I’ve been researching the urban legend of dark web internet assassination since last year, covering obvious scams, fake crowd funding models and I’ve even given a talk covering this subject. Combined with my expertise in darknet markets, I was uniquely positioned to debunk any innovation in this field, until one day such innovation came.

“Besa Mafia” as I first reported in in February 2016 “Assassination scams, the next generation” is a new site that tried to structure itself like a darknet drug market to give a veneer of legitimacy to its operation. This meant it needed comparable features like on-site messaging, bitcoin resources, FAQs and separate processes for buyers and sellers.

When the site admin reached out to me for an interview in early March, they were of course unable to defend their bad security theatre and poor anonymity advice, proving to me that without doubt they were a scam. Since this time my associate ‘Judge Judy’ and I have been studying their operations, and when their site was quietly hacked on the 23rd of April, have been analysing their business models, customer stories and scam methodologies in detail.

My associate is shocked at Besa Mafia’s poor security practices

Finally, on the 13th of May, a few irresponsible media outlets picked up the story and quickly published erroneous conclusions about the nature of the operation.

We’ve worked with Australian author Eileen Ormsby around the data breach from day one, and her analysis into the files is similarly ongoing. She will be putting out various stories in the coming weeks, as will we. We’re also working with journalists on responsibly disclosing additional information leads obtained to the authorities.

Because we have at the time of writing failed to get my analysis to the police (a story in itself), we will be releasing our findings in a piece-meal fashion. In the mean time, our first analysis is this infographic which outlines their main business models and methodologies of these innovative, but not murderous scammers.