Chris Monteiro
My attempts of creating summaries with ChatGPT violated the content policies last I tried.
There is lots of OSINT work to do, but until I have normalised all the ID data out from the message data, I am not comfortable handing it over to OSINT specialists or their AIs.
Yes, but it’s probably closer to saving maybe 25 lives, and saving 500 people from stalking/abuse/etc
The data is not public. I accessed it anyhow. Perhaps you want to listen to the podcast to get a fuller chronology, I have not written it up yet.
Publishing the whole list, without precise addresses
To identify a person internationally, a name isn’t enough, you must also supply an address or social media links.
I’ve performed medium level OSINT on most people so I annotate a fair bit of extra info internally.
I do have tentative plans to publish a highly redacted format, such as ’A <seriousness level> plot where someone <did/didn’t pay> to <kill/beat/harm> a <number of persons> of <genders> in <city/state/location + country> who appears to be <relationship-details> and <any other key details> who is can be found via <address only/social media> which <has/hasn’t> been reported to <le agency/media/other>
Honestly it’s depressing reading through the cases to the level I can write this up. I have the payer status, crime type, location, address, report details and social info mostly normalised, but I would have to parse all cases again to create this.
To my initial point, this is harmful to me. (And anyone)
Up to late 2023
Do you know anyone who could guide me through this process?
Interpol (and Europol) doesn’t work for the public, only for incumbent law enforcement agencies.
Europol took explicit credit for one case, https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/dark-web-hitman-identified-through-crypto-analysis but that was actually overturned in the Italian courts years later.
Attempts by the podcast team to route cases from the UK through to Interpol and other countries yielded no results, likely due to the game of ‘telephone’ such referrals go through. One case in India ended up informing the would-be-killer about his plot being discovered.
I would of course work with volunteers, but the work is stressful and brings you into contact with people unsafe situations and hostile and skeptical law enforcement. I guess it’s akin to being a social services worker. My limited attempts to do this has not yielded results.
‘I’ll help!’
<shares email of local police station>
Exposing this information gives ammunition to ruin lives, and it has. I remain anxious about sharing it with people who’s trustworthiness I can’t vouch for.
It varies depending on how powerful the law enforcement agency is and whether they understand it or not, with the FBI and German Federal police being the most effective.
It’s not all saving lives, often it’s protecting people from stalking, physical and mental abuse, child custody disputes and the like, because in many cases (especially so with women perpetrators) they would never actually turn to violence themselves.
I have not been party to all of the journalist hard costs for local investigators, but I think they were doing at least $3,000 initially per major case, but they would go higher when it looked like this would turn into a full podcast episode. There is also a issue where cases without payment are considered less serious than those with by the police, and require more up front investigation to understand. As a result, far more of the ‘payer’ cases were investigated compared to the non-payer ones, at least in the US.
Sometimes such as in the US the police would then move fast, but in places like Spain the journalist had to act as a victim advocate extensively for years, and in Italy the cases collapsed on technicalities.
Frankly, beyond my personal experience, I REALLY don’t want to live in a world where people can order commodity killings anonymously, as my data shows that all sorts of people would. I consider this analogous to the psychological effect that terrorism has on society, despite not being a high source of actually violence relatively speaking.
But yeah, murder is bad actually and should be given higher priority than other causes of death in my opinion.
I’ve looked! The only one that comes close I am aware of is https://globalinitiative.net/ with whom I have been trying to engage for some time. There appears to be more money to study crime and do things like victim support than any money to fight crime.
If I were to speculate, policing agencies would not like the existence of non state-aligned policing agencies, being considered like mercenaries, private detectives, vigellantes and hacktivists.
Any body who could appear sufficiently legitimate in the eyes of the law would be subsumed into the system by definition I reckon.
It varies by the country’s policing capability, citizens online footprint, the history and status of the feud, the severity of the online element and language barriers as well as highly variable economies of scale such as an effective engagement with a law enforcement agency.
