CONSPIRACY: Besa Mafia

If you've been around at all for the past decade, you've probably heard of the dark web.

It's the black market of the internet where all sorts of illicit activities go on.

Drugs, identity theft, human trafficking.

If it's illegal, you can probably find it there if you know where to look.

But that's the catch.

Since the dark web isn't searchable, it's impossible to know what's really out there and what's a hoax.

Like red rooms, for example, where actual murders are supposedly live-streamed.

Those don't exist.

Hitman for Hire sites, according to the anti-conspiracy theory site RationalWiki, those aren't a real thing either.

But in February 2016, an anonymous user made one small edit to the Rational Wiki page.

All assassination sites are scams, except for BASA mafia, which is real.

This is Supernatural, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

This episode is about a dark web murder-for-hire site called Besa Mafia.

When law enforcement learned about the site in 2016, they thought it was a scam like every other site of its kind until one of the hits was actually carried out.

We'll dig into the conspiracy right after this.

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On April 25th, 2016, a file was quietly uploaded to a data leaking site called Siphon.

It was a dump of stolen user data from BESA Mafia, which for the past few months had been the talk of the dark web community.

BESA is Albanian for trust.

The site is supposedly run by members of the Albanian mafia, although they don't carry out any of the services themselves.

It's sort of like Uber of violent crimes.

Like you can sign up to be an assassin, list your skills and pay rate, and they'll match you with customers in your area who want someone killed.

Besa Mafia appeared on the dark web in December 2015, and it started to gain attention a couple of months later.

Posts about the site were popping up all over the internet on Reddit and Quora and random blogs.

All of them insisted that it was the real deal.

The leaked data, though, told a different story.

There were definitely hundreds of paying customers, usernames, passwords, message logs, Bitcoin transaction, even pictures of the intended victims.

But reading through the messages, it looked like none of the hits that were paid for had ever actually happened.

The site's owner was taking payments and then stringing the customers along with unexpected delays, missed connections, and so on until they just gave up.

And I say appeared because whoever was behind the leak could have just cherry-picked messages to make it look like a fraud.

That's what a lot of the site's supporters were saying.

But to most people, the leak just confirmed the obvious.

Of course, basa mafia is a scam.

Every murder for hire site is.

Now, it's reasonable to think you could hire a hitman on the dark web.

Pretty much every other illicit business can be found there.

You've probably heard of Silk Road, the black market site that was shut down by the FBI in 2013.

They mostly sold drugs, but there are other sites out there that sell weapons, child abuse materials, human organs, any number of horrible things you could think of.

But none of the major markets allow the solicitation of murder.

And that's probably because, you know, murder is bad, but it's mostly because so many people were getting ripped off.

What makes contract killing different from any other illicit business like drug dealing or sex work is that hitmen don't typically have repeat customers.

And regardless of how well you would do the job, the likelihood that any of your clients will recommend you to a friend is pretty close to zero.

So, from a business perspective, there's no reason to actually go out and kill someone when you can just take the customer's money and run.

After all, what are they going to do?

Go to the police?

In fact, the guy who ran Silk Road, Ross Albrecht, tried to hire a hitman online and he got scammed.

Not only did he lose $730,000 on murders that never happened, but one of the hitmen that he tried to hire was an undercover cop.

That's one of the factors that led to his arrest in 2013.

If the person who more or less invented the dark web black market couldn't get a murder done without getting arrested, it seemed like no one could.

So after getting banned from basically every dark web marketplace, individual assassins started setting up their own sites, all of which were quickly confirmed to be scams.

At the time of the Besa Mafia leak in 2016, never in history has there been a single death tied to a dark web hitman.

And from the leaked data, it didn't look like Besimafia was going to be the first.

It ran on the exact same business model as the other frauds.

No murders, no refunds, just a bunch of lies.

But even if there were no real hitmen involved here, these customers were clearly serious about their desire to have someone killed.

For example, one of the most vicious orders came from a user called Dog Day God.

Their target was also one of the most unlikely, 43-year-old Amy Alwine, a dog trainer from Cottage Grove, Minnesota.

Dog Day God's real identity was a mystery, but they claimed to be a woman from the same area who knew Amy socially.

The order form said that Amy, quote, has torn my family apart by sleeping with my husband who left me and is stealing clients from my business.

I want her dead.

At the time of the leak in April, the job was still pending.

It hadn't been accomplished yet, but according to the messages, there had been a few failed attempts in the previous month.

