The things you find skulking around the darkest parts of the web

Eileen Ormsby delved into the dark web to see what happened if she requested someone kill her ex-husband. Photo / Getty Images

Sitting down at the keyboard, Eileen Ormsby went looking for a stranger on the internet willing to kill someone for money.

After finding a chatroom linked to an online hitman-for-hire service on the dark web — a shadowy underbelly of the internet only accessible with special encryption software — she typed out her ominous request.

"Hi can you get rid of someone in Australia my ex-husband is abusive and is still allowed to see my kid," she wrote.

The conversation that ensued involved negotiations about bitcoin payments and the protocol for purchasing an anonymous hitman who sits behind a mysterious and untraceable username, reports news.com.au.

These types of advertised services — internet assassins — are usually scams or sometimes even undercover law enforcement agencies. But on this particular occasion, neither party involved in the conversation were genuine in their intentions.

But it was all a ruse. The person Ormsby claimed she wanted killed was already dead. She was soliciting an online hitman for purposes of research — and it wouldn't be the last time.

The self-described writer and blogger of "all things vice" says she was "lucky" to have an insight into one of the biggest online hitman sites on the dark web, known as Besa Mafia.

While the people offering to do the contract killings are usually looking to take the money and disappear, there were plenty of "real people paying real money to this guy to have people whacked," she told news.com.au.

"When we got in the back door of this (website) thanks to a friendly hacker in the UK, we saw all these targets of people who others wanted killed. We passed those on to the authorities who just thought we were crazy people … And then a real murder happened," she recalled.

"The stakes were completely changed then, suddenly the FBI and everybody else were listening to us much more carefully."

Eileen Ormsby is the author of Silk Road and The Darkest Web. Photo / Supplied

The website was a one-man operation and the owner would later implore Ormsby to stop writing about his scamming activities, claiming he was doing the world a favour by taking money from people who believed they were commissioning murder.

This episode is just one of the many sordid encounters Ormsby has during her time spending countless hours sleuthing around the darkest corners of the web.

She has gotten to know the dark web's most unsavoury characters — even visiting some of the most notorious in real life.

THE MASTERMIND IN A BANGKOK PRISON

Ormsby's first book chronicled the rise of the internet's first big marketplace for drugs: the infamous Silk Road.

The administrator of that website, Ross Ulbricht aka Dread Pirate Roberts, is serving more than two life sentences in a US prison for the dubious honour of being the internet's first drug lord.

But during his trial, another shadowy figure who went by the name Variety Jones emerged. He too was allegedly responsible for the website.

"No one knew Variety Jones, no one knew he existed or anything about him during the Silk Road days until the trial and then all of a sudden here's these transcripts between Dread Pirate Roberts and this guy who turned out to be this amazing kind of mentor, and one of the biggest brains behind Silk Road," Ormsby said.

His real name is Roger Clark and Ormsby went to visit the Svengali-type figure while he was locked up in a Thai prison before he was extradited to the US earlier this month.

For a man who allegedly encouraged Ulbricht to use violence to maintain his drug empire and who used to sign off his dark web posts with the message; "The last thing you f***ing want is my undivided attention," he was "very friendly" during her visits.

"It was intimidating in that you know from past what he is capable of. He's got a reputation for being incredibly vindictive," Ormsby said.

While he wouldn't talk about his alleged role in Silk Road, it was fitting that she would meet the man who is alleged to have played such a vital role in the rise of the website that became synonymous with the dark web.

Underground drug website Silk Road deals in illicit substances such as cocaine, LSD, ecstasy allowing people to buy drugs online using the auction e-bay style site. Photo / Supplied

"I was very much there from the beginning of Silk Road. I was a part of the community all the way through the growth," she said. "It was such a fascinating microcosm of what the world might look like in a post-prohibition era."

The original idea that underpinned Ulbricht's creation is a worthwhile one in Ormsby's eyes. "To me it was a harm minimisation model for drug dealing, that was the most interesting thing for me.

"Ross Ulbricht was an idealist. Sure he made millions and millions of dollars but he was an idealist. He had this utopian vision of what a free market could be like," she said.

Since his downfall, organised crime has moved into the vacuum left behind and countless copycat websites have since popped up. Just last week, a 28-year-old housewife with no criminal record was unmasked as the person behind a major French dark web site that sold drugs and guns before it was shut down.

'THE REALLY HORRIBLE STUFF'

In her latest book, which came out earlier this year, Ormsby spends part of it detailing the most upsetting and confronting parts of the dark web. What she called "the really horrible stuff".

"That's the other part of what the dark web is … It's a meeting place for child predators," she said, or "a safe space for paedophiles".

The child exploitation part of the dark web is not built on commerce, but rather it's a sharing economy. You earn your stripes by showing your depravity.

"You can get into higher levels of certain sites by producing bespoke stuff that nobody's ever seen before," she said.

Because it's not based on financial transactions, it's easily able to thrive as a community. Ormsby estimates that a "vast majority" of the killer-for-hire services are scams and says really only the mass markets of drug sales — and to a lesser degree things like guns — exist as a truly reliable consumer market.

"In the end, the only things the dark web is good for is black market and as far as that's concerned it's only drugs and digital goods, like stolen credit card information or personal details that can be bought or sold to help people commit acts of fraud," she said.

Much of the rest is simply some of the worst things humans are capable of.