Julian Dorey Podcast - 😬 [VIDEO] - This Guy Probably Stole Your Credit Card | John Boseak • #121

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

(***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ John Boseak is a former international credit card scammer and illegal financial asset designer. Subscribe to John’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BoseakConundrum ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - John’s Childhood Homeless at age 13 22:31 - Life in Michigan; John has a lot of kids 34:28 - John’s first kid w/ a stripper story 53:27 - Incarcerated as a teenager; how John survived homeless; John gets into college 1:15:17 - Homeless during college and how John made money to live; Crazy first job 1:28:52 - FBI raids John’s boss; John faces having nothing again 1:41:55 - The earliest days of international credit card fraud; Eastern European Fraud Hot Spots; Virtual Carding & Physical Carding Explained 1:57:10 - How much money John made at first; The problems with Virtual Carding & Moving to Physical Carding 2:15:32 - John decides it’s time to scale; The parallel between Carding and the Gold Rush 2:29:45 - John’s brother fraud arrest story 2:41:09 - How John sold cards internationally as a “preferred vendor”; Printing money 2:49:57 - The first time John got caught by the Secret Service story; Worst cops in America 3:06:46 - John meets with Secret Service at their Headquarters; Going back to carding while awaiting charges (that never come…); Operation Open Market; John goes down once and for all ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io Music Produced by White Hot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So I went and I woke him up. He was out of a dead fucking sleep. I wake him up to go and commit credit card fraud with me. We drive from Coral Springs to West Palm Beach, Florida. We go to Walmart. We walk in. We go all the way to the back. We get the laptop. We get up to the counter. Everything's fine. We give the guy the card. He swipes the card. He looks at it. He goes. He picks up the phone. He says, we got a code red back in electronics. To the degree that I want it to, but success comes not when we want it you know when it's right you know when it's earned so right it's a good way to look at it but yeah for people who haven't seen your content before

you know you were one of the biggest card sellers fraudulent card sellers in america at one time i you've had a hell of a life though. I think the way that you tell your story and are able to kind of take it from the beginning, which I want you to do today, is pretty powerful because, you know, I obviously talk with a lot of different types of people in here. I'm curious about everyone's walk of life, how they ended up where they are. But I do love hearing about people who had wildly different environments and experiences than I was used to and how some ways where that could have gone wrong and what made it go wrong. And someone like you is nice enough to be extremely

open about that. So for the people that haven't heard you, where did you grow up and where did everything start for you? Sure. I was actually born in Mount Clemens, Michigan. It's just a small manufacturing city outside of about 30 minutes north of Detroit. And I was born there, lived there to about 1992. And then my mother moved myself and my little brother down to Homestead, Florida. Now, mind you, I don't have any family in Florida. We had no ties in Florida. My mother, for whatever reason, whether I don't remember it was a job opportunity or maybe she just wanted to maybe just change our environment, whatever she was going through at that time, moved us to South Florida and pretty much grew up in South Florida my whole entire life. I was going to say, you look like Florida, man. When I picture Florida, I'm like,

John Bosiac, that's him. I'm a Florida crack cracker bro i'm a florida cracker through and through i just i spent pretty much my whole entire life there now my entire my almost my entire family lives in michigan my dad my grandparents all my cousins my brothers my little brother my older brother everybody's in michigan so just you and your mom went down just me and my mom and my little brother went to Florida. And that was in like 1992. Relatively uneventful from 1992 to about 1996. I was a youth. I had a relatively normal childhood. I remember, you know, I just remember playing a lot, riding bikes in the neighborhood, you know, early 90s shit that all the kids did back then. You know, there was no video games. I think there was like regular Nintendo and, you know early 90s shit that all the kids did back then you know there was um there was no video games i think there was like regular nintendo and you know early stuff you know so it wasn't like

you know what it is today and then in 1996 um my mother moved back to michigan and i stayed in florida i just made the decision um as a 13 year oldold kid. I was going to say, you're young. Yeah, and I just didn't want to go back to Michigan. Like, I didn't like it. And it was right around that time that I kind of started getting into shit. Wait, how does that – hold on. How does that happen? You were 13 years old.

Yeah. You just said to your mom, I'm staying in Florida. Well, I was incarcerated at the time. Okay, you skipped that part. So what happened there? So I was in a boy's home at the time. How did you get there like 10 months just you know truancy from school shoplifting uh vandalism breaking and entering

you know you name it i had a whole laundry list of shit i kept getting in trouble for kept getting in trouble for kept getting because i had virtually no supervision growing up what was your mom did was she working all the time yeah you know um you know she didn't go to college or anything like that so she unfortunately had to work pretty hard she worked uh um logistics she was in logistics you know so shipping and receiving you know all those all those kinds of things and when did you start getting in trouble like nine ten oh i started running away from home when i was like eight years old you know packing my scooby-doo my or my ninja turtle backpack and why'd you want to run away i was just angry as a kid i don't know why uh things angered me I was like eight years old, you know, packing my Scooby-Doo or my Ninja Turtle backpack. Why did you want to run away?

I was just angry as a kid. I don't know why. Things angered me when I was younger and I just didn't know how to deal with my anger. Growing up, I didn't have any outlets. You know, nobody really took me as a child and did anything with me. You know, they didn't put me into sports. They didn't teach me how to draw. They didn't put an instrument in my hand. None of those things and you didn't see your dad much no my dad

wasn't in my life he's in michigan yeah he wasn't in my life um you know so it was just me and my mom and my mom was working 50 60 hours a week so what would you run away when she was home or like when she wasn't home um well i've been these these memories are foggy but it was um it's like a saturday morning we get into an argument about fucking cartoons or going doing you know whatever and then i would go to my room i'd pack my shit and i'd crawl out my window and i'd dip and i'd be gone all day long and what would she do about it oh she'd call the cops they'd be out looking for me she'd be driving around looking for me you know and that it just that's when it started the rebelliousness just and my

mother told me from from a very very young age she says you've always been independent she's like you've always just gotten up in the morning and made your own breakfast and you know put your cartoons on and i've always i guess i always you know got up and closed myself and she never had to really do too much with me you know she never really had to keep an eye on me too much she said was your brother was he getting involved in some of the same stuff, or what was the story with him? My brother is the complete opposite of me.

We eventually started doing karting together, but that wasn't until later on in life. My little brother, complete opposite. You know, quiet. Not running away from home? No, no, no, no, nothing like that. He was real quiet, just super nerdy. You know, always had something that he was involved in that held his attention and he would just get involved

with like whatever he was working on like whatever toy or project or whatever he had going on he would just envelope himself in that and nothing else would you know really transpire outside of that in life whereas me i'm just the complete and total opposite you know i'm more outgoing um it's hard for anything really to hold my attention for you know extended periods of time you know so i'll get out in something will pique my interest i'll get involved in it i'll become obsessed with it and then i'll just get bored with it and move on to something different you know do you think some of it i mean it sounds like your dad was in your life for the first seven years right before you moved down

there he's always been in my life just not my day-to-day right you know what i mean you think some of that is because then your mom's down there she's a single mother she's working all the time you don't get attention and you kind of obviously you were naturally independent, like she told you later, but you may have, you may have been acting out because you didn't, you didn't have those eyes on you. Sure. And I'm sure a lot of it was that. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of it was, I just wasn't getting attention. You know, it's, it's in retrospect, it's really hard to look back and. Where's your playlist taking you? Down the highway? To the mountains? Or just into daydream mode while you're stuck in traffic?

With over 4,000 hotels worldwide, Best Western is there to help you make the most of your getaway. Wherever that is. Because the only thing better than a great playlist is a great trip. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Book, direct, and save at bestwestern.com. And down, you know, the cause behind a lot of my behavior. I just attributed a lot of it to the kind of chaos that I was living in, which really wasn't chaos as far as like, there wasn't like,

you know, drug use or like abuse or any i didn't grow up with any of those things i mean if anything it was just probably you know neglect a little bit uh my mom's part but it was like she's working yeah i had no supervision man i had no supervision so the people who were supervising me um you know weren't really supervising me they were keeping an eye on me but me. Who's watching you when she's at work? The neighbors. We had live-in babysitters periodically. She would put ads in the paper

and somebody would move in and they'd be like a nanny and they would take care of us. But then it was like, this is the 90s, man. In the morning, I would get up, get on my bike, and I'd be gone until the streetlights came on.

And nobody would tell me anything different. And at some point pretty early you started doing things like skipping school sure yeah shop i guess like basic shoplifting all of the the negative influences that you could imagine i had in my life at that time because you know we didn't grow up the neighborhood we grew up in was it wasn't like you know it wasn't even like a middle class affluent neighborhood it was kind of like lower middle class lower middle working class neighborhood where you know a lot of my friend's parents were alcoholics um you know in and out of jail uh i'm homestead florida right and then that was like 1992 but then like hurricane andrew came uh and i was in hurricane andrew i remember vaguely

detail before i was alive but that shit was wild, right? It was the worst natural disaster to hit the United States before Hurricane Katrina. On like a level of just destruction of property, devastation of natural resources and everything. Completely leveled Homestead. And that hit the whole east coast of Florida. Yeah, so what it was, it was coming towards Homestead, Florida. And then it turned it went back out so all the forecasters was like they were like or it's trending out out out and

then all of a sudden it did a 360 came back and just made a beeline straight for yep hit homestead and then went up the coast and you know but yeah so it was horrible uh i remember that as a child you know it was i remember the wind and the rain i remember our house getting lifted off the foundation and carried all the way back to the property. Yeah, so it was pretty intense. And then so after that, we moved from Homestead because there was nothing left of Homestead at that point. There was nothing left. Whoa.

So we had to move to Florida City, which is just north of Homestead or just south. I don't remember. Lived in Florida City for a little while. Early memories, you know, as a kid. I don't really have too many. And then to Kendall. And once we moved to Kendall, that's when I was like started becoming like into my teen years, you know. So you're like 12, 13, 14.

Yeah, yeah. And how'd you end up in a, what was it, a boys home you said? Yeah, I was in Boysville. My mom just couldn't wrangle me in. She couldn't get a leash on me, you know. She would ground me and then I would just dip out the window and be gone. Oh, so she put you in there? Well, I kept getting arrested.

And they were telling her she was having meetings with counselors and people that were trying to straighten me out. I'm like, listen, let's stick them in one of these places, give them a fucking reality check and see if that helps. It did not yeah what was that like i mean i don't even know what goes on in those places you're in there amongst the worst of the worst i mean kids that are in there for carjacking murder um you know one kid lit his mom on fire while she was sleeping just you know those those kinds of those kinds of kids you're around and at this point in my time i'm time, I'm at an age where I'm very impressionable. Of course.

Because I haven't had, up until this point, I haven't had any kind of role models in my life that I looked up to or that would teach me anything. So the kids that I'm seeing, that I'm looking up to, are the kids that are carjacking, are the kids that are arm robbering, are the gangbangers, the kids that are selling drugs. Because there's a hierarchy. And just in that social environment I was in, those are the kids that I looked up to because those are the kids that everybody's like, oh, yeah, he does this and he does that. And it's cool. How much is it parallel to prison?

I mean, it's kids, so it's not the same. Oh, no, there's no parallel. No, not until you start getting up into like, I was in a place called um like a gbrc center uh genesee valley regional center um that place is like prison but it's all it's youth it's 18 and under but it's ran like a like a prison like a maximum security prison you've got cells and the whole nine so it wasn't like that at the boys home no boys home is more like a um more of like a group home setting you know you've got a roommate you've got you know you have group

meeting every day but then there's like a tv room there's no locked cells or nothing like that it's usually old converted convents from like we don't it's usually next to a church and like you know how the nuns used to live in the convent and yeah yeah not so much anymore you know what i mean so then they converted all these old convents into like boys homes and shit so that's like the the setting yeah i mean i i'm a huge believer in environment and how it molds you and and you know people make their decisions there is the final like check it off yourself and that that's just the reality of being a human being but you know environments can put you in a position where you only know what your reality is. So, I'm just trying to picture myself as... Well, you're conditioned, first of all. And then, you know,

your mind, you live in a certain paradigm. And once you've been living in that certain paradigm and you're conditioned to that environment, it's,'s man it's extremely hard to see the writing on the wall or even to step away from that in third person and kind of you know what i mean but also like the age you're getting in there too like third i'm thinking about myself at 13 like the hormones are starting to come in yeah you don't know anything but you actually think you know something at this point yeah and can't nobody tell you shit you know and it's like so you know my view of of the world and the way things operate was drastically skewed from a very young age you know and that that shaped my decision making over the next two decades yeah and i think there's something to be said for that though because these places and i could say

that i do say the same thing with even prison and stuff it's like they call prison department of corrections there's no correcting going on no there's no you know there's there's not when when you go into something like that you're scarlet lettered as it's just how society treats it and it's how we make it follow people around even after they've paid their debt to society they never really stop which i think is a little crazy for most things but like you also you're put in a killer be killed environment they make it a hellhole on purpose so while it's not like that as you point out in the boys home there's still the hierarchy that you point out there's still the guy to your left is a is a carjacker or something like that like actually doing crazy shit and as you also said it's like you're looking up to some of these people because that's what you're fucking that's what your male hormones are telling you to do at the time yeah and you know

these in these environments are you know there's a lot of fighting going on you know there's a lot of kids that were uh sexually abused as children so now they're teenagers so now they're preying on younger kids oh sexually like you got all kinds of weird fucked up shit that happens in these places fortunately enough i i never i never got the brunt of that like i was never i never got abused by like the staff but that was you know certainly going on um oh like the staff sexually abusing people oh yeah dude it's oh it's wild and they're wild you know and and fortunately i just was lucky enough never to have to experience any of that, like none of the sexual abuse, none of the physical abuse.

I got into it with other kids because we're kids. We're going to have your arguments. So I did fight other kids a lot, but not too much because I've always been a lot smaller than everybody else my whole life. So I wasn't one of those kids who was like quick to violence. Right. You know what I mean? Like I was always like smart enough to kind of just be quiet and mind my own business. And even when you do that, people still fuck with you. You know what I mean? Of course. Especially in an environment like that. Yeah. It was rough.

But while you're in there, you said your mom went back to Michigan. Yeah. She took off, went back to Michigan. And, um, did you, did, I mean, did she tell you? Yeah. She was like, you know, there was conversation. She's like, you know, we're doing this and then this is what we're doing. And when I got out, I just didn't want to go to Michigan. And I went, yeah, I went and lived with the neighbors, like the neighbors. So the people we live next to in, uh, Kendall, their kids, like they're, they're, they're, they used to watch me and my little brother and they had two kids around our age. So I just became really comfortable with them and their children and their family to the point to where when my mom took off, when I got out of the, out of the, out of the place I was in, I had to go live with them for a little while until my mom was supposed

to come back down to Florida to get me. But she never, she never did. And that was, I was just, she didn't show up. No. Yeah. She just stayed in Michigan and I stayed in Florida and that was i was just she didn't show up no yeah she just stayed in michigan and i stayed in florida and that was it wow yeah that's got to be i mean i know you were used to your mom not being around that much because she was working as a kid but still i don't did you feel at the time like that was traumatic or do you feel that way now or do you feel that way now but at the time i was like dude this is the coolest thing that ever fucking happened to me because now i really got nobody to tell me anything because my neighbors were cuban they didn't speak english they were older cuban couple

who spoke no english and they were you know so it was like i could get over staying with them yeah i could get over on them they didn't even speak english you know what i mean so it was like what are they gonna so after a while it was like um it got to the point to where they just kicked me out and i couldn't go back there and then i'm just now i'm just out doing now i'm 14 15 and i've got you're homeless i got the reign of the world like go go and come and come and go as i please do whatever i want that's how you're looking at it but you're fucking homeless yeah they kick you out of the house you're 14 15 i'm thinking about myself at 14 yeah it was like like i could have never in a million years done that but you get out and you're like oh this is okay like what

where do you where do you sleep at night what are you doing you know you got friends friends sneak you in you got people that sneak you in fucking their house and let you crash and then you know everybody i know their parents get up early and go to work in the morning and they were gone till you know at night so i would just hang out at people's houses all day you know that continued all throughout high school and then um you know you just like i said you just you just survive you just go day to day and like i was never really used to thinking any kind of in advance ever like that's a more recent more recent like i'm almost 40 now and that's just now I'm starting to incorporate the thinking ahead and looking into the future and planning months and years.

