Case. One day some guys came to me...
Some guys I know came to me one day with a very strange request.
They wanted to try to investigate an onion site that provides services to kill people. They were not even so much interested in who exactly behind it, and whether this site is fraudulent, because it is known that 99% of such sites - it is a scam or just a joke (some specifically make sites with shocking content to cause a reaction in people, not to cheat for money).
By the way, remember, I once wrote about a similar site that pretended to be realistic and even had a mini forum?
Warning: don't do such fucking things without a connection to law enforcement or a very experienced colleague.
So, what did we have from the raw data?
Cryptocurrency wallet, onion site, there were several photos and videos that were published allegedly as proof of experience and completed orders, an account in a securitized messenger.
We can immediately cancel it, we found nothing in the public data and it is not surprising.
We ran through basic reconnaissance tools, but we didn't find any reference points. No reviews or mentions of the site or nickname either.
Surprisingly, there were even a couple transactions there...that led nowhere because mixers were used. And the amounts weren't very large even combined, so it's unlikely it was payment for a murder. Although, one could hypothesize that it was payment for some kind of physical harm.
And here with the fourth option begins the most interesting. We have four options: generated images of people (it didn't look like it, because the quality is not very good), on the materials are mock-ups or “dolls” instead of people, these are real people and they were killed, these are real people and they are alive or dead by natural causes (or artificial, but not at the hands of these killers).
The first two options, unfortunately, were impossible to check.
Checking for generatedness usually happens when you can see the details of a photo or video, so that you can check AI weaknesses: ears, fingers, glasses\eyes, jewelry, teeth. In our case, the quality was quite poor as if it was shot on a not so good phone.
I'm embarrassed to say, but I don't know what quality of evidence killers usually provide to their clients...
On all sorts of thrashy video hosting or file-sharing sites you can sometimes see videos shot on a slipper, where they allegedly kill a person (or a model) or cause him other physical harm. In such cases, the quality is compensated by the “live” happening in the video, because if we want to look at violent or thrashy pics, they are usually of good quality, because details are the only thing that all sorts of sadists can take pleasure from.
The test for using a doll instead of a living being is much more complicated. I studied this in detail when I was researching particularly violent content. They look at how the “target” behaves, whether he is conscious, if there are wounds (and there are different kinds of wounds), they look at the nature of the wounds, how the blood spills out, whether there are bruises, whether the bone should already be broken under such pressure or not - and so on. There are a lot of signs and to assess, for example, the naturalness of the hydrodynamics of blood from a certain vessel on a video with poor quality - a pointless business. So in our case, that's not an option either.
Well, then let's look for people and see how alive they are or for what reasons they died. Standard photo identification of a person. By the way, a reprieve from Google, which no longer gives results if you search by face. We're armed with
- https://lenso.ai/en/page/face-search
- https://socialcatfish.com/reverse-image-search/
And went looking. We had four plus or minus clear faces (three women and one man). Two of them had nationality, so we also connected Facebook with filtering of people by a certain country.
Yes, we were very interested, but we had no illusions))
And then suddenly...we see a very similar woman.
I have had many cases with face search and I especially like to go through several stages of analysis.
The first is when you think that the tenth person is exactly like the original person.
The second is when your eye gets blurry and you can't distinguish anything anymore.
The third is when you're flipping through pictures of the next person and suddenly *click*. Something in your head stops and you realize that this is exactly who we want. It's an unparalleled moment, I love it. What probably helped me especially in this is that I draw, so there's an artistic sensibility to it.
Well, we found a woman just like her. Or rather, her old social media page. There were only a couple of photos and one entry on her wall from 2012. We started to look for relatives, but we never found joint photos, obituary, notes - nothing (although, by the way, there are many sites with the dead with obituaries).
I'd really like to end this case cryptically, saying we found an obituary, but it didn't say what she died of or when, but unfortunately that's not going to happen.
We also tried looking for the other people in our foursome, but found nothing. It's still a mystery to us why a picture of a real person was put on the site? Was it done for an order report? Was the woman really dead? If he didn't kill her, how did he find her photo and why did he decide to attach it? Could they be acquaintances?
The last step was that we wrote to the alleged killer's securitized messenger, he replied to us, quoted us a price. We asked about proof, he said it was a photo, it would take about three months. We decided not to write any more
I don't know whether it's good or bad that we didn't find out anything, I'm inclined to say good)))