Darknet Diaries - 129: Gollumfun (Part 2)

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

Brett Johnson, AKA Gollumfun (twitter.com/GOllumfun) was involved with the websites Counterfeit Library and Shadow Crew. He tells his story of what happened there and some of the crimes he committed.In part 2, his past catches up to him.Listen to more of Brett on his own show. https://www.thebrettjohnsonshow.com/.

So tell me about what some of the eBay scams were going on. Like, you know, how can you rip someone off on eBay? So some of the scams. Well, man, I mean, what I would do if it were going in Christmas season, I would see what the hot item was. Typically, it was a lot of cameras. It was a lot of cameras. It was a lot of laptops. It was those high dollar items that people were really wanting, but they didn't want to pay full retail price for. So the idea is you need to come in at an amount that causes that potential victim to put logic and reason at the door and react

emotionally. But you don't want to come in at so low of an amount that it causes them to question what's going on. And that's a very thin line that happens. You know, I'd find like a Canon XL1 and I would post that. Hold on a second. You can't be serious. You said, okay, listen, this is what happened to me at the same time. So I'm on eBay. I wanted the Canon GL1. This was a $2,500 camera. It was very expensive. I saw someone selling it for $1,200 on eBay. And I'm like, okay, I'll bid. So I bid on it.

They canceled the auction. Right. And say, oh, sorry, something went wrong. But listen, I still have the camera. Are you still interested? And I said, well, yeah. I mean, this is a half-priced camera. Like, why wouldn't I be? And I don't know where I got the money from or what I was even thinking to do with the camera like this. God knows I wasn't going into filmmaking, right?

It was just kind of to play around with. But I wanted this. Anyway, my heart was set on it, Okay. Um, so I said, yeah. So they said, I, I, so they said, okay, well send me the money and I'll get, I'll send you the camera. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, red flag. You know, you don't, we don't have this on eBay anymore. We're just going through email. That's right. You're off platform, no protection in place. Yeah. And so I'm like, no, no, no, this doesn't smell right. And they're like, listen, I'm a God-fearing person.

I've got a family. I would never do anything. And it was just a whole schmoozing. You're already laughing. I'm just thinking of one of the stories I told some of these people at one point. And hey, look, I don't take any pride on my stealing at all these days. I don't take any pride on my stealing at all these days. I don't. But back then, I would make up just weird shit to see if they would believe it. Like, I had sold like 13, 15 cameras on one auction.

And of course, so the idea being, you know, you've got one auction up there. Say you're selling that XL1. It retails for $2,500. I would put it at $2,000, all right? Someone is going to win for $2,500. I would put it at $2,000, all right? Someone is going to win at $2,000, but the next 10 bidders, whatever they would bid at, I would sell them that same non-existent camera for whatever their bid price was. And then I would wait for all the payments to come in. And so what happens is, you know, all the payments don't arrive at the same time. So you've got to start making up excuses as to why the initial winner did not get their camera yet.

So I remember one of my excuses was, well, you know, we've got a warehouse down there on the Mississippi, got all this flooding, the entire warehouse is flooded out. That's the kind of stuff that I would say just to see if I could get those people to believe it. And the problem – sure, go ahead. This is too close to home, Brett.

I mean – So here's the thing. So let me finish the story. So I – a month of convincing me that this is an okay deal, I say, okay, I'll buy it. And so they say, well, okay, well don't send PayPal, right? Let's only, I'll only take Western Union. And so this was a $1,200 agreement. I know this was another red flag. And so it was $1,200. And so I called up Western Union. I say, okay, I want to send this money. They said, you can't, the maximum we're

allowed you to sell, send is $1,000. You can't go over that. I was like, well, I'll just call back and do it again. They said, okay, you can do that. So I should have noticed that as a third red flag. So I send this money to someone, and they send me a tracking number the next day. They say, here's your box. It's on its way. The box never left the warehouse.

I never left the shipping facility. It just sat there forever. The box never left the warehouse. Of course. I never left the shipping facility. It just sat there forever. Right. And I never got the camera. Right. And you're telling me you did this same scam on PayPal at the same time that I got Brett. Was this you? I don't know if it was me.

And here's the thing. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. I'm the guy that's responsible for a lot of that. All right? You figure that before, you know, those sites we were talking about, Counterfeit Library and Shadow Crew, before those come into play, you really didn't have a lot of successful cybercrime because criminals were not able to work together. But once those sites come into play, you know, you've got all this open source environment, the collaboration, things like that. And I remember clearly posting many tutorials on how to do this type of fraud on eBay and even walking people through it. I mean, it's very, very possible And not proud of it, Jack. I'm not. But it's very possible that some sumbitch may have known who I was that was ripping you off. Absolutely, that's possible.

It's so weird to kind of close the circle on that. Like you said earlier, the victim just kind of gives up after a while. And you did. Well, what I did is I called Western Union. I said, hold on. Stop the money, reverse it. Okay. If you can't do that, because they said, you know, they already picked it up. I said, you got to tell me what ID they picked it up with. Give me their name. Give me what city they picked it up in. You know, tell me where, where in the world are they and what are, what's their name that they picked it up at, which probably wouldn't have mattered because they probably used fake ID.

But we had somebody working at the office that would just give them the money. That's their name that they picked it up at, which probably wouldn't have mattered because they probably used a fake ID. Sure. Or had somebody working at the office that would just give them the money. Yeah. So I was so pissed off at Western Union because they offered zero help at all. I said, look, I just got robbed. I just got scammed. Please, this happened over your platform. You need to open a police report.

We need to work together. You need to give me some information. I'm going to give it to the officers here. And they said, zero. We're not helping you at all. And they hung up the phone. And I was like, Western Union, you're aiding and abetting criminals here. Well, and you're not, I'm going to be honest with you, you're not far off. Because when we were hitting, we hit the hell out of PayPal, Western Union, of eBay, all those platforms back then. And by and large, the way those platforms back then responded

was telling the legitimate customers that were complaining of these things that it wasn't happening. And they just kind of put their head in the sand and ignored it until they were forced to do something about it. So it's not surprising that Western Union would have done that. eBay did the same thing. PayPal did that. Yeah, well, first of all, you jerk. Yes, I agree with you on that. But second of all, thank you. You can call me an asshole too. That's true too.

Okay, I'll do that. But I do say thank you because I was young and I was naive and that sucked the naivety out of me when going online, right? I didn't, I learned so many valuable lessons from that experience. I learned never to trust Western Union.

And, you know, even to this day, I've never used them again because it's just one of those, I don't ever want to deal with this company again. Well, I got to say, Jack, you know, you said it is not a happy thought to know that I was responsible for taking away people's naivete. I think there's a, um, I wish I had mine back, man. I really do. Well, but I mean, it is one of those things that

it, it, I think it, it changed just the way I thought about online. And it protected me in bigger ways that I probably would have gotten hit later on. And it made me see the internet for as it is, which is just this chaotic, hostile environment. It is that. Yeah. I think another thing that it helped me with is it gets like a sense of street smarts on the internet, right? Like you have this gut feeling when you're going into a deal online. And that gut feeling is more refined after meeting you or dealing with the people.

After meeting one of your associates. Yes. You get better honed, right? And so it's like trial by fire. You're right. And that's one of the things that I've been talking about in presentations recently. You know, our situational awareness is very high in the physical world. We know if something is wrong in our environment, when we're traveling or turn on a wrong street or what have you,

we know immediately, you know, that awareness is there, but it tends not to be as well defined in our online lives. And it really needs to be. It does. And, you know, it's just that no matter what platform that you're on, there are some sort of predators that are lurking there. And you need to be aware of that. And people just, I think that they rely too much on the website or the hardware or the supposed security systems that are on the site. And there's just too much reliance on that. And you really have to be aware of your own environment, regardless of what platform or what security may or may not be in place. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.

I'm Jack Recider. This is Dark by Delete Me. I know a bit too much about how scam callers work. They'll use anything they can find about you online to try to get at your money. And our personal information is all over the place online. Phone numbers, addresses, family members, where you work, what kind of car you drive. It's endless. And it's not a fair fight. But I realize I don't need to be fighting this alone anymore.

