An educated lady known to be of impeccable
character is sitting at her computer. She pauses for a brief second, looking outside at
the night sky, and then writes, “With a gun, in the street. $12,000 is fine. Just do it ASAP.”
Whoever is the other side of that message writes, “For $4,000, we’ll throw acid in her face, and
for $50,000 we’ll torture her to death.” The woman shakes her head. “No, just kill her.”
That’s based on a true story, and the person this woman was talking about could have been you.
Today you’ll hear about hitmen, drug traffickers, killers, and even cannibals, who’ve all at some
point been caught up in the darkest part of the Internet. You’ll hear why this is not a place you
should go to, and we’ll give you many reasons why. First of all, you should know where you’re
going when you visit the dark web. In short, it’s hidden within something called the
deep web. The deep web is just the part of the internet not accessible
by your standard search engines, and that makes up most of the net. The dark web
accounts for only about 0.01% of the deep web. To get there, you’ll have to download
certain software on your computer, such as the Tor browser. This should give you
anonymity, although as you’ll see today, that’s not always the case. Tor was invented by the US
government to create anonymous communications, and today you can find journalists and activists
using it as more open communication could find them in a spot of trouble. WikiLeaks,
for instance, is a part of the dark web, although it also publishes on the open web.
With this in mind, it’s not illegal to download some software and start using the dark web. It’s
what you do with all that anonymity that counts, which is what you’re going to hear about in this
rather dark show today. Let’s also remember that you might just be a curious sort of person who
just wants to have a look around the dark web, but by doing this there is always
the chance you might walk down the wrong virtual alleyway and find yourself in a
place you wish you had never gone. You might also be a marked man after this, or worse…
Before we talk about the really creepy stuff on the dark web, we should first talk about
drugs, the illegal kind. Some of you might have met a person who told you they ordered the
purest drugs they’ve ever had on the dark web, and it was delivered to their door
without a problem. Wow, how convenient, but listen on before you put your order in for
a sheet of colorful acid tabs and two dozen ecstasy pills that look like little LEGO bricks.
You can indeed do this, and many people have, with one former big fan of the dark web
drug business calling the place “Amazon run by cartels.” He explained that just about any
illegal drug you could think was there on offer, including “precursors”. You fans of Breaking Bad
will know that these are the substances you need to make certain drugs, such as crystal meth.
And believe it or not, the sites selling the drugs are often pretty reliable since there is
a place to give feedback to the seller. So, you might find a comment that says, “Grade A coke and
delivered on time. Top seller.” A few years back, there was a seller with the name Jesus of Rave. On
his site, he stated in quite a professional way: “Working with UK distributors, importers, and
producers to source quality, we run a tight ship and aim to get your order out same
or next day. This tight ship also refers to our attitude to your and our privacy.
We have been doing this for a long time.” It seems that ordering drugs on the dark web in
Britain really took off a few years ago. There are also lots of recent news reports stating that
seizures of ecstasy and amphetamines in the post had increased dramatically, with the drugs mostly
coming from The Netherlands after being ordered on the dark web. The Guardian wrote in 2019:
“Criminal organizations in the Netherlands are major producers and exporters of synthetic
drugs, exported via sea containers or trucks, but there is said to have been a growth
in online purchases in which the postal services are exploited. The US, Australia, and New
Zealand are the main recipients outside Europe.” The same article said that a sting operation
led police to a massive 300kg of drugs and 51 firearms. That same year, a dark web site called
the “Wall Street Market (WSM)” was shut down in Germany, and arrests were made. The owners were
making big bucks selling heroin, cocaine, weed, and speed, as well as malicious software,
counterfeit documents, and stolen data. It worked in six languages: English, French,
German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. At the time, prosecutors wrote, “WSM operated
like a conventional e-commerce website, such as eBay and Amazon. However, its sole existence
was geared to the trafficking of contraband.” As you probably know, the money to be made
selling drugs is just so good that arresting dealers or traffickers is like playing a game of
whack-a-mole. You put one in prison, and another pops up. The war on drugs has been nothing but a
failure for the most part, with the authorities looking like Sisyphus, that guy who was told he’d
have to push a round rock up a hill for eternity. This means two things. One thing is that you
can be assured that despite these arrests you can still go on the dark web right now and order
pretty much any drug you want. But it also means that you can be assured that some men with badges
will be trying to put you in prison for it. This is why it is dangerous. You might think you can
get away with it seeing as you have anonymity, but you actually don’t. The FBI and other law
enforcement entities are all over the dark web. This is the problem with the dark web: You can
get eaten by spiders. When people think they have impunity, they can get careless.
