Inside a Dark Web Kill List | Carl Miller | TED

Name: Inside a Dark Web Kill List | Carl Miller | TED
Duration: 14 min 39 s
Description: Who pays for an assassin on the internet? Dark web researcher Carl Miller spent years tracking down the answer to this question. In this chilling talk, he share

TED14:39Added Aug 30, 2026

Who pays for an assassin on the internet? Dark web researcher Carl Miller spent years tracking down the answer to this question. In this chilling talk, he shares how he uncovered real kill orders placed online by seemingly ordinary individuals — and gives an unsettling look at what drives people to the brink. (Note: This talk contains descriptions of violence.) (Recorded at TEDxManchester on March 1, 2025)

Watch on YouTube →

Contributed by 刘嘉琪

Transcript

00:04Alright, well, everyone, good morning.
00:06So I’m Carl Miller,
00:08and I spent years watching people trying to have someone murdered.
00:16They thought they were doing it in secret,
00:19but they weren't.
00:21So the year was 2020.
00:24COVID had descended
00:26and just like everyone else, I was spending a lot of time online.
00:30But I was going on a bit of the internet
00:32that I think probably fewer people here have actually been on:
00:35the darknet.
00:36A bit of the internet that, thanks to clever technology encryption,
00:40basically ensures your anonymity.
00:42And rumors have swirled around the darknet for years
00:46that you could buy anything on the darknet.
00:48That you could buy drugs,
00:50you could buy guns, that you could buy uranium.
00:53And also that you can buy murder,
00:57on websites like this.
01:00This is what the website looked like
01:01when I first laid eyes on it all those years ago.
01:05I mean, it looks like a website from the 1990s.
01:07It looks like someone trying to make clip art as scary as possible.
01:12But the offer that the website makes is a serious one.
01:15This website is saying, "Hey, we're the Mafia,
01:19and now you can deal directly with us thanks to the darknet."
01:22So you go on to this part of the internet,
01:24you load in your alias,
01:26you type in the message,
01:28and then it says you can directly transact to have someone killed.
01:34And so it was that in 2020,
01:37a hacker that I was working with, a man called Chris Monteiro,
01:41he was looking at this website.
01:44He was probing it, he was scanning it.
01:46He was seeing what he could learn.
01:48And then in discovery, which changed,
01:50I think, both Chris and my life forever,
01:53momentously, Chris found a little vulnerability
01:57with the way in which this website worked.
02:00A kind of little technical gap, if you will,
02:02that he could kind of, in a weird way, wiggle through
02:05and get into the back end of the website.
02:09And there Chris could see all the kill orders being placed.
02:14He could see names, addresses, pattern-of-life information,
02:19bitcoin payments
02:20and all the messages trying to have someone killed.
02:24So he phoned me.
02:27So suddenly these were flying in.
02:29These are, by the way, the literal actual kill orders
02:32we're intercepting on the site.
02:33I'm not mocking up anything today.
02:35These are all real.
02:36So suddenly we were seeing
02:37that there was a hit to kill someone in Amsterdam.
02:40"A simple, easy person, but high risk of putting me in jail."
02:43They paid almost 2,000 dollars.
02:45There was a hit to kill someone in Paris for 1,000 dollars.
02:47A person that needs to go away,
02:49her apartment needs to be set on fire.
02:51A large order to kill someone in Slovakia.
02:54"I need you to take down one guy," they say.
02:5614,000 dollars.
02:57There was an order in Hyderabad, in India.
02:59There was an order in Berlin
03:01to kill someone probably working from home,
03:0321,000 dollars for that one.
03:05Now some of these kill orders were short and curt and clipped.
03:11Others were long,
03:13offering lurid justifications as to why it was the right thing
03:17that this person had to die.
03:18And others still, they would log in almost every day,
03:20almost providing real-time updates.
03:22Oh, the target's just left the house.
03:24This is the car they're driving.
03:26This is how they're going to get to work.
03:28But put together,
03:29we called all of these orders the “Kill List.”
03:33It is the single most grotesque, disgusting, horrible,
03:38frightening thing I've ever had to read in my entire life.
03:42And it was getting longer all the time.
03:45So I did what any sane person would do.
03:47I phoned the police.
03:49And so it was in the middle of COVID,
03:51the first two strangers that I'd seen for months
03:54were two somewhat nervous uniformed police officers
03:57from the Metropolitan Police stood in my kitchen,
04:00and I laid it all out for them.
04:01I took them through the website,
04:03I took them through the hacks, I showed them the orders,
04:05we'd drawn this diagram of how the website worked.
04:09And they looked at it
04:11and they looked at me and they looked at each other
04:13and they were unfortunately, genuinely quite concerned I was insane.
04:17(Laughter)
04:19And it's a bit of a longer story, but ultimately,
04:21the Metropolitan Police decided
04:23not to take up an active investigation in the site.
04:25But we knew we couldn't step away.
04:27Like these people,
04:29these people whose images we could see,
