Hacked - Internet Hitmen Aren't Really A Thing

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

The story of the Besa Mafia and all the work that goes into making folks think you're a spooky dark web assassin syndicate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A few years ago, a writer named Eileen Ormsby started hearing these rumors. The first places I saw it was on Reddit and Quora. So Quora is like a question-and-answer site. Reddit is like a social platform. And on Reddit it was just posts in the relevant dark web subreddits. Rumors about these spookiest figures in all of, internet folklore. Saying, oh, you know, none of the old hitman sites were real, but I've just come across

a real one. Dark web hitman. Ormsby is a cybercrime writer, so when she bumped into this rumor, she started following it. And it led to a website for something called the BASA Mafia. As long as there have been stories about unseemly hard-to-find corners of the internet, there have been stories that you can find along with the drugs and the weapons that are for sale there. Internet hitmen.

So while this wasn't the first time Ormsby had found a site like this... The difference with this one was it was a much flashier sort of site. The old ones used to say, you know, I am this shadowy operative. I will come anywhere in the world and kill someone for you. And they were very, very obviously fakes. This one, the Bees the Mafia's site, rather than some... saying, you know, I'm this one shadowy assassin, he'd offered to hook you up with a hitman in your area.

And so instead of having people that are traveling all over the world, he'd say he'd had gang members and drug addicts in your area that he'd be able to hook you up with. They'd never have to know who they were talking to or who had hired them. So he was like an intermediary that would put you in touch with them. And yeah, and he claimed to have operatives all over the world. And the actual website was quite slick and efficient.

And, you know, it was like a really good e-commerce platform. This one was slick. It was a new business model and just sort of a different feeling to it. So Eileen kept digging. She started writing and publishing content about that digging, about the BASA Mafia, following their footprint online. and Eileen wasn't the only person publishing stuff about them. There was actually a lot of blog content coming out,

warnings about how dangerous they are. Basa Mafia had a pretty big footprint when Eileen showed up. But the deeper she dug, the more she discovered why there was all this content. There was some sort of upwork site that accepted Bitcoin, and so he was posting on those sorts of, sorts of sites just asking for these testimonials, like for people to write testimonials for him. There were ads offering to pay people to write these stories about how dangerous the Basa Mafia was. He started getting testimonials, and the testimonials were nearly always of very bad people that got killed.

You know, the guy that raped my sister, that sort of stuff, and I hired Beza Mafia and they did it right away for me. It was pretty transparent, but it got the buzz going. Someone was running a marketing campaign, hiring folks to write content about how serious and scary a deal this was. So Eileen started writing about that, about this astroturfing campaign, promoting the online arm of an Albanian organized crime syndicate. And she started publishing those stories. And when she did, when she started publishing content not about how scary the base of mafia is, but about how they're promoting themselves, and frankly, that it read to her like kind of a scam,

someone from the base of mafia read those stories. And they did not like it. They started tracking me down and sending me emails saying, you know, stop saying that we're a scam, we're the real thing. So now, Eileen is in a back and forth. with these people who claimed to be Albanian organized criminals. We got into a really full-on correspondence back and forth, and it started out with threats.

But who she claimed probably weren't about where they go from there. The business model doesn't make sense. I never really thought about this idea that there are internet hitmen. I remember learning that the dark web existed, then that you could buy illegal stuff, like drugs and weapons and even assassinations, and I knew the drug things was true, so I assumed the rest was too. But when I talked with Eileen,

she pretty quickly pointed out to me that the economics of Internet hitmen make zero sense. A person would never carry out a hit without getting paid, but once that person gets paid, anonymously, untrackably, irreversibly over the Internet, to commit a crime,

what is their motivation? to carry out that crime. Because once they've paid, there is absolutely no incentive for that hitman to go out and carry out the hit. Zero incentive whatsoever, because no one knows who he is. He can't track him down.

