WEBVTT 00:00:00.101 --> 00:00:04.380 JACK: Hey, it’s Jack, host of the show. We’re about to hear a story from a friend of mine, 00:00:04.380 --> 00:00:08.820 Jordan. Jordan is one of those guys that has a million stories. Like, his life is 00:00:08.820 --> 00:00:13.500 just filled with crazy adventures; like this one time he was traveling and got kidnapped, 00:00:13.500 --> 00:00:17.460 but then escaped. Then on another trip he was kidnapped again and 00:00:17.460 --> 00:00:22.500 escaped again. He’s also been in North Korea I think a few times. But today, 00:00:22.500 --> 00:00:28.380 he’s going to tell us a story about a time when he was a teenager and got a visit from the FBI. 00:00:28.380 --> 00:00:40.020 JACK (INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I’m 00:00:40.020 --> 00:00:55.080 Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] 00:00:55.080 --> 00:00:58.680 JACK: 00:00:58.680 --> 00:01:03.000 When Jordan was a kid, like many of us, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with himself. He was 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:09.480 smart, energetic, clever, bored, and sometimes a rascal. You mix all that up and you get a kid 00:01:09.480 --> 00:01:14.760 that constantly got in trouble and was into a lot of mischief. It seemed like he didn’t 00:01:14.760 --> 00:01:20.280 know right from wrong sometimes and might just be a bad seed going down a bad path. 00:01:20.280 --> 00:01:27.120 JORDAN: [MUSIC] There was a time when my mom was crying in the kitchen 00:01:27.120 --> 00:01:30.480 and it was one of the lowest points of my life. She was crying in the kitchen because 00:01:30.480 --> 00:01:36.060 she thought that her son was gonna screw his whole life up and he had a lot of promise. 00:01:36.060 --> 00:01:41.400 She didn’t understand why and she thought maybe it was her fault, and she had no idea. 00:01:41.400 --> 00:01:47.040 There was a time when I thought I can’t be an employee or I can’t get this stuff straight, 00:01:47.040 --> 00:01:53.100 or maybe I am gonna not be able to resist my own BS urges and end up doing something 00:01:53.100 --> 00:01:57.380 stupid and end up in prison, committing fraud to buy something dumb that I didn’t even need. 00:01:57.380 --> 00:02:03.000 JACK: We’ve all made mistakes when we were young. Our brain’s just not fully-formed yet. 00:02:03.000 --> 00:02:08.700 When you look at a young kid doing bad things, is there a way to tell if they’re really bad or deep 00:02:08.700 --> 00:02:15.660 down good? Curious kids get in trouble. Kids who think the world is strange or inefficient get in 00:02:15.660 --> 00:02:22.740 trouble. It’s only the kids who know how to play by society’s rules that do good as kids. But maybe 00:02:22.740 --> 00:02:28.920 some of us don’t know how to play by the rules properly until we get in proper trouble, or maybe 00:02:28.920 --> 00:02:36.600 it just takes the right person at the right time to make a serious impact on a young mind. Let’s go 00:02:36.600 --> 00:02:41.520 back to the early 90s when Jordan was twelve or thirteen, when he got his first computer. 00:02:41.520 --> 00:02:46.920 JORDAN: Of course, I got a modem and what I ended up doing was going on a lot of bulletin 00:02:46.920 --> 00:02:53.040 board systems, networking my way on there literally and figuratively. I don’t mean like, 00:02:53.040 --> 00:02:57.480 networking in the computer sense. I mean making friends with people online who lived in Detroit 00:02:57.480 --> 00:03:03.240 and talking about crazy, zany topics and having a lot of fun, and chatting about adult things. 00:03:03.240 --> 00:03:09.600 At this point, I really get interested in making things that explode. [MUSIC] 00:03:09.600 --> 00:03:14.520 Now, you can’t do that without getting your door kicked in by the FBI but back then, it was like, 00:03:14.520 --> 00:03:22.920 oh, Drano bombs; hilarious. Right? Ah, this bottle rocket or model rocket that you’ve attached the 00:03:22.920 --> 00:03:26.580 explosive payload to, so funny. You could make a big boom and the whole neighborhood freaks 00:03:26.580 --> 00:03:31.980 out and the windows rattle, and everyone’s like, that kid. Nobody’s like, Al-Qaeda. 00:03:31.980 --> 00:03:38.340 That’s what they do now, right, they go domestic terrorism! Back then it was just you redneck punk. 00:03:38.340 --> 00:03:46.200 I start getting a reputation as the guy that has all of those recipes for everything. I got every 00:03:46.200 --> 00:03:52.080 text file. They were .txt files of every [00:05:00] kind of device; box, explosive, 00:03:52.080 --> 00:03:59.400 everything. What my move was is I would sign up to a new board and I would – the sysop would have 00:03:59.400 --> 00:04:05.160 to approve you. You sign up for the new board, bulletin board system, and then at some point 00:04:05.160 --> 00:04:13.080 I’d say look, you should let me in. I have ten thousand or a thousand or whatever it was files 00:04:13.080 --> 00:04:19.740 about red boxes, blue boxes, explosives, all this stuff. A lot of people had some of it but not many 00:04:19.740 --> 00:04:26.420 people had all of it that you could possibly find anywhere. I was an avid collector of this. 00:04:26.420 --> 00:04:32.160 JACK: At thirteen and he’s already developing an encyclopedic knowledge of explosives, 00:04:32.160 --> 00:04:37.380 stuff that he probably shouldn’t be getting into at that age. But people on these bulletin boards 00:04:37.380 --> 00:04:42.180 thought he was cool, so the admins would ask him to upload what he had, and he did. 00:04:42.180 --> 00:04:48.840 JORDAN: These sysops of these great pirate boards or little hacker boards that were just like small 00:04:48.840 --> 00:04:54.840 time or medium time, I guess you could say, they were stoked. Sometimes boards would go hey man, 00:04:54.840 --> 00:04:59.460 you have so much of this. I need you to curate it. I’m gonna make you an assistant sysadmin after a 00:04:59.460 --> 00:05:03.300 couple months. Can you organize this, make it really cool? I wanna make this kind of an HQ. 00:05:03.300 --> 00:05:08.880 Our board has the most of this stuff now anywhere that I’ve ever seen. These are boards that also 00:05:08.880 --> 00:05:14.220 had games and stuff like that. They were pretty elite for my area back in Detroit. I remember 00:05:14.220 --> 00:05:18.020 they were always busy and they had multiple phone lines. I mean, these were frickin’ legit, man. 00:05:18.020 --> 00:05:24.240 JACK: Jordan started meeting some of these people from online in real life and he would get together 00:05:24.240 --> 00:05:29.880 and meet with them in Detroit. But these guys were into something that Jordan hadn’t seen before. 00:05:29.880 --> 00:05:36.000 They liked jumping into trash cans and looking for stuff; dumpster-diving. 00:05:36.000 --> 00:05:40.680 They were looking for something particular. No, they weren’t trying to find free pizzas 00:05:40.680 --> 00:05:45.360 or day-old bread. They were looking for something a little more interesting. 00:05:45.360 --> 00:05:49.500 JORDAN: The guys were like hey, you know, we’re dumpster-diving for these 00:05:49.500 --> 00:05:52.140 electronic serial numbers. You wanna see what we do with them? I was like, 00:05:52.140 --> 00:05:58.260 sure. I started learning how to program cell phones. That was the beginning of the journey. 