John Boziak, Miami's "Darklord of Credit Card Scams," details his evolution from a homeless teen inspired by Kingpin to a sophisticated counterfeiter operating under the alias "U.S. Plastico." Utilizing holograms from China and early digital currencies like WebMoney, he manufactured thousands of cards for Russian contacts before facing federal charges after a UPS store arrest. Despite millions in illicit gains and international evasion, Boziak received a relatively short sentence due to plea deals, now promoting his memoir "Bent" while reflecting on the fleeting nature of criminal freedom. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Early Access And Bonus Episodes00:04:08
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Hello, world.
Today's guest is John Boziak.
John is an insane character and a notorious cyber criminal.
Matt Cox actually met John in prison and ended up writing a book about his story.
It's called Bent.
At 26 years old, John was the most prolific manufacturer of counterfeit credit cards in the entire international cybercrime industry.
This kid went from being homeless at the age of 14 in the streets of Miami to one of the most cunning scammers and identity thieves ever.
He was even selling credit cards to the Russian mob at one point.
We went in on some crazy, crazy stories that he told about his life, scamming, and running from the Secret Service.
Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this podcast as much as I did.
It was wild.
Without further ado, please welcome John Boziak.
Thanks for coming on, John.
I appreciate you coming down here.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Your story is super interesting.
I'm so glad that you were able to meet Matt in prison and tell him your story because it is wild.
Yeah.
You were at age 26, one of the or the most prolific credit card scammer in the world.
Is that right?
I wouldn't say the world, but Matt was trying to spice it up.
Yeah.
I said one of.
I was definitely doing something.
I was shaking and moving.
Yeah.
Why are you here, Matt?
Why are you here with John?
Only because it's comical.
You know, guys will be watching and they'll be like, waiting for me to say something.
And I'm just sitting here going, Other than that, people are like, why is Cox here?
I think the hardcore fans know why you're here, but let's go ahead and tell everyone why you're here.
That's 1,000 people.
You know what I'm saying?
You're looking for 100,000.
Hopefully.
So what ends up happening is, when I was in prison, that's when I met.
I would say Boziak, but what do you want to go with?
John?
What are we going?
You're going with John?
John?
Whatever you want to go with?
John?
Yeah, let's go with John.
Okay, John.
So basically, I was in prison.
I didn't even talk to him for like the first couple months because he's walking around.
I just, I thought he was here for drugs.
I knew he had a short sentence.
So I didn't think, there's no reason to talk to some guy who's going to be gone in six months or a year.
No reason even.
But I was standing in line one day.
How did you, how did you.
Like, I don't even remember how.
We were standing.
How'd you figure out like the whole fraud thing?
So we were standing in line.
Chow Hall.
In the Chow Hall.
And we were standing there.
Somebody came up and just somebody happened to come up to me and say, you know, like some other guy had been around, had just gotten there, whatever, and they were talking about me because there's not a ton of fraud guys.
And somebody said, hey, Cox, what'd you get charged with?
And I was standing there and I said, you know, fucking bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, passport fraud.
You know, I started just naming off and I got to aggravated identity theft.
And he's standing behind me and he goes, he goes, that's what I'm here.
He goes, that's what I got charged for.
I remember I turned around and I looked at him.
I remember that.
You don't remember that?
No, I don't remember.
And I remember I said, really, I said, I just figured you were here for meth.
And you went like this, and you go, what made you think that?
And you started laughing.
And I thought, because you had all the tattoos, and I thought, this dude's all right.
And then I said, well, what did you do?
What do you mean aggravated identity theft?
And you go, yeah, I was doing.
And you started telling me, by the time we got to our fucking, or got to our food, I was thinking, oh, I got to hear this whole story.
We sat in the chow hall until they closed the fucker down.
Oh, yeah.
We're like two.
You were the last two motherfuckers?
Yeah.
I mean, we're sitting there.
Guards are telling everybody to leave.
The Silk Road Debit Card Scheme00:15:57
We're just like, all right.
I mean, he just fucking told me that.
I remember that.
Because remember Kingpin?
When you were halfway through your story, I was like, this is just like Kingpin.
There's a book called Kingpin.
And I was like, this is just like Kingpin.
And you said, I was on that fucking forum.
I know some of those guys.
Yeah, those two guys inspired me to do fraud, to do credit card fraud.
Those were like, when I like.
Max Butler?
No, Max.
Max Butler.
I watched their Inside True Crime episode on MSNBC.
It's good shit.
And that's when it fucking blew the whole thing open for me.
I was like, oh, okay.
And that's when I said, man, I got to write your fucking story.
I feel like I've interviewed a lot of people who have done crazy crimes on this podcast.
And I feel like yours is different because your story is just like from where you came from in Miami.
You were like a homeless kid, a super young homeless kid.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was pretty much doing my own thing from a pretty young age.
I always find it interesting people like you who come from that kind of background with basically, No parents.
At what age were you homeless?
From like what age to what age?
Like when did you first become homeless?
Yeah, that's a difficult one.
Technically, there's different stages of homelessness, I guess.
I mean, you know, you've got the straight up sleeping behind a fucking dumpster, eating out a trash can, homeless.
And then you've got like the kind of like I'm just couch surfing, staying at people's houses, homeless.
So, yeah, so like probably 13, 13 or 14 years old, I was just gone.
Yeah, out doing my own thing, sleeping on couches, staying out all night, you know, no curfew, no rules.
What's great?
The crazy parallel that I guess I made with your story is that you find a lot of really successful people, a lot of successful entrepreneurs come from that same type of background where they're kind of like disconnected from their parents or their parents abandoned them or whatever and they just had to figure it out on their own.
So I just found your story super fascinating in that regard.
Yeah, it's the adversity, I think.
I think the adversity builds character in the long run.
You know, people who have had struggle early on in life usually. tend to do pretty great things later on in life.
It equipped me to deal with situations later on in life that would break most people.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And it allowed me to sort of live in this frame of mind where I just, I don't really give a fuck.
Because I've slept on the street.
I've eaten out of trash cans.
I've been at rock bottom.
And once you've been at rock bottom, you're not scared to go back because there's only one way to go but up.
From there, you know.
And I, yeah, like I said, all of the adversity I had to go through early on, I think definitely set me up for success.
In a weird way.
Yeah.
You know.
So how did you get into this world of scamming?
Growing up on the street, you had to survive.
Yeah.
You know.
So it was shoplifting and it was.
Figuring out ways to get free food, and it was figuring out ways to scam this or figuring out ways to scam that, you know.
So it always starts small and then it builds over time, over time and over time and over the years it just gets bigger and bigger and the scams get bigger and the risks get bigger.
And yeah, so it starts small.
You know it started with I think I started uh, making fake coupons for on the computer using photoshop to go and get free food, you know.
And then it went from there to scamming the library system trading, figure out how to get free internet service, and you know what I mean Trying to figure out how to get free streams online with, and you know, it's just been a never ending saga.
Fraud has been such a huge part of my life, unfortunately.
And the fraud that you were committing was heavily influenced by your skills in design and Photoshop.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was always been interested in graphic design and media arts and stuff like that.
Right.
And always played around the computer and did a little bit of web development, graphic design.
And that, yeah, it allowed me to.
To see, okay, I can do this and I was, I had an artistic spin on that go, I can do this, or I can do that, or or, if this scam comes along, i'm able to, you know, figure out how to to work every angle of it, pretty much just through that one avenue.
So initially you were, what was it?
You were just trying to get by.
You're just trying to eat and put clothes on your back.
Is that why you were scamming?
First, I didn't want to work a job right yeah, I didn't want to work a regular nine to five.
Um, to me this is going to sound insane, but I I would.
I would rather commit suicide or spend the rest of my life in prison than work a regular nine to five job.
It's just not in the cards for me.
Yeah, I can relate to you there.
Yeah, it's just not something I can't do it.
I can't wake up every day and go to the same building and punch a clock.
You know what I mean?
Because at the end of the day, there's a ceiling.
Yeah, for sure.
You dig what I'm saying?
You're always going to have that limitation placed on you.
And I can't live with limitations.
I can't.
It limits my thinking.
It limits my.
You know what I'm saying?
So you started out homeless, scamming, doing little scams, like trying to scam people with fake lottery tickets and coupons, right?
Mm hmm.
How do you graduate from that to literally printing thousands and thousands of credit cards and making millions of dollars a month?
Yeah.
Well, that didn't happen overnight.
It was a slow process.
You know, I started buying cards myself online and using them.
When you say buying cards, what do you mean by that?
Plastic.
So I'm not sure how deep you want to get into it.
As deep as we can get.
Okay.
Balls deep, baby.
The forums.
Yeah.
Explain.
Yeah.
Sure.
The credit card forums.
Yeah.
Okay, well, I guess the easiest way to explain it is to kind of break it down and how the whole thing actually kind of works is anytime you go to a store and you use your debit card and you swipe that magnetic strip, that information that's stored on that magnetic strip is sent to a server somewhere and it's held.
Well, these kids over in Russia or Ukraine or wherever these kids are, they hack.
They get these numbers and these numbers by themselves are useless.
I mean, you can't.
You can't go online and buy anything with them.
You know, it's pretty much just a raw metadata, that's that's encoded to the back of your plastic card.
Right now they sell this information for five six seven ten, twenty dollars, thirty dollars a pop, whatever.
Now, with that information, you have to have another piece of equipment and you have to have a, a physical card to write that information to, to be able to clone, to copy, to go to use it um, in the retail setting.
You follow along.
So far yeah, and basically.
So basically, what you do is you got two different vendors um, that you can find, and you've got different, various avenues to get to these vendors.
Back when I was doing this, back in the early 2000s, there was carding forums, which don't really exist anymore.
The FBI and Secret Service and everything did a pretty good job of shutting them all down.
But yeah, you go to these websites and you go to these pages and you get these numbers and you code them to the cards, you go out and use them.
And this is what I was doing in the beginning.
I would log on, I would figure out what numbers were working, and they're called dumps.
Terminology, dumps.
Yeah, that's the terminology for the, for the track information.
Yeah, it's like a it's it's a dump of information.
So okay yeah, that's the terminology.
And this is the black strip on the back of the credit, the magnetic strip in the back of the credit card, correct?
Yeah, that's the dump.
Yeah, that's your, that's your track information.
It's referred to as a dump if you're gonna purchase it on the black market and so yeah, you know, I would purchase these dumps and I would, I would you know, have to figure out the plastic to write them to, and at that time the plastic was expensive, like vendors selling plastic was like 100, 200 bucks a piece, for one single, for one single card that they would print, that they would make, and they would sell it to you.
And then you would have a piece of equipment called an MSR 206 reader-writer, and you would have to encode, you know, write your own, encode your own cards and figure out how to use them.
And you're buying these legally, like in the U.S., the cars were illegal.
No, no, no.
Okay.
This is all illegal.
Everything.
There's nothing about this that's legal at all.
Yeah.
It's fraud all the way around.
Sorry.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it is a podcast.
Oh, stop.
Your stuff's going on.
Typically, you turn your phone off.
Oh, all right, all right, all right.
Yeah, it's fraud all the way around.
So, yeah, you can buy these plastic cards blank legally, but then you're going to need a printer to put the logos and the templates and the design and all that stuff like that.
So, yeah.
So, I got into it and I started using them just slowly here and there.
And then I kind of figured out, like, you know, I'm missing out on some good money.
I'm kind of being middled.
You know?
The money to me wasn't in using the cards at the stores, like the retail.
I mean, it was fun at first, you know, being able to walk into a store and pretty much swipe them.
You know, get whatever you want.
There's a rush, there's a certain rush to it mm-hmm, you know what I mean.
But when you look at it from a a financial standpoint, it just it wasn't.
It wasn't sustainable for any kind of long, long term, because you're taking too much risk.
You know, i'm walking in, i'm putting my face on a hundred different cameras every day and, let's say, on a good day, you hit five Walmarts and you got a laptop from every Walmart.
You're doing good right, you got five laptops.
You can go and sell them.
Well, once you do that, you got to go back and get five more.
And you got to go back and get five more.
And you got to go back and get five more.
You need a way to scale Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, I can't.
It's just like I said, it's just I needed more money and I needed less risk.
Where did the money come from, though?
So you're buying the dump.
So the information that's your information, some citizen's information.
Okay.
So the dumps that you're buying is some victims.
Well, yeah.
Like I explained in the beginning, it's like when you go to any store and you swipe your debit card, that information is saved somewhere.
Okay.
And then that information is subsequently hacked.
Got it.
From whoever and then sold on the market.
Got it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
So that's the first, that's like the front end of the operation.
The back end of the operation is the actual manufacturing of the cards themselves.
And there's like a whole other market for that as well.
You know, like, so there's people who sell just plastics.
They're called plastic vendors, which is what I eventually ended up making all my money.
It's where I found my success at later was with just actually being a plastics vendor myself selling plastic.
You know, but like in the beginning, I didn't know.
I was green.
Like I had no fucking idea.
You know, so I'm using them in stores.
I'm sorry, can I say something?
But it was basically you'd like to interject?
Yes, I like to interject.
You had to raise your hand and ask for permission.
Basically, but it was, you were, at that point, it was your brother who kind of came, had mentioned.
Yeah.
Is that what you meant?
Like, how did he get into it?
He kind of turned me on to the game a little bit.
He kind of put me up on game, kind of turned me on to it.
And then it kind of built from there.
So it was like he didn't come out of the gate knowing this.
It's like it was, you know, the brother.
And there were a lot of mistakes made.
They slowly started.
Yeah.
There were a lot of mistakes made.
I mean, I would go to a store and all my cards would get declined.
And I've been chased out of stores by security.
I've been, you know what I mean?
Like, I've, there's plenty of of trial and error to this whole thing.
You know I just didn't start off making crazy amounts of money.
You know it took.
It took about took about two years actually of just slowly, you know, building and working on the product and trying to trying to make it better and trying to figure out.
You know, little by little by little by little.
So you're buying these cards loaded up with people's information, you're going to stores, you're buying laptops, you're buying electronics, and what are you selling it on EBAY yeah Craigslist, and everything pretty much.
Yeah okay, and what kind of money are you making doing that?
It was up and down, man.
Another part of the problem is you really don't know what each limit of each card is going to be.
Because I don't know how much money you have in your bank account.
You know what I mean?
So it's like, if I'm walking into a store, I don't know how much I'm going to swipe for.
So it was never consistent.
So it was like maybe I'd make a couple thousand dollars one week, and then the next week I'd lose a couple thousand dollars.
You know what I mean?
Or the next week I'd make $3,000, and then the next week I would make $500.
So the money was never consistent.
And it was like every store you go into, it's like you got to watch security and you got to pick your piercing at the counter.
And it's like a whole, it's just, it becomes exhausting after a while.
Right.
Yeah.
So, how did you graduate from what did you graduate to after that?
And how did you step it up a level?
Yeah, well, I started doing online carding actually, which normally people usually do the online carding first, but then I started getting into the online carding second.
And that's when I got onto the online, I really got into the online forums because the online carding pushed me more online because the physical carding is just more okay, I'm going to buy it and I'm in the stores all day long.
I'm out doing the stores and I'm doing the physical aspect part of it.
But when I really started getting into the online carding is when I started getting into like the carding forums.
And I started reading tutorials and I started talking to other guys that were doing fraud.
And I kind of, you know what I mean?
Like, there were some guys that would do a bunch of fraud and they would just write a whole matrix on it.
What year was this?
2004, 2005.
So this is pre Silk Road.
This is pre Silk Road.
Okay, I was just going to ask you.
This is pre Silk Road.
Yeah, like the Silk Road didn't even exist at this time.
There was no dark web, Silk Road.
Right.
It just didn't exist.
So I was using IRC chats and I was using carding forums.
There was no Bitcoin, was there?
Bitcoin was in its infancy.
Okay, okay.
Yeah.
Which I invested believe it or not I invested I think somewhere around $2,500 in Bitcoin when they first kicked off and that I would be a multimillionaire by now I would be a hundred times over Holy yeah, but that laptop that that Bitcoin on was confiscated by the Secret Service.
No way.
Yeah, so the Secret Service has a laptop now with probably a hundred million dollars on it.
I mean, I don't know what the conversion rate is now.
I mean, you know, I mean do the math 2005 Bitcoin is at what like $12,000 is that like $12,000 $13,000 right now?
So yeah, yeah, so yeah Major bummer.
Fuck.
All right.
So you're on these forums.
So I got into online forums, and it really opened my eyes to the whole world of carding and fraud and the actual technical side behind it on the back end.
And that's when I kind of figured out where the money was at, like where the money is to be made at.
And it was in plastic.
It was in plastic.
Because the guy making the most money wasn't the guy mining the gold.
It was the guy selling the pickaxes.
Exactly.
You know what I mean?
And that's where my mind went to.
And I was like, you know what?
I love that analogy.
I like that.
I love that analogy.
I have a good friend who said that to me years ago, and that's always stuck with me.
Yeah.
And it made sense to me too at the time.
And I was like, okay, well, where's the money at?
Where's the money at?
And this whole thing, let's sit down and look at this whole thing subjectively.
Let's look at everything and figure out where the money is.
And once I figured that out, then I started working at that little puzzle.
Okay.
So how did you figure out that piece of the puzzle?
How did you start?
Trial and error, man.
How did you start making these pickaxes, these credit cards?
Yeah, I bought just a piece of shit, cheap fucking, I think it was like a Fargo DTC printer from eBay.
It was like $200, and the cards that you made with it were shit.
Like the quality, they never printed right or anything like that.
And I was making them, I was fucking going out to the store trying to use them.
Escrow Games And Selling Pickaxes00:04:51
You know what I mean?
And I was getting ran out of stores, and so it was like, so I had to start with like a real low tech operation.
Like I was using like a manual embosser to push the numbers in the cards.
Like I had a big Fucking wheel in it with all the fucking characters, and you had like an old, you know, like an old rotary phone.
Yeah, like a typewriter.
You had to physically stamp out the card, you know.
So I started, I started real, real low tech, you know.
And then I knew, you know, the better equipment I had to, you know, get the money and buy the better printer, buy the manual or the automatic embosser, buy the heat, the foil stamper.
And it's just, I knew every piece of equipment I had to buy to make my product better.
And that was like the main, that was like the first main goal.
Where'd you buy like the blank, the actual physical blanks?
Oh, there's a website that sells all that crap.
That sells the printer ribbons for the printer for the Fargo printers.
They sell the blank.
Because none of this equipment is illegal to own or purchase.
Right.
I mean, you can purchase all this equipment for your business.
Make gift cards.
Say you want to do employee ID badges or hospitals and banks and all this equipment, it's readily available on the internet.
You just got to know where to look.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, how did you, what kind of money were you making?
In the beginning, I wasn't making shit.
In the beginning, you were just buying shit and selling it on your credit card.
I was in the hole in the beginning.
I've lost so much money doing all this crap.
I think I poured so much money in the beginning, it was just ridiculous.
I mean, I was getting robbed.
You know what I mean?
There's a bunch of scammers online.
You got to go through that whole rigmarole and get robbed 10 times before.
Before you actually find somebody who's legitimate.
Really?
Fuck.
Yeah, it's a whole.
I mean, you're dealing with scumbags.
There's no rating system like on eBay.
There is now.
There is now.
Oh, there is now.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, they've got escrow services and shit now for fraud.
Like, say I want to buy like 100 pieces of plastic off a vendor and I've never purchased from you before.
Well, there's a fucking fraud escrow service where you send the money to escrow.
I get my product.
I tell escrow, okay, I'm satisfied with it.
And they go ahead and release the money to the vendor.
Wow.
Like, it's all fucking.
It's legit now.
It's all corporate now, yeah.
That's all corporate.
Yeah, I was back in the Flintstone days, man.
I was one of the first pioneers of this whole fucking thing.
I think.
That's fucking wild, dude.
Yeah, it's all Star Trek.
Is this stuff still going on, right?
Like today?
The game's changed a little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I mean, it's still the same.
It's still the same.
