Transcript
00:00:00 I was on the run for four months, stole $600,000.
00:00:03 I was in Las Vegas, Nevada.
00:00:05 One day I had stolen the night before
00:00:07 and stolen 160K out of ATMs.
00:00:10 Went in the next morning, I woke up,
00:00:12 signed on to cartersmarket.com,
00:00:14 which was ran by Max Butler, the Iceman.
00:00:17 And there’s my name, US Most Wanted on it.
00:00:21 And that gets your attention.
00:00:24 That was my real name with US Most Wanted beside of it.
00:00:26 Nobody knew my real name in that environment at all,
00:00:29 but then they did.
00:00:30 And it was talking about me being part
00:00:32 of the Secret Service, Operation Anglerfish,
00:00:34 everything else.
00:00:36 So of course, they’re all like.
00:00:37 Everybody’s after you.
00:00:39 They’re like, oh yeah, we’re gonna get this son of a bitch.
00:00:43 The following is a conversation with Brett Johnson,
00:00:46 a former cyber criminal who built the first
00:00:48 organized cybercrime community called Shadow Crew
00:00:52 that is the precursor to today’s Darknet
00:00:54 and Darknet markets.
00:00:56 He’s referred to by the United States Secret Service
00:00:58 as quote, the original internet godfather.
00:01:02 He has been the central figure in the cybercrime world
00:01:05 for almost 20 years.
00:01:06 Placed on the US Most Wanted list in 2006
00:01:10 before being convicted of 39 felonies for cybercrime,
00:01:14 escaped from prison, and then eventually being locked up,
00:01:17 served his time, and now is helping people understand
00:01:21 and fight cybercrime.
00:01:24 This was a raw, honest, emotional, and real episode.
00:01:29 Brett has caused a lot of pain to a lot of people,
00:01:32 and yet his own story is full of trauma and pain,
00:01:36 and also redemption and love.
00:01:40 This is a good time to say that I have and I will
00:01:44 talk to people who have served time in prison,
00:01:46 and perhaps people who currently are in prison.
00:01:50 I will try to do my best to both empathize
00:01:53 with the person across from me and not let them sugarcoat,
00:01:56 explain away, or dismiss the crimes they committed.
00:02:00 This is a tough line to walk,
00:02:01 because if you close your heart to the other person,
00:02:04 you’ll never fully understand their mind and their story.
00:02:08 But if you open the heart too much,
00:02:10 you can be manipulated to where the conversation
00:02:13 reveals nothing honest or real.
00:02:17 This requires skill and willingness to take the risk.
00:02:21 I don’t know about the skill part,
00:02:23 but I’d like to take the risk.
00:02:25 I always wear my heart on my sleeve.
00:02:27 If I get hurt for it, that’s life.
00:02:30 As I’ve said, I want to understand
00:02:32 what makes a person do these crimes,
00:02:34 the particular characteristics of their temporary
00:02:37 or permanent madness, their justifications,
00:02:41 but also their humanity.
00:02:43 I believe each of us have the capacity
00:02:45 to become both the criminal and the victim,
00:02:48 the predator and the prey.
00:02:50 It’s up to us to avoid these paths
00:02:53 or to find the path to redemption.
00:02:55 It’s on each of us.
00:02:57 It’s our responsibility and burden
00:03:00 of being human in a complicated and dangerous world.
00:03:05 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:03:07 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:03:09 in the description.
00:03:10 And now, dear friends, here’s Brett Johnson.
00:03:15 You were convicted of 39 felonies for cybercrime
00:03:19 placed on the US most wanted list in 2006,
00:03:22 escaped from prison.
00:03:24 You built the first organized cybercrime community
00:03:27 called Shadow Crew that is the precursor
00:03:30 to today’s darknet and darknet markets.
00:03:32 And for all this, the US intelligence service
00:03:36 called you the original internet godfather.
00:03:39 So first question, how did your career
00:03:42 as a cybercrime criminal begin?
00:03:45 My life of crime begins when I’m 10 years old.
00:03:47 10 years old, man, think about that.
00:03:49 I mean, you were probably playing the robots
00:03:51 when you were 10.
00:03:52 You know, usually kids are doing the Lego bit,
00:03:55 getting involved with sports, everything else.
00:03:57 And with me, it wasn’t like that.
00:04:00 With me, I’m from Eastern Kentucky.
00:04:02 Eastern Kentucky is one of these,
00:04:05 it’s like parts of Texas, parts of Louisiana,
00:04:08 that if you’re not fortunate enough to have a job,
00:04:11 you may be involved in a scam, hustle, fraud,
00:04:13 whatever you want to call it, man.
00:04:14 I was, my parents, my mom was basically
00:04:20 the captain of the entire fraud industry.
00:04:22 So this is a woman that at one point,
00:04:25 she’s stealing a 108,000 pound Caterpillar D9 bulldozer,
00:04:29 tramming it down the road.
00:04:31 You know, at another point, she’s taking a slip
00:04:32 and falling a convenience store trying to sue the owner.
00:04:35 We had a neighbor she acted as a pimp for at one point.
00:04:38 That’s my mom, my dad.
00:04:41 Wait, wait, wait, the neighbor acted as a pimp?
00:04:45 My mom prostituted, I mean,
00:04:47 she acted as a pimp for a neighbor.
00:04:50 Her name was Debbie and my mom used to sell her out.
00:04:54 Debbie needed money and my mom would find men
00:04:56 for her to sleep with for cash
00:04:58 and she’d take a part of the cash.
00:05:00 So Sauna’s like she diversified the methodologies
00:05:05 by which she hustled.
00:05:06 Very, had that entrepreneurial spirit.
00:05:09 Okay.
00:05:10 You know, we see that a lot with cyber criminals,
00:05:14 you know, that sense of being that entrepreneur.
00:05:16 So what was the motivation you think for her?
00:05:19 Is it money?
00:05:22 Is it basically the rush of playing with the system
00:05:27 or being able to know the rules
00:05:30 and break the rules and get away with it?
00:05:32 My mom’s a complex character.
00:05:34 She is, there’s no one single motivation.
00:05:36 So my mom was the individual, she’s still alive.
00:05:40 My mom was the individual who tested people.
00:05:45 She wanted to know how far she could abuse you
00:05:48 and you come back and still love her.
00:05:50 So, and that was with every relationship she’s ever had.
00:05:53 She would cheat on the men she was involved with.
00:05:56 She would abuse her children, me and Denise.
00:05:59 She would…
00:06:00 Psychological, physical?
00:06:02 Oh, it was mental, emotional, physical,
00:06:06 everything, everything.
00:06:07 I mean, she used to beat me and Denise with belt buckles,
00:06:12 you know, and that ended when she was,
00:06:16 I forgot what we had done.
00:06:18 It wasn’t much.
00:06:19 I think that it may have been the part
00:06:23 where she accused me of stealing her marijuana,
00:06:26 but she was hitting me and Denise.
00:06:29 We were living in a single wide trailer at that point.
00:06:32 She was hitting me and Denise.
00:06:33 We were on the bed trying to get away from it.
00:06:35 And Denise kicks her through a closet is what happens.
00:06:40 And Denise stands up and she said,
00:06:43 you’re through hitting me.
00:06:45 And that was the last time that mom hit us at that point.
00:06:49 But…
00:06:50 So sorry to take us there.
00:06:51 You’re, for people who know you
00:06:53 and people should definitely watch
00:06:55 some of your lectures online.
00:06:57 You’re extremely charismatic and fun and jolly
00:07:01 and whatever word you want to use.
00:07:03 But, you know, if we look at that kind of life,
00:07:06 there’s darkness there, there’s a struggle there.
00:07:10 There’s a lot of darkness.
00:07:12 So if you, how did you feel?
00:07:16 If you go back to the mind of the kid you were
00:07:20 with your mom, was there sadness?
00:07:24 Was there things like depression, self doubt,
00:07:28 all those kinds of things, or did you see this crime,
00:07:31 this chaos as ultimately exciting?
00:07:34 You know, I don’t think,
00:07:36 back then I didn’t view it as exciting.
00:07:37 Now it becomes exciting when I start being involved
00:07:40 in cyber crime, all right?
00:07:42 But back then it was simply a means to an end
00:07:44 was all it was.
00:07:45 So you take a 10 year old kid
00:07:46 and the way I get involved in crime is,
00:07:49 like I said, my mom was the fraudster.
00:07:51 My dad was a good guy.
00:07:53 He just forgot he was this good guy.
00:07:55 You know, he was always, he always had these principles,
00:07:58 but his issue was is he loved my mom so much,
00:08:02 he was scared of her leaving.
00:08:04 So if she wanted to do something, commit crime,
00:08:07 cheat on him, whatever,
00:08:10 he would pretty much just put up with it the one instant.
00:08:14 So, I mean, this woman used to,
00:08:16 she used to bring men home in front of him,
00:08:19 tell him that, hey, I’m leaving you.
00:08:21 I don’t love you anymore.
00:08:22 I want you to die, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:08:24 This was my mom.
00:08:25 There were two instances where the man,
00:08:30 where he can’t take it anymore.
00:08:33 And the first instance, I was,
00:08:34 I guess I was seven or eight.
00:08:36 My sister Denise is a year younger than I am.
00:08:38 My dad actually files for divorce,
00:08:41 files for divorce at that point.
00:08:42 My mom kind of goes crazy.
00:08:45 My dad, I was with my dad.
00:08:47 My sister was with my mother
00:08:49 because that’s that Eastern Kentucky mentality.
00:08:50 You know, men stay with men, women stay with women.
00:08:53 So he was filing for divorce.
00:08:57 Me and my dad, we were living in an apartment.
00:09:00 My mom was living with her grandparents
00:09:03 and with her parents bouncing back and forth
00:09:05 between the two.
00:09:07 And I remember I was sleeping in the bed.
00:09:08 We had a single wide bed.
00:09:09 My dad slept on the sofa.
00:09:12 I woke up one night
00:09:13 and there was some sort of ruckus in the living room.
00:09:16 So I wake up and I walk into the living room
00:09:18 and my mom has a knife to my dad’s throat.
00:09:22 And basically you’re not going to steal my son from me.
00:09:25 My mom was this individual
00:09:26 that when she knew she went so far,
00:09:29 like I said, she was always this person that tested.
00:09:32 What can I do this to you?
00:09:33 And you’ll still come back.
00:09:36 She knew, she was always also this person
00:09:39 that if she went too far, she knew it.
00:09:42 And she would always try to divert that into something else.
00:09:46 All right, so she knew at that point she’d went too far.
00:09:49 So what does she do?
00:09:50 She gets up crying, goes to the bathroom
00:09:53 and pretends to slit her wrists
00:09:56 so that my dad Ray will respond to that,
00:10:00 not respond to what she’s just done to him.
00:10:02 That was my mom in a nutshell.
00:10:03 She had a history of doing this kind of stuff.
00:10:07 Motivations as far as fraud with her,
00:10:09 I think with her it was, she was an LPN.
00:10:14 She had a very good nurse, but she didn’t want to work.
00:10:19 It was a lot of it.
00:10:21 So with her, it was easier for her to commit fraud.
00:10:25 And when I say commit fraud,
00:10:26 it was against businesses, against people.
00:10:29 I remember at one point she’s buying
00:10:31 over the counter capsules and emptying the capsules out
00:10:34 and putting some other crap in there
00:10:36 and selling at a speed and people were buying it.
00:10:39 She did anything she could for money.
00:10:41 And of course I get involved with that.
00:10:42 What happens is we were in Panama City at that point
00:10:46 and my mom leaves my dad and the way she left my dad,
00:10:53 my great grandfather had died.
00:10:55 My mom tells all three of us, hey, I’m taking the kids
00:11:00 and we’re going back to Eastern Kentucky
00:11:01 to attend the funeral.
00:11:02 Well, that was her leaving.
00:11:05 Me and Denise didn’t know it.
00:11:06 She didn’t pack any of our clothes at all.
00:11:07 She stows her clothes in the trunk of the car
00:11:11 and she leaves my dad and I don’t get to see my dad again
00:11:13 for I think five, six years, something like that.
00:11:16 My mom, like I said, she used to bring men home
00:11:18 in front of my dad.
00:11:19 She would, he’d sit there and cry and beg her not to do it.
00:11:22 She’d do it anyway.
00:11:24 When she leaves him, she kept up that.
00:11:28 So we were living at my grandparents house.
00:11:31 My grandfather, he had converted the house.
00:11:33 He had raised the house up
00:11:34 and built apartments underneath of it.
00:11:37 So me and my sister and my mom lived
00:11:39 in one of the apartments underneath
00:11:40 and that whole side of the family was just nuts, was nuts.
00:11:45 My granddad, Paul, he would,
00:11:49 this is a man that he didn’t want you
00:11:54 to eat any of his food.
00:11:56 So, you know, there was no such thing
00:11:58 as me and Denise going upstairs to eat.
00:12:00 If he found out me and Denise was taking a bath,
00:12:03 we were allowed to bath and bathe in two inches of water
00:12:06 one time a week
00:12:07 because he didn’t want to have to pay the water bill.
00:12:10 There’s rules.
00:12:10 There are rules.
00:12:11 You know, if you couldn’t have the TV on,
00:12:14 when he went to bed at night,
00:12:15 you had to have the television, the volume.
00:12:17 You could watch it, but without volume
00:12:20 because if he heard it, he would get up
00:12:22 in the middle of the night
00:12:23 and he would kick the power breaker,
00:12:25 turn off all the power on you.
00:12:26 This is my, this is my, the family, right?
00:12:29 So my mom, she used to leave me and Denise at home
00:12:32 for days, man, for days.
00:12:34 She’d go out and, you know, party.
00:12:36 And I mean, sometimes she’d take me into these with her.
00:12:40 We’d wait in the car.
00:12:41 Sometimes we’d wait in the living room
00:12:43 as she went and partied and everything else.
00:12:46 Most of the time she left us at home
00:12:48 and my entry into crime, Denise walks in one day,
00:12:52 she’s nine years old, man.
00:12:54 She walks in one day
00:12:55 and she’s got a pack of pork chops in her hand
00:12:57 and looked at her and I said, where’d you get that?
00:13:00 She’s like, I stole it.
00:13:01 And you know, it’s like, show me how you did that.
00:13:04 So she takes me over
00:13:05 and she shows me how she steals food,
00:13:07 how she’s stuffing it down her pants.
00:13:09 So we start stealing food.
00:13:10 I’m like, hell yeah, let’s do that shit.
00:13:11 So start stealing food.
00:13:13 And we get to the point where we’re wanting a sandwich.
00:13:16 Well, you can’t stuff a loaf of bread down your pants.
00:13:18 So there was a Kmart in the shopping center.
00:13:20 I go over to the Kmart, get a hoodie off the rack,
00:13:25 take the tags off of it, wear it out, work just fine.
00:13:28 And the way you steal bread
00:13:29 is you put the hoodie over your shoulder,
00:13:31 stuff a loaf of bread down the sleeve
00:13:32 and you walk out with it.
00:13:34 So we started doing that.
00:13:35 How’d you figure that out?
00:13:36 Just thought pattern.
00:13:38 So there’s like strategic thinking here.
00:13:43 Yeah, you know, you can’t wear the hoodie
00:13:45 and put the bread down here
00:13:46 cause you might mash the bread when you zip it up
00:13:48 or they might notice the bread.
00:13:49 Yeah, we have to think through that.
00:13:50 You gotta think through it.
00:13:51 But you gotta realize by this point,
00:13:53 I’m already seeing what my parents are doing.
00:13:57 You know, I’m already seeing the plotting.
00:13:59 That kind of puzzle solving
00:14:01 was something you were already developing yourself
00:14:02 individually cause you’re pretty young.
00:14:04 Yeah, 10 years old, pretty young.
00:14:05 But seeing how they act, how they respond to things.
00:14:08 And my mom, I guess you could call it a good thing,
00:14:11 they never kept any of that hidden from the kids.
00:14:14 You know, there was no discussions behind closed doors.
00:14:17 All that happened in front of everybody.
00:14:19 And from your young minds perspective,
00:14:22 seeing that kind of crime, you basically,
00:14:25 you know, a lot of us kind of grow up
00:14:27 thinking there’s rules you’re not supposed to break.
00:14:29 If you see other humans breaking those rules,
00:14:31 then you realize those rules are just human made.
00:14:35 But it gets worse than that.
00:14:37 I was in an environment where there were no decent people.
00:14:42 I didn’t really meet my first decent person
00:14:45 until I was 16 years old.
00:14:47 Who’s that?
00:14:48 That was a high school teacher.
00:14:49 So what happens is, you know, we start shoplifting food.
00:14:54 My mom finds out that we’ve been stealing stuff
00:14:56 and you know, she joins us.
00:14:59 What’s that?
00:14:59 She joins us.
00:15:00 Yeah, she comes in, you know, I’ve got the television,
00:15:02 I’ve got the Atari 2600, play the hell out of it.
00:15:05 Oh my God.
00:15:05 She starts seeing this shit.
00:15:06 She’s like, where’d this come from?
00:15:08 And I’m like, well, we found it.
00:15:09 She’s like, you didn’t find that.
00:15:10 Denise, Denise stands up, we stole it.
00:15:13 My mom, show me how you did that.
00:15:16 And she gets her mom too, to join in.
00:15:19 And she used to run me and Denise
00:15:20 as these little shoplifters.
00:15:21 We’d take, you know, we’d steal stuff for her.
00:15:24 We would distract security
00:15:27 and her and my grandmother would steal stuff.
00:15:30 They got caught doing that.
00:15:32 But that’s the entry into crime.
00:15:34 And Denise, you know, I’m adamant and I kind of mean it.
00:15:41 But the truth is I say, and I do mean it,
00:15:45 that I’m responsible for my choices as an adult, all right?
00:15:49 I believe that when you’re a child, you can’t control that.
00:15:52 The adults in your environment control what you do.
00:15:55 All right?
00:15:55 Once you’re an adult though, your choices are yours.
00:15:58 Now that being said, there’s some,
00:16:03 you can’t dismiss that childhood
00:16:07 influencing what I did as an adult.
00:16:10 You can’t do that.
00:16:12 I mean, it was kind of written on slate that,
00:16:14 hey, this guy’s gonna be this guy when he grows up.
00:16:18 That’s like sometimes that one person you meet,
00:16:20 that decent person can turn the tide of your life.
00:16:23 Absolutely, absolutely.
00:16:24 So what happens is, you know, the abuse,
00:16:26 everything continues on, when I’m 15,
00:16:30 my dad was in Panama City, Florida.
00:16:33 My mom was in, you know, we were in Hazard, Kentucky.
00:16:38 She was dating this guy.
00:16:40 My mom was this woman that the abuse would,
00:16:46 it was crazy abuse, man, just crazy stuff.
00:16:49 She would tell me and my sister, you know,
00:16:52 that she gave up her life for us,
00:16:55 that she was gonna leave one day and never come back,
00:16:57 that we’d find her dead in a ditch someplace.
00:17:00 She’d go out and date these men and she’d come back
00:17:02 and she’d talk about how these men were abusing her.
00:17:05 You know, so she’d be dating this guy
00:17:07 and she’d come back and she’d, you know,
00:17:10 start talking about how he had tried to rape her,
00:17:13 you know, trying to get me to respond to that.
00:17:14 And I would respond to that.
00:17:16 Make no doubt, I would respond to that.
00:17:18 Well, what happens is, and I knew that,
00:17:21 I don’t know if I knew it was abuse at that age, all right,
00:17:23 but I knew things were fucked up.
00:17:25 And I was talking to my dad in Panama City
00:17:29 and I really had it in my head
00:17:30 that I was gonna go down and live with my dad.
00:17:35 And I called my dad one day.
00:17:40 I was set to go to, me and my cousins
00:17:42 were gonna go see Return of the Jedi.
00:17:45 It had came out again in the theaters.
00:17:48 So I called my dad, it was a Sunday,
00:17:50 called my dad and he told me,
00:17:52 he had either gotten married
00:17:54 or he was about to get married to this woman.
00:17:56 And basically Brett Johnson
00:17:59 wasn’t gonna go down to Florida.
00:18:01 You know, I was gonna stay in Hazard.
00:18:03 I had to call my dad from payphone,
00:18:05 but the result of that was I walked him into a hospital,
00:18:11 got in an elevator and a woman got in the elevator
00:18:15 at the same time and I snapped
00:18:18 and beat the hell out of her right there.
00:18:21 And I was 15, didn’t really know what the fuck happened.
00:18:27 Didn’t really know, but.
00:18:29 Just anger came from somewhere.
00:18:30 Yeah, yeah.
00:18:32 And you know, the elevator,
00:18:37 beat the hell out of this lady.
00:18:40 Turned out she looked a shitload like my mom,
00:18:43 but the elevator doors open.
00:18:48 And one of the security guards,
00:18:51 I played basketball with his son.
00:18:53 So he saw me immediately.
00:18:55 I knocked the hell out of him, took off running,
00:18:58 made it back to the house where my grandparents were.
00:19:02 They didn’t know what had happened.
00:19:04 So I didn’t say anything.
00:19:07 About an hour later, Kentucky state police,
00:19:10 they pull up in the front yard and two of them get out
00:19:13 and I’m sitting on the front porch and me and my cousins are
00:19:16 and they start walking up where everybody starts walking
00:19:18 out of the house.
00:19:19 And I’m like, I just remember saying, what do you want?
00:19:21 What do you want?
00:19:22 Well, you know what they wanted.
00:19:23 They wanted to arrest Brett Johnson and they arrested me.
00:19:27 I went in and I told them everything.
00:19:31 Spent three months in a county jail.
00:19:33 They didn’t have juvenile facilities in that county.
00:19:37 So I spent three months in solitary, went to trial,
00:19:42 pled guilty to assault in the first degree.
00:19:44 The judge sentenced me to time served
00:19:48 and a psychological evaluation
00:19:50 where they sent me to Louisville, Kentucky.
00:19:54 Spent 30 days up there and they cut me loose.
00:19:55 They wanted me to have counseling after that
00:19:59 and never went to counseling.
00:20:02 You know, I wanted to, but mom was like, don’t need it.
00:20:05 And so never went to counseling.
00:20:08 And I became this pariah in the county. It’s crazy, man.
00:20:16 I mean, not a day goes by that I don’t think about that.
00:20:21 That moment in the elevator.
00:20:23 Yeah.
00:20:24 And what happens is, you know, you’re 15.
00:20:29 Fuck man, you’re 15.
00:20:31 So I go back to the high school that I was in
00:20:34 and I’m this piece of shit.
00:20:38 So everybody, you’re not the outcast.
00:20:41 Everybody knows.
00:20:43 So I moved, we moved, we were in Whitesburg at that point.
00:20:47 I finished up the year there and moved back to Perry County,
00:20:52 which is where Hazard is.
00:20:55 So we moved there and they’ve got three high schools here.
00:20:57 They’ve got MC Napier, they’ve got Hazard High School
00:21:00 and then they’ve got Dills Combs High School.
00:21:02 So I was within, me and Denise were within
00:21:07 half mile of MC Napier.
00:21:10 Show up there the first day of school
00:21:13 and I met me and my mom and my sister
00:21:16 were walking into the school and the kids won’t let me in.
00:21:20 The kids stand out there, he’s not coming in.
00:21:26 So my mom starts raising hell and I’m like,
00:21:29 nah, let’s just go, let’s go.
00:21:30 So from there it was, we went down to the city school,
00:21:33 Hazard and the principal tells my mom,
00:21:36 Denise can come, he can’t.
00:21:40 So my mom wants to raise hell and I’m like, no,
00:21:43 let’s just take me to this other school.
00:21:45 So this other school was like 15 miles away
00:21:48 and country high school.
00:21:55 So I go there and they accept me
00:21:57 and I walked in the first day
00:21:59 and this English teacher
00:22:04 name’s Carol Combs, I walked in
00:22:07 and handed her the paper, she was my homeroom teacher
00:22:11 and she heard this voice,
00:22:14 that is the way she explains it today,
00:22:15 she heard this voice and she looks up
00:22:19 and she was like, son, have you ever done any drama before?
00:22:24 And I’m like, no maam,
00:22:27 but I’m interested in the academic team,
00:22:29 I was this quick recall guy, right?
00:22:31 And she’s like, no.
00:22:33 She’s like, drama.
00:22:37 I’m like, no, I’m not interested in theater,
00:22:39 I’m interested in academics.
00:22:41 Well, she was the head of the drama department
00:22:44 and head of the academics department.
00:22:46 So the deal was, tell you what,
00:22:48 you can get on the academics team
00:22:50 if you start with theater too.
00:22:53 And I was like, okay.
00:22:54 So what happens is she was the only,
00:22:56 she was the first decent person I met in my life
00:22:58 and she became this kind of surrogate mother to me.
00:23:01 So under her tutelage,
00:23:04 I become one of the top academic team guys in the state.
00:23:09 Around there, I was captain of the team,
00:23:11 I was this just scourge across all the counties
00:23:15 in that part of Kentucky.
00:23:16 If we had a meet, it was like,
00:23:20 Jesus Christ, that’s Brett Johnson.
00:23:21 And it was like, she used to tell people
00:23:26 they would, the high school that I came from was Whitesburg
00:23:29 and the first time that Whitesburg came against us,
00:23:32 she told me, I was talking to her about a year ago
00:23:35 and she told me, she’s like, Brett,
00:23:37 she said, that first meet against Whitesburg,
00:23:40 she said, the captain came in, looked at you and said,
00:23:45 oh, you’ve got that Johnson boy on your team?
00:23:47 And she said, my response was that Johnson boy is our team.
00:23:52 So, but I did that and then with theater,
00:23:57 I ended up, my senior year,
00:24:00 I won best actor and actress in the state.
00:24:04 Only guy to ever do that in the state.
00:24:05 So, did pretty well, man, did pretty well.
00:24:08 Had scholarships coming out of high school
00:24:11 and everything else and I’m the idiot that turned them down.
00:24:14 Ask you a funny question.
00:24:15 Yeah.
00:24:16 You’d make a hell of a, I mean,
00:24:18 of all the many things you could probably do,
00:24:20 you would make a hell of a actor.
00:24:23 I’m very good on stage.
00:24:24 I’m very good on stage.
00:24:26 Have you acted professionally anywhere or not?
00:24:28 Not professionally.
00:24:29 We’ve done the college circuit and stuff like that.
00:24:31 What happened was is, so I turned down the scholarships,
00:24:38 you know, scared of leaving, I guess is what it was.
00:24:40 Started in community college
00:24:41 and the community college there hires
00:24:44 a new theater director out of California.
00:24:46 Well, he knew the guy
00:24:48 that ran the San Jose State Theater program.
00:24:50 A guy named Edward Emmanuel was his name.
00:24:53 His claim to fame, he had written the Three Ninjas movie.
00:24:56 Remember that, the three little ninja kids
00:24:58 back in the eighties, he had written this damn film
00:25:00 and it had made a shitload of money.
00:25:02 So, he invites Ed Emmanuel to come down and see the play
00:25:06 and Ed had written this Civil War piece.
00:25:09 So, we put that on.
00:25:11 I was doing like, it was a multiple role thing.
00:25:13 I was doing like 18 different roles in the show.
00:25:16 So, Ed sees the show and he was like, scholarship.
00:25:19 He said, look, he said,
00:25:20 right now you’re a big fish in a small pond.
00:25:22 We’ll make you a big fish in a big pot.
00:25:24 And I was like, deal.
00:25:25 So, I took the scholarship, man.
00:25:27 And he was like, I’ll be back in two weeks.
00:25:29 So, he flies out.
00:25:30 Two weeks later, this guy flies back in.
00:25:32 He drives down to where I’m living.
00:25:35 I’m out shooting ball with one of my cousins and friends.
00:25:39 He pulls up and he gets out of the car
00:25:42 and I was like, I’m walking over to him.
00:25:43 I was like, hey man, I’ll walk you in.
00:25:45 You can meet my parents.
00:25:47 He’s like, no, I got it.
00:25:48 I was like, okay.
00:25:49 So, I keep shooting ball.
00:25:50 He walks in the house, stays about 15 minutes,
00:25:54 walks out, white as a sheet, doesn’t say a word to me,
00:25:58 gets in the car, leaves.
00:26:00 I don’t hear from him again.
00:26:02 Had no idea what went on.
00:26:04 Takes me a couple of weeks.
00:26:06 What happened is my mom, he walks in and introduces himself.
00:26:10 My mom pulls a knife on the guy.
00:26:13 I will kill you.
00:26:14 You are not going to steal my goddamn son from me.
00:26:17 Scares the guy to death.
00:26:19 He bugs out and kind of broke my spirit at that point.
00:26:24 I was like, okay.
00:26:27 So, went into, just full fledged into scams,
00:26:32 crimes, everything else.
00:26:34 I had already been, when I was a minor,
00:26:37 I’d already been kind of brought up
00:26:39 on that side of the family with the crimes
00:26:40 that they were doing.
00:26:41 My mom was drug trafficking, the pimp stuff,
00:26:45 illegally mining coal, charity fraud.
00:26:48 Illegally mining coal?
00:26:50 Yeah, wildcatting coal.
00:26:51 So, you…
00:26:52 Can you explain that?
00:26:53 Yeah, so, to properly mine coal,
00:26:55 you have to get a permit, all right?
00:26:58 Eastern Kentucky, a lot of people don’t,
00:27:00 they can’t afford the permits.
00:27:02 They can get them a piece of equipment.
00:27:04 You get a dozer or a loader or whatever you’re going to get
00:27:06 or an auger or what have you.
00:27:08 So, you start mining, but you don’t get the permit.
00:27:10 So, you don’t have to do the, you don’t have to pay.
00:27:12 Back then, it was like $3,500 for a two acre permit
00:27:15 or $5,000 for a two acre permit.
00:27:17 Let you strip mine the coal on that.
00:27:20 Then you have to pay for the reclamation on top of that.
00:27:22 So, once you uncover the pit, take the coal out,
00:27:25 you have to cover back up the pit, sow grass,
00:27:28 make sure everything is environmentally friendly.
00:27:30 You got a silt pond, everything else at that point.
00:27:32 So, the whole idea is you buy an acre of land
00:27:35 or some area of land and then you can,
00:27:36 there’s a whole process you’re supposed to go through.
00:27:38 Entire process.
00:27:39 How many people involved in a mining,
00:27:41 the smallest number of people required
00:27:43 for a mining operation?
00:27:45 You can do it with three or four people.
00:27:46 Okay.
00:27:47 So, you’ve got your loader operator,
00:27:48 you’ve got your dozer operator.
00:27:49 You need, you can farm out the trucking to someone
00:27:52 if you need that or trucking company if you need to do that.
00:27:56 Then you’ve got your, whoever owns the business as well.
00:27:58 So, very few people can run an operation like that
00:28:01 and profit fairly well as long as
00:28:04 you don’t have to do the reclamation,
00:28:07 all that crap on top of it, all right?
00:28:08 The reclamation gets pretty expensive.
00:28:10 So, if you’re uncovering a pit of coal,
00:28:14 a pit, so a ton of coal is basically about 36 cubic inches
00:28:18 is what a 2000 pounds of coal weighs
00:28:20 if you’re in Eastern Kentucky
00:28:21 because it’s at the weight of the bituminous coal
00:28:24 and everything.
00:28:25 The fact that you know this is awesome.
00:28:26 The fact that you know exactly the volume
00:28:32 of a ton of coal, I mean, it’s great.
00:28:34 Yeah, you learn this shit, right?
00:28:35 Can you rattle this shit off?
00:28:36 So, you uncover the pit and then you’ve got to sell the pit.
00:28:40 Well, the thing is, is that,
00:28:41 where are you gonna sell the coal?
00:28:43 Well, you sell it to one of these other coal tipples
00:28:45 that knows that they’re buying the shit illegally.
00:28:48 So, back then a ton of coal was,
00:28:50 they’d give you like 36 bucks per ton is what that is.
00:28:54 And you’d have to go out and you’d test the BTUs on it.
