Panic World - Who orders hitmen online? (With Carl Miller)

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Right now, you might be thinking someone, somewhere, is on the internet doing something for money that’s really awful. That’s probably true, and has been in the past. Although, plenty of times it���s not — take Bonsai Kittens — but what about Red Rooms, where you can supposedly pay for assassinations or watch live torture? Today journalist Carl Miller joins us to talk about the dark web. What’s actually on there, how people use it, and how much should we be panicking about it? Our guest Carl Miller is the author of The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab, a journalist, and host of the podcast Kill List (https://wondery.com/shows/kill-list/).  Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Sponsors Audio Maverick, a new nine-part documentary about one of the most visionary figures in radio, Himan Brown. Out now wherever you listen to podcasts. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Engineer: Rebecca Seidel - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Just a quick heads up before we start today's episode. I wanted to do a quick content warning. Today's episode a little more intense than usual. We're talking about one of the darker parts of the internet. And in doing so, we have to describe, you know, how certain violent and exploitative corners of the web function. We do our best to not go into too much detail about these things. But at a certain point, you have to sort of talk about what you're talking about. Okay, Carl, what's like the craziest conspiracy theory?

you could call it about the dark web you've ever heard. Like, what's the most outlandish thing about the dark web you've ever heard? I don't know if it's a conspiracy theory, but the thing that kind of swirls around, I think, kind of like, what's interesting than anything else is around the Red Room. So it's this idea that there's a stream buried deep in some secret website somewhere in Tor hidden services,

you know, and the link is kind of passed around from kind of pocket to pocket and whisper to whisper. And if you manage to get this link and you get through, there's a stream of someone being tortured, It's very fear.com with Stephen Dorf. Do you remember that film? Yeah, I do. The internet is haunted.

I find that a lot of the crazy things I hear about the internet typically is the plot of a movie from the 2000s that people are kind of half remembering. And those plots are probably drawn from some digital libertarian essay written in the 1990s. It's shocking how often on the show it goes back to essentially one weird libertarian guy in the 90s caused a whole bunch of trouble for everybody. All the chaos.

But an old internet cliche is that anything you can imagine is on the internet and someone somewhere is probably jacking off to it. And it's probably true. But this leads us into thinking that somewhere someone is on the internet doing something for money that's really awful. And sometimes that is true. And not infrequently, this leads to a whole bunch of panic. But for every person looking to pay good money to watch someone be pushed into a vat of acid or what was the one when I was in a teenager, like growing a cat inside of a glass jar, bonsai kittens? Are you familiar with bonsai kittens? I remember that as a gruesome meme. Yeah, totally not real, but I, as a 13-year-old, definitely

thought it was. But a lot of times, there are also scammers that use these kinds of panics and fears and urban legends to make a lot of money. They'll take your crypto and they're run off with it. So today we're looking at the dark web, the mysterious place that you have definitely no doubt heard about in all kinds of, you know, scaring old people news articles and podcasts. and whatever, but we're going to talk about what's actually on there, how people actually use it, and give you a step-by-step guide for downloading a tour browser and committing crimes. So definitely stick around to hear more about that. But joining with me today as the host of Kill List, it's journalist Carl Miller.

Hello, Carl. Welcome to the show. Ryan, thanks to having me on. Hi, everyone. So why did you spend so much time on the dark web? What led you there? Well, the honest answer is initially I didn't really want to have much to do with the dark now. I'm a very reluctant kind of journalist or kind of investigator of it.

It first began when I was writing a book and desperately trying to understand how crime was changing. And I wanted to do that by basically embedding myself both in the police but also with criminals, understand what crime looked like actually from the eyes of the people that did it in one way or another. And that led me to kind of speak to this kind of strange breed of like investigator that I hadn't really known existence. before, kind of dark net cybercrime investigators. And one of them, Chris, I remember I met him in a pub. It was 2017, just before Christmas. It was like really hot and crowded.

I didn't know who was really. And he turned his phone around to me and he showed me a assassination market for the first time. Right. He tried to debunk it, in fact. He'd written about it publicly. And what had just happened to him, and that's why he was showing me the screen on his phone, is that they had just sent him a video with his username on a piece of paper in the dark,

this kind of shadowy man holding that, then the camera pans around and this car bursts into flames. And he was trying to think about whether that meant it was actually a scam or not, because scammers don't typically torch cards. I would say so, yeah. So this sort of like assassination market, as you call it, was this on what we would call the dark web, or was this somewhere, like, was this on sort of, like, easily accessible internet? It was on Tor hidden services, so it's a dot-hunit site. So I asked you this because I wanted to start here.

Okay, great. A bit of technical background for everyone. Yeah, because I actually think that, like, a lot of people, I would say most people probably don't actually know what we're talking about when we talk about the dark web. So, correct me if I'm wrong, but really broad strokes here is you can download an application called Tor. It's equivalent to, like, a VPN, let's say, but it's a little different. And it allows you to access websites that are not dot com, but typically dot onion sites.

And there's an entire sort of shadow version of internet services on these dot onion sites. I first accessed the dark web in 2011. I was working at Vice Magazine and pitched an extremely vice story where I had to go to the Silk Road. Are you familiar with the Silk Road? Yeah, yeah. So for people who aren't, Silk Road was a, I don't think it exists anymore. There's probably copycats. But at the time, it was this massive drug market hosted on the dark web.

So you download Tor, you go to, I mean, there's essentially, it's not like Google for dark web sites, but it's like a directory. And so it takes forever to load because Tor browsers are really slow and kind of suck shit. And then you can get into this, you know, these online marketplaces for illegal goods and services. Would you say that that is still kind of true a decade later? Ryan, firstly, that is the most 2011 vice experience, I think. I checked all boxes. That's like so classic middle of the darkboard vice going on the Silk Road.

Here's a good punchline of the story. So I used, I was mining Bitcoin at the time with my computer's graphics card because Bitcoin was so simple to mine at the time that you could just load it up as you loaded up your computer. So my roommate and I, we had what would now be billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, but it was like four or five Bitcoin. I think maybe seven. And I used it to buy acid on the dark web.