And just a few days earlier, Dog Day God had made a second payment to upgrade the murder from a staged car accident to an arson burning down the entire Allwine family family home.

So far, this user had paid Base and Mafia at least $11,000 for Amy's murder.

Clearly, they were serious about making it happen.

So if the hitman didn't come through, who knew if this person might take matters into their own hands?

So when the FBI learned about this data leak, they took it seriously enough to warn the local police in Cottage Grove about the threat on Amy's life.

The police contacted Amy and her husband, Stephen, who were understandably shocked by the news.

Neither of them had any idea who Dog Day God could be.

The Alwines were a happy, suburban couple who didn't have a single enemy in town.

I mean, they were both involved in their local church, and Stephen was even a deacon.

Amy insisted that she was not having an affair with anyone, and Stephen believed her.

So when they couldn't find any likely suspects, the police just kind of let it go.

After all, the evidence pointed to basimafia being a scam.

For all anyone knew, this could just be some kind of sick, practical joke.

So the Alwines went back to life as normal.

Over the summer, the Basa Mafia site was shut down by vigilante hackers.

The site owner was never found, and neither was Dog Day got.

But it looked like the Alwines nightmare was over.

But then, six months later, Amy was dead.

On November 13th, at around 7 p.m., Stephen and their son Joseph get home to find Amy's body sprawled on the floor of the master bedroom.

It looked as if she shot herself, the gun still laying next to her elbow.

It's the same handgun that she and Steven had bought for protection just a few months earlier.

Stephen calls 911 and says, I think my wife shot herself.

And he doesn't sound very sure about it, and it's no wonder why.

The local detectives remember the allwines from the hitman threat.

Before they even get to the house, they have a feeling that this probably isn't a suicide.

And all the evidence seems to confirm it.

There are some things at the scene that just don't quite add up.

First of all, there's a clean patch on the floorboards right outside the bedroom where Amy was found.

It was cleaned very recently, like the smear marks weren't fully dried yet, which implies that someone was cleaning up the scene after Amy died.

And even the bedroom itself looks staged.

There are signs that the body was moved post-mortem.

The gun is actually resting on the floor next to Amy's left elbow, which is odd placement on its own, but extra weird because the entrance wound is on the right side of her head.

And honestly, it's strange that she was able to aim the gun at all because when the autopsy came back, Amy had a large amount of scopolamine in her system.

Scopolamine is a prescription drug that, when taken in excess, can cause memory loss and unconsciousness.

Amy had taken 40 times the recommended dose.

So it's pretty clear this was not a suicide.

The entire scene had to have been staged.

Once again, the attention turned back to Dog Day God, but still, no one had any idea who this mysterious enemy could be.

Until two days into the investigation on November 15th, when the police enter the Alwines basement, it is filled with computers, monitors, gadgets, which isn't that weird since Steven is an IT specialist.

But for an IT specialist, he didn't do a very good job of covering his digital tracks.

Because searching his computer, the police found out that there was way more to Stephen's story than he was letting on.

For one thing, he'd been having affairs with two women that he'd met on the website Ashley Madison.

He also had five cell phones that he hadn't told the investigators about.

And on one of them, there were cookies left behind from a Bitcoin exchange.

On his laptop, there was a deleted backup file from a different phone, which had notes files with the address of a Bitcoin wallet.

And it's the same address that Dog Day got used to pay Besa Mafia.

They also found records of searches for Bitcoin mining, disposable computers, dark web-related sites, and scopolamine, the same drug that was used used on Amy.

It was undeniable.

Stephen had ordered the hit on his wife, and basomafia might be more real than anyone imagined.

I'll dig into the dark web right after this.

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And now back to the story.

Stephen Alwine had signed up on Besa Mafia on February 15th, 2016, right around the time when the site started gaining popularity.

His motivation, apparently, was to get rid of his wife Amy so that he could be with one of his mistresses.

Divorce isn't allowed in their church, so if Stephen went that route, he'd lose his position as deacon.

But if Amy died in a sudden accident, Stephen could grieve, move on, and remarry with no one the wiser.

Now, Stephen worked in IT and he was already pretty familiar with the dark web.

To get access, you have to use an encrypted browser called Tor, which makes it harder to trace your location and activity.

Tor is essentially the portal to a hidden network of websites that can't be found through search engines.

Instead of a regular URLs ending in.com or.net or whatever, these pages all end in.onion, which regular web browsers aren't set up to access.