But, you know, banks have cracked down a lot harder.
You know what I mean?
So say I would buy 100 dumps, 100 cards, and they were from, like, California.
And I was in Michigan.
And I tried to use them in Michigan, they would get declined right away.
Now they would.
Before it wasn't so much, but now it's yeah, now it's it's the whole game's changed Yeah, and I don't even know if there's a whole lot of money left in it anymore, you know, yeah Not like there was before anyway,
so you had like some hot chick you were dating right which one is it what part of the story was this you were dating you were gonna help you along you mean what is this the one that was you were dating some like hot chick Felicia was like black this is blackmailing you saying she's gonna rat you out because you had all this She said that you had like or you said in the story it says that you had all these like expensive clothes in your apartment had a bunch of shoes and watches and jewelry and all kinds of shit you were buying Yeah, she was a piece of shit.
How much money how much money did you have then like at that point when you were living with her?
Maybe 60 grand 80 grand it was less than a hundred thousand dollars I think I had at that point in time because I was live I was in Michigan.
I was in Detroit at that time.
It was this on the Flintstone machine No, this is I was actually I was actually doing something his car you were carting.
Yeah, I was I was in full swing You were in full swing.
Yeah, I was in full swing when I was with her.
Okay.
But this was actually.
That was carding, though.
You weren't making the cards at that point.
You and your brother were just carding.
No, no, no, no.
When I was with Felicia, this is after me.
My brother had already done the thing, and I was in Michigan.
Okay.
And then I was going back or whatever.
But yeah.
So why did you move to Michigan?
You went from Miami to Michigan.
My whole family's from Michigan.
Okay.
Yeah.
So you were originally from Michigan?
I was born in Michigan, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And you went back when?
This was right before I met my wife, right before I got caught in Temple Terrace.
So this was probably 2007, 2008 or something like that.
Yeah, I'm not really.
Okay.
The details are fuzzy.
I smoke a lot of pot, dude.
So, like, you know, fine details with me could be.
300 milligrams is kicking in right now.
I think so a little bit, yeah.
Yeah.
But do you have a probation officer or am I allowed to say that?
No, no, no.
I'm good.
Oh, you're good.
Okay.
Yeah, I'm good.
Hell yeah.
Yeah, I got out of prison and I went right back to prison after I got out.
Crafting Hologram Credit Cards00:12:26
And then I had like three years of paper and they fucking killed my paper.
How long were you in prison for total?
I did 24 months total.
24 months?
That's it?
Yeah.
Jesus Christ, Matt.
How long were you in for?
You were in for like nine years.
Fucking 12 and a half years.
I did 12 years.
Almost 13 years.
Yeah.
I got lucky.
Yeah, I got lucky.
And this dude made more money than you made.
Yeah.
He was supposed to get like 10 years.
Yeah, they were trying to slam me.
They were really trying to slam me.
I had the best lawyer ever.
How the hell did you get out of all that?
Yeah, huh?
How did you get out of all this?
I had a good lawyer.
Wow.
Public defender.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
Yeah, she just took a liking to me and just did not want to see me doing all that time.
Okay, so let's go back.
Let's go back in time.
Let's go through this thing chronologically.
You have the Flintstone credit card printer.
You're just starting to get into low-tech.
Low-tech.
Low-tech.
So what starts happening after that?
I started progressively making a little bit more money.
And I was able to slowly just start upgrading every piece of equipment to make a better product.
Okay.
So that was kind of like I say about a year.
It took about a year really to get going to really get like the good equipment, you know, to where I could make a credit card that looks like it came straight from the bank.
And when I got to that point, I was like, okay, I kind of knew.
Like I didn't have the clientele yet, but I knew I had the product.
I knew I had the product right, you know.
Were you honing in like the design of these cards?
The templates.
Yeah, the templates.
Everything had to be right.
I mean, I had to figure out how to make the Visa logo.
Because there's like, there's holograms and shit.
Built into these cards.
Yeah.
It's pretty technical the way to design them.
Yeah.
Chinese guy.
Yeah.
How did you do that?
With the hologram issue, I found a dude in China.
Yeah.
I found a dude in China that owned a printing company and I basically.
The Alibaba?
I was Alibaba or was it.
I know Fiverr was on there.
DH Gate or something like that.
DH Gate.
That's still around.
Oh, they're still cranking.
Holy shit.
Yeah, they're cranking.
So yeah.
So I found a dude on there and I cut out a credit card.
I cut one out.
Like a real credit card and then I mailed it to him to China and I was like can you can you do this for me?
And I was like I sent him he's like send me a sample and I sent it to him and I think like six weeks later I got like a roll of like 5,000 Visa and MasterCard holograms heat press hollows damn yeah, yeah And then once I had those it was a wrap because I mean my graphic design games pretty dope.
So yeah, oh, yeah, it's yeah, I'm a wizard with that shit.
I've always have been, you know, it's just something that I've just always been natural with, and So yeah, I mean once I did that and once I had that the holograms, and once I had the actual physical product made, once I figured out how to make the VISA logo, Once I had figured out how to do the SIG strip on the back, the signature strip on the back, because that's like a whole thing, and then there's like this rear indent embossing.
I had to figure that out, so there was hurdles and it took.
It took a while, took like six or eight months, before I had like a verifiable certifiable, like you know, a product that you just couldn't shoot holes in.
There's no way It would be completely indistinguishable from a regular credit card.
Yeah, if you put your from BANK OF America and you put mine next to it, there'd be no difference.
There'd be no difference.
That's crazy man yeah, yeah.
So so what are you doing with that?
So now, now you're making these credit cards and you're selling them on these forums, or what I started using them okay, first.
Okay, because I, I didn't want to test them out.
Yeah to, you know, just to see, do test runs and um, flying colors, you know, nobody even bat an eyelash.
I never had one issue, never one single issue.
Maybe a couple declines, you know, just because the, the dump information wasn't um, probably you know Good, or whatever, but yeah, yeah.
So I was using them, and then I figured out okay, let me get on the forum.
I was already dealing with people on the forum from buying dumps and buying plastic and stuff like that.
I talked to a few of my guys on the forum, and I had to get, you know, they had to vouch for me.
But since I'd already been on the forum for a year and a half, two years, that wasn't really a big deal, you know, and I was on two or three different forums.
So, like, I was pretty well known in the community, you know, it's just like you had, like, a popular screen name.
I did, yeah, U.S. Plastico.
U.S. Plastico.
That's what probably, in the long run, that's what probably got me fucked.
Was trying to be clever, and you know what I mean?
And oh, you're trying to brand yourself.
I was.
I was thinking, you know, I shouldn't, I should have just been, like, you know, anonymous or whatever, but.
So, I think that's.
But you have to stay consistent in that scam world, though, right?
I mean, people have to know who you are to be able to trust you.
So, it's like a double edged sword.
Yeah.
And like I said, I had two years in at that point.
And I knew all the major players in the game and I knew who was doing what just from being on the forums and, you know, being on IRC.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, so what happens next?
My product got better.
Sorry.
Did you already meet Melmo Man at this?
No.
Melmo Man came after I got onto Dark Market.
Okay.
But I wasn't on.
No, that was Carter.su.
I met Melmo Man.
And that came later.
That came, you know, that was probably towards the very end, like at the very pinnacle of my career, if you want to put it that way.
Melmo Man?
Yeah, Melmo Man was the dude who opened up all the doors for me in the carding world.
Really?
He had all the.
He knew.
Yeah, he plugged me in.
So you still, at this point, you got the guy from China who printed thousands of these holograms for you for your credit cards.
Yeah.
You had these fucking rock solid fake credit cards that you made.
Yeah.
But you still.
Had like a long way to go before you reached your peak.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Well, I had no clientele.
Okay, I had no clientele, and um, it took a while, it took maybe six months to build trust in the community and to build clientele.
So, thousands of these credit cards, you're literally taking these little holograms and you're physically like placing them on each of these credit cards with your hands, like hand by hand, each one, each credit card, each card's handy.
How long does that take?
How long does it take to do one card?
Oh, I had it down, I could print one card in less than five minutes.
I could print everything, print it, stick everything onto it.
Yeah well, yeah see, I would already have all the.
I would already have all the, the templates lined up in Photoshop.
Okay, like ready to go with all my windows open bomb, you know what I mean.
And then I would load maybe like 10 or 15 cards in the printer and I would be like okay, print in sequence, print one, print two, print three, print four, print five.
So then it would, it would run out all the cards, print them front and back.
You know what I mean?
It would print the, put all the, and the only thing I really had to do myself was emboss and do the hologram.
So I would have to physically place the hologram myself and use a heat press to adhere it to the plastic.
And then I would have to manually emboss the card myself.
And this is before I got the auto embosser where I could just throw them in and do a batch and it would run 50 or 100 at a time.
Damn.
So when I got really efficient at it, I could maybe do 100 cards in an hour.
About an hour.
I could print, hologram, and emboss about 100 cards.
So you're making close to 1,000 cards in a day.
Yeah, easy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If I'm cranking away, but then sometimes you have problems.
The printer gets too hot.
and starts fucking melting cards and printing shit sideways, you know, so you've always got little issues.
Right.
Yeah, like that you got to deal with.
But yeah, I could do a thousand cards in a day.
How many cards did you do in a day, you think?
That I've manufactured in one day?
I think I've done about 800, between 600 and 800 in one day, you know, on a good day.
If everything was going right and I had all my equipment operating properly.
Yeah.
Okay, so how did you start getting this out there on, on, Online or on these black market, on these, on the dark web, and start getting customers to buy shitloads of them.
Yeah.
So initially, the first Carter forum that I was on, I went ahead and I just made my first post.
Here I am, new vendor.
Here's my product.
You post pictures.
It's like a whole, well, it was like a whole thing, not anymore.
And then I would get maybe like one or two orders a month.
And then once those orders came in and people started leaving positive feedback, it just kind of snowballed after that.
And then I remember the day, because I would only get maybe one or two orders, but I remember the day I woke up and I checked, I think I checked one of my emails and I had 15 or 20 orders waiting for me and I couldn't believe it.
How much is $1,000?
One order is $1,000?
Yeah.
For how many cards?
$100.
$100 cards?
Yeah, it's $20 a card, $100 cards, two drivers.
I'd make IDs for you, however many you wanted.
And then I would do, I think it was like $100 cards embossed, everything encoded, numbers.
And IDs?
And IDs.
Yeah.
Holy shit.
But I wouldn't make $100 IDs.
Obviously, I'd make like two or three.
Okay.
Or whatever they wanted.
So there was a cap on that.
So the IDs have to obviously correspond with the credit cards?
Exactly, yeah.
Yeah.
Because say you go to a store and you make a purchase and it's over like $300 or $400.
Like a lot of stores, like people don't realize this, but a lot of stores, like say Best Buy, you go to Best Buy, you make a purchase over $300.
They ask, physically ask for your card.
And they physically take your card and they go on their POS machine.
Now, their POS machine, the point of sale service machine, won't let them process the sale unless the four digits on the front of the card match what's actually encoded to the card.
Mm hmm.
So, it's like a security step.
So, what they do is they take the card and they punch the numbers into the computer because you've already swiped it.
So, they're going to punch these numbers in.
And if these numbers in the front of the card don't match what's being swiped, it's automatic fraud.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So, you have to have the corresponding plastic to match the numbers, and you have to have the ID because they're going to ask for ID because A, I don't have the people's PIN number.
So, you're not processing it as debit.
You always have to process it as credit, even though it's a debit card.
Got it.
So, they have to have ID.
When you process anything for credit, they always ask for ID, always, especially if it's a big purchase.
Right.
You know, Louis Vuitton, you go to Louis Vuitton and try and buy a $2,000 handbag on a credit card, they're going to ask you for ID.
Right, right.
1,000%.
Yeah.
You know, even if you go in there looking the part, they're still going to ask, they always ask for ID.
Right.
You know, so you have to have the ID to match the card.
Everything has the jive, the numbers, everything has to be coherent.
Okay, so is there a minimum number of cards they had to buy for one order?
So is the minimum $100 card?
It was a $1,000 minimum order.
Okay.
So it was 100 cards, and then I would work with them on the IDs, like whatever they wanted.
Okay.
Because those were easy to make.
Cool.
So that's good money.
You're making a couple, you're getting a couple orders a day, making a couple thousand dollars a month.
I was doing like one or two orders a month.
And then, like I said, I woke up that one morning, and I remember I had 20 orders waiting on me, and I couldn't believe it.
One morning, you just had 20 orders.
I had 20 waiting on me, yeah.
Yeah, I remember that day distinctively, yeah.
Yeah, I couldn't believe it.
I was running around the house jumping off the fucking furniture, dude.
Were you?
Yeah, I couldn't believe it.
I mean, 20 grand, that's a lot of money for somebody who doesn't have shit.
And for somebody who's been getting robbed and pouring all their fucking every dollar they've had into this shit for the past two and a half years and not going anywhere.
You know?
So to me, this was victory.
This was, you know, I made it.
Right.
So what else are you doing in the meantime besides, I mean, obviously you're just sitting online.
Like you have your info sitting online for people to order.
And there's only so much time you're spending making these cards.
What else are you doing?
I was doing some online carding.
I was doing some virtual carding.
I was doing virtual carding.
I was still going in stores here and there.
And, you know, You know, mind you, I wasn't spending any money at this time either because I had cards.
If I needed gas, I would go fucking fill up with a card at the gas station.
If I needed groceries, I would take a card to the grocery store and buy $300, $400 in groceries.
You know?
So all my money is basically just going in a fucking shoebox in the closet and I'm not really spending any of it.
Yeah.
And at this point in time, I had been living off of credit cards, stolen credit cards for probably three and a half years.
Like I didn't have a job for three and a half years.
I was just using stolen credit cards for everything.
Where were you living?
At this point, I was in Coral Springs.
Okay.
And you pay your rent with the credit cards?
Oh, well, I would just go, if like when rent time would roll around, I'd go grab a laptop or two laptops.
Get cash.
Just cash it out, go pay $1,000 for rent or whatever.
Okay.
Yeah.
Wow, dude.
What a fucking life.
Long Distance Carding Partnerships00:09:05
How old were you?
Early 20s?
At this point, when you had the $20,000 order.
Early 20s?
Yeah, I was about 25.
24, 25.
Okay.
Yeah.
When did Shoulder Surfer come?
Shoulder Surfer and Memo Man came in later, about 2008, I think, early 2008.
Who's Shoulder Surfer?
Shoulder Surfer is another dude from the forums that I was dealing with.
It's another scam artist.
Another scammer.
And what was his story?
We were doing cash outs.
So I would send him cards, and then he would.
I think it was the guy running the.
I thought he was the Russian contact.
Shoulder Surfer?
Oh, I'm sorry.
Melmo Man.
Melmo Man.
Me and Melmo Man.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was just thinking.
The gummies are kicking in.
Yeah, the gummies are kicking in.
Yeah.
No, you're absolutely right.
Yeah.
He wrote the book.
I just lived it.
I mean, he knows all the facts.
He knows all the facts.
I'm fucking fuzzy.
What's funny is.
When I was writing the book, like he, you know, I like, you know, it's like Milmo Man.
Like he had been talking about Milmo Man.
I have all these notes with Milmo Man, Milmo Man.
And Milmo Man had introduced him to shoulder surfers.
Like, how do you even verify that these people are?
And I actually had a, I'd actually got a police report in where his brother had been arrested in like a Target or a Walmart or something.
I don't know what he, no, Target.
Yeah.
He got arrested in Target.
And, and, They went on the forum.
The police officer went on the forum and actually took a screenshot of the forum and it showed everybody that had been on the forum that day.
And Milmo Man was actually one of the people on there.
Like, I've been writing it down over and over again.
I just started reading through the names and sure enough, I was like, holy shit, there's Milmo Man.
But yeah, Milmo Man was the guy that introduced you to the Russian guy.
Shoulder surfing.
Shoulder surfing.
Like, to me.
Shoulder surfing.
Yeah, the Russian guy.
Sorry, that's what I was trying to think.
Because I remember when you told me the story and shoulder surfing is a term for people that.
Look over your shoulder or something like that.
That's the original.
Yeah, so they can get your pin number or whatever.
Yeah, back when.
It's just a tactic.
Yeah, back when.
A social engineering tactic.
Like he'd been, he was so old.
He'd been doing it so long that his handle was shoulder surfer, which is a thing that you wouldn't even know about.
It's like when you used to have like cards, you used to push, you used to, if you had to call somebody long distance, you had a long distance card, you had to punch in the pin number.
Shoulder surfing was where somebody would stand over your shoulder and.
I thought you said the camera's out.
All right, go ahead.
Someone would stand over your shoulder and get the pin number.
And then they would sell it or be able to use the long distance.
And that guy had been around so fucking long, that was his handle was shoulder surfer.
So that's like the 80s or 90s or something.
So, dude, it was old.
So that's what, yeah.
I knew when you.
I don't mean to go off topic, but did you know back in the day when they were back in the 80s, when they were doing the long distance phone call, you had to put in the pin and it would give you, it would register the dial tone with the company to let them know that.
This was the tone to let you into the long-distance phone call.
You know what I mean?
There was a whistle that they sold in a Captain Crunch cereal box that it was at a certain frequency that you could blow it into the fucking phone.
It would give you free long-distance phone calls.
What?
Captain Crunch?
Captain Crunch had a whistle they used to sell in their cereal boxes that was at like a certain.
Not on purpose.
No, of course not.
It was at like a certain hertz.
Like the frequency was at a certain hertz.
And for some reason, it just allowed you to, if you blew it on the phone, you hit a certain digit and you blew the whistle, it would allow you to make free long distance phones.
Did you do this?
Well, this is before my time.
You just heard about it.
Yeah, these are the scams I was like learning when I was a kid.
You know, all this, everything's digital.
We're talking analog shit.
Yeah.
All this shit was analog, you know, early 90s.
Like Steve Jobs and what's his name?
Wasn't you know?
They were selling that fucking box that allowed you to.
That was like their first little business was, they were selling this little box that allowed you to get free long distance.
Yeah yeah yeah, yeah.
It was like it's completely illegal, like that was the first thing they did was they sold these little I forget what they called them a blue box or something and you could you could put in a tone and it would over the telephone and it would give you free long distance.
So you were buying these boxes and they're selling you the boxes that allow you to fake out the telephone service so you could get free long distance.
That was Steve Jobs's.
That was like their first little thing before Apple.
Yeah.
That's wild.
But anyway, what I was trying to say was that when you started making the.
When you met Shoulder Surfer, the Russian guy.
That's when the money started rolling out.
Yeah, how did you meet this dude, Shoulder Surfer?
On the forums?
Yeah.
He's a Russian?
I don't know.
You never met him in real life.
No, you don't know what any of these people are.
I mean, I dealt with one dude for like two and a half years, and I thought he was like this.
In my mind, I thought he was like this nerdy fucking white dude.
Turns out he was like this Jamaican fucking black dude from Canada.
Whoa.
Yeah.
And that we were, I was doing fraud with back and forth.
And I got, yeah, it was.
Did you actually meet him in person?
No, but I ended up talking to him on the phone one day.
And like just through conversation, we kind of figured out, I kind of figured out like, you know, yeah, his ethnicity.
That's so funny.
I can deal with somebody for so long without meeting them.
Yeah.
You have no idea.
Cause I'm dealing with emails and screen names.
Yeah.
You know, everything's emails and screen names.
Everything's anonymous.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, then when you build a rapport, you deal with somebody for years, then you might get a phone call from them.
You know, you might talk on the phone with them to, you know, try and organize something or do whatever you guys are doing.
Are you paying?
Are you transacting everything in like with Bitcoin, or are you?
At this time, I was using something called WMZ, which is called web monies.
I think the FBI shut it down, and there was something else called a Liberty Reserve LRZ and this is all this is.
This was pre Bitcoin.
So then and then after, when Bitcoin came along, not too many people were hip to Bitcoin, and Bitcoin wasn't as easily accessible as it is today, like I can just open my Robinhood app and buy Bitcoin And sell Bitcoin.
