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In a brief yet fascinating press release, Europol just announced the arrest of an Italian man who is accused of “hiring a hitman on the dark web”.
According to Europol:
The hitman, hired through an internet assassination website hosted on the Tor network, was paid about €10,000 worth in Bitcoins to kill the ex-girlfriend of the suspect.
Heavy stuff, though Europol isn’t saying much more about how it traced the suspect other than that it “carried out an urgent, complex crypto-analysis.”
In this case, the word crypto is apparently being used to refer to cryptocurrency, not to cryptography or cryptanalysis.
In other words, the investigation seems to have focused on unravelling the process that the suspect followed in purchasing the bitcoins used to pay for the “hit”, rather than on decrypting the Tor connections used to locate the “hitman” in the first place, or in tracing the bitcoins to the alleged assassin.
Fortunately (if that is the right word), and as we have reported in the past, so-called dark web hitmen often turn out to be scammers – after all, if you’ve just done a secret online deal to have someone killed, you’re unlikely to complain to the authorities if the unknown person at the other end runs off with your cryptocoins:
Nevertheless, no victim targeted for murder via the dark web is ever going to take much comfort in the fact that their proposed assassin “might not have been real.”
And no one who is convicted of spending €10,000 on soliciting what they expect to be a murder can expect much sympathy from the court just because the hitman “could have been fake.”
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Intriguingly, hitmen-for-hire were a feature of what is perhaps the best-known dark web investigation and prosecution ever – the arrest and conviction of Ross Ulbricht, founder and operator of the Silk Road online bazaar.
According to a US Department of Justice press release issued in early 2014:
Using the online moniker “Dread Pirate Roberts,” or “DPR,” Ulbricht controlled and oversaw every aspect of Silk Road, and managed a small staff of paid, online administrators who assisted with the day-to-day operation of the site. Through his ownership and operation of Silk Road, Ulbricht reaped commissions worth tens of millions of dollars […] Ulbricht even solicited six murders-for-hire in connection with operating the site, although there is no evidence that these murders were actually carried out.
One of those “hitmen” was, apparently, an undercover cop, but Ulbricht was never charged for this alleged hiring-of-hitmen activities.
There were more than enough serious charges against Ulbricht anyway, for which he received two life-means-life jail terms plus an extra 20 years.
What to do?
It’s hard to know how to offer advice in a case like this, where the fact that the suspect was not as anonymous as they had hoped turned out to be a very good thing, given the enormity of the allegations against him.
However, there are many perfectly legitimate reasons why you might want to use something like the Tor Browser, even if your purpose for being pseudo-anonymous online is as simple as wanting to browse the web without being tracked and traced as much as usual.
Just remember – as this case and the case of Ross Ulbricht remind us – that online anonymity only goes so far.
So, if you plan to use Tor for legitimate purposes, make sure you RTFM first, as we advise in the video above, lest you inadvertently make yourself more of a target for online crooks than before.
A homicidal cycling and running fanatic known for his meticulous nature in tracking his victims has been undone by location data from his Garmin GPS watch.
Police in Merseyside, in northwest England, announced that a jury last week found Mark Fellows, 38, guilty of two gangland murders: that of “career criminal” John Kinsella last year and gang member Paul Massey in 2015. Fellows was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Kinsella was gunned down on 5 May 2018 by a masked hitman on a bicycle who was wearing a high-visibility vest with yellow markings and black tape that CCTV cameras easily picked up.
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Steven Boyle, 36, also found guilty in the killing of Kinsella, gave testimony against Fellows and acted as his spotter in the slaying, according to the Liverpool Echo. Boyle received a sentence of 33 years to life.
GPS watch
As the Liverpool Echo reported in December, during a search of Fellows’ home following Kinsella’s killing, police had seized a Garmin Forerunner 10 GPS watch. A prosecutor pointed out that the seized watch matched one Fellows had been wearing in photos taken during a road race – the Bupa Great Manchester Run – on 10 May 2015.
Investigators had taken the watch to Professor James Last, an expert in satellite-based radio navigation, to see whether the gadget had ever been to the area near Massey’s home.
It had. Professor Last testified that the Garmin had been near the victim’s home on 29 April 2015: almost two months before he was gunned down with a submachine gun. Prosecutors said that the trip was Fellows’s reconnaissance mission.
The watch mapped out Fellows’s journey and his escape route: a 35-minute journey from Fellows’s home to a church where he had lain in wait for Kinsella to take a walk with his pregnant girlfriend, then Fellows’s return path across a field towards woods and a railway line.
The Garmin also provided useful evidence regarding its wearer’s speed. Professor Last told the court that the Garmin wearer initially traveled around 12mph, suggesting that he was on a bike.
Professor Last said that the Garmin wearer slowed down to about 3mph on the grassland area, consistent with walking. Besides the Garmin GPS data, Professor Last also examined a TomTom Start satellite navigation system that police found in a car, and that prosecutors say was strongly associated with Fellows.
The TomTom data – the “Tomtology report” – showed that it often set off from an area near Fellows’s home and visited two locations that the prosecutor said were of interest in the investigation: one close to the home of a man with a van that prosecutors said Fellows used, and another area in which a mobile phone tied to Fellows was used, as the Liverpool Echo reports.
Given that CCTV repeatedly caught footage of Fellows on a bike, clad in the luminous yellow markings and covered with the black tape of his high-visibility jacket, police had already suspected that they knew who killed Kinsella.
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Kinsella’s killing had commonalities with Massey’s murder. But it was the Garmin data that tied the two together, the Echo reports: the location data provided “key evidence” in the Massey murder, said the local paper.
Other device-based convictions
Other convictions based on location data have included the pivotal Carpenter v. United States, which concerned a Radio Shack robbery and the privacy of the phone location data that got the robber convicted. In June 2018, the Supreme Court ruled it unlawful for law enforcement and federal agencies to access cellphone location records without a warrant.
The legal arguments in Carpenter have gone on to inform subsequent decisions, including one from last week in which a judge ruled that in the US, the Feds can’t force you to unlock your phone with biometrics, including your finger, iris or face.