Brett Johnson details his rise from a childhood of abuse to leading the "Shadow Crew," laundering $160,000 weekly via global banks before the CVV1 breach collapsed his empire. He recounts his 2005 arrest, a prison escape, and eventual redemption as a cybersecurity consultant who now critiques state actors like Russia and whistleblowers such as Snowden and Assange. Ultimately, Johnson argues that while forensic evidence can identify attackers, geopolitical hypocrisy and eroded public trust complicate the fight against modern cyber threats. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
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From Miami to Most Wanted00:15:00
Thank you.
I'm going to butcher this.
Maybe you can fix it.
But you're basically the Secret Service's most wanted cyber criminal in the history of the United States.
It's my understanding that I was the first, if you want to call it hacker, but first cyber criminal that made the United States most wanted list.
It's my understanding.
At least the Secret Service most wanted list.
Okay.
Okay.
So how did you get into this world?
Especially coming from Alabama, of all places.
Well, I'm from Kentucky.
Okay.
I'm residing in Alabama.
Okay.
So how did I get into it?
Man, that's an interesting discussion there.
What was your childhood?
Yeah, it's a childhood.
And I talk about it extensively on my show and everything else, but my life of crime begins when I was 10 years old.
My mom was the fraudster in the family.
My dad was a captain in the military, helicopter pilot in the army.
And mom was just this crazy fuck.
She was off the chain on stuff.
She was.
This is a woman that she would bring men home in front of my dad.
All right.
She cheated religiously on the man, but I remember times that she would bring men home in front of him, and he would sit there and cry, and she would explain to him how she didn't love him anymore, how she was leaving him, how she was going to go off with this guy, and she was going to take her children with her.
And he'd beg her not to do it, and he would keep taking her back.
And this was this guy, and his problem was he he loved my mom so much that he was scared of her leaving, so he would put up with it.
I mean, just a good man at heart, you know, and not really the criminal mindset at all for my dad.
He had two instances that I know in his life where he tried to do the criminal thing.
You know, his thing was like one of the things is he was a helicopter pilot in the military, in the army.
They downsized.
So they offered him, they said, hey, you can either come back in as a staff sergeant or we'll cut you loose.
And he was like, well, shit, cut me loose.
So he goes back and he decides he's going to be a coal miner in Eastern Kentucky.
Well, he didn't understand that coal mining in Eastern Kentucky, yeah, they were paying a hell of a lot of money back then, but you were on strike about every three months.
So most of the time you were on food stamps and unemployment.
So we were going broke pretty quickly.
And his first real criminal idea, mom was doing all this bullshit, you know, burning cars, faking accidents, all this other stuff.
But my dad had his first idea, and he said, Well, shit, you know, I can transport drugs back and forth across the Texas Mexican border.
Well, we had there was a guy named Tommy Allen Combs in the Hazard area.
He lived in a place called Jeff, which was right down the road from Hazard.
And he had served time.
He was part of what was called the cornbread mafia.
So he had served prison time.
My dad knew him pretty well.
So I remember my dad, we'd all load up me, my sister, my mom, and dad.
We'd load up and we'd pay Tommy a visit.
And Tommy's thing was, you know, He knew the trade.
He was connected to all those people.
He had served prison time, but he hadn't snitched on anybody.
So all the law enforcement in the area hated his fucking guts, but you could trust the guy.
So dad was talking to him, and dad wanted to do this job, and Tommy was down with it and everything.
And what derailed that, the sheriff in Perry County, Kentucky, his name was Pearl Couch.
He calls Tommy up one day, and he's like, Tommy, we got a warrant for you, and we need you to come in.
Tommy's like, I'm not coming in.
You'll have to come down and get me.
And Pearl's like, okay, we'll do that.
Well, They send a Kentucky State police officer and a Perry County Sheriff's Officer, and he kills one, puts the other one in a wheelchair for life.
And a six-hour shootout ensues from there.
They kill Tommy Allen.
And my dad at that point decides, maybe flying drugs back and forth across the border, not a good idea.
So that was the first instance.
The other instance, which we were in Hazard, and it gets us to Panama City, my dad was watching 60 Minutes one night.
And they've got a segment on the drug trade down in Miami.
Now, this is, you know, late 70s.
So they were showing the pallets of cocaine, the tables of cash and everything.
So he's sitting there locked onto that shit.
And after the segment, he looks over at my mom.
He's like, I think I need to go down to Miami and be a police officer.
And my mom's like, Yes, I think you do.
And the plan was he'd go down and become a Miami Dade officer.
And he had happened upon a drug deal.
He'd let them keep the drugs, he'd keep the cash.
And my thing was, and I was, shit, I was only like eight or nine.
My thing was, is won't they just shoot you?
He was like, Oh, no, it never happened.
So we get to Miami.
The night the Miami riots broke out, I forgot Orlando something was a guy's name.
This guy had been in a car chase.
He had wrecked.
The cops had drug him out of the car, literally beat him to death, then covered it up.
So when all that actually came out in the news that that happened, Miami exploded.
We got down there that night.
Good Lord.
All this shit's popping off, you know, and that was the first problem.
My dad goes to cop school day one, comes back.
He's like, oh, I think it's going to work.
Day two, he comes back.
We got to leave this fucking place.
So what had happened was Miami-Dade, the real cops burst in, arrest six of the people that were taking the classes because they had outstanding warrants.
All of them evidently had the same idea that he had, right?
So we were broke at that point.
The way we got the money to go from Hazard to Miami, they sold everything they had.
My mom had faked a slip and fall in a hospital and had sued the hospital.
To get some money.
So they used all that and loaded up a u-haw with what belongings they had, loaded up the kids and the dog and we started.
We went down to Miami.
Well, by the time we got to Miami we were pretty much broke and so they didn't know.
They knew they didn't want to stay in Miami, so they started heading north on I-75.
They get up around you know the Orlando area and they didn't know where they were going.
But they remembered they had both spent spring break in Panama City.
So they decided on Panama City, Florida.
My dad got a job as a 7-eleven store clerk, making 140 a week.
My mom was an LPN nurse.
She got a job, but she would only work long enough to see my dad off to his job.
Then she'd go out and cheat on him.
So that was our existence right there.
My mom leaves my dad.
I was 10.
My sister Denise was 9.
Mom leaves him, and the way she left him, her grandfather had died, my great-grandfather.
She tells my dad, she's like, I'm going to take the kids up to the funeral.
And dad's like, okay.
Well, we didn't know.
She was leaving him.
So she packs all of her clothes, didn't pack any of our clothes, bugs out, right?
And I don't see my dad again for, I was 10.
I don't see him again for five years.
I don't have a conversation with the man for probably 20 years after that.
Wow.
So we moved back to Hazard, Kentucky.
We moved, my mom's parents, and they were all fucking crazy, but my mom's parents, my grandfather had his house, he had elevated the house, and then underneath the house, he had built apartments that he would rent out, and we moved in one of those apartments.
And my mom would, she was, my mom was fucked up.
She was, as she is fucked up.
She could be physically abusive, but her heart was with the emotional and the mental, the verbal stuff, you know?
And she was negligent as all hell.
She would leave me and Denise alone for days at a time when she went out and partied.
Sometimes she'd take us with her.
Most of the time we just got left at the house.
So my life of crime begins.
And I said this, I say it on my channel too.
I get the worst parts from my mom and my dad.
My mom, I get that criminal mindset.
That's where that shit comes from, no doubt.
But my dad, it's mixed with that fear of the people that I love leaving me.
So it's bad, man.
I mean, it's bad.
I didn't have a healthy relationship until I was in my 40s because I always chose these women that were narcissistic, that were, you know, I could fix them, that kind of stuff.
That same type of woman my dad had.
And I have this huge fear of people leaving me.
I have a huge fear.
So I go over and above any type of normal, healthy type of relationship activities.
So, uh, My mom, where my life cry begins, my mom had been gone for a few days.
Me and Denise were at home.
No food in the house.
I'm the kid that used to post up at the window and look outside to see if she's coming home.
Denise was the kid that got angry, just mad all the fucking time.
Is this your sister?
Yeah, it's my sister.
And she's a year younger than me.
So we didn't have any food in the house.
Denise walks in one day and she's got this pack of pork chops in her hand.
And I'm like, where'd you get that?
And she's like, I stole it.
And I'm like, Show me how you did that.
So she takes me over to the ANP and she shows me how she's stuffing food down her pants.
And I'm like, shit, that's the best idea ever.
Let's do that.
It gets where we're wanting a sandwich.
And in the shopping plaza, there was the ANP and there were some other little shops and there was a Kmart at the upper end of it.
Well, you can't stuff bread down your pants.
So I was like, let me see what I can do.
Walked into Kmart, got a hoodie off the shelf, took the tags off of it, wore it out, made it out.
Nobody noticed anything.
And the way you steal bread is you take the hoodie, you throw it over your shoulder when you're in the grocery store, and you stuff the loaf of bread down the sleeve of the shirt.
You just walk out with it.
Nobody can see that's in there.
And that's what we did.
And I started using that hoodie to steal all kinds of shit.
I would go back into Kmart, and it became like this, you know, Maslow, a perverted form of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
You know, you got books and games and jewelry and music and all this shit.
Mom comes home.
Mom comes home, sees the Atari, sees the Intellivision, sees all this stuff that's stolen.
Ask where it came from.
I'm like, oh, we found it.
She's like, no, you didn't find that shit.
My sister stands up and she's proud about it.
She's mad about it.
And she's like, we stole it.
And my mom's like, show me how you did that.
So she starts running us as little shoplifters.
She joins us.
She calls her mom to join us as well.
Wow.
And we become this intergenerational shoplifting ring, right?
You used to take these road trips.
They'd go to JCPenney's and steal clothes and jewelry.
I'd go to the bookstore and steal books.
And that's the way it worked until.
They got caught.
We went to Bristol, Kingsport, or Bristol, whatever that is, that tri-city area, Bristol, Kingsport, Johnson City.
There was a mall called, I think the Fort Henry Thomas Mall was what it was called.
And they went into JCPenney's to steal clothes and jewelry.
My grandmother, my mom, my sister.
I went down to B. Dalton Bookstores to steal a shitload of books.
So we were supposed to meet back at the blazer at like at 1 o'clock, 1.30, shit like that.
So I come back, nobody's there.
I'm like looking around, nobody's there.
I'm waiting.
It felt like I waited about 30 minutes.
I'm like, some shit's going on.
So I hide my stolen property underneath the blazer because I couldn't get into it, walk into JCPenney's.
As I'm walking into JCPenney's, two security guards are standing in the entryway there, and I hear my name pop up on the walkie-talkie, Brett Johnson.
So I stop, and I'm like, Brett Johnson?
They're like, yeah?
Is that you?
I'm like, yeah!
They're like, come with us.
So they lead me to the security room in JCPenney's, and there's my grandmother and my mom huddled in a corner, holding each other, crying.
Talking about how they didn't mean to do it.
It was a mistake.
First time they've ever done it.
Didn't know what was going on.
We're sorry.
We're sorry.
My sister sitting opposite of them, not crying, just pissed the fuck off.
Just like I could kill you both right now.
So that's where my crimes begin, right there.
How old were you during that time?
Started when I was 10.
That was around 10 years old.
Started when I was 10, 10, 11, somewhere through there.
So that was kind of hardwired into you?
Well, it's interesting.
Now, you know, I've given interviews, and part of my problem is that I know that as an adult, my choices are mine.
All right, I know that.
So just because you have a fucked up childhood doesn't mean you have to go off and be a criminal or commit crime or victimize other people.
I chose to do that.
But, this is the but of that.
The but is that there has to be some correlation with the childhood.
And what happened, you know, with my committing crime as an adult.
Because what happens as a child, that whole side of the family were criminals.
Every fucking one of them were off the chain.
My grandfather used to buy stolen property.
This is a man who they blamed it on his diabetes and sugar, but this is a man who would chase you around the house with a knife, a hose.
He would, I mean, it was just insane stuff.
There was a couple of times he would fire off firearms in the house.
His wife, he put her in the hospital one time because she was decorating a Christmas tree and she was bent over and he was wearing these steel-toed boots and he just comes and kicks her as hard as he can, puts her in the hospital for like four days.
This is that environment.
My mom, I was telling somebody the other day, I've got two early memories, the earliest memories I've got.
One of them, and I knew the entire time that one was real, was my dad was in fort Lewis, Washington.
We were on base on Fort Lewis in the car.
Me and Denise were in the back seat.
My mom and dad were in the front seat.
Dad was driving.
They're arguing.
And my dad's common phrase back then was, Carolyn, please stop.
Just stop.
Please stop.
My mom's screaming.
And I remember my mom lunged across the car, grabbed the steering wheel, and tried to direct us into traffic.
Screaming the entire time, are you ready to die, you son of a bitch?
The Coal Company Disaster00:05:15
Now, I know that's a real one, all right?
The one memory that I didn't know was real.
and didn't know it for years.
It's only been in the past five or six years that my mom actually alluded to it at one point.
But I had this memory of my mom having a woman tied up in the front yard to a chair and beating her.
Yeah.
I mean, I had that memory, right?
And she was bleeding and everything.
And for years, I thought that that was a false memory.
You know, I just made it up.
Until my mom comes to visit when I was in Birmingham.
I haven't talked to my mom in like three or four years now, but she comes to visit at one point.
She alludes to that.
And I was like, holy shit, that stuff's fucking real, man.
So that's, and it's interesting that I was talking to a therapist about this, but when I start telling these stories, it's like it minimizes what actually went on because this stuff was every day.
I mean, it was not just an instance.
It was every day.
But at the same time, my mom could be a very loving person.
You know, you had this juxtaposition of somebody who was truly evil and criminal.
And then somebody that would hold you and hug you and tell you she loved you and everything else like that.
So it was this weird type of thing that I grew up in.
And as I get older, I get more involved in the types of crime that that family's committing.
So insurance fraud.
So I grew up knowing how to burn homes, how to fake car accidents, how to forge documents, charity fraud.
Insurance scams.
Insurance scams.
Absolutely.
Insurance scams.
The slip and fall you mentioned earlier.
Slip and fall.
But not only that, if you, you know, Hazard, Kentucky, that, that, area of Kentucky is known for flash floods and stuff like that.
If you had any type of damage or stuff like that, you'd learn how to do that type of fraud, false claims.
Illegally mining coal.
At that 13, 14, I figured out we were doing that, so I was involved in that kind of bullshit.
It gets to the point.
Illegally mining coal?
Yeah, yeah.
So my mom, she leaves my dad.
And my mom had this thing where she always picked unhealthy guys to date.
All right.
But she would date these guys, and then she would come back, and she would tell me and Denise, you know, that the guy at one point was, he had been convicted on murder, but he had gotten off.
He had killed his girlfriend.
So she'd tell us this stuff, or that he had tried to rape her the night before, you know, to just push our buttons all the time.
And it was common, it was me she would tell this stuff to.
But she ends up meeting this guy at a bar, and she marries him.
Now, he was a coal miner.
He was working for a coal company.
She talks him into quitting his job and going into business for himself.
His name was Jimmy, and he was a hard worker.
He was not very bright, but he was a hard-ass worker.
He loved the shit out of my mom.
But she talks him into going into business for himself.
He does, but to really do coal mining legally, it takes money.
You've got to have a loader.
You've got to have a dozer.
You've got to have the permits.
So they had a loader and dozer.
He had taken out loans, everything else to get this, and they had massive payments on these two pieces of equipment.
The permits are the problem because if you get a two-acre permit, I think back then it was like $3,500 per acre is what you had to put up for the bond.
So you get the permit, they grant you that, and then you strip mine the coal, and then you have to reclaim the land, which comes into some big money at that point.
So if you've got a pit of coal that's a few thousand tons of coal in there, you sell that, then you have to have a silt pond, you have to have all this bullshit that's there for the environment.
Most people can't afford that.
So what you do is you do wildcatting.
You find somebody that's got coal on their property, you pay them so much per ton for that coal, you bypass the permit structure, and you go out and you get the coal off.
So much work that goes into that.
Oh, yeah, that's one of the things.
Is the juice really worth the squeeze with that?
But you figure in eastern Kentucky, what are you going to do?
Right.
You know, you've got coal, you've got some medical, you've got some education.
Other than that, it's the service industry, the drug sales if you're illegal, shit like that.
So, uh, That started doing that.
They went broke on that.
And when I say they went broke, they were trying to get a pit of coal out.
They hired this dozer operator who didn't know how, not a dozer, a loader operator, that didn't know how to run a loader.
So he actually destroys the loader.
I mean, just blows the engine up right there.
At the same time, they had a final drive go out of the dozer, so had both pieces of equipment with massive amounts of repair.
The pit sat there.
They weren't able to get it out at all, so they go broke right there.
And what ends up happening is me, my sister, Jimmy, mom, and a work hand lived in a 40-foot trailer.
for about a year and a half, all five of us.
You know, it was a one-bedroom trailer.
Prison Time and Stage Fright00:09:37
Me and Denise slept in the living room.
Robert, the work hand, he slept in the kitchen.
And we lived on deer meat and cornmeal for a year, you know, well, a year and a half, until Jimmy, he got enough money to buy a couple of chainsaws and starts going out and making mining timbers is what he's doing.
And he builds up a mining, not a mining, but a timber company from that point.
And it does pretty well.
But so that was what that was.
But what happens is I was probably seven, eight, something like that, because I was still with my mom and my dad.
And, you know, mom used to, it was bad, man.
It was bad.
You know, she'd tell us that she was going to leave and not come back, that we'd find her dead someplace, that she'd given up her life for us, all this shit.
And she'd play games with us.
I remember once my mom, my dad was at work.
Me and Denise were playing video games.
We hear mom call us.
So we walk into the living room.
She's got all the lights doused.
She's got incense burning and these candles burning.
She's set up two dining room chairs in the middle of the living room facing each other.
And she tells us she sold her soul to Satan so that we could go off.
And the deal was she sold her soul to Satan so that we could go off to college and have good lives.
And once that, once we graduated college, Satan would call her home.
That's what she told us.
Now, that sounds ridiculous when you're an adult, but when you're a kid, you take that shit serious.
So the deal was we had to prove that we were worthy.
And the way we proved it is we would take turns sitting across from mom.
Mom would, and we'd keep eye contact, not supposed to blink, just keep eye contact.
And she would let Satan come out through her eyes as we thought happy Jesus thoughts and tried not to be possessed as well.
And we spent hours doing this shit, just hours doing that.
So that's what I grew up in.
Two things happened.
The first is that I start, mom and dad would leave and I would urinate in the floor.
I mean, just piss in the floor.
And it took me, geez, I guess it took 30 plus years to talk about that.
The way I started talking about it, I served my prison time.
I started speaking publicly, doing presentations for cybersecurity companies and conferences.
And during one of these presentations, I just started talking about this shit.
For the first time?
First time.
Just started talking about it.
Had you thought about it a lot?
Yeah, I had.
Did you have vivid memories of it?
I had.
I had been thinking about it.
And with speaking, I told myself, I'm going to be doing this stuff for a while.
So I want to learn something new about myself every time I'm on stage.
So, yeah, yeah, hell of a deal to make with yourself.
So I was on stage and I started talking about it.
And I mentioned in the presentation, I was like, I don't know why I did that.
Well, this woman comes up to me after the presentation and she says, You know, before I started this job, I used to work with abused kids.
So that's a control mechanism.
That's the only control you had was that.
She said, kids do that kind of stuff.
And it made a lot of sense to me.
So that was the first instance.
The second instance is my mom leaves my dad.
And that was when I was 10 or 11.
