Yura | 5

Speaker 2 Wandry Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of KO List early and ad-free.

Speaker 5 Join Wandry Plus in the Wandry app or on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 6 A new kill order comes in.

Speaker 7 The target lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Speaker 11 The user goes by the alias Boniface.

Speaker 8 They want the murder to happen today.

Speaker 11 Now that the FBI have arrested Ronnie Olgin Spokane, my team and I are talking to them every couple of days.

Speaker 19 When this new kill order comes in, we quickly send it to our contacts in Spokane, who forward the information to their colleagues in Tennessee and vouch for us that we're not crazy.

Speaker 11 This isn't some mad story.

Speaker 11 This time, the FBI act on our warning immediately.

Speaker 16 They speed to the victim's house and arrest the suspect, her husband.

Speaker 16 With another target safe, the FBI tell us they have a proposal.

Speaker 20 They want to take on all of our cases, both within the US and around the world.

Speaker 3 Suddenly, the arrests start flooding in.

Speaker 25 Investigators say this woman, Deanna Marie Stenson, tried hiring a hitman.

Speaker 27 37-year-old Kelly Harper was arrested on Friday.

Speaker 28 A former Thorn Apple Apple Kellogg teacher accused of hiring someone to try and kill his wife.

Speaker 22 Each arrest is a relief.

Speaker 17 Another person out of danger.

Speaker 26 Federal investigators were able to track him down, connecting his online Bitcoin transfers with his personal accounts.

Speaker 13 But arrests also attract attention.

Speaker 14 Our cases make the Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN, the BBC,

Speaker 4 dark web murder conspiracy, love affairs gone terribly wrong, Lurid fantasies spilled out in the courtroom.

Speaker 16 And there is another detail that is showing up in more and more reporting.

Speaker 32 The wife was informed of the plot by the crew of an unnamed international news organization investigating the dark web.

Speaker 20 There are headlines like, Journalists uncover Wisconsin women's murder for hire plot, FBI says.

Speaker 23 And reporters help feds foil murder for hire plot again.

Speaker 17 My team and I haven't been named yet. With arrests popping up around the world, other journalists are starting to connect the dots.

Speaker 13 And all this attention is making me nervous, because there's one person out there I desperately want to stay hidden from.

Speaker 3 The administrator of the Hitman for Hire website.

Speaker 33 I'm assigning a Hitman to do the job. It will take about one week or so.

Speaker 16 He, if it is a he, is lurking in the shadows, replying to every order.

Speaker 33 Normal killing by gunshot is $5,000.

Speaker 17 Stringing his customers along with false promises of death and destruction.

Speaker 33 We will make sure by all means he will not survive.

Speaker 7 We don't know his real name, but he has an alias, Eura.

Speaker 10 It would take so little for Eura to spot just one of these news stories and the game might be up.

Speaker 16 With a simple tweak of the site's security settings, he could shut us out.

Speaker 11 And that would be calamitous.

Speaker 19 Every law enforcement investigation relies on our access alone.

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Speaker 38 From Wanderer Novel, I'm Carl Miller.

Speaker 36 This is Kill List,

Speaker 22 episode five, Eura.

Speaker 1 On May 19th, 2021, Scott Quinn Burquette gets a WhatsApp message.

Speaker 36 Scott lives in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, where he works as a software technician.

Speaker 14 He's 24 and 6 foot tall with long brown hair and a straggly beard.

Speaker 14 On his phone is a message from a number he doesn't recognize. They've sent photographs, a few grainy shots of a young woman walking through a Walmart, and an instruction: Call me.

Speaker 19 Around 10 p.m., Scott calls the number.

Speaker 41 Hi, you got the pictures?

Speaker 3 Yep.

Speaker 24 That's that's her, right?

Speaker 42 Yeah, that's her. I was actually surprised to get that through WhatsApp.

Speaker 41 I know. We switch things up every once in a while.

Speaker 7 We know this because we have a transcript of their conversation.

Speaker 4 The words are read by actors.

