I spent days scrolling through dark web chatrooms - the things I saw were 'sadistic'
- READ MORE: How to check if YOUR information is on the dark web
Some corners of the internet are already scary and depraved. But there is an even darker version where criminals run rampant.
The 'dark web' is a part of the world wide web, but is untraceable and only accessible using a specialized browser.
A YouTuber asked 100 people in chatrooms about the worst things they have encountered - and he described the answers as 'sadistic.'
Austin Patton said that two-thirds told him that they saw child porn, while others claimed they encountered hitmen, drugs and watched people get murdered.
One anonymous visitor claimed they saw 'a dead body with 50 knives over it and it got shot over 50 times.'
A man spent hours on the dark web, asking 100 people what was the worst thing they had encountered - and the answers were disturbing
The dark web begun in 2000 with the release of Freenet, the thesis project of University of Edinburgh student Ian Clarke.
Clarke aimed to create a 'Distributed Decentralized Information Storage and Retrieval System,' touting it as a new way to anonymously communicate and share files online.
That groundwork was the basis for the Tor Project, which was released in 2002 and launched a browser in 2008.
Unlike the worldwide web, there are no publicly available links and you must know exactly where you are going on the dark web.
It can only be accessed through a open-source web browser and network, called Tor, which allows users to browse the internet anonymously.
Once there, people can be whoever they want, say whatever they want and buy anything - without repercussions.
The Justice Department announced in 2022 that it had shutdown Hydra Market (Hydra), the world’s largest and longest-running darknet market.
In 2021, Hydra accounted for an estimated 80 percent of all darknet market-related cryptocurrency transactions, and since 2015, the marketplace has received approximately $5.2 billion in cryptocurrency.
Patton has shared countless videos of his bizarre encounters on the dark web, but attempted an experiment by asking people about their experiences - and the first conversation took him by surprise.
He told the person that he was doing school project about the dark web and asking people the worst thing they have seen - and the person immediately said they had seen child sex.
The YouTuber was visually horrified by the answer, saying: 'That's literally our first one, this is for this is gonna be a bad video. This is gonna be a really bad video.
A YouTuber asked 100 people in chatrooms about the worst things they have encountered - and he described the answers as 'sadistic.'
'So that's one, 99 more to go.'
While Patton said he asked 100 people, he noted it would have taken too long to show each only revealed the weirdest and most disturbing.
One dark web user told the YouTuber: 'I am vendor in the darknet.
'My services are weed shipment, hacking, hitman, apple-products 50 percent price, credit cards with driver licenses, credit cards with known limits, guns and ammo and US and UK passports.
'All shipments international.'
The YouTuber also shared that he spoke to people who watched videos of others being murdered, which they claimed were live streamed videos.
He also said that users have encountered pedophiles looking for their next victim - and received explicit images from the person.
DailyMail.com visited the dark web last year and within minutes, accessed sites openly selling thousands of stolen credit cards, hard drugs, 'hacker services' that will plant child abuse material on people's computers to 'ruin their lives.'
We also accessed 'hitman' websites where alleged killers offered 'worldwide services' to murder people for as little as $5,000.
Austin Patton , who documents his crazy experiences on the encrypted browser, found about 65 percent said they saw children, while others said murder
One website described itself as the 'most reputable' hitman website on the dark web (it's worth noting, however, that there have not been any cases where it's been proven that a murderer was contracted via one of these sites).
But one of the darkest things the hidden internet was published in 2012.
Peter Scully is an Australian national jailed for more than 130 years in the Philippines for abuse videos involving the torture of toddlers, which he made available on a pay-per-view basis on Tor sites.
Scully released 'Daisy's Destruction' on the dark web in 2012.
The vile one-hour-long footage shows an 18-month-old being sexually assaulted by three adults.
The footage was part of a case against Josh Duggar, a former reality TV personality from TLC's '19 Kid's and Counting,' in 2021 over child porn allegations.
It is unclear if Patton spoke to anyone who encountered such horrors.
DailyMail.com visited the dark web last year and within minutes, accessed sites openly selling thousands of stolen credit cards, hard drugs, 'hacker services' that will plant child abuse material on people's computers to 'ruin their lives'
However, he did find one chatroom of people who denounced the idea that the dark web has hitmen for sale, saying they are false adverts set up by law enforcement to trap those willing to purchase such services.
A Texas woman was sentenced to prison this year after law enforcement were tipped off that she offered to hire a hitman on the dark web.
In January, James Wan has been sentenced for paying a hitman he found on the dark web to murder his girlfriend.
Wan then electronically transferred a 50 percent down payment of approximately $8,000 worth of Bitcoin to the dark web marketplace.
'What is real though is that you can buy credit cars and you can buy everything banking-wise, but you can't buy hitman,' a no-name person told Patton.
Patton shared other disturbing conversations that included a man bragging about sexually abusing a minor.
Other users, however, told him that they use the browser because of its privacy.
Peter Scully (left) is spending life in prison for abuse videos involving the torture of toddlers he released on the dark web. Josh Duggar allegedly downloaded a video made by Scully that shows an 18-month-old being tortured and is now spending more than 12 years in jail
'I realized that after talking to about 20 people at first and noticing that everybody's there for different reasons the biggest reason of all is mostly internet security using these dark web browsers is actually a big piece of mind to them because it allows them to be completely anonymous,' Patton said in the YouTube video.
'There's always a negative and when somebody is 100 percent anonymous their true colors come out.
'I noticed about 65 percent of the people I was talking [with] about said the worst thing [said] they've seen were children.'