Well, when I'm 15, I've been calling my dad and we'd talk on the phone, you know, these kind of cursory phone calls.
And I had it in my head that I was going to go live with my dad.
And it was a Sunday.
I know me and my cousins, we were going to go that afternoon and watch Return of the Jedi.
It had been up again.
They used to re-up that film every few years.
So in 1985 is when this was.
And I called my dad.
I used to walk out to that Kmart where I shoplifted things.
I used to walk out to that Kmart and they had a payphone there and I'd call my dad and we'd talk.
This day I called my dad and he tells me he'd either already gotten married or he was going to get married.
First I'd heard about it.
But it was evident that I was not going to go and live with my father.
So what happens is that call ends.
I go over to the hospital.
I get in an elevator.
This woman will.
This woman gets in the elevator at the same time that I do, and I ended up beating the hell out of the woman.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How old were you?
You're 15?
I was 15.
I was 15.
And beat the hell out of the woman.
I guess the emergency stop button got hit during that assault.
And I remember being in the actually, I remember every fucking thing in there.
But was there something that set you off, triggered you?
I really don't know what did that.
I do now.
Yeah, I do now.
Then I didn't.
Now, yeah, I know exactly what that is.
I could rationalize that and say that was the abuse that finally hit that head, and that the cap on that or the thing that actually caused it to pop was the phone call with my father.
Rationally, I can do that.
Emotionally, it's a completely different story.
Rationally, I can say, Brett, you were 15, you were a kid, but I did that.
I remember trying to climb the walls of the damn elevator to try to get out.
The elevator gets turned back on.
Make it up to the floor, the door opens, and there's an orderly there that I used to shoot basketball with his son.
He goes to grab me.
I knock the hell out of him and get out of the hospital.
make my way back to my grandfather's house is where I was staying at the time.
And within, you know, hour, hour and a half, Kentucky State Police show up because everybody knew who it was.
And they pick me up.
I go in, confess to everything.
It was like three or six months I spent.
They didn't have a juvenile facility.
Spent three or six months in basically solitary at that point and pled guilty to, actually I didn't plead.
I went to trial because they had charged me with robbery and assault.
I didn't steal anything.
The judge found me not guilty of the robbery, found me guilty of assault, sentenced me to time served and a psychiatric evaluation in Louisville, Kentucky.
went up there for 30 or 60 days, got through the evaluation, got cut loose, and I was supposed to get psychological evaluation or counseling after that, but you're in Eastern Kentucky, you don't get that shit.
So that was the end of that, and everybody kind of swept it under the rug.
The woman was, I was 15, she was 46 at that point.
What happened on the phone call with your dad prior to that?
What made you decide that you weren't going to go live with him?
It was, I don't even remember what the actual, the, The content of the call was it was He had said like I said he had said that he had gotten married or he was about to get married I've forgotten how what it was but Up until that point We had always talked about me moving down there,
you know that I was gonna go live with live with my dad and It was not that way during that call was evident that no Brad you're not gonna do that shit at all, you know I've got my life down here You're with your mom now.
And that was what went on.
What happens is, is I'm in jail.
My dad, he comes up to see me.
Now he sees me for, you know, a little bit, but, you know, you can't really see somebody when you're locked up like that.
And I don't see him again, really, until I was 15 at that point.
Next time I see my dad is when I'm being sentenced in federal court for all these crimes that I committed is what happened.
I mean, after all the cyber crimes and all of that stuff.
Yeah.
So 15, and it took, hell, I mentioned that on, I got, I was 30 years talking about that shit.
You know, I would, I'd think about it every day.
But, you know, being able to talk about that, and I have trouble now talking about it, but being able to actually talk about that and what I did, it took me over 30 years to do that.
And I did it on stage again because that's, that tends to be my safe spot.
So my safe spots on video with a podcast.
or on stage and a bunch of front of people and then I'll start talking about shit.
Yeah.
But, yeah, what happens is, is 15 did that.
Thirty Years of Silence00:05:35
Of course, I became the pariah in the community, deservedly so.
Yeah.
Because people don't know what the fuck's going on, you know?
Why this guy beat up this young lady.
Yeah, and you're a small town, so everybody knows about it.
Right.
And I can't say I didn't deserve that shit.
Certainly did.
You know, you do something like that, you deserve something.
But, ended up moving schools and the only school that I was allowed in was this place called Dill Sculms, which is like 15 miles away.
And I walked in and I was 16 and that's the first real decent person I met in my life right there.
So I walked in, walked into the homeroom and this woman hears this voice.
She tells me today, she's like, I heard this voice.
She's like, I looked up and it was you.
And she looks up at me and she's like, son, have you ever done any theater?
And I'm like, nope, but I want to join the academic team.
And she's like, no, no, no, theater.
I was like, no, no, no, academic team.
Well, it turned out she ran both.
And the deal was if I did theater, that I would do the academic team too.
And she became like the surrogate mom to me.
Were you always such a charismatic, outgoing kid?
Were you like that when you were from the theater?
No, I was always like that.
Okay.
Always like that.
Born with it, or did you develop it?
No, I'm kind of an introvert.
I really am.
I'm a homebody, man.
I don't want to go out and do shit or anything.
I want to stay at home.
I'm an introvert, but I fight it by being an extrovert.
By being overly extroverted.
So, like, if I'm at a conference or work or anything, I'll be on.
You turn yourself on.
And then once that's over, I'm back at the hotel room and I crash.
I don't want to go anyplace.
I don't want to do anything.
I don't want to talk to anybody.
That's it.
So I excelled under her name was Carol Combs, and I truly excelled under her.
I really did.
I mean, I did really well.
She was a surrogate mom to me, but we also became really good friends.
And the way that happened, school would let out, you know, 2.30, 3 o'clock.
My mom wouldn't pick me up until about 7 o'clock.
So down off the hill, there was a convenience store there, and I would just go and sit outside the store until mom would come and get me.
And one day, Carol, she stops by to get gas, and she looks at me and she's like, son, don't you have a ride?
And I was like, yeah, they're coming.
So about three days of that, one day she looks at me and she's like, come on.
And she starts driving me home.
And she became, like I said, this.
She became that, she became a better mom to me than my mom was, you know?
So, did really well under her.
Had scholarships coming out of high school for theater, things like that.
I turned them down because I got a girlfriend, really is what happened, and a preacher's daughter.
And I turned to my dad, you know?
You know, I got this girl.
I can't leave her.
I got this girl.
Well, what happens is, is I was going to community college there.
They brought a new theater.
They hired a new theater director for the college.
The theater director knew the head of the theater department at San Jose State, which was, I guess they have a pretty decent theater school there.
So he talks this guy, his name's Edward Emanuel.
He talks this guy into coming down and watching the show.
And I was doing a play that Edward Emanuel had written.
It was a Civil War play called House Divided.
That was the name of it.
But Ed comes down, sees the play.
Gets through watching the play.
He's like, scholarship, full boat.
And I was like, yeah.
And he's like, look, man.
He's like, you're a big fish in a little pond.
We'll make you a big fish in a big pond.
I was like, let's do that.
So I agreed to do that.
And he's like, okay, I'll be back in two weeks.
So two weeks later, he flies back in, drives down to Hazard.
I'm outside shooting basketball with some friends of mine.
He pulls up.
I walk over to his car.
I was like, come on, man.
I'll introduce you to my mom.
He's like, nah, man, I got this.
I was like, all right.
So he walks in the house.
He's in there about 15 minutes, comes back out after 15 minutes, white as a sheet, man, just ghost white, doesn't say a damn thing to me, gets in the car, drives off, right?
I'm like, what the fuck happened?
Mom did something.
Mom did something.
It took me two weeks to find out what mom did.
Mom, he walks in the house, and mom was like that.
She could be really, you'd think that everything was fine, then all of a sudden just pop on you.
So evidently that's what happened with him.
She's talking to him, pulls a knife on him, says, I will kill you, you son of a bitch.
You're not going to steal my son.
That scares him to death.
And at the same time, that kind of breaks my spirit.
I'm like, fuck it.
Let's just do what we're going to do.
She didn't want you to leave.
She didn't want me to leave.
Because me and Denise were basically property to her.
And that's one of the things that I never understood.
If you grow up in that environment, you don't know that that's not the way things are.
But there's a lot of people that when they raise their children, they think their children are then obligated to them that when they get old, they'll help out.
Or you have to do this.
You have to stay near mom, dad, all this other stuff.
So that sense of property.
Does she depend on you guys for anything?
Were you guys still stealing food?
It's interesting you'd say that.
Servant of the State00:03:56
The weird thing, Denise, other than that one shoplifting thing, Denise doesn't go off and break the law anymore.
Denise becomes a teacher.
She's a good parent.
She's a good citizen.
She's still got that angry type part of her mentality.
But she doesn't break the law anymore.
Me, I do.
And I embrace it full-fledged.
I was talking to my wife.
I've talked to Denise about that as well.
And you've got that, what I call that Eastern Kentucky mentality, that the male is expected to do these things.
You know, the male's expected to provide and put food on the table.
It's the male's job to do this stuff.
And I honestly think that part of it was, you know, Brett, me coming in and saying, you know, I'll help shield my sister from it.
You know, I'll help make sure that Denise doesn't get involved in that.
And I was expected to help mom out with this stuff, you know.
And that's, so that's where denise doesn't really go into that crime aspect, but I do.
You know, I'm helping out with the cars, the homes, the breaking and entering, the drug trafficking, all this other bullshit that's going on.
I grew up knowing how to do all that.
So what happens is I go, of course, the theater thing goes off to the side.
I fake a car accident.
I meet this girl, the preacher's daughter.
That ends.
I dated her for five years.
She was a hardcore Christian, and I was not.
And she kept thinking that I was until she finally figured out, oh, he is certainly not.
So she breaks up with me.
I, on the rebound, I meet this other girl and I married her within six months and had nothing in common with her at all.
And I was married to her for nine years, lied to her every day for those nine years, every single day, and never had a real conversation with her until the relationship ended.
It's crazy.
I'm surprised about the preacher's daughter.
Usually the preacher's daughter is a sexual deviance.
No, she was just a wholesome, wholesome girl.
Okay.
She really was.
And she kept.
Like when I met her, her dad was a preacher at the Church of Christ.
So the first time I met him, I'm sitting down on the sofa.
He comes in.
He was a coal miner and then a minister too.
He comes in from a day's work, sits down, he looks at me, he's like, You're dating my daughter.
I was like, Yeah.
He's like, So are you a servant of, what was it?
He was like, Are you a servant of God or are you a servant of Satan?
And I was like, What?
He's like, Because you can't be but one.
Whatever you want me to be.
And I was like, Sir, I think I'm a servant of God.
Are you?
Do you go to church?
No, sir.
Do you believe in the Lord Jesus?
Well, I have problems with that, sir.
So you're really a servant of Satan.
I'm like, okay.
And he told me, he's like, look, he said, you're going to date my daughter.
You're going to go to church every Sunday and Wednesday.
And I looked at him, I was like, guess I'm going to church every Sunday and Wednesday.
And for five years, that's exactly what I did.
Every Sunday, every Wednesday night, let's go.
Let's go.
And I learned the book.
And he was, I mean, he was a good man.
But he was setting his ways.
Christy was an outstanding woman.
But she wanted that match of a Christian mate.
That was not me.
It takes her five years to figure that out.
You two had very different childhoods.
We did.
Well, yeah, you take a mom that tells you the Satan stuff.
And we were in West Germany at one point.
She has a seance.
So you've got a mom that does that.
We were living in military housing.
And in Swabish Hall, Germany, my mom becomes convinced, or at least she says she was convinced, that our apartment had a poltergeist, is what she says.
Poltergeist in Germany00:07:58
And so she tells all the neighbors in the apartment complex and everything else, and I don't know if they believe it or not, but they at least humored her.
She fabricates this, I say fabricates, but she comes up with a story saying that before the apartment complex was there, there was a train that ran through that area, and the Nazis had the Jews on there, and one time the train stops, two Jews escape.
The train and this Nazi soldier, SS officer comes and kills them right on that same spot, and that's where the ghosts come from.
She fabricated this whole story about this stuff, and she actually gets to the point where she gets the neighbors to come in one night and has a seance.
Mom acts like she was possessed by the ghost of these people.
So, and like I said, as an adult, you can have fun with that.
You know, I can see as the neighbors, they would humor that bullshit, but when you're a kid seeing that, it Has a different effect on you.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, the reason I asked you about your personality, because what I've noticed is that the people who have had the most fucked up childhoods, when they grow up, they end up being the most interesting people I've ever met.
Well, I've been told my story is very interesting, but I will tell you it's a hell of a lot better to hear it than it is to live it.
All right, because, and we're going to get into that, I'm sure, but I hurt a lot of people.
A lot of people.
I hurt people that I knew, people that I didn't know.
I lied to everyone.
everyone across the board.
People who thought they were my friends, they didn't know what I did for a living, that I lied to them constantly about things.
Sometimes I may rip them off.
Any number.
I was a completely despicable human being.
I mean, no redeeming features whatsoever.
And I believe that to this day, that when you're committing crime, there's no, especially fraud, there's no redeeming feature in that.
You're not a Robin Hood.
This idea that, well, I stole from the rich and gave it to the poor.
No, he stole from everybody.
where I stole from everybody and kept it for myself and lied to everybody the entire time about it.
You know, my wife, I married Susan, faked a car accident to get the money to get married and moved from Hazard to Lexington, Kentucky to go to university.
She didn't know that I faked a car accident.
She didn't know I was a criminal.
I kept all that shit hidden from her.
When I started to get involved into cybercrime, I simply told her I was reselling shit on eBay.
So I lied to her the entire time.
Never had an honest conversation with her at all.
And the way she finds out, it took her three years, but the way she finds out that I'm a criminal was this a couple things happen.
So I find eBay.
And I like the shit out of eBay.
I had been doing fraud outside of eBay.
I'd been doing some charity fraud stuff, some theft by deception, running some cold checks, stuff like that.
All right.
But this was pre-cybercrime.
This is pre-bay.
This is pre-bay was your first criminal involvement.
Ebay is the first real entry into technology.
All right.
So I've been doing just the street-level frauds.
Find eBay liked the shit out of eBay eBay.
This was 90, 95, 96 so find eBay Was obsessed with eBay.
I'd spend time just looking at the shit for sale and everything didn't have any money but look at it and I was just you know everybody had that stuff on there I was like man, that's outstanding got to be some way to make money on it Didn't know how and I got a lot of my initial Inspiration from Bill O'Reilly so he was hosting inside edition back then inside edition was this 30 minute news tabloid show.
The first cyber crime that I committed was about beanie babies.
He had a show about beanie babies.
They were profiling this one called Peanut the Royal Blue Elephant, selling for $1,500 on eBay.
I'm sitting there watching it like, shit, he'd get me a peanut.
And I was naive as shit at that point, right?
So I'm like, well, man, all I got to do, I'm in Kentucky.
All I got to do, I'll go around to all the Hallmark stores.
They got to be one in a bin someplace.
So I skip class the next day, go around to all these stores.
Takes me four or five hours to figure out no idiot.
He's not in the stores because his ass is on eBay for $1,500.
But I ended up ripping a lady off the $1,500.
They had gray beanie baby elephants.
So I looked at it, and the only real difference was the color of the animal and the tag that was on the animal had a different name attached to it.
So I figured, well, I could rip the tag off, stop by Kroger on the way home, pick up a pack of blue writ dye, go home, try to dye the little guy blue.
So take the guy home.
Get a five-gallon bucket up, you know.
Put the dye in there, put the animal in there.
Find out pretty quickly the animal's made out of polyester, doesn't hold the dye at all.
Get him out of that bath, look like he's got the mange.
Yeah, yeah, that's idiot right here.
But what happens is I rip the lady off.
I find a picture of a real one online, post it.
She thinks I have the real thing.
She wins the bid.
As soon as she wins the bid, and I talk about this on my show, I talk about it in presentations.
I became a social, without social engineering, cybercrime fails.
That's a fact.
Unless you can have that element of social engineering, a lot of these cyber crimes that are existent today won't work.
Well, I became a social engineer as a child to be able to survive the environment that I was in.
Those adults around me, they're toxic.
You have to know what the hell they're thinking.
You have to know what's going on, especially like my granddad chasing people around, all this other shit.
You've got to be able to know what's going on.
You've got to try to be able to manipulate those adults.
So think of social engineering as that type of manipulation.
Online, it's using technology. and understanding human psychology to get an individual to give up information, access, data, cash, to get that individual to willingly do what you want them to do.
So she wins the bid for this animal, and that social engineering kicks in.
I want to put her on the defensive.
I don't want to be on the defensive.
I want her reacting to what I'm doing.
So I send her a message.
Hey, lady, never done any business with you before.
Don't know if I can trust you.
What I need you to do is send me a U.S. postal money order.
Now, look.
U.S. Postal Money Orders issued by the United States government protects us both.
You send that to me, I'll send you your animal.
She believed that, didn't ask any questions.
Sends me two U.S. Postal Money Orders because they just go up to $1,000 a piece.
Sends me two.
I cash them out, send her the animal in the mail.
Did that under my own name.
Immediately get a phone call.
This is not what I ordered.
My response, lady, you ordered a blue elephant.
I sent you a blue-ish elephant.
And that, is really the first lesson of cybercrime that most criminals learn.
That being that if you delay a victim, you just keep putting them off over and over and over again.
You keep putting these people off, they get exasperated.
They throw their hands in the air, walk away, you don't hear from them again, and none of them complain to law enforcement.
Now, that's really the first lesson that most cybercriminals learn when they start their crimes.
And it's interesting that the good guys, merchants and retailers that cybercriminals typically rip off, or fintech companies, It took them a while to learn that lesson too, because one of the major ways that you can practice security is to delay giving a criminal money in a fintech service or a refund fraud or anything else like that.
They found out that if you delay that criminal, they get exasperated.
They throw their hands up in the air, walk away, you don't hear from them again, and they can't complain to law enforcement.
Fake Baseball Certificates00:02:44
So that's the first crime I committed.
My wife, I did it under my own name, kept going though because I got away with it.
And as I said, I got a lot of inspiration.
From Bill O'Reilly and Inside Edition.
So the next crime I committed, he was doing a show about autographed baseballs.
Sammy Sosa, Mark McGuire.
So I'm sitting there watching.
They were selling on eBay for like 80 bucks a piece.
I'm sitting there going, shit, I can autograph me some baseballs.
So skip class the next day.
That seems like an easy one.
Yeah.
Skip class the next day, go down to the sports store, walk in, buy a case of baseballs.
Stop by Kroger, the same Kroger that had the Ritt die.
Stop by a Kroger, pick up a black Sharpie, go home, start signing Sammy Sosa, Mark McGuire, look at the ball, and I'm like, damn, that's pretty hard to sign a signature on a round object.
So I'm like, well, how about a certificate of authenticity?
So, I print my own certificates of authenticity up.
That's that problem solving, you know?
Right.
So, print those up, sell all of those on eBay for $60 a pop.
And that is when my wife finds out that I'm a criminal.
Because what happens is, one night, we were living off campus.
One night, you get that cop knock at the door, that bam, I'm like, shit.
Go up, open the door.
Susan is sitting on the couch at this point.
So, I open the door, and there is Sergeant Pat Tingle and a detective of the Fayette County Sheriff's Office.
And, uh, I got to know Pat Tingle pretty well.
But he looks at me.
He's like, are you Brett Johnson?
I'm like, yeah.
He's like, can we come in?
I was like, absolutely.
So by this time, Susan stood up.
She's not saying anything.
She's just standing up.
She's looking at them.
But then she zeroes in on me.