Speaker 43 They talk about the practicalities of a murder.

Speaker 6 Payment details.

Speaker 3 Timing.

Speaker 13 Proof. Good.
Alright.

Speaker 41 So, my understanding is what has to get done is this has to get done.

Speaker 41 We're looking at some kind of accident or robbery to have gone wrong, right?

Speaker 42 Yeah. That way, it doesn't get traced.

Speaker 13 Scott also wants proof once the job is done.

Speaker 42 Proof of the tattoo on her, one of her forearms.

Speaker 41 Okay.

Speaker 41 Is there any part of it you want to see?

Speaker 41 Do you want a video of her not breathing?

Speaker 13 What do you...

Speaker 41 What do you want to see?

Speaker 6 Scott thinks for a moment.

Speaker 42 Picture of the corpse and a picture of the tattoo to make to verify.

Speaker 31 Okay.

Speaker 21 Scott Quinn Paquette doesn't know it, but the hitman he's been speaking to is an FBI agent.

Speaker 22 Scott had already paid $14,000 to Eura's website for the murder of a woman he's been dating.

Speaker 1 We sent the FBI the kill order, but they need evidence that Baquette is behind it.

Speaker 44 So, they make contact directly with his target.

Speaker 30 They tell her to go to the supermarket and have someone discreetly take photos of her shopping.

Speaker 1 They also tell her to go down to the river near the local zoo and meet with a forensic photographer.

Speaker 46 Just like this big naturey park area.

Speaker 6 That's Scott's ex-girlfriend.

Speaker 1 We're calling her Faye.

Speaker 46 The whole walk to where they want to take these pictures, they're making these dark jokes about faking my death.

Speaker 39 Like, what even is going on?

Speaker 1 The photographer leads Faye to a spot near the water.

Speaker 46 Over where like all the bushes and trees and rocks and sticks and stuff are. She's telling me, lay down.
Lay down and pretend you're dead.

Speaker 46 It's like wet and muddy and there's like dead leaves and stuff. And she's telling me, you know, stick your arm out.

Speaker 46 And they have my arm like spread out to my side with my wrist facing up where you can see my tattoo on my forearm.

Speaker 36 The proof that it's actually Faye.

Speaker 46 They showed me the picture. You can see the photographer's like shoe in the corner of the picture.

Speaker 46 And they start making a joke about how it makes it look more real, like that's the hitman's foot in the picture.

Speaker 46 And they're like laughing about it. And I'm just like, I just laid in the mud for you so you can pretend to be my hitman and pretend I'm dead.
Like, why are you laughing?

Speaker 43 After receiving the first set of pictures of Faye, the ones in the supermarket, Scott agrees to wire the FBI another $1,000 via Western Union.

Speaker 21 And they agree on an alibi of where Scott will be when the murder is supposed to happen.

Speaker 26 A Beverly Hills man has been arrested in an alleged murder-for-hire hire plot to kill a woman he used to date.

Speaker 26 24-year-old Scott Burquette was taken into custody after he allegedly sent thousands of dollars in Bitcoin to range the murder of a woman he dated briefly.

Speaker 14 Scott Quinn Burquette is arrested by the FBI and charged with the use of interstate facilities to commit murder for hire. They search his house and his red Mercedes.

Speaker 40 Scott had met Faye online in the summer of 2020 through an anime Facebook fan fan page. In October, she flew to Los Angeles to meet him for the first time.

Speaker 43 According to court documents, Faye alleges that Scott was sexually aggressive towards her and pressured her into having sex.

Speaker 14 After she returned home, she ended their relationship, but it was hard to break off contact entirely.

Speaker 14 They had lots of mutual friends, were part of the same online community of anime fans, and Scott would still message Faye across her different social media profiles.

Speaker 10 In April 2021, Faye's sister intervened and told him to stop.

Speaker 16 Only eight days later, Scott placed a kill order.

Speaker 31 I'd like it to look like an accident, but robbery gone wrong may work better.

Speaker 31 So long as she's dead.

Speaker 7 I learn about Scott's arrest after it makes the news.

