it's also harder to get
govt funding for something as 'routine' as attempted murder vs headline fodder
like pedos.

I imagine there might be an opportunity for a reality TV producer to create a
"To Catch a Murderer" show along the lines of "To Catch a Predator." Once they
have a real 'client', they could let the client know a date and time for which
they'll need an alibi and then suggest a nearby location that has video
surveillance by which the would-be client can establish their presence.

That creates an oppty for the host of the show to approach the client at the
alibi location, ostensibly to return the client's money because there are
'problems' with the hit. The ensuing conversation would likely lead to some
high ratings as well as broadcast-quality, multi-angle indictment evidence.

~~~
flafla2
> one would hope that various law enforcement agencies have set up fake sites
> and are harvesting erstwhile 'clients'

This is entrapment, and is therefore highly illegal and in my opinion immoral
as well.

~~~
muddi900
Given that FBI is famous for catching terrorists 'red-handed' with bombs they
provided, who were recruited to commit terrorist acts by FBI agents, and
sometimes are mentally ill, I'd say the standard for entrapment is quite high.

~~~
2fast4you
Are you sure that’s real? If so, do you links to further reading?

~~~
goatsi
This is a good read: [https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-
plot...](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-plot-against-
occupy-187832/)

------
excalibur
> In June 2018, news came of a second death from the kill list. Twenty-one-
> year-old Bryan Njoroge was found dead in Indiana, shot in the head on a
> baseball field. The police ruled the death a suicide. Weeks earlier, a user
> with the alias Toonbib had paid around $5,500 to order his murder and
> provided details of his upcoming travel. Njoroge was a U.S. military
> serviceman who, before he died, had made a female friend the beneficiary of
> his life-insurance policy. His father questions whether the death was a
> suicide, but the local police department has said that it is aware of the
> dark-web assassination order and stands by its conclusion.

It's possible that the police know something the father does not. I would not
put it past a suicidal person to order a hit on himself.

~~~
thebean11
Ordering a hit on yourself doesn't really make it a suicide, someone has still
committed murder

~~~
ksdale
I know nothing of the particulars of this case, but a person could order a
fake hit and then kill themselves in order to make it _look_ like a murder to
ensure the life insurance payout.

~~~
excalibur
I mean maybe, if you thought the hit was real and were disappointed when
nothing happened you might go that route.

~~~
ksdale
Or if you fully intended to commit suicide and were only interested in a hit
as a way to make sure the insurance pays out.

Trying to make sure someone gets a life insurance pay out is a really common
feature of a lot of stories about suicide.

~~~
sfkdjf9j3j
Most life insurance policies actually do cover suicide.

~~~
paggle
After 2 years.

~~~
naniwaduni
Remember to check the terms of your contract, folks!

------
paulpauper
>Now it’s easy to purchase bitcoins on any number of mainstream markets and
“tumble” them so that their point of purchase is obscured. Similarly, thanks
to Tor, accessing the dark web requires only opening a browser and enduring
slower download speeds.

lol has the author tried buying bitcoins and then tumbling them? I would not
call submitting tons of ID to buy and withdrawal $5000 of bitcoin and then
setting up tor and getting a tumbler working to be easy, and not getting
scammed in the process. Also tor and tumblers are not necessarily fully
anonymous.

~~~
bilbo0s
> _Also tor and tumblers are not necessarily fully anonymous_

Money quote right there.

I'm not sure how many people consider using this sort of thing to skirt the
law. But believing in the anonymity of anything on the internet _while_ you're
skirting the law has landed many a naive person in prison. Especially if that
person was within the jurisdictional reach of the US government.

~~~
mirimir
Bitcoin Fog did pretty well during its run. It mixed Bitcoin from at least two
_huge_ thefts. At least one of them generated a huge Reddit crowd-sourced
tracking effort. And as far as I know, nothing was ever tracked.

I do get that Monero is ~anonymous by design.

But then, how does one buy it anonymously? All I see are exchanges that
implement KYC. Using bank transfers and credit/debit cards. Are there any cash
by mail exchanges? Or even local meatspace exchanging?

~~~
obituary_latte
There are atm machines popping up where you can go and deposit cash to get
btc. They typically have phone number requirements for transactions under
$3000 (over requires ID) and they are located in places with cameras (e.g. gas
stations/convenience stores), but those restrictions are easily worked around
(burner phone/pay a homeless person/disguise) if you have the desire.

------
ogoffart
I've read another article related to this about a year ago:

"The unbelievable tale of a fake hitman, a kill list, a darknet vigilante...
and a murder": [https://www.wired.co.uk/article/kill-list-dark-web-
hitmen](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/kill-list-dark-web-hitmen)

HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18767657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18767657)

------
lrobinovitch
This was a really interesting and worthwhile read despite the two pop ups.

The Beau Brigham case mentioned is sad[0]...guy seems to have been given a
shit lot in life (bedridden with illness for 5 years), payed a token $3.50 for
an assassination attempt on his stepmother, then received 3 years in jail. No
one should allow their frustrations to build up to actionable murderous intent
but you I can't help feel for the guy to some extent. 3 years in jail is
probably not the sort of help he needed.