But that was never even a part of my reality back then. You were living moment to moment. Oh, yeah, hand-in-mouth moment to moment. What am I going to eat at 5 o'clock? I'm hungry right now. What am I going to eat? Those kinds of things. That's wild how you just jumped right into that.

Yeah. I didn't worry. I'm even trying to think about that, like sneaking to sleep at your your friend's house being out before the parents can see you in the morning oh yeah that was you do and it's like that's how i grew up it's like you're doing this every day every single day yeah and you know school so i went to school um because school was like a big place for me to network so you're still going to school still going to school because that's where all the kids were that's where everybody because that's where all the kids were. That's where everybody was. That's where like all of my networking was everything at this point in time in my life because I had to be, I had to meet people.

I had to have places to go. You know, so I had to be a people person. I had to, I had to be, I had to be the funny guy because I had to make friends. Where was your address? Like what, what, what did the, did the school know anything about this? No, as far as they concerned, I was still living with my parents. You know, because, you know, they don't know they don't know I'm doing what I'm doing. I guess, yeah.

And I wasn't the person to go to the counseling. I didn't talk to the counselors and shit. You didn't strike me as that kind of guy. No, I wasn't that kind of guy. I was always, you know, I need someone to talk to kind of. I was like, fuck, you know, I'm good. I'm good.

So you still were, like you, as an emancipated, I guess, 14, 15-year-old. Unofficially emancipated. Unofficially emancipated with no official home. You were still making the decision to go to school. Well, yeah, because like I said, that's where all the girls were. That's where everybody was, where I could network and find people's houses to sleep over or little hustles to do. So that's how you would do it.

Yeah, school. At school, you'd be like, can I come over and sleep tonight? Yeah, I'd fucking just be hanging out. I'd be like, listen, hey, can I come crash at your house tonight? And everybody kind of knew my situation. Everybody kind of knew I was just out there. Did you have any contact with your mom? Hey, guys, hope you're enjoying the show.

I got three quick things to ask you, and if you don't mind, it's a huge help to grow in the show. Number one, if you haven't already commented down below please be sure to do that number two if you haven't already shared this episode with your friends either personally or on social media please be sure to do that as well it's the best thing we can get and number three if you are on apple or spotify right now please leave a five-star review on either one of those platforms that is an enormous help over there and i appreciate all of you who have been doing each of those things. Thanks and back to the show. At this point? Yeah, I would call her once a week, twice a week.

What'd she think you were doing? Living with the neighbors? Yeah. And they didn't speak English, so they weren't calling her and telling her. They didn't speak English, yeah. So she had no idea you were just couch surfing? No, not for about a year.

I think once I hit like 15, then I think she kind of knew, she kind of found out. Because I would go back and forth from michigan because things would get so rough for me on the street down in florida like i would just run out of places to stay and shit and like especially in like my earlier teenage years i would have to take off and go to michigan and how'd you how would you get the greyhound bus by myself when i, 16. And how would you get money? I would Greyhound bus it. Steal, pretty much, mostly just stealing. Yeah, because, you know, I didn't, you know, I didn't have a lawnmower.

I didn't, I couldn't cut grass. Nobody's going to give you a job at that age because you can't work. Yep. You know, so there's only one way for me to get anything I need and that's through theft. So that's basically what I did. It was petty theft, pretty much. You know, I would steal jewelry or i'm very much a um an opportunist yeah you know what i mean like i'm just i'll be somewhere and i'll see an opportunity and i and i'm just like bomb and then something will happen and i'll make a couple dollars here or there because you associate it with with survival

yeah you know what one of the things matt's talked with me about i think he did talk i keep forgetting if he talked about this on camera. I think he did a little bit, but we talked about it a lot off camera. But he's into the threshold of crime a lot, like he thinks about that. And it's a very important concept, I think, for people to have their own understanding of what they're capable of. of and the way he talks about it is you know he's like every single person that's ever lived on this earth has a threshold at which if it's crossed they will do something illegal he said what i recognize in myself is my threshold is much lower than the average person which is great that he has that understanding but like looking at you this was an example he didn't use you as an example

but i'm saying like this is an example he talked about he's like if a mother can't feed her kid she's gonna steal you know if you're on the street and you have nowhere to sleep you're gonna you're gonna do something and so with you you're in your formative years you don't know fuck all about the world you don't have any parent you're it's traumatic your parents are out of your life your brother's not even there he's up in michigan you have no family no one to turn to and you are like the stress of like i get stressed about trying to find guests right and like oh my god am i only six weeks out or four weeks out right you had stress every night of like i need to find a kid in school who's gonna let me

like me enough to let me sleep at home yeah so of course to i guess to get back to michigan and whatever like you do something to get there but like every time you went you would leave again even when your mom knew that you were basically homeless oh when even when i got to michigan i didn't really stay with my mom i would stay with other relatives like my i would say uncles or cousins they wouldn't tell you to stay nobody yeah nobody i was just free reign man my whole life just fucking free reign nobody ever corralled me or put rules or regulations or restrictions on me nothing even when i was 15 if i just didn't want to stay in michigan i would just get up in the morning pack my bag

catch the city bus downtown detroit to the fucking the greyhound bus station i'd already have somebody you know either purchase my ticket for me i purchased it on the phone and i would just hop on a bus and go wherever i needed to go. No questions asked. No questions asked. I did that a lot. I rode the Greyhound bus a lot when I was a kid. My teenage years, I, you know, all over, uh, all over the South, uh, Georgia, I spent a little time in Georgia with a girl I met and caught the Greyhound bus out there and, uh, lived in Georgia for a little while. And how'd you meet her? Um, just, I think through mutual friends just in the neighborhood or something she was from georgia and then i don't even remember how

i ended up in georgia but i ended up in georgia for a little while as a teenager yeah it's like you're at the same time unbelievably immature but mature like crazy in ways that you don't even appreciate or understand didn't understand bizarre understand. Yeah. I couldn't, I couldn't understand at that time. Like it just, it just, everything seemed normal to me at that time. Like all of this seemed normal.

You know what I mean? And it wasn't until later on in life that I realized that when I look back, I'm just like, wow, man. Wow. So many times something could have gone like way wrong and you're dead or something.

You know what I mean? So many times. Yeah. And it's, so many times. And it's not even in some of the predictable ways for your situation either it's more like you you took it on you you grabbed the bull by the horns and did it and like even if you're mature in the sense that i meant it where like you are you're developing independence insane independence in in dangerous ways even at a young age you're still I could call that mature

but your mind is not in a place where you're ready to understand what comes with that and as an example I'm just saying like this didn't happen but if you were 16 or 17 this is a prime case where you're going to knock up a girl right and then what the fuck do you do after that

that happened when I was 17 you did? you had a kid when you were 17 17 yeah yeah she's 21 now i didn't know that yeah i knew you had a kid i didn't know you had one that early you have five kids five kids well now you're making my point for me yeah because this is it like you're you're surviving you're going to places you're sleeping wherever and like you're making all your own decisions when your brain Is not in a formulated place to be able to make any kind of decision. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Understanding the ramifications of the decisions I was making and how it would affect my life in the long term I had no concept of that at all

You know, yeah, you had said something like you you did the one with with matt inside the darkness on on his second channel that was really really good and people should check that out because what matt does what does he call it he calls it poor man's soft white underbelly or something yeah yeah poor man's uh soft white underbelly owns it up and he'll tell you he'll tell you he's just it's a direct ripoff it's literally and he knows mark too i guess mark mark later the guy who does softwood underbelly but and you do yeah you're on that we're all cool with mark's cool man but amazing work he does but like that was that was really good when when you were on with him and there was something you said in there about your family that you know listening to you describe it now i'm still trying to put it all

together because it's i'm not trying to put it all together because it's i'm not sure i ever heard someone say it this way but you were like i have a family they're here on earth and you weren't you're not like you don't at least outwardly express anger at it though i would fully understand if you had that but you're like they're here on earth you know like yeah i don't really have physically exist here on this planet um like i have family they exist but they're just not they're just not a part of my life they never have been and that's the only way it's kind of like that was that was the divide that when when something like that happens it's like cutting a cord it's just amazing to me that you would still go up and visit there and it still wouldn't be

i can't wrap my head around yeah yeah you know i go and i see my grandparents and they love me to death and you know my cousins i have like 15 or 20 cousins and we're all around the same age age range um you know so it's always a big party every time i go up there and they welcome me and everybody loves me but it's like kind of just like out of sight out of mind with my entire family if i'm not physically present there then i just don't exist do you think it's because i'm speculating here i don't know because i don't know your family and you know i only know you a little bit but do you think it there's something like they the expectations of you at such a young age were put low because you were getting into trouble that they almost before you were even grown, like they accepted the fact that like, oh, he's going to be here when he wants to and not when he wants to.

And like, we can't really do anything about that. And so it's almost like they anchored it in their head that like this was your normal. Man, it's that I never really thought about it like that before um i just know my family is they're they're just strange they're all strange you know they're very very selfish um you know each individual unit of household uh is just very selfish with their resources and their time and their energy you know so it's like none of the family really expends too much time energy or resources into anything that's outside of their household does that make sense yes you know what i mean so it's like i have aunts and uncles and

they have and i have cousins and whatever's going on in their household that's their that's their you know their universe uh and i'm over here and i don't exist inside of their household so they don't invest any time energy or resources into me or my life and that's just how it's always been that's the way it is my grandparents that's the way it is all my aunts and uncles that's the way it is my mom uh that's just the way it is and i i don't know why they're like that it's just like and i see other people's families that'll bend over backwards right and spend their last dime to make sure somebody you know goes doesn't go a day without eating or sleeping on the street and for whatever reason my family's just not like that they just yeah and and

i think like i come from if i have big families on both sides yeah and as do i yeah and people are yeah you said you have like 20 cousins or something so i have a lot of cousins yeah but i think when you when when you know the reality that you just laid out as the other side of what you didn't experience, which is what I know, it's hard to fathom that. Because, I mean, I know how I feel about my family. Anyone could be like, oh, they're on a hard time. Like, hey, what can I do? You know what I mean? Exactly.

And that's how I'm wired. And by the way, that's how they're wired. Yeah. There's not really – everyone's got their own tics and, you know, different differences to them for sure. It's family. But at the end of the day, like there's something about that. There's a clear kinship.

And it's just what makes it more bizarre is the fact that there was still like, you know, you're connected by a thread at least still. Yeah. And it's still like I said, when I'm present, when I'm physically present, I get that feeling of that overwhelming feeling of acceptance and love and they include me in things. But when I decide that I, you know, when I'm off living my life somewhere else,

it's like I don't exist. Nobody calls to check on me. Nobody invites me over for holidays. Nobody, you know, it's nothing. It's like- Well, where the fuck do they call? This isn't during like the, this is the earliest days of the cell phone era maybe. Did you even have one? invites me over for holidays nobody you know it's nothing it's like where the fuck do they call this isn't during like the so this is the earliest days the cell phone era maybe did you even have one

oh back then and like when you were 15 16 17 i dude cell phones weren't even a thing until i was like senior in high school it was like the gordon gecko model yeah yeah so there were no there was no like so yeah communication was a little bit more difficult back then like you had to make an effort you had to actually fit, now it's effortless. Send the fucking pigeon, something. Yeah, it's effortless. But, you know, back then, it's just... Yeah, I've never really...

Actually, I've never really sat and tried to make sense out of any of it. I've just accepted it for what it is. And that's why you're here. That's why we're talking about it. It's so cute. I've never dug into it and tried to analyze any of it. That's why that content with Matt was great,

because for people who have never seen soft white underbelly for example or inside the darkness that matt does it's just you get up there and matt matt is totally like markled at least like talk with some of the people that's not even that just fucking leaves and he just says tell your story and and he wants you to just go and so people who are good at doing that can can i mean it's very compelling and when you were doing that it did seem to me and i and i guess i'm wrong about this it seemed to me like you had at least some like you were all as you were explaining things you were reflecting on it i do that a lot yeah but you're saying that you don't actively like you've never sat down outside of like talking

someone like me or something and and been like huh i wonder why no because to me it just it's not going to solve any it's not going to help me resolve anything i don't think you know so i just don't i don't spend any time or energy thinking about things that aren't you know that's a key right there you know what you just said because you had to learn in your survival as we've pointed out you had to learn how to how to survive tonight how to how to get through it so you're the rest of your brain chemistry your behavioral pattern says how am i surviving today to this day no matter how roof over your head whatever it is exactly yeah and so you're not really the type who ever had the opportunity even to have the luxury

of reflecting exactly I didn't have the luxury of even so that's just the way my brain is trained and you know I'm very good at compartmentalizing it's just something I've become very very very good at over the years so it's easy for me to take very traumatic

experiences file them away in a box somewhere and then just move on with the rest of my life and not really let those things uh affect me too much now granted i do have a lot of ptsd just from how i grew up and i'm starting to deal with that and realize that and become more when did you realize aware um in my 20s when i tried um in getting into relationships you know when i tried to like falling in love and being in uh other relationship that's when i i started to realize that um i don't have the tools necessary um to to to deal with to deal with this like being in relationships and like well

you know dealing with women and like what do you mean the tools necessary um specifically like so i i contribute i attribute um i have what i attribute to a lot of me being the way i am is empathy like i have a lot of empathy inside of me for other human beings. And I think that was instilled into me at a very young age from my grandmother. And I don't know, you know, and I curse her every day for it because I wish I didn't have the empathy on the level that I do, because I feel like I would have went a lot, I'd be a lot more successful in life if I was able just to step on, you know, people's necks and not think twice about it to get to where I need to go. Because I feel like anybody who's, you know... Those peoplecks and not think twice about it to get to where i need to go because i feel like anybody who's you know those people die alone and unhappy think so

so i i wouldn't i wouldn't i understand why you think like that you know all the things you've been through yeah and stuff and we'll get into all that yeah but i like that you turned out this way yeah that was a good that was a good move by grandmother. You know, so I just have empathy, man. And, you know, I think a lot about how my behavior is going to affect the world around me and, like, the people that are, you know, around me. And so a lot of that has shaped my decision making. You know what I mean? Yeah. But you, I mean, again, because I hadn't heard you in anything talk about this but you had your first kid at 17 17 years old so what what happens there like uh she was older you know she was uh 21 or 22 and

you know a real super religious family um georgia girl no uh this was in michigan actually it's happened in michigan that was one of the times i was up there for a few months or a year or whatever. And I was just hanging with the wrong crowd, hanging with drug dealers and gangbangers and escorts. And I was really big into the whole strip club scene and everything, even from like 16th. At 16th. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was living in that's the world that I was living in from probably 16, 15 or 16 all the way up until I was 25. So how did you meet religious 21-year-old?