00:05:58.260 --> 00:06:01.320 JACK: Jordan was up for this kind of stuff. Heck yeah, 00:06:01.320 --> 00:06:06.540 as a teenager hanging out in the town with the older kids who knew how to hack cell phones who 00:06:06.540 --> 00:06:11.310 also accepted Jordan? Jordan was in with the cool kids and things were getting exciting. 00:06:11.310 --> 00:06:16.200 JORDAN: Other things I started learning how to do were diagram and learn a lot about phone systems. 00:06:16.200 --> 00:06:20.100 We called it phreaking back then. Of course, you spelled it with a ph ‘cause you were very cool 00:06:20.100 --> 00:06:27.600 and elite. What I started to realize was cloning cell phones was really fun and listening to cell 00:06:27.600 --> 00:06:36.420 phone conversations was really easy. I think I had an NEC P301 or an NEC P300 or both. Somehow, 00:06:36.420 --> 00:06:40.560 you could get that to scan cell phone channels and you could listen to one 00:06:40.560 --> 00:06:45.180 side of the conversation. I think it was just one side. You could scan for channels 00:06:45.180 --> 00:06:49.500 ‘cause everything’s analog. Nothing’s encrypted, nothing’s really secure. I 00:06:49.500 --> 00:06:53.400 thought that was fascinating but you would lose them as they went out of reception 00:06:53.400 --> 00:06:56.940 and I think – I really do remember you were only getting one side of the conversation. 00:06:56.940 --> 00:07:01.500 JACK: Jordan continued to play around with the phones, trying to hack payphones and cell 00:07:01.500 --> 00:07:08.100 phones and landlines, everything. One day he saw a telephone repair truck parked. [MUSIC] 00:07:08.100 --> 00:07:13.260 Of course, this caught his attention. Jordan was super into phone hacking at this point and would 00:07:13.260 --> 00:07:18.120 have loved to get his hands on some of the pro tools that a lineman would have. Jordan 00:07:18.120 --> 00:07:26.520 watched the lineman go off to lunch, and he snuck over to the truck. He saw an Ameritech handset, 00:07:26.520 --> 00:07:33.600 the ones linemans use to test telephone boxes with. He grabbed it and ran. 00:07:33.600 --> 00:07:37.560 JORDAN: It has alligator clips; the orange handset, right? It has alligator clips on the end, 00:07:37.560 --> 00:07:43.080 so I went in and then I made a hex wrench or whatever kind of wrench it was to open those 00:07:43.080 --> 00:07:47.400 green boxes on the side of the road. There was one that had bushes near it and they 00:07:47.400 --> 00:07:50.580 hadn’t trimmed the bushes in a while. They were supposed to do that but they didn’t. I 00:07:50.580 --> 00:07:54.960 could dump my bike and sit in or near the bushes and not be spotted from the road, 00:07:54.960 --> 00:07:58.680 open up the green box, plug the alligator clips onto whatever line pair I wanted, 00:07:58.680 --> 00:08:02.400 and I can listen to conversations all day in my neighborhood. I would spend like, 00:08:02.400 --> 00:08:07.100 four and six hours listening to conversations in my neighborhood. 00:08:07.100 --> 00:08:13.860 JACK: Jeez, spending that many hours listening to people’s conversations? How weird. A lot of 00:08:13.860 --> 00:08:17.340 conversations were boring calls; someone calling their spouse. What’s for dinner, 00:08:17.340 --> 00:08:21.720 honey? Or do you need anything from the store? That kind of stuff. But as Jordan 00:08:21.720 --> 00:08:28.260 hung out listening to these calls, he started to get hooked on one guy in particular. This guy 00:08:28.260 --> 00:08:33.120 who made a lot of calls in his neighborhood was going through a divorce and living with his mom. 00:08:33.120 --> 00:08:40.560 JORDAN: [MUSIC] He would whine to his mom or his aunt, I guess, all the time on the phone. He would 00:08:40.560 --> 00:08:45.960 whine to his sister on the phone, he would act really tough with his friends on the phone, and 00:08:45.960 --> 00:08:49.680 when he was talking to his soon-to-be-ex-wife, he was just outright hostile. [00:10:00] I remember 00:08:49.680 --> 00:08:55.020 thinking even at age thirteen, age fourteen, if he just talked to his soon-to-be-ex-wife the 00:08:55.020 --> 00:09:01.860 same way he talks to his sister or his mom, he wouldn’t be in this situation which is kind of 00:09:01.860 --> 00:09:09.960 a funny insight for an adolescent tween to have. I listened to every bit of this guy’s phone calls 00:09:09.960 --> 00:09:16.580 that I possibly could. I remember my butt was just hurting, I would go out even if it was raining. 00:09:16.580 --> 00:09:22.500 JACK: This sneaky peek into the personal lives of adults changed Jordan a little. 00:09:22.500 --> 00:09:27.360 It was enlightening and educational to hear real conversations like this. 00:09:27.360 --> 00:09:32.580 JORDAN: But what was interesting about it for me as a kid was when you’re a kid, you don’t get to 00:09:32.580 --> 00:09:37.140 participate in adult conversations and if stuff’s getting heavy, you’re not around. They wait for 00:09:37.140 --> 00:09:42.060 you to leave or they tell you to leave. This was the first conversation or set of conversations 00:09:42.060 --> 00:09:48.180 where I was actually hearing what adults were really like. I remember in my young brain, 00:09:48.180 --> 00:09:55.080 adults, and this guy especially, transformed from this sort of two-dimensional caricature to a real 00:09:55.080 --> 00:09:59.100 person with feelings and situations and problems and concerns and ideas 00:09:59.100 --> 00:10:06.060 just like me. Coming from the position of a self-centered kid, that was a novel revelation. 00:10:06.060 --> 00:10:10.140 It made no sense to me at first and then it slowly opened me up. It allowed me to 00:10:10.140 --> 00:10:14.340 look at people in a completely different light and have more empathy. I remember 00:10:14.340 --> 00:10:18.540 taking these skills with me to school and talking with more adults and them saying oh, 00:10:18.540 --> 00:10:23.400 you’re so ahead of your time. I was learning so much from all of these phone conversations and 00:10:23.400 --> 00:10:29.760 that’s what really got me interested in people. Once you get interested in people but you’re at 00:10:29.760 --> 00:10:36.140 the age where mischief is really taking root, the next logical step is social engineering. 00:10:36.140 --> 00:10:41.280 JACK: Jordan continued to listen to phone calls for a while and was still actively uploading text 00:10:41.280 --> 00:10:47.880 files to BBSs, full of bomb-making recipes. He thought, maybe this isn’t a good idea. 00:10:47.880 --> 00:10:52.740 Maybe the cops are watching me upload this stuff. Maybe it’s not so cool to put all this 00:10:52.740 --> 00:10:59.220 explosive information on the BBSs, but the cops didn’t contact Jordan. They just left him alone. 00:10:59.220 --> 00:11:03.780 JORDAN: But I have no doubt that they were following my connections and my people online. 00:11:03.780 --> 00:11:09.120 I remember being on the phone chatting voice as we used to say, with some of the people who were 00:11:09.120 --> 00:11:14.400 operating other boards. They would be like wait, there’s somebody at the door. I remember them 00:11:14.400 --> 00:11:18.540 being like, hang up the phone. Then I wouldn’t hear from them for like, weeks. I’d be like, 00:11:18.540 --> 00:11:21.900 what happened? They’d be like, dude, the FBI came. I can’t talk to anyone. I’m not 00:11:21.900 --> 00:11:28.080 doing anything. The board would go down, all that stuff. These guys would get so scared. 