Transcript for:
Brett Johnson's Journey from Cyber Crime to Redemption

i was on the run for four months stole 600 thousand dollars i was in las vegas nevada one day i had stolen the night before i stole 160k out of atms went in the next the next morning i woke up signed on to carter's market dot com which was ran by max butler the iceman and there's my name us most wanted on it and uh that gets you attention it was my real name with the us most wanted beside of it nobody knew my real name in that environment at all but then they did and it was talking about me being part of the secret service operation anglerfish everything else so of course they're all they're all like everybody's after they're like oh yeah we're going to get this son of a bitch the following is a conversation with brett johnson a former cyber criminal who built the first organized cyber crime community called shadow crew that is the precursor to today's dark net and dark knight markets he's referred to by the united states secret service as quote the original internet godfather he has been the central figure in the cyber crime world for almost 20 years placed on the us most wanted list in 2006 before being convicted of 39 felonies for cybercrime escaped from prison and then eventually being locked up served his time and now is helping people understand and fight cybercrime this was a raw honest emotional and real episode brett has caused a lot of pain to a lot of people and yet his own story is full of trauma and pain and also redemption and love this is a good time to say that i have and i will talk to people who have served time in prison and perhaps people who currently are in prison i will try to do my best to both empathize with the person across from me and not let them sugarcoat explain away or dismiss the crimes they committed this is a tough line to walk because if you close your heart to the other person you'll never fully understand their mind and their story but if you open the heart too much you can be manipulated to where the conversation reveals nothing honest or real this requires skill and willingness to take the risk i don't know about the skill part but i'd like to take the risk i always wear my heart on my sleeve if i get hurt for it that's life as i've said i want to understand what makes a person do these crimes the particular characteristics of their temporary or permanent madness their justifications but also their humanity i believe each of us have the capacity to become both the criminal and the victim the predator and the prey it's up to us to avoid these paths or to find the path to redemption it's on each of us it's our responsibility and burden of being human in a complicated and dangerous world this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's brett johnson you were convicted of 39 felonies for cyber crime placed on the us most wanted list in 2006 escaped from prison you built the first organized cyber crime community called shadow crew that is the precursor to today's darknet and darknet markets and for all this the us intelligence service called you the original internet godfather so first question how did your career as a cybercrime criminal begin my life of crime begins when i'm 10 years old 10 years old man think about that i mean i you were probably playing the robots when you were 10. you know usually kids are doing a lego bit getting involved with sports everything else and with me it wasn't like that with me i'm i'm from eastern kentucky eastern kentucky is one of these um it's like parts of texas parts of louisiana that if you're not fortunate enough have a job you may be involved in a scam hustle fraud whatever you want to call it man i was my parents my mom was basically the captain of the entire fraud industry so this is a this is a woman that at one point she's stealing a 108 thousand pound caterpillar d9 bulldozer tramming it down the road you know at another point she's taking a slip and phone a convenience store trying to sue the owner we had a neighbor she acted as a pimp for at one point that's my mom my dad wait wait the neighbor acted as a pimp my mom prostituted i mean she acted as a pimp for a neighbor her name was debbie and uh my mom used to sell her out you know debbie needed money and my mom would find men for her to sleep with for cash and she'd take a a part of the cash so it sounds like she diversified the methodologies by which she uh hustled very had that entrepreneurial spirit okay you know we we see that a lot with with cyber criminals you know that that sense of being that entrepreneur so what was the motivation you think for her is it uh is it money is it basically the uh the rush of playing with the system of being able to um know the rules and break the rules and get away with it my mom's a complex character she is there's no one single motivation so my mom was the individual she's still alive my mom was the individual who tested people she wanted to know how far she could abuse you and you come back and still love her so and that was with every relationship she's ever had uh she would cheat on the men she was involved with she would abuse the uh her children me and denise she would uh psychological physical oh it was mental emotional physical um everything everything i mean she uh she used to beat me and denise with uh with belt buckles you know and that ended when she was i forgot what we had done it wasn't much i think that it may have been the part where she she accused me of stealing her marijuana but she was hitting me and denise we were living in a single wide trailer at that point she was hitting me and denise we were we were on the bed trying to get away from it and denise kicks her through a closet is what happens and uh denise stands up and she said uh you're through hitting me and that was the last time that mom hit us at that point but so sorry to take us there you're for people who know you and people should definitely watch some of your lectures online you're extremely charismatic and fun and uh jolly and whatever word you want to use but you know if we look at that kind of life it's there's darkness there there's a struggle there there's a lot of darkness so if you if you how did you feel if you go back to the mind of the kid you were with your mom was um was there sadness was there things like depression self-doubt all those kinds of things or did you see this crime this chaos is ultimately exciting you know i don't think back then i didn't view it as exciting now it becomes exciting when i started being involved in cyber cyber crime all right but back then it was simply a means to an end was all it was so you take a 10 year old kid and the way i get involved in crime is like i said my mom was the fraudster my dad was my dad was a good guy he just forgot he was this good guy you know he was always he always had these principles but his issue was is he loved my mom so much he was scared of of her leaving so if she wanted to do something commit crime cheat on him whatever he would pretty much just put up with it um the the one instant so i mean this woman used to she used to bring men home in front of him tell him that hey i'm leaving you i don't love you anymore i want you to die blah blah blah blah blah this was my mom um there were two instances where the man where he can't take it anymore and the first instance i was i guess i was seven or eight my sister denise is a year younger than i am my dad actually files for divorce files for divorce at that point my mom um kind of goes crazy uh my dad i was with my dad my sister was with my mother because that's that eastern kentucky mentality you know men stay with men women stay with women so um he was filing for divorce me and my dad we were living in an apartment my mom was living with uh with her grandparents and with her parents bouncing back and forth between the two and i remember i was sleeping in the bed we had a single wide bed my dad slept on on the sofa i woke up one night and there was some sort of ruckus in the living room so i wake up and i walk into the living room and my mom has a knife to my dad's throat and basically you're not going to steal my son from me my mom was this individual that when she knew she went so far like i said she was always this person that tested what can i do this to you and you'll still come back she knew she she was always also this person that if she went too far she knew it and she would always try to divert that into something else all right so she knew at that point she went too far so what does she do she gets up crying goes to the bathroom and pretends to slit her wrists so that my dad ray will respond to that not respond to what she's just done to him that was my mom in a nutshell and she had a history of doing this kind of stuff um motivations as far as fraud with her i think with her it was uh she was an lpn she had a very good nurse but she didn't want to work was a lot of it so so with her it was easier for her to commit fraud and when i say commit fraud it was against businesses against people i remember at one point she's she's buying over-the-counter capsules and emptying the capsules out putting some other crap in and they're in there and selling at a speed and people are buying it uh this she did anything she could for money and of course i get involved with that what happens is my we were in east we were in panama city at that point and uh my mom leaves my dad and the way she left my dad my great-grandfather had died my mom tells all three of us hey i'm we're going i'm taking the kids and we're going back to eastern kentucky to attend the funeral well that was her leaving me and denise didn't know she didn't pack any of our clothes at all she stows her clothes in the trunk of the car and she leaves my dad and i don't get to see my dad again for i think five six years something like that my mom like i said she used to bring men home in front of my dad she would he'd sit there and cry and beg her not to do it she'd do it anyway when she leaves him she kept up that so we were we were living at my grandparents house my grandfather he had converted the house he had raised the house up and built apartments underneath of it so me and my sister and my mom lived in one of the apartments underneath and uh that whole sound of the family was just nuts was nuts my my granddad paul he would this this is a man that he didn't want you to eat any of his food so you know there was no such thing as me and denise going upstairs to eat if he found out me and denise was taking a bath we were allowed to bath and bathe in two inches of water one time a week because he didn't want to have to pay the water bill his rules the rules you know if you couldn't have the tv on when he went to bed at night you had to have the television the volume you could watch it but without volume because if he heard it he would he would get up in the middle of the night and he would kick the power breaker turn off all the power on you this is my this is my the family right so my mom she used to leave me and denise at home for uh for days man for days she'd go out and you know party and uh i mean sometimes she'd take me to nice with her we'd wait in the car sometimes we'd uh wait in the living room and she went and partied and everything else most times she left left us at home and my entry into crime denise walks in one day she's she's nine years old man she walks in one day and she's got a pack of pork chops in her hand and looked at her and i said where'd you get that she's like i stole it and you know it's like show me how you did that so she takes me over and she shows me how she steals food how she's stuffing it down her pants so we start stealing food i'm like hell yeah let's do that shit so start stealing food and we get to the point where we're wanting a sandwich well you can't stuff a loaf of bread down your pants so there was a kmart in the shopping center i go over to the kmart get a hoodie off the uh off the rack take the tags off of it wear it out work just fine and the way you steal bread is you put the hoodie over your shoulder stuff the loaf of bread down the sleeve and you walk out with it so we started doing that as you figure that out just thought pattern so you so there's there's like strategic thinking here yeah you know you can't wear the hoodie and put the bread down here because you might mash the bread when you zip it up or yeah we have to think through that you got to think through it but but you got to realize about by this point i'm well i'm already seeing what my parents are doing you know i'm already saying just to see that that kind of puzzle solving was something you're already developing oh yeah individuals they're pretty young yeah 10 years old pretty young but but seeing how they act how they respond to things and and my mom i guess you call it a good thing she they never kept any of that hidden from the kids yeah you know there was no no discussions behind closed doors all that happened in front of everybody and from your young mind's perspective seeing that kind of crime you basically you know a lot of us kind of grow up thinking there's rules you're not supposed to break if you see other humans breaking those rules then though you realize those rules are just human-made but it gets worse than that you i was in an environment where there were no decent people i didn't really meet my first decent person until i was 16 years old who's that that was a high school teacher so what happens is is you know we start shoplifting food my mom finds out that we've been stealing stuff and you know she joins us what's that she joins us yeah she comes in you know i've got the television i've got the atari 2600 player the hell out of it oh my gosh she starts seeing this shit she's like where'd this come from and i'm like well we found it she's like he didn't find that denise denise stands up we stole it my mom showed me how you did that and she gets her mom too to join in and she used to run me and denise's these little shoplifters we'd take you know we'd steal stuff for her or we would distract security and her and my grandmother would steal stuff they got caught doing that but that's that's the entry into crime and denise you know i'm i'm adamant and i i kind of mean it but the the truth is i say and i i do i do mean it that i'm responsible for my choices as an adult all right i believe that when you're a child you can't control that the adults in your environment control what you do all right once you're an adult though your choices are yours now that being said there's some you can't dismiss that childhood influencing what i did as an adult you can't do that i mean it was kind of written on on slate that hey this guy's going to be this guy when he grows up that said like sometimes that one person you meet that decent person can turn the tide absolutely absolutely so what happens is you know the abuse everything continues on when i'm 15. my dad was in uh was in panama city florida my mom was in you know we were in hazard kentucky she uh she was dating this guy she and my mom was this guy this woman that uh the abuse would it was it was crazy abuse man just crazy stuff you she would tell me and my sister you know that she gave up her life for us that she was going to leave one day and never come back that we'd find her dead in a ditch someplace she'd go out and date these men and she'd come back and she'd talk about how these men were abusing her you know so she'd be dating this guy and uh she'd come back and she'd you know start talking about how he had tried to rape her you know trying to get me to respond to that and i would respond to that make no doubt i would respond to that well what happens is and i knew that i don't know if i knew it was abuse at that age all right but i knew things were fucked up and i was talking to my dad in panama city and i really had it in my head that that i was going to go down and live with my dad and i called my dad one day i was set to go to uh me and my cousins were going to go see a return of the jedi that it came out again in the theaters so i called my dad it was a sunday called my dad and he told me he had either gotten married or he was about to get married to this woman and basically brett johnson wasn't going to go down to florida you know i was going i was going to stay in hazard i had to call my dad from payphone but the result of that was i walked into a uh into a hospital got in an elevator and a woman got in the elevator at the same time and i snapped and beat the hell out of her right there and i was 15. didn't really know what the fuck happened didn't really know but uh just anger came from somewhere yeah yeah and uh you know the elevator beat the hell out of this lady turned out she looked a shitload like my mom but the elevator door was open one of the security guards i played basketball with his son so he he saw me immediately i knocked the hell out of him took off running made it back to the house where my granddad grandparents were they didn't know what had happened so i didn't say anything about an hour later kentucky state police they pull up in the front yard and uh two of them get out and i'm sitting on the front porch and me and my cousins are and they start walking up where everybody starts walking out of the house and i'm like i just remember saying what do you want what do you want well you knew what they wanted they wanted to arrest brett johnson and then they arrested me i went in and i told them everything spent three months in a county jail they didn't have juvenile facilities in that county so i spent three months in solitary went to trial uh pled guilty to assault in the first degree the the judge sentenced me to time served in a psychological evaluation where they sent me to louisville kentucky and spent 30 days up there they cut me loose they wanted me to have counseling after that and uh never went to counseling you know i wanted to but mom was like don't need it and so never went to counseling and i became this pariah in the county uh it's crazy man i mean not a day goes by that i don't think about that that that moment in the elevator yeah and and what happens is is uh you know you're 15. fuck man you're 15. so i go back to the the high school that i was in and um i'm this piece of shit to everybody everybody out there everybody knows so i moved we moved we were in whitesburg at that point i finished up the year there and moved to uh back to perry county where which is where hazard is so we moved there and they've got three high schools here they've got m.c napier they've got hazard high school and they've got dills combs high school so i was within mandanese were within a half mile of mcnapier show up there the first day of school and i met me and my mom and my sister were walking into the school and the kids won't let me in the kids stand out there he's not coming in so my mom starts raising helen i'm like nah let's just go let's go so from there it was uh we went down to the city school hazard and the principal tells my mom denise can come he can't so my mom wants to raise her and i'm like no let's just uh just take me to this other school so this other school was like 15 miles away and uh you know country country school country high school so i go there and they accept me and i walked in the first day and this english teacher name's carol combs i walked in and handed her the paper she was my homeroom teacher and she heard this voice as the way she explains it to me she heard this voice and she looks up and she was like son have you ever done any drama before like no ma'am but i'm interested in the academic team i was this quick recall guy right and she's like no she's like drama [Laughter] i'm like no i'm not interested in theater i'm interested in academics well she was the head of the drama department and head of the academics department so the deal was tell you what you can get on the academics team if you start with theater too and i was like okay so what happens is she was the only she was the first decent person i met in my life and she became this kind of surrogate mother to me so under her tutelage i become the one of the top academic team guys in the state um around there i was captain of the team i was this this just just scourge across all the counties in that part of kentucky if you know we had had a meet it was like jesus christ that's brett johnson and you know it was like she used to tell people they would the the high school that i came from was whitesburg and the first time that weisberg came against us uh she she told me i was talking to her about a year ago and she told me she's like brett she said that first meet against twiceberg she said the captain came in looked at you and said oh you've got that johnson boy on your team and she said my response was that johnson boy is our team and so but i did that and then with with theater i ended up my senior year i won best actor and actress in the state only god ever do that in the state so um did pretty well man did pretty well had had scholarships coming out out of high school and everything else and i'm the idiot that turned him down ask you a funny question yeah you'd make a hell of a i mean of all the many things you could probably do you make a hell of a actor i'm very good on stage i'm very good on stage have you acted professionally anywhere or not not not professionally we've done the you know the college circuit and stuff like that what happened was is uh so i turned down the um turned down the scholarships you know scared of leaving i guess is what it was start starting community college and um the community college there hires a new theater director out of california well he knew the guy that ran the san jose state theater program got him edward emanuel was his name his claim to fame he had written the three ninjas movie remember that the three little ninja kids back in the 80s he had written this for damn film and it made a shitload of money so he invites ed emanuel to come down and see the play and ed had written this civil war piece so we put that on i was doing like it was a multiple role thing i was doing like 18 different roles in the show so ed sees the show and he's like scholarship he said look he said right now you're a big fish in a small pond we'll make you a big fish in a big pot and i was like deal so i took the scholarship man and he was like i'll be back in two weeks so he flies out two weeks later this guy flies back in he drives down to where where i'm living i'm out shooting ball with with my cousins and friends he pulls up and he gets out of the car and i was like um walk over to him i was like hey man i'll walk in you can meet my parents he's like no i got it i was like okay so i keep shooting ball he walks in the house stays about 15 minutes walks out white as a sheet doesn't say word to me gets in the car leaves i don't hear from him again had no idea what went on it takes me a couple weeks what happened is my mom he walks in introduces himself my mom pulls a knife on the guy i will kill you you are not going to steal my goddamn son from me scares the guy to death he bugs out and uh kind of broke my spirit at that point you know i was like okay so um went into just full-fledged into scams crimes everything else i had already been when i was a minor i'd already been kind of brought up on that side of the family with the crimes that they were doing my mom was you know drug trafficking the pimp stuff uh illegally mining coal um charity fraud illegally mining yeah wildcatting coal so you um can you explain that yeah so to to properly mine coal you have to get a permit all right eastern kentucky a lot of people don't they can't afford the permits you know they can they can get them a piece of equipment you know you get a dozen or loader or whatever you're going to get or an auger or what have you so you start mining but you don't get the permit so you don't have to find do the you don't have to pay back then it was like thirty five hundred dollars for a two acre per minute or five thousand dollars for a two acre per minute let you strip mine the the coal on that then you have to pay for the reclamation on top of that so once you uncover the pit take the coal out you have to cover back up the pit sow grass make sure everything is environmentally friendly you got a silt pond everything else at that point so the whole idea is you buy an acre of land or some area of land and then you can there's a whole process you're supposed to go through the entire process how many people are involved in a mining the smallest number of people required for mining operations you can do with three or four people okay so you've got your loader operator you've got your dozer operator you need uh you can you can farm out the trucking to someone if you need another trucking company if you need to do that um then you've got your whoever owns the business as well so very few people can run an operation like that and profit fairly well as long as you don't have to do the reclamation all that crap on top of it all right the reclamation gets pretty expensive so if you're uncovering a pit of coal you know a pit so a ton of coal is basically about 36 cubic inches that's what what two thousand pounds of coal weighs if you're in eastern kentucky because it's that the weight of the bituminous coal and everything the fact that you know this is awesome the fact that you