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Cybercrime today, if it were a country, would have the third largest economy on the planet. That’s how things have expanded to that point. And now does that include pornography distribution? It does not. Without pornography? Without pornography. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. I had the opportunity to speak to Brett Johnson. And Brett, well, Brett had a rough life and led him dark places. And he spent a lot of time setting up and running the darker edges of the web. And for many years and facilitating the development of online criminality. And that’s become a real scourge in our society. And that all changed about six years ago when he decided that he was going to work on the positive side of the universe for a while. And so we spent a good amount of time walking through his bio and talking about how he got involved in Shadow Crew, say, from 2002 to 2004. He was an early consortium of online criminals devoted to the sales of illegal goods, drugs, guns, identities and information and so forth. And we walked through all that and then the mechanics of his decision to stop and to start working with law enforcement agencies and so forth and with corporations and to inform the general public about the dangers of online crime and about how to protect yourself and, well, about the realities that faces as we professionalize and organize criminality at the same rate that we’re doing with everything else using this amazing technology that’s at our fingertips. So welcome aboard. It’s going to be quite the ride. I’ve been studying this array of personality traits. It’s going to be a long question, but it’ll get us right into what we want to talk about today, known as the dark tetrad. Now the dark tetrad is a group of descriptors of personality that are negative. And they emerged as an object of investigation for two reasons. One reason was that there was this gentleman named Dr. Robert Hare who worked at the University of British Columbia. And he was the first psychologist who studied psychopaths. And he interviewed a lot of psychopaths in prison, hundreds of them, and developed a questionnaire measurement, a set of measurements essentially that helped determine what the personality characteristics were of people who were likely to become long-term, unrepentant career criminals. And his students started to study that psychopathy, let’s say. It kind of had two components. It had a callous component. So people who are psychopathic are likely to be very high in the trait. They’re disagreeable, self-centered, they have very little empathy for other people, and can be cruel if necessary. And then they also tend to have a parasitical lifestyle, which means that they’re perfectly willing to live on the earnings of other people or to manipulate them for that purpose. That kind of makes up psychopathy. They also tend to be relatively fearless. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then his students started to study psychopathy in normal life, right? Because many psychopaths end up in prison, but not all of them. So Harris students started to study more normal psychopathy, so to speak. At the same time, psychologists had put together a group of personality descriptors that covered the whole range of possible personality. Five factors, extroversion, extroverted people are talkative and full of positive emotion. Neuroticism, that’s a proclivity for negative emotion. Agreeableness, we talked about that a little bit already. Conscientiousness and creativity or openness. But they eliminated from those descriptors anything that was evaluative. So good, evil, bad, good, cruel, kind. Most of those were taken out because they wanted to make a non-evaluative representation of personality. But then that didn’t work out so well because you had to keep in the evaluative terms for the study of, say, serious misbehavior. And people started to look at how those descriptors clumped and came up with this dark, ketrad model. So the darker sides of personality are Machiavellian. So Machiavellians will use manipulation to get what they want from people. Psychopathy, which we already discussed. Narcissism, which is the desire for unearned social status and attention. And then sadism, which was the latest one that was added to that, which was something like positive delight in the suffering of others. OK, so that’s the background. Now, I’ve got extremely interested in this in recent years because our culture is splitting apart and there’s a culture war that’s occurring that’s much more and more serious. And it looks like part of that’s driven by polarization. And so I’m concerned that polarization is driven fundamentally by the disinhibition of the psychopathic or dark tetrad types online. So in normal interactions between people, there are lots of evolved mechanisms to stop manipulation. So, for example, if you and I have repeated interactions and if we’re in a community where people know me and know you, if you you can probably pull the wool over my eyes two or three times. But by the third time, I’m going to catch on maybe and then I’ll know you. And then word will get around and that’ll keep you under control. Right. And a lot of people are kept under control by nothing else than social reputation and social pressure. That’s all stripped away online. And so I’m concerned that the virtualization of the world is enabling the psychopaths. Now, there’s I want to add one more thing to that before asking you more specifically about this. I know already that about 35 percent of Internet traffic is devoted to the propagation of pornography. And my sense is it isn’t the world’s best guys that are involved in the production and distribution of pornography. And then there’s a huge area where there’s overt criminality. I mean, most of the elderly people I know are targeted on at least a weekly basis by people who are trying to steal everything they’ve got. And then around that, there’s an edge of sort of quasi criminal behavior that is engaged in by the anonymous trolls and so forth. The people who are doing their what they call it, they’re having their fun for the laws, which is to laugh out loud, to to gain amusement at the expense of others. And we also know that the people who do that are more likely to have these dark tetrad personality traits. So I’m wondering, you have extensive experience with this. You ran an organization or were involved in it called Shadow Crew. Right. 