00:28:56 You take a sample to the lab, test the BTUs,
00:28:58 you take that into the company.
00:28:59 What BTU?
00:29:00 British Thermal Unit.
00:29:02 So, you’d test what the BTU on the coal was.
00:29:04 How pure the coal is.
00:29:05 How pure the coal is, what BTU it burns at.
00:29:08 Back then, a good BTU was around 12.9
00:29:12 was what you’d get, all right?
00:29:14 So, 12.9 coal, $36 a ton.
00:29:17 You’d take that sample over to the coal tipple.
00:29:19 They’d say, okay, we’ll buy this for you.
00:29:21 How many trucks you got or how many tons you got?
00:29:23 And you’d say, this is what we’ve got.
00:29:24 Then you’d hire the trucking company.
00:29:26 And where you get it out because you’ve got the agents
00:29:29 that are looking for you by this point
00:29:32 because the people that you’ve bought the rights
00:29:36 to whoever the landowner is,
00:29:37 you said you’re gonna give them $2 a ton or whatever this is.
00:29:41 Well, the other people there,
00:29:42 are you paying them off or are you not?
00:29:45 Well, if you’re not paying them off, guess what?
00:29:47 They know your ass is mining it illegally.
00:29:49 They’re gonna report you.
00:29:50 Well, all of a sudden, you’ve got all these inspectors
00:29:53 that are coming around and everything.
00:29:54 Hey, we know what you’re doing.
00:29:55 So, they’re looking for you to get the pit out.
00:29:57 So, when do you get the pit out?
00:29:58 Right in dead of night.
00:30:00 So, you’re loading it up two o clock in the morning,
00:30:02 hauling this ass out is what you’re doing.
00:30:04 You sell it out from there.
00:30:06 So.
00:30:07 And your mom ran operations like this?
00:30:08 Yeah, yeah.
00:30:10 And you said you worked the mine too when you were younger?
00:30:12 Yeah, I learned how to run a loader, run a dozer,
00:30:14 learn how to clean off a pit, everything like that.
00:30:18 So, this is the lifestyle you grow up in.
00:30:22 You learn how to do this stuff.
00:30:23 And so, I knew how to do charity fraud as well,
00:30:27 insurance fraud, so.
00:30:28 Charity fraud.
00:30:29 Can we break down some of these?
00:30:31 Charity fraud, it’s much more romantic than what it sounds.
00:30:34 It was basically, it was basically standing beside the road
00:30:39 with a sign and a bucket taking up collections
00:30:42 for homeless shelters, for abused women,
00:30:44 for children, stuff like that.
00:30:47 Then later on, I branched off.
00:30:49 When I started off on my own,
00:30:51 I would set up my own charity company
00:30:53 and do some telemarketing and go on by
00:30:55 and collect checks and things like that.
00:30:57 We’re gonna talk about that.
00:30:58 But actually, can we just step back
00:30:59 and talk about your mom and your dad?
00:31:04 Given all of that, given all the abuse,
00:31:08 the complex ways that she played with love,
00:31:12 to see how far she can push you and the people around her,
00:31:15 and they still love her.
00:31:18 Today, do you love her?
00:31:20 You know, I called my dad yesterday.
00:31:22 My dad, he’s dying now.
00:31:24 He’s got a heart condition.
00:31:25 He’s not gonna get the operation to fix it.
00:31:27 So he’s like, fuck it, I’m ready to go.
00:31:29 And I’m like, I looked at him,
00:31:30 because hell, I’m 52 now.
00:31:32 Prior to 52, I’d have been like, no, you need to do this.
00:31:35 But I looked at him and I was like, I understand.
00:31:38 I understand.
00:31:39 You’re done.
00:31:40 And so he’s not gonna get the operation.
00:31:42 I was talking to him yesterday and he asked me,
00:31:44 he’s like, have you seen your mom?
00:31:45 And I was like, dad, I’ve not talked to her
00:31:47 for about two years.
00:31:48 And I told him, I was like, I love my mom,
00:31:52 but my mom is not a good person.
00:31:54 She’s not.
00:31:55 And he told me, I was talking to him on the phone yesterday,
00:31:59 and he told me that it took him several years
00:32:01 to really understand that.
00:32:03 You know, he loved her too,
00:32:04 but it takes, when you’re getting abused like that,
00:32:07 especially my dad, my dad came from a good family,
00:32:09 everything else, and, you know, upstanding family.
00:32:13 And I think that when you’re that victim of abuse,
00:32:18 you know, you’ve never seen it before,
00:32:20 you’ve never encountered it, and then it happens,
00:32:23 well, you’re like that frog in water all of a sudden.
00:32:25 You know, you get to the point where it gradually increases
00:32:28 until how do you get out of it?
00:32:30 Everybody else sees what’s happening, but you don’t.
00:32:32 I grew up in that environment though, you know,
00:32:34 so it took me a long time to come to terms with that.
00:32:39 My sister came to terms with it long before I did.
00:32:42 You know, my sister, she’s been a decade
00:32:44 without talking to my mom,
00:32:45 like she had tried to commit suicide, I didn’t know that.
00:32:48 What got me so bad is she said at one point
00:32:51 that she always thought someone was gonna come in
00:32:55 and save us, and my response, just immediate response,
00:32:58 not even thinking about it, my response was,
00:32:59 well, Denise, I knew no one ever was.
00:33:02 And looking at things now,
00:33:06 I think that’s where our paths diverged.
00:33:10 Me, it was, if you wanna do it,
00:33:13 if anybody’s gonna take care of you,
00:33:14 you gotta take care of yourself.
00:33:15 You’re on your own.
00:33:16 You’re on your own, you know, it’s up to you.
00:33:20 And Denise has always been that child
00:33:24 that has expected someone to come in and save her.
00:33:27 Well, and almost like it’s all going to be okay, somebody.
00:33:31 Yeah, and I knew it wasn’t.
00:33:33 No, no, you go.
00:33:34 Unless you.
00:33:35 Unless you make it okay, it ain’t gonna be okay.
00:33:38 So, you know, I was.
00:33:40 Are you able to forgive her, your mom?
00:33:45 My boundary with my mom, the reason I’ve not spoken with her,
00:33:49 over two years ago, I started this legal career of mine.
00:33:55 I’ve been the guy who has,
00:33:57 I spent a lot of time thinking about my past
00:34:01 and those choices and what brought those choices around.
00:34:04 So I’m big about taking responsibility for my actions.
00:34:06 I truly am.
00:34:07 I think it’s really important you have to do that.
00:34:09 Well, my mom, not so much.
00:34:12 So I was talking to her, you know,
00:34:14 and I would start saying, you know,
00:34:16 she would start the conversation talking about,
00:34:19 she didn’t understand
00:34:20 why Denise wouldn’t speak to her anymore.
00:34:22 That was one of her tropes.
00:34:24 So, and my response started to become,
00:34:26 well, because you were the abuser
00:34:28 and you spent your life doing that to her.
00:34:31 So it’s more healthy for her not to talk to you.
00:34:34 So she’s still not able to see the flaws
00:34:37 in her ways of the past.
00:34:40 No, not at all.
00:34:41 So my ultimatum to my mom was, look,
00:34:44 when you’re able to admit
00:34:46 that you abused the people in your life,
00:34:49 accept that responsibility
00:34:51 and be able to discuss it with me, we’ll have a talk.
00:34:55 Other than that, I don’t want to talk to you anymore.
00:34:58 So for the first year it was, you know,
00:35:00 calling, cussing my wife out, cussing me out,
00:35:04 you know, I don’t need you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:35:07 And then finally it started to taper off
00:35:09 and she’s never really contacted me after that point.
00:35:12 And your dad is dying.
00:35:18 What do you take from the way he’s taken on death?
00:35:21 Just saying, fuck it.
00:35:22 You know, it’s the man.
00:35:25 And what have you learned from your dad?
00:35:27 What do you love about your dad?
00:35:30 He’s one of these guys that, you know, like I told him,
00:35:34 I told my dad about the abuse and everything else.
00:35:37 And there was a point.
00:35:39 So, you know, I told you about the elevator stuff,
00:35:41 but before that, man, it was,
00:35:44 it took me 40 years to talk about that,
00:35:47 but it also took me 40 years to talk about,
00:35:53 there was a point that my mom and dad would leave the house
00:36:00 and I would urinate in the floor.
00:36:03 All right.
00:36:04 And…
00:36:05 Is that like out of anger?
00:36:09 No, no idea why.
00:36:11 All right.
00:36:12 But I would.
00:36:12 Piss on the carpet.
00:36:13 Carpet pissers like the Lebowski, right?
00:36:18 It really tied the room together, dude.
00:36:20 It really tied the room together.
00:36:22 I was talking about that
00:36:22 and this lady comes up to me after the presentation
00:36:26 and she had a career previous to that
00:36:29 where she dealt with abused kids.
00:36:31 And she told me, she was like,
00:36:32 Brett, she’s like, it’s a control mechanism.
00:36:37 The only control you had was that.
00:36:40 And she’s like, kids do that.
00:36:42 And I was like, so I’m not unique.
00:36:43 She’s like, no, you’re not unique in that.
00:36:45 So that, you know, this whole history of abuse,
00:36:49 Denise dealt with it by drinking,
00:36:51 by trying to commit suicide, things like that.
00:36:55 And then finally she escapes.
00:36:56 I’m the kid that didn’t.
00:36:57 And not only that, my wife pointed out to me that,
00:37:00 again, it’s that Eastern Kentucky mentality stuff.
00:37:02 You know, the male’s expected to do things.
00:37:04 So with me, it was almost like I stepped up
00:37:09 to take part in those crimes
00:37:12 so that Denise didn’t have to.
00:37:14 And she was able to avoid all that.
00:37:16 Other than that one shoplifting stuff,
00:37:18 Denise doesn’t break the law anymore.
00:37:19 She goes off to be a, she’s a good parent.
00:37:22 She’s an angry parent.
00:37:24 She’s a good parent.
00:37:24 She’s a teacher, a good citizen overall.
00:37:27 I was just the guy that kept right on going with it.
00:37:30 Kept on going.
00:37:31 So let me ask you about that.
00:37:32 So your life of cyber crime.
00:37:37 In describing some of the things you did or knew about,
00:37:40 you said, quote,
00:37:41 “‘I once stole several thousand dollars worth of coins
00:37:44 “‘from a family trying to sell them
00:37:47 “’to put a new roof on their home.
00:37:48 “‘Another time, I sent a counterfeit cashier’s check
00:37:52 “’to a victim and he ended up being arrested for it.
00:37:55 “‘I lied to family, friends, everyone I knew.
00:37:58 “‘I was a truly despicable person.’”
00:38:01 True.
00:38:02 “‘One of my Ukrainian associates script
00:38:05 “‘had someone who owed him money kidnapped and tortured.
00:38:08 “‘He posted pictures of it online.
00:38:11 “‘Another member, Iceman,
00:38:13 “‘used to flood his enemy’s email addresses
00:38:16 “‘with child pornography, then called the police on them.’”
00:38:19 That’s some stories.
00:38:20 Can you tell some of these stories that stand out to you
00:38:23 that are particularly despicable or representative
00:38:29 or interesting when you look back
00:38:31 that defined your approach and who you were at that time?
00:38:36 Let me say that I did not care about my victim, all right?
00:38:41 I cared about me, is what I cared about.
00:38:45 It’s rough to admit that.
00:38:50 You don’t give a shit what you’re doing to anybody else,
00:38:51 you only care about you.
00:38:52 But that’s the truth of the matter.
00:38:54 I didn’t care about the victims.
00:38:56 The lady, that wasn’t even at the beginning of my career
00:39:00 as a cyber criminal, that was right at the last of it.
00:39:03 Which lady?
00:39:03 The coin lady.
00:39:05 By that point, Shadow Crew had made
00:39:07 the front cover of Forbes, August of 04.
00:39:10 October 26th of 04, Secret Service had shut us down,
00:39:13 33 people arrested, six countries in six hours.
00:39:16 I was the guy that was publicly mentioned as getting away.
00:39:20 What happened was is I was the guy who was,
00:39:23 I had kind of invented this crime
00:39:25 called tax return identity theft
00:39:27 and was stealing a lot of money.
00:39:30 I went through all my stateside savings
00:39:33 and Shadow Crew gets shut down.
00:39:35 I don’t have any way to come in with any money,
00:39:37 so I start running counterfeit cashier’s checks,
00:39:40 defrauding people with that,
00:39:42 having them send products or bullion collections,
00:39:45 what have you, by COD, collect on delivery,
00:39:48 and I would pay with it
00:39:49 with a counterfeit cashier’s check.
00:39:51 This lady was on eBay.
00:39:54 She had been collecting these silver coins all of her life.
00:39:57 You know, the U.S. currency used to be,
00:39:58 the coins used to be silver,
00:40:00 so she had a whole collection of these things,
00:40:02 like, I don’t know, 80, 90 pounds of this stuff,
00:40:05 and I’m a very good social engineer.
00:40:10 So, convinced her that I was a legitimate person,
00:40:13 that, you know, hey, send it to COD,
00:40:16 you can use my FedEx account to do that
00:40:18 or my UPS account to do that.
00:40:20 I’ll pay with a cashier’s check,
00:40:23 you can take it in, same as cash.
00:40:25 She believed that, she was, even on the ad,
00:40:28 and we talked on the phone and everything else,
00:40:30 she had told me that she was a single parent,
00:40:33 and it was the only money that she had
00:40:34 to put a roof on the house for her and her kids,
00:40:39 and I didn’t give a damn.
00:40:41 I didn’t give a damn.
00:40:42 What was more important was me at that point.
00:40:44 Can I ask you a question about the social engineering aspect?
00:40:46 So maybe specifics like the methodology,
00:40:50 email, you said phone,
00:40:52 maybe you could discuss this process
00:40:57 from a bigger philosophical perspective
00:41:00 of what is it about human beings
00:41:03 that makes it possible to be social engineer,
00:41:06 to be victims of fraud?
00:41:09 So, first let me say that I became a social engineer
00:41:15 as a child, all right, because the adults in my environment,
00:41:20 as a child, I had to know exactly what they were thinking
00:41:23 and be able to try to manipulate that for survival.
00:41:26 So I became a social engineer for survival initially,
00:41:30 all right, and one of the things that I’ve seen
00:41:32 with a lot of cyber criminals is the exact same thing.
00:41:35 They’re really expert ones.
00:41:37 They become a social engineer as a child,
00:41:38 then later on, they use those tools to victimize others.
00:41:42 Which is fascinating because you’re,
00:41:44 in order to understand what others are thinking,
00:41:46 you have to be extremely good at empathy.
00:41:49 So you have to like really put yourself
00:41:51 in the shoes of the other person.
00:41:53 And yet, in order to do cyber crime,
00:41:56 you have to not care about the pain
00:42:00 that might cause them once you manipulate them.
00:42:03 So you have to empathize and yet not care.
00:42:06 Exactly, and I would argue,
00:42:08 I would argue that that is not a sociopath
00:42:11 because a cyber criminal, and I was no different,
00:42:13 most cyber criminals justify those actions.
00:42:15 So the justification becomes what’s important.
00:42:18 With me, the justification was why I did it for my family,
00:42:21 did it for my wife, did it for my stripper girlfriend.
00:42:24 So, and I believe those justifications.
00:42:25 That’s a good story, I heard that one.
00:42:26 Yeah, so.
00:42:27 I like that, because I care about love a lot.
00:42:28 Yeah, so the big picture of that is trust.
00:42:35 How do you establish trust with a potential victim?
00:42:40 All right, now I would argue online
00:42:42 that that trust is established through a combination
00:42:44 of technology, tools, social engineering.
00:42:47 All right, so we trust our tech.
00:42:50 We trust our cell phones, we trust our laptops.
00:42:53 A lot of times we don’t understand how they operate,
00:42:55 but we trust the news that comes across the line.
00:42:56 We trust the phone numbers that show up.
00:42:59 We trust IP addresses if we’re advanced enough
00:43:02 to look at an IP address or a domain
00:43:04 or anything else like that.
00:43:05 Criminals use tools to manipulate that,
00:43:07 spoof phone numbers, spoof browser fingerprints,
00:43:11 whatever that may be, whatever the tool may be.
00:43:14 Then that lays a base level of trust.
00:43:16 At that point, you shoot in with the social engineering
00:43:19 and lay whatever story that is in order to manipulate
00:43:22 that victim to act not out of reason,
00:43:25 but out of emotion all of a sudden.
00:43:27 This is fascinating about the way humans interact
00:43:31 with the world, which is you’re almost too afraid
00:43:34 to not trust the world.
00:43:35 You have to find a balance.
00:43:36 You have a lot of conspiracy theories now
00:43:40 about distrusting institutions and thinking
00:43:42 like everything around us.
00:43:44 It’s like I’ve been listening to people
00:43:46 who believe the earth is flat.
00:43:48 And that conspiracy theory is fascinating to me
00:43:52 because it basically says that you can’t trust anybody.
00:43:57 Like everything you hear is a lie.
00:44:00 So that’s one, you can live that life
00:44:03 or you can live a life
00:44:04 where you’re just naively trusting everything.
00:44:06 And we as humans have to,
00:44:08 because that life is kind of full of happiness
00:44:11 if nobody screws you over.
00:44:13 Cause you meet people with the joyful heart
00:44:16 and you get excited and all that kind of stuff.
00:44:18 But if you do that too much, you’re gonna get burned.
00:44:21 So you have to find some kind of balance
00:44:23 in terms of optimizing happiness where you trust,
00:44:28 I mean, but verify and on the internet
00:44:32 that becomes really tricky.
00:44:34 You’re almost too afraid to distrust everything
00:44:36 cause you’ll never get anything done on the internet.
00:44:38 But then if you trust too much, you can get screwed over.
00:44:41 And so the social engineering comes in where you’re like,
00:44:45 I’m not sure if I should trust this.
00:44:47 You kind of help them build the narrative
00:44:50 where it’s like, it’s good.
00:44:51 It’s good.
00:44:52 It’s good.
00:44:53 So in a lot of the times that social engineering
00:44:55 is just feeding into what the victim wants to believe.
00:45:00 All right.
00:45:01 It’s not really coming up with a brand new story at all.
00:45:03 It’s just knowing what that victim is,
00:45:05 what the motivations of that victim is
00:45:07 feeding into it at that point.
00:45:08 So you have to, again,
00:45:10 that social engineer has to almost immediately know
00:45:14 what’s driving that person that they’re talking about.
00:45:16 If I’m working on a phone,
00:45:18 talking to someone over the phone,
00:45:19 I have to know within seconds what I need to say,
00:45:22 how I need to act to interact
00:45:23 with that customer service agent
00:45:25 or whoever I’m talking to on the other end of the line.
00:45:28 So fascinating because you truly are empathizing
00:45:31 with the other person.
00:45:32 Absolutely.
00:45:33 Who is it?
00:45:34 This business man, Steven Schwarzman.
00:45:36 And I’ve talked to a few times.
00:45:40 He mentioned this thing that,
00:45:44 the way you build deep relationships
00:45:45 is you really kind of notice
00:45:49 the things that people are telling you.
00:45:51 Like what they want and what they’re bothered by,
00:45:56 what are their big problems in their lives?
00:45:58 Because everybody’s saying that all the time
00:46:00 and most of us are just ignoring it.
00:46:02 Right.
00:46:03 But if you take the time to listen,
00:46:05 you know somebody at that point.
00:46:07 Yeah.
00:46:07 Absolutely you do.
00:46:08 Then you have to be able to dismiss it.
00:46:10 You have to dismiss it after.
00:46:12 You’re looking for that just to see
00:46:14 how I can manipulate that is what you’re trying to do.
00:46:17 So the lady was one story,
00:46:20 another truly despicable story.
00:46:22 We’ll get to script in a second.
00:46:23 But another truly despicable story.
00:46:25 We were one of the really first groups
00:46:28 that started phishing attacks.
00:46:30 What’s phishing?
00:46:31 So that is a social engineering attack.
00:46:33 PH by the way.
00:46:34 Yeah, PH.
00:46:35 That’s another social engineering attack.
00:46:36 That’s sending that fake email out
00:46:38 that looks like it’s coming from a website
00:46:40 or your financial organization or whatever
00:46:42 and saying, hey, we’ve got a security problem.
00:46:44 We need you to update your account information.
00:46:46 Well, back then no one had ever seen a phishing attack.
00:46:50 So you could ask for all the information.
00:46:53 You were getting just complete identity profiles
00:46:56 on a phishing email.
00:46:57 Nowadays you can’t do that.
00:46:58 Nowadays you look for basically credentials
00:47:00 because everyone is aware of phishing.
00:47:02 But back then it was complete information.
00:47:03 We had phished out, I don’t know, 200,000 eTrade accounts.
00:47:08 That’s what we had the login credentials for.
00:47:10 The login password, yeah.
00:47:11 Login password, complete social, date of birth,
00:47:13 mother’s maiden account information, everything else.
00:47:17 So we had access to those eTrade accounts.
00:47:20 eTrade initially had no security in place.
00:47:24 So you could cash out the account,
00:47:26 ACH the money out to whatever account you wanted to,
00:47:29 went through just fine.
00:47:31 Made them alive on that for four to six months.
00:47:34 eTrade got to the point where you couldn’t
00:47:38 do any ACH coming out.
00:47:41 They locked everything down.
00:47:42 Well, you’re still sitting on thousands of eTrade accounts.
00:47:46 How do you make money on that?
00:47:50 That’s a good question.
00:47:51 So what you do is you find some fat cat that’s
00:47:53 got his retirement invested in blue chips.
00:47:57 Same time you find a penny stock,
00:47:59 you open up a brand new account, buy into that penny stock,
00:48:03 cash the fat cat out, buy into that same penny stock,
00:48:06 bump and dump schemes all of a sudden.
00:48:08 So you’re destroying people’s retirement accounts
00:48:11 for just a few thousand dollars.
00:48:12 Bam, bam, bam.
00:48:14 And of course, eTrade’s response is, not our problem.
00:48:17 It’s your problem.
00:48:18 You shouldn’t give up your password
00:48:19 or what have you at that point.
00:48:21 And you still see that issue today with Zelle scams
00:48:24 and things like that.
00:48:25 Which scam?
00:48:26 Zelle.
00:48:26 So you know, the instant payment that they have.
00:48:28 So it’s the same kind of operation,
00:48:29 same type of difference with different payment mechanisms.
00:48:32 You find an easy way to exploit a system,
00:48:35 and typically the financial organization, not our problem.
00:48:39 Our system’s secure, it’s the humans, it’s their errors.
00:48:41 Well, not really.
00:48:43 You know, you’ve got some culpability in that,
00:48:45 and you’re just trying to avoid paying the part of the bill
00:48:49 is what’s going on.
00:48:50 One of the things, just to stand fishing for a bit,
00:48:52 is it really makes me sad because there’s been people
00:48:57 on all kinds of platforms, including YouTube comments,
00:49:00 but emails too.
00:49:02 They figured out emails somehow.
00:49:04 So people are now seeing the followers
00:49:11 of this particular podcast who are fans,
00:49:13 they’re finding them on platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube
00:49:18 and so on, and they are figuring out
00:49:20 ways to get to those people by another channel, which
00:49:24 I suppose seems more authentic to those people.
00:49:29 So they send them an email from what looks like me,
00:49:34 and with this kind of loving message.
00:49:37 The interesting thing, the emails
00:49:39 sound like something I would write.
00:49:41 So these aren’t even, at this stage, it’s not even,
00:49:44 it doesn’t feel automated.
00:49:46 Or if it’s automated, there’s a human in the loop
00:49:49 that’s really fine tuning it to a specific,
00:49:52 or maybe I’m very predictable.
00:49:53 But it’s very loving in the way I would write that message.
00:49:58 So think about that, all right?
00:49:59 So when Phishing first comes out,
00:50:02 you could look at the language of the text or the website
00:50:04 and say, eh, if you were paying attention, that’s so OK.
00:50:07 So that’s not an English speaker who wrote that, typically.
00:50:11 But as time has went on, as the awareness of what a Phishing
00:50:15 attack looks like, we have people
00:50:17 that are sitting down now and making sure
00:50:19 that the language is proper.
00:50:20 It gets worse than that, though.
00:50:22 If you look at business email compromise,
00:50:24 so the way a business email compromise typically works
00:50:26 is the attacker will find a payroll person, find a CEO.
00:50:31 He will fashion a spear phishing email, which
00:50:34 is that’s a Phishing attack that’s targeting
00:50:36 one specific individual.
00:50:38 So he’ll fashion a spear phishing email.
00:50:40 And the way he does that is he pulls all the information
00:50:43 he possibly can on that person, that CEO.
00:50:49 Maybe he’ll spear that CEO just to get their login credentials
00:50:55 to their email, just to read the emails.
00:50:58 And he’ll go in there, and he’ll start
00:50:59 reading all these emails.
00:51:01 He’ll specifically read the emails to the payroll
00:51:04 department, see what that relationship is.
00:51:06 Are they talking about their kids,
00:51:07 talking about relationships, talking about vacation?
00:51:09 What are they talking about?
00:51:10 How are they talking?
00:51:11 Are they friendly?
00:51:12 Are they sterile?
00:51:13 What are they doing, all right?
00:51:15 So then he decides, well, I’m going to go ahead
00:51:17 and spear phish the payroll department as well.
00:51:20 So then he spear phishes in, gets those credentials.
00:51:22 At the same time, he creates a Unicode domain
00:51:25 in whatever the company name is, all right?
00:51:27 So instead of that English alphabet I,
00:51:29 he’s got that Russian letter that looks like an I
00:51:32 but without the dot on top, all right?
00:51:35 Comes back into the email, into the payroll email,
00:51:38 blocks the real CEO’s email, replaces that with the Unicode
00:51:42 email that he’s got, and then sends out a message
00:51:47 using the correct language, the correct relationships,
00:51:50 everything else, and says, hey, we’re updating
00:51:52 our account status, I need you to send this payment
00:51:55 instead of over here, they’ve set up a new account,
00:51:58 send all payments over here now.
00:51:59 And that is business email compromise in a nutshell,
00:52:02 all right, works great.
00:52:04 Probably the larger the organization,
00:52:06 the more susceptible to that kind of attack
00:52:10 because there’s like a distribution of responsibility
00:52:14 to where you’re more likely to believe that,
00:52:16 okay, this other person is responsible,
00:52:18 I’m sure they secured everything.
00:52:21 I’m okay listening to this.
00:52:24 So that’s business email compromise,
00:52:25 and those crimes, and that’s one of the things
00:52:27 you see about cybercrime.
00:52:28 Cybercrime’s not really sophisticated.
00:52:30 It’s not, the attacks are not sophisticated.
00:52:32 The stat is 90% of every single attack uses a known exploit.
00:52:37 It’s not zero day attacks, they’re out there,
00:52:41 but if you’re a criminal waiting on a zero day to profit,
00:52:43 you’re gonna starve to death.
00:52:45 The meat and potatoes are that 90%, known exploits.
00:52:50 And then the rest is, well, you’re saying it’s,
00:52:54 maybe you mean it’s not technically sophisticated,
00:52:56 but it’s social engineering sophisticated.
00:52:59 Very sophisticated on that end, very sophisticated.
00:53:01 I mean, it’s a fascinating study of that.
00:53:03 That establishment of trust and then using that trust
00:53:06 to defraud that victim.
00:53:09 That is something.
00:53:11 I wish, obviously, all of these folks
00:53:14 are really good at hiding.
00:53:16 I wish you could tell their stories in a way,
00:53:19 which is why you’re fascinating,
00:53:21 is you’re able to tell these stories now,
00:53:22 because it is studying human nature by exploiting it,
00:53:28 but you get to understand our weak points,
00:53:30 our hope, our desire to trust others.
00:53:35 Also, the weak points and the failures of digital systems
00:53:42 and at scale, humans have to connect.
00:53:46 It’s fascinating.
00:53:46 This is a weird question, asking for a friend.
00:53:52 Is spear phishing itself illegal?
00:53:54 What’s the legality here?
00:53:56 Oh, it’s all illegal.
00:53:57 Absolutely it is.
00:53:58 Is it?
00:53:59 Absolutely.
00:53:59 So here’s what, okay, let me construct an example.
00:54:02 So if my friend were to spear phish like a CEO, right,
00:54:10 and get their information and after they get control,
00:54:14 say, of their Twitter account,
00:54:16 they tweet something loving and positive, what’s the crime?
00:54:21 Unauthorized access of advice.
00:54:23 What will be the punishment, do you think?
00:54:27 That becomes questionable.
00:54:29 So no monetary loss, or was there a monetary loss?
00:54:33 Probably not, all right?
00:54:34 So you have to figure out who the victim is
00:54:37 before charges are pressed.
00:54:38 Now, the crime would be unauthorized access, all right?
00:54:42 But no real victim on that,
00:54:45 unless the person whose account you took over
00:54:48 takes exception to that.
00:54:51 No monetary loss.
00:54:53 So there’s not really standard fines.
00:54:55 Probably nothing’s gonna happen, right.
00:54:56 Right, right.
00:54:57 So, I mean, that’s kind of interesting,
00:54:59 because it’s, so when I got the ransomware,
00:55:04 when I got the zero day attack on the QNAP mass,
00:55:09 they basically say the criminal is QNAP, the company,
00:55:17 for having so many security vulnerabilities.
00:55:20 They’re like, you are the victim of QNAP’s incompetence.
00:55:25 That’s the way they kind of phrase it.
00:55:27 And see, I don’t agree with that.
00:55:30 I don’t agree with that at all.
00:55:31 So, SolarWinds.
00:55:33 Yeah.
00:55:34 Let’s, so I’ve got 130 page class action lawsuit
00:55:41 printed out at the house, I’ve been going through it,
00:55:43 that catalogs how SolarWinds lied for years
00:55:47 about their vulnerabilities, and they lied to investors.
00:55:49 The people who came in, the honorees who they would hire,
00:55:53 would, you know, they would not pay attention to them
00:55:57 when they said, you know, you’ve got these issues,
00:55:58 they would say, go away, shit like that for years,
00:56:01 until SolarWinds, you know, the attacks become apparent.
00:56:07 My view on that is that the only person
00:56:10 responsible for the crime are the criminals
00:56:14 who did the attacking, the actual criminals, not SolarWinds.
00:56:18 Now, does that mean that SolarWinds isn’t all fucked up?
00:56:21 They are, and there needs to be some accounting in place.
00:56:25 But the only individual, the only people responsible
00:56:29 for crime are the criminals, and that’s either online,
00:56:33 in the physical world, what have you.
00:56:36 Being an idiot is not a crime.
00:56:39 Not a crime.
00:56:40 You know, being criminally negligent is,
00:56:45 and I think that SolarWinds is certainly responsible,
00:56:48 not responsible, they’re culpable for what happened.
00:56:52 Can you actually tell folks about SolarWinds?
00:56:55 What is it, what are some interesting things
00:56:59 that you’re aware of?
00:57:00 SolarWinds was very, it provided a backbone of security
00:57:05 for hundreds, thousands of different companies.
00:57:12 If you looked at, a lot of security companies
00:57:14 were using SolarWinds that would allow you
00:57:16 to get a snapshot of the entire system
00:57:19 that they were working on.
00:57:20 So what happens is, is you get a Russian group that comes in
00:57:24 and they basically, they hack into SolarWinds
00:57:29 and get access to it, and it allows them
00:57:31 to view every single thing, I mean, every single thing
00:57:37 about every single client that SolarWinds had at that point.
00:57:42 So entire snapshots of all the IP that was going on,
00:57:46 all the emails, all the communications,
00:57:47 every single secret that was going on with those companies.
00:57:50 If a company had software like Microsoft,
00:57:53 it allowed them to look at the source code
00:57:55 of everything that was going on.
00:57:57 I mean, it’s just a complete and total nightmare, all right?
00:58:01 And something that you are not going to recover from.
00:58:05 You’re not.
