TED Talks Daily - Inside a dark web kill list | Carl Miller

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

Who pays for an assassin on the internet? Dark web researcher Carl Miller spent years tracking down the answer to this question. In this chilling talk, he shares how he uncovered real kill orders placed online by seemingly ordinary individuals — and gives an unsettling look at what drives people to the brink. (Note: This talk contains descriptions of violence.)Want to help shape TED’s shows going forward? Fill out our survey!Become a TED Member today at https://ted.com/joinLearn more about TED Next at ted.com/futureyou Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, TED Talks Daily listeners. It's Elise. Thank you for making this show part of your daily routine. We really appreciate it and we want to make it even better for you. So we put together a quick survey and we'd love to hear your thoughts. It's listener survey time. It only takes a few minutes, but it really helps us shape the show and get to know you, our listeners, so much better.

Head to the episode description to find the link to the listener survey. We would really appreciate you doing it. Thank you so much for taking the time to help the show. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. We see it in the movies, assassins, hit lists, dramatic races to save people's lives.

How real can all this stuff be? Well, in this wild talk, digital researcher Carl Miller makes it clear this isn't the stuff of movies, but rather of real life. He takes us inside the mysterious workings of the dark web, where people are engaging in immoral acts that belong in the halls of true crime. Hold on to your seats for this talk. We're at a pivotal moment in the housing industry. Housing in BC has seen another spike. There's missing ecosystem.

There's missing financial tools. I can't think of another time where all levels of government seem to be aligned on doing something. This means embracing new technologies to reimagine how we plan, finance and execute projects. They're all looking to Canada right now asking like, what's going on? We have an opportunity to lead here and I'd just love for us to be able to take it. Blueprint for growth, innovation and housing, streaming on all podcast platforms. This episode is sponsored by Google Pixel.

I am always looking for tools that help me stay curious and efficient. And lately I've been exploring the Google Pixel 9, which was gifted to me by Google. What's impressed me most is how it's powered by Gemini. That's Google's personal AI assistant built right into my phone. Gemini helps me brainstorm ideas, summarize emails, even plan out my day, all just by holding the power button. For example, let me show you how easy it is. Gemini, summarize my unread emails.

Re, away next week. Jonathan confirmed with Elise Hugh about rescheduling a meeting. Reminder, development committee meeting tomorrow at 12 p.m. Central Time. It's super helpful for staying on top of things without feeling overwhelmed. Or when I needed a quick dinner plan, I snapped a photo of what I had in my fridge and Gemini gave me recipe ideas. It's like having a research assistant right in my pocket. If you can think it, Gemini can help create it. Learn more about Google Pixel 9 at store.google.com. Support for this episode comes from Airbnb.

Every time I travel to Vancouver for the TED conference, I think of extending the trip by one more day to explore. Maybe visit Granville Island to check out their public market, to browse the colorful food and produce, or try out one of their world famous donuts or some fresh food. Maybe with my extra time I could check out the Grouse Grind hike on the Grouse Mountain nearby, which I've been told is Mother Nature's stair master. This time around I might just do it. While I'm away I've been thinking of hosting on Airbnb so my home doesn't just sit empty.

It would put my home to good use, and the extra income would be great to cover some of the costs of my trip. One more night in this incredible city, one more inspiring TED talk. It just feels like the smart thing to do. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca. All right. Well, everyone, good morning. So I'm Karl Miller, and I spent years watching people trying to have someone murdered. They thought they were doing it in secret, but they weren't. So the year was 2020. COVID had descended, and just like everyone else, I was spending a lot of time online.

But I was going on a bit of the internet that I think probably fewer people here have actually been on, the darknet. A bit of the internet that, thanks to clever technology, encryption basically ensures anonymity. And rumours had swirled around the darknet for years that you could buy anything on the darknet, that you could buy drugs, that you could buy guns, that you could buy uranium, and also, that you could buy murder. I mean, it looks like a website from the 1990s. It looks like someone trying to make clip art as scary as possible.

But the offer that the website makes is a serious one. This website is saying, hey, we're the mafia, and now you can deal directly with us, thanks to the darknet. So, you load in your alias, you type in the message, and then it says you can directly transact to have someone killed. And so it was that in 2020, a hacker that I was working with, a man called Chris Montero. He was looking at this website. He was probing it. He was scanning it. He was seeing what he could learn.

And then in discovery, which changed, I think, both Chris and my life forever, momentously, Chris found a little vulnerability with the way in which this website worked, a kind of little technical gap, if you will, that he could kind of in a weird way wiggle through and get into the back end of the website. And there, Chris could see all the kill orders being placed.

He could see names, addresses, pattern of life information, Bitcoin payments, and all the messages trying to have someone killed. So he phoned me. So suddenly we were seeing that there was a hit to kill someone in Amsterdam, a simple easy person but high risk of putting me in jail. They paid almost $2,000. There was a hit to kill someone in Paris for $1,000, a person that needs to go away, her apartment needs to be set on fire. A large order to kill someone in Slovakia. I need you to take down one guy, they say, $14,000. There was an order in Hyderabad, in India.

