My dalliance with the dark side of the web
LAST week I found myself idly musing over a menu of torture, decapitation and outright murder. Like a wannabe Tony Soprano, I debated which terrible option would best suit my enemies and whether it was really worth the money.
Over the course of an hour I went from law-abiding citizen to a potentially deranged criminal. And it all began with a crocked computer. Six o’clock on Friday is no time for your laptop to give up the ghost – especially when you’ve got a work deadline looming first thing Monday morning. So Saturday morning saw me haunting the city’s back streets in search of an emergency laptop physician. A pressed intercom buzzed open a door to a tiny room where a young man took my machine and handed it to an unseen colleague. Will it be long, I asked. “Yes,” came the disinterested reply.
After 30 minutes of silence, I tried another tack. “Do you know anything about the Dark Web?” His head snapped up: “What are you looking for?” Nothing specific, I replied, just enlightenment. Bingo, the man was suddenly a motormouth. Turned out he was working on a college paper covering internet scams, and proceeded to call up a site called ‘Slayer Hitmen’ for my inspection. Under the ‘Assassinations’ section it offered death by gun, knife or poison – costing $15,000, $22,000 and $40,000 respectively. An adjacent section entitled ‘Life Ruining’ got even more specific – acid attack $4,000, facial scar $3,000, crippling $10,000 and castration $30,000. Ouch.
Turns out the Dark Web is full of such services – most of them scams catering to the disenchanted, vengeful and just plain bonkers. Nobody gets kneecapped, only your wallet. The criminal operators charge in Bitcoin, and take payment up front. As soon as clients realise they’ve been ripped off, what can they do? Go to the police? Hardly.
In a recent case, an Illinois nurse was sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to sending $12,000 in Bitcoin to the ‘Sicilian Hitmen International Network’ site. She wanted the wife of her boyfriend killed – a common demand unscrupulous shysters exploit to the full.
The Dark Web is not indexed by search engines, operating as a lawless territory trading in drugs, guns, counterfeit money, even body parts.
A 2018 cybercrime report estimated its dark profits amounted to $1.5trn annually – ranking it 13th in terms of its global GDP, between South Korea and Australia. “It’s a serious place: you don’t want to go messing in there,” advised my educator. And with that my trusty laptop appeared, good as new for €180. I headed back out into the city streets, head filled with the dangers that lurk on the dark side…