She was a stripper. Come on. Yeah. Religious, super religious family. You know, father was a preacher. Mother was, worked in the church. Daddy issues probably. Yeah, she had all kinds of shit going on.

And, you know, met her through mutual friends. The crowd that I hung around with was always five or six years older than me. So at 15, 16, the kids I was around were in their 20s. Because the kids my age all had curfews and had to go home and do their homework. You couldn't have that. No, I can't. That doesn't even exist in my paradigm. So I'm with the older kids that can stay out all night and the ones that are you know can provide booze and drugs and you know and then the younger ones would sneak

in at 1 a.m to sleep yeah yeah well that's until i started finding flop houses just to fucking kind of stay at when i in my teenage years because there was plenty of those you know people's parents that were like on drugs so like all the teenage kids used to just come and go as they pleased and out of their home and the parents were so fucked up on alcohol and fucking barely able to pay the fucking rent that they didn't give a shit who was sleeping on the couch

you know what I mean like those kind of situations but you also told me this was I think right before we were on camera but you were saying you didn't touch drugs until you were in your 20s

yeah so even when you were young and you were with all these people I was exposed to crack I was exposed to heroin I was exposed to all that shit and you didn't touch it didn't touch any of it

yeah you just drank a little bit marijuana was? Marijuana was my thing. Yeah, it's always been my thing, even to this day. Marijuana has always been my thing. And I drank a little bit here and there. The drinking didn't even become really a problem until I was in my 20s, until after I was 21. And I could have free access to it. And then it became a problem periodically throughout my life. But yeah, I never got into the hard drugs, man. But the stripper was up in michigan so it's during one of your times visiting home like when you would visit home how long like two weeks three weeks it was all different times sometimes it would be for a few months sometimes it was the summer or something yeah always during the

summertime it was always during the summer when i went up there and then usually october november december starts rolling in. You got school. Yeah. And then things will change because you live where the seasons change. So the person that you meet in the summertime isn't the same person that's in the wintertime. Just like the seasons change, I feel like people that live in the Midwest, they have seasons and they change with the seasons. Oh, I've never heard that before. No? That's interesting.

Because the person you meet in the summertime isn't the same person you're going to... So if I were to go back home... Say I met somebody in July and I hung out with them for two months and I went back to Florida and then I came back up in January or February and I hung out with that same person. That's two completely different fucking people. You know what I mean? In the summertime, people are more like, oh, let's go do this.

And you wake up in the morning and you go out because the weather's nice and then the wintertime everybody kind of just slows down people's attitude changes they kind of get that hibernation thing they're working on something that you know i mean like it's two completely different you know when you live somewhere where it's 90 degrees all year round it's go go go go go and people have a different kind of personality i've thought about this with where people live yeah right so florida people sure it's florida people that people live yeah right so florida people sure it's florida people that's a certain thing but florida people jersey people or florida people michigan people something like that i've never thought about it with a person living in one

place like michigan and oh michigan person july michigan person january two completely as you just said that some shit was clicking that's wild yeah that some shit was just clicking in my head that that does make some sense to me yeah so those are two completely different people you're dealing with so you know when when the wintertime started coming in like the house parties stopped and people started coming out and like things just got lame and boring i'm like i gotta get the fuck out of here like i can't sit in a house for the next four or five months and play video games like you motherfuckers do up here like i can't do that so you might just show up to school in november then down in florida you just show up and they'd be like oh hey welcome back well you know i'd be like yeah i was on

vacation or whatever i was i was visiting family in michigan or and listen i'm i'm and they just say no problem yeah hop in class well i would i could write or produce whatever documents i needed to i've always been able to do that. How would you do that? Create fake shit? Oh, yeah. Doctor's notes. I was the go-to guy in my high school for any kind of documents you needed for whatever. How would you make a doctor's note?

How would you make the actual... Physically? Oh, so I would... Well, I would go to... So whatever hospital you said you went to, I'd go to the website or I'd go to Google Images or whatever and I'd get the hospital logo and I'd make a letterhead, an official looking document. And I would take the logo and I would duplicate it a bunch of times, drop the opacity on it and put it as a watermark on the back. And then I would put all the font in front of that and make it look like an official looking document. This is the earliest days of the internet though though you were able to get stuff that was good

enough I mean I'm thinking you got to be working with like ADP so something so I hacked into I was able to gain administrative access to the Fort Lauderdale public library system oh so once I did that I had access to all their computer networks and then I was able to how old are you oh I was a teenager 15 16 15 16 so then you were able to get access to this stuff yeah I was able to... How old are you? Oh, I was a teenager. 15, 16? Yeah, 15, 16. So then you were able to get access to this stuff? Yeah, I was able to gain administrative access to the Fort Lauderdale Public Library system. So then I was able to add and remove programs as I wanted to, to the computers. So I had, you know, the best, and obviously it's Windows 98. I mean, it was what it was. At the best of the time. At the time.

So I had access to it. I had full reign access to it. So I learned how to add and remove programs. And I learned how to use Adobe Photoshop at a very young age. I didn't even know that shit was around then. Well, I don't even think it was Adobe Photoshop back then. I think it was something else. It was like coral fucking paint.

Coral draw. And they had a couple other little very very rudimentary uh programs that you could use but yeah so you would learn how to make doctor's notes you would learn how to produce documents that that might be official like school documents you'd be able to find out what their letterhead looked like for that and then make it sign someone else's name and they believe it every time oh yeah yeah oh every time yeah and then and then i got a little bit older i started doing like a car insurance for people who you know couldn't afford car insurance but they needed to get their

vehicle registered so i would make a you know insurance document so that they could take them to the dmv and get their vehicle registered we're gonna get to that yeah i want to ask all about that too i'm just like this was the earliest forms of that where you were doing it and again what do you what's what is the psychological loop here i'm surviving bitch like that's that's how you're doing it's not like oh let me just go do fraud it's like oh shit all right it's november i'm coming back from michigan i gotta get into class all right yeah let's figure out this you know what like that's what people like me can't process but i need people like me who are listening to think about that and say well what would you do?

You do the same fucking thing. If you could even pull it off, that's impressive that you did. Nuts. But you had the kid at 17. So that was Michigan girl stripper. I guess you had met her in the summer or something. And then when did she tell you she was pregnant? Oh, well, we were dating. And then, you know, as soon as she knew, I knew.

She was dating a 16-year-old. I was 17 at this time. You were 17 when the kid was born or you were 17 when you knocked her up? How old were you? 16? You're right. I was 16. Yeah, I was 16.

So she was messing with me. I was 16. She was like 21 or 22. Isn't that a felony? In retrospect, yeah. It feels that way. Hypocritically, it never feels that way with chick on guy but yeah technically if it was 21 year old dude and a 16 year old girl it'd be a different

fucking story and it's hypocritical and there is um you know there is something to that which you know it's probably exciting for you i mean shit well yeah you know and everybody's like oh my god you're with someone like yeah i'm fucking they could nobody could believe it like people would talk shit to her like fucking she would catch a lot of shit for it too because i was so young i'll bet but i was young but i was like i was right there with everybody like i was i was right there with all with everybody who's 21 22 23 i was fucking right i was out all night with them i could hang drinking with them i could hang smoking with them quick question when you were back when you were talking about eight or nine just made me think of this and you'd take the bike and leave for the day were you hanging out with kids five six years older than you they were 15 16 i was hanging

out with the teenagers yeah this is what happened okay that makes the point so so she tells you she's pregnant and then what happens oh dude i'm a kid i don't fucking know i mean obviously i have no resources to be able to fucking take care of a kid yeah no money at this point you know um and her family was like oh yeah dude they didn't they didn't want me to have anything to do with the whole situation absolutely not they fucking and she was such a fucking nightmare that when she had the baby her parents just kind of took over with the kid and then she took off and became like a she just went down the worst road possible after that uh we split up and oh geez yeah she became like a hardcore drug addict and

like gained like fucking 200 pounds or something like that. Like 150, 200 pounds and fucking just ballooned out. Like she was tiny. She looked like, you know, like me, like 130, 140, something like that. And then I heard she... Fucked up her whole life. Yeah, she fucked up her whole life. And then now she's got like health issues and shit.

But it's like, you know, so I wasn't... Have you ever met your daughter? No. I was there for like the first year. They allowed me and then to like see her yeah like i would go and see and like you know hang out and when she was a baby and but dude i was you know i was 17 i know but did you feel yeah and and also i'm thinking about your own life where you've had to be independent you don't have like that i was homeless i didn't have a vehicle i didn't have a job did you feel a kinship because it's your kid?

Yeah. I mean, I, you know, you do feel that. And especially because I do have a lot of empathy and, you know, I, so I felt that immediate connection. But I was 17, man. You know, like how, how much can you understand that, what you're supposed to feel as opposed to what you do feel when it's like the whole thing's fucked. You know, and it's like, I didn't, I didn't know what to do or what to feel or how to what you do feel when it's like the whole thing's fucked, you know? And it's like, I didn't, I didn't know what to do or what to feel or how to act or the decisions to make.

I didn't, I didn't know any, you know, I had no fucking clue. And you guys weren't really together because you were living down in Florida. I'm 17. She's 22.

She's stripping. I'm banging her a little bit here and there. We're hanging out. She was still stripping after she had the kid. Well, yeah, she went right back to it. Oh, she was an absolute fucking nightmare. just an absolute nightmare of a person yeah you know so you know that was the situation it was and there was nothing i could do about it

you know and then once the parents took over they didn't want me to have anything to do with the you know obviously because i didn't even really have one conversation is that like them pulling you aside once and saying leave and never come back oh they didn't even do it face to face i showed up at the house and they wouldn't let me in one day now that kristen's not here i was like okay can i come in and see serena they're like no you can't what am i supposed to do you're a kid get violent uh you know i mean like i didn't i couldn't go get a lawyer i couldn't there was yeah what yeah what do i do i can't you know what do i call contact family services i'm a teenager they would have locked me they would have put me in a fucking home right you know i mean they would have been sending me to fucking some kind of fucking place there you

know what i mean so i was like and there's also probably a part of you well don't let me say this if it's not true but perhaps subconsciously that's like i i mean obviously you got to have disdain for the parents for doing that shit and obviously the whole situation but you're also looking at it like i i don't even know how i'm going to survive tonight i could never take care of a kid myself and so at least like she's got this home right here. The parents, you know, they're not missing any meals. They're doing okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, there was that relief, I guess, if you would call it a little bit. It's a bizarre relief. It is a bizarre relief. I mean, I knew that there, you know, her parents were kind of fucked up anyway, but it was like. There's shelter and. I don't even know where I'm going to live tonight.

So, you know, bringing a child into that at like 17 forget about it and you're and you know you're a male too it's like it's not as natural it's already hard to be a single parent period but then like a male single parent there's just there's a biological thing there it's not as yeah women are more adept at that yeah just you know with uh more with the you know the love and the affection and the feelings like men we're just more calculated you know uh you know i have to make this decision because you know x y and z has to happen so emotion can't be any part of this and you didn't have it either because you had to learn how to yeah you know i was i was emotionally

stunted um i didn't really i didn't learn the proper way to deal with other human beings until probably like the past five or six years and just now i'm starting to understand you know how you deal with people and you know every person is their own microcosm of fucking you know traumatic events ptsd and whatever else you know they got shit they got going on inside their head that makes them who they are and that's the the that's what's presented to the world and that's what you have to interact with and none of that i wasn't even thinking that way you know of course you weren't yeah i just wasn't can't be expected to i mean i you know the older i get the more i realize how fucking dumb i was and i mean i knew i that's the thing. I did have some self-awareness, like, a little bit, that I was pretty dumb at most ages.

But, you know, even thinking about myself at, like, 22, I'm like, holy shit, man. Yeah. You know, if I had had to face, I did have to face some serious life decisions at that age. But, like, if I had to face the most serious ones, you know, family, marriage, shit like that. Dude, I don't even know. Like, thank God. Yeah. You know, I don't know. I don't know how I would have possibly made good decisions.

Put it that way. Yeah. You know? It's difficult. The decision making is definitely difficult. For sure. But like, you said you had five total, right? Yeah, just, man, and you know.

Just so i know the timelines we move forward at what ages did you have each fuck 17 19 22 or 23 and then 27 26 you're fucking walking condom advertisement yeah 26 25 26 and then but see here's the thing with all my kids man like so i know for sure my daughter's mine um well at least and this and fuck i don't even know who knows knows? The first one. Who the fuck knows? You know what I mean? I don't know. You know what I mean? I think you feel pretty confident. I do, you know, but I was, I don't know. I was naive at 17.

You know, I thought she was only messing with me. She could have been. That's fair. She could have been fucking five other people at the time. That's fair. But I was 17 looking at it. Like, I was very naive. So I don't know.

You know, I had no fucking idea. You know, and then my next child I child i had i was um 19 you said i was 19 and i dated the girl for like eight months uh and she didn't even tell me she had a baby until he was four years old yeah so i was well it was it was four or five years after we had been separated that she had fucking contacted she said by the way i got pregnant i had a kid yeah and then so i don't even know if that one's It was four or five years after we had been separated that she had fucking contacted me. And then she said, by the way, I got pregnant and I had a kid. Yeah. So I don't even know if that one's mine either.

Because apparently she got with somebody right after me and then had the baby and told him it was his. Oh my God. Yeah. So he raised the kid for like three years. And then one day was like, you know what? I want a fucking paternity test. And found out it wasn't his. So the dude had been raising the kid, found out it wasn't his.

So then she called me and tried to tell me it was mine. But who, I don't know. I don't know. I've never taken a single paternity test for any of my children. I don't know if I'd buy that one. You know, so then that's the second one. Third one was with my,

was with this woman named, this girl named Melissa that I met in Fort Lauderdale. We were together for two years. He's mine for sure, 1,000%. His name's Nicholas. He lives in South Carolina. I talk to him every day on the phone. Oh, that's great.

Yeah, we have a really good relationship with each other. He's probably the only one, only child out of all my kids that I have like a really good relationship with. We'll unpack that later for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, so I, every day, you know, Instagram back and forth. I'm aware of the fifth one because I i don't want to give that away that's an important part of your story like when that all happened but that's that is uh and then that's a

lot and then after so when i was with her it was when all the secret service shit went down so she left me when when i got busted and then i was on the run for like not even on the run i was just for three years i didn't know what was going on i met i met someone else got married and then I was on the run for like, not even on the run. I was just for three years. I didn't know what was going on. I met someone else, got married, and then that's when I had Aiden, my most recent son, which he, that was 2012. Oh, so you had one after that. Okay. Yeah, so that was 2012 when he was born.

Got it. Okay, well, we'll get to those ones for sure, but I want to stay. Yeah, so he's 10. So he's 10, and then I have a little girl with my wife, which she's not mine 100%. But we can – yeah. Okay.

We'll get there. It's all crazy, man. It's nuts. There's a lot. Okay, and then – so me and my wife were together after I got out of prison in Nebraska. When did you get married to her? Like – 2011, before I went to prison.

