What if you were accused of someone trying to murder you, and the killer was a member of the Mafia from Eastern Europe, organized by the Dark Web?
Even with the protection provided by the FBI, months after the criminal website was dismantled, the target still did not escape death.
Many people may think that this is a novel or movie plot, but the scary thing about this world is that you can imagine that all the horrible things may exist in reality.
The incident happened not so long ago in 2016, in April of that year, a hacker broke into the database of the dark web site Besa Mafia and gave the information to the FBI, who struck hard and uprooted Besa Mafia. What does this site do? In short, murder for hire: if you have a need, you can contact the site and Besa Mafia charges a fee to outsource to "professionals".
According to the website's property description, the assassins who work for Besa Mafia are members of Eastern European gangs, and they only pay for their work. For example, if you want to disguise a murder as an accident, so that the police can never trace the employer, then you need to pay thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars depending on the situation; if you want to pursue efficiency, pay 5,000 yuan, when the killer will shoot the target in the head, simple and clear.
Such a setup resembles the fictional plot of "The Fast and the Furious". And similar to the usual rules of the dark web, Besa Mafia only collects bitcoins that are highly liquid and concealed.
In the information obtained, the FBI found that a woman named Amy Erwin in Minnesota was very special because she was named four times in a row by an employer nicknamed "Dog Day God". But the strange thing is that Amy is so lucky that the killer has planned traffic accidents, fires, robberies and home invasions, and many other plans, and she has actually avoided them all. And the site apparently does not stop there, there are signs that a fifth assassination is scheduled.
What is even more creepy is that the killer has a detailed grasp of Amy's information, not only know her height, weight, appearance, etc., but also familiar with her daily habits, and even the time and route of each trip are very accurate.
The police visited the door, Amy is a question three do not know. She is just an ordinary small role, friendly neighbors, law-abiding, every day to work on time, do not owe anyone money, let alone offend anyone. From the employer's email to Besa Mafia, the motive probably has two points.
One, the employer complained that Amy was stealing customers from his business. However, Amy's profession is very cold, a dog trainer, she can count the number of people she works with on one hand, and there is no business dispute between them, so I really can't think of anyone to suspect.
Second, the employer accused Amy of meddling in his marriage. But in fact, this is absolutely impossible - Amy is a devout Christian believer, and still has a position in the local church, and would not dare to do something contrary to doctrine.
You see, here's the nasty thing about the dark web.
Research on dark web technology began at the end of the Cold War and was planned for use in the exchange of intelligence between the U.S. Navy, government and other branches to keep the Soviets from snooping. in 1995, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory created the Onion Router, which secures network communications within the system from outsiders. in 2003, the U.S. military used the Onion Router to build the dark web, for one thing, to continue to provide some of the U.S. government's In 2003, the U.S. military used the Onion Router to build the Dark Web to continue to facilitate some of the U.S. government's "covert operations" and because the Dark Web could provide users with a service to conceal their identities so that they could not be named and traced, the U.S. military made the Dark Web a research project as a whole.
However, the project was so expensive that it was abandoned by the U.S. government after only 1 year, and funding for it was discontinued and open sourced. Technically speaking, the Dark Web cannot be shut down, and today it has become a haven for illegal transactions and terrorists, with a number of sites engaged in illegal transactions that generate billions of dollars in transactions every year, but governments have no way to deal with them.
It is rumored that one website kidnaps young girls from the street at random and abuses them live on the dark web, and the highest bidder among the onlookers can decide how the girls die. Perhaps in ordinary people's perception, such evil is just a little shadow hidden under the sun, but in fact the opposite - the familiar, healthy, safe and green Internet is the tip of the iceberg, the scale of the dark network is probably 400 to 500 times the surface network, a small beam of sunlight is shrouded in endless darkness.
No suspects means no direction of investigation, and the other side is the vast dark network, helpless, the FBI can only set Amy under heavy protection, set up several monitoring points near their homes, sending plainclothes agents on duty day and night shifts. However, day after day passed, everything was calm, Amy slackened.
In June of that year, the FBI came with a good report: the mysterious Besa Mafia is a fraudulent website, the server is located in a small and insignificant country in Eastern Europe, the website is operated by a total of three people. They hired the murderers to pinpoint, that these people have ghosts in their hearts, cheated also dare not sue the officials, sitting waiting for the wrongdoers to send money to the door.