That article also mentions how Monteiro is a registered sex offender related
to child pornography. This article[1] goes in to more detail, stating that
Monteiro had "58 images of child pornography on his computer, most of which he
created" and that "he committed illegal acts in order to access content on the
dark web. Monteiro said he compromised and shut down websites while obtaining
information about the case". Seems like these child porn sites require users
to generate content to gain and maintain access.

Hard to tell from the testimony the intent and extent of good or harm Monteiro
did around the child porn stuff. There should really be more published details
around the sex offender registry - did someone swap nudes with their underage
girlfriend or actively film abuse of their kids? There is a massive
difference.

Regardless, Monteiro is doing awesome work around the murder for hire
business. Really tricky field to navigate, and seemingly quite taxing and
unrewarding. He published this cool public data on murder for hire statistics
here [2]

[0] [https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/08/15/jury-finds-beau-
brigham...](https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/08/15/jury-finds-beau-brigham-
guilty-of-trying-to-hire-a-hitman/) [1]
[https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/07/31/key-witness-in-slo-
murd...](https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/07/31/key-witness-in-slo-murder-for-
hire-trial-admits-to-being-sex-offender/) [2]
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AICLS8bS6Kh4GgRTWkSf...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AICLS8bS6Kh4GgRTWkSfBe96cKHWwf8EPYiFc3pcgMY/edit#gid=0)

------
neonate
[https://web.archive.org/web/20191212221610/https://harpers.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191212221610/https://harpers.org/archive/2020/01/click-
here-to-kill-dark-web-hitman/)

[https://outline.com/y7DM9v](https://outline.com/y7DM9v)

[http://archive.is/DHAg6](http://archive.is/DHAg6)

------
eindiran
The Wired article on the original Silk Road back in 2012 was responsible for
driving a huge amount of traffic to the site. Harper's has a smaller
readership than Wired and fewer people are interested in pursuing hits than
getting high (hopefully), so maybe that won't happen here, but I worry that
the article will put these forums on people's radars. Thankfully the clearnet
sites that track darknet .onion addresses usually avoid having sites like
these listed.

------
sbussard
Could natural language processing and machine learning feasibly identify who
wrote the source code for dark web websites?

~~~
yosamino
I don't know about NLP or ML, but the keyword you are looking for for the
general process of identifying code authors is "code stylometry".

------
ggm
A headline designed to make me not want to.. click on it. Luckily reading the
comments here got me much of the sense.

------
joshstrange
So while I don't really participate in cryptocurrencies anymore I have a basic
knowledge of how it all works and have read up on ETH contracts. Couldn't
someone create a contract on the ETH network (my terminology might be off)
that allows you send a message to contract with a name (maybe more PII), a
date, and some amount of ETH to create the system Jim Bell hypothesized?

Obviously a big issue would be "death confirmation" as is how do we know X
person is actually dead so we can pay out to the "winner"? I imagine it could
be done through some kind of majority system but what incentive would other
"donators"/"would be killers" have to confirm a death has happened if they
aren't the beneficiary? I'm sure someone clever could think of some way to do
it...

~~~
saagarjha
> Obviously a big issue would be "death confirmation" as is how do we know X
> person is actually dead so we can pay out to the "winner"?

Put people on the blockchain, obviously.

~~~
strbean
Well this just gave me a chill down my spine. It isn't too crazy to imagine
this happening.

------
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
> _Her father gave her a pocketknife, and her boyfriend gave her a bigger
> knife to carry in her purse._

Stories like make me appreciate that someone can purchase and conceal a small
firearm (in most cities). All things unequal, a person with a gun is always
extremely dangerous.

The police, after all, have no actual legal requirement to protect you[1] —
and never forget that.

1\. [https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-
protect-y...](https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-you-
federal-court-affirms-yet-again)

~~~
zeveb
Miss Stern graduated high school in 2018, so she is probably too young to
purchase or legally carry a pistol — that age is 21 across the U.S., to my
knowledge and perhaps with a few exceptions.

I would agree that arming herself is a _really_ good idea.

------
mirimir
I was sure that TFA would cover the US drone program. That's exactly how it
works for the people controlling the drones. Just like a game.

------
kolleykibber
Interesting Story. Nice of the journalist to forewarn the suspect so any proof
can be destroyed.

Suspect on linkedin I see. [https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-
fry-366693b2/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-fry-366693b2/)

------
haecceity
You'd think it'd cost more money to kill someone. You'd have to pay insurance
for the assassin. If something went wrong you'd need to pay the costs of
taking care of the assassin's family. Whole lotta trouble.

~~~
laretluval
Indeed, as revealed in his court documents, Ross Ulbricht paid a lot more more
money than this (by an order of magnitude) to have his darknet hits carried
out (although he was likely being scammed).

The price mismatch makes me skeptical of this story.

~~~
Alupis
> although he was likely being scammed

It was the FBI posing as a "Hell's Angel" gang member. That part was revealed
pretty early on after his arrest.

------
fosco
Makes be think of slaughterbots based on some comments and concepts touched on
here

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw)

------
perl4ever
I thought this might be about a viral facebook post that said something like
"click here and a <something> will die" and how many people clicked.