So she stops looking at them completely and just looks at me the entire conversation.
So Pat Tingle's like, we'd like to talk to you about some baseballs.
And I'm like, yeah.
He's like, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire.
I was like, yes, sir.
He's like, you're selling them.
I'm like, yes.
He's like, where'd you get them?
I was like, I bought them off eBay.
He's like, You bought them off eBay.
I was like, yeah, and I'm reselling them.
He's like, huh.
With certificates of authenticity.
Yep.
Signed.
Yep.
Mr. Johnson, we have a sample of their actual autographs down at the station, and that doesn't look anything like that.
And I'm like, huh.
What comes with certificates of authenticity?
Mr. Johnson, we think you printed off those certificates of authenticity.
No, sir.
And Mr. Johnson, we think you signed those balls.
No, sir, I did not.
Then Tingle looks at me and is like, Mr. Johnson, you're going to send these people their money back or we're going to put you in jail.
Do you understand?
I was like, yes, sir.
Strip Club Cocaine Scandal00:10:36
So they leave.
The entire time, Susan hasn't said a word to me, just looking dead at me.
They leave.
I shut the door behind them, look over at her.
You can see it.
I mean, she's pissed, man.
So I looked at her.
I was like, what?
And she was like, you son of a bitch.
That's why you bought all those goddamn baseballs.
And I'm like, yeah.
Yeah.
So that's when she found out that I was a liar.
And a criminal.
So the next six years were me telling her that i've stopped, I will stop.
I'm going to stop just a little while longer, until finally it becomes, you like spending the money, don't you?
And uh, she knew she liked spending the money.
Yeah that's, that's.
That was the final insult, right there.
You like spending the money, don't you?
So shut up, you know?
And uh, she knew how I was.
She knew my history with my mom and everything.
So what happens is, I think, that she starts to cheat on me, rightfully so, because I wasn't giving her emotional support or anything else.
But I think also she knew that somewhere, maybe subconsciously or whatever, she knew that was the only way that I would really ever end the relationship.
So she starts to cheat on me.
I find out about it, and the relationship ends.
We were in Charleston, South Carolina at that point in time, and I take her back to Hazard, Kentucky.
She wanted to go back to her mom's.
So take her back to Hazard, drop her off, come back to the house in Charleston, and I'm walking around in a daze, stumbling, everything else, crying all the time.
Start to get suicidal.
And, you know, that fear of being abandoned, that became real, man.
I caused it, yeah, but shit, it was still real.
So I realized I'm getting suicidal.
Picked up the phone book, went to psychologists, went to criminal psychologists, because I figured I needed one of those.
Called this psychologist, literally crying on the phone to her and told her everything.
You know, I'm this criminal.
My wife left me.
Bam, She's like, come in today.
So I go in, tell her everything.
Saw her for about four months and she was trying to get me to stop breaking the law and to go into real estate.
I was like, Is there a difference?
And she's like, Yes, there's a difference.
I was like, Yeah.
But what happened?
I was 34 and I didn't start drinking until I was 34 because my mom was a drug addict and she loved alcohol.
And I was that control freak.
I was scared that if I ever did drugs or pushed you away from it.
Yeah.
So I never did that.
Started when I was 34.
That's what happened.
I was a big fan of the Big Lebowski, and my drink of choice was the White Russians, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So started drinking.
Not a bad way to start.
Not a bad way to start.
Not a bad way.
So I started drinking while I was 34, started seeing the psychologist, and one night got lonely and horny.
I'd never been to a strip club in my life.
Figured it was time to do that.
Figured I could get laid, too.
So I walked into the strip club, and I'm the guy.
Who literally falls in love with the first one he sees.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I joke about it, man.
It's weird with me.
A lot of the times I joke about shit because I'm not ready to discuss that shit.
Yeah.
I walked in, girl walks by.
I'm like, that's the one for me.
So moved her in with me.
After I moved her in with me, I found out she was addicted to cocaine because what was going on.
Well, how did you move her in with you?
Well, how did that go?
So I start, I go in that night.
This is a strip club in what state?
In Charleston, South Carolina.
In Charleston, South Carolina.
It's called Joe's Roundup.
One hell of a name.
Okay.
Never been there.
Yeah.
I've been to a few in North Carolina.
There you go.
So, walked into the strip club, saw Elizabeth there, and I pony up at the bar.
She comes over and she sits down beside me, and she's like, You want to buy me a drink?
Well, I didn't know that drinks for strippers are, you know, 30 bucks a pop.
So, I'm like, Sure.
So, they tell me how much that is.
I was like, Uh huh.
And then she's like, What do you want?
You know, we can go in the private room if you want to buy a bottle of champagne.
I was like, Shit, that's a really good idea.
Well, a bottle of Corbell was like $400.
So I was like, okay.
So we do that.
And I'm here, you know, I didn't know what to expect.
I was hoping to get laid, but go back there.
And it turns out I just wanted to talk is what I wanted to do.
And so we spent a couple hours back there just talking about anything.
And you could tell, you know, looking back now, she was sizing me up, you know, what kind of white you wear, what kind of car you drive, where you live.
You live out on Folly Beach.
Okay.
So, you know, sizing me up.
Just do your own social engineering.
Oh, yeah, doing all that stuff.
So I leave that night, come back a week later, pull her off to the side.
And I was like, look, I said, I'd like to take you to dinner if you'd like to go to dinner with me.
And she was like, she named this restaurant called Rue de Jean, which was an expensive French restaurant.
I didn't know it at the time.
I went back to one of my buddies and I was like, I got a date.
And he's like, you got a date?
And I was like, I got a date.
He's like, where are you going?
I was like, I'm taking her to Rue de Jean.
He looks at me.
He's like, take your wallet.
I was like, what?
He's like, you'll need it.
I was like, all right.
So I start dating this girl and I had not.
It was a mixture of that father aspect of mine, that wanting people to love me, going overboard in a relationship, and also just being out of the relationship with my wife was what it was.
So I went, I mean, just immediately head over heels.
Yeah.
I love this girl.
I love this girl.
Call it the rebound.
The rebound.
So I ended up moving her in with me.
Knew there were problems.
Absolutely knew there were problems.
Like she's got an apartment.
I go to, I'm the, I'm, I had planned on hiring people to clear out her apartment and move her stuff in, her clothes and everything else.
She didn't, for some reason, she didn't want to go back to her apartment.
So I volunteered to do that.
I'll hire people to do it.
I'll walk into her apartment.
It's a fucking wreck.
I mean, just like a bomb went off in there, roaches every place, all this other stuff.
And I'm like, well, I can't hire somebody to do this.
So I ended up cleaning out the entire apartment, steaming the carpets myself, everything else, because I didn't want anybody to know about it.
And moved her in with me.
She was still stripping at that point.
And she would go off to her job.
She typically worked on the weekends.
She would go off to the job, you know, show up at like 5, 6 o'clock at night on the job.
I didn't go because I didn't want to be in that environment.
She'd go to work, and then typically she wouldn't come home until 8 o'clock in the morning, 9 o'clock in the morning.
Typically, it was her calling me.
She wouldn't be able to drive home.
And I was like, so, you know, a few weeks of that, you're like, shit, something's going on.
So she had called me one morning, like at 10 o'clock on a Saturday, come and get me.
And I was like, all right.
And go and get her.
She comes in and immediately crashes in the bed.
I never went through a woman's purse in my life.
That was the first time right there.
So I went through her purse, found out how I didn't do drugs.
So I found the cut straw, found cocaine residue on the straw, found a little bag of shit and everything else, and it got me.
I'm the guy that's very good about finding out stuff about people.
At that point in time, I could crawl up somebody's ass and find out anything about anybody.
So I started researching forums about strip clubs in South Carolina.
There's this one, it's like USA Sex, whatever the fuck.
I forgot what the name of the site was.
But found that site.
They had a section on South Carolina strip clubs.
Sure as shit.
There she was listed in it.
Really?
So she is not only addicted to Coke, but she was prostituting herself to support the habit.
So found out all this shit while she's asleep in the bed.
And go in as she's waking up.
I go in.
I tell her.
I was like, hey, see, I didn't mention she's prostituting because I was like, I can't help.
I don't want her to know I know that.
But told her I found the coke and everything else told her she had to stop she starts crying, you know, that's it.
I don't do that often It's you know knew she was lying.
I was like, you know, didn't want to have that conversation But I was like you got to stop.
Oh, I'll stop.
I'll stop.
So she continues that same behavior, you know Weekends showing back up, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock, come get me.
And what happens is is it goes on for about two more weeks and One morning she calls me to come and get her.
I write a letter, leave it on the bed, Go and get her, take her back to the house where I'm at, get her in the bed and everything.
I was like, look, when you wake up you got a letter here for you.
I'm going to Columbia for the day.
So the letter basically said, hey, if you can't stop this, don't be here when I get back.
So at night I come back, she's quit her job and um, that same night as far as I know, she never did coke again either, but she supplied I didn't know this at the time she supplanted the coke with alcohol.
So you know you had to do something and I was like, okay, the alcohol is fine with me.
If you want to drink, as long as you ain't snorting anything, You're good.
I think it's a thing that goes hand in hand.
Evidently.
I didn't know that shit.
You get too drunk, you do a little bit of Coke, and it sobered back up.
I didn't know that.
I still haven't done Coke.
I'm 52.
I still haven't done Coke.
You're not missing much.
Thank you.
I told my wife, I said, when I get to base 70, 75, as I'm cashing out, I'll do the meth, Coke, Carolyn.
I'll hold court in the street.
We'll just do a shootout and everything else.
That's a great way to go, man.
If you're going to do it, do it that way.
I like your style.
I like your style.
But what happens is she quits that, and I get it in my head.
I guess subconsciously I figured if I could fix her, I could fix me.
I also figured, you know, I'd win her love and it'd be just fine and, you know, just keep trucking.
Well, the thing with her, not sure if it was abuse or just didn't like me or what, I believe she did love me.
But now, you know, it was this idea of, I adopted this idea of give her whatever she wanted as long as it kept her mind off of drugs.
Well, I didn't understand that strippers want everything.
So every night, and I was stealing a lot of money.
Identity Theft and Bank Accounts00:14:45
I'm this guy that created tax return identity theft, among several other types of crimes that I committed.
All right.
Yeah.
The reason your tax return is delayed is the son of a bitch that's sitting across from you today.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, I invented that fraud.
You invented that fraud?
Yeah.
Can you explain that?
Yeah.
So we were on counterfeit.
So I'll get back to Elizabeth.
Okay.
We'll go into cybercrime for a minute.
A little side set real quick.
There are three sites that redefine cybercrime as we know it today.
Those three sites are Counterfeit Library, Shadow Crew, and then Carter Planet.
Later on, you have Silk Road and sites like that.
But those three sites redefine cybercrime.
Before those three sites come into play, the only avenue you had to commit organized cybercrime, and it's always organized, the only avenue you had for that was an IRC chat session, Internet Relay Chat, where it's a rolling chat board.
You have no idea who you're talking to, if you can trust the individual, if the individual is a cop or a crook.
if they have a product or service, if it works or not, or if they're just going to rip you off.
Shadow Crew and Counterfeit Library, I started those, ran those, all right?
Carter Planet is started by a guy named Dmitry Golubov over in the Ukraine, who went by the screen name of Script.
Carter Planet is the genesis of all modern credit card theft as we know it today.
Counterfeit Library, Shadow Crew handles most of those other types of frauds, account takeovers, phishing schemes, tax return identity theft, identity theft in general, synthetic fraud.
All these other types of schemes kind of starts with Shadow Crew and Counterfeit Library.
It also gives a trust mechanism that criminals can use.
So before those two sites come into play, Counterfeit and Shadow Crew, criminals had no way to establish trust with each other, which is a necessity when you understand the way online crime works, because there are three necessities to successfully committing online crime.
Gathering data, committing crime, cashing out.
All three of those have to work in conjunction.
If they don't, the crime fails.
So you have to be able to trust people who are good in areas where you are not.
So if you can cash something out and commit the crime, but you don't know how to get the data, you have to work with someone who does know how, a cell or anything else like that.
Or if you're in a geographic area where you can't cash out the crime, you have to rely on money mules that you can trust.
So you have to be able to establish trust with a criminal where you don't know what they look like, don't know their real name, will never meet that individual.
Really?
Really.
So Shadow CREW does that by providing a large communication channel, a forum type structure, at that point in time.
It's changed over the years a little bit, but the forum type structure is there so that criminals now can reference conversations days weeks, months old.
They can take part in those conversations, learn from them, ask questions.
You know by looking at someone's screen name what the skill level of that person is.
If you can learn from them, network with them, trust them.
We had vouching systems in place, review systems in place, escrow systems in place, all with the singular purpose of establishing trust With one criminal and another.
Now, where tax return fraud comes up, I was the top of that heap.
I was the guy who ran that stuff, that godfather, like the Secret Service calls me.
Where that comes up, the initial databases that we had, because back then you had a lot of PII, personal information, that was just on the web.
If you know how to properly search for it or look at databases, you could get all these socials and everything else without having to steal them or pay for them or anything else.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So the first database that I had access to was the Indiana State Sex Offenders Registry.
All right.
So I'm the first guy that sells oh, my God.
Oh, yeah.
So that Indiana State Registry had the person's name, the mother's maiden, the driver's license number, the date of birth, social security number, address history.
What else do you need?
You don't.
All right.
And my idea was, shit, who's going to complain about victimizing pedophiles?
Nobody.
Right.
So what I did was I would use their identities to open up bank accounts.
And the only online bank at that point was called NetBank out of Georgia.
So I would open up NetBank accounts in pedophiles' names and either use them for personal use to cash out and launder money, or I would sell them online.
I'm the first supplier of fraudulently opened bank accounts on these forums and everything.
There's a whole list of whole firsts there.
So that's the first database that I had access to.
We mined that out so much that Indiana starts to remove the PII of those pedophiles.
You would sign in one day, and all of a sudden, hey, the socials aren't there.
What year was that?
This was.
97.98.
Okay.
98.99.
I'm sorry.
98.99.
So the next database we had access to was the Texas driver's license database.
That was nice because you had snapshots of the DLs.
You had all the information there and everything else.
You could make driver's licenses with all the correct data on there except it'd have your face on there.
Wow.
The person's face and then use that to commit fraud.
So that was the next one.
Where tax return identity theft comes from.
I got access to the California State Death Index.
All right.
So, huge listing of everyone who's ever died in California.
And it comes with their social, date of birth, mother's maiden name, which again is really the only thing you needed back then to commit a lot of different types of fraud.
So, the idea that I had, these people were dead.
The idea that I had was, well, I wonder if you could file for Social Security benefits on somebody who's dead.
How does the federal government know?
That an individual is dead.
So this goes into how cyber criminals operate a lot.
There's a lot of recon that goes on.
You've got to do a lot of study, a lot of reconnaissance, a lot of information gathering in order to commit a lot of these frauds that go go in place these days.
It's done for you all right, but back then you had to figure all this out.
So the first question is, is how does the federal government know someone's dead?
Well, the answer is, prior to 1998, the family only the family had to apply, had to file a Social Security death benefit, paid like 219.
All right, If the family had never filed that Social Security death benefit, the federal government doesn't know they're dead.
It's just the number becomes dormant after so many years.
But the government still thinks you're alive.
Okay?
Now, the next question is, since that's a state index, does the federal government reference state indexes and vice versa?
Back then, the answer was no.
It was against the law to do that because there's a lot of discrepancies between a state index and a federal index.
A lot of those people that are listed dead on the state index ain't dead.
So, you have to be able to make sure that they are before you start cross referencing with federal and everything else.
Why wouldn't they be dead?
So, what happens is some people are listed dead who aren't.
Oh, really?
Mistakenly.
Yeah, mistakenly.
Just happens.
Not a whole lot of people, but enough where you can't really trust a lot of these databases.
Right, okay.
Trying to get federal benefits to cross-border.
That's a crazy mistake.
So that's one of the issues there.
So you find out first how does the federal government find out you're dead.
That creates a loophole so they don't think you're dead.
So I start to apply for Social Security benefits.
Turns out you can't do that because the social is dormant for so long, Social Security Administration wants you to come in for a physical interview.
Well, you're 35, 34 at that, well, 33 at that point, you're that age, you're not going to sit down acting like you're 70 and convince some Social Security guy that, you know, you're this guy.
So that's out.
So the next idea I had was, well, I wonder if you could file income tax refunds on these people, which again comes up with a completely different range of information that you have to get.
How does the IRS work?
Do they have to get the information from the employer before they issue the refund for the people who are saying they work for these employers?
No, they don't.
Even to this day, they don't.
You can't get that information in time.
So the actual federal government gives you that refund before they verify with the employer that you've actually made that amount of money.
Yeah, big loophole there.
And at the same time as the federal government doesn't know you're dead, you've got all these employees that can pop up, fake, and you start filing income taxes.
You keep the dollar amount low, under $5,000, and very few flags are raised.
and you start filing.
I got to where I was filing a tax return.
I'd file a tax return once every six minutes, do that three to four days a week.
One day I'd plot out a map of ATMs.
Every six minutes?
Every six minutes.
So you do that for eight to ten hours a day, every six minutes, just bam, File 180 to 220 tax returns per week.
80% of those returns would fund.
So now you've got to figure out, so you're filing that many, how do you have them deposited?
Because you start doing research and tax refund fraud.
had been around prior to that.
But what was going on, people would have this shit deposited to their real bank account.
All right.
That gets into the stimulus fraud that happens during the pandemic, too.
The reason those idiots are arrested on PPP fraud is because they had that $2 million deposited to their real bank accounts.
So what happens is with cybercrime, you start to look at different types of deposit instruments.
At about the same time I'm doing that is when all these prepaid debit cards come into play, start just to come into surface.
You know, they started marking them as payroll cards is what they started marking them as.
Turns out that those types of cards will accept an ACH deposit, a federal government benefits deposit as well.
So you just go ahead and order 200 of these cards a week, have tax returns deposited onto all of them, take a road trip, spend two days, Friday, Saturday, and then Sunday, cashing out those cards, come back home on Monday, got a spare bedroom, and you chuck a backpack full of $150,000 cash into the spare bedroom.
Wow.
So it turns out that those Jansport type backpacks or the Under Armour backpacks, you know, the big ones that college kids wear.
Those fit $150,000 in 20s stacked properly.
Or you do this weird shit as a criminal, man.
You start weighing stuff.
It turns out each bill is a gram.
So you can weigh money.
And so $150,000 is 7.5 keys of cash.
Seven and a half kilograms of cash is what $150K is.
That's why, and I know this now working on the legal side, but when you've got big seizures of money, Typically, you don't count the money, you weigh the money.
And that will tell you how much you're actually seizing at that point.
So, yeah, I started doing that, stealing.
I would steal roughly about $160K a week.
How many tax, you said you were doing how many tax returns in one day?
File for eight to ten hours.
So roughly one every six minutes.
You'd take breaks during that point because that shit gets tedious.
But file anywhere from 180 to 220 tax returns on a weekly basis.
Roughly 80% of those would fund.
You'd cash out around 160K a week.
You'd put 150 in a backpack, chuck it in the spare bedroom, live off the 10K every week.
Bam, bam, bam like that.
Do that 10 months a year is what you do.
Then all of a sudden one day you wake up, you open up that.
Bedroom, and you see all those backpacks, and you're like, Gotta do something with that, right?
So then it's, it's.
Were you hiding this from your girlfriend at the time?
Well, see, I didn't, I had my wife at that time, and Susan knew what time that was.
Okay, that's where that comes in.
You like spending the money, don't you?
Well, shut the up.
