154: Hijacked Line

I just heard about this thing called KR insurance.

I didn't even know this was possible.

KNR stands for kidnapping and ransom.

If you think you're a likely target for kidnapping and people are going to hold you until you pay a ransom, then this might be worth buying.

Why do I know this?

I just ran across an article that said a guy was kidnapped in Toronto and held for ransom.

They wanted him to pay a million dollars and then they'll let him go.

And I think he paid it and then they dumped him off at a park and they sped off.

Why did they kidnap him?

Because they knew he had cryptocurrency-a lot of it.

He was the founder of a crypto-based startup, and if he didn't have the money, surely his company did.

Well, at least that's what the thieves thought, and they were right.

Scary stuff.

These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.

I'm Jack Reeseider.

This is Darknet Diaries.

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Let's see, what are you using for a mic here?

Steel series headset is a bad.

It sounds good.

Yeah, perfect.

So,

are you ready to tell us about the worst time of your life?

Yeah, I'm ready.

It always seems so weird to me to be digging into stories like this because it is probably a hard thing to talk about, isn't it?

Yeah, it is.

Especially when it just happened.

But I mean, it's been four or five years now, so I've kind of overcome it at this point.

How old are you now?

25.

Okay.

So

I bet all this started in a video game somewhere, didn't it?

Yeah, yeah, it did.

What game was that?

Completely right.

Okay, I was gonna guess Minecraft or Roblox.

Yeah,

you know, there's actually they're both involved at certain points throughout the story, so that was a fantastic guess.

Yeah, so it was really Minecraft where I got into everything.

Ever since I was younger, I've always had an obsession with computers and technology.

And I was always kind of reserved when I was a kid, so a lot of the time I spent online and on computers and on video games.

And in my younger years, that was Minecraft specifically.

So yeah, I used to play Minecraft multiplayer servers.

One day I just got bored and I decided to just join a server and start messing with people.

Which I cruelly took enjoyment in at the time.

So messing with, is that like griefing?

Just, yeah, grieving, that's the term, exactly.

Yeah, so is that using in-game mechanics to just screw with them or were you doing more than that?

In-game mechanics, yeah, just to mess with them.

Or just throwling them in the chat, like a little kid.

But

yeah, I was doing that for a while.

I had eventually joined one server, and I had seen this other player on the server teleport into blocks.

So Minecraft's obviously made of blocks.

This guy teleported a couple of blocks downwards and I was impressed.

I didn't know what he was doing.

So I think he kind of knew that I was messing around with the server.

He was doing the same thing.

So I had messaged him, private messaged him in the server, and we ended up talking on Skype.

And

that was the beginning of everything, really.

This is back when I was probably 11 or 12 years old.

So this is where you start learning

like glitches and hacks of some kind.

Yeah, so this guy was a programmer.

He was a Java programmer, but he had his own custom coded client on Minecraft that he used to carry out various exploits or little glitches.

And we had eventually I'd eventually befriended him and we would go on these servers together and mess with people just for fun,

because we enjoyed it.

But alongside programming in Java, he was also partaking in social engineering.

At that time, I had no idea what it was until he introduced me to it.

So we would join servers.

We'd mess with the admin of the server, so the owner.

And there was one, at one point, the first time I happened, we had joined the server.

He was talking to the admin kind of in a friendly way.

And then eventually, a couple of hours later, he logged into the admin's account on Minecraft on the server and took it over and deleted everything.

And I had no idea what was going on at this time.

Let me give you a little bit more context.

Minecraft is a game where players can create their own servers with unique content and stuff.

And sometimes you even need to pay to play on some of these player-made servers.

And somehow, this guy was able to find find the person who's the administrator to this Minecraft server, access their account, and delete the whole server.

What?

Eventually it figured out he socially engineered the admin of this server into giving him the two answers to his secret questions on his Minecraft account, reset his password, logged in and destroyed the server.

Oof, the admin got pwned.

No more Minecraft server.

Now at the time to take control of someone's Minecraft account, you had to log into Mojang's website, the creator of Minecraft.

And what you needed to do is have the username and password.

But if you didn't didn't have the password, you could reset the password if you knew the answers to the two secret questions, like, what was your first car?

And who's your sixth grade teacher?

And since he watched his friend do this, he wanted to learn how to do it too.

So for example, let's say the admin's secret question was, what's your first pet's name?

Second question was, what's your hometown or what school did you go to?

The second one's no problem.

You can easily find that out.

Simple Google searches.

The first question is a tough one.

So what we used to do is say we'd join a server, we'd find the admin, we'd target him, and we'd know his first question was, what was your first pet's name?

So we'd say, or I would say in the chat, oh, my little kitten died today.

Buttons,

have you ever had any pets before?

And we'd try and get talking to the admin

and try and get him to divulge the answers to that question.

So I'd say, oh, what was your first pet's name?

Unbeknownst to him.

Here I am typing it out, putting it into his Mojang account, getting ready to reset it.

And that was the first experience of socially engineering someone.

This is Connor Freeman, by the way.

I should have probably introduced you to him earlier, but I forgot.

He liked the sense of power that these little hacks gave him.

When you get control of a server like that, you become unstoppable.

You have full control of the server now, and you can delete it all if you wanted.

And there's something alluring about that, that sense of power.

But to me, it's quite a funny power dynamic.

A TV show I really like, I think it's hilarious.

It's called Trailer Park Boys, and it's about life in a trailer park.

But the thing that intrigues me about the show is the immense power struggle that's going on in this trailer park.

Like there's a huge clash between the park supervisor and a couple guys who are always scheming to make money off of other people in the park.

And then there's some drug dealers that live at home with their mom.

I mean, there's a power struggle right there.

And then there's a guy who doesn't even live in the trailer park who comes by to try to assert his dominance over the park.

It's this incredible battle for power.

All for what, though?

To get the respect of the people in the trailer park?

It just seems so meaningless on the grand scheme of things.

But they take this tiny trailer park so seriously as if it's their whole world.

I like it maybe because I grew up in different trailers myself, so I can relate.

But it just makes me think that there's this huge battle going on over a Minecraft server that a few hundred people play.

And it's all taken so seriously, too.

Anyway, after a while, Minecraft hacking got old to Connor and he was wondering what else is out there to mess around with.

And he found some hacking forums, which explained all kinds of new stuff he could do.

Yeah, a lot of

social engineering things.

Like

back in the day, people used to do refund scams.

So say you'd order something on Amazon, you'd get onto Amazon after it's said delivered on Amazon and say it hasn't arrived.

Someone might have stolen it off my porch or something like that.

You'd get a refund and get your money back.

That was a huge thing back then.

It still is now, but it's a lot less prevalent because Amazon had kind of caught on.