2002 to 2004. And so and that was one of the earlier attempts to organize. How would you describe it? Is it organized criminal behavior, quasi criminal behavior, illegal behavior, criminal, criminal, straight criminal. So let’s talk about Shadow Crew to begin with. Tell everybody exactly what that was. So Shadow Crew was the first organized cybercrime community. If you think about cybercrime, in order for it to succeed, three things have to take place. You have to gather data. That’s the stolen PII. That’s credentials. That’s the type of tool that’s used to help commit the crime, which is the second necessity of cybercrime. And then the third necessity is cashing that crime out. And that means either information access data or cash. All right. So the problem is. OK, so the three were again. The three are gathering data, committing the crime, cashing out. The issue is, is a single attacker, criminal, hacktivist, nation state, what have you, a single attacker cannot do all three things. So he has to network with other criminals for a good in those areas where he is not. So it’s like a thief with a fence, for example. That’s it. So you’re relying on the internet to fill that gap where you don’t have skill. OK. All right. So that’s what Shadow Crew primarily did, was it allowed criminals to network with each other. Shadow Crew is also the first forum or platform of its type that was a criminal marketplace for goods and services. So prior to Silk Road or whatever’s around today, the dark web as we know it, Shadow Crew was that platform that began all of that. OK, so that was the origin point. Right. OK, OK. And that was how old were you? I was. So this was 2002, 32 through 35. Shadow Crew makes front cover of Forbes August 2004 headline, Who’s Stealing Your Identity? October 26, 2004, Secret Service Arrest, 33 people, six countries, six hours. OK. So how exactly were you involved in that? Looking at financial cybercrime, the genesis of that, there are three sites. There’s Counterfeit Library, Shadow Crew and then Carter Planet. I ran both Counterfeit Library and Shadow Crew. Starts with Counterfeit Library. And the way it starts, geez, I mean, I grew up with a background in fraud. My mom was basically the major fraudster in Eastern Kentucky. So I grew up knowing how to do document forgery, insurance fraud. So faking stolen cars, faking accidents, burning homes for cash, trafficking drugs, illegally strip mining coal. That’s my basis of everything. And your mother was doing this? My mom did that. Yeah, my mom did that. My dad. How did she get involved in that? That’s a good question. I would say from her family, because as I grew up, it was really every single member on that side of the family. My grandfather, for example, I mean, what he would do is he would buy stolen goods all the time. We were in Eastern Kentucky, he’d sit down on the porch of his house and people would bring up stolen goods and they’d try to give him a story on how it was acquired. You know, Paul, this is where it comes from. He’d stop him. Son, I’m not an FBI agent. I don’t care how much do you want for it. So that’s where things began. But there’s a lot of fraud in Eastern Kentucky. That’s not an excuse. There’s just a lot of fraud takes place. So there’s a community there that engages in fraudulent practices regularly and your mother was neck deep in this. How old were you when you started to know that and started to get involved in? How old were you, do you think? I was 10 years old when I started break-along. Okay, let me go a little bit even earlier than that. So how would you describe yourself as a child? Like earlier than 10? Did you have friends? No, Dr. Peterson, I didn’t really have friends. I don’t really have friends now. Okay. So why didn’t you have friends when you were a kid? My dad was in the military. We moved around a lot. My mom and dad, they argued all the time. My entire circle were my parents and my sister. And your sister? Yeah. And is your sister younger or older than you? My sister’s a year younger. And do you have a relationship with her? I do. I do have a very good relationship. Did you have a good relationship with her when you were a kid? I did, yeah. Honestly, it was like me and her against the world. Okay, so you had one person. What was your relationship with your mom like? My mom was the person who always told us that she gave up her life for us, that she was going to leave and not come back, that we’d find her dead in a ditch someplace. She’d go out and know where the word to describe it other than she’d go out and whore around with other men on my father. Once she leaves him, she would come home and tell me that, make up these stories about how the men had abused her, tried to rape her, everything else. So I became the guy that the kid who was scared that she wasn’t going to come back. I was a kid that if she was going someplace, I would try to go with her to make sure she was going to be okay. So she was out there putting herself at risk constantly. But also tell me if I’ve got this right, I want to make sure I’ve got this right. But that she’d also come home and tell you in particular how dangerous the situation was. Yeah, in particular. Right, right. And so was she playing the martyr? Was she trying to