That’s what happened recently when 150 people were arrested in an operation called
“Dark HunTOR.” Law enforcement from Europe, the US, and Australia were involved and about
25 million bucks’ worth of drugs were taken. In this case, no small-time buyers were arrested,
just the sellers, but cops warned about something else. Many of the drugs these days contain
the killer substance Fentanyl. This stuff works well in hospitals for pain relief and
might sound good to a hardcore opiate addict, but the truth is, there have been
a startling number of news reports, including ones involving famous
people, of folks thinking they’ve taken a drug like cocaine and died because
the white powder also had fentanyl in it. As we write this, five people died all at
once of an accidental overdose in the US when they didn’t know their powder contained
this drug. But doing a quick search, we could have chosen numerous stories that included
the words “accidental Fentanyl overdose.” We don’t condone drug use here, but
if a person is intent on taking drugs, then the safest thing would be to know what you
are taking. When you order from the dark web, you really don’t know what you are getting and
since everything is anonymous the seller might not care too much about what they are giving you.
Even if you die, there is very little chance they will ever be arrested. We even found a story
containing the words “fentanyl-laced ecstasy tablets.” Rave to the Grave might be the
suitable expression here. Unfortunately, while it could save tens of thousands,
maybe even hundreds of thousands, of lives, the authorities for the most part have always
been dead set against providing folks with easily available drug testing equipment.
On top of this, sometimes the buyers do get arrested. There was a story in 2020 that
stated 179 people were arrested in a massive bust involving multiple drugs and guns, and some
of those arrested were buyers. Most were in the US, and the others in the UK, Germany, Sweden,
the Netherlands, and Austria. At the time, the authorities claimed that the “golden age of
the dark web marketplace is over” but they’ve been claiming to be winning the war on drugs since
people still watched black and white television. Nonetheless, Europol had a warning for
prospective buyers and sellers, saying, “The hidden internet is no longer hidden,
and your anonymous activity is not anonymous. Law enforcement is committed to tracking down
criminals, no matter where they operate – be it on the streets or behind a computer screen.”
They’ve even been arresting small-time dealers, as can be seen in one story involving a “Florida
Man.” Using the name “dacandyman”, his line of work was mostly the distribution of cocaine. He
would send the stuff right to your house via the mail, and guess what, once he was arrested the
cops also knew where he’d been sending the stuff. We’ll add one more thing here- some people on
the dark web might be pretending to sell drugs, but all they are after is your personal
information. They are looking to exploit that information, and as you’ll soon see,
sometimes so they can blackmail you. Mostly, though, they are phishing in order to get their
hands on your money. You can buy “Phishing Kits” on the dark web, but you can also be phished.