00:11:28.080 --> 00:11:32.400 It was fun for me in an exciting way ‘cause I was just on the outside of this. 00:11:32.400 --> 00:11:35.100 JACK: As the forums he would frequent would go down, 00:11:35.100 --> 00:11:39.360 he started checking out some other websites and forums that he knew about. When Jordan 00:11:39.360 --> 00:11:43.920 started learning about something, he has a tendency to dive deep into it. 00:11:43.920 --> 00:11:50.460 JORDAN: [MUSIC] I also, of course, was looking at the way that credit card systems work and 00:11:50.460 --> 00:11:56.700 payment systems work. I had this little racket going where I could order books using a money 00:11:56.700 --> 00:12:03.960 order. I could wait for them to get the money order and wait for them to go and take care of 00:12:03.960 --> 00:12:08.460 the money order and deposit it, or so they thought, and send out the stuff. There was 00:12:08.460 --> 00:12:14.460 this little lag between then and I would call to get confirmation. Most people don’t do that; 00:12:14.460 --> 00:12:17.700 they just wait for things to be shipped to them. I would call, find out they received the money 00:12:17.700 --> 00:12:23.580 order, immediately bike over to the drug store and cancel the money order and get my cash back. 00:12:23.580 --> 00:12:26.280 There was just enough of a lag, it was probably just a couple of days, 00:12:26.280 --> 00:12:30.780 where they would send out the stuff but I would still have my money. They would 00:12:30.780 --> 00:12:34.500 not know that it had been cancelled but you could cancel it right away; 00:12:34.500 --> 00:12:41.460 turn in that little stub and it would be done, and you’d get your cash right then. 00:12:41.460 --> 00:12:48.480 It was this easy glitch in the system that was so obvious to me as a kid, and I would get a ton of 00:12:48.480 --> 00:12:53.100 free stuff, usually books. I remember I ordered some more expensive stuff but the problem is, you 00:12:53.100 --> 00:12:57.080 have to have the money first to get a money order, so I was pretty limited in what I was able to do. 00:12:57.080 --> 00:13:02.460 JACK: Soon though, he got bored with this scam and started learning about other ways to scam 00:13:02.460 --> 00:13:08.340 with money. Quick side story; when I was thirteen, I was mad at my mom about something. She gave me 00:13:08.340 --> 00:13:12.060 an old checkbook and a pair of scissors and told me to cut up the checks since we weren’t 00:13:12.060 --> 00:13:16.500 gonna use those checks anymore and that she didn’t want thieves stealing the checks. Well, 00:13:16.500 --> 00:13:23.220 me being mad at her and a little mischief-maker myself, I didn’t quite understand this and I 00:13:23.220 --> 00:13:28.800 got into my head that somehow the checks were money. Money is confusing as a kid; 00:13:28.800 --> 00:13:34.320 it’s not clear if the check itself is money, or if a credit card is money, or just cash is money, 00:13:34.320 --> 00:13:38.760 or where the money is and how it moves around, and how is it tied to one thing or another? 00:13:38.760 --> 00:13:47.160 What the heck is money? I was thirteen and didn’t know. I took these checks and didn’t rip them up. 00:13:47.160 --> 00:13:52.680 After school one day, I went to an [00:15:00] ice cream shop and asked do you accept checks? The 00:13:52.680 --> 00:14:00.720 clerk said uh, yeah? So, I did my best to try to write a check out. Didn’t do it very well at all, 00:14:00.720 --> 00:14:08.100 I’m sure. I gave it to them. My hand was probably shaking. I had no idea if what I was doing would 00:14:08.100 --> 00:14:14.460 get me in trouble with this or what, but I just did it. I knew I was breaking some kind of rule 00:14:14.460 --> 00:14:19.380 just for a sweet lick of some ice cream. The manager came out and looked at the check, 00:14:19.380 --> 00:14:24.780 and told me where’s your mom? I grabbed the check and ran out of there, ripped up the checks, 00:14:24.780 --> 00:14:32.100 and never tried this again. But what if this did work and a small win got me a lick of ice cream 00:14:32.100 --> 00:14:39.120 with a stolen check? I probably would have done it again, and who knows where I would have ended up. 00:14:39.120 --> 00:14:43.980 I can absolutely see Jordan here having great success with the money orders and to just go 00:14:43.980 --> 00:14:50.100 ahead, take it further. Look for what’s next. What’s bigger? That’s when he got curious about 00:14:50.100 --> 00:14:57.900 credit cards. [MUSIC] Being on these dark and seedy forums, he came across full credit card 00:14:57.900 --> 00:15:02.940 numbers and credit card generators that would just make up fake credit card numbers. He found 00:15:02.940 --> 00:15:07.800 a credit card number online. It didn’t have an expiration date or a name, so he just made it up. 00:15:07.800 --> 00:15:12.780 He tried to order something small over the phone paying with a credit card and it worked. He got 00:15:12.780 --> 00:15:19.380 the item shipped to his house with a stolen credit card. Amazing. Jordan was onto something new here. 00:15:19.380 --> 00:15:24.780 JORDAN: One time, I decided to go big and I called from a pay phone and used a credit 00:15:24.780 --> 00:15:31.740 card and I ordered pizza for the next day for my entire middle school. I gave the guy instructions; 00:15:31.740 --> 00:15:34.800 I thought about this ahead of time. I said, you know what you need to do, come in, 00:15:34.800 --> 00:15:39.000 start putting the pizza down. Don’t go to the office, just come straight into the lunch room, 00:15:39.000 --> 00:15:44.340 start putting a pizza down on every table and eventually one of the women is gonna come up to 00:15:44.340 --> 00:15:47.700 you and say excuse me, what are you doing or something like that, and that’s when you say 00:15:47.700 --> 00:15:52.380 happy birthday, Mrs. Jacobson, ‘cause she was the assistant principal who was also our lunch 00:15:52.380 --> 00:15:56.820 monitor. I knew that she would be the one to go up and say excuse me, what are you doing? 00:15:56.820 --> 00:16:01.500 What happened, of course, was I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I told one friend who was a frickin’ 00:16:01.500 --> 00:16:07.740 idiot, still is an idiot actually, and he told everybody. Everybody knew and when that pizza 00:16:07.740 --> 00:16:16.620 van showed up, that guy got mobbed. Kids started housing that pizza and of course, 00:16:16.620 --> 00:16:19.860 when the principal came up, assistant principal came up and said what are you doing? He said 00:16:19.860 --> 00:16:25.320 happy birthday, Mrs. Jacobson, and the whole school started laughing and she was pissed. 00:16:25.320 --> 00:16:34.260 She took him to the office and the police came. They were unhappy. They called me into the office 00:16:34.260 --> 00:16:38.460 multiple times. They blamed everyone but me and eventually they had nothing on me 00:16:38.460 --> 00:16:42.600 other than rumor. They were gonna take one of my other friends who didn’t do anything; 00:16:42.600 --> 00:16:46.400 he had nothing to do with it. They were gonna take him down. They said, we’re gonna expel you. 00:16:46.400 --> 00:16:51.780 JACK: Seeing someone else getting in trouble for his crime, he had to come clean. 