‘Cyber Security Experts’ are providing dire warnings to parents that their teens may be accessing live-streamed torture and murder on the dark web. Why? 

Last week, in England, two teenagers were given life sentences for the murder of fellow teen, Brianna Ghey. In an unusual decision, the court released the names of the two perpetrators, despite their young age. They are Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe. Brianna was likely targeted because she was trans as Ratcliffe, at least, held transphobic beliefs. But it was one line in one message fr0m Jenkinson to Ratcliffe that had the UK tabloids frothing.

Scarlett Jenkinson had told Ratcliffe, ‘I love watching torture vids. Real ones on the dark web.’ She went on to boast, ‘I’ve liked this stuff for a while, I’m just happy cos I finally found a good red room.’

The tabloids picked this up and ran with it, reporting not that a psychotic teen had said she found a red room, but that she had, in fact, accessed one for real.

What is a red room?

Well, basically a red room is an urban myth, that grew and adapted from snuff films and the Hostel film franchise by chucking in some webcams. You go to a site on the dark web, pay in crypto and you get to watch – or if you pay enough, direct the action of – a livestream of a (usually female) person getting tortured to death.

There are plenty of examples to be found on the dark web. However, they are designed to part gullible people from their bitcoin. If you pay, nothing will happen. For the laziest of them, there’s no WAY anything could happen. They are static pages that basically say: send bitcoin to this address and a magic portal will open to let you into the show.

Now, it’s impossible to prove that something doesn’t exist, but there has never been the slightest whiff of a genuine red room outside of Hollywood, and there are several reasons discussed below why the chances that Scarlett Jenkinson came across a real one are zero.

Maybe the papers don’t know they’re fake?

One of the newspapers, The Daily Mail, did actually reach out to me. This is how the conversation went:

So The Daily Mail, at least, was put on notice that a murderous teenage girl might be full of shit and her story should possibly be investigated rather than uncritically regurgitated as fact.

Cyber Security Expert No. 1

Surprise! The Daily Mail decided this wasn’t really in the spirit of the story they wanted to tell. Instead they ran this story in which they quote Professor Alan Woodward, an ‘internationally renowned computer security expert’ from Surrey University.

Now, tabloids gonna tabloid, and I’m no stranger to having my views misrepresented by them, but this story certainly makes it sound like Professor Woodward is perpetuating the myth that red rooms exist. It provides direct quotes from him and his dire warnings about the evil lurking within the dark web. ‘Red rooms are where blood is involved, where people are being tortured and either killed or abused physically, where people draw blood,’ he is quoted as saying. ‘Something like a red room, or a torture room, can involve static imagery but sometimes it can also involve live streaming and those are very difficult to get to.’

He also makes claims like ‘’This isn’t like on the ordinary web, where you go onto Google to find them. You have to go searching and when you search you find other people who direct you….You can’t just go on the dark web and say, ”show me a snuff site or someone being tortured or beheaded,” or whatever it is you fancy, she would have had to have been told (where to go).”

No, you don’t have to infiltrate some secret society of people who will lead you further into the dark web. You just go to one of the many Tor search engines and start typing. The phrase ‘red room’ will get you to the sites above. Other phrases will take you to sites where other stuff is shown. It’s odd that a cyber security expert wouldn’t know this.

When tagged in my Twitter thread about it by ultimate dark web mythbuster/skeptic DekuShrub, Woodward responded with a series of tweets distancing himself from the claims:

The 2015 case he is referencing is Peter Scully, who certainly carried out and filmed heinous crimes on children, and who murdered a child. His torture (not murder) videos are hosted on dark web sites. And I don’t want to detract from just how vile and evil Scully is, but they are NOT RED ROOMS.

Cyber Security Expert No.2

The next day, The Daily Mail doubled down with this article by cyber security expert Edward Lucas. Now Lucas also seems to have some decent credentials behind him. He was formerly a senior editor at The Economist. But this piece was a massive piece of steaming scaremongering shit. ‘The twisted sites that any computer-literate teen can access via a phone, tablet or laptop are capable of leaving lifelong mental scars,’ he wrote. Then he goes on to say:

I have seen desperately unpleasant things. Few were worse than the website I was able to find and access within ten minutes of downloading an anonymous Dark Web browser to my home computer last week.