There was other kind of scams and schemes.

People would do return programs.

They'd scam return programs.

So, Steel Series was targeted a lot back then.

You could basically create a support ticket to say that you've bought a pair of Steel Series headphones.

They're not working.

Can I get a return?

And they would send you out a free headset and they wouldn't ask for anything in return.

The only thing you have to do was send them a picture of the headset or a serial number, which you could source from eBay or some kind of online marketplace where people are reselling them.

Hold on, Connor.

You're using a Steel Series headset right now.

Yeah, now I paid for this one.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's not from back then.

I mean, this is a long time ago.

So refund scams were becoming a thing back in 2018 or so.

There were instructions on how to do it, but some people did not feel comfortable calling up somewhere and lying to someone to try to convince them that you want to refund.

So there were actually people you could hire to do it for you.

Exactly.

So that was the makeup of it.

Essentially, you'd order, and that was Apple products were huge.

So essentially, you'd order something.

You'd have a, you'd order something, you'd go to a refunder, they were called, on the forums, and you would say, hey, I ordered a MacBook for $1,200.

Can you refund it for me?

And I'll give you 20%.

So, the refunder would log into your account or they'd call Amazon and pretend to be you.

And they'd execute this kind of scam on Amazon.

They'd socially engineered the rep into believing that the item was never delivered.

They'd get a refund for their customer, and then they get 20% of the total order value.

And that was a huge thing on that forum.

Like there was so many people doing it.

So you would pay a scammer like $200, $400

and then that's how you'd get your MacBook.

Yeah, exactly.

Instead of paying it full price for it.

Okay, what other ways?

To make money?

How were kids doing those days?

There was a lot of cracking services, which are still around now.

But again,

cyber hygiene has gotten better and as well as that services security has gotten better thankfully but back then you could crack most online accounts like

what's an example like Hilton Hotel was a massive one people that had Hilton accounts that stayed a lot in Hilton hotels you'd build up these points and you could spend the points on free rooms in Hilton branches worldwide.

So what people would do is crack these accounts.

They'd load up a massive list of usernames and passwords and try them against the Hilton login page.

Try and land a few accounts that had points on on them and they'd then resell them on these forums to uh to people looking to

see this one this one always surprised me because if if i go on there and i buy a hilton account with a ton of points and i actually go to the hotel and i stay there with these stolen points like i'm in the room now yeah if they want to like say hold on this is some stolen points yeah looking back in that now it's insane but i myself would never do that because

like just the stupidity of it if somebody if that person person who owned that account was to call up Hilton and say, look, I didn't book this room.

Like you're one phone call away from somebody knocking on the door and saying, hey, this isn't your account.

And you've stolen this room.

So but people got pretty brave with it.

Like people didn't care.

Pizza Hut was another big one.

So you'd order pizzas and you'd build up points and people would then try and crack your Pizza Hut account.

And you could use these points to get pizzas on other people's accounts and you'd just walk into the store, use their points and walk out with a free pizza.

It reminds me of pizza plugs as well.

Yeah, but pizza plugs are slightly different.

They're mostly carders, so they're credit card fraudsters, so they'd use stolen cards and order the pizza for collection or delivery.

A pizza plug is where you find someone who will give you really cheap pizzas, like for five bucks.

They'll send you three large pizzas or something.

And what they're doing is they're using a stolen credit card to order the pizzas to be sent to you, and then you just pay them like five bucks for it.

But again, that's insane because you're associating stolen card details with your own address if you say you get it delivered with a stolen card like not the brightest

cook groups is this is this a thing

cook groups

in terms of like clothes online yeah

yeah

there's about the clothes but it's called cooking groups cook groups

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because I used to be hugely into fashion.

I still am now, but not as much as back then.

So cook groups essentially would be groups that they would employ bots.

So someone would create a macro.

So I don't know if you're aware of what Supreme, I'm sure you are, Supreme or Say Palace.

They're worldwidely popular streetwear brands.

They have weekly releases or bi-weekly or whatever way they do it.

So they release a very limited amount of stock on a certain day at a certain time.

So it's very hard to get, especially items, certain items like box logo hoodies or something like that.

So people would create these macros or scripts that would automatically log them into the Supreme website.

They'd buy these clothes instantly before anyone else could and then resell them.

That's a part of the cook groups or they would people would put their names on an item and someone would bought it for them and resell it to them at a marked up price.

Yeah, it's kind of like scalping concert tickets.

Yeah.

So is this is there anything illegal about cook groups?

No,

not from what I'm aware of.

I'm sure it's in terms of

in terms of legality, no.

But it is kind of an underground culture there, right?

You got to find a group, and sometimes it's the wrong group you're in, and those guys are just there to rip you off.

So you've got to find a trustworthy group that actually

has these orders or whatever you're looking for.

Yeah, and that's the hard thing because a lot of these people aren't trustworthy because what they're doing isn't trustworthy in itself.

So it's hard to find someone that's actually going to pull through.

Yeah, it's amazing to me how big the hidden parts of the internet are and all these things going on at once.

And we never see it as just just like a common internet user you never see any of this how are you discovering all these different places on the internet

um but through this forum so the forum was massive i don't really want to say the name of it but um it was probably one of

so

hack forums was one of the forums that was around a long time i think it's been going for 15 years maybe a little less than that um that would be the oldest kind of clear now hacker forum that i'm aware of this forum that i was a member of kind of branched off of HackForms because the admin of HackForms was, I think it was kind of a well-known Fed.

People didn't really like him and he was really stringent on the rules on that website.

So this forum that I was on kind of branched off of HackForms and allowed for more

black hat or grey hatter unethical methods.

So all of the scumbags that weren't allowed to advertise their services on HackForms kind of moved over to this forum that I was a part of.

So I mean there was a huge range of services offered because there were so many people on it.

Well you call them scumbags.

You were one of the users.

I was one of them.

Yeah.

What do you get dabbling in?

What's kind of the first

money you're making in this kind of world?

Thinking back, so Xbox ran a promo a long time ago, or Microsoft rather, they ran a promo.

I think it was a collab with Skittles or something like that.

So they still do it now with Mountain Dew and Doritos.

Like you buy a bag of Doritos and they'll have a code on the back of it and get double XP or something something for Call of Duty.

But way back when, there was a promo that was run with, I think it was Skittles, where you'd buy a pack of Skittles, input the code on the back of the pack of Skittles, and you'd get a free seven-day membership or a 14-day membership on Microsoft Live.

But there was people that had scripts or macros that were brute forcing this code.

So you just set up the script, it brute force the code, throw hundreds of thousands of it against it, and you would eventually just keep racking up free membership codes because there was no rate limit or anything on the on website.

So you could just get like 50 to 100 to even more thousands of these 14-day Xbox codes.

