Disturbing Dark Web Websites

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Most people think of the dark web as a myth, a place full of
hackers, hitmen, and horror stories.
But here's the thing, A lot of those stories?
They're real. Hidden behind layers of
encryption are websites most people will never see.
Not because they're hard to find, but because once you do
find them, you wish you hadn't. We're talking about marketplaces

(00:23):
for illegal experiments, forms filled with cryptic countdowns,
and live streams no one should ever be watching.
Some of these sites were up for years and others vanished
overnight. A few people claimed they were
cursed, or worse. They follow you today.
We're not talking about urban legends.
We're talking about the darkest corners of the Internet that

(00:43):
actually existed. And by the end of the video,
you'll understand why. Some people say curiosity is
what gets you killed on the darkweb.
Please like and subscribe, it helps so much.
And let's get into some disturbing dark web websites.
Alpha Bay. Most of you have probably heard

(01:04):
of this Silk Road, the infamous dark web marketplace where drugs
were freely sold. You might not know of its
successor though, even though atits peak it had 10 times the
users that Silk Road ever had. Founded in 2014, a few months
after its predecessor was shut down by the FBI, it reached
nearly 370,000 listings at its peak with 400,000 users, and saw

(01:27):
over $800,000 flow through the site in the form of crypto
transactions every single day. The creator, Alexandre Kazis,
under the moniker Alpha O2, was well known in carding forums the
black market for stolen card info.
He would help out over there andeventually would decide to start
his own marketplace and Alpha Bay was born.

(01:48):
It was modelled after a conventional e-commerce site and
it's About Me section. Kaza said that it's goal was to
become the largest eBay style underground marketplace.
He was well aware of the illegalactivities he was facilitating
and even advised vendors on how to avoid law enforcement.
He charged each vendor a fee so they could sell on his site and

(02:09):
charged a Commission on each transaction around 2 to 4%.
A staff on payroll helped him maintain the site, which
included a security administrator, D Snake who had
similar access as Alpha O2, several monitors who could help
refund Bitcoin, scam watchers who would look out for phishing
attempts, etcetera, and even APRManager who would manage

(02:32):
outreach by posting on Reddit and other public forums.
However, just like Silk Road, itwould fall too, and for the same
reason too. Laughably sloppy security.
When Alphabet was launched, an associated form was launched to
allow customers to discuss when he signed up.
It asks you for an e-mail for password recovery, and to that

(02:52):
e-mail, Alphabet would send an e-mail welcoming them.
Sounds like a good idea, right? Customers should feel welcome.
But after all, except for the fact that the e-mail address
that sent these emails was actually Kaz's personal e-mail,
whenever you wanted to reset your password, you'd also get an
e-mail from the same address. Obviously, law enforcement very

(03:14):
easily found out who owned it. Kaz is his name and date of
birth was revealed, and his LinkedIn profile showed that he
worked at EBX Technologies. EBX Technologies was supposedly
a web design firm, but its website was barely functional
itself. Not a very good first impression
for potential customers. In fact, as you may have
guessed, it was a shell company to manage his crypto holdings

(03:35):
and liquidate them without too much trouble.
Currently, the website displays this message.
Following the sudden death of Mr. Alexandria Kazas in July
2017, Sicke acquired a portion of the assets of EBX
Technologies. If you are a company or an
individual who has done businesswith EBX Technologies in the
past and have pending work or other needs, please contact us

(03:57):
at your convenience. We would be delighted to meet
you and discuss how we can help.We look forward to hearing from
you when it comes to the companythat supposedly purchased the
assets of EBX. Sicke is a very unique web
design and development website. There's a chance that EBX
Technologies very did service web development for clients.
They soon found out that Kassis was living in Bangkok, Thailand.

(04:21):
The Royal Thai Police, working together with the FBI, arrested
him. Incredibly, his laptop was open,
unlocked and unencrypted. It was logged into the Alpha Bay
website as admin, and he was in the process of rebooting the
server as it went offline from an outage that the law
enforcement created themselves. Every single password including
the website and server passwordswere listed in an open plain

(04:44):
text file. Obviously they seized
everything. Apparently causes his like to be
organized as there was another file that identified all, I mean
all assets and holdings that causes held.
It was very detailed listing thestorage and location of all
crypto and assets like cars and property that he had bought.
Pretty convenient for the policeto find and sees everything.