And that was after obviously first girl got busted met this girl got married and then I went to prison let's come back to her I want to skip ahead of how everything went down and what you did I had a kid in Nebraska

apparently I was with my wife you need a fucking rubber I know it feels a lot better me and my wife Dude, you need a fucking rubber Listen I know, dude, I know, man I know it feels a lot better but that's my advice to you I feel comfortable giving that advice Yeah, it's a nightmare

I'm doing pretty good now Like now Now I know better Now I know I don't fuck around anymore Pull out game strong You have no idea As soon as I get that little tingle

Oh, man As soon as I start feeling the tingle That's how I'm out of there Alright, so You have the kid at 17 As soon as I get that little tingle. Oh, man. As soon as I start feeling the tingle, that's how I'm out of there. All right. So you have the kid at 17. So all these kids are questionable, pretty much. All right.

Except a couple of them. Except for maybe Aiden, for sure. He's mine and Nicholas, for sure. Okay. All the rest are up in the air. We'll talk about them. But the first one, by same year it sounds like they said you came over you're not allowed to be yeah they they just put an end to it okay so you're coming up on the end of high school or at the end of high school when that happens

when you're out of that kid's life right okay what'd you do after that because now high school is over you're not going to school every day. You're still technically homeless. Do you have any money in your pocket? No. What's happening? No, no, no. I'm living hand to mouth.

I've never really, I didn't really have any money per se until I started doing fraud. It's always just been, I'll get a check and then, like I'm just living, check to check, hand to mouth.

I never had any kind of savings or any kind of regular income. That's been my whole entire life up until, you know, quite recently. Um, so I, you know, I, no, I, well, I've always been, like I said, I'm altering documents, um, graphic design, web development. I got into a little bit of web development. Uh, I took a program or a class, uh, when I was incarcerated at one point in time when I was a teenager and that piqued my interest, uh, into, uh, it into a program called Dreamweaver. I don't know if you're familiar with that program. It's kind of an older program.

No, but when were you incarcerated? You were incarcerated again after 13? Oh, I was incarcerated probably nine or ten months out of every year from the age of 13 until I was 19 years old. I was in a program. So you really weren't going to school much because you were usually in something. Well, yeah, but I had to go to school in there. I had to go to school while I was in a program. So you really weren't going to school much because you were usually in something. Well, yeah, but I had to go to school in there. I had to go to school while I was... Oh, so it's not like...

Okay, so you're talking like the boys' home route more where you're still living in society. You're not a prisoner, but you're incarcerated in the sense that you have... You do get a roof over your head with that. And you're in there with like 15 or 20 or 30 other kids that are all, you know, but you do go to school, but you got to come back, you know,

and believe me, it's not, you're not free. Right. I mean, like, they do a head count. Every day you have to be back. And if you're not back, you got a warrant for your arrest. Right. You know what I mean?

Like fucking, or you get escalated to a higher security. Like these are all low security places they were sending me when I was a youth because I wasn't violent. I wasn't a violent teenager. Like a lot of the more violent kids, they would lock up and put them in. The security level was a little bit higher.

So it wasn't necessarily every year though, but you were in and out from 13 to 19. Yeah, it was probably six or eight, 10 months out of almost every year I was in a program. And then I'd get, I would complete the program. I'd get out out i would do good for a few months and then i'd violate my probation and because i had really nowhere to stay every time i would get picked up by the cops and i would go into the like the juvenile juvenile hall like the maximum security and i'd go and see the judge and they're like okay well where can we send him well he doesn't have a house to go to

so we have to put him into a fucking program we have to put him into boys home we have to put him into you never call your mom plenty of times and she told me when my mother called me on my 17th birthday and she told me that um i'm no longer her responsibility because the state of florida recognizes me as an adult at the age of 17 so i'm no i'm no i'm no longer her responsibility on my 17th birthday i got that phone call not that i didn't already know you know what i mean but i guess she just felt like she had to make it official official you know to like so now don't call me for anything else ever and i haven't spoken to my mother at this point i haven't spoken to or seen my mother since 2010 that's a lot to deal with man yeah i mean you you take it so it's fine matter of fact it's fine yeah i'm good yeah because listen i focus on the things

in life that make me happy i don't focus on all of the trauma and all of the past events and like all of the you know what could have been relationship with my mother and my family all that's done it is what it is. Like I benefit nothing from revisiting or even letting any of that affect me. But at some point in the last few years, you did recognize your own PTSD and everything. So did some of that come up when you did that? Now, yeah, well, yeah, because, you know, you're churning, you know, all of that old shit up. And I've been so good at compartmentalizing over the years that, you know, opening some of those cabinets does, you know, some of those feelings obviously are automatically going to come up to the, you know, the feeling of rejection, the feeling of

isolation, the feeling of being alone, uh, neglect, you know, all of those things, all of those feelings. But I, when those feelings pop up, I understand how to deal with them. You process them and then you, you know, figure out what triggered that emotion and then you move on i can't believe you're alive and and or that you're not like an almost dead drug addict oh i know i'm gonna be honest like and and i think that's in spite of some of the big mistakes you made along the way i think that's actually pretty incredible. By all means right now, I'm supposed to be a homeless, crazy drug addict

or doing like a 50 or 60 year prison bid. Yeah. Or I'm supposed to be dead. By all intents and purposes, those were the three avenues that I'm supposed to be. Like I said, I've just been extremely fortunate enough to always... I hate calling myself intelligent because I really don't feel like I'm that intelligent. I've just I've always been emotional intelligence of understanding other people you also live in a like there was a time in your life where every single thing you had to

do was a lie so you live in a constant state of you you've been in a period of your life now for five ten years where you're telling the truth on things it's not comfortable everything no i hate it it's not and i can tell because i can see like even just i'll tell you even just sitting here i can see where a wall comes up and like okay he's not totally telling me the truth there and then two minutes later you kind of do a little bit yeah it's like you want and that's a very admirable thing but to not to not have any even understanding of that until you were in your 30s like really thinking about it is also yeah because actually probably a blessing because now yeah oh yeah trust me it would have fucking buried me it was for my

own you know out of just pure survival that i couldn't i couldn't deal with those emotions i couldn't because it would have fucking ruined me and you know and like i said now i'm starting to unpack everything in retrospect and kind of because now i'm making decisions in my life that are that are detrimental to my success. And I'm doing it on autopilot. You always had been. And now I'm trying to figure out, you know, why? What's the mechanism behind the decisions that I'm making without actually being able to think about what I'm doing before I make the decision that's having this negative effect on my life? So now it's like I have to start dealing with all of this shit that i've been suppressing for 20 or 30 years because you know now i have the

next 20 or 30 years to look forward to and all this shit is gonna pop up at inconvenient times and ruin opportunities and you know things for me so now i have to start dealing with a lot of this shit it's a lot man yeah i mean it's pretty, it's... It's pretty heavy. You know, you think about the... We get some of these experiences through documentaries and movies and books, right? Like, people like me that had a, I would say, relatively just normal upbringing. Two parents, they didn't even divorce, which is, like, great in today's times as well. Yeah, it's pretty rare. Yeah.

I have a lot of friends whose parents divorced. That's certainly something there. You're on a whole different level. Yeah. You know, and so we hear about something like this. And again, I'll always say it, but just trying to – I, in these conversations, do my best. I can't, but I do my best to put as much of myself in, in this case, your shoes as I can. And it's not – I mean, it's very hard to be in any way an empathetic person and and judge

someone like you for for where you're at and also let's be honest here you're not a murderer you're not a rapist you it's i'm not a violent person right i'm not i'm not a violent person that harms people right i can't do that there's there is a huge difference yeah i may have been a thief at one point in time my life right i stole a lot but it was you know it wasn't it was not a malice yes exactly that and and i i look at with everyone with i don't care who you are great person bad person indifferent i do look at intent i make a lot of judgments on intent yeah you know like i'll sit there and tell matt like he didn't have to do this stuff his intent was bad and i make a judgment on what a bad person he was doing it yeah that's why i respect where he's at now and how he

looks at things you know he was not a good person at all yeah you know and it's not to say like oh you were an amazing person john printing credit cards and shit it's not that but it's like what the fuck else did you know yeah what other like like we talk about choices in life and yes you technically do have one as i said at the outset of our conversation but like what choice do you really have yeah you know so you you finish high school you don't even have that a little bit of that structure or the boys home structure if you want to even call it that yeah and i got my high school diploma so at least you do have that you got the ged i fucking walked you got and nobody was there to

watch me walk man i walk you you literally were at you went you showed up to graduation did the whole thing hell yeah i walked and i got my diploma and i did it on my own with nobody showed there nobody was there for support or nothing i walked i walked right off the stage took off my gown got my car fired up a fucking blunt and i went to the beach that was that was my graduation day yeah that had to feel pretty good though that was one moment like of all the shit you dealt with. That had to feel like, I still fucking did this. Wow, I passed. I thought I was going to feel a lot different when I got that diploma. I thought it was going to...

Because you build it up all these years, all these years, your whole entire life. This high school diploma is put on a pedestal. It's something that's this great achievement that I thought I was going to physically feel something when I got it, but I felt nothing. I didn't feel anything when I got it you know cuz it school wasn't wasn't challenging to me like the curriculum just was never challenging like I never ever sat down and was like oh my god how am I gonna finish this assignment I need help like that was never ever a part of my reality like so I always always did very well in school I kept uh I maintained a GPA of about 3.59 all the way through high school

and i would show up i would show up stoned everywhere and i was homeless and i show up school stoned every day i wouldn't study for any of my tests you know and and mathematics was like my worst subject so that's where i struggled the most was math really for whatever reason like i to this day i don't even know all my times tables like i just for whatever it is inside of my brain the frustration kicks in and i'm just automatically fucking done with it i wouldn't have guessed that yeah but so more my strong suit is more reading comprehension and um and language and and you know uh punctuation and you know uh just understanding you know sentences and that was always my strong strong

point science was another one. Social studies. History. I'm a fucking huge history buff. You do love history. I love history. I've always just been extremely fascinated by, you know, events. You are a very, and I'll say, and I've listened to you speak before, you are a very intelligent guy. Well, thank you. And, you know, not to judge a book by its cover cover or anything but you don't expect it at first and then never do and and you're also you're

unbelievably like down to earth and shoot the shit so it's like you're really not ready for it and then i started listening to you speak and and see you bring in things where you're not just talking about your story you're bringing in other things and i'm like oh wow like people never really expect anything intelligent to come out of my mouth when i start speaking let alone the vocabulary i have it does man so i i see where you're coming from on that i would have thought i don't know maybe it's because i you had to be so analytical i'm falsely attributing that in my head to also like just straight math but that's not necessarily true so yeah math for me was always a struggle man i hated it i fucking hated the i just it was cold and it was like you

know just memorization and you know learning the the uh you know the the algorithms and uh the the formulas and it's like dude i just didn't want no like once i would get once i get frustrated with something i was never taught to how to deal with my frustration so once i become frustrated with something to i just completely shut down and I just completely closed myself off to it. And that conversation we were having earlier, nobody has ever really, no, there's never been anybody there to make me do something I don't want to do. So I've never been made to overcome, you know, difficult things that challenged me. Like if it challenged me to the point to where I got frustrated with it, I could walk away from it. And there was nobody there challenged me like if it challenged me to the point where i got frustrated with it i could walk away from it and there was nobody there telling me like know what go ahead go revisit it

sit down calm down take a breath look at it from this point of view that just wasn't so but once you once you established that you found something you were good at it wasn't necessarily like that right no not at all i could open to the frustration because obviously because i'm interested yes you know it's holding it's piquing my interest i's i'm like okay it's a lot different that's okay but for me math and school is just fucking forget about it but you finished the ged and then you you did go to i got my high school diploma but you went to you went you went back to school yeah well i went to i went to college yeah yeah where'd you go yeah i went to the art institute uh fort lauderdale yeah i got how the hell i got my associate degree um i was

homeless the whole time through fucking yeah so i found a program called uh covenant house now covenant house is a non-profit organization they're all over the united states uh it's to help youth um you know pretty much 13 to 18 who are homeless who are in the system who don't have anywhere to go they have all of these housing uh places where you go there but it's like dude there's so many fucking rules yeah like and it's so easy to get kicked out and like they'll kick you out and be like go fuck yourself and you could be sleeping under a bridge and they don't give a shit because that happened to me quite a few times oh they don't then they take you back yeah well then they wake you like 30 days then you got to come and you got to have a meeting and you got to be like okay this is the reason i was kicked out

and this is i have you have to put down like four reasons why you won't, you know, do what you did before. And then like, what triggered you to do that? And it's like this whole mind fuck thing to get back into it. So I went into this covenant house and there's a whole program. You can go there. So they've initially, they have like the initial center where you're at, where it's like, it's, it's like a fucking, uh, it's like a homeless shelter pretty much for, for youth, for teenagers. And, uh, you go there and they help you out with like clothes if you don't have it and like food they'll feed you they'll let you stay there and you know you have to go to school and stuff like that uh but if you fuck up anywhere along the long line that you're out of there like

they don't fuck around there's zero tolerance at these places so i was in covenant house and just from being incarcerated as a youth my whole life i I knew how to deal with this place. Like, cause I had been doing this since I was 13 years old. Like I know how to do the group meetings. I know how to do the counseling sessions. I know how to wake up and do chores and clean up after myself and not create any waves and, you know, and become a favorite. Um, so I knew how to play the game and I knew, you know, the politics that were behind it so once i got into this program uh i just completely made it work to my advantage you know what i mean like i i took advantage of everything that they had to offer um what kinds of things so bus passes

um uh lunch vouchers for like when you're out in the community um they helped me get my birth certificate which i didn't even have you know what i mean like things like that helped me get my social security card they helped me get like an id they helped me uh sure it wasn't matt cox helping you no i didn't know matt at this time um you know so they help you just get your things that you don't really understand like i had no fucking clue about any of that stuff when i was so they help you you know kind of get your life on track and then they send you to like um they send me to classes to teach me how to like iron my clothes and like sew and cook and like so i learned like social skills like i had to go to social skills classes every day where somebody different would come and they teach you a different social skill

on how to fucking like take care of yourself or be a better person you know in society that's pretty cool it was cool you know and i learned a lot of stuff there but it was it was very short lived because i kept getting i was i was at that rebellious teenage years where i wanted to party i wanted to chase girls yeah you're what 18 19 when you're in there uh it was this was yeah this is about right up until i was 18 so i i was there from i was there probably from i was like right when i came back after i had the kid i got i was in and out i went in there at 17 graduated high school but you can only stay there until you're 18. And then there's another program.

So you do there and you turn 18. They kick you out of there. But there's an apartment complex that they own. I don't know if they own it or if they work with the people who own it. But they transition you from there into the apartment to where you get your own apartment. And it's income-based. So it's based on whatever your income is. And they come by and check on you to make sure you're not throwing parties and you can't have any alcohol.

They'll come in there when you're not even there. Is it free? It's income-based. Yeah, when you say that, but you made that sound like it's based on how much you make, they put you in a certain type of place. Or do they just garnish your wages? No, you have to... Is that the term, garnish your wages? Yeah, no, you have to pay.

