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Inside a Dark Web Kill List | Carl Miller… — TED shadowing | TryShadowing
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Inside a Dark Web Kill List | Carl Miller | TED
Inside a Dark Web Kill List | Carl Miller | TED
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14:40 · Sep 25, 2025
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0:05
All right.
0:05
Well, everyone, good morning.
0:06
So, I'm Carl Miller.
0:08
Uh, and I spent
0:10
years watching people trying to have murdered.
0:16
They thought they were doing it in
0:18
secret, but they weren't.
0:21
So, the year 2020.
0:24
COVID had descended and just like everyone else,
0:28
I was spending a lot of time online.
0:30
But I was going on a bit of the internet that I think probably
0:33
fewer people here have actually been on. The darknet.
0:37
A bit of the internet that thanks to clever technology,
0:39
encryption basically ensures your anonymity.
0:42
And rumors had swirled around the darknet for years
0:46
that you could buy anything on the darknet.
0:48
That you could buy
0:49
drugs, you could buy guns,
0:51
that you could buy uranium.
0:53
And also, you can buy
0:56
murder on websites this.
1:00
This is what the website looked like when I first laid eyes on it
1:03
all those years ago.
1:05
I mean, it looks like a website from the 1990s.
1:07
It looks like someone trying to make clip art as scary as possible.
1:11
Uh, but the but the offer that the website makes is a serious one.
1:15
This website is saying,
1:17
"Hey, we're the mafia
1:19
and now you can deal directly with us thanks to the darknet."
1:22
So you go on to this part of the internet,
1:24
you put on you you load in your alias,
1:26
you type in the
1:27
message, and then it says you can directly transact
1:31
to have someone killed.
1:34
And so it was that in 2020,
1:37
a hacker that I was working with,
1:39
a man called Chris
1:40
Montero, he was looking at this website.
1:44
He was probing it.
1:45
He was scanning it.
1:46
He was seeing what he could learn.
1:48
And then in discovery
1:49
which changed I think both Chris and my life forever momentously.
1:54
Chris found a little vulnerability
1:57
with the way in which this website worked.
2:00
Uh a kind of little technical gap if you will that he could kind
2:03
of in a weird way wiggle through
2:05
and get into the back end of the website.
2:09
And there Chris could see
2:12
all the kill orders being placed.
2:14
He could see names,
2:16
addresses, pattern of life information,
2:19
Bitcoin payments, and all the messages
2:21
trying to have someone killed.
2:24
So he phoned me.
2:27
So suddenly these were flying in.
2:29
These are, by the way, the literal
2:31
actual kill orders we were intercepting on the site.
2:33
I'm not locking up anything today.
2:35
These are all real.
2:36
So suddenly we were seeing that there was a a hit to uh to
2:39
kill someone in Amsterdam.
2:40
A simple, easy person, but high risk of putting me in jail.
2:43
They paid almost $2,000.
2:45
There was a hit to kill someone in Paris for $1,000.
2:47
A person that needs to go away.
2:49
Her apartment needs to be set on fire.
2:51
A large order to kill someone in Slovakia.
2:54
I need to take down one guy. They say $14,000.
2:57
There was an order in Hyereaban in India.
2:59
There was an order in Berlin
3:01
uh to kill someone probably working from home.
3:03
$21,000 for that one.
3:05
Now, some of these
3:07
kill orders were short and curts and clipped.
3:11
Others were long offering
3:14
lurier justifications as to why it was the right thing that this person had to die.
3:18
And others still they would log in almost every day almost providing like real time updates.
3:22
Oh, the targets just left the house.
3:24
This is the car they're driving.
3:25
This is how they're going to get to work.
3:27
Um, but put together
3:29
we called all of these orders the kill list.
3:32
Uh it's it was the single
3:34
is the single most grotesque,
3:37
disgusting, horrible, frightening thing
3:39
I've ever had to read in my entire life.
3:42
Uh and it was getting longer all the time.
3:45
So I did what any sane person would do.
3:47
I phoned the police.
3:49
And so it was in the middle of COVID, the first two strangers that
3:52
I had seen for months
3:54
were two somewhat nervous
3:56
uniform police officers from the Metropolitan
3:58
Police stood in my kitchen.
3:59
And I laid it all out for them.
4:00
I took them through the website.
4:02
I took them through the hacks.
4:03
I showed them the orders.
4:05
We' we' drawn this diagram of how the website
4:08
worked and they looked at it
4:11
and they looked at me and they looked at each other and they were
4:14
unfortunately genuinely quite concerned I was insane.
4:19
And it's a bit of a longer story, but ultimately the Metropon's
4:22
police decided not to take up an active investigation in the site,
4:25
but we knew we couldn't step away.
4:28
like these people, these people that whose images we could see, who were knew
4:31
where we live, these people being targeted,
4:33
they might be in terrible danger.
4:35
You know, they might not know that someone out there on the darknet was
4:38
trying to have them killed.
4:40
So, we took a decision
4:42
uh maybe the most difficult decision I've ever had to make, certainly professionally.
