If you feel like you’ve binged on every true crime podcast out there, we promise that the Kill List will rekindle your enthusiasm for a brilliant and terrifying true story that pits a small team of journalists and an ethical hacker against organised Dark Web criminals, potential murderers, and even numerous police forces.
The podcast, produced by Wondery, is narrated by British tech journalist Carl Miller, who in the midst of the Covid pandemic was approached by an ethical hacker who had unearthed a secret kill list in which hundreds of people from all across the world were listed.
With the police unable to use evidence derived from hacking, and then unwilling to believe the story retold to them by the journalist, the duo are forced to team up a behavioral psychologist, as well as journalists from as far afield as Canada, Switzerland, and numerous Asian countries in order to inform the people on the list that they are being targetted.
The twist, however—and we promise we’re not spoiling anything here—is that the list itself comes from a murder-for-hire website, whose ‘only’ illegality is spamming people who are desperate enough to get rid of their loved ones, coworkers, and abusers, out of cryptocurrency. Yet, as the Miller realises, many of these would-be murderers do not give up upon realising they’ve been scammed, instead taking matters into their own hands.
More worryingly, there were also actual hitmen in possession of the details who would contact those that had been scammed to offer their services in exchange for payment. In some cases, these offers were accepted and murders made to look like accidents or suicides ensued.