know exactly the volume of a ton of coal i mean yeah you learn this shit right you rattle this shit off so uh so you uncover the pit and you've got to sell the pit well the thing is is that where are you going to sell the coal well you sell it to one of these other coal tipples that knows that they're buying the shit illegally so back then a ton of coal was they'd give you like 36 bucks per ton is what that is and you'd have to go out and you'd test the btus on you take a sample to the lab test the btus you take that into the company uh british thermal unit so you test how what the btu on the coal was how bad you are the coal how pure the coal is what what what btu it burns at back then a good a good btu was around 12.9 was what you'd get all right so 12 9 coal 36 dollars a ton you'd take that sample over to the into the cold tipple they'd say okay we'll buy this for you how many trucks you got or how many tons you got and you say this is what what we've got then you'd hire the trucking company and where you get it out because you know you've got the agents that are that are looking for you by this point because the people that you know you've you've you've bought the rights to whoever the landowner is you said you're going to give them you know two dollars a ton or whatever this is well the other people there are you paying them off or are you not well if you're not paying them off guess what they know your ass is mining it illegally they're going to report you well all of a sudden you've got all these inspectors that are coming around and everything that hey we know what you're doing so they're looking for you to get the pit out so when do you get the pit out right in the dead of night so you know you're loading it up two o'clock in the morning hauling this ass out is what you're doing you sell it out from there so and your mom ran operations like this yeah yeah and you said you worked the mine too yeah you were younger learn how to run a loader run a dozer learn how to clean off a pit everything like that so this is this is the lifestyle you grow up in you know you learn how to do this stuff and uh so knew how to do charity fraud as well um insurance fraud so charity fraud can we can we break down some some of these are charity fraud it's much more romantic than what it sounds it was basically it was basically standing beside the road with a sign in a bucket yeah taking up collections for homeless shelters for abused women for children stuff like that then later on i branched off when i started off on my own i would set up my own charity company and do some telemarketing and go on by and collect checks and things like that you know we're going to talk about that but actually can we just step back and talk about your mom your dad given all of that given all the abuse the complex ways that she played with love to see how far she can push you and the people around her and they still love her today do you love her you know i called my dad yesterday my dad he's uh he's dying now he's got a heart condition he's not going to get the operation to fix it so he's like fuck it i'm ready to go and i'm like i look down because hell i'm 52 now and prior to 52 i'd have been like no you need to do this but i looked at him and i was like i understand i understand you're done and uh so he's not going to get the operation i was talking to him yesterday he asked me he's like have you seen your mom and i was like dad i've not talked to her for about two years and i told him i was like i love my mom but my mom is not a good person she's not and he told me i was talking to him on the phone yesterday and he told me that it took him several years to really understand that you know he loved her too but it takes when you're when you're getting abused like that especially my dad my dad came from a good family everything else and you know upstanding family and i think that when you're that victim of abuse you know you've never seen it before you've never encountered it and then it happens well you're like that frog in water all of a sudden you know you get to the point where gradually increases until how do you get out of it everybody else sees what's happening but you don't i grew up in that environment though you know so it took me a long time to come to terms with that my sister came to terms with it long before i did you know my sister she she's been a decade without talking to my mom like she had tried to commit suicide i didn't know that what got me so bad is she said at one point that she always thought someone was going to come in and save us and my response just immediate response not even thinking about it my response was well denise i knew no one ever was and looking at things now i think that's that's where our paths diverged me it was if you want to do it if anybody's going to take care of you you got to take care of yourself you're on your own you're on your own you know it's up to you and denise has always been that that child that has expected someone to come in and save her well and almost like it's all going to be okay somebody yeah and i knew it wasn't no no unless you unless you make it okay it ain't going to be okay so you know are you able to forgive her your mom my my boundary with my mom the reason i've not spoken with her over two years ago i started um this this legal career of mine i i've been the guy who has i spent a lot of time thinking about my past and those choices and what brought brought those choices around so i'm big about taking responsibility for my actions i truly am i think it's really important you have to do that well my mom not so much so i was talking to her you know and i would start saying you know she was she would start the conversation talking about she didn't understand why denise wouldn't speak to her anymore that was one of her tropes so and my response started to become well because you were the abuser and you spent your life doing that to her so it's more healthy for her not to talk to you so she's still not able to see the flaws in in her ways of the past no not at all so my ultimatum to my mom was look when you're able to admit that you abuse the people in your life accept that responsibility and be able to discuss it with me we'll have a talk other than that i don't want to talk to you anymore so for the first year it was you know calling cussing my wife out cussing me out um you know i don't need you blah blah blah blah blah and then finally it started to taper off and she's never really contacted me after that your dad is dying what do you take from the way he's taking on death just saying fuck it you know it's the man and what have you learned from your dad what do you love about your dad he's one of these guys that uh you know like i told him i told my dad about the about the abuse and everything else and uh there was a point so you know i told you about the elevator stuff but before that man it was it took me 40 years to talk about that but it also took me 40 years to to talk about there was a point that my mom and dad would leave the house and i would urinate in the floor all right and uh there's a like um out of anger no no idea why all right but i would piss on the carpet carpet pistors like the lebowski right [Laughter] that really tied the room together they really tied the room together i was talking about that this lady comes up to me after the after the presentation and she had she had a career previous to that where she dealt with abused kids and she told me she's like brett she's like it's a control mechanism the only control you had was that and she's like kids do that and i was like so i'm not unique she's like no you're not unique in that so um that you know this whole history of abuse denise dealt with it by drinking by trying to commit suicide things like that and then finally she escapes i'm the kid that didn't and not only that my wife pointed out to me that it's against that eastern kentucky mentality stuff you know the males expected to do things so with with me it was it was almost like i stepped up to to take part in those crimes so that denise didn't didn't have to and she was able to avoid all that other than that one shoplifting stuff denise doesn't break the law anymore she goes off to be a she's a she's a good parent she's an angry parent she's a good parent she's a teacher good citizen overall i was just the guy that kept right on going with it kept on going so let me ask you about that so um your life of cybercrime and describing some of the things you did or knew about you said quote i once stole several thousand dollars worth of coins from a family trying to sell them to put a new roof on their home another time i sent a counterfeit cashier's check to a victim and he ended up being arrested for it i lied to family friends everyone i knew i was a truly despicable person true one of my ukrainian associates script had someone who owed him money kidnapped and tortured he posted pictures of it online another member iceman used to flood his enemies email addresses with child pornography then call the police on them that's some stories can you tell some of these stories that stand out to you that are particularly despicable or representative or interesting when you look back at that that defined your approach and who you were at that time let me say that i did not care about my victim all right i cared about me is what i cared about um it's rough to it's rough to admit that you know that uh you don't give a shit what you're doing anybody else you only care about you but that's that's the truth of the matter i didn't care about the victims um the lady that was that wasn't even at the beginning of my uh career as a cyber criminal that was right at the last of it which lady the coin lady i was uh by that point shadow crew had made the front cover of forbes august of 04 october 26 though for secret service had to shut us down 33 people rested six countries in six hours i was the guy that was publicly mentioned as getting away um what happened was is i was the guy who was i'd kind of invented this crime called tax return identity theft and was stealing a lot of money i went through all my stateside savings and shadow crew gets shut down i don't have any way to come in with any money so i start running counterfeit cashiers checks defrauding people with that uh having them send products or bullion collections what have you buy cod collect on delivery and i would pay with it with a counterfeit cashier's check this lady was on ebay she had been collecting these silver coins all of her life you know the u.s currency used to be the coins used to be silver so she had a whole collection of these things like i don't know 80 90 pounds of this stuff and i'm a very good social engineer so convinced her that i was a legitimate person that you know hey send it to cld you can use my fedex account to do that for my ups account to do that i'll pay with a cashier's check you can take it in same as cash she believed that she was even on the ad and we talked on the phone and everything else she had told me that she would she was a single parent and it was the only money that she had to to put a roof on the house for her and her kids and uh i didn't give a damn i didn't give a damn it was more important was me at that point can i ask you a question about the social engineering aspect so maybe specifics like the methodology email you said phone maybe you could discuss this process from a bigger philosophical perspective of what is it about human beings that makes impossible to be social engineer to be uh to be victims of fraud so first let me say that that i became a social engineer as a child all right because the adults in my in my environment as a child i had to know exactly what they were thinking and be able to try to manipulate that for survival so i became a social engineer as for for survival initially all right and one of the things that i've seen with a lot of cyber criminals is the exact same thing they're really expert ones they become a social engineer as a child then later on they use those tools to victimize others all right which is fascinating because you're in order to understand what others are thinking you have to be extremely good at empathy so you have to like really put yourself in the shoes of the other person and yet in order to do cybercrime you have to not care about the pain that might cause them once you manipulate them so you have to empathize and yet not care exactly and i would argue i would argue that that is not a sociopath because a cyber criminal and i was no different most cyber criminals justify those actions so the justification becomes what's important with me the justification was why i did it for my family did it for my wife did it from a stripper girlfriend yeah so and i believed those justices because i care about love a lot yeah so the the the big the big picture of that is trust how do you establish trust with a potential victim all right now i would argue online that that trust is established through a combination of technology tools social engineering all right so we trust our tech you know we trust our cell phones we trust our laptops a lot of times we don't understand how they operate but we trust the news that comes across the line we trust the phone numbers that show up we trust ip addresses if we're advanced enough to look at an ip address or a domain or anything else like that criminals use tools to manipulate that spoofed phone numbers browser fingerprints or whatever that may be whatever the tool may be then that lays a base level of trust at that point you shoot in with the social engineering and lay whatever story that is in order to manipulate that victim to act not out of reason but out of emotion all of a sudden is this is fascinating about the way humans interact with the world which is you're almost too afraid to not trust the world you have to find a balance you have this uh you have a lot of conspiracy theories now about distrusting institutions and thinking like everything around us it's like i've been listening to uh people who believe the earth is flat and you know that that conspiracy theory is fascinating to me because it basically says that you can't trust anybody right like everything you hear is a lie so that's one you know you can live that life or you can live a life where you're just naively trusting everything and we as humans have to because that life is kind of full of happiness if nobody screws you over right because you you know you meet people with the joyful heart and you get excited and all that kind of stuff but if you do that too much you're gonna get burned so you have to find some kind of balance in terms of optimizing happiness where you trust i mean but verify and on the internet that becomes really tricky you're almost too afraid to distrust everything because you'll never get anything done right on the internet but then if you trust too much you can get screwed over and so the social engineering comes in where you're like i'm not sure if i should trust this you kind of help them build the narrative was like it's good it's good it's good so and a lot of the times that social engineering is just feeding into what the victim wants to believe yeah all right it's it's not really coming up with a brand new story at all it's just knowing what that victim is what the motivations of that victim is feeding into it at that point so you have to again that social engineer has to almost immediately know what's driving that person that they're talking about if i'm so if i'm working on a phone talking to someone over the phone i have to know within seconds what i need to say how i need to act to interact with that customer service agent or whoever i'm talking to i know they're in the line so fascinating because you truly are empathizing with the other person um what is it this this businessman stephen schwartzman um uh i've talked to a few times he mentioned this thing that you know the way you build deep relationships is you really kind of notice the things that people are telling you like like what what they want and uh what they're bothered by what are their big problems in their lives because everybody's saying that all the time and most of us are just ignoring it right you're right if you take the time to listen yeah you know somebody at that point yeah absolutely you do then you have to be able to dismiss it after you know you're you're looking for that just to see how i can manipulate that is what you're trying to do so that the the lady was one story another truly despicable story we'll get to script in a second but another truly despicable story we had um we were one of the really first groups that started phishing attacks so phishing so that is a social engineering attack ph by the way yeah ph that's another social engineering attack that's sending that fake email out that looks like it's coming from a website or your financial organization or whatever and saying hey we've got a security problem we need you to update your account information well back then no one had ever seen a phishing attack so you could ask for all the information you were getting just complete identity profiles on a phishing email nowadays you can't do that nowadays you look for basically credentials because everyone is aware of phishing but back then it was complete information we had fished out i don't know 200 000 e-trade accounts that's what we had the login login password yeah login password complete you know social date of birth mother's maiden account information everything else so we had access to those e-trade accounts e-trade initially had no security in place so you could cash out the account ach the money out to whoever to whatever account you wanted to went through just fine ate them alive on that for four to six months e-trade got to the to the point where they you couldn't do any ach coming out you know you they locked everything down well you're still sitting on thousands of e-trade accounts how do you make money on that it's a good question yeah so what you do is you find some fat cat that's got his retirement you know invested in blue chips same time you find a penny stock you open up a brand new account buy into that penny stock cash the fat cat out buy into that same penny stock pump and dump schemes all of a sudden so you're destroying people's retirement accounts for just a few thousand dollars bam bam bam and of course e-trade's response is not our problem it's your problem you shouldn't give up your password or what have you at that point and you still see that issue today with zell scams and things like that which scam zell so you know the instant payment that that so it's the same kind of operation some type of difference with this mechanism you find an easy way to exploit a system and typically the financial organization not our problem our system's secure it's the humans it's their errors well not really you know you've got some culpability in that and you're just trying to avoid paying the part of the bill that's what's going on one of the things just to stand fishing for a bit is um it really makes me sad because there's been people on all kinds of platforms like including youtube comments but emails too they figured out emails somehow so people are now seeing the followers um of this particular podcast where fans they're finding them on platforms like linkedin and youtube and so on and they are figuring out ways to get to those people by another channel right which i suppose is it seems more authentic to those people so they send them an email from what looks like me and with this kind like like loving me it's the the interesting thing the emails sound like something i would write so these aren't even at this stage it's not even it doesn't feel automated or if it's automated it's uh there's a human in the loop that's really fine-tuning it to specific or maybe i'm very predictable but it's very loving in the way i would write a message and so so so think about that all right so so when phishing first comes out you could look at the language of the text or the website and say yeah if you if you were paying attention that that's so okay so that's not an english speaker who wrote that typically all right but as as time has went on as as the awareness of what a phishing attack looks like we have people that are sitting down now and making sure that language is proper it gets worse than that though if you look at business email compromise all right so the way a business email compromise typically works is the attacker will find a payroll person find a ceo he will he will fashion a spear phishing email which is that's a phishing attack that's targeting one specific individual all right so he'll fashion a spearfishing email the way he does that is he pulls all the information he possibly can on that person all right that ceo maybe he'll spear that ceo just to get their login credentials to their email just to read the emails and he'll he'll go in there and he'll start reading all these emails he'll specifically read the emails to the to the payroll department see what that relationship is are they talking about their kids talking about relationships talking about vacation what are they talking about how are they talking are they friendly are they sterile what are they doing all right so then he decides well i'm going to go ahead and spearfish this the payroll department is good so then he spearfishes them gets those credentials at the same time he creates a unicode domain in whatever the company name is all right so instead of that english alphabet i he's got that russian letter that looks like an eye but without the dot on top all right comes back into the email into the payroll email blocks the real ceo's email replaces that with the unicode email that he's got and then sends out a message using the correct language the correct relationships everything else and says hey you know we're updating our account status i need you to send this payment instead of over here they've set up a new account send all payments over here now and that is business email compromise in a nutshell all right works great probably the larger the organization the more uh susceptible to that kind of attack because there's a um like a distribution of responsibility to where you're more likely to believe that okay this other person is responsible i'm sure they they uh secured that absolutely i should i'm okay listening to this so that that's business email compromise and it's it those crimes and it's one thing you see about cybercrime cybercrime's not really sophisticated it's not the attacks are not sophisticated the stat is 90 of every single attack uses a known exploit it's not the stuff it's not zero day attacks yeah they're out there but if you're a criminal waiting on a zero date of profit you're going to starve to death the the meat and potatoes are at 90 known exploits and then the rest is well you're saying it's uh maybe you mean it's not technically sophisticated but it's social engineering stuff is together very sophisticated on that end very sophisticated it's a fascinating study of that establishment of trust and then using that trust to defraud that victim that is something i wish obviously all of these folks are really good at hiding i wish you could tell their stories in the way which is why you're fascinating because you're able to tell these stories now because it is studying human nature by exploiting it but you get to understand like our weak points are um our hope our desire to trust others also sort of the the weak points and the failures of digital systems and at scale humans have to connect right it's fascinating is um this is a weird question um asking for a friend uh is is spear phishing itself illegal what's the legality here oh it's always legal absolutely it is but is it absolutely so here here's what okay let me let me construct an example so i if if my friend were to spearfish like a a a ceo right and get their information and after they get controls they have their twitter account they tweet something loving and positive what's the crime unauthorized access of advice what would be the punishment do you think that becomes questionable so so no monetary laws or was there a monetary loss probably not all right so you have to figure out who the victim is before charges are pressed now the crime would be unauthorized access all right but no real victim on that unless you know the person whose account you took over takes you know exception to that no monetary loss there's not really standard like fines probably that's not going to happen right right right so i mean that that's kind of interesting because it's so when i got the ransomware um when i got uh with the zero day attack on the qnap mass you know they they basically say the the criminal is qnap the company for having so many security vulnerabilities they're uh like you are the victim of qnap's incompetence that's the way they kind of phrase it and see i don't agree with that i don't agree with that at all so solarwinds [Laughter] let's so i've got a 130 page class action lawsuit printed out at the house i've been going through it that catalogs how solarwinds lied for years about their vulnerabilities and they lied to investors the the people who came in the auditors who would who they would hire would you know they would uh not pay attention to them when they said you know you've got