4:46
Uh and the decision was
4:47
that I would go and reach the people on the kill list
4:50
myself directly, that I would tell them that someone was trying to kill them.
4:56
And so we sculpted a script.
4:58
We wor with a psychologist.
4:59
We worked out how we would try and soften the blow
5:01
of being told that someone was trying to kill you.
5:04
And I had to also emotionally
5:06
embrace myself for this. I dreaded it.
5:08
The idea that I was about to throw this emotional hand grenade in someone's life.
5:12
It was absolutely awful.
5:13
Anyway, this is the call.
5:15
No, I don't want any information.
5:16
I'm I'm trying to give you information.
5:19
I I don't care. No, I'm sorry. Okay.
5:23
Well, thanks for your time anyway.
5:24
Um, do give me a phone back if you'd like more information.
5:33
Would we be able to arrange a time
5:35
um to be able to talk to you at greater length about that? Well, thank you. Thank you. Okay.
5:43
So, you don't you
5:46
hung up on me.
5:48
I mean, I wasn't an emotional hand grenade going off in these people's lives. I was awful.
5:52
I mean, no one believed me, you I spent a week with the the
5:55
story was so unbelievably fantastical.
5:57
Darknet assassins, you know, kill orders that that I just kept getting hung up
6:01
on for a week.
6:02
So, we knew we need to evolve our strategy in quickly.
6:05
So, we got local journalists on the scene.
6:08
They believed us to go and directly
6:10
meet the people on the kill list face to face.
6:13
And the first place we tried to do this was to reach a woman
6:16
called Elena here in Zurich in the outskirts of Zurich.
6:20
I spoke to the local journalist.
6:22
She she drove up to where Elena was living.
6:24
She took a deep breath.
6:26
She got out of her car and knocked on Elena's front door.
6:28
In 5 minutes turned into 10, 10 into 15.
6:31
And then at last, after an agonizing
6:34
weight, there was Elena
6:35
on a Zoom call.
6:36
A woman whose face I'd only seen on a kill order
6:39
was there speaking to me.
6:41
And this was the warning I delivered her.
6:44
Sorry, this is there's no easy way of really saying this.
6:46
Um, we've come across some information which might mean that someone had put some
6:50
information regarding you on the site.
6:53
I'm actually not really surprised. Really? In what way?
6:57
I'm having an ugly divorce.
7:00
It's going on for about
7:01
uh for about 3 years now.
7:03
So, um, and uh you know
7:07
there's money involved, quite a lot of money.
7:09
And um my husband
7:13
uh actually doesn't want to pay it.
7:16
So, you know, I'm not really surprised.
7:20
She took it unbelievably well.
7:24
Now, um, an important thing to know is that it wasn't just messages going into the site.
7:29
The shadowy people running the site were also replying.
7:32
Some of these conversations
7:33
would go back and forth for weeks or months.
7:35
And we could read all of those as well.
7:37
And what we, you know, what we realized when we were reading all of
7:40
those was that if there were hitmen out there,
7:42
these were the most incompetent
7:44
hitmen on the face of the planet.
7:46
Like they kept losing their weapons or they kept getting lost.
7:48
It'd build up to the hit and suddenly the target would be too well protected.
7:52
They'd have to pull out.
7:53
New teams have to come in and every single time the price would go up.
7:56
It became really obvious
7:58
that there were no shadowy hitmen out there.
8:00
The site had no interest in killing any of these people.
8:02
They were just trying to extort
8:04
as much money as they could from the people placing the orders.
8:07
But the people placing the orders,
8:09
they of course did not know that they were deadly serious when they were
8:13
trying to have these people killed.
8:14
And nowhere was that lesson and starker than actually with Elena herself.
8:17
So after we spoke to the police,
8:19
so after we spoke to Elena, we spoke to the police.
8:21
And sometime after that,
8:23
the Swiss police did arrest her husband.
8:26
And only then did we realize
8:28
that he'd been renting a secret
8:30
room next to her flat.
8:33
And in this room there was
8:35
a flint knife, a telescopic
8:38
batton, a submachine gun,
8:40
a Glock 9mm pistol,
8:42
an AK-47, zip ties,
8:44
a black bin bag,
8:46
black rubber gloves, um GPS trackers, lockpits.
8:51
That was a lesson to us if we needed it.
8:53
that the people writing these orders could be just as dangerous
8:57
as any darknet hitman.
9:00
So, who are these people?
9:01
Who are the people writing these orders?
9:03
Who is paying $2.2,000
9:05
here for a 5'5
9:07
male with blue eyes to be killed? Who?
9:11
This isn't doing it. She's Kelly Harper.
9:14
Kelly Harper is a a go-getter,
9:16
hospital administrator, one-time college sweetheart
9:20
of the target of the order who'd been locked with him in a bitter
9:23
years long custody battle
9:25
that had raged across the courts and the schools and the hospitals of S per Wisconsin.
