164: Oak Cliff Swipers

Man, have I got a story for you?

Where did this one even come from?

Oh, yeah, it was uh, it was Twitter.

I got a Twitter DM, and this guy's like, Hi, I'm Nathan.

I'm like, Okay,

and he was like, Yeah, I've done some

stuff,

and you might want to interview me.

I should note right here that this episode has a lot of swear words, and I would say it's for mature audiences.

So, if you have some sensitive ears around you, I recommend listening to this one with headphones or whatever you need to do.

That's your warning.

That's your graphic warning for this one.

So typically when someone DMs me and says, hey, you know, you should interview me for your show, my first response without even knowing anything about them is, can I see your police reports?

Because a lot of people who message me, they like want to be on the show for hacking something, but maybe they've never been caught.

And so I hate to glorify their actions, right?

But even more so, it's probably true that their story isn't over yet and it's just the beginning beginning.

and i should probably check in with them like in a few years to see how things are going but i also have ceos message me and say hey i'd like to come on the show and tell you about my product and how great everything is and how great we can defend things and stuff and so when i just immediately start by asking for a police report that cuts right through a lot of the small talk and gets right to the heart of what i'm looking for i want to know about the worst day of your life the the thing that happened that was just catastrophic to you and And you probably don't even want to talk about that.

But with this guy, Nathan, I ask him for a police report.

He just starts sending me link after link and news reports and files and videos and photos and yeah, indictments and affidavits and all that stuff.

And it was piling up.

This story just kept growing.

I couldn't even keep up.

And I was like, okay, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's definitely talk.

Whatever this one is, it looks like it goes deep.

So I'm like, hey, we should probably switch to Signal, which is a more private messaging app.

And he gives me his Signal number and I message him there and we start talking.

But then I find out I'm actually talking to his brother, a different guy.

I'm like, what, what the, what, hey, man, I thought, I thought I was talking to you on Signal, but it ended up being your brother.

And he's like, yeah, I gave you both me and my brother, my brother's signals.

You could talk to both of us.

And I'm like, okay, which one is yours?

So he tells me which one is his.

And I'm like, okay, let's do a call.

And he's like, great.

Give me a date and time and I'll be there.

And I'm like, all right, well, how about this weekend?

He's like, hell yeah.

Saturday, I'm free all day.

I'm like, great, let's do it.

Saturday comes.

I wake up and I check the signal and I got a message from him and all caps.

And it's like, I have to work until midnight, but it's not that hard.

So I can multitask and I can talk to you at the same time.

I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

Don't call me while you're at work.

Finish your job and then we'll talk.

How about tomorrow, Sunday, 10 a.m.?

He's like, yeah, that sounds great.

I got nothing going on all day Sunday.

So when Sunday, 10 a.m.

comes around, he messages me saying, man, my baby mama is tripping.

So I have to drive my daughter somewhere.

I'm going to be two hours late for the call.

I'm like, oh, okay, no problem.

It's Sunday.

See you in two hours.

So two hours go by and I'm like, all right, you ready?

And he's like,

my phone is about to die and I'm not near a computer.

So

let me charge it on a power bank for 30 minutes.

I'm like, okay, fine.

And I think at this time, he like went to his mom's house or something.

And she's like 70 years old.

And I think he was going to take her to the store or something.

But then he texts me a photo of her.

And she's all dressed up, ready to go out, jewelry on, purse in hand, but she's passed out on a couch.

And he tells me, she drank too much and passed out.

And then he tells me, like, it's not even her house.

Someone's asking me to take my mom somewhere else.

So now I've got to drive my passed out mom somewhere.

And then he starts filling my texts with wild chats.

He's like, I don't even know some of the shit he was saying to me on Signal.

It's like he was going to show me a video of him cussing out some cops.

And then he told me his brother is on the run due to some impending felonies.

And I'm like, is that the same brother I talked to?

He's like, yeah, man.

And he tells me his uncle killed himself and how he chose his kids instead of his uncle's life.

And I can't even follow what he's saying.

But then he goes swimming and he sends me a photo of him swimming in a pool with his daughter.

And

needless to say, we did not get a chance to do a call that weekend, even though I was sitting on the line for like six hours waiting for him to show up.

So, we tried to reschedule, but man, we had a lot of conflicts.

All I'm trying to say is that this guy, Nathan, is one wiggly guy and is hard to get on the phone.

But eventually, we got on the phone together.

You made it.

Yeah.

So, what are you doing right now?

I'm sitting right here

with the bomb in front of me in front of the five computer screens.

What about why five?

I mean, because my brain's going so fast oh yeah you only have two eyes though

but they're going everywhere

what's what's it

you see them all at the same time kind of you know what i mean

why what's going on in your brain why is it going so fast explain to me your process your brain here it's like fireworks constantly exploding in my brain yeah so Give me an example.

Are you like, oh, I got to check an email.

I got to check Twitter.

Like, what's going on?

Yeah, like a thousand, a thousand.

No, babe, I'm not talking to you.

It's my daughter.

No, honey.

I'm doing an interview.

She said, oh, okay,

yeah.

Yeah.

So,

so I'll, I'll prepare for the worst and then hope for the best.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

That way, you're never surprised.

Yeah, and you've gone through some pretty bad stuff.

So, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You've got different levels of trauma.

Right.

There are levels to it, for sure.

For sure.

Yeah.

Like, they need to scale for that.

Maybe all this new AI supercomputer shit, they'll come up with some good shit.

We're going to be cyborgs by like, by like 2030, we're going to be getting two years younger every year.

Yeah, yeah, I hope so.

I don't want to get older.

They want to live forever.

You know what I mean?

Yeah,

I want that.

I mean, I don't know if I want to live forever.

All right.

Let's start with what's your first name,

Nathan.

Okay.

I got in my notes that Nathan is the ringleader of this whole enterprise.

Well, you know,

I mean, if they would have really got the people that should have got or whoever, then it's probably

my mother-in-law that would have been the ringleader.

It gets worse already.

We haven't even started.

It already gets worse.

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

I'm Jack Reeseider.

This is Darknet Diaries.

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nathan grew up in oak cliff an area near dallas texas they put me on riddling when i was six years old bro riddling wow first day of kindergarten.

I tried to stab a kid at school.

Because your head was fireworks.

Wait, did you say you tried to stab a kid at school?

First day of kindergarten.

Oh, man.

You were that kind of kid.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

MHMR for real.

Yeah.

And then, of course, the drugs didn't help.

When you're self-medicating, you're thinking it's helping it, and it ain't helping.

By the time he was 14, him and his brother were really into video games.

Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft were his favorites.

And at the time, there was an underground market where you could buy and sell in-game items for real money.

So they'd play these games and try to sell things within the game.

Well, I was like 14 and I was selling Diablo 2 items.

I kept getting scammed on PayPal chargebacks.

So I just joined that side because they seemed to be making more money because I was losing more.

And there's his origin story.

He got scammed, and the scammer didn't get in any trouble at all.

He got away clean with Nathan's money.

He was like, all right, all right, I see how this world is.

Either you're getting scammed or you're the scammer.

Might as well be the scammer.

Like,

I knew right from wrong from when I was a kid.

I chose this path.

My parents didn't raise me like this.

My parents raised me to do right.

But when I got tired of getting scammed, I just chose the path to the dark side.

But his origin story isn't as simple as that.

If you know Oak Cliff, you may also know that that's a rough area of town to grow up in.

So I was raised middle class, but I lived in the hood.

Like my parents made probably about $100,000 a year.

Okay.

You know, we had the nicest house in the neighborhood and shit like that.

But I was raised in the streets.

Yeah, so tell me what was shitty about your neighborhood.

You know,

police chasing people around the neighborhood, shooting up people at three o'clock in the morning, you're looking out your window and there's three helicopters in the sky looking for somebody and the spotlight's signing on your house.

Shit, like that, gunshots, uh, you know, seeing people get shot.

Uh,

yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, I learned, I picked up all my bad habits at school.

I mean, that's where everybody learns all the bad shit, right?

Is that school?

And then I got on the internet, and then I started picking up all the bad shit.

Once I started getting into wares and programming and AOL back in 94, 95, 96, 97, 98.

Well, I think there's some sort of reflection here of like, it's like, hey, look, if I'm going to be nice, people are still going going to rob me and beat me up and all this sort of thing.

So I got to toughen up.

I got to be a jerk to the world because the world's a jerk to me.

And that's why I turned into a monster.

You're like, seriously?

Like, I just, I just did 13 years in prison and

I didn't even know I could fight that good.

I mean, I got into a lot of fights growing up where I grew up at, but I didn't know I was a beast.

People learn a lot about themselves in prison, don't they?

Yeah, you do.

I mean, I'm still learning things about it.

I just, I just realized what a couple of triggers I had that were pissing me off and how easy they were to change.

So I didn't get mad no more.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like self-discovery.

Like I'm just now getting self-discovery

because I've been clouded by drugs my whole life.

So who were you living with at 14?

I was living with my mom and dad in Oak Cliff,

Dallas.

And your brother living together as well?

Yes.

Yeah.

Me and my little brother.

All right.

I just dropped out of school.