Speaker 29 On balance, I'm glad the FBI are doing what they're doing. But even so, the tactics they use create a risk for us and especially especially our access to the site.

Speaker 40 What if Scott had gotten suspicious when the undercover FBI agent messaged him?

Speaker 36 He easily could have gone back to the site to let Eura know that something strange was going on.

Speaker 45 We could have ended up completely locked out.

Speaker 18 Then we intercept a message on the assassination site that's clearly about us.

Speaker 6 But it's not from Scott Baquette.

Speaker 48 How the fuck did the information on this order reach Indian police? How is this accessed by an investigative journalist?

Speaker 1 This was from a case we reported to the Indian Embassy before we started passing international cases to the FBI.

Speaker 36 It seems likely that instead of arresting the person behind the kill order, and I can't believe I'm saying this, the Indian police actually informed them about our investigation.

Speaker 7 And now that customer is lodging a complaint with Eura.

Speaker 47 The Indian police, they have jeopardised lives by doing this. Like, I can see absolutely no fucking reason why you would,

Speaker 47 if not

Speaker 47 divulge the information itself to the perpetrator, to tell them its source is absolutely fucking madness.

Speaker 47 Absolute madness for them to have done that.

Speaker 47 Crazy.

Speaker 49 Not only is it very possible that if Euro didn't know already, he'll find out about us. This is a sign of it starting to interfere with his customers.

Speaker 11 All of this makes one thing clear.

Speaker 16 Our investigation is living on borrowed time.

Speaker 7 Right now, the FBI are looking at each case in isolation.

Speaker 1 To end this story, we need to persuade the FBI to see the bigger picture.

Speaker 17 And to do that, we need to gather as much information as we can about Ura, his shadowy empire of scams and fake hitmen,

Speaker 13 and track him down.

Speaker 50 I'm Raza Jaffrey, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Morton Storm, the spy who lived inside Al-Qaeda.

Speaker 50 Unfulfilled with his life in a notorious Danish biker gang, Morton Storm is lost. One afternoon, he stumbles into a library looking for answers.
He finds them in the form of a book about Islam.

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Speaker 50 He turns from devotee to spy, tasked with rooting out some of al-Qaeda's most feared generals.

Speaker 50 The CIA and MI5 bid for his allegiance, as he loses himself in a life of cash-laden suitcases, double crosses, and betrayal.

Speaker 50 Follow the Spy Who on the Wondery app, or wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who Lived Inside Al-Qaeda, early and ad-free, with Wondery Plus.

Speaker 52 In the fall of 1620, a battered merchant ship called the Mayflower set sail across the Atlantic. It carried 102 men, women, and children, risking it all to start again in the new world.

Speaker 52 Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of American History Tellers.

Speaker 52 Every week we take you through the moments that shaped America, and in our latest season, we explore the untold story of the Pilgrims, one that goes far beyond the familiar tale of the first Thanksgiving.

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Speaker 52 But behind that story lies another, one of conflict, betrayal, and brutal violence against the very people who helped the pilgrim survive.

Speaker 52 Follow American History Tellers on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of American History Tellers The Mayflower early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus.

Speaker 24 Yura,

Speaker 33 Yes?

Speaker 16 Your name is Yura?

Speaker 33 What do you think?

Speaker 1 When Chris Montero first broke into the assassination site, he also hacked into Yura's email account.

Speaker 14 Yura figured out someone was in there and started sending messages to his own email for Chris to see.

Speaker 6 He assumed Chris was a police officer.

Speaker 33 I know you are law enforcement, but I talked to you because I want to show you that this is a scam, so an expensive investigation is not required.

Speaker 14 Right away, Yura admitted that there are no hitmen.

Speaker 33 You don't say anything?

Speaker 33 I feel like talking. You have the chance to find out more about me.

Speaker 33 I'm not playing with you. I just want to tell you more about me, so that maybe you quit the investigation as if it's not worth it.

Speaker 6 Yura told Chris that he's an ethnic Albanian, but also says that piece of information won't help track him down.

