Inside a dark web kill list | Carl Miller

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. We see it in the movies. Assassins, hit lists, dramatic races to save people's lives. How real can all this stuff be? Well, in this wild talk, digital researcher Carl Miller makes it clear this isn't the stuff of movies, but rather of real life. He takes us inside the mysterious workings of the dark web, where people are engaging in immoral acts that belong in the halls of true crime. Hold on to your seats for this talk.

0:48All right, well, everyone, good morning. So I'm Karl Miller, and I spent years watching people trying to have someone murdered. They thought they were doing it in secret, but they weren't. So the year was 2020. COVID had descended and just like everyone else, I was spending a lot of time online. But I was going on a bit of the internet that I think probably fewer people here have actually been on, the dark net. A bit of the internet that thanks to clever technology, encryption basically ensures your anonymity. And rumors have swirled around the dark net for years, that you could buy anything on the dark net, that you could buy drugs, that you could buy guns, that you could buy uranium, and also that you can buy murder.

1:40I mean, it looks like a website from the 1990s. It looks like someone trying to make clip art as scary as possible. But the offer that the website makes is a serious one. This website is saying, hey, we're the mafia, and now you can deal directly with us, thanks to the dark net. So you put on, you load in your alias, you type in the message, And then it says you can directly transact to have someone killed. And so it was that in 2020, a hacker that I was working with, a man called Chris Montero, he was looking at this website. He was probing it. He was scanning it. He was seeing what he could learn.

2:22And then in discovery, which changed, I think, both Chris and my life forever, momentously Chris found a little vulnerability with the way in which this website worked a kind of little technical gap if you will that he could kind of in a weird way wiggle through and get into the back end of the website and there Chris could see all the kill orders being placed he could see names addresses pattern of life information bitcoin payments and all the messages trying to have someone killed. So he phoned me. So suddenly we were seeing that there was a hit to kill someone in Amsterdam, a simple, easy person, but high risk of putting me in jail.

3:07They paid almost$2 ,000. There was a hit to kill someone in Paris for$1 ,000. A person that needs to go away, her apartment needs to be set on fire. A large order to kill someone in Slovakia, I need you to take down one guy, they say,$14 ,000. There was an order in Hyderabad in India. There was an order in Berlin. to kill someone probably working from home,$21 ,000 for that one. Now, some of these kill orders were short and curt and clipped. Others were long offering lurid justifications as to why it was the right thing that this person had to die. And others still, they would log in almost every day, almost providing real-time updates.

3:46Oh, the target's just left the house. This is the car they're driving. This is how they're going to get to work. But put together, we called all of these orders the kill list. It was the single is, the single most grotesque, disgusting, horrible, frightening thing I've ever had to read in my entire life. And it was getting longer all the time. So I did what any sane person would do. I phoned the police. And so it was in the middle of COVID, the first two strangers that I'd seen for months were two somewhat nervous, uniformed police officers from the Metropolitan Police stood in my kitchen, and I laid it all out for them.

4:25I took them through the website. I took them through the hacks. I showed them the orders. We'd drawn this diagram of how the website worked. And they looked at it, and they looked at me, and they looked at each other, and they were unfortunately genuinely quite concerned I was insane. And it's a bit of a longer story, but ultimately the Metropolitan Police decided not to take up an active investigation in the sites. But we knew we couldn't step away. Like these people, these people whose images we could see, who we knew where we lived, these people being targeted, they might be in terrible danger.

4:59You know, they might not know that someone out there on the dark net was trying to have them killed. So we took a decision, maybe the most difficult decision I've ever had to make, certainly professionally. And the decision was that I would go and reach the people on the kill list myself directly that I would tell them that someone was trying to kill them and so we sculpted a script we worked with a psychologist we worked out how we would try and soften the blow of being told that someone was trying to kill you and I had to also emotionally embrace myself for this I dreaded it the idea that I was about to throw this emotional hand grenade in someone's life it was absolutely awful anyway this is the call no I don't want any information.

5:40I'm trying to give you information. I don't care. No, I'm sorry. OK, well, thanks for your time anyway. Do give me a phone back if you'd like more information.

5:56Would we be able to arrange a time to be able to talk to you at greater length about that? No, no, thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay. So you don't... Hung up on me. I mean, I wasn't an emotional hand grenade going off in these people's lives. I was awful. I mean, no one believed me. You know, I spent a week with the story. It was so unbelievably fantastical. Darknet assassins, you know, kill orders, that I just kept getting hung up on for a week. So we knew we needed to evolve our strategy quickly. So we got local journalists on the scene. They believed us to go and directly meet the people on the kill list face to face.

6:37And the first place we tried to do this was to reach a woman called Elena on the outskirts of Zurich. I spoke to the local journalist. She drove up to where Elena was living. She took a deep breath. She got out of her car and knocked on Elena's front door. And five minutes turned into 10, 10 into 15. And then at last, after an agonizing wait, there was Elena on a Zoom call, a woman whose face I'd only seen on a kill order, was there speaking to me. And this was the warning I delivered her. Sorry, there's no easy way of really saying this. We've come across some information which might mean that someone had put some information regarding you on the site.