Like you fucking couldn't do that back in the day.
Like you had to go find somebody to cash your Bitcoin out.
And then there was like all these sketchy like online Russian services you had to go through to buy Bitcoin.
Like it just wasn't like it is now.
So yeah, so a lot of it, most of it was Western Union.
At the end of the day, it was Western Union.
Really?
It was like, it was the bulk of the currency exchange I was getting.
Yeah.
So how did this shoulder surfer dude change everything you were doing and change your business?
He emailed me one day.
He asked me to send him 2,000 cards on front.
Which is outrageous.
What's it like?
200 grand?
Yeah, something like that.
No, well, yeah, 2,000 cards.
Yeah, it was something real ridiculous.
It was just real ridiculous.
And I was just like, and he kind of put it out there.
He's like, listen, I got this guy.
He didn't tell me any details.
He's like, I got this guy.
He's trying to put something together.
He's like, can you send me X amount of cards?
I remember how, I think it was about 2,000 cards or something.
He's like, this is what I need.
And he gave me a laundry list.
And the dude's credible.
Like, I know who he is.
I know he makes money.
I know people personally that I've dealt with that he's made money in.
Past, which is Milmo Man, that's that's why I was getting to Milmo Man.
I was only saying Milmo Man because Milmo Man basically introduced him to Shoulder Surfer, and that's when it kind of takes off, yeah.
Okay, so I was like, I'm like, what do I got to lose?
I mean, it doesn't really cost me anything to make these cars.
There's no overhead on this.
I mean, I can order $5,000.
So you own the machines now?
Yeah, I own everything.
By the way, how much did these machines cost you?
The good one was about $5,000.
Okay.
And it was a Fargo HDP 5000.
So you just have these big, badass printers in your house.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I had one bedroom that was just all just far.
Just a print shop.
Yeah, it was just a print shop.
And then my wife I was with at the time, we weren't married, but my girlfriend I was with at the time, we had our son, Nicholas.
He was a baby, and I would have him in the room with me while I'm printing all these fucking credit cards.
And like all the ones that would come out fucked up, I would leave in a pile on the floor.
And he'd just be sitting in the middle of the floor playing with all these fucking, you know what I mean?
All these half printed fucking credit cards and shit.
It's like, oh my gosh, it's fucking.
Whoa.
Yeah.
I'd find them all over the house because he'd run off with them.
You know what I mean?
I'd find credit cards in the fucking couch underneath the bed.
What a great memory.
So sweet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he'd stash credit cards all over the house, and I'd have to find them and fucking shred them.
A little shit.
Oh.
Fuck.
Your kid showed up to daycare with credit cards falling out of his diaper.
What does daddy do for letting me make these?
Yeah, yeah.
It was funny.
Melmo Man plugged me in.
Melmo Man plugged me in.
200,000 credit cards.
Shoulder Surfer.
Shoulder Surfer.
2,000 cards, roughly.
I don't remember what the exact number was.
I think it was around about there.
It was about there.
So that, you were doing really good after that.
After that, whoever he plugged me in with, that was it.
I was there.
I didn't sell to anybody else after that.
I only sold to him.
Finding Shredded Credit Cards At Home00:03:17
I didn't have to deal with anybody else.
Like I just I pretty much just ignored everybody else and I only dealt with him because he was doing I think like a hundred orders a month I think after it got like really big Yeah, I think he was doing I think about a hundred orders a month after his fourth order It was every other day he wanted it he wanted a hundred cars Jeez dude.
Yeah, every two or three days you were physically doing all this.
Yeah, everything myself.
Yeah, wow.
Yeah Yeah, I had no co-defendants.
I had nobody in on it with me.
I had nobody, you know, it was just me.
Yeah, it was just me.
What about security?
What about the, like, you remember you were going, you said you were going through these different security, the socket servers?
Oh, you're just talking about the VPN and the Sox proxy and all that shit like that.
Yeah, just to hide my anonymity online.
Yeah, like, how does the Secret Service, once they got involved and they knew what U.S. Plastica was and they came looking for you, how do they not track you down?
Because they'd track me down in a second if I fucking said it.
No, well, I mean, I wasn't dumb.
I wasn't using my home IP address to do any of this shit.
Right.
You know, that's just ignoramus.
But how does that work?
I'm saying you go to well, yeah, you download what's called a virtual private network, a VPN.
It's usually just a service provider that hosts your IP address wherever you want.
And then you've got something like a SOCS proxy 3 and 4, which, you know, just jump your they plug your IP address into different servers, and it makes it a little bit harder for yeah, and this turns up what you're talking about.
Time in the 2000s, like the early 2000s.
Early 2000s, that is like advanced.
Yeah.
Oh, wait, he's just imagining him telling me all this in prison.
I don't fucking have a clue what any of this is at all.
So, there's something called a bin number, which is called a bank identification number.
And the first six digits of any credit card or any debit card will tell you what bank issued it.
So, when you get these dumps in, I had a directory where I could look up the bin.
Are we recording?
Yeah, we never stop recording.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, so the bin number, the first six digits of a card tells you what bank issues that card.
Now, after a while, after just doing it, it's hit or miss, but then you kind of figure out which bins work good in what areas because that's what it really comes down to.
At the end of the day, it boils down to what regions the bins come from and what regions the bins are being used in.
You know what I mean?
Because now it all gets flagged automatically.
Like they've got software now, and that just automatically flags.
Like, say, I'm from my it's all done by zip code now.
Like say mine's 85932 is my zip code and it's being used in 85936 or something that's way outside of your zip code.
The bank will automatically decline your shit and shut it down.
You know what I mean?
Then you got to call the bank or whatever.
Right.
You know.
But yeah, you figure out which bins work and it's just luck.
It's either luck or, you know.
So what were you talking about?
We were just talking about the VPNs and you were using VPNs to sure.
I was using VPNs and I was using a SOX proxy on top of the VPN.
And do you think those proxies and the VPNs you were using, do you think that's the reason why you were able to stay out of trouble for so long?
Automatic Zip Code Fraud Flags00:10:56
Yeah.
I mean, I flew under the radar for.
Well, I don't think it was only that.
It was because.
Because you seemed like you were pretty crazy.
I was crazy.
You didn't.
I mean, you seemed like you were just kind of like a little bit reckless.
You didn't seem like the kind of guy who would be actively using all this high tech shit to stay under the radar and make sure and cross all your T's and dot all your I's.
You sounded like you were a little bit reckless, too.
My brother is really the one that got me to be like, you know what?
Always be paranoid, he told me.
Always be paranoid.
He's like, always have a contingency plan.
Always be paranoid and always act as if you're being watched.
You know what I mean?
And he's the one that kind of taught me about your digital footprint.
And that's how I learned about IP addresses and you know what I mean?
ISPs and DSNs and all that shit.
Like I had no clue.
I was clueless before.
And fraud is what really got me into learning about all the IT.
Yeah.
They were both carting.
I mean, his brother's been caught.
His brother's been fucking.
Chase.
His brother was on the run.
His brother my brother is is an absolute genius.
He is yeah, like I know i'm smart, but there's a difference there's.
There's smart like i'm able to figure out and i'm able to watch somebody do something and I can repeat it fast and quick, like i'm a fast learner.
My brother is comes up with the original.
He just comes up with the original ideas.
Innovator, he's the innovator, he.
He just thinks outside of the box.
He's just got this brilliance about him that allows him to just to come up with these ideas that that You would never even, the angle that you would just never think of would be.
The first thing that he thinks of is his brilliance.
So we wrote the outline.
I wrote the whole outline.
After I wrote the outline, I started writing the whole book.
He got out and I wrote the whole book just with emails, emails between me and John and phone calls.
And then, of course, he disappeared, which I explained at the end of the book, he disappears.
I went back to prison.
But what happened is this.
What I was going to say was when I put up, when I did the, I put up the, I had a website while I was still in prison and I put up the story.
So I actually put up his story on my website just prior to getting out of prison, maybe a year or two in, or a year or two before I got out.
I put up the story and I had like photos and stuff on it.
I had his brother's mugshot on it.
His brother contacted me and was like, hey, you know, you know, Shit, what's your brother's name?
Christopher.
Yeah, Christopher.
Yeah, this is, you know, Chris Boziak.
I'm John's brother.
When people run my name, your story comes up and it's causing me major fucking problems.
I need you to remove my story and remove my name.
And I went, so of course, I'm emailing him back.
And we're going through somebody, by the way.
So I can't email him really directly.
I'm actually emailing him through this chick named Joy that was helping me.
So I email, I shoot one to her.
She shoots one back.
I shoot one to her.
Oh, I didn't know that either.
I didn't know that either.
And we're going back and forth.
And he starts saying, look, I need you to remove this, my name from it.
And I went, okay, well.
Well, I said, okay, I that would make I have to go through, rewrite the whole thing, have joy.
I got to pay to have this done.
Joy's not, you know, people this costs money and time.
And so, well, what are you going to do for me?
He's like, what do you mean?
I go, well, I need some pictures.
You know, your brother's disappeared.
I said, I don't know where he is.
I'm writing letters to the Freedom of Information Act.
I'm trying to figure out where he is.
I'm, um, and I end up saying, I need, I need some photos, some childhood photos, some this.
And I start asking him questions.
He's like, well, he goes, well, I got those photos, but that would require me.
To deal with my mother, which I'm unwilling to do.
He didn't want to go there.
He said he had to go to your mom's.
He had to go in the basement.
He had to dig out the files.
He goes, yeah, I don't want to have to deal with her.
I don't want to have to explain the whole situation.
I don't want to do that.
And I went, okay, well, then I'm not taking your name off the thing.
Well, it's causing me major problems.
I said, well, bro, there's multiple articles out there on you being arrested for credit card fraud.
So don't tell me that my story is upsetting, is causing you problems when there's multiple, you've got, Multiple arrests.
You've been imprisoned in multiple states.
You've got multiple articles about you being arrested for credit card fraud.
So my story is not affecting you.
The problem is my story tells the entire cohesive story as opposed to a random article here and there.
And I'm sure he didn't like that.
And I had the photograph.
Photographs, public records.
So we go back and forth, back and forth.
And he basically was unwilling to do anything other than to say, take this down.
No, I'm not going to fucking take it down.
I'll change it.
I'll alter it.
I'll use a different name, but give me something.
Make it worth my while in some way.
He wouldn't do it.
So anyway, that's why when you mentioned your brother, I just remember thinking, that's right.
Up until this point, me and my brother have been pretty tight.
Where's your brother now?
I believe he's in Texas.
He lives in Texas.
Okay, and you don't talk to him?
No, up until this point, me and my brother have been really close.
We grew up together, obviously.
When I was in prison, he was the only one that was there for me, sending me money and taking care of me and shit.
And now he won't even speak to me.
Why won't he speak to you?
Pretty upset about the him me involving him in this whole the book and all that.
I get it, dude.
I get it.
You know what I mean?
I get it.
You know, you're trying to live the straight and narrow and you're trying to.
And I believe, I don't think he even told his wife, doesn't even know.
I don't think she really knew like everything.
You know what I mean?
Like, I kind of think he may have minimized or whatever when he was, you know, explaining everything to his wife.
And I kind of just peeled open a whole fucking can of worms.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
I get it.
And I'm not even like, I'm kind of hurt by it, but at the same time, dude, I get it.
We're adults and, you know.
You guys got to live his life.
So if your brother was the genius and your brother was the innovator behind all this stuff, why did, so did you rise higher in the ranks than he did?
Or did you accomplish more, make more than he did?
Or was he, you know, for him, it was never about that.
He wasn't like, I, I, he was just fucking around with it as a joke, carting.
I know that's whatever, but he was just fucking around.
I got fucking obsessed with it and I made it, you know what I mean, my 24-7, 365.
You know what I'm saying?
So it was never really about like I, you know, went further than him or whatever because once he got, once he got busted, once me and him got chased out of a fucking Walmart for trying to get a laptop, I got away.
He got caught.
Really?
And I feel, I feel fucking horrible about it because I woke him up.
Explain that.
Explain it.
Explain that.
Like, I'm laughing about it.
You feel horrible and I'm thinking, I'm thinking.
Because this is what started like my brother's downward trajectory.
Okay.
You know what I mean?
It was like, I, First of all, he was because he was living with me in Coral Springs.
And I remember waking him up this day.
I remember this day distinctly.
I woke him up out of a dead fucking sleep to go commit credit card fraud because I wanted to go out and steal.
You know what I mean?
So I wake him up.
I make him go to Walmart with me to fucking cart a laptop because I think because he had the ID for the card.
So, you know what I mean?
He had to be the one to do it.
You know what I mean?
So we get there.
We get back there.
We get the laptop.
We get to the counter.
The dude looks at the card, swipes it, looks at the ID.
Picks up the phone.
We got a code read back here at electronics.
I immediately knew what fucking time it was.
So I kind of just do an about face and I slowly start walking towards the front door.
I look back, my brother's still standing at the counter.
And I'm thinking in my head, I'm like, man, just fucking walk away, walk away, walk away.
So I get to the front door, the automatic doors in Walmart, they slide open.
Here comes my brother just blowing past me with two dudes chasing him.
Just a fucking full out and do it.
The look of sheer fucking terror on his face as he was going through them fucking doors in Walmart and the two fucking dudes are chasing him.
I'll never forget to look in that kid's face.
And that's when it hit me in my stomach.
I was like, I fucked up.
And then one dude tries to grab my shirt.
I luckily, I did some kind of spin move and slapped his hand away and booked it out of the parking lot, and I got away.
And I went and hid in the fucking woods, and he went to jail, got arrested.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I felt bad.
Apparently, one of his flip flaps fucking blew out on him halfway across the parking lot, and they got his ass.
You know what I mean?
So, yeah, and I felt so horrible for this, you know, but I stayed up all night.
I didn't sleep, you know, tracking him, seeing what jail he was going to.
I watched him go from.
City to county and then I was on it.
You know what I mean I was.
I didn't sleep the whole night.
I was as soon as the bail bondsman's opened in the morning.
I got him a bail bondsman.
He called me after his first court appearance.
He's like, oh, I got a bond, blah blah.
I was like listen, I already got a bondsman on the way up there to get you.
You know what I mean, just sit tight.
And I bonded him out.
I did the right thing.
And then, like two or three weeks later, the bail bondsman calls me and he's like, uh, you can come pick up your money they drop, they drop the charges or some shit.
Yeah, something weird happened in the court.
I don't know if it was a clerical error or what happened, but they just they weren't.
They just weren't going to prosecute it or whatever.
So I got my bond money back.
Wow.
So we're thinking it's all good.
My brother's like, oh, I skated on that one.
I was like, yeah, you got lucky.
Well, about two or three weeks later, we get a knock on the door early in the morning.
And it was one of those.
So I knew it was the police because the police only fucking knock one way at fucking 7 o'clock in the morning.
You know what I mean?
Nobody else is beating on my door like that.
So I opened up the doors.
Coral Springs Police, you know, it's Christopher Boziak here.
And he was in the room sleep, but he had his room door closed.
And I was like, no, he's not here.
He's letting the cop, he's like, where is he?
I was like, he went to Michigan.
He took off and went to Michigan yesterday.
And the cop's like, do you have any ID?
So I went and got my ID, gave it to him just so he can make sure that I wasn't Christopher.
And he said, oh, well, good thing he did take off because he's got a warrant out for his arrest.
And I was like, and I told the cop, I was like, I got my bond money back from that.
He's like, yeah, well, somebody picked up the case so he could get a warrant out for his arrest.
So I went and woke him up like, dude, the fucking police were just here looking for you.
He was like, oh, man, that was almost my freedom.
And he took off that night and went to Michigan.
And he got caught up in Michigan like two weeks later at a target.
And that's when the whole thing unfolded.
And so then he got jailed up there and then he had to get extradited back down to Florida and the whole thing.
So after that whole thing happened with him, he was done.
Like that was the end of it for him.
Like once he got caught, you know what I mean, Coral Springs and went to Michigan and went through that whole fucking shit, I think after that he was done.
Like he was like, you know what, I'm going to go to college.
I'm going to get a degree.
I'm going to, you know, do what I got to do.
So he was out of the life of crime and pretty much away from me at that time.
Like after that, we went our separate ways.
Like he took off and, you know, went and did his thing and then I made carding my life after that.
Secret Service And College Dreams00:05:17
But yeah.
Did you see the Wikipedia page on him?
My Wikipedia page?
Yeah, there's a Wikipedia page.
I don't think I did.
Yeah, I'll send it to you.
We can pull it up and show it.
I'm doing big things.
I got my own Wikipedia page.
That's pretty legit.
Did you make it?
This is the mastermind.
This is my PR right here.
This is my publicist.
Who set it up?
No, I mean, Wikipedia.
What do you mean?
Wikipedia is user.
Listen, you've got to go through.
There's a whole process you've got to go through.
It has to get verified, and you've got to send in documents.
And they got to verify and yeah, they got to make sure it's legit.
I'm trying to get that blue check on instagram right now.
Then i'm really doing things.
So, after you got your brother, you and your brother split ways what.
What did you do?
Like what you did you?
I just made it shift into a higher gear.
Yeah, I made it my business, my I. Just every day i'd wake up and that's all I thought about.
And this is the point where you're making, like getting these two hundred thousand dollar orders every week.
At this point, i'm not really doing shit.
When me and my brother separated, I really wasn't doing much at this time.
Like I was making money and I was making cards and I was doing all right, but my operation was still pretty low.
And then me and Chris went our separate ways and that's when I was like, okay, I need to get better equipment.
I need to figure out, you know.
And you had all the VPNs.
You were staying under the radar.
Yeah.
You were being extremely smart about not getting caught.
Yeah.
At what point did you hit a level to where you're like starting to get worried?
When I started doing 100 orders a month.
I was going to say Secret Service showed up.
Well, I mean, that was quite a few times.
I would go to grab a package.
I'd be at my Dropbox store to go pick up a package, and I somehow would, they would be in there looking for me or something.
I would be like coming in or going out, and I'd be like, and then another time I was at, I think I was at like a Borders bookstore or something like that using their VPN.
And one of my VPNs had failed on me.
Like I thought I was being protected, and I wasn't.
And so you would be using public Wi-Fi?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Public Wi Fi with a VPN with a SOX.
You know what I mean?
Shit.
And I was using Russian proxies.
Like, I was going to Russian sites where they would just list all these proxies.
And this is back in the day.
So, you would have to get all these proxies, and then you'd have to run them through a checker one by one to see if they were valid.
Because there were only certain windows that these VPNs, that these proxies were valid for.
And then they would be no longer valid because the IP addresses would cycle and everything would get changed.
Right.
You know?
So, it was like I had to go through and, you know, use all these checkers and, Manually input the IP edge.
So, yeah, my VPN ended up failing on me and I didn't know it.
And I think I was at a Borders books and this was the Borders books I kept using.
And this is my mistake.
I just got comfortable.
You know, I kept going to the same place.
I mean, I did these big comfy chairs and I had my own little corner back away from everybody.
You know what I mean?
This is my fucking fraud corner.
This is what I do.
I go here, I sit.
Fraud corner.
I like that.
Yeah, it's my little fraud corner.
This is my spot.
Yeah.
VPN failed on me.
And yeah, they just got hip to me and they tried to come to Borders.
I think they walked into Borders one day.
The same.
Was it Secret Service agent?
Secret Service.
Yeah, the same Secret Service agent that I had seen at my Dropbox place.
How do you know he was Secret Service?
Well, you can always tell.
How?
They got the high and tight.
They wear the fucking cargo pants, the tan cargo pants with the tucked in polo, with the tucked in polo, with the fucking, the bed.
What do they call those?
A lanyard.
The lanyard, right?
The lanyard with the bed.
Everyone, if you Google image, they all look the same.
Really?
They all look the same.
What's on a lanyard?
What's hanging off the lanyard?
The Secret Service badge.
They wear the badge, like.
They tuck it in.
But they pull it out when they, you know what I mean?