But the Bitcoin market collapsed as I was buying the acid. So the dealer sent me a nice message and he goes, like, hey, I'm going to refund you. Like, it's just a bad time. Really sorry, man. And I was like, oh, all right. That was my entire experience on the dark web. What that touches on is actually something that I, by the way, that that is all correct. Yes.

Okay. The basic fact of the dark net, it uses clever encryption, clever mass to basically mask the request that your computer is making of a website. It's designed by the US Navy, in fact. So many kind of deeply subversive technologies for some reason. or they seem to emerge out of the U.S. military. Well, that makes sense to me because in a previous episode of Panic War,

we talked all about a guy on a nuclear submarine who basically got in trouble for using, like, gay chat rooms. So I totally believe that the Navy would have all kinds of ulterior communication models so that they don't get busted doing all kinds of wacky shit on nuclear submarines. That makes a lot of sense to me, yeah. Yeah, well, there you go, and it merged out of there. And it basically, it basically, it masks the request. What they create is this space online where you can be genuinely anonymous.

So before getting further, I feel like it's important to kind of establish a scale here because I think a lot of people, they're kind of sense of scale, but the internet goes out the window when we start to talk about nefarious, you know, shadowy stuff. So like, do you have any sense of like how many people are regularly accessing what we would call like dark web onion sites? If I say any number, I'm going to get a nasty email from a well-informed darknet enthusiast investigator that I'm sure will be able to prove I'm completely wrong. Substantial.

Some of these forums are really big. Dreadpiret Roberts's Silk Road, the one you mentioned, that was a massive drug sign. Yes, that one was huge. That was like, there's a lot of activity on there. Also, you could buy like a bunch of food on there, too, which I was always kind of surprise like it wasn't just for drugs it was it was essentially like a marketplace that allowed anything but you could all i mean i saw somebody who was like selling like um like doomsday prepper buckets on there like full of like you know libertarian slop food and stuff like it was it was a

full marketplace how was the price for the food like is a jar of peanut butter cheaper on the darknet than on amazon so is this where i should do my shopping no it was not cheaper it was not easier because the issue, and I'm sure we'll get further into this on the episode, is like, it was based on Bitcoin as an exchange rate, so it was constantly fluctuating. So your peanut butter could change in price, you know, within a couple seconds. My understanding was at the time, the most popular commodity on the Silk Road was, in fact, half-price supermarket coupons. Yes, yes. So the... Yes, it was a... Dollar coupons selling for 50 cents.

were outselling all drugs. This gets to like my favorite thing about any sort of panic about the internet, which is like, it's not that these panics aren't real. It's that they're typically like the thing we focus on rather than the like very stupid, silly thing that everyone is actually using this technology for. So it's like, yes, are people like buying and selling murder services or whatever on the Silk Road? Yeah, you can buy a gun on the Silk Road. Most people were doing it to scam supermarkets.

100%. Yeah. But it is fair to say as well that those sites, they did operate and do operate today with a stunning level of customer service. They are like your refund is by no means unusual. Like because no one knows who anyone else is, the only thing that matters on there is your customer reputation. That's so funny.

That's that rules. It feels very similar to that moment. So obviously we have like the Napster, Limewire, Kaza moment. But then there's a moment after with BitTorrent and music blogs. And all of a sudden, it's people who are hosting incredible amounts of copyrighted content, but they're trying to do it as a genuine service within a black market. That to me is kind of what my experience on the Silk Road felt like, which is that these people are enthusiasts for illicit services and substances. And they take it very seriously in a way that is both off-putting and endearing.

I would say. Yes, that's true. And like that points to going back to the very beginning of all of this, you know, John Perry Barlow, Declaration of Cyberspace Independent, CNAF Frontiers Foundation, there's always been this idea that the internet or manifestations of it like represent this like new sovereign space in human experience. You know, I think they called, he called it the home of mind, you know, and he warned the kind of weary giants of flesh and steel that you have no sovereignty where we gather. And I've always seen the kind of darknet as being a, um, being like kind of one of the purest technical attempts to try and make that really happen. So this space that states can't extend their power into because how can you when everyone's anonymous?

And as you are now an expert in, this sort of stateless miasma of digital services is not exactly safe. It's like a cool idea, but it can be very dangerous. And so I wanted to bring us back to you in the pub in 2017, possibly sitting in assassination market. So can you tell me how did this all start? I was kind of being handed from person to person to try and meet hackers, investigators. Now, were they all wearing the guy Fox mask when you would meet them? Or did some have? Were they all wearing a fedora with fingerless gloves?

It's an irony that I think that never have, never have I seen more stock imagery of a hacker sitting in the shadows than have been linked to various light pieces to do with the kill list and to do with the work I'd be doing over the last couple of years. And the irony is that I hate that image

more than anything else. I think it is like the worst way of like describing hackers. They don't really wear hoodies. I've not really known them to light, dark, and rooms more than anyone else does. They often work in teams. They could be quite social people

and they're definitely not typing binary code into a green screen computer. In my experience, most of them, if they're wearing anything, it's like the cat ear headphones. Yeah, maybe a Hello Kitty, like, and they, you know, they might be having a kind of, you know, a code joke on a T-shirt. Maybe they've got a blockchain tattoo. They might, you know, have a shock blue mohawk or something like that.

Like, hackers can look very different. Wait, so, so bring us back to the story here. So how long did it take to get an actual in-the-flesh meeting with this person? It was, it didn't take, probably a month or two of us, of me being handed around and back and forth, finally met him. After he showed me that the site existed, I decided there wasn't really much I could do about all of this until at least he'd gone to the police

and handed loads of stuff over. So I set up a meeting between him and the police. I was embedded in a cybercrime team at the police around the same time. I was talking to him quite a lot. I think American journals would be surprised by that move. I worked in the UK for a while, so I understand why you did it. But that is probably a surprising,

way to do that. You mean go to the police? Yeah, yeah. Well, I work a lot more with the police in a second, so Strangler fell in. No, yeah. So, yeah, tell us what happened after you sort of made the meat. So they made the meet. I step away.