The addresses also tend to be random strings of numbers and letters instead of words, which makes them really hard to track down, especially since Tor, by definition, is impossible to search on the regular web.

But somehow, Steven gets a hold of the address for the Besa Mafia site, which isn't the high-tech masterpiece that you might expect.

The site looks like it was designed by an amateur in early 2000.

Like the top banner, which uses the font from the movie The Godfather, says Besa Mafia, hire a killer or a hacker.

You know, just in case you hadn't made up your mind yet about which one.

The homepage is covered in what are obviously stock photos of men with guns with their faces blurred out for some reason as if they're pretending that these stock photo models are their actual assassins.

Like the whole thing just reeks of a scam.

There is a link to a page titled Services, which explains how it works.

We are a network of mob members who know how to use computers.

When you order one of our services, we will forward it to the nearest mob member to you.

He will provide the services to you locally.

We have gang members who are willing to do killings starting from $5,000.

And they don't just do murder.

Beatings, arson, any kind of violent crime is on the table here.

The site itself essentially acts as an escrow service.

Customers anonymously send the money through Bitcoin and Basa Mafia holds it until the hitman confirms the job is done.

Then they pass the money on, keeping 20% as a service fee.

It's supposedly no risk.

If the hitman backs out or fails, the site's admins will give you your money back.

At least, that's what they promise.

And since it's all totally anonymous, the police will never be able to trace it back to you, even if the whole site is seized.

All they'll have is your username and the address of your anonymous Bitcoin wallet.

Unfortunately for Steven, he decided to sign up with the username Dog Day God,

which he'd already used on everything from Reddit to his secret email account.

Once the cops had his computer, there was no way to deny that he was the one behind it.

But with that glaring exception, Steven had done everything imaginable to mask his identity when ordering the hit.

He decided to pose as a woman whose husband was having an affair with Amy.

That gives a decent motivation for the hit while also deflecting suspicion away from himself.

He also knew that the only way he would get away with this is if it looked like an accident, ideally an accident that happened while Amy was out of town, so he'd have a rock-solid alibi.

Amy was about to travel to Illinois for a dog show in March, which seemed like perfect timing.

So Stephen submits his order and pretty soon he gets a message back from the site's admin, who's only identified as Yura.

Yura clarifies that $5,000 is the base rate for a simple like gangland shooting.

Staging an accident is gonna cost more.

The most cost-effective method would be having someone run over Amy with a car, which they say is gonna cost him about $6,000.

Stephen writes back, that would work fine.

All he had to do now was transfer the payment.

There are a few different ways to acquire Bitcoin.

You can buy it online with a bank transfer or even a credit card.

You can go to physical ATMs that exchange cash for Bitcoin, or you can use a service like Local Bitcoins, which helps you find traders in your area who can do the exchange in person.

And that's what Stephen decides to do.

On March 3rd, he withdraws $7,000 from a joint bank account that he and Amy shared.

He takes it to a local Wendy's where he meets up with a guy named Ryan from Local Bitcoins.

Stephen hands over the cash and Ryan scans a QR code to drop money into Steven's Bitcoin wallet.

The next step is to send it on to Besa Mafia.

But here's where Stephen starts to get cold feet.

Not about the murder.

He's worried that they're going to rip him off.

After all, he'd heard about how Hitman for hire sites sites were all scams.

And sure, everyone said Besa Mafia was different, but Steven still is a little suspicious.

So he tells Yura that he wants to use a third-party escrow service to hold the money until the kill is done.

Yura points out the obvious problem with that.

Any reputable escrow service is going to require proof that the transaction was completed, and you can't exactly just send them a photo of a dead Amy.

And on the flip side, if Base and Mafia didn't do the job, how is Steven supposed to file a complaint about it?

Like, is he going to tell the escrow service that a hitman he hired didn't kill his wife?

Like, that's hardly an option either.

So Yura says, either find an escrow service that you trust that allows illegal transactions, or you're just going to have to trust us.

All those five-star reviews don't lie.

So finally, Steven relents and transfers the money to Yura's Bitcoin address.

He writes to Yura, they say that BESA means trust, so please do not break that.

On March 19th, Amy left for her dog show in Illinois.

She came back the next day in one piece.

Apparently, the hitman didn't have a good opportunity to stage a car accident.

Eura apologized and said that they were willing to try again.

Customer service is their top priority.

So Steven says, okay, one mistake is understandable.

We might as well keep trying.

The next time Amy heads out of town, he sets up another attempted hit.

