WEBVTT

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JACK: Tell me about what some of the eBay scams were going on.

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How can you rip someone off on eBay?

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BRETT: So, some of the scam – well, man, what I would do, if it were going in Christmas season, I

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would see what the hot item was. Typically it was a lot of cameras, it was a lot of laptops. It was

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those high-dollar items that people were really wanting but they didn’t want to pay full retail

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price for. So, the idea is you need to come in at an amount that causes that potential victim to

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put logic and reason at the door and react emotionally, but you don’t want to come in

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at it so low of an amount that it causes them to question what’s going on. That’s a very thin line

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that happens. But I’d find a Canon XL1 and I would post that, a couple pictures of it…

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JACK: Hold on a second. BRETT: Sure.

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JACK: You can’t be serious. You said – okay, listen;

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this is what happened to me at the same time, okay? So, I’m on eBay.

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BRETT: Okay.

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JACK: I wanted the Canon GL1. This was a $2,500 camera.

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BRETT: Oh yeah, yeah.

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JACK: It was very expensive. I saw someone selling it for $1,200 on eBay and I’m like okay,

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I’ll bid. So, I bid on it. They cancel the auction…

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BRETT: Right.

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JACK: …and say oh, sorry, something went wrong. But listen, I still have the camera. Are you

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still interested? I said well, yeah. This is a half-price camera. Why wouldn’t I be?

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I don’t know where I got the money from or what I was even thinking to do with a

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camera like this. God knows I wasn’t going into film-making, right? It was just kinda

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to play around with, but I wanted to – anyway, my heart was set on it, okay?

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BRETT: Right.

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JACK: So, I said yeah. So they said okay, well,

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send me the money and I’ll send you the camera. I’m like whoa, whoa,

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whoa, red flag. We don’t have this on eBay anymore, we’re just going through e-mail…

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BRETT: That’s right; you’re off-platform, no protection in place.

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JACK: Yeah. So, I’m like no, no, no, this doesn’t smell right. They’re like listen,

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I’m a god-fearing person, I’ve got a family,

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I would never do any – and it was just the whole shmoozing – you’re already laughing.

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BRETT: I’m just thinking of one of the stories I told some of these people at one point. Hey,

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look, I don’t take any pride on my stealing at all these days. I don’t, but back then I would make up

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just weird shit to see if they would believe it. I had sold thirteen, fifteen cameras on one auction,

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and of course all the – so, the idea being you’ve got one auction up there;

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say you’re selling that XL1. It retails for $2,500; I would put it at $2,000,

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alright? Someone is gonna win at $2,000, but the next ten bidders, whatever they would bid at,

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I would sell them that same nonexistent camera for whatever their bid price was. Then I would

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wait for the – all the payments to come in. So what happens is, is all the payments don’t arrive

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at the same time, so you’ve got to start making up excuses as to why the initial winner did not

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get their camera yet. So, I remember one of my excuses was well, you know, we’ve got a

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warehouse down there on the Mississippi; got all this flooding. The entire warehouse is flooded

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out. That’s the kinda stuff that I would say just to see if I could get those people to believe it.

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JACK: This is…

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BRETT: The problem – sure, go ahead.

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JACK: This is too close to home, Brett. [LAUGHING]

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BRETT: I mean, it…

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JACK: So, here’s the thing; so, let me finish the story.

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BRETT: Okay.

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JACK: So, I – a month of convincing me that this is an okay deal,

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I say okay, I’ll buy it. So they say okay, well, don’t send PayPal,

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right? I’ll only take Western Union. So, this was a $1,200 agreement.

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BRETT: Oh, Jack, Jack, Jack.

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JACK: I know, this was another red flag. So, it’s $1,200. So, I call up Western Union and I

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say okay, I want to send this money. They said you can’t; the maximum we’re allowed you – to

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sell – send is $1,000. You can’t go over that. I was like well, I’ll just call back and do it

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again. They said okay, you can do that. So, I should have noticed that as a third red flag.

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BRETT: Sure.

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JACK: So, I send this money to someone

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and they send me a tracking number the next day. Here’s your box; it’s on its way.

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BRETT: Okay.

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JACK: The box never left the warehouse.

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BRETT: Of course.

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JACK: Or it never left the shipping facility. It just sat there forever.

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BRETT: Right.

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JACK: And I never got the camera.

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BRETT: Right.

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JACK: You’re telling me you did this same scam on PayPal at the same time that I got…?

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BRETT: So…

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JACK: Brett, were – was this you?

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BRETT: I don’t know if it was me, and I – here’s the thing, here’s the thing;

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I’m the guy that’s responsible for a lot of that, alright? You figure that before those

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sites we were talking about, Counterfeit Library and ShadowCrew, before those come into play,

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you really didn’t have a lot of successful cyber-crime because criminals were not able

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to work together. But once those sites come into play, you’ve got all this open-source environment,

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the collaboration, things like that, and I remember clearly posting many tutorials on

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how to do this type of fraud on eBay, and even walking people through it. It’s very,

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very possible. I’m not proud of it, Jack, I’m not, but it’s very possible that some sombitch

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may have been – may have known who I was that was ripping you off. Absolutely that’s possible.

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JACK: It’s so weird to kinda close the circle on that, you know? Like you said earlier,

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the victim just kinda gives up after a while, and so…

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BRETT: And you did.

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JACK: Well, what I did is I called Western Union; I say hold on, stop the money. Reverse it. Okay,

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if you can’t do that – ‘cause they said they already picked it up – I said you gotta tell

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me what ID they picked it up with. Get me their name, get me what city they picked it up in,

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you know? Tell me where in the world are they, and what’s their name that they

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picked it up at? Which probably wouldn’t have mattered because they probably used a fake ID.

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BRETT: Sure. JACK: But…

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BRETT: Or had somebody working at the office that would just give them the money.

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JACK: Yeah. So, I was so pissed off at Western Union because they offered zero help at all. I

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said look, I just got robbed, I just got scammed; please – you – this happened over your platform.

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You need to open a police report. We need to work together. You need to get me some information.

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I’m gonna give it to the officers here, and they said zero. We’re not helping you at all,

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and they hung up the phone. I was like, Western Union, you’re aiding and abetting criminals here.

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BRETT: Well, and you’re not – I’m gonna be honest with you, you’re not far off, because when we were

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hitting – we hit the hell out of PayPal, of Western Union, of eBay, all those platforms

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back then. By and large, the way those platforms back then responded was telling the legitimate

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customers that were complaining of these things that it wasn’t happening. They just kinda put

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their head in the sand and ignored it until they were forced to do something about it. So, it’s

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not surprising that Western Union would have done that. eBay did the same thing. PayPal did that.

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JACK: Yeah. Well, first of all, you jerk.

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BRETT: Yes, yes. I agree with you on that.

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JACK: But second of all…

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BRETT: You can call me an asshole, too. That’s true, too.

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JACK: Okay, okay, I’ll do that. But I say – I do say thank you because

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I was young and I was naive, and that sucked the naivety out of me when going online,

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right? I didn’t – I learned so many valuable lessons from that experience. I learned never

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to trust Western Union. Even to this day, I’ve never used them again because

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it’s just one of those – I don’t want to – ever want to deal with this company again.

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BRETT: Well, I gotta say, Jack, you said – it is not a happy thought to know that I was responsible

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for taking away people’s naivety. I think there’s a – I wish I had mine back then. I really do.

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JACK: But I mean, it is one of those things that – it – I think it changed just the way

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I thought about online, and it protected me in bigger ways that I probably would

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have getting – gotten hit later on, and it made me see the internet for as it is,

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which is just this chaotic, hostile environment.

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BRETT: It is that.

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JACK: Yeah. I think another thing that it helped me with is – gets

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a sense of street smarts on the internet, right?

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BRETT: Oh yeah, oh yeah.

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JACK: You have this gut feeling when you’re going into a deal online,

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and that gut feeling is more refined after meeting you or dealing with the – your…

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BRETT: After meeting one of your associates…

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JACK: …your prodigy, yes. Did you get…

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BRETT: Well, I mean…

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JACK: You get better honed, right? So, it’s like…

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BRETT: Well, and that’s…

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JACK: …trial by fire.

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BRETT: You’re right, and that’s one of the things that I’ve been talking about in presentations

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recently. Our situational awareness is very high in the physical world. We know – if something is

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wrong in our environment when we’re traveling or turning on a wrong street or what have you,

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we know immediately. That awareness is there, but it’s – it tends not to

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be as well-defined in our online lives, and it really needs to be. It does, and

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it’s just that no matter what platform that you’re on, there are some sort of predators

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that are lurking there, and you need to be aware of that, and people just – I think that

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they rely too much on the website or the hardware or the supposed security systems that are on the

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site, and there’s just too much reliance on that. You really have to be aware of your

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own environment regardless of what platform or what security may or may not be in place.

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(INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I’m

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Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]

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JACK:

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Okay, welcome back. We are continuing with Part 2 of Gollumfun’s story. If you haven’t listened

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to Part 1 yet, you really do need to go back and listen to the episode just before this one.

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So, where were we? Okay, so Brett, or Gollumfun, had been doing all kinds of crimes and scams

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ever since he was a teenager, but when he got a computer, it really expanded his possibilities and

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skills doing scams on eBay, selling drugs online, buying fake IDs, ordering things with stolen

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credit cards, cashing out on stolen credit cards, the works. His home online was shadowcrew.com,

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a website he owned and operated, where all this criminal activity was taking place.

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But a lot of you may have heard about ShadowCrew before, and that’s probably because you heard the

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story of Albert Gonzalez. [MUSIC] Albert’s story is just a whole story on its own, and it really

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deserves its own episode, but I’ll summarize his story here real quick. He was a member on

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ShadowCrew and eventually became the forum techie. He know how to keep the forums up and operational,

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but he also was using the site to sell stolen credit cards. His big thing was to go drive into a

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parking lot and then aim an antenna at the store, figure out a way into their Wi-Fi and then into

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their cash registers, and then just steal lots of credit cards that customers used at that store.

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He had an epic ride of it too, but the Secret Service caught him, and it was around where

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Albert got arrested is when Brett just quit going on ShadowCrew and stopped being the admin for it.

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But when Albert got arrested, he was faced with a tough decision; either go to prison

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or help the Secret Service catch others. Albert agreed to help the Secret Service,

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so little did the people of ShadowCrew know, but the forum techie of the site was actually the

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Secret Service, which meant they could look up people’s IPs and see private messages and other

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user details. Not only that, but Albert set up a VPN and forced users to connect through that

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to get to the site. Albert claimed it was for security reasons, but what they didn’t know is

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that he was logging all the traffic and giving it to the Secret Service. But luckily for Brett,

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he wasn’t using the site at the time. Instead, Brett was just focused on doing tax refund fraud

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and then spending the money he earned from that on his stripper girlfriend, Elizabeth.

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BRETT: So what happens is I’m convinced that I love her.

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She’s not coming home, so she’s going to work dancing, and a lot of the time she’ll call me

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6:00 or 7:00 in the morning; come and get me, I can’t drive home. I have no idea what the hell’s

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going on there, so I come and get her one day. She comes in the house and she crashes in the bed,

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and I have never in my life went through a woman’s purse at all. I’m looking at her purse and I’m

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like goddamn, I gotta find out what the hell is going on. So, I start rummaging through her purse,

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find cocaine in there, and I had – up until that point – I was thirty-four – I had never

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seen cocaine in my life. I had seen pot, I had seen pills and all that, had never seen coke,

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and found coke there. So of course, dumb-ass Brett gets online and there was this website.

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It’s still around today; it’s called USA Sex Guide. So I looked up Charleston, I looked up

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strip clubs, and under Strip Clubs, it had – it was talking about – there was a few passages

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that mentioned Elizabeth, the stripper that was at Joe’s Roundup, a blonde girl, and it was obviously

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talking about her, and it was talking about – she was prostituting herself, and obviously

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it was to support her coke habit. So here I am reading that, and I guess I just went off the

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rails at that point. I got it in my head that if I could fix her, that I could fix me, maybe.

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I figured that if I just kept investing, that she would love me. The truth of the matter is,

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is Jack, is she couldn’t be intimate unless she was completely wasted. So, I went and confronted

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her about the coke. Over the course of the next two or three weeks, she finally quits her job.

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I guess she saw that she had a chance with me, ‘cause she didn’t know I was a criminal, either.