There was an order in Berlin to kill someone probably working from home. $21,000 for that one. Now some of these kill orders were short and curt and clipped. Others were long offering lurid justifications as to why it was the right thing that this person had to die. And others still, they would log in almost every day, almost providing like real-time updates. Oh, the target's just left the house.

This is the car they're driving. This is how they're gonna get to work. But put together, we called all of these orders the kill list. It was the single, is the single most grotesque, disgusting, horrible, frightening thing I've ever had to read in my entire life. And it was getting longer all the time. So I did what any sane person would do. I phoned the police.

And so it was in the middle of COVID, the first two strangers that I'd seen for months were two somewhat nervous uniformed police officers from the Metropolitan Police stood in my kitchen and I laid it all out for them. I took them through the website, I took them through the hacks, I showed them the orders, we'd drawn this diagram of how the website worked. And they looked at it, and they looked at me, and they looked at each other, and they were unfortunately genuinely quite concerned I was insane. And it's a bit of a longer story, but ultimately the Metropolitan Police decided not to take up an active investigation in the site. But we knew we couldn't step away.

Like these people whose images we could see, who knew where we lived, these people being targeted, they might be in terrible danger. They might not know that someone out there on the dark net was trying to have them killed. So we took a decision, maybe the most difficult decision I've ever had to make, certainly professionally, and the decision was that I would go and reach the people on the kill list myself, directly. That I would tell them that the people on the kill list myself. Directly. That I would tell them that someone was trying to kill them.

And so we sculpted a script, we worked with a psychologist, we worked out how we would try and soften the blow of being told that someone was trying to kill you. And I had to also emotionally embrace myself for this. I dreaded it. The idea that I was about to throw this emotional hand grenade in someone's life, it was absolutely awful. Anyway, this is the call.

No, I don't want any information. I'm trying to give you information. I don't care. I'm sorry. Okay, well, thanks for your time anyway. Do give me a phone back if you'd like more information. Would we be able to arrange a time to be able to talk to you at greater length about that? No, thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay, so you don't...

Hang off of me. I mean, I wasn't an emotional hand grenade going off in these people's lives. I was awful. I mean, no one believed me. You know, I spent a week with this. The story was so unbelievably fantastical. Darknet assassins, you know, kill orders that I just kept getting hung up on for a week. So we knew we needed to evolve our strategy quickly. So we got local journalists on the scene. They believed us to go and directly meet the people on the kill list face to face.

And the first place we tried to do this was to reach a woman called Elena from the outskirts of Zurich. I spoke to the local journalist. She drove up to where Elena was living. She took a deep breath. She got out of her car and knocked on Elena's front door. And five minutes turned into ten, ten into fifteen. And then at last, after an agonizing wait, there was Elena on a Zoom call. A woman whose face I'd only seen on a kill order was there speaking to me.

And this was the warning I delivered her. Sorry, there's no easy way of really saying this. We've come across some information which might mean that someone had put some information regarding you on the site. I'm actually not really surprised. Really? In what way? I'm having an ugly divorce. It's going on for about for about three years now so and you know there's money involved quite a lot of money and my husband actually doesn't want to pay it.

So I'm not really surprised. She took it unbelievably well. Now an important thing to know is that it wasn't just messages going into the site. The shadowy people running the site were also replying. Some of these conversations would go back and forth for weeks or months. And we could read all of those as well. And what we realized when we were reading all of those

was that if there were hitmen out there, these were the most incompetent hitmen on the face of the planet. Like, they kept losing their weapons, or they kept getting lost. It'd build up to the hit, and suddenly the target would be too well protected. They'd have to pull out.

New teams have to come in. And every single time, the price would build up to the hit and suddenly the target would be too well protected. They'd have to pull out, new teams have to come in, and every single time the price would go up. It became really obvious that there were no shadowy hitmen out there. The site had no interest in killing any of these people. They were just trying to extort as much money as they could from the people placing the orders. But the people placing the orders, they of course did not know that. They were deadly serious when they were trying to have these people killed. And nowhere was that lesson starker than actually with Elena

herself. So after we spoke to the police, so after we spoke to Elena, we spoke to the police. And sometime after that, the Swiss police did arrest her husband. And only then did we realize that he'd been renting a secret room next to her flat. And in this room, there was a flint knife, a telescopic baton, a submachine gun, a Glock 9-millimeter pistol, an AK-47, zip ties, a black bin bag, black rubber gloves, GPS trackers, lockpicks. That was a lesson to us if we needed it,

that the people writing these orders could be just as dangerous as any darknet hitman. So who are these people? Who are the people writing these orders? Who is paying $2,200 for a 5-foot-5 male with blue eyes to be killed? Who? Which is Kelly Harper.

