Daniel has been missing for 2 weeks now, the people who have him want £23,000 in bitcoin if we want to see him again...
I'm posting here through one of my old botnets in an attempt to avoid being found by this group of people. They call themselves 'The Winning Cause'. I'm quite lost as to what to do now; the police wont help, so i'm writing to you reddit as i know people have found their solutions on here before.
Let me explain the events that have taken place over these two weeks:
Daniel and I are both the tech-savvy geeks at our school, whether it was programming or seeing if your partner is cheating by hacking their snapchat, we were the people to call. Often our head-mistress would ask for help when she'd forgotten her password!
But enough patting myself and Dan on the back, the main point is we got bored of doing the same mundane things everday, so we turned to the deep web...
Now before you dismiss this as one of the ordinary deep web stories where someone/group of people go on it and get doxxed. We knew what we were doing and had been given several warnings from people on other forums we went on. It wasn't our skill that let us down. It was Dan's tendency to gloat.
Contrary to what I described earlier about Daniel and I hacking for other people, we are usually ethical about what we do, heck we even helped companies on bugcrowd! That's why we decided we would go looking for red-rooms and other places which would make the average Joe lose faith in humanity.
And no we didn't go there to watch these things. We went around either: attempting to take the website down, tracking the people who ran them, or feeding info back to the police. Despite popular belief, the people behind these websites may be dangerous, but do not put the effort into making their websites secure. They just care about the revenue.
However Daniel made it a routine of posting about dark-net sites we'd taken down every week after we had managed to remove one, despite my warnings to him, he did however agree to keep my name out of it, which is why now he's the one who's been kidnapped and not me...
We had found a seemingly boring looking forum called 'The Winning Cause' and I quickly realised that this forum page was a front for the real thing, I let Daniel do his thing and he found a login page.
As soon as he did a messagebox showed up in the bottom right corner of the page, it asked "Are you sure you're in the right place", we both glanced at each other as we had never encountered something like this before. There were only two options. Yes. and No.
Curiosity getting the better of us we clicked and it was a directory of links to streams where people were being slaughtered, some had videos dismembered limbs with blood seeping out of various cuts whilst some had people being shocked with a jumper cable. It was sickening, we quickly realized that people were paying bitcoin to see these streams.
I had setup a crawler to find links between different bitcoin addresses and would also see if the private key was listed anywhere on the dark-net, a lot of the groups we'd come across would list them somewhere in an admin section.
Sure enough these guys were the same, we took $23,0000 from these guys in total and gave links to their websites to the police. Daniel sure enough bragged about it the next week in his blog but I wasn't even bothered, I was just glad we took these guys down.
However some time after that, Daniel called me asking whether I had changed his social media password's (we had each other's passwords as we would routinely use our accounts to practice hacking), I told him I hadn't, he then told me that he was going to get a reset email for it and I told him that I'd check my account just in case.
I put the phone down and went through all of my accounts when I heard Daniel scream down the phone "THEY FOUND US, THEY FUCKING FOUND US, OH SHIT, OH SHIT...", at this point I'd almost forgotten about 'The Winning Cause' until he told me just then.
I was right, I was fucking right, he never should've bragged about it, the reset email he'd requested never showed up in his inbox, when he went to check his email, his inbox was filled with emails saying "You shouldn't have taken our money! We will win, We will prevail!".
I told him not to stress about it too much even though I myself was panicking as well, he told me that they were going to give him one chance to pay back all the money we took within the next hour, there was only one problem...
We kept all the bitcoin private key's that we had on an encrypted flash drive and Daniel keeps that usb at his dad's house. He wasn't due to see his Dad until tomorrow. I told him that he could just get it tomorrow and send the payment straight away and that with luck they'll accept the money and fuck off. I couldn't have been more wrong...
I went to his house the next day to see whether he'd send the payment. I knocked on his door and his dad answered. He had tears sreaming down his face, "Richard... have you seen Daniel", my heart dropped, no way did they kidnap him.
"No, I thought he'd be here", "He isn't, but there's some weird writing on the wall of his room written in red. I've already called the police but you need to see this.", I went up to his room with his dad expecting the worst...
In his room, it said "Never make us wait! The Winning Cause will prevail!" and beneath it was a piece of paper with writing, it was a bitcoin address and the words "It seems your friend spent the money, you have a month to earn it and send it to us, or else!"
The police didn't find any DNA in the room apart from Daniel's family's and mine, they said they were going to open a search but I knew that this was beyond the police. Reddit, I need your help...
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