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Figure she figured she could get out of the life she had and hook up with this guy. So, she quits

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her job. Over the next few weeks she finally quits coke because I finally lay down the ultimatum of

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if you’re gonna be doing this, I can’t have you around. So, she quits coke but she supplements the

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coke or replaces the coke by just being a – just an absolute horrible drinker. I mean horrible.

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She always wanted to go back to strip clubs and I would always refuse that. But she would

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drink like it was a religion, and I kept investing in the relationship. I was like,

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if I just keep doing more and more, it’ll be alright. Well, while that’s going

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on, [MUSIC] ShadowCrew makes the front cover of Forbes. October 26, 2004, United States Secret

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Service – and it depends on which law enforcement agency you listen to as far as the numbers,

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but the United States Secret Service arrested thirty-three people, six countries, in six hours.

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JACK: Yeah, the Secret Service totally took over and raided ShadowCrew,

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arresting tons of people who were on the site. But Brett was not one

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of the ones arrested. So, you felt like you just dodged a bullet at that point.

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BRETT: Oh man, I did, but the problem was – you see, that – this is that whole thing where I fall

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in love with a stripper. So what happens is I go through all of my stateside money. I had laundered

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all of my money over to Bank Latico in Estonia. I had maybe $150,000 stateside. I’m with Elizabeth,

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so I’m not committing crime because I’ve got this bankroll of money and I don’t

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want her to know that I’m committing crime. Meanwhile, I go through all of my stateside

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money because with her, it’s – all of a sudden I had been living somewhat frugally. I hadn’t been

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eating really expensive dinners, but every dinner with her became seven days a week,

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$500 to $600. Every week it was $1,000 pairs of shoes, $2,500 purses, just spending money

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out the wazoo. I quickly go through every bit of stateside cash I’ve got as ShadowCrew gets popped.

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Tax season – ShadowCrew’s popped in October.

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Tax season ends October 15, so I can’t do tax return fraud right now. I have to wait

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until January for that shit to start up. So, I can’t do that. I don’t know where to buy credit

00:16:38.760 --> 00:16:43.860
cards because ShadowCrew’s been shut down, so I can’t go back into credit card theft and make

00:16:43.860 --> 00:16:48.660
that $30,000 to $40,000 a month doing that. So, the only thing I’m left doing is running

00:16:48.660 --> 00:16:54.540
counterfeit cashier’s checks just in order to try to survive long enough to get to the point where

00:16:54.540 --> 00:16:59.820
I can start tax return identity theft again. So, I start running counterfeit cashier’s checks on

00:16:59.820 --> 00:17:05.340
COD orders off eBay. I found – find somebody that’s got bullion or something I can resell

00:17:05.340 --> 00:17:10.440
pretty quickly, a coin collection, something like that, convince them into sending it COD

00:17:10.440 --> 00:17:16.440
for a counterfeit cashier’s check, and then I’ll cash out the item like that. I start doing that,

00:17:16.440 --> 00:17:21.480
and that’s how I get arrested, is like that. [MUSIC] It got to the point I didn’t have

00:17:21.480 --> 00:17:26.820
enough money – like I told you, I started – I kept reinvesting in her and going deeper

00:17:26.820 --> 00:17:31.380
into the relationship with Elizabeth. She wanted a Tiffany engagement ring.

00:17:31.380 --> 00:17:34.020
JACK: What did you – what did she think you did for money?

00:17:34.020 --> 00:17:39.120
BRETT: Oh dude, I was a straight asshole. I told people, my friends and everything else,

00:17:39.120 --> 00:17:44.340
that I was a fraud consultant. I just didn’t tell them all which part of the fraud equation

00:17:44.340 --> 00:17:49.140
I was on. It was a big joke with me. Yeah, it was a straight asshole, straight asshole.

00:17:49.140 --> 00:17:54.840
She wanted a Tiffany engagement ring. Brett Johnson didn’t have enough money to buy a Tiffany

00:17:54.840 --> 00:18:01.860
engagement ring, so I conned somebody into sending me one for a COD order, or for a cashier’s check.

00:18:01.860 --> 00:18:07.620
Do that; the next one was she wanted Tiffany wedding rings. Well, I didn’t have enough money to

00:18:07.620 --> 00:18:15.240
do that either, so conned somebody into sending the COD shipment for the wedding rings. At that

00:18:15.240 --> 00:18:20.940
point, they were well aware that there was this guy and it was – his name was Gollumfun

00:18:20.940 --> 00:18:25.560
that was running counterfeit cashier’s checks out of Charleston, South Carolina. Because I was with

00:18:25.560 --> 00:18:33.000
Elizabeth, I didn’t want to travel out of area to commit the fraud. I was afraid to leave her, so I

00:18:33.000 --> 00:18:40.860
kept using the same types of drop addresses in the same areas. It was very easy to ping who I was.

00:18:40.860 --> 00:18:47.700
So, I go to pick up the rings and I think they were for $7,300 total, or something like that.

00:18:47.700 --> 00:18:52.260
I told Elizabeth – I was like, I’ll be back later. She was like, okay. She didn’t know

00:18:52.260 --> 00:18:55.920
I was a criminal or anything else. I was like, I’ll just be – I’ll be back in just a little bit.

00:18:55.920 --> 00:19:01.140
Typically what you can do when you’re picking up stolen goods from UPS or FedEx,

00:19:01.140 --> 00:19:03.180
you can just chase the truck down.

00:19:03.180 --> 00:19:07.380
As they stop to deliver a package, you just walk up to the driver and say hey, you’ve got a package

00:19:07.380 --> 00:19:13.140
on there for me; now give it to me. So, I chased the UPS driver down, and he tells me – he looks

00:19:13.140 --> 00:19:17.460
at me and he’s like oh man, he said I’ve got to – they changed the rules; I’ve got to deliver the

00:19:17.460 --> 00:19:22.560
package at the address where it’s going to. I was like okay, done. Just find me down there. I’ll be

00:19:22.560 --> 00:19:26.160
down there later. When are you gonna be there? He tells me and I’m like, okay. So, I drive back

00:19:26.160 --> 00:19:32.100
down to the drop address. He pulls up, I get out of the car. I was driving a – I had a Mercedes at

00:19:32.100 --> 00:19:36.300
that point. I got out of the car, walked up to him. I was like, now can I get my package? He’s

00:19:36.300 --> 00:19:41.220
like yeah, have you got a check? I was like yeah, so I hand him the check. He’s like, can I see your

00:19:41.220 --> 00:19:48.000
ID? Well, I was at the point – at that point, I couldn’t even get fake driver’s licenses anymore.

00:19:48.000 --> 00:19:55.020
So, I used my real ID. I was like ah, Brett Johnson, it’ll be fine. I just misspelled the – I

00:19:55.020 --> 00:19:59.520
spent – put it as Brett Johnston or some bullshit like that. So, I showed him the ID, Brett Johnson.

00:19:59.520 --> 00:20:05.280
He’s like okay, he handed me the box. I handed him the check. I turn around; there is the FBI and

00:20:05.280 --> 00:20:09.300
the Charleston PD. Come to find out, there were like, thirty police officers in the parking lot,

00:20:09.300 --> 00:20:13.380
and they swarmed the area at that point in time. I’m like dude, it’s not that serious.

00:20:13.380 --> 00:20:17.280
JACK: He’s questioned for a while and the police take him to search him house. Well,

00:20:17.280 --> 00:20:22.080
his girlfriend Elizabeth was there and she sees him come in with all these federal agents and

00:20:22.080 --> 00:20:27.360
police everywhere. She may have suspected he was a criminal before, but seeing him in this much

00:20:27.360 --> 00:20:33.180
trouble really made her mad. She was furious. The police seized a lot of his stolen things,

00:20:33.180 --> 00:20:39.360
including the ring off her finger and the watch off her wrist. They took him to an interrogation

00:20:39.360 --> 00:20:44.640
room and the Secret Service starts questioning him about stolen credit cards. He knows this

00:20:44.640 --> 00:20:49.920
is really bad for him, and he gets put in jail. But more Secret Service agents come to visit him.

00:20:49.920 --> 00:20:53.520
BRETT: Two agents fly in from New Jersey. They pull me out of the cell and they’re like,

00:20:53.520 --> 00:20:58.320
we got your laptop. I’m like, yeah. They’re like, have you got anything on your laptop? I’m like,

00:20:58.320 --> 00:21:03.060
yeah. They’re like well, you’re gonna be charged for whatever’s on it. I’m like, I figured.

00:21:03.060 --> 00:21:10.140
They’re like, anything you can do for us? Well, I was arrested February 8, 2005. I was supposed

00:21:10.140 --> 00:21:19.200
to marry Elizabeth February 26, 2005, and I was absolutely crazy for that girl. I had been taught

00:21:19.200 --> 00:21:22.980
my entire life not to snitch or anything else like that, but that was the most important thing to me

00:21:22.980 --> 00:21:27.900
and I looked at the guys, and my exact words were you let me get back with Elizabeth, and I will do

00:21:27.900 --> 00:21:33.660
whatever you want me to do. The guy looked at me and he was like, fair enough. Then they started

00:21:33.660 --> 00:21:38.340
asking me questions. They asked me for my e-mail passwords and they asked me if I knew who Scarface

00:21:38.340 --> 00:21:43.860
was. They asked me if I knew who Script was. I did know who Scarface was, but I figured it was in my

00:21:43.860 --> 00:21:48.840
best interest not to mention that. So I was like nope, not a clue. They were like, alright.

00:21:48.840 --> 00:21:56.460
JACK: [MUSIC] That’s when Brett Johnson switched sides. Instead of helping criminals

00:21:56.460 --> 00:22:02.760
commit crimes online, he’s now agreed to help law enforcement catch the criminals.

00:22:02.760 --> 00:22:08.820
Anything for love. He served a couple months in jail. Bond was set for $1,000,

00:22:08.820 --> 00:22:13.560
and he was able to get his sister Denise to come bail him out. So he gets out of jail.

00:22:13.560 --> 00:22:19.320
BRETT: I walk out. Well, my first phone call walking out isn’t to Denise; my first phone

00:22:19.320 --> 00:22:25.560
call walking out is to Elizabeth because that’s who I want to be with. So I call Elizabeth and

00:22:25.560 --> 00:22:30.960
she’s like, I’ll be right there. I’m like, yes. So, I’m – this is like, midnight. I’m standing

00:22:30.960 --> 00:22:35.040
in the parking lot of the Charleston County Jail. Secret Service agent – I forgot the guy’s name,

00:22:35.040 --> 00:22:40.260
but he was a great guy. He’s standing beside me. Elizabeth had a friend that owned a limousine

00:22:40.260 --> 00:22:46.800
company and she pulls up in a limousine. I’m like, okay. The trunk of the limousine pops. She gets

00:22:46.800 --> 00:22:51.600
out. She gets out these two plastic containers, storage containers that have my clothes in them,

00:22:51.600 --> 00:22:59.280
drop them on the pavement, gets in the car, drives off. I start just bawling right there, man.

00:22:59.280 --> 00:23:03.780
Secret Service agent, he looks at me and he was like, was that your fiance?

00:23:03.780 --> 00:23:06.540
I’m like, yeah. He was like dude, I am so sorry.

00:23:06.540 --> 00:23:12.360
I’m like, yeah. He gets me in the car and this guy, he gives me a nice talk. He was like Brett,

00:23:12.360 --> 00:23:18.720
he’s like, you’ve got a real good opportunity in front of you. Please, please don’t screw it up.

00:23:18.720 --> 00:23:25.860
I’m like, I don’t intend to, man. So, I had $30 to my name. He puts me up, he take – he spends his

00:23:25.860 --> 00:23:33.180
money to pay for me a night in a hotel, and he had some coupons for Hardee’s for meals, for burgers.

00:23:33.180 --> 00:23:38.280
So, he gives me those and he’s like, I’ll see you tomorrow. He said just be good, man. I was like,

00:23:38.280 --> 00:23:45.120
okay. As soon as that guy leaves, I take that $30 and I walk my ass to Walmart [MUSIC] and I

00:23:45.120 --> 00:23:49.440
buy a prepaid debit card ‘cause I know I’m gonna go right back into tax fraud again.

00:23:49.440 --> 00:23:53.520
Come back to the hotel; I call Elizabeth and I literally beg her to come and see

00:23:53.520 --> 00:23:58.080
me. She finally agrees to and I get her in the hotel room. I’m lying to her through my teeth,

00:23:58.080 --> 00:24:00.720
telling her everything’s gonna be alright, that I’m working for the government now,

00:24:00.720 --> 00:24:06.120
that I’m gonna have a good job and everything is gonna be great. She believes me.