9:31
Who's paying $16,000 to have a couple removed
9:34
someone that they quite
9:35
don't quote quite see eye to eye on something with, which sounds like the
9:38
understatement of the absolute century.
9:42
This is a man that's done that.
9:43
Christopher Pence, 40-year-old IT
9:46
Microsoft IT security technician,
9:48
uh the biological father of 11 children,
9:51
the adoptive father of five more children,
9:54
uh a a man, a deeply religious man actually, who from a large
9:58
uh solitary house in a valley in Utah
10:01
secretly plotted to have the biological
10:03
parents of his five adoptive children killed.
10:08
This order didn't want the target actually killed.
10:11
This order wanted the target kidnapped
10:13
and forcibly addicted to heroin.
10:16
The uh the the order went by the darknet
10:19
moniker SCAR 215 and they actually laid out a bonus structure.
10:24
So an additional 10,000
10:26
to permanently withdraw court motions.
10:28
An additional 10,000 to keep her mouth shut and tell no one.
10:31
The husband does not know this is happening, writes the order. Any guesses?
10:38
The husband definitely did know this was happening.
10:41
This is a husband, Dr. Ronald Il.
10:43
Uh, a neonatlogist, a doctor,
10:45
a man who ran an a clinic for vulnerable women with addiction issues.
10:50
Uh, a man who went from a poor rural upbringing in Oregon to a senior city clinician.
10:55
And a man obsessed
10:56
with controlling all the people in his life, especially the women.
10:59
a man so devoid of contrition
11:01
that after his conviction, he's been trying to sell the book rights to his
11:04
life by describing it as Fifty Shades of Gray on steroids.
11:08
And it wasn't just here.
11:10
This was a Sports Direct love triangle in Milton Kees.
11:14
Uh this was a woman trying to kill her two parents in Canberra, Australia.
11:18
We saw orders in Nevada.
11:19
We saw orders in Tampa.
11:20
We saw orders in Spain.
11:22
We saw orders in Italy.
11:23
We saw orders almost everywhere.
11:25
Now, we started working in secret
11:27
with the FBI and we were passing all of our orders to the FBI.
11:31
And to give you a sense of the scale,
11:32
over the years that we were doing this, we
11:35
disclosed 175 paid for
11:39
kill orders around the world.
11:42
32 arrests so far,
11:44
28 convictions so far.
11:46
Around 180 years of prison time has been sentenced as a result of the investigation so far.
11:51
There's probably more to come. Thanks.
12:01
Uh, and in case anyone's wondering, no, we're not still doing this.
12:05
So, there's a whole another investigation that we did into the people running the site.
12:09
It turns out very likely that they were a group of Romanian
12:12
cyber criminals and uh and some years ago, they were then arrested in a
12:16
rash of raids across Romania.
12:18
We were then locked out the site.
12:20
uh and yet convictions have continued that we have had nothing to do with
12:24
and that is the only reason I can stand on this stage today and
12:28
tell you about any of this.
12:28
This is by the way not a story
12:30
I really thought I would ever be on a stage and able to tell anyone about.
12:34
So it's a spectacular moment for me to be able to finally kind of
12:37
talk to the world about what we were doing all those long years ago.
12:40
But what where are we left with?
12:42
That's I think the final idea I want to leave us with.
12:45
Like what does all of this actually really mean?
12:48
When I first started doing this,
12:50
I thought the kinds of cases
12:52
that we were going to be dealing with
12:54
were going to be to do with maybe organized
12:56
crime, big drug deals gone ary.
12:59
And I think the reality
13:01
is somewhat more unsettling
13:03
than all of Uh
13:06
what this website seems to do
13:08
in the eyes of the orders at least
13:10
is to make taking out a hit on someone
13:14
convenient and clean and safe and easy
13:18
whereas it was once
13:19
uh difficult and dangerous and scary.
13:22
It's essentially lowered the barriers to entry
13:25
to ordering an assassination.
13:27
And I think that that brings us face to face with something
13:30
that is quite disconcerting.
13:33
The people on this list,
13:35
the kill list, and the people that put them there are normal people.
13:40
The perpetrators are basically normal people. They have jobs. They have friends.
13:45
They go about living their lives just like you and I, you know.
13:48
And they were going about holding all of that down basically at the same
13:51
time that they were plotting in secret constantly,
13:54
coldly often to have someone
13:57
Uh, I think that they, if there's one thing that unites them all, it
14:00
was often intimate partner violence, by the way,
14:03
spiraling out of control.
14:04
And I think the one thing that unites them all is a desire for control.
14:08
A need to have it.
14:09
An inability to lose it.
14:11
Control of a thing, control of a relationship,
14:13
of a family, and a willingness
14:16
ultimately, of course, to kill to get it back.
14:19
But I think that's where we are.
14:21
Uh, and if there's one thing
14:23
that I've come away from this whole lids
14:26
crazy journey really thinking,
14:28
we might all be just a little bit closer to the being on a kill list.
14:33
We might like to think.
14:35
Thanks very much everyone.
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