Now I use the help of Delete.me. Delete.me is a subscription service that finds and removes personal information from hundreds of data brokers' websites and continuously works to keep it off. Data brokers hate them because Delete.me makes sure your personal profile Bye. Thank you. and enter code Darknet at checkout. That's join, delete me, dot com, slash, Darknet Diaries, and use code Darknet. Support for this show comes from Black Hills Information Security. This is a company that does penetration testing, incident response, and active monitoring to help keep businesses secure. I know a few people who work over there,

and I can vouch they do very good work. If you want to improve the security of your organization, give them a call. I'm sure they can help. But the founder of the company, John Strand, is a teacher, and he's made it a mission to make Black Hills Information Security world-class in security training. You can learn things like penetration testing,

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to learn more about what services they offer and find links to their webcasts to get some world-class training. That's BlackHillsInfosec.com. BlackHillsInfosec.com. Blackhillsinfosec.com. Okay, welcome back. We are continuing with part two of Gollum Fun's story. If you haven't listened to part one yet, you really do need to go back and listen to the episode just before this one. So where were we? Okay, so Brett, or Gollum Fun, had been doing all kinds of crimes and scams ever since he was a teenager. But when he got a computer, it really expanded his possibilities and skills, doing scams on eBay,

selling drugs online, buying fake IDs, ordering things with stolen credit cards, cashing out on stolen credit cards, the works. And his home online was shadowcrew.com, a website he owned and operated where all this criminal activity was taking place. But a lot of you may have heard about Shadow Crew before, and that's probably because you heard the story of Albert Gonzalez. Albert's story is just like a whole story on its own, and it really deserves like its own episode. But I'll summarize his story here real quick.

He was a member on Shadow Crew and eventually became the forum techie. He knew how to keep the forums up and operational, but he also was using the site to sell stolen credit cards. His big thing was to go drive into a parking lot and then aim an antenna at the store, figure out a way into their Wi-Fi and then into their cash registers, and then just steal lots of credit cards that customers used at that store. He had an epic ride of it too, but the Secret Service caught him. And it was around where Albert got arrested

is when Brett just quit going on Shadow Crew and stopped being the admin for it. But when Albert got arrested, he was faced with a tough decision. Either go to prison or help the Secret Service catch others. Albert agreed to help the Secret Service. So little did the people of Shadow Crew know,

but the forum techie of the site was actually the Secret Service, which meant they could look up people's IPs and see private messages and other user details. Not only that, but Albert set up a VPN and forced users to connect through that to get to the site. Albert claimed it was for security reasons, but what they didn't know is that he was logging all the traffic and giving it to the Secret Service. But luckily for Brett, he wasn't using the site at the time. Instead, Brett was just focused on doing tax refund fraud and then spending the money he earned from that on his stripper girlfriend, Elizabeth. What happens is I'm convinced that I love her. She's not coming home. So she's going to work dancing. And a lot of the time she'll call me six or seven o'clock in the morning,

come and get me. I can't drive home. I have no idea what the hell is going on there. So I come in to get her one day. She comes in the house and she crashes in the bed. And I had never in my life went through a woman's person at all. I'm looking at her purse and I'm like, God damn, I got to find out what the hell's going on. So I start rummaging through her purse, find cocaine in there. And I had up until that point, I was 34. I had never seen cocaine in my life. I'd seen pot. I'd seen pills and all that. Had never seen coke and found coke there. So of course, dumbass Brett gets online and there was this website. It's still around today. It's called USA Sex Guide. So I looked up Charleston. I looked up strip clubs and under strip clubs it had, it was talking about, there was a few passages that

mentioned Elizabeth, the stripper that was at Joe's Roundup, the blonde girl. And it was obviously talking about her and it was talking about, you know, she was prostituting herself and obviously it was to support her co-cabot. So here I am reading that. And I guess I just went off the rails at that point. I got it in my head that if I could fix her, that I could fix me maybe. And, um, I figured that if I just kept investing that she would love me. And the truth of the matter is, is Jack is, she couldn't be intimate unless she was completely wasted. So I went and confronted her about the Coke. Over the course of the next two or three weeks, she finally quits her job. I guess she saw that she had a chance with me because she didn't know I was a criminal either.

Figured she figured she could get out of the life she had and hook up with this guy. So she quits her job. Over the next few weeks, she finally quits coke because I finally laid down the ultimatum of, if you're going to be doing this, I can't have you around. So she quits Coke, but she supplements the Coke or replaces the Coke by just being a, just an absolute horrible drinker. I mean, horrible. She always wanted to go back to strip clubs and I would always refuse that. But she would drink, drink like it was a religion.

And I kept investing in the relationship. I was like, if I just keep doing more and more, it'll be all right. Well, while that's going on, Shadow Crew makes the front cover of Forbes. October 26, 2004, United States Secret Service, and it depends on which law enforcement agency you listen to as far as the numbers, but United States Secret Service arrested 33 people, six countries, and six hours. Yeah, the Secret Service totally took over and raided Shadow Crew, arresting tons of people who were on the site.

But Brett was not one of the ones arrested. So you felt like you just dodged a bullet at that point. Oh, man, I did. But the problem was, you see, this is that whole thing where I've fallen in love with a stripper. So what happens is I go through all of my stateside money. I had laundered all of my money over to Bank Latiko in Estonia.

I had maybe $150,000 stateside. I'm with Elizabeth, so I'm not committing crime because I've got this bankroll money and I don't want her to know that I'm committing crime. Meanwhile, I go through all of my stateside money because with her, it's all of a sudden, I had been living somewhat frugally. I hadn't been eating really expensive dinners, but every dinner with her became seven days a week, five to $600. Every week it was, you know, $1,000 pairs of shoes, $2,500 purses, just spending money out the wazoo. I quickly go through every bit of stateside cash I've got as shadow crew gets, gets popped. Tax season, Shadow Crew's popped in October. Tax season ends October 15th.

So I can't do tax return fraud right now. I have to wait until January for that shit to start up. So I can't do that. I don't know where to buy credit cards because Shadow Crew's been shut down. So I can't go back into credit card theft and make that $30,000 to $40,000 a month doing that. So the only thing I'm left doing is running counterfeit cashier's checks just in order to try to survive

long enough to get to the point where I can start tax return identity theft again. So I start running counterfeit cashier's checks on COD orders off eBay. I'll find somebody that's got bullion or something I can resell pretty quickly, a coin collection, something like that. Convince them into sending it COD for a counterfeit cashier's check. And then I'll cash out the item like that. I start doing that. And that's how I get arrested is like that.

It got to the point I didn't have enough money. Like I told you, I started, I kept reinvesting and going deeper into the relationship with Elizabeth. She wanted a Tiffany engagement ring. What did she think you did for money? Oh, dude, I was a straight asshole. I had told people, my friends and everything else, that I was a fraud consultant.

I just didn't tell them on which part of the fraud equation I was on. It was a big joke to me. Yeah, it was straight asshole, straight asshole. She wanted a Tiffany engagement ring. Rhett Johnson didn't have enough money to buy a Tiffany engagement ring. So I conned somebody into sending me one for COD order or for cashier's check. Do that. The next one was she wanted Tiffany wedding rings.

Well, I didn't have enough money to do that. The next one was she wanted Tiffany wedding rings. Well, I didn't have enough money to do that either. So con somebody into sending the COD shipment for the wedding rings. And at that point, they were well aware that there was this guy and his name was Gollum Fund that was running counterfeit cashier's checks out of Charleston, South Carolina. Because I was with Elizabeth, I didn't want to travel out of the area to commit the fraud. I was afraid to leave her. So I kept using the same types of drop addresses in the same areas. It was very easy to ping who I was. So I go to pick up the rings and I think they were for $7,300 total or something like that. I told Elizabeth, I was like,300 total or something like that.