Ok, so maybe drugs are not your thing. Maybe you’re not really into anything illegal, but
you do have a very curious mind. When someone told you they had a video of a man being cut up
with a chainsaw, you just had to watch it. Freak! Unfortunately, gore sites are all over the open
internet, and while it’s not technically illegal to post videos of such things as someone being
stoned to death, beheaded, or perhaps eating a great big dish of steaming poop, sometimes what
you see will forever scar that mind of yours, unless of course you are either desensitized
to that kind of thing or are a bit on the weird side. That makes up a lot of society,
actually, seeing as just one site back in the day called Best Gore was getting in
the region of 10-20 million hits a month. The owner of best Gore was eventually
arrested after posting the video called “1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick”, which consisted of an
eternally unstable manic named Luka Magnotta dismembering a guy and then sending some of the
body parts to schools and political offices. Obviously, that was a very serious crime and
Magnotta is now in prison where he belongs. If you know the story, you will know that before he
was arrested animal activists were also hot on his tail because some of the videos consisted
of him doing very bad things to kittens. So, maybe one day you get on the dark web and
end up seeing something you wish you hadn’t, although we guess right now some of you are
thinking that Infographics Show writers are just big wusses. Maybe a bit of gore is nothing to you.
According to the Washington Post, much of the worst gore talked about that is supposedly
available on the dark web is just that: talk. You may have heard that you can watch
a movie that stars a person being murdered, aka, a snuff movie, but they may not actually
exist. Some of them are set up, and no one dies, or the rumors about certain films are just rumors.
Still, videos of accidental deaths, or executions, do exist, and it is not illegal for you
to watch them. As one writer pointed out, “It's illegal to murder somebody. It's illegal
to watch somebody get murdered and not report it. But it's not illegal to watch an online
snuff film. At least not at the moment.” You wouldn’t, for instance, have
been in trouble if you watched a video that surfaced on the web made by
the so-called “Dnepropetrovsk maniacs.” These two Ukrainian teenagers brutally murdered
21 people in 2007 and they filmed a lot of the violence. For a time, you might have been
able to see some of that on gore sites, but not anymore. Still, as we speak, people are
going to the dark web to watch similar stuff. One journalist went there to check out such gore,
later writing that there is a danger in becoming desensitized to it. He said in an article, “I
could make you physically sick in minutes by showing you stuff now, but the second or the third
or fourth time you see it you can get desensitized to it all. It happens to a lot of people.”
It creates a lack of empathy in people, and the more you watch, the worse that gets. We
don’t need to tell you that this isn’t good for your mental well-being, but this guy said people
get addicted to it. He added, “I don’t know what drives people to do it. It’s just pure evil. Why
does someone want to watch that? The uncomfortable truth is there is a lot of evil out there.”
Then you could be down one of these bloody rabbit holes and really see something you wish
you hadn’t, content of a sexual nature that is very much illegal. Your curiosity could possibly
take you there. In 2019, the BBC reported that 337 people were arrested in 38 countries because they
were involved with such content. Of the users, the police said, “They're not as
cloaked as they think they are, they're not as safe as they think they are.”
You never know if you are being watched when you’re on the dark web. There was a recent
case of a guy in the US that talked on a web forum in the dark web about killing his
wife. He asked other people for advice on how he might do it. He wrote, “I aim to
ensure my wife’s death within the 18 months, ideally long after our divorce is finalized (about
6-8 months from now). This is the only way I can begin a new life with full custody of my child.”
After some discussion, he came up with poison, which he said he might put in her coffee,
wipe on a door handle, or just slip on her feet while she was asleep. He then tried to buy
what the authorities called a “chemical weapon.” They later explained to the media that it was “a
colorless, volatile, flammable and highly toxic liquid” that can be “easily absorbed through the
skin and may produce life-threatening systemic effects with only a single drop.”
The man bought the chemicals, too, paying $95 for a 10-milliliter vial. The problem
is, the seller was none other than the FBI. Agents arrested him after he went to the place he’d
asked for it to be mailed. Once in custody, he admitted to the murder plot, and said he’d
been thinking about using the dark web to hire a hitman but he told agents that “hiring a hitman
would be as expensive as getting a divorce.” Hiring a hitman on the dark web could also
get you in trouble. Not too long back, you could have visited a so-called hitman-for-hire
website on the dark web and found one that stated, “If you want to kill someone, we are the right
guys. We have professional hitmen available throughout the entire USA, Canada, and Europe
and you can hire a contract killer easily.” One guy was told that he could have his wife
killed for $6000 and the death would look like an accident. A bunch of such sites were around
back then, with names such as Sicilian Hitmen, Ndrangheta Hitmen, Camorra Hitmen,
Bratva Mafia and Yakuza Mafia. They were all actually owned by the same person.