I don't talk to either of them, either the police or Chris, the hacker, for eight months, maybe. And I emailed Chris and I asked him how things are going. And in fact, the police had just let him out of the police. jail. So things had not gone well, basically. Oh, yeah. It seems like the opposite of one. Not what I intended. So they basically, for one reason or another, and I don't want to get, drag the tail into too tangled a kind of eddy, the police believed that he was running the dark net site. I'm shocked that British law enforcement had a tough time wrapping their heads around this one. They're typically so on it. That's shocking to me.

So they blew his door off his hinges, raided his house. Jesus gross. And it was only because of, I think, the fact that he'd had this meeting and gone in and showed them everything that he had, that he was finally, and it took several days, let out. I see. And it's just then, as COVID is collapsing society around my ears, and just as we're beginning this story and just as we're looking at these sites again, that Chris makes, I think, a kind of a really, really, fateful, like, life-changing kind of discovery, really. He's kind of probing the site and then kind of phones me one day and says, I've broken into it. So I actually can find a way through this little vulnerability that was present in the site.

Now, now, before we get any further, talk us through the site itself. Like, what are we talking about here? Right. Well, it looks, there's lots of black. There's lots of people in who reads. Sure. Like that. And they're kind of holding guns up towards the.

the camera. There's, there's some pretty gory pictures of corpses. And the site's pitch is basically, hey, you know, we're the mafia, you know, but we've got an e-commerce wing now as well. Sure, of course. You've got to stay up with the latest train. Yeah, of course. And they're like, you know, and which, exactly which mafia they claim to be does change a little bit. Is this like cameo for organized crime essentially is what it's pitching itself as? They're like, with the Albanian mafia, we've got, you want to. You want to. You want to. You. want to transact with us, now you can. Quite username. You log in.

And you're then invited to basically use the mafia, this mafia group, like eBay for assassinations. So it's like we're the trusted middleman. We're not the assassins. We've got a big network of assassins. I see. It's always a middleman with these guys. But if you pay for it, we'll hold it in escrow. We'll hold it. And we won't release it to them until they actually deliver on the hit to your satisfaction. That's the pitch. And it looks 1990s. There's loads of little clues that would make you pause.

Like, there's trademark symbols. Like, it's copyrighted at the bottom. I mean, like, I don't know if you can trademark a hitman website. I don't know if the mafia would be able to enforce a trademark infringement if it happened. Yeah, because I feel like that, like, okay, let's say your organized crime unit does have some sort of like shell company for laundering money. I feel like if you use that shell company to trademark your hitman website, it kind of defeats the purpose of your shell company for like legitimate business, right? Is the mafia genuinely going into a courtroom? Well, yeah, exactly.

They have ripped off our branding. Yeah, we are suing you for ripping off our hitman website. Right, right. So we're going to be talking more after the break about what you found after your hacker friend found the vulnerability inside this assassination marketplace. And hopefully giving you guys more tips for contacting a middleman who can then put you in touch with the Albanian mafia for murder for hire. So we'll talk about all of that after the break. So your hacker friend's out of... So he sends us what he's seeing.

So you've got to try and picture this. There's a bit of a kind of a weird situation we're in. He's able in the back end of the site to basically behave like an admin for the site. Okay. So, okay, he's taken over permissions for running the site, essentially. And, well, he's not, he's kind of, he's lurking. He's trying to create as small a footprint as he possibly can for the people running the site. But the most important thing that he can see are the individual messages that are passing back and forth between the people using the site and the people running it. Uh-huh. Okay. And what that really means is that he is intercepting the kill orders as the, they're coming into the site.

Okay, cool. So this first kind of sweep of messages, we can kind of see there are dozens of these kind of conversations that are happening. Quite a lot of them are really specific. So name, address, phone number, car registration number, Pat of Life information often as well, description, photos, always photos. Of the victims. Of the target.

Of the targets, yeah, yeah. Exactly. And often, kind of dozens and dozens of messages going back and forth, covering everything from, like, logistics through to like moral justifications for why the hit should occur. Sure. And then payments. So we begin to suspect that at least some of these orders actually had payments associated with them. Now, in payments, are we talking crypto?

Is it like, is it most of Bitcoin? Yeah. So are you using any sort of on-chain analysis from here to figure out who's giving them the Bitcoin? So we build what we call the pipeline. Sure. Just a quick bit of explanation for our users who might not know this. But almost all crypto is public. On-chain analysis is awesome.

There's a couple great users on places like X and CoinDesk that do this. But it's honestly quite easy to follow how Bitcoin moves because it's all on the ledger. You can do all these little investigations with crypto that are quite interesting. So you're building the pipeline. Now, what does this pipeline look like? Well, so it's basically a way for us to triage all these kill orders. Like, some were jokes. Some didn't seem like they were serious.

Like others looked like they were quite serious. So the pipeline firstly involved Chris scraping the site constantly, exfiltrating the messages and turning them into chains so we could see. Okay. We would then do on-chain analysis. So cryptocent, crypt open source intelligence. And it's super fun. It is fun.

I watched a guy last year at Ethereum, Denver, do it and basically prove that, like, a bunch of celebrities were buying and selling their own NFTs to themselves to inflate and deflate the market to, like, cash in. And he, like, did his whole thing of blockchain-based assets. I'm shocked. Manipulating a blockchain market. Somebody tell the president. Yeah.

So it's definitely like a really fun. It's a fun side effect of this technology that you can do this. So you guys are doing on-chain analysis and what are you finding? We're finding that there are indeed genuine and substantial payments connected with some of these orders. How much money are we talking here, like roughly, and like pounds or dollars? Well, over the whole, I can't remember at the very beginning, but over the whole course of the investigation, the cheapest hit, I believe, was for 100 pounds. That's, dude, I'd be so pissed.

if I got assassinated and it only cost somebody 400 pounds. Like you got to be... 100. 100. 100. 400 pounds. That's like not even a full grocery shop in America right now. That's ridiculous.