But I eventually got my hands on that script.

So that was probably the first money I made.

When I had that script, I had it running.

And then I was reselling these membership codes for like probably five or ten dollars apiece to people on the forum on eBay and online marketplaces.

When I was young, I discovered a way to get free audible books.

So

so far I'm with you, right?

I was hanging out in shady chat rooms, griefing people in video games too, and getting free stuff.

But I think this is where our paths are about to diverge.

All right.

So, this was making a few books for you, weren't we?

But not very much because you were just learning.

What were you like 14 years old then?

Probably 13 or 14, yeah, which is insane looking back.

After a while of being on this forum, I kind of got bored of it.

I kind of, I just had a relationship with the admin.

We talked back and forth, and

I think he kind of annoyed me one day.

So I just quit that forum.

And luckily for me, or unluckily, looking back, there was a new forum that opened up called OG Users,

which was an online marketplace where people would buy and sell.

OG original usernames.

So say at Jack on Instagram or at Jack on Twitter.

And they'd buy and sell these different usernames for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And that was my next venture then, getting into acquiring these usernames.

So Jack on Twitter is Jack Dorsey, the original owner of Twitter.

Good luck getting that one.

But the thing about OG users that

I think is worth pointing out is half of them were fine and legit reselling, and then half of them were social engineered stolen accounts.

Would you consider that to be true?

I'd say it's a lot more skewed.

I'd say it was probably

95, 5%, 95% stolen, 5%, if even that genuine.

So if you're not aware, OG Users is a place where people are selling usernames.

That is Twitter accounts, Instagram accounts, Snapchat accounts.

Why?

Well, because we all hate it when we go to register at one of these places and someone has already taken our name.

And so some people would pay extra for an account with a cool name.

The problem is the stuff for sale on this site is often stolen accounts where people would hack into that account, get control of it, and then sell it on this site, OG Users.

Yeah, so I had a bit of crypto.

I had discovered Bitcoin back when I dabbled in the other things on the other forum, but I had an understanding of what crypto was.

So I had a bit of Bitcoin, and I had bought a username one day

on Twitter.

I can't remember the exact handle, but I bought it to resell it.

I held it for a couple of weeks, put it back up for sale, and made a couple of hundred on that.

So

that was my first venture into buying and selling the usernames.

I didn't last long, though, buying them.

That's when it turned into me then stealing them or

being introduced to people that were stealing them and kind of falling into that.

What was your method for stealing usernames?

Breached databases were a huge thing back then.

I know they're even bigger now, but a lot of people didn't know

how to use them, utilize them, or how to find them.

So there were services where there still is now, I'm sure, but there were services where you could search someone's username or email and pull their data from a breach database, like their password, username, full name.

So what I was doing was doxing these account holders.

I would find their email.

I'd search the email through the breach databases and then find their password.

And I'd try my luck at logging into the account with that password.

And because not many people were doing this at the point, I had...

quite some success with that.

Probably most of these were just crappy usernames though, and you just didn't even care and you just logged back out.

Yeah, a lot of them were.

Yeah, it was more the thrill of being able to find the password and log in.

Or sometimes you get a password that's incorrect or you might add an exclamation mark or an add or something at the end and that would be the correct one.

And you get a bit of a thrill out of that.

But yeah, most of them weren't anything amazing.

Yeah, I imagine that's a big thrill to be like, yep, nope, wrong password.

And then you're like, what if I add an exclamation point?

And then bing, you're in.

Oh my gosh, I'm brilliant.

I'm a genius.

I'm the best hacker in the world.

Look at me.

Yeah, you feel like a genius.

This allowed you to acquire some

uh Twitter and Instagram were your main things?

Twitter and Instagram, yeah.

I mean, they're they're still the main ones now, they're the most popular social medium, so that's what people would go for the most.

Counter was making some scratch from all this, all in Bitcoin, of course.

Looking through database breaches, finding passwords that would work on Twitter, then stealing those usernames and selling them.

Okay, so, um, roughly, uh, how profitable was this for you selling OG users?

Um,

I qu I d I don't know, I couldn't quantify a figure.

Probably

$20,000 or $30,000.

No, probably a lot less.

I didn't really get into it that deep.

He built up a reputation for having quite a bit of usernames for sale on OG users.

It was going well.

But then something else caught his attention.

Something so much bigger that eventually made him lose interest in OG users altogether.

The thing he saw some people doing was sim swapping.

Yeah, so it would start with a target.

You'd

dox the user.

You'd use various different methods of getting all their information.

So, their full name, address, phone number, their SSN.

There's a certain website that you can buy credits on and input someone's first and last name and get their SSN.

So, you'd have all that information.

And then you'd back in the day, it was a lot simpler than it was now.

So, say if you were on T-Mobile, I would call up and say, hey, my name is Jack Resider.

My last four of my SSN is 1234.

I've just lost my phone, and my SIM card is inside a, I have a replacement SIM card here.

If I give you the ICC ID, can you swap my SIM over to this card?

And the agent would happily do it.

And once that's done, your phone number is now mine.

Your phone number is now mine.

Just think about how scary that sounds.

If someone can take your phone number from you, they can pretty much become you.

So much of our identity is tied to our phone number.

Yes, they can text the people you know as you.

They might be able to call your bank and pretend to be you.

But perhaps the scariest is that they can often recover some of your accounts.

Like if you have a Google account and you go there and say, oh, I forgot my password, they might have an option to text you a code to confirm it's you.

And they text you thinking, nobody in the world is going to have access to your phone except you, right?

Which you can use to reset a Google account.

And now you have access to their email, drives, photos, and maybe even their YouTube channel and more.

And once they have control of your main email account, they can just go through and reset your other accounts.

Say you lost your Twitter password.

It'll say, okay, no problem, let's email you a new one.

And so now they can get into your Twitter too.

And this whole thing hinges on whether or not you can convince the T-Mobile customer service rep that you really did lose your phone and to get them to switch SIM cards for you.

So were some couriers easier for you than others?

Yeah, T-Mobile by far was the easiest.

It was insane.

You'd get it.

Sometimes you'd have to brute force these calls.

So you'd have to call 10 or 15 times until you get an agent who just doesn't care enough and and he'll just swap it.

T-Mobile was insane.

You'd just make one call and they'd do it willy-nilly, happily just swap this in.

AT ⁇ T was definitely the hardest and then Verizon, I'd say, was in the middle.

Sprint as well, although not many people used it.

Sprint was another one.

And then I think Cricket is what it's called.

Cricket and Sprint were pretty easy too.

But as it got harder, people started to...

look into exploits on the actual websites of these these carriers.