Dropped out.

let me guess um

you were i want to i want to say dirtbag but it but you probably don't

don't call yourself a dirtbag i'm trying to guess what kind of person you are but i imagine just you got into drugs and just screwed around and like forget this i'm done with this and you didn't shower and you just played video games i don't know what i was i was out pivot hose

what

okay when i was sleeping i was out chasing pussy yeah

It was crazy like like so I dropped out and my mom bought me a computer from the IT guy at work.

It was a 486 Pentium and I want to say it was a

14 four baud modem

and

I've been stuck on a computer ever since

And this whole time Nathan and his little brother were watching how people were making money in their area and living in the hood you could probably guess what kind of stuff that they were seeing a A lot of hustlers and they were set on trying to find ways to make money themselves, but they were also super into computers.

So that's where they focused on trying to make money.

Okay, so like my whole life, me and my little brother, we always made money on the internet through like video games, through selling currency and stuff like that for games and stuff.

How do you do that?

For like selling in in-game currencies for different video games.

Like we used to have a couple of Diablo 2 dupes and we sold Diablo 2 items and we sold Wild Gold and we we had a virus, a brute kid virus that stole all accounts for every gaming platform that they had.

How are you getting the gold to sell?

Oh, we were buying it from stolen PayPals and shit.

Ooh.

So we got to step back a second about it.

Oh, that's a whole story.

So you got to

be in it.

It's just 94, you know?

I was doing it back in the BBS days.

Holy cow.

So he'd buy access to someone else's PayPal account, buy some in-game gold with that, and then he'd have the gold in his video game account, and then he'd sell that gold to some other player for real cash, which he could put in his pocket.

In this way, he was using World of Warcraft gold as sort of a money laundering mechanism.

And this led him to chat rooms where people were selling or trading credit card dumps.

This is where they get their hands on some full credit card details so that they could buy whatever they want with it and they just weren't hitting bro like you know it'd be like hit or miss like you know because they have all them uh algorithms and running so it would be hit or miss and then but then when you when you when you get a good one it'd be a banger you know so now i was like man so then we were sat down again and we're like well there's got to be a better way because these just ain't working see i've got to hand it to these two boys they were incredibly persistent and diligent at finding ways to make money sometimes it was legal sometimes it wasn't They would study a lot, learn how to do stuff, try it, fail, and then pivot and try something new.

They were young teenagers, though.

So a lot of the stuff they were doing was really dumb and not working.

But they knew there was loads of money to be made online somewhere, scamming, stealing.

It was just a matter of trying lots of stuff before finding where the good stuff was.

One idea was the one that his mother-in-law came up with.

He was married in, I don't know, 2008-ish, and his wife worked at Walmart.

And And his mother-in-law gave him an idea.

When someone goes to use a credit card to buy stuff at Walmart, the cashier tries to scan the card in the little machine.

And if it works, okay, great.

The card is charged and the person goes on their way.

But sometimes the magnetic stripe gets screwed up.

The card is broken or something like that, and it doesn't swipe right.

So if the cashier can't swipe the card, then they look at the numbers on the card and punch those numbers into the cash register manually and charge the card that way.

Well, his mother-in-law was like, So, what you guys should do, Nathan, you should bring a totally broken card when my daughter is on the register and put on the card a bunch of credit card numbers for her to try.

And she'll just keep punching in random credit card numbers until you guys find one that actually works.

My ex-wife was a manager at Walmart.

So, when I tell them that my card, I've demagnetized a strip on a card so that it would say they got to punch it in.

They can manually enter the number then if it doesn't swipe.

Then she came over there and put in her little manager key and I give her a blank card, like a blank PVC card with just a mag strip on the back of it with a post-it note on the front of it, with like eight card numbers, eight CGBs, and eight expiration dates.

And we just sit there and run that bitch and get whatever we can get off of them.

Can you guess what he was trying to buy with this?

Stacks and stacks of gift cards.

If a random card would work, then he'd buy as many gift cards as he could on that bogus, made-up, stolen credit card number.

I got $30,000 worth of gift cards in one day from her Walmart.

You didn't actually spend any of the gift cards right oh no we spent them all why you spent what'd you spend thirty thousand dollars in gift cards on

uh well you know it's half price when you're selling it anyways and when you're selling quantities like that you got to go down about 40% anyways so okay so you were reselling them and then other people were spending it yeah god damn it but i had sold one to my mom so she could you do bill pay at walmart So I sold one to my mom.

And then they jammed my mom up too.

My mom is retired and so she got her job at walmart when she retired

so what did your mom think of you giving her a stolen gift card like that's i i imagine you've been in trouble like a thousand times by this point but i i should have been asking this like what do your parents think of you

but you aggravated assaults with deadly weapons

Yeah, kind of garden, you are stabbing someone and then aggravated assaults.

I imagine it's not news for your mom to hear that you're doing crazy shit.

Right.

But yeah.

Okay.

So I don't even know what

fireworks, bro.

Fireworks.

At some point, the people at Walmart caught them and they put them in a room and interrogated them and told them, don't ever come back here again.

But nothing ever came of that.

I can talk about this now because the statue of limitations ran out and except my dick.

They're already nothing except my dick.

So.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Don't say anything that's going to get you in trouble here.

Yeah, I make sure the statue of limitations is ran out.

Yeah.

And

I should say that my journalistic ethics or policy here is that anything you tell me in the past, I'm not going to tell anyone except for whatever goes out publicly, right?

But if you tell me that you might like harm someone in the future or commit some crime in the future, then that puts me in a moral pickle where I'm just like, man, I could have prevented like a

you have a moral obligation to do what's right.

Yeah.

So don't tell, don't get me involved in any of this.

Don't tell them you're going, I'm gonna go kill some pedos.

You're not gonna tell me.

Don't tell me you're what you're gonna do in the future.

That's all I'm saying.

If I was going to

pedophiles, you wouldn't tell them

because it's not morally right to go tell the medical girl kill some pedophiles.

Well, have you heard, like, if you tell someone your plan, they're probably part of the conspiracy at that point just because you tell them?

You know, the feds give out one-person conspiracies.

What

I have a homegirl that was locked up in the feds.

She was on a one-person conspiracy.

Oh my gosh, that's the phone conversations and shit.

Man, fireworks is right.

All right, let's get back on track.

Okay, so that plan didn't work, and it was time for them to try something new.

We started OGH crew online gangster hackers and shit.

So we had like the original 419 scammers from Nigeria and shit.

We had some of them in our crew.

Like, it's crazy.

Like, the people that you meet online, bro, from all different regions of the world and just different cultures.

And, and it's amazing how, uh, but but you get on the internet and you know, we're all alike.

Everybody's everybody.

You can be wherever you want to be on the internet.

We fucking messaged this one uh China dude,

and they were, they did like back then, they did like uh fake iPhones and shit like that.

And uh, he had MSRs and uh

skimmers and

embossers and tippers and all that shit.

This is equipment to steal credit cards and print credit cards.

The MSR is a MagStripe reader writer.

So if you get a blank credit card, you could program it with the MSR.

They studied up on how all this works and they thought, yeah, if we get a skimmer, we could collect our own credit cards.

No need to buy dumps from others.

So he was like, all right, let's buy a skimmer.

But he had like a hell of a deal, bro.

It was like, you got to buy 10 of them, though, and they were like $250 a piece back then.

We saved up, got $2,500, and ordered them.

And we got

a couple MSRs, but we got most of the skimmers out.

Like, I had gas pump ones and everything.

Yeah,

so did you try putting those skimmers on gas pumps and stuff?

Oh, yeah, we had them on gas pumps.

How'd that, okay?

Okay.

I've never talked with anybody who's ran that.

So

tell me this process.

Was gas pumps your number one place you put them on or did you put them on other things?

I mean, we had we had ones on ATM machines too

back in the days too, but the part the problem was with them was trying to get get the pin recorded, right?

Like they didn't have the

3D printers now where you could print something that looks just like it, that's uh paper, that's paper thin that you could put right over the top of it.

You know, they didn't have shit like that back then.

So it cost $200 for one skimmer,

and that was cheap.

That was cheap.

Okay, they used like $600 back then.

Okay.

So you

so yeah, tell me about putting your first skimmer

that particular order was the ones that were about the size of a big lighter

and they're wireless.

Yeah.

And they Bluetooth on them.

Okay.

So tell me about putting your first skimmer on a machine.

Well, it's a gas station right around the corner from my house that I've been going to my whole life.

So

I mean, I used to like clean up the parking lot and shit when I was a kid at this gas station.

So it's like

they wouldn't ever fuck with me about anything anyways.

So I just put it in there and let it sit for about a week.

Yeah.

So you're not even nervous driving up to it, like, okay, here we go.

We're going to put this in.

You're just like,

I already got the keys for all the gas pumps.

Like, I live in the hood, so it's like, you can get whatever you want to get into anything.

Okay, so he leaves this skimmer on the gas pump for a few days.

And in case you don't know what a skimmer is, it fits right over the credit card reader on the gas pump.

So when you go to swipe your card to buy some gas, his skimmer will also read your card and save the data from it.

It's meant to look just like a regular scanner on the gas pump so that you don't notice it.

And this is why every time I go to swipe my card anywhere, I first grab the reader and wiggle it hard to see if it comes off because then it would be a skimmer.

After a few days, he comes back and pulls it off the pump.

And then he has to learn how to get the data off it.