But once again, she comes home safe and sound.

Over the next month, Stephen sets up at least five different appointments, but they all fall through for one reason or another.

Since getting her while she's traveling is proving difficult, Stephen suggests another idea.

Like, why don't you just kill her at our home and then burn down the house?

And Yura says, sure, we can do that for an extra $5,000.

Stephen begrudgingly agrees, transfers the money, waits, and of course, the arson doesn't happen.

Finally, Stephen issues an ultimatum: get it done by May 1st.

I don't care when or how, just get it done, or I want my money back.

He sends over another four Bitcoin, which would be a couple thousand dollars, and promises another 21 Bitcoin after Amy is dead.

But of course, once again, Stephen comes home to find Amy alive and well.

And at this point, he just gives up and asks for a refund.

He gets a message back on May 20th that says, unfortunately, this site has been hacked.

We got all customer and target information and we will send it to law enforcement unless you send 10 Bitcoin to this address.

To Stephen, it was obvious that this was part of the scam.

He wasn't getting his refund and now he was being blackmailed.

He didn't pay them a cent more.

By all evidence, that was the last correspondence Stephen ever had with Besa Mafia.

The hit never happened.

He didn't get his money back and within a couple of months, the site was shut down.

But now, in November, Amy was clearly dead.

So what happened?

Stephen was obviously involved in some way.

So on January 17th, he's arrested and charged with second-degree murder, at which point he stops cooperating entirely.

He claims that he's never even heard of the dark web, despite all of the evidence in his basement to the contrary.

If police are going to build a case against him, they need to figure out what actually happened and who else might be involved.

So they start by looking at Yura.

If anyone has answers, it's got to be him.

But Yura is basically a ghost.

No one knows who he is or where he is.

The base of Mafia's server had a Romanian IP address, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

I mean, he could be using a proxy.

It's impossible to trace him through his messages since it was all done on the encrypted Tor network.

And since the entire Besa Mafia site was taken down by hackers a few months ago, the police don't have any idea how to contact Yura at all.

But after a little bit of web sleuthing, the authorities found out that Yura wasn't working alone.

There were several blogs reporting that two other people had co-founded the site, an Australian journalist named Eileen Ormsby and a British programmer named Chris Montero.

Now, this comes as a bit of a shock because for the past year, Eileen and Chris had both been constantly posting on their own blogs about how basimafia was a scam.

Their posts are still some of the first results that you come up with when you google basimafia.

But according to these reports, that's all a decoy.

Chris was the real mastermind behind the site.

Eileen was in charge of promotion and marketing, and Yura was an Albanian mobster living in London who hooked them up with assassins.

But in early 2016, Chris and Eileen started to worry that the site was getting too much attention.

So, to keep law enforcement off their backs, they pretended to expose Basimafia as a scam.

Allegedly, Chris and Eileen orchestrated the data leak in April 2016.

They only released the messages from pending customers to make it look like none of the orders were ever completed.

And then they went on their personal blogs and wrote all about how Besomafia was fake so that no one would ever suspect that they were the ones running it.

Now, I totally understand that this is kind of a convoluted story, but it's the only lead that the police had gotten at this point.

So the UK's National Crime Agency gets a warrant to search Chris's apartment in London.

In early February 2017, a team of officers break down the door to find Chris sitting on the couch eating a bowl of pumpkin soup.

The living room in his place is full of computer equipment, like six different monitors all flickering with different programs, a whiteboard on the wall covered in numbers and arrows.

And before Chris can even react, he's handcuffed.

After seizing his computer, the officers take him down to the station and formally arrest him for incitement to murder.

When the NCA interrogates Chris, though, he has a very different side of the story to tell.

He says he's already spoken to the NCA and the FBI and the London police and the LAPD and the counterterrorism unit.

He was the one who hacked into the site and took it down.

If they were arresting him, they truly had no idea what they were were dealing with.

Coming up, the truth about Bass and Mafia finally unravels.

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Now back to the story.

Chris Montero is one of the leading researchers on cybercrime.

He runs the subreddit r/slash deepweb and he's written a bunch of wiki articles, including the rational wiki page on internet assassination.

In February 2016, someone edited that page to insist that Besa Mafia was real.

Chris had never heard of Besamafia, but as far as he knew, and he knew a lot, every Hitman for Higher Sight out there was a scam.

This This one couldn't be any different.

Chris isn't going to let someone fill his carefully researched article with lies, so he gets on the Besa Mafia site to see what's going on.