00:24:06.120 --> 00:24:12.720
JACK: A new chapter begins for Brett. He moves to Columbia, South Carolina, where the Secret

00:24:12.720 --> 00:24:17.820
Service offices are, and convinces Elizabeth that he’s no longer a criminal and he has a

00:24:17.820 --> 00:24:23.340
legit job with the Secret Service, and he’s able to convince her to come and move in with him. So,

00:24:23.340 --> 00:24:27.660
he starts going to work every day for the Secret Service, trying to catch criminals online.

00:24:27.660 --> 00:24:30.840
BRETT: So, the Secret Service, they came to me and Brad and Jim Ramicone, he – they came to me

00:24:30.840 --> 00:24:38.580
and they asked me; they were like hey, what do you got? What can you do? So, the job was

00:24:38.580 --> 00:24:44.580
going on and targeting individuals on different forums and marketplaces

00:24:44.580 --> 00:24:49.500
to build investigations against them, okay? Some of the people I targeted, Sean Mims,

00:24:49.500 --> 00:24:56.700
Daniel Rigmaiden was there, John Giannone. The biggest one became, I think, Max Butler. But so,

00:24:56.700 --> 00:25:01.680
I would target individuals and we would build cases against these individuals while

00:25:01.680 --> 00:25:06.480
also educating the Secret Service on how these cyber-crime environments operated. So,

00:25:06.480 --> 00:25:10.680
they would bring in – they brought in ICE, they brought in Bank of America, all these people

00:25:10.680 --> 00:25:16.020
for me to talk to about how these environments worked and how to build profiles, how to gain

00:25:16.020 --> 00:25:22.620
trust within these environments. That was my job, was talking to people, targeting individuals,

00:25:22.620 --> 00:25:28.740
and educating the Secret Service on how these environments operated, okay? My job became

00:25:28.740 --> 00:25:33.780
coming in four hours a day and being on these websites, talking to people, answering questions,

00:25:33.780 --> 00:25:39.420
networking, everything else. Very easy job. I was paid $350 a week for that. So, I was paid

00:25:39.420 --> 00:25:44.400
$350 and then they would cover all bills that I had, so rent, utilities, things like that.

00:25:44.400 --> 00:25:53.040
JACK: Okay, so Brett was getting $350 a week, but he thought that was not enough for Elizabeth to

00:25:53.040 --> 00:25:58.560
get the things she wanted. Brett really wanted to salvage his relationship with her, and the

00:25:58.560 --> 00:26:04.860
only way he knew how was to buy her things. So, this meant he needed a secret side hustle.

00:26:04.860 --> 00:26:10.020
BRETT: [MUSIC] I wasn’t doing the full-fledged tax service, but I was probably stealing – probably

00:26:10.020 --> 00:26:14.220
$20,000 a week doing that on tax return fraud. So, the way the setup was,

00:26:14.220 --> 00:26:19.440
they had me in their War Room, which was, I don’t know – twenty-five feet by fifteen feet

00:26:19.440 --> 00:26:25.500
was the size of the room. They had me on a laptop computer, private line or an outside line hooked

00:26:25.500 --> 00:26:31.500
up to a fifty-inch plasma monitor mounted on the wall. They sat next to me on a desktop computer,

00:26:31.500 --> 00:26:39.240
outside line, two Secret Service agents in the room at the – the entire time with a SLED agent,

00:26:39.240 --> 00:26:43.380
South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. So, three individuals in the room at all times,

00:26:43.380 --> 00:26:48.660
monitoring everything I’m doing, asking questions, everything else. Meanwhile they have Specter Pro

00:26:48.660 --> 00:26:54.600
and Camtasia on my laptop. So, they’re getting keystrokes and they’re taking snapshots of every

00:26:54.600 --> 00:26:58.620
single thing that’s going on. Like, snapshots every five seconds or something like that.

00:26:58.620 --> 00:27:04.200
All of that is burnt onto a DVD at the end of the evening. The first two weeks,

00:27:04.200 --> 00:27:09.660
they are extremely diligent. They are paying attention to every single thing that I’m doing

00:27:09.660 --> 00:27:12.300
and they’re – I mean, they’re asking questions, they are on the ball.

00:27:12.300 --> 00:27:18.960
What the problem is is watching a guy for four hours a night do the exact same thing

00:27:18.960 --> 00:27:22.980
every single night, they get to the point where they’re like, you tell us if anything

00:27:22.980 --> 00:27:29.400
pops up of interest. Okay, I’ll do that. So, that becomes the conversation, and they start

00:27:29.400 --> 00:27:35.100
using their computer to go to this website; typically the website is flashyourrack.com,

00:27:35.100 --> 00:27:41.460
where it’s pictures of these women who flash their breasts and you rank them from one to ten.

00:27:41.460 --> 00:27:45.960
So, for four hours every night, they’re watching porn. I’m sitting there doing the investigation,

00:27:45.960 --> 00:27:48.780
so I’m sitting there after a while, and I’m like,

00:27:48.780 --> 00:27:55.860
shit, why not? [MUSIC] Let’s do this. I start breaking the law from inside the offices as

00:27:55.860 --> 00:27:59.820
they’re watching the porn and partying amongst themselves and everything else. They were good

00:27:59.820 --> 00:28:06.780
guys. They just got bored. That’s the problem; they got bored. So, I’m working four hours a day

00:28:06.780 --> 00:28:12.120
in the Secret Service offices. Meanwhile, I’m committing tax return fraud on the side. So,

00:28:12.120 --> 00:28:16.020
I’m stealing a shitload of money doing that, and no one knows that I’m actually committing

00:28:16.020 --> 00:28:23.040
a lot of the crime from inside of the Secret Service offices at the same time. She moves up

00:28:23.040 --> 00:28:27.360
there with me and she had always wanted to keep going to strip clubs and I had always refused,

00:28:27.360 --> 00:28:31.140
but all of a sudden I’m in this position of I want to make her – make sure she’s happy.

00:28:31.140 --> 00:28:34.740
So, she wants to start going back to strip clubs and I’m like sure, we’ll go. So we start going

00:28:34.740 --> 00:28:41.580
to strip clubs – of an evening. I don’t know, I guess it’s maybe three, four months in. She looks

00:28:41.580 --> 00:28:46.560
at me one night ‘cause I told you, she couldn’t be intimate unless she was completely wasted.

00:28:46.560 --> 00:28:51.300
So she looks at me as we’re driving home one night. She’s like, I think it’d be funny if you

00:28:51.300 --> 00:28:58.800
got a blowjob from another girl. It took that right there for me to realize that

00:28:58.800 --> 00:29:03.240
I was just an escape mechanism for her. She never really loved me. She was just – she was trying

00:29:03.240 --> 00:29:08.340
to get out of her own position in life. I ended up breaking up with her after that, [MUSIC] and

00:29:08.340 --> 00:29:13.680
that’s when I drove – I dove deep into alcohol and all this other stuff, and started going through

00:29:13.680 --> 00:29:19.080
strippers like they were water, just – I’d go into a strip club with, I don’t know, just a

00:29:19.080 --> 00:29:23.460
wad – I’d spend maybe $4,000, $7,000 a night in a strip club. I would go in, I’d hand the bartender

00:29:23.460 --> 00:29:28.620
a wad of twenties, I’d tell her hey, however many Kamikazes that buys, just bring them. She’d stack

00:29:28.620 --> 00:29:32.940
up Kamikazes; they’d put tables together and they’d put Kamikazes stacked on these tables,

00:29:32.940 --> 00:29:38.940
and that – I called that my stripper magnet, and I’d sit there and talk and dance with strippers

00:29:38.940 --> 00:29:42.360
all night long and I’d go home with whichever one wanted to go home with me – of a night.

00:29:42.360 --> 00:29:47.820
JACK: Things felt like rock bottom for him. I mean, how could it get any worse,

00:29:47.820 --> 00:29:53.280
right? He got arrested, lost his girlfriend, was doing stuff behind the Secret Service’s back,

00:29:53.280 --> 00:29:58.020
and spending way too much money and time in strip clubs.

00:29:58.020 --> 00:30:05.820
But it’s not the bottom. It gets way worse. Stay with us through the break. At this point,

00:30:05.820 --> 00:30:10.380
Brett has been arrested and flipped to work for the feds, even getting paid by the Secret Service

00:30:10.380 --> 00:30:15.945
to set people up and collect enough info on them to get them arrested. But this is not an easy job.

00:30:15.945 --> 00:30:19.680
BRETT: [MUSIC] The first person that I betrayed was Sean Mims.

00:30:19.680 --> 00:30:25.140
JACK: Sean was the guy who helped Brett when Brett was really depressed after his breakup with his

00:30:25.140 --> 00:30:30.420
wife, Susan. Sean really was one of the only guys in the scene who was there for Brett at the time,

00:30:30.420 --> 00:30:37.140
helping him through that depression. Now Brett’s been asked to set up Sean to get him arrested.

00:30:37.140 --> 00:30:43.260
BRETT: That was within three days of beginning to work for the Secret Service. Sean – I had been – I

00:30:43.260 --> 00:30:49.440
had disappeared for three months. I had told Sean back when I – when he was talking with me when I

00:30:49.440 --> 00:30:53.160
was going through the depression with my first wife, I had told him hey, if I ever disappear,

00:30:53.160 --> 00:30:59.340
don’t contact me. If you do contact me, I’ll make a reference to the book Moby Dick. That way you’ll

00:30:59.340 --> 00:31:05.160
know it’s time to go. Sean finds me within three days that I go back online that I’m at the Secret

00:31:05.160 --> 00:31:10.500
Service offices and he’s looking for that keyword, something about this book Moby Dick. I never give

00:31:10.500 --> 00:31:22.800
it to him. I go from there – I knew at that point, I – that night, as soon as I’m off work,

00:31:22.800 --> 00:31:29.820
I go to a bar and I just get fucking wasted at that point. I just keep ordering drinks.

00:31:29.820 --> 00:31:36.060
I’m just downing them and downing them and downing them. I think that’s – that was part of the spiral

00:31:36.060 --> 00:31:43.980
at that point. The main spiral came when the relationship with Elizabeth ended, at that point.

00:31:43.980 --> 00:31:47.520
There was absolutely nothing else left.

00:31:47.520 --> 00:31:53.520
I thought I had hit rock bottom. Rock bottom is actually a lot farther down than that, but

00:31:53.520 --> 00:32:00.960
at that point it was just – there’s no motivation anymore. There’s not. You’re in a situation now,

00:32:00.960 --> 00:32:05.760
or I was in a situation at that point where I’m telling on everybody that I can, I’m

00:32:05.760 --> 00:32:12.060
snitching out every single person that I can. The initial reason for that – and I want to be fair;

00:32:12.060 --> 00:32:18.780
the initial – the real reason is to save my own hide. I used the relationship with Elizabeth to

00:32:18.780 --> 00:32:27.180
justify that, okay? That’s the interesting thing here. Crime, everything else is a choice. You

00:32:27.180 --> 00:32:33.000
choose to do that. I chose to snitch people out to save my own hide. I used the justification of the

00:32:33.000 --> 00:32:40.200
relationship with Elizabeth to support that, okay? So, that justification is gone now. Elizabeth’s

00:32:40.200 --> 00:32:44.940
gone. Here I am trying to rush through and find some other justification, and that justification

00:32:44.940 --> 00:32:50.160
became another stripper. Like I said, Jack, I was a straight asshole, straight asshole.

00:32:50.160 --> 00:32:55.380
JACK: Yeah. Let’s keep with that asshole thing for a second here, because I think a lot of people…

00:32:55.380 --> 00:32:55.860
BRETT: Sure.

00:32:55.860 --> 00:33:02.280
JACK: …are going to think you’re an asshole for baiting the people that

00:33:02.280 --> 00:33:06.720
you grew up teaching and stuff, right? Is there a difference in

00:33:06.720 --> 00:33:10.260
your mind between a snitch and working for the Secret Service?

00:33:10.260 --> 00:33:19.320
BRETT: No, no. No, I think it’s a – to this day, I think that snitching someone out is a despicable

00:33:19.320 --> 00:33:27.900
thing. Now that being said, I also understand that – one of the things I found in federal prison is

00:33:27.900 --> 00:33:32.280
that there are two types of people. There are the people who have talked and the people who

00:33:32.280 --> 00:33:37.620
have wished they talked, because the amount of time that you get is so large that you’re an

00:33:37.620 --> 00:33:45.480
idiot not to talk anymore. So, this idea, this thing of, you know, you don’t tell on people,

00:33:45.480 --> 00:33:53.040
that is a – that’s a bygone era of Italian mafia members that just doesn’t exist anymore.

