Featured Image Credit: YouTube/TED
Topics: Crime, Technology, News, Life
Niamh Shackleton
A researcher has lifted the lid on one of the most 'grotesque' things he found on there — and it puts the 'dark' in dark web.
Last year, Carl Miller gave a TED Talk where he discussed his years as a dark web researcher and gave an unsettling look at what really goes on in the worst parts of the internet.
One of the most disturbing things he came across was a 'kill list': where people put out hits on certain individuals for different reasons and would outline the sum they were willing to pay for it to be done.
"It is the single most grotesque, disturbing, horrible, frightening thing that I've ever had to read in my entire life," Carl shared.
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"[The list] was getting longer all the time," he went on. "So I did what any sane person would do – I phoned the police."
Carl explained that this happened in the middle of COVID and, because of the this, the first people he went on to see after months of isolation was two police officers from Metropolitan Police in London, UK.
Carl recalled: "I laid it all out for them. I 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 looked at me, then looked at each other and they were unfortunately genuinely quite concerned that I was insane."
Ultimately the police chose not to investigate what Carl had shown them, but he knew that he couldn't just step away from it all knowing that some people could have been in 'terrible danger'.
He went on to say that he 'made the most difficult decision [he's] ever had to make' and chose to contact the people on the so-called 'kill list' directly to tell them that someone was trying to kill them.
Carl proceeded to play a clip of one phone call that he had with someone listed as a target on the 'kill list', and the man on the other end simply said 'I don't care'.
He made these calls for a week but no one believed him and kept hanging up on him.
Eventually he recruited local journalists for their help, which aided them in successfully speaking to some people listed on the dark web's hit list.
Following a conversation with one of the people who appeared to be at risk of being killed, Carl worked out something vitally important.
He explained: "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 trying to extort as much money as they could from the people placing the orders."
"But the people placing the orders did not know that," Carl continued. "They were deadly serious when they were trying to have these people killed."