A man who went on the Dark Web to hire a hitman to murder his former lover's boyfriend in a staged car accident was sentenced yesterday to five years in jail.

Before handing down the sentence, District Judge Shaiffudin Saruwan said that Allen Vincent Hui Kim Seng's offence showed "cold-bloodedness" and premeditation.

The 47-year-old pleaded guilty in July to one count of intentionally abetting "Camorra Hitmen" to kill Mr Tan Han Shen, 30.

The website's name could be a reference to the Camorra, an Italian mafia-type crime syndicate.

Last week, defence lawyer Lee Teck Leng pleaded for a sentence of 2½ years in jail, stressing that "Camorra Hitmen" was a scam, and highlighted articles to support this notion. One of them, which appeared in July last year on British newspaper The Times' website, was entitled "Hire-a-hitman website is a scam and its owner has made a killing".

The other, entitled "The unbelievable tale of a fake hitman, a kill list, a darknet vigilante... and a murder", was published in Wired magazine last December.

Yesterday, Judge Shaiffudin said that Mr Lee's argument that "Camorra Hitmen" was a scam was not a mitigating factor as Hui truly believed he had engaged a hitman. The risk management executive started an extramarital relationship with Ms Ng Woan Man, 30, on April 22, 2016, but she ended the affair in February last year when she realised he had no intention of leaving his wife. Ms Ng started dating Mr Tan about two months later.

On May 6 last year, Hui went on the Dark Web, accessed the "Camorra Hitmen" website and asked for Mr Tan's right hand to be cut off.

He later asked for the younger man to be killed in a staged car accident, and the murder was to take place between 7pm and 8pm on May 22 that year. Hui was told that he would need to pay the hitman only after the job was completed.

Before that, he had to transfer sufficient bitcoins into his account on the "Camorra Hitmen" website as proof of his ability to pay.

The court heard that, meanwhile, a "British vigilante" known as Mr Chris Monteiro provided United States-based media company CBS with details about conversations from the "hitmen website".

On May 12 last year, a CBS journalist contacted the Singapore Embassy in Washington and informed it about the "hit".

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs alerted the Singapore Police Force, and officers arrested Hui five days later. No one was injured or killed in this case.