That same day, he writes a post on his blog, pirate.london, about all their terrible business practices and bad web design, asserting that it has to be a scam.

A few weeks later, he gets an email from Euro who insists Besa Mafia is real.

He even says, if you want us to prove that we do business, give us the name, picture, and address of some enemy of yours.

We can send some local crime members to do a beating to him.

Chris politely declines, and instead he says they could just send him some news coverage of murders that they were tied to.

And Euro actually has a good counterpoint here, which is that no one who'd ordered a murder on the dark web would go out and tell the news about it.

And that's impossible to argue with, so Chris doesn't try.

But he does publish the full email exchange on his blog, along with some mocking commentary.

Now, that's it for the next couple of weeks until someone leaves a comment on that post with a link to a video.

It shows someone setting a car on fire, then holding up a piece of paper that says, gang member for Besa Mafia on deep web, dedication to Pirate London, 10 April 2016.

At this point, Chris is starting to worry about who who he's gotten himself involved with.

Maybe there is something going on here.

Just to be sure, he signs up for a Basa Mafia account under the name Bodhi McBoatface.

He orders a hit on a fake person that he names Bob the Builder.

And pretty soon, he realizes there's a glaring flaw in the site's design.

Every message you send has a unique ID number.

And if you put that number into the URL, it'll show you the message, even if it was sent by a different user.

So using that technique, Chris methodically scrapes every single message from the database.

And what he sees is the same scheme playing out over and over again.

A customer pays, Eura keeps stalling and upselling until they finally give up.

As for all those happy customers all over the web, Eura had hired an army of freelance writers, making sure that they used the right buzzwords so their review would show up first on the page in the search results.

Now, Chris had nothing to do with the hack and the data leak in April 2016, but Yura apparently thought he did.

So he used the same strategy to fill the web with articles claiming Chris was a disgruntled co-founder of the site.

In hindsight, they shouldn't have been convincing enough to fool international law enforcement, though, especially because ever since the leak, Chris had been trying and failing to get the NCA and the FBI to take Basa Mafia seriously.

But he just kept getting passed around to different police agencies because no one was sure whose jurisdiction it was.

And frankly, because it didn't seem like a top priority.

Some Romanian scumbag is scamming murderers out of their money, like good for them.

But even if it was a scam, Chris figured correctly that some of the people might try to kill their targets by other means.

This was a dangerous scam to leave running unattended.

So Chris did the only thing he could think of.

He hacked into Besa Mafia and took it offline.

He replaced the home page with a picture of a closed door with the text, after six months of scamming criminals for their bitcoins and stealing over $65,000, the site has closed.

No one was ever beaten up or killed.

For good measure, he also sets the page to autoplay so long farewell from the sound of music.

But that wasn't the end of it.

Yura had started a new, nearly identical site called Crime Bay.

He hadn't updated security at all, so Chris was still able to read all the site's messages, and it was the same scam all over again.

Chris finally convinced the investigators to go look at his computer.

They'd find everything that he was talking about, the hacked data from Crime Bay, the messages from Eura, and of course, his emails with their colleagues in the NCAA.

After a long day and a a half of questioning, they finally cleared Chris and let him go.

But there was still one glaring question.

If basomafia wasn't real, then who killed Amy Alwine?

As it turns out, it was all Stephen.

When he couldn't find anyone to kill Amy for him, he drugged her and shot her himself.

In March 2017, his charge was upgraded from second-degree murder to first-degree murder, and he would eventually be found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

But if there's any silver lining to this tragedy, it's that the NCA finally started to take basimafia seriously, or crime bay, as it was now called.

In May of 2017, the NCA shut down the crime bay site and started tracking down the users to prevent another all-wine situation.

A few people were arrested for soliciting murder, but only one was actually charged, an Italian woman who was sentenced to six years for ordering a hit on her ex-boyfriend.

Yura, though, was never found.

And within months, he had set up another site called Cosa Nostra.

It was rebranded again and again with the names of different mob groups.

Sicilian hitmen, Yakuza Mafia, Bratva Mafia.

It seemed like nothing could bring him down.

All the while, he kept emailing Chris.

Weirdly, Yura now openly admitted that his sites were a scam, but he said that was the reason not to take them down.

In his mind, he was stopping crime by wasting the time and the money of aspiring killers.

As Yura wrote to journalist John Vopicelli, if you intend to report hitman scams, you are basically siding up with those would-be murderers, helping them to avoid scams and traps, and helping them to find other means to do their kill.