7:16I'm actually not really surprised. Really? In what way? I'm having an ugly divorce. It's going on for about three years now. So, and, you know, there's money involved, quite a lot of money. And my husband actually doesn't want to pay it. So, you know, I'm not really surprised. She took it unbelievably well. Now, an important thing to know is that it wasn't just messages going into the site. The shadowy people running the site were also replying. Some of these conversations would go back and forth for weeks or months, and we could read all of those as well. And what we realized when we were reading all of those was that if there were hitmen out there, these were the most incompetent hitmen on the face of the planet.

8:08They kept losing their weapons or they kept getting lost. It would build up to the hit, and suddenly the target would be too well protected. They'd have to pull out, new teams have to come in, and every single time the price would go up. It became really obvious that there were no shadowy hitmen out there. The site had no interest in killing any of these people. They were just trying to extort as much money as they could from the people placing the orders. But the people placing the orders, they, of course, did not know that. They were deadly serious when they were trying to have these people killed.

8:36And nowhere was that lesson starker than actually with Elena herself. So after we spoke to the police, so after we spoke to Elena, we spoke to the police. And sometime after that, the Swiss police did arrest her husband. and only then did we realize that he'd been renting a secret room next to her flat and in this room there was a flip knife, a telescopic baton, a submachine gun, a Glock 9mm pistol, an AK-47, zip ties, a black bin bag, black rubber gloves, GPS trackers, lockpicks. that was a lesson to us if we needed it the the people writing these orders could be just as dangerous as any duck in a hitman so who are these people who are the people writing these orders who is paying 2.2 thousand dollars for a five foot five male with blue eyes to be killed who which is kelly harper kelly harper is a a go-getter hospital administrator one-time college sweetheart of the target of the order who'd been locked with him in a bitter years-long custody battle that raged across the courts and the schools and the hospitals of Southern Prairie, Wisconsin.

9:50Who's paying$16 ,000 to have a couple removed, someone that they quite don't, quote, quite see eye to eye on something with, which sounds like the understatement of the absolute century? This is a man that's done that, Christopher Pence, 40-year-old Microsoft IT security technician, the biological father of 11 children, the adoptive father of five more children, a man, a deeply religious man actually, who from a large solitary house in a valley in Utah secretly plotted to have the biological parents of his five adoptive children killed. The order went by the dark net moniker SCAR 215, and they actually laid out a bonus structure.

10:35So an additional 10 ,000 to permanently withdraw court motions. An additional 10 ,000 to keep her mouth shut and tell no one. The husband does not know this is happening, writes the order. Any guesses? The husband definitely did know this was happening. This is the husband, Dr. Ronald Ilk, a neonatologist, a doctor, a man who ran a clinic for vulnerable women with addiction issues, A man who went from a poor rural upbringing in Oregon to a senior city clinician, and a man obsessed with controlling all the people in his life, especially the women. A man so devoid of contrition that after his conviction, he's been trying to sell the book rights to his life by describing it as 50 shades of grey on steroids.

11:19And it wasn't just here. We saw orders in Nevada. We saw orders in Tampa. We saw orders in Spain. We saw orders in Italy. We saw orders almost everywhere. Now, we started working in secret with the FBI, and we were passing all of our orders to the FBI. To give you a sense of the scale, over the years that we were doing this, we disclosed 175 paid-for kill orders around the world. 32 arrests so far, 28 convictions so far, around 180 years of prison time as being sentenced as a result of the investigation so far. There's probably more to come.

12:03Thanks. And in case anyone's wondering, no, we're not still doing this. So there's a whole other investigation that we did into people running the site. It turns out very likely that they were a group of Romanian cyber criminals. And some years ago, they were then arrested in a rash of raids across Romania. We were then locked out the site. And yet convictions have continued that we have had nothing to do with. And that is the only reason I can stand on this stage today and tell you about any of this. This is, by the way, not a story I really thought I would ever be on a stage and able to tell anyone about.

12:36So it's a spectacular moment for me to be able to finally kind of talk to the world about what we were doing all those long years ago. But where are we left with? That's, I think, the final idea I want to leave us with. Like, what does all of this actually really mean? When I first started doing this, I thought the kinds of cases that we were going to be dealing with were going to be to do with maybe organized crime, big drug deals gone awry. And I think the reality is somewhat more unsettling than all of that. What this website seems to do, in the eyes of the orders at least, is to make taking out a hit on someone convenient and clean and safe and easy, whereas it was once difficult and dangerous and scary.

13:24It's essentially lowered the barriers to entry to ordering an assassination. And I think that that brings us face to face with something that is quite disconcerting. The people on this list, the kill list, and the people that put them there are normal people. The perpetrators are basically normal people. They have jobs, they have friends, they go about living their lives just like you and I, you know, and they were going about holding all of that down basically at the same time that they were plotting in secret, constantly, coldly often, to have someone killed. I think that they, if there's one thing that unites them all, it was often intimate part of violence, by the way, spiraling out of control, and I think the one thing that unites them all is a desire for control, a need to have it, an inability to lose it, control of a thing, control of a relationship, of a family, and a willingness, ultimately, of course, to kill, to get it back.

14:21But I think that's where we are. And if there's one thing that I've come away from this whole ludicrous, crazy journey, really thinking, we might all be just a little bit closer to being on a kill list, we might like to think. Thanks very much, everyone.

14:46That was Carl Miller at TEDx Manchester in 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curationguidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmanivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.