Okay, that was Susan's time, right?
Okay, so uh, by the time Elizabeth rolls in, I've already started moving money out to Estonia to bank Latico out there, so I have bank accounts in the United States.
By this point, how much money had you acquired?
Probably about seven million total.
Is what I stole, all right uh, nothing to be proud of.
But uh, you know, just a lot of, a lot of money and a lot of victims.
So um, I had bank accounts in Canada Mexico, Caimans finally bounce that around enough places that it ends up in bank Latico in uh Estonia, Latvia.
Did you go to these places and open up these accounts personally?
Well simply, some of them you didn't have to.
Some of them you did like I took a trip to Estonia on a counterfeit passport and everything like that.
But um, how did you get the cash there?
You wire it.
So you're bouncing these wires.
Is what's going on?
I thought you're like what like No, no, you don't taping the shit to your body like Wolf of Wall Street.
No, you don't do full shit like that You wire the money.
So the idea was to wire money Canada Mexico Caymans bounce it over to finally Estonia and hopefully by that point it's not very traceable It worked to a degree.
I was arrested my initial arrest is February 8th 2005 The last seizure notice I got was January of 2010 So it took them five years.
There's still some money in Bank Latico, but nobody will ever get it because it's just there.
It's just there.
It's their money now.
It's their money now.
But that's where income tax identity fraud comes from, is right there.
That's fascinating.
That's fucked up.
You were the first one to come up with that.
First got to do it.
First got to do that.
That's why everyone's returns tend to be deleted.
That's insane.
It's because of that.
And there's a whole line.
When you're.
When you're at the top of that heap like that, what happens is you look at cybercrime.
Cybercrime is committed because of status, cash, or ideology.
Most of the attacks are cash based.
You're looking to steal money.
You've got some people that are ideological, like Ross Ulbricht starts up Silk Road because he had an ideology.
He thought he was going to change the world.
He didn't do it for the money.
He did not.
So they arrest Ross.
They confiscate like $24 million worth of Bitcoin back then.
Now it's well over a billion dollars in value.
But back then, he hadn't spent any of the money.
He was living in a room for let.
He had taken one vacation.
He slept on a mattress in the floor.
He literally did this shit out of ideology.
He thought he was going to change the world.
The guy who ran Silk Road, too, I've actually met that guy.
That guy, ideological attack, too.
He thinks he's going to change the world.
Have you ever heard of the, have you ever seen the show Westworld?
Ideology vs Cash Crime00:02:51
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a fascinating quote that's been on my mind ever since I first saw it.
I've watched it twice now.
But he's, when Ford is, before he kills one of the ladies, he's talking to her and he's like, The human psyche, he's like, I read a theory once where the human intellect is just an elaborate display of peacock feathers, like a peacock.
I think there's some justice to that.
Where it's like all of the, imagine all of the greatest art, all of the greatest literature, Shakespeare, Mozart, the Empire State Building.
All it is is just an elaborate mating ritual.
I would tend to agree with that.
So you look at, and some of it pays off.
You know, it pays off by getting laid, but it pays off by profit too a lot of the times.
So being at the top of these cybercrime heaps, you figure when Shadow Crew gets shut down, so we make the front cover of Forbes August of 2004.
October 26, 2004, Secret Service arrests 33 people, six countries, six hours.
Now, we ended with 4,000 members in 2004.
Fast forward to 2017.
The largest criminal group on the planet is called Alpha Bay.
Federal government shuts it down, 240,000 members.
Fast forward two more years to 2019, another black market gets shut down, a dark web market called Black Market, 1.15 million members.
All right, now all that's pre-pandemic.
During the pandemic, fraud explodes because stimulus programs are in place with absolutely no security at all.
No security.
All right.
So these numbers explode much bigger during the pandemic.
Now, if you are one of these members that's at that top of the heap, all right.
Now, yeah, I'm the guy that created this type of fraud and a lot of these types of fraud.
But the reason I was able to do that is all those people underneath of me were all the time feeding me information, products, and services.
All right.
So you get all this data that's coming in and you're able to look at these different types of exploits and everything else.
Like that and you start to see ways to profit.
And that's where this, these status types of attacks, come in.
If you're able to impress your criminal peers in these groups, do something that no one else can do, you gain the respect of everyone there, and that respect equates to profit.
You get all this information, you get all these products and services, everything else.
People are telling you things that nobody else is hearing and you get to use that information before anybody else does, and that's why you want to be at the top of the, that's why you want to be the number one seller, that's why you want to be running these forums and everything else, because you get all that data, all that intel right okay so, as I said, you know, with back back to Elizabeth uh she uh, god damn that.
The Big Buyer Trap00:16:42
That, that Jesus Man that uh, you know, I gave an interview a few weeks ago and I was.
I was talking about this and i've had a lot of feedback from a lot of people.
I've had some people that said oh, she loved you.
I've had a whole shitload of people that said oh, she was narcissistic and you're a sucker.
Are you talking about YouTube comments?
I am.
I read all those friggin' YouTube comments, man.
Gotta love them.
I do, and I comment on them and everything else like that.
But, you know, I think that, and I mean this, I went to, when I was in prison, I was very fortunate that I faked my way into the drug abuse program.
Very fortunate.
It turned out to be a CBT program, it's cognitive behavioral therapy.
And one of the things they taught people and they preached was that someone who is addicted to something cannot.
Love anything else except the addiction.
All right.
So the addiction comes first and foremost.
All right.
If you're addicted to Coke, you're going to choose the Coke over anything else that's going on.
If your addiction's crime or gambling or anything else like that, that's going to come first and foremost.
All your relationships are going to be damaged because of that.
So I really embrace that.
And I think, you know, looking back on that relationship that I had with her, for example, she could not be intimate unless she was drunk off her ass.
Could not, would not.
All right.
And only if.
when she was dog drunk, would she be intimate?
But I look back at it now and I'm like, well, she was coming down off of her addictions.
She was fighting those demons.
My addictions were the crime, the environment, everything else.
So you had two people that were fucked up to begin with that did you love each other?
Shit, who knows?
Because these addictions were first and foremost in both of our lives.
I think she was probably a little bit further ahead of it than me.
I think, honestly, looking back at it, that I was that escape valve.
She did see a way out of that stripper mentality, out of the Coke and everything else.
Whether that's true or not, I don't know.
Honestly, I bounce back and forth a lot.
These days.
You know, I know that my wife now is the uh.
The first healthy relationship i've had in my life truly is uh.
So I got out, uh.
What happens is is uh.
I got to the point as I said, my money I had, uh.
Oh, happy anniversary, by the way, thank you.
So my my my uh my my uh, my arrest.
What happens with that?
Like I said, Shadow CREW makes the front cover of Forbes, august of 04.
Who's Stealing Your Identity?
Had a full spread about Shadow Crew.
So I had retired from Shadow Crew at that point because we were getting, we had intercepted text messages of the Secret Service investigating us.
We had this guy named Enhance that was a member, and he's the guy.
So back in 2003, 2004, Paris Hilton has her T Mobile phone list published on the web.
And people go bugfuck crazy about it, all right?
Somebody hacked Paris Hilton.
It wasn't a hack, it was an insider that worked at T-Mobile went by the screen name of Enhance.
He got that list, published it.
But he also intercepted text messages of the Secret Service talking about Shadow Crew and published those on Shadow Crew.
They were using T-Mobile?
Oh, yeah.
They were using T-Mobile.
Yeah.
They were using T-Mobile.
On their sidekicks?
Exactly.
So they were using T-Mobile.
And he published that.
At the same time, we were starting to get IP addresses from law enforcement agencies across the friggin' planet.
We were getting all these government agencies that were pinging our system.
We started to see local and state forums, law enforcement sites and everything else mentioning Shadow Crew by name.
So I'm doing tax return fraud.
I'm making money.
I'm at the top of the heap.
And I'm like, shit, when this goes down, probably going to get recode on me.
I'm going to get charged with everything.
So I'm like, I need to leave.
So I drop out of Shadow Crew.
And that was a story in and of itself.
My second in charge.
So I'm the guy that builds that trust mechanism for criminals to use.
At one point.
That's basically the foundation of what Shadow Crew was, right?
It's a lot of foundations for Shadow Crew.
I think the biggest thing that Shadow Crew did was establish that trust mechanism for criminals.
But it was also this kind of eBay marketplace.
So it was the forerunner of today's dark web and dark web markets as well.
It was the forerunner of how cyber criminals communicate with each other, that type of open source mentality, sharing and exchanging information.
That's really what gives criminals the upper hand against good guys today.
The people that are on the legitimate side.
They don't collaborate.
They don't share and exchange information because you've got privacy concerns, regulations.
You've got competitive edges that keep them from doing that.
Criminals have, with the advent of Shadow Crew, we were all about openly sharing and exchanging information, teaching everybody how to do these types of frauds and crimes.
Everyone profits more.
You share and exchange and you don't judge anybody.
You just, what do you got?
Was there anybody regulating the platform, like regulating who could be on it, who could be off it, depending on how do you?
There was.
So what happens is, and that's what I was getting to there, with Counterfeit Library, I'm the guy that every single business deal goes through.
They had one reviewer on the site.
It was me.
You had a product or service.
You would send it to a drop or you would let me see your service, and I would test it.
Then I would post the review.
Depending on that review, because, again, I was basically the guy, if I gave a good review, that seller would make a shitload of money.
If I gave a bad review, that seller wouldn't do any business at all there.
All right.
And my reviews came with a guarantee.
Hey, if you buy from the seller and you get ripped off, I'll cover your losses.
I'll make sure you're recompensed.
And I meant that.
So that helped establish that trust.
People knew that if they dealt with this site and bought products, services, talked to anybody, they could come through me and the deal was good.
When we transitioned over to Shadow Crew, we had become so big that you couldn't do that anymore.
Not only that, but you start to get worried because now law enforcement's looking at you.
It'll be pretty easy to identify where I am if you've got a drop address in an area and everything else.
So you're picking up product pretty easy to get a controlled delivery going on.
So I started, I farmed that out to different reviewers at that point.
So we had mods, we had admins, we had all these people in charge that would either ban you, let you have access to things, take care of any problems that pop up, things like that.
What goes on is some of the people that I had some very competent people in charge.
I had some people in charge that I thought were competent.
That were not competent.
My second in charge, his name was Kim Marvin Taylor out of Denver, Colorado, went by the screen name of MacGyver.
All right.
46 year old guy.
At the time, he was 46.
And he worked at the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver.
All right.
And I thought the guy had knowledge through the roof.
I really did.
Turned out he was just very well read.
So he would talk about fraud, he would talk about changing identities, how that stuff was done.
And it sounded right.
I mean, it sounded spot on.
And he would talk about techniques that I hadn't tried before and stuff like that.
So I'm like, man, you know what you're talking about?
Let's bring you in.
You can be the admin too.
Everything's fine.
So he becomes my second in charge.
Now, what happens with this guy, at the same time this is going on, there's a gentleman out of Nebraska that's on the run for check fraud.
His name's David Thomas.
So David comes to the Shadow Crew forums, and he's broke.
He's begging for money.
He's like, hey, help me out.
So we take up a collection for the son of a bitch.
Send him some money.
I get him a job working with a carter.
So the carter's sending stuff like coin collections to him, stuff like that.
And then David is taking it to a freaking point uh, pawn shop getting 20 cents out of the dollar out of it, not making any money for anybody.
So three months of that David comes back to me.
He's like hey man, I need to make some money.
I was like okay, so I had these Ukrainian contacts reach out to one called big buyer.
Big buyer says yes, i'll work with him.
So big buyer sends David enough money David was in Texas at that point sends David enough money to go from Texas to Issaquah, Washington, right outside of Seattle.
Gives him the money to move up there and to open up a virtual office.
So office space where all these other businesses are coming in saying they've got office spaces, but you can get mail there.
And the idea is that big buyer is going to commit credit card fraud, order the items, have them sent to David.
David's going to get the merchandise and then relist the merchandise on eBay at 80% of retail, cash out like that.
Because that's the way you used to do credit card theft.
You'd sell everything on eBay.
Get 80% on the dollar for it.
That's what you do.
All right.
So, Big Buyer places an order.
He places an order with Outpost.com, $18,000 order.
At that point in time, it was the largest order that Outpost had ever gotten.
What did Outpost.com do?
It was like a merchandise store.
So electronics, all this bullshit.
It was electronics, jewelry, stuff like that.
That's what he ordered.
So got $18,000 worth of merchandise, sent it, largest order Outpost had ever hit at that point.
David gets the merchandise, happy as shit.
Emails me, gets me on ICQ.
Yeah, man, it's working.
We're going to make a lot of money.
MacGyver, Kim, finds out about it, messages me on ICQ.
I want to go to Issaquah.
Why do you want to go to Issaquah?
To make some money.
Dude, you're making money.
No, I want to go up there.
Okay, go.
Be careful.
He gets in his piece of shit Saturn, drives from Denver all the way up to Seattle.
They meet and party all that night.
Now, here's the rule back then.
If you're committing a credit card fraud, if a bank knows that there's potential fraud on the account, the bank shuts the account down.
Well, back then, we had all the logins to these credit cards that we were stealing.
So what you'd do is you'd place the order for Apple products or whatever you're doing, whatever merchant you were defrauding.
The day of the delivery, you'd wake up early that morning, sign on to the credit card account.
If you could sign on and access the account, the order was good.
You go pick up the merchandise.
If the account was shut down, you knew it had been flagged for fraud.
You get your ass back in the bed.
All right?
So that day, because Kim and David had partied all night long, they didn't go to log in.
They didn't check with Big Buyer to see if they could be logged in.
Meanwhile, Big Buyer is pinging me to beat all hell.
Hey, I need to get up with David.
I need to get up with David.
We got a problem.
I can't sign into the account.
They've not checked in with me.
Nobody can find them.
So they go to pick up the merchandise because during this point in time, Big Buyer has placed a second order with Outpost.com.
This order, $17,000, the second largest order that Outpost.com has ever gotten.
Five days, five days after the first order.
By this time, Outpost knows the first order is fraud.
So what do they do?
They pick up the phone, call Issaquah PD.
Hey, we got some fraud.
Issaquah is like, can you guys send some empty boxes?
So Outpost is like, yeah, we can do that.
So David, he's got an old Cadillac.
Kim's in the passenger seat.
David's driving.
David's girlfriend is in the back seat.
They pull into the complex where they've got the drop address.
Pull in there.
As they're pulling in, David sees this van that's parked in the lot, and this guy's turned sideways sitting in the seat, in the driver's seat.
David looks over and he says, that's an undercover cop.
Kim's like, nah.
So.
They pull up to the drop.
Kim's like, I'll go in and get it.
So he walks in, looks at the guy behind the counter.
I think you've got some merchandise for me.
Guy's like, one second.
He steps behind a wall.
Out pops the Issaquah PD, arrest my second in charge on the spot.
David Thomas sees this shit going on, hightells it, beats a path out to the they arrest him on the interstate.
They find out his real name, everything else.
So David had outstanding charges.
We couldn't bond him out.
Kim had no outstanding charges.
So we couldn't pay for it with a stolen credit card.
One of the other guys who helped build Shadow Crew, his name was Seth Sanders, who went by the screen name of Kid.
Kid got his girlfriend to use her credit card to bond out Kim Taylor from jail.
All right.
Stupid-ass move, but that's what happens.
So we get Kim out.
I put Kim on a bus to Utah to hang out with this guy that was willing to take him in, the guy that made counterfeit driver's licenses.
He went by the screen name of Midhack.
So Midhack's like, yeah, send him down.
Me and my wife will take him in.
So Kim's there about three, four weeks.
I get a call one night.
Midhack actually calls me.
He's like, hey, man, you got to get this son of a bitch out of here.
I was like, what?
He's like, man, the only thing he's doing, he sits in a chair all day and just pops X. All day long.
I'm like, what?
Jesus Christ.
That's all he's doing.
46 years old.
What a lunatic.
I'm like, what the fuck?
So I'm like, I get him on the phone.
I was like, you got to go.
He's like, where am I going to go?
Well, at the same time, because I'm running all this bullshit, all these different operations and everything.
This other guy, Larry Ruta, is coming from Los Angeles, moving his ass to Georgia, to whatever that coastal city is over in Georgia.
He's moving to Georgia.
So he's holed up in Denver.
He's had a stop over in Denver there.
Committing fraud in Denver to get some more money to make the rest of the way to Georgia.
I'm like, okay.
So Kim decides he's going to partner with Larry.
So he goes to Denver, gets in the hotel with Larry, and Kim starts passing checks, payroll checks.
So what they're doing is they're printing off payroll checks.
And I didn't know it until it was too late, but they're printing off payroll checks, going down to Safeway, using the payroll checks to buy Marriott gift cards.
Coming back and paying the Marriott bill with the stolen Marriott gift cards.
Needless to say, it doesn't take long to track those son of a bitches down.
So cops come in, arrest everybody at that point.
Kim gets away from that.
Now, this is all happening as I'm retiring from Shadow Crew.
Same fucking week, all this is happening.
What I end up doing, I contact my forum techie, a guy by the name of Albert Gonzalez.
Contact him.
I'm like, look, ban this guy.
I'm out.
So I retire.
Albert Gonzalez does initially ban Kim, but he lets Kim back in.
And the reason why is because Albert Gonzalez starts out as our forum techie.
All right.
Albert goes on to be the largest credit card thief in history.
170 million credit cards.
He gets two 20-year prison sentences.
He's still in prison to this day.
What?
All right.
Now, the way he gets caught, and that's what brings down Shadow Crew.
The way he gets caught, we have this thing called the CVV1 breach or hack.
All right, it's not a hack.
What happens is, we were doing all this phishing schemes.
We were getting, back then, when you phished, you had 20 different fields that somebody would fill out.
They'd do Mother's Maiden, DOB, Social Security number, passwords.
They'd do all this bullshit, credit card numbers, pins.
They'd put all that stuff.
These days, they don't do that.
Back then, they did.
We were getting the pins and the card numbers.
Now, for you to encode that on a physical card, and take it to an ATM, you have to have track two data.
All right.
So on the back of your debit card or credit card, that magnetic stripe, three data tracks.
First data track is a card number.
I'm sorry.
First data track is customer name.
Second data track is the card number, forward slash, 16-digit algorithm out the side of that.
Third data track is called indiscriminate data.
No one uses it.
Stolen Credit Card Details00:15:10
All right.
Okay.
For you to use that in ATM or to swipe it at a store, you've got to have that second track.
You've got to know.
That algorithm.
You can't guess it.
All right?
Now we had the card number, we had the PIN.
What the Ukrainians found out was that none of the banks had implemented the hash.
So you had the card number.
When you encode that on the magnetic stripe, you put the card number, a forward slash, and you could put any 16 digits out the side of it.
It would encode.
You could take it to an ATM, pull cash out on it.
All right.
Now, before we found that out, everyone was doing card not present fraud.
You'd get stolen credit card details.
You'd go online, buy merchandise and rip people off like that.
Okay.
And a good Carter at that point would profit.
$30,000 to $40,000 a month is what you could profit because you'd get the products in, you'd resell them on eBay, 80% of retail, and make money like that.
Now, when this hack comes out, where you're able to encode and cash out an ATM, that $30,000 to $40,000 a month turns into $30,000 to $40,000 a day.
Now, the people that were supplying that data, this goes into those three necessities of cybercrime I was talking about, gathering data, committing crime, cashing out.
The Ukrainians had the data.
They knew how to commit the crime, but they were physically in a location where they could not.
Put any cards in an atm.
So much fraud had happened in the Ukraine and Russia, that eastern part of Europe that every card was locked down so they had to get money mules in the United States.
