Closing out what is perhaps the last public saga of the now-defunct Besa Mafia ‘hitman’ site ring, a Tampa Bay woman was sentenced to six and a half years in prison on Wednesday for using one such darknet site to order the murder of her ex-boyfriend’s wife.
A US District Judge ordered DeAnna Marie Stinson, 51, to serve the time and pay $12,000 in restitution for attempting to hire a hitman through one of the well-known fake hitman sites on the dark web — whose operators had recently been apprehended by Romanian authorities.
Stinson admitted to attempting to hire what she believed was a professional assassin from a Besa Mafia site in exchange for payments totaling $12,307 in Bitcoin. She also provided a photo of the intended victim, along with their name and address. The “assassin” turned out to be a US federal investigator who was likely tipped off to Stinson’s intentions by one of the site’s admins.
“I cited the old adage, ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,’” said Federal Defender Alec Hall to the judge during Stinson’s sentencing, adding, “I think that’s what happened in this case.”
Stinson pleaded guilty to the charges in January.
Sprawling across a number of similar-looking darknet sites, the Besa Mafia operation has been known to exist since at least 2015, and famously suffered a data breach in May 2016 in which they were firmly outed as a scam. On the site which Stinson traversed, “death by shooting” started at a rate of $5,000, while a “beating” was listed for $2,000. At the top of the supposed services list was “death by sniper,” which was priced at $20,000.
The Besa Mafia admins were captured earlier this month as the result of a US-based investigation.