Speaker 30 He says he's somewhere in the European Union, but won't say where.

Speaker 1 He dances on the edge of revealing something, but never quite does.

Speaker 16 I assume this isn't your first scam.

Speaker 14 Yura sends a smiling emoji.

Speaker 33 I tried various things before, like credit card fraud, etc., but I don't like it. I saw that there is a niche in the murder sites online and there was no credible side.

Speaker 12 Yura is surprisingly candid about his operation.

Speaker 43 He even offers a justification for it.

Speaker 33 This could make the customer think that hitmen are not to be trusted in the end. He would not hire a hitman in real life either, after this, because he would be afraid of being scammed again.

Speaker 33 So, the hitman for hire fraud sounds like a great thing. Good, morally.

Speaker 10 The point that Yura is making here is one that we've long realized.

Speaker 3 The site he's created does expose dangers that would otherwise remain hidden.

Speaker 17 Eura himself, however, has done nothing to raise the alarm or warn the targets that they're in danger.

Speaker 7 But if we could take Eura out of the picture, the website could be controlled instead by the FBI.

Speaker 7 So who on earth is Eura?

Speaker 6 And what is this surreal business that he's built?

Speaker 17 First, Eura needs an audience. How do people wanting to order murders find his website in the first place? The answer probably won't surprise you.

Speaker 13 They Google it.

Speaker 17 And over the years, Eura has manipulated the search engine to make sure his site is, very often, one of the top results.

Speaker 21 What many of his customers find is a website on the normal internet that claims to be, believe this or not, a Hitman for Hire Comparison website.

Speaker 14 It promises to help you avoid all the fakes and scams to find the real assassination sites.

Speaker 19 for how you reach the dark net and where you need to go.

Speaker 39 If that still isn't enough to convince a potential customer, Eura has another trick up his sleeve.

Speaker 27 There was this small group of kind of cyberpunk gurus really into coding and programming and all that stuff that turned this ambulance into like a little house on wheels.

Speaker 1 This is Nemo.

Speaker 39 That's the name he goes by online.

Speaker 27 They had internet and everything and it was just like a hacker space on wheels basically that they lived in.

Speaker 40 So it was like a rural community like like farm work and off-grid living mixed in with cryptocurrencies and almost like a barter economy.

Speaker 27 Yeah, it was a lot of disenfranchised people that were just really lost.

Speaker 1 Around the same time Chris was messaging Eura, Nemo's life consisted of cryptocurrency-based gig work.

Speaker 30 He'd write website reviews, design restaurant menus.

Speaker 21 when he received a message about a Hitman for Hire website.

Speaker 14 Eura's site has had many names over the years.

Speaker 40 At that time, it was called Basomafia.

Speaker 27 I don't remember what country they said they were in, but it was a European country, and this friend had gotten beaten up by Basimafia, and so he wanted to stop them and, you know, vigilante underground justice or whatever.

Speaker 1 The person contacting Nemo told him they were starting a campaign to bring down Basimafia.

Speaker 1 They wanted to hire Nemo to write articles condemning Basimafia as a dangerous organization by warning people about all the murders they delivered.

Speaker 27 They wanted to start an organization called Stop Basimafia, where the stop was all capitals. I was trying to actually help him and say, okay,

Speaker 27 well, I guess I can write these articles for you. I almost thought of like

Speaker 27 him going to a domestic violence organization. Because

Speaker 27 this is well beyond my pay grade.

Speaker 16 How many of these articles did you write for him?

Speaker 27 Maybe about a dozen.

Speaker 4 Nemo did a lot of weird jobs back then.

Speaker 17 Things like leaving fake reviews for a dodgy online pharmacy or receiving strange packages from companies trying to test their international shipping.

Speaker 34 So he didn't look too closely at this job either.

Speaker 8 Some of the articles he wrote are still up online on old blog pages.

Speaker 25 Hundreds of people have been shot dead by their hitman for hire in the USA alone, and hundreds more in Europe.