That's what partners shadow crew with these Ukrainian forums at that point in time.
That's the first real partnership that takes place.
Okay, so the deal was, Ukrainians would supply the card data, we would encode it.
Cashiers would pocket 30 to 40 percent.
60 would go to the Ukrainians On a daily basis.
All right.
Albert, our forum techie, he starts to do this shit.
So one day he's in New Jersey.
He's got a backpack.
He's got a stack of white plastic cards that are all encoded with stolen debit cards.
He's got a stack of these son of a bitches.
Broad daylight.
Stands at an ATM for 40 minutes, putting one white card in after another, pulling out $20 bills, stuffing them in this damn backpack.
40 minutes.
Broad daylight.
He's wearing a wig.
Wow.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, it just so happens.
That two New Jersey cops are eating across the street and notice this kid standing at the ATM for 40 minutes.
One of them looks at the other.
Let me see what he's doing.
He goes over, walks up to Albert, sees that Albert's wearing the disguise, everything else, sees the white stack of cards in Albert's hand.
What are you doing, kid?
Albert falls apart at that point.
We didn't know Albert had been arrested.
Albert goes to work for the Secret Service.
Now, the big thing is, back then, I call it the FIS syndrome, the fucking idiot syndrome.
Everybody on both sides of the fence were idiots.
We were committing crime.
We didn't worry about security.
We didn't worry about a lot of stuff like that.
Law enforcement had no idea on how to track these people, how to arrest them, identify them, anything else.
So they arrest Albert on a mistake, just accidentally get the guy.
Albert immediately turns on us and they ask him, hey, how would you identify these people and arrest them?
So Albert says, You could try a VPN.
And they're like, hmm, a VPN.
Never heard of that before.
Yeah.
They're like, what is it?
And he tells them.
So it was Albert's idea to do this.
The reason Albert lets Kim back on the forums is so that he could identify him.
So Albert's already been arrested.
He's come back in, everything else.
Albert, I step aside, didn't know he had been arrested.
Albert comes in and he makes a rule.
He's like, hey, you know, law enforcement's looking at us and everything like that.
To be safe.
I put this VPN in.
Everybody's going to be protected.
Nobody can see what we're doing.
We got you.
Turns out Secret Service is running the VPN.
They caught drop addresses, real names, transactions, everything else.
So if you look at the Secret Service indictments, I think the indictment was only for like $3, $5 million for the fraud, something like that.
It was just for a few months and just for a set group of people that were using it out of that 4,000 group structure that was there.
But arrested 33 people, six countries, six hours.
I'm the only guy publicly mentioned as getting away.
There were a couple of other guys that did get away.
There was a guy that went by the screen name of tron.
He was a Ukrainian.
And what happened with that guy?
Secret Service is in the air about to arrest him.
They call the local Ukrainian PD, and they're like, we're coming down to arrest this guy.
Ukrainians are like, oh, yes, come on down and get him.
So as soon as the Secret Service hangs up, they get in the car, drive down, and tell the kid, hey, they're coming.
Kid bugs out, and he gets away like that.
There was a couple guys that got away just accidentally and things like that.
They pick me up February 8th, 2005.
And what happened there?
I had all my money overseas.
I had a couple hundred grand stateside, but where I went head over heels for Elizabeth and started spending money hand over fist, I mean just crazy amounts of money, when I started doing that, I went broke quickly stateside.
Had money overseas, couldn't access it at about the same time as when Shadow Crew makes front cover Forbes.
Then all of a sudden Shadow Crew gets busted.
Shadow Crew gets busted October.
I'm already out of money by October of that year.
You just spent it all?
Just blew it all?
Shit for me with her every dinner every night.
Didn't eat anything at the house, ate at the best restaurants in Charleston.
So every dinner was five to seven hundred dollars every dinner every night good, all right.
Every weekend was thousand dollar pair of shoes, at least twenty five hundred dollar purse every weekend.
I remember there were a few weekends I would, I would have a let.
There was one weekend in particular had eleven thousand dollars in cash on a Friday night, eleven thousand dollars on a Friday night, Sunday morning.
Nothing didn't know where it went, had no clue.
I remember we were, we were at a bar, one of these dance bar type things at a bar, and I had bought a.
I got a booth and had some champagne and all that.
No money by the.
You know, once the weekend is over, was this part of uh, your sort of inner control.
Like you wanted to, you didn't want to lose her, you didn't want her to leave you.
I'm a control freak, you want to be alone.
And then you wanted to just shower her with all this money and all these gifts and all these dinners.
So um, it's weird with me in relationships and my wife Michelle was.
She'll tell you the same thing.
I mean it's.
I'm still learning today what a healthy relationship actually entails.
Historically with me, if I wasn't dating someone or married or something like that, I would have friends or people I thought were friends.
When you're a criminal, you don't have friends.
But I would have people I would hang out with until I started to date someone.
Then immediately, it's just her.
Right, exactly.
That's it.
Nobody else.
Don't talk to anybody else.
Don't call anybody else, anything else like that.
Elizabeth kind of took that to the extreme because she had these problems and I became this Savior, you know, put the cap and mask on.
And I adopted that as my cause.
You know, I got to make sure she's fixed.
I didn't realize then she can't fix anybody but yourself.
And you're damn lucky if you can do that shit.
But I went head over heels.
It was this thing of whatever she wants, do.
So I go through all my stateside cash.
I get it in my head.
If I just keep going, it'll work out all right.
Just keep trucking.
Just a little bit more, a little bit more.
Figured the best thing I can do is get married to her.
You know, maybe if we get engaged, it'll show her I love her.
It'll show her she's going to be all right.
Go like that.
So she wants Tiffany engagement ring.
Of course she does.
Well, I don't have the money to buy a damn Tiffany engagement ring.
By this time, Shadow Cruisman popped everything else.
I'm like, well, how are you going to get it?
So I start running.
I used to preach to people not to run checks.
I start running checks, counterfeit cashier's checks.
And I would find somebody on eBay that had a coin collection, something like that, convince them to send it to me COD.
I'd pay the delivery driver with a fake check.
walk off, cash out the item like that.
Had a coin dealer in Charleston that would buy anything that I gave him as far as coins went.
So I did the same thing with the engagement ring.
Got this $20,000 engagement ring with a fake check.
Proposed to her.
She accepted.
Then she wanted Tiffany wedding bands.
Well, the problem is that when you're running checks, if you're going to do that, it's like with counterfeit currency.
If you're running counterfeit money, you don't shit where you eat.
You take a road trip.
That way you're not connected to one specific geographic area.
Same thing with checks.
You don't shit where you eat.
Well, because of Elizabeth, I couldn't travel.
So I was stuck in the Charleston area running checks.
Pretty easy to start to pinpoint that guy all of a sudden.
So I had UPS delivering these rings.
It was a COD order.
I guess they had flagged every COD order for high dollar items that was coming in.
And they figured out, ah, this is a son of a bitch right here.
So controlled delivery got me.
I leave the house one day.
She and I were going to go out to dinner that night.
And I was like, hey, I left like at 10 o'clock in the morning.
I was like, I'll be back in a few hours.
Got to pick this stuff up.
She didn't know what I was doing.
So I'm going to wait at the drop.
UPS driver pulls in.
I get out.
He was like, I was like, you got a package for me?
He's like, yeah.
He's like, you got an ID.
Flash him an ID.
He hands me the package.
I hand him the check.
Turn around.
There's the FBI, Charleston PD, about 30 of them in the parking lot.
They got the UPS officials there.
They got all these other people there.
And that's what got me.
Within 45 minutes, The U.S. Secret Service comes in, takes over the investigation.
They knew exactly who they had.
So they let me sit in a county jail for about a week, week and a half.
Two agents fly in from New Jersey because that's where all this stuff originates from is with Albert being arrested in New Jersey.
So the headquarters for all cybercrime at that time was all New Jersey based.
So two agents fly in from New Jersey, pull me out of a cell.
They looked at me and they were like, we got your laptop.
I was like, yeah.
They were like, have you got anything on it?
I'm like, yeah.
Oh, you're going to be charged for whatever's on it.
I'm like, yeah, I figured.
And then one of them looks at me and he's like, can you do anything for us?
Well, I was arrested February 8th of 2005.
I was supposed to be married to Elizabeth February 26th.
So I looked at him and I was like, look, you get me out.
I'll do whatever you want me to as long as I can get back with her.
And the agent looks at me and he's like, we're going to get you out.
I'm like, all right.
And so they let me sit there three months to get a taste of it.
I was under a $327,000 bond at that point.
After three months, they have it.
lowered down to $1,000.
My sister pays $1,000 so I can get out.
All right.
And I walk out.
Do I call Denise?
No.
I call Elizabeth.
So I called her up.
I'm out.
During that three months, she had visited like twice.
I'd had a few phone calls with her.
That's about it.
And then call her immediately.
She's like, I'll be there.
So me and the agent, Secret Service agent, are standing out in the parking lot.
It's like 11 or 12 o'clock at night.
She pulls up.
She had a friend that had a limo company.
She pulls up in a limousine, pops the trunk, gets out, gets these two storage containers out of the trunk with my clothes in it, drops them on the pavement in the parking lot.
It's nice for her to put them in containers.
Yeah, right.
Just looks at me and comes over and hugs me.
She says, Call me later.
I start crying.
She gets in the car and leaves.
The agent looks at me.
He's like, Is that your fiance?
And I'm like, Yeah.
He's like, Man, I am so sorry.
I'm like, Yeah.
But Idiot Brett here, what I do, he has to put me up in the hotel.
I don't have any money.
I've got $30 in my name.
He puts me up in the hotel that night, gives me money to eat on that night.
As soon as he leaves, I take the $30 that I do have, walk my ass over to Walmart, and buy a prepaid debit card so I can start back in crime that night.
Call Elizabeth right after that, beg her and get her to get back with me.
And I commit crime.
What happens is it takes a month.
I'm in Charleston at that point.
It takes a month for the Secret Service to get me moved up to Columbia, South Carolina.
That's where the field office is.
So the deal was I would go in to the offices every day, four to six hours, and surf the web.
It wasn't dark web back then, but you would surf these criminal forums.
Target people, have conversations with people, identify potential people to be arrested, help build cases, and at the same time, start talking to the Secret Service about these dynamics of cybercrime, those three necessities, how these environments work, everything else like that.
So that was my job.
I was paid $350 a week to do that.
They had two recording devices, so I was on a laptop outside line, hooked up to a 50-inch plasma monitor on the wall.
on a desktop computer right next to mine outside the line.
Two agents in the room, one South Carolina law enforcement agent in the room at all times.
So three people in the room at all times was supposed to be there.
So the first two weeks, they're very diligent.
They're paying attention to everything that's going on, everything else like that, asking questions, everything else.
But you're seeing somebody just surf the web every day, all day.
Is that a phone vibrator?
Oh, it's okay.
There.
It's like my freaking brain's going to rattle out.
The agents watching that every day, they get bored after a while.
And what happens is, they get so bored that they start to watch porn.
Yeah, now they were, at the same time, they were recording everything that I was doing.
They had Camtasia that was taking snapshots of the screen like every few seconds.
So it'd take a snapshot of the screen and save that.
They were using Spectre Pro, which would capture the keystrokes of everything that was going on.
All right.
Now, at the end of every night, that would go on a DVD on a spindle.
Okay, so.
You see that and you're like, shit, that's a large spindle of DVDs.
They're probably not going to go through that stuff.
At the same time, they're starting to watch porn.
I'm of the opinion, fuck it.
Let's see what we can do.
So I start to break the law inside Secret Service offices with them in the room with me.
Recording Every Keystroke00:14:46
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not the brightest guy, dude.
Not the brightest guy.
Well, I mean, these guys aren't the brightest dudes either.
Secret Service agents sitting there watching porn.
Oh, there's some crazy stories about that.
Some crazy stories about that.
So I do that for the next 10 months.
Now, when I say crazy stories, like, for example, we were hacked at one point.
So this guy, Max Butler, Max Butler is the guy who did it.
But Max, because they were having me open any type of file that would come in that would help you build a case.
If they're going to send you pictures of counterfeit currency or fake IDs or credit card numbers or anything else, open the file.
That way we got a copy of it.
Okay.
So you'd open it.
Max attaches a keylogger to one of the files.
All right.
And he starts capturing all the data, starts locking me out of the accounts, everything else like that.
So what happens is one day I walk in the office.
I usually go in the office about 4 p.m.
I walk in the office, go to sign in.
As I'm signing in, I get a phone call because I had a burner phone that was issued to me as well that was left at the office.
So I get a phone call, get on the call, and he's got this TTYL stuff.
For hearing impaired people, it's kind of an automatic voice that comes across.
And he's telling me he knows who I am, everything else like that.
So Secret Service is like, what the fuck's going on?
They think I'm doing it because I'm trying to get out of the investigation.
So they're like, get in the car.
So we'll go down to the apartment.
They search the apartment.
And then they figure out after a while, oh, no, we've got an attacker that's doing this stuff.
So this guy had a key logger on her system.
I'm telling them it's a key logger.
They're sitting there going, for three months, they allow the key logger on the system.
The guy's capturing all the data, everything else that's coming through that machine.
We weren't talking.
So it was not evident that I was an informant at that point because that machine was strictly about criminal conversations.
But he thought it.
Max thought it the entire time.
At the same time I was going, that was one story.
After three months, I walk in one day and Bobby or Brad, they were the two agents in charge.
I think it was Brad.
He looks at me.
He's like, you know what?
I think we've got a keylogger on the machine.
I was like, no shit.
He was like, let's format it today.
And I was like, excellent idea.
So that was the end of that story.
But the other big story, I'm driving back to the apartment after work one day.
Brad calls me and he's like, Brett.
And I was like, yeah.
And he's like, we may have another keylogger on our machine.
I was like, what's going on?
He's like, well, that site, La Cosa Nostra, is automatically installing keyloggers on machines.
And I was like, who owns the site?
And he's like, none of your goddamn business.
I was like, look, I'll come in in the morning.
We'll fix it.
He's like, done.
So what had happened was this kid in Canada had been arrested, sent to prison.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police got the kid out to act as an informant, to set up a website, a honeypot, and start gathering data.
Getting IP addresses, everything else on all these people that were visiting the sites.
So that was the idea from the RCMP.
All right.
One of the things the kid did was he put a keylogger on micosanoster.com so anybody who visited it, it would download the keylogger to their machine and he could start getting data like that too.
Little did he know it had been installed on my machine too, working for the government.
So I go in the next day.
Now I didn't know that he was an informant at this point, the kid, right?
So I go in the next day.
I'm usually let directly into the office.
This day I'm not.
This day I have to wait out in the waiting area.
So I'm waiting out in the waiting area.
Out comes Bobby.
I'm like, Bobby, I really need to know who owns the site.
He's like, well, I'll ask Brad.
I was like, okay.
So he goes in the back to ask Brad.
I hear Brad yelling all the way from the back toward the front.
Tell him it's none of his goddamn business.
I was like, okay.
So they take me back down to the room, the office where I'm working out, this big ward room.
They take me down there, and I'm like, well, what do you want me to do?
And they're like, well, what would you do if something like that usually happened?
And I was like, well, I'd shut him down.
Do what you usually do.
I was like, okay.
So I crawl up in this kid.
I start reaching out to my contacts, everything else, find out who owns the site, find out that the kid had been in jail, find out that the kid was mysteriously released from jail with charges still pending and everything else.
Oh, that's odd.
And I start talking about it.
48 hours later, site shut down, kid's back in prison.
Washington calls Columbia.
What's your fucking monkey doing?
Yeah.
Yeah, we're coming down.
So Brad comes back down.
Do you want to stay out of prison?
Yes, I'd like to.
Well, if you want to stay out of prison, the best thing you could do is say that you didn't know anything was going on, that you just did it on your part.
I was like, okay.
So Washington flies in because they're thinking the monkey has done something.
So Washington flies in.
They thought they were going to ask me some questions.
Washington doesn't even talk to me.
They pull me off after two hours of interviewing with the two agents who are telling them a bunch of bullshit.
Washington gets me in there and they ask me, hey, why aren't you targeting Ukrainian cyber criminals?
And I was like, I am.
We'll do it more.
And that was the entire conversation right there.
So we ended up shutting down another law enforcement's operation just for shits and giggles, is what happened.
So that's some of the stuff that goes on in those offices at that point.
Now, I want to say this, though.
Those guys, they were really good guys.
Yeah.
They were.
Um, They weren't used to dealing with people like I used to be, but they were good guys and they tried to give me a chance to do the right thing.
I got both Bobby and Brad got fired from the Secret Service.
And when you're fired in federal government, you're not fired.
You're transferred to another agency is what it is.
So what happens is when they finally find out that I'd been screwing them over, I'd ripped them off for committed crime for 10 months inside of the offices.
We had this operation called Operation Rolling Stone.
And an associate of mine by the name of Sean Mims, I had taught him how to do this tax return fraud that I was doing.
So they go to arrest him.
When they arrested him, there was absolutely no evidence in his apartment.
The apartment manager, he was living in Los Angeles.
The apartment manager comes out and tells him, hey, the night before he had a you-haw, packed out all kinds of shit.
Don't know what it was.
So they figure it was all the evidence.
So they come back in the office the next day.
They want me to take a polygraph test.
I'm like, no, not going to do it.
So they get my lawyer on the phone.
My lawyer's like, well, have you done anything?
And I was like, yeah.
And he was like, well, you could always try to lie and pass the test.
If not, they're going to throw you back in jail.
And I'm like, okay, let's roll those dice.
So they asked me three questions.
Have you accessed a computer out of work?
Have you talked to the press?
Have you informed anyone of any investigations?
I failed all three questions.
All right.
Revoked the bond, sent me back to the county jail in Charleston, South Carolina.
Three days later, what goes on is Jim Ramacone, Bobby Kirby, both Seer Service agents, they pull me out of the cell down there in Charleston.
They've got a Miranda waiver.
They've already searched my apartment.
They found prepaid debit cards, cash, IDs, all this other bullshit.
So you find all that.
Ramacone's pissed off.
Bobby's upset.
And what happened is, when I filled the polygraph, Brad and Bobby, they want to search my apartment.
And I'm like, Go and search it.
Let me go with you.
And they're like, okay.
So as they walk in the apartment, I get them distracted.
I looked at Brad and I was like, hey, man, you want to see what kind of porn I've got?
He's like, yeah.
So he comes in the bedroom.
I've got a stack of the DVD porn and all that.
I was like, look at that.
Got this.
So I'm showing him that.
Bobby's searching in the kitchen and living room.
The shit that I've got that's important is in the closet in the bedroom.
So Brad, he's distracted by that.
And I start talking to him about these strippers that I'm dating.
So he's talking about that.
He just kind of glances around, doesn't do anything else.
And I didn't know.
It took until 20.
I think I met Bobby in 2015, no, 2017.
I didn't know that's what got him fired right there.
They trusted me when they went in the apartment not to do a real thorough search.
They just, when I told them nothing was there, they believed that bullshit.
So what happens is later on, they didn't find anything on that search.
Later on, some more agents come in, do a thorough search, find all kinds of bullshit.
And because of that, they're dismissed from Secret Service.
I don't know where Brad's working now.
Bobby got a job over at the VA doing investigations for them.
That's where he works now.
But I had an opportunity to meet with Bobby in 2017, 2018, took that, was able to apologize to him, everything else.
And this is where this guy, he looks at me and I told him I was doing a lot better.
I was trying to be a better guy.
And he was like, Brett, you were always a good guy.
You just didn't know it.
Man, that shit hit hard right there.