00:33:53.040 --> 00:33:58.380
I don’t feel good about it. I don’t. I still consider myself – it’s weird with

00:33:58.380 --> 00:34:07.680
me. I really consider myself a piece of shit for snitching on people, but at the same time

00:34:07.680 --> 00:34:13.560
I think if I hadn’t have snitched on people, that I would be back in prison for twenty or longer.

00:34:13.560 --> 00:34:19.080
So, it’s weird with me. I’m this guy that – that’s one of the big regrets I’ve got,

00:34:19.080 --> 00:34:22.740
but it’s a regret at the same time that I’m like, it needed to be done. For me

00:34:22.740 --> 00:34:27.060
to do what I do today, it needed to be done. So I’m like okay, it’s part of it.

00:34:27.060 --> 00:34:31.620
JACK: Now, the people on the forums had some suspicions that something wasn’t

00:34:31.620 --> 00:34:37.020
right with Brett’s account, Gollumfun. You don’t retire and disappear just a little

00:34:37.020 --> 00:34:41.760
bit before shadowcrew.com gets raided and then come back a few months later.

00:34:41.760 --> 00:34:48.840
BRETT: It gets worse than that. When I retired as Gollumfun, on ShadowCrew I said – I made

00:34:48.840 --> 00:34:55.320
the statement, the name Gollumfun will never be back. If you ever see this name again, it’s law

00:34:55.320 --> 00:35:01.440
enforcement, alright? When I said something as Gollumfun, people took that to heart. I was top

00:35:01.440 --> 00:35:07.080
of the food chain. When I said it, it was gospel. So all of a sudden, the Gollumfun name is back; of

00:35:07.080 --> 00:35:11.340
course you’re gonna have a response of oh, dude, he said he would never bring it back. If it was,

00:35:11.340 --> 00:35:16.080
it was law enforcement control. So, people were coming out of the woodwork targeting the Gollumfun

00:35:16.080 --> 00:35:20.340
name. At the same time, the Secret Service has said hey, yeah, we need these investigations.

00:35:20.340 --> 00:35:23.880
Someone sends you a file or something like that, download it so we can see what the

00:35:23.880 --> 00:35:28.920
hell it is. Okay, let’s do that. Well, one of the files that came through was a keylogger.

00:35:28.920 --> 00:35:34.020
JACK: [MUSIC] Oh boy, this could be trouble. Brett was told to collect any information and

00:35:34.020 --> 00:35:38.820
open up any files that people sent him to see what it was, because there might be some incriminating

00:35:38.820 --> 00:35:44.040
evidence in there, right? So someone on one of these forums or IRC sent Brett a keylogger,

00:35:44.040 --> 00:35:48.300
and he didn’t know it. He opened it up and it got installed on the Secret Service’s

00:35:48.300 --> 00:35:55.800
computer. This enabled whatever person sent it to him to see every keystroke that Brett typed.

00:35:55.800 --> 00:36:01.200
So, now someone on one of these underground forums was watching everything Brett typed,

00:36:01.200 --> 00:36:04.560
and Brett had no idea it was on there. It was hidden.

00:36:04.560 --> 00:36:10.560
BRETT: So, here I am. I’m accessing. They’re wanting me to send files to Secret Services

00:36:10.560 --> 00:36:16.680
addresses from that laptop. So it’s not really secure to begin with. So here I am,

00:36:16.680 --> 00:36:22.500
I’m accessing my real e-mail. Not only that, but I’m also accessing – because you had DM boxes,

00:36:22.500 --> 00:36:25.800
but they were horrible back then. They were not optimized, they – you couldn’t use the damn things

00:36:25.800 --> 00:36:30.420
for shit. So, I’m accessing my e-mails, I’m sending stuff to the Secret Service,

00:36:30.420 --> 00:36:34.920
everything else from this laptop that we’re also running these investigations out of.

00:36:34.920 --> 00:36:40.500
JACK: Now at the time, the Secret Service gave Brett a cell phone, a way to contact him if

00:36:40.500 --> 00:36:45.660
they ever needed. It was a basic Cricket phone, but since Brett always worked out of the Secret

00:36:45.660 --> 00:36:51.480
Service office and came to work every day, nobody ever called him on it, until one day.

00:36:51.480 --> 00:36:56.640
BRETT: That phone rings and I pick it up, and it’s the TTYL line,

00:36:56.640 --> 00:37:02.160
so this hearing-impaired line is coming across. So, someone’s speaking on

00:37:02.160 --> 00:37:08.820
a – out of – typing on the other end of the line and it’s going to – from text to voice.

00:37:08.820 --> 00:37:15.180
It’s telling me that I – they know who I am, that they know that I’m working – I think it says it;

00:37:15.180 --> 00:37:18.060
they know I’m working for law enforcement or some bullshit like that. It gives a

00:37:18.060 --> 00:37:23.340
whole line of stuff that I’m like, holy hell. Basically what the guy has done is he has seen

00:37:23.340 --> 00:37:28.200
that some of these e-mail addresses that I’m sending stuff to is Secret Service, ss.gov.

00:37:28.200 --> 00:37:33.660
So, he’s seeing Secret Service e-mail addresses. He’s not only doing that, but he’s reading

00:37:33.660 --> 00:37:41.160
my internal e-mails, so he’s compromised my GTE mail account and has shut me out of it. Well, the

00:37:41.160 --> 00:37:47.220
GTE mail account has a lot of the conversations that I had with some of these guys from USA Sex

00:37:47.220 --> 00:37:54.060
Guide about Elizabeth being a prostitute. So, he’s got my real address, he knows about Elizabeth.

00:37:54.060 --> 00:38:03.420
He suspects that I’m an informant as well, and he’s going by the name of Manos Di, hand of god.

00:38:03.420 --> 00:38:07.620
I forget what the actual demand was, but he says he’s gonna publish it all, and he does.

00:38:07.620 --> 00:38:12.960
He publishes it on some of these newsgroups, and it – from what I recall,

00:38:12.960 --> 00:38:17.880
it really didn’t – it got a lot of traction with the Secret Service, but it didn’t get

00:38:17.880 --> 00:38:22.980
a lot of traction with the overall cyber-crime community. I was able to play that off. Well,

00:38:22.980 --> 00:38:28.920
the Secret Service, when they – when that phone call comes through, they think that it’s me

00:38:28.920 --> 00:38:32.220
fucking with them, trying to get out of the investigation, because the initial thing

00:38:32.220 --> 00:38:35.940
was I was only supposed to work with them for three months and they were gonna cut me loose.

00:38:35.940 --> 00:38:42.900
So, they think that it’s me that Elizabeth is at – back at the apartment on a laptop doing all this

00:38:42.900 --> 00:38:47.460
stuff. So they’re like, get in the car now. We all rush over to the apartment. Elizabeth’s sitting

00:38:47.460 --> 00:38:51.360
there watching some sort of reality show, some crap like that. It’s pretty evident that it’s not

00:38:51.360 --> 00:38:57.720
me. That thing with Manos Di continues. Well, I come back to the office that day and I’m like hey,

00:38:57.720 --> 00:39:05.640
it’s probably a keylogger. We need to format this computer. The answer is no. I’m like, you’re

00:39:05.640 --> 00:39:10.200
serious? They’re like no, we’re not formatting a damn thing. Get your ass on there and work.

00:39:10.200 --> 00:39:15.900
Okay, so start working. Meanwhile, Manos Di is getting keylogs of every single thing.

00:39:15.900 --> 00:39:22.260
He’s getting all the passwords, all this other stuff, and he’s taking over these accounts. This

00:39:22.260 --> 00:39:27.720
lasts – and I’m bitching about this for three months. This lasts for three months. He even

00:39:27.720 --> 00:39:33.720
takes over our eGold account at one point, okay? I actually – I had talked him into giving the eGold

00:39:33.720 --> 00:39:39.060
account back, and we become these – this – it’s this weird conversation of friends. He suspects

00:39:39.060 --> 00:39:47.040
I’m an informant; he doesn’t know it. I’m able to convince him to some point that I’m not. After

00:39:47.040 --> 00:39:54.180
three months I walk in the office one day and Bobby and Brad are there, and they’re like look,

00:39:54.180 --> 00:39:59.520
we think it’s a keylogger on the system. I’m looking at him; I’m like, are you shitting me?

00:39:59.520 --> 00:40:03.420
No, we think it’s a keylogger. I think we’re gonna format today. So, it took them three

00:40:03.420 --> 00:40:09.900
months to format that system. Meanwhile – and I – that’s what Manos Di did, was all that.

00:40:09.900 --> 00:40:13.080
JACK: Who do you think Manos Di was? Do you have a theory?

00:40:13.080 --> 00:40:17.680
BRETT: You know, I don’t know. My theory is it was Max. I don’t know. Max was the only one…

00:40:17.680 --> 00:40:17.693
JACK: Max…?

00:40:17.693 --> 00:40:19.680
BRETT: …competent enough to do it. Max Butler.

00:40:19.680 --> 00:40:24.720
JACK: [MUSIC] Whoa, Max Butler is in this story? Iceman? Well, this is the guy who

00:40:24.720 --> 00:40:28.620
was operating a competing website called Carders Market, and went on to steal two

00:40:28.620 --> 00:40:33.300
million credit card numbers and sold them on his site. Max was later arrested and sent to prison,

00:40:33.300 --> 00:40:38.280
I think one of the longest sentences ever in computer crimes, and it’s just crazy to

00:40:38.280 --> 00:40:45.120
hear how he may have sniffed out Brett as a fed and infiltrated the Secret Service.

00:40:45.120 --> 00:40:49.140
Another interesting story Brett has while working with the Secret Service is this whole

00:40:49.140 --> 00:40:54.840
thing that went on with La Cosa Nostra. I’m not talking about the mafia. This is a website that

00:40:54.840 --> 00:40:59.820
just happened to be the same name, and it was another forum for criminals to conduct crimes

00:40:59.820 --> 00:41:05.100
on and sell things. The Secret Service agents, Bobby and Brad, were monitoring this site.

00:41:05.100 --> 00:41:10.080
BRETT: It was a criminal forum, so it was like ShadowCrew. It’s one of these offshoot crime

00:41:10.080 --> 00:41:14.460
forums, alright? You go there and he had tutorials and there were forums on there talking about

00:41:14.460 --> 00:41:19.320
credit card theft and ID theft and hacking and all this other stuff. So I’m driving home one night.

00:41:19.320 --> 00:41:24.360
Brad calls me and he’s like hey man, La Cosa Nostra has a keylogger on the site. I was like,

00:41:24.360 --> 00:41:28.800
what? He’s like yeah, there’s a keylogger on La Cosa Nostra. Anyone who visits the

00:41:28.800 --> 00:41:34.860
site, a keylogger’s downloaded to it. I ask him – I was like well, who runs the site? He’s like,

00:41:34.860 --> 00:41:41.280
that’s none of your goddamn business. I’m like, okay. So, they lead me down to the War Room

00:41:41.280 --> 00:41:45.780
and I’m sitting there. We’re talking about La Cosa Nostra and the keylogger and everything

00:41:45.780 --> 00:41:52.620
else. I’m like well, what do you guys want me to do? Brad looks at me; he’s like well,

00:41:52.620 --> 00:41:57.600
what would you do if you came across a site like that that had a keylogger on it? I was like well,

00:41:57.600 --> 00:42:03.620
I’d shut it down. He’s like well, do what you usually do. I was like, okay.

00:42:03.620 --> 00:42:07.980
JACK: Brett had a lot of contacts in the criminal underground, so he asked around,

00:42:07.980 --> 00:42:12.780
hey, who runs La Cosa Nostra? He gets a name; it’s a young guy.

00:42:12.780 --> 00:42:17.280
BRETT: I start looking the kid’s name up and I start reaching out ‘cause I have every contact

00:42:17.280 --> 00:42:22.200
in the world. I start reaching out to all these criminal contacts. So, within thirty minutes,

00:42:22.200 --> 00:42:29.040
I find out that this kid has been arrested. Not only has he been arrested, but he was in prison.

00:42:29.040 --> 00:42:32.700
So I find out the kid’s real name, I start pulling the articles up on that,

00:42:32.700 --> 00:42:40.140
and it’s pretty easy to tell quickly that this kid is – he’s been let out to work for people,

00:42:40.140 --> 00:42:43.200
because you got the keylogger on the site, he was sentenced to this much time,

00:42:43.200 --> 00:42:48.960
he’s not an – he’s out of prison right now, so why is he out? He’s out for working, obviously.