Okay, so you can either unplug it and hook it up to your computer usb and it just downloads this so it opens it up and it's just like a pile

or you could bluetooth them then the later on tap bluetooth you just go bluetooth to it download okay so when you grabbed it and you and you connect it to your computer what'd you find

track one and track two information and bro i had the reason they caught me with all the victims and 6500 victims from over 100 different banks is because

I was trying to crack the code, bro.

Crack the code?

As an an algorithm.

I'm trying to generate thumps.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you just wanted to crack out each one of them, I'd be able to figure out the sequence, you know what I mean?

Yeah, because it's just a 16-digit number plus a CBV code.

If you could figure out a way to find those.

I mean, they already got gee ratios for the numbers.

So if you could just find how they get out, how they get the CBV code, you'd be good.

Yeah.

And that's what you were trying to do.

Right now, today.

So

I actually tried that same thing when I was a teenager.

Like, hey, this is just 16-digit code.

Let me just type in gibberish into this form and see if I could order shit.

And, of course, none of it worked.

And I was like, okay, this is beyond me.

Well, I just was doing it random, trying to think, like, how do they know if this is a real card?

I'm just going to type in whatever.

And then they somehow knew.

But I always just used mom and dad's credit card to find out.

And then I knew the cards work like that.

And then so I just started selling everybody else now.

Yeah.

Okay.

So

how many cards did you get from that gas pump?

Oh, probably like 83 or something like that, if I remember correctly.

Dang.

That was like for three A's?

And what did you do with those cards?

I sat on them.

I didn't do nothing with them.

Why?

I was scared.

Yeah.

They just weren't familiar enough with how all this worked.

The cards they were punching in at Walmart were just random numbers that they were trying.

And the dumps that they were buying, well, they knew that those were already stolen by someone else.

But these cards they were skimming themselves, that's new to them they never stole credit cards before like this so they just had to sit on them and let the heat cool down for a little while we're going to take a quick ad break here but stay with us because wherever you think this story is going i promise you it gets way crazier than that

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Okay, Chicken Express.

That's what this chapter is called.

Chicken Express.

I've never been there, but I'm looking at it on Google Maps and there's actually a bunch of them in Texas.

It's a drive-through fast food chicken joint.

And during busy times, they have two lanes for cars to line up in.

But in order to take the order from that second lane, a cashier needs to walk out to the car and take the order and then also take their money so that they can go into the building and charge the credit card or get change for them.

Nathan's brother's girlfriend, Elizabeth, got a job at Chicken Express taking orders.

And

what he would do is,

He had this little girlfriend and like, you know, manipulation, all that bullshit.

So, you know how that goes yeah you can convince any woman to do whatever you want just like they can convince every man to do what they want him to do so

she was working at chicken express and we're like okay

they had the skimmers from before and they were like you've got this great big apron on put the skimmer in your front apron pocket and then when you take the person's credit card into the building to swipe it also swipe it in the skimmer in your apron the machine to charge the card was inside the restaurant so that she would take the card, leave, and come back, which would give her ample opportunity to stick it in that pocket and swipe it through that skimmer.

Because it don't matter which way you go on the skimmer or anything, it's going to record it.

All right, I get it.

They basically were just grabbing a copy of everyone's credit card that came through that Chicken Express lane.

Her first day doing it, she got eight cards.

Not bad.

But again, they're too scared to use them.

They've just stolen eight cards.

Take it easy.

Don't do anything with it.

His brother was the one who was grabbing the cards off of Elizabeth Skimmer and keeping it on his computer.

He didn't want to share them with Nathan.

Right.

Well, we were just going to save them up for a while.

And what we really, what plan was is to start selling dunks.

Okay.

But I had other ideas in my head.

My little brother had his ideas.

I had mine.

Yeah, what was your brother's ideas?

Well, he didn't want to use them.

I wanted to to use them.

Why?

Okay.

This is what I don't understand.

Both of you have now spent $2,500 to buy skimmers.

You've both gotten dozens of cards from it.

And then you're like, let's not use this for anything.

Because we didn't know nothing about that side of it.

You know what I mean?

Like the dump side of it.

We knew what track one, track two was, and we knew how to put them on cards, and we knew all that stuff, but.

We didn't know none of the,

I guess, we were trying to do OPSEC on it.

You know what I'm saying?

Like I figured out.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

So you're just being hesitant.

If we were to use these,

we were detecting it, hacking it.

Trying to figure out

how their system worked.

We didn't know if we used one of these, they were going to come

busting down our door right there or not.

We didn't know.

That's right.

Yeah.

So we were more cautious about it.

Okay, fair enough.

But she keeps skimming them.

Yeah, she kept skimming them for months.

So they just sat on them, not sure what to do.

Just play cool.

Until one day, Nathan decided to use one.

One day I used like two or three, like we were stuck somewhere or something to handle gas or something.

Because we had an elaborate set up inside a vehicle to where we could make cards on our goat.

We'll get to that sooner or later.

Okay.

But

we didn't have no dumps, so we couldn't get none or we couldn't get no big back there.

It was Liberty Reserve.

We didn't have no Liberty Reserve to buy any our web money.

Uh

so we decided to use a couple of them.

They were bangers.

I'm talking about bangers, bangers, bangers.

He was storing these cards in a Google Doc and he took a few and got some blank credit cards and he used his MSR device to write the credit card details to the card.

At first, he just tried to use it on a gas pump and it worked.

He got gas with this card and then he went into a store and tried buying stuff.

And he says with just just a few cards he was able to buy three thousand dollars worth of stuff like every one of them hit bro every one of them hit of course they hit because they're cards you stole they're fresh right because the ones you were buying the ones you were buying online were sold to four other people before they were sold to you right yeah i know you didn't know that but that's why they weren't working yours yeah are fresh

we probably got scammed eight times before we ever got one that worked that's right yeah

you know

but yeah so we didn't know that they worked like that so once we used them fresh ones my brother brother didn't want to use no more, and I'm like, fuck him.

I got to, I'm going.

My wheels are spinning in my head.

And once I see the taste of money, it's like, I'm not worried about pussy.

I'm not worried about drugs.

You ever been addicted to making money?

You talk about being addicted to making money.

Because it's an addiction.

He had some of these cards from the skimmers that he was putting around town, but it was his brother who had the most amount of cards.

From all the cards, his girlfriend Elizabeth was skimming at Chicken Express, but his brother wasn't sharing those cards cards with Nathan and his mind was racing with how to get those from his brother I don't I don't know if you how much of the federal paperwork you read or if you looked anything up but there was like uh 58 people they weren't in the night 58 and they only got three of us well they had four of us but only three of us well you have to tell me when those other 55 come into play because we've only listed three so far they've already they've already been involved with all that we're already making cars well by that time we're already making cards we're already deep in the game by then this is when we get the fresh dumps and we're using the fresh dumps that were skimmed that's what our fat case started because of okay so the the other 50 people were involved before this

not necessarily all 50 of them like my brother his people and i had my people my brother had like four or five people and i had like 30 people

okay and that and these other people what were their roles

shoppers See, Nathan had a Fargo printer, which is a classic printer used to make IDs.

Think membership cards or student IDs, employee badges.

But he was using it to make credit cards and he was making them look really good.

I'd print the cards and then program the MagStrip.

And

my little key trick was so they don't have to ask you for ID, just put your fucking picture in the corner of the fucking card.

So you had a guy that would, that you took a picture of him and you would print it on the card to make it look like a legitimate card.

It wasn't just a blank card.

You were printing on the card to make it look as good as possible.

Yeah.

And then he was taking it in the store and like, look, my picture's on the card.

How can you say that to not me?

Exactly.

Wow.

That's going the length there.

Like, this was like in 2008,

or seven and eight.

So like, nobody was doing it like that back then.

So he would go around his neighborhood and hit up people he thought might want the extra cash and have them come over.

And then he'd make a bunch of credit cards with their photo on it and have them go out and shop with stolen credit cards and then bring back any of the stuff you buy with it.

So, what I'll do, since I'm providing the cards,

I figured the cards were if they're buying a dump and they're making the card, so I charge $100 for the card basically, right?

Okay,

it's what so say they bring me back $3,000 worth of merchandise.

I can only sell it for half price, so it's $1,500 out the gate.

I'm taking $100 off for each card,

and then I'm paying you cash the rest.

God damn.

So, people,

yeah, okay, that's a pretty good incentive.

I could see why a bunch of people would want to get in on this in Texas.

Well, and plus, you know, like

I was in the hood, so everybody's broke.

Nobody has nice jobs and shit like that.

All their parents are crackheads or whores or prostitutes or pimps or the pushers.

The pimps are the pushes.

Okay, so all that was going around for a while with crappy stolen credit cards.

A lot, that didn't work.

But now Nathan is like, man, I'm sitting on a bunch of banger cards.

It's time to start making some real money money with these but his brother was the one who had the bulk of them and he wasn't sharing so my brother didn't want to uh use them and so i hacked my brother

i mean i hacked him and started using them wait you hacked your brother yeah

why not

you got something i want i

mean how'd you do that I mean, I just got on his computer and fucking and stole his phone.

I knew, you know, it's my little brother, you know, so obviously he

learned from me.

So he's going to think kind of like I think.

So it wasn't that hard to find the text document where it was hidden.

And I've seen him, you know, because it's his girlfriend that's doing it, right?

Yeah.

So, and then, you know, I didn't go to prison the first time until I was 30.

So I made a pretty good while before I got in trouble.

I did good for myself.

