An unsuspecting hacker stumbled across a clandestine website listing targets for assassination.
In early 2020 tech journalist Carl Miller made the chilling discovery. While researching the dark web from London, a hacker colleague named Chris found the website with a 'kill list' of hundreds of people who other people wanted dead.
It included photos and personal details of the potential victims. "Kill him and make it look like a car accident," one read. Another stated: "Seeking house to be burnt down with occupants inside. No survivors."
"I remember being quite calm at the time," Miller told the Telegraph, "Then that evening, sitting there in the darkness, looking out of my window at this Covid-silent city, thinking 'what the **** have I got myself into? ".
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The discovery launched a four-year investigation for Miller, Chris, and a small team of journalists, as they sought to unravel the mystery behind this gruesome discovery. The journey would involve police forces and intelligence agencies worldwide, including the Met and the FBI.
The bizarre twists of the investigation are documented in the new podcast, Kill List, with the first six episodes now available. Miller quickly realized that the posts on the website weren't leading to actual murders. Instead, the kill list website was a con, tricking users into sending untraceable bitcoin payments for contract killings that would never happen.
The site posed as a broker, matching assassins with clients and promising to hold the bitcoin in escrow until the job was done. But in reality, the site's owner, a mysterious Romanian criminal named Yura, was using it to carry out an elaborate ruse.
Pretending to relay messages from the hitmen, he'd respond to customers claiming he needed more resources, stringing them along to squeeze out as much money as possible.
"We realized quite early on that the site itself had no interest in sending out hitmen," Miller says. "If they were real, which they were not, these were the most incompetent hitmen on the face of the planet. They kept getting lost, or losing their weapons, or they'd attend the target and discover they were surrounded by security and you needed to hire another hitman. He would always try to upsell, to get more and more bitcoin."
The assassins were fake, but someone wanted these people dead all the same. Miller and his team realized they had a responsibility to help. "We dropped what we were doing and realized these were serious threats to lives," he says. They used their site access to create a "pipeline," allowing them to track potential threats as they emerged, and involved the authorities.
"I phoned up the [Met] police; I think any sane person would do that as a next step," he recalls. "Then the police's main worry initially was whether I was sane or not. They came round and conducted mental health checks on me. They said the vast majority of these kinds of calls, about dark net assassins and so on, are related to mental health issues."
Despite confirming Miller's sanity and the reality of the threats, the police showed limited interest. They forwarded the information to Interpol, but little action followed. Because the targets were all over the world, the London police didn't pursue the case.
Disappointed by the police's reaction, Miller and his team realized they would have to alert the potential victims themselves. This did not always go smoothly.
Confronted with an unfamiliar British voice on the phone, warning them that their life was in grave danger, most of the people he called dismissed him or hung up, assuming it was some sort of scam call.
Despite his best efforts, Miller recounted the formidable challenge of alerting those targeted for assassination, finding many simply wouldn't take his warnings seriously.
"I initially thought it would be gangland, drugs deals gone wrong, that kind of thing," Miller reveals. The investigation found that most of the time it was people trying to kill spouses, former spouses, love rivals, people they were locked in an adoption conflict with. Then there was a smaller group of business partners, siblings or parents.
The wannabe murderers were anything but criminal geniuses. "Both the targets and the perpetrators are going around leading normal lives," he notes.
"They are doctors and air traffic controllers and fishmongers. They don't have a connection with organized crime. I don't think a hardened criminal would think these dark web sites could go about delivering murders."
This increased the complexity of alerting potential victims, as Miller and his team had to navigate without alerting the aspiring hitman-hirers to their infiltration of the website.
As the work progressed, police began to take notice, convinced by the intricate details submitted via the website. Arrests and criminal charges quickly followed.
To date, the probe has resulted in 34 arrests and 28 convictions across 11 countries, racking up 150 years of prison sentences collectively. Among those caught was Ronald Ilg, a neonatal doctor from Spokane, Washington, who was apprehended by FBI agents after he posted his desire for his estranged wife to be kidnapped and forcibly injected with heroin to deter her from seeking a divorce.
In January 2023, he received a prison sentence of eight years. The chilling case first emerged when Miller got in touch with a woman named Elena, from Switzerland, who seemed fairly unconcerned about the menace. However, once authorities took a close look at her estranged husband, they uncovered that he had secured an apartment right beside hers.
It was filled with firearms and zipties and bin bags and GPS trackers. In a separate instance last year, Whitney Franks, an employee at Sports Direct in Milton Keynes, found herself sentenced to 12 years (which was eventually reduced) after attempting to have her workmate and romantic rival, Ruut Ruutna, murdered. This case shed light on just how far-reaching cybercrime is.
The mastermind behind all this was Yura, who used a variety of tactics to attract attention to his sinister website, including creating a bogus hitman comparison site with tips for navigating the dark web. His strategy included hiring individuals to pen glowing reviews for his service while disparaging any rivals.
This meant that anyone typing "how to hire a hitman" into Google would be directed straight to Yura's site. Miller hopes that the podcast will highlight just how widespread cybercrime is.
'Kill List' is airing until Christmas, with fresh episodes weekly.
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