Speaker 16 We must stop them.

Speaker 53 How much would he pay?

Speaker 27 He paid very well. He just kept kept throwing money at me.

Speaker 6 Nemo's clients didn't just commission blogs.

Speaker 3 He also paid Nemo to try other methods of getting press for the campaign.

Speaker 27 He even sent a substantial amount of Bitcoin to pay for this big press release from like a company that advertised. We do press releases.
And then they denied it and refunded the money.

Speaker 27 And so he was getting really frustrated and restless. It almost seemed like he was just annoyed about it.
Just mad and increasingly more flustered with trying to get these articles out.

Speaker 11 Eventually, Nemo stopped receiving job requests from the strange anti-Basimafia vigilante.

Speaker 19 Then in 2020, a YouTube video came out on an account called Barely Sociable.

Speaker 9 This is the true dark web saga of Basimafia.

Speaker 27 Wait a second, Basimafia? I haven't heard about that since 2016.

Speaker 27 What is this?

Speaker 9 You'll learn that to this day, not a single real Hitman site has actually ever existed. But don't be discouraged, as this individual Darknet Hitman site has one hell of a story to tell.

Speaker 22 The video said that Base of Mafia was a scam website, but that its owner had created a fake campaign to have it shut down. He wanted to promote the idea that the site was genuinely dangerous.

Speaker 34 That's when Nemo realized by warning people about the dangers of the website, he was actually helping Eura advertise it.

Speaker 27 I had to even grapple with understanding it. Like, okay, so they were said they were trying to stop Besimafia, but it's not real.

Speaker 27 And they were using my negative articles for positive publicity for fake hitmen.

Speaker 27 This whole thing was, I would say, one of the craftiest and most well-designed scams I've seen in this underground market.

Speaker 36 Nemo isn't the only person who's been roped in to help Yura advertise his website.

Speaker 4 There are even fake hitmen too.

Speaker 11 There's a video on YouTube called Real Hitman for Hire from Chechen Mob.

Speaker 1 In it, a man in a black balaclava stands in front of the camera, surrounded by darkness.

Speaker 6 He loads bullets into a silver pistol before holding up a piece of paper with a link to Yura's site.

Speaker 39 Point me to target and I'll kill anyone.

Speaker 16 He points the gun into the air and fires off a volley of shots.

Speaker 22 There are dozens of videos like this that Eura has littered around the internet.

Speaker 1 Young men in balacarvas brandishing weapons, promising to be ready to kill.

Speaker 54 I am waiting on you. You can come here and submit your orders to kill the people you hate.
Just remember to never give your name, address, credit card, or email address to any hitman site.

Speaker 8 The production values aren't exactly high, but that doesn't matter.

Speaker 7 Eura is going for quantity, not quality. And even when Eura's customers eventually work out that the whole thing is a scam, Eura just moves on.

Speaker 43 He chucks out the old site, rebrands, and starts all over again.

Speaker 6 The person the FBI needs to look for is, at his core, a digital marketer whose skill is to create a web of illusion online that fools potential customers into believing his website is real.

Speaker 1 And for us, the biggest challenge is working out where he's doing this from.

Speaker 12 If we're going to convince the FBI to take action, we need to track down Yura's location.

Speaker 40 Fortunately, we have a lead.

Speaker 12 In one of Chris's hacks into the hitman site, He came across a needle buried in a haystack of files.

Speaker 29 It's an image.

Speaker 15 It looks like Eura accidentally screenshotted his computer desktop.

Speaker 12 He has a bunch of tabs open, including a Google page.

Speaker 17 On this screenshot is a clue that lets us get a fix on Yura's location.

Speaker 38 The language on all the tabs, the Google URL, they're all linked to one country.

Speaker 17 Romania.

Speaker 55 Human intelligence collection, monitoring, surveillance.

Speaker 39 If we're going to find Eura in Romania, we need someone who knows the terrain.

Speaker 55 Liaisoning with various agencies, various non-state actors, organized crime syndicates, and so forth.

