A woman has appeared in court after trying to pay a darknet assassin in bitcoin to kill her partner. Her attempt failed, not due to high transaction fees or a mempool backlog, but because the hitman was fake. Now, the 58-year-old is facing a possible life sentence for attempted murder.
On The Deep Web, Trust No One
As the adage goes, every teenage girl on the internet is a cop and every darknet hitman is a fraud. Despite this truism having been proven time and again, it hasn't deterred hapless chancers who seem to think that ordering an assassination is as easy as ordering a pizza. In a case that should be filed under "You couldn't make it up", a Danish woman requested a homicide, paid in bitcoin, from a darknet site named Crime Bay.
She Bought a Bullet for Bae on Crime Bay
The site, which purports to be operated by Chechen gangsters, is almost certainly a honeypot or the work of larpers. Such sites have proliferated on the darknet for years, where they've provided cheap thrills for bored web users. To date, there are no confirmed cases of murder successfully solicited via the deep web, although this is naturally hard to verify. Hypothetically, the buyer makes their order and places the fee in bitcoins into an escrow account. Then, as the Crime Bay explains:
The money stays in the escrow until the operative provides video proof of the job. When job is completed, we send to the customer a message with a link to the video proof…The customer can check local news or social media to see that the job has been completed.
Danish Woman Arrested After Paying for a Darknet Hitman With BitcoinFor an aspiring murderer seeking to off their spouse without getting their hands dirty, it all sounds so clean and simple. The reality is anything but. Denmark's DR.dk reports how the woman submitted her address and a photograph of the victim to the site. She also requested that a silencer be used and the job be completed on the first attempt.
A Darkly Comic Saga That Reads Like Cheap Fiction
Predictably, the whole plot unraveled before a muffled bullet could be fired. Full details of how the woman was caught have yet to emerge as the case is still at an early stage. Six prosecution witnesses will be summoned however when the case returns to court later this month. It's the first time Denmark's judicial system has had to deal with an attempted murder incident, fake or not, emanating from the deep web.
There are two likely explanations as to how the 58-year-old woman got caught. Either authorities had compromised the site and were monitoring all communications, or the entire thing was a honeypot. With Denmark's Prosecutor's Office having requested that the woman be sent to Italy to stand trial, it seems that the operators of Crime Bay – be they Chechens or cops – hailed from there.
On the darknet, everyone hides behind a hoodie.
The woman, who could face life in prison if convicted, maintains her innocence and has pled not guilty. Cases such as this illustrate the absurdity of trying to use bitcoin and the deep web to commit any sort of major crime. For low-level offenses, such as purchasing personal quantities of drugs, the darknet and cryptocurrency serve their purpose. Anyone ordering an assassination off a site named Crime Bay, however, deserves everything they get. Bitcoin has a multitude of uses, but it's rubbish for hiring an assassin.