(05:06):
It turns out he was also trying to obtain citizenship in Cyprus
where it is possible to gain residents by investing in the
country. He had sent 2.38 million euros
to buy a villa to a Cypress bankand had successfully bought his
way into the country. And you may wonder why Cyprus?
Well, causes probably chose it for its unique extradition laws.

(05:27):
Before the formation of the European Union, countries would
refuse to extradite you for crimes you committed in another
country. However, after the formation of
the European Union this changed and now EU countries consider
each other as domestic for the purpose of extraditions.
Despite Cyprus being a part of the EU, it's extradition laws
are different and would reject any foreign interference.

(05:50):
And side note, the US is actually the only real exception
to this. However, Cypriot banks only
interface with the the EU, so itdoes not get involved.
Furthermore, they are very careful to not conduct business
with any U.S. citizens. Combined with the fact that
citizenship can be easily boughtand the banks don't really care
where the money comes from, it makes it a very attractive

(06:12):
location to launder money through.
In the end, he had a total net worth of $23 million from his
underworld empire. A few days after his arrest, he
was found dead in a cell, allegedly committed S word.
Many in the dark web community felt like he was murdered.
This was not the end of the story for Alpha Bay though.

(06:33):
You might remember a site administrator that had a similar
level of access to the site D snake.
Four years later, he relaunched as the lone leader to make the
Alpha Bay name be remembered as more than the marketplace.
I got busted and founder made out to have committed S word in
his own words. This time, however, the sites
would not compromise on security.

(06:54):
One of the reasons Causes was caught was through Bitcoin
blockchain analysis. But now the site only accepted
Monero, another cryptocurrency network, which the same hack
would be almost impossible to replicate on.
In an interview with Wired, he detailed his security practices.
He runs an Aminosac operating system which wipes all data on
reboot. Furthermore, he claims to not

(07:16):
store any incriminating data on hard drives and has a USB kill
switch which would wipe his computer's memory in seconds.
He shuts it down every time his PC leaves his sights, even for
bathroom breaks. In his own words.
Biggest issue is that regard is the human needs.
I would say that is the biggest inconvenience.
You make sacrifices that once you get used to it, it becomes

(07:37):
second nature. While Kaz has made plans to go
to a non extradition country, the Snake actually managed it
and says that he is located in the former USSR.
Alpha Bay always had ties to Russia.
Its rules had always banned the sale of data stolen from victims
from former USSR countries, which is a common practice among
Russian hackers to prevent scrutiny.

(07:57):
Now, the Snake implemented a blanket ban on discussion on
USSR countries such as Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia,
etcetera. Still, the snake says he has
traveled to several continents in the last four years and was
living freely, all because of him always being technically
ahead of the law. It didn't live up to his former
glory, however, with only 500 listings in the beginning of its

(08:20):
relaunch, but it does have a fewflashy new features, mainly
Alpha Guard. Disney claims that it lets its
users withdraw their funds even if Alpha Bay went offline, as it
automatically rents and sets up new servers if Alpha Bay is
detected as being offline. This way customers can be sure
that they won't lose any money. A new I2P Mirror was launched,

(08:41):
which is a project designed to be a fully encrypted private
network layer, and his fortifications aren't fully
built yet. Apparently, he plans to make a
fully decentralized marketplace with no singular point of
failure, where he plans to host Alpha Bay.
The community is more skeptical,however, such as a thread on a
majority Russian forum, XSS, where many users are distrustful

(09:03):
of Disnec. It's fake and 99% sure, and
Fed's opening it again, one commenter wrote.
The snake's utopian vision didn't last long.
In January 2023, the site went offline.
This wasn't unusual, and the site was supposed to come back
shortly. However, time stretched on and
there was nothing. The snake was radio silence.

(09:24):
A month later, one of the Alpha Bay admins posted a message on
Reddit going by the handle AlphaBay the Cypriot.
They claimed that it was not lawenforcement, the signs were just
not there. Instead, it was partially shut
down because one of the Canariesused by the site was not signed
on time. A Canary is a way to tell users
that a website may have been compromised.

(09:44):
It requires the administrator toregularly sign a public message
containing some independently verifiable information with
their key. If it is not updated, it may
indicate a security breach. The snake, as part of his Moat,
implemented this directly into the security.
It would basically initiate a lockdown on the market because
the snake had not signed it withhis key for a month.

(10:05):
This was not the first time thishappened either.
Similar incidents had occurred previously, but the site had
always come back. This time though, it looked like
it was gone for good. So where was the snake?
One theory that makes more senseis that he was a casualty of the
Turkey Syria earthquake. He did say that he lived in a
non extradition country and had some strong links to Russia.