What age do you think your daughter is going to be before she goes to prison for the first time?

They're not going to prison.

Okay.

One of them graduated college.

The other one's in college.

My 16-year-old's fixing to graduate high school with her nursing shit done this year.

Do you have a better neighborhood that they're living in compared to where you grew up?

Yeah.

I mean,

it's Dallas, bro.

You know, it's a city.

So, I mean, it's like, bad shit happens everywhere.

You put it as like a badge of honor.

Like, man, i didn't go to prison till i was over 30 so i did pretty good most people either dead or or in prison by the time they're 30 in my neighborhood i grew up in oak cliff though see my my kids live in dallas with their mother yeah

garland i mean it's it's a little better i mean but it's still the city you know fast life

What did what did your dad do?

Like, was he a carpenter or a musician or whatever?

It's called fire systems and restaurants and paint booths.

Did he ever break the law?

he, what was his, what, at what age did he go to prison?

He went to, he went to jail when he was a kid, one time for running from the police because he had a race car.

He had a Dodge Challenger.

Yeah, I mean, when you say the fast life, it really does resonate with me because there is everything's just moving and changing, and things are happening.

And it feels uncomfortable because it's like, I'm not ready for this, but man, everyone else is doing it, so I better get ready for this because I got no choice.

Exactly.

It's like you're in a tank full of sharks.

So either you become a shark or you get eaten.

Okay, we need to get back on track.

All right, with the stolen file that he got from his brother, he had a whole new chest of cards to start cracking into.

And when I think about the supply chain here, it's pretty wild.

Elizabeth stole these cards from people at Chicken Express, and then she gave them to her boyfriend.

Actually, I think they got married sometime in there as well.

So she gave them to her husband.

Then Nathan steals the cards from him, and then he prints them onto cards and gives them to shoppers and swipers.

And then they go out and they buy things from the stores with them.

And then they sell those things back to Nathan for 30% of its value.

And then Nathan tries to sell it for 50% of its value on the streets.

So Nathan was a lot of people's hookups for just half-price stuff.

But despite being complex and long, the system was working.

With Nathan working with dozens of shoppers that were just going around buying stuff all the time, it was endless work for him.

He was making cards all day and reselling things and buying stuff, but he was making good money doing it all.

At this point, his brother realized that Nathan stole the cards and was unhappy about it, but was joining him on some of this anyway.

He, I mean, he had always joined.

He said I was doing too much because I was doing too much.

Anyway, he didn't want to miss out on all the money that he could get from these cards that his wife stole.

In order to be a good swiper, you got to believe in your heart and in your mind and in your body that this is your credit card.

This is your money.

If you don't, you won't do good.

You'll be one of them people that pays for the shit and then they ask you for an ID and you you burn off and you just burned yourself.

It's all about how you talk to people.

It's all about your finesse game, really.

Yeah.

And who you pick to check you out.

Did you teach people how to do that game?

Yeah, you got to.

Okay, teach me.

I want to be a good swiper.

Okay.

So I'm teaching you to be a swiper.

We'll give you a couple, probably like two or three cards, right?

Yep.

And I'm there to go.

I'm going to tell you what to go in there and get.

Like I plan people's routes out for them and everything.

Like back then it was MapQuest, right?

I'd plan their whole route out for him, tell them what stores to go to and everything, but I'd have it all woke down and everything.

So we would go to the store and you would come with me first and I'd show you how to do it.

I never, you never look up at a camera, never, never, I always wear a hat.

So, and I'm always looking down at my phone.

Always look, so always be on your phone.

That was the rule of 141.

Always be on your phone.

Because if you're looking down at your phone, you're always going to look down, right?

Yeah.

So you're not going to be looking up to where a camera can get a clear picture of your face.

That's why I get my federal document documents.

It says two unidentified white males, two unidentified white males.

There's always me and my brother.

Yep.

But it was two identified white males.

That's all it was.

Always cover up all your tattoos.

Wear black, wear a hat.

You know, things that are going to,

you know, make it not so obvious of who you are, but without not making it so obvious that you're.

hiding your identity right yep oh i liked i liked when i when i go get gift cards I'd like putting on some coveralls and getting them all dirty and shit.

Look like I've been working on the oil rig all day and I'm coming here to get $2,500 gift cards for my workers because they passed a safety test.

Yeah.

So then it doesn't look so obvious.

Then my brother's got coveralls with me.

He's with me.

My card don't work, right?

Yeah.

Bro, you're about to get on your card yet?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

My money got on my card.

Pay for my shit, bro.

And as soon as my shit gets on there,

I'll pay you back.

So he's at one register and I'm at the next register, and we're working together at the same time still, too.

Yeah.

So we're banging him double.

When I was doing that,

I went to

all the way to Missouri and back down and got like $30,000 worth of gift cards.

The dude sold them.

They were for eBay and PayPal.

And he had him buying a vet with them.

up eBay.

So over time, the shoppers and swipers and his network would be bringing him tons of stuff.

A lot was gift cards, but sometimes it was TVs and laptops and video game consoles, anything that would have a high resale value.

What I'd do is I'd have a storage and I'd fill it up.

And

there's pictures of it in my discovery packet.

And I'd fill it up.

And then I had a couple of Mexicans that are cartel.

They take all this shit back to Mexico, bro.

They'll buy that shit for cash because it's easier to transport that shit across the border than it is cash.

You're not going to lose it getting across the border.

They'll be able to drive right across.

It's crazy how much much logistics went into his operation, but the more cards he would get from skimming, the more cards he could just print and then give to shoppers, and they would be constantly bringing him stuff.

He had it all dialed in.

Bro, at the end of it, I was making like $5,000 cash a day profit.

But of course, in the wake of all his activity, it would mean that tons of cards were reported stolen and purchases were traced to certain locations.

And authorities started putting pieces together.

Napa, Texas, bro.

So basically half the United States.

This article says this case is being investigated by the Tyler Police Department, U.S.

Secret Service, the Smith County Sheriff's Office, the Henderson County Sheriff's Office, the Athens Police Department, the Canyon City Police Department, the Longview Police Department, the Mesquite Police Department, the Terrell Police Department, the Waco Police Department, the Corsican Police Department, the Waxichachi Police Department, the Van Zance County Precinct 4 Constable, Walmart Stores, Associate Asset Protection, and Southside Bank.

Yeah, it's crazy, right?

It wasn't too hard for them to all look at the cards for a common purchase point, which would indicate where they were likely stolen.

And the cops saw that Chicken Express and gas pumps were where these cards were getting stolen from.

Eventually, this meant the cops had an arrest warrant for Nathan.

And it didn't seem like they knew exactly what he was up to, but they had a strong suspicion that he was doing something wrong.

And for some reason, right around this time, Nathan broke up with his wife.

They got a divorce.

And she was the mother of his kids.

She wasn't clean from crime herself, though.

She got caught punching in those credit cards at Walmart, remember?

And the police gave her a stern talking to for that one.

But for whatever reason, the two of them broke up and we're done with that relationship.

I had, I met this bad bitch, bro.

So I had a bitch living in the house with me.

And I met this bad bitch, bro.

So I bring a bad bitch home with me and kick my other bitch out the night before, bro, that I got raided.

Bro, so I'm in there making some cards this morning.

It's like six o'clock in the morning, bro.

And

the dude comes over from across the street to get some cards.

I'm making some cards.

Five minutes later, bro,

I hear his bang on the door and they're kicking the door.

I fucking throw the laptop on the floor and I jump up.

He's in there.

And I come out.

I come into the living room.

They fucking got a gun in my goddamn daughter's head, bro.

She's like five years old, bro.

What?

And they're telling me to get down on the ground, but I said, get that fucking gun out of my daughter's face, you fucking bitch.

I'm like, I'm outrage, bro.

Like, I'm already freaking the fuck out.

His girlfriend and dad come home and they see Nathan in handcuffs in the front yard.

Then the Secret Service, they start asking me questions.

I'm like, I ain't got nothing to say.

And I'm like, well, they found stolen motorcycles here, drugs,

everything.

Believe in credit cards.

They raided the neighbor's house across the street to snitch on me.

They found a fucking baby white container with like a thousand cards in it.

They put them all in the news.

They have pictures of them.

all out on a table like they fucking, you know how they do.

They parade that shit around like they did something good.

yeah

i was just a modern day robin hood bro

that's all

i was from the rich and you were going to be you were not the robin hood you weren't giving you weren't giving anything to the poor you were the one making all the money you were like i want more money i want more money it looks like i made all the money because i had so many people working for me but everybody else made just as much money as i did

So the cops continued to question him, but he just kept quiet the whole time.

They told him, look, if you tell us the names of everyone involved, then we'll let you go.

But he didn't say anything, he didn't give up anyone's names.

And I'm not sure if they even knew he was the ringleader of all this or not.

They were like, Well, uh, we don't have anything to charge you with today.

I was going to have a search warrant.

Uh, you'll be receiving an indictment at a later date and left.

And you, they, they didn't take you, they just left you.

Nobody to jail.

They tried, they were trying to take my escalade, but they couldn't take my escalate because it wasn't in my name.

Never put nothing in my name.

Thank God.

So, okay, so what kind of cars did you have at the time?

I had a Jaguar, Lexus, and a catalog escalade.

Yeah.

And they couldn't take any of the cars?

No.

My Lexus is in my best friend's name.