The FBI and police withdrew their protection from Amy, and the Erwin family's life resumed as before, when things took a turn for the worse - Amy died.
On November 13, 2016, Amy's husband Steve Erwin suddenly reported that he picked up his son and came home to find his wife dead at home with a gun. Police arrived to find that the situation was indeed as he said, and that Amy was in a tragic state of death.
Investigators found an anonymous email in Amy's mailbox in which the sender threatened that the FBI would not shelter her forever and that it would be her time to die; not only that, the sender also threatened to kill Amy's family unless Amy committed suicide.
People immediately associate the matter with the mysterious Besa Mafia. Was the Besa Mafia destroyed by the FBI a fake, a cover-up by the Dark Web? Or is this criminal website still operating in a new skin? This conjecture is creepy, from the point of view of not involving the family, Amy could really be a suicide.
However, experienced investigators immediately found 3 suspicious points.
First, Amy was not subjectively suicidal, and even moments before her death that day, she was preparing dinner for her husband and son. This is counter-intuitive for someone whose mind is so unbalanced that she wants to self-destruct.
Second, Amy's wound was slightly bizarre.
The flow of blood was from the forehead to the chin, which means that the deceased remained standing or sitting for a certain period of time after death, while a person shot in the head with a pistol would immediately fall to the ground. If we disregard the fact that the murderer "executed" the victim by some ritualistic means, then Amy was obviously moved after death, which means that the "crime scene" was faked.
Again, investigators found a large amount of blood in the hallway of the house after wiping traces, it is clear that if the killer really did it, he has no reason to fake the scene.
Soon, forensics detected large amounts of scopolamine in Amy's blood, a very effective analgesic used to combat motion sickness and seasickness, and used in large quantities as an anesthetic. Amy's body had 40 times the normal level of scopolamine and was clearly drugged. Combined with the above clues, investigators backtracked the entire case, and finally pointed the finger at Amy's husband, Steve. You know, at the beginning of the investigation, he was excluded; moreover, he had an alibi - at the time, he was on his way to his father-in-law's house to pick up his son.
Just when Steve tried to use this to justify himself, the police found two other clues that directly destroyed his defense.
Shortly before the hired gun, Dog Day God, showed up at Besa Mafia, Steve "happened" to have purchased a large accident insurance policy for his wife, for his own benefit.
The technicians recovered some of the contents from Steve's phone, including a line of characters that was the address of one of the bitcoins recovered from the Besa Mafia operator.
With such direct evidence in front of him, Steve finally gave up the fight.
It turns out that in his eyes, his once gentle and beautiful wife became ugly and annoying, and the day-to-day boring life made him bored, and unknowingly, Steve had an extramarital affair. Being a programmer, he easily learned about the existence of Besa Mafia like this from the dark web, and on February 16, 2016, he ordered the service from the website for the first time and paid 15 bitcoins in discount according to the market at that time.
Instead of hearing about Amy's death, he received message after message of "killer failure". He asked the website for a comment, but the latter said, "That's your loved one, you have to pay more. Steve was helpless and reluctant, so he had to give in.
In the long wait, Steve lost patience and conscience, so much so that when he learned that Besa Mafia was actually a fraudulent website, he decided to take action himself, and there was the tragedy in the article. The good news is that Steve was eventually sentenced to 25 years in prison.
See here, you may say, this is just a murder case, and the dark network has nothing to do with it! But consider it from another perspective, this is precisely the dark net, or the real world of the horror.
We have been taught since childhood that the world is a good and beautiful place, and now the Internet is also full of "positive energy", living in such an environment, over time, I am afraid that many people rightly believe that this is what it is. In a sense, guiding people to be positive is actually the protection that every country provides to those who need it. No one is perfect, and even the noblest of people dare not guarantee that they have never had even a hint of evil in their hearts, let alone ordinary people. While morality and social rules require us to show our good side to others, the long development of human society has made people forget a very important point: it is the biological instinct to avoid harm - greed is the nature of human beings as opposed to restraint.
The existence of such a dark network in human society, as the mud on the white cloth, the dirt on the floor, but in my opinion, it is also like a mirror a window: from which you can see the sunlight can also see the darkness; it is not horrible in itself, but only for the ugly side of human nature to provide a way to vent, and this is also the real world of the terrible place.