So that's what happened with that.
So I was under state charges when they revoked the bond.
Judge reinstates the bond because they revoked the bond improperly.
No one calls the Secret Service to tell him I got out of prison.
Or not out of prison, but out of jail.
No one informs the Secret Service of that.
I walk out, and I'm of the opinion, hey.
You're going to screw me.
You're going to find me.
So I take off cross-country.
I borrow $1,000 from a stripper that I've been dating, borrow $1,000 from her, tell her I'll pay her back $3,000 in two weeks, and head west on I-20.
No idea where the hell I was going.
Get to Dallas and realize that there's a prepaid debit card supplier in Dallas.
So I walk into the offices there, get this guy, lie to this guy, get him to give me 67 prepaid debit cards without me paying for them and without showing ID.
He gives them to me, and I start filing income taxes.
Two weeks later, I cash out.
I think that night was like $110,000, $130,000.
Use that money to buy a Jeep Cherokee.
And the plan, a stupid ass plan, but the plan was to steal enough money to bug out to Brazil and set up shop down there and continue on with it.
So I was out.
I was on the run for four months, stole $600,000.
The night before, I was in Las Vegas, Nevada, had stolen $160K out of ATMs.
Woke up the next morning, signed on to Carter'sMarket.com, which was another.
Forum ran by Max Butler at that point in time, before he gets arrested, signed on to Cartersmarket.com.
There's my name us most wanted.
Beside of it yeah, and it was the first time that my name had ever been mentioned on a forum um, real name.
Everything else was there and I clicked on the link.
There's my picture, a link to the Secret Service.
No yeah, it's talking about me working with the Secret Service helping to put them in prison, everything else.
So everybody's just pissed to be all right.
So i'm sitting there, i'm sitting there looking at it like whoo, And I said out loud, I was like, well, Mr. Johnson, you've made United States most wanted list.
What do you do now?
I'm going to Disney World.
So, yeah.
Why?
Why not?
Why not?
So I figured that I'll have to lay down, lay low for about a year.
Can't get a passport because I was planning on getting a passport and bugging out to Brazil.
I was like, let things die down for about a year.
What do I need to do?
I'll go to Disney World.
I'll get my year ticket, you know, the yearly pass for Disney and Universal.
Go to the parks every day.
You just want to stay there?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Idiot.
Idiot, right?
Sounds like hell.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Nowadays, you know, I was in Orlando like three weeks ago for a conference.
I'm like, Jesus, I hate this place.
Oh, my God.
It's hell.
It's like never again.
But then it was like, oh, yeah, we'll go to the parks.
It'll be all right.
So I go down.
I pay for a timeshare for nine months in advance.
I go down.
It wasn't furnished.
So I go out and buy furniture, buy electronics, everything else.
Lasted about six weeks.
That's what I wanted to ask you earlier when you said you were taking in all that money, $100.
Some thousand dollars a week.
Did you ever think, did the thought ever cross your mind like maybe I should just take all this and buy some real estate and just get out of this?
slowly transition myself to go legit.
And I'll tell you the reason for that.
I'm not the only guy that acts like that when you're stealing that kind of money.
The thing is, you forget what the value of money is.
All right.
So the money is coming so fast that you're like, shit, just steal more money.
You know, my budget, I didn't have to come up with a budget until I was in my 40s.
My budget back then was just steal more cash.
You forget what the value of currency is.
And it just becomes this free-flowing thing all of a sudden where you just spend whatever.
I had the Rolexes, all that crap.
I went out and bought this Chanel J12 that was diamond-encrusted.
It was the gaudiest fucking piece of shit you've ever seen in your life.
It was the most ridiculous thing you ever bought.
That.
That was it?
It was a $25,000 watch.
So the J12 was a black ceramic band, and the entire band was encrusted with diamonds.
I mean, you couldn't wear it.
It's something like one of these freaking rappers would wear these days, right?
But I would have that, and people would come down.
I'd show it to them.
Hey, look what I got.
Look at this piece of shit.
It was weird stuff like that.
So you forget the amount of money, the value of currency.
Like you would go in my guest bathroom, and one of the drawers had $10,000 of cash in it.
Just for the hell of it.
I would get in there.
I'd use the bathroom sometimes, and the money that I had in my pockets, I'd just stack in there.
In case you ran out of toilet paper.
Yeah, finally you had $10,000 in there.
My kitchen cabinets, they had stacks of prepaid debit cards in the cabinets.
You know, unopened cards, envelopes full of cards.
That was what was in the cabinets.
When I was arrested, I had a Mini Cooper, and then I transitioned over to Mercedes.
But when I was arrested, I had, it was like 962 or 972 $2 bills in the vehicle.
You know, the odd shit like that is what happens.
Prison Money Hiding Spots00:12:53
In the kitchen cabinets, you had rubber bands of $1 bills just wrapped up, you know, just thrown in there all the time.
But as far as transitioning over to legal, That legal currency, like that.
What happens is for most cyber criminals, and we used to talk about all the time you know, you've got to have an exit strategy.
You've got to know when you're going to get out and you've got to get out before it's too late.
Everybody says that.
Nobody follows that.
Really?
Nobody follows that because the money is being stolen so quickly, you don't worry about that.
And then not only that, but it's an ego boost too, that status type thing, because now you've got everybody in those communities that are looking up to you.
You know you're the most important person on the planet to them.
So it's this huge ego boost all of a sudden.
So you're not, you don't get out of it, you don't stop it.
Something has to make you stop right.
All right, so you, you rip somebody off, you get arrested, whatever happens, and you get the consequences from that.
Right is what ends.
It comes up being the end of that kind of stuff.
All right, so yeah, so I mentioned I get, I go through the drug abuse program.
Right, I fake my way into that and what happens is is, so i'm arrested in Orlando, i'm held at the Orange County jail, there in federal holding, and didn't know a damn thing about federal inmates, anything else or the system at all.
This guy named Yeti, he was in there for meth.
He kind of takes that's.
I was blessed throughout this entire thing of people kind of taking me under their wing.
All right, so this guy named Yeti kind of takes me under his wing and he's like, hey man, you know, the only time you get off in federal prison is the drug program.
And i'm like, well dude, I don't have a drug problem.
He's like, well, you can find a drug problem, can't you?
And I was like, you know, I can find a drug problem so yeah, what happens is is they gave me diesel therapy and diesel therapy, That is basically to wear you down mentally and physically before you get to your final destination.
So it works by, it took me two weeks to go from Orlando to Columbia, South Carolina.
They stop at every single county jail they can find, let you go through processing, which is about six hours.
Once you go through that processing, hit your buck, hey, time to move.
Go to the next county jail.
Bam, like that.
Where is he down, right?
So what was going on is every county jail I would stop at, as you're going through processing, they ask you, do you have a drug problem?
Why, yes, I do.
Alcohol, cocaine.
So I would request assistance.
Yes, I'm more than willing to go to AA, everything else like that.
So by the time I get to Columbia, South Carolina, I've got a paperwork trail of me saying I've got drug issues.
My initial lawyer was a guy named Paul Thurmond, Strom Thurmond's son.
All right.
And I had paid for him with stolen money.
So I had to drop him.
So they gave me this guy that looks just like Billy D. Williams.
His name is Jimmy Rogers.
Jimmy P. Rogers was this guy's name.
Looked just like Billy D.
So he's the only good thing the guy did for me.
He stands up and.
During the arraignment, he asked the judge to order a psychological evaluation.
And the judge is like, yes.
So psychological evaluation is four hours long.
Psychologist comes to the county jail, pulls you out, gives you this four-hour interview.
About halfway through it, psychologist is like, use any type of drugs?
I was like, yeah.
What do you use?
Cocaine?
Smoke or snort?
Snort?
How much?
An eight-ball a day.
And he looks at me, and I'm like, he's like, that's a lot.
And I'm like, yeah.
He's like, do you have any trouble out of that?
And I was like, yeah.
I can't get an erection.
And he looks at me, and I looked at him, and I'm like, I got that shit from Boogie Nights.
You know, that last shot, Mark Wahlberg, he can't get it up.
And I'm like, that's got to be right.
So I looked at him.
Psychologist is looking at me, and I'm like, is that right?
And he's like, it could happen.
He's like, do you still have that problem?
I was like, no, no, not right now.
And he's like, okay.
So that makes it into my pre sentence report.
So, um, For federal sentencing, probation office and the prosecutor's office, they do this in-depth background check on this felon, this guy who's being charged, to tell the judge how much time to give you.
So they go through all your personal background.
They look at the charges, everything else, and they say, give him 75 months or that range, okay?
So that drug use goes into my PSR.
So the day of sentencing, prosecutor stands up and he's, I mean, this dude is screaming.
He's like, He's manipulating the prosecutor.
He's manipulating the Secret Service.
He's manipulating you today, Your Honor.
We insist on the upper limits of the guidelines.
So my guidelines were 60 to 75 months was what I was supposed to be sentenced to.
I had already been bragging that if I get any more than 60 months, I ain't staying.
So judge, after the prosecutor says this, judge says, I agree, 75 months.
I'm like, looked at my lawyer.
Can you get the drug program for me?
He's like, I don't know.
I'll ask.
So he stands up, Your Honor, will you order the drug program for Mr. Johnson?
Judge is like, no, but I'll recommend he gets evaluated for it.
I'm like, well, what does that mean?
Lawyers like, you're probably not going to get it.
I'm like, okay, how soon can you get me to the camp?
He's like, well, if you don't appeal, I can get you to the camp pretty quick.
I was like, my exact words were, fuck the appeal.
Get me to the camp.
I'll take it from there.
He looks at me like I'm the biggest fucking idiot in the world.
So we don't appeal.
I had had family and friends look up because you can have a prison recommended in federal system.
So I'd had them look up because a lot of camps back then did not have fences around them.
So I wanted a camp that didn't have a fence because I was going to leave.
They settled on Ashland, Kentucky.
Wasn't supposed to have a fence or anything else.
So two weeks later, I'm in Ashland, Kentucky.
14 foot fence, razor wire on top, pull into that.
I'm like, shit, that's not good.
So I go in, as they're processing, I'm talking to the guard, and I'm like, hey, man, are there any jobs outside of the fence?
And he's like, yeah, man, you can work in the natural forest if you want to.
I'm like, no, I'll die out there.
And he's like, well, you can do landscaping.
Well, shit, I can run a weed eater.
Next day, I walk into the landscaping office.
The guard in his office, his entire wall behind his desk is an aerial photo of the compound blown up.
So you can literally sit there and plot your escape, right?
So my dad starts to visit.
About the third visit in, the poor guy, he looks at me.
He's like, you know, I've been reading about you online.
I'm like, yeah.
He's like, yeah.
He's like, that's a lot of money you made.
I'm like, yeah.
He's like, you think you could teach somebody how to do that?
And I'm like, yeah.
Well, now, the truth of the matter is, is that when I first started telling that story, I blamed that on my dad.
I said, you know, I thought my dad was back in my life.
It wasn't.
He was just wanting to make money off of me was what happened.
The truth of the matter is, looking back now, I think what happened was my dad had always viewed me in that frame of my mom and that criminal mentality and the criminal actions and everything.
So I manipulated the man into helping me escape.
And in return, I taught him how to do tax return fraud.
He had $4,000 cash into his name at that point.
He dropped that off to me, dropped a change of clothes, cell phone, driver's license.
I lasted about about six weeks at the minimum security, then escaped, and I was out three to four weeks at that point.
U.S. Marshals, Canada's a three-state area.
Find me at a hold-up at a hotel, and that's what happens.
So that's how it's called that time.
On sentencing with that, what happened was I ended up saving time on my prison sentence by escaping.
Weird.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So what goes on, the escape happens so soon after the initial sentencing, they use the exact same pre-sentence report.
It's got that drug stuff in there, right?
Now, when I'm arrested I was arrested with a laptop, prepaid debit cards, stolen identities, everything else.
The U.S. Marshals come into the hotel room and seize that stuff without a warrant.
So they weren't allowed to use any of that stuff.
I was blessed on that part.
All right.
So the day of sentencing on the escape, I spent six months in a county jail.
Day of sentencing on the escape, prosecutor stands up.
Secret Service is there.
Prosecutor's there.
Prosecutor stands up.
Your Honor, we would appreciate it if you would consider that Mr. Johnson looks like he was engaged in identity theft again.
when he was arrested this time.
Judge looks at him and says, no, if you're going to charge him with it, you should have charged him with it.
Then he looks at me and he's like, Mr. Johnson, I have no idea why you did these things, but it looks like by you keeping your mouth shut right now, you're saving yourself a serious charge.
And I'm like, yes, Your Honor.
Then he gets the pre-sentence report.
He starts thumbing through it.
And he's like, it also looks like before you were involved with all these drugs, you were a pretty good citizen.
Yes, Your Honor.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you 15 months on the escape.
But I'm going to order the drug program for you.
I'm like, yes, Your Honor.
So I got 15 months on the escape.
The drug program gives a year off immediately.
And it gives you six months halfway house for 18 months.
So I got out of prison three months earlier than I would have by escaping.
Just a weird-ass story on that one.
What was the total time you ended up doing?
90-month sentence.
I ended up serving in prison about seven and a half.
Seven and a half years.
Seven and a half.
Between the county jails, eight months in solitary.
Eight months in solitary.
So I spent six months in the county jail because of the escape.
Once I was sentenced, I got sent directly to the solitary confinement at Ashland, Kentucky.
Spent eight months in that, waiting to be transferred out for punishment and waiting to be transferred.
The shoe.
Yeah, special housing unit.
What do you think about the shoe?
It's interesting.
It's interesting.
That's one word.
What I think about it, though.
You don't know where to go, but inward when you're there, huh?
It's a 6x9, 6x8 cell, so you can actually spread your arms out and touch the walls.
Oh, wow.
You've got a double bunk in there, but only one person in the cell.
You've got the toilet and you've got a desk that folds down from the wall.
And the way it works, and everybody's about the same, the first few months, you sleep as much as possible.
You know, 16, 18 hours a day.
You get up to eat, to use a bathroom, stuff like that.
The first few months, there was no books.
So, you know, you've just got your thoughts.
So that's why one of the reasons you try to sleep as much as you can.
And you play mind games.
You'll try to play a game of chess in your head.
You know, they talk about that.
It's almost impossible to do that shit.
Yeah.
You start doing this and trying to play mind games and all that.
You do stuff to occupy your time.
You make your bed four or five times, stuff like that.
There was no air conditioner in Ashland Shoe or in Ashland Prison at that point in time.
So what you'd do to stay cold or stay cool, you'd strip down to your boxers.
You'd wet the sheet that goes on your bed.
You'd wet it with water.
You'd lay it out on the concrete floor, and then you'd lay on top of that.
And that would provide some comfort on the lot.
So you'd do that.
After a few months, you get the King James Bible arrives, so you read the Bible a lot.
And then a few months later, actual books show up, and you're happy as hell to get that.
You're allowed a phone call a month.
You have to be there.
The first month, you're not allowed anything.
You're allowed after that first month, so 60 days in, you get a phone call.
And that's a 10-minute call.
You get two showers a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays.
And the shower is 10 minutes.
So they handcuff you out, march you to the shower.
Come back in you're supposed to get.
The law says you're supposed to get out of your cell an hour a day, so they've got a special yard for you and everything.
That's not the way prison actually works.
The way prison actually works, you're lucky to get out an hour a week, so most of the time is in the cell.
At that point, all right.
Um, you get to the point where you see shit man honestly, you see stuff.
You'll see.
You know your mind starts to fabricate stuff.
You'll see a bug that's not there, stuff like that.
Um, I still have problems with that today, as anybody would.
But it it has an effect.
It has a strong, strong effect on you.
It got so bad that what happens is I get sent to a real prison after that, Big Spring, Texas, which is a disciplinary medium-low is what it is.
Life Inside the Cell00:13:50
So all the fuck-ups go to Big Spring.
So anybody that's violent that doesn't classify for medium or max, they go to a disciplinary one.
All right.
So I went through three riots while I was there.
Saw two people murdered, four suicides.
That place is ran by the gangs.
Most prisons are ran by gangs.
I just didn't know it at that point.
So what happens is, is I go to Big Spring.
Your race meets you at the door as you come out of processing.
So who met me was the treasurer of the Aryan Brotherhood.
So Big Spring is a converted Air Force compound.
I'm walking up to the unit.
Out pops this treasurer named Nick Sandifer.
He looks at me.
He's like, how many more white guys are coming in?
I was like, shit, I don't know, four or five.
Next question.
What are you in here for?
My answer computer crime with a big ass smile.
Wrong thing to say.
Wrong thing to say because back then you didn't have credit card thieves and shit like that.
Back then, when you said computer crime, you were a pedophile.
You were child pornography.
Chomo.
Chomo time.
And what had happened is the week, the week before I got there, the Aryans, because who ran that compound was a Mexican gang called the Paisanos.
Paisanos.
The Paisanos.
So the week before I got there, the Aryans had paid the Paisanos.
to beat the living shit out of every pedophile on the compound.
Wow.
They had locks on socks.
Everything else is bam, And where they got the information from?
The guards gave the information of every pedophile that was on the compound.
Wow.
So what happens is 4 p.m. nationwide, you've got a stand-up count.
Every inmate in the federal system stands up.
You do a hand count of everybody.
So 4 o'clock count comes in.
After that, you lock down until lunch or until dinner.
I'm sorry.
You lock down until dinner.
So as soon as those doors locked that week, They had a list of all the pedophiles.
They got their socks.
They got their locks on their belts or in their socks.
Bam, So I come into that type of environment.
Everybody's on edge.
This guy asks me, what are you in here for?
I say computer crime.
He looks at me like I'm the biggest piece of shit in the world.
He's like, hold that thought.
He goes and gets his buddies.
And they're circling around like, what'd you say you're in here for?
So I'm telling them.
And they're like, you know, it sounds good.
You still said computer crime.
So the good thing about that is that they will not do anything to you.
Until they know.
So it's going to be paperwork or a guard's going to tell them.
Now, that shit had already popped off to the degree that you weren't traveling with paperwork.
Because it used to be you would come on the compound with your paperwork and you would show them at that point.
It would tell if you had cooperated with law enforcement, what your charges were, everything else.
That got to be such a problem that they now banned paperwork from inmates traveling.
So it took the guards to say that.
Well, the guards weren't telling them shit about me.
All right.
So for the first month, they think I'm a pedophile, but they can't prove it.
At the end of the first month, Wired Magazine hits the compound.
I'm in the magazine.
And it's talking about the hacking, the theft, the fraud, everything else.
I'm like, sweet.
Hallelujah.
Yeah.
Except it's got this line in there.
It says, Brett Johnson, Secret Service informant.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
So that was at four o'clock.
They had out mail right after the count.
That magazine hits.
I'm flipping through and I'm like, okay, I'm good until I see that line.
And then I'm like, I'm fucked.
We go to dinner after that.
At dinner, you already hear the conversations going.
We got a snitch on the compound.
We got a snitch on the compound.
We think it's that guy right there.
The warden shuts down the compound the next morning, shuts down everything, calls me into the office.
He's got SIS there.
He's got all the counselors there.
He looks at me.
He's like, did you give an interview to Wired Magazine?
I'm like, yeah.
He's like, don't you know they'll fucking kill you?
I'm like, no.
He was like, when did you give an interview?
I was like, during transport out of Oklahoma City and Atlanta and all that, he's like, they will kill you here.
So they're doing a locker search, trying to confiscate all the magazines.
He looks at me.
He's like, do you feel safe?
And I was like, if you tell them you don't feel safe, what happens to you?