Kelly Harper is a go-getter, hospital administrator, one-time college sweetheart of the target of the order who'd been locked with him in a bitter years-long custody battle that raged across the courts and the schools and the hospitals of San Pedro, Wisconsin. Who's paying $16,000 to have a couple removed, someone that they don't quote, quite see eye-to-eye on something with, which sounds like the understatement of the absolute century? $16,000 to have a couple removed, someone that they don't quote quite see eye to eye on something with, which sounds like the understatement of the absolute century. This is a man that's done that, Christopher Pence, 40-year-old Microsoft IT security technician, the biological father of 11 children, the adoptive father of five more children, a man, a deeply religious man actually,

who from a large solitary house in a valley in Utah secretly plotted to have the biological parents of his five adoptive children killed. The order went by the darknet moniker Scar215, and they actually laid out a bonus structure. So an additional 10,000 to permanent withdrawal court motions So an additional 10,000 to permanent withdrawal court motions, an additional 10,000 to keep her mouth shut and tell no one.

The husband does not know this is happening, writes the order. Any guesses? The husband definitely did know this was happening. This is a husband, Dr. Ronald Ilk, a neonatologist, a doctor, a man who ran a clinic for vulnerable women with addiction issues, a man who went from a poor rural upbringing in Oregon to a senior city clinician

and a man obsessed with controlling all the people in his life, especially the women, a man so devoid of contrition that after his conviction, he's been trying to sell the book rights to his life by describing it as 50 shades of gray on steroids And it wasn't just here. We saw orders in Nevada. We saw orders in Tampa. We saw orders in Spain We saw orders in Italy. We saw orders almost everywhere. Now we started working in secret with the FBI and

We were passing all of our orders to the FBI to give you sense of the scale over the years that we were doing this, we disclosed 175 paid-for kill orders around the world. 32 arrests so far, 28 convictions so far. Around 180 years of prison time has been sentenced as a result of the investigation so far. There's probably more to come. has been sentenced as a result of the investigation so far. There's probably more to come.

Thanks. And in case anyone's wondering, no, we're not still doing this. So there's a whole other investigation that we did into people running the site. It turns out very likely that they were a group of Romanian cyber criminals, and some years ago they were then arrested in a rash of raids across Romania. We were then locked out of the site, and yet convictions have continued that we had nothing to do with. And that is the only reason I can stand on this stage today and tell you about any of this.

By the way, not a story I really thought I would ever be on a stage and able to tell anyone about. So it's a spectacular moment for me to be able to finally kind of talk to the world about what we were doing all those long years ago. But where are we left with? That's, I think, the final idea I want to leave us with. Like, what does all of this actually really mean? When I first started doing this, I thought the kinds of cases that we were going to be dealing with were going to be to do with maybe organized crime, big drug deals gone awry. And I think the reality is somewhat more unsettling than all of that. What this website seems to do, in the eyes

of the orders at least, is to make taking out a hit on someone convenient and clean and safe and easy, whereas it was once difficult and dangerous and scary. It's essentially lowered the barriers to entry to ordering an assassination. And I think that that brings us face to face with something that is quite disconcerting. The people on this list, the kill list, and the people that put them there are normal people. The perpetrators are basically normal people. They have jobs, they have friends, they go about living their lives just like you and I.

And they were going about holding all of that down, basically at the same time that they were plotting in secret constantly, coldly often, to have someone killed. I think that if there's one thing that unites them all, it was often intimate part of violence, by the way, spiraling out of control. And I think the one thing that unites them all

is a desire for control, a need to have it, an inability to lose it, control of a thing, control of a relationship, of a family, and a willingness, ultimately, of course, to kill to get it back. But I think that's where we are, and if there's one thing that I've come away from, this whole Luthorid's crazy journey really thinking, we might all be just a little bit closer to being on a kill list, we might like to think. Thanks very much, everyone.

That was Karl Miller at TEDx Manchester in 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today's show. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmarnivon. It was mixed by Christopher Fazy-Bogan, additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Elise Hu.

I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. What is Happy Travels? It's exploring the world your way and creating cherished memories with a sun vacation, cruise, flight or hotel deal. That's by experts who have been where you are now and have gone where you want to go. Booking is easy with vacations for every traveler.

Organized by destination, travel provider and more. Find your getaway. Contact a travel expert or visit Still on vacations.com We're at a pivotal moment in the housing industry. Housing in BC has seen another spike. There's missing ecosystem. There's missing financial tools.

I can't think of another time where all levels of government seem to be aligned on doing something. This means embracing new technologies to reimagine how we plan, finance and execute projects. They're all looking to Canada right now asking like, what's going on? We have an opportunity to lead here and I'd just love for us to be able to take it. Blueprint for growth, innovation and housing, streaming on all podcast platforms. On the TED Radio Hour, legendary soccer player Abby Wambach remembers exactly what was going on in her mind at a crucial moment during the 2011 World Cup.

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