00:58:07 I mean, it’s done at that point.
00:58:08 You know, there’s not been a lot of news lately about it,
00:58:12 but the fact of the matter is, is that’s the type of attack
00:58:15 that’s a catastrophic attack.
00:58:16 So there’s a huge amount of information
00:58:19 that was read, saved elsewhere probably.
00:58:22 Oh yeah.
00:58:23 And so now there’s people sitting on information.
00:58:26 Absolutely.
00:58:27 So think about one of the attack vectors
00:58:28 has been Microsoft Outlook 365, things like that.
00:58:32 This allowed the attackers to look
00:58:34 at the source codes of that.
00:58:36 So they have the source code now,
00:58:39 so they go through it line by line.
00:58:41 Where are the vulnerabilities?
00:58:42 Let’s find new vulnerabilities, new zero days.
00:58:44 You know, I said zero days aren’t common,
00:58:46 but this opens up an entire new threat surface
00:58:49 all of a sudden.
00:58:50 So it’s a completely catastrophic attack.
00:58:52 Once all the chips are down, everything’s tallied up,
00:58:54 people are going to be like, yeah, we’re done.
00:58:56 We’re done.
00:58:57 Yeah.
00:58:58 All right, this whole computer thing,
00:59:02 we tried it and we’re walking away.
00:59:04 We’re done.
00:59:05 That’s terrifying.
00:59:07 So you’re saying that there’s not been obvious
00:59:11 big negative impact from that yet.
00:59:14 So, but like.
00:59:15 There’s been a lot of negative impact,
00:59:16 but we’re just starting.
00:59:18 Right.
00:59:19 So the capacity for destruction is huge here.
00:59:22 How much involvement from nation states
00:59:24 do you think there is on this?
00:59:26 You know, it’s interesting.
00:59:29 So you’ve got Iran, you’ve got North Korea,
00:59:31 China, Russia, you got the big four.
00:59:33 You also got Brazil.
00:59:35 You’ve got all these other countries
00:59:36 that are interested in the United States as well.
00:59:40 Nation states are interesting
00:59:42 depending on who the nation state is.
00:59:44 All right, so Russia is very good about working
00:59:46 with the type of criminal that I used to be.
00:59:48 You know, they’ll enlist these guys
00:59:49 and steal information or what have you,
00:59:51 then Russia will take the information they want to,
00:59:54 and they’ll basically go off and sell whatever you want to
00:59:56 and make some money.
00:59:58 China’s all about IP.
01:00:01 North Korea is about stealing money
01:00:02 because they really don’t know
01:00:03 what the hell else to do right now, but…
01:00:07 So North Korea is actively involved in cybercrime.
01:00:09 Absolutely.
01:00:10 They’ve stolen a shitload of Bitcoin, everything else.
01:00:13 So absolutely, they’re actively involved with that.
01:00:16 Very, very skilled attackers, very skilled.
01:00:19 But even if you look at, you know,
01:00:20 I told you that stat about 90%, all right?
01:00:23 So even though SolarWinds is going to be
01:00:27 the number one attack,
01:00:29 the followup to that is this NotPetya attack that happened.
01:00:33 And so that was the most sophisticated attack
01:00:35 launched by the Russian Sandworm Group
01:00:38 using all known exploits throughout.
01:00:40 So it’s not, again, it’s not…
01:00:43 You’re right in the sophistication
01:00:45 is typically not technical sophistication,
01:00:47 but it’s a social engineering sophistication.
01:00:50 How do you get these things put together
01:00:52 in line to attack and succeed?
01:00:55 But when you get access to the source code,
01:00:57 that’s where technical sophistication could really do
01:00:59 a lot of damage.
01:01:00 And that’s when you find out real quick,
01:01:02 that’s what separates the men from the boys in this game.
01:01:05 All right, because all of a sudden it’s not,
01:01:07 I don’t have to worry about social engineering.
01:01:09 I’ve got source codes and I’ve got professionals
01:01:11 that are looking at that.
01:01:13 And that’s your ass.
01:01:15 Which then enables probably even more powerful
01:01:18 social engineering methods too.
01:01:20 I mean, it’s just the cascade of…
01:01:24 Is this terrifying to you, by the way?
01:01:26 That this world that we’re living in,
01:01:29 as we put more and more of ourselves on the internet,
01:01:34 into the metaverse, that there’s so many more
01:01:38 attack vectors on our wellbeing?
01:01:40 What’s terrifying to me, I used to preach it on Shadow Crew,
01:01:45 is the idea that the perception of truth
01:01:49 is more important than the truth itself.
01:01:52 It doesn’t matter what the facts are,
01:01:53 it matters what I can convince you of.
01:01:56 That’s what’s terrifying to me.
01:01:58 So you look at deep fakes, you look at fake news,
01:02:02 all this stuff that’s going out,
01:02:03 that becomes truly terrifying.
01:02:09 Maybe there’s an angle where it’s freeing,
01:02:11 if nothing is true and you can’t trust anything.
01:02:15 But you see, we as human beings, we wanna trust.
01:02:20 We do, we need human interaction.
01:02:22 And for that human interaction,
01:02:24 you have to have a degree of trust.
01:02:27 But it’s more like you let go of an idea of absolute truth
01:02:31 and it more becomes like a blockchain style consensus.
01:02:35 So you let go of like, you know what?
01:02:39 There’s this human dream, you get this on the internet,
01:02:42 you get like facts, as if there’s at the bottom,
01:02:47 at the bottom, there’s one turtle that’s holding
01:02:49 this scroll that says, these are the truths of the world.
01:02:54 The problem is, I mean, maybe believing
01:02:57 that is counterproductive.
01:02:59 Maybe human civilization is an ongoing process of consensus.
01:03:04 And so it’s always going to be, everything is shrouded
01:03:08 and you can call them lies or you can call them inaccuracies
01:03:11 or you can call them delusions.
01:03:13 It’s constantly going to be, it’s going to be a sea of lies
01:03:16 and delusions, but our hope is to over time
01:03:22 develop bigger and bigger islands of consensus
01:03:24 that allows us to live a stable and happy society.
01:03:27 Don’t call it true, call it a stable consensus
01:03:32 that creates a high quality of life
01:03:34 for the inhabitants of the island.
01:03:36 I like it, I mean, I like it.
01:03:38 I mean, we’re going to agree on this.
01:03:40 And then don’t use outlook, no, I’m just kidding.
01:03:43 So maybe a step back, you mentioned, I’d love to talk
01:03:47 about ShadowCrew, maybe this is the right time
01:03:49 to actually, yeah, let’s go to ShadowCrew
01:03:51 because it’s such a fascinating story.
01:03:53 So tell me the story of building ShadowCrew,
01:03:54 the precursor to today’s darknet and darknet markets.
01:03:59 This is why you’re the original Godfather.
01:04:02 This is it, this is it.
01:04:04 So I get married.
01:04:06 I faked a car accident to get married,
01:04:09 got the money from that.
01:04:10 You’re romantic.
01:04:11 I remember, like my dad, man.
01:04:13 I’m the guy that, you know, I get from mom,
01:04:15 I get the criminal mindset.
01:04:16 From dad, I get that, don’t want him to leave.
01:04:19 So, you know, so.
01:04:22 To get married, what’s that story?
01:04:26 Oh, dude, I was.
01:04:28 How did you fall in love there?
01:04:29 My first girlfriend was a preacher’s daughter
01:04:32 and crazy over her, dated her for five years.
01:04:35 And she figured out pretty quickly that,
01:04:38 well, not quickly, it took her five years
01:04:40 to figure out that Brett Johnson is not the man of God.
01:04:44 I could talk it, but more that agnostic than anything,
01:04:50 she breaks up with me.
01:04:52 So I was at the community college.
01:04:54 You’d make one hell of a preacher by the way.
01:04:56 Thank you.
01:04:57 Let’s put that.
01:04:59 Yeah.
01:05:02 I’ve got that Langston Hughes problem.
01:05:04 I’m looking for Jesus to show up and he just doesn’t.
01:05:08 So I was at the community college
01:05:10 and I was a straight asshole.
01:05:12 I was arrogant, conceited, everything else.
01:05:14 And I had posted an advertisement
01:05:17 on one of the billboards looking for an adult babysitter,
01:05:20 hot blonde, you know, come visit me in the library.
01:05:24 Buddy of mine shows up and he’s like, Brett.
01:05:26 And I was like, yeah.
01:05:27 He’s like, hottest girl in school, right down the hall.
01:05:29 And I was like, serious?
01:05:30 He’s like, yeah.
01:05:31 And I was like, let’s go see.
01:05:34 Walk over and there’s these two guys that are hitting on her.
01:05:37 So I just walk up and me and Todd, that was my buddy,
01:05:40 walk up and I’m just sitting there and listening.
01:05:43 And they’re giving the spill and everything.
01:05:45 And she’s just kind of taking it in.
01:05:46 Finally, I looked over and I was like,
01:05:48 you want to get out of here?
01:05:50 And one of the guys looks at me and he’s like, hey,
01:05:53 we’re talking to you.
01:05:54 And I was like, well, you’re talking at her.
01:05:55 You’re not talking to her.
01:05:57 I’m about to save her ass from you.
01:05:59 Yeah, that’s a smooth pick up line, by the way.
01:06:01 If I ever heard one, that’s good.
01:06:02 You want to get out of here?
01:06:04 So start dating, and she was the girl
01:06:08 that screwed my brains out.
01:06:10 And I fell head over heels.
01:06:13 We got married six months later.
01:06:15 Six months.
01:06:16 That’s what love does.
01:06:17 That’s what it does.
01:06:18 And she didn’t know I was a crook.
01:06:22 She had no idea.
01:06:24 She knew I was very bright.
01:06:26 She knew I did a lot of theater, stuff like that.
01:06:30 Got a job at, I was in hazard.
01:06:32 There was no jobs to be had, so I got a job in Lexington,
01:06:35 because we were going to be moving to the UK.
01:06:38 Got a job in Lexington at Lexmark testing printer boards,
01:06:43 circuit boards.
01:06:44 So I would leave on a Thursday night,
01:06:46 work three 18 hour shifts at Lexmark,
01:06:50 come back home on Monday.
01:06:54 Got married, faked a car accident
01:06:56 to get the rest of the money that I needed to get married.
01:07:02 And the faking on that, man, I had bought a Chevy Spectrum
01:07:07 at a car auction.
01:07:08 Gave like $500 for it.
01:07:09 My aunt had previously defrauded USAA insurance
01:07:14 on a car accident, and she was telling me all about it.
01:07:16 She’s like, look, go down to this chiropractor.
01:07:18 Make sure you get the insurance where
01:07:19 they’ll pay for a rental car.
01:07:21 They’ll pay lost wages.
01:07:22 I was like, they pay lost wages?
01:07:24 She’s like, yeah, they pay lost wages.
01:07:25 I was like, hmm.
01:07:26 She’s like, by the way, you work for me.
01:07:29 And I was like, I work for you.
01:07:32 And you get to define the wage.
01:07:34 And you could also define how long you were unable to work.
01:07:37 Exactly.
01:07:37 Exactly.
01:07:38 And the chiropractor will sign off on any damn thing.
01:07:40 So my cousin, Ronnie, he figures out that I’m going.
01:07:45 He finds out I’m going to fake this car accident.
01:07:47 So he comes to me.
01:07:48 He’s like, hey, man, can I get in on that?
01:07:49 I was like, yeah, man, you get on that.
01:07:51 So this kid, he’s five days younger than I am.
01:07:53 This kid, he goes to the dentist the day
01:07:55 that we’re faking it, has a tooth pulled,
01:07:58 tells the dentist not to numb it, not to stitch it,
01:08:01 just pull it.
01:08:02 So he shows up.
01:08:04 He shows up the day that we’re driving out
01:08:06 to fake the accident.
01:08:07 He’s got blood all over his shirt.
01:08:08 He’s still bleeding out of the mouth and everything else.
01:08:09 I’m like, are you OK?
01:08:10 He’s like, yeah, man, it’s going to be good.
01:08:12 It’s going to be good.
01:08:12 I’m like, OK.
01:08:14 My mom, by this point, I’m living with my grandparents.
01:08:17 My mom is up in the head of a hollow.
01:08:20 So we’re like, we’ll just do it up there.
01:08:22 We’ll go act like we’re visiting my mom on the way back out,
01:08:25 ran over a mountain.
01:08:26 OK.
01:08:27 So we go visit and everything, come back out that night,
01:08:30 run over the side of the hill.
01:08:32 Me and Ronnie walk back up.
01:08:33 Of course, it totals the car.
01:08:35 Walk back to my mom’s, acting like we’ve wrecked.
01:08:37 She knows what time it is and everything else.
01:08:40 And file the claims.
01:08:41 So that gets the money to get married.
01:08:44 And me and my wife moved from Hazard to Lexington.
01:08:49 And I’m the kid that my crime, usually, if I was a single guy,
01:08:57 wouldn’t break the law.
01:08:58 Wouldn’t.
01:08:59 I would be all right.
01:09:00 But females involved, oh, yeah.
01:09:03 Oh, yeah.
01:09:03 Got to spend the money.
01:09:04 Got to show them gifts.
01:09:05 Everything else was never enough to show love
01:09:07 in some sort of healthy way.
01:09:09 Always had to go overboard.
01:09:10 And typically, it was buying or stealing
01:09:12 some sort of expensive crap.
01:09:13 So that was the thing.
01:09:15 That was the way you show love is by buying expensive gifts.
01:09:19 Or something overboard.
01:09:20 Back then, with Susan, initially, it was,
01:09:24 don’t worry about working.
01:09:25 I got it.
01:09:26 You just worry about going to school.
01:09:27 She was a music major.
01:09:29 I was like, you just worry about going to school.
01:09:31 So don’t worry about cooking and cleaning.
01:09:34 I got it.
01:09:34 I got it.
01:09:35 So not only was I this guy that was going overboard,
01:09:37 but I was kind of a control freak, too.
01:09:40 So no, I got it.
01:09:41 I got it.
01:09:41 I got it.
01:09:42 So here I am, 60 hour a week job, 18 hour class load,
01:09:47 cooking and cleaning.
01:09:48 Something had to give.
01:09:50 I quit the job.
01:09:51 I couldn’t do it.
01:09:51 Quit the job and start back in fraud.
01:09:55 And trying to hide that from her at the same time.
01:09:57 So it was initially telemarketing fraud.
01:10:03 The first job I had was a telemarketer at a cemetery,
01:10:07 selling gravesites.
01:10:08 And then that ended.
01:10:11 Went over to work for the Shriners Circus, Shriners
01:10:13 Hospital.
01:10:14 And it was a third party company that
01:10:16 was doing all the telemarketing.
01:10:17 Made really good money doing that.
01:10:19 That job ended.
01:10:21 And then they pivoted over to working with Kiwanis Clubs,
01:10:25 selling food baskets to the food banks and everything.
01:10:29 So I stole the phone list and started at my own Kiwanis Club
01:10:34 and would do the telemarketing, go out twice a week
01:10:38 and pick up checks.
01:10:39 Well, what happened was is I’m going out picking up checks,
01:10:44 go knock on a door.
01:10:46 Turns out one of the persons that I had called
01:10:48 was a law enforcement officer.
01:10:50 So he was like, who are you?
01:10:54 I’m with the Kiwanis Club.
01:10:55 And he’s like, no, you’re not.
01:10:57 So got arrested, spent three months in a county jail
01:11:00 for theft by deception.
01:11:03 Got out.
01:11:04 And we had to move from Lexington back to Hazard
01:11:09 and live with Susan’s parents.
01:11:10 They had gotten a desktop computer, HP.
01:11:15 And I started surfing around online.
01:11:18 Found eBay.
01:11:19 And didn’t really know how to make money on eBay.
01:11:22 At about the same time, I’m committing low level frauds
01:11:28 online.
01:11:29 And I don’t really talk about that in the past.
01:11:30 The first time I’ve really talked about that.
01:11:32 But I would pay for it with bad checks.
01:11:37 So more person, so not using a platform like eBay and more.
01:11:41 I would find somebody that had like a stereo system on eBay,
01:11:44 something like that.
01:11:44 And I’d pay for it with a bad check
01:11:46 and would rely on them not to chase me
01:11:49 because they were out of state at that point.
01:11:51 And the dollar amounts were very low.
01:11:53 So got the money to move to finally
01:11:56 did those schemes enough to get the money
01:11:58 to move back to Lexington.
01:12:01 Got to Lexington.
01:12:02 And by this point, I’m doing, like I said,
01:12:04 these schemes on eBay.
01:12:07 And I’m like, there’s got to be a better way
01:12:09 to make money on eBay.
01:12:10 Got to be.
01:12:11 So didn’t really know how.
01:12:13 One night, I’m watching Inside Edition with Bill Riley.
01:12:16 And they’re profiling Beanie Babies.
01:12:18 So I’m sitting there watching.
01:12:19 The one they’re profiling is this one called Peanut,
01:12:21 the Royal Blue Elephant.
01:12:23 Selling for $1,500 on eBay.
01:12:25 I’m sitting there going like, shit,
01:12:27 I need to find me a peanut.
01:12:30 My initial thought was, well, there’s
01:12:32 got to be one in one of these Hallmark stores
01:12:33 in Kentucky someplace.
01:12:35 So I skip class the next day.
01:12:36 Went out around all the Hallmark stores looking for peanut.
01:12:39 No, idiot.
01:12:40 He’s on eBay for $1,500.
01:12:43 So after a few hours of that, I’m like, hmm.
01:12:49 Turns out they had a little gray Beanie Baby elephants
01:12:51 for $8.
01:12:52 Picked up one of those for $8.
01:12:54 Stopped by Kroger on the way home.
01:12:56 Picked up a pack of Blue Rit dye.
01:12:58 Went home, tried to dye the little guy.
01:13:00 So that was a nightmare.
01:13:02 Turns out they’re made out of polyester.
01:13:04 Get them out of the bath.
01:13:05 Looks like they’ve got the mange.
01:13:08 And what happens is, so I’m trying to dye the damn thing.
01:13:11 I’m like, well, that’s not going to work.
01:13:13 That’s just not going to work.
01:13:14 So I got online, found a picture of a real one,
01:13:17 posted it on eBay, and I was like, well, what I can do
01:13:20 is I can claim that’s the one I’ve got
01:13:25 and then maybe claim that it got messed up in the mail
01:13:28 and work out like that.
01:13:29 So posted a picture of a real one online.
01:13:32 Woman thought I had the real thing.
01:13:33 She wins the bid.
01:13:35 That social engineering kicks in immediately.
01:13:37 I didn’t want to be on the defensive.
01:13:39 I wanted to put her on the defensive.
01:13:41 So as soon as she wins the bid, I send her a message.
01:13:44 Hey, we’ve not done any business before.
01:13:46 I don’t even know if I can trust you.
01:13:47 What I need you to do, protects us both.
01:13:50 Go down the US Postal Service.
01:13:52 Get two money orders totaling $1,500.
01:13:54 Send them to me issued by the US government.
01:13:57 That way we’re both protected.
01:14:00 Soon as I get the money orders, I’ll send you your animal.
01:14:02 She believed that.
01:14:03 Didn’t ask any questions at all.
01:14:04 She believed that.
01:14:07 Sent me the money orders.
01:14:07 I cashed them out.
01:14:09 Sent her the creature.
01:14:10 Immediately got a phone call.
01:14:12 I didn’t order this.
01:14:13 My response, lady, you ordered a blue elephant.
01:14:16 I sent you a blue fish elephant.
01:14:19 And she got pissed.
01:14:21 And she kept calling.
01:14:23 What I found out, and that’s really
01:14:25 the first lesson of cybercrime that most of these criminals,
01:14:27 including self, learns.
01:14:29 If you delay a victim long enough,
01:14:30 just keep putting them off.
01:14:31 A lot of them, they get exasperated,
01:14:33 throw their hands in the air, walk away.
01:14:35 You don’t hear from them.
01:14:36 And none of them, to this day, none of them
01:14:40 complain to law enforcement.
01:14:41 They eat it.
01:14:42 So it’s a mixture of you’re exhausted by the process,
01:14:47 so it’s just easier to walk away,
01:14:49 and second, almost like an embarrassment.
01:14:52 So there’s a whole slew of reasons, all right?
01:14:54 There’s the exhaustion, certainly.
01:14:56 There’s the embarrassment.
01:14:57 So if you figure out, if you look at it today,
01:14:59 where does the embarrassment come from?
01:15:00 Well, the media, family members,
01:15:03 we’re all very good about blaming the victim for crimes.
01:15:06 Why would you click on the link?
01:15:07 Why would you send money to somebody you don’t know?
01:15:09 Blah, blah, blah.
01:15:10 So you’ve got that that’s going on.
01:15:12 You’ve got the issue of, who do you complain to?
01:15:15 Back then, you didn’t know.
01:15:16 Do you complain to local police?
01:15:18 Because she’s in another state, so which local police
01:15:21 do you complain to?
01:15:22 Do you complain to the feds?
01:15:23 Well, the dollar amounts aren’t high enough
01:15:25 to complain to feds.
01:15:26 Feds are going to tell you to go local.
01:15:28 Local’s going to tell you, hey, it happened in Kentucky.
01:15:30 Complain to them.
01:15:31 Kentucky’s going to tell you, well, shit, you’re over there.
01:15:34 We need you to come in.
01:15:35 So there’s this whole issue of the jurisdiction,
01:15:38 of the blame factor, everything else.
01:15:41 So I got away with that crime and did it under my own name
01:15:45 at that point.
01:15:46 I kept going and got better at it,
01:15:49 started to understand how to hide identities,
01:15:51 things like that.
01:15:52 Started selling pirated software.
01:15:54 Pirated software led into installing mod chips.
01:15:58 The initial pirated software was Sega Saturn, PlayStation 1.
01:16:02 Well, you had to have a mod chip in those
01:16:03 to play the pirated disk, so I started
01:16:06 selling and installing mod chips.
01:16:08 That led into installing mod chips in the cable television
01:16:11 boxes so you could watch all the pay per view, which in turn
01:16:15 led into programming satellite DSS cards.
01:16:18 Those 18 inch RCA satellite systems,
01:16:20 pull the card out of it, program it, turns on all the channels.
01:16:24 Started doing that.
01:16:26 Can we just pause?
01:16:28 That is very entrepreneurial.
01:16:33 So just technically, so there’s laws and rules
01:16:41 that you’re breaking nonstop.
01:16:43 So there’s also legitimate ways of doing
01:16:46 that, which is break the rules of the conventions of the past.
01:16:49 That’s the first principles thing.
01:16:51 That’s what Elon Musk and his ilk do all the time.
01:16:55 That is guts and brilliance.
01:16:59 But when it’s crossing the lines of the law,
01:17:03 actually sometimes the law is outdated.
01:17:07 The thing is, as a human being, you
01:17:09 have to then compute the ethical damage you’re doing.
01:17:12 Like ethically, the damage you’re
01:17:14 doing about other human beings, that is fundamentally
01:17:16 the thing that you’re breaking, is you’re
01:17:19 adding to the suffering in the world in one way or another,
01:17:22 and you’re justifying it.
01:17:24 But in terms of me sort of as an engineer,
01:17:27 that is some gutsy thinking.
01:17:29 That’s how Woz and Steve Jobs thought.
01:17:34 That’s innovation.
01:17:35 And maybe just think, if you can introspect your thinking
01:17:40 process here, this is a new, I like
01:17:44 how you remember this in HP, this
01:17:48 is a totally new thing to you.
01:17:50 Computers is another domain.
01:17:53 How were you figuring these puzzles out,
01:17:56 presumably mostly alone?
01:17:58 Alone.
01:17:58 When you were thinking through these problems, is there,
01:18:03 this is a strange question to ask,
01:18:04 but what is your thinking process?
01:18:08 What is your approach to solving these problems?
01:18:10 So the approach is you do something, and you fuck it up,
01:18:15 and you’re like, you think back, OK, how do I fix that?
01:18:20 You fix that aspect, you commit the crime again.
01:18:23 And it goes a little bit further, and it screws up.
01:18:26 OK, how do I fix that?
01:18:28 What’s the issue on that?
01:18:29 How do I fix that?
01:18:30 So there’s not a deep design thinking like that?
01:18:32 Later on, it becomes that.
01:18:33 Once you lay that groundwork of the way
01:18:36 these schemes are working, it becomes that.
01:18:39 And you can apply that to other things in cybercrime
01:18:42 as a whole.
01:18:44 But initially, it’s basically trial and error.
01:18:47 You’ve got a problem, how do you solve that problem?
01:18:50 So I’m committing these crimes under my name,
01:18:54 how do I solve that?
01:18:56 Well, one of the first principles
01:18:57 that we started to teach on Shadow Crew
01:18:59 is all crime should begin with identity theft.
01:19:03 That’s one of the main first principles
01:19:05 that a lot of people to this day still don’t really get.
01:19:08 All right, why would I commit a crime under my name
01:19:10 if I can do it under your name?
01:19:12 So that’s one of the big buffers.
01:19:13 And that takes trial and error to get
01:19:15 to that point where you start to understand
01:19:17 that’s the way crime should operate if you’re a criminal.
01:19:20 But with me, it’s trial and error.
01:19:25 It’s that childhood where that mindset
01:19:28 is kind of ingrained in you where you’re looking
01:19:31 for ways, let’s say nontraditional ways
01:19:35 of getting around things or getting through things.
01:19:37 I mean, one of the questions I’ll probably ask this later
01:19:41 is there’s also a unique aspect to the outcome
01:19:44 of what you were doing, which is you weren’t,
01:19:47 you didn’t get caught for a very long time.
01:19:50 We’ll talk about why that is.
01:19:52 And the thing is, it’s so interesting,
01:19:54 all crime probably should, to be effective,
01:19:59 should start with identity theft.
01:20:01 I like that identity theft
01:20:02 because identity theft can take so many forms.
01:20:05 Right, right.
01:20:06 So yes, so Shadow Crew.
01:20:09 So what’s, so as we’re, you started with love.
01:20:13 Started with love.
01:20:14 So now we’re doing these schemes online.
01:20:18 I’m selling to these,
01:20:20 I’m programming these satellite DSS cards.
01:20:22 And one of the interesting things,
01:20:24 and you still see that to this day,
01:20:26 is something will happen
01:20:29 that will create an industry for criminals, all right?
01:20:33 So what happened is Canada, Canadian judge,
01:20:37 rules about the same time
01:20:38 that I’m doing these satellite cards,
01:20:40 Canadian judge comes out and says,
01:20:41 hey, it’s legal for my citizens to pirate those signals.
01:20:47 And his reasoning was is since RCA
01:20:49 doesn’t sell the systems up here,
01:20:51 my citizens can pirate it.
01:20:53 Okay, so what happens is is overnight,
01:20:57 about the same time PayPal comes into play.
01:20:59 So PayPal is coming right online at about the same time.
01:21:03 Overnight, a little cottage industry
01:21:05 pops up in the United States.
01:21:07 You go down to Best Buy, buy the system for $100,
01:21:09 take it out in the parking lot, open system up,
01:21:11 pull it, open box up, pull the system out,
01:21:13 pull the card out, throw the system away,
01:21:14 program the card, ship its ass to Canada, $500 a pop.
01:21:17 Started doing that.
01:21:19 Business is good.
01:21:21 Making, you know, $3,000, $4,000 a week doing that.
01:21:23 I’m like, yeah, that’s good.
01:21:26 I have so many orders, I can’t fill all the orders
01:21:29 and quickly think to myself,
01:21:31 why do I need to fill any of them?
01:21:33 They’re in Canada.
01:21:34 I’m down here.
01:21:37 You know, who are they gonna complain to?
01:21:39 Because I already found out people don’t complain, all right?
01:21:42 They’re not gonna complain to anybody.
01:21:45 So I start not.
01:21:46 Especially in Canada.
01:21:46 Especially in Canada.
01:21:47 And I’m having them send money.
01:21:50 That’s when PayPal’s first into play.
01:21:53 And it amazes me that everybody is using PayPal.
01:21:58 It’s like, you don’t even have to really ask.
01:22:00 They’re like, can we pay by,
01:22:01 yeah, you can pay all day long by PayPal.
01:22:03 And PayPal had no clue what they were doing with security.
01:22:05 So it’s like, okay.
01:22:08 So they’re sending money to PayPal.
01:22:09 I’m having the PayPal cashed out to bank accounts
01:22:13 in my name at that point.
01:22:15 And I get scared because by that point,
01:22:17 I’m still in four to $6,000 a week.
01:22:20 And I’m like, somebody’s gonna be looking at money laundering.
01:22:23 So get it in my head.
01:22:24 I’m like, best thing that I can do
01:22:27 is get a fake driver’s license,
01:22:28 open up a bank account using that driver’s license,
01:22:31 cash out at the ATM.
01:22:33 Good.
01:22:34 No idea where to get a fake ID.
01:22:35 Not a clue.
01:22:36 So I get online, looked around.
01:22:38 Spent a couple of weeks looking around.
01:22:40 Thought I found a guy.
01:22:41 He went by the screen name of Fake ID Man.
01:22:43 Thought I found a guy, sent him $200, sent him my picture.
01:22:46 Dude rips me off.
01:22:48 And I’m like, what the hell, man?
01:22:52 Oh, I got played.
01:22:53 He had a little website set up with reviews.
01:22:57 And I’m like, oh, it’s all legitimate.
01:22:58 He’s building that trust that I talked about.
01:23:01 So the end result, I got pissed.
01:23:05 And there was no site that dealt with anything
01:23:10 criminal or cyber crime related.
01:23:14 The only real avenue you had was an IRC chat session,
01:23:17 internet relay chat.
01:23:18 And that, I’m sure you’ve been on that.
01:23:20 It’s this rolling chat board.
01:23:22 You don’t know who the hell you’re talking to.
01:23:24 Most of them are full of shit.
01:23:26 You can’t trust anybody.
01:23:27 And you’re sitting there trying to conduct business.
01:23:29 So if somebody claims they’ve got a product or service,
01:23:32 do they have it?
01:23:33 Does it work?
01:23:33 Are they just gonna rip you off?
01:23:34 Because in those channels, everyone’s a criminal.
01:23:37 I kept looking around and I’ve happened upon a website
01:23:42 called Counterfeit Library.
01:23:44 And Counterfeit Library only dealt with counterfeit degrees
01:23:48 and certificates, degree mail type stuff.
01:23:51 But they had a forum and no one was using the forum.
01:23:55 So I basically get on there and bitch every day.
01:23:58 I got ripped off, don’t know what to do,
01:24:00 bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
01:24:01 About the same time I started doing that,
01:24:03 two other guys show up.
01:24:04 One’s named Mr. X, he’s out of Los Angeles.
01:24:07 Other guy’s named Beelzebub,
01:24:08 he’s out of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
01:24:11 And we all become buddies.
01:24:13 So a few weeks of me bitching,
01:24:15 a few weeks of them responding.
01:24:17 Beelzebub gets me on ICQ and he sends me a message.
01:24:20 He’s like, I went by the screen name of Gollum
01:24:22 at that point, Gollum Fun.
01:24:24 And he’s like, Gollum, I can make you
01:24:26 a fake driver’s license.
01:24:27 And I was like, well, motherfucker, do it.
01:24:28 And he’s like, well, I’m gonna charge you for it.
01:24:30 I’m like, yeah, you are.
01:24:32 He’s like, I am.
01:24:33 I was like, no, you’re not.
01:24:35 And he’s like, look, man, he said,
01:24:37 this business, if you’re gonna do this,
01:24:40 you have to trust people or you’re gonna fail.
01:24:44 He said, so I’m gonna charge you $200,
01:24:46 but I’m gonna send you a driver’s license.
01:24:49 Well, by this point, I’m friends with the people
01:24:51 who own Counterfeit Library.
01:24:53 We’re emailing, chatting, everything else.
01:24:55 And I tell him, I’m like, okay, I’m gonna send you $200.
01:24:59 That way, when you rip me off, I’ll have them ban you
01:25:02 and I don’t have to deal with you anymore.