00:16:51.780 --> 00:16:58.380 JORDAN: The cops said well, alright. I want to find out how did you do this? I explained 00:16:58.380 --> 00:17:05.220 everything and they said man, we got to tell the FBI because you used a card that belonged 00:17:05.220 --> 00:17:09.960 to somebody else. We can’t reach the person who owns the card. I kept saying look, I made the 00:17:09.960 --> 00:17:14.160 card number up. You’re using a name; of course you found somebody with that name in Florida. 00:17:14.160 --> 00:17:19.260 It’s a coincidence. I used a fake name. What are you talking about? They just could not wrap their 00:17:19.260 --> 00:17:25.740 minds around this. The FBI agent came and I’m sure he was pissed ‘cause he had to drive up from the 00:17:25.740 --> 00:17:32.340 office in Detroit to interview a fourteen-year-old kid. After I explained everything, he said look; 00:17:32.340 --> 00:17:37.500 you’re seemingly pretty intelligent. Why did you do this? I said I wanted to pull a fun prank. 00:17:37.500 --> 00:17:42.480 He goes, this is gonna get you in deep trouble. He said, but you should focus your energy on 00:17:42.480 --> 00:17:47.580 something else. I’m not gonna do anything with this. You gotta figure out how to pay back the 00:17:47.580 --> 00:17:51.420 damages for the pizza. You’ve gotta call the pizza place. You’ve gotta deal with this. I’ll deal with 00:17:51.420 --> 00:17:55.380 the credit card company. They might want to do something with this but I doubt it. It’s petty, 00:17:55.380 --> 00:17:59.700 but keep your nose clean, man. You probably have a bright future ahead of you if you stop pulling 00:17:59.700 --> 00:18:04.260 this crap. It made sense to me. Right? It made sense to me. Every other adult was just pissed, 00:18:04.260 --> 00:18:10.680 they were embarrassed, their ego was damaged. This was the only guy who was like huh, 00:18:10.680 --> 00:18:15.000 this is not the dumbest thing I’ve ever had to investigate, right? 00:18:15.000 --> 00:18:21.600 That to me gave me a little boost of confidence. Not to keep doing bad stuff but to maybe focus on 00:18:21.600 --> 00:18:25.920 something healthier instead. The assistant principal wanted to throw the book at me. 00:18:25.920 --> 00:18:30.120 The cops didn’t really seem to want to do that and the FBI definitely didn’t want to, 00:18:30.120 --> 00:18:37.440 and I’m thankful for that. As much as we in this community might make fun of or rib feds, these 00:18:37.440 --> 00:18:42.120 are not bad guys. You know, they were much more interested in trying to keep me on the straight 00:18:42.120 --> 00:18:47.640 and narrow and utilize my knowledge than they were in trying to get me into some kind of trouble, and 00:18:47.640 --> 00:18:52.920 I’m extremely thankful for that [00:20:00] because it would have been easier or just as easy for them 00:18:52.920 --> 00:18:58.980 to just book me for some sort of dumb crime and ruin my chances of getting into college. Instead, 00:18:58.980 --> 00:19:02.386 I ended up with a letter of recommendation from one of them. I mean, what are the odds of that? 00:19:02.386 --> 00:19:10.620 JACK: [MUSIC] When we come back, Jordan tries to find a date in a chat 00:19:10.620 --> 00:19:26.580 room but gets so much more than he bargained for. Stay with us. 00:19:26.580 --> 00:19:32.340 Jordan had a bit of a habit; he really did enjoy going to these shady forums where 00:19:32.340 --> 00:19:36.780 he saw batches of credit cards with holograms being bought and sold. He 00:19:36.780 --> 00:19:42.180 watched out of curiosity but stopped short of participating in criminal activity. His brush 00:19:42.180 --> 00:19:46.560 with the police and FBI had convinced him not to make fake credit cards. 00:19:46.560 --> 00:19:50.400 He took a job at the local movie theatre and designed websites on the side. 00:19:50.400 --> 00:19:55.560 JORDAN: One of the movie theatres that I worked at was owned by the owner of the Detroit Red 00:19:55.560 --> 00:19:59.400 Wings hockey team and that guy was one of the wealthiest men in the world, actually, 00:19:59.400 --> 00:20:03.060 at the time; certainly one of the wealthiest guys in the United States ‘cause he owned the Red Wings 00:20:03.060 --> 00:20:10.500 but he also owned Little Caesar’s Pizza, the whole chain. His daughter owned this theatre and they 00:20:10.500 --> 00:20:15.720 had some theft or some issue at the theatre, and so they had security come around. When 00:20:15.720 --> 00:20:22.560 they couldn’t find a regular security guy, [MUSIC] Mike Ilitch, the owner, the daughter’s father, the 00:20:22.560 --> 00:20:28.640 owner of the Red Wings and Little Caesar’s Pizza, he would send his in-house private investigator. 00:20:28.640 --> 00:20:29.640 JACK: 00:20:29.640 --> 00:20:35.940 A private investigator investigating a theft at the theatre Jordan worked at? That is interesting, 00:20:35.940 --> 00:20:42.420 right? Jordan was curious to know more about what a private investigator does so he starts chatting 00:20:42.420 --> 00:20:47.940 with him. They got to talking about all kinds of stuff; martial arts, websites, crime. One day, 00:20:47.940 --> 00:20:52.860 Jordan mentions to him that he knows how to build websites. That was sort of a rare skill 00:20:52.860 --> 00:20:57.660 back then. The PI gave Jordan a chance to build a website for his friend’s security company. 00:20:57.660 --> 00:21:02.340 JORDAN: They were kind of doing, on the one hand, security for the neighborhood; 00:21:02.340 --> 00:21:08.340 the apartment buildings and different commercial buildings. But on the other hand, they were legit 00:21:08.340 --> 00:21:16.320 vigilante in Detroit; tackle drug dealers, tie ‘em up and take them to the police station and collect 00:21:16.320 --> 00:21:21.240 a bounty, or just arrest dangerous people in the neighborhood. That’s what these guys were doing 00:21:21.240 --> 00:21:29.340 back then. I wanted in, man. That was exciting. I had a car at this point. In exchange for designing 00:21:29.340 --> 00:21:34.560 a website for this security company, they were training me in martial arts which were like, real 00:21:34.560 --> 00:21:40.560 martial arts, not like do a kata karate, break a piece of wood. They were showing me stuff nobody 00:21:40.560 --> 00:21:45.540 was talking about that they had learned in the Israeli military. I met some hard dudes back then. 00:21:45.540 --> 00:21:52.800 They were usually ex-military and they were in executive protection. We would end up, and by we, 00:21:52.800 --> 00:21:57.780 I mean I would either drive or be completely back in the office’s logistics, but we would have Ice 00:21:57.780 --> 00:22:03.360 Cube, Puff Daddy come in for concert and they would protect him. I handled our phone systems, 00:22:03.360 --> 00:22:07.740 our computer stuff. I did a lot of the driving. I was actually the only white guy for a long 00:22:07.740 --> 00:22:13.080 time in the office. I had gotten straight A’s so my dad, who worked for Ford, was like well, 00:22:13.080 --> 00:22:18.000 if you get straight A’s all three years ‘til your junior year, ‘til your senior year, I’ll rent you 00:22:18.000 --> 00:22:22.440 an SUV, or a car that you want. I chose an SUV. It wasn’t that fancy but you know, he was an 00:22:22.440 --> 00:22:28.320 employee at Ford; he got a great deal on it. I was really thankful for that. This was a badass car. 00:22:28.320 --> 00:22:33.960 I drove around and I drove our agents around in this. It was easy ‘cause a lot of them were 00:22:33.960 --> 00:22:40.260 busy doing client work, things like that, and I was able to [00:25:00] drive my car 00:22:40.260 --> 00:22:43.800 and transport agents around; some of them honestly, 20/20 hindsight, 00:22:43.800 --> 00:22:48.960 probably were not supposed to be driving. Probably had either felonies or lost their 00:22:48.960 --> 00:22:52.860 license or just didn’t have a car. There were some shady people in this executive protection 00:22:52.860 --> 00:22:58.440 company and I was pretty clean. I’d get pulled over at night and the cops would be like alright, 00:22:58.440 --> 00:23:03.540 have a good day. This is 90s Detroit, man. If I’m driving around in a nice area in an SUV, 00:23:03.540 --> 00:23:07.200 I’m just another white kid in an SUV. If they’re driving around at night in an SUV, 00:23:07.200 --> 00:23:10.440 all black, leather gear, tactical stuff, it’s not gonna look good. 00:23:10.440 --> 00:23:12.900 JACK: So now, Jordan is running with a whole new group of guys; 00:23:12.900 --> 00:23:16.860 security guards, martial artists, vigilantes, big, buff dudes. 