A disturbing new website CrowdHit.com is online and it's been called the Uber for contract killers. CrowdHit lets people post and crowdfund a contract to have someone killed, then professional or other killers for hire can browse the website and pick the jobs they want.
FBI investigators learned of the site when an informant told them about a CrowdHit out on former Federal Prosecutor Richard Spalding. Spalding is no stranger to death threats and agreed to have his name made public in the effort to fight and dismantle CrowdHit.
Other law enforcement and political figures whose names we've declined to print were warned by the FBI about their appearance on the website. Our crack team of investigators went through the site and found over Two Hundred CrowdHits out on political figures just in the US. Some hits had already taken in tens of thousands of dollars and the contractors had already accepted the jobs. Other CrowdHits had not collected much money at all, like the one out on a popular comedian in Las Vegas, which has only collected a few hundred dollars, and seemed to have little chance of being picked up anytime soon. A few hits, especially on unpopular political figures, continued to rake in donations even after the contract had been accepted, but not yet completed.
Boris Nemtsov who was assassinated last year in Moscow just yards from the Kremlin, was rumored to have been killed by an assassin hired on KillVox, which was the earliest version of what has morphed into the more socially integrated CrowdHit.
Interpol investigator, Brian Kriegen, says not much can be done with a site that originated in China and is now hosted on Russian servers where a Wild West atmosphere protects the web hosting companies and creators. Still the FBI and Interpol investigators are vowing to track down the owners of the site. "We can make sure that if they are ever in the US or a country where we have extradition partners, they have a better than even chance of being captured and prosecuted," Kriegen said.
The site has been up for six months now and investigators don't know exactly how many hits have actually been carried out, since contracts are deleted once they are completed and payment is made. Most of the contracts have been in Asia, but the service has become hugely popular in Europe and the US.
Congress is demanding to have their own investigation to determine if and why the FBI delayed notifying members of Congress and The Senate who had been targeted on CrowdHit.