these issues they would say go away shit like that for years until solarwinds you know the attacks become apparent um my view on that is that the only person responsible for the crime are the criminals who did the attacking the actual criminals not not solarwinds now does that mean the solarwinds isn't isn't all fucked up they are and there needs to be some accounting in place but the the the only individual the only people responsible for crime are the criminals and that's either online in the physical world what have you could be it's being an idiot is not a crime you know being being criminally negligent is yeah and i think that that solarwinds is certainly responsible not not responsible they're culpable for what happened can you actually uh tell folks about solarwinds what is it um what what what was what are some interesting things that you're aware of solarwinds was very it was it provided a background a backbone of security for hundreds thousands of different companies um if you looked at a lot of security companies were using solar winds that would that would allow you to get a snapshot of the entire system that they were working on so what happens is you get a russian group that comes in and they basically they hack into solarwinds and get access to it and it allows them to view every single thing i mean every single thing about every single client that solarwinds had at that point so entire snapshots of all the iep that weren't that was going on all the emails all the communications every single secret that was going on with those companies if company had software like microsoft it allowed them to look at the source code of everything that was going on i mean it's just a complete and total nightmare all right and something that you are not going to recover from you're not i mean it's done at that point um you know there's not been a lot of news lately about it but the fact of the matter is is that's the type of attack that's a catastrophic attack so there's a huge amount of information that was read saved elsewhere probably oh yeah and so now there's people sitting on information absolutely so think about one of the attack vectors has been microsoft outlook 365 things like that this allowed the attackers to look at the source codes of that so they have the source code now so they go through it line by line what are the vulnerabilities let's find new vulnerabilities new zero days you know i said zero days aren't common but this opens up an entire new threat surface all of a sudden so it's a it's a completely catastrophic attack once all the chips are down everything's tallied up people are going to be like yeah we're done we're done all right this whole computer thing we're trying we're walking away wait what's that that's terrifying because so you're saying that there's not been obvious uh big negative impact from that yet so but like there's been a lot of negative impact but we're just starting right so that's starting the capacity for destruction is huge here how much involve involvement from nation states do you think there is on this you know it's interesting um so you've got iran you've got north korea china russia you got the big four you also got brazil you've got all these other countries that are interested in the united states as well um nation states are interesting depending on who the nation state is all right so russia is very good about working with the type of criminal i used to be you know they'll enlist these guys and steal information and what have you then russia will take the information they want to and they'll basically go off and sell whatever you want to make some money china's all about ip uh north korea is about stealing money because they really don't know what what the hell else to do right now but uh so north korea is actively involved in cybercrime absolutely they've stolen a shitload of bitcoin and everything else so absolutely they're actively involved with that very very skilled attackers very skilled but even if you look at you know i told you that stat about 90 all right so even though solarwinds is going to be the number one attack the the follow-up to that is this not pedia attack that happened and so that was the most sophisticated attack launched by the russian sand worm group using all known exploits throughout so it's not again it's not your right in the sophistication is typically not technical sophistication but it's that social engineering sophistication how do you get these things put together in line to attack and succeed but when you get access to the source code that's where technical sophistication could really do a lot of damage and that's when you find out real quick that's what separates the men from the boys in this game all right because all of a sudden it's not i don't have to worry about social engineering i've got source codes and i've got professionals that are looking at that and that's your ass which then enables probably even more powerful social engineering methods too i mean it's just cascade of i um is this terrifying to you by the way this that this world that we're living in as we put more and more of ourselves on the the internet into the metaverse there is so many more attack vectors on our well-being what's terrifying to me uh i used to preach it on shadow crew is the idea that the perception of truth is more important than the truth itself it doesn't matter what the facts are it matters what i can convince you of yeah that's what's terrifying to me so you look at deep fakes you look at fake news all the stuff that's going out that becomes truly terrifying um maybe there's an angle where it's freeing if nothing is true and you can't trust anything but you see we as human beings we want to trust we do we we need human interaction and and for that human interaction you have to have a degree of trust but it's more like you let go of an idea of absolute truth and it more becomes like a blockchain style consensus so you let go of like you know what uh there's this human dream you get this on the internet you get like facts as if there's at the bottom at the bottom there's one turtle that's holding this like scroll that says these are the truths of the world the the problem is i mean maybe believing that is counterproductive maybe human civilization is an ongoing process of consensus and so it's always going to be everything is shrouded and you can call them lies or you can call them inaccuracies or you can call them delusions it's constantly going to be it's going to be a sea of lies and and uh delusions but our hope is to over time develop bigger and bigger islands of consensus that allows us to live a stable and happy society don't call it true call it call it a stable uh consensus that creates a high quality of life for the inhabitants of the island i mean i like it we're going to agree and then don't use no i'm just kidding so maybe a step back you mentioned uh uh i'd love to talk about shadow crew maybe this is the right time to actually yeah let's go to shadow code because it's such a fascinating story so tell me the story of building shadow crew the precursor to today's dark net and dark net markets you're this is why you're the original godfather this is it this is it so i um i get married i i faked a car accident to get married got the money from that you're romantic i remember like my dad man i'm the guy that you know i get from mom i get the criminal mindset from that i get that don't want him to leave to get married uh i how did you fall in love there my my first girlfriend was a preacher's daughter and uh crazy over her dated her for five years and uh she figured out pretty quickly that well not quickly it took her five years to figure out that brett johnson is not the man of god you know i i could i could talk it but you know more that agnostic than anything she breaks up with me so i was uh i was at the community college you'd make one hell of a preacher by the way yeah but you know so yeah i've got that langston hughes problem you know i'm looking for jesus to show up and he just doesn't so i was i was at the community college and i was i was a straight asshole i was arrogant conceited everything else and i had posted an advertisement on one of the billboards looking for an adult babysitter hot blonde you know come come visit me in the library buddy mine shows up and he's like brett and i was like yeah he's like hottest girl in school right down the hall and i was like serious he's like yeah i was like let's go see walk over and there's these two guys that are hitting on her so i'm i just walk up and uh me and todd that was my buddy walk up and i'm just sitting there and listening and they're you know they're giving the spill and everything and she's just kind of taking it in finally i looked over and i was like you want to get out of here and uh one of the guys looks at me it's like hey we're talking to you and i was like well you're talking at her you're not talking to her i'm about to save her ass from you yeah that's a smooth pickup line by the way if i ever heard one that's good you want to get out of here so start dating and uh she was the girl that screwed my brains out man and i fell f i head over heels we got married six months later six months that's what love does that's what it does and um i had i was she didn't know i was a crook she had no idea you know she knew i was very bright she knew i did a lot of theater stuff like that got a job at uh i was in hazard there was no jobs to be had so i got a job in lexington because we were going to be moving to uh to uk got a job in lexington at uh lexmark testing printer boards uh circuit boards so i would leave on a thursday night work uh three 18-hour shifts at lexmark come back home on on monday um got married faked a car accident to get that the other the rest of the money that i needed to get married and the the faking on that man i had bought a uh a chevy spectrum at a car auction gave like 500 bucks for it my aunt had previously defrauded usaa insurance on a car accident and she was telling me all about she's like look go down to this chiropractor make sure you get the insurance where they'll pay for a rental car they'll pay lost wages now it's like they pay lost wages she's like yeah they pay lost wages i was like she's like by the way you work for me and i was like i work for you i think you get to define the with the wage and you can also define how long you were unable to work exactly exactly and the chiropractor will sign off on any damn thing all right so uh my cousin ronnie he figures out that i'm going he finds out i'm gonna fake this car accident so he comes to me he's like hey man can i get in on that i was like yeah man you get on that so this kid he's five days younger than i am this kid he goes to the dentist the day that we're faking it has a tooth pulled tells the dentist not to numb it not to stitch it just pull it so he shows up he shows up the day that we're driving out to fake the accident he's got blood all over his shirt he's still bleeding out of the mouth and everything else i'm like are you okay he's like yeah man it's gonna be good it's gonna be good i'm like okay so my mom by this point i'm living with my grandparents my mom is up in the head of a hollow so we're like we'll just do it up there we'll go act like we're visiting my mom on the way back out ran over a mountain okay so we go visit everything come back out that night run over the side of the hill me and ronnie walk back up of course it totals the car walk back to my mom's acting like we've wrecked she knows what time it is and everything else and follow the claims so that gets the money to uh to get married and me and my wife move from hazard to lexington and i'm the kid that my crime usually if i was a single guy wouldn't break the law wouldn't i would be all right you know but females involved oh yeah oh yeah i got to spend the money got to show them gifts everything else was never enough to show love in some sort of healthy way i always had to go overboard and typically it was buying some or stealing some sort of expensive friends so that was that was the thing that was the way you show love is by buying expensive gifts or something overboard back then with with susan initially it was don't worry about working i got it you just worry about going to school she was a music major i was like you just worry about going to school so don't worry about cooking and cleaning i got it i got it so not only was i this this guy that was going overboard but it's kind of a control freak too right so now i got it i got it i got it so here i am you know 60 hour a week job 18 hour class load cooking cleaning something had to give i quit the job i couldn't do it quit the job and start uh back in fraud and trying to hide that from her at the same time so it was initially telemarketing fraud um started uh i was working at the first job i had was a telemarketer at a cemetery selling gravesites and then that ended went over to work for the shriners circus shriners hospital and there was a third-party company that was doing all the telemarketing made really good money doing that that job ended and then they pivoted over to uh working with kiwanis clubs selling food baskets to the uh the food banks and everything so i stole the the phone list and started at my own kiwanis club and would do the telemarketing go out twice a week and pick up checks well what happened was is i'm going out picking up jacks go knock on a door turns out one of the persons that i called was a law enforcement officer so he was like who are you i'm like i'm with the kiwanis club he's like no you're not so got arrested spent three months in a county jail for theft by deception got out and we had to move from from lexington back to hazard and live with susan's parents they had gotten a desktop computer hp and i started surfing around online found ebay and didn't really know how to make money on ebay about the same time i'm committing low-level frauds online i don't really talk about that in the past the first time i've really talked about that but i would uh pay for it with bad checks so some more uh person so not using a platform like ebay anymore i would find somebody that had like a stereo system on ebay something like that and i'd pay for it with bad jack and uh would rely on them not to chase me or because they were out of state at that point and the dollar amounts were very low so got the money to move to finally did those schemes enough to get the money to move back to lexington got to lexington and by this point i'm doing this like i said these schemes on ebay and i'm like there's got to be a better way to make money on ebay got to be so didn't really know how one night i'm watching inside edition with bill o'reilly and they're profiling beanie babies so i'm sitting there watching the one they're profiling is this one called peanut the royal blue elephant selling for fifteen hundred dollars on ebay i'm sitting there going like shit i need to find me a peanut so my initial thought was well there's gotta be one in one of these hallmark stores in kentucky someplace so i skipped class the next day went out around all the hallmark stores looking for peanut no idiot he's on ebay for 1500. so after a few hours of that i'm like turns out they had little gray beanie baby elephants for eight dollars picked up one of those for eight dollars stopped by kroger on the way home picked up a pack of blue red dye went home tried to dye the little guy so that was a nightmare turns out they're made out of polyester get them out of the bath looks like they've got the mange and what happens is i so i'm trying to dye the damn thing i'm like well that's not going to work that's just not going to work so i got online found a picture of a real one posted it on ebay and i was like well what i can do is i can claim that's the one i've got and then maybe claim that it got messed up in the mail and work out like that so i posted a picture of a real one online woman thought i had the real thing she wins the bid that social engineering kicks in immediately i didn't want to i didn't want to be on the defensive i wanted to put her on the defensive so as soon as she wins the bid i send her a message hey we've not done any business before i don't even know if i can trust you what i need you to do protect us both go down the u.s postal service get two money orders totaling fifteen hundred dollars send them to me issued by the us government that way we're both protected as soon as i get the money orders i'll send you your animal she believed that didn't ask any questions at all she believed that sent me the money orders i cashed them out senator the creature immediately got a phone call i didn't order this my response lady you ordered a blue elephant i sent you a blue fish elephant and she got pissed and she kept calling what i found out and that's the fir really the first lesson of cyber crime that most these criminals including self learns if you delay a victim long enough just keep putting them off a lot of them get they get exasperated throw their hands in the air walk away you don't hear from them and none of them to this day none of them complain to law enforcement they eat it so it's a it's a mixture of like you're exhausted by the process so it's just easier to walk away and second almost like an embarrassment so there's there's a whole slew of reasons all right there's there's the exhaustion certainly there's the embarrassment so if you figure out if you look at it today where does the embarrassment come from well the media family members were all very good about blaming the victim for crimes why would you click on the link why would you send money to someone you don't know blah blah blah so you've got that that's going on you've got the issue of who do you complain to back then you didn't know do you complain local police because she's in another state so which local police do you complain to do you complain to the feds well it's not the dollar amounts aren't high enough to complain to fed's fez you're going to tell you to go local local is going to tell you hey it happened in kentucky complain to them kentucky is going to tell you well shit you're over there we need you to come in so there's this this whole issue the jurisdiction of the blame factor everything else um so i got away with that crime and did it under my own name at that point i kept going and got better at it started to understand how to hide identities things like that started selling pirated software pirated software led into installing mod chips it was for the initial pirated software was sega saturn playstation one well you had to have a mod chip in those to play the pirated discs so i started selling and installing mod chips that led him to installing mod chips into cable television boxes so you could watch all the pay-per-view which in turn led into programming satellite dss cards those 18-inch rca satellite systems pull the card out of it program it turns on all the channels started doing that can we just pause that is very entrepreneurial so just technically so there's laws and rules that you're breaking nonstop so there's also legitimate ways of doing that which is break the rules of the conventions of the past that's the first principles thing that's what elon musk and his ilk do all the time right that is guts and brilliance but when it's crossing the lines of the law actually sometimes the law is outdated the the thing is as a human being you have to then compute the ethical damage you're doing like ethically the damage you're doing about other human beings that is fundamentally the thing that you're breaking is you're you're adding to the suffering in the world in one way way or another and you're justifying it but in terms of me sort of as an engineer that is some gutsy thinking that's how waz and steve jobs thought sure it that's that's innovation and maybe just think you're if you can introspect your thinking process here this is a new i like how you remember this in hp uh like what this is a totally new thing to you computers is a is a is yet another domain how are you figuring these puzzles out presumably mostly alone alone when you were thinking through these problems is there this is a strange question to ask but you know what uh what is your thinking process what is your approach to solving these problems so so the approach is is is you do something and you fuck it up and you're like you think back okay how do i fix that so you fix that aspect you commit the crime again and it goes a little bit further and it screws up okay how do i fix that what's the issue on that how do i fix that so there's not a deep design thinking like like later on it becomes that once once you once you lay that groundwork of the way these schemes are working all right it becomes that and you can apply that to other things in in cyber crime as a whole all right but initially it's basically trial and error you know you've got a problem how do you solve that problem all right so how do i i'm committing these crimes under my name how do i solve that well one of the first principles that we started to teach on shadow crew is all crime should begin with identity theft that's one of the main first principles that a lot of people to this day still don't really get all right why would i commit a crime under my name if i can do it under your name so that's that's one of the big buffers and that takes trial and error to get to that point where you start to understand that's the way crime should operate if you're a criminal all right but uh with me it was i mean it's it's trial and error it's it's that childhood where that mindset is kind of ingrained in you where you're you're looking for ways non-tradition let's say non-traditional ways of getting around things or getting through things i mean one of the questions i'll probably ask this later is there's also a unique aspect to the outcome of what you're doing which is you weren't you didn't get caught for a very long time right we'll talk about why that is and the thing is it's so interesting all all crime probably should to be effective just start with identity theft right i like that identity thought because identity thought can take so many forms right right so yes so shadow crew uh so what's so as we're you started with love started with love so now we're we're you know doing these schemes online i'm selling i'm selling to these i'm programming these satellite dss cards and you one of the interesting things and you still see that to this day is something will happen that will create an industry for criminals all right so what happened is canada canadian judge rules about the same time that i'm doing these satellite cards canadian judge comes out and says hey it's legal for my citizens to pirate those signals and his reasoning was is since rca doesn't sell the systems up here my citizens can pirate it okay so what happens is overnight about the same time paypal comes into play so paypal is coming right online at about the same time overnight little cottage industry pops up in the united states you go down to best buy buy the system for a hundred dollars take it out in the parking lot open system up pull it open box up pull the system out pull the card out throw the system away program the card ship its ass to canada 500 a pop started doing that business is good making you know three four thousand dollars a week doing that i'm like yeah that's good i have so many orders i can't fill all the orders and quickly think to myself why do i need to fill any of them they're in canada i'm down here you know who are they going to complain to because i already found out people don't complain all right they're not going to complain to anybody so i start not questioning candidates especially in canada and i'm i'm having them send money that's when paypal is first into play and it amazes me that everybody is using paypal it's like you don't even have to really ask they're like can we pay by yeah you can pay all day long by paypal and paypal had no clue what they were doing with security so it's like okay so they're sending money to paypal i'm having the paypal cashed out to uh to bank accounts in my name at that point and i get scared because by that point i'm still in four to six thousand dollars a week and i'm like somebody's gonna be looking at money laundering so getting into my head i'm like best thing that i can do is get a fake driver's license open up a bank account using that driver's license cash out at the atm good no idea where to get a fake id not a clue so i get online looked around spent a couple weeks looking around thought i found a guy he went by the screen name of fake id man thought i found a guy sent him 200 sending my picture dude rips me off oh i got played he had he had a little a website set up with reviews and i'm like oh it's all legitimate he's building that trust that i talked about so the end result i got pissed and there was no sight that dealt with anything criminal or cybercrime related the only real avenue you had was an irc chat session internet relay chat and that if i'm sure you've been on that this it's this rolling chat board you don't know who the hell you're talking to most of them are full of shit you can't trust anybody and you're sitting there trying to conduct business so you know if somebody claims they've got a product or service do they have it does