So there's a couple of well-known exploits in ATT and T-Mobile that people would use to either retrieve the PIN off someone's account or remotely swap the SIM themselves or pull their information or whatever else.

It's crazy to me how in-depth of knowledge you have of this, right?

You understand

wireless carriers of the world and SIM cards and

usernames and passwords and computers skills are just going higher and higher.

And yet you have to go to like, I don't know, history class

and learn about the war and stuff like in the afternoon and then go back to like this crazy technical stuff.

Did it feel like you were living two different worlds?

Yeah, definitely.

And nobody knew about it in

my personal life.

And that was the thing.

You kind of have this detached personality where in person you're a completely different.

different guy.

And then when you're online, it's like your brain is in a different place.

So you completely dissociate dissociate from your real life.

So it's like two separate personas that you have.

It was like that the whole time.

Yeah.

I mean,

it's also interesting to look at maybe some of the other kids in school who are trying to build up their social media, right?

And you see these people who are on Instagram and you're like, all right, so you've got like, you know, 300 followers.

I can get to a count by this afternoon with a million followers.

Like,

what's the deal here?

There's no, there's no game.

And I don't, how did you feel?

Like, did you ever look at that like that?

Like, what are the high schools?

It was actually exactly that.

I mean, when you're young and impressionable, like I was, I thought I was on top of the world and way smarter than everybody else.

So I would kind of look at them and be like, oh, you're an idiot.

How do you not know what I know?

Or how are you so impressed?

Or whatever else.

Well, you had to know that.

You had to know that what you were doing is not exactly the straightforward way to do things.

It's the back way,

wrong way, and it works way, but it's not exactly the way you're supposed to.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

I mean, mean, it's hard to know that, though, right?

The ethical compass

isn't quite as aligned as it should be because when you go online, this is all you see, right?

And it's kind of like

if you really want to get married and you go online and all you see is other people getting married and other people's engagement photos and their marriage and all this stuff.

And you're just like, oh, I want to get married so bad.

And it's like all you see, right?

And so it's like, everyone's getting married but me.

And so when you go online, you're just like, dang, everyone's getting paid but me.

I got to get paid too.

Because this is all you see.

Your mind is kind of tuned into it yeah exactly and so it's hard to know exactly what is right and wrong in this world when everyone's around you is doing this stuff and it's like okay i'm not even gonna ask if this is legal or not but if you guys are getting away with it i guess it's not so bad

yeah there is no there's no forethought of illegality or at least back then because it was

like i said it was completely separating the real world from a computer screen so you wouldn't even be thinking of legality because it wouldn't be an idea or a thought in your head because you're in this other world, essentially.

Quite often, people come to me in a panic telling me that someone just took over their Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook account, and they can't log in anymore.

And they ask me, What should I do?

And unfortunately, I don't have a good answer.

I mean, you can open a ticket with that site and ask for help, but because the site is so overwhelmed with help tickets, it's likely that your ticket gets ignored.

It's as if their support team doesn't exist.

But really,

that's like the only option I have.

Go through support to get it back.

I would tell them to go on LinkedIn, sort by company, employer, and look through all the people that work at Twitter and Instagram and just message them all on LinkedIn.

I hope someone sees your message and helps you out.

That's probably the only way it's happening.

Yeah, but it does sound like the other way is to go, is to go hire a hacker to get it back as well.

I'm never going to recommend that, but that, if, gosh, that sounds like the more

likely way to get it back.

I'm sure it's just all for a lot of people, yeah.

So, up until now, the reason why Connor would do a sim swap was to steal someone's Twitter or Instagram account so he could sell it on OG users.

There was this direct connection between sim swapping and making money selling users.

Granted, it's criminal, but he didn't care.

But then he started learning about cryptocurrency.

By the time you start doing your first sim swap for crypto, how old are you?

Must have been 17, 16 or 17.

So were you out of school by then?

No, what have it still been in school?

Okay.

So it was my last couple of years of school.

Yeah, you're doing that sort of thing.

Do you have extracurricular activities at school that you're doing stuff too?

Nothing.

As soon as school's out, you're like, I'm going straight home.

Yeah, exactly.

That's what I went to.

That's where all my friends are.

My friends are home.

Why would I go somewhere else?

Exactly.

So you go home, you log into the chat app, whatever it is, like you, like you just said, and you just sort of like, what's the crack?

What's everyone up to?

Yeah.

Or go into forums and troll around and see what's going on that day.

But yeah, we'd talk about it.

And what would some of the stuff you'd see?

Just the marketplaces, really, and what people are up to and what's happening in the...

the kind of community that I was in on these forums.

I mean, was it addicting to the point where you're like, to, I want to check to see what's going on.

I want to see what's going on.

I want to see what's going on.

Or was it like, no, I'm going home to play video games and I'll check on it maybe Sunday night.

Yeah, well, see, I would game and look at it intermittently.

So I would game a lot.

I would sometimes game with these people and then I would check back on the forums or check in with the other people and see what's going on.

Counter-Strike.

You moved on.

Yeah.

I knew it.

Yeah.

All right.

And you're grieving on Counter-Strike, I bet, too.

You hit your own teammates.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Oh, I hate you.

The thing about crypto is you have to secure your own with traditional money.

A bank will secure your money for you.

And if they get robbed, they're insured.

So they still have your money.

But that's not the case with cryptocurrency.

People have to stand up for their own security.

And some people are worse than others at this.

And Connor's friends were starting to go after people for their cryptocurrency instead of their usernames because stealing their cryptocurrency is way more valuable than stealing their usernames.

Someone had messaged me, I think they'd send me like a blockchain explorer link of their wallet, and I had like maybe 10 or 15 Bitcoin.

I messaged them back, like, how did you do this?

Like, how did you get this money?

And then they kind of introduced me into SimSwapping for crypto then.

And that's where it all started.

Oh, yeah.

We're 30 minutes in, and now we're going to get started.

But we're going to take a a quick break first before we do.

Stay with us.

Connor was adept at sim swapping and Bitcoin and now was ready to combine the two.

I kind of had joined calls with these guys and I'd be witnessing them carrying out these heists while I was in the call and then I kind of ended up getting involved.

The first one I can't remember.

I'm sure it was someone on Twitter that was parading about having crypto and they were chosen as a target.

Yeah, step one of robbing someone is to figure out who to rob.

He's got the skills to get into someone's account if he knows their phone number and stuff.

So now he just needs to figure out who are the people with a lot of crypto out there and then try to target them.

So my main role throughout the whole thing really was seeking out people with crypto, doxing them and then sharing this information.

And then my other group members would carry out the sim swap process.

And sometimes I would help with that, sometimes I wouldn't.

So my role was really the pre-attack OSINT, I would say.

