I've written a couple of books about the dark web, which means I've spent a bit of pretty much every day of the past eight years poking around inside. Over the years, I spoke to, interviewed, and even visited many dark web identities, drug dealers, and the operators of the darknet markets mostly. I attended a trial of one of the most evil people on the planet, Lux, the owner of Hurt to the Core, a child hurting site. Turns out to be a friendless, unhappy kid who built his evil empire from his childhood bedroom with his parents, blissfully unaware of what was happening under their noses. The only time I've ever even felt slightly in danger despite all this nosing around in there was when I helped uncover a hitman scam. The owner of Besa Mafia, the most profitable murder-for-hire site in history, came after me when I started writing about him. He made loads of thread, but that wasn't scary, as I had access to the back door of his site thanks to a friendly hacker and knew he didn't really want to hurt anybody. It took a bit of a darker turn when he told people who had signed up to work as a hitman on his site, and who he made video of themselves burning cards with signs on them to advertise how legit his site was, then never sent them the promised money for doing so, that I was the owner of the site who had ripped them off. That could have become ugly, but luckily even the thugs weren't dumb enough to believe him. The only other time I've been a bit nervous was when meeting Homeland Security and wanting to have a friendly meeting with me on one of my trips to the US to attend a trial. They were friendly, but scary too.