A Nevada woman has been sentenced to five years in prison for conspiring to murder her husband. According to court documents, Kristy Lynn Felkins confessed to paying Bitcoin on the dark web to hire a hitman to kill her ex-husband.

Thirty-eight-year-old Kristy Lynn Felkins from Fallon, Nevada, used Bitcoin to pay $5,000 in 2016 to have her ex-husband murdered in order to get a hold of a large life insurance payment.

Felkins said she wanted her ex-husband killed while he was traveling in Chico, California. She also confessed to offering to pay an extra $4,000 to up the timeline of the murder. “I stand to get his retirement, our house, and possibly a large life insurance payout,” she said in court. 

Court documents show that O’Hara found the hitman-for-hire on a dark web website called Besa Mafia. There, users can anonymously hire hitmen using Bitcoin to kill people.

Felkins instructed the assassin to make the murder look like “it was a mugging gone wrong,” and she stated that she did not care if her former husband’s new girlfriend was also injured as a result of the operation. Luckily, the site was a scam and no hitman existed. 

There were no details on how law enforcement got in on the transaction, but Felkins accepted a guilty plea earlier in March as part of an arrangement with federal prosecutors to avoid a trial. If the case had gone to trial and Felkins was found guilty, the sentencing was likely going to be a longer one as she faced a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Now, a district judge has asked Felkins to surrender in September to start her 5-year prison sentence. Additionally, she is required to undergo three years of supervision upon her release.

While cryptocurrencies are known to give people more freedom and privacy with their money, that same anonymity and decentralization also open the door for many criminal and unethical acts.

There have been many cases in the past of people using Bitcoin to hire hitmen on the dark web. However, it’s unclear how many of these dark web hitmen are real or just scammers looking to collect Bitcoin payments.

Earlier in the year, a US doctor was caught hiring hitmen on the dark web to kidnap his wife and beat up his former colleague. The doctor, Ronald Craig Ilg, was sentenced to eight years in prison and was ordered to pay $25,000 in restitution and a $100,000 fine for paying $60,000 worth of Bitcoin to hitmen on the dark web. 

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