(10:28):
Syria is mostly under the control of the Syrian Arab
Republic which is backed by Russia and Iran. 24,000 Syrians
died in the devastating earthquake and the snake could
very well have been one of them.However, there is no concrete
proof, and what really happened to the snake remains a mystery,
just as he would have wanted to be.

(10:49):
Cannibal Cafe. Everyone has their unique
tastes, but most of the time they're legal and while weird,
are usually harmless. But there's a disgusting group
of people out there whose interests and hobbies are
borderline psychotic. Started in 1994 by Pero Loco,
Cannibal Cafe was a website for,well, cannibals.

(11:11):
Loco was well known in these dark corners of the Internet and
was hailed as somewhat of a celebrity, popularizing a quote
UN quote artist who would depictand cannibalism in his art.
This artist went by the pseudonym Doll Slit.
While it was just a moniker, theword doll slit is defined as a
pretty terrible It's a about some, well, disgusting stuff and

(11:34):
I'll leave it at that. Loco would continue posting and
popularizing Dulcet's work, and after a while, Dulcet gave him
full permission to post it online and was pleased that he
was getting the free promotion. This is what prompted Loco to
create the Cannibal Cafe. It lasted for eight years before
it was shut down by a distributed denial of service
attack by German authorities. In those eight years however, it

(11:56):
managed to produce some of the most gruesome stories of
documented cannibalism ever, andthis would range from people
signing themselves up as livestock to loco killing and
eating an entire human being. The website would feature a
gruesome livestock marketplace which was constantly filled with
individuals, both men and women,looking to eat or be eaten.

(12:18):
People would apply to be livestock and go through
training. You can use your imagination as
to what the training might have been.
They would call these people whosigned up to be livestock as
cows, and it was outlined in thesubhead of the web page that
there is no limitation of the intended or actual use of any of
our cows. But should any leased livestock
be terminated during the lease period, you'll be invoiced for

(12:40):
the full purchase price. I'd rather not find out what
some people did with their purchase livestock, but it only
gets worse from here. Chelsea loco pero loco.
Suppose a daughter was on the website and the description is,
well, horrifying. Daddy, I'm ready.
Hope I taste as good as mom. And then it goes on to describe

(13:00):
her heights, weights, and some general descriptions of her body
parts and I'll leave that out, but it's just horrifying.
Another livestock listing was Cow Tina who supposedly engaged
in S word and her meat was up for sale.
Cannibal Cafe wasn't only for genuine savages who wanted to

(13:23):
own and sell humans to eat or doeven worse things with, but it
had several other branches. Shows are adult videos which
involve murder as a form of, I guess fun video for some people,
you know, psychopaths. Let's get into the disclaimer.
Our websites are subscription orpay-per-view entertainment for
adult audiences only. Our sites contain nudity and

(13:45):
simulated violence intended purely as fantasy entertainment.
We do not encourage nor condone real life violence against
others. There's no pornography at these
sites and no one is actually hurt during the making of our
photo stories and videos. It linked to several other
websites which would contain videos of men, but mostly women

(14:06):
in other adult videos. Despite the very convincing
disclaimer, the videos on the sites were real, with real women
and men taking part in these heinous acts.
The website encouraged heavy participation of viewers, that
being through one of two ways. The first being a guest book
where users would sign, leave inrecommendations, opinions or

(14:27):
really whatever they felt like saying.
This guest book had a concerningamount of sign ONS, each with
increasingly concerning messages.
Great sight. Looking forward to see more ESP
more cows from Europe available for.
Wish more wild stuff went on there.
Hope that this site rolls for you.
Hey, looks nice so far. Can't wait for the human

(14:48):
livestock to be bred and cattledright from the start.
The Cannibal Cafe also hosted a message board, which is what
would lead to its eventual shutdown.
What brought this site to the attention of the authorities was
the Muis Jurgen Case, a user of Campbell Cafe.
Armin Miwis, had started talkingto another user on the website,

(15:09):
44 year old burned Jurgen Brandis who lived 250 miles away
from Armin. They started talking after Armin
responded to an ad posted by Brandis on the Cannibal Cafe
message board. Who's looking for someone to eat
him alive? On March 9th, 2001, Armin
brought Jurgen home and had withhim before killing him.