The only ones that have come close to this have been the FBI and the Bundespolizei (German Federal Police) where there is evidence they did at least a basic investigation of every major case based on a medium (US) and very high (Germany) public arrest and prosecution records.
I won’t share exact figures as my hiring of detectives is still in the ‘trial and error phase’, but it cost over £1000 to work one case in Japan, and nearly that to work the one case I have in New Zealand.
In somewhere like India I would get a far cheaper day rate, but you often have to retain lawyers (and likely bribes) and other costs to get things done there. Yet in countries like US, Canada and Europe, instead of corruption you have the complex bureucracy of even reporting these effectively.
Appriasing these case is something I am actively working on, so I can publish this info to capture the interest of people from those countries.
I have had very random people reach out to me who have been the target of threats etc so I have looked them up.
But compared to the scope of data breaches and the ease of checking them via an email address, my 1000 names is not at that scale. I have had some very small scale investigations work commissioned off of these queries, but it’s so quick and easy for me to do I have not got around to charging or doing extended investigations.
Maybe, but I have been contacted by people who have received the scam email before.
It’s true that some people reached out AFTER the podcast aired, only then taking it seriously. I am partially able to leverage it for credibility also.
Ultimatey significant effort is required to contact people, and then further more to provide a full context, risk assessment, after which they typically require support taking the issue through multiple law enforcement agencies, that is if they don’t turn to violence themselves which has happened in at least one occasion:(
But how are people supposed to react to such framing? Also some orders are limited to just name / address etc, where as some plot graphic torture for weeks and months.
Not really. Journalists spent months doing this via phone, email and messages and were ignored.
Also, there are literal ‘I am a hitman hired to kill you, pay me money to stop’ scams that exist.
without social support from people who have seen this stuff before
The little contact I have had with police doing darknet investigations of this nature leads me to believe they are mostly ineffective at anything international, as does last year’s operation by the police against the site.
The police have presumably learnt that ‘international is hard’ (which it is) and chosen to accept this.
In about 50% of cases I have social media links for the victims, but that is not the same as having their emails. I am working on abstracting the contact details from the messages so I could pass it for cheap bulk osint, but it isn’t that cheap when you are going after semi-hidden PII across different countries and languages with significant different postures on public records.
Per ‘Kill List’, I believe they got close to 0% hit rate emailing, messaging and phoning people. People only started to listen when journalists or police knocked on their doors.
The problem with local law enforcement is they don’t understand the complexity (bitcoin, darknet, scam but real threat), and national law enforcement is not directly available. There is nearly always an insistence on investigating on a case-by-case, and not reusing central specialist. (The US has been a little better here, but they have state level specialists, where as most countries utilise national specialists). And local law enforcement want to do everything over phone calls and treat you as a suspect / time waster / scammer.
By the way, I don’t really consider this ‘public’ safety, as it’s all based on individuals, but I guess that’s a fair comparison.
With regards to dumping the info on the internet, the files by definition contain extensive personal identifable information about people, names, addresses, photos, social media links often alongside allegations of their alleged crimes ranging such as infidelity, child abuse and financial fraud.
I can rarely substantiate these, and know for a fact based on the investigated cases that such allegations are often completely fabricated in order to frame the user’s request for violence as more morally justified. I don’t think it’s fair to publish such information and allegations publicly for both the victims and my own personal liability.
The police literally are unable to take this data beyond a case by case basis, and doing so requires scores of emails and phone calls between multiple specialists. As I am not a crime victim, I don’t get any reference number to reuse and frankly it’s a nightmare. I am still attempting bulk submissions via private detectives to get the information submitted as intelligence, but that is different to making an effective crime report.
Prosecutors, even those who have prosecuted people on the Kill List previously in my experience don’t respond to my emails, even when their are victims in their same jurisdiction.
I am sure there are some interesting uses of agented AIs in can configure for automated OSINT but this feels quite large a task given I am bottlenecking more in who to hand the data to rather than it being insufficiency rich.
Know any preconfigured agency menageries for something like this?