Who pays for an assassin on the internet? Dark web researcher Carl Miller spent years tracking down the answer to this question. In this chilling talk, he shares how he uncovered real kill orders placed online by seemingly ordinary individuals — and gives an unsettling look at what drives people to the brink. (Note: This talk contains descriptions of violence.)For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. We see it in the movies, assassins, hit lists, dramatic races to save people's lives. How real can all this stuff be? Well, in this wild talk, digital researcher Carl Miller makes it clear. This isn't the stuff of movies, but rather of real life.
He takes us inside the mysterious workings of the dark web, where people are engaging in immoral acts that belong in the halls of true crime. Hold on to your seats for this talk.
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All right, well, everyone, good morning. So I'm Karl Miller, and I spent years watching people trying to have someone murdered. They thought they were doing it in secret, but they weren't. So the year was 2020. COVID had descended, and just like everyone else, I was spending a lot of time online.
But I was going on a bit of the internet that I think probably fewer people here have actually been on, the darknet. A bit of the internet that, thanks to clever technology, encryption basically ensures your anonymity. And rumors had swirled around the darknet for years, that you could buy anything on the darknet, that you could buy drugs, that you could buy guns, that you could buy uranium.
And also, You can buy murder. I mean, it looks like a website from the 1990s. It looks like someone trying to make clip art as scary as possible. But the offer that the website makes is a serious one. This website is saying, hey, we're the mafia, and now you can deal directly with us, thanks to the dark net.
So you put on, you load in your alias, you type in the message, and then it says you can directly transact to have someone killed. And so it was that in 2020, a hacker that I was working with, a man called Chris Montero, he was looking at this website. He was probing it, he was scanning it, he was seeing what he could learn.
And then in Discovery, which changed, I think, both Chris and my life forever, momentously, Chris found a little vulnerability with the way in which this website worked. A kind of little technical gap, if you will, that he could kind of, in a weird way, wiggle through and get into the back end of the website. And there, Chris could see all the kill orders being placed.
He could see names, addresses, pattern of life information, Bitcoin payments, and all the messages trying to have someone killed. So he phoned me. So suddenly we were seeing that there was a hit to kill someone in Amsterdam. A simple, easy person, but high risk of putting me in jail. They paid almost $2,000. There was a hit to kill someone in Paris for $1,000. A person that needs to go away.
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