There you go. Yeah, I mean, that did not really affect the sentencing. But it goes all the way up to, I think about 90,000 was the most expensive. Okay. That's what I'm thinking, like, this has got to be student law. you don't know this in the UK. But this has got to be student loan level, honestly. Like, if you're going to kill somebody, that's got to be at least five figures.

You say that, but we disclosed a one particular order to the Colombian police for about 5K, if I remember correctly. And the Colombian police said, this is ridiculous. We don't believe you. We think you're making this up, you pesky journalists. And we're like, why? They're like, the street value of an assassination in Bogota is far lower than that. That's far as important.

I mean, honestly. As unrealistic. Okay. I got to give them credit for that one. That's pretty good. Yeah, I was going to ask, though, so, like, where are these services being carried out? Like, geographically, what are the assassination market hotspots? They were all over the place.

So these orders, you know, there was one to, and not all of them were for murders. So one was to burn down an Italian nightclub. Okay. There was a Galician fishmonger in Spain. there was a nurse that lived in the Hague in Amsterdam. There was an air traffic control in Wisconsin. There's quite a lot of US targets. That's actually a really good thing to know here,

which is that it's not just that these are assassination targets. It is what you said it is. It is the middleman for distributing services in support of organized crime. I mean, we realized two things quite quickly, like after we started intercept and listened to these messages. Number one, if these were hitmen, they were the most incompetent hit men, like, known to man. Like, they kept getting lost. They kept losing their weapons.

Like, the target would be too well protected. I just finished watching The Supranos for the first time. So that actually kind of clocks for me. That sounds right to me. So basically, we were pretty sure from the very beginning that they weren't real hitmen. Like, there was an upsell kind of scam happening for each. Interesting. Was there any haggling going on?

Not haggling. More like they would accept. Ultimately, the people running site would accept the money that was being offered. And then every single time would invent a string of mishaps to mean that the assassins needed more money or a new assassin had to be brought in. Oh, my God. It's an organized crime pig buttering scheme. That's what this is. That's so clever.

Honestly, like, that's sick. That's great because like no one can complain because they're paying for a crime. Can't complain. And in fact, at the end of it, sometimes they would try and extort, they would say they were a scam and then try extort the people for more money to not disclose it to someone. The other thing we realized, though, is that the people that seem to be targeted and that seem to be using the site. Targeted by the scam or targeted by the, yeah, by targets, I mean the people that have

hits put out on them. Okay, let's call them targets and let's call the customers. Let's call them dumbies. They're perpetrators. Yeah, okay, perpetrators fine too. I was going to say marks, a real mark, you know. Okay, yeah. So the targets.

Yeah, so the targets and in fact the marks, they were like normal people. They didn't seem to be linked to organized crime. You know, I kind of thought, oh, these are going to be drug deals gone south or something, but they weren't. Like, these seem to be both the Marx perpetrators. and the targets both seem to be, in most cases, like you and me. I mean, they seem to be living like reasonably normal lives, normal jobs, normal parts of countries.

See, that doesn't totally surprise me, if only because I do feel like a lot of the story of the internet is essentially making our worst impulses quite easy. And this is obviously not an easy thing to do, right? You have to download a Tor browser, go on an onion site, get a Bitcoin wallet, set it all up, talk to the guy, organize all this stuff, yada, yada, yada. But it is still much easier than, like, meeting a guy in a motel and, like, figuring, you know, having to do this in person. And I do think that, like, our worst impulses made easier by the click of a button,

just make, I don't think it, like, exposes that we're naturally like that. It just, like, for a lot of people, cuts out some friction and lets them do this thing that they would not have normally done. Like, that clocks to me. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I think, like, for a normal person, obviously, actually meeting a genuine potential hitman would be totally terrifying, very risky and possibly impossible for people. Way too scary.

Yeah. But, I mean, here, like, you know, yeah. I mean, in most cases, it wasn't impulsive. Like, they would spend weeks. Sure. And it was like, you know, she's just left her at the home. Like, now would be a perfect time. Like, they would drop in, like, all the time.

Sometimes we'd, like, real time information about the target. So we, and this actually was what led us to this, like, we found that. in this kind of horrible, ethical position, where suddenly we believe we're like the only people in the world that know that this like growing list of people are being targeted. Well, you can set up your own competing marketplace. No, I totally get it. Yeah, totally. So what happens with all of this?

Like, is the, is, were you able to get the marketplace shut down? We, we did know at the beginning also, like, so there's no hit men going out there. But we thought some of these people are going to be in like great danger. from the person that put them on the site. And there was a woman in 2016 called Amy Allwine who was murdered by someone using this site. This exact site, Stephen O'Wine, her husband, who went by the username Dog Day God.

He murdered her in their home and tried to make it look like an accident, a suicide, in fact. So we knew that there was like a danger coming from these people. I mean, they were trying to get these people killed. and, you know, who knew if they were going to do it themselves or they would try and find some other way of doing it. So that was a dilemma, really. Like, how on earth do we act on this information

to try and help these people that were being targeted? And how did you do it? Well, like, initially, I went to the police. Sure. They arrested your source. Yeah, okay, yeah. I know to U.S. listeners, like, cooperation with the police, I do think to a U.S. is sounds a bit different to someone in the UK.

Like, our police, we don't have a kind of defund the police movement here. Oh, no, no, it's not that. It's, uh, so I've been a journalist in both countries. And what it is is I was doing a, a project years ago about a predator on TikTok. Mm-hmm. And so I'm talking to all the victims. I'm putting together my report. At the end of that, I reach out to the FBI.

and I'm like, hey, are you investigating this person? And, you know, and I'm telling the victims to go to, you know, have you spoken to authorities or not? And, you know, if you do, like, that makes the reporting stronger, et cetera, et cetera. At the end of my reporting process, I go to the authorities. I say, you know, are you investigated them? And then the FBI likes to play their game where they're like, no. And then I have to say, would you investigate someone like this?

