NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) – A Queens woman was charged on Monday for allegedly hiring a hitman on the dark web to murder her lover’s wife, according to the Department of Justice.
Yue Zhou, 42, of Flushing, allegedly sought to hire a hitman through a murder-for-hire website on the dark web to murder the unidentified victim who was the spouse of Zhou’s then-romantic partner in 2019.
Using the alias, “BIGTREE,” on the website, Zhou placed an order to have the victim murdered, according to court documents. She allegedly contacted a Bitcoin service in Ukraine to make a $5,000 payment to the website, which was actually a scam operated by a third party with no real hitman. Prosecutors said she was unaware of this at the time. Zhou then provided a detailed description of the victim, including her home, work schedule, and the best time to target her.
After making the payment, Zhou allegedly grew suspicious that the hitman website was a scam. She then sent messages to the website administrator, threatening physical and sexual violence against the administrator and his family, according to the court documents.
According to court documents, Zhou also tried to use the hitman hiring website to get them to murder another victim, her lover’s adult daughter.
Court documents also revealed that Zhou contacted her lover’s daughter in December 2019 with threatening messages: “warning: I will cut your body into hundred pieces if you guys still don’t take responsibilities. [sic] I know where you live. I watch you all time.”
In February 2021, Zhou allegedly also sent a text message to a neighbor of her romantic partner’s adult daughter seeking to hire that neighbor to kill her as well. Zhou allegedly offered the neighbor $10,000 and sexual favors in exchange for killing the daughter and disposing of the body in a lake.
“As alleged, the defendant took affirmative steps to hire a hit man to carry out the ruthless killing of the wife of her romantic partner,” Breon Peace, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York said. “Her depraved plan was only thwarted because the web site she used to set up the murder-for-hire was a scam. Although the scheme involved newer technologies like the Internet and Bitcoin, the end result would have been age-old cold-blooded murder.”
Zhou was arrested on June 5 in Virginia and removed to New York on July 3.
She is being charged with murder-for-hire.