Speaker 17 An old friend put me in touch with someone, an ex-French foreign legionnaire and now a private investigator.

Speaker 38 He's someone with deep contacts in Eastern European law enforcement.

Speaker 10 He goes by the nom de guerre, Kuzman.

Speaker 4 Kuzman grew up in the Eastern Bloc. He was raised on stories of Greek gods and his grandfather's wartime heroics.

Speaker 55 As I was growing up in the shadow of my grandfather, who was a famous general, I kind of wanted to be like him, to emulate him, to work for something bigger, bigger than me.

Speaker 39 He says that when he was a young man, he got to know organized crime bosses and warlords.

Speaker 55 You go have dinner with someone, you get drunk together, and all of a sudden you are brothers.

Speaker 55 And at the same time, you know, something else flips and they would be willing to wipe out your entire family.

Speaker 6 The story Kuzmin told me of his career spans the world of high finance, working as an intelligence asset, and as a paratrooper.

Speaker 39 Now he specializes in corporate intelligence across Eastern Europe, which makes him the perfect person to find Eura.

Speaker 3 We've always thought that Eura was a single person, but that doesn't seem to chime with your experience of how these things normally work. Is that right?

Speaker 55 Honestly, I've never seen anything even closely similar to this subject

Speaker 55 that was a one-person show.

Speaker 4 I've briefed Kuzman on what we know about Eura and how he operates.

Speaker 12 Now he's given me his appraisal.

Speaker 55 We are looking at multiple individuals who have multiple roles, potentially Eura being a single individual who's the head of a, I would guess, a loosely organized criminal group.

Speaker 1 Kuzmin puts out feelers with some contacts in Romania.

Speaker 30 A month later, he comes back with his findings and we run into not online hitmen, not organized crime, but yet another layer, one I never thought we'd find in this investigation.

Speaker 55 It turns out that a big part of the cyber community in Russia not only does not want to have anything to do with anyone trying to investigate our subject, but actually spoke of him as if he's one of them.

Speaker 14 Kuzmin tells me that some government agencies, especially Russian, take advantage of the underground world of cyber criminals. They have a loose arrangement.

Speaker 16 If the criminals occasionally carry out pro-government activities, the authorities turn a blind eye to their money-making scams.

Speaker 55 In the meantime, these characters are more or less free to do whatever they want.

Speaker 19 So Eura, or Eura's group, could be operating under the protection of a state.

Speaker 23 state.

Speaker 19 I don't know anything about him for certain yet, but when I put the theory to the former director of GCHQ, the UK equivalent of the National Security Agency, he agreed it sounded plausible that the Russian authorities could have some kind of understanding with cyber criminal groups in the region.

Speaker 16 If Eura really is a government asset, the prospect of locating him might actually become impossible.

Speaker 8 But one thing is giving me confidence.

Speaker 17 I've been handed another lead. I can't say where I got it from, but it's from a source I trust.

Speaker 3 This source has passed me two IDs.

Speaker 4 They're for two men based in Romania, whose names are both associated with a Bitcoin wallet receiving payments from the users of the site.

Speaker 40 I pick up a printout of one of the IDs and examine it closely.

Speaker 3 If that is Eura, then he looks like an extremely clean-cut man, probably in his early 20s, I imagine, staring kind of almost surprisingly at the camera.

Speaker 14 One of these IDs could be Eura, or they could very well be someone lower down the food chain in Euras network, being paid to cash out the money.

Speaker 10 I hand them over to Kuzman to see what he can find out.

Speaker 55 We can start assembling the puzzle. There'll still be big holes in it, but then we can see, okay, you know, where to take this forwards.

Speaker 17 Kuzman works as contacts and consults sources on the ground to pull together a detailed report.

Speaker 6 A few weeks later, he sends it to me.

Speaker 30 It's a profile of one of the suspects in the IDs.

Speaker 22 By the looks of it, they're a real person.

Speaker 30 It's not a fake ID.

Speaker 4 I call my producer, Caroline, right away to dissect it.

Speaker 49 This is wild.

