Turkish criminal networks are advertising contract killings, recruiting children, selling weapons and arranging migrant-smuggling routes to Europe through platforms such as Telegram, an investigation published Tuesday by the T24 news website found.
Groups linked to the Daltonlar, Casperlar and Baygaralar gangs have turned messaging groups into a market for crimes ranging from assault and murder to money laundering, drug sales and theft of personal data, the report found.
At Wednesday’s exchange rate of 48.3 lira to the dollar, posts reviewed by T24 offered to hurt people for as little as 10,000 lira ($210) and priced killings between 700,000 and 7 million lira ($14,000 to $145,000).
In one exchange a user seeking 7 million lira for a killing lowered the price to 3.5 million lira ($72,000) after being told others would carry it out for 1 million to 2 million lira ($21,000 to $41,000).
Other notices sought a recruit under 18 in İstanbul’s Esenyurt district and advertised a 15-member team in the western province of İzmir for debt collection, shootings and attacks intended to break victims’ bones.
The call for minors cited sentence reductions available to children under Turkish law as the reason for seeking them.
A law that took effect August 18 allows courts to deny age-based reductions to children aged 15 to 17 convicted of murder or forms of intentional injury that cause death or lasting harm.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned that longer prison terms would not stop gangs from using children and called for social services, school support and aid for children exploited by criminal groups.
The findings come after prosecutors in İstanbul said in December that the Daltonlar and Barış Boyun networks had used 74 minors in 65 cases involving murders, shootings and armed robberies.
Italian police arrested Boyun in 2024 during a joint operation targeting his network in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Turkey.
T24 also found advertisements offering M4 rifles fitted with silencers for 185,000 lira ($4,000), dynamite by weight and devices intended to block tracking signals.
One seller described packing Kalashnikov rifles in straw beneath cartons of eggs before sending them by courier.
Other users described laundering illegal gambling proceeds through shell companies and offered account holders up to 17,500 lira ($360) a day for each bank account, along with food and hotel costs.
The groups offered access to Turkey’s population registry data for 2,000 lira ($40), fake bank accounts, virtual point-of-sale terminals and cyber intrusion services.
Migrant-smuggling advertisements promised nightly trips between İstanbul and Edirne, a province bordering Greece and Bulgaria, paying drivers 30,000 lira ($620) per trip and marketing the smuggling of people to Germany, France and the United Kingdom.