00:23:16.860 --> 00:23:22.860 JORDAN: They used to rib me about hey, are you meeting any girls? [MUSIC] You meeting any girls? 00:23:22.860 --> 00:23:26.400 I was embarrassed ‘cause I wasn’t, really. 00:23:26.400 --> 00:23:29.160 I met girls at the movie theatre where I worked at that was kind of it. 00:23:29.160 --> 00:23:33.420 JACK: He tried to meet girls but he just wasn’t having any luck, 00:23:33.420 --> 00:23:38.760 so he decided to try and meet them in a different way. Jordan was online a lot and thought hey, 00:23:38.760 --> 00:23:44.340 if I’m online, there’s probably girls online, too. He started looking around for them. See, 00:23:44.340 --> 00:23:48.960 this is decades before Tinder and at that time, it was extremely weird to sort of make 00:23:48.960 --> 00:23:55.680 new friends online and try to find a girlfriend. But he popped on AOL to try his luck anyway. He 00:23:55.680 --> 00:24:00.600 liked AOL since it had a ton of chat rooms and you could privately message people, too. He found his 00:24:00.600 --> 00:24:05.760 way into a Detroit chat room, or a teenager chat room, and tried to find girls in there. 00:24:05.760 --> 00:24:10.860 JORDAN: AOL turned out to be a gold mine because a lot of girls my age had it and I could use instant 00:24:10.860 --> 00:24:15.840 messenger. I told the guys what I was doing, that I was meeting girls on AOL instant messenger, 00:24:15.840 --> 00:24:18.660 and they were really enthralled. ‘Cause they were like wait a minute, there’s a way to meet 00:24:18.660 --> 00:24:23.160 girls using the modem? I don’t understand. How do I do this? I was showing them this 00:24:23.160 --> 00:24:28.380 and one of the guys goes, you know what? If you want to stand out from other guys doing this, 00:24:28.380 --> 00:24:33.600 what you should do is create an account that sounds like a girl and see what the guys say 00:24:33.600 --> 00:24:39.360 to you. I thought that’s pretty genius. Social engineering for the win, right? 00:24:39.360 --> 00:24:43.200 Probably one of the very first times I ever even thought about doing anything like that. I made 00:24:43.200 --> 00:24:50.580 a screenname on AOL that sounded really girly. [MUSIC] Immediately I started getting – I made 00:24:50.580 --> 00:24:53.460 these basic profiles; I would go in the chat rooms. Immediately, guys would start 00:24:53.460 --> 00:24:56.940 hitting on me and immediately a lot of it was really pathetic. Some of it was really clever; 00:24:56.940 --> 00:25:03.480 I started taking notes and learning. But then some of it was kind of funny and I would print 00:25:03.480 --> 00:25:10.800 out the chat transcripts of these guys hitting on this girl, or me, who they thought was a 00:25:10.800 --> 00:25:15.920 girl. The guys at work would have a laugh about it every single time I went to work. 00:25:15.920 --> 00:25:23.400 JACK: But then his boss stops him one day and says wait a minute, this guy says he’s a professional 00:25:23.400 --> 00:25:29.940 photographer and thinks you’re a fifteen-year-old girl. He’s a thirty-nine-year-old man. 00:25:29.940 --> 00:25:33.720 Suddenly Jordan realized this dark side. This was 00:25:33.720 --> 00:25:38.400 not just some lonely guy. He was being hit on by child predators. 00:25:38.400 --> 00:25:44.940 JORDAN: This is a criminal. This is a guy who victimizes young girls. 00:25:44.940 --> 00:25:48.840 I didn’t think about that being, I think, fifteen or sixteen at the time. 00:25:48.840 --> 00:25:54.620 I didn’t think about the fact that this was a criminal. I was just thinking he was pathetic. 00:25:54.620 --> 00:25:59.760 JACK: It quickly turned from a good, lazy laugh to holy crap, 00:25:59.760 --> 00:26:02.940 this is really bad. Some of these guys were hitting on 00:26:02.940 --> 00:26:08.880 this fake girl are monsters. Suddenly the conversation took on a different meaning. 00:26:08.880 --> 00:26:14.760 JORDAN: This is not even me being flirty or anything; this is just me being like yeah, 00:26:14.760 --> 00:26:19.800 I’m fifteen and I live with my parents and I like going to the beach. Then they’d be 00:26:19.800 --> 00:26:23.040 like hey, I’m a photographer. Do you want to become a model? Hey, 00:26:23.040 --> 00:26:26.400 you should come see me. Where do you live? What’s your address? When are your parents 00:26:26.400 --> 00:26:29.640 home? We don’t want your parents to be home. Hey, can I take you out on a date? Like, 00:26:29.640 --> 00:26:34.080 really weird stuff. These guys were unrelenting. I didn’t even have to really feed that much into 00:26:34.080 --> 00:26:38.940 the chat. It was extra-creepy. These guys said wait a minute; we gotta figure this 00:26:38.940 --> 00:26:43.520 out. This is not good. A couple of the guys, of course, had connections to the local FBI office. 00:26:43.520 --> 00:26:48.540 JACK: Yeah, even though those security guys were your typical tough guy, they had to deal 00:26:48.540 --> 00:26:53.700 with the FBI before so they gave Jordan a fax number to an FBI agent. But the FBI agent wasn’t 00:26:53.700 --> 00:26:57.780 used to dealing with cyber-crime because I don’t think many agents were, at the time. 00:26:57.780 --> 00:27:02.700 JORDAN: Think about this; since it was computer crime, the Detroit office was like, 00:27:02.700 --> 00:27:07.380 we’re not really sure what to do with this. Now, I mean, what crime does the FBI handle 00:27:07.380 --> 00:27:16.320 that’s not done with a computer, right? But back then, this was a bank fraud unit-type of crime. 