it work or they just want to rip you off because in those channels everyone's a criminal i kept looking around and i've happened upon a website called counterfeit library and counterfeit library only dealt with counterfeit degrees and certificates as all degree meal type stuff but they had a forum and no one was using the forum so i basically get on there and bitch every day i got ripped off don't know what to do about the same time i start doing that two other guys show up one's named mr x he's out of los angeles the other guy's named beelzebub he's out of uh moose jaw saskatchewan and we all become buddies so you know a few weeks of me bitching a few weeks of them responding bl's above gets me on icq and he sends me a message he's like i went by the screen name of gollum at that point got him fun and he's like got him i can make you a fake driver's license and i was like well motherfucker do it and he's like well i'm going to charge you for it i'm like yeah you are he's like i am i was like no you're not and he's like look man he said this business if you're going to do this you have to trust people or you're going to fail he said so i want to charge you 200 but i'm going to send you a driver's license well by this point i'm friends with the people who own counterfeit library where email and chat and everything else and i tell him i'm like okay i'm gonna send you 200 that way when you rip me off i'll have them ban you and i don't have to deal with you anymore and he's like bet i'm like okay so i sent him 200 sending my picture two weeks later i get a driver's license name was stephen schwecke out of ohio and uh real guy worked at adp payroll to this day works at adp is where the guy works got the driver's license and to me at that point in time it was the prettiest thing that i'd ever seen you know i'd never seen a fake id before i thought it was great turns out you know looking back it's like so but it is a kind of a strong first step in creating a fake identity very strong very strong so this so that was like gasco just on on the point he made that if you're going to be successful in this you should have people you trust is he right on that oh he's absolutely right he's absolutely so you have to have this is like mob you have to you have to have an inner circle that you trust you know i'm sure you've probably heard me say this before successful cybercrime all right there are three necessities to being successful online if you're a criminal three necessities are gathering data committing the crime and then cashing it out all three of those necessities have to work in conjunction if they don't the crime fails the problem and it's a huge problem is that one guy can't do all three things you know you've got the you've got the people who gather the data basically the the general store sells people who sell pii credit card logins uh data tools they always sell the spoofed phone numbers or the rdps stuff like that a lot of the times those people don't know how to commit the crime and those people certainly don't know how to launder the money out put cash in pocket so you've got either because of a skill level sometimes a geographic location limits what that individual can do all right so you have to rely on people who are good in areas where you are not in order for that crime to succeed and that means you have to trust those people so what happens with shadow crew all right so counterfeit library is the start all right counterfeit library transitions over to shadow crew right before that transition there's a ukrainian guy by the name of dmitry golabov he was a spammer at that point in time he saw what we were doing with with counterfeit library and he liked it he was getting all these credit card details and this kid i mean he's a kid this kid has an idea and his idea was i wonder if people would buy stolen credit card details it's pretty good uh ukraine russian accent so yeah he picks up the phone he calls his buddies they call their buddies they have a physical conference in odessa 150 of these cyber criminals show up and they launch this idea this launches a website called carter planet which is the genesis of all modern credit card theft as we know it alright so remember i mentioned those three necessities of cybercrime dimitri had all the credit data in the world and he partnered with all these other ukrainians who had all this data as well the problem was is so much fraud had been committed on that eastern side of europe that every card had been shut down even if you were a legitimate card holder and tried to cash it out you weren't doing it at that point so again those three necessities gathering data committing crime cashing out dimitri had the data they could commit the crime they could not put cash in pocket so we were running counterfeit library one day i get this message or not a message one day script shows up and he posts just on the general forum he posts hey i've got credit card data give me an address give me a burner phone number wait five business days order whatever you want to we had never seen anything like that we were a paypal fraud and ebay fraud side that's what we were and fake driver's licenses so then and we had i guess we had two three thousand members of that point so the response from the members was that can't be real you've got to be law enforcement it's got to be in trying to get us arrested and everything else what let me backtrack a little bit so the driver's license that i had got beelzebub had an idea what he wanted to do is he wanted to sell driver's licenses mr x wanted to sell social security cards he made a very passable social security card me i didn't i had no skill level on that i knew paypal fraud and ebay fraud so beelzebub was like tell you what you be the reviewer that way you get every product or service that comes in they'll have to send it to you or let you have access to it you can learn the entire game and because you're not selling anything it gives you legitimacy on the reviews all right so i started out as a reviewer the only reviewer on counterfeit library so over the next year beelzebub turns out he was a pot grower he goes back to growing pot because he wasn't making shit selling driver's licenses mr x about a year and a half in he gets arrested cashing out driver's credit card not credit cards cashing out to casinos doing some shit with that so i'm the only guy left standing and i'm at the top of the heap so and it becomes this thing where if i review somebody they make a lot of money if i don't you don't do business here so script shows up saying he's got this i'm the only reviewer on site people think he's law enforcement first week it goes like that after a while i'm like okay i got to do something and i'm scared man because i'm like he may be law enforcement so i get him on icq and i'm like hey you have to be reviewed he's like what the hell is that so i tell him what it is he's like you review me i was like yeah that's the idea so give him a drop address give him a burner phone number wait five business days and i try to hit dell for five thousand dollars the order fails i get back on icq hey man it didn't work he's like give me one more chance i was like look i'll give you one more chance but it's your ass after that he's like one more chance like okay give him another address another phone number wait another five business days hit thompson's computer warehouse for four thousand dollars dell for five thousand dollars order goes through get the products in i post that review on counterfeit library and literally overnight we turn from an ebay paypal fraud site to a credit theft site and that becomes a lot of money really quickly for members so we were doing now it's called cmp fraud card not present fraud so you hit you use hit an online merchant with stolen credit card data back then a a fairly experienced fraudster could profit 30 to 40 000 a month okay just buying you know laptops what have you and cashing out you know put them on ebay for sale and sell them like that and 30 to 40k a month was the profit on that script had a lot of buddies he had people like roman vega these other guys that would sell not just credit card data but counterfeit physical credit cards as well we had um counterfeit not stolen so constantly counterfeit that that must be tough to do so the connections must be harder than crazy drivers crazy so you know you're back so what's what boa initially had and i became the the united states salesperson for boa but what he had was is he was the first dumps provider in the united states so on the back of your credit or debit card there's a magnetic stripe three data tracks on the stripe there is the first data track is customer's name second data track is the card number forward slash 16-digit algorithm outside of that that's important we'll get back to that in a few minutes third data track is called indiscriminate data no one uses it all right so what's bought and sold is the second data track it's called the dump and the reason that's sold is when you go into a shop you insert the card or you swipe the card the only information that's sent out for verification is the second data track all right that goes to the processor bank for verification the first data track that customer's name shows up on the screen of the cashier in front of you so what typically happens is is you buy 10 of these dumps you get 10 counterfeit cards in code track 2 on all 10 cards track one you create one fake driver's license track one is just the name of that one fake driver's license that way when you go in the shop swipe the card track two sent off a verification track one shows up on the screen in front of the cashier if you ever ask for id you pull out the fake id everyone's a nice warm fuzzy you walk out with cameras rolex and track one could be it doesn't have to be connected it's not connected attractive not connected at all all right that's that's one of the big problems all right yeah so script brought a host of technical people into that type of environment all committing credit card theft we had proxy providers we had all these people that were doing this stuff we start making a lot of money a lot and the reason that happens is again script did not have the ability to cash out so he was reduced to selling things at the same time he's looking for how do i make more money all right the ukrainians happened upon this thing called the cvv1 breach or hack that's what it's what they call it so what happens is remember i told you of track two card number forward slash sixteen digit algorithm you gotta know the algorithm to encode it so you can swipe the card or take it to the atm machine all right atm you got to know it now we were fishing data from hell i mean we were we were doing a lot of fishing a lot we were getting pins we were getting card numbers but you can't get that algorithm so ukrainians start testing stuff what they found out was no bank had implemented the hash on track two so you take the card number forward slash any 16 digits it would encode take it to the atm pull cash out because you got the pin all right started doing that well wait uh sorry i'm trying to understand so that means so if there's no ha are they generating random numbers or do they have valid numbers for track two no numbers needed at all as long as just the track two was a complete track too so it's a valid track too that doesn't matter so the pin is the thing that gets you in right so back then all right back then what we're talking about is you need to typically today you need a whole track too you need that valid track too all right you need the you need the 16 digit card number forward slash and then whatever that algorithm is out of the side of it all right back then none of the banks had implemented that algorithm so while the algorithm was there you didn't need it to encode interesting interesting so you can't make a lot of money uh with uh physical of that debit card not present fraud remember i told you it was 30 to 40 000 a month all right that turned into 30 to 40 000 a day yeah the ukrainians again they can't cash it out they've got all the data on the planet but they can't cash it out those three necessities of cybercrime so the deal became you have to rely on the americans tell you what we'll give you 40 so you had all these cashiers that were 40 of 40 000 a day yeah we'll take that all right send the rest of it over to by western union or what have you to ukrainian contact that's before cryptocurrency came into play now you had a couple of forerunners with e-gold and liberty reserve things like that but back then it starts out with western union then it becomes prepaid cards sending track information over loading the card up like that and then finally you get to e-gold liberty reserve and today it's with crypto that's that's used um started stealing a lot of money a lot and that got law enforcement attention so we started to see i mean this it's a crazy-ass story we started to see uh ips coming in from law enforcement agencies government agencies because back then they didn't know how to shield their identity either so you saw you saw secret service you saw dod you saw all these like and you're like that's interesting you know and at the same time we had it was called a hack but it wasn't a hack we had a guy that worked at t-mobile in los angeles this is the same guy that back then published paris hilton's phone contact list that made a lot of news not only did he do that but it turned out that the los angeles secret service agency was using t-mobile phones so he's getting text messages of the secret service investigating shadow crew and he posts those damn things on shadow crew so i'm sitting there going head of the pile i'm sitting there going this is not going to end well this is not going to end well so at the same time i had access i started out with access to the indiana state sex offenders registry and i was using that to create bank accounts a lot of the money out and i would sell the bank accounts and stuff like that they shut that down the next database i had access to was the texas driver's license database and started using that to create fake driver's licenses what have you and then finally we happened upon the california death index all right complete information mother's maiden socials dobs all that and it's like gotta be a use for that well you can use it to create identities all day long my idea was i wonder if you could take somebody that's died and then file for social security death benefit not death benefits but social security benefits for that individual and get that recurring paycheck in so that takes a lot of research to start seeing if you can do that how does the federal government know if you're dead do federal indexes reference state indexes you've got all these questions that pop up well it turns out federal indexes don't reference state indexes it's against the law so it also turns out the only way the federal government knows you're dead is prior to 1998 the family had to file a social security death benefit for that person all right prior to 98 of course most people don't right prior to 98 it took the family after 98 the hospital can do it funeral home can do it or the family can do it so a lot more people have it filed after if they've died but it's still there's a lot of people probably a lot of people because that death benefit's only like 219 yeah okay nobody's thinking about that shit so i started to apply for social security benefits nope number's dormant so they want you to come in for a physical interview here i am you know 32 you're not going to pass as a 65 year old so no so the next idea i had was i wonder if you could file income tax returns on these people turns out you can all day long so i started doing that and i started to steal once i got ramped up because you test everything you know your testing make sure you got to figure out what the deposit instrument is and everything else and once you get all that lined out i started to steal 160 000 a week every week for 10 months out of the year by paying taxes by filing fake yeah filing fake tax returns so you find a business yes and the way the system worked is the irs will issue a refund on somebody before they're able to verify that that person works for an employer still works like that today all right so and you're keeping the amounts relatively low keep them at three thousand dollars all right amounts are very low but you're still able to achieve scale because this large index and i was manual later on a couple buddies of mine went automated with it wait you would go doing this by hand so there's no code involved all manual wow i'd follow return once every six minutes work 10 hours a day three days a week so clicking on so to typing fast and click one return every six minutes that's changing ip that's uh changing address everything else will return every six minutes for three days a week fourth day i would take a road trip plot out a map of atms and then the next two days cash out bam bam bam bam bam all right come back home rinse and repeat um turns out that a backpack i don't see any sitting around here but a backpack will hold 150 000 of 20s is what it'll hold so i'd put 150k and 20s in a backpack i had a spare bedroom i'd come in toss the backpack in the bedroom this is very very important information and the fact that you know it is is also very first we started with the volume of coal that weighs a ton and now a backpack holds a hundred fifty thousand dollars and then you can multiply that by five for hundreds yeah uh most of the time it's 20 it's coming out atm right these 20 ways a gram each 20 weighs a gram so those actually go by weight which is what federal authorities do when they get a pallet of cash they just weigh it oh they just they just weigh it so 150 k is seven and a half keys of cash fp50 oh that's pretty light that's bad yeah did you get big backpack go do a good uh run with david goggins with it nice i like it you know this is great so wait uh where does that come in with a backpack so what happens is i didn't know how to launder money all right so you know i'm throwing cash in in the spare bedroom one day you open up the bedroom and you're like gotta do something with those backpacks and that's when you start learning how to launder money you know cash-based businesses things like that i had a production company i had a couple of detailing company i was thinking about going into food trucks things like that in charleston actually can you pause on that to take a tangent there how does my money laundering uh work i mean at that time and what years are we talking about this is uh by the time the tax return schemes go into play we're talking uh 2002 2003 is when tax returns start and so what uh at that time and what you're aware of now how it evolved how does monday money laundering work you know it's not that much different it's really not you you get a cash-based business start laundering the money or putting the money through that saying that transactions are legal you then start depositing into bank accounts from bank accounts my my thing was is have bank accounts the united states mexico canada and then finally bounce over to estonia was the final destination of all this stuff and the idea is is to try to move them to so many places that by the end of the day it looks legal and you can't trace it all if you're ever caught which you ultimately are but uh so cash-based businesses you know when you say sorry to interrupt the cash-based businesses so you have money that needs to be moved to other people uh so how does that work what's what's the business your service and you're giving them money right so you you do the ozark thing if you want to do that so you can gamble cash out something like that so our trips to whatever casinos you've got you've got your production company or your detail company so how many cars you cleaning today how many companies have you got to do that all right whatever that company is it's got to be cash based somebody's paying you in cash is what you're doing you have to have enough of those cash-based businesses where it doesn't look funny all right because if you're a detail company making a hundred thousand dollars a month that's a problem yeah okay so then you start depositing into that well because of the patriot act as a suspicious activity report sars came in at 2 500 instead of the 10k that it used to be so all of a sudden you've got multiple bank accounts that you've got to set up all right fortunately what you also had is you had a bunch of prepaid debit cards that were coming into play at the same time so a combination of bank accounts prepaid debits that had ach abilities attach those as well and you start running them all together then once it's out of the united states you don't have to worry as much you can start funneling that into fewer bank accounts until finally you've got the one main account that's over at bank letico and estonia at that point that's what you've got um so much a bunch of hops that end up at a place that you can't trace and to give you an idea i was arrested february 8th 2005. my last seizure was 2010. got the last seizure notice so took them they got it but it took them that long to get to it so so how do stories like with script that come into play here where he uh had someone who owed him money kidnapped and tortured so when does it turn darker it turns darker when the more the the more money you make script was a kid that he was stealing enough money that he was able to buy whatever state he wanted to and he would brag about touring the countryside and if he saw a property that he liked he would buy it and that was not just to brag he was doing that so this kid is stealing a lot of money at the same time he's got connections politically because of his family he's got connections and that family's got connections with the ukrainian mob all right so he's got these inroads and people are looking out for him and he's stealing a lot of money at the same time somebody doesn't pay him a decent amount of money somebody doesn't pay him now we had never with shadow crew with carter planet with counterfeit library we were basically the geeks all right we were the just the fraudsters the social engineers we had never really considered violence the rules that i had in play were hey we're not we don't do child pornography we don't do counterfeit currency we don't do drugs and the only thing we ended up really obeying was the child porn stuff except for max butler who you mentioned earlier um script someone rips the guy off and uh he comes online on shadow crew at that point and he posts these pictures one day and i mean it was a detailed narrative through the pictures had the guy that rammed in the van had the door open round and rammed in the van had the guy tied up had the guy being tortured and the response was this is what happens when you steal from me and that's the that's the first time that violence came into play at that point that's when things got you start realizing things are getting a little serious how does that make you feel the first response is can't be real he's he's just that's he's just doing that you know he's wanting to send a message then you're like no that's real that's real and uh were you afraid in your own heart that you might uh descend to that too like if you see that or was it pretty clear to you that that's a that's a line that some people can cross and some can and you're not one of those that can cross it you know i got to tell you i joke with my wife the the joke i give the joke i tell my wife is you know but i knew some guy that had 8 000 bitcoins i might be persuaded to ask him for access to that and she was like how and i was like well hammer and toes yeah and i say that as a joke but there's that line where you're like i remember who i used to be and if you're looking at that kind of money i might be persuaded to do that back then you know that's that's and i think that's what was scripps issue is he it was a lot of money to him this is the money and then there's you know violence can also be gradual so every time you do a little more a little more a little more a little more yeah you get used to what's going on and then i can desensitize and you figure you take somebody like uh like ross ulbrick the the silk road guy all right ross was not a violent guy he's he was not but at that point in time you know he was sitting on 24 24 million in bitcoin he was the only game in town and that 24 now is like i don't know 20 to 24 billion some crap like that but uh he felt in danger of this guy was going to turn him in you know it was a black mountain and everything so ross thinks he hires a couple hit men to kill the guy so it's it's it becomes that thing and i saw that over and over again and i'd like to say i wasn't like that but given the same circumstances i would have probably done the same thing and also when you're it's not just about money there's a lot of other forces like if you're threatened um for your well-being or for your wealth or for your power all all of us all the different motivations plus that that online aspect with those communities like that if you're the head guy you really feel like you're the parent of these guys yeah so somebody's starting to threaten them it's like all right what do i need to do so what do you make of silk roast the shadow crew started