They have it ready for when they're front end.
Exactly.
I mean, I can smell police.
I can see police a mile away.
You can always tell when somebody's police.
Yeah.
Especially when you're doing fraud and that's what you're watching for.
Were you like, did you know?
I didn't know he was Secret Service.
Okay, you didn't know he was Secret Service.
I didn't know he was Secret Service until I seen him come into borders.
Because the only people that got pulled with IP addresses and that kind of organization to be on you like that would be Secret Service.
Because FBI and Secret Service, but FBI doesn't deal with that kind of things.
Okay, Secret Service.
Secret Service, they deal with all financial crimes.
And you saw this shady looking dude who looked like a cop.
And what did you like?
He carried himself like the cop.
He was dressed like a cop.
He made you super suspicious.
Right, so I had gone to my.
I had something called like an HQ.
So I don't know if you're familiar with that.
It's like a virtual office where they can do employment verification.
You can have packages shipped there.
They could do mail.
They answer phones for you.
So I had one of those.
And I was running, you know, packages out of there or whatever like that.
So I had seen, I was going to pick up a package one day and I had seen, I think I was coming out of an elevator and I had seen those, them walking into the office, the police.
Covering Tracks With Fake Addresses00:15:35
I'm like, man, this something just hit me in the gut and something just did not feel right at all, at all.
And there's courier guys, there's couriers that run in and out of the building to pick up packages or whatever like that.
So I had paid one of the couriers to go and grab my packages for me at my HQ.
Okay?
And I went and sat in the parking lot.
So when, when my courier comes out with my packages, sure enough, the BOBO looking and then the dude that was with them grab them.
No yeah, and that's when I knew, right then and there, that that something was wrong.
But I didn't know.
It was my VPN, you know what I mean.
I thought it was, I thought that they maybe it was, just I didn't know how or why.
Sorry, at that point in time, you know there's a um, I was just thinking about uh, I what the the at the foyer that what's-her-name has to get That.
What's her name?
So there's a possibly let's just say doc the doc.
Yeah, I'm working on a little something right now.
Yeah, I got a little something cooking maybe.
Yeah, doc.
There's a documentary right there's a documentary producer that is going through the whole thing and she just got a Freedom of Information Act like I got a bunch of stuff But keep in mind I can only get so much and she's like a you know, she's a investigative journalist, right?
So she just got like a ton Of documents in.
And like I've been talking to her and she sent me a thing the other day.
She's like, they just mailed them to me.
They said it was too big to fucking email or something.
And we were talking about that earlier.
He was like, that doesn't even make sense.
But they had to, maybe they're sending it to her on a thumbnail or a thumb drive or something.
I don't know.
But they're mailing it.
I was just wondering, like, I wonder what's going to come up.
It's going to be interesting.
Because like I got a ton of documents, right?
Like I got a ton of stuff that was showed up as I was ordering the documents that are showing up, verifying this is true.
This is true.
I'm dying to know.
And I sent it to her.
She was like, this is amazing.
I'm wondering.
what additional stuff she came up with.
Do you see what I'm saying?
Like, I get a movie about you, John.
A documentary.
I hope so.
Yeah.
Hope so.
Yeah.
Well, they got to sell it first.
They're going to like Netflix or somebody.
I was going to ask you that, Mike.
Is there already a movie made about you?
We're working on it.
We're trying to get a deal made.
The chick already, they make documentaries for Netflix.
They actually are making one right now for Netflix.
I think they just sold something to Netflix.
Yeah, for sure they sold it because they're down here, what, shooting it?
Is it here?
You know what's funny?
She told me Sarasota, but then she wants to meet you in, anyway, she's in Florida.
They're in Florida right now and they're supposed to meet with him.
But I was just wondering about that when you said that.
I thought, fuck.
Freedom of information.
I'm dying.
It's interesting to see because you don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
Like, I don't know how they knew what or when or when to be where, when.
Obviously, you know, because I'm not on their team.
Right.
So when you get all the Freedom of Information Act shit, it's all in there.
Like all the reports, all the documents, everything's in there.
Yeah, the eyes open.
Every interaction.
Every interaction.
Any piece of paper that's attached to my name that has anything to do with any of these cases, there's paperwork on.
And all of that can be released through Freedom of Information.
Keep in mind, I could get everything.
First of all, he was gone.
He left way before me.
How many years?
You said it today.
You said it's been five years.
Five years.
Yeah, it's been five years since I've seen you.
I got out in 2015.
Oh, yeah.
Fuck.
I got out in 2019.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah.
So.
But I'm saying, I was just thinking, like, it was funny all the different things that, like, when his brother's police report, when his brother got arrested, like, I have the whole police report.
So I know, like, he used the car.
You know why his brother got caught?
Why?
When he went up, he was.
So he goes back up to Michigan and starts carting again.
Yeah.
Who does his brother?
His brother.
Remember, he went on the run.
He went, but he starts karting again in Michigan.
He had got caught, got released in Florida, and then goes back up there, starts karting again.
And then when he was karting, he uses a card.
So he uses a card, buys something like fucking for like he ran it up for four or five grand.
I think I actually have.
Was it that much?
Yeah.
I actually have the.
Not just at Target, it was throughout the day.
On the same card.
Yeah, same card.
Okay.
It was because I actually have from the bank.
Where it's like, whatever, $3,900 or $4,200, whatever, around four grand.
He ran up this card.
Well, here's the funny thing.
So the card, so he gets the stuff and he leaves.
Well, the woman gets notified by the bank saying, hey, your card's been run up or whatever.
She then goes, okay, well, oh gosh, this is all around here.
This Target is right up the street.
She calls the Target and they're like, yeah, I know.
Oh, okay, yeah.
And she's like, okay, well, She talks to them and they're like, Yeah, there's nothing we can do.
They call the police.
They go, Yeah, just fill out the police report.
And she goes, No, no.
It's right down the street.
They have surveillance cameras.
I want you to go down there and look at the.
She throws such a fucking stink.
She makes the police do their job.
It was a Karen.
They actually.
It was definitely a Karen.
They actually get up.
They drive down there.
They look on the surveillance photos.
They actually get the name because his brother used his own ID with the strip.
And they actually get his brother's ID.
They look in the phone book.
Find out where he lives, go there, open the door.
It's fucking swag everywhere.
They open the door and fucking.
It's him.
The cop just saw him on the.
Just swag?
Stolen merchant or whatever.
It's all.
It's an older term.
I've never heard it.
It's a boomer term.
I've never heard swag.
I know it's swag.
It's a boomer term.
Not in that context.
So it's basically.
There's all his places filled with fucking.
with stolen stuff or whatever.
Hotels of fucking gift cards.
Yeah, just.
And he arrests him right there.
But I mean, it was the victim wasn't willing to just.
Roll over and go, okay.
She was like, oh no, no.
She put up a stink.
You go down there.
You look on the surveillance photo.
And that's the article.
There's a huge article that was written up about his brother.
Wow.
You know, talking about it.
They make it sound like it's like a big deal and stuff.
It's like the five, it was four or five grand.
So, anyway, I'm sorry.
So, that's when your brother first got busted.
Right.
No, second time.
That was after me and him got ran out of Walmart.
Oh, that was after.
Yeah.
But I have that police report.
Like, I have the police report of the interviews, of the screenshots, of the cards, of the everything.
So, I mean, that's the kind of stuff that I kept getting in.
And then, like, the time you almost got caught buying a gun in the, like, he, there were, I was getting documents in the stories that he never even told me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He didn't even tell me.
Like literally, I'm reading this Hillsborough County Sheriff's Report, and I'm reading the report going, what the fuck is this?
Yeah, I had a warrant out for my arrest, a federal warrant out for my arrest.
They did not.
I didn't know.
And I'm at a gun store, and I'm trying to purchase a fucking firearm, and they're doing the background check on me.
The police are on their way up there to arrest me, and I just finally get sick of fucking waiting around.
I'm like, you know what?
I'm over it, and I leave.
And 10 minutes after I leave, five minutes after I leave, the sheriffs show up to arrest me.
Yeah.
And they call them.
Yeah.
You understand I was in prison when I got this report and I completely forgot about this whole this whole thing and I was on the phone calling and I'm like hey, bro.
I got a report in and he's like oh Yeah, yeah, yeah, they will you know I left they wouldn't give me the thing and that and I was wondering why they were acting weird after after they like after I gave him the information I ran my information the dude was acting fucking kind of strange behind the counter because I guess he knew the police were coming to arrest me You know what I mean so that so something just didn't sit right now.
I looked at my wife and I was like no, we got it The fuck out of here.
You know, something's fucking weird.
The cop even wrote up the phone call when he called him.
He's like, Hey, is this John Bozier?
He's like, Nah, man, my name's Jay or whatever you said.
He said, Like, my name's Tom or whatever.
Brian.
Right.
Yeah.
He's like, Nah, you got the wrong number, wrong number.
Well, this isn't it.
And he hangs up on him.
But the cop writes up the whole thing.
And so I tell him that.
I'm like, You never told me that story.
He's like, Yeah, I remember.
That's right.
I mean, there were all these things that were clear.
We were talking about this earlier.
I was like, And years later, when I got busted, I got arrested.
I was in Hillsborough County Jail.
But I was on a federal hold.
So federal.
Inmates don't get held at Hillsborough.
They get shipped out to Pinellas and they hold all the federal inmates at Pinellas.
Well, they did then.
I mean, they had a contract.
I'm not sure if they do anymore.
But the dude, the cop that came to pick me up from Hillsborough to transfer me to Pinellas, was the same one that came to arrest me at the gun shop.
And he's like, you know, I got there 10 minutes after you left.
I was coming to arrest you.
The sheriff's deputy got there first.
That's the report I got.
Okay.
But he's saying that the Secret Service, they also showed up.
I think he was like a U.S. Marshal or something like that or something.
Yeah, I don't remember who was transferring me, but he was like, I was the one that came to arrest you.
But I just barely missed you.
And he's like, I went to whatever address you put on the application I filled out for the background check or the gun form or whatever.
And he's like, yeah, it was just like a vacant apartment or something.
And I was like, yeah, I have a habit of not ever putting where I live or any proper information on anything.
And it's hurting me now because now I'm like a legitimate citizen in society and I'm trying to function properly.
And it's like, I've got all these habits where I just don't put down wrong phone numbers for shit.
I don't ever give my address out where I live.
I don't have my driver's license registered to the address, my physical home address.
I don't put any utilities in my name.
I just.
Yeah.
Because I'm used to living life on the lamb.
You know, I'm used to fucking always having warrants or, you know.
That paranoid life.
Somebody chasing me for child support or some shit.
You know what I mean?
Oh, yeah.
I got a couple of those.
I've been ducking those for a while.
Jesus.
So, yeah, you know.
Those habits now are really, they're hard for me to get out of.
How long has it been since you got out?
Five years.
Five years.
Yeah, I've been out five years.
All right.
So at some point between from when you first started noticing the Secret Service agents hovering around you, you figured out who they were.
They were getting close.
They're getting close.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So now you must be getting like way more paranoid because these fucking guys are on you.
Like they know who you are.
They're trying to find, they know what's going on online.
They know how to fucking, they know that the tech, the technology of the VPNs and whatever.
They know what you're doing on the forums, the buying and selling of stuff.
Yeah.
I think at this point they knew who I was and what I was doing.
They just didn't know who I was.
They didn't know what you look like.
They didn't know, like, yeah, they didn't know who I was.
Right.
But how many, did you have a bunch of fake identities?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I could print driver's licenses.
Right.
And I had access to hundreds of thousands of people's information.
At any given point in time, I could buy, I mean, I had contacts.
I could call somebody and be like, listen, I need 500 first name, last name, birth date, I'm sorry, first name, last name, date of birth, and social security number.
So, Matt Cox, you were basically like the beta version of John Boziak.
Matt Cox was the analog version.
The analog version.
Yeah, Matt Cox was doing everything analog.
He was actually going to homeless people and acting like he had a survey and having them write their information down.
I was like, I'm on the ground.
I was like, I'm on the ground.
I was like, he's the dial up version.
Yeah, yeah.
Boots on the ground.
Wow.
That's fucking sick.
I'm actually going in the bank, filling out paperwork, getting it out in cash.
He's filling it out online.
He's having it transferred.
Yeah.
So at any given time, I could be anybody I wanted to be because I could just make the driver's license.
And even if I didn't, I know how to steal identities.
So I could just go to a, I could, you know, get, I can get anybody's birth certificate.
All I need is your first name, your date of birth, and your social security number.
I can get your background check.
I can pull your credit file.
Once I do those two things, I can get your birth certificate.
Once I get your birth certificate, I can go straight to the DMV and I can get a driver's license in your name with your birth certificate.
So now I'm, I'm, I'm whoever I want to be.
Right.
And that's relatively easy.
That's peanuts.
Does he know about what you had to go through to get people's identity?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And you know what?
Getting homeless people's social security numbers.
He loves to do this.
He loves these lifestyle.
What do you think about what he was doing?
Because he was going, finding homeless people, saying that they needed to fill out surveys to get their social security numbers.
Matt's a megalomaniac.
That's what enabled Matt to do the things that he did.
Plain and simple.
He's a narcissistic megalomaniac that he just, you know, you know, that little governor that people have inside of them that tells them not to do certain things or not to talk to people a certain way, Matt doesn't have that.
He doesn't have that governor.
He doesn't have that filter.
I'm all better now, though.
No, I mean, but what do you think about, like, the actual process that he had to go through?
I wouldn't.
To steal people's identities.
I couldn't.
I would never do that.
If that's what I had to do, it seems like so much work compared to what you were doing.
Are you kidding me?
There's no way.
There's no way.
I would never in a million years ever do something like that.
I would break in.
I would, you know, do a commercial burglary and get into a fucking file system or something like that before I even thought to do something like that.
Well, I have to do a survey.
You just walk around the pad.
You just, hey, excuse me.
I'm taking, you know, I'm walking through the park.
And you get a $20 bill.
You say, I'm doing surveys.
I'll give you $20.
We're trying to figure out where we want to put the next, we say American Cross.
No, right next to the house.
How'd I go?
Just homeless.
You can say homeless facility, but basically Salvation Army.
Yeah.
We're the Salvation Army.
I had a badge.
And I'd ask him, I said, how many people actually gave you the real information?
He said, all of them.
All of them.
Almost.
I literally, I'll bet you, I'll bet you maybe, maybe one or two people gave me something bad.
Almost never.
And even then, like I had one guy who gave me, his date of birth he gave me was off.
Like he switched, like he thought he was going to fool me.
I'm going to change my date of birth.
It doesn't matter when we pulled the credit, the real date of birth showed up.
But that's a super inefficient way of stealing somebody's identity compared to what you were doing.
Well, it's actually smart because these people are fucking homeless junkie drug addicts.
Yeah, they're not going to show up.
It was creative.
Let's say they're not going to show up and say, hey, he took it.
They're never going to show up to court.
They're not going to know if somebody's doing anything with their name or anything like that because they're fucking crazy and homeless.
Yeah, the bank's not going to call them and say, hey, somebody's using your credit card.
It's more work.
And it's less efficient than what I was doing.
I mean, obviously my work it's more money, though.
I'm borrowing a million dollars in this guy's life.
That's also a different scam, though.
Yeah, completely different.
When I stole people's identities, I wasn't doing it for any kind of financial gain.
I wasn't using their name to build a credit report or take loans out or go into a bank or anything like that.
I was just using it so that when I went to go do my dirt, that people didn't know who I was.
Say I was going to open a UPS store, box at a UPS store.
That's when I would make an identity.
Or I was going to do an HQ.
You know, like the virtual office or whatever.
You guys wanted to cover your tracks.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What about eventually?
I mean, you know, I don't know if I mean, I don't know if you want me to help you along here.
Oh, of course, yeah.
So eventually, you end up you went to Rock Hill.
Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Yeah, where you get pinched, right?
That fucking backwater, hick-ass town.
I should have never fucking where was it?
Unbelievable.
Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
Them fucking rednecks.
Why were you there?
Using UPS Stores For Identities00:03:54
Unbelievable.
The girl I was with at the time, that's where she was from.
She's from South Carolina.
Her family's from there.
A little Southern Belle.
Yeah.
And for whatever reason, we decided to leave Florida and take my son and go to South Carolina.
I'm like, listen, I can do what I do anywhere.
Right.
You know what I mean?
So, you know, we get up there, and that was the nail in the coffin.
That was the nail in the coffin.
That's what sent me to prison, was eventually my decision, yeah.
That was it.
So, how did that play out?
Right.
So.
When I send out packages, I just go into a UPS store because I pre-print my labels.
So I just go into a UPS store and I hand it to them and give them $5.
And they scan it and they send in the outgoing mail and it goes out.
Which is cool because in South Florida, there's 10,000 fucking UPS stores.
I mean, you literally put in your GPS and you get all day long.
Yeah, they're everywhere.
So I never have to go to the same one twice.
And I could do this for months and months and months and keep rotating.
Well, where I was, there was two UPS stores and that was it.
So I had to go to the same UPS store to send out my packages when I was sending them out.
Same UPS store, same UPS store.
So eventually the old man that was running the UPS store, I didn't know at this time that they're all franchises.
I mean, I know that.
I knew that then.
I didn't know that.
So the old man that worked at the UPS store was the owner of the UPS store.
And I was going there, you know, three, four times a week, sending shit out.
And they're going all over the world.
My shit's going to, you know, Europe, South America.
The documentary chick, Caitlin, tracked him down.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
She's actually already tracked.
This chick is.
Girl, she don't fuck around.
Listen, she lives here in Florida.
She's from New York.
Yeah, she just happens to be here.
But I'm saying, I just want to mention.
We should have got her on this fucking show.
She's, listen, she worked for Time.
I don't know if she specifically worked for them, but I know she has stuff published with People Magazine or People.
No, no, she did.
She worked for People until just recently.
She quit to co-start her own thing.
She's doing her own thing.
She did for like five or ten years or something.
She was an investigative journalist.
But I'm sorry.
But I just thought it was amazing because that's somebody she was like, oh, no, no.
I already tracked her.
How did she find out about you?
From Matt's story?
From my story.
Yeah, from Matt.
She was investigating.
Matt plugged me in.
Donovan Davis.
And so she went through, she was reading this stuff on my website.
Well, no, on the YouTube channel.
And then on the YouTube channel, she came across Boziak's story.
Yeah.
Bent.
So that's the first one I put up.
So she came across the narration on my story.
It has 26,000 views right now on YouTube, by the way.
26,000 views on YouTube, by the way.
So it's, yeah.
Putting up real numbers.
So, yeah.
So on my channel, she saw it and she read it and she contacted me and she goes, okay, who's this guy?
And I was like, oh, it's this.
And she's like, okay, well, at the end of this story, he disappears.
And I went, oh, no, no, no, no.
I said, you got to get his book.
I said, there's a book.
He shows up.
I explained he did disappear, but then I said, he had actually gotten arrested and then did some time and got out.
I said, I've contacted him.
And she said, you're in contact with him.
I was like, yeah.
And she goes, oh, okay.
She said, can I get you?
So you can put me in contact with him?
I said, yeah, I can get you his number and everything.
Yeah.
And she's like, okay.
So at that point, you weren't.
No, you weren't working for Tesla then.
At the end of the book, you were.
I was living in L.A. at this time.
I had moved from San Francisco to L.A.
Yeah.
So I gave him her number because we talked when I was in the halfway house.
So I still had his information.
So I gave him his information.
She contacted him.
She came back to me.
She said, will you be interviewed?
And I said, yeah, I'll be interviewed.
And she goes, well, do you have all the information on him?
I was like, yeah, why?
She was super stoked about it.
She's like, this is great.
This is an amazing documentary.
Because, you know, we didn't get into all the fucking times he got grabbed and handcuffed.
And we didn't get into all that.
Getting Heavily Tattooed In Prison00:04:01
So how did you get busted in South Carolina?
Right, yeah.
So pretty much the old man was just a nosy old fuck.