If you could tell me, would you tell me? And they're like, no, we can't tell you, blah, blah. and we go back and forth, and I get a non-statement. In the UK, you know, your crime laws and your reporting laws are just much different. And so, like, to me, it's not super surprising that you would go to them because you also, like, you have contempt of court laws that are very different than ours as well. So it's just a totally different reporting process. Yeah, yeah.

And yeah, I think all of that's right. Also, I think when you, like, these kill orders were, like, immediate threats to life. Right. And so I think, like, they're, like, the moral case is pretty clear cut. Like, you have to disclose that. So I phone up the police. And in the middle of COVID, they kind of come around, these two young, keen kind of police constables, basically to check if I was mad or not. I mean, they genuinely feared that I had a mental health problem.

And they said, like, it's part of the podcast. They were like 99 times out of 100, someone kind of comes to us with this kind of story. Like, obviously it's going to be mental health related. Fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, and I think, like, understandably, it is crazy. I've, you know, I'm part of a team that's broken into an assassination market on the dark net, and we've got all these kill orders and people's lives at risk.

I mean, it sounds completely, it sounds crazy. They did bleat me. They did take it seriously, eventually. The problem was that all these people, the targets, were spread, as we've just chatted about all over the world. Right, of course. And not a single one at that point was in the UK. So the Metropolitan Police, the police in London, they were like,

It's not our problem, basically. Ultimately, we then decided that what we needed to do was to reach the targets ourselves. I got you. Okay. And was that hard? Was that difficult to sort of explain to them the severity of what was going on? So it wasn't hard usually to reach them. I mean, sometimes, like, their phone number was literally part of the kill order.

Right. And often we could find the phone number. We had some really talented open source intelligence people working at Bellingcat. I don't know if you've ever spoken about. them on the show. Oh, of course. Yeah. Big, big, big friends of the show. Right. So we're working with Belling Cap. We were finding ways of reaching them. The problem was, I was terrified when phoning someone who has a hit out on them. Either, number one, that person will go into, like, a catatonic state of shock or get really angry, think they know who's done it, and like,

and basically react very, very badly. Number two, and, And this was like even worse to me was that the person that put them on the site could be literally stood next to them or sat next to them as I was telling them. Right. You can't really protect the domino effect of telling someone something like that. Some of the people that were using the site were trying to kill their spouses. So it was actually, I mean, and in one case when the police turned up at their house, like the person to put them inside was in the house. So it was, you know, we basically were like, yeah, I mean, definitely. in some of these cases, like the person that is trying to kill them is going to be close to them in their lives.

And I didn't know whether telling someone meant that the person that had put them on there could hear it and maybe take matters into their own hands then and there or soon after. So the way that I tried to cold call people was this like really, it sounds really weird, like kind of slightly angular kind of attempt where I'd be like, hey, I'm Carl, I'm a journalist, and doing this kind of like investigation into scam sites on the darknet, hey, maybe we can book a time just somewhere where you feel really safe and are most importantly alone, you know, where I can, like, call for you. You got to be really careful with that one.

Yeah, it's like, hey, can you like be alone next time we talk? Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm trying to do. And without exception, they all hung up the phone. Oh, yeah. I would also think you're crazy. Yeah. It was also right in the middle of COVID. So like scams were going crazy, right?

Right, of course. Internet scams. Everyone was kind of getting scammed at that point. So I feel like this sort of like this story is a really good example of kind of like the veil of paranoia that exists over this entire realm, right? The cops think you're crazy. The victims think you're crazy. You probably even start to think you're crazy because you can't tell if you can believe

what you're seeing or not. And that brings us to the conspiracy you mentioned at the top, red rooms. Have they ever existed? And where did the concept even come from? Should we all be terrified that there's some sort of secret internet full of people being murdered all the time. Well, we dug into it, and now we have to microwave the hard drives on our computers. And we're going to be talking about that and teaching you how to use them.

And we'll teach you how to set up your Bitcoin wallet and watch some snuff films on the dark web right after the break. Just a warning to the listener, this is where things are going to get a bit darker. Okay. I think we've got the basics down of kind of like how this technology works, how this culture exists, like who's using it, which is ever. everybody, if they want. When was the first time you came across the idea of a red room, which, as you said at the top of the episode, is sort of this illicit, haunted stream, if you will, that when you access it, you're watching a live death? Like, when did you first hear about this? It must have been like 2014, 2015. And it was, it was just part of this kind of cloud

of rumor around the dark net that actually people like Chris were investigating and trying to trying to discern whether they were true or not. I don't know about you, but the internet that I grew up on was one of like rotten.com and shock sites where, you know, you'd be mining your own business in the computer lab and someone would send you goate-see. You know, it was a very wild west internet where I felt like snuff film style content was never very far away. And at a certain point, you sort of just say to yourself like, none of this could be real

because if even some of it's real, like, I have to go to therapy, right? And so what's your sort of general sense of, like, how real these things are? Like, like, how much genuine, let's say, exploitative, violent content is out there for people to watch recreationally like this? Well, I mean, in terms of, like, archive content, probably. I mean, any of us that have spent time on, like, non-fascist 4chan, or pre-fascist 4chan, Another big friend of the show is pre-fascist 4chan. We talk about it all the time, yeah. Yeah, and the only kind of content that stuck around on 4chan was unbelievably gory or sexy or shocking in some way.

So there's tons of snuff, tons of go. I mean, I have to say, like, I got desensitized to that kind of stuff, like, pretty quickly in my mid-teens. Like, by my late teens, like, I wouldn't bat an eyelid. I mean, it's actually incredible how quickly that kind of stuff normalizes. It didn't really bother me until I was a breaking news reporter in my mid-20s covering like genuine like terror attack stuff. And that's when I was like, oh, I can't like, like, I know this is some semblance of real. And so it's sort of I kind of like undesensitized myself to it. And now I'm probably like overly sensitive to it if you can be.