something that today you can call dark net and dark net markets so these markets that operate that trade uh trade things everything from child pornography to drugs to i mean what else everything what are the dark things that humans want to do that they don't want anyone to know about all of those things right um so can you maybe tell me you know what let's just even step back what is the dark net how big is it so what happens there let let's let's backtrack a little bit more before we get to that all right um what shadow crew did other than you know dealing in all these stolen wares what shadow crew did that's really important remember those three necessities that i talked about but the important thing is is it established trust among criminals all right because that's a necessity you have to be able to trust who you're dealing with because you have to deal with somebody you have to all right so how do you know you're not dealing with a cop how do you know you're dealing with somebody that's skilled how you know you're going to deal with somebody that's not going to rip you off you have to be able to trust that individual shadow crew provided that trust mechanism for criminals you had that communication channel the forums where you could reference conversations weeks months old take part and learn from those conversations you had vouching systems and review systems in place escrow systems in place you had you could knew by looking at someone's screen name if you could trust the individual network with the individual all right and that community of just humans provided that backbone of trust and that's that's really interesting when you think about it you you had the trust that was there but you also had this almost this instantaneous information that was available about the community or about cybercrime at large and that's that's still in play today all right so when that that was the way things were until a couple of things happen and one was cryptocurrency the other one was the tour browser the dark web now i was working with the secret service ripping the cigarette service off when tor comes into play all right so we got we got a memo in one day and it was talking about the tor browser and it was like we really need to be careful with this this is going to be problem and so we all fired up the tor browser and it turns out it was this was 2005 early 6. turns out it was completely unusable could not use it at all simply because no one was using it and it was extremely slow so uh so people don't know tor browser is a way to be completely anonymous as long as you properly know how to use it right huge caveat yeah all right so developed by the united states navy and they developed this yeah oh yeah it wasn't the hackers that interest u.s navy to this day the number one funder of tour military to this day all right interesting i mean the same i guess with the internet the the origins are developed so that operatives could communicate with each other without being identified all right that then goes open source they release it eff comes in starts sponsoring and everything else like that the next idea was well you know people get around their country's firewalls whistleblowers can use it things like that well someone forgot to mention that the first adoptees of tech if you can use it to launder money or remain anonymous are criminals and so criminals start to use the damn thing all right so along the same time we get well a few years later we get satoshi nakamoto pops up with his ideas for bitcoin and then ross ullbrick runs with it ross albert decides he's going to start up silk road so initially the people who were using tor which later was the dark web people were using tor were just talking with each other visiting websites communicating like that someone figured out hey man we could host websites on this thing and they have a lot of trouble finding the box so that is the advent of silk road all of a sudden ross obrecht has this idea that he's going to change the world by becoming the largest drug dealer on the planet so he opens up the silk road and the only payment instrument he allows is bitcoin so if those people out there are wondering why bitcoin is going at what 44k today yeah yeah by the time this is out it could be a hundred thousand or ten thousand absolutely we'll see who knows if it's 10 000 i'm going to buy some which is a hilarious statement to make because that statement would be ridiculously wrong like five years ago right people 100 years from now i'll be laughing wait it was that low so he only accepts bitcoin and that's of course the the initial use case of crypto is no one wants to admit it today but the initial use case is we're going to buy a bunch of pot we need somebody we need a way to pay for it so that's that's what happens uh ross it's it's really interesting to me if you um if you look at motivations of cyber criminals the motivations are status cash ideology all right my guys all cash across the board all cash ross is ideology he really believed he was going to change the world he really didn't i've been fortunate i uh i actually know the guy who ran silk road 2 and have talked to the kid everything else and i will tell you that those those guys who are motivated by ideology they are a completely different breed they really are it's not you know the cash guy it's it's it's low-hanging fruit the the ease of it's hard to stop committing crime but it's much easier for a cash-motivated individual to stop than it is that ideology guy that silk road 2 guy he's still got it you know he's not breaking the law but you can see it's like he wants to he he wants to so it's it's uh that's fascinating that i i mean the the worst atrocities in human history are committed with people that operate under ideology all the other motivations are much weaker but you know you think about it with ross i mean very bright guy very bright guy but think about the amount of cognitive dissonance that the guy's got that he thinks he's going to change the world by running a drug site i mean it certainly i mean could he have changed the world yeah could he have done it like that probably not like i could steal man those arguments i said i listened to quite a few uh libertarians and you could push that to anarchists and you know there's a lot of people that argue um so i actually talked to uh to fac a professor columbia who actually argues that all drugs should be legalized and not at a philosophical level political level but the fact that um all the negative consequences of drugs that people talk about are actually have to do with other factors in your life i would agree with that and so that's a okay but that's more like a argument about negative aspects of drugs i think the ideology comes in where it's like well nobody should tell you what to do you should be you should have the responsibility of your own actions like uh um the government or any other institution shouldn't be the uh the rule setters the constraints for how you live your life and so that i could i could see that argument being made and ultimately if you uh like create an open market for drugs how that could build a better society it might break down the outdated the corrupt the bureaucratic institutions i mean you can make you can make that argument there's an argument and let's be fair i want to be fair with it i mean could did he change the world we do have this whole thing called cryptocurrency yeah in the long arc of history perhaps yeah we do have that that's a biggie so and that might have been for it to take hold in society maybe the darker parts of society at first maybe that was necessary right i mean maybe i will see how it pans out shadow crew we had this guy albert gonzalez this kid's name we had we were growing so big that i had to start farming things out so the first thing i started farming i i instituted this review system kind of establishing that trust mechanism even further for criminals to use we needed somebody to take care of our tech aspects of the forum so um associate of mine by the name of kim taylor we were looking for a forum techie he comes to me one night and he's like a founder forum techie i was like who's that he's like it's this kid and i was like is it any good he's like well he knows the software and i was like okay we just signed his ass on he went by the screen name of cumba johnny was his screen name and uh he starts selling credit cards after a while under his screen name with scarface and that cbv1 breach where you're cashing out the track twos at atms you know forty thousand dollars a day so albertson new jersey one day broad daylight and stands at an atm for 40 minutes just standing there feeding in one atm card after another point out cash taking the 20s out stuff them in that backpack meanwhile just across the street a couple cops just happen to be there and they start noticing this kid's just standing there so 40 minutes they watch this kid 40 minutes finally one cop looks at the other let me see what's going on there walks over across the street albert's wearing a wig he's got the disguise on everything else like that ask him kid what are you doing albert falls apart we didn't know albert had been arrested so albert immediately goes in i want to work for the secret service at that point in time secret service i referred to and i i want to make sure i i don't say that it's not like that anymore but back then they were fucking idiots all right they had no clue what was going on so there was a competence issue that they were working through is one way to put it that's a nice that's a nice euphemism poor fucking idiots there's another way to say it so they're just like not aware of this digital world they have no clue no clue the way that uh albert tells them how to catch us because they looked at him how do we catch them and alfred's like i'm serious i'm serious so albert's like well you could try a vpn what's a vpn yeah so he explains it to him they're like that's a good idea so i quit shadow crew i was worried about all the news that was coming in everything like that i'm stealing 160k a week i didn't know albert had been arrested i'm worried about being arrested i know the writing's on the wall and i'm like i'm quitting where did you see the writing like the ips that were coming in yeah the uh text messages about the secret service investigations and their buildings precious buildings and this is not going to end well this is this is this is going to be bad so uh i announced my retirement of february 15th i'm sorry april 15th 2004 that's my retirement i think that's 2004. and uh i quit i walk away well albert had been arrested they cut him loose no one knows he's been arrested he comes back into shadow crew i leave kim taylor at the same time he's kind of on the run which if you want to know that that's a nightmare story in and of itself so my second in charge kim taylor this guy there was this guy named david oh what was his name he was el mariachi was was the guy's name david thomas david yeah yeah he was a film guy so scarface yeah yeah so el mariachi real name david thomas he's on the run out of nebraska for check fraud he comes to us on shadow crew telling us this sad story we take up a collection for this guy send it to him all right i get him a job working with a low-level carter trying to make him some money all right el mariachi or thomas does this for a few weeks comes to me one day and he's like man i'm not making any money i'm like okay let me see what i can do well i had a ukrainian guy by the name of big buyer he um a real friend of mine and i contacted him i was like look man i got a guy who wants to do some work can you help the guy out he's like i got him i was like okay so he sends thomas enough money to go thomas is in texas at that point sends thomas enough money to go from texas to issaquah washington and rent an office space all right so thomas goes up there rents his office space him and his girlfriend rents an office space and the plan is this big buyer is going to place an order get product sent mariachi is going to get the product listed on ebay cash out 50 50. easy enough all right so big buyer places an order first order is outpost.com 18 000. the largest order outpost.com had ever received at that point in time order goes through because the stuff goes through he gets the product all right mariachi comes back tells me tells my second in charge kim taylor kim taylor at this point he's i'm i'm 33 34. kim taylor is 46 he works at the tattered covered bookstore in denver colorado that's where he works at this point and he fancies himself jason bourne all right he's even got one of the screen names of jason bourne so i'm like alright so mariachi's telling us how much how much money he's making everything else i'm like well that's good i'm glad you're all right kim contacts me he's like i want to go to issaquah and i was like why he's like to make some money i'm like you're making money he's like i want to go to issaquah i was like all right go be careful so he gets in the car saturn is what he's driving he drives his little piece a piece of saturn all the way up to issaquah gets there you know midnight they party all night long because they've never met each other they're just celebrating partying drinking everything else like that meanwhile big buyer has placed another order with outpost.com 17 000. the second largest order outpost.com had ever received at that point in time by this point in time outpost knows the first order was fraudulent guess where it's going the exact same address the first order goes so outpost picks up the phone calls issaquah pd hey we got a fraudster issaquah is like would you mind sending some empty boxes and the outpost is like be happy to so the rule was is on credit card fraud if you've got full account access you place the order the morning that's supposed to arrive you sign into the bank account or the credit card account if you can sign in you go pick up your product if you can't sign in you go back to sleep that day all right well big buyer was the guy who placed the order mariachi in my second in charge are partying all right so they're supposed to contact big buyer they don't meanwhile big buyer is raising hell getting up with me like hey where are you where are the guys i can't find them they don't need to pick up this product so i can't get in touch with them they go down to pick up the so mariachi's got a cadillac old 70s cadillac he's got a cadillac pulls into the complex now mariachi's driving kim taylor's in the passenger seat david thomas's girlfriend's in the back seat as they pull into the complex going through the parking lot mariachi just happens to glance over and he sees a van with a guy sitting sideways in the van and he looks at kim taylor and he's like that's an undercover and kim's like ah it's fine so they pull up to the office complex kim's like i'll go in and get the packages so he walks in looks at the guy behind the counter i believe he has some packages for us guys like one second so he disappears around the wall out pops the issaquah pd arrest kim david thomas is in the car watching all this happen he bugs out and they arrest him on the interstate where he has three fake driver's licenses in his wallet along with his real driver's license another no-no but they get him so david thomas had outstanding warrants out of nebraska we couldn't bond him out kim taylor didn't have any warrants so we bonded him out um my third in-charge kid um seth sanders was his name he bonds him out uses his girlfriend's account to bond them out and uh i get married i get kim taylor to go to utah where he uh another friend of mine agrees to house him him and his wife so i think everything's fine and all that about three weeks later this guy in utah gets me on the phone hey he's got to go i'm like what's going on he's like well the only thing he's doing is popping ecstasy tablets every day all day and i'm like seriously he's like yeah i was like okay he's got to go so we kick him out of there by this point i've got another crew that's coming through i mean i had all these crews running had another crew that's coming through denver send kim back to denver to partner up with these guys kim gets these guys arrested so by this point in time i'm exasperated i just want to throw my hands up in the air and walk away so my retirement's coming up at the same time so i'm like fuck it i'm done so i tell everybody the rest of the admins and the mods there i'm like this is what's going on you guys need to watch out for this we need to ban kim not let him back in be careful what's going on i walk away at the same time i walk away cumber johnny albert gonzalez comes back into play he sees everything that's going on he uses that to his advantage he starts banning everyone that's suspicious of him sets up the vpn at the same time and says hey to make sure we're all secure i need all transactions to go through this vpn vpns ran by the secret service all right secret service ends up i think they ended up cataloging like seven million dollars worth of transactions over the next four or five months shadow crew makes the front cover of forbes august 2004 headline who's stealing your identity october 26 2004 united states secret service arrest 33 people six countries six hours i was in charleston south carolina when i saw it happen and i'm like [Laughter] you're you're you're the one that got away i'm the one public there were a couple other guys that got away that they didn't publicly mention one uh his his name was tron he was a um in the zero yeah exactly but uh he went by the screen name tron he had access almost unfettered access to bank of america um so what happens is they identified the guy secret service is in the air to go get him they call the ukrainian police hey we're coming down to rest this guy ukrainian cops are like oh come on down so as soon as they get off the phone ukrainian cops get in the car go down and tell tron hey they're they're coming to get you yeah so he bugs out down to south america and they don't catch him i think for six or seven years after that something caught him eventually he caught him eventually well let me actually ask you on this point you've said that if you do cyber crime eventually it's not going to end well it does not end well why is that so i don't want to say that's because you're going to be arrested because honestly very few people are arrested all right but it doesn't end well because of the type of person that that you become you you quoted me earlier you you lie to everybody around you you lie to yourself you lie to your friends you like your family of course you lie to your victims you don't have any friends you know i went 20 years without friends i had associates i didn't have friends um you can't truly trust you don't trust anybody you don't trust anybody you know i had uh my wife i was married for nine years i lied to her every single day of those nine years and it took her nine years to uh to give up on me to realize that i was that piece of shit and uh she leaves at that point then from there i started dating a stripper and lied to her i thought i had friends i lied to all those people that i knew that thought they were my friends i lied to them the entire time you become that individual i don't think a lot of people really understand how bad that is you know you talked about you pointed out that woman that i ripped off she was trying to put a roof on her house for freaking kids man you're that person you're that person so you're also lying to yourself and and that's not a mindset in which you can grow as a person find happiness find genuine simple human affection which is what love is yeah simple real friendship all of those things right so you know i went to prison of course one of the things that one of the most important lessons that i that i've learned in prison because cyber crime as a whole if you're a criminal it's an addiction all right if you're addicted to something whether it be drugs crime gambling what have you if you're addicted to something you cannot love anything else except the addiction the addiction comes first all right and you know you pointed out some of those truly despicable things script for example tortures that guy you get to the point where it's like okay this is the business and you know i tried to convince myself that you know i'm a businessman but i'm a good guy on the other end and you're not you're not so those lies become part of it everything else and uh you know it's yeah you get the higher ups are usually arrested they are but you know you've got millions of cyber criminals these days so most guys are not going to be arrested so you may be arrested you may you may be like freaking jonathan james he was a minor a very very talented individual very competent he had as a kid he had broken into nasa dod pentagon he shut the nasa computers down for six weeks this is that kid then he decides he wants to go into credit card theft partners with albert he's arrested with albert law enforcement they were going on they were going to blame him he was the only competent individual so this kid gets up one day he wasn't in prison yet he gets up one day goes in his dad's bedroom gets out as 45 walks in the bathroom and blows his brains out you know you've got you've got things like that um or you're going to rip somebody off and you're going to end up like scripted with that guy the the guy who hit who ran evolution marketplace no one knew who two people ran that guy and girl and no wonder who they were he ends up stealing about 24 million dollars a lot of from ukrainian mob and they found him about a year later on a beach without his head and hands but you know it always goes south but more than anything to me the uh the negative thing is is you really become somebody that i mean just truly a despicable human being when you get to the point when you're you're still you're you're destroying people's retirement accounts you're stealing money from a woman that simply wants to do something good for her family when you when you become that individual and you're okay with that my god man it got to the point i had one guy ripped off it's like for nine hundred dollars is when i first started the cyber crime stuff that's when i was becoming competent and i ripped him off for like nine hundred dollars and he sent me an email and he was like the email said something like i guess you needed the money and it's okay you know you keep it and uh i'm getting chills right now thinking about it but it's that uh where you become that individual yeah can i actually backtrack i listen i love love okay and there's a story uh that you fell in love with the stripper i mean you you have to tell the story so how did you fall in love um with somebody not there's anything wrong with that profession but it's it's it's romantic it's like a true romance by the way great movie it is a great film it's truly a great film and even even brad pitt um who makes a brief appearance is genius there's so much good acting there anyway uh so tell me that love story all right so you know what uh like i said i get from my dad i get that fear of being abandoned you know i lied to my wife for nine years until she leaves and i was in charleston south carolina and what happened was i noticed that susan uh she was not coming to bed like you know she used to and she'd stay up all night long and sometimes she'd go and be gone a few hours and everything else and i'm like well something's going on and i'd pass by her her computer and she would minimize the screens and i'm like well got to figure out what the hell is going on so uh put a key logger on our system as any uh anybody should in the relationship well absolutely because you trust them you know why not you should be tracking all their movements all their exactly exactly like i said i was the control freak too it's romantic so um found out she had been cheating on me and she was um here you go they had a reason bad reason i justified so i found out she was cheating on me she was asleep when i found it out and i sat there looking at and i was like well shit so got up walked in the bedroom opened up the wardrobe got a suitcase out started putting her clothes in it and she wakes up she's like where are you going i'm like i'm not you are well my my bravado disappeared pretty quickly i uh took about a week of both of us crying and arguing and everything else and she she finally left and uh i went through this depression i went uh i was in charleston south south carolina i would just walk around the house kind of stumbling in a daze realized i was getting suicidal and uh was smart enough to do something about it and picked up the phone book and uh that's where there's always this sense of humor so i picked up the phone book i'm going through the yellow pages i'm like psychologist criminal psychologist because i need that called this psychologist crying to her i'm crying on the phone told her everything i'm this criminal this is what's happened she's like come in now i was like go in spill my guts and uh saw her for about four months and i joke about it it's true she she was trying to get me to stop breaking the law and to go into real estate and i remember telling her is there a difference she was like yes there's a difference so sorry for about four months i was i was 34. i didn't start drinking until i was 34. i'd never done