01:25:04 And he’s like, bet.
01:25:04 I’m like, okay.
01:25:06 So I sent him $200, sent him my picture.
01:25:09 Two weeks later, I get a driver’s license.
01:25:11 Name is Steven Schwecki out of Ohio.
01:25:13 And real guy, worked at ADP payroll to this day,
01:25:17 works at ADP, is where the guy works.
01:25:20 Got the driver’s license.
01:25:22 And to me, at that point in time,
01:25:24 it was the prettiest thing that I’d ever seen.
01:25:27 You know, I’d never seen a fake ID before.
01:25:29 I thought it was great.
01:25:30 Turns out, you know, looking back, it was like, eh.
01:25:33 So, but.
01:25:35 That is kind of a strong first step
01:25:39 in creating a fake identity.
01:25:42 Very strong, very strong.
01:25:44 So this is. So that was like, Gasko just,
01:25:48 on the point he made, that if you’re gonna be successful
01:25:53 in this, you should have people you trust.
01:25:56 Is he right on that?
01:25:58 Oh, he’s absolutely right.
01:26:00 He’s absolute.
01:26:00 So you have to have, this is like mob.
01:26:03 You have to.
01:26:04 You have to have an inner circle that you trust.
01:26:07 You know, I’m sure you’ve probably
01:26:08 heard me say this before.
01:26:11 Successful cyber crime, all right?
01:26:14 There are three necessities to being successful online
01:26:17 if you’re a criminal.
01:26:18 Three necessities are gathering data,
01:26:21 committing the crime, and then cashing it out.
01:26:24 All three of those necessities have to work in conjunction.
01:26:26 If they don’t, the crime fails.
01:26:28 The problem, and it’s a huge problem,
01:26:30 is that one guy can’t do all three things.
01:26:34 You know, you’ve got the people who gather the data.
01:26:37 Basically, the general store sells people
01:26:39 who sell PII, credit card logins, data tools.
01:26:44 They always sell the spoofed phone numbers
01:26:46 and the RDPs, stuff like that.
01:26:48 A lot of the times, those people don’t know
01:26:49 how to commit the crime.
01:26:51 And those people certainly don’t know
01:26:52 how to launder the money out, put cash in pocket.
01:26:54 So you’ve got, either because of a skill level,
01:26:58 sometimes a geographic location,
01:27:00 limits what that individual can do, all right?
01:27:03 So you have to rely on people who are good in areas
01:27:06 where you are not in order for that crime to succeed.
01:27:10 And that means you have to trust those people.
01:27:15 So what happens with Shadow Crew, all right?
01:27:17 So Counterfeit Library is the start, all right?
01:27:21 Counterfeit Library transitions over to Shadow Crew.
01:27:24 Right before that transition, there’s a Ukrainian guy.
01:27:27 By the name of Dmitry Golubov.
01:27:29 He was a spammer at that point in time.
01:27:31 He saw what we were doing with Counterfeit Library
01:27:34 and he liked it.
01:27:35 He was getting all these credit card details
01:27:37 and this kid, I mean, he’s a kid.
01:27:39 This kid has an idea.
01:27:41 And his idea was, I wonder if people would buy
01:27:43 stolen credit card details.
01:27:45 That’s pretty good Ukrainian Russian accent.
01:27:47 So he picks up the phone, he calls his buddies.
01:27:52 They call their buddies.
01:27:53 They have a physical conference in Odessa.
01:27:56 150 of these cyber criminals show up.
01:27:58 And they launched this idea,
01:28:00 this launches a website called Carter Planet,
01:28:03 which is the genesis of all modern credit card theft
01:28:06 as we know it, all right?
01:28:07 And so, remember I mentioned those three necessities
01:28:10 of cyber crime.
01:28:12 Dmitry had all the credit data in the world.
01:28:16 And he partnered with all these other Ukrainians
01:28:17 who had all this data as well.
01:28:19 The problem was, is so much fraud had been committed
01:28:22 on that Eastern side of Europe,
01:28:24 that every card had been shut down.
01:28:26 Even if you were a legitimate card holder
01:28:28 and tried to cash it out,
01:28:30 you weren’t doing it at that point.
01:28:32 So again, those three necessities,
01:28:33 gathering data, committing crime, cashing out.
01:28:35 Dmitry had the data.
01:28:37 They could commit the crime.
01:28:38 They could not put cash in pocket.
01:28:41 So we were running counterfeit library.
01:28:44 One day I get this message,
01:28:46 or not a message, one day script shows up.
01:28:48 And he posts just on the general forum.
01:28:50 He posts, hey, I’ve got credit card data.
01:28:54 Give me an address, give me a burner phone number,
01:28:56 wait five business days, order whatever you want to.
01:28:58 We had never seen anything like that.
01:29:01 We were a PayPal fraud and eBay fraud site,
01:29:03 is what we were, and fake driver’s licenses.
01:29:06 So then, and we had,
01:29:07 I guess we had two, 3,000 members at that point.
01:29:09 So the response from the members was, that can’t be real.
01:29:16 You’ve gotta be law enforcement.
01:29:17 It’s gotta be trying to get us arrested and everything else.
01:29:21 What, let me backtrack a little bit.
01:29:23 So the driver’s license that I had got,
01:29:27 Beelzebub had an idea.
01:29:28 What he wanted to do is he wanted to sell driver’s licenses.
01:29:34 Mr. X wanted to sell social security cards.
01:29:36 He made a very passable social security card.
01:29:39 Me, I didn’t, I had no skill level on that.
01:29:40 I knew PayPal fraud and eBay fraud.
01:29:42 So Beelzebub was like, I’ll tell you what,
01:29:45 you be the reviewer.
01:29:47 That way you get every product or service that comes in.
01:29:50 They’ll have to send it to you or let you have access to it.
01:29:53 You can learn the entire game.
01:29:55 And because you’re not selling anything,
01:29:57 it gives you legitimacy on the reviews, all right?
01:30:01 So I started out as a reviewer,
01:30:02 the only reviewer on Counterfeit Library.
01:30:05 So over the next year, Beelzebub turns out
01:30:09 he was a pot grower.
01:30:10 He goes back to growing pot
01:30:11 because he wasn’t making shit selling driver’s licenses.
01:30:14 Mr. X, about a year and a half in,
01:30:16 he gets arrested cashing out driver’s, not credit cards,
01:30:20 cashing out to casinos, doing some shit with that.
01:30:24 So I’m the only guy left standing
01:30:26 and I’m at the top of the heap.
01:30:28 And it becomes this thing where if I review somebody,
01:30:32 they make a lot of money.
01:30:33 If I don’t, you don’t do business here.
01:30:36 So script shows up saying he’s got this.
01:30:38 I’m the only reviewer on site.
01:30:41 People think he’s law enforcement.
01:30:43 First week it goes like that.
01:30:45 After a while, I’m like, okay, I gotta do something.
01:30:47 And I’m scared, man,
01:30:48 because I’m like, he may be law enforcement.
01:30:50 So I get him on ICQ and I’m like,
01:30:52 hey, you have to be reviewed.
01:30:53 He’s like, what the hell is that?
01:30:54 So I tell him what it is, he’s like, you reviewed me.
01:30:56 I was like, yeah, that’s the idea.
01:30:58 So give him a drop address, give him a burner phone number,
01:31:03 wait five business days,
01:31:04 and I try to hit Dell for $5,000.
01:31:06 The order fails.
01:31:08 I get back on ICQ, hey man, it didn’t work.
01:31:10 He’s like, give me one more chance.
01:31:12 I was like, look, I’ll give you one more chance,
01:31:13 but it’s your ass after that.
01:31:15 He’s like, one more chance.
01:31:16 I go, okay, give him another address, another phone number,
01:31:20 wait another five business days,
01:31:22 hit Thompson’s Computer Warehouse for $4,000,
01:31:25 Dell for $5,000.
01:31:26 Order goes through, get the products in.
01:31:29 I post that review on Counterfeit Library,
01:31:33 and literally overnight,
01:31:35 we turn from an eBay PayPal fraud site
01:31:38 to a credit theft site.
01:31:40 And that becomes a lot of money really quickly for members.
01:31:44 So we were doing, now it’s called CMP fraud,
01:31:46 card not present fraud.
01:31:47 So you hit an online merchant
01:31:49 with stolen credit card data.
01:31:51 Back then, a fairly experienced fraudster
01:31:54 could profit 30 to $40,000 a month, okay?
01:31:58 Just buying laptops, what have you,
01:32:00 and cashing out, put them on eBay for sale
01:32:03 and sell them like that.
01:32:03 And 30 to 40K a month was the profit on that.
01:32:06 Script had a lot of buddies.
01:32:08 He had people like Roman Vega,
01:32:11 these other guys that would sell
01:32:12 not just credit card data,
01:32:14 but counterfeit physical credit cards as well.
01:32:17 We had, and he.
01:32:18 Counterfeit, not stolen.
01:32:20 So counterfeit.
01:32:21 Counterfeit.
01:32:22 That must be tough to do.
01:32:25 So the connection.
01:32:26 That must be harder than driver’s licenses.
01:32:28 It’s crazy.
01:32:29 So what BOA initially had,
01:32:32 and I became the United States salesperson for BOA,
01:32:37 but what he had was,
01:32:38 is he was the first dumps provider in the United States.
01:32:42 So on the back of your credit or debit card,
01:32:44 there’s a magnetic stripe.
01:32:47 Three data tracks on the stripe.
01:32:48 There was the first data track is the customer’s name.
01:32:50 Second data track is the card number,
01:32:52 forward slash 16 digit algorithm outside of that.
01:32:56 That’s important.
01:32:56 We’ll get back to that in a few minutes.
01:32:58 Third data track is called indiscriminate data.
01:33:00 No one uses it, all right?
01:33:02 So what’s bought and sold is the second data track.
01:33:05 It’s called the dump.
01:33:06 And the reason that’s sold is when you go into a shop,
01:33:10 you insert the card or you swipe the card,
01:33:12 the only information that’s sent out for verification
01:33:15 is the second data track, all right?
01:33:17 That goes to the processor bank for verification.
01:33:19 The first data track, that customer’s name,
01:33:21 shows up on the screen of the cashier in front of you.
01:33:24 So what typically happens is,
01:33:26 is you buy 10 of these dumps.
01:33:28 You get 10 counterfeit cards
01:33:30 in code track two on all 10 cards.
01:33:32 Track one, you create one fake driver’s license.
01:33:35 Track one is just the name
01:33:36 of that one fake driver’s license.
01:33:38 That way, when you go in the shop, swipe the card,
01:33:40 track two gets sent off for verification.
01:33:42 Track one shows up on the screen in front of the cashier.
01:33:44 If you ever ask for ID, you pull out the fake ID.
01:33:47 Everyone’s a nice, warm, fuzzy.
01:33:48 You walk out with the cameras, Rolex.
01:33:51 And track one could be, it doesn’t have to be connected.
01:33:54 It’s not connected to track two.
01:33:55 Not connected at all, all right?
01:33:57 That’s one of the big problems, all right?
01:33:59 So Scrip brought a host of technical people
01:34:05 into that type of environment,
01:34:07 all committing credit card theft.
01:34:08 We had proxy providers.
01:34:10 We had all these people that were doing this stuff.
01:34:13 We start making a lot of money, a lot.
01:34:15 And the reason that happens is, again,
01:34:17 Scrip did not have the ability to cash out.
01:34:21 So he was reduced to selling things.
01:34:23 And at the same time, he’s looking for,
01:34:25 how do I make more money, all right?
01:34:28 The Ukrainians happened upon this thing
01:34:31 called the CVV1 breach, or hack,
01:34:34 is what they called it.
01:34:36 So what happens is, remember I told you track two,
01:34:39 card number forward slash 16 digit algorithm.
01:34:43 You gotta know the algorithm to encode it
01:34:46 so you can swipe the card or take it to the ATM machine.
01:34:49 All right, ATM.
01:34:51 You gotta know it.
01:34:52 Now we were fishing data from hell.
01:34:54 I mean, we were doing a lot of fishing, a lot.
01:34:58 We were getting pins, we were getting card numbers,
01:35:01 but you can’t get that algorithm.
01:35:03 So Ukrainians start testing stuff.
01:35:07 What they found out was no bank
01:35:10 had implemented the hash on track two.
01:35:13 So you take the card number forward slash any 16 digits,
01:35:17 it would encode.
01:35:19 Take it to the ATM, pull cash out,
01:35:21 because you got the pin, all right?
01:35:24 Started doing that.
01:35:26 Well, wait, sorry, I’m trying to understand.
01:35:28 So that means, so if there’s no hash,
01:35:32 are they generating random numbers
01:35:34 or do they have valid numbers for track two?
01:35:37 No numbers needed at all,
01:35:38 as long as just the track two was a complete track two.
01:35:41 So it’s a valid track two that doesn’t match,
01:35:45 so the pin is the thing that gets you in?
01:35:48 So back then, all right, back then,
01:35:50 what we’re talking about is you needed,
01:35:52 typically today you need a whole track two.
01:35:54 You need that valid track two.
01:35:55 All right, you need the 16 digit card number,
01:35:59 forward slash, and then whatever that algorithm
01:36:01 does, the other side of it, all right?
01:36:03 Back then, none of the banks had implemented that algorithm.
01:36:06 So while the algorithm was there,
01:36:08 you didn’t need it to encode.
01:36:13 Interesting.
01:36:14 Interesting.
01:36:15 So you can make a lot of money with physical of fake.
01:36:20 So much money that card not present fraud.
01:36:24 Card not present fraud, remember I told you,
01:36:25 was $30,000 to $40,000 a month, all right?
01:36:28 That turned into $30,000 to $40,000 a day.
01:36:32 The Ukrainians, again, they can’t cash it out.
01:36:36 They’ve got all the data on the planet,
01:36:38 but they can’t cash it out,
01:36:39 those three necessities of cybercrime.
01:36:41 So the deal became, you have to rely on the Americans.
01:36:44 Tell you what, we’ll give you 40%.
01:36:46 So you had all these cashiers
01:36:48 that were 40% of $40,000 a day.
01:36:51 Yeah, we’ll take that, all right?
01:36:53 Send the rest of it over to buy Western Union
01:36:55 or what have you to your Ukrainian contact.
01:36:57 That’s before cryptocurrency came into play.
01:36:59 Now you had a couple of forerunners
01:37:01 with eGold and Liberty Reserve, things like that.
01:37:04 But back then it starts out with Western Union,
01:37:07 then it becomes prepaid cards,
01:37:09 sending track information over,
01:37:11 loading the card up like that,
01:37:12 and then finally you get to eGold, Liberty Reserve,
01:37:14 and then today it’s with crypto that’s used.
01:37:19 Started stealing a lot of money, a lot.
01:37:23 And that got law enforcement attention.
01:37:26 So we started to see, I mean, it’s a crazy ass story.
01:37:30 We started to see IPs coming in
01:37:33 from law enforcement agencies, government agencies,
01:37:35 because back then they didn’t know
01:37:36 how to shield their identity either.
01:37:38 So you saw Secret Service, you saw DoD,
01:37:42 you saw all these like, and you’re like,
01:37:44 that’s interesting.
01:37:45 So, you know, and at the same time,
01:37:51 it was called a hack, but it wasn’t a hack.
01:37:54 We had a guy that worked at T Mobile in Los Angeles.
01:37:58 This is the same guy that back then
01:38:01 published Paris Hilton’s phone contact list.
01:38:04 That made a lot of news.
01:38:07 Not only did he do that, but it turned out
01:38:09 that the Los Angeles Secret Service Agency
01:38:12 was using T Mobile phones.
01:38:14 So he’s getting text messages of the Secret Service
01:38:17 investigating Shadow Crew,
01:38:19 and he posts those damn things on Shadow Crew.
01:38:21 So I’m sitting there going, head of the pile,
01:38:23 I’m sitting there going, this is not gonna end well.
01:38:27 This is not gonna end well.
01:38:28 So at the same time, I had access,
01:38:31 I started out with access
01:38:33 to the Indiana State Sex Offenders Registry,
01:38:35 and I was using that to create bank accounts,
01:38:37 launder the money out, and I would sell the bank accounts,
01:38:39 stuff like that.
01:38:42 They shut that down.
01:38:43 The next database I had access to
01:38:44 was the Texas Driver’s License database,
01:38:47 and started using that to create fake driver’s licenses,
01:38:51 what have you.
01:38:52 And then finally, we happened upon
01:38:54 the California Death Index, all right?
01:38:58 Complete information, mother’s maiden,
01:39:00 socials, DOBs, all that, and it’s like,
01:39:04 gotta be a use for that.
01:39:06 Well, you can use it to create identities all day long.
01:39:09 My idea was, I wonder if you could take somebody
01:39:14 that’s died and then file for social security death benefit,
01:39:18 not death benefits, but social security benefits
01:39:20 for that individual, and get that recurring paycheck in.
01:39:23 So that takes a lot of research
01:39:24 to start seeing if you can do that.
01:39:26 How does the federal government know if you’re dead?
01:39:29 Do federal indexes reference state indexes?
01:39:32 You got all these questions that pop up.
01:39:34 Well, it turns out, federal indexes
01:39:36 don’t reference state indexes, it’s against the law.
01:39:39 It also turns out, the only way the federal government
01:39:42 knows you’re dead is prior to 1998,
01:39:46 the family had to file a social security death benefit
01:39:51 for that person, all right?
01:39:53 Prior to 98.
01:39:54 Which of course most people don’t.
01:39:56 Right, prior to 98, it took the family.
01:39:58 After 98, the hospital can do it,
01:40:01 funeral home can do it, or the family can do it.
01:40:03 So a lot more people have it filed after,
01:40:05 if they’ve died after.
01:40:06 But it’s still, there’s a lot of people
01:40:08 who probably don’t. A lot of people don’t.
01:40:09 Because that death benefit’s only like $219, okay?
01:40:13 Nobody’s thinking about that shit.
01:40:15 So I started to apply for social security benefits.
01:40:19 Nope, number’s dormant.
01:40:21 So they want you to come in for a physical interview.
01:40:23 Here I am, you know, 32.
01:40:26 You’re not gonna pass as a 65 year old, so no.
01:40:29 So the next idea I had was,
01:40:32 I wonder if you could file income tax returns
01:40:34 on these people.
01:40:37 Turns out you can, all day long.
01:40:40 So I started doing that.
01:40:42 And I started to steal, once I got ramped up,
01:40:45 because you test everything.
01:40:46 You know, you’re testing to make sure,
01:40:47 you gotta figure out what the deposit instrument is
01:40:50 and everything else.
01:40:51 And once you get all that lined out,
01:40:53 I started to steal $160,000 a week,
01:40:55 every week for 10 months out of the year.
01:40:58 By paying taxes?
01:41:00 By filing fake returns.
01:41:03 Yeah, filing fake tax returns.
01:41:05 So you find a business, and the way the system worked
01:41:07 is the IRS will issue a refund on somebody
01:41:11 before they’re able to verify
01:41:13 that that person worked for an employer.
01:41:15 Still works like that today.
01:41:17 All right, so.
01:41:18 And you’re keeping the amounts relatively low.
01:41:20 Keep them at $3,000.
01:41:22 All right.
01:41:23 Amounts are very low.
01:41:24 But you’re still able to achieve scale
01:41:25 because this large index of real people.
01:41:27 I got to where, and I was manual.
01:41:28 Later on, a couple buddies of mine
01:41:30 went automated with it.
01:41:31 Wait, you were doing this by hand?
01:41:32 So there’s no code involved?
01:41:34 All manual.
01:41:35 Wow.
01:41:36 I’d file a return once every six minutes.
01:41:39 Work 10 hours a day, three days a week.
01:41:42 So clicking on, so typing fast and clicking.
01:41:44 One return every six minutes.
01:41:46 That’s changing IP.
01:41:47 That’s changing address.
01:41:49 Everything else, one return every six minutes.
01:41:52 For three days a week.
01:41:54 Fourth day, I would take a road trip,
01:41:57 plot out a map of ATMs.
01:41:59 And then the next two days, cash out.
01:42:01 Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
01:42:02 All right.
01:42:03 Come back home, rinse and repeat.
01:42:06 Turns out that a backpack,
01:42:08 I don’t see anybody sitting around here,
01:42:09 but a backpack will hold $150,000 of 20s,
01:42:12 is what it will hold.
01:42:14 So I’d put 150K and 20s in a backpack.
01:42:16 I had a spare bedroom.
01:42:18 I’d come in, toss the backpack in the bedroom.
01:42:21 This is very, very important information.
01:42:23 And the fact that you know it is also very,
01:42:25 first we started with the volume of coal that weighs a ton,
01:42:27 and now a backpack holds $150,000 of 20s.
01:42:32 And then you can multiply that by five 400s.
01:42:35 Yeah.
01:42:36 I like this.
01:42:37 It’s also times 20s coming out of ATM, right?
01:42:39 Each 20 weighs a gram.
01:42:42 Each 20 weighs a gram.
01:42:43 So you can actually go by weight,
01:42:45 which is what federal authorities do
01:42:47 when they get a pallet of cash, they just weigh it.
01:42:49 Oh, they just, they just weigh it.
01:42:52 So 150K is seven and a half keys of cash.
01:42:55 One and a half, 15, oh, that’s pretty light.
01:42:59 Not bad, not bad.
01:43:00 Yeah, you get a big backpack,
01:43:02 go do a good run with David Goggins with it.
01:43:05 I like it.
01:43:05 The fact that you know this is great.
01:43:08 So wait, where does that come in with the backpack?
01:43:11 So what happens is I didn’t know how to launder money.
01:43:14 All right, so I’m throwing cash in the spare bedroom.
01:43:17 One day you open up the bedroom and you’re like,
01:43:20 gotta do something with those backpacks.
01:43:22 And that’s when you start learning how to launder money,
01:43:25 cash based businesses, things like that.
01:43:26 I had a production company,
01:43:28 had a couple of detailing company.
01:43:29 I was thinking about going into food trucks,
01:43:31 things like that in Charleston.
01:43:33 Actually, can you pause on that to take a tangent there?
01:43:35 How does money laundering work?
01:43:39 I mean, at that time and what years are we talking about?
01:43:42 This is, by the time the tax return schemes go into play,
01:43:46 we’re talking 2002, 2003 is when tax returns start.
01:43:51 And so what, at that time and what you’re aware of now,
01:43:54 how it evolved, how does money laundering work?
01:43:59 You know, it’s not that much different.
01:44:00 It’s really not.
01:44:02 You get a cash based business,
01:44:04 start laundering the money or putting the money through that,
01:44:06 saying the transactions are legal.
01:44:08 You then start depositing into bank accounts.
01:44:11 From bank accounts, my thing was is
01:44:15 have bank accounts in the United States, Mexico, Canada,
01:44:19 and then finally bounce over to Estonia
01:44:22 was the final destination of all this stuff.
01:44:24 And the idea is to try to move them to so many places
01:44:28 that by the end of the day, it looks legal
01:44:31 and you can’t trace it all if you’re ever caught,
01:44:34 which you ultimately are.
01:44:36 But so cash based businesses, you know.
01:44:38 So when you say, sorry to interrupt,
01:44:40 the cash based businesses,
01:44:41 so you have money that needs to be moved to other people.
01:44:48 So how does that work?
01:44:49 What’s the business?
01:44:50 Are people providing you a service
01:44:52 and you’re giving them money?
01:44:54 Right, so you do the Ozark thing if you wanna do that.
01:44:57 So you can gamble, cash out something like that.
01:44:59 So it trips to whatever casinos you’ve got.
01:45:02 You’ve got your production company or your detail company.
01:45:05 So how many cars are you cleaning a day?
01:45:08 How many companies have you got to do that?
01:45:10 All right, whatever that company is,
01:45:12 it’s gotta be cash based.
01:45:13 Somebody’s paying you in cash is what you’re doing.
01:45:16 You have to have enough of those cash based businesses
01:45:19 where it doesn’t look funny.
01:45:21 All right, because if you’re a detail company
01:45:23 making $100,000 a month, that’s a problem.
01:45:26 Okay, so then you start depositing into that.
01:45:30 Well, because of the Patriot Act,
01:45:33 a suspicious activity report, SARS, came in at $2,500
01:45:37 instead of the 10K that it used to be.
01:45:40 So all of a sudden you’ve got multiple bank accounts
01:45:42 that you’ve got to set up, all right?
01:45:44 Fortunately, what you also had
01:45:46 is you had a bunch of prepaid debit cards
01:45:47 that were coming into play at the same time.
01:45:49 So a combination of bank accounts, prepaid debits
01:45:53 that had ACH abilities attached to those as well,
01:45:56 and you start running them all together.
01:45:58 Then once it’s out of the United States,
01:46:00 you don’t have to worry as much.
01:46:01 You can start funneling that into fewer bank accounts
01:46:05 until finally you’ve got the one main account
01:46:07 that’s over at Bank Letico in Estonia at that point.
01:46:11 That’s what you’ve got.
01:46:12 So a bunch of hops that end up at a place
01:46:15 that you can’t trace.
01:46:16 And to give you an idea, I was arrested February 8th, 2005.
01:46:19 My last seizure was 2010.
01:46:22 Got the last seizure notice.
01:46:24 So they got it, but it didn’t took them that long
01:46:28 to get to it.
01:46:30 So how do stories like with Script that come into play here
01:46:34 where he had someone who owed him money
01:46:38 kidnapped and tortured.
01:46:40 So when does it turn darker?
01:46:45 It turns darker the more money you make.
01:46:48 Script was a kid that he was stealing enough money
01:46:52 that he was able to buy whatever estate he wanted to.
01:46:55 And he would brag about touring the countryside.
01:46:58 And if he saw property that he liked, he would buy it.
01:47:00 And that was not just a brag, he was doing that.
01:47:03 So this kid is stealing a lot of money.
01:47:05 At the same time, he’s got connections politically
01:47:08 because of his family, he’s got connections
01:47:10 and that family’s got connections with a Ukrainian mob.
01:47:13 All right, so he’s got these inroads
01:47:16 and people are looking out for him
01:47:17 and he’s stealing a lot of money at the same time.
01:47:20 Somebody doesn’t pay him a decent amount of money.
01:47:24 Somebody doesn’t pay him.
01:47:25 Now we had never, with Shadow Crew, with Carter Planet,
01:47:29 with Counterfeit Library, we were basically the geeks.
01:47:33 All right, we were just the fraudsters,
01:47:35 the social engineers.
01:47:36 We had never really considered violence.
01:47:38 The rules that I had in play were,
01:47:40 hey, we don’t do child pornography,
01:47:43 we don’t do counterfeit currency, we don’t do drugs.
01:47:46 And the only thing we ended up really obeying
01:47:48 was the child porn stuff, except for Max Butler,
01:47:51 who you mentioned earlier.
01:47:54 Script, someone rips the guy off.
01:47:57 And he comes online on Shadow Crew at that point
01:48:02 and he posts these pictures one day.
01:48:04 And I mean, it was a detailed narrative through the pictures.
01:48:07 Had the guy that rammed in the van,
01:48:10 he had the door open, rammed in the van,
01:48:12 had the guy tied up, had the guy being tortured.
01:48:15 And the response was, this is what happens
01:48:20 when you steal from me.
01:48:22 And that’s the first time that violence came into play
01:48:27 at that point, and that’s when things got,
01:48:29 you start realizing things are getting a little serious.
01:48:32 How did that make you feel?
01:48:34 The first response is, can’t be real.
01:48:38 He’s just doing that.
01:48:42 You know, he’s wanting to send a message.
01:48:44 Then you’re like, no, that’s real, that’s real.
01:48:49 Were you afraid in your own heart
01:48:52 that you might descend to that too?
01:48:55 Like if you see that, or was it pretty clear to you
01:48:58 that that’s a line that some people can cross
01:49:02 and some can’t and you’re not one of those that can cross it?
01:49:05 You know, I gotta tell you, I joke with my wife.
01:49:10 The joke I tell my wife is, you know,
01:49:13 I knew some guy that had 8,000 Bitcoins.
01:49:15 I might be persuaded to ask him for access to that.
01:49:19 And she was like, how?
01:49:20 And I was like, well, hammer and toes.
01:49:23 And I say that as a joke,
01:49:28 but there’s that line where you’re like,
01:49:32 I remember who I used to be.
01:49:34 And if you’re looking at that kind of money,
01:49:38 I might be persuaded to do that back then.
01:49:41 You know, that’s, and I think that was Scripps issue
01:49:46 is it was a lot of money to him.
01:49:49 There’s the money.
01:49:50 And then there’s, you know, violence can also be gradual.
01:49:53 So over time you do a little more, a little more,
01:49:54 a little more, a little more.
01:49:56 You get used to what’s going on
01:49:58 and then I get desensitized.
01:49:59 And you figure, you take somebody like Ross Ulbricht,
01:50:02 the Silk Road guy, all right.
01:50:05 Ross was not a violent guy.
01:50:08 He was not.
01:50:08 But at that point in time, you know,
01:50:10 he was sitting on 24 million in Bitcoin.
01:50:13 He was the only game in town.
01:50:15 And that 24 now is like, I don’t know,
01:50:17 22, 24 billion, some crap like that.
01:50:20 But he felt in danger.
01:50:27 This guy was gonna turn him in.
01:50:28 You know, it was a black mountain and everything.
01:50:29 So Ross thinks he hires a couple hit men to kill the guy.
01:50:34 So it becomes that thing.
01:50:36 And I saw that over and over again.
01:50:38 And I’d like to say I wasn’t like that,
01:50:41 but given the same circumstances,
01:50:43 I would have probably done the same thing.
01:50:46 And also when you’re, it’s not just about money,
01:50:49 there’s a lot of other forces.
01:50:50 Like if you’re threatened for your wellbeing
01:50:54 or for your wealth or for your power,
01:50:56 all of us operate under different motivations.
01:50:59 Plus that online aspect with those communities like that,
01:51:02 if you’re the head guy,
01:51:03 you really feel like you’re the parent of these guys.
01:51:06 So somebody is starting to threaten them,
01:51:07 it’s like, all right, what do I need to do?
01:51:10 So what do you make of Silk Road?
01:51:12 The Shadow Crew started something that today
01:51:16 you can call dark net and dark net markets.
01:51:19 So these markets that operate, that trade,
01:51:23 trade things, everything from child pornography to drugs,
01:51:28 to, I mean, what else?
01:51:31 Everywhere.
01:51:32 What are the dark things that humans want to do
01:51:34 that they don’t want anyone to know about?
01:51:36 All of those things.
01:51:39 So can you maybe tell me, you know what?
01:51:44 Let’s just even step back.
01:51:45 What is the dark net?
01:51:46 How big is it?
01:51:47 What happens there?
01:51:48 Let’s backtrack a little bit more before we get to that.
01:51:51 All right, what Shadow Crew did,
01:51:56 other than dealing in all these stolen wares,
01:52:01 what Shadow Crew did that’s really important.
01:52:04 Remember those three necessities that I talked about?
01:52:08 But the important thing is,
01:52:09 is it established trust among criminals, all right?
01:52:13 Because that’s a necessity.
01:52:14 You have to be able to trust who you’re dealing with
01:52:17 because you have to deal with somebody.
01:52:19 You have to, all right?
01:52:21 So how do you know you’re not dealing with a cop?
01:52:23 How do you know you’re dealing
01:52:24 with somebody that’s skilled?
01:52:25 How do you know you’re going to deal with somebody
01:52:26 that’s not going to rip you off?
01:52:27 You have to be able to trust that individual.
01:52:30 The Shadow Crew provided
01:52:31 that trust mechanism for criminals.
01:52:33 You had that communication channel, the forums,
01:52:35 where you could reference conversations weeks, months old,
01:52:38 take part and learn from those conversations.
01:52:41 You had vouching systems and review systems in place,
01:52:44 escrow systems in place.
01:52:46 You knew by looking at someone’s screen name,
01:52:49 if you could trust the individual,
01:52:51 network with the individual, all right?