One site claimed, “We offer you a large international network of experienced hitmen
and provide services to beat up, set fire, or kill customers’ targets. We assign hitmen in the
same country as the target with the appropriate skills that match the job specifications.”
The thing was, the guy behind the sites never even intended to kill anyone. He just took
the money, and at times talked to the FBI. There have been instances when someone went on
the dark web trying to hire a hitman, and after payment was made, the person got arrested.
This happened not too long with a British doctor, and it later happened to a woman in Denmark
for hiring someone to whack her former boyfriend. A very recent case included a
51-year-old woman in Florida who’d gone on the dark web and tried to hire a hitman
to murder the new wife of her ex-boyfriend. She paid $12,000 in Bitcoin and a further
$350 for the gun, and all that information was seen by the FBI. The agency also saw her first
message, which read, “I am looking for a quick hit in southern Florida. Is anyone available?”
This was a woman with a Master’s Degree, who’d had her own financial consulting
business, and regularly attended church. She was sentenced to six and a half years in
prison. The website was just another scam, although it looked real enough. It
stated that the prices were $5000 for “death by shooting”, $20,000 for “death by
sniper”, and just $2,000 for a good beating. Another recent case involved a man in Italy
who’d paid 10,000 Euros ($11,885) in Bitcoin for men to go visit his girlfriend and beat
her to death. European police got wind of this, although news stories didn’t state exactly how.
In 2020, a woman in Michigan was also hoodwinked by such a website that she believed had
18,000 operatives working worldwide. She gave the site $5,000 to knock off her husband.
It turned out that the site was run by a man in the US who never killed anyone but pretended to
be a hitman as a way to catch potential criminals. This is a murky area since such websites
might entice folks to want someone killed. The owner of the site told the media that since
he’d started up, he’d talked to 400 people who were looking to have someone killed and a few
people who’d wanted to sign-up as hitmen. The guy said about 10 percent of the people
he chatted with had legitimate requests, and that’s when he informed the cops.
The point we are making is when you’re on the dark web, you never quite know with whom
you are getting involved. We are sure some of you would think it would be funny to talk to a
hitman and pretend you wanted someone killed, but even that could get you in trouble. Still,
the owner of the aforementioned site said he always waited a day to ask the person if they
still wanted the job done. If they did, he then got on the phone with law enforcement. Talking
about one of his first cases, he told the media: “I get an email from a woman saying she needed
three people murdered. A few hours later, she sent a second email with the names and
addresses of the people she wanted killed.” The woman was a British-Canadian who said the
people she wanted dead had stolen the inheritance she should have received from her father.
The website owner added, “She wanted to get even. She was gonna stop at nothing. I reached out
to a friend who was a sergeant and said, 'I think this lady is serious, can we request a welfare
check? The friend notified Canadian authorities.” She was eventually sent to prison for a few
months for soliciting to commit murder. The website owner was proud, saying he helped save
the lives of three people, although you have to question if this woman would have had those
killed in the end or killed them herself. The web is full of these stories. One website
claimed that it wouldn’t just kill people, but would torture them to death, although
that would set the client back a whopping $50,000. Painless poisoning was $42,000. An acid
attack was $4000, and crippling was $10,000. Not only are these sites scams, but even if
a person doesn’t get reported to the police, how will they ask for their money back?
They don’t even know who they’ve been talking to and there is no way they can
go to the cops about their missing money. These days the newest hitman websites on the dark
web tell people that there are all kinds of hitman scams out there, but that they are the real
deal. One site declared, “We can provide video proof of our services, with time stamps. Again,
such proof is not possible for fake services.” Sometimes they will go to great lengths to look
real, too, with one website going as far as hiring some dude to set a car on fire and film it just to
show the potential client that he meant business. It was later found out that the guy who’d
set the car on fire was a man in California who’d contacted the website and said he somehow
wanted to get involved with the hitman business. The website in this case was called Besa
Mafia. It was later talked about in the media after it was discovered that after a man
had paid $6,000 to have his wife killed and it never happened, he then killed her himself.