drugs anything else like that because my mom was an addict as well so i i was this guy i always wanted to be in control didn't want to you know lose control of myself and had never been to a strip club so uh one night i was getting lonely so i walked into the strip club actually i was researched this strip club and it was uh joe's roundup in charleston south carolina joe's roundup a little bitty hole in the wall stuff i was yeah real classy so i walked in and i'm literally that guy man that fell in love with the first the first stripper that he sees she walks by i'm like that one so i didn't know i didn't know the strip club game again criminal naive as hell so uh belly up at the bar order the beer i'm sitting there drinking it she comes over to me and we start talking and she's like uh would you like to get a bottle of champagne i was like does that mean going in back or what she's like well yeah you need to do bottles going back and i was like sure let's buy a bottle of champagne 400 bottle of corvail wow like all right then again that bravado disappears pretty quickly i get back there and we talk for two hours and you know nowadays i don't understand that most men who go to strip clubs the strippers are their therapist most the time all right so i'm sitting there talking we're talking of course she's she's sizing me up she's looking at the watch she's like what kind of car you drive you know everything else and i'm like telling her i'm talking so at the end of the night i'm like really nice meeting she's like it's so nice meeting you too so i leave she you guys just talked and just talked and there's no damn feeling of love and all of that yeah so just talk just you know got along pretty good i'm like i like her i like her so come back in a week later walk in and uh call her over and i was like look i said i'm not uh i said it was my first time to a strip club i said don't know yeah i like you i'd like to know you more would you like to go out to dinner and she was like yeah i was like where would you like to go so she says rude to john and i was like don't know what it is that's where we'll go so i go back and i was uh i had a theater buddy at that point in time because i was trying to get my life yeah i tried to get my life together uh jc was his name and i was like i got a date he's like he got a date i was like yeah man i got a date and he's like okay where are you going and i was like rude jean and he's like take your wallet i'm like yeah he's like take your wallet that's like all right so uh we start you know doing the the lunch and the dinner thing and uh i get to where i really like her she's uh i was 34 she was 23 and uh got along really well listen you know had common interest in music and arts and stuff like that she had i mean a stereotypical she was she had graduated college with a degree in religious studies well yeah so i was like all right so um so yeah you just fell in love yeah we we got along really well really well so i ended up moving her in with me she hadn't quit her job and uh what was happening was she's working weekends and uh you know the club would close at three or four she wouldn't come home until 10 or 11 in the morning and most the time it would be a phone call saying come and pick me up i can't drive home and uh then i'd never use drugs had never been around my mom valium and pot and things like that but as far as interacting with her i've never done anything like that by this point of time i'm kind of getting head over heels with her i've moved around with me and everything and i had never i was 34 i'd never went through a woman's purse in my entire life and so she comes in passes out and i'm like i gotta know what the fuck's going on and uh went over and went through her purse found cocaine and you know the straw cut off straws and all that stuff and i'm like broke my heart i just sat there and started crying got online and uh i'm the guy that can find information so i started looking for forums on strip clubs found a forum i found that one found where it was talking about her prostituting herself to support the habit and uh that got me man that got me talking about everything she was doing to uh to do that and that broke your heart there oh man yeah so uh went like i could i didn't have the heart to tell her that i knew she was prostitute but i went to her and i was like she was waking up and i was like look i found this in your purse i can't have that and she's like well you think i'm prostituting i was like no no i don't think that i knew it but i didn't mention it to her and uh i was like i can't have that well i i don't do that it's just a one-time thing i was like all right so um she went back to work and continued to do it for a couple more weeks and then finally i was like i can't so i picked her up one morning as like she was she was she couldn't drive home before i picked her up i'd written her a note left it on the pillow so i brought her home tucked her in the bed and uh told her i'd be back that night told her she had a letter when she woke up i woke up and the letter was basically uh you know i love you if you can't stop this don't be here when i get back and i went to uh columbia that day came back that night and uh should quit her job and she quit drugs that night really acquittal and uh i got it in my head that i needed to do whatever i needed to do to make sure she didn't go back to that that became that to me because of my background that meant spending a lot of money and uh so every night was you know three to six hundred dollars for dinner it was uh thousand dollar shoes every week two thousand dollar purse every week all that i had most of my money laundered out to uh to estonia and uh elizabeth at the same time she had she quit but uh she didn't want me to go anywhere all right she wanted me there all the time i guess that was that connection you know she i guess she was scared she might go back to something so shadow crew gets busted i start i go through basically all my us funds can't get anything from overseas shadow crew gets busted october i can't go into committing tax fraud because season's over can't go back into credit fraud because shadow crew has been busted i don't know who to trust online i'm left with running counterfeit cashiers checks to get money in trying to make it until you know i can start back with some other fraud and uh lying to her the entire time she knows about none of this no no none of it and she's got she thinks i've got a shitload of money and uh she's got expensive tastes so um and at the same time she couldn't be intimate i mean the girl loved me i that's first time i've really said that so there's deep love there both ways yeah yeah the things we do so uh she couldn't be intimate unless she was stone cold drunk i mean just shit stones go drunk and i you know i said i didn't mind her drinking alcohol i'd rather have that than cocaine so uh that was the intimacy there and i kept i had this i kept thinking if i continued to invest that it would work out you know that just keep going she'll be all right we'll be all right and what happens is uh like i said she thought i had money she thought i had money she wanted a couple of tiffany engagement rings so i said we can get married you know i figured marriage show her that i love her sure it's going to be all right so i was like oh let's get married she's like well i've always wanted a tiffany ring shit i didn't have money to buy the tiffany ring because all my money was overseas so here i am i've defraud says counterfeit cashiers i find a like a three carat ring on ebay for 20 grand and pay for it with a counterfeit cashier's check at the same time because she doesn't want me to leave she needs me there typically if you're doing that type of crime you need to be traveling you can't do it in one central area because you're going to be identified pretty quickly i knew that but i didn't have much choice so start running counterfeit cashiers chase to get the money to to live in everything get the get the engagement ring we were scheduled to be married our wedding date was february 26 2005. february 8 2005 i'm i've got a tiffany wedding band a couple of them coming in and i get arrested in charleston south carolina and she didn't know i told her i said i've got to go pick up those rings she didn't she thought i was just having them sent in so i got to get those rings and i said we'll go out to dinner after that and uh i left at uh like eight o'clock in the morning and i was arrested at uh i think 11 30 something like that of course i wanted to call her you know and uh the fbi got me it turns out it was it was controlled delivery there were like 30 agents in the parking lot fbi got me charleston pd got me within 45 minutes the secret service comes in takes over that investigation they knew exactly who they had along about seven o'clock at night they're like we want to search your house and i was like look i'll sign off on the search if you let me go with you so i can see her and uh they were like okay so i got to see my phone at that point i had like 140 calls that she where she'd been trying to call that time just way yeah and uh so they load me up in hell i mean you talk about 10 12 cars you know 40 agents everything else she's got a dog at that point i'm scared they want to shoot the dog and it was dark and they had me walk up and they're all behind me i knock on the door and tell her the police are there and she needs to put the dog up so she does and uh they come in and just start ransacking them put me in cuffs set me down start berating her with questions she had no idea what the hell was going on were you able to say a word or two to help her understand yeah i was trying to tell her and at the same time they're they take a watch off her wrist they let her keep the ring uh they're telling her i'm this guy what's my real name bang bang bang bang bang across across the board she's probably terrified oh yeah yeah yeah and uh i tell her i was like look they're gonna arraign me tomorrow don't come don't come i said i'll see what's going on but don't show up of course she's there the next morning her dad and she's she's back in the back crying they're reading off the charges i'm under 300 000. bond everything else and uh that's it i they throw me in a cell meanwhile more charges keep coming in you know and uh it's like 10 12 charges a day at that point and i'm trying to call her to make sure she's all right and uh just get through so i spent three months in jail and during that three months she visits twice i get like three or four phone calls to her um i'm just looking back now i understand why you know back then it was like i'm the victim you know why doesn't she talk to me but uh you know now i understand why hell the girl loved me too you know and she found out i was this piece of shit and uh after a week in county jail two agents fly in from new jersey two secret service guys pulled me out of cell looked at me and they were like we got your laptop and i was like yeah and uh he's like well if you got anything on your laptop i was like yeah he's like you're going to be charged for it that's like i figured and then he looks at me as like can you do anything for us and i told him my exact words were look you let me get back with elizabeth i'll do whatever you want me to do. and he looks at me he's like we're going to get you out i was like all right so they let me sit there for three months to get a taste of it and uh get me out my sister they have the bond reduced to a thousand dollars my sister pays the thousand dollar bond by this point she's disowned me and because i'm dating the stripper and denise bonds me out the person that i call immediately is elizabeth i'm out and she's like i'll be there i was like okay so it's like 11 o'clock at night i'm in the parking lot of the charleston police charleston county jail me and a secret service agent standing there and elizabeth had a friend that owned a limo company so she pulls up in a limo gets out pops the trunk gets these two plastic containers out that have my clothes in them drops off the pavement comes over hugs me call me later gets in the car drives off i'm sitting there crying like a baby agent looks at me is that your fiance i'm like yeah he's like i am so sorry and i'm like yeah i had uh well she sounds fascinating yes yeah pull up in a limo i had thirty dollars my name at that point thirty dollars uh the agent had to pay for my hotel room that first night so he drops me off after paying for the hotel room buy me something to eat as soon as he drops me off i take that thirty dollars walk a half mile to walmart buy a prepaid debit card so i can start back in tax fraud as soon as i get back to hotel room call elizabeth beggar to come see me she comes to see me and we talk most of the night and uh convince her to give me a chance i tell her that everything's going to be all right they're going to hire me i'm going to be this big consultant lies lies just so she get back with me and she's like okay and so we moved from from charleston the field office is in columbia south carolina and uh i'm breaking the law even before i start working with them i'm breaking the law and so they've got me in the office the field office they got this big war room in there i'm on a laptop outside line laptops hooked up to a 50-inch plasma monitor on the wall they've got a desktop sitting directly next to me outside line two secret service offices officers in the room at all times with a south carolina law enforcement officer my job is four to six hours a day surfing the web picking up targets intel teaching them how cyber crime operates everything else like that for the first two weeks they are extremely diligent they pay attention to everything that's going on ask questions everything else but the problem is is that that shit gets boring real quick because i'm i'm very fast online doing that so they're they're like what the hell is he doing and it gets tiring looking at a guy just doing that shit so after two weeks they get lazy and bored and they start watching porn instead of watching me at the same time they've got a key logger and they've got they've got spectre pro and camtasia key loggers and taking snapshots of everything that i'm doing go every night it goes on a dvd rom on a spindle so i'm like they're not going to go through that shit so i'm like fuck it start breaking all from inside the secret service offices while they're in the room why not um that continues for 10 months at the same time the relationship with elizabeth fell apart completely fell apart do you have an understanding of why it's just because of the her heart got broken because there was lying it was the truth like she did a lot yeah to uh sacrifice for the liver you've got you got a woman there that uh she had even said it she was like uh she had told one of her friends we were out having dinner one night and this is before i got arrested she told one of her friends and i was the only guy that ever asked her to stop using drugs yeah yeah yeah i mean i i have to say that that part of the story so it's so powerful and then that she chose to do it and she chose to stop and she told me that uh there was one instance she told me that if she didn't marry me she'd never be married and uh as far as i know she's never been married and so it started to fall apart there yeah because i was a piece of shit still you didn't take a step by the way can i just say how just moving it is how honest you are but yeah thank you thank you for being that person but at that time you there's still that lying oh man yeah yeah yeah so uh it's falling apart she had uh she wants to start going to strip clubs and uh i'm like fuck it why not we'll go so we start going to strip clubs and she's you know she'll come back and get wasted and we'll have sex what have you and uh one night she looks at me and she was like she was like i think it'd be funny if you got a blowjob from somebody else and uh that got me that got me i was like to me that was the final straw right there i was like she doesn't care for me anymore or anything else like that we've been going to strip clubs so i started dating another stripper and uh she knew something was going on and uh she looks at me one day and she's like why don't you just tell me that it's over and i looked at her i said it's over we're done and i told her i was like look i said whatever you want we were renting an apartment i was like whatever you want in here take it and uh i said not only that but uh i'll make sure you got money for for several months so you're all right and uh i was like just leave me uh you know leave my tv and leave leave me some some plates and stuff so i go to work that day at the secret service come back that night and she's taken everything and left a picture of herself in the bedroom on the floor i'm like okay i guess i deserve that so he's got i i like her yeah she's cool she was cool so i i i'm giving her a thousand dollars like every two weeks for some shit like this and uh it gets to the point because i'm doing this tax fraud from inside the offices well the debit card companies are pinging the cards they start to realize that hey some son of a bitch is stealing money using our debit card so they start to shut down the cards before i can pull cash out so i start not to have the money to send to her and i'm like so i she calls and she's like look i have to have money and i was like well look i'm doing what i can you promised money i was like look if you knew what i was doing to get this money you wouldn't be asking that and she's like i need money my rent's behind by a month right now and i'm like your rent's behind she's like yeah so i was like okay so i'll pick up the phone call the rental office and i was like i just want to make sure that uh you know i'm sorry i'm behind on the rent for this apartment number oh no that rent's paid up three months it's like okay hang up call elizabeth back i was like you're behind on the rent and she was like yeah and i was like funny they just said you're up on it three months and she gets quiet and she's like well you lied to me too and i was like you're right i did i did that i was like but look i i can't do it anymore and uh that's the last time i spoke to her right there what happens is as i was breaking law from inside the offices i had a buddy that his name was shawn mims out of los angeles i had taught him how to do tax return fraud i told sean i go missing right i go missing for three months i told him if i ever went missing not to contact me and so i go missing then i show back up online first day he contacts so he becomes a target and they identify him pretty quickly at that point he's set to be arrested sometime in march of uh of six that's when he said to be arrested operation rolling stone was the name of the operation nine people were supposed to be arrested that night so secret service goes in a re goes and arrests this guy they search his apartment and don't find anything the apartment manager comes out and explains to him how sean has done all kinds of work to the apartment as a matter of fact he brought in thirty thousand dollars worth of italian tile to put in the apartment that he's renting and by the way last night he had a u-haul out here and took out a whole shitload of stuff secret service comes back in they look at me and they're like we need you to take a polygraph and my answer was i ain't taking a polygraph so they're like well we'll throw you back in jail if you don't i was like call my lawyer lawyer gets me on the phone he's like you don't have to take polygraph i was like well good i'm not going to he's like but they will throw you back in jail i was like don't want to do that he's like have you done anything i was like yeah and he's like well you can try to pass the polygraph i'm like okay so i was like let's take the polygraph they asked three questions the questions were have you talked to anybody have you have you been on a computer outside of the offices have you talked to the press which i was interviewing with a new york times writer the entire time and then have you contacted or warned anybody about investigations and i failed polygraph completely so they revoked the bond take me back down to charleston county throw me into jail three days later secret service shows back up and uh pulled me out of the cell it's jim ramichon and bobby kirby and they were i mean honestly i i they were good men and they gave me chances upon chances to do the right thing and i was not ready to do that and uh jim ramacon and bobby's in there and bobby i mean bobby was a friend yeah i mean he truly was i later on a couple years ago i had a chance to uh a couple years ago i had a chance to uh to have lunch with the man and uh i told him i was sorry for everything i did to him because i got him and him and another agent fired and told him i was sorry for what happened and uh he told me then he's like we were your friends man we were truly your friends so they were good they wanted to help yeah they want they wanted you to be a good man yeah yeah what what got me today i'm bad is uh i told him i was like man i'm trying to be a better guy yeah and uh he's like brett you always were a good guy you just didn't know it and uh fuck people like that yes we need people like that in this world yeah you need somebody to basically believe oh man that you can be a good man so uh jim ramacan pulls me out he's the second in charles charge in south carolina he's got the miranda waiver in front of him right and he looks at me he's like i'm playing hard ass bobby's over here looking distraught and you know like a hurt dog and jim's like here's the way this is going to work he said you're going to tell me everything you've done the past six years i'm going to make it my mission in life to fuck over you and your family and he said not just this case once you get out of prison i'll hound you the rest of your life then he slides the miranda waiver over and he's like now you want to talk and i looked at him i was like nope he was like he gets up gets all red in the face storms out as on the way out he's like fuck you very much so i go back to the cell a week later i was on only under under state charges a week later judge rules they revoke the bond improperly properly oh reinstates the bond nobody calls the secret service to tell them i walk out i walk out i was dating the stripper and i i told my mom i was like well if they're going to fuck me they're going to have to find me she just went on the move yeah i i called this stripper girl up i'd given her like 60k some bullshit like that and i told her i was like kim i need some money and she was like what i was like look i said give me a thousand dollars i'll give you back three thousand dollars in two weeks she was like okay so i met her in augusta georgia and uh got the thousand from her and started driving west on i-20 no idea where to go to anything else got to dallas there was a prepaid debit card supplier in dallas went in walked in the office convinced the guy social engineering convinced the guy to give me 60 prepaid debit cards without a driver's license without payment anything else he did and that started the run i ended up stealing from that i stole like 160k profit used that to buy a jeep cherokee and the idea was to steal enough money to bug out to uh florianopolis brazil and set up shop down there and do it again that was the dream that was it that was it so uh i was on the run for four months stole 600 thousand dollars i was in las vegas nevada one day i had stolen the night before i stole 160 k out of atms went in the next the next morning i woke up signed on to carter's market dot com which was ran by max butler the iceman and there's my name us most wanted on it and that gets you attention it was my real name with the us most wanted beside of it nobody knew my real name in that environment at all but then they did and it was talking about me being part of the secret service operation anglerfish everything else so of course they're all they're all like everybody's after they're like oh yeah we're going to get this son of a bitch so i sit there looking at it and i was like said it out loud i was like well mr johnson you've made the united states most wanted list what do you do now and i was like i'm going to disney world literally literally literally said that out loud so loaded up the jeep drove from las vegas to orlando florida and got the two annual passes one to disney world the other one to universal studios paid paid for a time share they were building these new time shares right off universal drive building these brand new time shares paid for a time share nine months cash yeah i was like we take cash yeah we take cash there's twelve thousand nine hundred dollars then it wasn't furnished so i went down to a furniture store bought thirty thousand dollars in furniture they had seized a dvd collection of mine worth thirty grand bought that back and proceeded to go to disney world every day and that lasted about six weeks they used a trigger fish is what they use nowadays it's called a stingray to find me so one day i was uh it was like 10 30 in the morning on saturday september 16th was the day 2006 so yeah 2006 september 16th i was used to the builders coming around knocking making sure everything was all right so i was asleep heard this knock at the door and uh get