I told Elizabeth, I was like, I'll be back later. And she was like, okay. And she didn't know I was a criminal or anything else. I was like, I'll be back in just a little bit. Typically what you can do when you're picking up stolen goods from UPS or FedEx, you can just chase the truck down. As they stop to deliver a package, you just walk up to the driver and say,

hey, you've got a package on there for me and they'll give it to you. So I chased the UPS driver down and he tells me, he looks at me and he was like, oh man, he said, I've got to, they changed the rules. I've got to deliver the package at the address where it's going to. And I was like, okay, done. Just find me down there. I'll be down there later. When are you going to be there? And he tells me, I'm like, okay. So I drive back down to the drop address. He pulls up. I get out of the car. I was driving in a, I had a Mercedes at that point. I got out of the car, walked up to him. I was like, now can I get my package? He's like, yeah, have you got a check? And I was like, yeah. So I hand him the check. He said, he's like, can I see your ID? Well, I was at the point at that point in time,

I couldn't even get, I couldn't even get fake driver's licenses anymore. So I used my real ID. I was like, ah, Brett Johnson, it'll be fine. I just misspelled the real, I put it as Brett Johnston or some bullshit like that. So I showed him the ID, Brett Johnston. He's like, okay, he handed me the box. I handed him the check.

I turn around, there is the FBI and the Charleston PD. Come to find out, there were like 30 police officers in the parking lot. And they swarmed the area at that point in time. And I'm like, dude, it's not that serious. He's questioned for a while. And the police take him to search his house. Well, his girlfriend Elizabeth was there.

And she sees him come in with all these federal agents and police everywhere. She may have suspected he was a criminal before. But seeing him in this much trouble really made her mad. She may have suspected he was a criminal before, but seeing him in this much trouble really made her mad. She was furious. The police seized a lot of his stolen things, including the ring off her finger and the watch off her wrist. They took him to an interrogation room, and the Secret Service starts questioning him about stolen credit cards. And he knows this is really bad for him. And he gets put in jail. But more Secret Service agents come to visit him. Two agents fly in from New Jersey. They pull me out

of the cell and they're like, we got your laptop. I'm like, yeah. They're like, have you got anything on your laptop? I'm like, yeah. And they're like, well, you're going to be charged for whatever's on it. I'm like, I figured. And they're like, anything you can do for us. Well, I was arrested February 8th, 2005. I was supposed to marry Elizabeth February 26th, 2005 and I was absolutely crazy for that girl and I've been taught my entire life not to snitch or anything else like that but that was the most important thing to me

and I looked at the guys and my exact words were, you let me get back with Elizabeth and I will do whatever you want me to do. And the guy looked at me and he was like, fair enough. And then they started asking me questions. They asked me for my email passwords and they asked me if I knew who Scarface was. And they asked me if I knew who a script was. And I did know who Scarface was, but I figured it was my best interest not to mention that. So I was like, nope, not a clue. And they were like, all right. That's when Brett Johnson switched sides. Instead of helping criminals commit crimes online, he's now agreed to help law enforcement catch the criminals. Anything for love. He served a couple months in jail.

Bond was set for $1,000 and he was able to get his sister, Denise, to come bail him out. And so he gets out of jail. And I walk out. Well, my first phone call walking out isn't to Denise. My first phone call walking out is to Elizabeth because that's who I want to be with. So I call Elizabeth

and she's like, I'll be right there. And I'm like, yes. So I'm, this is like midnight. I'm standing in the parking lot of the Charleston County jail, secret service agent. I forgot the guy's name, but he was a great guy. He's standing beside of me. Elizabeth had a friend that owned a limousine company and she pulls up in a limousine and I'm like, okay, the trunk of the limousine pops. She gets out. She gets out these two plastic containers, storage containers that have my clothes in them, drop them on the table, gets in the car, drives off. I start just bawling right there, man. Secret service agent, he looks

at me and he was like, is that your fiance? And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, dude, I am so sorry. And I'm like, yeah. He gets me in the car and this guy, he gives me a nice talk. He's like, Brett, he's like, you've got a real good opportunity in front of you. Please, please don't screw it up. And I'm like, I don't intend to, man. So I had $30 to my name. He puts me up, he spends his money to pay for me a night in a hotel. And he had some coupons for Hardee's for meals, for burgers. So he gives me those and he's like, I'll see you tomorrow.

He said, just be good, man. I was like, okay. As soon as that guy leaves, I take that $30 and I walk my ass to Walmart and I buy a prepaid debit card because I know I'm gonna go right back into tax fraud again. Come back to the hotel, I call Elizabeth and I literally beg her to come and see me.

She finally agrees to and I get her in the hotel room. I'm lying to her through my teeth, telling her everything's going to be all right, that I'm working for the government now, that I'm going to have a good job, that everything's going to be great. She believes me. A new chapter begins for Brett.

He moves to Columbia, South Carolina, where the Secret Service offices are, and convinces Elizabeth that he's no longer a criminal and he has a legit job with the Secret Service, and he's able to convince her to come and move in with him. So he starts going to work every day for the Secret Service, trying to catch criminals online. So Secret Service, trying to catch criminals online. So Secret Service, they came to me and Brad and Jim Ramacone, they came to me, they asked me,

they're like, hey, what do you got? What can you do? So the job was going on and targeting individuals on different forums and marketplaces to build investigations against them. Okay. And some of the people I targeted, Sean Mims, Daniel Rigmaiden was there, John Giannone, the biggest one became, I think, Max Butler. But so I would target individuals and we would build cases against these individuals while also educating the Secret Service on how these cybercrime environments operated. So they would bring in, they brought in ICE, they brought in Bank of America, all these people for me to talk to about how these environments worked and how to build profiles, how to gain trust within these environments. That was my job, was talking to people, targeting individuals, and educating

Secret Service on how these environments operated. Okay. And my job became coming in four hours a day and being on these websites, talking to people, answering questions, networking, everything else. Very easy job. I was paid $350 a week for that. So I was paid $350 and then they would cover all bills that I had. So rent, utilities, things like that. Okay. So Brett was getting $350 a week, but he thought that was not enough for Elizabeth to get the things she wanted. And Brett really wanted to salvage his relationship with her. And the only way he knew how was to buy her things.

So this meant he needed a secret side hustle. I wasn't doing the full-fledged tax service, but I was probably stealing probably $20,000 a week doing that on tax return fraud. So the way the setup was, they had me in their war room, which was, I don't know, 25 feet by 15 feet was the size of the room. They had me on a laptop computer, private line or an outside line, hooked up to a 50-inch plasma monitor mounted on the wall.

They sat next to me on a desktop computer, outside line, two Secret Service agents in the room at the entire time with a SLED agent, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. So three individuals in the room at all times monitoring everything I'm doing, asking questions, everything else.

Meanwhile, they have SpectraPro and Camtasia on my laptop. So they're getting keystrokes, and they're taking snapshots of every single thing that's going on, like snapshots every five seconds or something like that. All of that is burnt onto a DVD at the end of the evening. The first two weeks, they are extremely diligent. They are paying attention to every single thing that I'm doing. And they're, I mean, they're asking questions. They are on the ball. But the problem is, is watching a guy for four hours a night do the exact same thing every single night. They get to the point where they're like, you tell us if anything pops up of interest. Okay, I'll do that. So that becomes a conversation.

And they start using their computer to go to this website. Typically, the website is flashyourrack.com, where it's pictures of these women who flash their breasts, and you rank them from one to 10. So for four hours every night, they're watching porn. I'm sitting there doing the investigation. So I'm sitting there after a while, and I'm like, shit, why not? Let's do this. And I start breaking the law from inside the offices as they're watching the porn and partying amongst themselves

and everything else. And they were good guys. They just got bored. That's the problem. They got bored. So I'm working four hours a day in secret service offices. Meanwhile, I'm committing tax return fraud on the side. So I'm stealing a shitload of money doing that. No one knows that I'm actually committing a lot of the crime from inside of the secret service offices at the same time. She moves up there with me and she had always wanted to keep going to strip clubs and I'd always refused. But all of a sudden I'm in this position of I want to make sure she's happy. So she wants to start going back to strip clubs and I'm like, sure, we'll go.