Whereas the drug dealer does have an incentive to send the drugs because he wants you repeat custom. So that's why none of these, that's the basic reason why these other things don't work. What are you going to do? Report them for not killing someone for you?

all you could do is leave a bad review and they could clearly pay folks for good ones Eileen didn't figure out that the Basa Mafia were scammers pretending to be internet hitmen pretty much all internet hitmen are scammers base of mafia is just a slick one and their victims the real victims if you can call them that are not assassination victims they're the people

trying to hire us at who, like victims of most internet scams, just get strung along for as much money as possible until they are wrung dry. So when Eileen started publishing content about this weird new grift, the base of mafia reached out to her, first telling her to stop it right now. And then asking her if she wanted to help. Because who was more worth scamming? Who was less sympathetic a victim than people trying to hire hitman. This is how internet hitman are not really a thing here on Hacked. I'd already been looking at the hitman sites right from the very beginning when I started

reporting on the dark web. You can only go so far investigating whether or not internet hitman are real before you bump into the same wall. And it's kind of structural to the whole scam. I even tried to engage a few of them. Eileen thought, what better way to see how this works than to pretend to want to hire an internet hitman? She didn't want to even start putting out a hit on a real living person just in case. But the person had to be real.

So she says, I'll use the name of someone who's already passed. And she reaches out to some of these folks on the dark web asking them... To murder someone that was already dead. So I'd send a photo and details of someone that was already dead and ask them about it and see how far I got. But the structure of the scam is always kind of the same. All right, great. You want me to do the hit?

Send me their name. Send me a photo and then send me the money. So unless you're willing to send that money, it kind of just ends there. And it was always just, you know, you got to a point where they just said, oh, you have to send money up front. And then it would stop

because I wasn't interested in sending them any money. Her research could only ever go so far. So when Ormsby bumped into the base of mafia, there was this whole other way in, all that content that they were paying to have written about them. I use this term briefly in the intro, astroturfing.

If you don't know it, it's an advertising term. It's a play on grassroots, as in a grassroots group, a group of real people coming together to advocate or talk about something. AstroTurfing is when you pretend something as grassroots and real and organic. It's astro-turf because it's fake grass.

Anyway, unlike most dark web assassin groups, she tried writing about, the astroturfing campaign the Basra Mafia is doing was a great way in. She was able to start reading and researching these different posts they were putting up to try and build a sense of the architecture of this whole thing without budding up against that wall. Basa Mafia contracted two general kinds of content for their promotional efforts. First, she got the obvious stuff, the blog posts, the testimonials, the hype. Here's an abbreviated version of an ad from what.

of those content mills. This is something a freelance writer looking for gigs might have bumped into. Quote, I need fiction stories that are one page long and written in the style of a testimonial. These are fictional. You as a writer must imagine that you are a different person each time. And you need to write a story or testimonial about how someone did something bad to you. You wanted to take revenge and you found some site on the deep web called BASA Mafia. You tried them? They did the job well for you, killing a person. So he'd get a freelancer to write sort of five blog posts. He'd pay them once, and then they'd write another 100 for him, and he wouldn't pay them for any of those.

Basin Mafia wanted people to write first-person stories about how they had hired the Basa Mafia. But the end of that ad is very interesting. It's their explanation to these writers about why they're paying for this content. And it's, according to them, to take down the Basa Mafia. Quote, The purpose of these fictional stories is that we are fighting base of mafia and want to get their site closed down. We want to shock the public and mass media to put pressure on the FBI to close their site. They provide real beating up and killing services, but their customers don't publish stories,

so media doesn't bother with them. We need stories to shock the public and get pressure on the FBI to close Basin Mafia's site down. And then the brass tax. Can you write fictional stories like this? You get paid $5 for each story. One page long, 500 words. Which I think is like a penny a word. It's not great.

On the frequently asked question section of Basin Mafia's site, fact number 10, I'll just read it too. Frequently asked question number 10, how do I know this is not a scam? Answer? Because we don't have any complaints on the internet, even though we have been active a long time. Ultimately, these positive ratings they're paying for and the comments and the blog posts, they're how they manufactured this authenticity. So that's one half, the writers, the purported clientele. But that's only part of who they were hiring.

