Kill List - Yura | 5

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

Binge episodes 1-6 and weekly new episodes of Kill List by signing up for Wondery+ on Apple or Spotify.Carl searches for a permanent solution to the Kill List. He turns his attention to the shadowy mastermind behind the site.Follow the Kill List on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting www.wondery.com/links/kill-list now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Kill List early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. A new kill order comes in. The target lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. Would like it to be a road rage or carjacking gone wrong. Don't lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. The user goes by the alias Boniface. They want the murder to happen today. Now that the FBI have arrested Ron Elgin Spakan, my team and I are talking to them every couple of days. When this new kill order comes in, we quickly send it to our contacts in Spokane,

who forward the information to their colleagues in Tennessee and vouch for us that we're not crazy. This isn't some mad story. This time, the FBI act on our warning immediately. They speed to the victim's house and arrest the suspect, her husband. With another target safe, the FBI tell us they have a proposal. They want to take on all of our cases, both within the U.S. and around the world.

Suddenly, the arrests start flooding in. Investigators say this woman, Deanna Marie Stinson, tried hiring a hitman. 37-year-old Kelly Harper was arrested on Friday. A former Thorn Apple catalog teacher accused of hiring someone to try and kill his wife. Each arrest is a relief. Another person out of danger. Federal investigators were able to track him down, connecting his online Bitcoin transfers with his personal accounts. But arrests also attract attention. Our cases make The Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN, the BBC. Dark web murder conspiracy, love affairs gone terribly wrong, lurid fantasies spilled out in the courtroom. And there is another detail that is showing up in more and more reporting. The wife was informed of the plot by the crew of an unnamed international news organization

investigating the dark web. There are headlines like, journalists uncover Wisconsin woman's murder-for-hire plot, FBI says. And reporters help feds foil murder-for-hire plot again. My team and I haven't been named yet, but with arrests popping up around the world, other journalists are starting to connect the dots. And all this attention is making me nervous, because there's one person out there I desperately want to stay hidden from.

The administrator of the Hitman for Hire website. I'm assigning a hitman to do the job. It will take about one week or so. He, if it is a he, is lurking in the shadows, replying to every order. Normal killing by gunshot is $5,000. Stringing his customers along with false promises of death and destruction. We will make sure by all means he will not survive. We don't know his real name,

but he has an alias. Jura. It would take so little for Jura to spot just one of these news stories, and the game might be up. With a simple tweak of the site security settings, he could shut us out. And that would be calamitous. Every law enforcement investigation relies on our access alone. I'm Matt Ford.

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From Wanderer Novel, I'm Carl Miller. This is Kill List. Episode 5. Eura. On May 19th, 2021, Scott Quinn Burkett gets a WhatsApp message. Scott lives in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, where he works as a software technician. He's 24 and six foot tall, with long brown hair and a straggly beard. On his phone is a message from a number he doesn't recognise. They've sent photographs, a few grainy shots of a young woman walking through a Walmart.

And an instruction. Call me. Around 10pm, Scott calls the number. Hi. You got the pictures? Yep. That's her, right? Yeah, that's her. I was actually surprised to get that through WhatsApp.

I know. We switch things up every once in a while. We know this because we have a transcript of their conversation. The words are read by actors. They talk about the practicalities of a murder, payment details, timing, proof. Good, all right. So my understanding is what has to get done is this has to get done. We're looking at some kind of accident or robbery to have gone wrong, right? Yeah, that way it doesn't get traced.

Scott also wants proof once the job is done. Proof of the tattoo on her, one of her forearms. Okay. Is there any part of it you want to see? Do you want a video of her not breathing? What do you want to see? Scott thinks for a moment. Picture of the corpse and a picture of the tattoo to verify.

Okay. Scott Quinn Beckett doesn't know it, but the hitman he's been speaking to is an FBI agent. Scott had already paid $14,000 to Eura's website for the murder of a woman he's been dating. We sent the FBI the kill order, but they need evidence that Burkett is behind it. So they make contact directly with his target.