So we start going to strip clubs of an evening. And I don't know, I guess it's maybe three or four months in. She looks at me one night because I told you she couldn't be intimate unless she was completely wasted. So she looks at me as we're driving home one night. She's like, I think it'd be funny if you got a blow job from another girl. And it took that right there for me to realize that I was just an escape mechanism for her.

She never really loved me. She was just trying to get out of her own position in life. I ended up breaking up with her after that. And that's when I drove, I dove deep into alcohol and all this other stuff and started going through strippers like they were water. Just, I'd go into a strip club with, I don't know, just a wad, I'd spend maybe four or $7,000 a night in a strip club. I would go in, I'd hand the bartender a wad of 20s. I'd tell her, hey, however many kamikazes that buys, just bring them. And she'd stack up kamikazes that buys, just bring them. And she'd stack up kamikazes.

They'd put tables together and they'd put kamikazes stacked on these tables. And I called that my stripper magnet. And I'd sit there and talk and dance with strippers all night long. And I'd go home with whichever one wanted to go home with me of a night. Things felt like rock bottom for him. I mean, how could it get any worse, right? He got arrested, lost his girlfriend, was doing stuff behind the Secret Service back, and spending way too much money and time in strip clubs. But it's not the bottom. It gets way worse. Stay with us

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That's spelled V-A-N-T-A, vanta.com slash darknet for $1,000 off. At this point, Brett has been arrested and flipped to work for the feds, even getting paid by the Secret Service to set people up and collect enough info on them to get them arrested. But this is not an easy job. The first person that I betrayed was Sean Mims. Sean was the guy who helped Brett when Brett was really depressed after his breakup with his wife Susan. Sean really was one of the only guys in the scene who was there for Brett at the time, helping him through that depression. And now Brett's been

asked to set up Sean to get him arrested. And that was within three days of beginning work for the Secret Service. Sean, I had disappeared for three months. I had told Sean back when he was talking with me when I was going through the depression with my first wife, I had told him, hey, if I ever disappear, don't contact me. If you do contact me, I'll make a reference to the book Moby Dick. That way you'll know it's time to go. Sean finds me within three days that I go back online that I'm at the super service offices. And he's looking for that keyword, you know, something about this book Moby Dick. And I never give it to him. And I go from there. I knew at that point, I mean, I, I, uh, that night, as soon as I'm off

work, I go to a bar and, uh, I just get fucking wasted at that point. I just, I just keep ordering drinks. I'm just downing them and down on them and down on them. And I think that was part of the spiral at that point. The main spiral came when the relationship with Elizabeth ended at that point. I just, there was absolutely nothing else left. I thought I had hit rock bottom. Rock bottom is actually a lot farther down than that. But at that point, it was just, you know, there's no motivation anymore. There's not. I mean, you're in a situation now, or I was in a situation at that point where I'm telling on

everybody that I can, I'm snitching out every single person that I can, the initial reason for that. And I want to be fair, the initial, the real reason is to save my own hide. I used the relationship with Elizabeth to justify that, okay? That's the interesting thing here. Crime, everything else, it's a choice. You choose to do that. I chose to snitch people out to save my own hide. I used the justification of the relationship with Elizabeth to support that, okay? So that justification is gone now.

Elizabeth's gone. Here I am trying to rush through and find some other justification. And that justification became another stripper. Like I said, Jack, I was a straight asshole. Straight asshole. Yeah, let's keep with that asshole thing for a second here, because I think a lot of people are going to think you're an asshole for baiting the people that you grew up teaching and stuff, right? Is there a difference in your mind between a snitch and working for the Secret Service? No, no, no.

I think it's a, to this day, I think that snitching someone out is a despicable thing. Now, that being said, I also understand that one because the amount of time that you get is so large that you're an idiot not to talk anymore. So this idea, this thing of you don't tell on people, that's a bygone era of Italian mafia members that just doesn't exist anymore. I don't feel good about it. I don't. I still consider myself, it's weird with me. I really consider myself a piece of shit for snitching on people. But at the same time, I think if I hadn't snitched on people that I would be back in prison for 20 or longer. So it's weird with me. I'm this guy that that's one of the big regrets I've got, but it's a regret at the same time that I'm like, it needed to be done for me to do what I do today.

It needed to be done. So I'm like, okay, it's part of it. Now, the people on the forums had some suspicions that something wasn't right with Brett's account, Gollum Fund. You don't retire and disappear just a little bit before shadowcrew.com gets raided and then come back a few months later. Well, it gets worse than that. When I retired as Gollum Fund on Shadow Crew, I said, I made the statement, the name Gollum Fund will never be back.

If you ever see this name again, it's law enforcement. All right? And when I said something as Gollum Fund, people took that to heart. I was top of the food chain. When I said it, it was gospel. So all of a sudden, the Gollum Fund name is back. Of course, you're gonna have a response of,

well, dude, he said he would never bring it back. If it was, it was law enforcement control. So people were coming out of the woodwork targeting the Gollum Fund name. At the same time, the Secret Service has said, hey, yeah, we need these investigations. Someone sends you a file or something like that. Download it so we can see what the hell it is. Okay, let's do that. Well, one of the files that came through was a key logger. Oh boy, this could be trouble. Brett was told to collect any information and open up any files that people sent him to see what it was, because there might be some incriminating evidence in there, right?

So someone on one of these forums or IRC sent Brett a key logger, and he didn't know it. He opened it up and it got installed on the Secret Services computer. And this enabled whatever person sent it to him to see every keystroke that Brett typed. And so now someone on one of these underground forums was watching everything Brett typed and Brett had no idea it was on there. It was hidden. So here I am, I'm accessing, they're wanting me to send files to secret service addresses from that laptop. So it's not really secure to begin with. So here I am, I'm accessing my real email. Not only that, but I'm also accessing, because you had VM boxes, but they were horrible back then.

They were not optimized. You couldn't use the damn things for shit. So I'm accessing my emails. I'm sending stuff to the Secret Service, everything else from this laptop that we're also running these investigations out of. Now, at the time, the Secret Service gave Brett a cell phone, a way to contact him if they ever needed.

It was a basic cricket phone. But since Brett always worked out of the Secret Service office and came to work every day, nobody ever called him on it. Until one day. That phone rings, and I pick it up, and it's the TTYL line. So this hearing impaired line is coming across. So someone's typing on the other end of the line and it's going from text to voice. And it's telling me that they know who I am, that they know that I'm working.

I think it says that they know I'm working for law enforcement or some bullshit like that. It gives a whole line of stuff that I'm like, holy hell. And basically what the guy has done is he has seen that some of these email addresses that I'm sending stuff to is Secret Service, SS.gov. So he's seeing Secret Service email addresses. He's not only doing that, but he's reading my internal email. So he's compromised my GTE mail account and has shut me out of it. Well, the GTE mail account has a lot of the conversations that I had with some of these guys

from USA Sex Guide about Elizabeth being a prostitute. So he's got my real address. He knows about Elizabeth. He suspects that I'm an informant as well. And he's going by the name of Manus D, Hand of God. And I forgot what the actual demand was, but he says he's going to publish it all. And he does. He publishes it on some of these news groups. And from what I recall, it got a lot of traction with the Secret Service, but it didn't get a lot of traction with the overall cybercrime community.

I was able to play that off. Well, the Secret Service, when that phone call comes through, they think that it's me fucking with them, trying to get out of the investigation. Because the initial thing was I was only supposed to work with them for three months, and they were going gonna cut me loose. So they think that it's me, that Elizabeth is back at the apartment on a laptop doing all this stuff. So they're like, get in the car now.

We all rush over to the apartment. Elizabeth's sitting there watching some sort of reality show, some crap like that. And it's pretty evident that it's not me. That thing with Manus D continues. Well, I come back to the office that day and I'm like, hey, it's probably a key logger. We need to format this computer.

The answer is no. And I'm like, you're serious. And they're like, no, we're not formatting a damn thing. Get your ass on there and work. Okay, so start working. Meanwhile, ManusD is getting key logs of every single thing. He's getting all the passwords, all this other stuff,

and he's taking over these accounts, and this last, and I'm bitching about this for three months, this last for three months, he even takes over our e-gold account at one point, okay? And I actually, I talk him into giving the e-gold account back, and we become these, it become this weird conversation of friends. He suspects I'm an informant, but doesn't know it. I'm able to convince him to some point that I'm not.