The Escalade was in the cop's name I bought it from.

And my Jaguar is in my other homeboy's name.

So you were buying cars with this.

What else were you doing with the money?

Oh, we buy electronics, jewelry.

I had lots of jewelry and lots of guns.

Drugs?

Oh, yeah, lots of drugs.

Yeah.

I always had drugs.

What?

Of course.

Sorry to ask.

When they took me out for Riddling, what else did I have to do besides self-medicate?

Yeah,

they gave you drugs at the beginning.

Methamphetamines when I was six years old.

What did they expect me to turn into?

The cops did take all the blank cards, the gift cards, writers, and stuff that looked illegal.

I saw a picture of it.

They laid it all out on a table for the media to see.

One picture, I counted, over 200 gift cards just spread out all over the table.

And at the time, he was still living with his parents, his mom and dad, and his kids.

His little brother was living there, but his brother got a sense that Nathan was doing just too much and was going to move out.

And his brother was still mad that he stole the file off his computer.

He's mad as fuck.

Even though his brother did some of this activity himself, too, there was just too much going on for him.

It was getting too hot.

And his little brother moved out just before the cops raided the place.

He wasn't here, bro.

He already burnt off because he said I was doing too much.

I mean, ultimately, we would have got caught anyways.

I just kind of put us in the HOV line and got us there quicker.

Yeah, but their past of punching in credit cards at stores, buying dumps online, and getting dozens of people to help be shoppers, they were doomed from that alone.

The Chicken Express cards that they were using like this, it just sped up the process of them getting caught.

So after they rated us, I had $20,000 stash that they didn't find.

It was in a fucking one of the big flashlights that has the big, big square batteries in it.

Had five rows of $5,000 a piece wrapped up rubber band in there in my dad's room.

Didn't search, they didn't even search my parents' room at all.

Okay, all right, so what do you do after that?

Is he stopped cold turkey?

You became a good boy.

No, I smashed the gas on their bitch ass.

Smash the gas.

Most of the cops are already after me.

They already know what I'm doing.

The fuck am I going to stop for?

Marty in trouble?

Marty?

Oh my God.

No, I'm like what?

I'm an Aquarius for one.

So it's like I'm all or nothing.

I'm going to give it 110% or I'm going to give it no percent.

Same thing I do with my relationships.

But I'll go back to the childhood still like you were talking about earlier, you know?

You apply what you've learned to everything.

So what he knows is how to make money and be invisible.

So he grabs the $20,000 and goes on the run.

Like three days later, I went to Dallas and

I got me a staying at hotels at first.

And then I got me a spot, a little house that I was able to rent in somebody else's name, get the electricity and shit going on, somebody else's name, all that.

And

started making credit cards there.

My homeboy, my right-hand man, that lived with me, he sold drugs.

I sold credit cards.

So I never had to buy drugs anymore.

And he never had to buy credit cards no more.

Worked out.

Now, during that time, the police were also looking for his brother, but he was hiding out too.

But one day, his brother made a mistake with one of the stolen credit cards okay i i have it in my notes that he was at an arcade messing around with quarters he got like 200 worth of quarters at the fucking uh automated quarter machine with a credit card with a stolen credit card yeah and why was this suspicious at all

because people don't buy 200 worth of quarters I mean, not and put them in their pocket and leave.

Why would you put $200 worth of quarters in your pocket?

It is, I guess you're right.

I would have been playing video games.

So he just goes into the arcade, grabs $200 worth of quarters, and is like, I'm going to see you.

And the mall worker calls the cops.

Yeah.

And says, this guy's weird.

He put, he just bought $200 worth of coins and he's leaving.

He went shopping too.

He had a whole bunch of shit under the car outside the mall.

He had a whole bunch of shit under the car that he had been shopping in there all day, too.

Just follow the trail of quarters to the mall.

You'll catch them.

He's like, shit, that's easy $200.

That's like the Mac and let you get out per card.

So this is how his brother got caught.

And since they caught him in the act, they took him right to jail.

So they ended up catching my brother probably around November, and they got arrested in Dallas.

And I was, I had already knew a bondsman, so I called the bondsman and had the bondsman go get him right out, and he got out.

His brother was out of jail, but not for long.

Stealing from the mall is one thing, but running a huge stolen credit card ring is another.

So the feds came and arrested his brother and took him to jail a week later.

Oh, I couldn't bond him out the feds.

When the feds got him and the U.S.

Marshal detainer was on him, yeah, and they ain't no bonding out the feds, bro.

I had a hundred thousand dollars cash.

I tried to get him out, and they told me I was fucked.

So I ended up paying $20,000 for a federal lawyer.

That was the biggest waste of money ever.

So your brother is stuck in jail.

I can't get him out.

You can't get him out.

I mean, you know, this is my best friend, you know.

Oh, yeah.

My first best friend was my sister.

She died when I was 13.

She was killed in a drunk driving accident.

Oh, no.

So then my little brother became my best friend, you know?

So was she

a drunk driver hit her?

Yeah.

Were you in the car, too?

No, it was her and her boyfriend and then two other people in the other vehicle.

All four of them were intoxicated.

Your sister was intoxicated too?

Yeah, she was underage and she, like, we won a $5 million lawsuit against Dennis Rodman, bro, but it was under LLC, so we don't never get none of the money.

Wait, how does Dennis Rodman come into this story?

Well, it's not into the story.

It's into the story of my sister dying.

He owned the bar that they were at drinking underage and we the investigator that went there we got video of it and shit and we went in in court

okay so was it the car that your sister was in that was the drunk driver or was it the other car

both of them oh okay but everybody was drunk in both cars holy cow what a what a awful situation that is to lose your sister at 13.

Yeah, it was true.

That was probably my first real traumatic event in my life.

And that's when I started started using drugs.

That's when I blamed God for everything.

That's why, you know what I mean?

Like,

that's when my life really took a turn for the worst.

Really?

Dude, they hit you hard.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, getting a

knock on the door at four o'clock in the morning, two police officers being there, and you're 13 years old, and you're answering the door with your mom and dad because somebody's beating on the door at four o'clock in the morning.

And then you're hearing this.

So it's like,

yeah.

Our parents didn't know how to deal with losing a kid.

So how could they help us cope with losing a sister?

Yeah, right.

They're probably losing their mind.

They don't know their grief, and they can't help you, right?

I didn't do that.

Like, what are they going to do to tell it?

What are they going to do to help us?

So you had to find your own way, which is drugs.

Right.

That was my escape.

God damn.

My escape from reality.

And then once I figured out how to escape from reality, I mean, you escape from reality forever.

This time I've been told for like five months.

You've been sober right now for the last five months?

Yeah.

Oh, good for you.

Wow.

That's hard.

You know, it took me losing probably the love of my life to figure that out.

Wait, hold on.

We started this call.

You told me you had a bong in front of you.

I do.

I didn't say I smoke weed.

What are you smoking?

I don't know what to believe with you.

I believe I just took a bong rip.

Sober for five months.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, um,

so your brother's in jail.

You're stressed out on this.

You're hiding out from the cops.

Are you missing from the cops?

Or like, are they asking you to come to court?

And you're like, nope, I'm not coming.

I'm wanting.

So my brother's baby mama, Elizabeth, she's staying with my cousin in another house in Oak Cliff.

And I get a call one day that she was talking to

the Secret Service.

They're trying to get her to turn herself in.

And I find out about it.

I go back and tell her to get in the car.

She gets in in the car.

I tell her to give me her phone.

She gives me her phone.

I took a battery out, send the car out, throw the shit out the window, break that bitch in hand, throw it out the window, and tell her talking to coffee again.

I'm going to kill her.

Damn.

I kidnapped her.

What, you kidnapped Elizabeth?

Yeah.

And then she started getting high on methamphetamines, and now she's in jail still for methamphetamines.

I turned her out, fucked her life off.

What?

Never got high before.

I got her high for the first time.

She's been doing methamphens.

Oh, my God.

What?

My brother got custody of both his sons because

he could tell you all that stuff.

But yeah, he ended up getting custody of both of his sons because his baby mama was a piece of shit.

My baby mama was a piece of shit, too.

She got back with a guy that molested my kids.

Yeah, but you're the one who turned her into a piece of shit by getting her hooked on math.

It's not my fault she stayed addicted.

What is this?

This is

you need your own.

You need your own

TV show.

Someone needs to be following you with a camera.

We'd be all be rich.

You can't make this shit up.

I know.

Like, Jersey Shore would have nothing on you.

You would just be like,

and this is real life reality.

All that shit that they do is fake scripted shit.

Yeah.

So the indictment comes out.

It lists Nathan, his brother, and his brother's wife, Elizabeth, saying they were stealing credit cards from Chicken Express and then using those at Walmart.

Nathan was still wanted, though, missing, hiding out, and still making stolen credit cards.

I had a a budinguera a witch lady come from mexico a what a budinguera what the hell yep it's like a witch person a witch doctor or something

no that's they worship santa marte

why would you get this

so they can confront my house

how much did you pay them

i like 200 bucks

So what happened was, so I was ending up burning that candle in my house, one of the Mexican candles, and it stopped burning.

So my homeboy was still staying over there.

The cops came to the house looking for somebody, but it wasn't for me or for him or anything.

It was some wrong house, basically.

But I panicked.

And so I wasn't never going back there.