They tell her to go to the supermarket and have someone discreetly take photos of her shopping. They also tell her to go down to the river near the local zoo and meet with a forensic photographer. It's like this big nature-y park area. That's Scott's ex-girlfriend. We're calling her Faye. The whole walk to where they want to take these pictures, they're making these dark jokes about faking my death. Like, what even is going on? The photographer leads Faye to a spot near the water.

Over where, like, all the bushes and trees and rocks and sticks and stuff are, she's telling me, lay down. Lay down and pretend you're dead. It's, like, wet and muddy and there's, like, dead leaves and stuff. And she's telling me, you know, stick your arm out. And they have my arm, like, spread out to my side with my wrist facing up where you can see my tattoo on my forearm. The proof that it's actually Faye. They showed me the picture. You can see the photographer's, like, shoe in the corner of the picture. And they start making a joke about how it makes it look more real,

like that's the hitman's foot in the picture. And they're, like, laughing about it. And I'm just like, I just laid in the mud for you so you can pretend to be my hitman and pretend I'm dead. Like, why are you laughing? After receiving the first set of pictures of Faye, the ones in the supermarket, Scott agrees to wire the FBI

another thousand dollars via Western Union. And they agree on an alibi of where Scott will be when the murder is supposed to happen. A Beverly Hills man has been arrested in an alleged murder-for-hire plot to kill a woman he used to date. 24-year-old Scott Burkett was taken into custody after he allegedly sent thousands of dollars in Bitcoin to range the murder of a woman he dated briefly. Scott Quinn Burkett is arrested by the FBI

and charged with the use of interstate facilities to commit murder-for-hire. They search his house and his red Mercedes. Scott had met Faye online in the summer of 2020 through an anime Facebook fan page. In October, she flew to Los Angeles to meet him for the first time. According to court documents, Faye alleges that Scott was sexually aggressive towards her and pressured her into having sex. After she returned home, she ended their relationship, but it was hard to break off contact entirely. They had lots of mutual friends, were part of the same online community of anime fans, and Scott would still message Faye across her different social media profiles. In April 2021, Faye's sister intervened and told him to stop.

Only eight days later, Scott placed a kill order. I'd like it to look like an accident, but robbery gone wrong may work better. So long as she's dead. I learn about Scott's arrest after it makes the news. On balance, I'm glad the FBI are doing what they're doing. But even so, the tactics they use create a risk for us and especially our access to the site. What if Scott had gotten suspicious

when the undercover FBI agent messaged him? He easily could have gone back to the site to let Eura know that something strange was going on. We could have ended up completely locked out. Then we intercept a message on the assassination site that's clearly

about us. But it's not from Scott Burkett. How the fuck did the information on this order reach Indian police? How is this But it's not from Scott Burkett. This was from a case we reported to the Indian embassy before we started passing international cases to the FBI. It seems likely that instead of arresting the person behind the kill order, and I can't believe I'm saying this, the Indian police actually informed them about our investigation. And now that customer is lodging a complaint with Jira.

The Indian police, they have jeopardized lives by doing this. Like, I can see absolutely no fucking reason why you would if not not divulge the information itself to the perpetrator to tell them its source is absolutely fucking madness absolute madness for them to have done that crazy not only is is it very possible that if Yura didn't know already he'll find out about us, this is a sign of it starting to interfere with his customers. All of this makes one thing clear. Our investigation is living on borrowed time. Right now the FBI are looking at each case in isolation. To end this story we need to persuade the FBI to see the bigger picture. And to do that we need to gather as much information as we can about Yura, his shadowy empire of scams and fake hitmen, and track him down.

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Your name is Eura? What do you think? When Chris Montero first broke into the assassination site, he also hacked into Eura's email account. Eura figured out someone was in there and started sending messages to his own email for Chris to see. He assumed Chris was a police officer. I know you are law enforcement, but I talk to you because I want to show you that this is a scam, so an expensive investigation is not required. Right away, Yura admitted that there are no hitmen. You don't say anything?