But I do think it's important to kind of map out here the history of what we would call the snuff film with with media. Because in the 70s, we start to get the concept of a. snuff film. It actually comes from a 1971 book about the Manson family, which reads, in the summer of 1969, Manson and his followers stole an NBC news truck loaded with film equipment. An anonymous family member claimed to have heard about a snuff film that the group shot. However, this person never actually saw the film. These snuff films were never found, nor was any evidence that they existed, but the moniker stuck, which I think is an important thing here because the idea of a snuff film has always existed alongside moral panic, social panic,

particularly around youth culture. The Manson family is kind of like the ultimate first sort of teens are going crazy and like randomly murdering people panic, right? Like that's what this is all is. In the 80s, we started to see professional movies, you know, fake snuff films, you know, like Cannibal Holocaust. Obviously there was also in the 90s, the Blair Witch, which we have a whole episode about. You should go check it out.

And then we get to the internet age. So, you know, what is your sort of take on how the idea of the idea of the idea of of this red room started? Like, where do you think this all begins? I think he goes earlier, Ryan. I think it goes to like the Victorian age and anatomists and kind of cutting bodies apart. And, you know, like, sorry, this is a very English history. No, I was going to say, you can get away with making this point because of your accent.

I cannot. I have to be like, it all started with the Manson family. All the way back in the 1970s. And you're like, no, it actually started 300 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. You're probably right. And so why do you think the idea of a red groom caught on the way it did?

Like, yeah. So, for instance, in 2015, author Eileen Ornsby told Vice that she thought that she had maybe found a red room. Let me read you with an excerpt here. So in this case, the event was supposedly going to involve several captured Islamic State members. Excited revelers on Fortune and Reddit hyped up the launch of the stream, which would happen at midnight on Friday. and the site owner promised humorously there would be bacon. The stream was not presented. Instead, a banal 21 minutes long video was uploaded, according to Ornsby.

In the end, it was a troll, albeit one that required a fair amount of effort to pull off. Another example was an apparent human trafficking site that motherboard, vices tech site, recently profiled. It, too, was later revealed as an elaborate hoax designed to steal potential customers' bitcoins, like the one that you discovered. So do you have any sense of when the notion of a red room started? No, not in terms of an origin. By the way, Eileen's a great dark dark dark net investigator and well worth following for everyone that's interested in all of this.

What she's doing there is a kind of really important distinction where on the surface, there is all of these different parts of the dark net that someone might casually intersect with around gun sites or human hunting or red room. all this kind of stuff, they are almost certainly scams. So the one that Ornsby mentions, I think is really important because there's this thing that happens all the time, and it's come up several times in this show, actually, which is that the panic is essentially a more complex version of something that already exists. So in this instance, like, if you want to see violence being done to or done by ISIS members, in 2015 you could have just gone on YouTube and seen it.

Like they were posting it on Twitter. But because the mundanity of sort of the awful things that we do online is so boring to people, they dress it up. So instead of saying to yourself, like, I could just log into Twitter and watch war crimes, which you can do right now if you want. It has to be this like secret, more complicated thing because we can't accept that people do evil things. and it's actually quite mundane and boring. That's sort of my overall take on all of this. And obviously, as you discovered, it becomes a massive vector for scamming people.

It becomes a vector. And where it does exist is in far deeper, more protected, more secret pockets of the internet. I would say, though, like maybe the other reason why the Red Room has been this kind of enduring meme or trope, whatever you want to call it, is because it is adjacent to a much more widespread practice.

from the Darknet, which is to do with child sexual abuse material. We have to talk about it. We have to talk about it. We can't talk about the Darknet and the evils on there without talking about it. It's obviously not funny. It's deeply distressing to talk about. It's extremely difficult as a journalist to cover. I don't cover it.

I was at an event, actually, two days ago on the Darknet and investigations. And one of the journalists there does cover CSAM and was just talking about the sheer, like, moral, psychological, and legal complexity of actually dealing with it because it's very, very hard to do if you're not a warranted police officer. One of my main beats in the 2010s was covering essentially like influencers doing grooming cases, both in the US and the UK and parts of Europe. And as child sexual abuse material is sometimes involved, not always, but it can happen. But the majority of what you're hearing about, you know, with someone like, let's say

having like a hard drive full of a list of material, what that is is like they are either communicating with someone to buy it. or commission it. That's essentially how the marketplace works. And as you get more, let's say, more complex forms of child sexual abuse material that you want to buy or commission, the communication goes further down the rabbit hole. Right. So I think there's been some recent cases in the U.S. where like telegram networks were being used for it. But if you want to, if you want to get to like the stuff that like I don't even really want to like vocalize out loud because it's so upsetting, that's when you're going to start to get to the dark web. And a lot of,

I don't know if you encounter this, but like a lot of dark web websites will casually use what they're claiming might be child sexual material as a way to self-incriminate each other. You know, two people who might be like organizing a hit or something might say like we're both going, you know, we're both incriminated now. You just use it as almost like a second form of currency. It's a very dark, upsetting thing. It is, yeah. And I think they also believe anyway that it's a way of being able to discern whether someone's

a police officer or not. Right. Which is, I don't think that has like, It's true. I mean, police can't break the law in an investigation. They can definitely do that. The thing where like you think an undercover cop is with you so you like give them drugs or something. Like that's how they're using this stuff, which is, I mean, just another layer of evil.

I think it's like the casualness of it once again, just like this sort of heartbreaking. So would you say across the board that the concept of the red room is not real? Like are you, do you feel like it isn't or do you feel like that, like, like, it is based on some sort of truth? One of the kinds of child sexual abuse that is, uh, documented by journalist though, is like live to order kind of services. Okay. So like that's, that is a red room in a way, you know, I mean, that is. Absolutely. Yeah.

So, so you've got like two things, I think, you've got with the red room. You've got this kind of law and myth and rumor and panic, but you've also got actually a genuine practice. which is happening, not with adults necessarily being tortured, but children being victimized and being abused. Yeah, I think that's important to note, which is that if you want to go see people kill each other on the internet, you can do that. It's actually not illegal to film that in a lot of places, depending on the context. But the fixation on that is also obscuring a very real thing that exists.