And somebody called me and told me the candle was going out.

I go to get the candle.

The candle was going out.

Never got the candle lit again.

So she could channel her spell and keep her spell protection over me.

Well, didn't work.

I was on the fucking channel 45811 News,

most wanted, top 10 DFW, most wanted by the U.S.

Marshals.

And

they're looking for me in my escalate.

So I dropped my escalate outcome Alexis.

And

we went and got our OCS for Oak Cliff Swipers.

We had a little swiping clit called Oak Cliff Swipers.

And

we went and got our OCS tattoos, me, my cousin, and one of my shoppers.

Tattoos.

You're on the run from the feds, and you're like, guys, we need to stop and get tattoos on the way out of town.

Oak Hill Swipers.

Oak Cliff.

Oak Cliff Swipers.

I got a song about it.

It called Oak Cliff.

That's my hood.

Oak Cliff.

Yeah, that's my hood.

Put it in his face.

Get that shit understood.

Yeah, this ain't what you want, boy.

Tell me.

That means you should be the opening intro music.

Oak Cliff.

That's my hood.

My main girlfriend shows up at the tattoo parlor.

So I got both my bitches there.

They didn't know about each other.

yeah.

They knew about it.

The side bitch knew about it, they didn't.

Okay, the main bitch didn't like the side bitch.

Side bitch didn't give a plug.

Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, that's how it usually works.

My cousin tells me, I got you, cuz.

So I make both my bitches sit in the back seat.

My cousin rides in the front seat with me.

We go to my cousin's house.

My side bitch goes in the house with me because my cousin and my main bitch don't get along.

They hate each other.

So she's like, You can't come to my house.

So this bitch is outside my Lexus.

I'm in the bed with my side bitch, my cousin's house.

I wake up the next morning, make some cars, roll a blunt, go start looking for my cousin, Rose Blunt.

She goes, Nathan, the cops are here.

My cousin, she had the doors open in the front of the house and was cleaning and shit.

She's seen the secret service car pull up.

There were just two secret service agents originally with one Dallas patrol car

when they came to arrest me.

And I don't know how they got the anonymous tip there.

I'm pretty sure it was my main bitch's fucking mama.

I'm about 99.9% sure,

and uh, it's all good, you know, I was gonna get caught immensely anyway, so I'm glad it went down like I did, and I didn't get hurt because I ran everybody out of the house.

My cousin's Mexican, she got like three kids at the house with her.

I got both my bitches are out of the house.

I ran everybody out of the house, put on my body armor, got my AR-15, loaded that bitch, had 10-30-round clips.

I was ready for war.

I didn't know what was happening, I thought I was going to prison for the rest of my life, bro.

Wow,

so I was ready to die.

So, you cleared everyone else out of the house and then you loaded up body armor and

armed yourself with all the weapons you had.

Yeah.

And you flashed it out the windows and the doors like, hey,

stay out.

In-screen front porch, bro,

underneath the carport.

It had the screen on it, though, that you could see out, but people couldn't see in, right?

Uh-huh.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean.

So I was sitting there watching them for six hours, bro, while they were surrounding my house, the tank pulling up in the front yard and putting the robot on the porch, throwing a phone in through the door, shooting flashbangs and tear gas.

I'm sitting there watching these fucking idiots thinking they're tear gashing and flashbanging me.

I'm sitting out here on the front porch watching these fucking idiots the whole time, bro.

Oh, dang.

Yeah, they didn't know you were on the porch.

Picked them off, bro.

I mean, I want to get all of them, but I could have picked them off, bro, if I really wanted to.

They wouldn't even know.

I mean, after the first couple of shots, I mean, I would have got a couple of them before they got me.

Oh, yeah.

I wouldn't try to call it like that.

Not at that point in my life.

I mean, this sounds really intense.

Were Were you scared?

Were you tensed up?

Were you high?

I was hyperventilating.

I was

cold sweats.

Like,

it was

an adrenaline rush and

sadness.

And it's over with.

All at the same time, you know.

So I just said, fuck this.

I took some hydrocode on.

I took some Xanax,

went in the house.

As soon as I went in the house, my eyes started burning like a motherfucker, crying like a baby.

So I fucking put on some big-ass glasses, wrapped a towel around my head, got it wet, and went to the door.

And then I find this phone that they threw in through the window, and I pick up the phone.

The hospital negotiator gets on the phone.

I'm telling him, you bitch, I don't want to talk to you.

Put Secret Service Agent Reeves on the phone.

He said, yes, sir.

He got on the phone.

So Ms.

Reeves, these Dallas police are going to kill me, bro.

They're treating, look at this.

They got this tank out here in the front yard.

They got the goddamn SWAT.

They got the command center band down at the end of the block.

there was there was an actual tank in your yard bro they had they had snipers on the hospital across the street damn

okay what how did they know that you were like armed and dangerous in there were you you must have showed them like hey i've got these weapons like through the window or something and stand back

like three rounds into the ceiling and uh i mean i came to the door you shot the ceiling yeah

and they and and they at the door they saw so they came all the way to the door and they saw you shooting the ceiling ceiling.

They were in the yard.

They were in the yard within the tank.

They had like turned on the tank so that they shoot tear gas.

They're like, this is crazier than Waco.

Secret service.

Like, they're very professional, bro, and they're very chill and laid back, bro.

Like, he said,

since this is, since we don't know if there's anybody else in the house, you have to come out and surrender to them.

But as soon as you surrender to them, I'm going to come and get you.

I said, that's your word.

And he said,

what are your demands?

I said, bro, I want to talk to my kids.

I don't want to smoke some cigarettes.

And I just want to call my parents and my kids, tell them I love them, tell everybody I love it.

He's like, Well, you come out peacefully, you got my word, you got that.

I was like, That's I was like, That's your word as a man.

He's like, That's my word as a man.

And uh, Slav surrendered peacefully after eight hours.

Holy mackerel, okay.

Thought was for them, they were fixed to come in, was in like the next five minutes, they were they were they were they were fixing to come in and get me,

so I probably would have been dead.

Yeah,

um, did they did they honor their their word?

The Secret Service they didn't do.

As soon as I didn't even get put in handcuffs by the Dallas police.

And

when he arrested me, he put his dip ties on me and put him in the front.

And he let me sit in the front seat with him when we left.

When we drove off, I was in the front seat with him.

And the other agent was behind me.

And he gave me his cell phone.

He said, call your kids.

We got down to the grassy knoll where Kennedy got shot.

He said, you're not going to try to run, are you?

I said, nope.

He said, if you do, I'm going to shoot you in the back.

Let me sit down on the grassy knoll and and smoke three cigarettes before he took me to Lou Starrett.

Lou Starrett Justice Center is the main Dallas County jail.

And as you could guess, he was facing tons and tons of charges at this point.

They were slapping him with charges of things he didn't even do.

Like anytime that there was a stolen credit card incident in Texas, he was getting charged with that.

There was actually one of the computers that had been purchased from us.

They had ended up finding it somewhere or something.

And they found out it had some cell child pornography on it.

But my lawyer had a special investigator.

And

somebody had bought the laptop before us and taken it back to Walmart.

And then my shopper purchased it.

Okay.

So at this point, your brother's in jail.

His ex-wife, Elizabeth, is in jail.

You're in jail.

Yep.

And Corey Davis, Snitch is in jail, too.

Corey Davis, let me see what I have on him.

So this guy was an accomplice um

he was the one that was getting credit cards that morning for everyone who got raided originally yeah

they're across the street for me dude couldn't feed his kids him and his wife lost their job and couldn't feed their kids pay their bills or nothing so i put them on and then they tell on me oh he was your neighbor yeah yeah yeah so he he was cashing it for you and

when the police got to him he got scared to he just got scared for his own sake man he was like i don't want to go to prison forever what do you want to know i mean that's the thing about snitching is everyone says, don't snitch, no snitch.

But then, when it's like, well, you got 40 years in prison or you can snitch, and then suddenly the reality hits people.

Well, yeah, I got a little brother.

I call him my little brother because me and my ex-wife raised him.

It's her little brother.

And he just got five years for murder.

But

what?

I mean,

the dude that was with him did the murder, and my little brother didn't know he was doing the murder.

I see.

We got out and blew somebody's head off on a motorcycle.

My little brother only got five years.

But he got like 15 years because he had a whole bunch of other shit too.

But they know he wasn't part of the murder, so they're only getting five years for it.

Have you ever

diagnosed yourself for any

mental situations like ADHD or anything?

Well, I'm not diagnosed yourself, but have you been like, are you officially anything at ADHD?

Yeah,

I have ADHD, dyslexia,

intermittent explosive anger disorder,

PTSD, extreme TCSD, extreme anxiety.

Um,

that's it.

Did I say bipolar one and two yet?

No, yeah, I got them.

Oh, that's what they, that's what I've been diagnosed with by the doctor.

What's some of your favorite music, musicians?

Uh, Tupac, yeah, I listen to rock music, like death metal, like heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy, death metal,

you know, like um, uh, you know, uh, Braunstein, uh, Slipknot, uh, yeah,

okay, I was gonna say slipknot.

Um,

break shit music.

ICP?

Yeah, yeah.

I went to ICP concert.

They're fucking hilarious, bro.

Oh, my gosh.

I bet they are.

Bunch of clowns.

Yeah.

Okay.

Where were we?

Oh, yeah.