I feel like talking. You have the chance to find out more about me. I'm not playing with you. I just want to tell you more about me so that maybe you quit the investigation as if it's not worth it. Yura told Chris that he's an ethnic Albanian, but also says that piece of information won't help track him down. He says he's somewhere in the European

Union, but won't say where. He dances on the edge of revealing something, but never quite does. I assume this isn't your first scam. Jura sends a smiling emoji. I tried various things before, like credit card fraud, etc. But I don't like it. I saw that there is a niche in the murder sites online and there was no credible site. Jura is surprisingly candid about his operation. He even offers a justification for it. I am frauding criminals who want to kill people. Basically, if I would not deceive them by taking for it. Yuri claims he's actually doing a good thing. He's helping to stop would-be murderers by depleting their financial resources. This could make the customer think that hitmen are not to be trusted in the end.

He would not hire a hitman in real life either after this, because he would be afraid of being scammed again. So the hitman for hire fraud sounds like a great thing. Good, morally. The point that Jura is making here is one that we've long realised. The site he's created does expose dangers that would otherwise remain hidden. Jura himself, however, has done nothing to raise the alarm or warn the targets that they're in danger. But if we could take Jura out of the picture, the website could be controlled instead by the FBI.

So who on earth is Jura? And what is this surreal business that he's built? First, Jura needs an audience. How do people wanting to order murders find his website in the first place? The answer probably won't surprise you. They Google it. And over the years, Jura has manipulated the search engine to make sure his site is, very often, one of the top results. What many of his customers find is a website on the normal internet that claims to be, believe this or not, a hitman-for-hire comparison website.

It promises to help you avoid all the fakes and scams to find the real assassination sites. Top quality and affordable prices. This website is the only dark web marketplace that is too complex to be a joke or a scam. And of course, all the top-rated murder-for-hire websites belong to Eura. This comparison site sits there on the internet like a large, visible and not-quite-illegal signpost. It has lots of useful instructions for how you reach the dark net

and where you need to go. If that still isn't enough to convince a potential customer, Jura has another trick up his sleeve. There was this small group of kind of cyberpunk gurus really into coding and programming and all that stuff that turned

this ambulance into like a little house on wheels. This is Nemo. That's the name he goes by online. They had internet and everything and it was just like a hacker space on wheels basically that they lived in. So it was like a rural community like farm work and off-grid living mixed in with cryptocurrencies and almost like a barter economy. Yeah, it was a lot of disenfranchised people that were just really lost. Around the same time Chris was messaging Eura, Nemo's life consisted of cryptocurrency-based

gig work. He'd write website reviews, design restaurant menus, when he received a message about a hitman for Hire website. Eurosite has had many names over the years. At that time, it was called Besa Mafia. I don't remember what country they said they were in, but it was a European country, and this friend had gotten beaten up by Besa Mafia, and so he wanted to stop them and, you know, vigilante underground justice or whatever. The person contacting Nemo told him they were starting a campaign to bring down Basemafia. They wanted to hire Nemo to write articles condemning Basemafia as a dangerous organization by warning people about all the murders they'd delivered.

They wanted to start an organization called Stop Basemafia, where Stop was all capitals. I was trying to actually help him and say like, okay, well, I guess I can write these articles for you. I almost thought of like him going to like a domestic violence organization. He's like, this is, this is well beyond my pay grade. How many of these articles did you write for him? Maybe about a dozen. Nemo did a lot of weird jobs back then. Things like leaving fake reviews for a dodgy online pharmacy or receiving strange packages from companies trying to test their international shipping. So he didn't look too closely at this job either. Some of the articles he wrote are

still up online on old blog pages. Hundreds of people have been shot dead by their hitman for hire in the USA alone and hundreds more in Europe. We must stop them. How much would he pay? He paid very well. He just kept throwing money at me. Nemo's client didn't just commission blogs. He also paid Nemo to try other methods of getting press for the campaign. He even sent a substantial amount of Bitcoin to pay for this big press release from like a company that advertised, we do press releases. And then they denied it and refunded the money. And so he was getting really frustrated and restless. It almost seemed like he was just annoyed about it. Just mad and increasingly more flustered with trying to get these articles out.

