A story of two hackers, both US citizens and former members of the UGNazi hacking group, who deceived and murdered one hacker's girlfriend in the Philippines
Tomi Masters was a 23-year-old from Indiana who moved to California with dreams of making it big in the cannabis business. Tweets: @daveyalba , @buzzfeednews , @agoldmund , and @bernstein Tweets: Davey Alba / @daveyalba : This was a wild story to work on with @Bernstein: Tomi Masters was a hardworking young woman in the California weed business who got wrapped up in her hacker boyfriend's world of lies. Then her body ended up dumped in the Pasig River in the Philippines. http://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... @buzzfeednews : Bitcoins, BMWs, and a body in the river: How a tangled web of drugs, lies and cryptocurrency led to a killing http://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Alex Goldman / @agoldmund : This story is devastatingly sad, and gets right to the heart of the moral bankruptcy of a lot of these hacker kids I have interacted with. http://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Joe Bernstein / @bernstein : The craziest story I've ever written (with @daveyalba): Tomi Masters had dreams of making it big in the weed business. Then she met a hacker who introduced her to a dark new world of digital manipulation, one that swallowed her alive. http://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
BuzzFeed's Davey Alba and Joe Bernstein reconstruct how Tomi Masters — a 23-year-old from Indiana chasing a career in California's cannabis business — was drawn into her boyfriend's 'world of lies' among former members of the UGNazi hacking crew, and ended up dead in the Pasig River. The piece joins a run of reporting on hackers whose crimes stopped being purely digital: months later, Wired detailed an IT support technician who tried to buy his wife's murder on a dark web site, and TechCrunch later covered Jesse Kipf hacking Hawaii's death registration system to fake his own death.
First-order effects
- The two US-citizen hackers now face homicide exposure spanning two jurisdictions — the killing happened in the Philippines while they are American nationals — pulling Philippine and US investigators into one case.
- Masters's death exposes how the fraud economy around her boyfriend's circle ran on real-world assets: the reporting ties the crew to Bitcoins and BMWs, not just online notoriety.
Second-order effects
- Crypto flows become central evidence: tracing the Bitcoin trail puts this case in the same investigative playbook as the US government's laundering case over the 2016 Bitfinex hack, where digital currency records anchored a physical-world prosecution.
- Cross-border cases like this force cooperation between Philippine authorities and US agencies over suspects who assumed distance from the crime scene meant safety.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — hacker-crew alumni moving from group notoriety like UGNazi's toward fraud, violence, and staged identities — law enforcement structures built around cybercrime as property crime will keep being stretched toward homicide and transnational pursuit.
The trend: Hackers profiled in this coverage keep migrating from keyboard crimes into physical-world violence and identity manipulation, with cryptocurrency as the connective tissue between the two.