After three months, I walk in the office one day, and Bobby and Brad are there. And they're like, look, we think it's a keylogger on the system. And I'm looking at them like, are you shitting me? And no, we think it's a keylogger. I think we're going to format today. So it took them three months to format that system. Meanwhile, that's what ManusD did, was all that.

Who do you think ManusD was? Do you have a theory? You know, I don't know. My theory is it was Max. I don't know. Max was the only one confident enough to do it. Max Butler. Whoa, Max Butler is in this story? Iceman? Well, this is the guy who was operating

a competing website called Carter's Market and went on to steal two million credit card numbers and sold them on his site. Max was later arrested and sent to prison. I think one of the longest prison sentences ever in computer crimes. And it's just crazy to hear how he may have sniffed out Brett as a fed and infiltrated the Secret Service.

Another interesting story Brett has while working with the Secret Service is this whole thing that went on with La Cosa Nostra. And I'm not talking about the mafia. This is a website that just happened to be the same name. And it was another forum for criminals to conduct crimes on and sell things. And the Secret Service agents, Bobby and Brad, were monitoring this site. It was a criminal forum. So it was like Shadow Crew.

It was one of these offshoot crime forums, all right? You go there and he had tutorials and there were forums on there talking about credit card theft and ID theft and hacking and all this other stuff. So I'm driving home one night, Brad calls me and he's like, hey man, La Cosa Nostra has a keylogger on the site. And I was like, what? He's like, yeah, there's a keylogger on La Cosa Nostra.

Anyone who visits the site, a keylogger's downloaded to it. And I asked him, I was like, well, who runs the site? And he's like, that's none of your goddamn business. And I'm like, okay. So they lead me down to the war room. And I'm sitting there and we're talking about La Cosa Nostra and the key logger and everything else.

And I'm like, well, what do you guys want me to do? And Brad looks at me and he's like, well, what would you do if you came across a site like that that had a keylogger on it? And I was like, well, I'd shut it down. And he's like, well, do what you usually do. I was like, okay. Brett had a lot of contacts in the criminal underground, so he asked around, hey, who runs La Cosa Nostra? And he gets a name. It's a young guy.

I start looking the kid's name up, and I start reaching out because I have every contact in the world. I start reaching out to all these criminal contacts. So within 30 minutes, I find out that this kid has been arrested. Not only has he been arrested, but he was in prison. So I find out the kid's real name. I start pulling the articles up on that, and it's pretty easy to tell quickly that this kid is, he's been let out to work for people

because you got the key logger on the side. He was sentenced to this much time. He's not out, he's out of prison right now. So why is he out? He's out for working, obviously. Oh, how interesting. A kid who operated this criminal forum had been arrested by the Canadian RCMP.

He disappeared for a short while and then was back. And suddenly his website is trying to install a keylogger on all its users, tracking all their keystrokes. Brett connected the dots and suspected that this kid might be a snitch, just like Brett. So here I am. Gollum Funds, the name is still highly respected, even though some people are thinking that I'm an informant.

So all of a sudden, I'm like, hey, I can use this as one of these things to help build trust across everyone else who thinks I may be an informant because there's no way an informant's going to tell on another one. So here I am. I just start posting it. I break it all down into a nice catalog, you know, a nice timeline, everything else. I post the articles, post the kid's name,

bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. 48 hours later, Lacoste Nostrad disappears from the internet. It turned out that the kid running the site was arrested by the RCMP and was working with them, just as Brett suspected. He turned into an informant to avoid prison time, and so the RCMP had him set up a keylogger on the site to try to find more information on its users. The kid was working for the RCMP. Yeah, La Cosa Nostra was an RCMP investigation. So Brett Johnson goes in and has that damn thing shut down.

RCMP calls Washington. What the fuck? Washington is calling Columbia, South Carolina. Hey, what the fuck is your monkey doing? And it goes from there. Columbia, South Carolina was where Brett was working in the Secret Service field office. And the monkey they were referring to was him. Referring to me. What is your monkey doing? Yeah, well, this resulted in the Secret Service agents from Washington, D.C. coming to South Carolina to talk with Brett. He didn't actually get in trouble for ruining an RCMP investigation, but they did reset some of his objectives.

Okay, so I know there are a lot of different timelines to keep track of here, so let me just recap real quick where we are. There are three things going on at this point. One is Brett is a snitch turning people in to the Secret Service. Two is Brett lost his girlfriend, Elizabeth. And three is Brett is still doing tax return fraud scams to make extra money. And not only was he doing it, he was doing it in the Secret Service offices while at work. They just had no idea he was doing it, though. But then something happened. One of the guys that Brett turned in had strangely hid some evidence in storage the day before he got arrested. And they suspected Brett tipped him off,

gave him some sort of warning like, hey man, hide your stuff, you're going to get arrested. So they gave him a polygraph test and decided to search his home for any suspicious stuff. Jim wants them to go and search my apartment. I'm like, yeah, yeah, let's go search the apartment. I'm fine with that. Well, in the apartment, I've got prepaid debit cards. I've got a stash of cash. I've got some fake IDs. I've got all this bullshit in there.

And I want to go there to make sure they don't get it or go through everything. So I know at this point that both Brad and Bobby, they like to look at the girls a bit. So I'm like, okay. So we all drive down to my apartment. As I walk in, I'm like, do you want me to show you where everything is, Bobby? And he's like, no, I can work.

I'm like, that's fine. I look at Brad and I was like, what do you want to look at? He's like, well, let's go in your bedroom and look around. So as I walk in the bedroom, I look at Brad and I'm like, have I showed you my new girlfriend yet? He's like, new girlfriend? I was like, yeah, man, I got a new girlfriend. And he's like, no, you've not. So I open up my phone.

I show him the naked pictures of the girl. And I was like, you want to see my porn stash? And he's like, no, man, I don't want to see your porn stash. I was like, are you sure you don't want to see my porn stash? It's right there on the desk. So he's like, what do you got? So he starts looking at that. Then I walk him home where I was like, this is

my closet. You want to go through the doors here. We can go through the drawers, whatever you want to do. Well, it was the closet that I had all the stash of the prepaid debit cards and everything else in there. So I make a point of going to the closet and going in and start trying to pull everything out in the hopes that he'll start to say, i don't need to see that which is exactly what he did i had unlearned enough about him at that point that i got got him distracted on the girl and everything else meanwhile bobby's going through everything in the house he doesn't find anything else they leave and that worked brett tricked the secret service agents and took advantage of their trust to social engineer them and keep them from finding his illegal stuff, which was right there in the closet. Crazy. But one of the higher-ups in the

Charleston Secret Service office, Jim Ramacone, suspected something was going on with Brett, and a while later ordered a second search in his apartment, where they do find his stuff. And it was so obvious in his apartment that the two agents that Brett had tricked, Bobby and Brad, were fired from their positions in the Secret Service. Well, I guess they actually got reassigned to do something else, but they did get in some big trouble for this. But Brett was in big trouble too. They threw him in jail and threatened to charge him with his previous crimes once again, unless he cooperated. But he didn't want to cooperate. And he sat in jail. Well, not long after going to jail,

someone came and paid his bond and he was able to leave. So he goes outside and there's his mom telling him his bond has been paid and she got him out. She's in the parking lot. She tells me you're out. And I looked at her and I was like, I can't stay. And she's like, what do you mean? I was like, look, I said, they're going to be arresting me. I've got to go. So go back to Aiken, South Carolina. I sleep the night there. The next morning, I call Kim, the stripper that I had been dating. I'd given Kim, I don't know, probably $60,000 at that point and called her up. And I was like, Kim, I need $1,000. And she was like, why do you need $1,000? And I was like, look, I said, I've got to go. I've got to round up the money for an attorney. I said, I'll pay you back $3,000. I need $1,000. And she's like, meet me in Augusta, Georgia.