It's not dissimilar from the Q&on fixation on human trafficking, getting in the of like genuine research and activism around ending human trafficking. It's this thing once again, we're like, we've made up this myth because the reality is kind of too horrible to deal with. Yeah. So would you say that like the Red Room idea as like a, as a live torture feeds, would you say that those exist? Like I mean, do you do you know if they exist?

I've never seen them. I've never seen evidence of them. So there have been some core cases involving Red Rooms. So Coin Telegraph reported in 2020 that two Italian teens paid Bitcoin to see a child killed over live stream and were arrested. The website, they went to, offered pre-recorded videos and live videos for more money and a menu of elaborate, horrible things. Does this kind of gel with scam sites you've seen where they're sort of like giving you a like a saw or like a hostile style menu of like horrible things that can be done? Yeah, the assassination site we were investigating had its own pricing list. So, you know, a beating would be 3,000 and a killing started at 5.

But if you wanted a military-trained sniper, it would be up to 8. Yeah, absolutely. Like, they try and do it, I think, to try and create as much. Well, I mean, they want to appear as similar to the real deal as possible. And so they imagine that, you know, lists and kind of menus are the way to do it. And unfortunately, like, Italian media from what you could tell, never actually deterred, like, never published whether or not this. site was real. The teens were arrested and about 25 people were investigated, 19 minors and six who were over 18 across 13 Italian provinces. At no point does anyone ever sort of say

if this was actually real or not, which I feel like in a lot of ways by the time these stories wrap themselves up is almost beside the point. But it is kind of frustrating. And another example, we wanted to mention here, so in December, 23, two teams. were found guilty of murdering Brianna Gay in the UK, a trans teenager. We don't have the two attackers' names because they were under 18, but from the Daily Mail, sorry for quoting the Daily Mail to you. I can't get around it sometimes. They write, the jury was told that Girl X downloaded an onion browser six months before

Brianna's murder, which allowed her to access and watch videos of people being murdered and tortured, sometimes via live streams on the dark web without being traced. The psychologists call it disinhibition, he said. The internet leads to a lot of criminal activity because it's seen as a fantasy. Users are not only desensitized, but they are goaded into doing it themselves. So they carry out a frenzy attack and they don't think of the consequences because they are still living in that online virtual world. Which to me, I don't want to call into question the very excellent editorial standards of the Daily Mail. But that feels like a, like the idea of blaming that on the dark web does feel like a stretch to me.

As we've said, like, you can just see people die on the normal internet as much as you want. Right. I mean, one, tons of gore on the normal internet. Two, that reporting, that was in very general terms. I don't think they know they were just saying that's the kind of stuff that can happen. Right. I think, like, to me, so I've done a lot. I spent 10 years in think time researching online harms.

And I think like sheer exposure to it doesn't allow. you to differentiate people that have actually been genuinely harmed or gone on to harm someone from the millions of people, like you and me, Ryan, that were on 4chan, that were exposed to access to the same information and nothing happened. I think it becomes, you're able to draw a firmer link, though, when that person becomes embedded in a community of one kind or another, like say pro-anorexia forums. Yes, yes, I would agree. begin to change the norms and moral standards and what they think normal and and healthy

to be. I think, you know, so when like people have been goaded, that's often happened within forums, say, that have actually tried to say normalize things around suicide or normalize self-harm. That you can draw more of a link, I think. But of course, communities have existed and exist in loads of different places, like internet and not. Yeah, I, I've definitely kind of come around on the idea of like what I would call, like, a

meatic social disease, like an eating disorder. I think we can sort of, we can look at that and we can say, okay, this is clearly spreading and this is clearly influencing people's behavior in the same way like any kind of trend would. I have a tougher time saying, like, you downloaded a Tor Onion browser and then decided to carry out a murder. I wanted to sort of hit this really important point from a tech reporter Jamie Bartlett, who wrote, I've spent a lot of time on the dark net. I have never seen a functioning red room, nor have I seen links to functioning red rooms

or any other type of murder or torture video. Red Room sites simply do not exist in the Darknet. But according to specialist, Aline Ormsby, this is the same specialist from the vice article we talked about, there's no evidence any of them actually work. In fact, they are most likely scams designed to lure people into spending Bitcoin for live streams. One thing I can confidently say is that Girl X would have spent a lot of time searching for this material.

It would have appeared in front of her or via an accidental link click. The Darknet doesn't work like that. You need to know where you're going. which in my opinion means you're looking for the thing. It's not like it's coming across your TikTok feed and going like, I should carry out a murder. It's I want to carry out a murder. I'm going to go to a bad corner of the internet and learn more about how to do it.

Well, and you're far more likely to see like we did with the assassination market, scams exploiting rumors and myths for an easy quick buck than I think you will, the kind of deeper reality. But saying that, you know, the darknet is a deep, murky place. And I can't definitively say that there isn't those kinds of services being offered either. Yeah. And like we, I mean, we found like a couple examples of like people uploading, you know, pretty, pretty grisly murders to the internet.