You turn in your paychecks and you're can you make got it you make 8 50 an hour so this is we're gonna do 10 15 or whatever this is what your rent is got it okay and i had no money to put no money down or anything no security deposit they put you in there they get you in there you know so they got me into an apartment and um i fucked that up somehow i don't remember how but i fucked it up i think i wasn't supposed to have somebody living there with me and i had like a girl there or i think they came by and checked it when i was at work and i had like some booze in the fridge or something like that so i got kicked out um and then once you get kicked out of there you're done like there's no coming back oh because now you're not in it's not the covenant it's not the covenant

house anymore now you're an adult and now you just got kicked out of an apartment and now there's no program to let you back into now you're fucked so once i got kicked out of there i was done i was back living in my car at this time i was fortunate enough to have a car i had a car at this time it was a uh a 1992 chrysler sundance with a with a rust mohawk you said that after i missed that when you said after graduation you walked off the stage took the shit off and got in your car and ripped a blunt so like what yeah what age did you buy a car oh i had cars periodically as a teenager i don't remember how i would get them but i would get them they were like maybe like five six hundred dollar pieces of shit cars like did you ever get a license no i didn't have a license until i was like 25 or 26 years old so i used to be driving

dude no insurance no registration i would go steal a license plate off of somebody else's car slapping on that one and just be fucking every day like fuck it what do you know i mean like what are you gonna do what are you gonna do yeah you know and um so yeah that was just i was just so i had cars periodically never registered them never fucking got them insured nothing like that um yeah so i had a car i had a 1992 1992 Chrysler Sundance, uh, with a rust Mohawk and the fucking headliner would be hanging down and you'd be on the fucking highway and the fucking headliner would be going like this. You know what I mean?

And you get out of the car, you'd be completely covered in shit from the fucking, you know, it's like one of those situations. And, um, so yeah, I slept in my car a lot. So, but yeah, but when I was in Covenant House, anyway, that's the story I was getting to with Covenant House is Covenant House, um, enrolled's the story I was getting to with Covenant House is Covenant House enrolled me, got me into the Art Institute because there was a counselor that worked at the Covenant House that was, he was like a part-time graphic designer. Actually, full-time graphic designer. He just did the Covenant House thing as like a kind of like a bleeding heart liberal kind of thing that he wanted to help the youth. And he took a shining to me because we were sitting there talking one day and I seen him on the computer and i recognized the program that he was using i kind of looked over i was like oh

that's so-and-so program he's like yeah what do you know about it i just know then we just got to kicking it and he realized that i was on the level like i knew my i knew my programs i knew you know css i knew html at that point i knew graphic design like i just knew a lot of shit could you hack at all or i wasn't i wasn't a programmer i wasn't a hacker no i never went that route yeah i didn't think that was involved in anything i just didn't know if you know i know i never went that route um i just didn't have those kind of influences uh in my life had you had a digital you had a good digital footprint understanding i did yeah i did yeah i just i understood computers because i had been on them

since i was a little kid you know i just for whatever reason i had always had access to even like the earlier apple computers in like the early 90s like the first apple computer i remember getting on as a kid somewhere i was like i always i always had access to technology so when you hacked when you were a kid and you hacked the the library systems places is that you pretty much you found a way to steal the usernames yeah i i don't remember how but i i figured out uh an administrative login i think that i think somebody i think honestly how i did it was i sat down at a terminal and uh somebody had left themselves logged in under their administrative password so and i quickly figured that out and i fucking went in and i changed uh the, the, I went in and I fucking created a new login for myself and a new administrative password for myself without

having to change theirs. So then I just had my own personal administrative access, uh, after that point. Got it. So this other guy was watching you. He knew you knew your shit. Exactly. He, and he was like, listen, man, um, you know, we have connections here where we can get you. He's like, do you have your high school diploma? I said, yeah, I just graduated actually. He was like, listen, man, we have connections here where we can get you. He's like, do you have your high school diploma? I said, yeah, I just graduated, actually. He's like, well, listen, man, if you're interested, it's up to you. But we have a program where we can get you guys into the arts. He started naming off all these schools.

I was like, oh, the Art Institute. I've always wanted to go there. Because I knew right where the campus was. It was in Fort Lauderdale. And I was like, yeah, I've always wanted to go to that school. Because I wanted to get a degree in graphic design, media I wanted to do web programming and uh you didn't do fine arts did you no I didn't get a fine arts degree Matthew Cox no I was more digital everything I did was digital I Matt can Matt can draw and paint yeah and it's actually low-key really very good

yeah he taught me how to paint we do a lot of painting and uh over the past year or two I've learned how to paint actually pretty well just standing next to that guy. You guys need to have, like, documentary cameras in that fucking place until you live in a guy. I know. It's fucking – it is pretty wild. How do you parole officers feel about that? Well, you don't have one, but I'm good. And his don't know.

Well, they do now. Yeah. We'll see. No, no. He told me she knows. I talked to him. I asked – because i asked him about that when we were in the car last time like aren't you still technically like on parole

or probation or whatever he's like yeah they're cool with it i'm like hey great yeah love it anyway yeah and um you know so he he was like listen they got these programs let me see what i can do for you and they got me in they talked to whoever at the admin at the college and i went and i took uh just an entry exam. And I passed all the entry exams with flying colors. And I started going to the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. So how many years did it take to get a degree? It took me two and a half years to get my associate's.

And it was a graphic design degree. Yep, graphic design, media arts. Now, during this time, you were kicked out of that program. So you were homeless, like you said, the whole time. I was living in my car throughout pretty whole, pretty much the whole thing. For two and a half years, I was pretty much living in my car. Where would you shower? At the beach.

Going to the ocean? No. Or like the actual, like... They got the showers out there. You show up early in the morning, so it's not embarrassing, you know what I mean? Yeah. Oh, I figured out that I could shower in the ocean, but you had to use dish soap. Regular soap doesn't lather in the ocean.

I had to figure that out the hard way. Really? Yeah, like bar soap and all that other shit, it won't lather in the fucking... Because of the salt? Because of the heavy saline, because it's so heavily concentrated in the saline, it doesn't allow... But the dish soap, for whatever fucking... It's a different formula that'll allow you to get in there and lather. So yeah, I would shower in the ocean, or I would shower at the beach, or... even at this point like i still had people's houses i could go to just not every day you

know what i mean like i didn't want to burn some of those places out so i would you know but like i never looked homeless though i was always i was always clean i always had clean clothes on you keep all your clothes and everything in the car obviously everything was always in the trunk yep always had all my stuff how are you paying for gas oh fuck i don't remember at this point i think i was still shoplifting or bumming money, or sometimes I would just leave my car in the parking garage at the, because I was selling weed to the guy, to one of the main security guard that ran the whole parking structure,

and he let me park my car in there and sleep in my car at night after it was closed. So he used to let me go in there at night and sleep in my car in the parking structure after just because he was your friend well yeah i used to sell him weed and stuff like that yeah so i used to get that's how you're funny you're selling weed yeah i just yeah well yeah i did sell a little bit of weed i'll smoke a lot of weed selling a lot of weed so i mean listen i've always had money here and there i never really a little bit a little bit not thousands of dollars but i've always had at least three four hundred dollars in my pocket at all times you know that comes in handy yeah we'll do something like that enough to get a tank of gas enough to get me something to eat and a bag of weed and you know whatever else i needed to do

hey look i i get i actually understand it a little bit i had a friend at that's i'll say i had a friend at some point in my life not fuck it. I have a friend who this was a different time where he went through a period where he was never homeless, but... Couch surfing. It was a bad situation. Yeah, couch to couch. Yeah, yeah. It was the worst kind of situation if you weren't totally like completely homeless and like you know he we would walk into a place and he'd walk out with a five-figure discount i wouldn't say a word and

then and then i remember like wouldn't tell you to get in the car yeah pulling shit out and you're like and like you said and i'm like should i be driving faster now like what do we do but i listen like maybe the fifth or sixth time i asked him i'm like you know you just do that every time and he's like yeah i mean i gotta eat yeah he said something he said something like that and it's not like he was starving or anything but he was thinking like all right well i don't know the next time i don't really have any money so i'll do it so in a way like he was doing you know you were finding it through weed and whatever in that time period but you mentioned other periods where you're finding it through stealing stuff it's like that's it just comes natural and it's

actually not yeah actually shockingly not hard to do looking back man i feel bad about all the theft like because now i would i would never steal anything now from anybody or like you know i mean so looking back on it man i feel so bad about all the times i used to fucking because and that that's that's great and now you also have perspective yeah at the time it's also again like i've said this seven times today but it comes back to like well you need to make sure you eat tonight yeah i either go into the store and i take something or i'm not gonna eat until i either go beg somebody to fucking feed me and i wasn't about begging like a lot of the other kids used to panhandle. I never, I couldn't do that.

Like I couldn't sit there. Is that like sucking dick for money? Panhandling? Yeah. No, it's like, sir, do you have a dollar? Do you have fucking, sit there. Oh, like we call that mostly begging up here. Yeah, begging.

Yeah. But it's, you know, it's, that's an older term panhandling. Cause they sit there with a, you know, with a cup. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard it before. I just didn't. That's exactly what it is. I couldn't do that, there with a cup. Yeah, I've heard it before. That's exactly what it is. I couldn't do that, man.

I couldn't bring myself to sit outside McDonald's and beg for money. I just wasn't one of those kids. So I would rather go break into cars all night long and steal cell phones and car radios than sit outside McDonald's and beg people for money to eat. That's your independence. Because a lot of the people, not everyone, but a lot of the people doing that are doing that because they got into hard drugs or something or their life fell off the rails. You only knew a life where you were surviving. Yeah. And I'm not completely without shame. You know what I mean? I'm not one of those

shameless people. And I've never been one of those people. Like I get embarrassed easily, even when I was homeless and I didn't have anything those people like i get embarrassed easily even when i was homeless and i didn't have anything like i would get embarrassed if i had to you know go somewhere and somebody found out that i was homeless or somebody you know what i mean looked like i always had that inside of me so i could never really there was levels that i could just never go to no that's and i guess that i guess that's your line everyone's got a line somewhere does that make sense but you're this time, you're living in your car. You're sleeping, it sounds like, a lot of the time in that parking garage.

Yeah, majority of the time I was just – because it gets to a certain point to where people just don't let you sleep at their house anymore. Yeah. Or it gets to a certain point to where – Grown-ass man. Yeah, exactly. Or you just don't want to keep asking people. You know what I mean? And especially with me, I always kind of be independent and kind of do my own thing.

It got to a certain point to where i just didn't want to be that guy right you know and and i learned a long time ago that the less you ask people for shit the more willing people are to help you out when you actually really need it that's so true you know what i mean so i never ask anybody for anything dude even if i fucking need it i don't ask because if i need it that bad i'll figure out a way to go out and get it for myself and you gamify it in your head too you may end up it's like the people who save up the money and they never use it yeah but like they felt good about knowing they did it the entire time it got it it allowed them to take the actions that they continue to take to be able to do that

i understand that with some people you know it's not necessarily exactly how i think but on some things i do. Actually, with my money a little bit, I don't have any money, but there's a line like that. It's like $5,000, $6,000. I never let it get below there. Even if it could, I won't do it. You know what I mean? That's how I am nowadays too.

Yeah, you can't. There's some sort of line there. So I get that. But you finish school in two and a half years. You get the graphic degree so you're like 20 21 years old whatever it is now still homeless pretty much still homeless yeah but do you get a job like what what happens next so i'm getting ready to graduate um the art institute and for every graduating, they hold like a job fair or like a, like a, let's guess what it kind of is, the job fair. What is this? Prospective employers come and they want to check out the graduating class. So, you know, companies that need graphic designers,

companies that, you know, they come there, they set up a little booth and you go there and you've got, you know, your portfolio of things you've been working on over the past two and a half years. And you go to each one, you're like, this is what I've been working on, you know, and you've got, you know, your portfolio things you've been working on over the past two and a half years. And you go to each one, you're like, this is what I've been working on, you know, and they're like, okay, well, this is the opportunity. And then you kind of just bullshit with each one and blah, blah, blah. So we did that. And then I graduated in about a week after I graduated, one of my counselors called me at the, at the college and he told me to come in and talk to him. He said, I had a job offering from one of the companies from the, uh, from the job fair. So I came came in i talked to him

and he he's like okay well this is what they're offering uh you know this is the salary and and you know this is a job title and uh all this this is where the company is and when he told me that they were offering eighty thousand dollars a year to start what year is this? 2005. Or wait. No, like 03. 2004. I graduated high school in 03. So this is probably 2004. Or something.

This is, yeah, 2004. Well, no, it'd have to be a couple. You graduated high school two and a half years before this, right? Yeah, I graduated high school in 2002, I believe. No, not 03. It was 02. And then I went to college. So 03, 04. So this is almost 2005.

It's like 2004, 2005. This is still 80 grand. 80 grand. 80 fucking thousand this is almost 2005. It's like 2004, 2005. Still 80 grand. 80 grand. 80 fucking thousand dollars a year. This isn't New York City either. Dude, I've been homeless my whole life. I've never, once I heard that 80, once I heard that $80,000. Did you fall off your fucking chair?

Oh, dude, I was like, yeah, fucking, I tried to, you know, and like my counselor was like, listen, I've never really seen offers like this before. He's like, this isn't, this isn't a normal, you know, situation. Why did they offer you that? They thought your work was amazing, I guess. they really liked me the guy really liked me um you know i guess he had seen something in me that i he didn't tell me that but apparently he had seen something in me because when i went to go work for him he used to just fucking like come on let's go and he used to hop in the car with him we should just go do shit that had nothing to do with work

what kind of company was it it was a a graphic design company. So they we did a screen printing we did so we screen printed t-shirts flyers We did like the the window Stickers for like wraps. So we did vehicle wraps. We did graphic wraps. We did a window We did pretty much everything we had the big big printers Yeah, everything and when I started there there was another guy working there who was their lead graphic design artist but he was getting uh he couldn't stay in the country or something like that his green card his passport whatever was going on he had to go back to his country where he was working so that's why they they brought me in and they used him to train me for a few months of you know not really graphic design on the way out

the door yeah yeah just this is how this is how the company works this is what we do on a daily basis this is what we print this is how you this is how you run this machine you know this is how you deal with this customer so i learned all of that um and then he went back to his country and i was just lead graphic design artist poor guy yeah adios javier gracias yep got you now yeah and he took over the whole thing yeah i took over i was lead graphic design artist and they hired me 80k a year salary you know so i was you know fucking it wasn't like an hourly wage position um and this was you know more money than i had ever seen in my entire life when i got that first check honestly bi-weekly pay no it was once a month once a month yeah so 80 divided by 12 between the first and the third or whatever it's like five or six grand a month so you see that

first that first check is like 5500 or something like that and that that at that point i had had money like that before sporadically but i'd had it and then it was immediately spent you know what i mean like i built it up yeah but this is one check wow and i was holy fucking shit what do you know oh i went and got an apartment i went and got a fucking i went got an apartment i ran it i assume yeah i went and it was a really nice one, too It was like fucking at this it was like 1500 a month or something like that You definitely have at this point smart as you may be for surviving on your own. You have zero concept of money None, I am dollar dumb. I had zero fucking concept of how money works about, you know

Inflation and saving and fucking investing and like I had no fucking idea at all So I went and got the most fucking nicest expensive apartment i could fucking afford how much a month it was 1500 a month and this is an 04 so you gotta imagine the place was fucking it was awesome it was on brickle avenue right downtown miami oh you were bald oh killing them i'm killing them and then i guess i got the apartment and then i went and then like the next month remember the next month after that i went and got a brand new cadillac like a Cadillac STS or something like that. The luck, the big fucking, the big one.

And went and got a brand new car, had a fucking brand new place, you know, nice furniture. I'm fucking, you know, I'm the man at work. I walk in, I really don't have to work that hard because there's two other people that work underneath me who they actually do all of the physical printing and everything else. I'm just, I'm just here moving, you know, doing my thing, which is nothing. I mean, and all the shit they gave me to do, I could do in 15 or 20 minutes. So I had the rest of the day pretty much to do whatever the fuck I wanted. Holy shit. Yeah, so I went out and I was learning vehicle wraps.