You know what I mean?
So I dropped the package off one day and he opened it and went through it and seen what I was sending out.
And then he called the postmaster general and then the postmaster general contacted the Secret Service.
He also, keep in mind, he's walking in all tattooed up.
This is a little town in South Carolina.
Oh, you had the tattoos.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is a little town in South Carolina.
He thought he was sipping drugs, driving a nice Cadillac.
Yeah.
He thought he was sipping drugs.
Tell me the story about when you decided to get all the tattoos.
Didn't you have to get you?
Didn't you try to buy a Rolex or something?
And you got, oh yeah, you got locked in a closet or something at the mall.
And then the closet, and then you have security yes, you know, like one of those little rooms and they and then you climb through the ceiling to escape yeah yeah yeah, through drop ceiling.
Yeah yeah um, the tattoos was that before or after you got the tattoos?
Uh, I've always had tattoos.
Oh really yeah, I started getting tattooed when I was young.
The rockstar, yeah rockstar, that's that's over here.
Oh yeah yeah, That's what that was.
It's covered up now.
It's covered up now.
I can still see it though.
I can see it.
If you're looking for it, you can see it.
Yeah.
What about?
Is that the dollar bill thing?
It's the Illuminati, brother.
When did you get that fucker?
I just did my whole head last year.
Damn.
Yeah, I just started going really hard on the tattoo.
But I've always had tattoos.
I started getting tattooed extremely young.
Probably 14 or 15.
I think I got my first tattoo.
And then I did my first tattoo when I was like 16.
Your own first tattoo?
Yeah.
Yeah, you tattooed yourself or you tattooed somebody else.
I tattooed somebody else, and then it was just like an obsession after that.
Yeah, like tattooing and just like getting tattooed and doing tattoos and everything.
Tattooing in prison, yeah, yeah, with a needle.
Oh, we were making tattoo machines in there, man.
Out of whoa, we had little motors, we were taking out of shavers.
And they're burning fucking ink and making their own making our own ink, yeah, yeah.
I got into it, man.
I mean, that's that's how I make all my money now.
I'm full time tattoo artist now, yeah.
I would walk by and sell in the air.
Matt would walk by like, oh yeah.
They got lookouts and, you know.
Dude sitting in the chair watching for the police.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so I've always been obsessed with tattooing.
And, you know, ever since I was a kid, because I grew up in a rough part of town, you know, with, you know, rough cats and everybody's always tattooed.
I got the impression from the story that you just got the tattoos so you could look.
I started getting heavily tattooed later on.
Because you thought, you feared you'd go to prison and you wanted to have more tattoos.
Yeah, that's part of it, I guess.
That's Matt's.
Matt's spin on it.
Matt's sofa psychiatry, I think.
Sofa psychiatry.
You had said, fuck, I knew eventually I'm going to end up in prison.
You had said that.
Yeah, it was just like, you know, I'm not a very big guy.
You know what I mean?
I've always been small.
And it's just like, I wanted at first, I wanted you were smaller then, too.
You're bigger now.
When we met, you were even in prison, you were thin.
You were way thinner.
Yeah, yeah.
Probably weighed 135, 145 pounds when I met you.
What do you weigh now?
160.
Oh, he was probably 135 when I met him.
Yeah, 130.
5'7".
125, 130.
Going into prison.
Going to federal prison.
Tiny, tiny little dude, yeah.
So I was like, you know, I got to do something.
You know what I mean?
Better to have faced hats.
No.
I didn't have any of this when I went to prison.
You didn't?
No, nothing.
You got it all after?
Nothing in my head, nothing.
I think I had.
Yeah, you had the neck.
I had the sleeves.
And you definitely had the neck.
I had the neck.
No, no, no.
I didn't have any of this.
I just had the two sides.
Just the sides, yeah.
I had the two sides, and then I had.
And I was sleeved up.
And the sleeves.
And then when I got out, I was like, I'm not fucking getting a nine to five.
I'm not doing it.
So it's either going to be tattooing or I'm going back to prison.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So I just went ham.
I went fucking ham, and I just.
I went, you know, I went crazy.
Yeah.
But, you know, it works for me.
Living Insanely In San Francisco00:03:11
You know, it works for me.
And I make, I make, I make really good money right now tattooing.
You know, that's awesome.
Yeah.
I have a friend who just got into it.
She just started apprenticing at a tattoo place up in Tampa.
She was a graphic designer.
Okay.
Yeah.
She did graphic design for a while.
There's a lot of graphic designers.
Luke's wife.
Yeah.
Luke's wife.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And she just started apprenticing or?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've been tattooing pretty solid for about 10 years, I think.
Really?
Yeah.
About 10 years solid.
That's fucking cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So now it's just like, That's my bread and butter now.
I mean, I get to wake up every single day.
I have the best life ever.
I get to wake up every day and do whatever I want to do.
I get to wake up every day and just go to the gym and work out and eat breakfast and hang out.
You know what I mean?
And get on the computer and draw a little bit and schedule a couple tattoos and then go fuck around with a girl over here.
You know what I mean?
It's just whatever I want to do, my day is mine.
You know what I mean?
I'm not a fucking wage slave.
You know?
And I'm lucky that I figured out a way out of it.
Do you own your own shop?
I'm working out of a private studio right now.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you like rent a space or whatever?
Yep.
Okay.
Well, he just moved to.
To Arizona.
You just moved to Arizona from LA?
I had to get the fuck out of LA, man.
LA was.
Everything closing down, huh, from COVID?
LA is an absolute fucking shit shower.
That's what I hear from everybody.
They're killing cops out there.
They're burning cop cars.
They're fucking looting.
They're rioting.
They're protesting.
Everything's fucking shut down.
I mean, it's fucking $4 a gallon for gas.
I was paying $2,100 a month to live in a fucking not even that nice of an apartment in Anaheim, fucking Orange County.
Why would you want to fucking live there, dude?
It's unlivable.
California is unlivable.
It's just not.
The homeless are.
It's done.
It's insane.
I've never.
Well, you know that because we talked.
Yeah.
You were in LA.
California is a democratic liberal fucking shit pool.
Yeah.
That's what it is.
Fucking needles and homeless people shitting all over the streets.
Yeah.
And then you've got these fucking multimillionaires getting out of the Rolls Royces, stepping over three fucking homeless people to get into a restaurant to pay fucking, you know what I mean?
$200, $300 for a steak dinner and a $500 martini.
It's the whole thing.
It's just fucking absolute insanity.
Oh, it's insane.
Absolute insanity.
In Florida.
Yeah.
And I lived in, sorry, never happened.
Never happened.
I lived in fucking San Francisco for two and a half years.
Isn't it worse there?
It's worse.
San Francisco is way worse than LA.
I mean, they both have their own problems, but san Francisco was.
San Francisco, same thing downtown.
I was in downtown LA and I've been in downtown San Francisco.
San Francisco downtown is worse.
It's funny because there's so many beautiful parts of California too.
California is a beautiful state.
California is a beautiful state.
San Diego and La Jolla.
I lived in Orange County.
So when I lived in LA and then I moved to Orange County and I was living out by Huntington Beach and Huntington Beach is amazing.
It's fucking amazing.
You go out there, you hang out.
You got the beach, you got the restaurants, you got the shops.
Everything's cool.
You know what I mean?
But then you got.
LA is just like a fucking dumpster, dude.
Shh.
Yeah, it's a bummer, dude.
The tent cities, just the homeless, the homeless down there, it's just, it's off the charts, man.
You mean?
Everybody's leaving.
Literally, every building you walk into, you're accosted by a homeless person.
Every gas station, every 7 Eleven, every place you go to, there's somebody literally covered in filth, half naked, screaming at nothing.
Miami Homeless People Everywhere00:02:45
And you think I'm trying to be funny?
I'm not.
That's a physical description of every fucking homeless person in Miami.
Bro, you know what I mean?
You know Soft White Underbelly?
Did you ever talk to him, Mark?
Yeah, he's coming on the podcast.
Awesome.
Love Mark.
He's coming down here.
Mark's 60 something years old and looks amazing.
Yeah, Soft White Underbelly, dude.
His channel is amazing.
Oh, he's great.
You know where his, okay, Skid Row in downtown LA?
That's where his studio is.
So when he interviews people, you could, I've watched the interviews, right?
Can you hear crazy shit going on?
Oh, yeah.
You can hear like sirens.
And I was watching.
Oh, that's constant.
And I was sitting there looking at, because they're beautiful.
The interviews are beautiful.
They're amazing.
They're amazing.
The photography is phenomenal.
And I'm watching and I hear the sirens and I go, wow, that's neat that he kind of, he must put that in there.
And then I got down there and did my thing and I was like, dude, I'd be happy.
Oh, you didn't put this shit in here.
It's pretty rough, man.
This is 10 feet outside the door.
Two homeless guys screaming at each other.
This is 15 feet.
There's a fucking police.
He's got an interview with this dude, this black dude who had half of his face blown off by a shotgun.
Oh, yeah, I watched that interview.
Horrible.
It was a horrible movie.
I watched that interview.
And the dude's like actually.
And he's homeless.
He's homeless, but he's actually got his shit together.
He can actually.
He's coherent.
He's lucid.
He can talk about it.
And he's like a good dude.
Yeah.
He's like a good dude.
He's like, man, I always try and help people out and fucking, you know what I mean?
Do right by people.
Yeah.
Missing half his fucking.
It's fucking insane how that guy's still alive.
He's done multiple interviews with that guy.
I think he's done one and then he did one a long time ago with him and then all of a sudden, like, years later, he did another one with him.
Yeah.
I may be wrong.
I don't know.
I'm just talking shit.
I mean, just the channel story.
I don't know what that's about.
He went to, where did he go?
To, um.
Somewhere in Tennessee where he interviewed this inbred family.
Yeah, that's like one of his videos.
I fucking just watched that.
Oh, that's the dude.
Okay.
I've been watching his videos all week long, man.
See how many hits that thing got?
The one dude that just barks like a dog in the background.
Yeah, he just barks and he's like, what happened to your brother?
Where's your brother?
That's all he does.
And you're like, oh my God.
And you can tell the dude's like trying to communicate to him.
He's understanding him, but he can only bark like a dog.
That's it.
And then he goes, he walks across the street and there's a fucking grave.
They just buried his brother right across the street from the house.
Yeah.
In an empty fucking field.
Yeah.
It was wild, man.
Hey, did you watch that one?
Did you watch?
Oh, you checked that one out.
I watched.
That's a good one.
I literally turned it on for like 20 seconds.
I went, oh, I can't watch this.
Inbred family from fucking.
Where were they at?
I think.
I thought it was in the Midwest somewhere.
I thought it was somewhere in Tennessee.
Was it?
Oh, it was Tennessee.
I thought.
Maybe not.
I don't know.
Kentucky or Tennessee?
Appalachia.
It was Kentucky or Tennessee.
Appalachia would be Kentucky.
Yeah.
One of the two.
The Dog Barking On Video Calls00:02:46
Well, I mean, you want to wrap the.
He got arrested.
Oh, sorry.
We got arrested.
Let's get back on track.
It's all right, man.
We're just passionate about it.
Anyways, dude, this fucking crazy old dude who worked at a UPS store.
Yeah, he.
He cut open your package, found your credit card.
Yeah, he contacted the Postmaster General.
Postmaster General contacted the Secret Service.
And then I got an email one day telling me I had a package waiting on me, which I did, actually.
I had stuff coming in and out.
And I get there and I walk up to the counter.
And I'll give the old man points for this one.
I'll give the old fucking bastard points for this one because I couldn't tell.
He was not even shook.
Really?
He played it cool as a motherfucking cucumber.
When I went up there, I signed for my package.
It was just like normal.
It was like an everyday process.
You know what I mean?
Transaction with them.
And I'm pretty good.
Like, I pick up on subtle things like that.
I can tell if somebody's nervous.
I can tell if something isn't right.
You know what I mean?
Especially when I deal with somebody on a regular basis.
But no, he played it cool.
I'm going to walk out the door, and the door swings open.
And I didn't see the dude's face.
I just seen a badge.
Because he had it on his belt.
They were in, like, plain clothes.
And he had a badge on his belt, and that's what I seen.
And then I went to go walk out the door, and the other dude blocked the door, and I was like, fuck.
And that's when it all just came flooding.
Like, my stomach fucking dropped.
Like, I immediately, my armpits just started, like, turned on the faucets.
You know what I mean.
Like the nerves just started going crazy and they were like uh, Ryan Pearson.
And I was like yeah, and he said uh, what do you say?
He said uh um, we need to talk to you about what you've been sending out of here.
I tried, I tried to play stupid at first, but he said Ryan Pearson.
So I was like okay well, obviously he doesn't know who the I am, and I tried to play it stupid at first and I was like, what do you mean?
He's like?
He gave me that look and I was like, all right, all right, He's like, well, why don't you come in the back?
He's like, come in the back because there were people coming in out the store.
And she's like, why don't you come in the back and talk to us real quick?
So I sat down.
He's like, they're like, so what have you been sending out of here?
Because he's like, we have your package you sent out of here.
We know what you've been sending out of here.
And then that's when literally the movie Blow flashed in my head.
And I remember when he was sitting in, you've seen the movie Blow, obviously, when he's sitting in the room and he knew it was a setup at that time.
He's like, he knew it.
And he just sat back in his chair and he was like, all right, fuck it.
Let's do it.
And that's what I said.
I said, I was like, all right, fuck it.
Let's do it.
He's like, what's your name?
I was like, you know, John Boziak.
And then he's like, what you been sending out of here?
I was like, credit cards.
He's like, all right.
And then he's like, you know, I had to explain to him what I had been doing.
And of course, I minimized every fucking thing.
You know what I mean?
I minimized the shit out of that situation.
I was like, okay.
In my mind, I was like, what do they have?
You know what I mean?
Setting Up A Rico Case Trap00:14:58
What do they really have?
500 cards?
Okay.
That's what they have.
So I gave them, I gave them, What they kind of felt like I already knew they thought they knew that I didn't know that they knew if that makes any sense You know what I mean like I was trying to be slick with it and so I just told them I gave I fed them what they what I thought they already like okay,
they know I've been making cards So I'm gonna tell them I've been making cards I'm not gonna fucking tell them how long I've been doing it right or how much I've you know how many cards I've been doing it obviously I'm not gonna just be like okay Here it is I've been doing everything, you know, and I'm not gonna obviously I'm not gonna tell on myself So I just I gave them enough to set that I felt like satisfied them So I agreed to.
He gets on the phone with his supervisor.
He's on the phone on and off.
He's got Blackberry.
He's sending email.
He's making phone calls.
What year is it now?
2009.
Okay.
Crackberry.
Yeah, he's in the Blackberry.
Crackberry.
Yeah, those are Blackberries.
Well, all the feds use Blackberry.
I think they still use iPhones.
Oh, do they?
Yeah, they're all iPhones now.
But yeah, they used Blackberries back in the day.
So what was I saying?
Oh, yeah, I agreed to let them come to my home in search.
And seize all my equipment.
Oh, wow.
You should see the list of the seizure list.
Like when I got it, it's multiple.
Freedom of information?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and it's on your indictment.
No, no.
Yeah, it's on the indictment.
It's on my indictment, yeah.
Where they list, like, I was just, you know, this Fargo or this thermal printer, this thermal printer, this, like, multiple MRS. Like, it's like three or four laptops.
I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on.
Like, you know, hot foil, you know, press machine.
You know, it's like, why do you need to go to jail?
Here's what fucking blew me away out of this whole situation is they didn't arrest me.
I didn't go to jail.
They fingerprinted me and took my picture out.
They fingerprinted me in the back of the UPS store.
Then they made me go out in front of the UPS store.
And they made me stand, and they took my picture, and they turned aside, and they took my picture, and then they had a bunch of paperwork faxed to the UPS store, and I signed all of it, letting them, okay, I give you permission to search my home.
I give you permission to, you know, whatever.
This is before we even went to my condo.
They put me in the back of their car, drove me to my condo, and they went in, and they spent about four and a half hours tearing that motherfucker apart.
Just two dudes.
Actually, it was one dude that was doing all the searching.
I was sitting in the living room, and the other dude was just sitting in there with me.
You know?
And to these guys, I'll give these guys credit.
They were cool.
You know what I mean?
Like, under any other circumstances, like, these weren't, like, bad dudes.
Like, some cops are fucking pricks.
Right.
You know what I mean?
They just, they talk down to you.
They talk shit to you.
You know what I mean?
They tear your shit up.
You know what I mean?
These motherfuckers were kind of cool.
You know what I mean?
They were, in my closet, I had, like, I don't know, like, 300 pairs of sneakers or something like that.
And a dude was like, he was like, he kept coming out there.
He was like, dude, I really like your fucking, he's like, we were talking about, like, Jordan's.
He was talking about my sneaker collection while this other asshole was in there fucking tearing up and going through all my computers and shit.
And then, so, yeah, they searched my whole place.
They, they confiscated anything with a removable.
Removable storage I think they say anything with removable storage they took it so any hard drive any cell phone Laptops they obviously they took I had a safe in the bedroom.
Oh, yeah I had my safe in the bedroom with a bunch of money in it fucking ammunition fucking I had like a thousand cards or something like that printed because what I would do is I would get ahead of myself like if I was wasn't busy I would be bored.
I would just print it and make a thousand cards just in case you had a new blanks right just to stick them in the safe and then I would just and then if I needed to I would go ahead and boss them and code them and you know just streamline the whole process right And then, so yeah, they confiscated everything, took my safe, and he gave me a card.
And I had guns at the house.
They didn't take none of my guns.
I had my concealed weapons license.
I had firearms all over the house.
They didn't take any of them.
I had weed at the house.
And this is South Carolina.
South Carolina, okay.
Illegal.
At that time.
Marijuana is illegal in South Carolina.
Fuck yeah, still.
They're fucking them hicks over there.
They ain't legalized.
That's the Bible Belt, baby.
Yeah, that's the fucking exactly.
He was balls deep in the Bible Belt.
Yeah, you said you I mean, you had told me.
I remember you had said they were like, anything we should know about?
And you said, well, I've got guns.
And they were like, well, we're not the ATF.
Yeah, he's like, we're not the ATF.
And I was like, well, I got a little bit of weed, too.
He's like, well, how much weed do you got?
And I was like, well, it's not pounds.
It's a little bit.
You know what I mean?
Because I smoke every day.
I have been since I was, you know, a little kid.
But yeah, they didn't take the weed.
They left all my fucking drugs and my guns.
They only wanted the fucking credit cards and all the equipment and everything.
And then he gave me.
And he didn't arrest you.
They didn't arrest me.
He gave me a business card and he gave me a date.
on the back of the business card, he said, I need you to be here on this date.
If not, you're going to have a warrant for your arrest.
And so, yeah, I had to go to the Secret Service headquarters in Columbia, South Carolina, and I walk into a room, and there's this long fucking table.
And I walk into this room, and there's like eight dudes sitting around the table.
And in the middle of this table, they got all these screenshots laid out in front of them of Carter.SU, of fucking all the Carter forums I was on.
They had screenshots of my posts on the forums.
They had screenshots of all my fucking people who I had been dealing with.
They had screenshots of I see I see Q chats with me So apparently I had been chatting with the Secret Service like they were buying cards from me.
What?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I didn't know any of this.
And they still couldn't fucking track you.
They still couldn't find you.
Oh, man.
I was bulletproof.
Yeah.
Whoa.
They still didn't arrest them.
And they still didn't arrest them.
So I go down there, right?
So I show up.
They haven't been indicted yet.
Do you see what I'm saying?
So what are they trying to do?
Well, they got to put together a case.
Yeah.
So they're trying to build their case.
And this is just a theory of mine.
But they thought they got the little fish.
And they were trying to get the big fish.
There was a big fish, though.
There was a big fish to get.
Just not in the United States.
Yeah.
Yeah, which would have been so.
So they were using you to build a bigger Rico case?