04:31who we knew where they lived, these people being targeted,
04:33they might be in terrible danger.
04:35You know, they might not know that someone out there,
04:38on the darknet, was trying to have them killed.
04:40So we took a decision.
04:41Maybe the most difficult decision I've ever had to make,
04:44certainly professionally.
04:46And the decision was that I would go
04:48and reach the people on the Kill List myself.
04:51Directly.
04:52That I would tell them that someone was trying to kill them.
04:56And so we sculpted a script.
04:57We worked with a psychologist,
04:59we worked out how we would try and soften the blow
05:01of being told that someone was trying to kill you,
05:04and I had to also emotionally brace myself for this, I dreaded it.
05:08The idea that I was about to throw this emotional hand grenade
05:11in someone's life, it was absolutely awful.
05:13Anyway, this is the call.
05:15(Audio) No, I don't want any information.
05:17I'm trying to give you information.
05:19Person 1: I don't care.
05:21No, sir.
05:23Carl Miller: OK, well, thanks for your time anyway,
05:25do give me a phone back if you'd like more information.
05:29This is the second call.
05:32(Call 2) Would we be able to arrange a time to be able to talk to you
05:36at greater length about that?
05:37Person 2: No, no, thank you, thank you, thank you.
05:41CM: OK.
05:43So you don't ...
05:45(Line breaks)
05:46Hung up on me.
05:48I mean, I wasn't an emotional hand grenade
05:50going off in these people's lives,
05:52I was awful, I mean, no one believed me.
05:54You know, I spent a week,
05:55the story was so unbelievably fantastical.
05:57Darknet assassins, you know, kill orders,
06:00that I just kept getting hung up on for a week.
06:02So we knew we needed to evolve our strategy and quickly.
06:05So we got local journalists on the scene.
06:07They believed us to go
06:09and directly meet the people on the Kill List face to face.
06:13And the first place we tried to do this was to reach a woman called Elena,
06:17here in Zurich, on the outskirts of Zurich.
06:20I spoke to the local journalist,
06:21she drove up to where Elena was living,
06:24she took a deep breath,
06:26she got out her car and knocked on Elena's front door.
06:28And five minutes turned into 10, 10 into 15.
06:31And then at last, after an agonizing wait,
06:34there was Elena on a Zoom call,
06:36a woman whose face I'd only seen on a kill order,
06:39was there speaking to me.
06:41And this was the warning I delivered her.
06:44(Audio) Sorry, there's no easy way of really saying this.
06:47We've come across some information
06:48which might mean that someone
06:50had put some information regarding you on the site.
06:53Elena: I'm actually not really surprised.
06:56CM: Really? In what way?
06:57Elena: I'm having an ugly divorce.
07:00It's going on for about three years now.
07:03So ...
07:05And, you know, there's money involved.
07:08Quite a lot of money.
07:09And my husband ...
07:14Actually doesn't want to pay it, so ...
07:17You know, I'm not really surprised.
07:20CM: She took it unbelievably well.
07:22(Laughter)
07:24Now an important thing to know is that it wasn’t just messages
07:28going into the site.
07:29The shadowy people running the site were also replying.
07:32Some of these conversations would go back and forth
07:34for weeks or months, and we could read all of those as well.
07:37And what we realized when we were reading all of those
07:40was that if there were hitmen out there,
07:42these were the most incompetent hitmen on the face of the planet.
07:46They kept losing their weapons, or they kept getting lost.
07:48It would build up to the hit,
07:50and suddenly the target would be too well protected
07:52they'd have to pull out, new teams have to come in,
07:55and every single time the price would go up.
07:57It became really obvious that there were no shadowy hitmen out there.
08:00The site had no interest in killing any of these people.
08:03They were just trying to extort as much money as they could
08:06from the people placing the orders.
08:07But the people placing the orders,
08:09they, of course, did not know that.
08:11They were deadly serious
08:12when they were trying to have these people killed.
08:15And nowhere was that lesson starker than actually with Elena herself.
08:19So after we spoke to Elena, we spoke to the police.
08:21And sometime after that,
08:23the Swiss police did arrest her husband.
08:26And only then did we realize
08:28that he'd been renting a secret room next to her flat.
08:33And in this room there was a flip knife,
08:37a telescopic baton, a submachine gun,
08:40a Glock 9mm pistol,
08:41an AK-47, zip ties, a black bin bag,
08:46black rubber gloves, GPS trackers, lock picks.
08:51That was a lesson to us if we needed it.
08:53The people writing these orders could be just as dangerous
08:57as any darknet hitman.
09:00So who are these people?
09:01Who are the people writing these orders?
09:03Who is paying 2,200 dollars here
09:06for a five-foot-five male with blue eyes to be killed?
09:08Who?
09:10This is who's doing it.
09:12She's Kelly Harper.
09:14Kelly Harper is a go getter, hospital administrator,
09:18one-time college sweetheart of the target of the order,
09:21who'd been locked with him in a bitter, years-long custody battle