Speaker 51 Yeah.

Speaker 15 The thing that really made me gasp was that he's involved in e-commerce.

Speaker 44 The fact that he was actually at one point in 2009 running an e-commerce company, for me, that was

Speaker 44 that made me exclaim out loud.

Speaker 49 Yes.

Speaker 49 But if you were going to have predicted any business that would be the perfect fit for him to run as like, you know, the legitimate face of what he's doing and how he's earning his money, what would it have been?

Speaker 49 It would have been e-commerce, surely. Time will tell if we've got the right person right, but it seemed almost impossible that we were even going to find anything.

Speaker 11 It feels great.

Speaker 44 Thank God for Kisman. It feels like we're on the offense for the first time.

Speaker 17 With this, it feels like we're one step closer to unmasking Eura.

Speaker 20 Now I want to know more about the guy in the second ID.

Speaker 18 I reach out to our contacts at the open source investigation specialist SpellingCat and an investigative journalist based in Romania.

Speaker 12 They tell me that the man in the second ID has built various websites, including web forums, and that he'd been fined by the authorities for illegally posting private data online.

Speaker 24 We still don't have anything concrete to prove who Eura is, but we've got more than enough to share with the FBI.

Speaker 17 We send them everything we have. In the FBI's hands, this information could be what it takes to finally catch Eura.

Speaker 20 We talked to the FBI several times about this on video calls and over emails.

Speaker 17 They ask questions and share little bits of information.

Speaker 16 They keep their cards close to their chest.

Speaker 22 But the more and more we talk about it, the more we start to suspect that they could be as interested in catching Eura as we are.

Speaker 17 And after a couple of months of back and forth, they tell us that they want to meet in person.

Speaker 39 On the 23rd of September, I find myself in Times Square, New York.

Speaker 53 It's a hot day with the huge signs of Times Square all around. People filming over there, it's like a TV crew and thousands and thousands and thousands of tourists everywhere.

Speaker 53 And it's a really weird place to have what's going to be quite a secret meeting. I'm feeling extremely apprehensive.

Speaker 37 I never thought that this would be part of my life, but I'm here in New York, about to go and meet the FBI.

Speaker 1 When I arrive at one of the many towering glass hotels on the street, three men in suits are waiting to meet me.

Speaker 53 Hi there, I'm Carl. Pleased to meet you.
Nice to meet you. Let's go talk.

Speaker 1 The agents won't let me record the meeting, so I turn off the recorder.

Speaker 6 We're sitting in the breakfast bar of a hotel overlooking Times Square.

Speaker 4 Below, thousands of people wander under the neon lights cast from gigantic billboards. The FBI agents are from the Knoxville Bureau.

Speaker 4 They're the ones that have been taking all of our information and then parceling it out to the other FBI bureaus around the country.

Speaker 17 Armed with the Bitcoin wallet information we've given them and the other information they've gathered about Eura, the FBI agents tell me they think they're ready to make their move.

Speaker 17 And they agree with our strategy. They want to take over the site and run it themselves.

Speaker 13 And they're closer to Eura than I ever could have hoped.

Speaker 44 I jump on a call with my producer Caroline back in London to tell her the news.

Speaker 49 So Phil Me and Carl.

Speaker 47 They have found the server ip

Speaker 47 that is hosting his sites oh wow and it's all the same ip no way seriously yeah the big mistake he's made is that

Speaker 47 he has used a us server hosting company oh so they can subpoena it yeah He doesn't know whether the subpoena from the server is going to lead to Euro or to another wall, But he's in little doubt that this is a big opportunity and that all being well, they may know who Eura is really quite imminently.

Speaker 47 I mean, they were pleased that we have this like shared idea that we want them to take over the site, they want to take over the site. I don't know him.

Speaker 47 I don't know if he's just like blatantly lying, right? But I don't think he is. But I was like, is there a chance that you will just go and nick Eura without us or anything?

Speaker 47 He was like, that will not happen. When I know who he is, I will tell you.