(15:30):
While Brandy's did consent to this, it's still very illegal.
The following events were recorded on a video camera.
And of course, I can't show any of this on YouTube since it is
way way, way too disturbing. Maui's performed a series of
disturbing and illegal acts on Brandy's which involved severe
bodily harm. Brandy's had taken medication

(15:51):
beforehand to help with the painwarning.
The following details are still very graphic and unsettling.
Viewer description is strongly advised and if you have a weak
stomach, please skip to the timestamp on screen.
Following these initial acts, the two prepared and shared a
meal involving Brandy's body. Grandy's later requested to be
left to pass peacefully, succumbing to his injuries

(16:12):
overnight. His final words were reportedly
I have to piss before he collapsed.
In the months that followed, Mawis continued to consume parts
of Brandy's before being arrested in December 2001.
He was initially charged with manslaughter, but after a
retrial in 2006, he was convicted of murder and
disturbing the peace of the dead.
So that was a YouTube friendly description of what happened

(16:35):
that day. Mawis is currently serving life
in prison. Para Loco is still out there,
the creator of Cannibal Cafe. After posting an announcement on
the message board reading. I am in the process of putting
up an all new website which is called and.
The site is dedicated to the concept that there are real doll
set girls and we are going to explore darkest desires.

(16:57):
Or at least I am, and you're welcome to join me for the fun.
One thing in particular that I'mgoing to do is set up a
photographic diary, or log book if you will, following the
progression of our doll set girls from the relative innocent
submissive through training as the ultimate submissive to
cattle status and ultimately to meet on the table.
In addition, the site will feature my entire collection of

(17:18):
doll set art and doll set style art, as well as photographs,
both real and Memorex. We already have at least one
Real Doll Set girl and of courseare looking for more.
I'm sorry that I haven't been keeping up on the posts here in
this forum. I'll try and do better.
I'm wondering if Terry is interested in becoming a Real
Doll Set Girl, since I know thatmost of you would love to see
photos of her training and what follows.

(17:40):
By the way, the best way to reach me is always via e-mail.
I can be reached through either of my addresses, which are.
Thanks for your attention. Pero local this website is still
up and running, the one that he recently created, but I will not
say it and don't go looking for it.
Big disclaimer, do not go looking for this website.

(18:01):
This is still an active form site and has a very extensive
registration agreement. The agreement does have some
interesting and concerning aspects to it though.
The first paragraph says this. You agree through your use of
this form that you will not postany material which is false,
defamatory, inaccurate, abusive,vulgar, hateful, harassing,

(18:22):
obscene, profane oriented, threatening, invasive of
persons, privacy, adult material, or otherwise in
violation of any international or United States federal law.
The website will force you to provide your legal legitimate
information. After you register and log into
this forum, you'll be able to fill out a detailed profile.

(18:43):
It is your responsibility to present clean and accurate
information. Any information the forum owner
or staff determines to be inaccurate or vulgar in nature
will be removed with or without prior notice.
Appropriate sanctions may be applicable, and if for any
reason they're finally caught, they politely inform you that
they will outright leak your personal information.

(19:05):
You remain solely responsible for the content of your posted
messages. Furthermore, you agreed to
identify and hold harmless the owners of this Forum, any
related websites to this Forum, its staff and its subsidiaries.
The owners of this Forum also resolves the right to reveal
your identity or any other related information collected on

(19:25):
the Service in the events of theformal complaint or legal action
arising from any situation caused by your use of this
Forum. So it's very clear why I haven't
decided to probe deeper. Please note that with each post,
your IP address is recorded. In the event that you need to be
banned from this forum or your ISP contacted, this will only

(19:46):
happen in the event of a major violation of this agreement.
Also note that the software places a cookie, a text file
containing bits of information such as your username and
password, in your browser's cache that is only used to keep
your logged in slash out. The software does not collect or
send any other information to your computer.

