A researcher has revealed one of the most ‘grotesque’ discoveries he encountered online — a glimpse into how truly ‘dark’ the dark web can be.
In a TED Talk delivered last year, dark web researcher Carl Miller spoke about his time investigating the internet’s most hidden corners, describing some of the disturbing material he found along the way.
Among the worst was what he described as a “kill list” — a page where users appeared to request murders of specific individuals, including details about why they wanted the person dead and how much they were willing to pay.
“It is the single most grotesque, disturbing, horrible, frightening thing that I’ve ever had to read in my entire life,” Carl shared.
“[The list] was getting longer all the time,” he went on. “So I did what any sane person would do – I phoned the police.”
He said this unfolded during the COVID period, and after months of isolation the first people he met in person were two officers from London’s Metropolitan Police.
Carl recalled: “I laid it all out for them. I took them through the website, I took them through the hacks, I showed them the orders. We’d drawn this diagram of how the website worked, and they looked at it, and looked at me, then looked at each other and they were unfortunately genuinely quite concerned that I was insane.”
According to Carl, the police ultimately decided not to pursue what he had presented. But he said he couldn’t simply walk away, worried that individuals named on the list could be in serious danger.
He explained that he made what he considered the hardest choice of his life: contacting the alleged targets himself to warn them that someone had tried to arrange their death.
Carl then played audio from one of those calls, where the person on the other end responded with a blunt “I don’t care”.
For a week, he continued reaching out, but said he repeatedly faced disbelief and people ending the call.
Eventually, he sought help from local journalists, which he said made it possible to get through to some of the individuals named on the supposed hit list.
After speaking with someone who seemed to be at risk, Carl said a crucial detail became clear to him.
He explained: “It became really obvious that there were no shadowy hitmen out there. The site had no interest in killing any of these people, they were trying to extort as much money as they could from the people placing the orders.”
“But the people placing the orders did not know that,” Carl continued. “They were deadly serious when they were trying to have these people killed.”