They throw you in the shoe for eight more months until they transfer your ass.
So I'm like, no, I'm not going back there.
Yes, I feel completely safe.
He looks at me like, you're an idiot.
He says, hey, look, if anybody says anything at all to you, you better tell somebody.
They will kill you here.
I'm like, understood.
So I go back, think everything's fine.
Next day I walk into the unit.
There's Nick Sandifer on his bunk.
He's got the magazine wide open reading it.
I'm like, oh, shit.
Walk up to him.
I'm like, hey, Nick, what are you doing?
I was just doing some reading.
Anything interesting?
It's getting that way.
Let me show you.
So I take the magazine, point the line out.
He's like, man, I already knew.
I was like, do we have a problem?
He's like, Did you snitch on anybody that's here right now?
I was like, no.
He's like, until someone hits this compound that you've told on, we don't have an issue.
I'm like, good.
He's like, but we do need you to do something for us.
So in federal prison, federal system, you have to have a job.
Doesn't matter what you do, you've got to have a job.
I got a job in education teaching a lit class.
Every Aryan signs on to this lit class that's taught Wednesdays 6 to 8.30 p.m.
Did we teach books?
No, we didn't.
We taught fraud every Wednesday, 6 to 8.30.
Anything you guys want to know?
Help me help you.
I'm here for you guys.
That was job one.
The second job, and I've talked about this before, but there's two groups, there's two types of inmates that you can see and really point them out as they're stepping off the bus.
You know who those pedophiles are immediately.
You know those guys.
And the second one, you can pretty much point out the bank robbers.
Those two groups of people.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
What do the bank robbers look like?
It's like they're individuals.
They're just, you know, they know their place, man.
It's like they're that.
That guy.
Cocky.
It's not really even cocky.
It's just like they're this guy that's just this loner type individual that's got this kind of aura around them and they know their place and it's just bam.
They're not asking for help from anybody.
They're not doing anything else.
They're just their own person.
And it's this weird type of just vibe that they put off when they're walking out.
It's a swagger type walk.
Everything else is just there.
And you can really point these people out like that.
Pedophiles, easier shit to point out.
My job was to go up to the white pedophiles and have a talk with them.
Hey, I don't know what you're in here for.
I don't care what you're in here for.
But if you got some sort of fucked up charge, you need to tell me.
Because you see those guys over there?
If you tell me you don't, and then they start to talk to you and they find out you do, they will fucking kill you.
So what do you want to do?
And most of them at that point would be, I just want to do my time.
And you know at that point, okay, look, here's the way this is actually going to work.
You can't talk to these guys.
You can't go in the TV room.
You're not allowed in there.
You're allowed to talk to your people.
All right.
You may have somebody come up and try to victimize you, extort you or something like that.
Not much you can do about that shit either.
And that's the way your existence is if you're that type of criminal that's inside.
All right.
So could you be beaten?
Yeah, it doesn't really happen that much.
Not at that level.
Up in the higher levels like Max, you can't be on the compound.
You cannot.
You were in a low, you said?
Disciplinary medium low is what it is.
Medium low.
So it's weird.
So you've got minimum, low, medium, max.
All right.
But you've got these disciplinary levels on each one, too.
Oh, okay.
I do the low.
I know mainly the white collar crimes are low.
Yes.
White collar is, well, white collar, depending on the time that you're sentenced to.
Right.
You're sentenced to more than 10, you can't go to a camp.
You've got to be under 10 to hit that camp level.
So depending on the time, you could end up in a max, like Ross Ulbrich, for example.
That guy's basically a fraudster.
He's all white collar, even though he's drug trafficking.
His dollar amount's so high, he hits max level at that point.
He's in that big Colorado supermax.
The same one El Chapo's had.
Yeah, and will he ever get out?
Shit, who knows?
I mean, he beat one of the life sentences, but he got life plus he beat one of them.
So he got sentenced to two life sentences plus 40 years.
Which was initially, that was double El Chapo's sentence.
Yeah, think about that.
Oh, I thought about it.
I can't fucking, it doesn't compute.
It doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
You know, I grant you the guy, he fucked up, but does he deserve life in prison for that?
No.
Fentanyl was not popular at that point so you can't even say fentanyl.
Deaths were related to Silk Road.
Most the traffic on Silk Road was pot.
So most drug buyers on the dark web it's marijuana.
You've got some ex people right now.
You do have meth and coke and all this other bullshit too, but 80, 90 percent it's pot.
And he claims, or his parents claim, that there was no sex trafficking.
None of that stuff.
There wasn't.
There wasn't not.
Not no child porn there, absolutely no child porn.
No, that's, that's one of the big that's.
So, looking at dark web markets, child porn has never been on dark web markets.
It's always been a separate type of thing.
And that goes back to the Shadow Crew days.
We had rules against child porn, drugs, counterfeit currency.
The only one we really lived by was child porn.
So you don't have human trafficking on Silk Road's side.
You don't have child pornography or any pornography of any type on Silk Road.
You did have massive amounts of drug trafficking.
You had fraud-related stuff, too.
Now, does that equate to two life sentences?
No.
I can't see that, man.
They tried to ping it.
They tried to get him.
What they tried to nail him with was the hit that they put on the people.
So he tried to have two people murdered.
All right.
Now, there's a lot of people that are fans of Ross these days that try to say, well, that didn't happen.
Yeah, that should happen.
All right.
He was being blackmailed.
Someone evidently knew his real identity or knew the identity of somebody.
And Ross, and I've been in that position.
I've been in that position where you're basically the father of these people.
Right.
You take care of them.
That's your tribe.
You're going to take care of your people.
So when you're presented with something like that, you want to with me, i'll with you, right?
So Ross thinks he's going to have a hit done and the whole time it's set up by law enforcement.
They send pictures of this supposed hit.
Everything else now, that's enough.
He wasn't charged with that and i've not looked at the case files, but i'm willing to bet he was not charged with.
He was not charged with the attempted murders.
But that doesn't mean it doesn't go into sentencing, all right.
Right, it could be part of relevant conduct in the PSR and they consider that with sentencing.
I'm willing to bet that's where that life sentence bullshit comes from.
Is right there, They found some sort of corruption with the prosecutors, right?
Oh, geez, man.
There were Secret Service agents that were stealing crypto.
There were like two or three of them that were doing that bullshit.
I mean, there was all kinds of wild stuff that was going on.
At least one of the agents was sentenced to prison for that stuff.
Right, right.
And all that.
I mean, there was a load of stuff.
The case, Ulbricht should have never gotten that type of sentence simply because of all the bullshit that was going around with law enforcement at that point.
And that goes back to this idea.
Nowadays, that was back, what, 2011.
2010, 2011.
So nowadays, law enforcement is pretty on point.
They really are.
They've got that shit locked down.
They're very good about tracking individuals, all this other stuff, and they do things right.
But back then, you know, people were seeing the bounces with this crypto stuff and all that, and you had a lot of cops, that temptation's there.
They really didn't have the investigations on point like they needed to, things like that.
So you had that possibility of law enforcement coming in and fucking around.
Right.
Okay.
And that's exactly what goes on.
And I'm hoping the guy, certainly Albrecht deserves some time.
He certainly does.
Does he deserve that life?
No, he doesn't.
And at the same time, you got to understand that I talk about him being ideological.
For a few years, I was like, yeah, give a son of a bitch life in prison.
And that's because of my biases.
Because when you actually do turn that curve and become that law-abiding citizen, it's like an AA type thing.
An alcoholic is a teetotaler all of a sudden.
But looking at the guy, he doesn't deserve life in prison.
Give him 10, 15, some shit like that.
If you gave him 15, he'd be out by now.
But give him some time.
He's not going to do that shit again.
You've already sent a message to every other criminal on the planet that this is what you get for this stuff.
You're already really good about shutting down dark web markets, about identifying cyber criminals that you want to arrest and stuff like that.
So why are you giving this guy life plus 40 at this point?
There's no benefit to that one.
So that's not justice.
That's going above and beyond what's needed for actual justice to be installed on that point.
And you think about Ross, Bitcoin today, $39,000.
$39,000 is what it's going for.
It's down some today.
But, you know, you hear a lot of talk about the blockchain.
You hear a lot of talk about NFTs and crypto and everything else like that.
The reason you hear that talk is because of Ross Ulbricht.
That's why.
You know, he's the guy that made it popular.
He gave it its use case to this day.
The real viable use case for crypto is that shit.
Payment Processor Jobs00:12:37
Yeah.
Well, it is.
I mean, merchants, when merchants started to, the first attempt that they had, at accepting crypto for payment.
You had Microsoft, you had a few other big sites that accepted crypto.
All right.
And this was, what, 2012, 2013, somewhere through there.
On a monthly basis, these huge, huge box stores were pulling $300, $400 total in crypto.
And that's still the way it is today.
You've got all these people, all these businesses that accept crypto, but a lot of them don't make a whole lot of money with crypto.
You've got people that hold it and people that make money like that, but actually buying stuff with it.
Not a whole shitload of people are doing that.
Okay.
Now, so you did seven and a half years?
Seven and a half.
Total.
How did you, what happened when you eventually got out?
What was life like?
I got out in 2011.
I went through the drug abuse program, nine months of CBT training, therapy, and it was very beneficial.
When you choose to apply it, it's very beneficial.
I got out in 2011, sent to the halfway house.
I was met with my dad.
My dad had been doing tax returns.
That was because I taught him how to do a yeah, no need to fudge on that.
Yeah.
So he had been doing that, and he gave me some money when I got out and everything like that.
I was under three years probation.
Could not get a job.
So could not touch a computer.
The first job, the job that I get, I was in Tallahassee, Florida.
My releases, the halfway house is in Tallahassee.
My releases in Panama City, hour and a half away.
So on the weekends, I'd come down to Panama City, stay with my dad and my stepmother, and look. for a job and the job that I ended up getting was driving a taxi.
Turns out that you got to have a taxi license but before you get the license you can work six months as a temp before you have to go in and actually get the license.
They do not give taxi licenses to felons.
So I go in and apply for this job.
Turns out that the guy that I was talking to had been convicted years before on some bullshit.
He looks at me and he's like look Brett he said I'll hire you but you can only work six months because they won't give you a license.
I was like, I understand.
I appreciate the job.
So I drove a taxi for the first six months.
Loved the job.
I thought it was an outstanding job to have.
After that ends, I had been living with my dad.
Get it out of prison.
You don't want people to tell you what to do.
You don't.
And my stepmom, she was an outstanding woman, but she was a woman that she had rules.
And by God, you were going to obey the rules.
It didn't matter who you were, how old you were.
It's her house.
If you're going to live in her house, you're going to obey the rules that are there.
And I had curfews and everything else, and I did not like those curfews.
So I ended up moving out and worship.
Looking back now is a good mistake, but back then it's the worst mistake I could have made.
I didn't have any money.
The job was ending.
I started to bum money off my dad and my sister because I couldn't get a job.
The taxi job ended, could not get a job.
So I'm bumming money from my dad that stole the money that he had.
Using all that that he's got, he's like we were talking about before we started Know Before, the company right on the spot to try to get a job with them.
And they're a fishing company, right?
They're a fishing simulation company.
Simulation.
They raise awareness on fishing.
Do simulation training, everything else to teach you not to fall.
Huge company huge, huge company.
And what happens is, is I, I get out of prison, I start to apply for jobs I apply for.
I had job offers from Deloitte to run a cyber security or cyber crime office in the UK.
Dipshit here.
Thought I could go to the UK and do that.
My probation officer, like no, you're not going anywhere.
So then no, before offers me a job here in Tampa.
He's like, I sent him my resume.
Six minutes after sending my resume, I get a call from this guy, Stu Showerman, the CEO.
Back then they only had six employees, six whole employees there, and he has me take the psychological test.
He's talking to me.
He's like, man, we love you.
He's like we'll start you out as a salesman.
I was like, done, go to my probation officer.
I got a job where you got a job, Tampa.
You're not going to Tampa.
I was like what?
He's like you're not going doing what?
Fishing simulate?
You're definitely not.
You know, they're all scientology, they're scientology owned.
I was about to say that.
So stew, he's talking to me and he's like, now we're all scientologists here.
Oh yeah, he tells me this.
And I was like seriously.
He's like yeah, do you have a problem like with that?
And I was like Stu, I don't have a problem with that.
As long as you got a paycheck, I'm fine with that.
He's like, okay.
So I couldn't take that job.
It gets where I'm, I had a couple of payment processors that offered me jobs.
So you'd go in the POS terminals, you'd replace those, sell some merchant that.
And my probation officer was like, you want to sell those, do you?
So I'm like, okay.
So it gets to where I'm trying to apply for fast food.
Well, that cash register is a computer.
Can't touch that.
Okay.
What about a waiter's position?
No, that's a computer and credit cards, idiot.
So couldn't take that.
So I was bumming money from my dad and my sister.
I was on food stamps so I could eat.
I had a roommate that took care of half the rent for me.
They tell you when you leave prison, they're like, hey, man, find you a job, find you something you care about, you won't recidivate.
Well, I couldn't get a job.
What I had, I had a cat.
And got to the point I had enough money to feed my cat.
Didn't have enough money to buy toilet paper.
So I go to the dollar store on the beach, buy the cat some food.
On the way out, they had a kiosk there with toilet paper.
First crime I committed right there, shoplifting toilet paper and um, they make it as difficult as possible for people to get out of prison.
I mean everyone i've talked to who's done a long time in prison.
They always it was bad, it was bad.
They talk about how difficult it is to get back on your feet.
The the problem is is that you're released from prison with the exact same tools.
You go in with less because you can't get jobs and you cannot get a job and you know, no one can't rent an apartment, no one's going to hire you.
No one is going to hire you.
Right, that is a fact, because you've got people out here that have not committed crimes, That don't have the history, that want a job too.
So, an employer who the hell are they going to hire?
You or this person that's done everything right?
Yeah, it's almost like that our country would rather have people incarcerated than free and have a flourishing society.
It's bad, man.
And the problem is that, unless with me, and I've seen it with other people too, unless you have people that help you, you're not going to be able to make that.
It's a minefield when you get out.
Yeah, you can't do it by yourself.
I served time with multiple prisons, knew hundreds of inmates personally.
I was a social butterfly in prison too, so I encountered thousands of inmates.
All those people that I knew, 99% of them, they were just doing their time and they really had hopes and dreams of getting out and doing the right thing.
They did not plan on getting out and breaking the law again.
They wanted to get out and have healthy relationships, get a good job, do things right.
But most of those guys go right back to it because they're not given those opportunities.
They don't have somebody like the FBI taking you in and like they did me under their wing and giving you references and advice and bullshit like that.
They don't have these people who give you jobs that, you know, you've got this history.
Come and talk to us about that.
You don't have that opportunity.
And because of that, what do you do?
You've got to eat.
You've got to put food on the table.
You may call it cognitive dissonance if you want to.
But the truth of the matter is, is that, hey, you're in a country where you've got to survive.
And if you can't get a job doing anything, what are you going to do?
And that becomes a huge issue.
Right.
Okay.
So, yeah, with me, I couldn't get a job.
Shoplifted the toilet paper.
My wife, Michelle, she meets me right after that.
And that was, I mean, great, great woman.
Truly, my saving graces are my sister, my wife, and then the FBI.
My sister had disowned me, and she comes back into my life after a while.
Michelle, she finds me.
I didn't find her.
She found me.
And I was I was broke, and I was about to lose the apartment.
I didn't have much food in the house to eat or anything else, and I ended up moving in with Michelle within two months.
Didn't get married.
Finally, I got a job, the only job I could get.
I was on Craigslist, and a guy was advertising for landscaping.
I called the guy up, and he's like, yeah, come on down and talk to me.
So I drove down to Destin to talk to him.
He was running the business out of his house.
Him and his brother were.
He starts talking to me.
He has me start up the weed eater and shit like that.
And about 20 minutes into the conversation, he looks at me.
He's like, Can I ask you a question?
I was like, yeah.
And he's like, are you on the run or something?
And I was like, no, why do you ask?
He's like, you just don't seem like the type of person that would do this.
So I told him my history.
His name was Dustin Duramus.
I told him my history, and he looks at me.
He's like, man, I'm going to have to think about it.
So I go back home.
That was a Friday.
I go back home.
Sunday evening, he calls me, and he's like, man, if I give you a job, are you actually going to work?
And I was like, Dustin, if you'll hire me, I'll work my ass off.
And he's like, show up tomorrow morning at 7 a.m.
So I go down there.
My job was pushing a lawnmower 10 hours a day, five days a week, $400 a week.
And I busted my ass doing that.
I'd hit it hard every day, come home of a night, literally pass out, wake up the next morning, take a shower, hit it again.
But I was happy, man.
I mean, I had a job.
Michelle was there for me.
It was a good environment.
I mean, I knew it was a healthy environment, everything else.
And what happens is it gets cold, the grass doesn't grow, job ends.
So, what do you do?
I say that my motivation for crime is cash.
And I say that because it's an easy out.
My motivation is more ideological, my motivation is taking care of mine.
All right, if my the people that are in my circle I want to make sure that they're okay that that the ones I love are there for me and I'm there for them So the job ends and that that got to show her I'm worth it.
I got to show her she's all the more working I got to prove I'm worth it in the relationship So I get it in my head.
Well, if nothing else, I can bring food in the house So I get on the dark web got stolen credit cards start ordering food.
Well, the boys are there.
I've got two stepsons They're there and I'm like well, I can save her some money and bring clothes for the boys in the house.
Well, it comes food comes clothes.
We got Christmas coming up Let's do that.
So you got all this shit.
I got arrested on a food order.
So I went to pick up some steaks.
Because if you're going to steal shit, steal shit.
So I go to pick up.
I mean, there ain't no need to steal baloney if you can steal steaks and crab legs.
That's a good point.
So, I mean, go to pick up an order.
And the cops have a controlled delivery there and they arrest me.
Michelle didn't know what I was doing.
I get sent back to prison for 10 months on violation.
That's what happens.
My sentencing for that, the only people in the courtroom, judge, prosecutor, probation officer, U.S. Marshals, me and Michelle.
I'm sitting there crying.
Michelle stands up, and she tells the judge that I'm a better dad to her kids than their father is.
Prosecutor stands up.
We think he's a good guy.
We think it's a one-time thing.
Probation officer says the same thing.
Judge gives me a year.
Probation officer stands up.
If you can give Mr. Johnson a year and a day, he can get the good time.
He can get back to his family sooner.
Judge amends the sentence to a year and a day, so I do 10 months instead of 12.
I go back to Texas, serve my time out, and that's where I I finally got that lesson, man, that Michelle didn't need me for what I could do for her.
She just wanted me for me that entire time.
And I hadn't had that.
I'd had it with my sister, but I hadn't had it anyplace else.
And served my 10 months, get out, get married shortly after that.
They kill probation so I can touch a computer, but who's going to hire this guy that steals everything?
They tell you that you can at least get a job at selling cars.
You can't.
You can't.
Not if you're the guy that steals everything.
So couldn't get a job at all.
To this day, I know what my triggers are.
I know what it takes for me to go back and commit crime.
And I never say I'll never do it.
What I do say is I'm recovering what I used to do.
Zero Day Social Engineering00:15:46
All right.
So I knew what my triggers were.
Knew I'd go so far before I did it again.
Looked at Michelle and I was like, let me see what I can do.
So signed on to LinkedIn, started to reach out to all these people, reached out to this FBI super cop by the name of Keith Malarsky.
He was involved in some of my arrests and everything else.
Sent him a message.
I was like, hey, man, respect you greatly.
No hard feelings.
I think you did a great job.
By the way, I'd like to be legal.
