Ten years after Silk Road falls, Variety Jones is sentenced
The sentencing of Silk Road’s Variety Jones, aka Plural of Mongoose, aka cimon, aka Ross Ulbricht’s mentor, aka Roger Thomas Clark was held at 10:00am on July 11, 2023, in courtroom 23A of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse that houses the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. This […]
Tying up Silk Road’s loose ends: Redandwhite
The Silk Road saga continues with the indictment of James Ellingson, known by numerous aliases on the platform, most famously as ‘redandwhite’. But is he in the US? Is he possibly even in the same establishment as Variety Jones? Last week, a certain James Ellingson was charged with drug and money laundering offences connected to […]
The recently arrested “redandwhite”: one of Silk Road’s greatest nemeses
I was blown away today to read the news that one of the Silk Road arrests, James Ellingson, aka “MarijuanaIsMyMuse” is apparently also the Silk Road user known as “redandwhite”. If my theory is right, redandwhite is one of the greatest scammers Silk Road ever encountered. MarijuanaIsMyMuse tickled my fancy back in the SR days […]
Behind the scenes of a CBS 48 Hours story on dark web hitmen
How I became a dark web consultant to a TV show, and my somewhat complicated relationship with the owner of the most profitable online murder-for-hire service in history I recently worked as a consultant to CBS for their season premiere of 48 Hours: “Click for a Killer” after I met a CBS producer at the trial […]
Murder, they wrote – freelancing for a dark web hitman
Dark web murder-for-hire organisation Besa Mafia never paid any of their would-be hitmen for burning cars for them. The only people paid were their army of freelance writers. Here’s what Besa Mafia had them do. Any freelancer knows that sometimes you have to take some pretty questionable jobs to put dinner on the table. This […]
Dark Web’s CrimeBay raising funds for a hit on Trump
CrimeBay, the new incarnation of Besa Mafia, has stepped up its marketing with a new attempt to extort money by crowdfunding a hit on the new US President. “Donald Trump is an extremely difficult target”, the site acknowledges, “however, he is neither a God nor immortal, and Crime Bay enjoys a challenge.”
So what’s been happening on the Dark Web?
The problem with writing a new book is that you save all the good stuff for the book and that leaves you with nothing for the blog. So in desperation, I’ve been clicking on random links from Onion crawlers to see if there’s anything new, relevant and/or even vaguely interesting happening in the deep dark web. […]
Ugly kids are cheaper – The Besa Files
Another story from the dark web “murder-for-hire” site hack. Read The Curious Case of Besa Mafia first. There are stories of people paying real money, verifiable through the blockchain, that have come out of the hack. Both targets and their would-be killers can be identified, so it’s only fair to leave those to the authorities for […]
The Little Texas Hit that Wasn’t
The hack of dark web “murder-for-hire” outfit Besa Mafia, which I wrote about a couple of days ago. has provided a treasure trove of stories of people who are prepared to go to extreme measures to be rid of someone in their lives. Most never got further than the initial enquiries. A few parted […]
Hitting on the Aussies – the Besa Mafia files
Before the recent hack confirmed definitively what rational people already knew – i.e. that the dark web “murder-for-hire” site was a scam – it was a little disconcerting that Besa Mafia’s No.1 FAQ was Do you have people in Australia? Now a thorough search of the leaked mails and orders has found no evidence that […]