A foreign woman living in New York went shopping for a freelance killer who might be able to rid herself of a troublesome wife of a lover and her grown daughter, according to allegations leveled on June 8 by federal prosecutors.
According to the US Attorney’s Office in New York’s Eastern District, 42 year-old Yue Zhou of China, who now lives in the Flushing area of Queens, New York, made an appearance before Robert M. Levy, a U.S. Magistrate Judge who holds court in Brooklyn’s federal courthouse, there to face charges relating to the murder-for-hire plot.
According to the allegation documents filed with the court, Zhou arranged, through a Ukranian crypto exchange, to pay $5000 equivalen in Bitcoin to a hit man website. The transaction was completed through a middleman based in Brooklyn. She also allegedly provided details about her lover’s wife’s appearance domicile, work schedule, regular targeting opportunities, and Zhou’s own schedule so that the hit man would strike at a time when Zhou would have an alibi.
Zhou also tried to add her lover’s daughter—a grown adult resulting from a previous marriage—to the hit list, according to prosecutors. She later allegedly sent harassing and threatening messages to the daughter in question, ending with the caution “I watch you all the time.”
The transactions allegedly took place between March 5 and April 4 of 2019.
Fortunately for Zhou’s intended victims, the hit man website was a scam. It did not employ any actual hit men, nor were hit men members of its community, according to court documents. Zhou only began to suspect that she’d been scammed after she had finished the transaction. Enraged, she threatened the website’s administrator and his family with violence of both the physical and the intimate sorts.
The cryptocurrency transaction was reportedly confirmed by special agents of Homeland Security Investigations, who audited the public transaction records—known as “the blockchain—that form the backbone of all cryptocurrency technology.
