Centralizing murder-for-hire is a good way to get caught, scam or not. I believe Kuklinski did it for a while but it's not a savvy way to go about your business these days.
There have been more than a few cases of people putting ads for wetwork on Craigslist that were successfully responded to. There was even one bizarre case in which a teenaged girl put a successful hit out on herself.
> Which makes sense from an economic point of view - there's much more incentive running a (relatively inoffensive) scam and making boatloads of money
Not everybody is intelligent/skilled/capable enough for organized crime. To a lot of people, a mere $5000 is enough money to get caught up on their late rent, car payments and child support. Pull-trigger-get-5k is a simple procedure, moreso than running elaborate darkweb portals and fucking around with Bitcoin.
Contract killing hasn't changed much over the ages. You don't need to retain a celebrity hitman, you just need to get in contact with some desperate nobody willing to do anything to make ends meet. Morality and ethics are luxuries for those who can afford it.
And to be clear, I'm not saying murder for hire on the Internet is a thing; I'm just mildly surprised nobody seems to have done it yet, especially now that cryptocurrencies have pretty much solved the largest problem of how to get paid.
-It's easier to manufacture your own drugs than commit murder
-It's easier to go unnoticed by law enforcement manufacturing, selling or buying drugs than going unnoticed with murder
-Enforcement authorities around the world are much more willing to cooperate with each other when it comes to solving murder rather than busting someone's MDMA lab
-The market for drug consumption is much larger than the market for hitmen (fortunately!) and it's easier to reach out for the former audience rather than the latter
-There are much more third parties willing to act as escrow for drug trade rather than hitmen services
-There's a moral case to be had about leaving drug use alone (victimless crime and all that), as opposed to murderers or murder instigators which are universally reviled; there are much fewer people willing to engage in a hypothetical hitman market than there are with a drug market
-A review system can actually work with drugs because of the large demand and relatively risk-free aspect for buyers; a good seller can quickly build a reputation, while a bad seller will get buried by bad reviews. Can you imagine a hitman customer writing an Amazon-style review over the person he had murdered?
>And to be clear, I'm not saying murder for hire on the Internet is a thing; I'm just mildly surprised nobody seems to have done it yet, especially now that cryptocurrencies have pretty much solved the largest problem of how to get paid.
There just isn't enough demand for it to be worth the risk and hassle. As I said, any hitman stupid enough to set up a front store is begging to be busted by undercover cops posing as "customers".
Well that seems false. You literally need no equipment to commit murder. If you have no connection with the victim, it's even easy to get away with it with a few precautions.
Drug synthesis is much, much harder.
The rest of your points seem mostly sound. The low demand for murder services is probably the most pertinent reason for the difference.
A bigger problem might be that it's not as easy to for sure kill someone as most people think, especially if you want to avoid leaving any evidence at all. It only takes one error to kill your career. It also doesn't help that the public's image of assassins (super professional bald guys with enormous resources) is pretty much completely wrong. Actual assassins are much more likely to be drug addicted flat broke bums.
I think this overstates the case. Up to 40% of murders go unsolved in any given year. Most murders are committed by people the victims know, that's why they're "easy" to solve. If you don't know your victims, there's virtually no way for the police to link you to the crime unless you make a colossal mistake, like divulging our identity or your contact info to the person who hired you, as the police will be looking at them closely.
DNA and fingerprints, unless you're already a criminal where those are registered, would only establish you as serial murderer whose identity is unknown.
Or a cop happens to be sitting one street over and hears a gunshot and gets to the scene just as you're stepping out of the building.
Or the victim is paranoid and has an itchy trigger finger.
Or the cops are investigating the victim's family and associates and notice a weird pattern in their bank account.
There's a lot of ways a killing can go wrong. Even if the odds of any one killing going bad are small, the cumulative chance of an error creeps up with each job. Worse, it's hard to jack up your prices really high to reduce the number of jobs you have to do because the more money moves around the more scrutiny it receives.
Interesting that you assume an assassin's preferred method of execution is a gun or other violent means of execution. That seems like the last resort of anyone competent to me.
There's probably a lot fewer people who think that about the hitman business.
As for ordering drugs, the legal consequences vary a lot depending on the country's jurisdiction. There's also such a thing as a priority list in law enforcement, and they presumably care a lot more about murders than drug use, so one will draw much more attention than the other.
*Yes, readily available. There's nothing "dark" about a website that can only being accessible through special software, it's been a thing since the days of Usenet and BBS.