A look at the rise of murder-for-hire marketplaces on the dark web, the vast majority of which are schemes to pilfer money from gullible users
The dark world of online murder markets — On a sunny July day in 2018, Alexis Stern was sitting behind the wheel of the red Ford Fusion … Tweets: @harpers , @adamshermanesq , @davidparis , @bcmerchant , @craigmod , and @codinghorror Tweets: @harpers : “Q: Do you kill women? A: Of course.” Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) reports on the rise of online murder marketplaces, which may force us to redefine what constitutes criminal intent. https://harpers.org/... Adam Sherman / @adamshermanesq : “While I was working on this story, journalists at BBC News Russia confirmed the first known case of a murder being ordered on the dark web and successfully carried out by hired assassins.” https://harpers.org/... Paris / @davidparis : Almost every dark web hitman site is a scam, but they're far from harmless. This is fascinating and horrifying. https://harpers.org/... Brian Merchant / @bcmerchant : If we do not take seriously the threat of dark net murder markets— *especially* the hoaxes—more people will have their lives ruined. More people will die. This is the subject of my cover story for Harper's January issue, and I really hope you'll read it https://harpers.org/... @craigmod : Incredibly well written and compelling look at the evolution of and present state of online anonymous assassination markets: https://harpers.org/... Jeff Atwood / @codinghorror : This article is a fascinating mix of human stupidity and real terror https://harpers.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Brian Merchant's Harper's report lands on an already-documented beat: the criminal investigation of an IT support technician who paid a dark web murder-for-hire site that turned out to be a scam, then killed his wife himself. What Merchant adds is scale and taxonomy — these marketplaces are numerous, and by his account and the relationships in coverage, the vast majority exist only to extract fees from gullible customers.
The one confirmed exception matters analytically: journalists at BBC News Russia verified the first known case of a murder actually ordered on such a site and carried out by hired assassins. So the category splits into fraud operations and at least one functioning one — which is what forces the criminal-intent question the piece raises.
First-order effects
- Customers who wire money to these sites are defrauded outright — the dominant outcome is theft, not violence — while law enforcement inherits cases like the technician's, where a murder was solicited and paid for even though no killer was ever engaged.
Second-order effects
- Because most sites are scams, would-be customers can rationalize an order as harmless — a dynamic visible in the technician case — which lowers the psychological barrier to solicitation and generates more raw material for prosecutors deciding whether payment to a fraudster constitutes attempted murder.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, dark web service marketplaces follow the same arc as peer-to-peer goods markets covered elsewhere in this corpus — Armslist's intermediary-free gun sales, the safeguard failures ProPublica found on Facebook Marketplace — with platform structure, not any single listing, becoming the regulatory target.
The trend: Peer-to-peer online marketplaces are expanding from goods into illicit services, with fraud as the dominant business model and legal systems forced to price intent when the promised service never existed.