00:27:16.320 --> 00:27:21.300 They had to figure out who was dealing with stuff ‘cause remember, AOL’s servers are in Virginia or 00:27:21.300 --> 00:27:29.400 whatever. I’m in Michigan and the other guy’s in Ohio. What local PD has jurisdiction? Nobody had 00:27:29.400 --> 00:27:33.900 a clue. We were faxing these transcripts back and forth and he would send it to DC and then 00:27:33.900 --> 00:27:38.400 a week or so later they’d come back with hey, we need more information on these people. Hey, 00:27:38.400 --> 00:27:42.720 are you still [00:30:00] talking to these people? I had their screennames so I could easily go and 00:27:42.720 --> 00:27:49.380 get them and bait them into a chat. I started working at that time via Agent Forester and some 00:27:49.380 --> 00:28:00.240 of the other agents with people in DC to hand off my chats to them so that they can continue them. 00:28:00.240 --> 00:28:05.340 [MUSIC] After I kept sending them a bunch of chat transcripts, whoever it was up in the 00:28:05.340 --> 00:28:09.960 powers that be in Washington DC, they decided to get interested ‘cause I think at that time 00:28:09.960 --> 00:28:15.360 they thought eh, so some kid finds a pedophile on AOL. Who cares? No harm, no foul. But then 00:28:15.360 --> 00:28:22.380 was it was like, ten a week and it was me barely doing anything but showing up in a chat room with 00:28:22.380 --> 00:28:28.260 a name that kind of looks like it could belong to a girl, that became very, very problematic. That 00:28:28.260 --> 00:28:33.060 became very problematic. It became hard for them to ignore and I think at some point they figured 00:28:33.060 --> 00:28:38.820 this is no longer something that we can just sort of sit there and ignore all the time, or in good 00:28:38.820 --> 00:28:46.620 conscience not deal with. I started to send them more and more transcripts and they would call me, 00:28:46.620 --> 00:28:52.920 ironically on a cloned cell phone, some of the time, they would call me. 00:28:52.920 --> 00:28:57.540 They would ask me questions about where I’m meeting these people, how I’m engaging with them, 00:28:57.540 --> 00:29:02.880 and things like that. I don’t know this is fact but I think since they probably didn’t 00:29:02.880 --> 00:29:08.160 have enough manpower to deal with this, they felt comfortable enough having me send them, 00:29:08.160 --> 00:29:13.680 I guess you would call it the leads, and progress the conversations to the point where it was very 00:29:13.680 --> 00:29:17.640 clear these were no longer innocent parties that were just kind of interested in flirting 00:29:17.640 --> 00:29:23.280 with someone online. It became really clear and really obvious very quickly that these 00:29:23.280 --> 00:29:29.700 guys were more than willing to cross state lines and meet with and engage with a minor. 00:29:29.700 --> 00:29:33.300 This is long before To Catch a Predator, now that I think about it, 00:29:33.300 --> 00:29:37.320 right? This is long before then but it became really clear that 00:29:37.320 --> 00:29:43.200 me barely doing anything was good enough for this guy who lived in Ohio to come up 00:29:43.200 --> 00:29:52.080 and cross the state line into Michigan in order to engage in clearly inappropriate acts with a minor. 00:29:52.080 --> 00:29:57.420 That got them pretty interested. They started organizing with local PD and they started making 00:29:57.420 --> 00:30:03.000 arrests. I would hand off the chat so I didn’t get all the logistics work. That was kind of on them 00:30:03.000 --> 00:30:08.160 and they would do some confirmation of like so, is this gonna happen, are these things gonna happen? 00:30:08.160 --> 00:30:12.980 This guy, I mean, I saw the transcripts, some of them, and they were pretty explicit after that. 00:30:12.980 --> 00:30:18.960 JACK: Okay, so what are your parents thinking of this? ‘Cause I mean, number one, you’re 00:30:18.960 --> 00:30:23.760 talking to pedos online and number two, you’re an informant for the FBI at sixteen years old. 00:30:23.760 --> 00:30:30.600 JORDAN: They were just glad that I wasn’t blowing anything up or doing any drugs. They were really 00:30:30.600 --> 00:30:36.960 glad about that but they were not happy that I was talking to pedos online until they got 00:30:36.960 --> 00:30:41.400 a call from the FBI because they originally, when they couldn’t reach me on my cell phone or before 00:30:41.400 --> 00:30:46.080 I even got the cell phone, they were calling the house. Imagine the FBI calls your house. 00:30:46.080 --> 00:30:50.940 Your parents, first of all, have a miniature heart attack and then the FBI agent says he’s helping us 00:30:50.940 --> 00:30:55.920 catch people, bad people, or whatever they had to say on the phone. Then my mom goes, okay. 00:30:55.920 --> 00:30:59.340 Of course, they had to sign off on some of this. 00:30:59.340 --> 00:31:03.120 It wasn’t just like hey, I’m talking to the FBI and nobody can know about it. It’s like, no, 00:31:03.120 --> 00:31:11.160 your guardian has to say it’s okay for my son to be working with you. They were 50% proud, 00:31:11.160 --> 00:31:18.780 30% worried, 20% completely not sure about what the hell was actually really going on and kind 00:31:18.780 --> 00:31:23.460 of clueless and probably gladly so, ‘cause they were just like, as long as our kid’s not dead. 00:31:23.460 --> 00:31:29.160 Bear in mind, I’m still getting straight A’s in school at this point, I’ve got a job. There’s 00:31:29.160 --> 00:31:36.660 not a whole lot for them to complain about. I just also do this crazy FBI stuff on the side. 00:31:36.660 --> 00:31:40.200 JACK: [LAUGHING] Jordan was still a teenager but he stuck out of public 00:31:40.200 --> 00:31:43.860 school because he had a cell phone. No one really had cell phones in the 90s, 00:31:43.860 --> 00:31:48.840 much less teenagers. If you had one, people thought you were a drug dealer or a secret 00:31:48.840 --> 00:31:55.020 agent or something. Jordan was a secret agent and had a cell phone. He even had a get out of 00:31:55.020 --> 00:31:59.880 jail free card; he had a note signed by the superintendent of schools, the principal, 00:31:59.880 --> 00:32:05.640 and the FBI agent stating that he could carry a cell phone in school. How cool is that? 00:32:05.640 --> 00:32:11.460 JORDAN: A librarian caught me in the hallway calling my mom on the cell phone and she just was 00:32:11.460 --> 00:32:17.340 clutching pearls and gasping; oh my god. She ran back in the library and she called the assistant 00:32:17.340 --> 00:32:23.340 principal. This is a high school, not the one that I embarrassed over the pizza incident. 00:32:23.340 --> 00:32:27.720 Mr. Speechco, bless him, comes out, hadn’t seen the note. This is a pretty early day 00:32:27.720 --> 00:32:31.800 and me being able to carry the phone in school comes over and goes Harbinger, 00:32:31.800 --> 00:32:36.540 do you have a cellular telephone in your bag? 00:32:36.540 --> 00:32:41.100 [MUSIC] He’s not mad. He’s more like, incredulous. [00:35:00] Just like, who the hell has a cell 00:32:41.100 --> 00:32:46.320 phone? This is one of my teachers. He teaches a unit on Vietnam. I’m very active in his class. 00:32:46.320 --> 00:32:53.220 He knows I’m not a drug dealer or an idiot and the librarian comes out and she’s got librarian swag. 00:32:53.220 --> 00:32:58.800 She can’t wait to watch me get busted by the assistant principal and she’s got a smirk on 00:32:58.800 --> 00:33:04.020 her face that I’ll never forget. I said yes, I do. I also have a letter from the principal, 00:33:04.020 --> 00:33:09.360 the super intendant, and the FBI. He goes, can I see it? I said sure, the phone or the letter? He 00:33:09.360 --> 00:33:14.340 goes oh yeah, the phone and the letter, ‘cause I think he just wanted to see the phone, initially. 00:33:14.340 --> 00:33:19.020 I hand him the phone and he’s just like, in awe. He looks at the letter and he goes well, I’ll be. 00:33:19.020 --> 00:33:22.860 You sure do. Well, good for you. Are you working with the FBI? What are you doing? 