The other half were the hitmen, air quotes. Say you're trying to scam someone into believing that you have a network of freelance hitmen at your disposal. How do you prove that you have all these very scary, dangerous criminals working for you? you. Idea number one, get folks to commit crimes and then film it. April 2016, this video pops up online, an amateur video of a car that's been set on fire. If you picture like the image identity verification post on Reddit or something where like a person holds up a sheet of paper with their info and the date on it, it's kind of like that. But instead of proving their face, it's they're proving they set a car on fire. It's a photo of a burnt car and they're holding a, and they're holding a,

a piece of paper in front of it that says, gang member for base of mafia on deep web. It's proof, so to speak, that the base of mafia had hardcore criminals working for them because setting cars on fire is a crime. And that image goes immediately into circulation. It's up on the deep web forums. It's just a lot of

great PR, more proof of how real and scary BASA is. The question then is if they don't recruit assassins, who set that car on fire? Turns out if you successfully create the ruse of an organized crime syndicate online, the customers aren't the only people are going to reach out. You will, weirdly enough, get folks supplying to work for you as hitmen.

And so later on, what he would do was give the people that were signing up as hitmen a test. And the test would either be something like burn a car on video with a sign saying that you're doing it for Beesa Mafia or graffiti in great big areas saying advertising Besa Mafia. And that would be the tests that he would send out to would-be Hitmin. Prove your medal. Set a car on fire and take a photo holding a sign and then we'll talk.

You use that photo for your marketing efforts and then you string that person along like all the rest. Same with the burning cars. He paid for the first burning car, but then it didn't pay for. for any more after that. So, I mean, he was ripping off everybody. That, you know, and he made good money.

Let's get to who was behind all this, because Eileen pretty quickly figures it out. Eileen is writing about what she's finding. She's posting these stories to her blog, and eventually someone starts commenting on that blog. Oh, well, he was commenting on my blog constantly. And on her blog was her email. And, yeah, and then he started directly,

emailing me and he just like write these absolute word-sellers of email like pages and pages of them and he'd repeat himself an awful awful lot but I think he was just so I mean he was pretty much you know your classic Nigerian scammer with the the people that were signing up so he was you know he was he was the prince that once you send me a little bit more money then the hit'll be taken out and a little bit more money, a little bit more money. And so I think he knew that persistence was key when dealing with anybody. And so he was persistent with me as well. Eileen says, this guy from this thing I'm writing about is now talking to me. And I very much like to interview this internet hitman grifter. So of course I'm going to talk with him. And I engaged. I wrote back to him because,

you know, I was trying to get him to give me interviews. I wanted, I wanted him to work with me on a book. So, you know, there was something in it for both of us, really. The guy she was corresponding with, he's the other big character in all this. His name was Yura. And Yura, Eileen was quickly piecing together, was not the base of mafia's PR guy. He was not the social media person who manned the emails and ran the online marketing and responded to rude blog posts.

URA was at the time probably the entire base of mafia. This was his scam. I was working with a cyber security researcher in the UK by the name of Chris. And Chris had determined that he believed that Eura was Romanian, came from Romania. And the little quirks of phrase, it was very obvious that he was English, was his second language. And the little quirk to phrase did point to him being Eastern European. So we sort of had that idea. And the speed of correspondence between Eileen and Eurah starts to ramp up.

We got into a really full-on correspondence back and forth. And it started out with threats. He was threatening me to take down any articles that I wrote about him, to stop writing about him. Euro was in the business of paying people to write about Basin Mafia as a promotional tool to scam people. So when it became clear that Eileen was not going to stop debunking their operation, just calling it what it was.

Then it moved into sort of cajoling and saying, look, when he admitted to me, I am a scam. We are, you know, I am scamming people, but the people that I am scamming want to carry out murders on other people. So isn't it a good thing that I'm doing this? So take down your articles and just let me be, let me do my scam. And when it became clear to Eura that Eileen was not going to stomp, he then proceeded into offering her a job.

He said, I look, you're really good with words, and my English is not so great, so could you perhaps, you know, rewrite my website? And he said, you know, he had too many people to deal with, and he said he'd pass on some of them to me, and I could scam them. So it went through this whole ups and downs.

Our relationship went through a lot of ups and downs, and then it'd go back to him hating me and threatening me again, but his threats were very empty because I knew that he was a scam and didn't want to hurt anybody. Eura the hitman didn't want to hurt anybody because Eura was not an internet hitman.