I mean, it happens in 2012. A man named Luca Magnata in Canada uploaded a video and images of him dismembering someone's body and he gets caught later. He's putting it on a website called Best Gore. He's not using a Tor browser to go to an onion site to do it. Like, I mean, honestly, like to have this. conversation in the age of like the Christchurch shooter live streaming. Right, I'm going to say, like mass casualty terrorist attacks just being casually live screamed. And that's been 15 years of

this. So like the idea that you have to go download a special browser to upload a murder is like almost laughable at this point. Just this month, there was a guy who killed himself on a live stream while tons of people watched and he was doing it to promote a meme coin. So I feel like to sort of end things because we've talked so much about kind of like what isn't real and sort of the scammers that use this to take advantage of people, or to perhaps carry out some foreign vigilante justice, let's say. Do you have any sort of sense on like how prevalent genuine assassination markets, online hitman, you know, like the internet hitman thing? Like, is that happening on the dark web? Is that actually happening? Do you think? There's a small, very, very small

number of verified cases. There might be two or three where, and they weren't from marketplaces. So where we think they may have happened is where, and this is kind of weird, in the margins of other criminal sites, people met each other and spoke about having someone killed and then went out and killed that person. There's one case I believe in Finland and another in Russia where that has. Those damn fins, they can't stop carrying out hits on each other. But all of the actual like, hey, we're assassination markets. I've never seen one that looked like it was real. We thought our break into the site was unusual. And then we actually go and meet, and it's the last episode of the podcast,

we meet an American, in fact, who runs his own assassination site to capture the people using it and so that he then passes all of that off to the police. So there's multiple kind of honeypots out there of assassination sites that, of course, aren't delivering killing. I pulled up this article before the taping today just so I could get the details straight, because so I'm a very big, like, heavy music fan. And I remember in the 2010s, there was this whole drama around the band, as I lay dying. They had a lead singer named Tim Lembess, and he fell for a honeypot. He thought he was ordering a hit man to kill his wife, and it

turned out to be an undercover agent going where the code name read. I'm pretty confident at this point saying that 90% of the internet hitman that you might be talking to are not actually internet hitmen. They are either genuine law enforcement or people who are going to sell you out to law enforcement. Oh, I think we can go higher than 90%. Yeah? You want to push like 99%? Well, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So that's the official ruling on Panic World is that 99% of the internet hitman out there are law enforcement. As Killis has taught me, if I want to take out Ryan, I'm going to have to Go to some bars and queens. No, what's so crazy is that I've been talking to an internet hitman.

I've been talking to an internet hitman about killing Grant. And Grant's been talking to internet hitman about killing me. But I'm the internet hitman he's talking to and he's the internet hitman that I'm talking to. It's a rom-com we're pitching to Netflix. Do you think they're going to buy it, Carl? Last question. I cannot wait until you get the TV contract for this one. Deadlist in Seattle.

Yeah, there's... Exactly. That's right. Yeah. So, okay. So we've decided that like internet hitman almost totally don't exist. Red rooms do exist, but the real thing that is a red room is so horrific. One caveat for you. Sorry, I'm doing this right at the end.

No. When we were intercepting all these messages going into the site, what does slightly undermine the thesis that you and I have built together over at least the last hour is we were also intercepting individuals that wanted to be hit men. That's so funny. That's like honestly really funny. Is that like there's a whole bunch of people about this is honestly such an incredible indictment of like the internet middleman because there's a whole bunch of people that want to be

hitman yeah and there's a whole bunch of people that want to hire hitmen to kill people yeah but the middleman is so crammed full of scams and like they can't find the the the dark web and the non-dark web suffer from the same problems which is that the middlemen are just getting in the way this is why bitcoin could fix it because you could just hire a hitman directly you will you don't need a middle man. Well, but how so, but how do you find them? How do they market themselves? That's the problem. How do they differentiate from all the scams? The problem, I think, is that there's not enough murders so that there's not enough social reputation, like, input. So a drug market market is like 10 to thousands of them, but when it's like 10 hits or something,

you know, we don't get enough five-star reviews. So, like, you can't, you can't differentiate. But genuinely, you need like an Amazon brand hitman. So you know that like, okay, this one in the marketplace will probably show up on time. Yeah. You need Amazon Prime for internet hitman. Okay, yeah, totally. Carl, can you talk about how the website would use negative reviews? Oh, sure, yeah. The site was running, like maybe the most fiendishly clever disinformation strategy in the world. Firstly, it created a Hitman for hire comparison site on the Lightnet. It gained Google. It was like top of the hire a hitman search rankings. But then it knew that people, would be searching whether these hits had actually been carried out. So the person running the site

who goes by the name Eura, he's a Romanian cybercriminal. So Yura is that he's collecting essentially clips of the successful, of the carried out murders, if I understand it. No, no. So what he's doing is he's paying freelancers on on crypto freelance websites to write a carpet of like activism and like fake journalism which is a campaign to try and have his own site closed down because of the murders that it's apparently committing. So it was like pressure groups around the world that were trying to pressure police to close down his own site. So, okay, that's so funny.

It's a bit of a kind of twisted kind of thread there. No, it makes total sense because like, so we talked about this in a previous episode. I did an investigation in Mexico years ago into like a fake news farm around their election. And the thing that I discovered was that most of the customers of this, like, fake news content farm were politicians commissioning fake articles about themselves so that they could accuse their opponents of planting them. There's probably more examples of this than we think, like, people essentially making fake news about themselves to then be like, it doesn't go to, it's not as linear as I think people think it is. It's much more 4D chess than you think. Yeah, for sure. And here it was like, you know, if you Googled the site, you'd see like all these apparently

concerned citizen groups being like, they've, this has been the fifth murder that they've delivered this month. So you, if you're the user, you're like, oh my God. This place is great. They're so efficient. Yeah, wow. Yeah, yeah. So it's social reputation.

It all comes back to digital marketing. Those people ruin the planet. Thank you very much for coming on the show today. This was fantastic. This was much more fun and upbeat conversation about commissioning contract killers on the internet than I thought it would be. And it was delightful having you on. Seriously, this was great. Yeah, this was fun.

If people want to check out your podcast, read your book, find you on the internet, where can they do that? What onion site do they type into a Tor browser to find your directory of services? Well, they'll have to find. They'll have to be inventive and find that themselves. But they're always into the podcast. It's called Kill List. Okay. And it is, it's on the light net.

So you don't even have to download tour. And are you on any social platform? as people can follow you in? Yeah, Carl Jack Miller on Twitter. Cool. Well, thank you very much. This is fantastic. Thanks.

Panic World is a Garbage Day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at Garbageday. Email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. It's engineered by Rebecca Seidel. Our Durange logo was created by Gabby Cash.

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and you can reach him at Panicworldpod at gmail.com. And one piece of advice for me to you. Chill out. Touch grass while you still can.