Back in mid-2013 I put myself on ‘a list’. How do I know I put myself on a list? Because I stumbled across the Assassination Market on Tor and posted to my Facebook status:

Only $15,000 to assassinate Obama wtf?

Pictured: A person I very much appreciate alive

I quickly realised this was an inadvisable thing to post and deleted it, but then I was reminded that Facebook own my data and I would have inevitably flagged their various systems they’ve semi-integrated with law enforcement. <sigh>

Towards the end of 2013 the mainstream media picked up the existence of the site and even secured an interview with the founder. Since then what’s been remarkable is the fact these sites simply have not been reported any genuine commercial or media activity and in the absence of such, we can assume what we mostly thought from the beginning, that they are different flavours of scams.

Today I had a chap from Kazakhstan visit my /r/deepweb/ subreddit around engaging an internet based assassin to have a member of his family murdered. After reporting him to the Reddit admins and having the thread removed, it occurred to me this was yet another ‘Deep Web’ urban legend that had grown out of control. This prompted me to write a Rational Wiki article on Internet assassination which aggregated relevant reports of such activities from various sources including the deep web site types and other activities such as the allegations against Ross ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ Ulbricht.

I hope it to be a valuable tool for when people ask ‘how do I murder someone over the internet?’ you can respond with ‘you can’t’ and cite this page. Internet assassination appears to be, like a device to stab people in the face over the internet, a fantasy rather than reality.