01:52:53 And that community of just humans
01:52:57 provided that backbone of trust.
01:53:01 And that’s really interesting when you think about it.
01:53:04 You had the trust that was there,
01:53:05 but you also had this,
01:53:08 almost this instantaneous information
01:53:11 that was available about the community
01:53:13 or about cyber crime at large.
01:53:15 And that’s still in play today, all right?
01:53:18 So that was the way things were
01:53:21 until a couple of things happened.
01:53:23 And one was cryptocurrency.
01:53:25 The other one was the Tor browser, the dark web.
01:53:29 Now I was working with a secret service,
01:53:30 ripping the secret service off,
01:53:32 when Tor comes into play, all right?
01:53:34 So we got a memo in one day
01:53:37 and it was talking about the Tor browser.
01:53:38 And it was like, we really need to be careful with this.
01:53:41 This is going to be problem.
01:53:43 And so we all fired up the Tor browser
01:53:45 and it turns out it was, this was 2005, early six.
01:53:50 It turns out it was completely unusable,
01:53:52 could not use it at all,
01:53:53 simply because no one was using it
01:53:55 and it was extremely slow.
01:53:56 So for people who don’t know,
01:53:58 Tor browser is a way to be completely anonymous.
01:54:01 As long as you properly know how to use it, huge caveat.
01:54:04 All right, so developed by the United States Navy
01:54:07 and they developed it.
01:54:08 I don’t know this.
01:54:10 Oh yeah.
01:54:10 It wasn’t the hackers that, interesting.
01:54:13 US Navy, to this day, the number one funder of Tor,
01:54:17 military, to this day, all right?
01:54:20 Interesting.
01:54:21 I mean, the same, I guess with the internet,
01:54:22 the origins are the dark web and DOD.
01:54:25 It was developed so that operatives could communicate
01:54:28 with each other without being identified, all right?
01:54:31 That then goes open source.
01:54:33 They release it, EFF comes in,
01:54:35 start sponsoring and everything else like that.
01:54:38 The next idea was, well, you know,
01:54:40 people can get around their country’s firewalls,
01:54:42 whistleblowers can use it, things like that.
01:54:44 Well, someone forgot to mention
01:54:45 that the first adoptees of tech,
01:54:48 if you can use it to launder money or remain anonymous,
01:54:50 are criminals.
01:54:52 And so criminals start to use the damn thing.
01:54:55 All right?
01:54:56 So along the same time we get,
01:54:59 well, a few years later,
01:55:00 we get Satoshi Nakamoto pops up
01:55:02 with his ideas for Bitcoin,
01:55:05 and then Ross Ulbrich runs with it.
01:55:07 Ross Ulbrich decides he’s gonna start up Silk Road.
01:55:10 So initially the people who were using Tor,
01:55:13 which later is the dark web,
01:55:15 people were using Tor or just talking with each other,
01:55:18 visiting websites, communicating like that.
01:55:21 Someone figured out,
01:55:22 hey man, we could host websites on this thing,
01:55:25 and they have a lot of trouble finding the box.
01:55:28 So that is the advent of Silk Road all of a sudden.
01:55:33 Ross Ulbrich has this idea
01:55:35 that he’s gonna change the world
01:55:37 by becoming the largest drug dealer on the planet.
01:55:40 So he opens up the Silk Road
01:55:42 and the only payment instrument he allows is Bitcoin.
01:55:46 So if those people out there are wondering
01:55:48 why Bitcoin is going at what, 44K today?
01:55:51 Yeah, and by the time this is out,
01:55:54 it could be 100,000 or 10,000.
01:55:56 Absolutely.
01:55:57 We’ll see.
01:55:57 Who knows?
01:55:58 If it’s 10,000, I’m going to buy some.
01:56:04 Which is a hilarious statement to make
01:56:06 because that statement would be ridiculously wrong
01:56:09 like five years ago, right?
01:56:10 I know, I know, I know.
01:56:12 People 100 years from now will be laughing,
01:56:14 wait, it was that low back then?
01:56:18 So he only accepts Bitcoin,
01:56:20 and of course the initial use case of crypto
01:56:23 is no one wants to admit it today,
01:56:26 but the initial use case is we’re gonna buy a bunch of pot.
01:56:29 We need somebody, we need a way to pay for it.
01:56:33 So that’s what happens.
01:56:35 Ross, it’s really interesting to me.
01:56:38 If you look at motivations of cyber criminals,
01:56:43 the motivations are status, cash, ideology, all right?
01:56:48 My guys, all cash, across the board, all cash.
01:56:52 Ross is ideology.
01:56:54 He really believed he was gonna change the world.
01:56:57 He really didn’t.
01:56:57 I’ve been fortunate.
01:56:59 I actually know the guy who ran Silk Road 2
01:57:03 and have talked to the kid, everything else,
01:57:07 and I will tell you that those guys
01:57:10 who are motivated by ideology,
01:57:13 they are a completely different breed.
01:57:16 They really are.
01:57:17 It’s not, you know, the cash guy, it’s low hanging fruit.
01:57:21 The ease of, it’s hard to stop committing crime,
01:57:26 but it’s much easier for a cash motivated individual
01:57:29 to stop than it is that ideology guy.
01:57:32 That Silk Road 2 guy, he’s still got it.
01:57:35 You know, he’s not breaking the law,
01:57:36 but you can see it’s like, he wants to, he wants to.
01:57:41 So it’s…
01:57:44 That’s fascinating that, I mean,
01:57:45 the worst atrocities in human history
01:57:47 are committed with people that operate under ideology.
01:57:51 All the other motivations are much weaker.
01:57:53 But you know, you think about it,
01:57:54 with Ross, I mean, very bright guy, very bright guy,
01:57:59 but think about the amount of cognitive dissonance
01:58:02 that the guy’s got,
01:58:04 that he thinks he’s gonna change the world
01:58:06 by running a drug site.
01:58:09 I mean, certainly, I mean, could he have changed the world?
01:58:12 Yeah, could he have done it like that?
01:58:15 Probably not.
01:58:17 Well, I can steel man those arguments.
01:58:19 I listened to quite a few libertarians
01:58:22 and you can push that to anarchists.
01:58:25 You know, there’s a lot of people that argue…
01:58:28 So I actually talked to a professor at Columbia
01:58:32 who actually argues that all drugs should be legalized
01:58:35 and not at a philosophical level, political level,
01:58:37 but the fact that all the negative consequences of drugs
01:58:41 that people talk about actually have to do
01:58:44 with other factors in your life.
01:58:47 I would agree with that.
01:58:48 And so that’s, okay, but that’s more like a argument
01:58:51 about negative aspects of drugs.
01:58:53 I think the ideology comes in where it’s like,
01:58:56 well, nobody should tell you what to do.
01:58:59 You should have the responsibility of your own actions.
01:59:02 Like the government or any other institution
01:59:07 shouldn’t be the rule setters,
01:59:12 the constraints for how you live your life.
01:59:14 And so I could see that argument being made
01:59:17 and ultimately if you like create an open market for drugs,
01:59:22 how that could build a better society,
01:59:24 it might break down the outdated, the corrupt,
01:59:28 the bureaucratic institutions.
01:59:29 I mean, you can make that argument.
01:59:31 There’s an argument and let’s be fair.
01:59:33 I wanna be fair with it.
01:59:34 I mean, did he change the world?
01:59:38 We do have this whole thing called cryptocurrency.
01:59:40 Yeah, in the long arc of history, perhaps.
01:59:43 Yeah, we do have that.
01:59:46 That’s a biggie.
01:59:48 And that might’ve been for it to take hold in society.
01:59:50 Maybe the darker parts of society at first,
01:59:52 maybe that was necessary.
01:59:54 Right, I mean, maybe, we’ll see how it pans out.
01:59:57 Shadow Crew, we had this guy, Albert Gonzalez,
02:00:02 Albert Gonzalez, that’s the kid’s name.
02:00:04 We had, we were growing so big
02:00:06 that I had to start farming things out.
02:00:11 So the first thing I started farming,
02:00:12 I instituted this review system,
02:00:16 kind of establishing that trust mechanism
02:00:18 even further for criminals to use.
02:00:21 We needed somebody to take care of our tech aspects
02:00:25 of the forum.
02:00:25 So an associate of mine by the name of Kim Taylor,
02:00:29 where we’re looking for a forum techie,
02:00:31 he comes to me one night and he’s like,
02:00:33 found our forum techie.
02:00:34 I was like, who’s that?
02:00:35 And he’s like, it’s this kid.
02:00:36 And I was like, is he any good?
02:00:38 He’s like, well, he knows the software.
02:00:39 And I was like, okay, we’ll just sign his ass on.
02:00:43 He went by the screen name of Kumbajonny,
02:00:45 was his screen name.
02:00:46 And he starts selling credit cards after a while
02:00:49 under a screen name of Scarface.
02:00:51 And that CB1 breach where you’re cashing out
02:00:56 the track twos at ATMs, $40,000 a day.
02:01:02 So Albert’s in New Jersey one day, broad daylight,
02:01:06 and stands at an ATM for 40 minutes, just standing there,
02:01:11 feeding in one ATM card after another, pulling out cash,
02:01:16 taking the 20s out, stuffing them in that backpack.
02:01:19 Meanwhile, just across the street,
02:01:21 a couple of cops just happened to be there.
02:01:23 And they start noticing this kid just standing there.
02:01:28 So 40 minutes, they watch this kid, 40 minutes.
02:01:31 Finally, one cop looks at the other,
02:01:33 let me see what’s going on there.
02:01:36 Walks over across the street, Albert’s wearing a wig.
02:01:39 He’s got the disguise on, everything else like that.
02:01:42 Ask him, kid, what are you doing?
02:01:43 Albert falls apart.
02:01:46 We didn’t know Albert had been arrested.
02:01:48 So Albert immediately goes in,
02:01:51 I wanna work for the Secret Service.
02:01:55 At that point in time, Secret Service,
02:01:59 I referred to, and I wanna make sure I don’t say,
02:02:03 it’s not like that anymore.
02:02:04 But back then, they were fucking idiots, all right?
02:02:07 They had no clue what was going on.
02:02:09 So there was a competence issue
02:02:10 that they were working through is one way to put it.
02:02:12 That’s a nice euphemism.
02:02:15 So, or fucking idiots is another way to say it.
02:02:19 So they’re just not aware of the digital world.
02:02:21 They had no clue, no clue.
02:02:23 The way that Albert tells them how to catch us
02:02:26 because they looked at him, how do we catch them?
02:02:28 And Albert’s like, Albert, I’m serious, I’m serious.
02:02:32 So Albert’s like, well, you could try a VPN.
02:02:35 What’s a VPN?
02:02:37 So he explains it to them, they’re like,
02:02:39 that’s a good idea.
02:02:41 So I quit Shadow Crew.
02:02:43 I was worried about all the news
02:02:45 that was coming in and everything like that.
02:02:46 I’m stealing 160K a week.
02:02:47 I didn’t know Albert had been arrested.
02:02:51 I’m worried about being arrested.
02:02:52 I know the writing’s on the wall.
02:02:54 And I’m like, I’m quitting.
02:02:56 Where did you see the writing?
02:02:58 The IPs that were coming in,
02:03:00 the text messages about the Secret Service investigators
02:03:03 I referred to.
02:03:04 So the pressure’s building.
02:03:05 This is not gonna end well.
02:03:06 This is going to be bad.
02:03:09 So I announced my retirement of February 15th,
02:03:13 I’m sorry, April 15th, 2004 is my retirement.
02:03:18 I think that’s the 2004.
02:03:19 And I quit, I walk away.
02:03:22 Well, Albert had been arrested.
02:03:24 They cut him loose.
02:03:26 No one knows he’s been arrested.
02:03:27 He comes back into Shadow Crew.
02:03:29 I leave Kim Taylor at the same time.
02:03:31 He’s kind of on the run, which if you wanna know that story,
02:03:34 that’s a nightmare story in and of itself.
02:03:36 So my second in charge, Kim Taylor, this guy,
02:03:40 there was this guy named David, oh, what was his name?
02:03:46 He was, El Mariachi was the guy’s name.
02:03:49 David Thomas.
02:03:50 David, yeah, he was a film guy.
02:03:53 Scarface.
02:03:54 So El Mariachi, real name David Thomas,
02:03:58 he’s on the run out of Nebraska for check fraud.
02:04:02 He comes to us on Shadow Crew telling us this sad story.
02:04:06 We take up a collection for this guy.
02:04:09 Send it to him, all right?
02:04:10 I get him a job working with a low level carter
02:04:13 trying to make him some money, all right?
02:04:16 El Mariachi, Thomas does this for a few weeks,
02:04:19 comes to me one day and he’s like,
02:04:20 man, I’m not making any money.
02:04:22 I’m like, okay, let me see what I can do.
02:04:23 Well, I had a Ukrainian guy by the name of Big Buyer.
02:04:27 He, a real friend of mine.
02:04:29 And I contacted him, I was like, look, man,
02:04:30 I got a guy that wants to do some work.
02:04:32 Can you help the guy out?
02:04:33 And he’s like, I got it.
02:04:34 I was like, okay.
02:04:35 So he sends Thomas enough money to go,
02:04:38 Thomas is in Texas at that point,
02:04:40 sends Thomas enough money to go from Texas
02:04:43 to Issaquah, Washington and rent an office space, all right?
02:04:48 So Thomas goes up there, rents his office space,
02:04:51 him and his girlfriend rents an office space.
02:04:54 And the plan is, is Big Buyer is going to place an order,
02:04:59 get product sent, Mariachi is going to get the product,
02:05:03 list it on eBay, cash out 50 50, easy enough, all right?
02:05:07 So Big Buyer places an order.
02:05:09 First order is outpost.com, $18,000.
02:05:13 The largest order outpost.com had ever received
02:05:16 at that point in time.
02:05:18 Order goes through.
02:05:19 It goes through still.
02:05:20 Goes through, he gets the product, all right?
02:05:23 Mariachi comes back, tells me,
02:05:25 tells my second in charge, Kim Taylor.
02:05:27 Kim Taylor at this point, I’m 33, 34.
02:05:31 Kim Taylor’s 46.
02:05:32 He works at the Tattered Cover Bookstore
02:05:35 in Denver, Colorado is where he works at this point.
02:05:37 And he fancies himself Jason Bourne, all right?
02:05:40 He’s even got one of the screen names of Jason Bourne.
02:05:43 So I’m like, all right, so Mariachi is telling us
02:05:46 how much money he’s making, everything else.
02:05:48 I’m like, well, that’s good.
02:05:49 I’m glad you’re all right.
02:05:50 Kim contacts me and he’s like, I want to go to Issaquah.
02:05:53 And I was like, why?
02:05:54 And he’s like, to make some money.
02:05:55 I’m like, you’re making money.
02:05:57 He’s like, I want to go to Issaquah.
02:05:58 I was like, all right, go, be careful.
02:06:00 So he gets in the car, Saturn is what he’s driving.
02:06:04 He drives his little piece of Saturn
02:06:06 all the way up to Issaquah.
02:06:08 Gets there, you know, midnight.
02:06:10 They party all night long
02:06:12 because they’ve never met each other.
02:06:14 They’re just celebrating, partying, drinking,
02:06:16 everything else like that.
02:06:17 Meanwhile, Big Buyer has placed another order
02:06:23 with Outpost.com, $17,000.
02:06:27 The second largest order Outpost.com had ever received
02:06:31 at that point in time.
02:06:33 By this point in time, Outpost knows
02:06:35 the first order was fraudulent.
02:06:37 Guess where it’s going?
02:06:38 The exact same address the first order goes.
02:06:41 So Outpost picks up the phone, calls Issaquah PD.
02:06:44 Hey, we got a fraudster.
02:06:46 Issaquah’s like, would you mind sending some empty boxes?
02:06:51 And Outpost is like, be happy to.
02:06:54 So the rule was, is on credit card fraud,
02:06:58 if you’ve got full account access,
02:07:00 you place the order.
02:07:01 The morning it’s supposed to arrive,
02:07:03 you sign into the bank account or the credit card account.
02:07:06 If you can sign in, you go pick up your product.
02:07:09 If you can’t sign in, you go back to sleep that day.
02:07:12 All right?
02:07:13 Well, Big Buyer was the guy who placed the order.
02:07:17 Mariachi and my second in charge are partying, all right?
02:07:20 So they’re supposed to contact Big Buyer, they don’t.
02:07:24 Meanwhile, Big Buyer is raising hell,
02:07:26 getting up with me like, hey, where are the guys?
02:07:31 I can’t find them.
02:07:32 They don’t need to pick up this product.
02:07:34 So I can’t get in touch with them.
02:07:36 They go down to pick up the,
02:07:37 so Mariachi’s got a Cadillac, old 70s Cadillac.
02:07:41 He’s got a Cadillac, pulls into the complex.
02:07:45 Now Mariachi’s driving,
02:07:49 Kim Taylor’s in the passenger seat,
02:07:51 David Thomas’s girlfriend’s in the back seat.
02:07:54 As they pull into the complex,
02:07:55 going through the parking lot,
02:07:57 Mariachi just happens to glance over and he sees a van
02:08:00 with a guy sitting sideways in the van.
02:08:03 And he looks at Kim Taylor and he’s like,
02:08:05 that’s an undercover.
02:08:07 And Kim’s like, ah, it’s fine.
02:08:10 So they pull up to the office complex.
02:08:13 Kim’s like, I’ll go in and get the packages.
02:08:16 So he walks in, looks at the guy behind the counter.
02:08:19 I believe you have some packages for us.
02:08:21 Guy’s like, one second.
02:08:23 So he disappears around the wall,
02:08:26 out pops the Issaquah PD, arrests Kim.
02:08:29 David Thomas is in the car watching all this happen.
02:08:32 He bugs out and they arrest him on the interstate
02:08:37 where he has three fake driver’s licenses in his wallet
02:08:40 along with his real driver’s license, another no, no,
02:08:43 but they get him.
02:08:44 So David Thomas had outstanding warrants out of Nebraska.
02:08:48 We couldn’t bond him out.
02:08:50 Kim Taylor didn’t have any warrants.
02:08:52 So we bonded him out.
02:08:53 My third in charge, kid, Seth Sanders was his name.
02:09:00 He bonds him out, uses his girlfriend’s account
02:09:02 to bond him out.
02:09:03 And I get Kim Taylor to go to Utah
02:09:09 where another friend of mine agrees to house him,
02:09:13 him and his wife.
02:09:15 So I think everything’s fine and all that.
02:09:18 About three weeks later, this guy in Utah
02:09:21 gets me on the phone.
02:09:22 I’m like, hey, he’s got to go.
02:09:24 I’m like, what’s going on?
02:09:27 He’s like, well, the only thing he’s doing
02:09:30 is popping ecstasy tablets every day, all day.
02:09:33 And I’m like, seriously?
02:09:35 He’s like, yeah.
02:09:36 I was like, okay, he’s got to go.
02:09:37 So we kick him out of there.
02:09:38 By this point, I’ve got another crew that’s coming through.
02:09:40 I mean, I had all these crews running.
02:09:42 Had another crew that’s coming through Denver.
02:09:45 Send Kim back to Denver to partner up with these guys.
02:09:50 Kim gets these guys arrested.
02:09:52 So by this point in time, I’m exasperated.
02:09:54 I just want to throw my hands up in the air and walk away.
02:09:57 So my retirement’s coming up at the same time.
02:10:00 So I’m like, fuck it, I’m done.
02:10:03 So I tell everybody, the rest of the admins
02:10:06 and the mods there, I’m like, this is what’s going on.
02:10:08 You guys need to watch out for this.
02:10:09 We need to ban Kim, not let him back in.
02:10:11 Be careful what’s going on.
02:10:13 I walk away.
02:10:15 At the same time I walk away,
02:10:17 Cumberjani, Albert Gonzalez, comes back into play.
02:10:20 He sees everything that’s going on.
02:10:22 He uses that to his advantage.
02:10:24 He starts banning everyone that’s suspicious of him,
02:10:26 sets up the VPN at the same time and says,
02:10:29 hey, to make sure we’re all secure,
02:10:31 I need all transactions to go through this VPN.
02:10:34 VPNs ran by the Secret Service.
02:10:37 All right, Secret Service ends up,
02:10:39 I think they ended up cataloging like $7 million
02:10:41 worth of transactions over the next four or five months.
02:10:45 Shadow Crew makes the front cover of Forbes, August, 2004.
02:10:49 Headline, Who’s Stealing Your Identity.
02:10:52 October 26, 2004, United States Secret Service arrest,
02:10:56 33 people, six countries, six hours.
02:11:00 I was in Charleston, South Carolina when I saw it happen.
02:11:02 And I’m like.
02:11:03 So you’re the one that got away.
02:11:08 I’m the one public.
02:11:09 There were a couple other guys that got away
02:11:10 that they didn’t publicly mention.
02:11:12 One, his name was Tron.
02:11:14 He was a zero.
02:11:17 Yeah, exactly.
02:11:18 But he went by the screen name Tron.
02:11:21 He had access, almost unfettered access to Bank of America.
02:11:27 So what happens is they identified the guy,
02:11:29 Secret Service is in the air to go get him.
02:11:31 They call the Ukrainian police.
02:11:33 Hey, we’re coming down to arrest this guy.
02:11:34 Ukrainian cops are like, oh, come on down.
02:11:38 So as soon as they got off the phone,
02:11:39 Ukrainian cops get in the car, go down and tell Tron,
02:11:42 hey, they’re coming to get you.
02:11:44 Yeah.
02:11:45 So he bugs out down to South America
02:11:47 and they don’t catch him I think for six or seven years
02:11:50 after that, something like that.
02:11:51 But caught him eventually.
02:11:52 Caught him eventually.
02:11:53 Well, let me actually ask you on this point.
02:11:55 You’ve said that if you do cyber crime eventually,
02:11:59 it’s not gonna end well.
02:12:00 It does not end well.
02:12:02 Why is that?
02:12:03 So I don’t wanna say that’s because
02:12:05 you’re gonna be arrested because honestly,
02:12:07 very few people are arrested, all right?
02:12:10 But it doesn’t end well because of the type of person
02:12:13 that you become.
02:12:14 You quoted me earlier, you lie to everybody around you.
02:12:21 You lie to yourself, you lie to your friends,
02:12:23 you lie to your family.
02:12:24 Of course, you lie to your victims.
02:12:25 You don’t have any friends.
02:12:27 You know, I went 20 years without friends.
02:12:30 I had associates, I didn’t have friends.
02:12:33 And you can’t truly trust anybody.
02:12:35 You don’t trust anybody.
02:12:36 You don’t trust anybody.
02:12:37 You know, I had my wife, I was married for nine years.
02:12:41 I lied to her every single day of those nine years.
02:12:46 And it took her nine years to give up on me,
02:12:49 to realize that I was that piece of shit.
02:12:52 And she leaves at that point.
02:12:55 Then from there, I started dating a stripper
02:12:58 and lied to her.
02:12:59 I thought I had friends.
02:13:00 I lied to all those people that I knew
02:13:02 that thought they were my friends.
02:13:04 I lied to them the entire time.
02:13:06 You become that individual.
02:13:08 I don’t think a lot of people really understand
02:13:13 how bad that is.
02:13:14 You know, you talked about, you pointed out that woman
02:13:17 that I ripped off.
02:13:18 She was trying to put a roof on her house
02:13:20 for her freaking kids, man.
02:13:22 You’re that person.
02:13:23 You’re that person.
02:13:24 So you’re also lying to yourself.
02:13:29 And that’s not a mindset in which you can
02:13:34 grow as a person, find happiness,
02:13:38 find genuine, simple human affection,
02:13:41 which is what love is.
02:13:42 Simple, real friendship, all of those things.
02:13:46 So I went to prison, of course.
02:13:48 One of the things, one of the most important lessons
02:13:50 that I’ve learned in prison,
02:13:52 because cyber crime as a whole,
02:13:54 if you’re a criminal, it’s an addiction, all right?
02:13:56 If you’re addicted to something,
02:13:57 whether it be drugs, crime, gambling, what have you,
02:14:00 if you’re addicted to something,
02:14:01 you cannot love anything else except the addiction.
02:14:05 The addiction comes first, all right?
02:14:08 And you pointed out some of those truly despicable things.
02:14:13 Script, for example, tortures that guy.
02:14:16 You get to the point where it’s like,
02:14:18 okay, this is the business.
02:14:20 And I tried to convince myself that I’m a businessman,
02:14:25 but I’m a good guy on the other end.
02:14:27 And you’re not, you’re not.
02:14:28 So those lies become part of it, everything else.
02:14:31 And yeah, the higher ups are usually arrested, they are.
02:14:37 But you’ve got millions of cyber criminals these days.
02:14:40 So most guys are not gonna be arrested.
02:14:43 So you may be arrested.
02:14:45 You may be like freaking Jonathan James.
02:14:49 He was a minor, a very, very talented individual,
02:14:53 very competent.
02:14:54 He had, as a kid, he had broke into NASA,
02:14:57 the OD, Pentagon.
02:14:59 He shut the NASA computers down for six weeks.
02:15:01 This is that kid.
02:15:03 Then he decides he wants to go into credit card theft,
02:15:06 partners with Albert, he’s arrested with Albert.
02:15:09 Law enforcement, they were gonna blame him.
02:15:13 He was the only competent individual.
02:15:15 So this kid gets up one day, he wasn’t in prison yet.
02:15:19 He gets up one day, goes in his dad’s bedroom,
02:15:21 gets out his 45, walks in the bathroom,
02:15:24 and blows his brains out.
02:15:26 You know, you’ve got things like that.
02:15:29 Or you’re gonna rip somebody off,
02:15:31 and you’re gonna end up like scripted with that guy,
02:15:32 the guy who ran Evolution Marketplace.
02:15:37 No one knew who, two people ran that guy and a girl.
02:15:40 And no one knew who they were.
02:15:42 He ends up stealing about $24 million,
02:15:45 a lot of it from Ukrainian mob,
02:15:46 and they found him about a year later
02:15:48 on a beach without his head in hands.
02:15:51 But you know, it always goes south.
02:15:53 But more than anything, to me,
02:15:54 the negative thing is you really become somebody that,
02:16:02 I mean, just truly a despicable human being.
02:16:05 When you get to the point when you’re destroying
02:16:09 people’s retirement accounts,
02:16:11 you’re stealing money from a woman
02:16:13 that simply wants to do something good for her family.
02:16:18 When you become that individual,
02:16:20 and you’re okay with that, my God, man.
02:16:23 It got to the point, I had one guy I ripped off,
02:16:26 it’s like for $900,
02:16:27 is when I first started the cybercrime stuff.
02:16:29 It’s when I was becoming competent.
02:16:31 And I ripped him off for like $900,
02:16:35 and he sent me an email, and he was like,
02:16:41 the email said something like,
02:16:43 I guess you needed the money, and it’s okay.
02:16:47 You know, you keep it.
02:16:48 And I’m getting chills right now thinking about it.
02:16:52 It’s that, where you become that individual.
02:17:00 Yeah.
02:17:02 Can I actually backtrack?
02:17:03 Listen, I love love, okay?
02:17:06 I do too.
02:17:07 And there’s a story that you fell in love with a stripper.
02:17:11 I mean, you have to tell the story.
02:17:13 So how did you fall in love with somebody,
02:17:17 not that there’s anything wrong with that profession,
02:17:19 but it’s romantic.
02:17:20 It’s like a true romance, by the way, great movie.
02:17:23 It is a great film.
02:17:24 It’s truly a great film.
02:17:27 Even Brad Pitt, who makes a brief appearance, is genius.
02:17:31 There’s so much good acting there.
02:17:32 Anyway, so tell me that love story.
02:17:35 All right, so like I said, from my dad,
02:17:39 I get that fear of being abandoned.
02:17:41 I lied to my wife for nine years until she leaves.
02:17:45 And I was in Charleston, South Carolina.
02:17:48 And what happened was, I noticed that Susan,
02:17:53 she was not coming to bed like she used to.
02:17:56 She’d stay up all night long,
02:17:57 and sometimes she’d go and be gone a few hours
02:18:01 and everything else.
02:18:02 And I’m like, well, something’s going on.
02:18:03 And I’d pass by her computer
02:18:05 and she would minimize the screens.
02:18:06 And I’m like, well, gotta figure out
02:18:08 what the hell is going on.
02:18:10 So put a key logger on her system.
02:18:13 As anybody should in a relationship.
02:18:17 Absolutely, because you trust them, so why not?
02:18:20 You should be tracking all their movements,
02:18:22 all their stuff.
02:18:23 Exactly, exactly.
02:18:24 Like I said, I was the control freak too.
02:18:26 It’s romantic.
02:18:26 So I found out she’d been cheating on me.
02:18:29 And she was.
02:18:30 See, there you go, they had a reason.
02:18:31 They had a reason, I justified.
02:18:34 So I found out she was cheating on me.
02:18:35 She was asleep when I found it out.
02:18:36 And I sat there looking at it and I was like, well, shit.
02:18:40 So I got up, walked in the bedroom,
02:18:42 opened up the wardrobe, got a suitcase out,
02:18:45 started putting her clothes in it.
02:18:46 And she wakes up, she’s like, where are you going?
02:18:48 And I’m like, I’m not, you are.
02:18:51 Well, my bravado disappeared pretty quickly.
02:18:54 I took about a week of both of us
02:18:58 crying and arguing and everything else.
02:19:01 And she finally left.
02:19:03 And I went through this depression.
02:19:07 I was in Charleston, South Carolina.
02:19:09 I would just walk around the house kind of stumbling in a daze.
02:19:12 Realized I was getting suicidal.
02:19:15 And was smart enough to do something about it.
02:19:18 And picked up the phone book.
02:19:19 And that’s where there’s always this sense of humor.
02:19:22 So I picked up the phone book.
02:19:23 I’m going through the yellow pages.
02:19:25 I’m like, psychologist, criminal psychologist,
02:19:27 because I need that.
02:19:30 Called the psychologist, crying to her.
02:19:32 I mean, crying on the phone.
02:19:33 Told her everything.
02:19:33 I’m this criminal.
02:19:34 This is what’s happened.
02:19:35 She’s like, come in now.
02:19:36 So I go in, spill my guts.
02:19:39 And saw her for about four months.
02:19:42 And I joke about it, but it’s true.
02:19:43 She was trying to get me to stop breaking the law
02:19:47 and to go into real estate.
02:19:48 And I remember telling her, is there a difference?
02:19:51 She was like, yes, there’s a difference.
02:19:54 So I saw her for about four months.
02:19:57 I was 34.
02:19:59 I didn’t start drinking until I was 34.
02:20:02 I’d never done drugs or anything else like that,
02:20:04 because my mom was an addict as well.
02:20:07 So I was this guy that always wanted to be in control.
02:20:09 Didn’t want to lose control of myself.
02:20:13 And had never been to a strip club.
02:20:16 So one night, I was getting lonely.
02:20:19 So I walked into the strip club.
02:20:20 Actually, I was researching the strip club.
02:20:22 And it was Joe’s Roundup in Charleston, South Carolina.
02:20:27 Joe’s Roundup.
02:20:28 Little bitty hole in the wall stuff.
02:20:30 Yeah, real classy.
02:20:32 So I walked in, and I’m literally
02:20:35 that guy, man, that fell in love with the first stripper
02:20:39 that he sees.
02:20:41 She walks by, I’m like, that one.
02:20:44 So I didn’t know the strip club game.
02:20:46 Again, criminal, naive as hell.
02:20:48 So belly up at the bar, order the beer.
02:20:52 I’m sitting there drinking it.
02:20:54 She comes over to me, and we start talking.
02:20:57 And she’s like, would you like to get a bottle of champagne?
02:21:01 I was like, does that mean going in back or what?
02:21:03 She’s like, well, yeah, you need to do the bottle
02:21:04 when you’re going back.
02:21:05 And I was like, sure, let’s buy a bottle of champagne.
02:21:08 $400 bottle of Korbel.
