I spent days scrolling through dark web chat rooms – the things I saw were ‘sadistic’
Some corners of the internet are already creepy and depraved. But there is an even darker version where criminals have free reign.
The ‘dark web’ is a part of the world wide web, but is untraceable and only accessible via a specialized browser.
A YouTuber asked 100 people in chat rooms about the worst things they’ve encountered, describing the answers as “sadistic.”
Austin Patton According to him, two-thirds of respondents said they had seen child pornography, while others claimed they had seen hitmen, drugs and people being murdered.
An anonymous visitor claimed he saw “a dead body with 50 knives on it and that it had been shot more than 50 times.”
A man spent hours on the dark web asking 100 people what the worst thing they’d come across was – and the answers were disturbing
The dark web began in 2000 with the launch of Freenet, the thesis project of Ian Clarke, a student at the University of Edinburgh.
Clarke wanted to create a “distributed decentralized information storage and retrieval system” and pitched it as a new way to communicate anonymously and share files online.
That groundwork formed the basis for the Tor Project, which launched in 2002 and released a browser in 2008.
Unlike the World Wide Web, there are no publicly accessible links on the dark web and you need to know exactly where you are going.
It is only accessible via a Open-source web browser and network called Tor that allows users to surf the Internet anonymously.
There people can be who they want, say what they want and buy what they want – without consequences.
In 2022, the Department of Justice announced that it had shut down Hydra Market (Hydra), the largest and longest-running darknet market in the world.
In 2021, Hydra accounted for an estimated 80 percent of all cryptocurrency transactions on the darknet market. Since 2015, the marketplace has received approximately $5.2 billion in cryptocurrency.
Patton has shared countless videos of his bizarre encounters on the dark web, but he did an experiment by asking people about their experiences. The first conversation surprised him.
He told the person that he had a school assignment about the dark web and that he had asked people what was the worst thing they had ever seen. The person immediately said that he had seen child sex.
The YouTuber was visually shocked by the response, saying, “That’s literally our first, this is for this is going to be a bad video. This is going to be a really bad video.
A YouTuber asked 100 people in chat rooms about the worst things they’ve encountered, describing the answers as “sadistic.”
“That’s one, there are 99 more to come.”
Patton said he interviewed 100 people, but noted that it would take too long to show that everyone had revealed only the strangest and most disturbing things.
A dark web user told the YouTuber: ‘I am a seller on the dark net.
‘My services include weed transport, hacking, hitmen, Apple products at 50 percent off, credit cards with driver’s licenses, credit cards with known limits, weapons and ammunition, and US and UK passports.
‘All shipments international.’
The YouTuber also said he had spoken to people who had watched videos of others being killed, claiming they were live-streamed videos.
He also said that users have encountered pedophiles looking for their next victim, and have received explicit images of that person.
DailyMail.com visited the dark web last year and within minutes gained access to sites openly selling thousands of stolen credit cards, hard drugs and ‘hacker services’, which place child pornography on people’s computers to ‘destroy their lives’.
We also visited “hitman websites” where alleged killers offered “worldwide services” to kill people for as much as $5,000.
Austin Patton, who documents his crazy experiences on the encrypted browser, found that about 65 percent said they saw children, while others said they had committed murder
One website described itself as the “most trusted” hitman website on the dark web (it is worth noting, however, that there have been no proven cases of a hitman being hired through any of these sites).
But one of the darkest things about the hidden Internet was published in 2012.
Peter Scully is an Australian who served a 130-year prison sentence in the Philippines for making abuse videos in which toddlers are tortured. He made the videos available on pay-per-view on Tor sites.
Scully released ‘Daisy’s Destruction’ on the dark web in 2012.
The gruesome hour-long footage shows an 18-month-old girl being sexually abused by three adults.
The footage was part of a 2021 case against Josh Duggar, a former reality TV personality from TLC’s “19 Kid’s and Counting,” on child pornography charges.
It is unclear whether Patton spoke to people who experienced such horrors.
DailyMail.com visited the dark web last year and within minutes gained access to sites openly selling thousands of stolen credit cards, hard drugs and ‘hacker services’ that would plant child abuse material on people’s computers to ‘ruin their lives’.
However, he did find a chat room with people who decried the idea of hitmen being for sale on the dark web, claiming it was a false advertisement set up by law enforcement to lure people into buying such services.
A Texas woman was sentenced to prison this year after police received a tip that she was trying to hire a hitman on the dark web.
In January, James Wan was convicted of paying a hitman he found on the dark web to kill his girlfriend.
Wan then electronically transferred a 50 percent deposit of approximately $8,000 in Bitcoin to the dark web marketplace.
“What is true is that you can buy credit card cars and you can do everything through banking, but you can’t buy a Hitman,” an anonymous person told Patton.
Patton shared even more disturbing conversations, including one with a man who bragged about sexually abusing a minor.
However, other users told him that they use the browser for privacy reasons.
Peter Scully (left) is serving life in prison for abuse videos involving the torture of toddlers that he released on the dark web. Josh Duggar allegedly downloaded a video of Scully torturing an 18-month-old baby and is now serving more than 12 years in prison
“When I spoke to about 20 people, I realized that everyone was there for a different reason. The main reason was mainly internet security. Using these dark web browsers is a great comfort to them because they can remain completely anonymous,” Patton said in the YouTube video.
‘There’s always something negative, and when someone is 100 percent anonymous, their true nature comes out.
“I found that about 65 percent of the people I spoke to said the worst thing they had ever seen was children.”