They were hoping that I was going to pop the lid off of some kind of big conspiracy, big multinational crime ring fraud, which I was a part of, but I didn't have the keys to unlock that door.
So you were, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean, listen.
Yeah, Shoulder Surfer is just a fucking like a.
And I get it.
Weren't you dealing with like the Russian mob?
That's Shoulder Surfer.
Yeah.
Shoulder Surfer.
I didn't know until later that that's what was going on.
Like I had no clue until after.
And so I fucking put two and two together and figured everything out.
And I'm like, oh shit, that's pretty fucking intense, man.
Shoulder Surfer was part of the Russian fucking mafia.
Yeah.
Either he was plugged in or they used him because he was a tech guy or I don't know how.
He ran.
They used all kinds of.
It's not like he's a made guy.
That's what I was saying.
Oh, okay.
No, yeah, I know he was over there doing.
That's what these kids do over there.
I mean, it's been going on over there for.
That's where it actually started at.
It started in Europe, you know, way before it came over here.
I mean, they had the chip and pin system over there years before we did over here.
Do you remember talking about that?
Fucking years.
Do you remember talking about that when I was asking you about, like, that?
Because when we were talking, they were just implementing the chips in the United States.
And I was like, bro, man, they're going to come out with those chips and it's over.
And you go, pfft.
You go, they've been making them fucking chips forever.
What are you fucking talking about?
We're five or ten years behind Europe when it comes to all that shit.
Yeah.
So they get everything first and it trickles down to us.
Because we're, you know, We're a, what do they call that?
A corporatocracy.
Corporatocracy.
Corporatocracy.
Yeah, that's what we are here.
Yeah, slow too.
But where were we?
Yeah.
So that's basically all I was trying to do.
So yeah, they brought you in with a bunch of people.
They weren't arresting you.
No, they weren't arresting you.
What were they trying to do?
They were trying to figure out who I was, who I knew.
Trying to get more people taken down.
Yeah, I had to give up all my passwords to all my emails, all my ICQ chats, all of the forums.
So I'm sure that they were like, if you log on, we'll know.
If we see you on any of the fucking forums, we'll know.
You know what I mean?
Blah, blah, blah.
We'll come and arrest you.
So I was like, you know, it is what it is.
And they didn't take me to jail.
It was weird.
And, you know, and they just, after that, after I went there and I met with all those people and they were asking me all these questions, I got interrogated.
You know, do you know this person?
And they show me this.
They're like, do you know this?
They show me screen names.
Do you know this person?
Do you deal with this person?
You know, do you speak Russian?
Do you code?
All this shit, you know?
And do you code?
Yeah.
They want to know if I was like, you know they wanted to know what the spectrum, what my spectrum of knowledge, I think, was, you know, to try and see where they could implement me, you know, because there was this whole, what was the name of the operation?
Remind me, Matt?
Open Market?
Open Market, yeah, there was Operation Open Market going on at this time.
Matt can explain it a little bit better than I can, because Matt, you actually researched it that I didn't really do.
Because basically, he was basically there was a Carter.su, like Carter.su.
Was the one that the main forum that he was using.
And they got, and so what happened was after, keep in mind, after he left, I'm still getting documents in.
So things he's telling me happen.
When you say after he left, after John left prison, okay.
I had written a synopsis and I had like 60 pages of notes, right?
60, 70 pages of just notes.
I might have had 80 pages of notes, actually.
So I wrote a synopsis, which was maybe 20 pages.
Well, no, it was like 15 pages long.
That's the one that I sent you that's on the, on the, uh, My YouTube channel.
Okay.
And it's on, and the website.
So that's a short version.
Then I wrote the book.
So I had already decided I'm going to expand this into a whole book because there's so much good shit here.
So I start getting stuff in.
I got the indictment, the Carter.SU indictment.
I'm pretty sure it's open market.
Yeah, it's open market.
Dark market was the other one.
Open market.
So Carter.SU was being run out of Russia.
And that was the form.
And they, Secret Service had an investigation into it and was called Operation Dark Market.
No, Open Market.
Operation Open Market.
Where they indicted like, I don't know what they indicted, 150 or 50 people, something like 50 or 100 people, whatever, and a whole bunch of John Doe's and that sort of thing.
And that's when, remember he said, so after he left the UPS store, I'm sorry, after he leaves South Carolina, they let him go.
He's interviewed.
Like, there's a lot of little things.
Like, I didn't know, like, he just said they took pictures of him in front of the UPS store.
Like, I didn't even know that.
Like, I was like, when he said that, it was like a booking.
Yeah, but in front of the UPS store?
Like, I didn't know that.
Like, I'm thinking, that's kind of, you know, they turn, you know, in, you know what I'm saying?
Yeah, right there.
Like, I didn't know that.
I remember the thing where the blow thing, because I mentioned that in the book, the blow thing where you said that it flashed through your head.
Anyway, so after he leaves there for South Carolina, he goes and gets some cash and he gets money out of the bank, right?
How much money did you have in the bank at this point?
About 200 grand.
Okay.
My BOA.
So he.
No, I think he's talking about the money that was in like U.S. Plastico, like in the fucking couple million.
What was U.S. Plastico was what?
The U.S. Plastico account.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
At this point, yeah.
So U.S. Plastico?
Right.
Remember, that's the fucking name.
My eye is, I think I just rubbed something in my eye.
Oh, okay.
Sorry.
He laughs.
When are we talking about now?
We're talking about in South Carolina after the Secret Service lets you go and you go to Miami.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I had a little over $2.5 million or something like that in the bank at this time.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
But he goes and gets a couple hundred thousand out of the bank, and then he gets like a hundred thousand or so in cash he had.
Weren't you, you were cool with keeping two and a half million dollars in the bank at this point?
Like, you had a service on your ass?
Well, the account wasn't in my name, obviously.
Yeah, nothing.
I set the account up.
So there's, you didn't feel like there was any risk in keeping the account?
There was no risk.
There was no risk at all because it was a corporate account.
Okay.
And you know what?
A corporate account that was in a business's name that you were not affiliated with.
Exactly.
Yeah.
That I had set up under a fake identity.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay.
Yeah.
So he grabs money laundering 101.
So he grabs some of the money.
Fake affiliation.
Fake fucking person's got a bank account with two and a half million in it, so he grabs some of the money, goes back to Miami.
Obviously there's a warrant out version well.
Well, I guess they no, wait this time.
There wasn't no, there wasn't then.
But they indict you, they wait yeah yeah yeah, they waited like a couple years right, like three years.
Yeah, put a warrant out for my arrest right, I thought I had fucking years.
After that I thought I had gotten away with everything because yeah remember, he goes, he goes, he still uses, he uses his real id to go in and buy a gun.
Because listen, at this point I thought I was going.
Hey, I thought I was going to prison.
I'm convinced that i'm going to prison right, but after so long, You know what I mean.
Five years, yeah.
Yeah, I saw it.
How old are you at this point?
Late 20s.
Oh, maybe mid 20s?
25, 26, 27, yeah.
Went to prison when I was 27, so.
Yeah.
So he goes, then he goes to Miami.
24 years old with two and a half million bucks in the bank from credit card fraud.
Listen, that's pretty wild.
How many fucking Cadillacs have you owned?
Oh, all of them.
I mean, you know, I did, yeah, yeah.
Now it's Mercedes.
Well, you worked at a Chevy manufacturer.
No, I worked for GM.
I worked for General Motors when I was like 19.
Yeah, yeah.
And then, you know, I watched all the dope boys growing up driving Cadillacs and shit, you know what I mean?
And then I finally got my RTS.
Not so much the Dunks, they were like the older.
You know, 60s, 67, 77.
It was like the 70s from the 70s.
I'm more like, yeah.
I'm more like 80s muscle cars.
You know, like the dope boys, the Cutlasses, the Regals, the Monte Carlos.
You know what I mean?
And then I started getting into like the Caddies, STS, the CTS.
I had them all.
I had a Deville, had the DHS, had two DHSs, had three CTSs.
I had four STSs.
I had a red one, a white one, a black one.
Wow.
Yeah.
Gave a fucking Cadillac away to some stripper.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Why'd you give it to her?
She sucked good dick.
Really?
Yeah.
That's worth it.
Yeah, it's worth a Cadillac.
I don't know about that.
But anyway, so yeah, so he goes back to Miami and goofs off for like a year.
And that's when you met, I forget, what was the rich kid's name?
Oh, not my wife.
You're talking about the rich kid.
Giovanni.
Giovanni.
Yeah, Giovanni.
Yeah.
Who is Giovanni?
Euro trash.
This fucking kid I met in Miami Beach, this fucking trust fund kid living off his dad's money.
And, you know, just Euro trash, strip club, fucking cocaine, partying, you know what I mean?
Just that type of dude.
But he was plugged in everywhere.
He knew everybody.
Giving Cadillacs To Strippers00:15:05
Really?
Every fucking buddy, dude.
He knew everybody.
Like, he had a badass fucking condo at the top floor of this fucking, this building on Brickle in downtown Miami.
Brickle's amazing.
Dude, we used to party.
Like, I've never been to Brickle since I got out of prison.
Oh, really?
Yeah, I remember going to his place and partying, dude, with like Brooke Hogan.
It's like Financial District.
And fucking, dude, a lot of fucking people would be there just fucking hanging out.
And I'd walk in and be like, what the fuck is going on here, dude?
You know what I mean?
It's just wild shit.
The chick from, that one chick from Orange is the New Black.
Name it American Pie.
She was in Orange is a New Black as well.
Oh, is she?
Yeah, what's her name?
I forget.
Natasha Leone or whatever.
Is that her name?
I don't know.
No, she's a comedian, actually.
She's actually a really funny comedian.
No, it's something like that.
So who is this kid?
Giovanni.
What was his deal?
Giovanni, like I said, he's just a fucking Euro trash, you know?
But he was.
What was his connection to that?
Oh, nothing.
No, I was just saying.
No, nothing.
But yeah, that's just part of the wild shit I went with.
Because he basically went for like a year.
There's so many characters like that guy in Miami, I feel like.
Yeah, he went for like a year or so and didn't do anything.
Like, didn't do anything but just basically hang out with Giovanni and party and blow money, but then the money ran out of money.
And then he started carting again.
That's when the second indictment, that's why I was saying I got another indictment in.
Remember, I told you, okay.
Do you think if you wouldn't have started carting again, you would have never gone to prison?
Well, they still would have.
Yeah, I mean, I had a warrant at that time, so I was going to prison.
It was inevitable.
You know what I mean?
I had a mandatory minimum, by the way, a mandatory minimum of 24 months.
With aggravated identity after I got everything you know reduced down.
I mean, they wanted it was like 10 months 10 years like what 150 months 120 120 months That's what I was looking at initially was 120 months.
Yeah at 25 I was 26 Yeah, so I would I would be almost 40 by the time I got up.
So he started carding again Went back on the forum started carding again.
That's all I knew.
That's what I knew because he basically ran on money.
You weren't working you were just spending all the millions that you had.
Yeah, I was running through it pretty fast So he starts carding again, and that's when what you guys jumped like, we've been jumping back and forth.
Basically, remember strippers and it's a lot of cocaine.
Yeah, while I was flying private as well back and forth from Vegas.
Oh, yeah, you were flying private.
How much money were you fucking blowing on private planes?
Well, you get a package.
People don't know this.
You get like a package.
You pay like 120 grand, 100 grand or something like that.
Were you doing the timeshare thing?
You get so many hours.
So you pay X amount of dollars.
You get so many hours of flight time.
Timeshare.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You get so many hours of flight time.
Right.
You know what I mean?
So that's basically what I was doing.
Where a bunch of people will basically throw in money on a bunch of planes or whatever.
Exactly.
Yeah, it's way cheaper.
So it's not, you know.
It's not like I was.
It's not like owning your own jet.
No, I didn't have a pride in owning my own private jet.
That's stupid.
That's such a waste of fucking money.
Well, I mean, unless you got private jet money.
Unless you own an NBA team.
Yeah, sometimes these guys have ridiculous.
Or if it's like a write off or something like that where you can just business, something like that shit.
But yeah, no, I was doing that.
So yeah, I was flying.
I was doing Vegas a lot.
I was going back and forth from Fort Lauderdale to Vegas.
And I was doing the Miami Euro trash scene.
And it was just getting out of hand.
You know what I mean?
It was just all getting completely out of hand.
Just like piles of cocaine and hookers on private planes flying.
I don't know, like it wasn't like that crazy.
I mean, I think I only like Scarface.
I think I only took a stripper on a plane like one time.
Yeah, it was all up.
And we had a town car come pick us up from Scarlett's Cabaret and drive us straight to the Fort Lauderdale executive airport and hop on the but that that's in Miami.
And when he was in Miami, that's when he got caught.
Remember the thing when he told you about Brickle or about the courier because you guys jumped forward.
I was going to say something, say it, but yeah.
Say it after he started carting again.
That's when he went to go pick up a package at a HQ and he saw the secret service, a secret service.
Yeah, we skipped around a minute.
Yeah, we skipped around a lot.
So that's when the courier got grabbed.
And that's when they and then when he came in, also when I was in like the border bookstore and I seen the same dude that grabbed the courier come in.
Right.
And that's when I knew my fucking VPN was bullshit.
Right.
That's when I knew whatever I was doing wasn't doing something right.
I got sloppy.
And so he went to Temple Terrace.
All this happened after I got caught the first time by the Secret Service.
So that's when he went to Temple Terrace.
Remember, he said he got grabbed in Temple Terrace?
So that's when he left Miami, went to Temple Terrace, which was where I grew up, by the way.
Where is Temple Terrace again?
Temple Terrace is.
What state?
No, Tampa.
It's just outside Tampa.
Oh, yeah, it is.
It's like the ghetto side of Tampa.
Basically, people think Temple Terrace is kind of like a suburb, but it's actually his own little city.
But yeah, it's basically.
It's like Hillsboro.
Hillsboro and fucking.
So he was there.
That's when he gets arrested for the final time.
And that's when they sent you to Coleman.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
So, I mean, I know we were jumping around back and forth.
Yeah.
But that's when he got arrested in a Cadillac.
It's like every report I would get in, Cadillac, Cadillac.
I just think it's so fucking amazing.
I put that one in the river.
Oh, yeah.
And I didn't, so I didn't even tell him the story.
Yeah.
Like, I completely fucking forgot I put a Cadillac in the river.
No, you did.
Full of people.
No, you did.
And then I didn't even tell Matt the story or something.
No, wait.
I think I had mentioned it.
I don't remember fucking how it happened, but he got a police report.
And then he was like, Oh, I just got this police report.
It said you drove a car into something.
And I was like, Oh, yeah, I fucking forgot about that.
You did tell me that.
You had told me over lunch one time.
I didn't write it down.
Like, I didn't write it down in our notes.
Like, when we were taking notes, I didn't write it down.
He just happened to tell me one day he was driving his buddy's car.
It was your buddy's car.
It was my Cadillac.
It was mine.
I don't think it was a Cadillac.
It wasn't a Cadillac at all.
You put it in the fuck.
I had a Cadillac at the time.
That's right.
It was my, I had a Grand Am.
And so he raced a car and jumped it into, lost control, jumped it and it went into like a canal or something.
And so he had told me this story, and I was like, okay.
Well, when I ordered all these documents, I happened to get this police report in, and I'm reading, and I'm like, the fuck is this?
And I was like, this is when he told me he was racing his buddies.
He's like doing donuts in the fucking apartment or driving around his car.
I was playing Tokyo Drift through the apartment complex.
Yes, yeah.
They were trying to see how he could drift, and he ended up, that's right.
They were playing a video game or something.
They were talking about fucking drifting.
Tokyo drifting through the fucking apartment complex.
Hit the curb.
Great where you pull up into my spot at, there was like, you know, like the little parking block, and then there's like a hill and a canal.
And I was just going too fast and fucking over, down the hill into the canal.
And I read the cop report.
We were all drunk.
Sure enough.
Car full of girls.
I was trying to fuck this one girl.
That totally fucking turned her off for the night.
That kind of killed the whole mood.
Killed the whole mood for the night.
Fucking bummed me out.
Yeah.
That's hilarious.
There were all these little ridiculous things that he had told me that I would get these documents in.
And at that point, you were in that halfway house, I think.
And I'd call and he'd answer and I'd be like, well, what's up with that?
I got this thing.
And he'd be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think it's so.
Fucking crazy.
How much time did you do total in prison?
Federal prison.
It was almost about 24 months.
Yeah.
24 months.
So two years.
It was two years.
Yeah.
I think it's so fucking wild how much shit that you did and you only got two years.
Well, are you saying the 24 months you're not including like the halfway house?
Because his victims.
Yeah, that's halfway house included.
His victims.
Well, you did.
Oh, you got.
I got suspended.
Not with me.
What about the second time when you got arrested?
Oh, yeah, after I got out.
Yeah, you got out.
You got arrested.
You're not including that.
So you went in for two years in Coleman?
About six months.
Okay, so that's 30 months.
This is 30.
That's about three years then.
Yeah.
All together.
So you did two years in Coleman, got out, and then you started carding again?
Yeah.
I started fucking around again.
Right as soon as I got out, I had a problem.
And this was after Matt met you, wrote the synopsis, and he was trying to call you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I got out and started fucking around again.
And then you got six months.
You were talking on the phone.
He just disappeared.
Talking on the phone.
He's like, yeah.
Yeah.
Just one day.
And listen to this shit, dude.
I got fucking.
So I order.
So I go back through my Connect, right?
I call my dude from China and I got holograms coming in, right?
After I.
This is after I'm living in Miami.
I just got out the halfway house.
I'm in a fucking studio apartment.
And I was living in like a little Havana or something like that in Miami.
What happened to the bank account with all the money in it?
It was completely depleted.
It's gone.
I don't have access to it.
Yeah.
I don't have access to that.
What happened to it?
My debit cards and all that shit got thrown out, my wife, because we were getting pulled over.
So when I got picked up in Temple Terrace, I thought for sure they're going to come to the house and search when I got picked up.
You know what I mean?
I was unaware that I had a warrant from the other shit from years prior or whatever.
And that's what it was for.
So when I told my wife, I was like, listen, as soon as you get home, Get rid of everything.
Whatever I have there, just get rid of it.
You know what I mean?
Dispose of it.
Okay.
And because I thought they were going to come and search.
And if they would have found all that shit, I would fuck, I'd still be in prison.
You know?
They would have built a prison and named it after me.
So, yeah, she went home and she got rid of everything.
She fucking just destroyed everything, threw it away.
I don't know what the fuck she did with it.
And so I go to jail.
And I was in jail for a little while.
And then I come home and I was like, you know, she's like, I got rid of everything.
I was like, good.
Like, where are the debit cards?
Did they ever come to search for it?
No.
No.
They never came to my house to search because the warrant wasn't for that.
I wasn't getting picked up for that like I thought I was.
I thought I was getting picked up for that, for specifically what I was doing at the moment, but it was for what I had already done.
So, yeah, to clarify, the warrant that he was being picked up on was for the South Carolina arrest, which they'd already confiscated all of their stuff.
Right.
He's thinking it's for a second indictment out of Nevada.
So he's thinking they're going to come to the house again.
But they don't come to the house.
And you already had bought a shitload of more equipment.
I had all new equipment.
You had all kinds of cards.
I read up and went for a fucking second run.
Yeah.
Okay, so you.
I was trying to do the big dirty.
You call your wife up.
I was trying to do the big dirty.
She tossed all the cards.
And what'd you do with all the equipment?
She tossed it.
Threw it away.
So you came home after going to jail for how long?
I was gone for.
I was only gone like a week or something like that, a week or two.
So I had to go to court and then all that shit.
So all your money is on all these different cards.
It was spread out and all these different debit cards.
How much money was it?
I want to say I know the BOA for sure had over a million dollars in it at the time.
And then I maybe had maybe 120,000 spread out throughout the Western Union cards.
Because I mean, I had close to $3.5 million at the beginning.
But I went on just a rampage, like a two-year rampage almost.
And then I met my wife in Miami, and then I calmed down.