(20:07):
Now I don't know about you, but I'm having a hard time trusting
that, especially after seeing what these guys get into.
There's two options once you've signed your rights away.
One being that you're above the age of 18 and that you accept
the terms, or that you're younger than 18.
In most cases, a button which says that you're younger than 18
and accept the terms will probably kick you off the

(20:28):
website, but with this, who knows what it does.
The website was insanely popularall the way up until 2011, where
it was reported that we receivedover 1,000,000 visits each
month, with even AUS congressmanbeing an active user.
The average user age was around 40 and the website was under
constant scrutiny by the FBI, with Loco himself having been

(20:50):
hauled into questioning numeroustimes.
Para Loco believes he's doing noharm by encouraging these
activities, believing that consenting adults should be able
to do whatever they want, even if that involves killing each
other. Except this doesn't reflect on
the issues where there are youngimpressionable children and
teenagers who may stumble upon these sites and grow up with a

(21:12):
deeply sick and twisted worldview.
In the Meiweis case, it was reported that his just came upon
him as a result of his twisted upbringing paired with his
environment at the time. He grew up with a psychotic
mother who had heavy Miss Andrew's views, making him
Meiweis dependent on her completely.
It would go as far as her accompanying and practically
chaperoning him to dates and even work trips.

(21:34):
She would guilt trip him, humiliate him, and her
psychoticness was further solidified by the fact that both
her ex husbands left due to mental cruelty.
Maiwis's cannibalism developed during his adolescence after he
was introduced to home slaughtering of cattle, poultry,
hogs and deers, and being taughthow to gut small animals like
rabbits since he was just six years old.
In most cases this would have led to anyone else turning into

(21:57):
a well adjusted and equipped individual with strong survival
skills and a pretty fun and coolchildhood.
But due to his upbringing, beingso lonely and then early
exposure to the Internet, it ledto him murdering a man instead.
Consent or not, murder is still murder.
Bass Mafia The Bass Mafia was, as you might expect, not your

(22:17):
typical organized crime syndicate that had unusually
strong ties to Mediterranean countries.
Instead, it was a new age assassination marketplace hosted
entirely online. Hit Man were freely available
for hire to carry out your dirtyjobs, from maiming to kidnapping
and of course, murder. For the ambitious, you could
even apply to be 1. Soon, however, the facade

(22:39):
crumbled. Chris Montero, a systems
administrator trader who runs ITsecurity for a firm in London,
is a digital vigilante working as an independent cybercrime
researcher. In the off hours in 2016, he
stumbled on the website Base of Mafia and wrote a scathing
critique on his blog Pirates London, claiming that it was a
scam and exposing its many security flaws.

(23:01):
Reputation was very important tothe owners of Base of Mafia and
the supposed site administrator Yura messaged him furious,
imploring him to take it down and then attempting to bribe
him. Montero of course refused,
believing that it was an all empty threat.
Your a seemingly wasn't all smoke.
However, a few days later he sent Montero a YouTube link of

(23:21):
him setting a car on fire, holding a sign that said that it
was dedicated to Pirate London, Montero's blog.
Now worried that maybe it was actually a genuine hitman
marketplace, Montero, along withan anonymous cyber cop going by
the name of Judge Judy, shut down the website entirely, using
a vulnerability that allowed himto see every order, which he
later leaked online, to be picked up by the FBI.

(23:43):
Yura did not fall at this hurdlethough, and continued setting up
similar sites with similarly threatening names such as Sickle
and Hitman and Azerbaijani Eagles, Kimura, Hitman and a
host of others. They all work the same way.
An aspiring criminal would set up an anonymous account, select
their desired job and upload thedetails.
They would start a chat with Yura where he would coax them
into trusting him in the Bitcoinwould be sent over.

(24:07):
Now, some of you may have had the suspicion from the beginning
that it was actually a scam and there were no real murders
looking for the job. And you would be right.
Of course, Euro did not put mucheffort into making it believable
either. His English was poor and his
knowledge of the US geography even worse.
For example, 1 user ordered a hit on somebody in Hawaii.

(24:27):
You're responded by saying that he had a hit man in the nearby
state who could drive there and do the job no problem.
For those unfamiliar with the United States, Hawaii is an
island roughly 2500 miles away from the nearest state.
Not to mention that driving there would be very difficult
with the Pacific Ocean between it and the US.
The user still paid $3000. The site you stock pictures of

(24:48):
assassins and results from a Google search for scary looking
hitman on its front page. It would be laughable if not for
the real and despairing loss of lives that did actually occur
due to this site. In February of 2016, a user
named Dog Day God ordered a hit on a middle-aged woman Posting
for reasons that are too personal and would give away my
identity. I need this dead so please help

(25:10):
me. The target was Amy Alwine of
Cottage Grove, MN, she had a husband, Stefan, who worked as
an IT professional and was also an elder in the United Church of
God. They had an adopted teenage son.
Dog Day God transferred around $6000 in Bitcoin to Europe,
feeding him information on when Amy would be alone in the house
or places outside she would go where there would be no one