There is no shortage of spiders and crazy people on the dark web, which in general
is why you ought to give it a wide berth. We can find only one instance when it has been
proven that hitmen were hired on the dark web and actually went through with the murder.
That was a case in Russia when two teenage boys killed a drug trafficker for
a rival drug trafficker. In short, if you go to the dark web and try to hire someone
to do something nasty for you, you’ll likely just lose a lot of money and then end up in prison.
Not too long ago you might also have met a British man named Matthew Falder, a person
you could call the embodiment of evil. Using the names ‘666devil' and ‘evil-mind’,
this guy went on dark web forums and talked about all manner of disgusting things,
usually involving young people. His thing was to lure people online into thinking
he liked them, and then as time went on, he’d ask them to make very compromising videos
of themselves. Since he was well-spoken and seemed sincere, people fell for it. Falder
was very educated, holding a position as a geophysicist researcher at Birmingham University.
Once he had his hands on the images or videos he said that if the victims didn’t pay him a whack
of cash, he’d send the content to everyone they knew. In one message, he told a young victim
that he would “send the images to everyone on Facebook associated with your school, and
in letters to your parents and teachers, explaining with printouts of all the
pictures that you will strip for money.” Most of the victims were naïve and it wasn’t
that hard for a highly-educated maniac to manipulate them. In some cases, he told them to
film themselves licking toilet seats and eating dog food, after which he posted the content to
his many fans on the dark web. He wrote in one post to those fans, “Glad you are all enjoying
her suffering” and later "I love blackmail, especially forcing someone met online to do
things they don't want to for amusement.” Imagine visiting websites where people like that
post things. Imagine virtually befriending this person and not knowing what you were getting into.
Another example of blackmail involved a man who wrote on Reddit that not too long ago
he’d tried to buy drugs on the dark web and had given an address, only for him
to receive a letter instead of the drugs. The letter stated, “Congrats you BLEEP. You have
been participating in illegal activities and we have had our eye on you.” The man didn’t send
any cash and the scammer was at best amateurish, but this is just another example
of how when you go on the dark web you are potentially making yourself vulnerable.
One other thing some people go on the dark web to do is just to pretend to be something they’re not
as that in itself can be kind of exciting. These people sometimes roleplay very dark fantasies.
This can also get you in trouble, never mind blackmailed if you meet the wrong person.
You might have heard of the case of a New York City police officer who got the name the
“Cannibal Cop”. His real name was Gilberto Valle. A few years ago he was sentenced to a prison term
for going on a website called Dark Fetish Net and talking about how he wanted to kill and eat women,
including his own wife – the woman who eventually found those disturbing messages on his computer.
He didn’t just talk about it, either, but had a list of around 100 women whose names and addresses
he had thanks to his job as a cop. One of his messages about his wife said that he wanted to let
“her bleed out then butcher her while she hangs.” It was a big case at the time because this guy
really didn’t seem like a killer at all. In court, he said his conversations on the
forum were all about role-playing and he never intended for anyone to get hurt.
He said in court, “As time went on, you know, more and more people wanted to do these role
plays with me because I was really good. I kind of wanted to provide and be a little more
graphic and kind of not disappoint - again, the competitive side of me came out.”