00:42:48.960 --> 00:42:55.860
JACK: Oh, how interesting. A kid who operated this criminal forum had been arrested by the

00:42:55.860 --> 00:43:01.020
Canadian RCMP. He disappeared for a short while and then was back,

00:43:01.020 --> 00:43:06.480
and suddenly his website is trying to install a keylogger on all its users, tracking all their

00:43:06.480 --> 00:43:13.845
keystrokes? Brett connected the dots and suspected that this kid might be a snitch just like Brett.

00:43:13.845 --> 00:43:20.160
BRETT: [MUSIC] So here I am; Gollumfun’s – the name is still highly respected even though some

00:43:20.160 --> 00:43:24.540
people are thinking that I’m an informant. So all of a – and I’m like hey, I could use this

00:43:24.540 --> 00:43:29.460
as one of these things to help build trust across everyone else who thinks I may be an informant,

00:43:29.460 --> 00:43:33.120
‘cause there’s no way an informant’s gonna tell on another one. So here I am,

00:43:33.120 --> 00:43:38.040
I just start posting. I break it all down into a nice catalog,

00:43:38.040 --> 00:43:42.420
a nice timeline, everything else. I post the articles, post the kid’s name, bam,

00:43:42.420 --> 00:43:46.580
bam, bam. Forty-eight hours later, La Cosa Nostra disappears from the internet.

00:43:46.580 --> 00:43:51.780
JACK: It turned out that the kid running the site was arrested by the RCMP and was

00:43:51.780 --> 00:43:56.640
working with them, just as Brett suspected. He turned into an informant to avoid prison time,

00:43:56.640 --> 00:44:01.680
and so the RCMP had him set up a keylogger on the site to try to find more information on its users.

00:44:01.680 --> 00:44:08.700
BRETT: The kid was working for the RCMP. Yeah, La Cosa Nostra was an RCMP investigation. So, Brett

00:44:08.700 --> 00:44:15.840
Johnson goes in and has that damn thing shut down. RCMP calls Washington; what the fuck? Washington

00:44:15.840 --> 00:44:21.240
is calling Columbia, South Carolina; hey, what the fuck is your monkey doing? It goes from there.

00:44:21.240 --> 00:44:25.260
JACK: Columbia, South Carolina was where Brett was working in the Secret Service field office,

00:44:25.260 --> 00:44:27.960
and the monkey they were referring to was him.

00:44:27.960 --> 00:44:30.500
BRETT: Referring to me; what is your monkey doing?

00:44:30.500 --> 00:44:34.800
JACK: Yeah, well, this resulted in the Secret Service agents from Washington,

00:44:34.800 --> 00:44:40.800
DC coming to South Carolina to talk with Brett. He didn’t actually get in trouble for ruining an

00:44:40.800 --> 00:44:47.520
RCMP investigation, but they did reset some of his objectives. Okay, so I know there are a lot

00:44:47.520 --> 00:44:51.840
of different timelines to keep track of here, so let me just recap real quick where we are.

00:44:51.840 --> 00:44:56.580
There are three things going on at this point. One is Brett is a snitch turning people into

00:44:56.580 --> 00:45:02.040
the Secret Service. Two is Brett lost his girlfriend Elizabeth, and three, Brett is

00:45:02.040 --> 00:45:07.080
still doing tax return fraud scams to make extra money. Not only was he doing it, he was doing it

00:45:07.080 --> 00:45:12.060
in the Secret Service offices while at work. They just had no idea he was doing it, though.

00:45:12.060 --> 00:45:18.000
But then something happened. One of the guys that Brett turned in had strangely hid some evidence

00:45:18.000 --> 00:45:22.500
in storage the day before he got arrested, and they suspected Brett tipped him off,

00:45:22.500 --> 00:45:26.340
gave him some sort of warning, like hey man, hide your stuff; you’re gonna get arrested.

00:45:26.340 --> 00:45:32.640
So they gave him a polygraph test and decided to search his home for any suspicious stuff.

00:45:32.640 --> 00:45:37.020
BRETT: Jim wants them to go and search my apartment. I’m like yeah, yeah, let’s

00:45:37.020 --> 00:45:41.100
go and search the apartment. I’m fine with that. Well, in the apartment I’ve got prepaid debit

00:45:41.100 --> 00:45:47.040
cards, I’ve got a stash of cash, I’ve got some fake IDs, I’ve got all this bullshit in there.

00:45:47.040 --> 00:45:51.720
[MUSIC] I want to go there to make sure they don’t get it, or go through everything. So, I

00:45:51.720 --> 00:45:59.700
know at this point that both Brad and Bobby, they like to look at the girls a bit. So I’m like okay,

00:45:59.700 --> 00:46:05.100
so we all drive down to my apartment. As I walk in, I’m like, do you want me to show you

00:46:05.100 --> 00:46:08.820
where everything is, Bobby? He’s like no, I can work. I’m like, that’s fine. I look at Brad and

00:46:08.820 --> 00:46:10.920
I was like, what do you want to look at? He’s like well, let’s go in your bedroom and look

00:46:10.920 --> 00:46:16.440
around. So as I walk in the bedroom, I look at Brad and I’m like, have I showed you my

00:46:16.440 --> 00:46:20.220
new girlfriend yet? He’s like, new girlfriend? I was like yeah, man, I got a new girlfriend.

00:46:20.220 --> 00:46:23.280
He’s like no, you’ve not. So I pull – I open up my phone and I show him the naked pictures

00:46:23.280 --> 00:46:26.520
of the girl and I was like, you want to see my porn stash? He’s like no, man, I don’t want to

00:46:26.520 --> 00:46:29.280
see your porn stash. I was like, are you sure you don’t want to see my porn stash? It’s right there

00:46:29.280 --> 00:46:35.400
on the desk. So he’s like, what do you got? So, he starts looking at that. Then I’m – I

00:46:35.400 --> 00:46:37.980
walk him over where I was like, this is my closet. You want to go through the drawers,

00:46:37.980 --> 00:46:42.660
here, we’ll go through the drawers, whatever you want to do. Well, it was the closet that I

00:46:42.660 --> 00:46:48.840
had all the stash of the prepaid debit cards and everything else in there. So, I make a point of

00:46:48.840 --> 00:46:53.640
going to the closet and going in and start trying to pull everything out in the hopes

00:46:53.640 --> 00:46:57.780
that he’ll start to say no, I don’t need to see that, which is exactly what he did. I had learned

00:46:57.780 --> 00:47:02.100
enough about him at that point that I got him distracted on the girl and everything else.

00:47:02.100 --> 00:47:07.380
Meanwhile Bobby’s going through everything in the house. He doesn’t find anything else. They leave.

00:47:07.380 --> 00:47:13.260
JACK: And that worked. Brett tricked the Secret Service agents and took advantage

00:47:13.260 --> 00:47:17.940
of their trust to social engineer them and keep them from finding his illegal stuff,

00:47:17.940 --> 00:47:22.980
which was right there in the closet. Crazy. But one of the higher-ups in the

00:47:22.980 --> 00:47:28.260
Charleston Secret Service office, Jim Ramicone, suspected something was going on with Brett,

00:47:28.260 --> 00:47:35.040
and a while later ordered a second search in his apartment where they do find his stuff. It was so

00:47:35.040 --> 00:47:39.660
obvious in his apartment that the two agents that Brett had tricked, Bobby and Brad, were

00:47:39.660 --> 00:47:44.400
fired from their positions in the Secret Service. Well, I guess they actually got reassigned to

00:47:44.400 --> 00:47:49.500
do something else, but they did get in some big trouble for this. But Brett was in big trouble,

00:47:49.500 --> 00:47:54.360
too. They threw him in jail and threatened to charge him with his previous crimes once again

00:47:54.360 --> 00:47:59.820
unless he cooperated. But he didn’t want to cooperate, and he sat in jail. Well,

00:47:59.820 --> 00:48:03.720
not long after going to jail, someone came and paid his bond and he was able to leave.

00:48:03.720 --> 00:48:08.760
So he goes outside, and there’s his mom telling him his bond has been paid and she got him out.

00:48:08.760 --> 00:48:12.600
BRETT: She’s in the parking lot. She tells me you’re out, and I looked at her and I was like,

00:48:12.600 --> 00:48:16.620
I can’t stay. She’s like, what do you mean? I was like, look – I said they’re gonna be arresting me.

00:48:16.620 --> 00:48:22.980
I’ve gotta go. So, I go back to where – to Aiken, South Carolina. I sleep the night there. The next

00:48:22.980 --> 00:48:28.500
morning I call Kim, the stripper that I had been dating, and I had given Kim, I don’t know,

00:48:28.500 --> 00:48:34.380
probably $60,000 at that point. [MUSIC] Called her up and I was like Kim, I need $1,000. She

00:48:34.380 --> 00:48:38.520
was like, why do you need $1,000? I was like, look – I said I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta round

00:48:38.520 --> 00:48:43.260
up the money for an attorney. I said I’ll pay you back $3,000. I need $1,000. She was like,

00:48:43.260 --> 00:48:56.400
meet me in Augusta, Georgia. [MUSIC] So I drove. I had a 1997 Dodge Dakota truck. Drove that

00:48:56.400 --> 00:49:01.740
to Augusta, Georgia, met her in the parking lot of Lowe’s, sat there crying, telling her

00:49:01.740 --> 00:49:09.320
how much I loved her, everything else, and got $1,000 from her and headed west on Interstate 20.

00:49:09.320 --> 00:49:14.640
JACK: Brett went on the run. He wanted to get far away from this place,

00:49:14.640 --> 00:49:19.440
far away from the courts and the police and the Secret Service, and never come back.

00:49:19.440 --> 00:49:24.240
He was supposed to stick around and go to court and face tons of charges that were against him,

00:49:24.240 --> 00:49:33.000
but no way. That was not gonna happen. Brett was outta there. See, all Brett ever knew was crime.

00:49:33.000 --> 00:49:38.220
He had been committing crime since the age of ten. His mom and dad were both prolific criminals,

00:49:38.220 --> 00:49:43.680
and he spent most of his time online interacting with criminals, honing his skills, mastering the

00:49:43.680 --> 00:49:50.520
dark art. He saw himself as a lifelong criminal, so what’s a person do that sees himself as nothing

00:49:50.520 --> 00:49:58.140
else but a criminal? They run and go commit more crimes. Brett was on the loose, heading west from

00:49:58.140 --> 00:50:04.020
South Carolina in a Dodge Dakota with a wad of cash in his pocket, and no clue where to go.

00:50:04.020 --> 00:50:12.480
BRETT: Every single day is the most stressful day of your life and the most exhilarating.

00:50:12.480 --> 00:50:19.980
You have the highest highs, the lowest lows. I was – talking about depressed,

00:50:19.980 --> 00:50:29.820
I was the guy who – any ballad come on the radio, I was crying like a baby at that point.

00:50:29.820 --> 00:50:33.540
You don’t have friends, so strangers become your friend.

00:50:33.540 --> 00:50:40.800
JACK: Brett ends up in Dallas, Texas, and immediately starts doing tax refund fraud

00:50:40.800 --> 00:50:46.020
once again. It had worked really well for him in the past, so why not keep doing it? He gathers

00:50:46.020 --> 00:50:50.100
the supplies he needed, which was a computer and prepaid debit cards, and gets to work.

00:50:50.100 --> 00:50:55.740
BRETT: You would file, and it typically took ten days for the money to hit the account, and the

00:50:55.740 --> 00:51:01.500
account would always hit early Friday morning, so you know, 2:00, 3:00 AM, Friday morning. So here

00:51:01.500 --> 00:51:06.120
I am; by Thursday I don’t have any damn money at all. I’ve got some bologna, I’ve got like, I don’t

00:51:06.120 --> 00:51:10.620
know, six, eight dollars in cash is what I’ve got left, ‘cause I’ve spent the rest on it on food

00:51:10.620 --> 00:51:20.520
and on Kinkos at twelve dollars an hour filing income taxes. So, down to six, eight dollars.

00:51:20.520 --> 00:51:24.780
Wake up, keep checking the account through the night. 3:00 AM, check the account;

00:51:24.780 --> 00:51:31.020
money is on the cards. [MUSIC] At that point, it’s important to get the money out as fast

00:51:31.020 --> 00:51:35.820
as you possibly can, so I get in the damn truck and start looking for ATM machines.