Like I would do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I went out to the garage and I was learning how to actually physically wrap the vehicles because I was extreme. I'm a car guy. Always have been. And so I would actually go out and physically actually learn how to wrap the vehicles and shit like that i'm a car guy always have been and um so i would actually go out and physically actually learn how to wrap the vehicles and shit like that yeah so that was

fun were you getting in trouble at all or did you just totally take up the the drinking was a little bit of an issue like the weekends i would go pretty hard and i was always i would always come to work miami i would always come into work monday with like a black eye or fucking you know what i mean like a big fucking scar on my face or fucking it was worth it half my leg fucking tore up you know i was they were like you have a good weekend fuck yeah having such a great haven't slept since friday i can hopefully i'll get some sleep tonight i woke up on the sls pool deck this morning yeah so partying man because you know that kind of money and i was just i just turned like 21.

You're spending as fast as it comes down. Oh, I'm in the bars on the weekend, chasing girls. And so I was having fun. And it's not like that's a lot of money back then, especially for coming out at 21 years old, whatever. It is a lot of money. I know grown men don't make that kind of money now. But I'm saying. And have families.

Yeah, but I'm saying it's not like an insane amount of money. No. You're not in there making it rain $1,000 stacks. No, no, no. I can't. No, no. I'm not buying Ferraris and throwing money at the strip club. So you knew not to spend money you didn't have in that way.

You just didn't save anything. No, I was able to pay my bills. I knew once I got paid, I'd pay my bills, and then I would spend everything, and I'd be left with like $100 until my next paycheck. Right. You know what I mean? I would barely have enough money for gas to get to work. And work was work in Fort Lauderdale, too?

No, it was in Miami. Yeah, it was in Miami. So it was pretty close to you. Yeah, I was living in downtown Miami. My job was in, like, I was in North Miami. So it was still a little bit of a hike, but not that much. Okay. So how long were you working there?

I was there for about a year. About a year and six months approximately. But a year and whatever it was, 12, 18 months in, you pull up to work one day and the FBI, who else? I mean, who was there? I think it was just FBI. Just FBI. There was a lot of people there, but what I only recognized was FBI because they were

wearing the jackets. And I was like, hmm, that's fucking... I pulled up in the parking lot like, I thought they were filming a movie. Because, you know, all over Miami, they're always filming movies and shit. So when I pulled up in the parking lot, I seen like all like... I thought it was... Cut! Cut! I gotta walk through. No, I thought it was a movie set.

Because that's what it looked like. It was like, I thought it was a fucking movie set. And I'm like, huh. And I go to walk in and fucking tape on the door. I'm like, what the fuck? Walking back out to my car, I get stopped. I get fucking, they're like, oh. Then they interviewed me and asked me a fucking shitload of questions.

What was it about? It was either it had something to do with drugs or money laundering. In Miami? Come on. That doesn't happen. So the owners were Argentinian. They were from Argentina. Are we sure about that?

That's what they told me. Yeah. You know, so I don't know. Feeling more Columbia vibes. Yeah. So they had something going on. It was either the whole thing was some kind of fucking front they were laundering money from, or they were fucking running drugs through it.

But, like, I never seen anything suspicious. And, like, I have a sixth sense because I've been on the street my whole life. That's why they're paying you 80K. They just have money to toss around. They're like, let's just get a guy in here who's chill. All right, yeah, 80K. That's it. Pick them off 80.

Wow. That's it. And I guarantee that's why my salary was so high because they didn't really give a fuck. And they just needed somebody to get in there and just run the whole operation. They needed to get rid of the money too. Yeah, exactly. They had too much. Yeah.

So when they interviewed you, I assume they didn't really give you any details. No, they just asked me the day-to-day. How often do you see this person? How often do you see that person that do you deal with any of the financials of the company? I said no, I'm just a graphic designer The wife of the husband is the one that pretty much runs the show the day-to-day activities of the job She was the one that signs the checks and you know took care of customer accounts and all that shit like that so i was like no that's you know that's her job and then so she showed up and as she got you know she showed up she showed up as all this was going on and didn't get arrested didn't get arrested she well they were talking to her i seen her that and

then like it was it was chaos dude it was fucking the whole scene like i said it was like a movie scene i thought they were filming a fucking movie so she walks over to me and to another person that was a salary and cut us a check for our the remainder of the year for our whole salary one lump sum what like 40 grand something like that it was really high she was like um go to the bank and cash this right now she's like not tomorrow not friday she's like as soon as you leave here you drive straight to the bank and you cash this check did I assume the feds didn't see her do this no

well yeah I don't know like I just remember sitting in my I was sitting in my car and she walked up to my car window and handed me a check yeah she handed me a check for my car window

with all the feds right there she's like you need to leave this parking lot and drive straight to the bank oh my god yep so that's what I did I drove

I went and I fucking were you scared at all when you were talking to the feds uh were you like shit did I do something wrong no well no i didn't know it had nothing to do with me because i knew i didn't do anything wrong um i hadn't been committing any crime at this point uh for for you know a little while six months yeah six eight months i've been scam free i've been i've been pulling any petty petty larceny scams or anything like that you know um and yeah so i went to the bank and i cashed a check and I had an account with the bank.

I didn't get it all in cash. I had them just, you know, deposit it into my account. And then I immediately just started looking for another job, you know? So you go home, like, did you just apply online or something? Yeah, I went on Monster. I think it was like Monster. And this is shocking what's going on. Yeah, I couldn't believe it, man.

I was fucking, I was calling everybody like, fuck, let's go trying to figure out like anybody that knew them i was trying to call them to figure out what happened and nobody could tell me anything and you know after like a few months like it just was like a memory or whatever and i would drive past the building and it was just completely closed and you could tell like nobody was you know there was no business being run out of there or anything like that the building was like and then after a couple months after that the building went up for sale so but you still immediately went home and started looking for jobs oh yeah immediately yeah even even with the check there wasn't like a moment where you're like i'm gonna go to the club for a couple weeks well i mean i knew i knew i had some time to chill you know what i mean so i wasn't

like i wasn't pressed about finding a job immediately right away but i did i didn't i think i went home that day and started looking for jobs but it was within a week or two i was like okay now what am i gonna do you know and it was within a week or two, I was like, okay, now what am I going to do? You know? And it was like, fuck. And they had it built up in my mind that I could actually make this kind of money doing what I was doing. But that just wasn't the case. So I tried to find another job, but nobody wanted to pay me $80,000 a year for graphic design.

See, that's the issue right there. You had a baseline right away when you came out so you you get this offer that as you said the guy who was at the school and was like i've never seen something like this it's because it wasn't normal because they were literally looking to launder money yeah so now you have this for the first time you get this money in your pocket and you set the expectation of like oh this is what i make this is what i do it's whatever yeah and suddenly it's taken from you so now you're going out and you're looking at other jobs and i mean i gotta imagine these offers are what 10 bucks an hour oh fuck the highest i think i got was like 15 bucks an hour 16 bucks an hour or something like

that and you're looking at i assume a car payment and you're looking around at your apartment i got a 1500 a month rent to pay my car is costing me somewhere in the neighborhood of fucking seven seven hundred dollars a month or something like that with my car payment insurance you know so it was like fifteen dollars an hour won't even get me close to that that means i'm gonna lose everything that means i'm gonna have to fucking either go back to i'm gonna have to get rid of my house get rid of my apartment and downgrade i'm not gonna be able to drive this car anymore like i'm what you know so in my mind now i'm starting to panic the more it set in that i wasn't gonna get another job with that salary panic so you had always had nothing and that was your baseline that's what you understood yeah but now that you had something and had seen it i'm not going backwards i'm not going back i'm

not going back to having nothing fuck that it seemed because psychologically and i wasn't in your head but the way you talk about it and i think it's pretty legit is that any stress air quotes that was happening during your teenage years where you're finding places to sleep in and out of group homes and stuff like that it was always compartmentalized because it was just like all right i gotta get to the next thing so you weren't thinking about it maybe meaning the stress was in a lot of ways and this isn't healthy but it was messed right so now you i'm guessing i also i also didn't have time to stop right right or let any of that affect me you know so now for the first time you are literally sitting in an apartment you just put a fat check

in the bank account but it's the last one coming you are looking at the reality of holy shit 10 15 bucks an hour i'm gonna have to get rid of all this and you're i would imagine your head's going to i'm gonna be living in my fucking car again yep oh yeah yeah i'm gonna get living going to get living in my car, and then they're going to fucking repossess my car, and then I'm going to be back on the street pretty much. So is there like a giant chill that comes over your body thinking about that? Yeah, it was more of like a kick. It was more of like a, what the fuck am I going to do? Like I have to figure something out right now.

I have to figure something out right now because i'm not going back to being homeless so what did you do again uh well i figured out i was like okay well what kind of what kind of fucking scam can i run now that i've got a little bit of money and i've got i've got a better foundation to start from because prior to this that was all you ever knew i was just flying by the seat of my pants you know and so whatever scams i was doing you know now i actually have a little bit of money and a little bit i have a little bit of time to actually cultivate something to actually figure something out was there ever a part of you i'm not going to answer this question for you i think i know the answer but was there ever a part of you that stopped during this to think like oh this is bad

bad in in what sense like i shouldn't do this it's very illegal no exactly never those kinds of those kinds of thoughts never crossed my mind listen yeah my entire life there was no rule or no law or nothing that was going to stop me from doing what i wanted to do. Period. Because I was alright with the consequences. I've always been alright with dealing with the consequences. Whatever the consequences are, bring it on. I'm not fucking, I'm not scared of the consequences. I'm going to go to jail. I'm going to go to jail.

They also put a, by the way, this does need to be said. Because this is real. They also put a roof over your head too. Yeah. The consequences give you shelter. They give you food. It's not the same. When you're homeless or know what homeless is thinking about this i'm not saying like oh let's lose my freedom i'm not saying that but i'm saying it's not the same level of like the

shutter up your spine of the dude who's living in his own place and living his own life yeah exactly so really you know going to jail at that point it really wasn't that big of a deal for me because now i gotta tie now i'm gonna go hang out somewhere where there's air conditioning and i'm So really, going to jail at that point really wasn't that big of a deal for me. Because now I'm going to go hang out somewhere where there's air conditioning and I'm going to get a little bit of food. Now I can sit and regroup and think about my next fucking scam as soon as I get released. So what did you do? You said you had to come up. You're like, all right, what's a scam I can do?

And to be clear, the scams you had been doing were more forging school documents to get into school doing basic shoplifting another big one yeah another big one i was doing was um i learned how uh upc labels worked upc labels so it's like uh coupons and things you go to the store like take coupons and shit it's called it's called upcs and so i figured out how the barcoding system for the upc labels worked and i would make fake coupons to go and get free food when you were in high school and stuff oh high school and all the way through college because i'm you know i fucking i was living off of food stamps and in my food stamps i found a place well i knew this fucking bodega i could go to and like say i would get like 400 in food stamps i'd give him my card he'd give me 200 in cash and he'd swipe the $400 and just keep the $400 off the card.

So I would do that a lot. And so my food stamps would run out. So then the money would run out, obviously pretty fast. And then I would have to figure out a way to eat. So I was selling my food stamps, but then I had to figure out a way to eat. So then I figured out the UPC system

and I was able to get on the Photoshop or I was still using the the public library for everything at this point you had access all these years yeah and all these years so i'm that's always where i go back to and there was a certain little computer back in the corner that nobody ever came back there because it was like yeah it was nobody ever so it was my corner i went back there and i just committed massive amounts of fraud it's not why they designed the library system but um each is and why they designed the library system. But hey, each is up. And I knew all the library.

They all knew me in there. It's like, he comes here every day and he's so quiet. Fucking Johnny Fraud. He's back there. Yeah, so I figured out how the UPC labels work. So I'd be able to go to like McDonald's, Burger King, anywhere where there's fast food. I could go and I could present the coupons. Working your way around the best parts of the food pyramid as well yeah

definitely nutritious yeah oh yeah nutrition my whole life has just been mcdonald's and i grew up on fast food and i have crones actually right now really yeah i attribute that to i think just um just my shitty diet for for for decades just eating fucking institution food and fast food and there was a point in time where i had to eat out of dumpsters um you know because i just i couldn't i had stolen so much and got caught stealing so much that i couldn't go into any publics in like fort lauderdale because they fucking knew me because i would go in there listen i would go in i'd grab rotisserie chicken and i'd go to the bathroom and eat that bitch on the toilet inside publics and i did it so many times

and i got caught so many times doing it but i didn't give it like it would come down to like i'd just knock on the bathroom i'd be so hungry i'd be shaking and like i i would i remember being so hungry to where walking in the publics i didn't know if i was going to be able to make it to get the chicken to get to the bathroom without passing out because i was i was i was in and out of consciousness. I was going to faint because I hadn't eaten in two or three days. You know what I mean? Jesus Christ. Yeah, so I did that so many times that they just knew me.

So yeah, there was a period of time where I unfortunately, and I hate fucking talking about this, dude, but I had to fucking go in the dumpsters and get food. I knew when 7-Eeleven would throw away all their sandwiches and they wouldn't give them to you so i'd have to wait for them to throw them in the dumpster and i'd have to go in the dumpster and get them or like behind pizza hut like at the end of the night i go in there and get pizza and i remember picking bugs and and dude it was just horrible bro i remember doing that and and see you but that's that's exactly what i was talking about a few minutes ago yeah

you thought about that when this job wasn't there and anything else was going to be below subsistence yeah you're like i am never fucking going back to that that's not an option fuck that's not an option if i gotta go to prison i'm gonna go i'm gonna go to prison before i go back to eating out of a fucking trash can. You can kiss my ass, period. 100%. And that was just my mentality. So, you know, coming from, like, I knew scams, and I had heard about the carding thing, you know, from, I think it was, I don't remember who had put me onto it, but I didn't really, I wasn't doing it, but I knew about it. And I didn't know about it, like, know about it, know about it, but I was aware of it. So you hadn't ever been involved with it per se no no no i just knew i knew about it and i knew a few people that were doing it and i was like and so that's immediately my brain i was

like fuck let me research every let me figure this out so when you're by the way we're because we're going to go through all this now sure there's going to be times where you're saying stuff and i'm going to step in and interrupt if you're like giving a lot of terms at once. So just bear with me when I do that. But let's start right there at the first moment because you moved up with this. Like where you ended up, you didn't start there at all. So when you say carding to the average person out there. Right. The term carding means using fraudulent credit card information to purchase goods or services, either online or in a brick-and-mortar business.

Now, how do you go about doing this? At the time, at least like when you were 05, 06, or 07? In the early 2000s, there were something called carding forums. Now, these are like Reddit, if you will. Okay. And it's just like Reddit. You go on, and there'll be a board uh and there'll be a bunch of different topics on the board you click on a topic and then that

topic expands and you can either you know read tutorials like people would post tutorials about you know credit card fraud or about um you know the banking systems and you know like everything you could imagine in that plethora of information, people would post tutorials about it. And did you access this only through VPNs and stuff like that? No, at this point, when I was going to the forums, I didn't know about Internet security protocols at this point in time, which I learned through actually being on the forums and reading tutorials about VPNs and SOX proxy, SOX 4, SOX 5, you know, geolocation, fucking ISPs. Like I had no idea

about any of that. I mean, a little bit because I did a little bit of web development. And to know, to do HTML, you kind of got to know about like ISP providers and all that stuff, but very little. So once I figured out, once I learned about the cyber security and like you know the like i said the vpns the socks the virtual private networks then i was like but i you don't really need to start using that until you start committing fraud like just going to the forums and reading about the stuff it's not really you're not really in any danger you know and so and so that's what i was doing in the beginning i was just going and i was just reading everything i could like i just it's not a crime to read it no it's not no it's not and i i i for probably three weeks i just scoured the internet for every little morsel of information i could about fraud maybe this

back then this wouldn't have happened but i would imagine today if you just went on to read a forum like that there's got to be some sort of government catch-all that just... They don't... Listen, forums like that don't exist anymore. And if they do, they're run by the police to catch criminals. Like, they just... You know, everything's gone... They don't exist at all.