Valle wasn’t using the dark web. This stuff was out in the open, but make no mistake,
there are more people like him on the dark web, a lot more. He was eventually cleared and released
from prison, but his case begs the question, just how much can you just talk about crimes
online without falling foul of the law? Can you roleplay online or just mess about
and get in trouble? We are guessing that some of our viewers would try this with
friends just for fun, maybe to see who replied and to understand the depravity of certain people
online. You should probably give that a miss. In 2018, a man in the US went on the dark web
and found a forum where he left this post: “I’d like to try cannibalism, and see how it
feels to take a life. If you’d be willing to let me kill you, are in the US (preferably in
the south) and can travel by car, contact me.” His name was Alexander Nathan Barter and
at the time he was just 21-years old. First of all, yet again we are showing you what
kind of people you might meet on the dark web, but secondly, even if you yourself posted
this kind of content as a kind of joke you should know that not long after Barter posted
that message it was read by an officer working for the Texas Department of Public Safety.
That agent replied, saying he was willing to give his daughter to Barter for the expressed
purposes, namely for killing and eating. Several other emails were exchanged, in which Barter
told the agent to meet him and bring a spare set of clothes and a burner phone. In another
email, he stated, “I really want to do this.” Barter was arrested on the day
the murder was supposed to happen, and on him at his house was a knife and some
plastic bags. But was this just part of a dark, twisted fantasy, or would he have really done it?
The jury thought so and a judge sentenced him to 40 years in prison. In court, the prosecution
said, “As this chilling case demonstrates, online talk is not always just talk. The
constant vigilance of our law enforcement partners has prevented an evildoer
from finding a like-minded accomplice and bringing his grisly plan to fruition.”
A site that no longer exists on the open web was called The Cannibal Café. When it was still
up, you could have read posts with titles such as, “I really fantasize about being
butchered, roasted, and eaten.” Then in 2001, a computer specialist in Germany named Armin Meiwes killed a
man he’d found on that forum. His victim was Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes. Both men were in their 40s when they
agreed to go through with this. The two met and let’s just say what happened
was one of the strangest dates in history, and in the end, bits of Brande ended up in
Meiwes’ freezer, and the cannibalistic fetishes he’d had since he was a child became
a reality. He also ended up in prison. Meiwes told the court that for many years
he’d only fantasized about doing such things, but it was when he found a real-life cannibalism
website that things moved from fantasy to possibility. He added, “If I hadn’t been so
stupid as to keep looking on the Internet, I would have taken my secret to the grave.”
As we said, his interactions with his victim happened on the open web, but that was back
in the day. These days if you want to talk shop about eating people, you’d struggle to do
that out in the open virtual space. As we showed you with the Texan guy, the dark web is the
place to go for that kind of thing these days. You might find a forum with someone saying
something like this (real dark web comment), “I need someone to eat my fresh meat. I am juicy
and tender”, but we are guessing most of these people are just messing around for the sake of
being a bit naughty. Still, now you know that law enforcement could be reading such messages,
we don’t recommend risking playing around. As another example, one guy we found said he did
a bit of messing about on the dark web. He later said on a forum, “I was trying to make a small
explosive for a dumb little movie I was gonna make with my friends. I found myself in the dark
corners of the internet. One site, in particular, had a text document downloaded talking about how
to sneak explosives past metal detectors. NSA is probably all over me right now.”
He could be right. There might not be any Red Rooms on the dark
web, or hitmen who’ll torture your ex to death, or ghastly human experiments with homeless
people, but there certainly are sexual deviants and torture fans only too happy to share
content with you. There might be the odd person who wants to chat about eating human
eyeballs with you, and there is a long list of folks who want to sell you guns, drugs,
and someone’s personal data. Those people might also be law enforcement or blackmailers.
Unless you’re depraved, desperately drug-addicted, downright evil, or a dedicated journalist
or activist in hiding, then why would you go there? The real reason you shouldn’t visit
the dark web is there’s just no point and if you aren’t any of the things we just mentioned,
there really is no reason at all. Pandora’s box, as full of snakes as it is, is best
left locked. Even if you do manage to get yourself flagged by law enforcement or
scammed by a heartless fiend, you’ll have to wade through a lot of junk to get there.
Now you need to watch this fascinating story we just mentioned, “Why DARK WEB HITMAN
Turned on His Own.” Or, have a look at…