(25:32):
else. First they discussed a hit and
run. Dog Day God like this idea as it
could be seen as an accident andthen arson.
You're promised him that it would be done soon, but the hit
man were failing and he couldn'tdo anything about it.
Of course, there were no attempts at all and you're kept
asking for more money after eachsupposed failure and Dog Day God
grew angrier. I do not care about date or

(25:54):
method. You have her picture and address
so you can tailor or do whateveryou need to do to get the job
done. One curious request, however,
was that the husband and kid be left alone.
He claimed that the kid was a friend of their child and he did
not wish to see him orphaned. A surprising amount of thought
and empathy from someone who's planning to murder the kids
mother. Thankfully though, a couple of

(26:15):
months later nobody was murderedand nothing came from it.
Another hacker by the name of BRSPD broke into the website and
dumped all the chat logs online.In May of 2016 the FBI picked
these up and alerted all the targeted victims.
They hold Amy and Stephen to bump up their security so they
bought a home security system and a gun to protect themselves

(26:36):
with Stephen shot aiming the head with the very same gun.
Six months later. Stephen was dog day God all this
time. Makes sense why in the request
he made it at the assassin shouldn't kill the husband or
child. The truth was that he'd been
having affairs through Ashley Madison which was a website for
married or people in relationships to find other like

(26:56):
minded individuals to cheat with.
He could not divorce his wife because of his position in the
church and so we took this drastic measure before it all
started. He took out a $700,000 life
insurance policy in his wife's name and have been sending her
threats and pressuring her to end her life online.
He attempted to make it look like an S word.
However, a police investigation revealed that the Bitcoin

(27:16):
signature of the payment he madewith Yura recovered from the
chat logs matched the hard driveon his laptop, proof that it was
in fact not an S word, but a long planned murder.
Convicted of first degree murder, he was sentenced to life
in prison. Stephen is still serving out a
sentence to this day. The inhumanity of the users
really showed when another orderwas revealed.

(27:37):
Another user by the name of Agent Si inquired about a
possible hit on a 14 year old. It was no prank or some sort of
morbid joke either, as the user actually transferred roughly
$18,500 to Euro. And so somewhere in New Jersey,
a kid is walking around with a nearly $20,000 bounty on his
head. Another chat log revealed that a

(27:57):
woman from Nevada ordered a hit on her ex-husband and
transferred 12 bitcoins to Base of Mafia.
She was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison on the
charge of a murder for hire plot.
Thankfully, Base of Mafia was a scam website, so the major loss
from his creation was the Bitcoin wallets of criminals.
But innocents were still hurt orkilled, as in the case of Amy

(28:18):
Alwine. An or 8 was a huge online image
board. It had barely any moderation, if
any at all, leading to the posting of some very disturbing
and usually outright illegal videos, images and messages.
It was created in October 2013 after a computer programmer,

(28:40):
Frederick Brennan, came up with the idea for a site which was a
free speech friendly alternativeto 4 Chan which he felt was
growing to be authoritarian. Brennan had grown up with
brittle bone disease or osteogenesis imperfectia and
lived his life in foster care, suffering over 120 bone
fractures by the time he was 20.He had been using 4 Chan since

(29:02):
the age of 12 in 2006. Quite the tragedy and pretty
telling when it came to where things went wrong.
When his father put him and his brother in the foster care
system of New York, he felt isolated and would browse 4 Chan
for hours, dominating his childhood.
He was a self-taught computer programmer and grew up to live
in Brooklyn work in freelance. He was becoming increasingly

(29:23):
frustrated with the moderators on 4 Chan, who he felt were too
strict on what was supposed to be the Wild West of the
Internet. Unsurprisingly, he was high on
shrooms when the idea formed in his head, but was conscious
enough to write it down so he wouldn't forget about it when he
was sober. It took him two days to research
and then compile and releasing it online, but this fun little
free speech message board experiment would turn incredibly

(29:46):
drastic in ways you'd never imagine. 11 months after his
creation they became home to theGamergate campaign.
If you don't know, Gamergate wasa misogynistic far right wing
campaign which lasted from 2014 to 2015.
It started from a blog post written by the ex-boyfriend of
Zoe Quinn, an indie video game dev.
He made false claims that Quinn had slept as a journalist to get