Eventually, Nemo stopped receiving job requests from the strange anti-Besa Mafia vigilante. Then, in 2020, a YouTube video came out on an account called Barely Sociable. This is the true dark web saga of Basemafia. Wait a second, Basemafia? I haven't heard about that since 2016. What is this? You'll learn that to this day, not a single real hitman site has actually ever existed. But don't be discouraged, as this individual Darknet Hitman

site has one hell of a story to tell. The video said the base of Mafia was a scam website, but that its owner had created a fake campaign to have it shut down. He wanted to promote the idea that the site was genuinely dangerous.

That's when Nemo realized, by warning people about the dangers of the website, that the site was genuinely dangerous. That's when Nemo realised, by warning people about the dangers of the website, he was actually helping Yura advertise it. I had to even grapple with understanding it. Like, OK, so they said they were trying to stop Basemafia, but it's not real. And they were using my negative articles

for positive publicity, for fake hitmen this whole thing was i would say one of the craftiest and most well-designed scams i've seen in this underground market nemo isn't the only person who's been roped in to help Jura advertise his website. There are even fake hitmen, too. There's a video on YouTube called Real Hitman for Hire from Chechen Mob. In it,

a man in a black balaclava stands in front of the camera, surrounded by darkness. He loads bullets into a silver pistol before holding up a piece of paper with a link to Jura's site. Point me to target and I'll kill anyone. He points the gun to the air and fires off a volley of shots. There are dozens of videos like this that Jura has littered around the internet.

Young men in balaclavas brandishing weapons, promising to be ready to kill. There are dozens of videos like this that Eura has littered around the internet. Young men in balaclavas brandishing weapons, promising to be ready to kill. I'm waiting on you. You can come here and submit your orders to kill the people you hate. Just remember to never give your name, address, credit card or email address to any hitman's site. The production values aren't exactly high. But that doesn't matter. Eura is going for quantity, not quality.

And even when Eura's customers eventually work out that the whole thing is a scam, Eura just moves on. He chucks out the old site, rebrands, and starts all over again. The person the FBI needs to look for is, at his core, a digital marketer whose skill is to create a web of illusion online that fools potential customers into believing his website is real. And for us, the biggest challenge is working out where he's doing this from. If we're going to convince the FBI to take action, we need to track down Yuri's location.

Fortunately, we have a lead. In one of Chris's hacks into the hitman's site, he came across a needle buried in a haystack of files. It's an image. It looks like Jura accidentally screenshotted his computer desktop. He has a bunch of tabs open, including a Google page. On this screenshot is a clue that lets us get a fix on Jura's location. The language on all the tabs, the Google URL, they're all linked to one country. Romania.

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You can binge seasons early and ad free right now on Wondery Plus Human intelligence collection, monitoring, surveillance. If we're going to find Eura in Romania, we need someone who knows the terrain. Liaisoning with various agencies, various non-state actors, organized crime syndicates and so forth. An old friend put me in touch with someone, an ex-French foreign legionnaire and now a

private investigator. He's someone with deep contacts in Eastern European law enforcement. He goes by the nom de guerre, Kuzmin. Kuzmin grew up in the Eastern Bloc. He was raised on stories of Greek gods and his grandfather's wartime heroics. As I was growing up, in the shadow of my grandfather, who was a famous general, kind of wanted to be like him, to emulate him, to work for something bigger, bigger than me. He says that when he was a young man,

he got to know organised crime bosses and warlords. You go have dinner with someone, you get drunk together, and all of a sudden you are brothers, and at the same time, you know, something else flips and they would be willing to wipe out your entire family. The story Kuzmin told me of his career spans the world of high finance, working as an intelligence asset and as a paratrooper. Now he specializes in corporate intelligence across Eastern Europe,

which makes him the perfect person to find Jura. We've always thought that Jura was a single person, but that doesn't seem to chime with your experience of how these things normally work. Is that right? Honestly, I've never seen anything even closely similar to this subject that was a one-person show. I've briefed Kuzmin on what we know about Jura and how he operates. Now he's given me his appraisal.