02:21:11 So I’m like, all right.
02:21:13 And again, that bravado disappears pretty quickly.
02:21:15 I get back there, and we talk for two hours.
02:21:18 And nowadays, I don’t understand that most men
02:21:21 who go to strip clubs, the strippers
02:21:23 are their therapist most of the time.
02:21:26 So I’m sitting there talking, we’re talking.
02:21:27 And of course, she’s sizing me up.
02:21:29 She’s looking at the watch.
02:21:30 She’s like, what kind of car do you drive?
02:21:33 Everything else.
02:21:34 And I’m telling her and talking.
02:21:36 So at the end of the night, I’m like, really nice meeting.
02:21:39 She’s like, it’s so nice meeting you, too.
02:21:41 So I leave.
02:21:44 You guys just talked.
02:21:45 Just talked.
02:21:46 And there’s still this feeling of love and all of that.
02:21:48 Yeah, so just talked.
02:21:49 Just got along pretty good.
02:21:51 I’m like, I like her.
02:21:52 I like her.
02:21:54 So come back in a week later.
02:21:57 Walk in and call her over.
02:21:59 And I was like, look, I said, that was my first time
02:22:02 to a strip club.
02:22:03 I said, don’t know you.
02:22:04 I like you.
02:22:04 I’d like to know you more.
02:22:05 Would you like to go out to dinner?
02:22:07 And she was like, yeah.
02:22:10 I was like, where would you like to go?
02:22:11 So she says, Rue de Jon.
02:22:13 And I was like, don’t know what it is.
02:22:15 That’s where we’ll go.
02:22:16 So I go back.
02:22:16 And I had a theater buddy at that point in time
02:22:19 because I was trying to get my life together.
02:22:23 JC was his name.
02:22:24 And I was like, I got a date.
02:22:25 He’s like, you got a date?
02:22:26 I was like, yeah, man, I got a date.
02:22:28 And he’s like, OK, where are you going?
02:22:30 I was like, Rue de Jon.
02:22:31 And he’s like, take your wallet.
02:22:34 I’m like, yeah.
02:22:35 And he’s like, take your wallet.
02:22:37 I was like, all right.
02:22:38 So we start doing the lunch and the dinner thing.
02:22:43 And I get to where I really like her.
02:22:47 I was 34.
02:22:48 She was 23 and got along really well,
02:22:52 had common interest in music and arts and stuff like that.
02:22:57 I mean, it’s stereotypical.
02:22:59 She had graduated college with a degree in religious studies.
02:23:05 Yeah.
02:23:06 So I was like, all right.
02:23:08 So yeah, you just fell in love.
02:23:10 We got along really well, really well.
02:23:12 So I ended up moving her in with me.
02:23:14 She hadn’t quit her job.
02:23:16 And what was happening was she was working weekends.
02:23:22 And the club would close at 3 or 4.
02:23:26 She wouldn’t come home until 10 or 11 in the morning.
02:23:30 And most of the time, it would be a phone call saying,
02:23:33 come and pick me up.
02:23:34 I can’t drive home.
02:23:35 And then I’d never used drugs, had never been around.
02:23:39 And my mom, Valium and pot and things like that.
02:23:42 But as far as interacting with her,
02:23:43 I’d never done anything like that.
02:23:46 By this point in time, I’m kind of getting head over heels
02:23:48 with her.
02:23:48 I moved her in with me and everything.
02:23:50 And I had never, I was 34, I had never
02:23:54 went through a woman’s purse in my entire life.
02:23:57 And so she comes in, passes out.
02:24:01 And I’m like, I got to know what the fuck’s going on.
02:24:04 And went over and went through her purse.
02:24:08 Found cocaine and the straw, cut off straws and all that stuff.
02:24:13 And I’m like, broke my heart.
02:24:15 I just sat there and started crying.
02:24:19 Got online, and I’m the guy that can find information.
02:24:23 So I started looking for forums on strip clubs.
02:24:26 Found a forum, found that one, found
02:24:30 where it was talking about her prostituting herself
02:24:33 to support the habit.
02:24:35 And that got me, man.
02:24:40 That got me.
02:24:41 It was talking about everything she was doing to do that.
02:24:45 And I broke your heart there.
02:24:46 Oh, man.
02:24:48 Yeah.
02:24:49 So I didn’t have the heart to tell her
02:24:53 that I knew she was prostituting.
02:24:55 But I went to her, and I was like, she’s waking up.
02:24:58 And I was like, look, I found this in your purse.
02:25:01 I can’t have that.
02:25:02 And she’s like, well, you think I’m prostituting?
02:25:04 I was like, no, no, I don’t think that.
02:25:06 I knew it, but I didn’t mention it to her.
02:25:08 And I was like, I can’t have that.
02:25:11 Well, I don’t do that.
02:25:13 It’s just a one time thing.
02:25:14 I was like, all right.
02:25:15 So she went back to work and continued
02:25:18 to do it for a couple more weeks.
02:25:20 And then finally, I was like, I can’t.
02:25:23 So I picked her up one morning.
02:25:25 She couldn’t drive home.
02:25:28 Before I picked her up, I had written her a note,
02:25:31 left it on the pillow.
02:25:32 So I brought her home, tucked her in the bed,
02:25:35 and told her I’d be back that night.
02:25:41 Told her she had a letter when she woke up.
02:25:43 And the letter was basically, I love you.
02:25:46 If you can’t stop this, don’t be here when I get back.
02:25:50 And I went to Columbia that day, came back that night,
02:25:59 and she had quit her job.
02:26:07 And she quit drugs that night, really quit them.
02:26:13 And I got it in my head that I needed
02:26:21 to do whatever I needed to do to make sure she didn’t go back
02:26:26 to that.
02:26:29 That became, to me, because of my background,
02:26:35 that meant spending a lot of money.
02:26:37 And so every night was $300 to $600 for dinner.
02:26:42 It was $1,000 shoes every week, $2,000 purse every week,
02:26:49 all that.
02:26:49 I had most of my money laundered out to Estonia.
02:26:54 And Elizabeth, at the same time, she quit.
02:27:02 But she didn’t want me to go anywhere.
02:27:09 All right, she wanted me there all the time.
02:27:12 I guess that was that connection.
02:27:14 I guess she was scared she might go back to something.
02:27:17 So Shadow Crew gets busted.
02:27:21 I go through, basically, all my US funds.
02:27:24 Can’t get anything from overseas.
02:27:26 Shadow Crew gets busted October.
02:27:28 I can’t go into committing tax fraud because season’s over.
02:27:32 Can’t go back into credit fraud because Shadow Crew’s
02:27:35 been busted.
02:27:35 I don’t know who to trust online.
02:27:38 I’m left with running counterfeit cashier’s checks
02:27:40 to get money in, trying to make it until I can start back
02:27:45 with some other fraud, and lying to her the entire time.
02:27:49 She knows about none of this.
02:27:50 None of it.
02:27:53 And she thinks I’ve got a shitload of money.
02:27:55 And she’s got expensive taste.
02:27:59 So at the same time, she couldn’t be intimate.
02:28:06 I mean, the girl loved me.
02:28:09 That’s the first time I’ve really said that.
02:28:12 So there’s deep love there both ways.
02:28:15 Yeah.
02:28:17 Yeah.
02:28:18 Things we do.
02:28:21 So she couldn’t be intimate unless she was stone cold drunk.
02:28:30 I mean, just shit.
02:28:31 Stone cold drunk.
02:28:34 And shit, I didn’t mind her drinking alcohol.
02:28:38 I’d rather have that than cocaine.
02:28:40 So that was the intimacy there.
02:28:44 And I kept thinking, if I continue to invest,
02:28:51 that it would work out, that just keep going,
02:28:57 she’ll be all right, we’ll be all right.
02:29:03 And what happens is, like I said, she thought I had money.
02:29:07 She thought I had money.
02:29:09 She wanted a couple of Tiffany engagement rings.
02:29:11 So I said, we can get married.
02:29:13 I figured of marriage, show her that I love her,
02:29:17 show her it’s going to be all right.
02:29:18 So I was like, let’s get married.
02:29:21 She’s like, well, I’ve always wanted a Tiffany ring.
02:29:23 She doesn’t have money to buy the Tiffany ring
02:29:25 because all my money was overseas.
02:29:26 So here I am.
02:29:27 I defraud.
02:29:29 So it’s counterfeit cashiers.
02:29:31 I find like a three carat ring on eBay for 20 grand
02:29:36 and pay for it with a counterfeit cashiers check.
02:29:40 At the same time, because she doesn’t want me to leave,
02:29:43 she needs me there, typically, if you’re
02:29:46 doing that type of crime, you need to be traveling.
02:29:49 You can’t do it in one central area
02:29:51 because you’re going to be identified pretty quickly.
02:29:53 I knew that, but I didn’t have much choice.
02:29:57 So start running counterfeit cashiers checks
02:30:00 to get the money to live and everything.
02:30:03 Get the engagement ring.
02:30:06 We were scheduled to be married. Our wedding date
02:30:13 was February 26, 2005.
02:30:19 February 8, 2005.
02:30:23 I’ve got a Tiffany wedding band, a couple of them coming in.
02:30:28 And I get arrested in Charleston, South Carolina.
02:30:32 And she didn’t know.
02:30:34 I told her, I said, I’ve got to go pick up those rings.
02:30:36 She thought I was just having them sent in.
02:30:39 I said, I’ve got to go get those rings.
02:30:40 And I said, we’ll go out to dinner after that.
02:30:43 And I left at like 8 o clock in the morning.
02:30:49 And I was arrested at, I think, 1130, something like that.
02:30:54 Of course, I wanted to call her.
02:30:56 And the FBI got me.
02:30:58 It turns out it was controlled delivery.
02:31:00 There were like 30 agents in the parking lot.
02:31:03 FBI got me.
02:31:04 Charleston PD got me.
02:31:05 Within 45 minutes, the Secret Service
02:31:07 comes in, takes over that investigation.
02:31:09 They knew exactly who they had.
02:31:13 Along about 7 o clock at night, they’re
02:31:16 like, we want to search your house.
02:31:18 And I was like, look, I’ll sign off on the search
02:31:21 if you let me go with you so I can see her.
02:31:23 And they were like, OK.
02:31:27 So I got to see my phone at that point.
02:31:28 I had like 140 calls where she had
02:31:32 been trying to call all that time.
02:31:34 She was worried.
02:31:35 Yeah.
02:31:36 And so they load me up.
02:31:40 And hell, I mean, you talk about 10, 12 cars, 40 agents,
02:31:45 everything else.
02:31:46 She’s got a dog at that point.
02:31:47 I’m scared they’re going to shoot the dog.
02:31:49 And it was dark.
02:31:55 And they had me walk up.
02:31:57 And they’re all behind me.
02:31:58 I knock on the door and tell her the police are there.
02:32:01 She needs to put the dog up.
02:32:03 So she does, and they come in and just
02:32:06 start ransacking them to put me in cuffs, set me down,
02:32:09 start berating her with questions.
02:32:11 She had no idea what the hell was going on.
02:32:13 Were you able to say a word or two to help her understand?
02:32:16 Yeah, I was trying to tell her.
02:32:18 And at the same time, they take a watch off her wrist.
02:32:21 They let her keep the ring.
02:32:24 They’re telling her that I’m this guy.
02:32:25 What’s my real name?
02:32:27 Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang across the board.
02:32:29 So she’s probably terrified.
02:32:31 Oh, yeah.
02:32:31 Yeah.
02:32:32 Yeah.
02:32:33 And I tell her, I was like, look,
02:32:34 they’re going to arraign me tomorrow.
02:32:36 Don’t come.
02:32:37 Don’t come.
02:32:38 I said, see what’s going on, but don’t show up.
02:32:42 Of course, she’s there next morning.
02:32:43 Her and her dad.
02:32:45 And she’s back in the back crying.
02:32:47 They’re reading off the charges.
02:32:49 I’m under $300,000 bond, everything else.
02:32:55 And that’s it.
02:32:59 They throw me in a cell.
02:33:01 Meanwhile, more charges keep coming in.
02:33:04 And it’s like 10, 12 charges a day at that point.
02:33:10 And I’m trying to call her to make sure she’s all right.
02:33:13 And does it get through?
02:33:16 So I spent three months in jail.
02:33:19 And during that three months, she visits twice.
02:33:21 I get like three or four phone calls to her.
02:33:26 Looking back now, I understand why.
02:33:28 Back then, it was like, I’m the victim.
02:33:29 Why doesn’t she talk to me?
02:33:31 But now I understand why.
02:33:35 Hell, the girl loved me too.
02:33:37 She found out I was this piece of shit.
02:33:39 And after a week in county jail, two agents
02:33:44 fly in from New Jersey, two Secret Service guys.
02:33:47 Pulled me out of cell, looked at me, and they were like,
02:33:50 we’ve got your laptop.
02:33:51 And I was like, yeah.
02:33:52 And he’s like, well, have you got anything on your laptop?
02:33:55 And I was like, yeah.
02:33:56 He’s like, you’re going to be charged for it.
02:33:57 I was like, I figured.
02:33:59 And then he looks at me, he’s like,
02:34:01 can you do anything for us?
02:34:05 And I told him my exact words were, look,
02:34:07 you let me get back with Elizabeth.
02:34:08 I’ll do whatever you want me to do.
02:34:11 And he looks at me, he’s like, we’re going to get you out.
02:34:14 I was like, all right.
02:34:15 So they let me sit there for three months
02:34:17 to get a taste of it and get me out.
02:34:21 My sister, they have the bond reduced to $1,000.
02:34:25 My sister pays the $1,000 bond.
02:34:27 By this point, she’s disowned me.
02:34:28 And because I’m dating the stripper.
02:34:31 And Denise bonds me out.
02:34:36 The person that I call immediately is Elizabeth.
02:34:40 I’m out.
02:34:41 And she’s like, I’ll be there.
02:34:43 I was like, OK.
02:34:44 So it’s like 11 o clock at night.
02:34:49 I’m in the parking lot of the Charleston County jail.
02:34:53 Me and a Secret Service agent standing there.
02:34:55 And Elizabeth had a friend that owned a limo company.
02:34:58 So she pulls up in a limo, gets out, pops the trunk,
02:35:04 gets these two plastic containers out
02:35:06 that have my clothes in them, drops them off the pavement,
02:35:12 comes over, hugs me, call me later.
02:35:16 Gets in the car, drives off.
02:35:18 I’m sitting there crying like a baby.
02:35:20 Agent looks at me, is that your fiancee?
02:35:23 I’m like, yeah.
02:35:23 And he’s like, I am so sorry.
02:35:25 And I’m like, yeah.
02:35:28 I had to.
02:35:30 She sounds fascinating.
02:35:32 Pull up in a limo.
02:35:36 I had $30 in my name at that point, $30.
02:35:40 The agent had to pay for my hotel room that first night.
02:35:43 So he drops me off after paying for the hotel room,
02:35:45 buy me something to eat.
02:35:47 Soon as he drops me off, I take that $30,
02:35:50 walk a half mile to Walmart, buy a prepaid debit card
02:35:53 so I can start back in tax fraud.
02:35:56 Soon as I get back to the hotel room, call Elizabeth,
02:35:58 beg her to come see me.
02:36:00 She comes to see me, and we talk most of the night,
02:36:03 and convince her to give me a chance.
02:36:05 I tell her that everything’s going to be all right.
02:36:07 They’re going to hire me.
02:36:09 I’m going to be this big consultant.
02:36:11 Lies, lies, just so she’d get back with me.
02:36:14 And she’s like, OK.
02:36:16 And so we move from Charleston.
02:36:20 The field office is in Columbia, South Carolina.
02:36:24 And I’m breaking the law.
02:36:27 Even before I start working with them, I’m breaking the law.
02:36:30 And so they’ve got me in the office, the field office.
02:36:34 They got this big war room in there.
02:36:36 I’m on a laptop, outside line, laptops hooked up
02:36:39 to a 50 inch plasma monitor on the wall.
02:36:43 They’ve got a desktop sitting directly next to me,
02:36:47 outside line, two Secret Service officers in the room
02:36:50 at all times with a South Carolina law enforcement officer.
02:36:54 My job is 46 hours a day, surfing the web,
02:36:59 picking up targets, intel, teaching them
02:37:01 how cybercrime operates, everything else like that.
02:37:04 For the first two weeks, they are extremely diligent.
02:37:08 They pay attention to everything that’s going on,
02:37:10 ask questions, everything else.
02:37:12 But the problem is that that shit gets boring real quick,
02:37:17 because I’m very fast online doing that.
02:37:20 So they’re like, what the hell is he doing?
02:37:22 And it gets tiring looking at a guy just doing that shit.
02:37:25 So after two weeks, they get lazy and bored.
02:37:28 And they start watching porn instead of watching me.
02:37:34 At the same time, they’ve got a keylogger.
02:37:37 And they’ve got Spectre Pro and Camtasia,
02:37:39 keyloggers and taking snapshots of everything that I’m doing.
02:37:43 Every night, it goes on a DVD rom on a spindle.
02:37:46 So I’m like, they’re not going to go through that shit.
02:37:51 So I’m like, fuck it.
02:37:53 Start breaking the law from inside the Secret Service
02:37:55 offices while they’re in the room.
02:37:57 Why not?
02:38:00 That continues for 10 months.
02:38:03 At the same time, the relationship with Elizabeth
02:38:06 fell apart, completely fell apart.
02:38:12 Do you have an understanding of why?
02:38:14 Because her heart got broken because there was lying.
02:38:18 It was the trust.
02:38:19 She felt like she did a lot to sacrifice for the relationship.
02:38:23 You’ve got a woman there that she had even said it.
02:38:33 She was like, she had told one of her friends
02:38:38 we were out having dinner one night.
02:38:41 And this was before I got arrested.
02:38:42 She told one of her friends that I was the only guy that ever
02:38:47 asked her to stop using drugs.
02:38:49 Yeah.
02:38:51 Yeah.
02:38:52 Yeah, I have to say that part of the story is so powerful.
02:38:57 And then that she chose to do it, and she chose to stop.
02:39:03 And she told me that there was one instance she told me
02:39:07 that if she didn’t marry me, she’d never be married.
02:39:10 And as far as I know, she’s never been married.
02:39:15 And so it started to fall apart there.
02:39:17 Yeah, because I was that piece of shit.
02:39:23 Still, you didn’t take a step.
02:39:25 By the way, can I just say how just moving it is,
02:39:29 how honest you are.
02:39:30 But thank you.
02:39:32 Thank you for being that person.
02:39:34 But at that time, there’s still that lying.
02:39:38 Oh, man, yeah.
02:39:39 Yeah.
02:39:39 Yeah.
02:39:40 So it’s falling apart.
02:39:44 She wants to start going to strip clubs.
02:39:46 And I’m like, fuck it.
02:39:49 Why not?
02:39:50 We’ll go.
02:39:51 So we start going to strip clubs,
02:39:52 and she’ll come back and get wasted.
02:39:55 And we’ll have sex, what have you.
02:39:58 And one night, she looks at me, and she was like,
02:40:07 I think it’d be funny if you got a blow job
02:40:10 from somebody else.
02:40:12 And that got me.
02:40:15 That got me.
02:40:16 I was like, to me, that was the final straw right there.
02:40:20 I was like, she doesn’t care for me anymore or anything else
02:40:23 like that.
02:40:25 We’ve been going to strip clubs, so I
02:40:27 started dating another stripper.
02:40:29 And she knew something was going on.
02:40:33 And she looks at me one day, and she’s like,
02:40:37 why don’t you just tell me that it’s over?
02:40:39 And I looked at her, and I said, it’s over.
02:40:41 We’re done.
02:40:42 And I told her, I was like, look, I said, whatever you want.
02:40:48 We were renting an apartment.
02:40:49 I was like, whatever you want in here, take it.
02:40:53 And I said, not only that, but I’ll
02:40:58 make sure you got money for several months
02:41:02 so you’re all right.
02:41:04 And I was like, just leave me my TV
02:41:07 and leave me some plates and stuff.
02:41:11 So I go to work that day at the Secret Service,
02:41:15 come back that night, and she’s taken everything
02:41:19 and left a picture of herself in the bedroom on the floor.
02:41:22 I’m like, OK, I guess I deserve that.
02:41:26 She’s got, I like her.
02:41:28 She’s got a sense of humor.
02:41:29 Yeah, she was cool.
02:41:30 She was cool.
02:41:33 I’m giving her $1,000 every two weeks
02:41:36 or some shit like that.
02:41:37 And it gets to the point, because I’m
02:41:40 doing this tax fraud from inside the offices.
02:41:43 Well, the debit card companies are pinging the cards.
02:41:47 They start to realize that, hey, some son of a bitch
02:41:49 is stealing money using our debit card.
02:41:51 So they start to shut down the cards
02:41:53 before I can pull cash out.
02:41:54 So I start not to have the money to send to her.
02:41:57 And I’m like, so she calls, and she’s like, look,
02:42:01 I have to have money.
02:42:02 And I was like, well, look, I’m doing what I can.
02:42:05 You promised money.
02:42:06 And I was like, look, if you knew
02:42:08 what I was doing to get this money,
02:42:10 you wouldn’t be asking that.
02:42:11 And she’s like, I need money.
02:42:13 My rent’s behind by a month right now.
02:42:16 And I’m like, your rent’s behind?
02:42:18 She’s like, yeah.
02:42:18 So I was like, OK, so I pick up the phone,
02:42:21 call the rental office.
02:42:23 And I was like, I just want to make sure that I’m sorry
02:42:27 I’m behind on the rent for this apartment number.
02:42:29 Oh, no, that rent’s paid up three months.
02:42:33 It’s like, OK, hang up, call Elizabeth back.
02:42:35 I was like, you’re behind on the rent.
02:42:38 And she was like, yeah.
02:42:39 And I was like, funny, they just said
02:42:42 you’re up on it three months.
02:42:43 And she gets quiet, and she’s like, well, you lied to me, too.
02:42:47 And I was like, you’re right.
02:42:50 I did.
02:42:51 I did that.
02:42:52 I was like, but look, I can’t do it anymore.
02:42:54 And that’s the last time I spoke to her right there.
02:43:00 What happens is I was breaking law
02:43:05 from inside the offices.
02:43:07 I had a buddy that his name was Sean Mims out of Los Angeles.
02:43:12 I had taught him how to do tax return fraud.
02:43:16 I had told Sean, I go missing, I go missing for three months.
02:43:19 I told him if I ever went missing not to contact me.
02:43:22 And so I go missing, then I show back up online.
02:43:26 First day, he contacts.
02:43:28 So he becomes a target.
02:43:29 And they identify him pretty quickly at that point.
02:43:33 He’s set to be arrested sometime in March of six.
02:43:38 That’s when he’s set to be arrested.
02:43:40 Operation Rolling Stone was the name of the operation.
02:43:43 Nine people were supposed to be arrested that night.
02:43:45 So Secret Service goes and arrests this guy.
02:43:50 They search his apartment and don’t find anything.
02:43:53 The apartment manager comes out and explains to him
02:43:56 how Sean has done all kinds of work to the apartment.
02:43:58 As a matter of fact, he brought in $30,000 worth of Italian tile
02:44:03 to put in the apartment that he’s renting.
02:44:06 And by the way, last night he had a UHaul out here
02:44:09 and took out a whole shitload of stuff.
02:44:11 So Secret Service comes back in.
02:44:15 They look at me and they’re like, we
02:44:17 need you to take a polygraph.
02:44:19 And my answer was, I ain’t taking a polygraph.
02:44:22 So they’re like, well, we’ll throw you back in jail
02:44:25 if you don’t.
02:44:25 And I was like, call my lawyer.
02:44:26 Lawyer gets me on the phone.
02:44:27 He’s like, you don’t have to take the polygraph.
02:44:30 I was like, well, good, I’m not going to.
02:44:32 But they will throw you back in jail.
02:44:33 And I was like, don’t want to do that.
02:44:35 And he’s like, have you done anything?
02:44:39 And I was like, yeah.
02:44:41 And he’s like, well, you can try to pass the polygraph.
02:44:46 I’m like, OK.
02:44:48 So I slipped out.
02:44:49 I was like, let’s take the polygraph.
02:44:51 They asked three questions.
02:44:52 The questions were, have you talked to anybody?
02:44:56 Have you been on a computer outside of the offices?
02:44:58 Have you talked to the press, which
02:45:00 I was interviewing with a New York Times
02:45:02 writer the entire time?
02:45:03 And then have you contacted or warned anybody
02:45:05 about investigations?
02:45:07 And I failed polygraph completely.
02:45:09 So they revoked the bond, took me back down
02:45:12 to Charleston County, throw me into jail.
02:45:15 Three days later, Secret Service shows back up
02:45:19 and pulled me out of a cell.
02:45:21 It’s Jim Ramacone and Bobby Kirby.
02:45:23 And I mean, honestly, they were good men.
02:45:27 And they gave me chances upon chances to do the right thing.
02:45:30 And I was not ready to do that.
02:45:33 And Jim Ramacone and Bobby’s in there.
02:45:36 And Bobby, I mean, Bobby was a friend.
02:45:39 I mean, he truly was.
02:45:40 Later on, a couple of years ago, I had a chance to have lunch
02:45:50 with a man.
02:45:51 And I told him I was sorry for everything I did to him
02:45:55 because I got him and another agent fired.
02:45:58 And I told him I was sorry for what happened.
02:46:01 And he told me then, he’s like, we were your friends, man.
02:46:05 We were truly your friends.
02:46:07 So they were good men.
02:46:08 They wanted to help.
02:46:09 Yeah.
02:46:10 They wanted you to be a good man.
02:46:12 Yeah.
02:46:13 What got me so damn bad is I told him,
02:46:17 I was like, man, I’m trying to be a better guy.
02:46:19 And he’s like, Brett, you always were a good guy.
02:46:22 You just didn’t know it.
02:46:24 Fuck.
02:46:25 People like that, we need people like that in this world.
02:46:28 Yeah.
02:46:30 You need somebody to basically believe that you
02:46:33 can be a good man.
02:46:35 So Jim Ramacone pulls me out.
02:46:37 He’s the second in charge in South Carolina.
02:46:39 He’s got the Miranda waiver in front of him, right?
02:46:43 And he looks at me.
02:46:43 He’s like, I’m playing hard ass.
02:46:45 Bobby’s over here looking distraught and like a hurt dog.
02:46:49 And Jim’s like, here’s the way this is going to work.
02:46:52 He said, you’re going to tell me everything you’ve done
02:46:55 the past six years, or I’m going to make it my mission in life
02:46:58 to fuck over you and your family.
02:47:01 And he said, not just this case.
02:47:03 Once you get out of prison, I’ll hound you
02:47:05 the rest of your life.
02:47:07 Then he slides the Miranda waiver over,
02:47:09 and he’s like, now you want to talk?
02:47:11 And I looked at him, and I was like, nope.
02:47:15 He was like, he gets up, gets all red in the face,
02:47:19 storms out on the way out.
02:47:20 He’s like, fuck you very much.
02:47:23 So I go back to the cell.
02:47:24 A week later, I was only under state charges.
02:47:28 A week later, judge rules they revoke the bond improperly.
02:47:33 Wow.
02:47:36 Reinstates the bond.
02:47:37 Nobody calls the Secret Service to tell them I walk out.
02:47:42 I walk out.
02:47:43 I was dating this stripper, and I told my mom.
02:47:46 I was like, well, if they’re going to fuck me,
02:47:49 they’re going to have to find me.
02:47:52 She just went on the move.
02:47:53 Yeah, I called this stripper girl up.
02:47:55 I’d given her like 60K, some bullshit like that.
02:47:58 And I told her, I was like, Kim, I need some money.
02:48:01 And she was like, what?
02:48:03 I was like, look, I said, give me $1,000.
02:48:06 I’ll give you back $3,000 in two weeks.
02:48:08 She was like, OK.
02:48:09 So I met her in Augusta, Georgia,
02:48:11 and got the $1,000 from her and started driving west on I20.
02:48:16 No idea where to go to, anything else.
02:48:18 Got to Dallas.
02:48:20 There was a prepaid debit card supplier in Dallas.
02:48:23 Went in, walked in the office, convinced the guy,
02:48:26 social engineering, convinced the guy
02:48:27 to give me 60 prepaid debit cards without a driver’s
02:48:30 license, without payment, anything else he did.
02:48:33 And that started the run.
02:48:35 I ended up stealing.
02:48:36 From that, I stole like 160K profit,
02:48:39 used that to buy a Jeep Cherokee.
02:48:41 And the idea was to steal enough money
02:48:43 to bug out to Florianopolis, Brazil,
02:48:47 and set up shop down there, and do it again.
02:48:51 That was the dream.
02:48:52 That was it.
02:48:53 That was it.
02:48:53 So I was on the run for four months, stole $600,000.
02:48:58 I was in Las Vegas, Nevada.
02:49:00 One day, I had stolen the night before.
02:49:02 I had stolen 160K out of ATMs.
02:49:05 Went in the next morning.
02:49:06 I woke up, signed on to cartersmarket.com,
02:49:09 which was ran by Max Butler, the ice man.
02:49:12 And there’s my name, US Most Wanted on it.
02:49:16 And that gets your attention.
02:49:18 That was my real name with the US Most Wanted beside of it.
02:49:21 Nobody knew my real name in that environment at all.
02:49:24 But then they did.
02:49:25 And it was talking about me being
02:49:26 part of the Secret Service, Operation Anglerfish,
02:49:29 everything else.
02:49:31 So of course, they’re all like, everybody’s after you.
02:49:33 They’re like, oh, yeah, we’re going to get this son of a bitch.
02:49:36 So I sat there looking at it.
02:49:38 And I was like, said it out loud.
02:49:39 I was like, well, Mr. Johnson, you’ve
02:49:41 made the United States Most Wanted list.
02:49:42 What do you do now?
02:49:44 And I was like, I’m going to Disney World.
02:49:47 Literally.
02:49:48 Literally.
02:49:49 Literally.
02:49:49 Said that out loud.
02:49:51 So loaded up the Jeep, drove from Las Vegas
02:49:54 to Orlando, Florida, and got the two annual passes,
02:49:59 one to Disney World, the other one to Universal Studios.
02:50:02 Paid for a timeshare.
02:50:05 They were building these new timeshares right off
02:50:07 Universal Drive, building these brand new timeshares,
02:50:10 paid for a timeshare in nine months, cash.
02:50:13 I was like, we take cash?
02:50:15 Yeah, we take cash.
02:50:15 There’s $12,900.
02:50:18 Then it wasn’t furnished.
02:50:19 So I went down to a furniture store,
02:50:20 bought $30,000 in furniture.
02:50:22 They had seized a DVD collection of mine worth $30,000,
02:50:27 bought that back, and proceeded to go to Disney World
02:50:31 every day.
02:50:32 And that lasted about six weeks.
02:50:35 They used a trigger fish, is what they use.
02:50:37 Nowadays, it’s called a stingray to find me.
02:50:42 So one day, it was like 1030 in the morning on Saturday.
02:50:45 September 16 was the day, 2006.
02:50:48 Yeah, 2006, September 16.
02:50:50 I was used to the builders coming around knocking,
02:50:54 making sure everything was all right.
02:50:55 So I was asleep, heard this knock at the door,
02:50:59 and get up, look through the keyhole, nobody’s there.
02:51:02 You know, people, nobody’s there.
02:51:03 I was like, huh.
02:51:04 Open the door, step out into the hallway.
02:51:06 Walking down the hall is Bobby Kirby,
02:51:09 another South Carolina guy and a Orlando Orange County cop.
02:51:14 And they turn around, and they’re like, hey, Brett.
02:51:17 And I’m like, hey, Bobby, how are you?
02:51:19 And it’s like, we’re good, how are you?
02:51:20 And I’m like, I’m fine, would you like to come in?
02:51:23 He was like, let’s put you in cuffs first.
02:51:25 And I was like, that’s probably a good idea.