(30:09):
good reviews for her video game.This quickly spread the 4 Chan
and a mass harassment campaign was launched.
They didn't spare any woman who defended her either, with R word
threats and death threats becoming common.
After extreme backlash, 4 Chan then banned any mention of
Gamergate from its site and the angry misogynists migrated to
the website where they continuedto coordinate attacks on any who

(30:31):
didn't agree with their supposedagenda.
As Gamergate slowly faded from popular culture, the users
remained and their agenda shifted to other individuals who
oppose their mainly right wing ideology.
One such movement is the famous Q Anon, A conspiracy.
An anonymous user Q, named afterhis opposed Q level security
clearance in the US government, would often post his conspiracy

(30:53):
theories on sites like 4 Chan and 8 Chan.
For those who don't know about this outlandish conspiracy, it
basically outlines a theory thatPresident Trump is waging war
against elite St. worship that run the government and have it
other powerful positions in America.
They believe that a day of reckoning will come where
prominent leaders of this cult such as Hillary Clinton would be

(31:14):
executed. Q predicted that Trump would win
in the 2020 elections, but as you might already know, he
didn't win. Q Anon conspiracists were
suspected to be behind the January Six riots where
Republicans stormed the Capitol building in an unprecedented
attack. If that wasn't enough, the site
was also a platform for Three Mash who use it to advertise
themselves. Brenton Tarrant live streamed

(31:36):
himself murdering 51 people in the devastating Christchurch
Moss shooting in New Zealand. And he posted a link to his
Facebook live stream first on with a message saying well lads
it's time to stop posting and time to make a real life effort
post. I will carry out an attack
against the invaders and will even live stream the attack via
Facebook. His manifesto was also posted

(31:56):
there. The PO Wei said in the OR one
person was fatally shot and three injured.
Posted an extremely racist and anti-Semitic letter on trying to
mirror the Christchurch shooting.
The El Paso shooting where 22 were killed and further 26 were
injured. Also posted a manifesto on
ranting about immigration. All of these hate filled posts

(32:17):
received a sickening amount of praise from the user base.
Cloudflare, a service that protects DDoS attacks,
immediately stopped supporting and as a client after the
shootings. Its founder, Frederick Brennan,
is disgusted by these events. He felt at least partially
responsible for the hurt caused to so many due to his website.
Until 2016, he served as an administrator and his misgiving

(32:39):
started soon after the days after the Christchurch.
He said that he didn't care if it was shut down, wondering
whether it was a good thing thathe created.
Keeping it online soon became a struggle for Brennan, as
bandwidth limits kept exceeding and nobody really wanted to host
it for obvious reasons. Hope came from Ronald Watkins,
along with his father and current owner Jim Watkins, who

(33:01):
owned NT Technology, said he would host it.
While Brennan acted as the public figurehead of the site.
They did not charge him, only taking 60% of any profits made.
Brennan soon moved to the Philippines where he stayed in a
fancy villa in Manila provided by Watkins who also live there.
Jim Watkins made his money by helping Japanese corn stars

(33:21):
evade the country strict regulations by hosting a corn
site called Asian Bikini Bar andallowing them to host their
content on it. In 2016, after a fallout with
Watkins, Brennan soon left A andgave up a complete control to
the Watkins, who are prominent supporters of the Q and Non
conspiracy. After Cloudfare took down their
services the site rebranded to Aand relaunched through a Russian

(33:42):
host known for enabling cyber criminal activity, but its
return was brief until a Vancouver based software
company, Von Wotech, started providing services to ATM Von
Wotech is known for hosting a variety of FAR Rights and NEO
websites such as the Daily Stormer and Kiwi Farms, a
website responsible for multipleS words in the online community.

(34:03):
While Brennan now be appalled that what his vision had become,
it is too late to salvage anything of A and or now as it
becomes the home for the extremist far right and has a
reputation so bad it leaves a bad taste in your mouth every
time you talk about it. Rotten.com, you might all know
about Live Like, the infamous Internet forum where you could

(34:24):
see things you really shouldn't see.
But before that, in the beginnings of the Internet,
there was rotten.com. The Internet only became
mainstream a couple years prior,with easy access being available
to the public. Founded in 1996 by developer
Only, known as Soylent Communications, it's ideology
was heavily inspired by the 1st Amendment.

(34:44):
At a time when Internet censorship was becoming a bigger
worry, rotten.com wanted to prove that censorship was
ethical and wrong and serve as ahaven for free speech of a most
controversial nature. In the developers own words, it
was the OG shock site. Blood, gore, and extreme graphic
violence were all too common on the site.