I tried.
It was like, okay, I'm just going to go straight now.
So all of those cards, the million, one point whatever million.
Gone.
Just gone.
Poof.
It up and vanished like a fucking fart in the wind.
And there was nothing I could do about it.
And believe me, I'm still sick to my stomach to this day.
What was your reaction when you found out she threw everything away?
I snapped out.
But it was just like, my initial reaction was I snapped out.
And then we sat down and we had a conversation about it.
And it was like, I tried to go and look where she said she threw the stuff away at.
And the garbage had been taken out.
You know what I mean?
Like, I was thinking about going to the fucking landfill and digging through fucking, like, I just didn't, like, I didn't know.
Like, I didn't, you know what I mean?
Like, all these ideas are running through my head.
Like, this can't be it.
Like, this just can't be it.
It can't.
This can't be, this can't be the end of it.
This can't be the end.
This can't be it.
And it was just, it was over.
It's fucking all over.
It's all over.
Going to the landfill, that's extreme.
Yeah, you're never going to.
People have done much worse for fucking less money for half that amount.
You know what I mean?
So I'll go fucking dig through fucking piss and shit, you know what I mean, to get those goddamn debit cards back.
But they were just gone.
Everything was gone.
And it was over.
The ride was over.
I had literally no money, like nothing.
I had maybe $10,000 in cash in a fucking shoebox somewhere.
And that was it.
And I was going to prison.
And I was out on fucking supervised release.
And they let him out on bond again.
That's what I understand.
I can't get fucking bond.
They let him out.
They grab him.
They keep letting him out.
They let him out again.
And then he doesn't report.
He stops.
He goes to fucking Michigan, went to Michigan, came back, and then eventually they catch up with him how long after they caught up with you?
I forget if it was a month or two months or whatever.
I don't remember.
It wasn't that long.
They raided your uncle's.
Was it your uncle or cousin?
Yeah, my uncle called me.
He's like, dude, the fucking U.S. Marshal just kicked in my door.
He's like, you know, I just got done burning.
Then my old fucking OG calls me up.
He's like, dude, I just got done burning.
The fucking U.S. Marshals kicked my door.
And I'm like, fuck.
I got the Marshals report for that.
Like they staked that out.
Oh, did you?
Yeah.
That's why I said, that's one of the reasons I wanted to go back and get the document to show you.
Remember, you say, you said, dude, it was a bad trip.
I'm like, dude, I'm sorry, man.
Fucking, I don't even know.
Killed my buzz.
He's like, dude, it was a bad trip.
I was like, dude, I'm sorry, bro.
I didn't know, you know?
I'm sorry.
You would probably know, like, looking at the documents, they, like, sat out some fucking guy's house.
They're staking out all these fucking houses.
He had gone.
I thought I was at.
Yeah, he's not even in Michigan.
He'd gone there, came back.
And then they caught up with you somewhere.
So what do you do after you find, after you fucking have this coming to Jesus?
Moment where you realize all of your millions of dollars are gone and you have nothing.
It was all downhill after that.
These are the bad times that when you started fucking what happened?
Yeah, now what happens?
Dude, I'm broke, I got fucking.
I'm married, I got a kid.
That's not like nine months old.
I go to prison.
I'm broke, I go to prison.
And it was I fucking.
I lost everything everything, everything I had, all my cars, Everything I had, like my I don't know all my sneakers.
Fucking, I'm like in prison.
I'm like okay.
At least I'm gonna get out and have some gear You know what I mean?
At least I'm fucking get out and have a fucking little something.
Going Broke After Millions Gone00:04:54
You know what I mean?
Some clothes, some shoes.
You know what I'm saying?
So the shit, the fruits, all the shit that I had fucking got with all, you know what I mean?
At least I'll have that when I get out.
All fucking gone.
Yep.
Wife got knocked up by some other dude.
No.
I swear to God.
No, I didn't know that.
I get out.
I'm in the halfway house.
Were you still talking to your wife when you were in prison?
I remember when she was in prison.
She didn't really write me that much.
She never came.
I didn't get one visit the whole time I was there, the whole two years.
She wrote me like once or twice.
No, you were getting emails.
She was emailing you.
Yeah, but those got cut off after a minute.
Oh, okay.
And so I was like, whatever.
You know what I mean?
Did you worry about it when you were in there?
No, I wasn't.
Because she, every time I talked to her, she's like, baby, everything's fine.
I love you.
So to give her a little bit of credit, thank you for that.
You know what I mean?
That kept you kind of safe.
Thank you for not shitting on me.
Like, listen, I'm fucking this dude right now.
And you know what I mean?
Like, yeah, at least, you know what I mean?
Don't fucking tell me that shit.
You know what I mean?
At least fucking.
You know what I mean?
I can see that.
My time was a little bit easier.
I mean, I didn't really have that much time, but whatever.
And yeah, I get out.
I'm in the halfway house.
She's got some dude living with her at her fucking mom and dad's, right?
I'm fucking her as soon as I get out of the halfway house.
The day I get out, I'm fucking her.
And she's going back to this dude she's got living with.
That's my wife, dude.
We're fucking married.
We have a kid together.
What are you doing, you fucking retard?
You know what I mean?
What are you doing?
Yeah.
So she's still with this dude, and I'm still fucking her.
You know what I mean?
So yeah, so she dips out.
Like one day she just disappears, and she goes to fucking Nebraska.
She disappears to Nebraska and I'm on I'm on I'm on I'm on federal probation at this time because I just got out of halfway house.
I'm on federal probation and She just disappears I'm like okay, whatever I'm in Miami.
I'm fucking I'm working at this warehouse in Miami and it's grueling man.
I mean, I'm having to wake up at three o'clock in the morning and I was living in I was living on like 12th and Flagler in little Havana Which is like right by like Miami high school, which is like kind of like by downtown, but not really like you got to go down Flagler ways before you get downtown Miami And so I had to walk every morning because I didn't have a car.
I didn't have shit when I got out of Halfway House.
I didn't have nothing.
No money.
I came home to nothing.
No nothing, dude.
I had like fucking one pair of shoes that I got bought while I was in prison.
From prison commissary, fucking Nikes.
You buy Nikes in prison commissary?
Oh, yeah.
What?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I didn't know that.
I mean, they're not nice.
I'm still wearing them.
They're not like fucking Retro Jordans or anything.
They're like socks and t shirts and shit from fucking prison.
Really?
I still wear them.
Oh, I fucking got rid of all that shit.
I fucking still wear them.
You buy LeBrons in prison?
Nah.
They're not cool Nikes.
You know what I mean?
They're not the good ones.
You know what I'm saying?
But they're Nikes.
So, yeah, so I'm rocking prison Nikes.
You know what I mean?
I'm getting up at 3 o'clock in the morning and I'm fucking, I got to walk all the way downtown Miami from 12th and Flagler.
And that's a rough part of town in Miami.
That's a fucking pretty rough part of Miami.
And at 3 o'clock in the morning, there's no buses running.
So I got to walk all the way downtown at 3 in the morning because I got to catch the very first train that leaves downtown Miami that goes all the way to fucking Hialeah, which is an hour train ride.
But I got to catch the first one because I got to be to work at a certain time in the morning.
So I got to catch the first train to go an hour to catch a bus, to ride a bus an hour to go to work.
To work fucking in a warehouse for 10, 12 hours a day and then have to run that whole fucking.
back again all the way to the house.
And I was doing that as soon as I got out of prison.
You know what I mean?
I'm used to driving brand new fucking cars and doing whatever the fuck I want to do.
And now I'm a fucking cockroach down here in Miami doing nothing.
So it was like, I could only take a couple months of that.
And I was just like, I was at my breaking point to where I was like, listen, I'm going to kill myself.
Like, this is, there's, because for me, let me look at me.
I'm fucking tattooed.
I mean, I have an education.
I have my associate's degree.
You know what I mean?
And I kind of feel like I can articulate myself well and I have a vocabulary and I speak well, but that people don't see that.
And people don't give a fuck about your associate's degree when you've been to prison and you look the way I do.
They just don't care.
So any kind of situation that I go into that's a regular kind of employment situation, I'm not making it fucking very high on the corporate ladder.
No.
You made that decision a long time ago.
It is what it is.
And I'm fine with that.
But here I am, I have to have a job because I'm on probation.
You know what I mean?
I'm on federal fucking probation.
And I got this probation officer, which she was really fucking cool.
She didn't really give a shit what I did.
I can only do it for two months and I was just over it and I was just.
I was just like I can't do this anymore, I'm fucking over it.
And I was fucking this girl from the halfway house that I met in the halfway house and like her brother, like I started fucking with her brother and her brother kind of was like wanted to, like he kind of knew about like I kind of told him like what I had done, like my past, and kind of knew about like everything and he was like he kind of wanted to jump into it and He kind of put up the money.
Talking My Way Out Of Probation00:14:45
He didn't, kind of he did, put up the money.
He put up the money and we bought, bought the equipment And I fucking suited up for another run, dude.
The third one, I'm like, you know what?
This is going to be the big dirty.
The last hurrah.
I'm going to get a million and I'm going to go ahead and invest it and, you know what I mean?
Open like a legitimate business and pay taxes and all that shit.
Didn't go that way.
She turned out to be a complete fucking psychopath.
Wait, is this the chick that stabbed you?
Yeah.
Oh.
Yeah.
Listen, this story, like, there's a whole other series of stories.
Like, he got this is a.
Our chick stabbed me with a pair of scissors and almost killed me.
Where did she stab you?
In my chest.
Bounced off my breastplate.
Yeah, almost killed me.
And then, so yeah, that whole thing went south pretty fast.
And then I'm fucking with this chick, and her brother wants to get into it.
And he bought the equipment.
So yeah, so I contact my dude in China, and I get some holograms sent in.
And they get stopped at customs.
Because I'm tracking my package, and I can see it says customs hold on it.
So I'm like, fuck.
They got it, which it's fine because I'm like, it's not in my name.
It's not coming to my apartment.
Right, right, right.
I get about a week, two weeks later, I get two DHL, the delivery service, DHL dudes at my door knocking.
And I look at my people and I see two DHL dudes.
I'm like, what the fuck?
So I open the door.
Two.
Two.
And he's got this yellow, he's got this envelope in his hand that's wrapped in yellow tape.
And that's anything that comes from China.
I don't know if you've ever ordered anything from China, but they use this.
And this you can see it from a mile if you see it you know what it is like anything that comes from China like if you order bulk anything from China They wrap it in this like this yellow fucking tape You know what I mean?
So I seen the package in his hand.
I knew exactly what it was immediately because I'd ordered holograms from this dude before.
So right then and there, I'm like, fuck.
And he's like, they were like, and I didn't have my name on it, obviously.
He's like, the package is for you.
And he showed me to him.
He's like, no, they don't live here.
And he's like, you sure?
He's like, how long have you been living here?
I was like, I just moved in.
That's already too many questions.
About a month ago.
I was like, yeah.
I was like, are you sure?
Yeah, DHL.
He's like, okay.
And so I closed the door.
And he walked away.
And immediately, I was like, fuck me.
Fuck me.
I'm done.
I'm going back to prison.
Because I'm on, listen, I just got out of prison.
I just got out of fucking federal halfway house.
I'm on federal probation.
You know what I mean?
It's all bad.
It's just all bad.
Yeah.
And, um, so he comes back to the door.
I haven't heard this.
Like, I heard, I knew you got arrested.
No, I knew he got arrested.
Like, we were on the phone when he said, fuck, they showed up at my fucking house.
They grabbed me.
They arrested.
They brought you downtown.
I knew that.
But I haven't heard this whole thing.
Yeah.
And, um, So yeah, so then I hear bang at the door.
I'm like fuck he's like police and then now they're yelling police So I'm like fuck dude.
I'm looking at the side window You know I'm saying I'm thinking about jumping out the fucking side window and then dipping I'm like wait a minute I'm thinking in my head.
I was like I don't have anything here I Was like they don't fucking have anything on me.
I was like all they have is this package that came to my door and you've already denied it.
You didn't sign so I opened the door back up.
I'm like I'm gonna fucking ride this thing all the way out fuck these motherfuckers.
Yeah, you know what I mean?
Who the fuck do they think they are coming here trying to arrest me?
You know what I mean?
I'm gonna fucking talk my way out of this shit like I do everything else I'm talking my way out of it, right?
And I'm still, I got them convinced at this point.
Like, I got them convinced at this point that it might not be me.
Like, they think it's me, but they might not be me.
It's discharged.
But they don't know, but they don't, because they don't have, I'm not registered to this address.
Oh, and you haven't, they don't have your name yet?
They haven't given, I haven't given them my driver's license or anything yet.
Right.
Okay.
I didn't know.
So we're talking, we're in my kitchen.
FedEx shows up with a giant fucking box.
Of what?
A fucking embossing machine.
Somebody else ordered a bossing machine to your address?
That's crazy.
Who would do that?
While they're in there talking to you.
I almost had them.
I almost fucking had them until the fucking FedEx fucking shows up with this giant box.
I didn't know this.
That's good shit.
And when the box shows up, it shows up to the same name as the holograms were showing up for.
And the police went out there and talked to him.
That probably worked it to your advantage, though.
No, it didn't.
Because they went out here and talked to him.
And he's like, yeah, I've delivered several packages to this address, and he signed for them.
Oh, right there they fucking had me.
No right there they fucking had me.
Yeah, they knew I couldn't talk my way out of it then they knew and I had to give my ID and they ran They found out what I'd just been to prison for and they're like okay.
All right So at this point I'm like oh I'm fucked.
This is it.
It's all over with I'm going back to fucking prison.
All right, I just got out.
I'm fucking going back So he's like we want the lab they kept saying we want the lab.
We want the lab the lab yeah the print shop because I guess they had just busted some people because Miami's huge for crypt for fraud Miami is like fucking fraud central in the United States.
It's fucking New York, Miami, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles are like the crime hubs for credit card fraud and for identity theft and all that shit.
So, fingers are turning blue, cutting off the circulation.
What the fuck's that saying?
They want the lab.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We want the lab.
We want the lab.
And, so, I mean, this next part's going to fucking kind of sound kind of bad on my part.
Would you snitch?
Oh, for sure I did, yeah.
I'm not going back to prison.
Right.
I'm not going back to prison.
Okay?
Massive.
Listen.
Fuck these motherfuckers.
Fuck these motherfuckers.
You know what I mean?
That's my attitude.
I'm not going back to prison for these motherfuckers that I don't even know.
You know what I mean?
So they're like, we want the lab, we want the lab.
I'm like, all right.
So this dude's the mastermind, I told him.
You know what I mean?
This dude's the fucking mastermind.
I threw Buddy under the bus.
I'm sorry, Buddy.
If you ever watched this, I'm fucking sorry.
His name's Buddy?
No, his name's not Buddy.
Oh, okay.
I'm fucking sorry, dude.
I apologize.
But I wasn't going back to prison.
I apologize.
Yeah, my bad.
Who was the who it wasn't the Secret Service though that grabbed you?
It was no, this was the Miami Financial Crimes Unit.
So it hadn't I was like, is this federal?
That's the first thing I asked him.
I was like, is this federal?
He's like, no, it's not federal.
I was like, okay, now I got some wiggle room.
Then I knew I had some wiggle room, you know what I mean?
Because if it's federal, you're fucking you're done.
They're just gonna indict you and then you can cooperate.
And you're still going to prison, you're still going to prison.
Yeah, so if it was federal, I was like, you know what?
Let's go right now, right?
Because it would have done me no good to fucking to do anything, but it was local, so I knew I had some wiggle room, you know, you can work with them.
So I gave him the dude's fucking address, and then the dude fucking calls me while they're there.
All this is happening.
They just, just the wrong fucking day, dude.
Yeah.
The wrong day.
The dude calls me because we were waiting on the embosser to come in, and I was going to, because the lab was at his house.
Because I was like, that's what I told the dude.
He was like, dude, I'm not setting all this shit up.
I got my fucking probation officer comes over here.
Right.
He's going to come in here and see what, ask me questions about all this equipment.
I'm not even supposed to have a fucking laptop.
You know what I mean?
Fuck.
So we had all this shit set up at his house.
He calls me while they're there.
I had to put in a fucking speakerphone.
He's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's talking to me.
He's like, yo, did it show up?
I'm like, yeah, it's here.
He's like, come drop it off now.
I'm like, I can't really do that.
And they're like, they're both like, fuck.
I'm like, all right, where you want to meet at?
So he's had me meet him at this fucking, I don't remember what it was, like a Publix or something like that.
And he's like, oh, we got to mic you up.
We got to mic you up.
I'm like, what the fuck are we talking about?
Listen, I'm not wearing a wire, man.
What the fuck are you guys talking about?
You know what I mean?
He's like, no, no, it's not like the movies.
You know what I mean?
They brought me like a fucking pager.
And the pager was like a listening device.
It was like a microphone.
And I had to fucking wear it in my pocket when I went and dropped the fucking thing off to him.
Yeah.
So I drive.
So I meet the dude at Publix.
I drop the fucking.
I drop.
This whole story is wild.
I drop the fucking.
I drop the thing off with him.
I wear the fucking listening device.
Once again, dude, I'm sorry.
I wear the fucking listening device.
You know what I mean?
I'm fucking such a piece of shit for this, dude.
I'm 100%, but I'm not going back to prison.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Fuck that.
I'm not going back to prison.
Right.
I heard it.
It is what it is, dude.
I'm sorry.
So, um.
Yeah, I had to wear the listening device on buddy and then fucking meet at Publix meet at Publix.
I dropped it off.
I met with him I drove somewhere and then another one of the one of the two dudes that were there met me there They followed him to his house and then called in fucking reinforcements and they fucking raided his house and found all the equipment Everything they found all the equipment so he was like he's like all right.
He's like you can go the dude at the thing.
He's like you can go I was like, all right.
He lets you walk.
He let me walk.
But he's like, we'll be in contact with you.
And he's like, you know, we have to report this to your probation officer.
We have to.
It's by law.
We have to.
Right.
So I was like, well, all right, fuck.
I'm running.
You know what I mean?
Because now I got a little while to get back to my fucking apartment, pack a bag, and get the fuck out of Dodge.
You're going to get a probation violation.
1,000% of them are going to get a probation violation.
Yeah.
So even if the state says, we're not going to charge them for engaging in illegal activity, which is clearly, a fucking violation of the rules of my fucking conduct, my probation.
Yeah.
Doesn't matter if it's a crime.
Clearly, they don't want me fucking printing credit cards.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Or attempting or hand.
They can, they can, they're going to, they're going to violate you for anything, something like that.
They're going to violate you for anything.
Yeah.
Anything.
Yeah, so I take off.
I go back to my little apartment I had.
And at this time, we hadn't even started making any money yet at this time.
Like, I was still fucking working at the warehouse.
I still really didn't have shit.
I mean, I had a little bit of money because I was doing, we were making cards, so I was going out and doing a little bit of store carding and shit.
You know what I mean?
Just to have a few dollars here and there because I was doing bad, dude.
I was doing fucking bad.
I went up to the used car lot at the end of the street and got a fucking old 2003 Cadillac fucking DHS or some shit like that.
I mean, it was fucked.
It wasn't.
You know my former glory.
If I was trying to get back to my former glory, you know, you ever see that fucking movie Kingpin with Um?
You might be a little bit too young for that one.
It's got Woody Harrelson in it and it's got yeah, I know, and he's got, he's got, he's got that, he's got the Gto and he's young and he's fucking.
You see him like years down the road and the Gto's all fucked up and he's bald and shit.
Like that was me trying to make a comeback.
And here I am trying to make a come try and fuck.
I got the Cadillac.
You know what I mean.
I'm starting to break cards again.
I'm doing all right, you know.
But then I got.
We all got fucked up, but at least they gave me the heads up that they're gonna notify your probation officer, right.
So I got.
I had a little bit of time.
So I go back to my condo, my apartment, and I pack a bag and I call my cousin in Detroit and I was like, yo, he's like, I need to come.