No, everything's gone encrypted now. Everything's gone, like, Tor browser. Right. Onion router. So, that's my point. You can't even... No. Yeah, you can't just do anything out in the open anymore.

But this is the wild west back then. You got to realize credit card fraud was in its infancy back then. It was just coming over from Europe. The Europeans had been doing it for fucking years. You know what? Here's a dumb question, but I'm thinking of this out loud because I've never Googled it or looked at it. When did, how far back did credit cards start late 90s well actually okay well it started in the early so credit cards have always been around since like 79 yeah i was gonna

say it had to be started with diners club the diners club was like the first fucking credit card and then you know discover american express visa mastercard all eventually came into line but it was like and you got to realize before the internet everything was done by paper so when you went to a store and used your credit card they didn't charge that there was no swiping it they put it on a thing and they and they made a copy of it on a piece of paper and then that piece of paper gets sent to the fucking credit card and then they and then they would bill them and then like everything took up months and weeks to catch up so internet internet launches in the 90s, effectively. Oh, 2000.

Yeah, like early 90s, the year 2000. Yeah, when did the, you're saying the cards part of it launched in 2000? You mean like the physical? Because the internet, I think technically, I might be getting this wrong. It was the 90s. So check me in the comments. I think it was 94. Yeah, mid-90s.

So then you have the dot-com bubble grow grow but when did cards start relying on the internet like 97 98 i want to say man probably yeah 97 98 is when they started bringing in the the mag strip with the pos systems and and so the europeans caught on to this immediately well they had they had it over there before they had it over here this is where all the technology comes from is Europe. For whatever reason, their payment systems and everything there, they've always been, they're always a decade ahead of the United States. Really? So do you remember when they switched over to the chip and pin?

Remember before the credit cards came with a chip in it? Yeah. That was over in Europe five years, six years, seven years before. They had chip and pin over there 10 years before we did. When did we get chip and pin? Like 2011, 2012? Yep. Yep.

Yep. Interesting. And when I was carding, there was no chip and pin. But it was over there. But it was over in Europe for 10 years before it came over here. No shit. Yeah. So they've always just been ahead of the curve over there for whatever reason.

So you get on there. You're an American. For whatever reason, this is highly concentrated, and this is 06 maybe something like that. 05, 06. It's highly concentrated in Eastern Europe. So are we talking Russia, Ukraine? Eastern Europe, Eastern Ukraine, Russia. Why are they the smartest computer people?

I know, man. I know. I attribute a lot of it to language. And this is something what a lot of people don't realize is it's the way whatever language you learn as a baby, it wires your brain to be able to process information at the speed in which you speak. You know what I mean? So a lot of these languages that are rapid fire, like, you know, the Slavic languages, it's fast. They use a lot of vowels.

They use a lot of fucking uh you know what i mean so it's like the way their brains are wired when you look at computer programming and you look at stuff like that i think it's just it fits with the way their brain processes information same with the same with the chinese chinese that's real because math because it's their language their language is so fast that their brain is already operating at that at that cadence but also so in malcolm gladwell's book i think it was outliers he talks about like oh the stereotype of chinese people are better at math he goes good at math well he's like we stereotype it but actually there's there's a logical explanation here as to why they are so talented at it their numerical system does not work like ours right ours goes one two

three four five six seven eight nine ten and then we start new languages and then every hundred we start new languages and then in a thousand every digit we add a new language they start off at base it starts at base and everything works off at base so kids i forget what his exact stats were so i'm not going to say it but it has something to do with kids are able to count significantly higher at an earlier age in China, for example, than they are here. So that makes sense for that. But then I've never heard someone talk about like the phonetics of the language and the speed and flow of the language translating to ones and zeros on code. Oh yeah. Wow. And I've never really read that anywhere or that's just my own, something I you're onto something that's just something i've you know through power of deduction and observation of you know that makes a lot of sense i think there's some we'll hear

some idiots in the comments like immediately shutting it down and you might be wrong to be fair to them you might be and i'm yeah but you should i'm willing i'm willing to be wrong i'm willing to be wrong you know because that's how you learn. Love that. Love that. Yeah. But so like I said, Eastern Ukraine, Russia, that's where all these sites, that's where all these forums were coming out of. So you're on – you're in your non – on your non-VPN computer in your apartment looking through this and – Scouring the internet for weeks. So you had – as you said at the outset, you had at least known it existed and this was something you just immediately looked at like the card for weeks. So you had no, as you said at the outset, you, you had at least known it existed. And this was something you just immediately looked at like the carding space,

but can you break down like how, when you say, all right, we're going to commit credit card fraud, how that works. Cause I believe if I've, if I understand correctly, several different types of credit card fraud. All right. Yeah. Just, you know, you take it away. Sure. There's several different types of credit card fraud. There's, you know, you've got your physical carding where you actually take a physical card and you go into a brick and mortar business to get you know goods to card goods to resell later in online then there's something called virtual card wait is that i'm sorry i just want to make sure is that like stealing someone's card and walking in and buying it um well i'm making a call i'll break it all down for you uh exactly how it all works so to fill so let's start with virtual carding first because that's

that's how i how i you know first gained you know entry into the the carding scene was through virtual carding and i think that's everybody's natural progression um anybody that you know follows the the traditional route anyway some kids just jump in and start doing in-store. But I started doing virtual carding. Now, virtual carding is, there's something called a CBV, which is the three digits that are on the back of the card for security. Now, that's called a CBV. Now, something called a CBV2 is the actual information that's on the physical card. So, it's the credit card number on the front of the card, the expiration date, the first name, the last name,

and the three digits from the back of the card, the security feature. That's what's referred to, the terminology for that is a CVV2. Now, with that information, you can only go online and purchase things. Now, if you want to go to a website or you want to, you know, Pornhub.com, whatever you want to do, you can use a CVV2 as long as you have, I'm spitting everywhere, as long as you have, what I found out later that I was a super rookie mistake in the beginning is there's all these, you know, security features that they put in the place for your, when you go to say like, I don't know, amazon.com or new egg or whatever website you're going to go to that you say, okay, I have these set of numbers and

now I need to either purchase goods or services. So you go to these websites and what I didn't know at the time is where, so the IP address of the account being used had to match the IP address or had to match the geolocation of the credit card that was being used. Wait, wait. The IP address of the account being accessed had to match? The billing address zip code of the credit card being used. So, okay. So, say I'm sitting in Seattle.

Say I'm sitting in Arizona and I'm online and I'm online and I'm using a credit card being used so okay so say i'm sitting in seattle say i'm sitting in arizona and i'm online and i'm online i'm using a credit card but the billing address for the credit cards out of delaware washington so places will only ship to the billing address of the credit card also really also they look at the wait what yeah that's a thing still oh yeah oh yeah huge huge unless unless you you call you actually physically call the company and you're gonna be still oh yeah oh yeah huge huge unless you you call you actually physically call the company and you're gonna be like oh yeah for fraud oh yeah for fraud because you know think about like this if i have your credit card information i could just go online and have the shit sent wherever i want so after a while of this happening the the these retailers

got smarter and they started hiring fucking it guys to be like okay the ip address of the person making this purchase doesn't match the fucking where the credit card is building addresses automatic shut it down we're not going to ship this product and you need to you need to verify this information so wait a second i ordered i don't know if i did that on my card though i i'm remembering one now this isn't final across the board i mean some places you may be able to get away with if they haven't experienced too much fraud because i ordered on my card something delivered to an address in philly this is maybe a year or two ago right from amazon and it went through but you're saying that usually that won't go through

well amazon's different amazon's a whole whole different animal because they have their own algorithms and everything that they look for it's if it's outside of your purchasing habits and all that shit like that for the account but but either way what you were dealing this is 20 years ago and this is you know when uh this is right you know the dot-com era so all of these online stores are being launched and there's just like this whole like you know what i mean so it's like online carding was i'm impressed they had these guardrails up at the time they did yeah yeah and when i got into it online virtual carding had been going on for a little while so there was like you said a lot of guardrails in place but not really in the u.s not so much not so much

brick and mortar at this time but as far as like virtual like online oh yeah like the it online was pretty good even in the early 2000s because you guys the dot com was like 2000 so we're five or six years into it at this point so you know security and this is becoming a multi-billion dollar business so they're going to have you know all of their it guys on it um so when you go to a website and you make a purchase the website logs your ip address and then it geo tags your low your ip your ip address and then it geotags your IP address to wherever your ISP provider is from. So, and then it cross-references. Now, all this is done automatically and it cross-references that information with the billing address of the credit card. And if the zip code doesn't

match the ISP location, service location service providers location then it automatically gets shut down okay but you get around that by using a vpn so say i'm so say i got 10 cards out of fucking arizona i just use a vpn that puts me in arizona and that completely fucking you know so you figure that out i figured that out pretty quick and so i started doing the virtual carding um i'm on these forums and i figure out that I can purchase this information in bulk for relatively little amount of money. So you can purchase card numbers. Yes. And then just use your VPN and then go order whatever the fuck you want.

Yes. Yeah, exactly. And you would have it delivered to drop addresses. Now drop addresses is obviously not my house. It's just somewhere where I'm having all of the shit sent to. Yeah. So where would you have it sent to um it was mainly ups stores but i wouldn't have like an account at the ups store i would just have it shipped there and i wouldn't even tell them and i'll just show up there like oh i had a package coming here earlier i don't know if uh

and they would just give it to me oh yeah i did that so so many times your face is there though too so when they get talked i didn't care i didn't care there were so many times. But then your face is there, though, too. So when they get talked to... I didn't care. I didn't care. There were so many UPS stores, I would never use the same one twice. Still, though, but they see you. So then the feds come in there like, all right, there's been packages sent here. Okay, well, then they got a picture of a white kid with no tattoos. I didn't have any tattoos or nothing at this point. I was a normal-looking, your average, everyday citizen.

So, I mean, what are they going to do? I was careful enough not to pull up in the parking lot so they can get my my license plate you know i had i had you know i was smart enough at least not to do that so you immediately got into this oh yeah immediately i figured it all out i like i said i scoured the internet and i i happened upon these fucking these these credit card forums and and then it was just fucking all downhill from there baby you know what i mean like what what kind of money like when you were starting so you just started on the virtual side but weren't you doing stuff where you would have to walk into stores and and that wasn't until later okay so at the beginning let's let's start with this then how much money are you making because you're buying stuff to be able to resell it, no? Yeah.

It was hit or miss, man. Like it was so inconsistent. Like one week I would make $5,000 and then the next three weeks all my orders would get shut down and nothing would get shipped. Why would it get shut down? Security. Oh, because people caught it on their statement or something? Yeah, you know, just for whatever reason, man, they would just say, you know know you need to send us a copy of your driver's license before we let this purchase go through or whatever you know like it was just like you know fucking or the card would get declined like i would get a base of cards where there was like a 20 validity rate amongst a thousand oh so

you're you're on this carding forum you're buying like how much did what were cars sold two or three dollars two or three dollars per number? Per number. Okay. And that's for CBV2s. So you buy a bundle of 100 of them, you're spending two, three hundred bucks. Yes. And then you know that 80 of them aren't going to work.

Exactly, yeah. So you have to go through basically all 100 and see what ones hit. And you don't know. And you don't know and there's no way to, at this point there's no way to test them. And you're ordering all different shit to not create a pattern. Yes. So I'm online all day and all night putting in orders for, you know, cell phones, laptops. And were you scheduling them to be delivered like all same day type deal? Overnight delivery, always.

Always overnight delivery. Because if you didn't choose overnight delivery, there was always a chance of the person who credit card you used finding it immediately and calling the company and, the company and not letting the shit get shipped out. But if you order overnight delivery, it does have a cutoff at some point, right? So if you're starting working at 9 a.m. and you're still working at 9 p.m. and you order overnight at 9 a.m. and then the other stuff by 9 p.m.

We had to know how to time it. Yeah, you had to know. Yeah, there's a lot to think about here. There is, there's a lot. A lot of work and crime. It's not easy. Listen listen it's not smash and grab you know what i mean you gotta know what you're doing yeah so you would you're it was too inconsistent basically because of it do you need more water by the way no i'm good okay it was too inconsistent because of the numbers essentially like the hit rates and The money was just way too inconsistent to...

And what kinds of things would you buy? At first, it was high-end electronics. So you're buying stuff that have a nice price tag on them? Yeah, at least $1,000. To make it worth your time? Yeah, at least between $800 and $1,000 every item. And then you'd flip them, like, almost new on eBay or something? Sealed package.

Yeah, it was eBay and it was Craigslist at this time. There was no Amazon didn't exist. There was no. So you've always been picky about your produce. But now you find yourself checking every label to make sure it's Canadian. So be it. At Sobeys, we always pick guaranteed fresh Canadian produce first. Restrictions apply.

See in-store or online for details. You know, there was no offer up. There was no none of that shit. There was no Facebook marketplace. Facebook didn't even exist. And your accounts on eBay and Craigslist were under assumed names and stuff? Yeah, always. And then I used, at this point, so once I actually started doing fraud,

like I was completely savvy like about the VPNs and about the laptop that I was using for fraud. I never even booted up at my address. Where would you do all of it? In the library? At the library or at Barnes and Nobles. Like the library? Yeah. Okay. Because wherever there was free Wi-Fi and there was a lot of people, that's where I would go.

So I had a couple different spots I would go to, but I never even booted that laptop up at my address. So you were disciplined as fuck. Yeah. And I always used a VPN, and I always used different drop addresses. How long from first day of going onto Google or whatever and searching? How to do carding. Sure. To actually full-blown into it, doing orders for overnight, did it take?

It was about a month. That's not that long. Yeah yeah it was about four weeks um it was two or three weeks of research and then i was just a crash course after that right into it great work ethic man fuck it well yeah i'm not lazy no you're not i can't accuse you of that at all so you're but you stopped that the virtual form because it was too hit or miss because of the cards so what did you did at this point i know well because i was looking to scale you know what i mean i was looking to scale and i knew that this just there was no way to scale it because there was just too many inconsistencies and there was just too many um too many high risk situations and there was just too much legwork like the different drop addresses and always fucking you know there's just way too

much legwork too much can go wrong there's always fucking, you know, there's just way too much legwork. Too much can go wrong. There's too many moving pieces. Too many variables. Yeah. So you decide to move to the physical side then. Yes. And that's when I was like, okay, well, I was reading about the physical in-store carding

and all that shit. And then- And how does it work? So, okay. Anytime you go to Walgreens, Walmart, CVS, you know, anywhere that you have to swipe your card or you put that chip in, that information that's saved to that magnetic strip or that chip on your credit card is

physically saved somewhere in a server. Now, it's called track one and track two information, okay? And when you swipe, so you've got this little machine in front of you and a laptop, and you swipe your debit card, credit card, anything, and it reads the information, the physical representation of that information on the computer screen in front of you is going to be two tracks of information. That's why they call it track one and track two. Now, the first track of information is just going to be the information that's physically on the card. It's going to be the credit card number, the expiration date, the name, all of that shit. The track two on that information is just a random string of digits

with the card number and expiration date everything in there but that is the string of information that allows the pos machine the point of sale machine that you're at to communicate with the bank that allows the transaction to transfer the funds okay now that information is saved somewhere on a server always it's held and it's saved now it encrypted now, and that encryption has gotten better over the years. I'm sure you've heard of some of the bigger breaches over the years. Oh, yeah. With Target, there was a big one about five or six years ago where 50 million debit cards. Home Depot was another big breach.

