A New Jersey resident, John Michael Musbach, has been sentenced to 78 months in jail following his try to rent a hitman by way of the darkish net to assassinate a minor he had beforehand sexually exploited.
The target of this heinous act was to forestall the 14-year-old sufferer from testifying towards him. Musbach, 34, paid over $20,000 in bitcoin to a fraudulent murder-for-hire web site on the darkish net, aspiring to have the kid murdered.
His actions had been uncovered in January 2019 when Homeland Safety Investigations (HSI) brokers in New Jersey obtained information detailing communications between the directors of the darkish web page and its customers, who had been looking for to rent hitmen.
In Could 2016, a consumer beneath the pseudonym “agentisai” was discovered to be looking for the homicide of a 14-year-old baby. After confirming {that a} minor was an appropriate goal and disclosing a price range of $20,000, agentisai transferred 40.64 bitcoin to the positioning and positioned an order.
The positioning’s directors knowledgeable agentisai that the hitman assigned to his order had been arrested for cocaine possession en path to executing the hit. They then requested a further $5,000 in bitcoin to assign the order to a extra dependable hitman.
Nonetheless, after a number of unsuccessful makes an attempt to withdraw his funds, agentisai requested a bitcoin refund. The positioning’s directors then revealed the fraudulent nature of the positioning and claimed they’d forwarded their customers’ data to regulation enforcement.
Investigations by Coinbase revealed that the bitcoin deal with utilized by agentisai was registered to Musbach, who had additionally used the account to switch the 40.64 bitcoin to the murder-for-hire web site.
Musbach had initiated a sexual relationship with the meant sufferer in the summertime of 2015, which concerned the trade of specific movies and photographs. The kid’s dad and mom found the abuse in September of the identical 12 months and reported it to the police.
Musbach was arrested in March 2016, and his digital units had been seized. He pleaded responsible in October 2017 and obtained a two-year suspended sentence in February 2018. Additional investigations in October 2019 revealed that Musbach had been researching methods to commit homicide.
Musbach was arrested once more in August 2020 and charged with knowingly and deliberately utilizing a facility of interstate and international commerce with the intent to commit homicide. He pleaded responsible to the cost in February 2023. Along with his jail sentence, US District Choose Joseph H. Rodriguez sentenced Musbach to a few years of supervised launch and imposed a high-quality of $30,000.