Since he was in Ireland, it was harder for him to navigate the whole SimSwap aspect since a lot of targets had American numbers and stuff.

So his job was to find the people who had crypto.

And really, it wasn't that hard.

A big thing was Twitter.

Obviously, a lot of people in the crypto community are active on Twitter.

So sometimes people would post stupidly, or not stupid, really, really, they should be allowed to post their wallet balance.

But people would post their wallet balance on these social media sites, Twitter, for example, stating that they had 100 Bitcoins or something like that.

And then they'd instantly become a target

for us or for other people doing the same thing.

Another thing was altcoins.

So people who create their own crypto, we would target...

They'd typically be teams of 10 or 15 people that would always have a CEO and a CFO.

So they were the two roles that we would target.

The CFO is obviously the chief financial officer.

So they're normally in charge of the assets.

And then the CEO would have a big stake in the actual altcoin.

So we would normally target people either on Twitter or target these team members of up-and-coming altcoins.

If you have crypto, the first step in securing it is to not let anyone know you have it.

Because if it's not Connor and his lads coming after you, it'll be North Korea coming after you or maybe even your own government if they don't like you having crypto.

And on top of that, don't use your real name online.

It just makes it easier for everyone to find your address and where you work and everything.

What some Twitter users were doing was they were using their real name and posting their wallet balance.

And this would immediately make Connor zoom in on them and he would start a new document and just start going through his methods to find information about them.

There's a couple of different ones.

One good one is say you knew their full name.

and you knew their their approximate location.

So let's say you're Jack and you're living in Tampa, Florida or somewhere like that.

If you had maybe posted on Twitter about ordering your favorite Asian food and you had maybe a bag that had the restaurant's name on it, we could call that restaurant.

And then you could say,

my name's Jack, I want to place an order.

Do you have me on file?

I just want to make sure you have the right address.

The person working in the Chinese restaurant that you've ordered food from before would then reiterate your address to

who they think is Jack, and then you'd you'd have their address there in front of you.

Going back to the exploits as well, ATT and T-Mobile had exploits at some point.

ATT, you could put in a a mobile number and then you could pull back their SSN or the last four of their SSN from their AT ⁇ T account unauthorized.

That was a big one that we used.

Many other people have used if you couldn't find their SSN on the other sources.

He wants as much information as he can get about them because the more he knows the easier it'll be to hack into their digital life.

Yeah, so you'd namely need the full name, the address, the last four of the SSN.

You might need the last four of a debit or credit card number.

In some cases, a date of birth.

you might need a mother's maiden name,

previous addresses, maybe

all these different types of things.

But I mean, they were all easily sought out online.

So we would essentially profile them before we executed the attack.

So we would have a full docs, like all their family, their previous addresses, like a huge list of information about them.

So when it came to that time, we weren't lacking any information.

It was just, we were ready to go.

Ready to go, as in, he'd hand this information to the other guys in the group and say okay i found a guy with 100 bitcoin here's his info i think he's a good target should we because the thing about stealing crypto is that there's no way to reverse the transfer there's no central authority there's no support ticket to open if you snatch it you can keep it unless of course someone catches you now as he said he's not operating alone here Once the other guys decide that this is a good target that he found and he has info on, then other people join in to do the same swap process and the heist begins.

Typically I'd be waiting at the reset password screen so we'd all be in a call together on Discord and

someone would be doing the sim swap process and I would be ready then to reset the password and input the 2FA code.

So they'd let me know when it was go time really.

And I would send the code, they'd read it out to me and reset the password and then start looking through.

The code he's waiting for is to get into their Gmail.

He knows their Gmail address and he started the login process but said, I forgot my password.

And it asks him, okay, do you want us to text you a code to let you in?

So his finger is on that button, waiting until the sim swap happens before he says yes.

And so as soon as they get the sim swapped, he says, yes, go ahead and send me that code.

And then the person reads off that code over the phone and he can log in.

It's all very coordinated and done extremely quickly.

What are all the roles going on here, right?

So you've got you as the OSINT doxer targeting person, person,

and then there's someone who does the sim swap, and they're the holder of the phone call.

Exactly.

Is there a holder that's a different person than the one you're calling?

It depends on the circumstances.

So

no, you'd always really have a holder, at least back then anyway.

So you'd have someone that would find the target.

You'd have someone that would engage with someone

to sim swap the target, either do it themselves or they'd engage an employee of a carrier.

And then you'd have someone who's the holder.

So that's the person who's physically holding the phone and replacing the SIM card in the phone with the blank SIM that the number has been swapped to.

So

you're on a call with the holder and the SIM swapper.

So the SIM swapper is like, okay, hold on, let me call him, try to get it.

No, it's not working.

Let me call again.

No, it's not working.

All right.

Let me call again.

Okay, it worked.

I got him to port the number.

Do you see it, holder?

And the holder's like, yeah, it's active.

Okay.

And then you're like, okay, great.

I'm going to initiate a password reset.

Tell me the number.

And then the holder's like, I don't see it yet.

I don't see it yet.

Okay, here it is.

Is that kind of how those calls went?

Yeah, that's exactly how they went.

It was like clockwork, the process.

So each rel would execute their action and then it'd go.

Then directly after that, so

the holder would say, the same's active.

As soon as the same's active, then you send the reset code and you get going.

Then it's the email.

Connor's second task is now to find the crypto.

They got access to this person's phone and Gmail, and they're assuming somewhere in this digital life of theirs must be the keys to their crypto wallet.

And all they need is a seed phrase or a private key.

And these are very important to keep safe and have backups of.

So a lot of people store them somewhere in their online world.

So as soon as Connor gets in, he immediately starts sniffing for blood.

So the first thing, which is...

crazy the way that it was and still is.

So if you go on to if you have a Gmail account, go into Chrome.

If you're assigned into your Chrome account with your Gmail address, if you type in passwords.google.com, it'll pop up.

You'll be prompted to put in your password.

Once that's done, you'll be prompted with a page that has every single website you've used and the password, if you've saved that password for that website.

But this would sync across devices.

So say I took your Gmail account and

you had saved your Twitter password or your Gemini or whatever, your Binance password onto your Gmail account.

I could log into your email and view all these saved passwords, which would then allow me to just use them and log straight in.

And in the event that I needed to FA, we had your phone so we could get that code.

Okay, hold it.

Just stop right there.

I just tried this and I'm so upset right now.

I've been using Gmail since like 2007 or so.

And the last few years, I've taken drastic measures to de-Google my life.

However, I just logged into my Gmail and then went to passwords.google.com, just like he said.

And what do you know?

Some of my most sensitive passwords are sitting right there, easily organized and in clear text.

I must have told Google at some point, yeah, you can remember to log into this site, and it did, but I have my own password manager.