02:51:28 He was like, he walks in, he’s like,
02:51:33 have you got anything in here?
02:51:34 And I was like, yeah, there’s $120,000 in the bedroom.
02:51:37 And he was like, seriously?
02:51:39 I was like, yeah, that and an AK 47.
02:51:42 His face goes white, and he’s like, you’ve got a rifle?
02:51:44 And I was like, no, I’m kidding with you.
02:51:48 He was like, OK.
02:51:50 So they throw me in jail in Orange County,
02:51:54 and they give me diesel therapy.
02:51:57 And diesel therapy is, it took like two weeks
02:52:01 to transport me from Orange County, Orlando,
02:52:04 to Columbia, South Carolina.
02:52:06 And what happens is, is you stop at every county jail
02:52:08 you possibly can, go through the processing, which
02:52:11 is about six hours.
02:52:13 Once you get to your bunk, hey, time to transport you.
02:52:18 They do that on purpose?
02:52:19 On purpose, on purpose.
02:52:21 Wears you down mentally and physically and everything.
02:52:24 I get to Columbia, South Carolina.
02:52:26 Now, while I was at Orange County, what happens is,
02:52:29 this inmate, because we were in federal holding,
02:52:32 this inmate, he looks at me.
02:52:33 His name was Yeti.
02:52:35 And he’s like, hey, man, you know,
02:52:36 the only time you get off in federal prison
02:52:38 is the drug program.
02:52:40 I was like, well, man, I don’t use drugs.
02:52:42 And he’s like, you can find a drug problem, can’t you?
02:52:45 And I was like, I can find a drug problem.
02:52:48 So what happens is, is every county jail I stop at
02:52:51 on the way to Columbia, I tell them I’m alcoholic and cocaine.
02:52:56 So by the time I get to Columbia, South Carolina,
02:52:58 they’ve got this paper trail of Mr. Johnson
02:53:00 requesting help for drugs.
02:53:04 I had hired Strom Thurmond’s son as an attorney.
02:53:09 They make me drop him because I paid for him
02:53:12 with illegal funds.
02:53:13 So they give me a public defender.
02:53:15 He gets a psychological evaluation order for me.
02:53:19 So psychologist comes in county jail, four hour interview.
02:53:22 About halfway through, he looks at me,
02:53:24 he’s like, you using these type of drugs?
02:53:25 I was like, yeah.
02:53:26 What do you use?
02:53:27 Cocaine.
02:53:28 Smoke or snort?
02:53:29 Snort.
02:53:29 How much?
02:53:30 An eight ball a day.
02:53:32 That’s a lot.
02:53:33 Yeah.
02:53:34 Do you have any trouble out of that?
02:53:36 Yeah.
02:53:37 I can’t get an erection.
02:53:40 And he looks at me.
02:53:41 And I’m looking at him like, because I had gotten
02:53:44 that shit from Boogie Nights.
02:53:49 Finally, I’m like, is that right?
02:53:51 And he was like, it could happen.
02:53:54 I was like, OK.
02:53:57 That makes it into my pre sentence report.
02:54:00 So all federal inmates, probation office
02:54:03 and prosecutor, they do this detailed background check
02:54:07 to basically tell the judge how much time to give you.
02:54:09 So that drug bit with that interview makes it into the PSR.
02:54:14 So day of interview, I mean, day of sentencing.
02:54:17 I had pled guilty, day of sentencing.
02:54:21 The prosecutor, he stands up, and this dude
02:54:24 is screaming at this point.
02:54:26 And he’s like, Mr. Johnson’s manipulated
02:54:28 the Secret Service.
02:54:30 He’s manipulated the prosecutor.
02:54:31 Then he points at the judge.
02:54:33 And he’s manipulating you today, Your Honor.
02:54:35 We insist on the upper limits of the guidelines.
02:54:38 Well, I’ve been telling everybody in the jail
02:54:40 that if they give me any more than 60 months,
02:54:43 I am not staying.
02:54:45 So we’re like, OK, sure.
02:54:47 So the judge looks at me.
02:54:50 She’s like, I agree.
02:54:51 I’m like, she says, 75 months.
02:54:55 So I looked at my lawyer, and I was like,
02:54:57 can you get the drug program for me?
02:54:59 He’s like, I don’t know why I ask.
02:55:00 So he stands up.
02:55:02 Your Honor, will you order the drug program for Mr. Johnson?
02:55:05 The judge says, no, but I’ll recommend he gets evaluated.
02:55:09 So the Secret Service had told her, hey, he’s full of shit.
02:55:12 So she’s like, no, but I’ll recommend he gets evaluated.
02:55:15 I looked at my lawyer, and I was like, what does that mean?
02:55:16 He was like, you’re probably not going to get it.
02:55:19 I’m like, how soon can you get me to the camp?
02:55:22 And he was like, well, if you don’t appeal,
02:55:24 I can get you there pretty quick.
02:55:26 My exact words were, fuck the appeal.
02:55:29 Get me to the camp.
02:55:30 I’ll take it from there.
02:55:31 He looks at me like I’m the biggest idiot in the world.
02:55:35 I get sent to, because you can get a camp recommended.
02:55:38 I have friends, family members look
02:55:41 for camps that don’t have a fence around them.
02:55:43 And we settle on Ashland, Kentucky.
02:55:47 Six weeks later, I’m in Ashland, Kentucky,
02:55:49 and pull up there, 14 foot fence, a razor wire on top.
02:55:53 And I’m like, I don’t climb fences, so I go in.
02:55:58 First question I ask is, are there any jobs
02:56:01 outside of the fence?
02:56:02 And he was like, guards like, well, you
02:56:04 can work in the national forest.
02:56:05 And I’m like, no, I’ll die out there.
02:56:07 He was like, well, you could do landscaping.
02:56:09 I’m like, I can run a weed eater.
02:56:13 Two days later, I walk into the landscaping office,
02:56:16 and the cop, this is this genius of some
02:56:19 of these people and institutions.
02:56:21 The cop, behind his desk, the entire wall
02:56:25 is a blown up photo of the compound and the outlying area.
02:56:29 So I can literally sit there and plot where I’m going.
02:56:35 My dad, I hadn’t spoken to that man in years.
02:56:40 And he shows up at my sentencing and stands up
02:56:44 in front of the judge.
02:56:45 And he’s like, Your Honor, I want to make
02:56:47 sure Brett gets a good start.
02:56:49 He can live with me when he gets out, everything else.
02:56:52 Looking back, the man meant that.
02:56:54 And I just thought it was bullshit at the time.
02:56:58 So he starts to visit me in prison.
02:57:00 I mean, yeah, in prison, he starts to visit.
02:57:02 And about the third visit in, he looks at me.
02:57:05 He’s like, I’ve been reading about you online.
02:57:07 I was like, yeah.
02:57:08 He’s like, yeah.
02:57:09 He’s like, that’s a lot of money you made.
02:57:11 And I was like, yeah.
02:57:12 He’s like, you think you can teach somebody
02:57:15 how to do that?
02:57:16 And I’m like, so what I used to say,
02:57:21 and again, it’s this thing of really coming
02:57:25 to terms with things.
02:57:26 What I used to say was I thought my dad was back in my life
02:57:31 and that he was just trying to use me.
02:57:35 The truth of the matter was is that my dad
02:57:38 hadn’t really seen me except in that frame of crime,
02:57:43 being that criminal with my mom, everything else.
02:57:46 I really think that’s how the man was trying
02:57:48 to communicate with me.
02:57:50 He wanted to connect with you in the places
02:57:52 where you know, where you love, where you’re interested in,
02:57:54 where your addiction is, essentially.
02:57:56 And what I did is I manipulated the man
02:58:00 into helping me escape.
02:58:01 So I agreed to teach him how to do tax fraud.
02:58:04 And in return, the only money he had to his name,
02:58:06 he had $4,000 cash.
02:58:09 So I manipulated him into giving me that
02:58:11 and to dropping me off a change of clothes, a cell phone,
02:58:13 and a driver’s license.
02:58:14 The only driver’s license he had was my driver’s license,
02:58:17 Brett Johnson.
02:58:18 So I was at the camp for, I don’t know, six, eight weeks.
02:58:22 And the hardest worker that landscaping had ever seen.
02:58:26 At one point, the cops got me on a mountainside
02:58:29 with a broom, sweeping off the mountain.
02:58:31 I’m like, yeah, we’ll do that, absolutely.
02:58:34 So you’re building trust with the guys there.
02:58:36 Yeah, working my ass off.
02:58:37 And in six weeks, I take off.
02:58:39 And I lasted, I think, two, three weeks, something
02:58:42 like that.
02:58:43 US Marshals, I made it 100.
02:58:45 They called you escaped.
02:58:45 Yeah, escaped.
02:58:46 Escaped.
02:58:47 US Marshals, they’re canvassing a three state area.
02:58:50 They found me, I think, 250 miles away.
02:58:52 It’s like Lexington, Kentucky.
02:58:53 They found me in Lexington because I had
02:58:55 to use my real driver’s license.
02:58:57 I had a laptop.
02:58:59 I had prepaid debit cards.
02:59:00 And I had stolen identity information.
02:59:03 And the way it got me was I had dyed my hair this flaming red.
02:59:09 I had this deep tan.
02:59:10 I didn’t look anything like myself.
02:59:11 And I was at a hotel, had the curtains open, saw this guy.
02:59:18 I was on the laptop, saw this guy walk by.
02:59:21 He walks by the window, and he stops.
02:59:24 And then he backs up.
02:59:26 He looks inside.
02:59:28 He knocks on the window.
02:59:30 I look up at him.
02:59:31 He’s like, you.
02:59:32 I was like, me?
02:59:33 He’s like, you.
02:59:34 Then he pulls out this badge, and he points at it.
02:59:37 He’s like, and then he points at the door.
02:59:39 Now!
02:59:41 So I was like, oh, OK.
02:59:42 So I open up the door.
02:59:44 He’s like, US Marshals Service.
02:59:47 So they arrest me.
02:59:49 How did they track you down?
02:59:50 They canvassed that area.
02:59:51 They talked to every hotel, everything else.
02:59:54 So it’s like a traditional, like, they were just tracking?
02:59:57 Traditional police work is what it was.
02:59:58 So it wasn’t like, from the internet,
02:59:59 they kind of got something?
03:00:01 I don’t know, just straight police work.
03:00:02 Good, good, good, good.
03:00:03 US Marshals are outstanding in everything they do.
03:00:05 So they arrest me.
03:00:06 I go to a, I’m initially held at a county
03:00:09 jail in Moorhead, Kentucky.
03:00:11 And that, man, that was one hell of an experience there.
03:00:14 But then I’m transferred after sentencing on that.
03:00:17 So sentencing, here’s the weird thing.
03:00:20 So I spend like, I think, two or three months at the county
03:00:23 jail in Moorhead, Kentucky.
03:00:26 Get sentenced.
03:00:27 At my sentencing, it happens so quickly
03:00:31 after the initial sentencing that they
03:00:34 use the exact same presentence report.
03:00:36 The report that’s got all that drug shit in there.
03:00:39 So at my sentencing, prosecutor’s there,
03:00:42 Secret Service is there, judge, me, and my attorney.
03:00:47 Prosecutor stands up.
03:00:48 He’s like, Your Honor, we would like
03:00:50 it if you would consider that when Mr. Johnson was arrested,
03:00:54 he had a laptop, he had all this information with him,
03:00:56 looks like he was engaged in identity theft yet again.
03:01:00 Judge looks at the prosecutor, says no.
03:01:03 Says, hey, if you were going to charge him with it,
03:01:05 you should have charged him with it.
03:01:06 I’m only considering the escape.
03:01:08 Then he looks at me.
03:01:09 He’s like, Mr. Johnson.
03:01:11 He said, it looks like by you keeping your mouth shut right
03:01:14 now, you’re really saving yourself
03:01:16 a pretty serious charge.
03:01:17 And my response was, yes, Your Honor.
03:01:20 And he was like, then he opens up the presentence report,
03:01:22 he’s fingering through, and he’s like,
03:01:24 it also looks like before you got
03:01:26 involved with all these drugs, you were a pretty good citizen.
03:01:30 I was like, yes, Your Honor.
03:01:33 And he’s like, so here’s what I’m going to do.
03:01:34 He said, I’m going to give you 18 months on the escape.
03:01:38 I was like, OK.
03:01:39 He said, I’m also going to give you,
03:01:41 no, it’s 15 months on the escape.
03:01:42 He said, I’m going to give you 15 months on the escape.
03:01:44 He said, and I’m also going to order the drug program for you.
03:01:48 I was like, yes, Your Honor.
03:01:51 So the drug program gives you a year off,
03:01:54 and it gives you six months and halfway house.
03:01:59 So by escaping, I got out of prison three months earlier
03:02:03 than what I should have gotten out of it.
03:02:05 So the original thing about drugs worked in the long term.
03:02:11 The interesting thing with that, and this
03:02:12 was the best lie I ever told, honestly,
03:02:14 the best lie I ever told.
03:02:17 I spent eight months in solitary confinement, eight months.
03:02:21 And that’s an experience.
03:02:24 Because you ain’t got no books for the first month or so,
03:02:27 then they give you a King James Bible.
03:02:30 Yeah.
03:02:31 And then for a month, no books.
03:02:34 No books for a month.
03:02:36 This is a pretty small and.
03:02:38 Six by nine room.
03:02:39 Six by nine.
03:02:40 Yeah.
03:02:41 No books.
03:02:41 No books, no paper, no pen, no pencil.
03:02:44 You’re alone with your mind.
03:02:45 You got a mat, a toilet.
03:02:48 What’s that like?
03:02:50 You sleep as much as you can.
03:02:52 You’re sleeping 16, 18 hours a day is what you’re doing.
03:02:55 What about, were you thinking about even just going back
03:03:00 like Elizabeth?
03:03:01 You think about.
03:03:02 You go through all that.
03:03:03 The whole thing.
03:03:04 Through all that.
03:03:04 Every bit.
03:03:05 Your mom, too.
03:03:06 Yeah.
03:03:07 Going through every single bit of that.
03:03:08 And so you’re supposed to get out an hour a day.
03:03:12 Law says you’re supposed to get out an hour a day.
03:03:15 That’s the law.
03:03:16 That’s not the way things actually happen.
03:03:18 What actually happens is you’re lucky to get out an hour a week.
03:03:21 You take a shower twice a week, and that’s it.
03:03:25 You get a phone call once a month.
03:03:26 Oh, so you don’t get to see nature.
03:03:28 Don’t see anything.
03:03:29 You’re getting solitary.
03:03:31 And it takes about a week.
03:03:34 The first week is the roughest.
03:03:36 You’re bouncing off the walls that first week
03:03:38 because you can’t sleep, can’t do anything else.
03:03:40 Then you start to adapt to it after a while.
03:03:43 When that book does arrive, you’re happy as hell to have it.
03:03:46 I’m well versed in King James Bible.
03:03:49 So you’re happy to have it.
03:03:51 Then finally, you get other books
03:03:53 that come in from that point.
03:03:56 Spent eight months at that.
03:03:57 And they send me out to a real prison, Big Spring, Texas,
03:04:02 West Texas, where have you been out there?
03:04:07 No.
03:04:07 Man.
03:04:08 But I could tell.
03:04:10 Prairie dogs and tarantulas is what it is.
03:04:13 No kidding, it gets so hot that warnings
03:04:16 come on the radio telling you not to drive on certain streets
03:04:19 because they’re melted.
03:04:21 That’s Big Spring.
03:04:23 So if you’ve seen the movie From Dusk
03:04:26 Till Dawn, the opening scene is in Big Spring, Texas.
03:04:30 So it’s hot.
03:04:31 Yeah, very hot.
03:04:33 And that’s where I find out what a real prison is.
03:04:35 And it’s not ran by guards.
03:04:38 Prisons are ran by inmates.
03:04:40 And that’s a fact.
03:04:41 So you’re met at the door by whatever race you are
03:04:47 is what happens.
03:04:48 So Big Spring is a converted Air Force compound.
03:04:50 It’s a disciplinary prison.
03:04:52 So you get the bad guys are in there.
03:04:54 So I go through processing, and I’m walking up to the unit,
03:05:00 and I’m met at the door by a guy named Nick Sandifer.
03:05:03 He’s the treasurer of the Aryan Brotherhood.
03:05:06 And first question out of his mouth
03:05:08 is, any more white guys come in?
03:05:10 And shit, I didn’t know.
03:05:11 I was like, hell, I don’t know, four or five?
03:05:13 Next question is, what are you in here for?
03:05:17 My answer was, because I’m like, I got no worries.
03:05:19 My answer was, computer crime.
03:05:20 Smiled at him.
03:05:22 Turns out, wrong thing to say, because computer crime is not
03:05:27 credit card theft or hacking or any bullshit like that.
03:05:30 Computer crime in prison is child pornography.
03:05:34 So tell him that.
03:05:35 He looks at me like I’m a piece of shit,
03:05:37 goes and gets his buddies.
03:05:38 They circle around.
03:05:40 What are you in here for?
03:05:41 I like how the Aryan Brotherhood has lines.
03:05:45 They’re like, oh, yeah, this is child porn.
03:05:47 That’s it.
03:05:48 That’s the bad guy.
03:05:49 They circle around.
03:05:50 They’re like, what did you say you’re in here for?
03:05:53 So I’m sitting there trying to explain it to them.
03:05:55 They’re like, you tell a good story.
03:05:57 You still said this.
03:05:59 Computer crime basically really does
03:06:02 mean usually child pornography.
03:06:04 In prison, yeah.
03:06:06 And what you see, and that’s one of things you find out,
03:06:08 the guys that are going in there for child porn,
03:06:10 they will tell them it’s credit card theft.
03:06:14 So yeah.
03:06:15 Right.
03:06:15 They’ve learned.
03:06:16 So I’m that guy.
03:06:17 But you also don’t, I mean, for people
03:06:19 who are just listening to this, you don’t exactly look
03:06:22 like the typical computer hacker.
03:06:24 That’s true.
03:06:25 That’s true.
03:06:26 That’s very true.
03:06:27 But I don’t look like the pedophile either.
03:06:29 That’s right.
03:06:30 That’s right.
03:06:31 But it’s like it doesn’t make it seem like you’re, I mean,
03:06:34 I guess you’re not wearing a hoodie,
03:06:36 and you’re not like emo, dark.
03:06:41 The way it actually works in prison,
03:06:43 they won’t attack you until they know.
03:06:47 So they have to see paperwork, which now in federal prison,
03:06:50 you don’t get transported with paperwork because of that.
03:06:54 So they have to see paperwork, or a guard
03:06:57 will tell them what you’re in there for.
03:07:00 Guards will tell who the pedophiles are.
03:07:02 So none of the guards told them that it was anything.
03:07:06 So for the first month, they think I am,
03:07:08 but they’re not doing anything because they
03:07:09 don’t know for sure.
03:07:10 At the end of the first month, I’d
03:07:12 been talking to Kevin Polson over at Wired Magazine
03:07:15 about Max Butler.
03:07:17 He does an article about that.
03:07:19 It shows up in Wired Magazine.
03:07:20 So at the end of the first month,
03:07:21 Wired Magazine hits a compound, front cover, all the story.
03:07:24 You would think.
03:07:25 You would think it saved me.
03:07:27 So I’m reading the article, really happy about it.
03:07:29 So what happens is four o clock is mail call.
03:07:31 Four o clock’s a stand up count nationwide.
03:07:34 After four o clock is your mail call.
03:07:35 They hand out all the mail for the day.
03:07:37 So the mail comes, I get the magazine.
03:07:38 I’m reading through it.
03:07:39 I’m like, well, shit, I’m good to go.
03:07:41 Then it says, Brett Johnson, Secret Service informant
03:07:45 in the article.
03:07:47 So you’re now a snitch.
03:07:49 Which is right up there with the pedophiles.
03:07:51 So we go to dinner after that.
03:07:55 At dinner, you can hear it.
03:07:57 You can hear the chat.
03:07:57 We got a snitch.
03:07:58 I think it’s that guy over there.
03:08:01 Warden, next day, shuts down the entire compound,
03:08:04 calls me into his office.
03:08:06 They got security there.
03:08:07 They got the counselors there and everything else.
03:08:08 Warden looks at me.
03:08:09 He’s like, did you give an interview to Wired Magazine?
03:08:12 I’m like, yeah.
03:08:13 He’s like, do you not know they will kill you in here?
03:08:17 I was like, he was like, do you feel safe?
03:08:21 Well, I know if you tell me you don’t feel safe,
03:08:24 they transport you.
03:08:25 Transport you means another eight months
03:08:27 in solitary confinement.
03:08:28 You start to see shit in solitary after a while.
03:08:31 So I’m like, no, not gonna do that.
03:08:33 So I’m like, completely safe.
03:08:34 He was like, look, he’s like,
03:08:37 if anybody says anything to you, immediately come to us
03:08:42 because they’ll fucking kill you.
03:08:44 So they do a locker search,
03:08:45 try to confiscate the magazines.
03:08:47 They can’t.
03:08:48 The next day, I walk into the unit.
03:08:50 There’s Nick Sandefur laying on his bunk,
03:08:52 magazine wide open reading it.
03:08:53 I’m like, oh shit.
03:08:55 Walked up to him.
03:08:56 I was like, hey, Nick, what are you doing?
03:08:58 He’s like, oh, doing some reading.
03:09:00 I was like, anything interesting?
03:09:01 He’s like, it’s getting there.
03:09:03 I was like, let me save you the trouble.
03:09:07 Take the magazine, turn it over to the page.
03:09:08 I was like, right there is what you’re looking for.
03:09:10 He was like, man, I already knew.
03:09:12 I was like, do we have a problem?
03:09:15 And he looks at me.
03:09:16 He’s like, is anyone on the compound you told on?
03:09:20 I was like, no.
03:09:21 He’s like, until someone gets here, you snitched on.
03:09:24 We’re okay.
03:09:26 I was like, okay.
03:09:28 He’s like, but I need you to do something for me.
03:09:32 All right, so in federal prison, you gotta have a job.
03:09:35 Everybody works.
03:09:36 It doesn’t matter what you do, but you gotta work.
03:09:37 I got a job in education teaching a lit class.
03:09:42 Every Wednesday, six to 8.30 PM, lit.
03:09:45 And had all, every area on the compound
03:09:48 signs up for the lit class.
03:09:50 Had a couple of guards every now and then popped in.
03:09:52 And did we teach lit?
03:09:54 No, we taught fraud.
03:09:56 Every Wednesday, six to 8.30 PM.
03:09:59 That’s how I didn’t get my ass beaten.
03:10:02 And my other job, I had two jobs with them.
03:10:04 The other job, you get to the point, it’s weird, man.
03:10:07 You get to the point, people walking off the bus,
03:10:11 you know immediately two groups of people.
03:10:14 You know who the bank robbers are immediately.
03:10:16 Just by them walking off the bus,
03:10:18 you’re like, that motherfucker’s a bank robber.
03:10:20 And you know who the pedophiles are immediately.
03:10:23 So my job as the white guy was to approach
03:10:27 the white pedophiles and have a conversation.
03:10:29 And the conversation was basically,
03:10:31 hey, don’t know what you’re in here for.
03:10:34 Don’t care what you’re in here for.
03:10:37 But if you got some sort of fucked up charge,
03:10:40 you need to tell me.
03:10:43 If you tell me, everything’s gonna be all right.
03:10:46 If you don’t tell me, you see those guys over there?
03:10:49 If you start to associate with them
03:10:51 or they start to talk to you,
03:10:52 and then they find out you’re in here on something,
03:10:55 they’re gonna kill you.
03:10:57 And what are the things, pedophile?
03:10:59 Pedophile, rapist, anything that harms children,
03:11:02 harms women, anything like that.
03:11:04 And there are, it’s like the mob,
03:11:07 there’s rules, there’s an ethical code.
03:11:10 Even if you have the division between races on all that,
03:11:15 you still have these lines drawn.
03:11:17 And there’s a hierarchy too.
03:11:19 Very, very much so.
03:11:20 And what that looks like in prison,
03:11:22 depending on the, it depends on the security class
03:11:25 that you’re in, what level prison.
03:11:27 But at that prison, what that looked like
03:11:29 was you’re not allowed to talk to anybody.
03:11:33 You’re not allowed to watch television.
03:11:35 You can go to the library.
03:11:37 You don’t associate with anyone except your own type.
03:11:40 If you do anything like this, we will kill you.
03:11:44 If someone wants to extort you,
03:11:47 we will do that too and you won’t tell on us
03:11:51 or we’ll kill you.
03:11:52 So that’s the way that works at that point.
03:11:55 And everybody quickly large this.
03:11:58 Quickly, quickly.
03:11:59 And so typically the guys would say,
03:12:02 I just wanna do my own time.
03:12:03 That would be the line.
03:12:05 And it’s like, okay, don’t mess with him, all right?
03:12:09 Every now and then you’d have somebody lie
03:12:11 and that would come with those types of consequences.
03:12:14 I got to see, while I was there, saw two people murdered,
03:12:20 saw, went through three prison riots
03:12:23 and through my entire tenure in prison, saw four suicides.
03:12:26 The people who got killed, it was,
03:12:29 so we had, outside you had this track,
03:12:32 a third of a mile track.
03:12:33 You walk it counterclockwise.
03:12:35 And inside of the track, you got two handball courts.
03:12:38 So of an evening that happened both times,
03:12:42 all of us would be walking, doing our exercises.
03:12:44 And at the top of the key, like a flock of birds,
03:12:47 you’d see all the inmates start to migrate down
03:12:51 toward the gate.
03:12:52 So the first time you see that, you see that migration,
03:12:55 you look up in the distance and one of the inmates
03:12:57 got another inmate down and he’s just hammering his head
03:13:01 right into the pavement, like that right there.
03:13:04 Well, guards don’t stop that because a guard may get hurt.
03:13:07 So a guard is 15 minutes coming out to stop that
03:13:11 until everything’s over.
03:13:12 By that point, the guy doesn’t have a head.
03:13:15 They shut the compound down and this is what happens.
03:13:17 So you shut the entire compound down.
03:13:20 They make two lines of the inmates.
03:13:22 And what happens is the inmate walks into a room,
03:13:25 they shut the door behind the inmate,
03:13:27 guard asks them two questions.
03:13:28 First question is, did you see anything?
03:13:30 The answer is no.
03:13:31 Second question is, if you had seen anything,
03:13:34 would you say anything?
03:13:35 Answer is no.
03:13:36 Guard then says, get the fuck out.
03:13:38 And that’s it.
03:13:40 Anybody that stays in any longer than that
03:13:43 is automatically suspect.
03:13:45 So there was one incident, I remember this Hispanic guy,
03:13:49 he’s in there for a few minutes.
03:13:51 And everybody’s like, what’s going on?
03:13:55 So his people then call him over,
03:13:59 explain to us what went on.
03:14:01 And it happens like that.
03:14:03 It’s fascinating because you talked about
03:14:05 the network of trust in the cyber crime community.
03:14:10 And here’s a network of trust
03:14:13 in the prison crime community.
03:14:16 And trust.
03:14:17 Trust matters.
03:14:18 Trust drives everything at the end of the day.
03:14:21 The riots that I went through,
03:14:23 the first riot, man, you’re scared to death.
03:14:26 Scared to death.
03:14:27 You know, you’ve got the cops dressed up
03:14:29 in the Ninja Turtle outfits,
03:14:30 you’ve got the rubber bullets,
03:14:33 the tear gas canisters, all that crap.
03:14:35 You got the inmates that are raising hell.
03:14:37 Scared to death.
03:14:39 The second riot, you calm down.
03:14:42 Second riot, you start to notice.
03:14:44 This is racial riot.
03:14:46 This is typically, and almost always,
03:14:48 it’s Hispanics and African Americans.
03:14:50 So you get to detect what is the motivation
03:14:53 for the riot, what is the reason,
03:14:55 and that gives you some calm.
03:14:56 That’s exactly right.
03:14:57 So the second riot, you start to notice this.
03:14:58 Hey, man, this ain’t me.
03:15:00 This ain’t our group.
03:15:02 Third riot, no shit.
03:15:03 Third riot, you lay in your bunk.
03:15:07 You let them wage war all around you,
03:15:10 and every now and then you have an inmate
03:15:12 that’ll run up to you and he’ll point to a locker
03:15:13 and say, is that your locker?
03:15:14 And if you tell him yes, they leave it alone.
03:15:16 If you say it’s not my locker,
03:15:17 they’ll break into it and steal everything out of it
03:15:20 and go from there, and that’s what happens, but.
03:15:23 So you did your time for five years.
03:15:25 Five and a half.
03:15:26 Five and a half.
03:15:27 You made it out.
03:15:28 Made it out.
03:15:29 I went through, I told you it was a good lie that I told.
03:15:32 I went through the residential drug abuse program.
03:15:35 It’s a nine month intensive therapy,
03:15:37 and the way I got to that, this counselor at Big Spring,
03:15:42 he bought this.
03:15:44 He wanted inmates to be educated.
03:15:46 He was a really good guy.
03:15:48 So he wanted inmates to be educated.
03:15:49 He got a discount on a game theory class set.
03:15:55 So he gets all these discs and everything,
03:15:56 and he’s asking, does anybody on the compound
03:15:59 know anything about game theory?
03:16:00 And somebody says, if anybody does, it’ll be Brett Johnson.
03:16:04 So he comes up to me one day at my buggy.
03:16:07 He’s like, are you Brett Johnson?
03:16:09 I was like, yeah.
03:16:10 He was like, do you know anything about game theory?
03:16:12 And I was like, yes, I do.
03:16:15 So I start rattling off Prisoner’s Dilemma
03:16:17 and everything else.
03:16:18 He’s like, well, you teach a class?
03:16:20 So I start teaching that.
03:16:21 I start teaching inmates public speaking
03:16:24 and to make friends with this counselor.
03:16:26 So it gets time where I’m supposed to be transferring out
03:16:29 to this drug program that they only had in Fort Worth,
03:16:32 and the transfers are taking like four or five months.
03:16:36 That’s four or five months I could be out free.
03:16:39 So I went up to him one day and I was like, look,
03:16:41 his name was Keely.
03:16:42 I was like, look, man, I said, is there any way
03:16:45 that I can get transferred out any sooner?
03:16:47 And he looks at me and he’s like, Brett, I cannot help you.
03:16:50 And I was like, I appreciate that.
03:16:52 Thank you so much for even trying.
03:16:53 So he said that a week later, I’m on a bus
03:16:58 by going to Fort Worth.
03:16:59 So he got me to Fort Worth.
03:17:00 I got it.
03:17:00 Yeah.
03:17:01 I love it.
03:17:02 So it was a nine month program,
03:17:04 24 hours a day of cognitive behavioral therapy.
03:17:06 Had nothing to do with drugs.
03:17:07 It was all peer study stuff and CBT training.
03:17:12 And honestly, it’s the best thing that could ever happen.
03:17:15 Truly is.
03:17:16 So that part, what was the thing that changed you as a man?
03:17:21 Is it the solitary confinement?
03:17:23 Was it the years?
03:17:24 Was it losing the people you loved?
03:17:28 Or was it that behavioral therapy?
03:17:30 It’s a combination, man.
03:17:31 It’s a combination.
03:17:32 It was, so my sister disowns me.
03:17:36 The only person I had in my life.
03:17:38 I mean, me and my sister, that’s it.
03:17:41 I mean, yeah, I loved Elizabeth.
03:17:42 I love my wife now, but it’s…
03:17:46 Me and my sister, we went through all that shit together.
03:17:49 So Denise disowns me.
03:17:50 She doesn’t talk to me for an entire year
03:17:52 when all this stuff happens.
03:17:54 And after I get arrested on the escape,
03:17:58 she ends up driving seven hours
03:18:01 to come see me to tell me she loves me.
03:18:02 And I don’t see her again for five and a half years.
03:18:04 Yeah.
03:18:05 So that’s really the first turnaround.
03:18:07 Took me two and a half years in prison
03:18:10 to accept responsibility.
