Hey guys welcome to my blog here is what I'm up to today.
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.
That marks the end of my blog. Please follow for more.
https://youtu.be/zC3DLxwGzDk
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