[side note: a ‘cyber security expert’ only downloaded Tor for the first time last week???]

For obvious reasons, I will not name the site. It served up an alphabetic directory of the most virulent pornography, from A for amputees to Z for zombies: images of violent sex involving seemingly helpless, legless and armless people, followed by similar images of skeletal anorexia sufferers— and that was just under A. This isn’t even the worst of what can be found on these sites.

The site he is not naming sounds a lot like the infamous idiot-bait site for those about to be parted from their money, The Hidden Wiki (possibly the least hidden site to have ever existed on the dark web).

Lucas also implies that the hitman sites are (or at least could be) real, and he makes the claim: it is plausible that Jenkinson found a red room.

IT.IS.NOT.PLAUSIBLE.

Again. There has NEVER been an any verified example of anything that even comes close to fitting the definition of a red room. Tor doesn’t have the bandwidth to stream in anything other than the grainiest of stop-start footage.

A Twitter user had a darkly amusing, but accurate take on it:

From way back when I first started reporting on the dark web, there were people screeching “OMG they have human experiments and gladiator fights to the death on there, I’ve SEEN it!” Spoiler alert: no they hadn’t. They’d seen some crappy cosplay sites made with WordPress.

How many errors is too many?

Lucas also makes the claim about having to be inducted into the secret dark web society to find stuff: ‘There is no search engine. Instead, each page has an address of random numbers and letters, like a password. Reaching that site involves knowing where to look — information shared among friends, via social media or in internet chatrooms.’

It’s like these people didn’t even bother to go and LOOK at the dark web before writing these ‘expert’ articles about it. If they did they’d find, you know, search engines.

He goes on to say that the BBC had an .onion site (it does), but ‘this optimistic beginning was soon corrupted. Just as no one a foresaw social media could be used to undermine democratic elections with conspiracy theories, the potential for organised crime and extreme porn emerged only later.’ 

Except that 30 seconds on Google would tell you that the BBC didn’t get its .onion until 2019, a good eight years after the first mass-marketed drugs bazaar, Silk Road, started on there and seven years after Hurt2theCore.

He says ‘Payment for these services is in untraceable digital currency such as bitcoin.’

This is just getting silly. The blockchain is RIGHT THERE. Criminals are getting caught criminalling because of just how very, very, VERY traceable bitcoin is. The tiniest bit of research should at least have you replacing ‘bitcoin’ with ‘monero’ (which has been the preferred currency of many darknet markets for a while now).

Like Woodward, Lucas also backtracked somewhat on his claims when challenged on Twitter/X:

So who should you believe?

Like I said before, tabloids gonna tabloid, but most of the more serious news services reported it responsibly and far less salaciously. But I can’t help wonder why people who seem to be respected in their field go on record to perpetuate a creepypasta myth in a way designed to instil mostly groundless fear.

I have an with the UK tabloids uncritically reporting on the existence of ‘red rooms’ purely because a disturbed 15-year-old girl claimed to have accessed them. There was no attempt to verify or delve into her claim. This misinformation, deliberately put forward by tabloids like the Daily Mail, is great for clicks but leads to very unhelpful moral panic and hysteria around darknets (which are privacy tools) and the dark web, which admittedly is home to some heinous sites, but if the tabloids are to believed is chock-full of hitmen, slave auctions and live-streamed torture-on-demand. This is simply not true.

As journalists and experts in our respective fields, we have a duty to call out this sort of sensationalist and salacious reporting. There’s more than enough misinformation and scaremongering about the dark web out there without adding to it.

But I’m happy to share some tweets of those who can see through the bullshit:

OzFreelancer’s Cheat Sheet to the Dark Web

Things that exist on the dark web:

• drugs markets
• fraud markets
• CSAM (child abuse) sites
• other types of illegal porn/abuse sites
• gore videos of real deaths and torture (which also exist, and are much easier to find, on the clear web)
• spooky-looking sites that edgy teenagers love screencapping
• Mirrors of the BBC, the Guardian and CIA sites so whistleblowers can contact in private

Things that don’t exist on the dark web:

• Red Rooms
• Human Experiments
• Gladiator fights to the death
• Guaranteed ways to double your bitcoin