03:18:12 That was amazing that she did that.
03:18:14 Yeah.
03:18:15 She’s down.
03:18:16 Yeah.
03:18:17 She did that.
03:18:18 Yeah, she’s something.
03:18:19 She’s something.
03:18:19 Yeah, she saw me for 10 minutes,
03:18:20 tell me she loves me and then I don’t see her again.
03:18:23 Planted the seed.
03:18:24 Yeah.
03:18:24 Yeah.
03:18:25 So…
03:18:26 But yeah, you had time to think over those years.
03:18:29 Took two and a half years to realize
03:18:31 that I didn’t commit crime
03:18:32 because of stripper girlfriends or wives or family.
03:18:35 I committed it because I wanted to, chose to.
03:18:38 And that’s the first turnaround.
03:18:42 Second turnaround is the CBT training.
03:18:45 It didn’t really hit while I was in prison.
03:18:50 I went through it and they ingrained it in you,
03:18:52 but until you choose to make it work, it doesn’t work.
03:18:56 So I got out in 2011, didn’t wanna break the law, did not.
03:19:00 And I was under three years probation,
03:19:02 couldn’t touch a computer.
03:19:04 I had a job offer from Deloitte
03:19:07 to run a cyber crime office in the UK,
03:19:10 which that was a no.
03:19:11 Now you’re not moving and that’s a computer idiot.
03:19:13 So then I had a job offer from Know Before,
03:19:18 a phishing company, couldn’t take that.
03:19:20 I got to where I was trying to apply for fast food jobs.
03:19:24 That’s a computer, can’t touch that.
03:19:26 Okay, then what about a waiter’s position?
03:19:28 Well, that’s a computer and access to credit cards, idiot.
03:19:31 Can’t touch that either.
03:19:33 So literally could not get a job, could not.
03:19:38 Doing food stamps, I had a roommate
03:19:40 that paid half the rent.
03:19:42 They tell you when you leave prison
03:19:43 to get a job in something you care about
03:19:46 and you won’t recidivate, couldn’t get a job.
03:19:48 And what I had was a cat, and Monster the Cat,
03:19:53 that was the cat’s name.
03:19:55 And I had enough money to feed that little guy
03:19:59 and didn’t have money to buy toilet paper for the apartment.
03:20:02 So I was on Panama City Beach.
03:20:05 How long were you living like this?
03:20:07 It was a steady decline,
03:20:08 because remember I taught my dad how to commit tax fraud.
03:20:11 So he bankrolled a lot of that until he couldn’t.
03:20:14 And then from there, it’s like, what the fuck do you do?
03:20:18 So I didn’t want to go into computer crime at all.
03:20:20 And I ended up shoplifting toilet paper, man.
03:20:25 Shoplifting toilet paper.
03:20:26 Just like for the basics, the basics of survival.
03:20:30 So about the same time I had a friend that, this guy,
03:20:35 I’d been dating the same type of women I had been dating,
03:20:37 you know, the unhealthy ones, the hot unhealthy ones.
03:20:41 Yes, love, that’s how that works.
03:20:45 So I had a friend post an ad for me on Plenty of Fish.
03:20:49 And this woman responds, my wife, she responds.
03:20:53 And the pictures I had taken were these prison type pictures,
03:20:56 you know, the serious like, they were there.
03:20:59 She sends me a message of, why aren’t you smiling?
03:21:01 And my response was, that is my happy face.
03:21:04 So we start talking and we started dating.
03:21:09 And she’s that second saving thing, man.
03:21:13 I ended up moving in with her.
03:21:14 I was going broke.
03:21:15 I was about to get kicked out of the apartment and everything
03:21:17 else.
03:21:17 And she didn’t say it, but I think she knew it.
03:21:20 And moved in with her.
03:21:26 And I got a job.
03:21:27 And the job I got, my probation officer
03:21:30 let me have a cell phone.
03:21:31 I was going through Craigslist.
03:21:32 This guy was advertising for landscaping.
03:21:35 Called him up.
03:21:35 His name was Dustin DeRamus.
03:21:38 Called him up.
03:21:38 And he’s like, come on down, talk to me.
03:21:40 So he was running this business, him and his brother
03:21:42 were, out of his house.
03:21:43 So I’m sitting there talking to him for about 20 minutes.
03:21:46 He looks at me.
03:21:46 He’s like, can I ask you a question?
03:21:48 I was like, yeah.
03:21:49 He’s like, are you on the run or something?
03:21:51 So I’m like, no, why?
03:21:53 And he’s like, well, you just don’t look
03:21:55 like the kind of guy that do this.
03:21:57 So I told him.
03:21:59 I was like, this is who I am.
03:21:59 This is what I’ve done.
03:22:01 And he looks at me.
03:22:03 He’s like, man, I got to think about that.
03:22:05 So he tells me to go on home.
03:22:08 That was a Friday.
03:22:09 Sunday evening, he gives me a call.
03:22:11 And he was like, Brett, if I hire you, will you actually work?
03:22:17 And I told him, I was like, Dustin, if you give me a job,
03:22:20 I promise I’ll work my ass off.
03:22:22 And he’s like, show up 6 o clock.
03:22:24 I was like, all right.
03:22:25 So my job was to push a lawnmower 10 hours a day,
03:22:29 five days a week for $400 a week, and busted my ass.
03:22:33 I hit it so hard, I would come in of a night and pass out,
03:22:40 wake up the next morning, and hit it again.
03:22:42 And it got to the point, this dude
03:22:47 ended up offering me to come in and partner with his business.
03:22:51 His brother dropped out.
03:22:52 And by that point, I’d learned everything
03:22:54 on the business and everything.
03:22:56 And he was like, if you’d like to come in,
03:22:58 I’ll cut you in half.
03:22:59 And I was like, Dustin, I can’t do it, man.
03:23:02 Because I wasn’t making any money.
03:23:03 He didn’t want to pay me anymore until he was able to do more.
03:23:07 And I thought I found another job doing something else.
03:23:12 And in a speech, I say it got cold and the grass
03:23:14 started to stop growing.
03:23:15 The truth of the matter was I thought I found another job.
03:23:18 Guy was offering to pay me $1,500 a week doing the sales
03:23:23 for oil rig training, was what it was.
03:23:26 And I accepted the job.
03:23:29 I quit working for Dustin.
03:23:31 And the guy, I told him before he even offered me a job,
03:23:36 I told him my criminal history because I
03:23:38 was required to do that.
03:23:41 So I was supposed to start work.
03:23:42 Well, he calls me and tells me he can’t hire me.
03:23:44 So I’m out of work.
03:23:46 And Dustin’s already hired somebody else by that point,
03:23:49 so I can’t go back with him.
03:23:51 And I’m that guy again, man.
03:23:58 It’s important for me to show value in a relationship.
03:24:05 So Michelle was the only one working.
03:24:10 I’m like, I got to do something.
03:24:12 And I get it in my head.
03:24:14 I was like, if nothing else, I can just
03:24:16 bring food in the house.
03:24:17 She was only making, I think she was, I mean,
03:24:20 we had it hard, it was just her working.
03:24:23 And I was like, if nothing else, I can bring food in the house
03:24:27 and get on the dark web, get some stolen credit cards,
03:24:32 start ordering food.
03:24:33 Well, it gets worse than that.
03:24:36 She’s got two sons there.
03:24:38 So I’m like, well, they need clothes.
03:24:40 So they start stealing clothes.
03:24:42 And it continues like that.
03:24:44 I get arrested.
03:24:45 I get arrested on a food order.
03:24:48 And Michelle didn’t know what I was doing.
03:24:53 So she had been to work, and she was coming back from work.
03:24:55 I get arrested.
03:24:56 And I’m like, they let me make a phone call.
03:24:59 And I call her, and I say, come to the police station.
03:25:01 I’ve been arrested.
03:25:02 And she shows up.
03:25:04 And she didn’t know I’d been doing that.
03:25:06 My probation officer, of course, he didn’t know anything else.
03:25:11 At my sentencing for that, probation officer
03:25:14 was there, prosecutor, the judge, US Marshals, Michelle,
03:25:19 and me.
03:25:21 Michelle stands up, and she tells the judge
03:25:23 that I’m a better dad to her kids
03:25:25 than their actual father is.
03:25:26 And by that point, I’m crying.
03:25:33 Probation officer stands up.
03:25:35 And he was like, we think Mr. Johnson’s a good guy.
03:25:39 We think this is a one time thing.
03:25:40 Prosecutor says the same thing.
03:25:43 Judge sentences me to one year.
03:25:46 Probation officer stands back up.
03:25:49 And he was like, Mr. Johnson, Judge,
03:25:52 if you can give Mr. Johnson a year and a day,
03:25:55 he can get the good time and get back to his family sooner.
03:25:59 So the judge amends the sentence to a year and a day.
03:26:01 So I served 10 months.
03:26:03 They sent me back to Texas.
03:26:04 And that’s when I find out that Michelle didn’t need me
03:26:08 for what I could give her.
03:26:10 She just wanted me for me that entire time.
03:26:12 She stands by me the entire time.
03:26:14 I do my 10 months, get out.
03:26:16 We get married after that.
03:26:18 And they kill probation.
03:26:20 So I can touch a computer.
03:26:21 They tell you, they were like, you know,
03:26:23 inmates, a felon, if nothing else, he can sell cars.
03:26:28 Well, it turns out you can’t.
03:26:30 You can sell cars if you’re a drug dealer.
03:26:32 If you’re the guy that steals all the money and people’s
03:26:34 information, no, fuck no.
03:26:35 You can’t get a job selling cars.
03:26:37 So can’t get a job.
03:26:39 Cannot.
03:26:40 And to this day, Lex, I know what my triggers are.
03:26:45 I know what it would take to get me back
03:26:46 into committing crime.
03:26:48 So, and I knew I’d go so far at that point.
03:26:50 So I looked at Michelle and I was like,
03:26:51 let me see what I can do.
03:26:53 Signed on to LinkedIn, reached out to this FBI super cop
03:26:56 named Keith Malarski out of the Pittsburgh office.
03:26:58 He was involved with my arrest and some associates
03:27:02 and everything else and sent him a message.
03:27:05 And the message was, you know,
03:27:06 hey, I respect everything you did.
03:27:07 Think you did a great job.
03:27:09 By the way, I’d like to be legal.
03:27:12 And dude responded within two hours.
03:27:16 Two hours, he gives me references, advice,
03:27:19 takes me in under his wing, everything else like that.
03:27:22 And from that point, man, it was the head
03:27:24 of the identity theft council did the same thing.
03:27:28 Card not present group hires me to speak.
03:27:31 Microsoft hires me to consult with them.
03:27:34 And the Microsoft hire established enough trust
03:27:37 in the industry that I was all right from that point.
03:27:42 So now you’re helping in many ways,
03:27:45 fight the very guy that you used to be.
03:27:48 So big picture advice.
03:27:52 What, given that you were that guy,
03:27:55 how do we fight cyber crime today
03:27:58 and in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years?
03:28:01 What advice do you have to individuals, to companies,
03:28:04 to governments of what, and also to Elizabeth,
03:28:13 like the humans, human beings that love,
03:28:19 that live, that are friends with cyber criminals?
03:28:24 There’s so many lessons to really be had from that.
03:28:30 To me, the lesson, one of the big lessons to me
03:28:33 is you can’t serve two masters.
03:28:38 If you’re that guy that is committing crime
03:28:41 or that person that’s addicted,
03:28:43 or you’re in love with somebody that’s addicted or has that,
03:28:48 they don’t love you.
03:28:49 They love that addiction that comes first.
03:28:51 It’s always gonna come first.
03:28:53 So you have to realize that.
03:28:54 You have to know when to cut somebody off,
03:28:59 when to end something, that knowing
03:29:02 that they’re not gonna change until they decide to change.
03:29:07 At the same time, you gotta realize
03:29:08 that the only reason I was able to turn my life around
03:29:12 is because people took that chance on me.
03:29:14 That’s really the only reason.
03:29:16 They believe that there’s a good person in there.
03:29:18 Yeah, if Malarski hadn’t responded,
03:29:21 if I hadn’t had my sister, my wife,
03:29:23 these companies that initially gave me that chance,
03:29:26 my ass would be back in prison for 20 years.
03:29:28 I have no doubt about that at all, all right?
03:29:31 So you have to realize that.
03:29:34 Cybercrime, a lot of companies that I talk to,
03:29:37 they don’t really understand or appreciate
03:29:41 that networking aspect, that trust aspect
03:29:44 of how criminals establish trust with each other,
03:29:47 how they work together.
03:29:48 A lot of companies think that it’s a single player
03:29:51 that’s out victimizing them.
03:29:52 And when you really break down how cybercrime operates,
03:29:55 that you’ve got a group of individuals
03:29:57 that are working together to hit you,
03:29:59 but not only hit you,
03:30:00 but they share and exchange information freely.
03:30:03 Companies don’t do that.
03:30:04 You’ve got privacy concerns,
03:30:05 you’ve got competitive edge concerns, everything else.
03:30:07 Companies don’t share information across the board
03:30:09 like criminals do.
03:30:11 Criminals do that.
03:30:13 You have to appreciate that.
03:30:13 You have to understand that big statistic
03:30:17 that 90% of your tax use known exploits.
03:30:19 It’s not the stuff we don’t know about,
03:30:20 it’s the shit we do know about.
03:30:22 We’re not doing anything about.
03:30:24 So the way to defend against cybercrime
03:30:26 is like there’s a lot of low hanging fruit
03:30:29 that you should fix.
03:30:30 A lot of that.
03:30:31 A lot of that.
03:30:32 Sort of a lot of basic stuff
03:30:33 that’s already vulnerabilities,
03:30:34 update the system security.
03:30:35 Now that doesn’t take care of SolarWinds or CNAP
03:30:39 or anything like that.
03:30:40 It doesn’t.
03:30:41 But those instances, I mean, okay, that’s a big instance.
03:30:46 I mean, it is.
03:30:47 But in the full spectrum of, especially in the future,
03:30:52 because there’s more and more companies
03:30:56 that are coming online, they’re becoming digital.
03:30:58 And it’s just more and more and more.
03:31:01 And those vulnerabilities in terms of human nature,
03:31:03 so for social engineering and the actual outdated systems,
03:31:07 all of it.
03:31:08 Some of it, I guess is, I mean, you’re exceptionally good
03:31:11 at this is educating on the social engineering side,
03:31:14 is educating people in companies that like.
03:31:16 You’ve got to do that.
03:31:18 And companies have to, you know, I made that point
03:31:20 that they never report to law enforcement.
03:31:23 That’s companies and individuals.
03:31:25 You know, I’ve worked with Fortune 50 companies
03:31:27 that will not press charges.
03:31:30 Instead, they’ll have that insider or that criminal
03:31:34 sign an NDA, they’ll pay them off.
03:31:36 And we won’t mention this shit anymore.
03:31:39 You have to be, you have to press charges.
03:31:41 You have to report, you have to raise the awareness
03:31:43 of everyone in the group.
03:31:45 You have to be, it’s that idea.
03:31:47 And I’ve talked about that before
03:31:49 of understanding your place in that cyber crime spectrum.
03:31:52 The way a criminal will victimize you
03:31:55 depends on who you are and what you do
03:31:57 as a person and as a business.
03:31:59 So you have to understand that, design security around that.
03:32:02 You know, we’ve got 7,500 security companies out there.
03:32:05 A whole lot of them are snake oil salesmen.
03:32:07 A lot of them is going to tell you that
03:32:09 we’re the one stop solution, but you’re not, you’re not.
03:32:13 You’re a tool, all right?
03:32:15 And you may have a very good tool,
03:32:17 but it’s not the only tool that’s needed
03:32:19 to protect against the attacks that are out there.
03:32:22 And we have to be open and honest
03:32:24 about that kind of stuff if we’re not.
03:32:25 So I guess defending defense is not just like one tool.
03:32:29 It’s a process of just like a diversity
03:32:33 and just constantly educating people.
03:32:36 Absolutely.
03:32:36 So it’s the social side, it’s constantly,
03:32:40 because there’s so many probably attack vectors
03:32:42 in terms of the software that you have.
03:32:43 If you look at it, that attack surface,
03:32:45 you can’t plug everything.
03:32:47 It’s too damn large to plug everything.
03:32:50 But you can do the best job you can possibly do,
03:32:52 but it takes a variety of tools to do that, all right?
03:32:55 The idea, and Arcos is big about that,
03:32:59 but the idea is to take the cost of fraud
03:33:04 to the fraudster so high that they basically
03:33:06 try to pick another target, all right?
03:33:08 And that’s the idea that you want.
03:33:09 You want it to be not worth the criminal’s time
03:33:12 to hit your company.
03:33:14 What about white hat hacking?
03:33:16 So like hacking for good,
03:33:21 sort of testing systems and then giving companies
03:33:24 the vulnerabilities as you find them?
03:33:27 I think it’s outstanding.
03:33:28 I do, I think that, I think pen testing,
03:33:29 white hat stuff is outstanding.
03:33:31 I truly do.
03:33:32 I think that you have to.
03:33:36 It has to be tempered with what is reality as well though.
03:33:40 All right, we’ve got a whole industry of people
03:33:43 who try to sell RFID wallets,
03:33:45 that I don’t know of many RFID hackers out there
03:33:48 on the criminal side, to be honest with you.
03:33:50 Yeah, so some of it is just like a psychological
03:33:52 safety blanket that’s not actually providing any protection.
03:33:58 By the way, you wrote on LinkedIn something about ID me.
03:34:04 What is it?
03:34:05 Why is it a problem?
03:34:07 I was going down a rabbit hole with you.
03:34:08 I was wondering if you were gonna mention that.
03:34:10 You know, they lost, I guess I was partially responsible
03:34:14 for them losing an $86 million contract.
03:34:17 What was the contract with the government?
03:34:19 With the IRS.
03:34:19 Just with the IRS.
03:34:21 So what is it?
03:34:22 So ID me is an identity, okay, backtrack.
03:34:25 ID me is a marketing company that wants to say
03:34:28 they’re an identity verification company.
03:34:30 I just wanna bring this up to see you get angry.
03:34:32 Okay.
03:34:35 I’ll tell you what my issue is.
03:34:36 My issue is.
03:34:37 So it’s a company that’s used for authentication
03:34:42 by the IRS, I guess.
03:34:43 IRS, Social Security Administration, VA,
03:34:47 at 1.23 state unemployment offices, few other services.
03:34:51 So I guess the idea is that you would be able
03:34:54 to unlock your account or authenticate yourself
03:35:00 as a human being by using your face or something like that.
03:35:04 Or private information.
03:35:06 They’ve got a tiered system with verification.
03:35:08 They’ve got, you can do, they’ve got a free system
03:35:12 which is questionable where you submit an ID
03:35:14 and it’s been shown, several bypasses have been shown.
03:35:17 And I don’t wanna talk about their security horribly bad
03:35:20 because I wanna be honest, there are bypasses
03:35:22 for a lot of security systems out there.
03:35:24 All right?
03:35:26 The issue that I have with ID me is that
03:35:30 their policies are somewhat questionable.
03:35:34 I don’t care if you’re a private company
03:35:36 that has those policies in place.
03:35:37 But if you’re a government agency
03:35:40 and you as a citizen are entitled to a benefit
03:35:43 or a service of that government agency,
03:35:46 and then the government agency forces you
03:35:49 to give up your complete identity profile
03:35:52 to a private company.
03:35:53 And then that private company uses that profile
03:35:55 for marketing purposes, to further profit, things like that.
03:35:59 I have a huge issue with that.
03:36:01 I don’t care if you’re a private company that does that.
03:36:03 I just don’t think that citizens need to be forced
03:36:05 into doing that in order to get a benefit
03:36:07 or service that they’re entitled to.
03:36:09 So that’s my big issue.
03:36:11 So that, I mean, given how much value,
03:36:14 how much we talked about the value of identity,
03:36:17 you don’t think that should be handed over lightly?
03:36:19 No, absolutely not.
03:36:21 And who would have thought that Brett Johnson
03:36:23 would ever become a privacy advocate?
03:36:25 But here I am.
03:36:29 I mean, it’s just, people don’t understand
03:36:33 or appreciate the value of who they are.
03:36:38 And certainly you’ve got a host of companies,
03:36:41 ID means not the only one,
03:36:42 but you’ve got some of these companies that say,
03:36:44 well, we strip out the PII of the individual.
03:36:48 We’re just using the biometrics
03:36:49 and the sites they’re visiting and things like that.
03:36:51 That’s identity.
03:36:53 You can still ping that one unique individual
03:36:55 out of all, using that information.
03:36:57 Stripping out the PII,
03:36:58 you can still ping who that individual is.
03:37:00 So having lived a life of crime for many years,
03:37:05 I’m sure you’ve connected indirectly
03:37:08 to a large number of very dangerous people.
03:37:11 Directly and directly.
03:37:12 Yeah.
03:37:14 But the network indirectly is even larger, right?
03:37:17 Oh yeah, oh yeah.
03:37:18 Are you, and I apologize for this question,
03:37:22 are you ever worried for your life, for your wellbeing?
03:37:27 Like having seen a world that’s really dangerous
03:37:30 in ways that’s not, that operates in the shadows.
03:37:38 Like I said, when we started Shadow Crew
03:37:41 and started that initial cybercrime business, that world,
03:37:46 violence wasn’t there.
03:37:47 It came in later.
03:37:49 Now violence is inherent in the system,
03:37:51 to do the Monty Python bit.
03:37:52 It’s part of it.
03:37:55 Yeah, the mob, the mafia are now part of this whole thing.
03:37:58 Cartels are part of it.
03:38:00 Yeah.
03:38:00 Drugs are inherently intertwined in cybercrime marketplaces
03:38:05 because of the profit potential.
03:38:06 And with that comes a lot of violence as well.
03:38:08 Yeah, the cartels already brought the violence
03:38:12 that they’re good at from the 20th century.
03:38:14 Absolutely, absolutely.
03:38:14 Into the technology of the 21st century.
03:38:16 Now, do I worry about that?
03:38:20 It’s interesting that my family worries about that.
03:38:25 All right.
03:38:26 I think I may be just too involved in it
03:38:28 to appreciate that type of danger.
03:38:32 But my family worries about that.
03:38:35 They do.
03:38:36 Do I think it’s a possibility?
03:38:38 I’m the guy that says what needs to be said.
03:38:41 I’ve built my trust in this industry
03:38:45 by not being scared of calling out companies and individuals
03:38:51 and not being scared of targeting criminals
03:38:53 or criminal groups.
03:38:54 Your honesty as a human being emotionally
03:39:00 and intellectually is really refreshing.
03:39:03 It’s a gift and thank you.
03:39:05 Thank you for doing that.
03:39:06 Is there a device you can give to young people today
03:39:11 about life?
03:39:13 You broke many rules, all the rules.
03:39:19 Some rules should be broken.
03:39:21 So if you look at somebody young today
03:39:23 in high school and college,
03:39:24 thinking how they can break the rules legally
03:39:30 and live a life that’s something they could be really proud
03:39:34 of, what would you say?
03:39:35 Biggest lesson I’ve learned.
03:39:39 You want your life to be one where you’re helping people
03:39:43 and not hurting people.
03:39:45 And that really hit me the first time I walked into Quantico.
03:39:49 You see the brightest minds in the United States
03:39:54 who give up a lot of money,
03:39:57 the opportunities of a lot of money
03:39:58 because they believe in helping people.
03:40:01 Where I spent a career just hurting and harming individuals,
03:40:05 that’s a hell of a lesson.
03:40:07 And I’m glad I’m there,
03:40:09 but I would tell people out there,
03:40:12 it’s fine to want money.
03:40:13 It’s fine to do that.
03:40:14 It’s fine to test systems.
03:40:16 It’s fine to circumvent the rules
03:40:18 if you’re not breaking the law.
03:40:19 It’s fine to do all that.
03:40:20 I like doing that, all right?
03:40:22 But if you’ve got the mindset,
03:40:23 if you can just adhere to the mindset of helping people
03:40:26 and not hurting people,
03:40:28 I think you’ll be all right at the end of the day.
03:40:31 What gives you, again, given the dark web,
03:40:35 given all the dangers out there,
03:40:37 what gives you hope about the future,
03:40:39 looking into five, 10 years, 50 years?
03:40:43 I mean, hope for human civilization.
03:40:45 If we do all right, if we make it out of this century,
03:40:53 what do you think would be the reason?
03:40:57 That’s a damn good question.
03:40:59 Because I mean, we’ve got a lot of bad stuff going on.
03:41:01 We’ve got a lot of reasons.
03:41:03 If I asked you the other question of
03:41:05 how do you think human civilization would destroy itself,
03:41:08 I’m sure you have a lot of answers.
03:41:10 You know what gives me hope is
03:41:12 that you see people working together.
03:41:16 The COVIDs have been a little bit different
03:41:19 because I think too many people
03:41:20 wanted to play politics with it.
03:41:22 That’s been the heartbreaking thing about COVID
03:41:24 is it’s in many ways pulled people apart.
03:41:26 I mean, because a virus involves
03:41:29 kind of being afraid of each other
03:41:33 because I mean, that was a scary thing.
03:41:35 People talk about pandemics in that way
03:41:38 that you’re afraid of other humans.
03:41:40 That is the most terrifying thing.
03:41:41 It’s not the destructive nature of what it does to your body.
03:41:44 It’s just that it pulls people apart.
03:41:46 And then you realize how fundamental
03:41:49 that human connection is to human civilization.
03:41:51 Absolutely, absolutely.
03:41:53 But you know, as human beings,
03:41:55 we do, when things really get bad,
03:41:59 when things really get bad,
03:42:00 we do tend to respond and group together.
03:42:03 We do that.
03:42:04 When there’s injustice, we see it, we rise up.
03:42:09 I wake up every morning and I watch Fox News and CNN
03:42:15 so I can be pissed off at everyone.
03:42:17 All right, so the division, the outrage,
03:42:21 they’re really feeding.
03:42:22 They want you, they want you to be angry.
03:42:25 Yeah, that’s what causes me to spare
03:42:27 and what I think that, you know, we just need to.
03:42:30 Elizabeth was very good.
03:42:32 She taught me one hell of a lesson
03:42:34 because before I met her, I was a news hound.
03:42:37 News would be on all the time.
03:42:38 A couple of channels of it.
03:42:40 And she was the woman who didn’t watch the news at all.
03:42:45 And I didn’t understand that back then, man.
03:42:48 But now I do.
03:42:49 You know, now I’m like, it’s pretty smart, you know?
03:42:52 Don’t need to listen to that bullshit as it is.
03:42:55 That’s why I love reading history books.
03:42:59 I just, I feel like that’s the right perspective
03:43:03 on take on modern times.
03:43:05 You know, how will this time be written about
03:43:07 in the history books and react to that?
03:43:10 Don’t the daily ups and downs of the outrages,
03:43:15 which is getting worse and worse
03:43:17 in terms of how quick the turnaround is
03:43:19 in terms of the news.
03:43:20 I’ll tell you what, I’m sitting here.
03:43:22 I appreciate you talking to me.
03:43:24 I do, because, you know, I talk about that relationship
03:43:28 and everything.
03:43:29 It’s really been this kind of realization
03:43:32 for me on a lot of things.
03:43:33 So I really appreciate you asking those questions
03:43:34 and everything, maybe be able to talk about that.
03:43:36 I love it that you value, first of all,
03:43:41 you’re self aware how important love
03:43:43 is in a human being’s life.
03:43:46 It can make you do some of the best
03:43:48 and some of the worst things in this world.
03:43:50 And it’s good to think about that.
03:43:51 It’s good to think about that.
03:43:53 That is what makes us human, is that connection
03:43:55 and that love for each other.
03:44:00 What do you think is the meaning of life?
03:44:01 This big, ridiculous question.
03:44:03 Why the hell, what are we all here for?
03:44:05 I don’t think it is ridiculous, man.
03:44:07 To me, that meaning of life is finding out
03:44:09 that lesson that we need to help each other.
03:44:13 If you talk, you ask about security,
03:44:15 how do you get to say that?
03:44:16 But, you know, everybody’s worried about themselves.
03:44:19 The way you solve that security problem
03:44:21 is it takes everybody looking out for everyone else.
03:44:26 That’s how you solve that problem.
03:44:29 And however you take, whatever journey you take
03:44:32 to discovering that point.
03:44:34 Yeah, I mean, with me, I’ve been asked a few times,
03:44:37 do you regret anything?
03:44:38 Would you change anything?
03:44:40 I’ve done a shitload of despicable things in my life.
03:44:46 But I’m at a point in my life where I like who I am.
03:44:50 And I know that I am doing exactly
03:44:51 what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.
03:44:53 So, would I change anything?
03:44:55 As bad as a lot of that shit has been, I wouldn’t.
03:44:59 It made you who you are.
03:45:00 Yeah.
03:45:01 The whole of it, the whole mess.
03:45:03 That’s trite to say that, but it’s true.
03:45:05 That’s the weird thing, it’s true.
03:45:09 Yeah.
03:45:10 Also, you mentioned that you’re thinking of launching a show.
03:45:13 What’s it gonna be called?
03:45:14 Cause you’ve done a couple of podcasts.
03:45:16 You’re incredibly good at this.
03:45:17 You’re so good at this.
03:45:18 I’ve done a couple.
03:45:19 I’m on a lot of podcasts and everything like that.
03:45:22 I had the fraud cast with a friend of mine,
03:45:25 Carice Hendrick.
03:45:26 And that ended because of a difference of opinion.
03:45:29 Depending on who you ask, one of us was an asshole.
03:45:34 Yes.
03:45:35 And it may have been me.
03:45:36 Yeah.
03:45:36 But then I did the Anglerfish podcast,
03:45:38 which that was, I gotta be honest with you, Lex,
03:45:40 it was completely directionless.
03:45:41 And it was Brett Johnson getting lazy.
03:45:43 Yeah.
03:45:45 So I ended that.
03:45:46 The Brett Johnson show is launching.
03:45:50 That’s the new one.
03:45:50 That’s the new one.
03:45:51 That’s what the new one’s called.
03:45:52 And, you know, I.
03:45:53 What do you think I’m doing with it?
03:45:56 Making a difference, for one thing.
03:45:58 But it’s gonna be talking about cyber crime security,
03:46:00 helping people.
03:46:03 Interviews.
03:46:03 Interviews.
03:46:04 A lot of it’s gonna be solo.
03:46:06 Now I’m calling it the Brett Johnson show.
03:46:08 I mean, because it’s gonna handle crime,
03:46:10 talk to criminals and how they turn their lives around
03:46:12 to a degree as well.
03:46:13 But there’s some shit I wanna bitch about too.
03:46:15 Yeah.
03:46:16 So figure it out.
03:46:16 I can tell you’re good at this.
03:46:17 I’m a fan already.
03:46:18 I wanna listen.
03:46:19 I wanna subscribe.
03:46:20 You should too.
03:46:21 You’re launching it soon.
03:46:22 Soon.
03:46:23 Next week.
03:46:24 Brett, you’re an incredible human being.
03:46:26 The honesty, the love.
03:46:29 I could just see how much of yourself you put out there.
03:46:33 One of the best public speakers I’ve ever heard.
03:46:36 Definitely you should be in a Scorsese film
03:46:38 about cyber crime.
03:46:41 100%, I could tell you’re a good actor.
03:46:43 It makes perfect sense.
03:46:45 Anyway, I really, I’m deeply honored
03:46:47 that you’ll spend your time with me today.
03:46:48 I am, actually.
03:46:49 Thank you.
03:46:50 It was amazing.
03:46:51 Thanks for listening to this conversation
03:46:52 with Brett Johnson.
03:46:53 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors
03:46:56 in the description.
03:46:57 And now, let me leave you with some words
03:46:59 from George R.R. Martin, from A Clash of Kings.
03:47:04 A good act does not wash out the bad,
03:47:07 nor a bad act the good.
03:47:10 Each should have its own reward.
03:47:12 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.