He was like a digital marketer for a very involved scam who clearly wanted to talk to someone about what he was doing, whether it meant threatening her, asking her to help him, he just wanted to talk about the whole thing. And considering how illegal it was, who else could he talk to other than the tech true crime writer covering his scam.

This is what I found with a lot of the drug dealers as well in my work is part of it is they like having someone that they can tell the truth to and who they know is the person that they say they are because everyone on the dark web is just a name, a username. And you have no idea who's behind that username. Whereas everyone knows who's behind my username. It's, you know, I'm very open about it. So a lot of people do really like unloading on someone that they can trust is who they say they are. And that they can actually, you know, because most of these people are hiding and they can't tell the people around them, talk to the people around them. They can't trust a lot of the people they work with. They can't tell their loved ones what they're doing.

And so they really can unload. Yura isn't scary. He's not scary on the scale of hit men, which the story is kind of a, about. He's no scarier than most internet scammers. But there are scary people in this story. Weirdly, it's you're as victims. Because taken outside the context of this scam, where they're just folks getting fleeced for Bitcoin until they figure out the base of mafia isn't real, they are people who are attempting to have someone killed. If this scam works, it's because they exchanged money with what they thought was a murderer for hire.

They're lurking at the edge of this whole thing, because for as weird as this is, it only works as long as there's a flow of people around the world who want this horrible, albeit imaginary service. Look at it from another angle, Yura is in possession of a list of people who want to have someone killed. And Yura, yes, was a scam,

but is getting scammed enough to stop a person who wants someone dead? Eileen wanted to raise the alarm on that part, on those people. And at first, no one was really interested in hearing it. We started contacting law enforcement in the US, the UK and Australia, trying to convince them that this was a real threat. Not that the hitman site was a real threat, but the people that were paying the hitman site to have hits carried out were a real threat.

and, you know, the freakiest one that came out of that was we told the FBI about this woman, Amy Orwine, that someone had paid $13,000 to have a hit taken out on it. And, you know, we're trying to convince the FBI and people to take this seriously. And it was just all too hard. It was just so new, you know, dark web hit men, this is crazy, what are you talking about sort of thing? And we got hung up on a lot. So we kind of end up with three parties and all. all this. We've got the true crime writer Eileen. We've got the fake internet hitman Yura who she was

covering. And we've got all those people, Yura was scamming, who wanted to have a real person killed somewhere. And these three groups had kind of reached a balance. Eileen kept writing, Yura kept scamming, and new victims kept showing up. And law enforcement didn't care about any of this. He had husbands ordering hits on their wives, business partners looking to have their colleagues killed a guy who lost a bunch of money betting on sports online trying to kill a customer service rep who wouldn't give him his money back. It had like a weird balance, waiting for something to come along and knock it off kilter. If you're paying really close attention, right now you might be asking.

That last part, the list of the real clients, how did we know that? The rest of this makes sense. It's stuff the base of mafia either says. or paid to have said about them. But how do we know who actually hired them? And it's because, right at this point in the story, Yura and the base of mafia got hacked. And we get to see even deeper into how this whole thing ticked.

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to a handful of files is posted by someone claims to have hacked the BASA Mafia. It is a repository of emails sent to and from BASA at sigaint.org, and a database broken up into two columns, orders and targets, what the client wants done and to who. We really were talking about people that were putting in orders that they thought it was a real site, and they were putting in some of the most horrible orders, you know, acid attacks and murders and breaking bones and to read through all that.

And to see, you know, they'd send photos and details about the person that they wanted killed. There was a 14-year-old boy on the hit list that someone was going to go to court for grooming him and they wanted to kill him before they... You know, there's things like that that were going on. Yeah, it was really full on these stories. So, and yeah, and then to...

just not be able to have any law enforcement take us seriously, or it seemed that no one was taking it seriously, it was quite frustrating because, you know, they sort of thought these are real threats here. Folks were fleeced from between 5,000 and 20,000 U.S. in Bitcoin. That was Bitcoin back in 2016, mind you. Here is a quote from a story Eileen wrote about all this, unpacking one of the attempted hints we learned about in that leak.