Guy responds within two hours, gives me references, advice, does the same thing to this day.
He retired about two years ago, does the same thing to this day.
Just was right there.
You could do this right here, Brett.
From there, it was the head of the Identity Theft Council took me in under his wing, guy named Neil O'Farrell.
Carice Hendrick at CNP hires me to come in and give a keynote speech.
Microsoft hears about that.
Microsoft hires me to consult.
At that point, everything kind of blows open.
Wow.
Today, I've got I've got a couple of podcasts I'm trying to grow, but I'm spokesperson for AARP, speak across the planet, consult with the largest companies, help victims out for free, speak at universities for free, help law enforcement.
I teach at Quantico twice a year.
I was recently named chief criminal officer for Arcos Labs out of San Francisco to help with clients and security.
I lead a very blessed life.
I don't deserve.
Make no mistake.
I don't think I deserve it at all, man, but I'm damn grateful to have it, and I work hard.
I work hard every day to try to help people be protected from the type of person I used to be.
You know, I don't think I can make amends for any of that bullshit that I've done.
I really don't.
But I can make sure that my choices now are good choices.
And I think that's really all I can do.
Right.
Okay.
One thing I wanted to ask you about was this, what was it called?
Stuxnet.
Stuxnet.
Have you seen the documentary by Alex Gibney?
I've not.
Zero Day.
I've not seen that.
Now, Stuxnet, they just dropped a thumb drive in a lot.
Well, it was a.
They basically admitted that it was a virus that was created by the Iranian, or not by the Iranian, I'm sorry, by the Israelis and the United States to take down or just sabotage the Iranian nuclear program.
By causing the processors to overheat.
Right, exactly.
The rods that they had in there.
By controlling them to spin faster or spin slower, making them explode and fuck up.
Very damaging.
Yeah.
To say the least.
And there was a, they talk about how they had to get across a network gap, an air gap.
So how do you do that?
They said they had double agents in Iran, that they would be able to go in, someone repairing the laptops or doing maintenance on laptops in there.
All they would have to do is put the thumb drive in the computer, and the fucking virus had a mind of its own and knew exactly what to do.
And they didn't even need to communicate with it.
So think about what we've talked about.
I've alluded to it at the beginning of our conversation.
All right.
Without social engineering, cybercrime fails.
What you just explained is a social engineering attack.
You've got the program, which is a highly sophisticated program.
But if you can't get that program installed, you're useless.
So how do you get it installed?
Act like a repairman.
It becomes even easier at some points.
You can drop a thumb drive in a parking lot.
I worked with an infrastructure company up in Ohio, did a test with that stuff.
You drop a thumb drive in a parking lot, see if anyone will pick it up.
They will.
See if anyone will plug it in.
They will.
And if there's any mention of salaries on the thumb drive, like a file that says salary on it, they'll always open that file.
Wow.
Yeah.
So that's a social engineering attack.
You know, there's a story about if you walk up to an office building and you're just carrying a ladder, you can get entry.
And you can.
That's, again, that's a social engineering attack.
It's understanding that human psychology in order to get somebody to come in and get you to do what they want you to do.
Information, access, data, cash.
That's always what you're looking for.
So with Stuxnet, what are you looking for?
Access.
What is what we're needing?
What is?
What does it actually mean when something is a zero day?
Zero day is an unknown vulnerability, unknown to any, to everyone except the attacker.
All right.
So if i'm attacking say Amazon, and i've got a zero day vulnerability or a zero day attack, Amazon doesn't know about it.
The security community doesn't know about it.
Who knows about it?
I know about it, maybe my little circle of people know about it.
Or the person that I bought the zero day knows about it.
All right, but the victim doesn't know about it.
That's the big one at that point.
But zero day attacks meaning that there's no, there's no sort of symptoms of anything being out of place, or it's interesting you would mention that, all right, there's always symptoms of something being out of place.
So 90 of every single attack uses known exploits right, okay.
So it's not zero day attacks that are the problem.
The problem is the known exploits that are out there.
We've been preaching for years not me, because I wasn't on the bad, I was on the bad guy's side but People have been preaching about for years what needs to be done.
They've not been listened to, and that creates a problem.
Think of the two largest cyber attacks in history.
You've got SolarWinds and you've got NotPetya.
SolarWinds is going to be the largest.
What was the other one?
NotPetya.
I haven't heard of that one.
So NotPetya, they're both nation-state attacks.
They're both the Russian state.
NotPetya is attacking the Ukraine.
SolarWinds is, of course, attacking the United States.
So NotPetya, the Sandworm Group, and there's a good book on it.
I think it's called Sandworm.
But there's a very good book that details this, too.
So the Russian Sandworm Group, the top hacking group on the planet.
They go and they launch an attack against the Ukrainian people.
They take over basically the QuickBooks of the Ukraine.
How do they take it over?
They take over its update server by faking a Microsoft certificate.
Known exploit.
All right?
They then release this thing that looks like it's ransomware, but it's not.
There was a ransomware attack called Petya a year prior, and it uses some of the code from Petya to make it look like it's ransomware, but it's not.
It's a program that's simply sent to destroy hard drives.
It's not ransomware at all.
It's just going to destroy systems.
So that attack uses Eternal Blue and Eternal Romance, both known exploits, which were patched a year prior.
No one had applied the patches.
It uses Mimikatz to harvest credentials out of RAM because Microsoft systems, even after you've logged out, those credentials are still in RAM.
Mimikatz will get that out of there for you.
So it uses that, known exploit.
It looks for outward-facing SMBs.
We've known about that.
For years, we've told people to shut that shit down, that remote access.
All right.
You would think there would be many systems out like that.
Millions are out like that.
All right.
Another known exploit.
It chains all those together to cause over $50 billion worth of damage.
On record, that's still the largest cyber attack in history.
It gets outside of the Ukraine because it looks for outwards, it looks for those SMBs that are open.
It gets outside, it hits MERSC, it hits pharmaceutical companies that have still not been mentioned today.
Causes over 50 billion in damage, the largest most sophisticated attack in history.
All using known exploits, not a zero day one wow, all right.
Solar Winds same thing, right.
So Solar Winds, what you got?
You got the Solar Winds, the password.
Solar winds one two three, you got all these known exploits.
I've got a 130 page class action lawsuit printed out at the house.
I've been working my way through.
That details how Solar Winds knew of every single vulnerability that they had.
They brought auditors in, they brought Pentesters in everything else, and people would warn them about it, and they would dismiss these people, they would lie to their investors, everything else about all the known vulnerabilities that were there.
All right, meanwhile, what's happening?
Meanwhile, you've got the attackers that are getting the source code for Microsoft products, you've got all these stuff that are getting snapshots of all these Fortune 50, Fortune 500 companies, every single aspect of those companies.
That once the chips are down, that will be the largest attack in history, largest, most successful attack.
Again.
No zero days involved with that.
All right.
So it's not zero days.
That's a problem.
Stuxnet is extremely.
There was four zero days.
They said it was four zero days inside of Stuxnet.
And that's impressive.
I mean, when you think about it, because most attacks don't, they don't have to use zero days.
But when you do have a zero day that you can properly use, oh, my God, you are doing something at that point.
Right.
All right.
It's just not very common, and you don't have to rely on it to be effective in attacks, as these other two attacks point out.
Okay.
Why is Russia and Ukraine always in the conversation when you're talking about this kind of shit?
So, for financial cybercrime, it's really the Ukraine.
Okay.
Russia's there too.
But, you know, Vladimir, it's weird, man.
And, you know, Vladimir Putin was talking about how Ukrainians are Russians.
All right.
Right.
Now, the weird thing about that is, is if you're a Ukrainian cyber criminal, you kind of buy into that shit.
All right.
Because Vladimir's like, hey, man, we harbor you.
We protect you.
Sometimes we hire you.
Right.
Shit like that.
Even though you've still got that Ukrainian nationality of yourself, you kind of feed into that a little bit.
At the same time, the Ukrainians have been very good about harboring and protecting their own cyber criminals.
They will give up some of those people, but like Dmitry.
He was never extradited at all.
The only reason Roman Vega was arrested was because he was in Cyprus at that point in time.
So they harbor a lot of cyber criminals.
You are allowed to commit crime in those areas as long as you don't shit where you eat, as long as you don't commit crime against your people.
But in Western capitalist countries and states, you're not going to get in trouble.
So you take all those Russian cyber criminals that are over there, as long as they stay in Russia, there's nothing that's going to happen to those guys.
Nothing.
They're not going to be extradited.
The only way they get caught, and you see this happening every now and then, one of these idiots that's stolen a few million dollars, he decides he wants to vacation on a beach somewhere, and he gets on a friggin' plane, flies out, and the feds arrest him immediately when he lands.
That's the problem.
You can't leave.
You cannot leave.
All right.
But as long as you're happy in that area, you're a millionaire, you got your Lambeau, you got all this other bullshit that's going on, you got your connections, you got a lot of power, and you're done at that point.
And that's the same thing in Ukraine.
Now, Ukraine has gotten better at extraditing some of these people.
Some of the attackers that hit Colonial Pipeline, I think they got extradited recently.
A couple other guys.
Oh, really?
Yeah, a couple other guys got extradited from the Ukraine as well.
But they still harbor and protect those people.
And that becomes a huge problem.
And it's so effective.
There was a case about four years ago in Russia where these cyber criminals had actually rented an entire office building.
The entire building was just a cyber crime business.
You had 400 employees.
And each floor had a different type of crime that was taking place at that point.
So that's what that type of environment allows.
That's why they're so successful.
Ukraine's so big because it was the tech sector of the Soviet Union.
So now you had a lot of guys after Union Falls that were highly trained, could not get a job.
The guys that I knew, they didn't really want to commit crime.
They were just looking to eat.
And you see this, I forgot the guy's name.
Wired did a story on this, but one of the guys.
That got caught.
He tells the feds this, and the feds start to advertise for employment and you had all these cyber criminals that started to apply for these jobs.
They were doing credit card fraud, but they didn't want to do that, they just wanted a job.
Nowadays, it's a little different.
Out of those areas, nowadays you're looking to become cyber criminals right, okay?
And then also um Israel, Israel.
They're very effective.
They started or they created the Pegasus yeah right right, are you pretty familiar with Pegasus?
I can't speak on that.
I don't know a lot about it either, but I know it's basically a hack or some sort of program that you can purchase from Israel for like a half a million dollars to zero day into somebody's phone.
Right.
And basically turn it into your phone.
Which is really nifty.
Which is fucking crazy.
The Saudi prince, Mohammed bin Salman, did it to Jeff Bezos.
So, and you think about that, all right?
You think about, you know, in our country, we had Snowden.
that warns about that privacy, warns about government intrusion, things like that.
And I'm not a huge fan of Snowden, but he warned about that.
And we're talking about a free country where that's happening.
You take Saudi, you take some of these countries that aren't very friendly to their citizens that have a tool like that.
Oh, my.
And evidently Israel was not adverse to selling it to these people either.
So that's a huge issue, all of a sudden.
I will say that as far as cybersecurity goes, Israel is top-notch.
They really are with security companies and stuff like that.
They put out some amazing products, and they do very effective work.
Well, they said in the documentary about Stuxnet.
One of the reasons that the US decided to collaborate on Stuxnet with them is because they didn't want them trying to start an all out war with Iran.
Right.
But then I guess the Israelis got impatient and they winged it and installed the virus with all these clues that tied it back to them, which made it become so apparent to everybody where it came from.
And that's a lot of the problem with cyber attacks.
You see a lot of people that, you see a lot of politicians, all right, that talk about, well, how do we know that these attacks came from Russia?
How do we know these attacks came from this country?
How can we attribute that?
Well, the problem is that there are telltale signs of forensics, the way the countries are set up with their cyber, the products that they use, everything else, the IPs that come in, all that stuff leads in where you can say, this guy did it, specifically this group did it, because that's the way this group historically has operated.
So you can attribute.
Pretty effectively, who it is, and the U.S. was right.
I mean, hey, before you launch that, you may want to cover your tracks a little bit better than you have, yeah, because somebody's going to get pissed off, yeah.
And that was during Obama, and right, they showed basically him talking to the press about it or whatever.
And he was just basically straight up like, if we find whoever leaks this kind of, we're gonna oh, yeah, prosecute you to the full extent, yeah, they're gonna put you under the drill, yeah, at that point, yeah, it's it's bad, it's bad, and and but you know, you've got people that that do that leaking all the time, you know, you and and and You know, I've got to do a show on, I had a request to do one on Assange and Manning and Snowden.
Manning, Snowden, and Assange00:06:17
And that's a hell of a talk when you think about it.
You take Snowden.
He stole so much data that if it were printed out, it would fill a dump truck.
Now, he tried to say, I was aware of what I stole.
No, you're not.
You're not.
You don't have a clue what you took.
Now, I grant you, hats off to you for letting everybody know what was actually going on.
I'm grateful.
Turns out nobody really gave a damn from the looks of it.
You know, at the same time, we as Americans, we give up all of our information for a free game sometimes.
And that's it.
My problem with Snowden is that he decided to run over to Russia instead of sticking stateside.
Right.
You know, and you look at him now, you've got this Ukrainian war thing going on, and he's quiet as a church mouse.
Right.
Yeah, they don't even have Twitter over there anymore.
They don't have anything anymore.
They don't have anything anymore.
No internet, no nothing.
It's like, what are you doing, man?
At least Manning.
Had the guts to stick around and stand up for what he, she believed in.
You know, he then, she now.
But I respect Manning far more.
I don't like either one of them, but I respect Manning far more than Snowden.
I think they both did good things, but I think Snowden could have handled it a hell of a lot better than what he handled it.
Yeah, I've had a few people on here with the same sort of idea, same sort of opinion on Snowden, that he did the right thing.
Everyone said, most people say that he did the right thing the wrong way.
Yeah, I'd agree with that.
I'd agree with that.
I don't think that, you know, they cut Manning loose.
I don't know how much time he served, but they cut him loose.
they would have cut Snowden loose the same way if he had just stuck stateside.
Well, you know that there was an uncovered CIA plot to assassinate Assange.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a fact.
Yeah.
That's a fact.
That was there.
But, you know, at the same time, I mean, I think that Assange starts out, certainly he's had a hard on for the United States.
Yeah.
That's what is unfairly against the United States when all these other countries are doing the same thing.
Right.
He's had that.
All right.
At some point, the guy goes way past what proper journalism is.
You know, that idea that the government now says that he assisted Manning with stealing that data, actually walked Manning through exactly what needed to be done.
This is how you do it.
All right, well, that is not journalism.
That's conspiracy to commit a crime.
So I'm all for it.
I've actually met Assange.
Through video.
Really yeah, very bright guy.
I was at a conference in in London the Cybersecurity summit conference.
That that was back in 2017.
Um, we were all on a panel together.
He was at the Ecuadorian embassy, zooming in.
Wow and uh, I mean extremely bright guy.
This guy goes off and he starts talking about he was relating the internet to the way that countries have their borders and talking about the differences between the two.
I mean just a brilliant conversation.
I mean it truly was.
I mean impressive as hell when he was talking about that.
Then he goes off on a tangent and talks about how he's been locked up for so many years in the Ecuadorian embassy.
And I'm sitting there going, dude, you're not really locked up.
You're choosing to stay in there.
And he's talking about how it was like a prison cell.
Well, I'd already seen pictures of his apartment.
I'm like, that doesn't look like any cell I've ever been in.
Yeah.
You know, so I didn't really, I think he's extremely bright.
I think he's got some cognitive dissonance in there.
I think that he had such a hard-on for the United States that he stopped being a journalist in an effort to get him.
Is what happened.
Yeah.
Just in my opinion, but, you know, that's it.
Yeah, I mean, at the same time, you know, the United States, they never, they don't have to be accountable for any of the crimes or the murders or anything like that.
Never.
Well, you remember, you've heard of the Christic Foundation or not?
No.
So there was a, I think it was down in Guatemala, the CIA paid to have some journalists murdered at that point.
And the Christic Foundation comes up and sues the CIA for that shit.
And they actually proved it in court.
That the CIA did that.
So that was in the early mid 80s that that happened.
So, I mean, you've got all these issues that go on.
I mean, I was talking to my wife about it the other day.
You know, the America that we had where people trust the government, that shit's been long over.
You know?
Oh, yeah.
You've got the McCarthy of the 50s.
You've got the 60s bullshit.
You've got the stuff that happened in the 70s with Vietnam and Nixon and all that.
And then you've got all this stuff recently with the misinformation, the fake news, and all that stuff.
I mean, The idea of anybody trusting the United States government, Tuskegee experiment, all these issues that's happened over the years, why should you anymore?
Right.
You know, and I certainly wouldn't.
Yeah.
But at the same time, you know, even though the U.S. government is clearly guilty of all this fucking crazy, secretive corruption and fucked up, just fucked up things that they've done from coups and the provocateurs and, you know, for different revolutions, like including, I did a big podcast about the.
The Maidan massacre in Ukraine and how the CIA was involved in that and regime change and just all that stuff.
But at the same time, we don't really know what's going on in all these other countries as well.
No.
And is it, I don't know if it's the brightest thing to just have your scope set on the United States.
It's not.
Especially when you're from the United States.
It's absolutely not.
All these countries are fucking up.
We get the, because we're the biggest, most powerful.
We get the main spotlight is what happens.
But, you know, I got to say, man, I mean, I'd rather be here than a lot of other countries that are out there.
Yeah.
And I've traveled all over the world.
I'm sure you have too.
And it's one of these things where, as fucked up as we are, I'll take the U.S. right now.
Growing a Political Audience00:02:21
I truly will.
And, I mean, we are really fucked up.
We've got a people that we're schismed across the board.
I saw this thing on, I watch CNN and Fox every morning so I can be pissed off at everybody.
But CNN had this survey because they're always doing surveys saying that 40% is.
hard left wing, 40% of the population is hard right wing, you've got 20% that's in the modern, I'm sitting there going, nah, nah, nowhere near 20%.
But, you know, we used to have a country where we could actually have discourse with each other.
You could disagree on things and still be friends.
Now you can't do that.
I saw this guy on Twitter about a year, year and a half back, and he was pissed off at his dad because his dad was a Trump supporter.
And because of that, he he wouldn't let his dad see his grandson anymore.
He wasn't calling his dad, wasn't visiting anything else.
I'm sitting there going, damn, dude, it's fucking politics, man.
That's your family.
Who cares if you don't get along with the guy, if you don't agree with him on that?
That's your fucking family, man.
So you're in that type of environment these days where you can't say anything.
You can't get a real opinion on anything.
If you do, like I've got my show, if I talk politics, I'm going to piss off half out of you.
And I'm trying to grow an audience.
Well, tell people listening and watching where they can find your show.
So I recently started The Brett Johnson Show.
Right now it's on YouTube, The Brett Johnson Show.
It's on YouTube.
We're going to be on Spotify, hopefully within the next week, on these other podcast platforms as well.
I'll have the actual website up, TheBrettJohnsonShow.com.
I'll have that up this week, and we'll go from there.
There are 18, 19 episodes out right now.
It's a one man show.
I get on there and I bitch a lot about cybercrime, cybersecurity.
give you advice on how to protect yourself, your business, hopefully entertain you a little bit at the same time.
What's your website called?
Website, I've got two.
The website that is up right now is anglerfish.com, www.angler, A-N-G-L-E-R, P-A-N-P-A-L-H-I-S-H, anglerfish.com.
Launching a new one later this week called the BrettJohnsonShow.com, B-R-E-T-T, JohnsonShow.com.
Cool, man.
Well, thank you so much.
I really appreciate you coming down here and doing this.