I don't ever remember using Google's password manager, yet I'm looking at my logins here and I'm miffed about it.

Dang, there's even an option to export all these passwords too.

And it shows me all the sites I've declined to save passwords for.

Like, this just lays out my whole digital life.

And I had no idea Google was saving any of this.

And I'm a guy who's super focused focused on computers and security and tech and privacy.

I can't imagine how a non-techie navigates this.

I deleted all my passwords from here and the sites that I said I want to opt out of saving passwords for because I never want Google to be storing my passwords.

I've just been finding more privacy focused apps to use instead of Google.

Most of their products are not end-to-end encrypted.

And I feel that my stuff is just too important to be subject for an eventual data breach or being subpoenaed or something.

My sensitive data is either stored locally and never sees the internet at all, or is stored on some end-to-end encrypted service somewhere.

So even if it shows up in a breach, it can't be seen by someone.

Taking your personal privacy seriously is the only way to make sure that your stuff is safe.

Next thing then would be Evernote, which was the cloud note taking app, but a lot of crypto investors seem to use that for whatever reason.

So we'd reset the Evernote account, look through the notes, see if we could find it Nomic somewhere or seed phrase

we'd go through Google Docs Google Drive any linked cloud accounts like anything that was there did you have like a regular expression that you were able to search for for seed phrases

yeah mnemonic or seed phrase or

Bitcoin or crypto or you just try a plethora of different things and you'd find it eventually or you'd look in their sent emails sometimes people would send their mnemonic to to themselves or a different email so it would be in the sent emails

but it

you're right, it is kind of an art.

You'd need to know what to look for, or else you'll find nothing like this.

And is it just you in this account, or are other people looking as well?

No, it would be most of us would be logged in

looking simultaneously.

But if you had too many people on at the one time, it would lock everyone out.

So it would be probably two or three people.

But just to go back to the OSIN stage, the

pre

sim swapping stage, I'll say I missed this step.

So what you could could do is

say your email is jack at darknetdiaries.com or whatever.

I could go into coinbase.com, go into reset password, and input your email.

If your email existed in their database, it would send out a password reset form.

If it didn't exist, it would pop up and say, this user does not exist or this email does not exist.

So, what we would do is try their email against these different services, and we compile a list of services that we knew they used.

So, once we were in the email account,

we would go to them directly straight away.

So say I would try all the different crypto exchanges with their email, see which ones they're registered to.

And then as soon as we have access to the account, we can try them instantly.

So there's no time wasting.

Yeah, so they fixed that.

If you try to reset an email password there, it'll say, well, if we had an account here, we'll send you the password right now.

And they don't give any sort of clue.

So

the way to do it nowadays, I believe it still works, is just to go register at Coinbase with that email address and it'll say, oh, this account already exists.

Okay, thank you.

That's all I wanted to know.

Yeah, not a great patch they put in.

I don't mention this enough, but I do think that you should have a different username on every site you log in for.

You already know how to use a different password for every site.

Take it a step up and use unique email addresses or usernames for every site.

Like what some people do is they'll get a domain.

Like I have darknetdiaries.com and I have a catch-all email rule so that anything going to at darknetdiaries.com, I will get in my inbox.

So I can make something like Coinbase at darknetdiaries.com or Evernote at darknetdiaries.com.

Asever many email addresses as I want.

I don't even have to create them.

I can just use them because there's a catch-all email and gets them all.

This way I can have unlimited email addresses and each one is unique for every single site I use because you don't want people to be able to profile you by just taking your email that you use everywhere to register accounts for, and then they can cross-reference that or Google that or search databases to see what are all the accounts that this email address is valid for.

When you're protecting your digital life, the goal is to make it as hard as you can for people like Connor.

You can't have perfect security, but I'm a big fan of making it as painful as possible for someone to hack you because eventually they'll run out of time or energy to hack you and move on to the easier targets.

I've said it before, before, being secure online is like running from a bear in the woods.

You don't need to be faster than the bear.

You just need to be faster than your friend in order to survive the bear.

So that should be your personal goal, to be more private and more secure than your friends.

I recently met someone whose privacy was way better than mine and we became friends and it really made me step up my game.

And defense in depth is important too.

Hiding all your most personal data behind a single login or account is a bit scary.

But if you assume someone does get into your Gmail, why not also limit them to what they can see and do from there?

Make them run into dead ends again and again.

So like delete your emails when you don't need them anymore.

I don't know about you, but every time I get a new Windows or Mac computer, I create a fresh Microsoft or Apple account just for that machine, which is not tied to any other profile that I use.

And that severely limits the damage that can be caused if someone gets into that account without my consent or gets breached or something.

Oh, and I should also mention it's a good idea to use two-factor authentication that isn't SMS text messages because he had access to the person's phone, right?

If the 2FA code can be sent by text, he can get it.

But if you're using something like Google Authenticator for 2FA codes, that's harder for him to access.

However, as you know, I'm skeptical about what Google is collecting about me.

They want it all.

So I personally use Aegis to store my 2FA codes.

That's spelled A-E-G-I-S.

It's an open source app that works great for this.

And in my opinion, it's way more private than Google Authenticator is or Aussie.

God, I gotta stop ranting about privacy.

Sorry.

All right, let's get back on track.

All right.

So let's say you find a

private key.

What do you do?

So if you found a private key, you'd load up the wallet.

Say I found an Exodus key.

I'd have an Exodus client download it and ready.

I'd have a couple of different clients.

Say I found a Bitcoin private key.

I could go into Exodus or blockchain and import that seed phrase and have access to the wallet.

Now, just because they found the private key or seed phrase doesn't always mean there's crypto in that wallet.

So there's a moment of truth.

Does this wallet have money in it?

You're right.

Nine out of ten times you wouldn't know what's in that wallet.

So you could put it in and you could hit nothing.

It could say zero.

You could put it in and it would say

1 million 500,000 600,000.

So you'd be on this call and you'd input this wallet and you'd see X amount of money and you'd be freaking out and then everyone would collaboratively freak out then all all together on the call.

It would sound like monkeys in a zoo.

Once we had access, then we would send the funds to the newly created wallet.

And then from there, we would disperse the funds evenly from that fresh wallet.

And just like that, the heist is a success.

Each of the people involved would get their cut and go on their merry way.

Some would convert their Bitcoin to Monero to make it harder to trace.

Others would convert it to cash in some sort of street deal type thing.

And others would just try to buy crazy things with crypto.

And of course, once they were able to steal money and get away with it, they wanted to do it again and again.

So it became a regular thing for these guys.

And Connor went along on a number of crypto heists.

There were ones that were smaller sums of money in maybe the tens of thousands.

And then there were some that were low to high six figures.

The biggest one was $2 million.

$2 million in one wallet.

