International Investigations
[2020-24] Novel/Wondery - Kill List
Almost 4 years were spent working with this UK podcast company, trying to stop more murders and seeing many further attempts transpire.
Can journalist Carl Miller persuade people to take him seriously over the phone? (Spoilers - he cannot). Can local journalists be hired to knock on doors to make the would-be victims and police take these plots more seriously? Yes they can!
The ‘Kill List’ investigations led to about 40 arrests and investigations, 30 imprisonments and 180 years of jail time across 10 countries and has been by far my most successful collaboration. I am featured more heavily in a Darknet Diaries podcast episode explaining more about all this from my point of view, rather than that of the journalists.
The Romanian scammers behind the scam were (briefly) arrested too, before being released days later and resuming their scamming and soliciting people to murder.
Unfortunately editorial decisions during production were made to characterise the investigations as ‘complete’ and the responsibilities ‘over’. when there are in fact about 800 outstanding cases.
At least 1x additional murder took place in this period that we were unable stop, but this has not be covered in the media yet.
[2019] Brian Merchant/Harpers Magazine - Click Here to Kill
Who tried to kill Minnesota teen Alexis Stern? It was the scumbag ex boyfriend from Bath, United Kingom Adrian Fry of course. Fry evades arrest due to police incompetence around transnational investigations.
Merchant calls up a number of people on the ‘Kill List’ so far, with a range of unimpressed responses.
[2019] Gian Volpicelli/Wired UK - The unbelievable tale of a fake hitman, a kill list, a darknet vigilante... and a murder
There’s a ‘hit’ on a US serviceman for $5000, who turns up dead by suicide only a few days later. It’s still not known what happened here, but Volpicelli tells my story so far up to this point in 2019.
[2018-19] CBS/48 Hours - Click for a Killer
Who killed Amy Alwine? Who paid to have her murdered online? Well it was her scumbag husband Stephen Alwine of course. And now there’s media interest.
In 2018, whilst in conversations with US Crime documentary programme 48 hours, I was surprised to find the website had not in fact been closed down by UK law enforcement in 2017 as I had believed, but was instead still doing business with the same misconfigured code base.
What else could I do but pass the information to the programme? Several investigations took place leading to arrests and jail time in the US and 1x in Singapore.