It is a moral right to scam criminals and would-be murderers.

Sure, maybe he has a little bit of a point, but clearly stealing money from these people isn't going to stop them from committing the murder on their own.

It's just delaying the inevitable.

If he doesn't share all of the information he collects with police, he's partially responsible if anything happens.

But it does seem like after Amy's murder, Yura had a bit of a change of heart, even if he didn't change his business practices at all.

In 2018, the CBS show 48 Hours did an episode on Hitman for Hire Sites, and they actually reached out to Yura for comment.

Amazingly, he started sending the producers the names of some of his customers and targets.

He apparently wanted to prove that he was serious about stopping crime.

Yura's tips led to the arrest of four of his own clients.

An army specialist was sentenced to 15 years for the attempted murder of his pregnant girlfriend.

A nurse in Illinois got 10 years for attempted murder of her lover's wife.

And a man in Singapore tried to kill his ex-lover's new boyfriend, and he got five years for that.

There was even a California man who was sentenced to three years for ordering a hit on his stepmother, and his sentence was lighter because even though the full cost of the job was $9,000, he'd only paid about $3 before 48 Hours tipped off the police.

But not every story had a happy ending.

In June 2018, someone ordered the murder of 21-year-old Brian Njiroge, a soldier who was on leave in Indiana.

Now, Yura didn't follow through on this hit as usual, but a week later, Brian was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head under the stairs at a local baseball field.

This is hard to believe, but even though the police were tipped off about the hit order, they didn't investigate Brian's death at all.

It was ruled a suicide and the case was closed within a couple of days.

So, this could be the second death linked to Euro's website, but it's impossible to say for sure.

At the very least, when the 48 Hours special aired in September 2018, it meant Euro's days were numbered.

In June of 2019, he emailed 48 Hours saying that, unfortunately, after your show, the business has decreased tremendously.

People concluded that the site is a scam.

Now, there's really no surprise there, but he also claimed that he was getting out of the murder business and had opened a restaurant.

As strange as it sounds, this was the detail that might finally give up Yura's identity.

With the help of an intelligence analyst, 48 Hours was able to connect some of the hacked data from one of Yura's dark websites to an email address that belongs to an older Russian woman living in New York City.

From there, they found an email address for her son-in-law, which contained the words gun and killer.

That man had moved to the U.S.

in the 1990s, owned a tech company, and had recently bought a restaurant.

48 Hours actually tracked this man down in New York City in early 2020.

They ambushed him on the street and asked him, Are you Ura?

The man denied having any idea what they were talking about and claimed someone must have stolen his identity.

But his reactions were bizarrely combative though.

Like he started to get a little bit violent and the 48 Hours team ended up running back to the van before things got out of control.

They never got a full interview with the man, and they've never released his name.

But based on his behavior, it's totally probable that he could be Yura.

And that seems to be the last anyone has seen or heard from Yura, if that was really him.

Law enforcement isn't that interested in catching him, even though his scam sites have brought in an estimated millions of dollars over the past few years.

He clearly has never actually killed a person.

The real criminals are the customers themselves.

I wish I could say that we could rest easy knowing that there aren't any assassins lurking on the dark web, but the fact that so many people are trying to get random acquaintances or people they love or know or used to love killed is terrifying on its own.

These targets aren't bad people.

They're mothers, unsuspecting husbands and wives.

Some are even children.

There's an old truism that the internet brings out the worst in human behavior.

You're a nameless, faceless account on a screen, so you can do or say pretty much anything without fear of consequences.

That's what the real horror is about the dark web: the complete anonymity.

You get to see how people behave when they think no one is watching, and you might find out that the people you love are just monsters in disguise.

Thanks for listening.

I'll be back next week with another episode.

To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and I'll audio check originals.

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There's a story I think you'd be interested in.

If you just skim the headlines, you'd think police have always had a strong suspect for the decades-old disappearance of Dawn Mozzino, a convicted serial killer who knew our victim.

They just couldn't prove it.

Case kind of closed, right?

However, with the help of Dawn's sister, the Crime Jenkin team got access to Dawn's diary.

where for three months leading up to her disappearance, Dawn detailed not one, but two love triangles that she was in the middle of.

And the diary's final entry might hold the key to what really happened to her.

You do not want to miss this latest episode of Crime Junkie.

Listen to the episode titled Missing Dawn Mozzino Right Now, Only on Crime Junkie, available wherever you get your podcasts.