Red rooms are known as shows on the dark web where people are tortured, murder or experimented with according to the demands of the viewer for which the hosts are paid a premium price in cryptocurrencies.
But do they actually exist or is it a myth? Let’s find out!
Image: A site on the dark web claiming to be a red room.
If you navigate a dark web directory such as ‘The Hidden Wiki’, chances are you’ll come across a red room link. Upon visiting it, you’ll be presented with a message of sending a certain amount of Bitcoin to an address to access the Red Room.
Bitcoin is the preferred payment method on black markets and such illegal business because of the anonymity it provides although now even that has been debunked.
However, it’d be common sense to realize that once you send your coins to the address, there is no guarantee of the site owners granting access to the user(if it even exists), no escrow protection exists. This raises several red flags and doesn’t take half a brain to realize the bait here. No one has ever provided evidence of their existence which further makes us believe that these are outright scams.
Exposed Pedophiles & Red Rooms
One popular theory by people who claim that red rooms exist is the conviction of an infamous pedophile named Peter Scully. Peter is known to have tortured and committed horrific sexual crimes against children all while recording them for people to see.
Image: Peter Scully
As Mike Pearl from The Vice states,
According to reports from the Australian media, Scully moved to the Philippines in 2011 after being charged with fraud. While living there, he allegedly began making pornographic films of underage girls for a depraved global market; he was reportedly paid $10,000 (over $7,000 USD) by those who wanted to view his most notorious film, “The Destruction of Daisy,” which allegedly features the torture of a baby under the age of two.
Scully was tracked down using the clues in the videos and by his Australian accent with access to the videos being only with the Police, not released to the public.
Technical Point-of-View & Conclusion
Apart from this, no evidence has been recorded that confirms the existence of red room. If we view this from a technical point of view, it makes sense. Think about it, the TOR network passes traffic through 3 separate nodes.
Image Source: Bitcoin Isle
The first one being the user’s computer, the second one being the bridge or the middle node and the third one being the exit node. This considerably slows down the network as compared to the regular Internet speed and for this reason, it is not practical to stream videos on the TOR network.
Rob from The Metro sums this up pretty well here in the following words,
If ‘Pay per View’ torture sites do exist, it’s almost certain that they don’t work via Tor (the software used to access dark web sites) – which is too slow to stream video live.
So the next time someone claims dark rooms exist, just let them know that it may be possible but definitely not on the dark web. Communication carried out through the dark web to facilitate their operations is indeed possible but not streaming them.