00:33:22.860 --> 00:33:27.900 This is really cool, man. Hey, can you come by after school? I want to hear all about this. 00:33:27.900 --> 00:33:35.640 Anyway, the librarian’s face went from a smirk, and I’ve never seen somebody melt into a puddle 00:33:35.640 --> 00:33:40.200 so quickly, and it’s a vindication that is so rare as a teenage boy that I don’t 00:33:40.200 --> 00:33:44.580 think I’ll ever forget it, even as a forty year old man who should be over this by now. 00:33:44.580 --> 00:33:51.600 I’m still not because she just slunk back into her library and was just like, whah, 00:33:51.600 --> 00:33:58.380 I can’t believe it. Mr. Speechco, the assistant principal, was flabbergasted that one of his 00:33:58.380 --> 00:34:04.680 students was working with the FBI to catch pedos online. When he heard the story, all 00:34:04.680 --> 00:34:09.180 the teachers heard the story in short order and I remember when my phone would ring during class, 00:34:09.180 --> 00:34:13.440 even the hardest, strictest teacher would just point to the door and I would walk out 00:34:13.440 --> 00:34:18.240 and take the call. They weren’t happy about the disturbance but it was kind of like well, 00:34:18.240 --> 00:34:23.880 the bat signal is flashing so Harbinger’s gotta leave the room now. It was awesome. 00:34:23.880 --> 00:34:31.260 JACK: After school, he would call the FBI agent and report what he saw. He would call and give 00:34:31.260 --> 00:34:36.180 reports frequently. Since this whole internet thing was still new and the FBI agents didn’t 00:34:36.180 --> 00:34:41.040 quite understand it all, Jordan just invited them to the house to take a look for themselves. They 00:34:41.040 --> 00:34:47.220 came over, went into Jordan’s bedroom, sat down, and watched as his dialed into AOL, connected to 00:34:47.220 --> 00:34:52.320 chat rooms, used a girly name he made up, and made some kind of entrance into a chat room. 00:34:52.320 --> 00:34:56.820 JORDAN: They would see me login and then they would see it be like bring, bring, 00:34:56.820 --> 00:35:00.720 bring. I would go in the chat room; bring, bring, bring, private messages would start 00:35:00.720 --> 00:35:09.300 popping up all over, fourteen at a time. I’ve got my screen tiled with chats and nine out of 00:35:09.300 --> 00:35:13.680 ten are pedos and the occasional kid who’s like hi, are you pretty? But nine out of 00:35:13.680 --> 00:35:18.780 ten are pedos and this wasn’t a weird chat room. This was like a standard, generic AOL chatroom. 00:35:18.780 --> 00:35:22.560 JACK: [MUSIC] He even told the FBI about the cell phone cloning 00:35:22.560 --> 00:35:27.420 that he was doing. They didn’t exactly condone it but they didn’t seem to care, 00:35:27.420 --> 00:35:31.980 either. Maybe they didn’t understand what the harm was at that point. It wouldn’t 00:35:31.980 --> 00:35:37.440 be until years later that the FBI would see how cell phone cloning could cause real harm. 00:35:37.440 --> 00:35:42.000 JORDAN: But of course, the dark side of this was people were committing crimes using cloned cell 00:35:42.000 --> 00:35:45.900 phones and then throwing them in the garbage. The guys I was learning and cloning with, 00:35:45.900 --> 00:35:50.460 some of them ran businesses where they would jack or buy phones, 00:35:50.460 --> 00:35:57.060 reprogram them with stolen ESNs, sell them to drug dealers and mafiosos who would use them for a week 00:35:57.060 --> 00:36:01.920 and then throw them in a dumpster or return them to my buddy who would reprogram them. There was 00:36:01.920 --> 00:36:07.200 a real dark side to that but I wasn’t messing with all that, you know? I felt like a hero. I 00:36:07.200 --> 00:36:13.140 was catching pedos online and I didn’t even have to go and tackle anyone. I wasn’t tough. I was 00:36:13.140 --> 00:36:16.980 the least tough guy in the security company but I still had mad respect from all those 00:36:16.980 --> 00:36:22.080 guys because I was like, the local hacker. I wasn’t hacking squat; I wasn’t doing anything 00:36:22.080 --> 00:36:29.700 really that complex. I was just sweet-talking knucklehead, pervy pedo predators into crossing 00:36:29.700 --> 00:36:35.000 state lines and to getting arrested by the cops. I felt like I was doing the Lord’s work, dude. 00:36:35.000 --> 00:36:40.140 JACK: Time passed and Jordan grew up a little. He got through high school and decided to go to 00:36:40.140 --> 00:36:45.420 college to become a lawyer. FBI agents came to his school to give a talk about how to become an 00:36:45.420 --> 00:36:51.000 FBI agent and they recommended students become a lawyer or an accountant to do that. But as 00:36:51.000 --> 00:36:56.940 Jordan studied law, he thought becoming an FBI agent may not pay off his student debt very well 00:36:56.940 --> 00:37:02.820 and the forensic work just didn’t excite him so after law school, Jordan moved to New York city. 00:37:02.820 --> 00:37:08.940 He passed the bar and got a job as a lawyer on Wall Street. It was 2007; the whole economy was 00:37:08.940 --> 00:37:14.220 about to implode. One of the higher-up partners of this company was Dave. Dave was assigned to 00:37:14.220 --> 00:37:19.860 be Jordan’s mentor to teach him all about being a lawyer on Wall Street, but Dave was never in the 00:37:19.860 --> 00:37:25.440 office to mentor him. One day, Jordan asked to meet up with Dave over some coffee and finally, 00:37:25.440 --> 00:37:29.220 he had a chance to ask him some of these questions that have been nagging him since day one. 00:37:29.220 --> 00:37:34.500 JORDAN: He took me to coffee in the basement of the building at a Starbucks and he said alright, 00:37:34.500 --> 00:37:39.180 ask me anything you want. He’s banging away on his BlackBerry and I said how come you’re [00:40:00] a 00:37:39.180 --> 00:37:44.640 partner, you’re one of the youngest partners, but you’re never in the office? Thinking he was 00:37:44.640 --> 00:37:50.400 gonna give me the magic cheat code to working from home, and instead he said well, I work from home 00:37:50.400 --> 00:37:55.020 sometimes, yeah, but mostly I’m out generating business for the firm. I thought wait a minute, 00:37:55.020 --> 00:37:59.700 what does that even mean? Of course, I had to know. I said what do you mean you’re generating 00:37:59.700 --> 00:38:04.080 business for the firm? He goes yeah, I bring in deals. I don’t worry about my billable hours. I 00:38:04.080 --> 00:38:08.700 don’t worry about getting a billable hourly bonus because if I get a bonus for bringing in two or 00:38:08.700 --> 00:38:14.100 three deals a year, it eclipses any hourly bonus I would have gotten, so I focus on generating deals. 00:38:14.100 --> 00:38:17.940 I said how come everybody doesn’t do that? He goes, not everybody’s good at that. 00:38:17.940 --> 00:38:22.260 I said well, how do I get good at that? He goes, you know, you gotta go out there and 00:38:22.260 --> 00:38:26.340 meet people and work your connections, and go to events. I’m going to this charity event, 00:38:26.340 --> 00:38:30.720 I’m playing racquetball here, squash over there, I run over here, I bike over there, 00:38:30.720 --> 00:38:34.800 I do jujitsu. You know, it’s cool, man. I do a lot of different stuff. Whenever there’s 00:38:34.800 --> 00:38:39.480 an investment banker, I make sure that one of our clients is – I’m hanging out with him. Then 00:38:39.480 --> 00:38:42.900 they throw us a deal. It’s actually not that hard. [MUSIC] I wish more people would do it 00:38:42.900 --> 00:38:46.740 but maybe I’m glad more people don’t. He goes, if you learn how to do that, you can write your 00:38:46.740 --> 00:38:52.580 own ticket. You’ll make partner earlier. That changed the way that I look at work forever. 