get attention? Was she that confused? Was she out for adventure? What do you think was going on with her? So I view my mom, and I don’t have a real relationship with my mom now, but I view her as the person who always tested people. If I can do this to you, will you still love me at the end of the day? She cheated prolifically on my father. Abused him, tried to kill him, tried to poison him. And he always kept taking her back. Always. And I think that was my mom. That’s how I view my mom is what could she do to you and you would still love her at the end of the day. Did you know her mother at all? I did. What was her mother like? So her mom’s name was Alverna. And she was, I don’t know if she was, she wasn’t like that. She was very condescending. She wouldn’t say anything to your face. It was always behind your back. That type of mentality. Now, grandfather, her father, Paul was very in your face. And he was the one that was involved with the fencing, essentially. He was, yes. So he was always in your face. He would tell you what he thought of you. And it was almost as if he had high blood sugar. And he wouldn’t take proper insulin for that a lot of the time. So he would go off the rocker a lot. Oh yeah. So that was an additional wild card. But this is a man who not only fencing, if you angered him, he would chase you around the house with a butcher knife, with a hose. He rented apartments downstairs of his house. He had converted the downstairs to apartments. If he heard any noise down there after 11 o’clock at night, the breakers were upstairs. He’d throw the breakers on the renters. We lived in the house with him for a while. Once he went to bed at night, he slept in a bedroom off from the living room. So he would watch the evening news at 11 p.m. It would end at 1130. At 1130, he went to bed. You could watch television, but it had to be muted. If he heard anything, and he kept his bedroom door open, if he heard anything, he’d get up. I was one of the breakers at that point in time. Me and Denise, when my mom leaves my dad, we were allowed to take a bath once a week. And Paul would measure the water. You were allowed two inches of water. And that was it. And so that was that. What was your emotional state like as a kid, when you were a little kid? Say even before 10? I don’t remember a lot of that. I remember just saying, you know, not wanting my mom and dad to argue. That makes any sense. I remember I’ve talked about it before, but I’ve got two earliest memories. The one that I knew was real, we were in Fort Lewis. My father was a captain in the military, and we were driving in the car. Me and Denise were in the back seat. Mom was in the passenger seat. Dad was driving. She was screaming at him. And finally, she lunges across the car, grabs the steering wheel and screams at him, are you ready to die, you son of a bitch, and tries to steer him into traffic. And he always remained calm. He was always, what can I do? What can I do? How can I help this? The other memory I had was, and I didn’t know it was real until I was in my 40s, and my mom mentioned something about it, but she had a woman tied up in the front yard of my grandfather’s house, and she was beating her. And it turned out that she had cheated on my mom’s sister, with her husband. And those are the two earliest memories I’ve got. Oh yeah. Well, those are plenty rough. They’re a little rough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I didn’t have friends. It was always just that survival. I don’t know if you called it embarrassment or what. I don’t know if you’d call it embarrassment, not wanting to bring people around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you couldn’t see how you could bring people over to your house. And you said you moved around a lot because your dad was in the military. So you’re moving constantly. That makes making friends difficult. And what about your father? How often was he around, and what sort of relationship did you have with him? My dad passed away about six weeks ago. And growing up, my dad was always the center of reason, if that makes sense. And you never heard him yell or scream. And when my mom was doing these things, he would try to reason with her. She would bring men home in front of him, and he would cry and beg her not to. She’d do it anyway. She brought this one man home and told him that she was leaving him. And he’s sitting there crying. She leaves for a few weeks, comes back. I love my dad. I did. What happens is that my mom leaves my dad. I was 10. My sister, Denise, 9. And we moved from Panama City, Florida to Hazard, Kentucky. And you asked for that entry into crime. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So mom had been gone for a few days. I was a guy that didn’t think she was going to come back. I always worried about her. Denise was the kid at 9, just pissed off all the time. And mom had been gone. Denise walks in one day with a pack of pork chops in her hand, because we didn’t have any food in the house. We couldn’t go upstairs and eat, because they would talk about us all the time. You’d go upstairs to try to get something to eat. And while you were sitting there eating, they’d say stuff to you. Who would? My grandmother and my grandfather. So you didn’t want to go upstairs a lot. You wanted to just stay downstairs in the apartment. What would happen if they said things about you? Well, nothing. I mean, they’d feed you. Maybe they’d feed you, but at the same time they were feeding you, your mom needs to get a job, your mom needs to do this. I can’t believe this is going on, all that stuff. So I took that kind of personal, I think Denise did too. So Denise walks in one day, and she’s got a pack of pork chops in her hand. I’m like, where’d you get that? She’s stealing it. She shops it. And she was nine? She was nine. And we start stealing food. The shopping plaza