Dark web Secrets: Pay a Murder in Bitcoins

Finding a lover can usually lead to a divorce. However, if your significant other has life insurance worth more than $700K – maybe it’s more convenient to get widowed, and rich at the same time, right? Darkweb has the answer.

Just when we thought nothing can go worse in the world of criminal, wars and money heists – came the dark web.

A Dark Web is a World Wide Web content that exists on darknets, overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. Its services can include Drugs, Fraud, Gambling, Hacking, Whistleblower or Murder.

But, if you decide to go and find out about the dark web secrets – you may find so much more – like murder if you’d like.

Finding a lover can usually lead to a divorce. However, if your significant other has life insurance worth more than $700K – maybe it’s more convenient to get widowed, and rich at the same time, right? Stephen Allwine obviously had that in mind when, through the dark web, he found Yura, a member of Albanian criminal group called “Besa mafia” and working under the catchy slogan: “If you want to kill someone, or to beat the shit out of him, we are the right guys.”

After buying $6,000 worth of BTC, Allwin wrote to Yura:

“They say that Besa means trust, so please do not break that. For reasons that are too personal and would give away my identity, I need this b**ch dead.”

“The B**ch” was Allwin’s wife, Amy Allwine, with whom he ran a website for couples called Allwine.net, which included a list of songs and videos showing how to have fun without excessive touching. And while at church, Stephen taught married couples how to be purified from all the sins sex can bring, at home he wasn’t such an angel- sort to speak.

Naughtydates.com and LonelyMILF.com were just some of the porn websites Stephen liked to “learn” from. Through the dating website Ashley Madison, he met his new lover – Michelle Woodard.

Disciplined and computer-savvy, Stephen was, in theory, the perfect criminal for a dark-web crime. He covered his tracks by using anonymous remailers, which strip identifying information off messages, and Tor, which cloaks an IP address by randomly bouncing communications through a network of relays.

Stephen had spent at least $12,000 on the hitman idea but Yura couldn’t seem to handle a job. However, he appeared to become more determined and logged onto Dream Market, a dark-web marketplace best known for selling drugs and ending buying Scopolamine (prescribed for motion sickness, but it could also make people pliable and amnesiac).

About two months after Stephen first ordered the hit on his wife, Besa Mafia was hacked and Yura’s messages with clients—including dogdaygod, the email adress Allwin made for corresponding—were dumped in an online Pastebin. The data dump revealed that users with names like Killerman and kkkcolsia had paid tens of thousands of dollars in bitcoin to have people killed all over the world.

Allwin ended up trying to poison Amy, but after she didn’t die from Scopolamine, the best thing he found to do – was killing her. After he went to the police, claiming she killed herself, evidence haven’t quite confirmed his side of the story.

Blame the Apple

It was a quirk in Apple backups that provided the strongest piece of evidence.

The digital forensics specialist found, in Stephen’s MacBook Pro, that a note with a bitcoin wallet address had appeared on Stephen’s iPhone back in March 2016. This was 23 seconds before dogdaygod wrote Yura with the same 34-digit bitcoin wallet code.

Forty seconds after dogdaygod messaged Yura, the note was deleted from Stephen’s phone. But deleted files don’t disappear until they’re overwritten by other files. Several months later, when Stephen backed up his phone to iTunes, the crucial history was preserved on his laptop.

He is now serving a life sentence and Yura reportedly started other hit-man-for-hire scam sites—Crime Bay, Sicilian Hitmen, Cosa Nostra…

Need American Drivers Licence?

At last Blockchain Live Asia conference, I got to speak about dark-web and its resistance to conventional ways of trading.

An anonymous network, The Onion Routing (TOR), allows accessing the content available on Dark Web.

According to some studies, the daily anonymous active user on TOR (or darknet markets) in the world “during January to December 2018 was above 4 million in the two first months of 2018 and this cipher has fallen off after the second month of the same year.” Now globally there are around 2 million anonymous daily active users on TOR network (or Darkweb).

Did you know that for 0,0102 BTC you can buy 10K followers on Instagram? You can also buy an American drivers licence or – if you’re into scamming big time – private bank account data. You can also buy a manual of “How to steal any car in 10 minutes”, or a “Fake Picasso authenticated by an individual heir”.

These are just a few items available on the dark web’s marketplaces that are otherwise perfectly legal when bought and sold in the bright light of the clear web, or actual, physical marketplaces. Turns out the anonymous bazaars dotting the underbelly of the internet aren’t all just illegal drugs, precursor chemicals, and murder-for-hire services.

Which raises an intriguing question: Set against the backdrop of something like the recently-launched Silk Road 2.0, where do we draw the line between “legal” and “illegal”?

I think IRS and FED would know the answer to this one. However, until then – checking this bottle of Chablis from 2009 couldn’t hurt – or maybe?