Imagine the world wide web as an iceberg.
Most of what you use is the part above the water, the part of the Internet you use normally.
But there’s a part you don’t normally see, what lurks beneath the water.
Today we’ll look at the darkest parts of the dark web, in this episode of the Infographics
Show, 11 Scary Things Found on The Dark Web.
11.
Mail Order Drugs We’ll start with something that isn’t
too scary, but it’s still quite surprising how many people use the dark web to buy their
drugs.
According to the Global Drug Survey 2018 a quarter of British drug users shop for their
“gear” on the dark web.
The deliveries usually come by post and buyers seek good ratings and reviews before they
take the risk of sending money.
The founder of the survey told The Independent newspaper that with all those irksome CCTV
cameras in the UK the dark web and mail delivery was hitting an all time high.
Recent arrests include a guy from Wales who was mailing the dangerous drug Fentanyl all
over the world.
“They look for convenience, product range, quality vendor ratings,” said the researcher.
He also said that most of the dark web drugs buyers were young.
This might not shock some of our wayward viewers, but what’s coming is worse.
10.
Human Products Ok, let’s get strange.
Like fashion?
How about products like belts made out of human flesh.
We found someone writing on Quora who said he is very familiar with the dark web, and
said that some of these sites selling human products, “have a complete loyal customer
base.”
We found a screenshot of the website Humanleather.co.uk with this text, “All products are carefully
hand-crafted by experienced master craftsmen, with years of experience in handling the finest
leather known – human leather.”
According to one writer a pair of human shoes will set you back $14,000.
You can read threads about this on Reddit.
Some say it’s fake, but as we haven’t made an order we just don’t know.
9.
Hitmen for hire Some skeptics write that this is a hoax; that
you can’t really hire a killer off the dark web.
Ok, so the hitman site Besa Mafia did turn out to be a joke, but Fortune published a
story in 2015 citing research by security firm Trend Micro.
It turned out that for $45,000 you could get someone taken care of.
For $180,000 it could be someone well known to the public.
Apparently, you could also get someone beaten or crippled.
That’s what’s advertised anyway.
The problem in checking if this is authentic of course is paying for a hit and seeing what
happens or trying to stop it happening once you find out it’s real.
Many people are skeptical regarding hitman sites being real, but we wouldn’t like to
put it to the test.
8.
Human organs and body parts Some sites on the dark web will tell you they
sell human organs.
Again, we can’t tell you if this is true or not.
Gizmodo wrote an article in 2012, with prices of what organs and body parts on the black
market would cost- a pair of eyeballs was said to be $1,525, a heart $119,000, a hand
$385 and a kidney $262,000.
Illegal organ trafficking certainly does exist, so you might think the dark web would be a
good place to open a store.
The World Health Organization wrote that each year thousands of organs are bought on the
black market, with most of the money going to middlemen, not to those who sold their
organs.
The Big Think tells us these organs usually come from the poorest reaches of the world
and end up in the richest parts of the world.
According to Popular Science, a man on Craiglist tried to sell his kidney for $100,000 and
he received plenty of offers until his post was taken down.
So, do we think organs are available on the dark web?
Well, it’s conceivable.
7.
Cannibal Forums According to those who know the dark web there
are forums where people who have a taste for human flesh congregate and talk about their
unusual predisposition.
Some media reports that there was a website called Cannibal Café, but that’s now closed
down.
This is where people looking to be eaten or wanting to eat someone would meet, a kind
of personals forum for slaughterers and those willing to be slaughtered.
“There were stories, artwork and users seeking advice on the best to way to cook someone,”
says one writer who apparently had visited the site.
He said that frozen human meat was even for sale.
It’s not hard to believe if you’ve heard the story of Armin Meiwes, the German guy
who filmed the killing, dissection, and his own consumption of another man who had agreed
to be eaten.
That happened in 2001, but it’s likely this kind of thing has happened without the story
ever hitting the media.
6.
Dead Babies Apparently, there’s a website dedicated
to sharing photos of still-born children.
Now this can be taken in different ways.
The Telegraph reported in 2015 that a charity was helping parents with the grieving process
by photographing their still-born child.