December 2010, Nathan, his brother, and his brother's wife, Elizabeth, were all in jail.

And Nathan's brother and Elizabeth had kids.

His son with Elizabeth is with his grandparents.

And then his other son with his other wife is with his birth baby mama.

And my three kids were with

my baby mama.

But when I got arrested, my kids were with my parents.

When my wife left me, she left me with no car, no nothing, and three kids.

Like she paints this whole story.

She got everybody pictured this whole story that I'm the evil person.

You abandoned me and the kids.

Yeah.

I feel like I abandoned them eventually anyways because I went to prison for so long.

So I feel like I abandoned them too, though.

And I did, you know, but at the time,

when you have no means of making money,

when I was 17, I got my first computer job working for Southwestern Bell,

doing tech support for Pacific Bell and the Vader Bell and Pacific and Southwestern Bell.

I used to work for Microsoft, bro.

I used to work for Vario Web Hosting.

And I worked in Network Operations Center.

I could have had a good promising computer career.

But I fucked it all off because of drugs.

I was doing cocaine.

I was doing cocaine, lines of cocaine, when I worked for Earthlink Internet.

Earthlink, yeah, I remember Earthlink dial-up.

Yeah, I was doing lines of cocaine on the desk with the trainer.

With the trainer,

the trainer from Seattle would come down, come get me.

We'd go to Oak Cliff, get him some cocaine.

He'd smoke cocaine on top of a weed and his tobacco pipe, and I'd do lines of cocaine on the table.

He'd be like, I'm gonna go get Michael.

We're gonna go work on some training material.

We do all this on the clock.

Crazy motherfucker.

Okay.

I don't think I actually hacked Earthlink, bro.

They cried the fuckers, bro.

I crashed their stock, bro.

This is like,

yeah.

I cracked their stock, bro.

So, like, it was the Earthlink Mind Spring merger, right?

Yeah.

Sprint took over, basically, because they own 80% of Earthlink.

That's way back when they had that short short URL shortener called CJB.net.

Remember CJB?

No.

Hey, it was a URL shortener.

So I made ELN sucks.cjb.net.

I worked in the Network Operations Center, bro.

So I had access to the server room and everything, you know?

And

so I got into the company, the president of the company's emails and him and the vice president and people on the board and shit that were talking about how they fuck over their customers, how fucking, because their service was shit, bro.

It was trash.

And

it was just,

anyway, so I posted these documents, all these confidential information about how they got hacked one time.

and they didn't report it to nobody.

But that back then you didn't have to.

So I released all this.

I put it it on cjb.net website.

This little HTML thing with some snippets from the

emails.

And fucking, I started spamming fucking MSN and Yahoo stock message boards.

And their fucking stock was from about $32 down to $18.

Damn.

Because, like, these, this company comes in here and they're now got all these customers, got all these new employees, and now they're trying to reneg on what they said they were going to do.

You know what I'm saying?

I'm always for the little man.

You know what I'm saying?

I always stand up for the little man.

But I never went back.

Yes.

I bet you didn't.

Man, we get off track fast in this one.

All right.

Yeah.

Still, Nathan, his brother, and Elizabeth are all in jail.

Elizabeth pleads guilty, and his brother pleads guilty.

And the two boys actually said that they coerced Elizabeth into doing it.

So this meant she got less time in jail.

And so she ended up serving two years in jail.

His little brother got four years in prison.

And the last one to face trial was Nathan.

I pled guilty.

His faith gave me access to my frog.

And I went to prison.

He was sentenced to four years and three months in prison, three months more than his brother.

Yeah, I ended up doing all of it.

My brother ended up doing all of it too.

And you know, I mean, I went to prison, bro.

I lived like a rock star the whole time I was in prison.

I stayed high on K2 and drinking moonshine.

The hell is it K2?

That's a vitamin.

No, K2 is like synthetic marijuana.

Oh my God.

Okay.

So you do your four years, three months in prison, you get out, and then you're a good boy after that and you've reformed.

You do self-rehabilitation in prison.

You're right.

Got out.

I got out of the halfway house.

When I got out of the halfway house, I got seven violations the first week I was out.

For drugs.

Driving while intoxicated, getting caught in a stolen car.

Fucking.

But it wasn't a stolen car.

It was a rental.

It just didn't get taken back when it was supposed to.

But being out of district, not reporting it to my probation officer.

And she told me, Mr.

Michael, you want to go jail?

You want to go back to jail?

Or do you want to go to then they put me on the code shit, the color code shit, and I had to go to the intensive drug treatment program go one-on-one counseling for six months straight

no i think a lot of people might have gotten out early because of good behavior it's it's surprising to me to that you who had to serve the entire sentence there was no good behavior for you i discharged my my my federal sentence and my state sentence i stayed in medium close custody i'm a luck go ahead

yeah i got but i didn't i didn't listen to the police in the world why am i gonna go to prison and start listening to them to get out early and see your kids?

Yeah, but I want thinking about that.

The way they treat people in prison, bro, is inhumane.

So, why?

Well, if they treat you like an animal, why aren't you going to act like an animal?

Okay,

they leave me in a cage 23 hours a day and they let me out an hour a day.

What am I going to do when I get out for that hour?

It's just like locking a dog in a cage for 23 hours a day and letting him out.

All right, so you get out of prison, and

how does it go wrong after that?

Well, I got a girl pregnant, and uh,

I had like, yeah, I was at the hotel, and I broke, I was sitting there one day.

I was like, man,

I had three different businesses in three different rooms, not knowing what to do in one hotel, yeah, man.

You how, what's it, what's the secret to your Riz?

How are you attracting so many of these girls?

What's crazy is, bro, like, my brother always asked me the same thing.

He's like, How do you get so much pussy?

How do you get so much?

I don't know, bro.

I don't go chasing pussy, bro.

It's just like,

that's what I always tell people.

I pose and get chos.

I just chill and be still, bro.

It comes to me.

It's crazy.

Pose and get chose.

I'm going to try that.

I'll see if it works.

I mean, it works.

Like, me and my girlfriend broke up four months ago, and she's been dragging me for four months.

And

I finally cut her completely off about a week ago.

And I got two chicks already.

Like,

45, and I'm still upgrading.

Okay, so you're in a hotel with three

different ladies from the hotel and you're looking at it like, man, how am I supposed to juggle this?

Keep going.

Yeah.

So it's like,

you know, and then the guy that was down here at the lake with us, he was originally involved in our fucking Fed case, but he didn't tell.

He was one of the ones that didn't tell.

Stay stiff and starts fucking with him again.

And then me and him are out in fucking Fort Worth.

We're going to Chili's because they had them kiosks where you just swipe right at the fucking table.

Yeah, so so despite serving four years in prison, Nathan went right back to carding, getting stolen credit cards, printing them on blank cards, and using them to buy stuff in the stores himself.

He was doing all his old tricks, wearing disguises and buying gift cards from Home Depot and Walmart.

Oh, yeah, and using them to get free food at Chili's.

Since the ordering system is right there at the table, you could just keep trying different cards until you find one that actually works and pays for your food without the server getting suspicious, right?

So he's riding in the car with this guy, and they're on their way to get food at Chili's.

Like, we're turning

to get onto the highway, and he runs a red light with three cops parked at the red light right across the street.

The dude's in, the dude ended up being a snitch, right?

My brother's got a couple penny felonies because of him right now.

And my brother kept fucking with the dude, and I told my brother the whole time that he snitched, he snitched, because everybody, you know, people talk.

You said he was a stiff guy, though, and he didn't, though.

But he ended up, he's not stiff now.

Well, he was just, he was just in another state in like Virginia or somewhere, and he was in there for like three felonies, like larseny and a whole bunch of other shit.

And he said they gave him time served in county for felonies.

Where the fuck do they do that at?

Oh, yeah.

County is not a felony place.

You can't, you can't, you can't serve your time.

You can't serve filly time in county.

No.

I don't think anywhere.

I mean, I still could imagine like maybe a few weeks before they transfer you to the right place, but not your whole duration.

But you might get time credited towards your Philly, but you're not going to do your Philly time there.

I agree with you.

And then he went to Alabama.

So was this guy got down to the night back here?

Okay.

So was this guy high or stoned when he was driving around like that?

Yeah, of course we were.

I was high on GHB, and

he was high on fucking Mass and GHB, probably.

All right.

So you're leaving Chili's.

You're speeding through.

We're going to Chili's.

Okay.

Going to Chili's, going through red lights, right past cop cars.

Keep going.

Pull in right behind us.

Turn the turn lights on.

He pulls right over.

Doesn't even fucking drive five feet.

He slams on the the brake pulls over

i i i got rid of all my cars bro the cops can kiss me with no card they didn't catch me with no plastic

you threw out the window no i put them down the side the side of the window got into the door oh it's smart yeah right in the glass okay yeah yep they didn't catch me no cards they didn't catch me no gift cards

i got rid of everything they caught them they caught my code defenders with everything uh i got eight years they got 10 years deferred uh probation Probation has never been an option for me.

They've never given me probation or offered me probation.

Wait, so when the car got pulled over, is that when you went to jail or you got off?

Yeah.

I went to jail that night.

Well, how?

Because you didn't have the cards.

How'd they know it was you?

The cops got the receipts and

the car's packed full of shit.

Well, yeah.

That was just the last place we went was Home Depot.