------
tpmx
Potentially unpopular opinion: This is one of the reasons why we as a society
can't afford to allow untraceable electronic money transactions.

Imagine the combination of perfectly untraceable money transactions with
actual working low-cost swarms of facial recognition-based killbots/drones.

That's what, maybe 5-7 years away from now?

The risk here is that the cost of a hit could go down to very low costs, say
between $1k to $10k per hit/murder. If it goes that low we're screwed as a
society, especially if the transactions aren't traceable.

~~~
int_19h
Thing is, it doesn't really matter what you "allow". There's no way to enforce
it for these kinds of uses. A blanket ban can put it outside of purview of
your average mildly curious common person for purposes like, say, buying
recreational drugs. But if they have seriously decided that they want to
murder someone, they'll find out how to make that payment - and you can't
meaningfully trace that short of full online Panopticon (all connections
wiretapped 24/7, all Internet access tied to secure real name ID).

There's a lot more coming. 3D printers similarly enable access to stuff that a
lot of people would like to get banned, such as firearms and accessories to
them. For example, it is already possible to 3D-print a high-capacity Glock
magazine completely from scratch (the only metal part is the spring, and even
that is bent to shape out of a suitable steel wire using a 3D-printed jig).
And it costs about $200 one-off for the printer, and <$1 per magazine
thereafter. There are already laws that make doing this illegal in some
locations, but again - how do you actually enforce them?

Our societies will have to either go high-tech totalitarian, or learn to live
with these possibilities. I hope it's going to be the latter; after all, past
societies - before the growth of administrative state with its IDs,
registries, accounting, and pervasive bureaucracy - already had to deal with a
situation where it was very hard to track a determined criminal. But looking
at the evolution of surveillance and police power laws in modern developed
democracies and China, it's probably going to be the former.

~~~
tpmx
My informed gut feeling is that legislation is surprisingly efficient.

Your tangent on 3d-printing aside: If we decide to make cryptocurrencies
illegal, I think that will solve like 80% of the problem. Given the tradeoffs
involved, I think that's worth doing.

------
idclip
What an amazing, jarring read.

------
mnm1
Hard to not come away from this article with a sense that the FBI and other
law enforcement organizations are simply incapable and unwilling to do their
jobs.

For example, this sentence: "The FBI has a mandate to pursue only those crimes
that violate a federal statute." Sorry, but how can a crime over the Internet
like this NOT violate federal statutes? It's impossible. By definition all
these crimes would be pursued at the federal level.

Then there's the description of the interview where they interviewed the
husband and wife together despite the husband being the main suspect. That's
like pulling the plug on your server and wondering why the website's down.
Beyond incredibly stupid to the point where it's hard to believe that actually
happened. Those agents should themselves be charged for facilitating that
murder.

I won't bother to go into the failing of allowing the identification of the
British guy who placed the hit either by not allowing his ex-gf to read his
messages. How dumb are these fucking cops?

The whole piece reads like a story of police, FBI, and law enforcement
failings at every level. It's practically guaranteed that hits are taking
place online and this is law enforcement's response? Making things worse or at
the very best, fucking up investigations with their extreme stupidity.

------
onesmallcoin
Too many popups I quit

~~~
excalibur
Stock firefox, default tracking protection. I received a single nag about free
articles that was easily dismissed. One first-party subscription ad at the
bottom of the right column, another at the bottom of the article. No other ads
of any kind.

~~~
graedus
I got two. For those that don't know, a good portion of these nagging modal
windows play nice in the sense that pressing ESC closes them - good to be able
to instantly dismiss them without having to hunt for the close button. The
first one I saw could be closed with ESC, the second one required clicking
"Close".

------
sandoooo
so this 'journalist' Brian Merchant has not been able to prove shit, but he
felt comfortable enough to dox someone, full name, and accuse him of being a
murderer based on 1. his ex's suspicions and 2. the fact that he refused to
give an interview?

I suppose before you do this sort of thing you make very sure that your target
is not rich enough to sue you for defamation.

~~~
jen729w
It’s safe to assume that Harper’s legal team have a lot more information than
we do, and that this information was sufficient for them to OK this story.

Don’t forget how complicated the world is. If something looks too simple to be
true, it probably is.

~~~
sandoooo
I imagine the legal review goes like this: "he's not rich, he doesn't have a
social media following, and if we spin this shit right everybody will think
he's a creepy stalker-slash-murderer so nobody will stand up for him. What's
he gonna do, _actually_ put a contract out on us? Yeah, print that shit."

------
rozab
>After a few minutes, Monteiro succeeded in hacking into the site with stolen
administrator codes and installing an automated script that scraped the entire
site every three hours and dumped the data on his server.

Ugh, fuck off. I think the big question here, the one that should be at the
top of the article, is "Has a hit ever been purchased and carried out via
darkweb sites", and the answer is "obviously not, lol".

~~~
TimonKnigge
Someone didn't read the article :-)

> While I was working on this story, journalists at BBC News Russia confirmed
> the first known case of a murder being ordered on the dark web and
> successfully carried out by hired assassins.