Speaker 47 So, with a fair wind, and this was the big news, they might have Eura in three weeks.

Speaker 49 Three weeks,

Speaker 48 like, as in, they'll have him.

Speaker 49 What do they mean by have him?

Speaker 47 They'll know who he is.

Speaker 49 Oh my god, well, three weeks, we have to watch this space.

Speaker 47 Yeah, it genuinely feels like this is moving forward to some kind of conclusion. Exciting

Speaker 14 after my meeting with the FBI, three weeks pass by,

Speaker 13 then three more.

Speaker 13 No news.

Speaker 7 But I'm still hopeful.

Speaker 14 We're still passing the cases to the FBI and remain in regular contact.

Speaker 20 Just no word on Eura.

Speaker 17 With each passing day, my excitement is slowly replaced by the gnawing anxiety that momentum is slipping away.

Speaker 17 Then, six months after our meeting, I get an update. But it's not the one I was hoping for.

Speaker 16 The FBI's investigation into Eura is being shut down.

Speaker 12 The agents we've been communicating with are taken off the case.

Speaker 30 Another federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security, is taking over.

Speaker 18 Having been on the cusp of finally getting Eura, we now have no idea how long the DHS investigation is going to take.

Speaker 30 It could be kicking around for months or even years.

Speaker 16 And that's if the investigation even still exists at all.

Speaker 15 The FBI agents we've been dealing with don't ghost us entirely.

Speaker 16 They're still willing to take new kill orders.

Speaker 14 But as they're no longer leading the investigation into Europe, they can't tell us anything about if and when he might finally be caught.

Speaker 1 Then, on the 6th of April 2022, I wake up to news.

Speaker 1 The news is out of Romania.

Speaker 40 There has been a massive police raid.

Speaker 36 That's coming up on the next episode of Kill List.

Speaker 2 If you like Kill List, you can binge all episodes ad-free right now by joining Wandry Plus in the Wandry app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music.

Speaker 3 Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wandry.com slash survey.

Speaker 3 From Wandry and Novel, this is episode five of Kill List.

Speaker 39 Kill List is hosted by me, Carl Miller.

Speaker 17 It was written by me, Caroline Thornham and Tom Wright.

Speaker 39 Our lead producer is Caroline Thornham. Our producer is Tom Wright.

Speaker 17 For Wandery, our story editor is Chris Siegel and our senior producer is Russell Finch. Our assistant producer is Amalia Sortland and our researchers are Megan Ojinka and Lena Chang.

Speaker 17 Additional research from Chris Montero, Kuzmin Meyer, Attila Biro from the Context Investigative Reporting Project Romania and from Anika Mossu, Fuca Postma and Brenna Smith at Bellingcat.

Speaker 38 Additional reporting by Amber Singer.

Speaker 17 Fact checking by Fendor Fulton. Our managing producers are Cherie Houston, Sarah Clobin, and Charlotte Wolfe for Novel and Latter Pundia for Wanderer.

Speaker 7 Original music by Skyler Gerdeman and Martin Linebell.

Speaker 17 Music supervision by Nicholas Alexander, Max O'Brien and Caroline Thornham. Sound design and mixing by Nicholas Alexander.
Additional engineering by Daniel Kempson.

Speaker 17 The news clips you heard were from NewsNation, Fox 17, Fox 47, ABC7, Creme 2, WKOW 27, KCAL News, Attina 3 CNN and Televisiona Info.

Speaker 17 The vlog clips were from the YouTube channels of Annie Elise, Tygay Michael, NGBTG and Keith Jones. We also featured clips from Barely Sociable and Eric Mercer.

Speaker 17 For novel, Willard Foxton is Creative Director of Development. Our executive producers are Sean Glynn, Austin Mitchell, Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan for Novel.

Speaker 17 Executive producers for Wandery are George Lavender, Marshall Louie, and Jen Sargent.

Speaker 2 When you're done with the first six episodes, I go deeper into the kill list, revealing never-before-told stories of more victims. Your episodes roll out weekly.
Thank you for listening.