that had the ANP, it’s got a Kmart in it. Start shoplifting and other things. Hoodies so you can put, the way that started, we wanted a sandwich. So I went in, got a hoodie off the rack, took the tags off of it and stuffed a loaf of bread down the sleeve of the hoodie, threw it across the shoulder. And from there it was video games and jewelry and clothes and all that. Mom comes home and sees the stuff that we’ve stolen. Takes her a while to notice what we’ve stolen. But asks where it came from. I tell her we found it. She’s like, no, you didn’t find that. Denise, we stole it. My mom looks at my sister, show me how you did that. And not only does she join us and start running this little shop with us, but she calls her mom to join us as well. So we used to take these road trips. And that’s a lot of the problem I have right now. With the holiday season approaching, why not include saving a baby’s life on your Christmas list? Through our partnership with Preborn, an organization that’s rescued over 270,000 babies, you can do just that. Every day, Preborn’s network of clinics rescues 200 babies as they compete head to head with the abortion giants. You see, they offer an abortion-minded woman a free ultrasound. Once she meets her baby for the first time and hears that heartbeat, her baby’s chance at life is doubled. For just 1 per month trial period at Shopify.com. Go to Shopify.com.jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you’re at. Go to Shopify.com.jbp. So when you learn to sell food baskets for Kiwanis, you said in all of that you learned to be manipulative, let’s say, or better at it. So what tricks did you learn telemarketing that then enabled you to produce the next scam? Like what kind of how much of a theory do you have of that? I mean, you’re a smart guy. You must have been thinking through the processes that you use to entice people to buy while you were selling something that was genuine to begin with. But you said you were good at you said, I believe that you were good at manipulating people. And, you know, the line in sales, especially something like telemarketing between selling and manipulating is, you know, it’s a tricky moral line. And so and you can be disproportionately rewarded in a telemarketing operation if you happen to be good at it. So what were you teaching yourself to do while you were telemarketing? Well, see, you got to backtrack a little bit on that. So you got to realize that when I was a kid, and this is this whole thing called social engineering. So as a child, I had to know what the adults were doing around me, what they were thinking, how to try to, you know, to survive that, that Paul Campbell routine sometimes, right? So I had to know what was going on. That translated really well to phone work. So you’re paying attention, you’re doing this active listening thing. So the first few seconds of the call, depending on the tone, depending on the aggression of the person, how they’re answering the phone, everything else like that, you know, you know, whether they’re in a hurry, you know, whether they’re dominant or passive, you know exactly how to handle that call, do you need to come in and be aggressive? Do you need to come in and be more passive and submissive with that call? And did you mirror the people like if they were aggressive, what would you do in response? If they were aggressive, you get so it’s all predator prey. You’re depending on the relationship that you’re with someone, you’re either predator or prey, but it’s not always that you’re predator or prey. You have to know when to make that switch. If you’re making that switch, so an aggressive person, you’d come in with more of a submissive type attitude until finally you’re ready to take over that call. All right. I see. I see. So you back off and look for your opportunity. Right. Always, always gauging the person, always paying attention to what they’re saying, how they’re saying it, the pauses that are taking place, everything else until you finally you’ve read that person enough and you need to do it quickly. You’ve read that person enough to know exactly what you need to do to trigger that sell, to do that manipulation, to get them to do what you want them to do. And that’s exactly that. Right. And was that a game? Yeah, that’s a game. Yeah. But that’s the exact same thing that translates extremely well when we’re talking about online crime. Right, right. Okay. So that all these, this. Yeah. Well, it’s interesting too, because telemarketing is sort of, it’s the gateway to virtual, right? Because you’re just on a phone. You’re not actually there in person. So you’re half virtual on the phone. Right. Right. So you’re learning all sorts of tricks. Right, right. And you get good at it. How long do you do that? I did that for, I married in 94, so probably through 97, 98. Oh yeah, so four years. Yeah. Right. How many hours a week? 30, 40 hours a week. Okay, okay. So you definitely develop expertise. Yeah. How long till you branch off with your own false charity? So that would have been two and a half years in. Okay. So you, okay. And how long did you run the false Kiwanis organization? Probably eight to nine months. Okay. And what happens is I was doing some telemarketing and I was one man operation. So they would, I did not have a drop address for them to send checks for cash. I would actually go around and pick it up. Oh yeah. It seems like a bad idea. Yeah, it’s a horrible idea. Yeah. So went to pick up checks, walked up this guy’s door. He walks outside on his porch. He’s like, you are not with the Kiwanis Club. I was like, what are you talking about? He’s like, I’m a member of the Kiwanis Club and law enforcement is on their way. Oh. So I get in the car, take off, get caught, served three months in a county jail. And how much, how much, what was the dollar amount of fraud that you’d managed at that