We are looking at multiple individuals who have multiple roles, potentially Jura being a single individual who's the head of a, I would guess, a loosely organized criminal group. Kuzmin puts out feelers with some contacts in Romania. A month later, he comes back with his findings, and we run into not online hitmen, not organized crime, but yet another layer, one I never thought we'd find in this investigation. It turns out that a big part of the cyber community in Russia not only does not want to have anything to do with anyone trying to investigate our subject, but actually spoke of him as if he's one of them.

Kuzmin tells me that some government agencies, especially Russian, take advantage of the underground world of cybercriminals. They have a loose arrangement. If the criminals occasionally carry out pro-government activities, the authorities turn a blind eye to their money-making scams. In the meantime, these characters are more or less free to do whatever they want. So Eura, or Eura's group, could be operating under the protection of a state. I don't know anything about him for certain yet.

But when I put the theory to the former director of GCHQ, the UK equivalent of the National Security Agency, he agreed it sounded plausible that the Russian authorities could have some kind of understanding with cybercriminal groups in the region. If Europe really is a government asset, the prospect of locating it might actually become impossible. But one thing is giving me confidence. I've been handed another lead. I can't say where I got it from, but it's from a source I trust. This source has passed me two IDs.

They're for two men based in Romania whose names are both associated with a Bitcoin wallet receiving payments from the users of the site. I pick up a printout of one of the IDs and examine it closely. If that is Jura, then he looks like an extremely clean-cut man, probably in his early 20s, I imagine, staring kind of almost surprisingly at the camera.

One of these IDs could be Jura. Or they could very well be someone lower down the food chain in Jura's network, being paid to cash out the money. I hand them over to Kuzmin to see what he can find out. We can start assembling the puzzle. There'll still be big holes in it, but then we can see, okay, you know, where to take this forward. Kuzmin works his contacts and consults sources on the ground to pull together a detailed report. A few weeks later, he sends it to me.

It's a profile of one of the suspects in the IDs. By the looks of it, they're a real person. It's not a fake ID. I call my producer Caroline right away to dissect it. This is wild. Yeah. The thing that really made me gasp was that he's involved in e-commerce. The fact that he was actually at one point in 2009 running an e-commerce company,

for me, that made me exclaim out loud. Yes. But if you were going to have predicted any business that would be the perfect fit for him to run as like, you know, the legitimate face of what he's doing and how he's earning his money, what would it have been? It would have been e-commerce, surely. Time will tell if we've got the right person, right? But it seemed almost impossible that we were even going to find anything. It feels great. Thank God for Quizman.

It feels like we're on the offense for the first time. With this, it feels like we're one step closer to unmasking Jura. Now I want to know more about the guy in the second ID. I reach out to our contacts at the open source investigation specialist Spellingcat and an investigative journalist based in Romania. They tell me that the man in the second ID has built various websites, including web forums, and that he'd been fined by the authorities for illegally posting private data online.

We still don't have anything concrete to prove who Jura is, but we've got more than enough to share with the FBI. We send them everything we have. In the FBI's hands, this information could be what it takes to finally catch Jura. We talk to the FBI several times about this, on video calls and over emails. They ask questions and share little bits of information.

They keep their cards close to their chests. They ask questions and share little bits of information. They keep their cards close to their chests. But the more and more we talk about it, the more we start to suspect that they could be as interested in catching Eura as we are. And after a couple of months of back and forth, they tell us that they want to meet. In person. On the 23rd of September, I find myself in Times Square, New York.

It's a hot day with the huge signs of Times Square all around, people filming over there, it's like a TV crew and thousands and thousands and thousands of tourists everywhere and it's a really weird place to have what's going to be quite a secret meeting. I'm feeling extremely apprehensive. I never thought that this would be part of my life but I'm here in New York about to go and meet the FBI. When I arrive at one of the many towering glass hotels on the street, three men in suits are waiting to meet me. Hi there, I'm Carl. Pleased to meet you. Nice to meet you. Let's go talk. The agents won't let me record the meeting,

so I turn off the recorder. We're sitting in the breakfast bar of a hotel overlooking Times Square. Below, thousands of people wander under the neon lights cast from gigantic billboards. The FBI agents are from the Knoxville Bureau. They're the ones that have been taking all of our information

and then parceling it out to the other FBI bureaus around the country. Armed with the Bitcoin wallet information we've given them and the other information they've gathered about EUR, the FBI agents tell me they think they're ready to make their move. And they agree with our strategy. They want to take over the site and run it themselves. And they're closer to Eura than I ever could have hoped. I jump on a call with my producer Caroline back in London to tell her the news. So fill me in, Carl. They have found the server IP that is hosting his sites.