(35:04):
It first gained notoriety when an alleged picture of Princess
Diana's fatal crash was posted on the site and traffic spiked.
It was later proven to be fake, but now the site was in the
public's eye. Tupac's autopsy was featured on
the site along with other high profile crime scenes such as the
murder of Nicole Simpson and RonGoldman.
It was one of the first media outlets, if it can even be

(35:27):
called that, to cover the 9/11 attacks and had the most videos
on 9/11 jumpers. If you don't know what a 911
jumper is, it's pretty horrifically self-explanatory.
ron.com had the most footage of these jumpers as regular prints
in digital media had buried and or censored it out of fear that
it was simply too much, too goryor too harsh.

(35:47):
And by the accounts of some people, it may have been for the
best. I was a photo editor at Monthly
Magazine in New York City on 9/11, 2001.
Later that week I had to edit photos from Getty Images for
usage in the magazine. The raw footage that was only
accessible to publications that paid for the service.
I have never forgotten the images of the jumpers.

(36:07):
The photos were clear and you can see their faces.
It was horrific. But even worse, in every shot,
the woman jumped holding the hand of another woman.
The men were always alone when they jumped.
I remember crying at my computeras I'm typing this post.
Their faces were so clear that afamily member could definitely
recognize them. The second day I was so upset my
editor in chief sent me home. Those posts still exist in the

(36:30):
Getty archives. I have never forgotten those
horrific photos. This shot was a trigger that I
had repressed. I still remember the smell of
the city as I walked home from Midtown to Brooklyn with
millions of others in a days. Soylent justified this gruesome
content by saying that if you wanted to censor the site, you
have to censor medical texts, museums and libraries.

(36:51):
Furthermore, he added that horrors are sprinkled throughout
life and I see no problem with concentrating them.
If you want, we can go down to the bookstores and find pictures
of cadavers for you. It's very easy.
It's not possible to write a lawto make it impossible to display
that stuff, even reminders. It's too much of A slippery
slope to take in its peak. It was seen roughly 200,000

(37:12):
visitors a day and was being investigated by the FBI for
images involving and cannibalism.
Those, thankfully, were proven to be fake.
So who is Soylent Communications?
There's a rumor that it is a programmer named Thomas E Dell
who allegedly run Soylent and wrote a bulletin board system
named Waffle. Waffle was used by an early

(37:33):
Internet service provider named Mindvox, founded by the Legion
of Doom hacker group, where it would cover a vast array of
topics from the evolution of cyberspace to drugs.
And Mindvox may have been the inspiration for ron.com, and
there are many other similarities to the site.
However, ron.com is no traditional form site.
It had a very minimal layout, just consisting of user

(37:56):
submitted links with a morbid joke description below it and no
thumbnails, which meant that youcould just see about anything if
you click that link. It also spawned a host of other
sites. The Daily Rotten, started by
Thomas E Dell, published storiesbased on terrorism, murder S
word, and abuse. It was driven entirely by user
submissions, filtered by an editor posting extremely graphic

(38:16):
images on entirely real gore. Another site was the Gaping Ma,
which was a site for commentary and satire written by cartoonist
Tristan Farnan. This actually improved the
site's image a little bit, as itwas more of a discussion and
contained intellectual argumentscompared to the mindless
violence posted every day on themain site.
The user base ofrotten.com was obviously deeply disturbed, and

(38:39):
this would show clearly when a game called Rotten Deadpool was
launched in its players would pick 10 people who they believed
would die over the next 10 months and will get a point for
each correct guest they made. I don't know about you, but this
sounds pretty similar to something I've seen in a movie.
Well, the message of what This site is trying to achieve seems
pretty clear. The problems it poses greatly

(38:59):
outweigh the principle at hand. With there already being several
rumors of what's hiding deep within the website, there's no
telling how long before it's revealed that the website is
hosting videos of a very disgusting nature.
The Internet is a mirror of humanity, and sometimes what it
reflects is truly terrifying andin this case, disturbing.

(39:20):
These places remind us that not everything online is meant to be
found. And if you made it this far,
thank you so much for watching. I appreciate you all.
This is one of my favorite videos I've ever made.
Please come down below if you'd like to see another dark web
video in the future or maybe in an Internet rabbit holes video
in the future. I'm down to make anything.
I appreciate what's sticking to the end.
Please like the video, subscribeto the channel, it helps a ton.

(39:42):
This was Snook and I'll see you next time.
Bye.