I spent four years investigating a dark web kill list – and warning the victims they were in danger

 After Carl Miller unearthed a ‘kill list’ of assassinated targets, he worked to give warning to the victims – and take the criminals to justice

In early 2020,

 as the world dealt with the pandemic, technology journalist Carl Miller made a shocking discovery. While researching the dark web from London, a hacker friend named Chris accessed a secret website where people posted targets for assassination—like eBay for hiring killers. This was the "kill list," a catalog of hundreds of ordinary people with photos and personal information, listed by others who wanted them dead. The requests were horrifying, with messages like, “Kill him and make it look like a car accident,” and “Burn the house down with people inside. No survivors.”

“I remember staying calm at the time,” Miller says, reflecting on that moment over a Zoom call. “But that night, sitting in the dark and looking out at the quiet city, I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’”

Accessing the site began a four-year investigation for Miller, Chris, and a small team of journalists. They worked with police and intelligence agencies worldwide, including the Met and the FBI. Their journey is the focus of a new podcast called Kill List, with the first six episodes now available.

Miller quickly realized that the website wasn't leading to real killings.

 Instead, it was a scam. People were tricked into paying in untraceable bitcoin for assassinations that would never happen. The site pretended to be a middleman connecting clients with hitmen, promising to hold the Bitcoin until the job was done. But the site’s owner, a mysterious Romanian criminal named Yura, used it to create an elaborate fake setup. Acting as if he was in touch with hitmen, he would tell customers he needed more resources, keeping them paying more and more.

“We figured out early on that the site wasn’t actually sending hitmen,” Miller says. “If these hitmen were real—and they weren’t—they were the worst ever. They kept getting lost, losing their weapons, or finding their target surrounded by security and needing another hitman. Yura would always ask for more bitcoin.”

The assassins were fake, but someone still wanted these people dead. Miller and his team felt they had a responsibility to help.

“We stopped everything else and realized these were real threats to people’s lives,”

 he says. Using their access to the site, they set up a “pipeline” to track threats as they came in and contacted the authorities.

“I called the [Met] police; I think anyone would do that next,” he says. “But the police were first worried about my mental health. They came to check on me, saying most calls like this—about dark web assassins—are related to mental health issues.” Even after confirming Miller was sane and the threats were real, the police didn’t show much interest. They passed the information to Interpol, but nothing much happened.

“They believed me,” he says, “but the issue was that the targets were worldwide, so the police didn’t take responsibility.” He repeatedly offered to show them how to access the site, but they weren’t interested.

Frustrated, Miller and his team realized they would have to warn the potential victims themselves. This didn’t always go well. When Miller called people, warning them they were in danger, most hung up, thinking it was a scam.

“We decided, perhaps mistakenly, that we had to warn the people ourselves,” Miller says. “I tried calling people, but it was a disaster. I thought my British accent might reassure them, but everyone thought I was a scammer. No one believed me. They just hung up.”

When people think of hitmen and contract killings, they usually picture the mafia. But the reality here was more ordinary. “At first, I thought it would involve gangland conflicts or drug deals gone wrong,” Miller says. “But as we learned more about the people on the list and the police dug into their stories, we found that most cases were people wanting to kill spouses, ex-partners, romantic rivals, or people they were in legal battles with. There were also a few cases involving business partners, siblings, or parents.”

These people weren’t criminal masterminds. “Both the targets and those wanting them dead were just regular people,” Miller says. “They were doctors, air traffic controllers, and shopkeepers. They weren’t tied to organized crime. I don’t think a hardened criminal would expect these dark web sites to actually deliver murders.” This made warning the potential victims even harder because Miller’s team couldn’t alert the people paying for these services that the site had been exposed.

As Miller and his team continued, police began to take more notice, impressed by the detailed information coming through the website. This led to arrests and convictions. So far, the investigation has resulted in 34 arrests and 28 convictions across 11 countries, with a total of 150 years in prison sentences. In one case, a neonatal doctor from Spokane, Washington, named Ronald Ilg was arrested by the FBI after he posted that he wanted his estranged wife kidnapped and injected with heroin to scare her into not divorcing him. In January 2023, he was sentenced to eight years in prison.

The first person Miller warned was a woman named Elena in Switzerland. She was initially calm about the threat, but police later found that her estranged husband had rented an apartment next door to her and filled it with weapons, zip ties, garbage bags, and GPS trackers. “I can’t say for sure that he would have acted on it, but he was clearly preparing to harm her himself,” Miller says. “We believed many of the people on the site were in real danger from those making these orders.”

Last year, a woman named Whitney Franks, who worked at Sports Direct in Milton Keynes, was sentenced to 12 years (later reduced) for trying to have a colleague and romantic rival killed. The investigation highlighted how advanced cybercrime has become. Yura, the website owner, was clever at promoting his site. He created other sites, including one comparing “hitmen-for-hire,” and he hired people to write positive reviews about his own site and criticize others. When people searched online for “how to hire a hitman,” they were led to his site. Miller hopes the podcast raises awareness about the rise of cybercrime and how outdated police methods are for dealing with it.

“I hope this prompts a conversation about cybercrime,” he says. “We’re in a serious crisis with law enforcement. Privately, police are very worried about cybercrime and how hard it is to investigate, but they hesitate to speak out for fear of causing alarm or alerting criminals to go even more digital. We need to rethink how police work is organized. In the UK, we have 43 constabularies, each with a small cybercrime team, expected to handle international crimes.”

The Kill List podcast will run weekly until Christmas. It’s a powerful reminder of how the internet can enable the worst in human nature. The website might have been a scam, but the intent of its users was very real.