Inside a Dark Web Kill List | Carl Miller | TED

All right.

Well, everyone, good morning.

So, I'm Carl Miller.

Uh, and I spent

years watching people trying to have murdered.

They thought they were doing it in

secret, but they weren't.

So, the year 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 your anonymity.

And rumors had swirled around the darknet for years

that you could buy anything on the darknet.

That you could buy

drugs, you could buy guns,

that you could buy uranium.

And also, you can buy

murder on websites this.

This is what the website looked like when I first laid eyes on it

all those years ago.

I mean, it looks like a website from the 1990s.

It looks like someone trying to make clip art as scary as possible.

Uh, but the 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 go on to this part of the internet,

you put on you 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.

Uh 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 these were flying in.

These are, by the way, the literal

actual kill orders we were intercepting on the site.

I'm not locking up anything today.

These are all real.

So suddenly we were seeing that there was a a hit to uh 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 to take down one guy. They say $14,000.

There was an order in Hyereaban in India.

There was an order in Berlin

uh to kill someone probably working from home.

$21,000 for that one.

Now, some of these

kill orders were short and curts and clipped.

Others were long offering

lurier 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 targets just left the house.

This is the car they're driving.

This is how they're going to get to work.

Um, but put together

we called all of these orders the kill list.

Uh it's it was the single

is the single most grotesque,

disgusting, horrible, frightening thing

I've ever had to read in my entire life.

Uh 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 had seen for months

were two somewhat nervous

uniform 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' we' 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 Metropon's

police decided not to take up an active investigation in the site,

but we knew we couldn't step away.

like these people, these people that whose images we could see, who were knew

where we live, these people being targeted,

they might be in terrible danger.

You know, they might not know that someone out there on the darknet was

trying to have them killed.

So, we took a decision

uh maybe the most difficult decision I've ever had to make, certainly professionally.

Uh and the decision was

that I would go and reach 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 wor 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 I'm trying to give you information.

I I don't care. No, I'm sorry. Okay.

Well, thanks for your time anyway.

Um, do give me a phone back if you'd like more information.

Would we be able to arrange a time

um to be able to talk to you at greater length about that? Well, thank you. Thank you. Okay.

So, you don't you

hung up on 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 I spent a week with the the

story was so unbelievably fantastical.

Darknet assassins, you know, kill orders that that I just kept getting hung up

on for a week.

So, we knew we need to evolve our strategy in 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 here in Zurich in the outskirts of Zurich.

I spoke to the local journalist.

She 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.

In 5 minutes turned into 10, 10 into 15.

And then at last, after an agonizing

weight, 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, this is there's no easy way of really saying this.

Um, 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

uh for about 3 years now.

So, um, and uh you know

there's money involved, quite a lot of money.

And um my husband

uh actually doesn't want to pay it.

So, you know, I'm not really surprised.

She took it unbelievably well.

Now, um, 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, you know, 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 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 and 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

batton, a submachine gun,

a Glock 9mm pistol,

an AK-47, zip ties,

a black bin bag,

black rubber gloves, um GPS trackers, lockpits.

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 $2.2,000

here for a 5'5

male with blue eyes to be killed? Who?

This isn't doing it. She's Kelly Harper.

Kelly Harper is a 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 had raged across the courts and the schools and the hospitals of S per Wisconsin.

Who's paying $16,000 to have a couple removed

someone that they quite

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 IT

Microsoft IT security technician,

uh the biological father of 11 children,

the adoptive father of five more children,

uh a a man, a deeply religious man actually, who from a large

uh solitary house in a valley in Utah

secretly plotted to have the biological

parents of his five adoptive children killed.

This order didn't want the target actually killed.

This order wanted the target kidnapped

and forcibly addicted to heroin.

The uh the the order went by the darknet

moniker SCAR 215 and they actually laid out a bonus structure.

So an additional 10,000

to permanently withdraw 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 Il.

Uh, a neonatlogist, a doctor,

a man who ran an a clinic for vulnerable women with addiction issues.

Uh, 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 Fifty Shades of Gray on steroids.

And it wasn't just here.

This was a Sports Direct love triangle in Milton Kees.

Uh this was a woman trying to kill her two parents in Canberra, Australia.

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.

And to give you a 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. Thanks.

Uh, and in case anyone's wondering, no, we're not still doing this.

So, there's a whole another investigation that we did into the people running the site.

It turns out very likely that they were a group of Romanian

cyber criminals and uh and some years ago, they were then arrested in a

rash of raids across Romania.

We were then locked out the site.

uh and yet convictions have continued that we have 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.

This is 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 what 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 ary.

And I think the reality

is somewhat more unsettling

than all of Uh

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

uh 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, you know.

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

Uh, I think that they, if there's one thing that unites them all, it

was often intimate partner 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.

Uh, and if there's one thing

that I've come away from this whole lids

crazy journey really thinking,

we might all be just a little bit closer to the being on a kill list.

We might like to think.

Thanks very much everyone.