point? I was only charged with maybe six, 70 a piece. That’s all he could afford for that. And he surprised me. There was this Texas Instruments, they had a personal computer division. They were going out of business. So this man goes and waits two hours in line to get this TI-994A. Oh yeah. What year is that? Jesus would have been 79. Oh, okay. So that was very early. It was early. Right. Because computers really didn’t become widespread until about 83, 84. Even that was really early. Right. So you had one very early. Yeah, and it was, you know, it’s glorified video games. Yeah, yeah. But you’re in the game at that. Yeah, you’re in it. You’re programming. You’re typing in all the lines of code and everything so you can play that game for 10 minutes and all that. So from there, it just kind of took a turn. Sure, sure. But you’ve got to understand that it’s not really, a lot of crime online is not really being adept at computers. It’s being adept at fraud. Right. But the computer wasn’t an impediment. Right. It was not. It was not. Okay. So what do you start doing online? I started looking around. Just, you said porn. Yeah, I was part of that 35% of that point. I’d spent a lot of time on porn sites and everything else. And finally I find eBay and I’m like, I like eBay a lot. And I was like, there’s got to be some way to make money on eBay. And what I came across was Bill Riley, he used to host Inside Edition. And they were doing a show on Beanie Babies one night, profiling Peanut the Blue Elephant was what they were profiling. I was watching and I was like, I’m a naive guy. I was like, you know, I’m in Kentucky. There’s got to be one of these little animals someplace in a store in a bin someplace because he was selling for 1,500. Right. They’d already been well scavenged. Exactly. Exactly. So I was always the guy that did research. I go home and I start researching, okay, what do you have to send? If you don’t send an item in the mail, can they arrest you for that? Is what I was like. Turns out they can. So I was like, so how do you get around that? Well, it turns out that they had these little gray Beanie Baby Elephant sprayed dollars. Bought one of those, stopped by Kroger on the way home, picked up a pack of blue RIP dye. Oh yeah. Went home, dyed the guy. I was like, you know, I can tell the lady if nothing else that damaged and shipping something like that, because they were exactly the same except for the color. So put a picture of a real one on eBay. She wins the business. How much like the real one did they look? Not at all. Oh, okay. Looked like it had the mange when you got it out. So it’s made out of polyester. Right. So it’s hard to dye. Yeah, you can’t dye it. Right. It’d be splotchy and everything. It’s wet and everything else. And I was like, you know, what’ll happen is she’ll get it in the mail. She’ll see that it’s been wet and everything. She’ll think it was damaged and shipping. I can claim that if nothing else. So dyed the thing, sent it out to her, got a call as soon as she gets it. But before I sent it out to her, I was like, hey, I want to make sure I get my money. Send her a message. This is a social engineering thing again, because I don’t want to be on the defensive of this conversation. I want her on the defensive. I want her to have to establish trust with me, not me with her. So I sent her a message. Hey, congratulations. You win the bid. We’ve never done any business before. I don’t know if I can trust you. What I need you to do is go down to the US Postal Service, pick up a couple of money orders totaling 1,500. Okay. So then what happens? Well, what happens is, is I continue with little eBay scams under my own name, but I start getting better because I start to realize that, hey, these people are calling me and complaining about this stuff. Right. So I start- Seems like an unnecessary amount of trouble. Very unnecessary. But remember, I’ve got that history and identity theft at the same time. So what I started doing is, is I transitioned over into pirated software. Pirated software, in order to play like pirated video games, back then you had to have a mod chip that was soldered onto the circuit board of the gaming system. So I started to do that. That opened up the door. Okay. Do what? Exactly. So you’d get this little circuit chip and you would crack open the PlayStation 1 or the Sega Saturn, the Newcastle. You’d find out where on the circuit board you had to solder that chip and you’d solder the chip on there and that would allow you to play the pressed or the- The false game. The CD’s that you had the games on. Oh, yes. So that would do that. So that led into programming satellite DSS cards. So the RCA 18-inch satellite systems, you can pull the access card out of it, program it, turn on the channels. Started doing that. How did you learn to do these things? Read it online on forums. This is not complicated stuff at all. All right. So when I was soldering, I learned working at Lexmark. So that tool translated very well to that. The pirated software led into what got me on there was I was doing porn online and some of the sites had banner ads or people discussing pirated software. So that led into getting the context for the pirated software, which then led into modchips. The modchip forums started to talk about RCA satellite systems. So this is the beginnings of a criminal network emerging online, essentially. And then what happens is a Canadian judge, he actually rules in court. He was like, since RCA doesn’t sell the systems up here, my citizens can pirate the signals. Oh, yeah. Thank you, Canada. Yeah. So what happens is you go down to Best Buy, you buy the system for 500 a pop. Oh, yeah. Oh, that’s a good deal. Good deal. And then that’s legal too, eh? That’s legal. Well, it’s great. Yeah, okay. All right. So it’s legal in Canada, but it’s not legal to do it in the United States and ship it to Canada. I see. Okay. So started doing that. Also relatively low probability of getting caught because your Canadian people are not going to be unhappy. So started to do that. And at the same time is when PayPal comes into fruition. And back then, PayPal… How much money are you making with the chips? 