up look through the keyhole nobody's there you know people nobody's there i was like huh open the door step out into the hallway walking down the hall is bobby kirby another south carolina guy and a uh orlando orange county cop and uh they turn around they're like hey brett i'm like hey bobby how are you and it's like we're good how are you and i'm like i'm fine would you like to come in and he was like let's put you in cuffs first and i was like that's probably a good idea he walks out like those guys he's like have you got anything in here and i was like yeah there's 120 000 in the bedroom and he was like seriously i was like yeah that an ak-47 his face goes white he's like you've got a rifle and i was like no i'm kidding with you it was like he was like okay so they throw me in jail in orange county and they give me diesel therapy and diesel therapy is it took like two weeks to transport me from orange county orlando to columbia south carolina and what happens is you stop at every county jail you possibly can go through the processing which is about six hours once you get to your bunk hey time to transport you they they do that on purpose on purpose on purpose wears you down mentally and physically and everything i get to uh columbia south carolina now while i was at orange county what happens is this inmate because we were in federal holding this inmate he looks at me his name was yeti and he's like hey man you know the only time you get off in federal prison is the drug program i was like well man i don't use drugs and he's like you can find a drug problem can't you and i was like i can find a drug problem so what happens is is every county jail i stop at on the way to columbia i tell them i'm alcoholic and cocaine so by the time i get to columbia south carolina they've got this paper trail of mr johnson requesting help for drugs i had hired strom thurman's son as an attorney they make me drop him because i paid for him with illegal funds so they give me a public defender he gets a psychological evaluation order for me so psychologist comes in county jail four hour interview about halfway through he looks at me as like using type of drugs i was like yeah he's like what do you use cocaine smoker snort snort how much an eight ball day that's a lot yeah do you have any trouble out of that yeah i can't get an erection and he looks at me and i'm looking at him like because i had gotten that shit from boogie nights so i'm like and finally i'm like is that right and he was like it could happen i was like okay so that makes it into my pre-sentence report so all federal inmates probation office and prosecutor they do this detailed background check to basically tell the judge how much time to give you all right so that drug bit with that interview makes it into the psr so day of interview i mean day of sentencing i'd pled guilty day of sentencing they're what the prosecutor he stands up and this this dude is screaming at this point and he's like mr johnson's manipulated the secret service he's manipulated the prosecutor then he points at the judge and he's manipulating you today your honor we insist on the upper limits of the guidelines well i've been telling everybody in the jail that if they give me any more than 60 months i am not staying so they were like okay sure so the judge looks at me and she's like i agree i'm like and she says 75 months so i looked at my lawyer and i was like can you get the drug program for me he's like i don't know i'll ask so he stands up your honor will you order the drug program for mr johnson the judge says no but i'll recommend he gets evaluated so the secret service had told her hey he's full of shit yeah so she's like no but i recommend he gets evaluated i looked at my lawyer and i was like what does that mean he was like you're probably not going to get it and i was like how soon can you get me to the camp and he was like well if you don't appeal i can get you there pretty quick my exact words were fuck the appeal get me to the camp i'll take it from there he looks at me like i'm the biggest idiot in the world i get sent to because you can get a camp recommended i have friends family members look for camps that don't have a fence around them and we settle on ashland kentucky six weeks later i'm in ashland kentucky and pull up there 14 foot fence razor wire on top and i'm like i don't climb fences so i go in first question i ask is are there any jobs outside of the fence and he was like uh guard's like well you can work in the national forest and i'm like no i'll die out there he was like well you could do landscaping i'm like i can run a weed eater two days later i walk into the landscaping office and the cop this is this this genius of some of these people and institutions the cop behind his desk the entire wall is a blown-up photo of the compound and the outlying area so i can literally sit there and plot where i'm going all right my dad i hadn't spoken to that man in years and he shows up at my sentencing and stands up in front of the judge and he's like your honor i want to make sure brett gets a good start he can live with me when he gets out everything else looking back the man meant that and uh i just thought it was bullshit at the time so he starts to visit me in prison i mean yeah in prison he starts to visit and uh about the third visit in he looks at me he's like i've been reading about you online i was like yeah he's like yeah he's like that's a lot of money you made and i was like yeah he's like you think you can teach somebody how to do that and i'm like so what i used to say and again that it's this i it's this thing of you know really coming to terms with things what i used to say was is i thought my dad was back in my life and he was just trying to use me all right the truth of the matter was is that my dad hadn't really seen me except in that that frame of crime you know being that criminal with my mom everything else i really think that's how the man was trying to communicate with me he wanted to connect with you in the places where you know where you love where you're interested in where your addiction is essentially and what i did is i manipulated the man into helping me escape so i agreed to teach him how to do tax fraud and in return he had the only money he had to his name he had four thousand dollars cash so i manipulated him and given me that and to drop me off a change of clothes a cell phone and a driver's license the only driver's license he had was my driver's license brett johnson so i was at the camp for uh i don't know six eight weeks and the hardest worker that landscaping had ever seen at one point the cops got me on a mountainside with a broom sweeping off the mountain i'm like yeah we'll do that absolutely so building trust to the guys yeah there yeah work them out yeah and within six weeks i'd take off and uh i lasted i think two three weeks something like that uh u.s marshals i made it of you escaped yeah escaped escape u.s marshals they're canvassing a three-state area they find me i think 250 miles away it's like lexington kentucky they found me in lexington because i had to use my real driver's license i had a laptop i had prepaid debit cards and i had stolen identity information and kind of the way it got me was i had dyed my hair this flaming red you know i had this deep tan i didn't look anything like myself and i was at a hotel had had the curtains open saw the scout i was on the laptop saw this guy walk by he walks by the window and he stops and then he backs up he looks inside he knocks on the window i look up at him he's like you i was like me and he's like you then he pulls out this badge and he points at he's like and then he points at the door now so i was like oh okay so i opened up the door he's like u.s marshals service so they arrest me and uh how did they track you down they canvassed that area they talked to every hotel everything else i had i uh traditional like the traditional policework is what it was so it wasn't like from the internet they kind of got something just just straight good good us are outstanding yeah everything they do so they arrest me i go to a i'm initially held at a county jail in moorhead kentucky and uh that ban that was one hell of an experience there but then i'm transferred after sentencing on that so sentencing here's the weird thing so i spent like i think two or three months at the county jail in moorhead kentucky get sentenced at my sentencing it happens so quickly after the initial sentencing that they use the exact same pre-sentence report they report that's got all that drug shit in there so i'm a sentencing prosecutor's there secret service is there judge me and my attorney prosecutor stands up he's like your honor we would like it if you would consider that when mr johnson was arrested he had a laptop he had all this information with him looks like he was engaged in identity theft yet again judge looks at the prosecutor says no says hey if you were going to charge him with it you should have charged him with him i'm only considering the escape then he looks at me he's like mr johnson he said it looks like by you keeping your mouth shut right now you're really saving yourself a pretty serious charge and my response was yes your honor and he was like then he opens up the pre-sentence report he's fingering through and he's like it also looks like before you got involved with all these drugs you were a pretty good citizen i was like yes your honor and he's like so here's what i'm going to do he said i'm going to give him 18 months on the escape i was like okay he said i'm also going to give you and i was 15 months on this escape so i'm going to give you 15 months on this game he said and i'm also going to order the drug program for you i was like yes your honor so the drug program gives you a year off and it gives you six months and halfway house so by escaping i got out of prison three months earlier than what i should have gotten out of so the original thing about drugs worked in the long run now now the long term the interesting thing with that and it's the best lie ever told honestly the best lie ever told i spent eight months in solitary confinement okay eight months and that's an experience because you ain't got no books for the first month or so then they give you a king james bible yeah and then for a month no books this is a pretty small and six by nine room six by nine yeah no books no books no paper no pen no pencils you're alone with your mind you got a mat a toilet what's that like it's you sleep as much as you can you're sleeping 16 18 hours a day is what you're doing were you thinking about um even just going back to like elizabeth you think oh yeah you go through all that the whole through all that every bit your mom too yeah going through every single bit of that and uh so you're supposed to get out an hour a day uh law says you're supposed to get out an hour a day that's the law that's not the way things actually happen what actually happens is you're lucky to get out an hour a week you take a shower twice a week and that's that's it you get a phone call once a month oh so you don't get to see nature don't see anything you get in solitaire all right and uh takes about a week the first week is the roughest you're bouncing off the walls the first week because you can't sleep you can't do anything else then you start to adapt to it after a while when that book does arrive you're happy as hell to have it i'm well versed in the king james bible so you're happy to have it then finally you get other books that are coming that come in from that point um spent eight months at that and uh they send me out to a real prison uh big spring texas west texas where have you been out there prairie dogs and tarantulas yeah that's what it is it got no kidding it gets so hot that uh warnings come on the radio radio telling you not to drive on certain streets because they're melted that's that's big spring so if you've seen the movie uh uh from dusk till dawn the opening scene is in big spring texas that uh it's hot very hot so and that's where i find out what a real prison is and uh it's not ran by guards prisons are ran by inmates and that's a fact so you're met at the door by whatever race you are is what happens so big spring is a converted air force compound it's a disciplinary prison so you get the bad guys that are in there so i get uh i go through processing and i'm walking up to the unit and i met at the door by a guy named nick sandofer he's the treasurer of the aryan brotherhood and uh first question out of his mouth is any more white guys come in and shit i didn't know i was like i don't know four or five next question is what are you in here for my answer was because i'm like i got no worries my answer was computer crime smiled at him and it turns out wrong thing to say because computer crime is not credit card theft or hacking or any bullshit like that computer crime in prison is child pornography so tell him that he looks at me like i'm a piece of shit goes and gets his buddies they circle around what are you in here for i like how the aryan brotherhood has like lines they're like oh yeah yeah this is the child porn that's it that's the bad guy they circle rather like what did you say you're in here for so i'm sitting there trying to explain it to them they're like you know you tell a good story you still said this now computer crime basically really does mean usually child pornography in prison yeah yeah yeah and what you see and that's one thing you find out that the guys that are going in there for child porn they will tell them it's credit card theft so yeah right they've learned so i'm that guy but you also don't i mean for people who are just listening to this you don't exactly look like the typical computer hacker that's true that's true that's very true but i don't look like the pedophile either that's right that's right but it's like it doesn't make it seem like you're i mean i guess you're not wearing a a hoodie and you're you're not like emo dark you know the way it actually works in prison they won't attack you until they know all right so they have to see paperwork which now in federal prison you don't get transported with paperwork because of that so they have to see paperwork or a guard will tell them what you're in there for guards will tell who the benefits are so none of the guards told them that was anything so for the first month they think i am but they're not doing anything because they don't know for sure at the end of the first month i had been talking to kevin poulsen over at wired magazine about max butler he does an article about that shows up in wired magazine so at the end of the first month wired magazine hits compound front cover all the story you would think you would think it saved me so i'm reading the article really happy about it so what happens is four o'clock is mail call four o'clock is a stand-up count nationwide after four o'clock is your mail call they hand out all the mail for the day so the mail comes i get the magazine i'm like reading through i'm like well shit i'm good to go then it says brett johnson secret service informant in the article so you're now snitch which is right up there with the pedophiles so we go to dinner after that at dinner you can hear it you can hear the channel we got a snitch i think it's that guy over there warden next day shuts down the entire compound calls me into his office they got security there got the counselors there and everything else warden looks at me he's like did you give an interview to wired magazine i'm like yeah he's like do you not know they will kill you in here i was like he was like he was like do you feel safe well i know if you tell me you don't feel safe they transport you transport you means another eight months in solitary confinement you start to see shit in solitary after a while yeah so i'm like no not gonna do that so i'm like completely safe he was like look he's like if anybody says anything to you immediately come to us because they'll fucking kill you so they do a locker search try to confiscate the magazines they can't the next day i walk into the unit there's nick sanders laying on his bunk magazine wide open reading it i'm like oh shit walked up to him i was like hey nick what are you doing he's like oh doing some reading i was like anything interesting he's like it's getting there i was like i was like let me save you the trouble take the magazine turn it over the page i was like right there is what you're looking for he was like man i already knew i was like do we have a problem and he looks at me it's like is anyone on the compound you told on i was like no he's like until someone gets here you snitched on we're okay i was like okay he's like but i need you to do something for me all right so in federal prison you got to have a job everybody works doesn't matter what you do but you got to work i got a job in education teaching a lit class every wednesday 6 8 30 p.m lit and uh had all every area of the compound signs up for the lit class had a couple guards every now and then popped in and did we teach lit no we talk fraud every wednesday 6 8 30 pm that's how i didn't get my ass beaten and my other job i had two jobs with them the other job you get to the point it's weird man you get to the point people walking off the bus you know immediately two groups of people you know who the bank robbers are immediately just by them walking off the bus they're like that motherfucker's a bank robber and you know who the pedophiles are immediately so my job as the as the white guy was to approach the white pedophiles and have a conversation and the conversation was basically hey don't know what you're in here for don't care what you enter for but if you got some sort of fucked up charge you need to tell me if you tell me everything's going to be all right if you don't tell me you see those guys over there if you start to associate with them or they start to talk to you and then they find out you're in here on something they're going to kill you and what other things pedophile pedophile rapist anything that harms children harms women anything like that there are it's like the mob there's rules there's there's an ethical code even if you have the division between races on all that you still have this these lines drawn and what that is hierarchy too very very much so what that looks like in prison depending on the uh it depends on the security class that you're in what what what level prison but at that prison what that looked like was you're not allowed to talk to anybody you're not allowed to watch television you can go to the library you don't associate with anyone except your own type if you do anything like this we will kill you if we if someone wants to extort you we will do that too and you won't tell on us or we'll kill you so that's that's the way that works at that point and everybody quickly learns this quickly quickly and uh so typically the guys would say i just want to do my own time that would be the line and it's like okay don't mess with him all right um every now and then you'd have somebody lie and that would come with those types of consequences i got to see while i was there i saw two people murdered saw went through three prison riots and through my entire tenure in prison saw four suicides the people who got killed it was uh so we had outside you have this track a third of a mile track you walk it counterclockwise and inside of the track you got two handball courts so of an evening it happened both times you all of us would be walking you know doing our exercises and at the top of the key like a flock of birds you'd see all the inmates start to migrate down toward the gate so the first time you see that you see that migration you look up in the distance and this other one inmates got another inmate down and he's just hammering his head right into the pavement like that right there well guards don't stop that because the guard may get hurt so a guard is 15 minutes coming out to stop that until everything's over by that point the guy doesn't have a head they shut the compound down and this is what happens so you shut the entire compound down they make two lines of the inmates and what happens is inmate walks into a room they shut the door behind the inmate guard asks them two questions first question is did you see anything the answer is no second question is if you had seen anything would you say anything the answer is no guard then says get the fuck out and that's it anybody that stays in any longer than that is automatically suspect so there was there was one incident i remember this hispanic guy he's in there for a few minutes and everybody's like what's going on so his people then call him over explain to us what went on yeah and it happens like that it's fascinating that because he talked about the network of trust in the in the cyber crime community and here's a network of trusts absolutely in the prison crime community absolutely and trust trust trust matters trust drives everything at the end of the day the riots that i went through the uh the first riot man you're scared to death scared to death you know you've got the cops dressed up in the ninja turtle outfits you've got the uh the rubber bullets the tear gas canisters all that crap you got the inmates that are raising hell hell scared to death the second riot you calm down second right you start to notice this is racial riot this is typically and almost always it's hispanics and african-americans so you get to you get to detect what is the uh motivation for the riot what's the reason and that gives you some calm that's exactly right so second round you start to notice this hey man this ain't me this ain't our group yeah third right no shit third right you're laying your bunk and you let them rain you let them wake war all around you and every now and then you have an inmate they'll run up to you and they'll point to a locker and say is that your locker and if you tell them yes they leave it alone if you say it's not my locker they'll break into it and steal everything out of it and go from there and that's what happens but uh so you did your time for five years five and a half five and a half you made it out made it out i went through uh the the i told you it was a good lie that i told i went through the residential drug abuse program it's a nine month intensive therapy and uh the way i got to that this counselor at big spring he uh he bought this he wanted inmates to be educated he was a really good guy so he wanted inmates to be educated he got a discount on a game theory class set so he gets all these discounted and everything and he's he's asking does anybody on the compound know anything about game theory and somebody says if anybody does it'll be brett johnson so he comes up to me one day at my bug he's like are you brett johnson i was like yeah he was like do you know anything about game theory and i was like yes i do so i start rattling off prisoners dilemma and everything else he's like will you teach the class so i start teaching that i start teaching inmates public speaking and to make friends with this counselor so i i get it gets time where i'm supposed to be transferring out to this drug program that they only had in fort worth and the transfers are taking like four or five months and that's four or five months i could be out free so i walked i went up to him one day and i was like look his name was keeley i was like look man i said is there any way that i can get transferred out any sooner and he looks at me he's like brett i cannot help you and i was like i appreciate that thank you so much for even trying so uh he said that a week later i'm on a bus by going to fort worth so he got the support i got it yeah i love it so it was a nine month program uh 24 hours a day of cognitive behavioral therapy had nothing to do with drugs it was all peer peer study stuff and cbt training and uh honestly it's the best thing that could ever happen it truly is that part what what is it what was the thing that changed you as a man is it the solitary confinement was it the years was it losing uh the the people you loved or was it that behavioral therapy it's a combination man it's a combination it was uh so my sister disowns me the only person i had in my life you know i mean me and my sister that's it you know i mean yeah i loved elizabeth i love my wife now but you know it's me and my sister we went through all that shit together so denise disowns me she doesn't talk to me for an entire year when all this stuff happens and uh after i get arrested on the escape she uh she ends up driving seven hours to come see me to tell me she loves me and i don't see her again for five and a half years yeah yeah so that's that's really the first turnaround took me two and a half years in prison to accept responsibility that was amazing that she did that yeah she drove you down yeah she did that yeah she's something she's something yeah she uh saw me for 10 minutes tell me she loves me and then i planted the seed [Laughter] so uh but yeah you had time to think yeah over those years it took two and a half years to uh to realize that you know i didn't commit crime because of stripper girlfriends or wives or family i committed it because i wanted to chose to and that's the first turn around second turn around is like the cbt training you know that uh it didn't