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 assassination targets, he worked to warn the victims – and bring the criminals to justice

In early 2020, as the world faced down the pandemic, the technology journalist Carl Miller made a remarkable and morbid discovery. He was researching the dark web from London when a colleague, a hacker called Chris, broke into a secretive website where people were putting up targets for assassination, like eBay for contract killings. This was the “kill list”: a catalogue of hundreds of ordinary men and women, complete with pictures and personal information, whom others wanted dead. The list of requests was ghoulish. “Kill him and make it look like a car accident,” one demanded. Another read: “Seeking house to be burnt down with occupants inside. No survivors.” 
“I remember being quite calm at the time,” Miller says, over Zoom, remembering that breakthrough moment. “Then that evening, being sat there as it was dark, looking out of my window at this Covid-silent city, thinking ‘what the f— have I got myself into?” 
Gaining access to the website was the start of a four-year investigation for Miller, Chris and a small team of journalists, as they tried to get to the bottom of this gruesome find. The process would involve police forces and intelligence agencies around the world, including the Met and the FBI. The investigation is the basis of a gripping new podcast, Kill List, the first six episodes of which are available now. 
It did not take long before Miller realised that the posts on the website were not leading to actual killings. Instead, the kill list website was a scam, in which users were conned into sending payment, in the form of untraceable bitcoin, for contract assassinations that would never take place. The site masqueraded as a middle man that would match assassins with clients. It promised to hold the bitcoin in escrow until the contract had been fulfilled. Instead, the site’s owner, an enigmatic Romanian criminal called Yura, was using it to maintain an elaborate illusion. Pretending to be relaying messages from the hitmen, he would reply to the customers saying he needed more resources, stringing them along to extract as much money as possible.
“We realised quite early on that the site itself had no interest in sending out hitmen,” Miller says. “If they were real, which they were not, these were the most incompetent hitmen on the face of the planet. They kept getting lost, or losing their weapons, or they’d attend the target and discover they were surrounded by security and you needed to hire another hitman. He would always try to upsell, to get more and more bitcoin.” 
The assassins were illusions, but someone wanted these people dead all the same. Miller and his team realised they had a responsibility to help. 
“We dropped what we were doing and realised these were serious threats to lives,” he says. Using their access to the site, they built a “pipeline,” which enabled them to track the possible threats as they came in. They also involved the authorities. 
“I phoned up the [Met] police; I think any sane person would do that as a next step,” he says. “Then the police’s main worry initially was whether I was sane or not. They came round and conducted mental health checks on me. They said the vast majority of these kinds of calls, about dark net assassins and so on, are related to mental health issues.” Even having established that Miller was sane and the threats were real, the police had limited interest. They passed the information on to Interpol, but nothing much happened. 
“They believed me,” he says, “but the problem was that because the targets were all over the world, the police didn’t take it on themselves.” He says he offered repeatedly to show the police how to break into the site themselves, to no avail. 
Frustrated by the police response, Miller and his team realised they would have to warn these possible victims themselves. It did not always go to plan. Faced with a strange British voice speaking down the phone, telling them their life was in serious danger, most of the people he rang ignored him or hung up, assuming it was some type of scam caller. 
“We decided, somewhat fatally for the investigation, that we would have to warn the people on the list ourselves,” Miller says. “I tried, unsuccessfully, to call people. It was a total nightmare. It didn’t work. I was hoping my British accent would reassure people, but everyone thought I was a scammer. They flatly refused to believe me. I didn’t convince a single person. People would hang up on me.” 
While talk of hitmen and contract killings brings to mind the mafia, the reality was more mundane. “I initially thought it would be gangland, drugs deals gone wrong, that kind of thing,” Miller says. “It was only later, as we got to know people on the list and the police investigated and we got the story, most of the time it was people trying to kill spouses, former spouses, love rivals, people they were locked in an adoption conflict with. Then there was a smaller group of business partners, siblings or parents.” 
These-would be murderers were far from criminal masterminds. “Both the targets and the perpetrators are going around leading normal lives,” he says. “They are doctors and air traffic controllers and fishmongers. They don’t have a connection with organised crime. I don’t think a hardened criminal would think these dark web sites could go about delivering murders.” This made warning the potential victims even more difficult, as Miller and his team had to be careful not to tip off the would-be hitman-hirers that they had access to the website. 
As Miller and his colleagues continued their work, the police began to pay more attention, persuaded by the detailed information coming through the website. Criminal charges ensued. So far the investigation has led to 34 arrests and 28 convictions in 11 countries, and a total of 150 years of prison sentences. Ronald Ilg, a neonatal doctor from Spokane, Washington, was arrested by FBI agents after posting that he wanted his estranged wife to be kidnapped and forcibly injected with heroin, in the hope of intimidating her into not divorcing him. In January 2023, he was sentenced to eight years in prison.
The first potential target Miller contacted was a woman called Elena, in Switzerland, who was initially relaxed about the threat. When police finally investigated her estranged husband, they found he had rented a flat next door to her. “He had filled it with firearms and zipties and bin bags and GPS trackers,” Miller says. “I can’t say for certain that he was going to act on it, [but] he was clearly in an active preparation stage of murdering her himself. We thought that was the situation for a lot of cases, that these people were in real danger from the people placing orders on the site.” 
Last year Whitney Franks, who worked in Sports Direct in Milton Keynes, was initially sentenced to 12 years (later halved) for trying to get her colleague and love rival, Ruut Ruutna, killed. The investigation exposed the extent of cybercrime. Yura was an ingenious online marketeer. To lure people to his site, he set up a range of other websites, including a hitman-for-hire comparison website, which contained instructions for how to get onto the dark web. He hired people to write positive reviews of his site and disparage his competitors. Once users google-searched “how to hire a hitman”, they would find themselves drawn inexorably towards his site. Miller hopes the podcast helps raise awareness of how widespread cybercrime has become, and how hopelessly outdated the police’s methods of investigating it are. 
“I hope that it’s something of a wake-up call for us to have a conversation around cyber crime,” he says. “Because I think we’re living through a horrendous crisis when it comes to law enforcement. The police have been far more undercut than is being publicly discussed. In private, the police are very alarmed by cybercrime and the difficulty in investigating it. But it’s difficult for the police to talk about this openly for fear of raising alarm or giving signals to criminals to make their operations even more digital. We need to reorganise the way the police work. We have 43 constabularies in the UK, and they all have a tiny cyber crime team, and they are expected to investigate crimes that are inherently international in nature.” 
Kill List is scheduled to run until Christmas, with new episodes every week. It is a reminder of the internet’s power to facilitate the worst in human nature. The website might have been a scam, but the malignant intent of the people using it was all too real. 
Kill List, from Wondery and Novel, is out now