Who Pays For Assassinations On The Dark Web? - Carl Miller (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Carl Miller’s talk titled “Who Pays For Assassinations On The Dark Web?” at TEDxManchester, May 20, 2025.

Listen to the audio version here:

Carl Miller: I’m Carl Miller, and I spent years watching people trying to have someone murdered. They thought they were doing it in secret, but they weren’t.

Discovering the Dark Web’s Deadly Marketplace

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 your anonymity, and rumours have 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 can buy murder on websites like 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, 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 onto this part of the internet, you put on, you load in your alias, you type in the message, and then it says you can directly transact to have someone killed.

The Hack That Changed Everything

And so it was that in 2020, a hacker that I was working with, a man called Chris Monteiro, 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 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.

The Kill List Revealed

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 mocking up anything today, these are all real. 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 going to 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.

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Taking It to the Police

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 sites.

Making the Difficult Decision

But we knew we couldn’t step away, like these people, these people whose images we could see, who we knew where we lived, 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, 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 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.

The Phone Calls That Failed

Anyway, this is the call. “No, I don’t want any information, I’m trying to give you information.” “I don’t care.” “No, I’m sorry.” “Okay, well, thanks for your time anyway. Do give me a phone back if you’d like more information.” This is the phone call. “Would we be able to arrange a time to be able to talk to you at greater length about that?” “No, no, thank you, thank you, thank you.” “Okay.” “So you don’t…” 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 know, I spent a week, but 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 and quickly.

Reaching Elena

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, on 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 three years now. And, you know, there’s money involved, quite a lot of money. And my husband actually doesn’t want to pay it. So, you know, I’m not really surprised.”

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She took it unbelievably well.

The Incompetent Hitmen

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, 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 starker than actually with Elena herself. So after we spoke to the police, 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 gas mask, a telescopic baton, a submachine gun, a Glock 9mm 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 dark web hitman.

Who Are These People?

So who are these people? Who are the people writing these orders? Who is paying 2.2 thousand dollars here for a 5 foot 5 male with blue eyes to be killed?

Business is doing it. 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 Some Prairie, Wisconsin.

Who’s paying 16 thousand dollars to have a couple removed? Someone that they don’t quite see eye-to-eye on something with, which sounds like the understatement of the absolute century. This is the man that’s done that, Christopher Pence, 40-year-old Microsoft IT security technician, the biological father of 11 children, the adoptive father of 5 more children, 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 5 adoptive children killed.

This order didn’t want the target actually killed, this order wanted the target kidnapped and forcibly addicted to heroin. The order went by the darknet moniker SCAR215, and they actually laid out a bonus structure. So, an additional 10 thousand to permanently withdraw court notions, an additional 10 thousand 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 didn’t know this was happening. This is the 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 of life by describing it as “50 shades of grey on steroids.”

A Global Network of Violence

And it wasn’t just here. This was a sports direct love triangle in Milton Keynes. 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.

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Now we started working in secret with the FBI and we were passing all of our orders to the FBI. 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.

[APPLAUSE]

And in case anyone’s wondering, no, we’re not still doing this. So there’s a whole other 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 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 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 talk to the world about what we were doing all those long years ago.

The Disturbing Reality

But where are we left with? That’s, I think, the final idea I want to leave us with. 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 organised crime, big drug deals going to rhyme. 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, spiralling out of control. 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.

Conclusion

But I think that’s where we are, and if there’s one thing that I’ve come away from this whole 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.

Who Pays For Assassinations On The Dark Web? – Carl Miller (Transcript)