09:24that had raged across the courts and the schools and the hospitals
09:28of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
09:30Who's paying 16,000 dollars to have a couple removed?
09:33Someone that they don't "quite see eye-to eye-on something with,"
09:37which sounds like the understatement of the century.
09:40(Laughter)
09:42This is a man that's done that, Christopher Pence.
09:44Forty-year-old Microsoft IT security technician.
09:49The biological father of 11 children.
09:51The adoptive father of five more children.
09:54A deeply religious man, actually,
09:56who from a large, solitary house in a valley in Utah,
10:01secretly plotted to have the biological parents
10:04of his five adoptive children killed.
10:08This order didn't want the target actually killed.
10:10This order wanted the target kidnapped and forcibly addicted to heroin.
10:16The orderer went by the darknet moniker "Scar 215,"
10:21and they actually laid out a bonus structure.
10:24So "an additional 10,000 to permanently withdraw all court motions.
10:28An additional 10,000 to keep her mouth shut and tell no one.
10:31The husband does not know this is happening,"
10:34writes the order.
10:36Any guesses?
10:38The husband definitely did know this was happening.
10:40This is a husband, Dr. Ronald IlG.
10:43A neonatologist, a doctor,
10:45A man who ran a clinic for vulnerable women with addiction issues.
10:50A man who went from a poor rural upbringing in Oregon
10:53to a senior city clinician,
10:55and a man obsessed with controlling all the people in his life,
10:58especially the women.
10:59A man so devoid of contrition,
11:01that after his conviction,
11:03he's been trying to sell the book rights to his life
11:05by describing it as "50 Shades of Gray" on steroids.
11:08And it wasn't just here.
11:10This was a "Sports Direct" love triangle in Milton Keynes.
11:14This was a woman trying to kill her two parents in Canberra, Australia.
11:18We saw orders in Nevada,
11:19we saw orders in Tampa,
11:20we saw orders in Spain,
11:21we saw orders in Italy.
11:23We saw orders almost everywhere.
11:25Now we started working in secret with the FBI,
11:29and we were passing all of our orders to the FBI.
11:31To give you a sense of the scale,
11:33over the years that we were doing this,
11:35we disclosed 175 paid-for
11:39kill orders around the world.
11:42Thirty-two arrests so far,
11:4428 convictions so far,
11:46around 180 years of prison time has been sentenced
11:49as a result of the investigation so far.
11:51There's probably more to come.
11:54(Applause)
11:58Thanks.
12:01And in case anyone's wondering,
12:03no, we're not still doing this.
12:05So there's a whole other investigation that we did
12:07into the people running the site.
12:09It turns out very likely that they were a group of Romanian cyber criminals.
12:13And some years ago,
12:15they were then arrested in a rash of raids across Romania.
12:18We were then locked out the site.
12:20And yet convictions have continued that we had nothing to do with.
12:24And that is the only reason I can stand on this stage today
12:27and tell you about any of this.
12:29This is, by the way, not a story
12:30I really thought I would ever be on a stage and able to tell anyone about.
12:34So it's a spectacular moment for me
12:36to be able to finally, kind of, talk to the world
12:38about what we were doing all those long years ago.
12:40But where are we left with?
12:42That's, I think, the final idea I want to leave us with.
12:45What does all of this actually really mean?
12:48When I first started doing this,
12:50I thought the kinds of cases that we were going to be dealing with
12:54were going to be to do with maybe organized crime,
12:57big drug deals gone awry.
12:59And I think the reality is somewhat more unsettling than all of that.
13:05What this website seems to do,
13:08in the eyes of the orders, at least,
13:10is to make taking out a hit on someone
13:13convenient and clean and safe and easy,
13:17whereas it was once difficult and dangerous and scary.
13:22It's essentially lowered the barriers to entry to ordering an assassination.
13:27And I think that that brings us face-to-face with something
13:30that is quite disconcerting.
13:33The people on this list, the Kill List,
13:35and the people that put them there
13:38are normal people.
13:40The perpetrators are basically normal people.
13:42They have jobs, they have friends.
13:44They go about living their lives just like you and I, you know,
13:47and they were going about holding all of that down
13:50basically at the same time
13:51that they were plotting in secret, constantly, coldly often,
13:55to have someone killed.
13:57I think that if there's one thing that unites them all,
14:00it was often intimate partner violence, by the way, spiraling out of control.
14:04And I think the one thing that unites them all
14:06is a desire for control,
14:07a need to have it,
14:09an inability to lose it.
14:10Control of a thing,
14:12control of a relationship, of a family,
14:14and a willingness ultimately, of course, to kill, to get it back.
14:19But I think that's where we are.
14:21And if there's one thing
14:23that I've come away from this whole lurid,
14:26crazy journey, really thinking:
14:28we might all be just a little bit closer to being on a kill list
14:33we might like to think.
14:35Thanks very much, everyone.
14:36(Applause)