00:51:35.820 --> 00:51:41.220
Start pulling all these twenties out, throwing them in – throwing the twenties in the floorboard

00:51:41.220 --> 00:51:46.800
of the truck because I don’t have anything to hold the damn twenties on. Finally I get a nice pile of

00:51:46.800 --> 00:51:50.340
twenties up and I was like okay, I’ve gotta do some shit with that, so I go back to the hotel,

00:51:50.340 --> 00:51:55.260
go up to the desk and I’m like hey man, you got a Hefty bag? He’s like, what? I was like,

00:51:55.260 --> 00:51:58.200
do you have a Hefty bag I could get? I got some garbage I need to take care of. So he

00:51:58.200 --> 00:52:03.180
hands me a Hefty bag. I go back to the truck, start putting the twenties in the Hefty bag,

00:52:03.180 --> 00:52:06.780
and that’s what I do the rest of the night; I just continue – I go back to the ATM route,

00:52:06.780 --> 00:52:10.800
start – keep cashing out until I end up with – I think it was

00:52:10.800 --> 00:52:17.420
$67,000 that first night in twenty-dollar bills, all stuffed into a black garbage bag.

00:52:17.420 --> 00:52:23.400
JACK: Incredible. He’s got quite a sizeable stack of cash now.

00:52:23.400 --> 00:52:30.060
He’s kinda back on his feet, so what’s next? Well, he bought a better car, a Jeep Cherokee,

00:52:30.060 --> 00:52:35.240
and kept heading west, first hitting up Roswell, New Mexico, and then he kept going.

00:52:35.240 --> 00:52:41.640
BRETT: From Roswell I head to Vegas, stay – I think I stayed the first trip – a couple –

00:52:41.640 --> 00:52:47.820
three weeks in Vegas, stole $150,000 out of ATMs at that point doing tax fraud.

00:52:47.820 --> 00:52:57.060
From Vegas went to Oceanside, California, stole another $120,00, $160,000, something like that,

00:52:57.060 --> 00:53:06.240
then back to Vegas. I was in LA for a while. Finally what happens is is I’m back in Vegas and

00:53:06.240 --> 00:53:13.980
the idea had been to try to get enough money up to bug out to Brazil. I was looking at trying to buy

00:53:13.980 --> 00:53:18.780
a place down in Florianopolis there and setting up business again. That was my thing; hell, I’m

00:53:18.780 --> 00:53:24.960
just gonna keep on trucking. So, I was in Las Vegas and the night before, I had been

00:53:24.960 --> 00:53:30.720
– I had stole $160,000 out of ATMs. I come back to the hotel, and before I went to sleep,

00:53:30.720 --> 00:53:38.880
I booted up the laptop, signed onto Max Butler’s site, Carders Market, and the first thread there

00:53:38.880 --> 00:53:44.040
was Gollumfun Most Wanted. I sat there and I sat there looking at it and I was like,

00:53:44.040 --> 00:53:48.240
what? Before I clicked on it, I just looked at it and I say, Gollumfun Most Wanted.

00:53:48.240 --> 00:53:57.120
Well, I click on it and there is my picture and a link to the Secret Service site. Clicked on the

00:53:57.120 --> 00:54:02.520
site, and it’s talking about Operation Angler Fish and the work I’ve done for the Secret Service and

00:54:02.520 --> 00:54:08.640
how I’m wanted. Then I start reading the threads down below it, and Max Butler – the thing was is

00:54:08.640 --> 00:54:17.040
I had been an admin up until that point. I was an admin on Max Butler’s site. So, Max is pissed off

00:54:17.040 --> 00:54:22.440
the gills. He’s wanting to find me, and Max had always had an anger problem, so he was –

00:54:22.440 --> 00:54:27.720
he’s talking murder and everything else like that. I’m sitting there going well, I’m out of IDs now.

00:54:27.720 --> 00:54:34.620
JACK: While on the run for those four months, Brett stole $600,000 from the IRS through tax

00:54:34.620 --> 00:54:39.540
refund fraud. He was blowing through the money as fast as he’d get it, too. Vegas will do that to

00:54:39.540 --> 00:54:44.520
you; strippers, gambling. He was living the high life. But with no reliable way to get

00:54:44.520 --> 00:54:50.580
fake IDs anymore, the tax refund fraud came to a screeching halt. Brett knew he needed to get out

00:54:50.580 --> 00:54:55.860
of Vegas. Too many bits of evidence on him there. Time to pick a new place to hide out for a while.

00:54:55.860 --> 00:55:00.120
BRETT: So, what about Orlando? So, that’s where I went. I got in the Jeep the next

00:55:00.120 --> 00:55:06.780
day and drove straight to Orlando. [MUSIC] What I did in Orlando was I decided on a timeshare,

00:55:06.780 --> 00:55:10.560
paid cash for a timeshare for nine months that they were just building at that point.

00:55:10.560 --> 00:55:16.080
Then I went down to Universal and I went to Disney and bought the year passes and

00:55:16.080 --> 00:55:21.180
figured I’d just lay low for six to nine months until everything kinda died down.

00:55:21.180 --> 00:55:26.280
Then I could – maybe I would get a passport at that point and bug out.

00:55:26.280 --> 00:55:29.310
JACK: How many times did you go to Disneyland at that point?

00:55:29.310 --> 00:55:34.422
BRETT: Daily, daily. Yeah. So, it was…

00:55:34.422 --> 00:55:34.433
JACK: What?

00:55:34.433 --> 00:55:40.620
BRETT: It was – I went every day or I went to Universal, and I did that daily. So, yeah.

00:55:40.620 --> 00:55:42.000
JACK: Why so many times?

00:55:42.000 --> 00:55:48.080
BRETT: I like theme parks, man. I’m fifty years old; I like theme parks still.

00:55:48.080 --> 00:55:53.720
JACK: Okay, so I mean, I’ve gotta imagine you are on quite a bender, right?

00:55:53.720 --> 00:55:53.736
BRETT: Oh, I am.

00:55:53.736 --> 00:55:58.020
JACK: So, you stole – you stole, what, $600,000 in those four months?

00:55:58.020 --> 00:55:59.580
BRETT: Yeah, about $600,000, yeah.

00:55:59.580 --> 00:56:05.640
JACK: So you’re partying, you’re getting girls. But it just doesn’t fit in there

00:56:05.640 --> 00:56:10.320
that you’re going to Disneyland. It just doesn’t seem like adult fun compared to the other stuff.

00:56:10.320 --> 00:56:15.840
BRETT: Yeah, I’m drinking like a fish in the night; during the day I’m waking up

00:56:15.840 --> 00:56:22.740
and I’ll go down to spend a few hours at the park, then come back, eat at a restaurant,

00:56:22.740 --> 00:56:27.740
and then go to a strip club or something like that. Yeah, that was Brett Johnson.

00:56:27.740 --> 00:56:33.180
JACK: Well, as you can imagine, the Secret Service was extremely mad

00:56:33.180 --> 00:56:37.680
that Brett was not facing his charges that they had previously arrested him on twice,

00:56:37.680 --> 00:56:42.240
and he was nowhere to be found, and he was out there committing more crimes. It was at this

00:56:42.240 --> 00:56:47.880
point that Brett was on the Secret Service’s Most Wanted list, and they were spending a lot

00:56:47.880 --> 00:56:52.440
of time and effort trying to find him. In some point, they figured out his cell phone number.

00:56:52.440 --> 00:56:57.720
BRETT: I didn’t know it, but they called the phone. I hadn’t been getting phone numbers –

00:56:57.720 --> 00:57:03.060
phone calls on the phone, but it came through and they were acting like Papa John’s pizza.

00:57:03.060 --> 00:57:07.620
I knew it was a – kind of an iffy call when it came through, ‘cause it just didn’t make sense.

00:57:07.620 --> 00:57:13.080
But I didn’t think much about it. I found out from talking to Bobby that that night,

00:57:13.080 --> 00:57:17.580
they had actually went to another apartment, or – yeah, another apartment in the timeshare

00:57:17.580 --> 00:57:21.660
thinking that I was in that apartment, but I wasn’t. So what they did the next morning is

00:57:21.660 --> 00:57:24.480
they were just going door to door. [MUSIC] That’s the only thing that they were doing;

00:57:24.480 --> 00:57:32.040
door to door. So, at 10:00 AM – I think it was September 16, 10:00 AM, on 2006;

00:57:32.040 --> 00:57:38.640
I get a knock, and I was in bed asleep. I get up, walk to the door, look out the peephole.

00:57:38.640 --> 00:57:45.720
Nobody’s there. So, I open the door, step out in the hallway. Walking down the hall is Bobby Kirby,

00:57:45.720 --> 00:57:50.820
another South Carolina Secret Service agent and an Orange County police officer.

00:57:50.820 --> 00:57:54.780
They turn around and I looked at them; I said hey guys, how you doing? Bobby gets

00:57:54.780 --> 00:57:57.720
a smile on his face. He’s like, pretty good, Brett. How are you? I’m like good,

00:57:57.720 --> 00:58:02.520
guys. You want to come in? Bobby’s like yeah, we do. Why don’t we put you in cuffs first? I’m like,

00:58:02.520 --> 00:58:08.160
why don’t you do that? So, they put me in cuffs, take me in, sit me down on the couch. Bobby looks

00:58:08.160 --> 00:58:13.800
at me and he’s like, you got any cash in here? I was like yeah, I got $150,000 in the bedroom.

00:58:13.800 --> 00:58:18.060
He’s like, anything else? I looked at him; I said yeah, there’s an AK-47 in there, too. He

00:58:18.060 --> 00:58:22.980
stops dead and he’s like, are you serious? I was like no, I’m just shitting with you. He was like,

00:58:22.980 --> 00:58:27.720
that’s good. That saves you a charge. I was like, I figure. Then he gets Brad on the phone and Brad

00:58:27.720 --> 00:58:32.400
just starts screaming at me. He’s like, let the fucking begin. I’m like yeah, Brad, I understand.

00:58:32.400 --> 00:58:37.560
JACK: They put him in the county jail in Orlando for a while, but they needed to take him back

00:58:37.560 --> 00:58:42.360
to South Carolina so he could face all his charges. But instead of taking him right there,

00:58:42.360 --> 00:58:46.500
they take him to another county jail on the way and leave him there for a while.

00:58:46.500 --> 00:58:48.960
Then when he’s used to that, they put him in a bus and took him to another county

00:58:48.960 --> 00:58:53.220
jail a little closer to where he’s trying to go. I guess they call this diesel therapy,

00:58:53.220 --> 00:58:56.880
and they kept moving him from jail to jail until he got to where he’s supposed to be.

00:58:56.880 --> 00:59:01.680
At some point he fakes having a drug problem so that he can get into a drug rehab program,

00:59:01.680 --> 00:59:04.200
which he thinks will treat you better if you have a drug problem.

00:59:04.200 --> 00:59:08.700
BRETT: Prosecutor’s standing up, and I mean, he’s screaming. He’s like, Johnson has manipulated the

00:59:08.700 --> 00:59:13.800
Secret Service, he’s manipulated the prosecutor, and he’s manipulating you today, Your Honor, and

00:59:13.800 --> 00:59:20.460
we insist on the upper limits of the guidelines. Judge looks at me and she’s like, I agree.

00:59:20.460 --> 00:59:28.740
Seventy-five months. So six weeks later, I’m at the gates of the Ashland Kentucky Camp,

00:59:28.740 --> 00:59:32.820
federal prison camp. Ashland was not supposed to have a fence around it. Well, we pull up

00:59:32.820 --> 00:59:37.980
in the bus and Ashland’s got a fence around it; fourteen foot, razor wire on top, and I’m sitting

00:59:37.980 --> 00:59:42.600
there going well shit, I don’t climb. So we go in and during processing I look at the guard that’s

00:59:42.600 --> 00:59:47.100
doing the intake and I’m like hey man, are there any jobs outside of the fence? He’s like well,

00:59:47.100 --> 00:59:51.660
you can work in a national forest. I’m like no, I’ll die out there. He’s like well, you could do

00:59:51.660 --> 00:59:58.980
landscaping. I’m like, I could do landscaping. So, the next day I walk into the landscaping office

00:59:58.980 --> 01:00:04.320
and behind the guard – he was a great guy, but behind his desk, [MUSIC] the

01:00:04.320 --> 01:00:09.660
entire wall was this aerial photo, blown up, of the compound and the

01:00:09.660 --> 01:00:15.960
outlying area. So I can sit there and talk to him and plot my escape the entire time.