In one wallet, yeah.

Or I think it might be might have been spread across a couple of different ones but it was one victim um that was two million

that was kind of a freak out moment when that happened uh that sounds like quite a high

yeah it was and that's the thing you know it it wasn't really about the money for me like i didn't spend if you look at all the other people there was a kid arrested releasing recently i don't know if you've seen it but it he stole hundreds of millions of crypto through sim swapping but he was spending his money on luxury cars and bottles and clubs i wasn't that type of person like i think i spent

a hundred thousand max out of two million that i had um

so it was more the high that i chased and and uh the sense of achievement that you'd get when you found the wallet looking back now it's pathetic getting the achievement from that but back then it was it was like a high

and it just became addicting then this i mean again it's still one of these crazy moments of of like,

whatever your family, what is your family like, life?

Like, you got, you got, uh,

you got like homework and stuff to do, and your family's like, Dave, make sure you do your chores, Connor.

You got to make sure to get this done.

And that, and you're like, okay, okay.

And then, and then they're like, giving you like a few, a few dollars for doing your chores or whatever.

I don't know what's going on there.

You just got like, oh, that's great.

But I got,

and then, and then I just imagine like, mom, don't interrupt me.

It's Friday night.

We got a I got a big thing going on tonight.

Uh just please do not come in my room.

Like, it was it just in the bedroom of your parents' house?

In the bedroom of my parents' house, yeah, but it's I live with my mom, or I lived with my mum back then, and and uh

see, I because I was making money or a smaller amount of money back in the in the heyday and the older days before any of this started, um I always kinda used to have a small bit of money just from different online ventures.

But when this happened, I had kinda told her and the rest of my family that I was investing in crypto because this was at the point of the crypto boom where Bitcoin first exploded.

So it was kind of believable that I had invested early with the funds that I made when I was 12 or 13 into Bitcoin and it's now exploded and multiplied my wallet when in reality it was it was stolen.

So that was the

I mean,

what were the excuses of just like, hey, I'm busy tonight.

Please don't schedule dinner for, like, just bring dinner in the room.

Like, I'm not going to come out because I'm on a really intense

investment thing.

What are you saying to her?

Yeah, see, I was kind of a hermit already, so it wasn't unusual for me not to leave the room for extended periods of time.

So it's,

I don't know, she didn't really suspect much because she was so used to it from years and years of me being like that.

Yeah.

And I've watched these old Western movies where

the bandits rob the train or whatever or the gold mine and they kill people on the way to do it, right?

But then there's like, you know, three or four bandits involved in this and they're camping out there

in the desert or whatever.

And they're looking at each other like, I could kill these other two guys and then I don't have to split my cut.

Was that kind of experience happening?

Because like you said, you see someone post on Twitter, hey, I've got $100,000 in crypto.

You're like, there's my target.

Well, if somebody sees your chat, like, oh, these kids just stole $100,000, there's our new target.

Let's target these kids.

Well, like other people targeting us?

Yeah.

No, not for me because of where I am, but I know it happened to a lot of other people in the States.

There was a lot of swatting and doxing and various things going on between the community.

People would get pissed off.

Targets would be stolen.

people would start doxing people, sim swapping them, swatting them, crazy things.

I know there's a bigger community now of violence as a service, which people are now using to hire people to commit violent acts against other community members, like throwing bricks through windows and things like that.

That wasn't a big thing back then, but I know it's increasing in popularity now.

All right.

Did we reach the height of this?

Like, is this where things start going wrong?

Yeah, so.

After the 2 million one, that was really where I called it quits.

I mean, I wanted to for a long time, but

the big one, someone kind of reached out to me

and I said I join in.

And then we did that and I got my split and that was it.

I was done.

And that went on for a good while.

I think that was in

2018.

Yeah, so altogether you said you've made about $2 million from all this.

Yeah, roughly around there.

Like you said, you stopped at around $2 million.

Was that a goal to hit $2 million and then say, I think I've got enough for a while?

What was your future plans?

no

yeah i'll get into the future plans in a minute but um

no there was no monetary value i think at that point just before that hack happened i think i was kind of my moral compass was starting to develop and and my conscience was starting to uh

to develop as well so i kind of started realizing that it was wrong and then that happened and

And then I kind of knew I can't do this anymore.

This is what I'm doing isn't right.

And I'm stealing money from people.

And that's when I kind of stepped away from it.

In terms of the exit plan, I had looked at a couple of different things.

There's a couple of islands.

One that I was looking at was St.

Kitts and Nevis.

So you could purchase a citizenship through ownership of property.

So say you could buy a three-bedroom house for $300,000 and they would give you a passport.

And St.

Kitts and Neves are these islands, I think they're the Virgin Islands or something like that, they have no income tax.

So I was kind of thinking of buying a house there, moving over there and somehow laundering my money.

I mean, it was a pipe dream now that I think of it now.

But back then, that was my plan of action.

That's a funny plan because

that sounds like, I don't know,

gangster drug dealer plans of like, okay, we're just going to rob one more bank and then we're going to disappear into the Virgin Islands.

And it's not a plan for an 18-year-old to be like, I'm retired at the age of 18.

Yeah.

And then I'm just going to live on the island forever now.

It's a weird feeling.

I was hoping, I don't know what I'm hoping, but it's like, okay, now I have this money.

I'm going to start a big business and I'm going to start the startup and I'm going to do this great stuff.

After it, I had kind of,

before it ended, I had kind of started thinking about how to legitimize my skills.

So I was thinking of maybe opening up a cybersecurity consulting business because of what I was doing, which is ironic.

But I was thinking of using my funds to create a business to protect people online or help them protect their organizations or themselves.

So that was also part of the exit plan to create my own consulting company in that space.

But yeah, that never panned out.

You had these plans.

You're like, okay, that's the end.

Last one.

That was a big, nice one.

Do you just leave the group entirely or?

Yeah, kind of, yeah.

It got to a point where I had stopped and then

I was so paranoid that every day I would be searching SimSwap arrest and things like that.

And one day I had woken up and checked my phone and I had searched this term.

And I had seen one of the people I was associated with was arrested over in America in the States.

And

that's when I kind of knew my time was coming

once I seen this article.

And then it was really just a countdown then after that.

Yeah, so what did you do after that?

Nothing.

Nothing.

I just waited.

You got to go to the Virgin Islands.

No.

Now's the time.

Go, go, go.

Because, like I said,

my conscience was growing more and more guilty.

I was developing as a person.

I was a young adult, so I was growing older.

My brain was kind of developing out of being a stupid little kid stealing money.

So, I mean, my guilty conscience just told me to just wait and get arrested, and that's what happened.

One of the holders in this group, the person who had the physical phone during the sim swap, was just 15 years old.