So I drove, I had a 1997 Dodge Dakota truck. Irove that to Augusta, Georgia. Met her in the parking lot of Lowe's. Sat there crying, telling her how much I loved her and everything else. Got $1,000 from her and headed west on Interstate 20. Brett went on the run. He wanted to get far away from this place, far away from the courts and the police and the Secret Service and never come back. He was supposed to stick around and go to court and face tons of charges that were against him, but no way. That was not going to happen. Brett

was out of there. See, all Brett ever knew was crime. He had been committing crime since the age of 10. His mom and dad were both prolific criminals, and he spent most of his time online interacting with criminals, honing his skills, mastering the dark art. He saw himself as a lifelong criminal. So what's a person do that sees himself as nothing else but a criminal? They run and go commit more crimes. Brett was on the loose, heading west from South Carolina in a Dodge Dakota with a wad of cash in his pocket and no clue where to go. Every single day is the most stressful day of your life and the most exhilarating. You have the highest highs, the lowest lows. I was, talk about depressed.

I was the guy who, any ballot come on the radio, I was crying like a baby at that point. I'm leaving this behind because I want to stay the same. You don't have friends, so strangers become your friend. Brett ends up in Dallas, Texas and immediately starts doing tax refund fraud once again. It had worked really well for him in the past, so why not keep doing it? He gathers the supplies he needed,

which was a computer and prepaid debit cards, and gets to work. You would file, and it typically took 10 days for the money to hit the account, and the account would always hit early Friday morning. So, you know, 2, 3 a.m. Friday morning. So here I am by Thursday. I don't have any damn money at all.

I've got some baloney. I've got like, I don't know, $6, $8 in cash is what I've got left because I've spent the rest of it on food and on Kinkos at $12 an hour filing income taxes. So down to $6, $8, wake up, keep checking the account through the night, 3 a.m. check the account, money is on the cards. At that point, it's important to get the money out as fast as you possibly can. So I get in the damn truck and start looking for ATM machines

and start pulling all ATM machines and start pulling all these 20s out, throwing them in, throwing the 20s in the floorboard of the truck because I don't have anything to hold the damn 20s on. Finally, I get a nice pile of 20s up and I'm like, okay, I've got to do some shit with that. So I go back to the hotel, go up to the desk. I'm like, hey man, you got a hefty bag? And he's like, what? And I was like, do you have a hefty bag I can get? I got some garbage I need to take care of. So he hands me a hefty bag. I'm like, hey, man, you got a hefty bag? And he's like, what? And I was like, do you have a hefty bag I can get? I got some garbage I need to take care of. So he hands me a hefty bag. I go back to the truck, start putting

the 20s in the hefty bag. And that's what I do the rest of the night. I just continue. I go back to the ATM route, start, keep cashing out until I end up with, I think it was $67,000 that first night in $20 bills, all stuffed into a black garbage bag. Incredible. He's got quite a

sizable stack of cash now. He's kind of back on his feet. So what's next? Well, he bought a better car, a Jeep Cherokee, and kept heading west, first hitting up Roswell, New Mexico, and then he kept going. From Roswell, I head to Vegas, stay, I think I stayed the first trip a couple of three weeks in Vegas, stole $150,000 out of ATMs at that point doing tax fraud. From Vegas, went to Oceanside, California, stole another $120,000, $160,000, something like that. Then back to Vegas. I was in LA for a while. Finally, what happens is I'm back in Vegas. And the idea had been to try to get enough money up to bug out to Brazil. I was looking at trying to buy a place down in Florianopolis there and setting up business again. That was my thing. Oh, I'm just going to keep

on trucking. So I was in Las Vegas and the night before I'd been, you know, I'd stole $160,000 out of ATMs. I come back to the hotel and before I went to sleep, I booted up the laptop, signed on to Max Butler's site, Carter's Market. And the first thread there was Gollum Fund Most Wanted. And I sat there looking at it. I was like, what?

Before I clicked, I just looked at it and said, Gollum Fund Most Wanted. I click on it, and there is my picture and a link to the Secret Service site. And clicked on the site, and it's talking about Operation Anglerfish and the work I've done for the Secret Service and how I'm wanted. And then I start reading the threads down below it. And Max Butler, the thing was, is I had been an admin up until that point. I was an admin on Max Butler's site. So Max is pissed off the gills. He's wanting to find me. And Max had always had an anger problem. So he's talking murder and everything else like that.

And I'm sitting there going, well, I'm out of IDs now. While on the run for those four months, Brett stole $600,000 from the IRS through tax refund fraud. He was blowing through the money as fast as he'd get it to. Vegas will do that to you. Strippers, gambling, he was living the high life. But with no reliable way to get fake IDs anymore, the tax refund fraud came to a screeching halt. Brett knew he needed to get out of Vegas. Too many bits of evidence on him there. Time to pick a new place to hide out for a while. So what about Orlando?

So that's where I went. I got in the Jeep the next day and drove straight to Orlando. What I did in Orlando was I decided on a timeshare, paid cash for a timeshare for nine months that they were just building at that point. Then I went down to Universal and I went to Disney and bought the year passes and figured I'd just lay low for six to nine months until everything kind of died down. Then I may be able to get a passport at that point and bug out.

How many times did you go to Disneyland at that point? Daily, daily. Yeah. What? I went every day or I went to Universal and I did that daily. So, yeah. Why so many times? I like theme parks, man. I'm 50 years old.

I like theme parks still. Okay. So, I mean, I've got to imagine you are on quite a bender, right? Oh, I am. You stole what? $600,000 in those four months? Yeah, about $600,000. Yeah. So you're partying, you're getting girls, but it just doesn't fit in there that you're going to just, it just doesn't seem like adult fun compared to the other stuff.

Yeah. I'm drinking like a fish overnight during the day, I'm waking up and I'll go down to spend a few hours at the park. Then come back, eat at a restaurant, and then go to a strip club or something like that. Yeah, that was Brett Johnson. Well, as you can imagine, the Secret Service was extremely mad that Brett was not facing his charges that they had previously arrested him on twice. And he was nowhere to be found, and he was out there committing more crimes. It was at this point that Brett was on the Secret Service's most wanted list. And they were spending a lot of time and effort trying to find him. And at some point, they figured out his cell phone number. And I didn't know it, but they called the phone. And I hadn't been getting phone numbers and phone calls on the phone, but it came through and

they were acting like Papa John's pizza. And I knew it was kind of an iffy call when it came through because it just didn't make sense. But I didn't think much about it. I found out from talking to Bobby that that night they had actually went to another apartment, yeah, another apartment in the timeshare, thinking that I was in that apartment, but I wasn't. So what they did the next morning is they were just going door to door. That's the only thing they were doing, door to door. So 10 a.m., I think it was September 16th, 10 a.m. on 2006, I get a knock and I was in bed asleep. I get up, walk to the door, look out the peephole. Nobody's there. So I open the door, step out in the hallway, walking down the hall is Bobby Kirby, another South Carolina Secret Service agent and an Orange County police officer.

They turn around and I looked at him. I said, hey guys, how you doing? Bobby gets a smile on his face. He's like, pretty good, Brett. How are you? I'm like, good guys. You want to come in? Bobby's like, yeah, we do. Why don't we put you in cuffs first? I'm like, why don't you do that? They put me in cuffs, take me in, sit me down on the couch. Bobby looks at me. He's like, you got any cash in here? I was like, yeah, I got $150,000 in the bedroom. He's like, anything else? I looked at him and said, yeah, there's an AK-47 in there too. And he stops dead and he's like, are you serious? I was like, no, I'm just shitting with you.

He was like, that's good. That saves you a charge. I was like, I figured. Then he gets Brad on the phone and Brad just starts screaming at me. He's like, let the fucking begin. And I'm like, yeah, Brad, I understand. They put him in the county jail in Orlando for a while, but they needed to take him back to South Carolina so he could face all his charges. And I'm like, yeah, Brad, I understand. They put him in the county jail in Orlando for a while,

but they needed to take him back to South Carolina so he could face all his charges. But instead of taking him right there, they take him to another county jail on the way and leave him there for a while. And then when he's used to that, they put him in a bus and took him to another county jail a little closer to where he's trying to go. I guess they called this diesel therapy.