Oh, wow. And it's all the same IP. No way. Seriously? Yeah. The big mistake he's made is that he has used a US server hosting company. Oh, so they can subpoena it? Yeah. He doesn't know whether the subpoena from the server is going to lead to Eura or to another wall, but he's in little doubt that this is a big opportunity and that all being well, they may know who Eura is really quite imminently. I mean, they were

pleased that we have this like shared idea that we want them to take over the site. They want to take over the site. I don't know him. I don't know if he's blatantly lying, right? But I don't think he is. But I was like, is there a chance that you will just go and nick Yura without us or anything? He was like, that will not happen.

When I know who he is, I will tell you. So with a fair wind, and this was the big news, they might have Yura in three weeks. Three weeks? Like, as in, they'll have him... What do they mean by have him? They'll know who he is. Oh, my God.

Well, three weeks, we'd have to watch this space. Yeah. It genuinely feels like this is moving forward to some kind of conclusion. Exciting. After my meeting with the FBI, three weeks pass by. Then, three more. No news.

But I'm still hopeful. We're still passing the cases to the FBI and remain in regular contact. Just no word on Eura. With each passing day day my excitement is slowly replaced by the gnawing anxiety that momentum is slipping away. Then six months after our meeting I get an update but it's not the one I was hoping for. The FBI's investigation into Jura is being shut down. The agents we've been communicating with are taken off the case. Another federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security, is taking over.

Having been on the cusp of finally getting Jura, we now have no idea how long the DHS investigation is going to take. It could be kicking around for months or even years. And that's if the investigation even still exists at all. The FBI agents we've been dealing with don't ghost us entirely. They're still willing to take new kill orders. But as they're no longer leading the investigation into Eura, they can't tell us anything about if and when he might finally be caught.

Then, on the 6th of April 2022, I wake up to news. The news is out of Romania. There has been a massive police raid. That's coming up on the next episode of Kill List, you can binge all episodes ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com. From Wondery and Novel, this is episode five of Kill List. Thank you. Tom Wright. For Wondery, our story editor is Chris Siegel, and our senior producer is

Russell Finch. Our assistant producer is Amalia Sortland. And our researchers are Megan Oyinca and Lina Chang. Additional research from Chris Montero, Kuzmin Meier, Attila Biro from the Context Investigative Reporting Project Romania,

and from Anik Mosu, Fuka Postma, and Brenna Smith at Bellingcat. Additional reporting by Amber Singer. Fact-checking by Fendor Fulton. Our managing producers are Cherie Houston, Sarah Tobin, and Charlotte Wolfe for Novel,

and Lata Pundia for Wanderie. Original music by Skylar Gerderman and Martin Linnebell. Music supervision by Nicholas Alexander, Max O'Brien and Caroline Thornham. Sound design and mixing by Nicholas Alexander. Additional engineering by Daniel Kempson. The news clips you heard were from News Nation, Fox 17, Fox 47, ABC 7, Creme 2, WKOW 27, KCAL News, Atena 3 CNN, and Televisiuna Info.

The vlog clips were from the YouTube channels of Annie Elise, Ty Gay Michael, NGBTG, and Keith Jones. We also featured clips from Barely Sociable and Eric Mercer. For novel, Willard Foxton is Creative Director of Development. Our Executive Producers are Sean Glynn, Austin Mitchell, Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan for Novel. Executive Producers for Wanderie are George Lavender, Marshall Louis and Jen Sargent. When you're done with the first six episodes,

I go deeper into the kill list, revealing never-before-told stories of more victims. New episodes roll out weekly. Thank you for listening.