Why someone would go to the dark web to see someone else’s dead baby might just be for
help, curiosity, or something far more repugnant.
5.
Last Words Hearing the last words before someone dies
can be a saddening thing.
There are sites on the dark web apparently committed to finding such recordings, but
to be frank it’s not the darkest thing in the world seeing as it’s easy to find the
last words of pilots online, before their plane hits the ground, a mountain, or just
goes up in flames.
According to one website there are places on the dark web where you can hear much more
than black box recordings regarding the last words someone said though.
4.
Pedophilia web forums What’s perhaps so surprising about this
is that it seems a lot of people are into it.
There’s a thread on Reddit where one guy discusses his time on the dark web, saying
he started off just looking at sites selling drugs, guns, fake IDs, etc., but morbid curiosity
drove him deeper in.
There he found a website called “**********” He said he found threads on a forum with titles
such as "Toddler", "4yrs+", "10yrs+", "Jail bate".
He said Toddler had over 50,000 posts.
A Cracked writer tells of his time in the Dark Web, saying there’s something called
“Hard Candy”, which he said was a kind of Wikipedia for child pornographers.
In 2018 the BBC reported about a man sentenced to 32 years, this“sadistic pedophile”
shared abuse tips on the dark web and had 137 charges against him, including numerous
charges of rape.
3.
Animal Abuse Anyone with a heart who has seen one of those
clips that circulate on the web such as puppies being crushed underfoot, or cats being burned
alive will likely have that image in their minds forever.
Thankfully, it’s not something we see often.
But apparently on the dark web people go looking for this kind of stuff and they don’t have
to look too hard.
On one site on the dark web called Cruel Onion Wiki people would (reports say it’s closed
now) post images and videos of the torture and killing of animals.
It was very much real, with Motherboard writing in 2014, “A site called Cruel Onion Wiki
collates links to videos of women killing and torturing animals, usually in a sexualized
fashion.”
Motherboard writes that cats, dogs, bats, rabbits, hamsters, geese, turtles, monkeys,
pheasants, would be “crushed, sat on, or suffocated, often by fully or semi-nude women.”
An editor watched some of the videos to check the authenticity and left saying he felt horrified.
2.
The Human Experiment Is this a hoax?
According to numerous sources the dark web has a website run by doctors or pseudo doctors
that perform unethical procedures on unwilling patients, usually people off the streets.
The tagline on the website reads, “Not all humans are equal, for some of them were born
superior to others.”
Experiments include pain tolerance, starvation, vivisection, drug trials, transfusions, as
well as experiments on babies and pregnant women, and more.
“The bodies of the dead are dissected and then disposed of in dumpsters of meat shops
where their bodies will not be found,” it says on the site.
The sites itself definitely exists, or existed, but the actual experiments may not.
We hope not.
Motherboard writes that it likely doesn’t exist, but certainly there are a few places
on the dark web where you can find humans being tortured- but you can also find that
on the bright web, the one we use every day.
1.
Hurtcore and Snuff There are rumors of things called “Red Rooms”,
a kind of pay per view live streaming of people being tortured or even murdered.
These might be urban legends, however, Australian Peter Scully was arrested for making films
where children were tortured.
His film company was called “No Limits Fun”, and the most infamous film was called “Daisy’s
Destruction”.
Metro describes this sick movie: “‘Daisy’s Destruction’ showed the baby girl being
tied upside down by her feet, sexually assaulted and beaten by Scully and a masked woman.”
Scully charged people on the dark web $10,000 to watch it.
Although the child in the film did not get killed, police found human remains on one
of this man’s properties.
Scully has been sentenced to life in prison for rape and sexual assault and now faces
more charges of torture, abuse against children and murder.
So, do snuff films exist?
Snopes says no.
Most who have investigated them say no.
We must remember that people being killed on camera is certainly a thing, but the films
were not made for commercial purposes.
To this day it seems there is no evidence of snuff movies, but Hurtcore certainly exists
and we think it’s about as low as you can go into the darkest part of the Internet.
Do you agree?
What has your experience been with the dark web?
Can you confirm anything we’ve discussed today?
Is there worse?
Tell us in the comments, and as always, please don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.