This one in particular is going to come out later. quote, one of the worst hits was a lady who wanted a hit carried out on a woman who, quote, tore my family apart by sleeping with my husband who then left me and is stealing clients for my business and wanted it to look like an accident. Over two months, she transferred an initial 15 Bitcoin, then another 10 than another four, the transactions are visible on the blockchain, as Basa had been dished up excuses for the failure of the murder to take place. Besa was still working on her at the time of the hack. They had relieved her, approximately $13,000.

There are thousands of these emails in this leak. Thousands of these correspondents of folks desperately believing they were talking to and sending money to people who were going to kill folks for them. Throughout this whole thing, Eileen and that security researcher Chris had been trying to get law enforcement to give any kind of a crap about what was going on here. We started contacting law enforcement in the U.S., the UK and Australia, trying to convince them that this was a real threat. Not that the hitman site was a real threat, but the people that were paying the hitman site to have hits carried out were a real threat.

But they were not having much of any luck. Then to just not be able to have any law enforcement take us seriously, or it seemed that no one was taking it seriously, it was quite frustrating because, you know, they sort of thought these are real threats here. So when this hack happens, you're a... starts to get kind of scared, kind of stressed that maybe he's been exposed by this leak, which is when you would think that ERA would have started to try to negotiate, to try and leverage the power of this list of wannabe murders he has into some kind of

a conversation with law enforcement. But interestingly, what we learn from this hack is that Eura had already tried. But he was also trying to keep his business going. And one way that he thought that he could keep his business going was if he started telling me, telling police when there were threats that he'd decided that he'd got as much money as he could out of the would-be murderer, then he'd pass on the details to either me or to the police. Once the scam was done, once Eura had concluded that he'd tapped the well,

gotten all the money he was going to get out of these folks, Yura had one last step. You just straight up rated on him. Using the email Jane Blondie sexy at gmail.com, he would reach out to law enforcement in the area where the victim lived and report the person who hired him. Here's one of those emails sent to law enforcement in Texas. Quote, we receive orders to kill people from all over the world.

However, our site is fake and we don't have any hitman. We forward the orders to police departments where the targets are located. We are a team of computer programmers living in Europe, and we made this website as a honeypot for criminals to fight crime and criminals. So wait, is Eura the good guy? I mean, he's no, he's no angel. He wasn't doing this out of altruism. It was all a money-making thing for him.

No, no, Euro was not the good guy. Everyone in this story is just kind of sucks. There's a reason we're talking about this story from around 2016. now in 2022. And it's because of a development that happened this past April. Eurah was almost certainly not the real name of the person Ilema's corresponding with. That much is clear. What is not clear is the point at which Eura expanded.

Because in April 2022, well, I'm just going to read you the headline. Five men believed to be behind the web's most notorious murder for higher scheme, arrested, in Romania. The video of the arrest that Romania's directorate for the investigation of organized crime and terrorism posted online doesn't have an audio channel I can play you. But it's a raid like any

other. Half a dozen folks in tactical gear going into a particularly poorly kept basement apartment. They find a gun on a shelf, a weird big knife in a brown leather sheath, and some bedrooms. Which is when the footage blurs for confidentiality. The

rundown building, doors knocked off their frames as a handful of guys living in it. They're handcuffed, left facing down on the floor, and the rooms where they're found, which is how the video ends. One of those guys is probably Eura. The Romanian police did the raid at the request of the United States Department of Homeland Security and the FBI who say they have been investigating cases related to the base of mafia for years. The same law enforcement Eileen pleaded with to do something about this years earlier. The same law enforcement, Eura, had been contacting directly saying, I'm a fake internet hitman, and I have a list of people who tried to hire me. It's believed that about 25 people who tried to hire the base of

mafia were arrested over the years based on the info in those original leaks. Economic damages as of 2016 were about a half a million in euros. The internet itself has made a lot of keyboard warriors and people that would never do things or say things that they would normally say. But then with this added layer of protection that no one can find my IP address, no one could ever know who I am. Most of the way the people put out the hits, it was pretty obvious to police that they were able to find out who placed those hits pretty quickly, except for the case of Amy Orwine.