it didn't really hit while i was in prison you know i went through it and they ingrained it in you but until you choose to to make it work it doesn't work so i got out 2011 didn't want to break the law did not and i was under three years probation couldn't touch a computer i had a job offer from uh deloitte to run a cyber crime office in the uk which that was a no no you're not moving and that's a computer idiot so yeah then had a job offer from know before a fishing company couldn't take that i got to where i was trying to apply for fast food jobs that's a computer can't touch that okay then what about a waiter's position well that's a computer and access to credit cards idiot can't touch that either so literally could not get a job could not um doing food stamps i had a roommate that paying half the rent they tell you when you leave prison to to get a job and something you care about and you won't recidivate couldn't get a job and what i had was a cat and uh monster the cat that was the cat's name and uh good name yeah i had had enough money to feed that little guy and didn't have money to buy toilet paper for the apartment so uh there's i was on panama city beach were you living like this it was a steady decline because remember i taught my dad how to commit tax fraud so he bankrolled a lot of that until he couldn't and then from there it's like what the fuck do you do so i didn't want to go into computer crime at all and um i ended up shoplifting toilet paper man shoplifting toilet paper just like for the basics yeah the basics of survival so about the same time i had a friend that uh this guy i i've been dating the same type of women i had been dating you know these yeah you know the unhealthy ones the hot unhealthy ones yes love yeah that's how that works so i had a friend post uh an ad for me on plenty of fish and uh this woman responds my wife she responds and the pictures i i had taken were these prison type pictures you know the serious like yeah they were there she sends me a message of why aren't you smiling and my response was that is my happy face so we started talking and we started dating and she ends up she's that second saving thing man she uh i ended up moving in with her i was going broke i was about to get kicked out of the apartment everything else and she didn't say it but i think she knew it and uh moved in with her and i got a job and the job i got my probation officer let me have a cell phone i was going through craigslist this guy was advertising for landscaping called him up his name was dustin deramus called him up and he's like come on down talk to me so he was running this business him and his brother were out of his house so i'm sitting there talking to him for about 20 minutes he looks at me he's like can i ask you a question i was like yeah he's like are you on the run or something so i'm like no why and he's like well you just don't look like the kind of guy that do this so i told him i was like this is who i am is what i've done and he looks at me like man i got to think about that so he uh he tells me go on home that was a friday sunday evening he gives me a call and he was like brett he's like if i hire you will you actually work and i told him i was like dustin if he'll give me a job i promise i'll work my ass off and he's like show up six o'clock i was like all right so my job was to push a lawnmower 10 hours a day five days a week for 400 a week and busted my ass i i hit it so hard i would uh i'd come in of a night and pass out wake up the next morning and hit it again and it got to the point he ended up this dude ended up offering me to come in a partner with his business his his brother dropped out and he uh by that point i learned everything on the business and everything and he's like you know if you'd like to come in i'll cut you in half and i was like dustin i don't i can't do it man because i wasn't making any money when he didn't pay me anymore until you know he was able to do more and uh i thought i found another job doing something else i and in a speech i say it got cold in the grass started to stop growing the truth of the matter was is i thought i found another job a guy was offering to pay me 1500 a week doing the sales for uh oil rig training was what it was and i accepted the job i quit working for dustin and the guy um i told him before he even offered me the job i told him what you know my criminal history because i was required to do that so i was supposed to start work well he calls me and tells me he can't hire me so i'm out of work and dustin's already hired somebody else by that point so i can't go back with him and uh i'm that guy again man i it's important for me to uh to show value in a relationship all right so uh michelle was only one working i'm like i gotta do something and uh i get it in my head i was like you know what if nothing else i can just bring food in the house she was only making that i think she was she was she i mean we were headed hard you know it was just her working and i was like nothing else i can bring food in the house and get on the dark web get some stolen credit cards yeah start ordering food well it gets worse than that it uh you know she's got two sons there so i'm like well they need clothes so he starts stealing clothes and it continues like that i get arrested i get arrested uh on a food order and michelle didn't know what i was doing so she had she had been to work and she was coming back from work i get arrested and i'm like they let me make a phone call and i call her and i said come to the police station i've been arrested and uh she shows up and uh she didn't know i've been doing that my probation officer of course he didn't know or anything else at my sentencing for that probation officer was there prosecutor the judge u.s marshals michelle and me michelle stands up and she tells the judge that i'm a better dad to her kids than their actual father is and by that point i'm crying probation officer stands up and he was like uh we think mr johnson is a good guy we think this is a one time thing prosecutor says the same thing judge sentences sentences me to one year probation officer stands back up and he's like uh mr johnson the judge if you can uh give mr johnson a year and a day he can get the good time and get back to his family center so the judge amends the sentence to a year and a day so i served 10 months they sent me back to texas and that's when i find out that michelle didn't need me for what i could give her she just wanted me for me that entire time she stands by me the entire time i do my 10 months get out we get married after that and they kill probation so i can touch a computer and they tell you they tell you they were like you know inmates a felon if nothing else he can sell cars well it turns out you can't you can sell cars if you're a drug dealer if you're the guy that steals all the money and people's information no fuck no you can't get a job selling cars so i can't get a job cannot and uh to this day lex i know what my what my triggers are i know what it would take to get me back into committing crime and i knew i'd go so far at that point so i looked at michelle and i was like let me see what i can do signed on to linkedin reached out to this fbi super cop named keith milarski out of the pittsburgh office he was involved with my arrest and some associates and everything else and sent him a message and the message was you know hey i respect everything you did think you did a great job by the way i'd like to be legal and dude responded within two hours two hours he uh gives me references advice takes me in under his wing everything else like that and from that point man it was the head of the identity theft council did the same thing um card not present group hires me to speak microsoft hires me to consult with them and the microsoft hire established enough trust in the industry that i was all right from that point so now you're helping in many ways fight the very guy that you used to be so big picture advice what given that you were that guy how do we fight cyber crime today and in the next five years 10 years 20 years 50 years what advice do you have to individuals to companies to governments of what and also to uh elizabeth like the humans human beings yes that love that live that are friends with cyber criminals there's so many lessons to really be had from that you know to me the the lesson one of the big lessons to me is is you can't serve two masters you know if you're if you're that guy that is committing crime or that person that's addicted or you're you're in love with somebody that's addicted or has that they don't love you they love that addiction that comes first it's always going to come first so you have to realize that you have to know when to uh you gotta know when to cut somebody off when to end something that knowing that they're not gonna change until they decide to change at the same time you got to realize that the only reason i was able to turn my life around is because people took that chance on me yeah you know that's really the only reason they believe that there's a good person in there yeah if if molarsky hadn't responded if i hadn't had my sister my wife these companies that that initially gave me that chance my ass would be back in prison for 20 years i have no doubt about that at all all right so you have to realize that um you know cyber crime a lot of companies that i talk to they don't really understand the or appreciate the uh that networking aspect that that trust aspect of how criminals establish trust with each other how they work together a lot of companies think that it's a single player that's out victimizing them and when you really break down how cyber crime operates that you've got a group of individuals that are working together to hit you but not only hit you but they share and exchange information freely you know companies don't do that you've got privacy concerns you've got competitive edge concerns everything else companies don't share information across the board like like criminals do criminals do that um you have to appreciate that you have to understand that that big statistic that ninety percent of your tax use known exploits it's not the stuff we don't know about it's the shit we do know about we're not doing anything about it so the way to defend against cybercrime is like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that you should fix a lot of that a lot of that so a lot of basic stuff that's already vulnerabilities update the system security now that doesn't take care of solar winds right or cnap or anything like that it doesn't but those instances i mean okay that's a big instance but i mean it is but in the full spectrum of especially in the future uh because there's more and more companies are coming online right becoming digital and it's just more and more and more and those vulnerabilities in terms of human nature so for social engineering and the actual outdated systems all of it and some of it i guess is the uh i mean you're exceptionally good at this is educating on the social engineering side right is educating people in companies that like they've got to do that you've got and companies have to you know i made that point that they never report to law enforcement that's companies and individuals you know i've worked with fortune 50 companies that will not press charges instead they'll have that insider or that criminal sign an nda they'll pay them off and we won't mention this shit anymore you have to be you have to press charges you have to report you have to raise the awareness of everyone in the group you have to be it's that it's that idea and i've talked about that before of understanding your place in that cyber crime spectrum the way a criminal will victimize you depends on who you are and what you do as a person and as a business so you have to understand that design security around that you know we've got 7 500 security companies out there a whole lot of them are snake oil salesmen a lot of them is going to tell you that we're the one stop solution but you're not you're not you're a tool all right and you may have a very good tool but it's not the only tool that's needed to protect against the attacks that are out there and we have we have to be open and honest about that kind of stuff so i guess defending defense is not just like one tool it's it's a process of just uh like a diversity and just constantly educating uh people absolutely so it's the social side it's constantly because there's so many probably attack vectors oh this is the software that you have if you look at it that's that attack surface you can't plug everything it's too damn large to plug everything but you can do the best job you can possibly do but it takes a variety of tools to do that all right the idea and arcos is big about that but the the idea is to take the cost of fraud to the fraudsters so high that they basically try to pick another target all right that's that's the idea that you want you want it to be not worth the criminals time to hit your company what about uh white hat hacking so like um you know hacking for good sort of testing systems and then giving companies the vulnerabilities as you find i think it's outstanding i do i think that i think pen testing white hat stuff is outstanding i truly do i think that that you have to it has to be tempered with what is reality as well though all right you know we've got a whole industry of people who try to sell our fed wallets that i don't know of many are fit hackers out there on the criminal side be honest with you yeah so some of it is just like a psychological safety blanket that's not actually providing any protection by the way you uh wrote on linkedin uh something about id me [Music] what is it why is it a problem i was going down a rabbit hole i was wondering if you were gonna mention that you know they lost i guess i was partially responsible for them losing an 86 million dollar contract what was the contract with the government the irs government yeah the irs so what is it so id me is an identity okay backtrack id me is a marketing company that wants to say they're an identity verification coach i just want to bring this up to see you get angry i'll tell you what my issue is yeah my issue here so it's a company that's used for authentication by the irs i guess irs social security administration va uh at one point 23 state unemployment offices few other services so i guess the idea is that you would be able to unlock your account or get get you know uh authenticate yourself as a human being by uh using fake your face or something like that so private information they've got a they've got a tiered system with verification they've got you can do uh they've got a free system which is questionable where you submit an id and it's been shown several bypasses have been shown and i don't want to talk about their security horribly bad because i want to be honest there are bypasses for a lot of security systems out there right all right um the the issue that i have with idme is that their policies are somewhat questionable um i don't care if you're a private company that has those policies in place but if you're a government agency and you as a citizen are entitled to a benefit or a service of that government agency and then the government agency forces you to give up your complete identity profile to a private company and then that private company uses that profile for marketing purposes to further profit things like that i have a huge issue with that i don't care if you're a private company that does that i just don't think that citizens need to be forced into doing that in order to get a benefit or service that they're entitled to so that's that's my big issue so that i mean given how much value how much we talked about the value of identity you don't think that should be handed over lightly no absolutely not and who would have thought that brett johnson would ever become a privacy advocate but here i am i mean it's just people don't understand or appreciate the value of who they are you know and certainly you've got a host of companies idm is not the only one but you've got some of these companies that say well we strip out the pii of the individual we're just using the biometrics and the sites they're visiting and things like that that's identity that is you can still ping that one unique individual out of all using that information stripping out the pii you can still ping who that individual is so having lived a life of crime for many years i'm sure you've connected indirectly to a large number of very dangerous people directly and directly yeah but the network indirectly is is even larger right oh yeah oh yeah are you and i apologize for this question um are you ever worried for your life for your well-being like having seen a world that's really dangerous in ways that's not that operates in the shadows you know like i said when i when we started shadow crew and started that initial cyber crime business that world violence wasn't there it came in later now violence is inherent in the system to do the monty python but it's it's part of it um the mob the mafia are now part of this whole thing cartels are part of it yeah drugs are inherently intertwined in cyber crime marketplaces because of the profit potential and with that comes a lot of violence as well the cartels already brought the violence that they're good at from the 20th century absolutely which is the technology of the 21st century now uh do i worry about that it's interesting that that my family worries about that all right i think i may be just too involved in it to appreciate that type of uh of danger but uh my family worries about that they do uh do i think it's a possibility i'm the guy that says what needs to be said i've made uh i've built my trust in this industry by not being scared of calling out companies and individuals and not being scared of targeting criminals or criminal groups your honesty as a human being emotionally and until actually is really refreshing it's a gift and thank you thank you for doing that is there advice you can give to young people today about life you broke many rules all the rules some rules should be broken so if you look at somebody young today in high school and college thinking how they can uh break the rules legally and live a life that's uh something they could be really proud of what would you say biggest lesson i've learned um you you want your life to be one where you're helping people and not hurting people and uh that that really hit me the first time i walked into quantico you know that you see the the brightest minds in the united states who give up a lot of money the opportunities a lot of money because they believe in helping people where i spent a career just hurting and harming individuals that's that's a hell of a lesson and i'm glad i'm there but i would tell people out there you know it's fine to want money it's fine to do that it's fine to test systems it's fine to circumvent the rules if you're not breaking the law it's fine to do all that i like doing that all right but if you've got the mindset if you can just adhere to the mindset of helping people and not hurting people i think you'll be all right at the end of the day what gives you again given the dark web given all the dangers out there what gives you hope about the future looking into 5 10 years 50 years i mean hope for human civilization if we do if we uh if we do all right if we do uh if we make it out of this century um what do you think would be the reason what would be well that's a damn good question because i mean we got a lot of bad stuff going on we've got a lot of reasons if asked if i asked you the other question of how do you think human civilization would destroy itself i'm sure you have a lot of things oh yes you know what what gives me hope is you see people working together the covets have been a little bit different because i think that too many people wanted to play politics with it that's been the heartbreaking thing about covet is it's in many ways pull people apart i mean because a virus involves kind of um being afraid of each other because i mean that was a scary thing people talk about pandemics in that way that you're afraid of other humans that is the most terrifying thing it's not the destructive nature of what it does to your body it's just that it pulls people apart and then you realize how fundamental that human connection is to humans absolutely absolutely but you know we uh as human beings we do when things really get bad when things really get bad we do tend to respond and group together we do that and there's injustice yeah we uh we see it we rise up i i wake up in the morning and i watch fox news and cnn so i can be pissed off at everyone all right so the division the outrage they're really feeding they want you they want you to be angry yeah that's what that's what causes me to spare what i think that you know we just need to elizabeth was very good she taught me one helpful lesson because before i met her i was a newshound news beyond all the time a couple channels of it and she was the woman who didn't watch the news at all and i didn't understand that back then man but now i do you know now i'm like it's pretty smart you know don't need to listen to that bullshit as it is that's why i love reading uh history books and people you know i just uh i feel like that's the right perspective on take on modern times you know how will this time be written about in the history books yeah and react to that don't the uh the daily ups and downs of the outrages um which is getting worse and worse in terms of how quick the turnaround is in terms of the news i'll tell you what uh i'm sitting here i appreciate you talking to me i do because uh you know i'm talking about about that relationship and everything it's it's really been this kind of realization for me on a lot of things so i i really appreciate you asking those questions and everything may be able to talk about that i look i love it that uh that you value first of all you're self-aware how important love is in a human being's life it can make you do some of the best and some of the worst things in this world and it's good to think about that it's good to think about that that's that is what makes us human is that connection and that love for each other um what do you think is the meaning of life this big ridiculous question why the hell what are we all here for i don't think it is ridiculous man i i to me that meaning life is finding out that lesson that we need to help each other if you you talk you ask about security i didn't get to say that but you know everybody's worried about themselves the way you solve that security problem is it takes everybody looking out for everyone else that's how you solve that problem and however you take whatever journey you take to discovering that point yeah i mean with me i've i've been asked a few times do you regret anything would you change anything i've done a shitload of despicable things in my life but i am at a point in my life where i like who i am and i know that i am doing exactly what i'm supposed to be doing with my life so when i change anything as bad as a lot of that shit has been i wouldn't it made you who you are yeah the whole of it i mean let's try to say that but it's true that's that's the weird thing it's true yeah also you mentioned that you're uh you're thinking of launching a show what's it gonna be called because you've done it uh you've done a couple of podcasts you're incredibly good at this you're so good at this i've done a couple i'm on a lot of podcasts and everything like that i had the broadcast with a friend of mine karise hendrick and that ended because of a difference of opinion depending on who you ask one of us was an asshole yes it may have been me yeah but then i did the the anglerfish podcast which that was i got to be honest with lex it was completely directionless and it was brett johnson getting lazy yeah um so i ended that the brett johnson show is launching that's the new one absolutely and you know i what are you thinking of doing with it making a difference for one thing but uh it's going to be talking about cyber crime security helping people um interviews interviews a lot of it's going to be solo now i'm calling it the brett johnson show i mean i because it's going to handle crime talk to criminals and how they turn their lives around to a degree as well but there's some shit i want to bitch about too yeah so figure it out i can tell you're good at this i'm a fan already i'm going to listen i'm going to subscribe you should too uh you're launching it soon soon next week uh brett you're an incredible human being the the honesty the the the love i could just see how much of yourself you put out there one of the best public speakers i've ever heard uh definitely you should be in a scorsese field about cyber crime uh 100 i could tell you you're a good actor it makes perfect sense anyway i really i'm deeply honored that you spend your time with me today thank you it was amazing thanks for listening to this conversation with brad johnson to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from george rr martin from a clash of kings a good act does not wash out the bad nor bad act the good each should have its own reward thank you for listening and hope to see you next time