01:00:15.960 --> 01:00:23.220
So I worked for that dude for six weeks. Feds call it an escape, so let’s call it an escape.

01:00:23.220 --> 01:00:31.560
I walked off, and the way that happened was my dad. I hadn’t – my mom leaves my dad.

01:00:31.560 --> 01:00:37.920
I had not talked to him, had a real conversation with him, I don’t know, twenty years. I mean a

01:00:37.920 --> 01:00:42.480
real conversation. I had seen him a couple of times but when I say seen him, I mean maybe

01:00:42.480 --> 01:00:49.380
for five, six minutes. When I get to Ashland, he starts visiting me there. I don’t know, it’s – I

01:00:49.380 --> 01:00:53.160
guess it’s the third visit in. He looks at me; he’s like hey, I’ve been reading about you online.

01:00:53.160 --> 01:00:57.780
I’m like, yeah. He’s like yeah, and he’s like, that’s a lot of money you made. I’m like, yeah.

01:00:57.780 --> 01:01:03.420
Then he looks at me; he’s like, you think you could teach somebody how to do that?

01:01:03.420 --> 01:01:09.120
So he mentions that and I decided to manipulate him into helping me escape. So I taught him how

01:01:09.120 --> 01:01:14.880
to do tax return identity fraud in exchange for $4,000 in cash, a change of clothes, a cell phone,

01:01:14.880 --> 01:01:20.160
and a driver’s license. The only driver’s license he could get was my driver’s license. So,

01:01:20.160 --> 01:01:28.280
he drops it off in a package in the woods. I last six weeks at the landscaping job and then leave.

01:01:28.280 --> 01:01:33.840
JACK: He makes his way to Lexington, Kentucky, dyes his hair, and immediately

01:01:33.840 --> 01:01:38.400
goes back into tax refund fraud. He ordered one hundred prepaid debit cards,

01:01:38.400 --> 01:01:42.180
and that was sent to him, and he bought a laptop, and then he went to the movies.

01:01:42.180 --> 01:01:47.880
BRETT: Come back to the hotel. I’ve got the – I’m on the second floor. I’ve got the curtains open on

01:01:47.880 --> 01:01:55.380
the window. I’m sitting there on my laptop, and this guy walks by the window. He walks by; I see

01:01:55.380 --> 01:02:03.780
him stop. He backs up, looks at me, knocks on the window, reaches in his shirt, pulls out his badge,

01:02:03.780 --> 01:02:12.900
points to his badge, points to the doorknob. I get up, open the doorknob; I’m like, yeah? He’s like,

01:02:12.900 --> 01:02:21.300
Brett Johnson. I’m like, yeah. He was like, you are under arrest. I’m like, yeah. So…

01:02:21.300 --> 01:02:26.160
JACK: You sound annoyed, but is it really frightening, or what is the real emotion?

01:02:26.160 --> 01:02:30.480
BRETT: Oh dude, it’s – at that point, everything. Everything is resignation,

01:02:30.480 --> 01:02:38.580
every single thing, and that right there, at that point was rock bottom for me.

01:02:38.580 --> 01:02:42.840
That was – as far as I was concerned, up until that point, there was still some glimmer of

01:02:42.840 --> 01:02:48.240
hope that hey, I will still be able to make it out of country and I will still have all this

01:02:48.240 --> 01:02:52.800
money and I’ll be alright. But at that point I was like my god, it’s not happening now.

01:02:52.800 --> 01:02:58.320
JACK: They threw him in prison and the first eight months, they made him go to solitary confinement,

01:02:58.320 --> 01:03:01.740
and he was sentenced to ninety months in prison at this point,

01:03:01.740 --> 01:03:08.640
which is seven and a half years. Brett was very depressed during that time, suicidal, even.

01:03:08.640 --> 01:03:12.720
Kevin Poulsen from Wired Magazine had been calling Brett to run a story about Max Butler,

01:03:12.720 --> 01:03:18.960
and eventually the magazine article came out, but in it it said Brett Johnson was a Secret

01:03:18.960 --> 01:03:26.220
Service informant. When you’re in prison and other prisoners find out you’re a snitch, it

01:03:26.220 --> 01:03:30.780
might not go so well. So Brett was pretty worried about how the other prisoners would take this.

01:03:30.780 --> 01:03:38.040
BRETT: The next day I walk back into the barracks. Nick Sandfor has a copy of the magazine, reading

01:03:38.040 --> 01:03:43.380
it on his bunk. I’m like, oh shit. I walk up to him; I’m like hey, Nick, what are you doing? He’s

01:03:43.380 --> 01:03:48.660
like, I’m doing some reading. I was like, anything interesting? He was like oh, it’s getting there. I

01:03:48.660 --> 01:03:53.040
was like, let me save you the trouble. So, took the magazine, pointed the line out to him and

01:03:53.040 --> 01:03:58.920
he was like man, I already knew. I was like, okay. I was like, are we gonna have trouble?

01:03:58.920 --> 01:04:02.940
He looked at me; he’s like well, he said did you snitch on anybody that’s here right now?

01:04:02.940 --> 01:04:08.100
I was like, no. He’s like, until someone gets here you told on, we don’t have a problem.

01:04:08.100 --> 01:04:11.100
JACK: At some point his sister comes to visit him,

01:04:11.100 --> 01:04:17.640
and something about her visiting him really made him think about whether he should continue to be

01:04:17.640 --> 01:04:23.280
a lifelong criminal and if he should keep doing that. Prison gave him a lot of time to think.

01:04:23.280 --> 01:04:28.080
BRETT: You do nothing but think. You can read, you can do all this other stuff, but there’s a

01:04:28.080 --> 01:04:32.520
lot of time to think. Every time you’re walking that track, four, five hours a day, you’re just

01:04:32.520 --> 01:04:39.060
thinking. So there’s a point in time where you either accept responsibility or you don’t.

01:04:39.060 --> 01:04:45.000
I was very fortunate, very – and I think – I credit Denise to that

01:04:45.000 --> 01:04:49.260
because I was the guy, I was the guy who really believed that bullshit lying of well,

01:04:49.260 --> 01:04:55.260
I did it for my family, I did it for my wife, all that. About two years in,

01:04:55.260 --> 01:05:00.900
it really hit me that the only reason that I’m in prison is me. I’m the guy who put me in prison.

01:05:00.900 --> 01:05:06.360
JACK: He lied and said he was addicted to drugs, which gets him transferred to another prison in

01:05:06.360 --> 01:05:10.920
Fort Worth, Texas for treatment. He says that program was actually really good for him,

01:05:10.920 --> 01:05:19.800
and Brett spent a whole six years in prison. Okay, so by the time you’re

01:05:19.800 --> 01:05:24.462
ready to get out, do you have a plan of what you’re gonna do when you get out?

01:05:24.462 --> 01:05:30.060
BRETT: [LAUGHING] Oh yeah, oh yeah. My plan is to go right back into tax fraud, oh yeah.

01:05:30.060 --> 01:05:32.820
JACK: What? After five years of prison time?

01:05:32.820 --> 01:05:38.520
BRETT: Oh yeah. My plan is to go right back into it. Yes, sir. Yeah, I get – so,

01:05:38.520 --> 01:05:43.140
I’m released. I get the year off. I get the six months halfway house. They put me on a

01:05:43.140 --> 01:05:50.340
Greyhound bus in Dallas going to Tallahassee, Florida. That’s where – my dad is in Panama City.

01:05:50.340 --> 01:05:56.100
The halfway house is in Tallahassee. So, I take the Greyhound bus to Tallahassee. My dad picks me

01:05:56.100 --> 01:06:00.900
up at the station and he’s not been able to talk to me ‘cause I’ve been teaching him how to do

01:06:00.900 --> 01:06:06.660
tax – I taught him before I escaped how to do tax fraud. He’s got all these questions about – hey,

01:06:06.660 --> 01:06:09.600
how do you do this, how do you do this, how do you do this? So, I’m answering the questions,

01:06:09.600 --> 01:06:14.880
he’s got – I guess he’s stolen – or, not guess; he has stolen some money. He’s stolen some money

01:06:14.880 --> 01:06:19.920
by this point. He gives me a couple of giftcards and a – five hundred bucks apiece on him in case

01:06:19.920 --> 01:06:25.680
I need anything while I’m at the halfway house. He was like, what do you want to do? I was like well,

01:06:25.680 --> 01:06:30.840
I’m gonna go back into tax fraud. He’s like no, son. He really does; he’s trying to talk

01:06:30.840 --> 01:06:35.640
me out of it and everything else. I tell him; I’m like dad, this is what I’m doing.

01:06:35.640 --> 01:06:39.420
JACK: He doesn’t want to do tax fraud at the halfway house though,

01:06:39.420 --> 01:06:43.740
because they monitor you too closely. So he just plays it cool there and tries to be good,

01:06:43.740 --> 01:06:48.360
and to get out of the halfway house, they required him to get a job in the city where

01:06:48.360 --> 01:06:53.040
he wanted to move to. His probation restricted him so that he couldn’t use a computer though,

01:06:53.040 --> 01:06:58.680
so he had a hard time finding a job, but he was able to get a job driving a taxi, which allowed

01:06:58.680 --> 01:07:04.320
him to move out of the halfway house to Panama City, Florida. But once he moved there, the taxi

01:07:04.320 --> 01:07:09.420
company realized he was a convicted felon and was like oh, no, you can’t continue to work here.

01:07:09.420 --> 01:07:14.820
BRETT: That’s when I start committing tax fraud again, almost immediately, as soon as I get there.

01:07:14.820 --> 01:07:21.900
I buy – Amazon had released their first Kindle tablet, so I start trying to commit tax fraud.

01:07:21.900 --> 01:07:27.240
The problem is is that I’m so scared doing it that I’m doing very low-dollar, very low.

01:07:27.240 --> 01:07:31.020
I’m getting prepaid debit cards from – at that point you didn’t get them online. You didn’t have

01:07:31.020 --> 01:07:34.980
to anymore; they had them at convenience stores and Walmart and things like that.

01:07:34.980 --> 01:07:40.380
JACK: Now, the way he was doing all this was that he would look up the death index of a state and

01:07:40.380 --> 01:07:45.600
then file taxes for dead people, which he liked a lot because first, he knew dead people hadn’t

01:07:45.600 --> 01:07:49.380
filed their taxes yet, which meant he could probably get a return on them, but second,

01:07:49.380 --> 01:07:54.120
he didn’t feel like he was screwing over someone who’s been dead for years. They were dead;

01:07:54.120 --> 01:08:01.080
what’s the big deal? Well, just a few months into this, the IRS got hip to Brett’s scam and put an

01:08:01.080 --> 01:08:06.000
end to it, making a new rule; no more filing tax returns for dead people. Up until this point,

01:08:06.000 --> 01:08:11.280
the IRS just never checked this. But now they were being more strict and denying any tax

01:08:11.280 --> 01:08:16.380
returns for dead people. Well, this really put the kibosh on Brett’s whole money-making scheme.

01:08:16.380 --> 01:08:21.300
He didn’t have a job anymore and he had no income from the tax return fraud, and he

01:08:21.300 --> 01:08:27.300
didn’t have much money at all. So, he ran out of money and he was bumming some money from his dad

01:08:27.300 --> 01:08:32.400
and his sister to get by. At some point he was so broke that he ended up shoplifting toilet paper.

01:08:32.400 --> 01:08:39.420
BRETT: I had had a friend of mine; he had posted an ad on Plenty of Fish for me,

01:08:39.420 --> 01:08:44.580
that free dating site. So, I would go over to his house every now and then and we’d

01:08:44.580 --> 01:08:49.380
check in. He’d update the site for me and we’d communicate with some of the women

01:08:49.380 --> 01:08:56.040
that were texting me and everything else. Who reached out to me is Michelle. I had

01:08:56.040 --> 01:08:59.940
been giving these basically prison poses, you know. You give this kinda stern look,

01:08:59.940 --> 01:09:06.420
and she had sent a message; why aren’t you smiling? My response was that is my happy face.

01:09:06.420 --> 01:09:14.280
So, we started talking. I started talking over the phone, and about a month of talking on the phone,

01:09:14.280 --> 01:09:17.460
she calls me up; she’s like, would you like to meet today? I was like yeah,

01:09:17.460 --> 01:09:20.280
let’s meet. Well, she didn’t know I was a criminal or anything like that. So,

01:09:20.280 --> 01:09:26.100
I was in Panama City. She was in Crestview, Florida, and we agree to meet halfway in Destin,

01:09:26.100 --> 01:09:32.940
Florida. So, we meet in Destin on a beach there, and we’re sitting there. About ten minutes into

01:09:32.940 --> 01:09:36.180
the conversation she looks at me. We’re sitting on the beach watching the water and she’s like,

01:09:36.180 --> 01:09:38.160
what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life? I looked at her and…

01:09:38.160 --> 01:09:38.247
JACK: [LAUGHING]

01:09:38.247 --> 01:09:44.040
BRETT: Yeah, yeah. I looked at her and I was like well, I just got out of federal prison.

