Some features of cryptocurrency make them ideal for illicit activities, like paying bad guys to do their job. Recently, a man from New Jersey had accepted in Federal Court on Thursday, February 2, 2023, about trying to hire an assassin on the dark web for killing a 14-year-old boy for $20,000 worth of Bitcoin. In a case related to child pornography, according to the Justice Department.
The Case
John Michale Musbach, aged 31, from Haddonfield, New Jersey, had pleaded guilty to a murder-for-hire charge. Levied upon by the US District Court in Camden, NJ. Accepting his visit to a website that offered killings in exchange for Bitcoin. He is about to be sentenced on June 13, 2023, and is expected to face 10 years behind bars.
Back in the summer of 2015, Mr. Musbach exchanged sexually explicit photographs with the victim, who was just a 13-year-old kid living in New York. Resulting in child pornography charges against Mr. Musbach; hence he decided “to have the victim killed so that the victim could not testify against him in the pending criminal case,” said the Justice Department in a press release.
The case reached its conclusion on October 11, 2017, when Mr. Musbach pleaded guilty to endangering the child’s welfare by sexual contact. Causing a two-year sentence with parole supervision for life on February 9, 2018.
Timeline
During a Thursday night interview Rocco C. Cipparone, the lawyer for Mr. Musbach, said that his client, who had worked as an IT professional, had “decided to put this matter behind him and accepted his responsibility without a trial.”
With the information at hand, including chat logs and in-depth information from the murder-for-hire website. The prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey circumspect the details of how Mr. Musbach ineptly tried to have the child killed.
The case came to light in 2015 when the boy’s parents discovered the incident and reported it to the police in New York. NJ officers worked swiftly and arrested him in the child pornography case.
The culprit became desperate by May 7, 2016, and started communicating with admins of the murder-for-hire website on the dark web. Their homepage reads,” We have professional hit men available throughout the entire U.S., Canada, and Europe, and you can hire a contract killer easily.”
Initially, the culprit wanted to buy a gun for the job, but later changed the mood and went to hire the guy instead. Given that the target was a 14-year-old boy, he was worried about the deal’s acceptance, given the budget of only $20,000.
When the website accepted the deal, Musbach continued talking through May 20, 2016, with the admin, who informed them about a gang member capable of doing the job. But about 7 p.m. that very day a message was received from the website saying:
Our site is a scam; we pass customers and target information to law enforcement.” Admin asserted that if more money were not received, law enforcement would be informed. Although the lawyer tried telling on about the fraud from the website, adding that “does not affect what his state of mind was.”
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2023/02/03/us-hitman-paid-20-k-in-btc-to-kill-a-teenager-attempt-failed/