200 in my picture, and he rips me off. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I got really angry at that. You should have thought that was funny, really. You know, today I do. I do. Today it’s all karma. But back then I was just mad. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s a blow to your ego. It is. Definitely. But I still needed the ID. Yeah. So continue to search for this thing. The only avenue you had back then to commit crime online was IRC, Internet Related Chat, rolling chat board. Had no idea who you were talking to, if you could trust them, if they had something for sale, if they actually had it, or if they were just going to rip you off. So you couldn’t use that network. The only real website at that point in time was called Counterfeit Library. And the only thing it dealt in was counterfeit degrees and certificates. But they had a forum section attached to it. So because that was the real only platform out there, I started going to that forum every single day and complaining about getting ripped off. That’s all I do. I’m bitching about that. About getting ripped off for the ID? Yeah. Because I’m looking for this ID. So I’m complaining about getting ripped off, and I still need this ID. So what happens is, because that’s really the only trustworthy platform that’s out there at the point, you start having these other people coming into this forum as well. I ended up partnering with two other people. A guy from Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, a guy from LA. The Moosejaw guy. Moosejaw, this international crime… Exactly, right? Moosejaw. So Moosejaw, he actually made fake IDs. So he gets me one day on ICQ, and he’s like, hey, I can make you a fake driver’s license. I was like, we’ll make it. He’s like, no, I’m going to charge you 200. So that way, when you rip me off, I can have you banned from here, and I don’t have to worry about you anymore. And he’s like, bet. I was like, okay. So send him a picture, send him 200. So most family members did not because they’re in grief at that point in time. After 98, that law changes. Now the hospital or the funeral home can do that for you. Okay. And they do. So back then I was like, I wonder if you can do social security death benefits, you know, retirement benefits on these people. You can’t because the numbers have been dormant for so long. They want you to come in for a sit down interview. The next thought was, I wonder if you can file taxes for tax returns on these people. You can. All right. So the way that system works is you pay your taxes. The US government gives you a refund on those taxes before they are able to verify with the employer whether that person was hired and worked and had taxes withdrawn. So you can file a false return that’s very realistic for someone else and claim a return. And they will send you the money. Oh yeah. Okay. So I started doing that. So around 180 tax returns a week. Got to where I was manually able to do one every six minutes. Sunday through Wednesday, file returns. And for what amounts approximately? 3,000. I see. I see. So started doing that, would spend time. 180 returns a week. Right. So you’re starting to make a lot of money at this point. Making a lot of money. At the same time, shadow crews starts to get a lot of law enforcement attention. Were those things linked or were they separate? They were not. I knew I was doing tax return theft at that point in the scene. But what happens is… And so how were you making money on shadow crew then? I wasn’t. I never made money on shadow crew. Oh, I see. You were just making your connections and learning. I ran the entire thing, never made any money. Okay. So why did you do it? The eco. Okay. Fair enough. I was that guy. Yeah. Well, like you said, status is a major motivator. And I got a lot of… So if anyone like I partnered with the Ukrainians, I was the guy who brought them over. They would shoot me free products and services all the time. So as long as I was giving them good reviews and as long as their product worked, I was more than happy to do that. So they made a lot of money too. So it was just… Never made cash, but I made products and services. Shadow crew, we had this thing called the CVV-1 hack, which allowed you to take phished information like we were getting the card number and the PIN. We found out through testing that the banks had not implemented what was called the hash. So in order to encode it onto a physical card, you’ve got three data tracks on the card. The second data track is what’s important at an ATM. That’s the card number forward slash, and then there’s a 16-digit algorithm outside of that. None of the banks had implemented the hash for that. Meaning, you’ve got the card number, you’ve got the PIN, you put any 16 digits out, it would encode, you take it to an ATM, start pulling money out. We started doing that, and typically a cashier would make 150,000 in a backpack. That’s what will fit in 20s in a backpack. Put 150,000 a week on that. All right, 10 months out of the year. So a lot of money coming in. And is that where it’s sitting? It’s sitting until literally one day I open up the bedroom door and I’m like, shit, I’ve got to do something with those backpacks. So at that point is when I start learning how to launder money. I had a bank account in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Caymans throughout Europe and it finally ended up into Estonia, a bank called Bank Letico. That’s where most of the money ended up. And how much money are we talking about at this point? How much do you manage to make? About 7 million. Pretty good one. And so why didn’t you just do that instead? Because you could have had a nightclub then. Looking back, it’s the ego thing. Yeah, okay. You’re in it already. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it’s hard to express how big of a draw that is when you’ve got everyone that’s relying on you. So my days, I was spending 14, 16 hours a day at a computer. I only took time off from the computer to go get money out of ATMs. Right, so you’re working your tail off. Yeah, yeah. So that’s what happened at that point. And it’s really hard. You’re not even using, are you drinking at this point? No, I don’t start drinking until Susan leaves. What about women? No. I see. So you’re just having up backpacks of money. Now I have to tell you, once Susan leaves, I make up for the alcohol and the women at that point. All right? Right, and you’ve got the cash to bankroll that now. And I’ve got the cash to bankroll it. So when I was working for Secret Service, I would typically spend 6,000 a night at a strip club. Just go in and I’d give the bartender a wad of 20s and say, however many kamikazes that will buy. And they would put this table together and they’d put all these kamikazes on that. And I called that my stripper magnet. And what’s a kamikaze? It’s vodka and I forgot what all this got in there, but the girls liked it. And I would drink these white Russians, which is what I would drink all the time. Right. And so once Susan left, that’s where you were going at night, the strip club. Once Susan leaves, I get depressed. And I put a key logger on her computer to find it out. So she was cheating on me, found some pictures and everything else. And she was asleep in the bedroom in Charleston. I walk in there and it’s like 10 o’clock in the morning. I walked in there, I opened up the closet, got a suitcase out, started putting her clothes in it. She wakes up, she’s like, what are you doing? I was like, where are you going? I’m like, I’m not going anywhere. You are. And so you’ve been married how long? Nine years. And that’s your first wife? Yeah. Right. Okay. Okay. And this affair she’s having, she’s found someone else that she wants to be with this guy? What’s the scoop with that? So yeah, looking back, what I think actually happened was I think that’s the only way she figured she could break off the relationship. Because that’s always my line in the sand right there. Right. Well, and you said you’d already rendered her or she’d already been rendered dependent as well. So she needed an out. Yeah. Right. And did she know how extensive your online criminal activity? Oh, yeah. Yeah, she was well aware of it. Okay. So she’s… Yeah. Okay. Okay. Did she have any family or anyone connections at that point still? She did. And what happens is, I was a pure asshole. her back to Kentucky that day, but it was a week of me and her crying at the house and ending the relationship. This is after you pat… Yeah. After I pat her almost a week doing that. And I mean, it’s obvious that the relationship’s over. And so I take her back to her mom’s in Eastern Kentucky, and that’s the last time I see her right there. From there, I go back to Charleston. I’m walking around the house crying all the time. As I was getting suicidal, figured I’d better do something about that. Picked up the phone book, went to psychology, went to criminal psychology, found what it said criminal psychology on there, called the psychologist crying. She tells me to come in, and I see her for about four months. And she was trying… I tell it in speeches, but she was trying to get me to stop breaking the law and go into real estate. And I kept telling her, is there a difference between the two? What happens is, is one night I get lonely and horny, had never been to a strip club before. I was like, tonight’s the night I get laid, because I’ve got all this money to walk in. And I’m the guy that falls in love with the first one that he sees. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. She walks by, I’m like, that’s the one for me. Move her in with me. How long? I moved her in with me within eight weeks. Yeah. Yeah. That’s not wise. Yeah. Is that when you started drinking? I started drinking shortly before that. Uh-huh. And were you intoxicated when you made the decision to go to the strip club? I was not. Completely sober. Completely sober. Okay. And were you drinking at the strip clubs by that point? No, I was only… I only drink… At the point of time, I only drank White Russians, and it was just a beer bar was all it was. I couldn’t stand beer at that point. So what happens is, is she walks up to the bar, and she’s like, you want to buy me a drink? Well, the drinks for 25? And finally, she’s like, well, we can go in the back if you buy a bottle of champagne. I was like, well, how much is champagne? She’s like, bottle of Corbelle is 500,000 dinners. It became 1,000 Giuseppe Zanotti shoes every weekend. Quickly start dwindling down on funds at the same time that Shadow Crew gets busted. So Shadow Crew makes that front cover of Forbes and gets busted three, four months later. When that happens, by the time that happens, I’m out of money. Elizabeth stopped using cocaine. Absolutely, she started to substitute it with alcohol at that point. But she stops using coke and she gets this thing where she doesn’t want me to be away from her. Well, when you’re doing this type of cyber crime, you have to take road trips. You don’t want to shit where you eat. So you want to travel because if they find out a central location for you, they’re going to get you. Because Elizabeth didn’t want me to leave any place, I can’t take a road trip. Shadow Crew gets busted right as tax season is over. I can’t do tax return fraud in October. So I have to wait until late January, February to start back tax fraud. Shadow Crew gets busted. I can’t go into credit theft or anything else all of a sudden. The only thing that I’m left with is checks, running paper. I used to teach people, never run paper. You’re going to go to prison for that. It’s easy enough to catch that stuff. I start doing that, get caught. What happened was Elizabeth wanted Tiffany rings. So Tiffany engagement ring, that was a counterfeit cashier’s check. And then she wanted the wedding bands and that’s where I got caught. I had them ordered through eBay. You know this is the plot of a very bad novel. Oh, it was very bad one that we’re trying to work on. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so you get nailed at that point. You’ve broken your own rules there too. I have. Why? Why? Did you think you could get away with it like you knew you said? No, I knew. By that point I knew. I guess just tired, worn out, didn’t give a damn anymore. Everything else. When Susan left, I actually tried to get a real job that didn’t mess. Oh yeah. So do you suppose there was a part of you that was hoping you were going to get caught? I hesitate to say that. Yeah, but it’s strange that you would pick something that you knew. But I do the same thing with the Secret Service, so maybe, yeah. Maybe. Yeah, yeah. Well, you said you were pretty sick of yourself after your wife left. Yeah. Yeah, and then the whole thing with the stripper couldn’t help that much. Right. Yeah. Did you love her? It’s that addiction thing, right? Yeah, I loved her. I loved the shit out of her. I did this other show and up until that, I had always joked about it. That first stripper that I see, and I was talking to this guy and he asked me and I looked at him and I was like, well screw it man, why not? And I told him, I was like, yeah, I absolutely loved her. She contacted me after that. Oh yeah. First time I’ve gotten to talk to her since 2006. Yeah. And just sent me a message and I told her, I was like, I’d like the opportunity to apologize to you. That’s it. I’m sorry I did everything to you. But she’s doing good and everything from what I can tell. I manipulated her too. So I got Secret Service, they arrest me. Spent three months in a county jail. They get me out. And the night they get me out, I go back into committing crime again. Why did they get you out? To work with them. I see. So you were making an arrangement at this time. Yeah, I was talking to Jane. To work with them in what way? So they get me, I’m arrested February 8th of 2005, three weeks before I’m supposed to marry Elizabeth. And I was head over heels with her. I get arrested. She doesn’t know I’m breaking the law. She finds out pretty quickly once they search the house and throw me into county jail. They let me sit there a week. Two agents flying from New Jersey pulled me out. We got your laptop. I’m like, yeah. Got anything on it? Yeah, you’re going to be charged for it. I figured that. Then they asked me, is there anything you can do for us? In my exact words, you let me get back with Elizabeth. I’ll do whatever you want me to do. And they said, we’re going to get you out. So they let me sit there for three months to get a taste of it. Get out after three months. First phone call I make is Elizabeth. I’m out. She’s like, I’ll be there. So it’s midnight, standing outside in the parking lot, agent beside of me. She had a friend that owned a limo company, pulls up in a damn limo, pops the trunk, gets gets these two storage containers out with my clothes, drops them, comes over, hugs me, call me later, leaves. I’m sitting there bawling by this point in time. Agent looks at me. He’s like, is that your fiance? I’m like, yeah. He’s like, I am so sorry. I’m like, yeah. So I didn’t have him. I had 30, walk to Walmart, buy a pre-paid debit card so I start back in tax fraud. Then I call Elizabeth, beg her to get back, and I lay these lies on her. I’m like, hey, it’s going to be fine. I’m not going to do any prison time. You’ve seen that Frank Abagnale movie, haven’t you? Catch me if you can. I’m that guy. And she leaves then. Don’t tell her I’m back from committing crime. I’m like, hey, it’ll be just fine. So I move her from Charleston to Columbia, South Carolina, where the field office is. And my job was to work four to six hours a night, consult with the Secret Service, whoever they bring in to teach them about cybercrime, also target individuals for potential arrest. Now were they paying you for this? They were. They were paying $350 a week. Plus, they were paying rent, all the utilities. Right. So nothing compared to what you have been making. Nothing compared to it. But you have, do you still have money in Estonia at this point? I do, but I can’t get it. Okay. Well, that’s the problem with having money in Estonia. That’s the money we’ve been all the way over there. Can’t get it. So, start, what happens is, four to six hours a night, when I’m online, I’m really fast with things. I’ll have 20, 30 windows open. I’m bouncing between them all the time. Now they’ve got Camtasia and SpectrePro on my machine. So they’ve got me on a laptop hooked up to a 50-inch plasma monitor on the wall outside Internet line. They are two agents in the room at all times with a South Carolina law enforcement official. They’ve got their desktop computer literally next to mine outside line as well. For the first two to three weeks, they’re diligent. They’re paying attention to everything, asking questions, everything else. After that, they get bored because how could you not be? You don’t even understand what’s going on. Right, right, right. So they start, there used to be this site called flashyourrack.com. They start looking at women who are exposing their breasts and rank them on a scale of one to ten. Most of your nights doing that. So I’m sitting there going, nobody’s paying attention to me. All the data every night is going on a DVD. Why not? So I start breaking the law.