And they kept moving him from jail to jail until he got to where he's supposed to be. At some point, he fakes having a drug problem so that he can get into a drug rehab program, which he thinks will treat you better if you have a drug problem. Prosecutors standing up now, I mean, he's screaming. He's like, Johnson has manipulated the Secret Service. He's manipulated the prosecutor, and he's manipulating you today, Your Honor, and we insist on the upper limits of the guidelines. Judge looks at me, and she's like, I agree, 75 months. So six weeks later, I'm at the gates of the Ashland, Kentucky camp, federal prison camp.

Ashland was not supposed to have a fence around it. Well, we pull up in the bus and Ashlyn's got a fence around it, 14 foot razor wire on top. And I'm sitting there going, well, shit, I don't climb. So we go in and during process and I look at the guard that's doing the intake and I'm like, hey man, are there any jobs outside of the fence? And he's like, well, you can work in the national forest. And I'm like, no, I'll die out there. And he's like, well, you can do landscaping. And I'm like, I can do landscaping. So the next day I walk into the landscaping office. And behind the guard, he was a great guy. But behind his desk, the entire wall was this aerial photo blown up of the compound and the outlying areas.

So I can sit there and talk to him and plot my escape the entire time. So I worked for that dude for six weeks. The feds call it an escape, so let's call it an escape. I walked off, and the way that happened was my dad, he, I hadn't, my mom leaves my dad. I had not talked to him, had a real conversation with him, I don't know, 20 years. I mean, a real conversation.

I had seen him a couple of times. But when I say seen him, I mean maybe for five, six minutes. When I get to Ashland, he starts visiting me there. And I don't know, I guess it's the third visit in. He looks at me. He's like, hey, I've been reading about you online. I'm like, yeah. And he's like, yeah.

And he's like, that's a lot of money you made. And I'm like, yeah. And then he looks at me, he's like, you think you can teach somebody how to do that? So he mentions that and I decided to manipulate him into helping me escape. So I taught him how to do tax return identity fraud in exchange for $4,000 in cash, a change of clothes, a cell phone, and a driver's license. And the only driver's license he could get was my driver's license. So he drops it off in a package in the woods. I last six weeks at the landscaping job and then leave. He makes his way to Lexington, Kentucky, dyes his hair, and immediately goes back into tax refund fraud. He ordered 100 prepaid debit cards, and that was sent to him, and he bought a laptop, and then he went to the movies. Come back to the hotel. I'm on the second floor. I've got the curtains open on the window.

I'm sitting there on my laptop, and this guy walks by the window. He walks by. I see him stop. He backs up, looks at me, knocks on the window, reaches in his shirt, pulls out his badge, points to his badge, points to the doorknob. I'll get up, open the doorknob. I'm like, yeah. He's like, Brett Johnson. I'm like, yeah. He was like, you are under arrest. And I'm like, yeah. He's like, Brett Johnson. I'm like, yeah. He was like, you are under arrest. And I'm like, yeah. You sound annoyed, but I mean, is it really frightening or what is the real emotion? Oh, dude, it's at that point, everything, everything is resignation, every single thing.

And that right there, at that point was rock bottom for me. That was, as far as I was concerned, up until that point, there was still some glimmer of hope that, hey, I will still be able to make it out of country and I will still, you know, have all this money and I'll be all right. But at that point, I was like, my God, it's not happening now. They threw him in prison. And the first eight months, they made him go to solitary confinement. And he was sentenced to 90 months in prison at this point, which is seven and a half years. Brett was very depressed during that time, suicidal even.

Kevin Poulsen from Wired Magazine had been calling Brett to run a story about Max Butler. And eventually, the magazine article came out. But in it, it said that Brett Johnson was a secret service informant. And when you're in prison, and other prisoners find out you're a snitch, it might not go so well. So Brett was pretty worried about how the other prisoners would take this. The next day, I walked back into the barracks. Nick Sandifer has a copy of the magazine, reading it on his bunk. I'm like, oh, shit.

I walk up to him. I'm like, hey, Nick, what are you doing? He's like, I'm doing some reading. I was like, anything interesting? He's like, oh, it's getting there. And I was like, let me save you the trouble. So took the magazine, pointed the line out to him, and he's like, man, I already knew. I was like, okay.

I was like, are we going to have trouble? And he looked at me. He's like, well, he said, did you snitch on anybody that's here right now? I was like, no. He's like, until someone gets here you told on, we don't have a problem. At some point, his sister comes to visit him, and something about her visiting him really made him think about whether he should continue to be a lifelong criminal and if he should keep doing that. Prison gave him a lot of time to think. You do nothing but think.

You can read, you can do all this other stuff, but there's a lot of time to think. Every time you're walking that track, you know, four or five hours a day, you're just thinking. So there's a point in time where you either accept responsibility or you don't. I was very fortunate. And I think I credit Denise to that because I was the guy. I was the guy who really believed that bullshit line of, well, I did it for my family. I did it for my wife, all that. About two years in, it really hit me that, you know, the only reason that I'm in prison

is me. I'm the guy who put me in prison. He lied and said he was addicted to drugs, which gets him transferred to another prison in Fort Worth, Texas for treatment. And he says that program was actually really good for him. And Brett spent a whole six years in prison. Okay. So by the time you're ready to get out, do you have a plan for what you're going to do when you get out? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. My plan is to go right back into tax fraud.

Oh, yeah. After five years of prison time? Oh, yeah. My plan is to go right back into it. Yes, sir. Yeah, I get, so I'm released. I get the year off. I get the six months halfway house.

They put me on a Greyhound bus in Dallas, going to Tallahassee, Florida. That's where my dad is in Panama City. The halfway house is in Tallahassee. So I take the Greyhound bus to Tallahassee. My dad picks me up at the station and he's not been able to talk to me because I've been teaching him how to do tax, you know, I taught him before I escaped how to do tax fraud. He's got all these questions about, hey, how do you do this? How do you do this? How do you do this? So I'm answering the questions.

He's got, he's, he's, I guess he's stolen, I guess he has stolen some money. He's stolen some money by this point. He gives me a couple of gift cards that have 500 bucks a piece on them in case I need anything while I'm at the halfway house. And he's like, what do you want to do? And I was like, well, I'm going to go back into tax fraud. And he's like, no, son. And he really does.

He's trying to talk me out of it and everything else. And I tell him, I'm like, dad, this is what I'm doing. He doesn't want to do tax fraud at the halfway house, though, because they monitor you too closely. So he just plays it cool there and tries to be good. And to get out of the halfway house, they required him to get a job in the city where he wanted to move to. His probation restricted him so that he couldn't use a computer, though. So he had a hard time finding a job, but he was able to get a job driving a taxi, which allowed him to move out of the halfway house to Panama City, Florida.

But once he moved there, the taxi company realized he was a convicted felon and was like, oh no, you can't continue to work here. That's when I start committing tax fraud again, almost immediately, as soon as I get there. I buy, Amazon had released their first Kindle tablet. So I start trying to commit tax fraud. The problem is, is that I'm so scared doing it that I'm doing very low dollar, very low. I'm getting prepaid debit cards from,

at that point, you didn't get them online. You didn't have to anymore. They had them at convenience stores and Walmart and things like that. Now, the way he was doing all this was that he would look up the death index of a state and then file taxes for dead people, which he liked a lot because first, he knew dead people hadn't filed their taxes yet, which meant he could probably get a return on them. But second, he didn't feel like he was screwing over someone who's been dead for years. I mean, they were dead. What's the big deal? Well, just a few months into this, the IRS got hip to Brett's scam and put an end to it, making a new rule, no more filing tax returns for dead people. Up until this point, the IRS just never checked this, but now they were being more strict and denying any tax returns for dead people. Well, this really put the kibosh on Brett's whole money-making scheme.

He didn't have a job anymore, and he had no income from the tax return fraud, and he didn't have much money at all. And so he ran out of money, and he was bumming some money from his dad and his sister to get by. At some point, he was so broke that he ended up shoplifting toilet paper.

