A 42-year-old woman has been charged with a murder-for-hire plot after allegedly offering a man sexual favors and $10,000 to kill her lover’s wife and adult daughter.
Yue Zhou, of Flushing, Queens, was accused of offering cryptocurrency and cash to successfully execute her double-murder plot, without having any idea that the dark web website she was using was fictitious.
Zhou, a Chinese national who worked as a massage therapist at spas in several states, also had a dating profile on Match.com, sources told DailyMail.com.
She was arrested June 5 in Virginia and transferred to New York on July 3. On Monday, Judge Robert M. Levy formally charged her in federal court in Brooklyn and she pleaded not guilty. She is being held in jail and has not filed a request for bail.
The two victims, whom he tried to kill with the fake hitman, were unharmed.
Yue Zhou, 42, of Flushing, was accused of offering cryptocurrency, cash and even sexual favors to successfully execute her double-murder plot, completely unaware that the dark web website she was using was fictitious.
The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York said “newer technologies,” including Bitcoin, were used to carry out the scheme and that “the end result would have been a cold-blooded murder like the ones before.”
“His depraved plan was only foiled because the website he used to organise the contract killing was a scam,” he said.
Zhou allegedly used an alias ‘BIGTREE’ and sought to hire a hitman between March 25, 2019, and April 4, 2019.
At the time, Zhou was having an affair with her married lover and had become emotionally invested in the relationship, expressing her desire to marry and have children with him, the documents state.
Unaware that the hitman’s website he was using was fake and run by a third party, he allegedly completed the financial transactions necessary to further his murder-for-hire scheme.
During the investigation, special agents from Homeland Security Investigations confirmed that a cryptocurrency transaction related to the ‘BIGTREE’ order occurred.
To pay for the murder, he contacted a bitcoin exchange service that acted as a middleman and was based in Ukraine. He made a payment of $5,000 in bitcoins to the website.
He then delivered another $5,000 or so in cash to a middleman in Brooklyn. After both transactions were made, he emailed the hitman’s website administrator to confirm that the payments had been received.
After making the payment, he proceeded to give a detailed description of his lover’s wife, victim number one.
She gave the fake killer the woman’s home address, her work schedule and the best time of day to kill, so that her lover would have an alibi for the murder.
She went on to claim the murder of her boyfriend’s daughter, victim number two.
When he began to suspect that the Hitman website was a scam, he began sending several disturbing threats to the Hitman website administrator, threatening physical and sexual violence against the administrator and his family.
In December 2019, Zhou contacted his lover’s daughter, who was from a previous marriage, and sent her threatening messages, according to the documents.
She was arraigned Monday in federal court in Brooklyn.
He allegedly told them: “Warning: I will cut your body into a hundred pieces if you continue to fail to assume your responsibilities. I know where you live. I watch you all the time.”
In February 2021, Zhou texted a neighbor of his lover’s daughter with a proposal of $10,000 and sex to kill the daughter and dispose of her body in a lake.
According to court documents, she said: “I’m going to throw her body in the lake. I really don’t want to see her again.”
On or around January 2, 2021, cellular data revealed that Zhou communicated with the second victim’s neighbor from Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Zhou previously worked for short periods of time at several spas across the country that are linked to illicit sex work, including a spa in Cheyenne, Wyoming, called Asian Relax Sap on West Lincolnway.
The spa owner and an employee were arrested in April 2021 for prostitution following an extensive investigation that The spa workers were found to be offering and performing sexual acts in exchange for money, local reports show.
Zhou worked at Cheyenne Spa in 2020 and 2021.
On June 5, she was arrested at a spa in Virginia pursuant to the arrest warrant issued with her indictment, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Prior to her arrest, Zhou had also worked at a spa in Maryland that was also linked to illicit sex work, according to local police.
Zhou, who faces a lengthy sentence if convicted, is a citizen of China and does not have permanent legal status in the United States, and is therefore considered a serious flight risk.
Evidence against Zhou included messages to the hitman website, text message correspondence, cell site data, IP address information, witness testimony with identification of the defendant, cryptocurrency tracing analysis and transaction details.
“Although the defendant has no documented criminal history in the United States, her involvement in a depraved plot to kill Victim-1 speaks volumes about her, as does her subsequent attack on Victim-2, the adult daughter of Victim-1’s spouse,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
His next court date is scheduled for July 31.