And so he's got all the shit and they've opened up a box, a security camera box.

We got the MSR in it and shit.

And

they run my name and they see what I was in federal prison for.

And they're like, what's the access to vice fraud?

So they always ask me every time I get pulled over.

What's access to wife fraud?

You ever lose your credit card or you get stolen?

It's interesting how vivid Nathan's memories are in those moments right before being arrested.

That must be like a flashbold moment for a lot of people, you know?

Like you remember it so perfectly clear.

It's almost like those are the last moments of freedom that his brain holds on to.

Or maybe he replays those moments again and again in his head to try to think what he could have done differently.

Anyway, the cops found swiping equipment in the car and quickly put the pieces together that he was still doing swiping.

So they arrested him and took him to jail again.

This time, he pled guilty.

and they sentenced him to eight years in prison.

And the main crime they were saying he did is that he swiped a stolen card at home depot and bought twenty two hundred dollars worth of gift cards okay so this is the second time you're going to prison yeah eight years they put you in for for twenty two hundred dollars like there's that's a lot for just such a small amount i mean but they know i was doing more than that though

so what they i mean what were they

like text texas

i mean you know how fucked up the legal system is it's fucked up in every state i'm sure oh it is, but what were they saying your charges were?

I mean, it wasn't just the 2,200.

They were swiping for 2,200.

They charged me with engaging in over criminal activity.

So it was felony.

The first one was they were saying you did a million dollars in damage.

What were they saying here?

They didn't say nothing.

They just said $2,200 was shipped from fucking...

It's just so hard that there's eight years in prison for $2,200 stolen.

Tell me about it.

But because they didn't charge me.

see, like, if I would have got caught in Dallas, bro, they would have charged me with credit card fraud and abuse.

It would have been a state jail felony, maximum two years.

But since I was out there and I got caught with two other people, they're doing this shit in Texas now, and they're charging people with basically conspiracy in the state.

It's crazy.

At that time, it's not a dollar amount anymore.

See, so like it goes up and higher towards how much the dollar amount it is.

But once you're charged, once you get the enhancement of engaging in more as criminal activity,

it's enhanced from a second-degree felony to a first-degree felony.

And then, therefore,

geez, man.

Okay.

They're trying to give me 15, bro.

15.

My homeboy paid $10,000 for a lawyer for me in the state.

And

they came down to eight.

So I took the eight.

And you went to prison for eight years.

Yeah.

And self-reformed while there and got out.

And now you're a good boy.

boy.

Now I'm a good boy.

Okay.

We made it.

Is it true?

Are you doing good now?

Everything I do now is ethical.

Okay.

So that's.

But, you know, it took all that and all the trauma that I went through and what happened to my kids while I was in prison and my dad dying while I was in prison and everything for me to finally wake up.

What happens to your dad?

My dad died when I was in prison, bro.

It was horrible.

Like two worst fears that something happened to my kids, and I'm not being there when I was in prison.

And then something happened to one of my parents while I was in prison.

And something happened to my kids while I was in prison.

And my dad died while I was in prison.

My two worst fears came to fruition while I was in prison the second time.

How did your dad die?

He had a heart attack, I think.

I mean, he was in the hospital, like his blood was septic and shit.

Like, he had a bad heart.

Like, he had

health conditions for like 15 years.

Pretty much his heart.

He wouldn't quit eating salt, bro.

That's awful, man.

I'm sorry you went through that.

Yeah, that, that, that, uh, you know,

he always promised he'd be there and shit.

At the end of the day, I took feasting it because I knew my dad loved me, and I know he knows I love Jim.

So I found feasting it in that.

But I never have to ask the questions that you always want to ask your dad when you get older, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

God damn.

It's crazy.

And that just a snippet.

That's just That's just the one moment.

That's just a blip on the radar.

But I was mature at a lot of your older ages and women.

Like,

I don't think it finally clicked for me until I was about 38.

So

did you serve all eight years?

Yeah.

And I went back for violation after that, and they fucking held me for another fucking four months for the cocksuckers.

For violation, yeah.

So that's

four years plus eight years.

That's 12 years.

Like with the extra time that I had to do for the violation, all the extra days and shit is closer.

I was pretty much about 13 years.

Yeah, 13 years.

And I was thinking, you have three kids now, and two of those were there for the first one, and one was there for the second, right?

So that's.

Well, no, all three of them were there.

My 16-year-old that's here with me today.

She was there.

She was like one year and two months when I got arrested and went to the feds.

For the first time.

I missed her whole body.

I missed her whole life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The middle one was three when I first got locked up, and the oldest one was six when I first got locked up.

My wife is three years apart.

Yeah, that's a huge gap to not see that.

That must be really hard.

That's the hardest part right there.

That's the hardest part.

Because you can't ever get the time back.

And now they're grown and doing their own thing, so you don't get the time that you want.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're on their own schedule now.

Yeah.

But,

you know, I'm in their life and we have good relationships.

I have good relationships with the youngest and oldest for sure.

The middle one, she still has a lot of resentment.

But she'll get there.

Okay.

You know,

their mother painted a bad picture of me.

She made me look like the monster.

And what it was is we were both young and stupid at the end of the day, you know, and we both made bad decisions.

Neither one of us was perfect.

That's the reality of it.

But I take responsibility for all of it because I'm the man.

You know what I mean?

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, the mom was part of that Walmart scam anyway.

So I know that she's not

cheated on each other and all that shit, you know.

What a crazy story.

I know, man.

Like, fucking, and you know, all I want to do now is like when we were kids, bro, growing up, we didn't have nobody to look up to.

Yeah.

We didn't have hackers that fucking been doing this shit their whole lives to look up to because it started with that.

Are you telling me you're going to be the you want to be someone that people look up to?

I want, I want to be the one that helps save the world, and I want to help kids, I want to help children, bro.

I want to help

you, I'm going to be the world a better player.

I'm going to come out with the first jailbreak for the fucking robots, bro.

You better buy my shit.

I'm going to start preaching the jailbreak for robots right now.

Okay, you're going to save us from the robots.

I mean, who else is going to save us from the digital world?

That could be a fair redemption.

When the robots turn on us and the computers turn on us, who's going to save us?

It's not going to be fucking Joe down the street that's working on your car.

It's not going to be cooked at McDonald's that's making your burger.

It's going to be you.

It's going to, well, not just me.

It's going to be all of us.

Okay.

Well, I will buy your shit when it comes to it.

Or the robots could just take over and just kill us all.

No, no, you got to save us now.

I'm hoping you're going to do it.

On AI, we have a 50% chance to survive AI and we have a 50% chance to survive robots.

Okay.

I think if you've survived all this, then you've got a fair chance of surviving the rest of whatever's coming.

I don't know how you made it this far.

I mean, because I wake up every day with a smile on my face, no matter what happened to me before.

How many times did you come close to dying in your life?

I was in a coma when I first got out.

I had an overdose.

And by the time I got to the hospital, I was breathing at 30%.

So they put me in a induced coma.

And when I tried waking up, I went crazy on them and tried fighting them all.

Yeah.

I couldn't feel my legs.

So I sat up in my bed and told them to lie.

I thought I was having flashbacks when I was in prison.

I ripped my restraints off and everything.

They had to have like eight people hold me down and hit me with like three

things to put me to sleep.

And then fucking they got off of me and they started tying me back up and I woke back up on their bitch ass.

Jesus.

Okay, so that was one time being close to death.

Any other times?

When I was probably about 15, huffing some

air.

This is from,

you know, I had a little airsoft gun that I, I mean, to paint model cars with.

Yeah.

And I was hooking the air, and my dad woke me up, and I was choking on my throw-up.

My bed was covered in throw-up, and I was laying on my back.

I'd have died if my dad didn't wake up and come get me.

Yeah, see, this is what I mean.

Like, you've survived all these things.

Not only that, but all the shootings in your neighborhood and probably the stabbing in prison.

Missot and stab.

Prison was worse.

Like when we first got to Leavenworth, there was fixing to be a ride between the Sarannios and the whites and

over a TV.

Yeah.

And I mean, there's probably about at least, we made probably about 200 steaks at night.

Look like vampire steaks, but knives.

Jeez, and now's your arrival.

And they're like, you got to join a side.

Come on.

We're

fixing for war.

Jesus Christ.

What a way to do it.

There you get pushed over.

It's just like in the world.

You're in a shark full of tanks.

You're going to be a guppy or you're going to become a shark.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

I mean, that's what I'm saying: is if you've survived all that, then I think that you're good for the rest of your life.

You've, you've cashed in all your lucky.

I've been in our prison three years now, so my recidivism rate of going back to prison is pretty fucking low.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And your survival rate is pretty high.

You've gone through the worst things of your life and you're still doing good.

I mean, you're still alive.

I'm not doing good.

I'm still struggling.

You know what I'm saying?

But I'm free.

I got my freedom.

I got my health.

And

I got the people that love me around me.

You know what I'm saying?

So that's my blue.

That's my Zen.

I say we leave it as that.

Walking off into the sunset

with your loved ones near you.

It was good talking to you.

All right, man.

Thanks for sharing your story.

Bye.

Have a good one.

Bye.

Thank you so much to Nathan Michael for sharing this story with us.

What a wild life he's lived.

And he's only 45 now, so he's got a great big life ahead of him.

And I'm certain it'll be drama-free from here on out.

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