I'd had a friend of mine, he had posted an ad on Plenty of Fish for me, that free dating site. So I would go over to his house every now and then, we'd check in, he'd, you know, update the site for me, and we'd communicate with some of the women that were, you know, texting me and everything else. And who reached out to me is Michelle. I've been given these basically prison poses. You give this kind of stern look. And she had sent a message, why aren't you smiling? And my response was, that is my happy face. So we started talking. I started talking over the phone and about a month of talking on the phone, she calls me up. She's like, would you like to meet today?

And I was like, yeah, let's meet. Well, she didn't know I was a criminal or anything like that. So I was in Panama City. She was in Crestview, Florida. And we agreed to meet halfway in Destin, Florida. So we meet in Destin on a beach there. We're sitting there. About 10 minutes into the conversation, she looks at me and we're sitting on the beach

watching the water. And she's like, what's the worst thing you've ever done in your life? And I looked at her and I was like, well, I just got out of federal prison. And she's like, no, no, no. What's the worst thing? And I was like, I just got out of federal prison. And she looks at me and I tell her everything. And we sit there the rest of the night and we go over to a McGuire's pub and we have dinner over there. And at the rest of the night. Then we go over to McGuire's Pub and we have dinner over there. And at the end of the night, I looked at her and I was like, look, I said, I really like you. I said, I'd like to keep seeing you. I said, that's going to be

your choice though. I said, you're going to go home tonight. You're going to Google me. And she's like, no, I won't. And I was like, look, I said, you'll go home tonight. You'll look me up. So she goes home and she looks me up. And then she, her oldest son, she's got three sons. Her oldest son was in the Navy. He was home on leave during that point. She asked him, she's like, well, what do you think? Should I keep seeing him?

And Taylor was like, you know, do you like him? She's like, yeah. And he's like, you think he's still screwing around? And she's like, he doesn't seem to be. And he's like, well, hell, keep talking to him then. Well, I ended up moving in with Michelle within two months. I was going completely broke. I was about to lose the house and everything else. And it was obvious I loved her.

So I moved in with her within two months and started, you know, kept looking for a job. And the job that I got, my probation officer allowed me to have a cell phone. He said, he told me, he called me and he's like, look, he said, I can't keep you from getting on the internet. If I give you permission, at least I know what you're doing. He said, you can go get you a smartphone. So I got a smartphone and I was looking on Craigslist

and there was this guy that was advertising for landscaping. How ironic. So I called him up. So 20 minutes talking, he looks at me. He's like, well, he said, can I ask you a question? I was like, yeah. He's like, are you on the run or something? I was like, what?

He's like, look, he said, you just don't look like the type of guy that would do this type of work. He's like, so are you on the run or something? And I just told him, I was like, told him who I was and everything and what had happened. And he looks at me and he was like, his exact words, he's like, man, I'm going to have to think about it. I said, if you'll give me a job, I'll work my ass off. And he tells me, he's like, show up six o'clock tomorrow.

So I went there, my job was 10 hours a day pushing a lawnmower. And I made $400 a week doing that. And I worked my ass off. I did. I'd come in so damn tired that I'd just lay down and I'd fall asleep. And wake up the next morning and do it again. Why is the lawnmower story hard for you to tell? Because that was the only job I could get.

Come to find out, Brett Johnson was kind of broken at that point. I didn't want to go back into fucking breaking the law and fraud and all that bullshit. So I just wanted a job. That job didn't last long. He got hired somewhere else and quit mowing, but then that new place realized

who he was and didn't want to hire him anymore. So he was back to having no job. His girlfriend he was living with was struggling to make ends meet. I get it in my head. I'm like, you know, hell, got to help out some way. I don't, I'm not working. I'm a piece of shit. Got to do something to, got to do something to show her that, you know, that I can help provide. So I get it in my head. I was like, you know, hey, I can bring food in the house. I can at least make sure she doesn't have to

use the money that she's bringing in to buy food for us. So I'm that guy that got online and the way I started, the way I started out was

start ordering food. Well, the thing is is when you're, when you're stealing food online, the places you hit are not cheap places because, I mean, there are no cheap

places to sell food online. So I started hitting the steakhouses and all that bullshit, getting all these expensive orders in with stolen credit cards. And then I'm looking at the boys. Well, they can, you know, she doesn't have to spend money to buy them clothes. So hell, I can, I can, where do you guys pick out something on an Under Armour? What do you like an Under Armour? What size do you wear? Okay, let's make sure you got clothes. And then it goes, clothes for her. And then, you know, once that's taken care of, it's clothes for me.

Let's do that. So I had ordered from Nyman Ranch, Nyman Brothers Ranch, a bunch of steaks. And of course, I had been hitting Nyman Brothers for a while. Nyman Brothers was used to being hit in the panhandle of Florida, so they started flagging every order that was coming in for the panhandle. They flagged that order, contacted the actual cardholder. The cardholder said, no, no, I didn't order that. So it was controlled delivery. I go to pick up steaks and it's the, I think it's

the Fort Walton Sheriff's Department was who picked me up at that point and arrested me. And that's when Michelle finds out that I was committing crime. She didn't know that. And I go back to prison for 10 months. He goes back to prison. The same one that he went to in Fort Worth, Texas. And at this point, I'm just reminded of this clip from the movie, Liar Liar. Stop breaking the law, asshole! Every single relationship, except for my relationship with my sister,

every single relationship I'd ever had had been based on what I could give somebody, not on just me. And Michelle was the first person that I had ever had a relationship with that she needed me for me. She didn't need me for what I could give her, you know? She stood up for him at court, and she kept in contact with him when he was in prison. And after spending 10 months in prison, when he got out, he goes back to her, and she accepted him.

And only a few months after getting out of prison, they get married. And that's been the last run-in with the law for Brett Johnson. He says he's no longer a criminal. So what made him change? That's a good question. He viewed no longer a criminal. So what made him change? That's a good question. He viewed himself as a criminal. And when that's what you identify with, it's really hard to undo that identity

without feeling totally lost. A few things made him change, though. One was stopping to notice his sister. She grew up in the same house as him, but did not turn to a life of crime. She works in a school and has a kid and is doing just fine. Noticing how she turned out and was there for him through some of the toughest times really helped him realize that there are some good

people in the world that are doing good things for him, and he took advantage of that. Realizing how his life could be so different was a big turning point. Second was when his wife was there for him through court and didn't care for the things he gave her, but instead just liked him for him being him and not the criminal parts of who he is, but the good guy she saw in him. That life he made with her really did have a big impact on him deciding not to commit crimes anymore.

But I think the last thing is when people gave him a chance at life again. People who hired him or vouched for him so that he could get a job that really meant a lot to him. And it gave him new, clean opportunities in life that he was thankful for. So today, Brett has become a speaker, talking about cybercrime at many conferences and events around the world. And he also makes a podcast called The Brett Johnson Show. And he does consulting work, teaching companies how criminals think and how to protect against them. It's enough to make him feel like he's making a positive difference in the world, which goes a long way at keeping him straight.

At the end of the day, with me, it's evening out those scales. I can't change what I've done in the past, but I can make sure that what I do from here on is much better decisions. Big thank you to Brett Johnson, a.k.a. Gollum Fun, for sharing this crazy story with us. I first learned about his story by listening to his podcast called The Brett Johnson Show. And there he interviews his sister and other federal agents and tells all these crazy stories with them. At some point, his neighbor comes over and he tries to explain to his neighbor what he did. And it's just hilarious to hear how his neighbor what he did, and it's just hilarious

to hear how his neighbor thinks of all this. So check out the podcast, The Brett Johnson Show, or follow Brett on Twitter. His name there is Gollum Fun. This show is made by me, the sneaker, Jack Recider. I did the sound design for this one, too. Editing help this episode is by the spontaneous Damien, and this episode was assembled

by Tristan Ledger and mixed by Proximity Sound. Our theme music is by the cyber Gang, Breakmaster Cylinder. Hey, Jack, what do you call a fat computer? What? A big Mac. Get it? You can't call a computer fat. It's not PC. I can call it anything I want to. That's the file system, damn it.