01:09:44.040 --> 01:09:49.680
She’s like no, no, no. What’s the worst thing? I was like, I just got out of federal prison.

01:09:49.680 --> 01:09:55.500
She looks at me and I tell her everything. We sit there the rest of the night, then we go over to

01:09:55.500 --> 01:10:00.060
McGuire’s Pub and we have dinner over there. At the end of the night I looked at her and I

01:10:00.060 --> 01:10:06.360
was like, look – I said I really like you. I said l’d like to keep seeing you. I said that’s gonna

01:10:06.360 --> 01:10:09.660
be your choice, though. I said you’re gonna go home tonight, you’re gonna Google me. She’s like,

01:10:09.660 --> 01:10:13.680
no I won’t. I was like, look; I said you’ll go home tonight, you will look me up.

01:10:13.680 --> 01:10:19.920
So she goes home and she looks me up, and then she – her oldest son – she’s got three sons – her

01:10:19.920 --> 01:10:24.720
oldest son was in the Navy. He was home on leave during that point. She asks him; she’s like well,

01:10:24.720 --> 01:10:29.580
what do you think? Should I keep seeing him? Taylor was like, you know, do you like him?

01:10:29.580 --> 01:10:34.080
She’s like, yeah. He’s like, you think he’s still screwing around? She’s like, he doesn’t seem to

01:10:34.080 --> 01:10:41.040
be. He’s like well, hell, keep talking to him then. Well, I ended up moving in with Michelle

01:10:41.040 --> 01:10:46.740
within two months. I was going completely broke. I was about to lose my house and everything else.

01:10:46.740 --> 01:10:53.760
It was obvious I loved her. So, moved in with her within two months and started – kept looking for

01:10:53.760 --> 01:10:59.880
a job. The job that I got – my probation officer allowed me to have a cell phone.

01:10:59.880 --> 01:11:03.180
He said – he told me – called me in and he’s like, look; he said I can’t keep you from getting on

01:11:03.180 --> 01:11:08.880
the internet. If I give you permission, at least I know what you’re doing. He said you can go get you

01:11:08.880 --> 01:11:13.920
a smart phone. So I got a smart phone and I was looking on Craigslist and there was this guy that

01:11:13.920 --> 01:11:20.460
was advertising for landscaping. How ironic. So, I called him up. So, twenty minutes of talking, he

01:11:20.460 --> 01:11:25.800
looks at me; he’s like well – he’s like, can I ask you a question? I was like, yeah. He’s like, are

01:11:25.800 --> 01:11:29.940
you on the run or something? I was like, what? He was like, look – he said you just don’t look like

01:11:29.940 --> 01:11:36.240
the type of guy that would do this type of work. He’s like, so are you on the run or something?

01:11:36.240 --> 01:11:40.380
I just told him. I was like – told him who I was and everything and what had happened. He

01:11:40.380 --> 01:11:45.360
looks at me and he was like – his exact words; he was like man, I’m gonna have to think about it. I

01:11:45.360 --> 01:11:54.480
said if you give me a job, I’ll work my ass off. He tells me; he’s like, show up 6:00 tomorrow. So,

01:11:54.480 --> 01:12:02.940
I went there. My job was ten hours a day pushing a lawnmower. I make $400 a week doing that. I worked

01:12:02.940 --> 01:12:10.920
my ass off. I did. I would – I’d come in so damn tired that I’d just lay down and I’d just – I’d

01:12:10.920 --> 01:12:18.600
fall asleep. Wake up the next morning – ‘scuse me – wake up the next morning and do it again.

01:12:18.600 --> 01:12:22.340
JACK: Why is the lawnmower story hard for you to tell?

01:12:22.340 --> 01:12:31.140
BRETT: ‘Cause that was the – that was the only job I could get. Come to find out,

01:12:31.140 --> 01:12:33.900
Brett Johnson was kinda broken at that point. I didn’t want to go back into

01:12:33.900 --> 01:12:41.900
fucking breaking the law and fraud and all that bullshit. So, I just wanted a job.

01:12:41.900 --> 01:12:46.860
JACK: That job didn’t last long. He got hired somewhere else and quit mowing,

01:12:46.860 --> 01:12:52.500
but then that new place realized who he was and didn’t want to hire him anymore. So he was

01:12:52.500 --> 01:12:56.760
back to having no job. His girlfriend he was living with was struggling to make ends meet.

01:12:56.760 --> 01:13:00.120
BRETT: I get it into my head, I’m like you know, hell,

01:13:00.120 --> 01:13:06.900
gotta help out some way. I’m not working, I’m a piece of shit. Gotta

01:13:06.900 --> 01:13:13.920
do something to show her that I can help provide. [MUSIC] So I get it in my head, I was like you

01:13:13.920 --> 01:13:18.840
know, hey, I can bring food into the house. I can at least make sure she doesn’t have to use the

01:13:18.840 --> 01:13:26.340
money that she’s bringing in to buy food for us. So, I’m that guy that – get online, and the way

01:13:26.340 --> 01:13:33.540
it started out was I start ordering food. Well, the thing is is when you’re stealing food online,

01:13:33.540 --> 01:13:38.220
the places you hit are not cheap places because there are no cheap places to sell food online,

01:13:38.220 --> 01:13:44.160
so I start hitting steakhouses and all that bullshit, getting all these expensive orders in

01:13:44.160 --> 01:13:48.840
with stolen credit cards. Then I’m looking at the boys; well, they can – she doesn’t have to spend

01:13:48.840 --> 01:13:54.420
money to buy them clothes, so hell, I can order you guys – pick out something on Under Armor.

01:13:54.420 --> 01:13:58.200
What do you like on Under Armor? What size do you wear? Okay, let’s make sure you got clothes. Then

01:13:58.200 --> 01:14:04.680
it goes clothes for her, then once that’s taken care of, it’s clothes for me. Let’s do that.

01:14:04.680 --> 01:14:14.160
So, I had ordered from Nyman Ranch, Nyman Brothers Ranch, a bunch of steaks. Of course I had been

01:14:14.160 --> 01:14:19.920
hitting Nyman Brothers for a while. Nyman Brothers was used to being hit in the panhandle of Florida,

01:14:19.920 --> 01:14:26.100
so they started flagging every order that was coming in for the panhandle. They flag that order,

01:14:26.100 --> 01:14:33.000
contacted the actual cardholder. The cardholder said no, no, I didn’t order that. So they – it

01:14:33.000 --> 01:14:39.180
was controlled delivery. I go to pick up the steaks and it’s the – I think it’s the Fort Walton

01:14:39.180 --> 01:14:48.360
Sheriff’s Department was who picked me up at that point and arrested me. That’s when Michelle finds

01:14:48.360 --> 01:14:55.380
out that I was committing crime. She didn’t know that, and I go back to prison for ten months.

01:14:55.380 --> 01:15:00.300
JACK: He goes back to prison, the same one that he went to in Fort Worth,

01:15:00.300 --> 01:15:06.560
Texas. At this point I’m just reminded of this clip from the movie Liar, Liar.

01:15:06.560 --> 01:15:09.073
FLETCHER: Stop breaking the law, asshole!

01:15:09.073 --> 01:15:13.740
BRETT: Every single relationship except for my relationship with my sister,

01:15:13.740 --> 01:15:19.380
every single relationship I had ever had had been based on what I could give somebody, not

01:15:19.380 --> 01:15:26.340
on – not just me. Michelle was the first person that I had ever had a relationship with that

01:15:26.340 --> 01:15:31.560
she needed me for me. She didn’t need me for what I could give her, you know?

01:15:31.560 --> 01:15:37.200
JACK: She stood up for him in court and she kept in contact with him when he was in prison. After

01:15:37.200 --> 01:15:43.440
spending ten months in prison, when he got out, he goes back to her and she accepted him. Only a

01:15:43.440 --> 01:15:49.680
few months after getting out of prison, they get married, and that’s been the last run-in with the

01:15:49.680 --> 01:15:57.180
law for Brett Johnson. He says he’s no longer a criminal. So what made him change? That’s a good

01:15:57.180 --> 01:16:02.820
question. He viewed himself as a criminal, and when that’s what you identify with, it’s really

01:16:02.820 --> 01:16:08.280
hard to undo that identity without feeling totally lost. A few things made him change,

01:16:08.280 --> 01:16:14.520
though; one was stopping to notice his sister. She grew up in the same house as him but did not turn

01:16:14.520 --> 01:16:20.040
to a life of crime. She works in a school and has a kid and is doing just fine. Noticing how

01:16:20.040 --> 01:16:24.840
she turned out and was there for him through some of the toughest times really helped him

01:16:24.840 --> 01:16:29.340
realize that there are some good people in the world that are doing good things for him, and he

01:16:29.340 --> 01:16:34.740
took advantage of that. Realizing how his life could be so different was a big turning point.

01:16:34.740 --> 01:16:40.380
Second was when his wife was there for him through court and didn’t care for the things he gave her,

01:16:40.380 --> 01:16:46.080
but instead just liked him for him being him, and not the criminal parts of who he is, but the good

01:16:46.080 --> 01:16:51.720
guy she saw in him. That life he made with her really did have a big impact on him deciding not

01:16:51.720 --> 01:16:57.960
to commit crimes anymore. But I think the last thing is when people gave him a chance at life

01:16:57.960 --> 01:17:04.020
again, people who hired him or vouched for him so that he could get a job. That really meant a lot

01:17:04.020 --> 01:17:11.400
to him and it gave him new, clean opportunities in life that he was thankful for. So today, Brett

01:17:11.400 --> 01:17:16.080
has become a speaker, talking about cyber-crime at many conferences and events around the world,

01:17:16.080 --> 01:17:21.420
and he also makes a podcast called The Brett Johnson Show. He does consulting work teaching

01:17:21.420 --> 01:17:26.160
companies how criminals think and how to protect against them. It’s enough to make him feel like

01:17:26.160 --> 01:17:30.480
he’s making a positive difference in the world, which goes a long way at keeping him straight.

01:17:30.480 --> 01:17:40.200
BRETT: At the end of the day with me, it’s – with me it’s evening out those scales. I can’t make –

01:17:40.200 --> 01:17:42.780
I can’t change what I’ve done in the past,

01:17:42.780 --> 01:17:46.680
but I can make sure that what I do from here on is much better decisions.

01:17:46.680 --> 01:17:57.780
(OUTRO): [OUTRO MUSIC] A

01:17:57.780 --> 01:18:03.660
big thank-you to Brett Johnson, AKA Gollumfun, for sharing this crazy story with us. I first learned

01:18:03.660 --> 01:18:08.460
about his story by listening to his podcast called The Brett Johnson Show. There he interviews his

01:18:08.460 --> 01:18:12.900
sister and other federal agents and tells all these crazy stories with them. At some point

01:18:12.900 --> 01:18:16.980
his neighbor comes over and he tries to explain to his neighbor what he did, and it’s just hilarious

01:18:16.980 --> 01:18:20.940
to hear how his neighbor thinks of all this. So check out the podcast The Brett Johnson Show,

01:18:20.940 --> 01:18:25.260
or follow Brett on Twitter. His name there is @Gollumfun. This show is made by me,

01:18:25.260 --> 01:18:29.580
the sneaker, Jack Rhysider. I did the sound design for this one, too. Editing help this

01:18:29.580 --> 01:18:33.720
episode is by the spontaneous Damienne, and this episode was assembled by Tristan Ledger

01:18:33.720 --> 01:18:38.340
and mixed by Proximity Sound. Our theme music is by the cyber-gang, Breakmaster Cylinder.

01:18:38.340 --> 01:18:41.640
BRETT: Hey Jack, what do you call a fat computer?

01:18:41.640 --> 01:18:43.080
JACK: What?

01:18:43.080 --> 01:18:46.800
BRETT: A big Mac. Get it?!

01:18:46.800 --> 01:18:51.840
JACK: You can’t call a computer fat; it’s not PC.

01:18:51.840 --> 01:18:55.080
BRETT: I can call it anything I want to. That’s the file system, dammit! [LAUGHING]