![]() He could find no evidence of anybody ever being killed by a hitman hired online, nor of any hitman working online. Monteiro’s research suggested all such websites to be either harmless trolling or scams designed to rob people of their bitcoins. Some were structured as “prediction markets”, with users crowdfunding the assassination of VIPs and politicians or they could be catering to the private grudge-bearer wanting to book a hit via private chat. That was because, unlike snuff movies and evil AIs, hitman-for-hire services were ubiquitous on the dark web. The rumour that you could hire a contract killer on the dark web in exchange for bitcoin had been around since the early 2010s. He also wrote RationalWiki’s article about internet assassination. He made it his mission to kill urban legends – he contributed to Wikipedia’s articles on the dark web and darknet market, and created RationalWiki’s pages about red rooms and runaway AIs. He documented his findings on his blog – pirate.london – and on online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia and anti-pseudoscience website RationalWiki. In 2015, Monteiro started running the r/deepweb subreddit, a front row on the day-to-day happenings of the online netherworld. “This weird fringe of the internet, it's one of the toughest areas to seek truth,” Monteiro says. Online forums crawled with references to sentient AIs lurking in the dark web, live-streaming websites showing people being slaughtered in “red rooms”, or dark web pages revealing the secret of the Illuminati. This was the perfect environment for scammers – impenetrable to search engines and rife with illegality. He knew a great deal about credit card fraud. He gave talks about the politics of sci-fi, using a slightly slurred patter. He was into transhumanism, the internet-based movement advocating for human enhancement and immortality. He called himself a “cybercrime and niche topic internet researcher”. By day, he worked as a computer system administrator for a London-based firm by night, he turned on a six-screen desktop computer in his South London flat and spent hours plumbing the depth of the internet. A tall man in his thirties with thick sable hair, a short beard and deep-set, dark eyes, Monteiro is a man of weird pastimes. In 2016, two years before sending me the email about Njoroge, Monteiro was just a guy writing wikis. ![]() On June 9, Bryan Njoroge was found with a fatal gunshot wound to the head, near a baseball field in Clarksville, Indiana. “I will assign an operative to your job and it will be done in about a week, is this ok? I will get back to you shortly with an estimated date,” the capo wrote on June 1. The day after, Toonbib started chasing the presumed capo for an answer, which took some more time to arrive. They paid about $5,500 in bitcoin for the hit. “He will only be in location from june 01 2018- june 11,” Toonbib wrote. Toonbib had sent a picture of Njoroge in a suit, lifted from a school yearbook, and an address in Indiana where Njoroge – a soldier, who usually resided at a military base in Kentucky – would stay for a few days. On May 29, a person calling themselves Toonbib had exchanged messages with someone they thought was a Mafia capo renting hitmen on the dark web. Its subject read: “Suicide (or Murder)?” The email contained a link to a webpage showing unequivocally that someone wanted Bryan dead. Yet in late June 2018, a message arrived in my inbox. In ordinary circumstances, I would have never heard of his death, more than 6,500 kilometres away. I had never met him, talked to him, or encountered him online.
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