Somehow they didn't look at her husband, which was bizarre, you know, the most obvious person who was in IT and had a basement full of computers. somehow they didn't look at him but in most cases it was pretty obvious who had taken out the hits. This is normally the part where I would wrap up. Talk about what happened to Eileen,

talk about what happened to the Eura and everybody. But unfortunately we have to end this one on a pretty big downer. The story about internet hitmen because internet hitmen are pretty much always a scam has zero deaths in it so far. There's 30 plus arrests, a lot of money and Bitcoin shuffled around, but no actual murders. But there is one.

And frankly, I didn't know where to put it. Didn't want to put it in the middle because it would have been a weird detour. I didn't want to open with it because it was confusing, but it's just been there the whole time lingering around the edge of this story. Because once you get past that thesis, that there are no internet hitman. And you get through the story of the base of mafia and Yura, using internet folklore of online assassins to fleece people, get past all that stuff. You're just left with the folks who tried to hire it. Because in a lot of cases, getting scammed by an internet grifter from Romania isn't going to be enough to stop you if you want someone dead. It has to do with that case study, I mentioned earlier, the one who reached out to base it to kill the woman who stole her husband.

the victim in that story, the real victim, not the person who tried to hire them, the person who died. Her name was Amy Allwine. And if we're looking for it, she's the actual victim in all this. And all this money and bullshit flying around and law enforcement taking an astonishingly long time to do something about this, she is who got hurt. So I'm going to play what Eileen told me about Amy. And then I'm going to play the theme music.

And then we're all going to go outside. and enjoy the sun. Turns out the best reason to make a tech show is because real true crime is a pretty big bummer. This user by the name of Dog Day God had taken out a hit on a woman by the name of Amy Orwine. And Dog Day God and Eura had back and forth emails. So we saw every one of these emails,

like back and forth between the two of them. And he'd paid, Dog Day God had paid like $13,000 worth of Bitcoin told Eura that he wanted Dog Day God wanted this bitch dead because she had stolen my husband and my business so he you know even in his interactions with Eura he was trying to make up this story

that it was a love rival Amy Orwin was so he provided Facebook info and photos of Amy she was a suburban housewife devout Christian trained dogs, didn't seem to have an enemy in the world. And so that one was really interesting, and that was one of the main ones that we wrote about

and told the FBI about. And so the FBI did, in fact, follow up on it, didn't tell us that they had, but we found out later that they did, in fact, go and visit Amy and visited the local police and said, you know, there's this, a hit has been taken out on you. Do you have any idea who might, want to do that and she was like well no I have no enemies um I certainly haven't stolen anybody's

husband I'm a devout Christian woman um no idea and they didn't actually show her the emails and then they sort of just left it and said well you know and they they interviewed her with her husband at the time and um they said oh look put up a few more security cameras just watch out you know that was pretty much it um and so then she started receiving emails telling her to kill herself so saying there are hitmen out there, they're going to kill your family if you don't kill yourself. She sent those off to the FBI and they were still like, you know, any idea? No, no idea. And next thing we knew she was shot in the head and apparent suicide. But the local police that attended that apparent suicide very quickly picked up that it was not a suicide, that it was

actually a murder. And, you know, it soon led back to being her husband. And the reason he wanted to kill her was he was also a devout Christian. They had a real Pentecostal sort of church. And he was a minister in that, and the church did not believe in divorce. And he was having an affair with someone that he met through the Ashley Madison website, and he wanted out of his marriage. And he couldn't get divorced. He couldn't stay a minister in his church if he got divorced.

So he decided the way out was to kill her. Thanks for listening to our weird summer of no co-host, You're unhacked. We wish Scott Well in his European adventure. And thank you to our new patrons on Patreon. Patreon.com slash hackp podcast, a very, very good way to support the show. Thank you to Josh Flint. I really appreciate it. Vitis C. Thank you very much.

Yalm. Thank you. Melissa Wells, thank you very much. Dean Kavanaugh, thank you for supporting the show. Thank you for listening. Thank you for making it to the end of a very strange one. We will be back with you next episode. Thanks for listening.