00:38:52.580 --> 00:38:56.640 JACK: Once again, one person saying the right thing at the 00:38:56.640 --> 00:39:01.260 right time enlightened Jordan. Instead of banging away at becoming a great lawyer, 00:39:01.260 --> 00:39:04.980 maybe he needs to change his focus a little. He thought about this. 00:39:04.980 --> 00:39:09.240 JORDAN: Oh, there’s this secret third path that nobody’s even thinking about which 00:39:09.240 --> 00:39:13.980 has to do with networking and relationship development. This is psychology-based. I can 00:39:13.980 --> 00:39:18.300 do this. These are people skills. This is like social engineering 00:39:18.300 --> 00:39:24.180 but it’s like sales. A lot of people look at social engineering and they go yeah, it’s kind 00:39:24.180 --> 00:39:28.860 of like sales only it’s a little dark side. I learned social engineering first and I went oh, 00:39:28.860 --> 00:39:33.960 it’s like sales, it’s like social engineering but it’s white hat. I didn’t even think about 00:39:33.960 --> 00:39:41.100 that before. Then I dedicated myself whole-hog into body language, non-verbal communication, 00:39:41.100 --> 00:39:47.820 persuasion, influence. That kind of stuff was my bag so I took every class I could find, 00:39:47.820 --> 00:39:51.660 I read every book that I could, and I started to apply this and I started trying to generate 00:39:51.660 --> 00:39:56.340 business for the firm. Of course, I was too young and too junior to be able to do this. 00:39:56.340 --> 00:40:00.480 Of course, other lawyers, they didn’t care to learn this. They didn’t know it was important. 00:40:00.480 --> 00:40:07.620 What they did care was that I went from being a homebody nerd to going out all the time and 00:40:07.620 --> 00:40:11.760 meeting a ton of women and people were like wait, what happened to you? I said well, 00:40:11.760 --> 00:40:17.100 I’m learning all this sales stuff and networking stuff, and it just so happens that when you 00:40:17.100 --> 00:40:23.160 apply it to the opposite sex, it really works well. Then I had their attention, right? Then, 00:40:23.160 --> 00:40:30.240 everybody was like wait, wait, wait; teach me what you’re talking about here. That was the genesis 00:40:30.240 --> 00:40:36.120 of me starting The Jordan Harbinger Show and the podcast, and the things that I teach in consulting 00:40:36.120 --> 00:40:41.100 and things like that when I, ironically, train law enforcement, military, and security companies. 00:40:41.100 --> 00:40:46.140 JACK: Yeah, Jordan Harbinger is a podcaster. That’s how I met him; 00:40:46.140 --> 00:40:50.940 one podcaster meeting another. But he’s also no stranger to going to Defcon and has a lot 00:40:50.940 --> 00:40:54.960 of friends in the social engineering village there. He rounds up all this knowledge he has, 00:40:54.960 --> 00:40:58.320 and experience, and interviews a ton of interesting and successful people 00:40:58.320 --> 00:41:03.240 on his podcast, the Jordan Harbinger Show. Even though he used to dream about becoming 00:41:03.240 --> 00:41:07.320 someone in the intelligence community, now he trains those kinds of people. 00:41:07.320 --> 00:41:12.900 JORDAN: Well, remarkably, what intelligence officers do best is not follow people through 00:41:12.900 --> 00:41:17.580 dark alleys and go on chases. You know this and everyone listening probably knows this too, 00:41:17.580 --> 00:41:23.460 but one of the things intelligence officers tend to do a lot of is manage lots and lots 00:41:23.460 --> 00:41:27.960 of relationships, sometimes with people who are not completely open, sometimes with people who 00:41:27.960 --> 00:41:32.940 are maybe a little hostile. They have to generate trust and that’s exactly what I’m 00:41:32.940 --> 00:41:36.600 training them to do. I’m teaching people how to know, like, and trust you so that you can 00:41:36.600 --> 00:41:41.880 use influence. It’s fairly straightforward but it requires a lot of discipline, a lot of practice, 00:41:41.880 --> 00:41:48.300 and you really have to work on the skills. It becomes a way of being and a set of habits, 00:41:48.300 --> 00:41:53.640 not a set of hypnosis persuasion tactics that you can apply. You really do need 00:41:53.640 --> 00:41:59.460 to be socially fluent. I’m training them things that I learned as a teenager that I then turned 00:41:59.460 --> 00:42:03.780 into things I used in my twenties to date and meet people that I then, once again, 00:42:03.780 --> 00:42:09.165 turned into social engineering and networking and sales. It’s really come full-circle. 00:42:09.165 --> 00:42:14.520 JACK: Huh, the once-punk kid chose wisely. Through a series of remarkable events, 00:42:14.520 --> 00:42:18.420 he ended up teaching himself to be socially fluent and is now running his own business, 00:42:18.420 --> 00:42:22.020 making even more money than when he did as a lawyer on Wall Street, 00:42:22.020 --> 00:42:27.120 more money than what he could have probably been making if he was a criminal, too. I don’t know 00:42:27.120 --> 00:42:31.800 what the life lesson is here to take away from Jordan; maybe not to be afraid of pushing the 00:42:31.800 --> 00:42:36.120 boundaries and the rules because you might not realize how smart you are until you get caught, 00:42:36.120 --> 00:42:40.260 or maybe it’s that social skills are a ton [00:45:00] more valuable than we think, 00:42:40.260 --> 00:42:45.840 and that social engineering can be applied for good and have great rewards. But of course, 00:42:45.840 --> 00:42:50.580 what’s interesting to me is that Jordan is constantly trying to learn and grow every day. 00:42:50.580 --> 00:42:56.160 It doesn’t matter how smart he is or feels like he is; he knows he needs to learn more which is 00:42:56.160 --> 00:43:01.520 something I think that’s important for us all, no matter how much knowledge we think we have. 00:43:01.520 --> 00:43:11.280 JACK (OUTRO): [OUTRO MUSIC] A big thank you to Jordan Harbinger for sharing his story with 00:43:11.280 --> 00:43:16.200 us. You can hear so many more of his stories on his podcast called The Jordan Harbinger Show. I 00:43:16.200 --> 00:43:20.820 recommend the episode where he interviews Richard Clarke and another good one is when he interviews 00:43:20.820 --> 00:43:25.080 Frank Abagnale. They talk about nation state hacking and social engineering. That’s just 00:43:25.080 --> 00:43:30.720 fantastic. Oh, and don’t forget to check out the Darknet Diaries Patreon. This is where you can get 00:43:30.720 --> 00:43:35.880 bonus episodes and really help support the show to make more things and greater things and better 00:43:35.880 --> 00:43:40.440 things. Thank you everyone who is supporting the Patreon because that’s really what gives this show 00:43:40.440 --> 00:43:46.620 wings. This show is made by me, the snow-coder, Jack Rhysider. This episode was produced 00:43:46.620 --> 00:43:51.420 by Michelle Martin, sound design by Andrew Meriwether, editing help from Damienne; artwork 00:43:51.420 --> 00:43:57.540 this episode by Lorin Olsen. Our theme music is by the jingling Breakmaster Cylinder. Even though my 00:43:57.540 --> 00:44:03.240 dad still doesn’t own a cell phone because he’s just tech-illiterate, this is Darknet Diaries.