I need to come home.
I need to come up there.
And he bought me a plane ticket.
And I drove my, remember I drove my Cadillac to the airport and I just left it at the airport and I hopped on a plane because I had no intention of ever coming back to Florida at this point.
I mean, I did maybe, but not in the same car in the same apartment in that, you know.
So I left the fucking car at the airport and I flew to Michigan.
And I hung out in Michigan.
Let me see.
I got out of halfway house and I got out of halfway house on my 30th birthday.
is when I got out of the halfway house.
It was February 6th on my 30th birthday.
And this was February, so by July, this is when everything went down was in July.
Okay.
So it was like five months.
Okay.
So then I go out to Michigan, and this time I was like, okay, I'm fucked.
Obviously, I know I have a probate.
I just absconded.
Just got a high.
Yeah, I just absconded from probation, and I'm going to have the probation violation for the shit I just got popped for.
Right.
So now I'm like, you know, I'm fucked, pretty much.
So I'm in Michigan.
I'm fucking partying it up, staying at my cousin's house, just going on a rampage.
Drinking and just knowing that it's all coming.
Oh, yeah, dude.
I'm going out with a bang.
You know what I mean?
And so I'm partying it up.
I'm like, okay, I don't give a fuck if whatever happens, happens.
And my wife calls me up.
She's in Nebraska.
She says, I'm pregnant.
I need you to come out here.
I said, all right.
You know what I mean?
At this time, I'm like, fuck, I can get the fuck.
I'm going to hide in Nebraska.
Who the fuck's going to find me in Nebraska?
You know what I mean?
There's nothing out there but corn.
You know, that's it.
Corn and cattle.
Right.
That's it.
And I'm fucked.
I go hide in Nebraska in my mind.
I'm like, that's the perfect fucking place.
I go out there, you know what I mean?
Settle down.
I got the wife, got the kids out there.
I can fucking hide, and maybe in a few years I'll be able to work all this fucking shit out with a lawyer or something, or maybe not.
So I go out to Nebraska, and that started shit show number two because it was just one fucking conundrum after another.
After I went out, dude, my this whole thing with my wife and I went out there, and guys are bringing flowers by the house and fucking leaving bags of sugar at the fucking door and all kinds just.
all kinds of fucking weird shit, dude.
Like, yeah, it's like, dude, this chick had every dude in this little town we lived in wanted to fuck her.
You know what I mean?
And they just, every dude in the entire little fucking town.
Because they knew where we lived.
Yeah, we lived.
You know what I mean?
We had nice cars and we lived in the house on the main drag and she went to McDonald's every morning for her coffee and we both worked at these small manufacturing plants right in this little tiny small town in Nebraska.
And, um, Yeah, I mean, shit went sideways out there real fucking fast.
She started, you know, doing meth and fucking around with, you know, scumbags.
And here I am.
I don't do drugs.
You know what I mean?
Like, I smoke pot, which is a drug.
Yeah.
So apparently I'm a drug addict and a liar.
You're nothing like any of these other guys.
Yeah.
You're completely normal.
Yeah.
But I'm not doing the hardcore drugs.
Right.
I'm not, fuck, I've never done heroin.
Right.
I'm not smoking crack.
I'm not fucking, I'm not doing none of that shit.
You know, I'm a fucking, I'm a stoner.
I don't even really drink that much.
You know, I barely ever drink.
So, you know, shit goes sideways out there, dude.
So the baby's born with meth in its system.
Mm.
Bomb.
They take our kids away.
God.
They take our kids away.
Fuck.
I got a warrant up for my arrest.
I'm laying in a hospital bed with her.
Here come two fucking cops into the fucking hospital room.
Wanting to lock her up and me up for drugs and this whole fucking thing.
I'm like, what the fuck is going on?
And I didn't even know she was doing meth.
I had no idea she was doing meth while she was fucking pregnant.
Because I had to go and work at the fucking, I was working, yeah.
Yeah, it was fucking all bad.
Yeah, fucking piece of shit.
Fighting Police In The Front Yard00:04:39
So that happened.
And then our kids got taken away.
Find out the little girl.
Not mine.
Not even yours.
I knew right away when the baby was born, she wasn't mine.
That it was the other dude that she had living at her fucking mom and dad's house with her after I got out of the halfway house.
You knew right when the baby was born?
Yeah, I knew right away.
How?
Sorry.
Yeah, I knew right away.
How'd you know right away?
Oh, I looked at her.
I looked at her.
Yeah, I could look for sure 1000% because I knew what the kid looked like.
All right?
And this little girl looks just like that fucking kid.
I mean, it's his 1000%.
I mean, even the dates don't match up.
Because when she had the baby, I was like, wait a minute.
I was in the halfway house.
And I remember, I was like, we had.
This day, this day.
Were you doing the math?
You're like, I'm doing the math.
I'm like, this shit just doesn't fucking jive, dude.
You know what I mean?
But here I am.
Trying to give her the benefit of the doubt?
Well, you know, we had already had my son together, and I knew he's mine for sure.
And, you know, I still love her.
And even to this day, I still love her.
I still love her to death.
And we're still married.
Even though I haven't talked to her in months, and we've been separated for four years.
I haven't seen her in four years since Nebraska.
So this whole thing went down in Nebraska, and, you know, our kids get taken away.
Excuse me.
And I have a worn-up for my arrest.
Because I just took off from.
After all, this just happened down here in in Florida.
Let me get some water.
It's just getting wild.
I'm parched yeah, now i'm.
I'm because yeah, keep in mind, by this point, i'm, i'm stunned with the with the book.
Right, the book's been written.
Yeah, we're into book number two now yeah yeah yeah yeah, like I said, this whole whole, whole another situation and um yeah, so you know the cops, they get involved and I got a warrant for my arrest.
So i'm like dude, what the?
You know what I mean.
I'm in my head.
I'm like dude, this just me, you know what I mean.
Like I came out here to chill And you fucked me because you're an idiot.
You know what I mean?
So the fucking police get involved.
And, you know, sure enough, they finally figure out who I am and they run my name.
And they came to the house to get me one morning.
And this is the whole thing.
Let me tell you this story.
So, okay, so these cops show up.
The gummies wore off.
Yeah, how it's all coming to them.
Pulling teeth before.
It's like, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so I'm working.
I'm working at this little machine shop next door to the house in this small town in Nebraska.
And I'm over there at work.
And I see two sheriffs' cars roll up to my house.
And I already knew what time it was.
So I called my wife and I was right next door.
I'm like, like the police were outside.
I'm going to jail.
She's like, what?
Where?
I'm like, they're outside the house.
She's like, okay, just stay over there.
And I was like, listen, if they know where I live, they know where I work.
You know what I mean?
He lives here.
He works there.
It's not very fucking hard.
So I remember what happened.
I think they left.
She told him I wasn't there and they left.
And then they drove around the back of the shop.
And then so I leave the front door of the shop and I walk into the house and I'm fucking hiding inside the house.
And, like, the cops are, like, surrounding the house now.
Now they know I have a warrant for my arrest.
They know who I am.
They're there to fucking take me to jail.
They got the whole fucking house surrounded dude.
They're beating on the door.
They got flashlights in the windows My wife's not my wife's out there just arguing with him on the front lawn like he's not here my wife my wife bless her heart.
She's five foot even 120 pounds and she's Cuban and her English isn't you know what I mean not like ours You can tell she's not a native, you know, so she's out there arguing with them They finally come in the house.
They finally find me in the basement.
I'm inside of a cabinet.
I'm hiding inside of a fucking cabinet inside of the basement.
I can hear them all walking around the house for like an hour searching for me.
I'm not coming out.
I'm not coming out.
Motherfuckers, you got you have to come down here and find me hide and seek.
Motherfuckers, you know what I mean, you're it?
You dig what i'm saying?
So i'm in the basement, i'm inside of a cabinet and i'm small so I can curl up in a ball and they pull open the cabinet door and he shines the light in there and I just stay still and he closes the cabinet and he was like and they were going to walk away and then I heard.
I heard I heard the footsteps stop and then I heard somebody say something real low.
He saw you yeah, I heard him say somebody real low and then they yank open the cabinet, got the tasers on me.
They got two of them with tasers on me.
I'm like fog and they're like, come out your hands up.
You know what I mean.
So I'm trying to crawl out of this fucking cabinet, dude.
And he just grabs my arm and they yank me out of the fucking cabinet.
Dude, I come outside.
I'm getting arrested.
My wife is fighting the police.
She's physically fighting the police in the front yard.
God bless her.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's what I said.
Like, all right, she's going ham for me.
You know what I mean?
Like, she's fucking going ham.
She's screaming.
She's fighting the police.
She gets arrested.
They arrest us both right there.
Take us both to jail.
Yeah.
Our kids were already taken away.
They were in, like, a fucking foster care or whatever, like that.
We both go to jail.
Yeah, so this was November of 2015.
Transferring Through Leavenworth And Atlanta00:03:23
Is when I started this little journey is when I when I got arrested and we both went to jail and everything I didn't get to South Carolina because I had to go back and see my judge in South Carolina because that's where my warrant was out of I had a federal warrant out of the Southern District of Southern Carolina Northern District of Southern Carolina So I had to go I had to go back to South Carolina to see the judge.
I'm in Nebraska That's on the other side of the fucking country.
You know how long it takes to ship a federal inmate from Nebraska Not good to fucking to South Carolina They don't put you on American Airlines and fly you a direct flight I'll tell you that much right fucking now.
They don't do that.
They don't do Con Air.
They do Con Air, but they hop, skip, and jump you to 10 different fucking little shithole county jails or wherever, you know, who has the contract to hold federal inmates at that time.
You know, so that I'm bouncing around.
Yeah, so I go from, dude, I'm trying to remember now.
I went from Nebraska to the small town I was in.
I sat there for like a week, and then I went to Omaha, Nebraska, which is the big city.
It's the town.
It's the big town.
In in Nebraska, which is they handle all like the big cases.
I sat in Omaha for a month, maybe two weeks, I think two weeks until they transferred me from Omaha I went to what's the federal uh prison in Oklahoma City?
No, right next to Nebraska, it's in um Indiana.
Oh uh um Leavenworth Leavenworth, Leavenworth.
Yeah, so they transferred me from Oklahoma to Leavenworth.
So sad that I know this.
Yeah yeah, and that's an uh, a federal prison encyclopedia.
Yeah I, whenever you need information.
So, yeah, so then I go to Leavenworth.
I'm in Leavenworth for a couple of weeks, maybe a month.
From Leavenworth, they put me on Con Air and they fly me out to Oklahoma and I sit in Oklahoma in the federal prison out there for like a month.
And okay, mind you, when they're transferring you around, you don't get in the general population.
You're in holding.
You're in holding for a month.
That means no commissary.
That means the little tiny toothbrush with the little tiny toothpaste that doesn't fucking work.
You know what I mean?
So your breath's always hot.
You know what I mean?
You get the little tiny deodorant because I can't buy deodorant.
So you get the little tiny deodorant that's one thing and it comes out and it fucking pops and hits the floor and jumps.
You know what I mean?
The one razor that just basically just cuts you and cuts you and cuts you.
Yeah, I didn't even get razors.
Yeah, yeah.
Or you can request.
They'll give it to you.
You shave.
You give it back.
They watch you use it.
Yeah.
Well, you take the razor out and use a knife.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
You can pop out the razor.
Now you got a razor and you can fucking put it on the end of it.
Got it.
I mean, it's really, it's just, it's fucking, these guys are ingenious, but if you're just trying to fucking.
Survive like I'm not involved in all that shit my life's miserable because you guys want to kill each other Yeah, so they transferred you back to South to where South Carolina or what eventually I get back to South Carolina after Leavenworth.
Yeah, I go to Oklahoma then Oklahoma I go to Atlanta then Atlanta I go to lovejoy then from lovejoy I get fucking transferred to some other little listen and mind you through this whole process I almost starved to death twice Okay, they left me in a fucking room to to sit me somewhere for a second while they went and did something and forgot about me for like 18 fucking hours No fucking bullshit, dude.
I was there was no there was nowhere to get water in the fucking room.
I was gonna die I was gonna fucking die in that room if somebody wouldn't just open the door to see if somebody was in there.
Dying Of Thirst In A Cell00:02:39
Yeah.
Yeah So then I made then I get put into some little shithole fucking Jail in South Carolina where they starve you where I almost fucking starved to death, you know, so now I've got PTSD from that shit So yeah, no, I finally get back out South Carolina.
I don't get back out South Carolina to see my judge until after January, after traveling from November, getting picked up in like the beginning of november, so I don't even get to see my judge until the middle of january.
And how much time had passed in that that time period, like from when you were three months.
Three months, 90 days.
Okay, it took about 90 days to get me, just to get me, in front of the judge.
God Bro yeah, yeah.
And then you got six months.
Yeah, and then they killed my paper.
What does that mean?
Uh, they released me without federal probation and I had how does that happen?
My probation or my.
My judge said that i'm not a supervisable.
Yeah, some guys that I'm a flight risk because they've had to extradite me from Nebraska to South Carolina.
They've had to extradite me from Florida to South Carolina multiple times.
And they're like, it's just costing us too much money to ship you all over the country because you can't stay in one spot.
And he keeps running.
And I keep taking off.
I keep absconding on probation.
But A, I'm not a career criminal.
I'm not a drug addict.
You know what I mean?
I'm not somebody who is in the higher category for recidivism.
Yeah, he's not going to go into a bank with a fucking AK-45.
It's not like it's going to bounce back.
I'm not a danger to the public.
Yeah, I'm not going to, you know, I'm not a raper or a stabber or nothing like that.
Right, right, right.
So, yeah.
I'm sorry.
I was going to say, a lot of guys, I've known guys that have literally, like, they'll get five or 10 years.
They'll have five years' paper.
They'll get paper, meaning probation.
They'll get out and violate and come back to prison.
And then, so they'll violate their paper and go in front of the judge and be like, and the judge will, they used to do this all the time.
They don't do it as much anymore.
The judge would say, okay, look, you've got, You have three years left on your probation.
You know, if I give you a cup, if I release you and you put you back on probation, you know, you're going to be okay.
And they will, you know, you're going to do the right thing.
There are guys that will be like, absolutely not.
I'm going to violate again.
Like they'll get caught smoking pot or doing drugs.
They'll go, I'm going to do drugs again, Your Honor.
And they'll look at them and go, well, then you're going to go back to prison.
Well, then I'll go back to prison, but I'm going to keep doing it.
And the judge will just look at them and go, would you rather I quash your paper?
And they'll say, yeah.
Okay, well, then you got to go to jail for a year.
It's usually one third.
So they'll go, You go to jail for a year, and when you get out, you don't have any probation.
Okay, I'll go back for a year.
Weird.
So they'll go back for a year.
Listen, I got five years' paper.
Violating Paperwork To Face The Judge00:04:38
But the problem is, I owe $6 million.
That's rough.
He's got somebody up his asshole for five fucking years.
She's a nice lady, though.
I mean, she is nice.
She's just strict.
Most of them are nice.
Yeah.
They have to do their job.
Right.
I think the craziest thing about all this is like, he had a victimless crime.
You basically scammed scammers, you scammed the financial institution, the banks.
Well, there were some victims in there.
Yeah, there's a couple of victims.
There's people, some people off money.
You had legitimate people, individuals.
You were taking it straight from their bank accounts, right?
No, these are credit cards.
They don't lose any money at all.
They do have to make some phone calls, and it's a pain in the ass.
But look, if I take your credit card information, And I run up $5,000 on your credit card, and then you get the bill in the next month, and you go, Holy shit.
Right.
You just call them, and they chalk it up to fraud.
Right.
You follow a police report.
You didn't steal anybody's hard earned money.
No, no, no.
Really, I was just manufacturing financial transaction devices.
Right.
Yeah, that was the actual charge was access to, what was it called?
A fraudulent transaction device.
Yeah.
Manufacturing of a fraudulent transaction.
That's just amazing.
Which they dropped those charges.
Which they dropped those charges.
It's wild, ain't it?
Well, I mean, it's amazing.
Well, it is, but I was also look, I was high profile.
There was a lot of coverage.
There was, they're not going to let me skate.
The truth is, my look, the truth is the people involved in my case most likely were like, if it hadn't been high profile, that they would have been like, they would have shrugged it off.
I would have gotten five or ten years.
No big deal.
But boom, a lot of fucking press hammer this guy.
Him, they dropped, he's supposed to get ten years.
They dropped the charge because the UPS guy never should have opened the package, but they wouldn't drop the aggravated identity theft.
Because they could prove that.
So he got two years.
Yeah, yeah, I got the mandatory and the mandatory minimum for that, which I got really good.
Because the guy should not have opened the package.
He never should have opened the package.
He didn't have authorization on the war.
He didn't have authorization.
Those were sealed packages.
Did he get in trouble?
No.
No, but I mean, he helped me out.
He helped me and hurt me, I guess.
Yeah, but I mean, look, they can't put him on the stand.
He's got to either get on the stand and implicate himself.
I opened a piece of mail, I broke a federal law.
So most people are probably going to get on the stand and say, I can't answer that.
Or he's going to get on the stand and say, look, when I called the U.S. Post Office, I felt they were instructing me to open the package.
And that's why I opened it.
That gives him an out.
You see what I'm saying?
And then guess what?
Now that's no good.
What was in the package is no good as evidence anyway because he's saying you told him to do it.
Either way, we can't use it.
So his public defender got the U.S. attorney to drop that part.
And he said, okay, I'll drop that.
But he's got to do the two years.
And they said, and he came back to him and he was like, fuck, two years is a gift compared to 10.
So dig this, though.
This is something I didn't forgot to tell you guys.
So when I get back in front of the judge and she's reading all my charges and I get my paperwork back with all my violations on it, because there's different levels of violation.
And in the federal system, everything's structured.
Like, okay, if you.
Fall in this category of like a level one violation, they can only give you X amount of months for, and then they have to kick you back out again.
Or if it's a level two, then they can give you X amount of months.
Or if they, you know what I mean?
So I'm going over my paperwork and I'm reading my report that my probation officer had left.
And she said that she went to my apartment.
I had, she called me on several occasions and I didn't answer her calls.
So she went to my apartment and I didn't answer the door.
And that the landlord had just happened to be there, like cleaning it out.
And she said that I had moved.
So she violated me from absconding for probation.
Yeah.
Had nothing.
Those two dudes that busted me never went and fucking told them pulled told my probation officer nothing really never told never so I ran I ran for no fucking reason I could have stayed I could have stayed in Miami and and and just try to do the probation thing I didn't know and I and you know I didn't know they weren't gonna say anything that was fucking who the fuck knew they weren't gonna stay I didn't she didn't know she had no idea that any of that had even happened and they violated me because I I just absconded Yeah,
that's fucking fucking wild We just did three fucking hours.
Moving Apartments And Absconding00:01:04
Are you serious?
Yeah.
Rockin' and rollin'.
That was amazing, man.
We were rockin' and rollin'.
All right.
So, where can everyone listening to this and watching it find more about your story and whatever?
You got any social media you want people to follow?
Buy Matt's book.
Yeah, no, buy his book.
He's got a book.
He's got a book called Bent.
Yeah.
It's a memoir.
You can find it on Amazon.
Yeah, it's my memoir.
Yeah, you can find it on Amazon.
It's Bent, B E N T.
Yeah.
If you just go on Amazon and you type in the search bar Bent Cybercrime, it comes right up.
Yeah.
Or my channel, but you got my channel.
He's got the narration, which is just a synopsis of the book.
Matt's YouTube channel.
Yeah, it's Matt Cox and Inside True Crime.
Yeah.
You know, we can put the links.
Yeah.
Or you can connect with me through my social medias, Slumby Nature, at Slumby Nature, Instagram.
Yeah, with the, yeah, a bunch of the tattooing stuff, too.
Hell yeah.
Oh, yeah, my tattoo page is jug.ink, j-u-u-g.ink.
Yeah, we can do that.
But we can send him all the, if you send it to me.