His parents heard him calling T-Mobile, trying to act like someone else lying on the phone.

His parents caught him in the act and they called the police on their own kid.

Or so the story goes.

That 15-year-old was very cooperative with the police, which Connor thinks is how the police learned who he was.

Well, that, and Connor simply went by Connor in the group that he was with.

So his OPSEC wasn't really that good.

I was woken up by a knock on the door

while I was in bed, really.

My mother let him in.

I'd say 12 to 15 police officers came into my room.

Your mother had probably had no idea.

No clue at all.

You had done anything illegal.

Yeah.

Okay, so the twelve officers, twelve officers come in your room?

There was a huge amount, yeah, because they obviously needed the search team and they didn't know whether I was gonna

kick off or try and hurt them.

That's gotta be quite the shock to be sitting there playing CSGO or whatever and turn around and say twelve officers in your room.

Like, well, hold on, fellas.

Yeah, so I was actually asleep in bed, so I had woken up.

I sat up and opened my eyes, and in a semicircle surrounding the end of my bed was was this mass amount of police officers and I thought I was dreaming so I went to grab my phone next to me and they kind of shouted at me, put the phone down.

I went to go and check the time.

So

that's when it hit me then that this situation is happening now and

there's police in my home.

Do the police in Ireland have guns?

No, not not normal officers, no.

Okay, so you had no guns pointed at you?

Not from what I can recall.

There might have been a couple of armed officers, but I highly doubt it.

I mean, they knew what they were getting into when they raided me.

They knew this fat little 18-year-old wasn't going to pull out an AK-47 and start shooting them.

They had no idea, but that's why they brought 12 of them with them.

Hey,

it's not just some fat little 18-year-old.

We got to really muscle this guy if he does something.

Okay, so, I mean, that's quite a shock.

So I imagine they start talking with you.

They take all your devices?

They took all my devices.

I'd asked to see the search warrant and they produced it.

United States versus Connor Freeman or whatever, extradition request search warrant.

And

and then it all started becoming real.

They started searching everything and then brought me down to the the station and and booked me into the system then.

And did you tell them you did it or did you talk or what?

No, I I kinda acted ignorant, but I mean the the evidence was substantial that they had.

So, I mean, they weren't relying on me saying I did anything.

I mean, I was kind of screwed either way.

So, I mean, I didn't really have to tell them anything.

I was just arrested.

I was brought down to the police station and they carried out a search and seized all my devices.

Okay, so the United States wanted you.

They didn't want you.

This was not an Irish investigation.

That's correct, yeah.

Well, that's scarier, I think, because the United States is more harsh on um criminal criminals than the Irish.

Well, I wouldn't say that.

I mean,

maybe in terms of of headline sentencing, but

for white-collar crime, I think they're they're pretty similar.

But it it was an extradition request, so there's an extradition treaty between the USA and Ireland that that they can um

I don't know exactly how it works, but uh the the USA can conscript conscript Irish police forces to to carry out an arrest arrest on their behalf to be extradited back to the the states.

So that's that's what happened.

You so you went to the United States?

No, didn't go to the US.

No, so I was arrested on this extradition warrant and I was booked into an Irish jail

but but they had sought my extradition so it's obviously a long legal process before that actually happens.

So I was booked into an Irish jail.

And I was there for a couple of weeks

and then, yeah, I was kind of released.

So

when my property was searched, I had all my crypto in a treasure hardware wallet.

That was never found when my house was being searched.

So while I was on bail, I had made an agreement with

my lawyer to hand over my crypto wallet to the Irish police to then hand over it to the U.S.

So I'd given up all of my assets.

voluntarily.

That's a decision I've heard that other criminals in your situation have to think hard about.

Because the two options are hold on to it until after all this is over, maybe 10 years from now, and I come back and there's all this crypto that I could just live off of, or give it all up in order to reduce my sentencing.

And hopefully that's like a nice gesture that they notice and think

positive of me forgiving it.

Yeah, well, it was a mix of both.

To me, really, it was dirty money.

So whether I had it or not, I didn't care.

I didn't really want to be in possession of it anyway anymore because it was

it just didn't feel right having that money so

I we made an agreement I'll give it back to them and and uh that obviously went in my favor in the end but um

yeah I I was in jail for about a month and then I was released on bail and then the the legal process went on for quite a while until I was eventually sentenced.

I thought there was an article where I saw that you were gonna get a hundred and eight years.

Yeah, so the headline sentence sentence in the USA was 108 years.

That's the maximum penalty for each of the charges added up consecutively.

I mean, did you freak out if you heard?

Did you hear that that was a possibility?

Are you going to go to prison for 100 years?

It definitely freaked me out, yeah.

What did they sentence you to?

So I got three years in prison.

And then because I spent a month in jail, I was given one month off.

So it was two years and 11 months.

And in Ireland, you typically every prisoner gets a quarter of their sentence off, but if you're sentenced to under three years, you get a third of your sentence off.

So I served 11 or 12 months in total out of the two years, 11 months.

So what was prison like?

It was fine.

I mean, it helped me a lot in some ways.

It was fine.

Well, I mean, prison is prison.

It was as fine as it can be.

A lot of people ask me how did it feel when when I got arrested and I spent my first time in first night in jail and they're weirded out when I say it felt great, but like that was the best sleep I'd had in years because I I my conscience had grown so guilty and I had felt so bad like I was sleeping horribly for a long time.

So when I finally got arrested it was kind of like a

kind of moment like I could sleep peacefully

knowing that this was the end of things.

How did you pass the time in prison?

Exercising and reading, really.

I read a lot and I exercised a lot.

What kind of books did you like reading?

A lot of self-help books.

Yeah.

Okay, so how long have you been out of prison?

I've been out since 2020, I think.

What's going on now?

I literally just finished a master's degree in cybersecurity last month, so I was doing that for two years.

After I got out of prison, I think I'd been out for about a year and I'd seen a college here was offering a course in masters in cybersecurity.

I'd applied for that, and luckily I was accepted and undertook that for the last two years.

So I've just finished that last month.

Similar to what you wanted to do, right?

Which is to help people get secure.

Yeah, it's kind of

turned around a lot.

The opposite of what I used to be.

A big thank you to Connor Freeman for coming on the show and telling us this wild internet adventure, he went on.

Stay out of trouble, kids.

This episode was created by me, the pocket pirate, Jack Reece Sider.

Our editor is the busy tone bandit, Tristan Ledger.

Mixing by proximity sound, and our intro music is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder.

I wanted to make my phone sim swap proof, so I opened up the little SIM card tray and I filled it with glitter and hot glue.

Now, if someone tries to get in there, they're going to get a dazzling surprise.

This is Darknet Diaries.