So they save it, yeah. So it's all saved on servers. All this information, because they have to save it. They have to because they have to be able to process. And then Vladimir gets in there. Exactly. And they hack it in bulk and boris and then they resell it they resell it on on the market now all of this information is useless

unless you have a physical card to encode it to yeah because in the store you can't just give the number no you can't i actually you know what's crazy i didn't even think of this but about a month ago i walked to a store and i realized i didn't have my shit with me i was on the way home walking from somewhere else and i was like oh shit and i went up to the front it was a cvs and i'm like oh can i just give you my number and they're like no yeah and i didn't stop to think like why they were saying that but yeah yeah you're like yeah you know you're totally oblivious you're just thinking in the moment like i need to yeah i'm like oh shit i'd like to buy this i'm like can i just give you nope yeah that's why mobile wallets and everything are are great now right fucking apple pay and all that shit keep

all your cards which that's a whole another i set that up too afterwards i'm like that's why i need that yeah you always got your phone yeah yeah um so yeah all this information's saved and it's you know saved on a server and then it's resold to people who now you need a piece of plastic to write this information to and to be can't just be any plastic. Well, I mean, you can. You can write it to whatever has a track information on it, but good luck going to a fucking, trying to get a $5,000 Birkin bag, or good luck going to fucking Walmart,

trying to get a big screen TV using a card you found, or like a fucking gift card with somebody's information written to it. Good luck. Because that's how people go to jail.'s how idiots that's how the idiots that you know those are rookie mistakes because you can read the person at the cash register can really tell well not not only that it's once okay so once you make a purchase over a certain amount of money and i don't know if you've ever noticed this before but go to best buy and try to make a purchase for a thousand dollars they're going to ask for your credit card they're going to ask for your debit

card or your credit card because okay well not if it's a debit card because if a debit card you put in your PIN and you're good to go. But I don't have the PIN number. I don't have the PIN number for any of these cards that I'm using. So I always have to process it as credit. Oh, you're saying they're going to ask you for your PIN number even on the credit card. No, no, no. I misspoke. I'm sorry.

Okay. It's enough on that. So if you have your debit, if you have your PIN number, they never ask for your card. Obviously, because it's your card, you know that you know the PIN number. It's even okay. So I don't have the PIN number to these cards that I'm buying, obviously, because if I did, I'd go right to the ATM and just pull out cash instead of trying to go, you know, card high ticket electronic items.

So you always have to process it as credit. Even if it's a debit card, you always have to process it as credit. Even if it's a debit card, you still have to process it as credit. Now, what they do at the store is they physically, they say, can I see your card? And they look at the card in the last four digits that are on the card. They type that into the POS machine. And if that number doesn't jive with what's being swiped, automatic fraud. Why wouldn't it job well because the numbers that you're writing to the card are it's a different credit card number than the card than the physical card that you're using you know what i mean why is it a different no i don't know okay is it a

different number i'm gonna pull out my credit card i'm gonna show you we need a we need i think i'm just having a visual aid we need a visual aid please and you got the camera right there if you want to show people as well so we've got this credit card number on this card, right? This is my card number, right? This is my card number. This is my card. This card was issued to me with this card number on it. Are we going to broadcast that to the world? Oh, it doesn't matter.

I'll believe. You know what? I can mosaic it out. That's fine. Yeah. It's okay. This is my credit card number with my number on it that was issued to me. Okay?

Now, you see this magnetic strip on the back? Yes. When I program this magnetic strip, I'm using somebody else's credit card information to program to this card. So it's going to be a different credit card number than what's physically on the card. Oh, sweet. So you're using your own card. No, I'm not using my own card, but I'm using... A different card, but you're not programming the same shit onto it.

Yeah, because you're buying somebody else's information that was stolen from their credit card and i'm cloning it what essentially what you're doing is you're creating a clone of someone else's credit card using so why wouldn't you just clone everything the same on it why wouldn't you clone the same number on it you do and that but it's not easy like the the process for doing that for actually printing your own credit cards which i end up and that's what I ended up doing. And that's how I made all my millions of dollars. It's not fucking easy. So when you were doing this, you weren't doing this.

No, because I had no – well, I was buying. So what I was doing is I would buy these cards online. I would buy these numbers. I would buy them. And the technical terminology is called dump. Yep. They're dumps because it's a dump of information. Got it.

Now, once you purchase the dumps you You have to have a card to encode them to to go to the store to use it Now I didn't have printers and embossers and all the equipment to go out and make my own fucking credit cards with matching numbers So what I would do is I would go to like cvs or walgreens with a backpack and I would steal every Debit card that was on the rack like the the gift card, like the prepaid debit cards. I'd take all of them. Every single one of them. Now I can take those and I can write.

I can have a little machine. And I can reprogram the magnetic strip on these cards with the numbers that I just purchased. Because you didn't have an adequate way to produce. You were just mixing and matching. But I'm limited to where I can shop with these cards now. Because a lot of places, if you go, like anywhere you go in, like say Target, for instance, anything over $300, if you process it as credit,

they have to ask you for the last, they have to... They have to take the card and... Type in the last four digits. And listen, the POS machine won't even let them process the sale unless they do that. So there's no way of getting around. They have to ask you for the card to type in the last four digits so now and if you're using a card that doesn't match you're fucked you're done you're done so now you there were only you wanted to hit the mendoza line

of items that were high enough to make it worth your time but they couldn't be too high to exactly and then again i'm it depends on i hit i hit another law i hit another wall like i couldn't scale so what were you buying during this period tvs do you remember when ipods the ipod touch came out those were huge before the iphone really took off and they were what like 400 bucks they were expensive four or five hundred bucks yeah i was fucking dude i had so many of those goddamn i had probably 200 of those so that that was low enough. Yes. I was just under the threshold at certain stores like, oh, Circuit City was still a thing. No, wait. Circuit City was closed.

Radio Shack. Radio Shack was another one. Staples. They didn't check last four. Staples didn't check last four. Office Max checked last four. Target checks last four. Did you learn that through practice?

Trial and error. a lot of it and then i i remember one day i stumbled upon a tutorial where it just had a big list of all the fucking stores that checked last four and which ones didn't trial and error were there a few times where you ran oh yeah i got chased out quite a few times of stores okay all right now a couple times where i probably didn't even have to run but i just got nervous and ran anyway yeah fucking left the car yeah okay uh we have both there was quite a few times where I probably didn't even have to run, but I just got nervous and ran anyway. Yeah. Fucking left the car there. Yeah. Okay. We have both. There was quite a few times where I'd get chased out of stores and shit would go wrong.

We'd go sideways in the beginning. Yeah. Got it. So how long were you doing just that? So I started doing that. I did that for only maybe like three or four months until I was like, you know what? Too much. Dude, I'm getting chased out of stores.

I can't scale it because I'm pretty much limited to where i can shop and you know what i can make or you know so i was like well i need to figure something else out so what'd you do i started buying cards that people would make so okay so i found a guy in line and i i use this service i was like listen i need 15 pieces or 20 pieces of plastic and i would be like okay this is the number i need uh embossed on the card and i would send them the card number just the number is this like vladimir or something like someone over there the plastic vendors at that point in time were all out of eastern europe and hong kong and how are you communicating with them like irc channels irc chats yep it was all irc and then tell people what who don't know what that was so irc back in the day is um something akin to like um i would say like

yahoo chat or or those of you that were on the old school um msn or was that what was that aol aol exactly it was like aol aim it was just chat rooms, pretty much. But it was encrypted, right? It was encrypted, and it was super, super fucking low-tech. There was no user. It was super simple, you know what I mean? It looked like a 90s government nuclear computer. It looked like you were looking at MS-DOS, if you know what that is. I actually don't know. Remember when computer screens used to be green? Yes, just like no no that's exactly it yes yes it's

just like just the text and little boxes almost like a pac-man game that was it yeah it was super simple that's like what julian assange and and wiki leaks were using yep early on that's how andy greenberg was on this podcast that's how he got in touch with them yeah but okay so you're using irc's and you're buying you're you're saying to to vlad out here like all right i need i need six four two nine and blazoned on a american express card exactly and he would so he would have some sort of plastic that was convincing that he could produce the american express label on and then print that number on and he'd send you the physical card. And then I would encode my dump to the card with my encoder, because that little piece

of equipment was only like 20 bucks. Oh, because now you're lining up the numbers. Okay, right, right. Because now I need, so he's going to stamp the cards for me, but I'm encoding them, because I have. And now, when they plug in the four digits, you're good. Good to go. Yeah.

Yep, yep. Okay, so now you can buy whatever you want doing that yeah you go in and theoretically yeah a four thousand dollar computer if you want to theoretically so how didn't always work out that way but yeah why didn't always work out well because you don't really know what the balance is on any of these cars like i don't have any way of finding out how much money you have in your bank account limit is or what the credit limit even if it was credit because a lot of these, the debits were cheaper. Those were between $7 and $12 a piece.

The credit cards were a little higher because those were obviously guaranteed for a certain credit limit. You know what I mean? So the credit cards were like $20, $30, $40, $50 each. And you didn't know if it had $1,000 or $5,000 on it. Exactly. You never knew. So you had to do at least one trial and error, I guess.

Yeah. Usually multiple. And then once you start doing it for to do at least one trial and error, I guess. Yeah. Usually multiple. And then once you start doing it for a while, there's something called a BIN number. It's called a Bank Identification Number, B-I-N. So the first six digits of any credit card, debit card, will tell you exactly which financial institution issued it. Right. You know what I mean? Yes.

So once you figure out what BINs kind of have, you of have money on them, then you kind of just like, okay, you ask the people selling the numbers, the vendors, if they have – do you have this bin number in your base? What about like American Express or something like that? Smaller credit unions I found, people usually had higher balances in their account. Like I hate to say this, but like teachers' teachers credit unions i used to hit those a lot um i used to hit the usaa the whatever that is the usaa credit unions and i know because it's all military and i know they got paid they get paid on the fifth or they get paid in the first and the fifth so i always knew that like if i had a base of those dumps it was always going to be good around like the first week of every month i can hit those for pretty high amounts and the fact of the matter is the crime against those people is they just get a massive inconvenience.

It is a horrible, massive inconvenience. But they'll get the money back. 100% of the time, they always get their money back. Always. So you're essentially stealing from banks. The financial institutions, which if you know how modern banking actually fucking operates, it's not even their money to lend out in the first place. And the money is not even real. doesn't even exist it's created out

of thin air that's a whole that's a whole another podcast but yeah so you so the the just keeping square out there the crimes are people's time and stress and effort which is a crime for sure it's a but then yeah but then it's also the actual money crime is at the end of the day, you're taking money from banks. Yeah, I'm stealing from financial institutions. Right. I mean, I'm inconveniencing people, sure. And they could blow it. And there are some instances where-

Sometimes it's bad. Maybe if it's a single mother and she went to a store to buy formula and now all of a sudden some asshole used her credit card and now it's going to take a couple days to get her money back and she needs to feed her kids. There's situations like that that I'm sure I've caused problems and I feel horrible You know, I do I do feel bad about those kinds of things but that was that was the time period you were in Yeah, yeah, that's the paradigm. I was living you're not and you're not there's no way you're really thinking about that

While you're doing it. You can't yeah, you have a cognitive dissonance. Yeah, you have to you have to yeah You won't commit the crime. That's something that sends a shiver up your spine later yeah so you like was that a lot more profitable than i assume like you're still missing on some because you don't know the limits but now it's less stressful because you don't have to pick out specific places you have it lined up you can go make big buys yeah so are you making a lot of money at this point uh when i start purchasing the cards yes yeah i'm probably doing uh two or three thousand a day at this point uh when i start purchasing the cards yes yeah i'm probably doing uh two or three thousand a day at this point shit yeah and how long did you do this exclusively not that long only maybe another two or three months before i really felt like then again i

was ready to scale and i couldn't because the inconsistency and the plastic i was getting like the inconsistency and the plastic I was getting, like the inconsistency in the quality of the plastic I was getting was just absolutely ridiculous. So some cards you had to throw away. Some cards I would get them in the mail and I couldn't even use them. I'd be like, what the fuck is this? What would be wrong with them? The numbers would be misaligned.

They weren't embossed right. The images on the credit card wouldn't come all the way up to the edges, so there'd be like a white line around the image on the fucking card. You know what I mean? And if you flip it over, so there's a lot of security features that credit cards have that people are unaware of. Like people are unaware that if you put your credit card under a blacklight, there's UV security features on the card that you can't see. It's like a license. Yeah, and then there's something called a rear indent where it's embossed from the front to the back with the last the last

three is actually there it's actually raised in the back if you feel your card it's called a rear indent a lot of the cars didn't have that the sig strips on them were printed on which they're not if you look at your credit card it's a whole different fucking got it you know what i mean so like a lot of the shit the other cars that we're getting were fucking absolute garbage and i'm like dude i can only there's only certain places i can use these at but you're only doing you do this for like two, three months, 60, 90 days. You're making a lot of money,

but it's quick and you're also throwing shit out. So you... I'm also getting ran out of stores sometimes because the cards aren't working because you know, like I just...

They're not good enough. Yeah, they're not good enough. Like a lot, there was a lot of, I was having a lot of problems. So you tried someone that were on the line. I'm paying $30, $40 a piece

for these motherfuckers. Just for the plastic. But you... And then I'm paying, and then I'm paying $30, $40, $50 a piece for the numbers. But you were trying shit that was on the line though it sounds like. Yes. Not just the ones that were obvious like you couldn't do. But sometimes you'd be like, maybe it will work and those are the ones that are getting chased out of stores.

A lot of times, yeah. A lot of times, yeah. And, you know, I was just – like I said, I would have – each card I was going out to use, I have like $80 invested. And then it doesn't work. But if you're making two, three grand a day, that's a business expense. It is. But, you know, once you try it. But I was thinking in scale.

And I was like, well, that's, you know, I'm going to lose too much money and that's just too much risk I'm taking. So I'm getting middled at the end of the day. I need to figure out how to make more fucking money um and that's when i figured out i was like well how hard is it just to print these cards on my own and that led me down a whole another rabbit hole so you went from you went from i'm gonna make a parallel here from salesman to supplier you went you went from dude on the ground to ceo by saying okay instead of being the guy who orders this shit and goes in and physically does it and that's how i make my money instead of instead i'm going to sell to all those yeah instead of being the end

consumer of the product um i you know something something somebody once told me a long time ago and i've always i always revert back to this because I feel like this was an exact turning point when I had this thought. And I'm a big history buff. I know a lot about history. I research it, and I study it a lot on my own just for fun. And people think I'm fucking insane, but I just do. It's fun. During the gold rush, the guys mining the gold weren't the ones making all the money it was the guys

selling the pickaxes those were the guys that were making all the money during the gold rush and that's a little known fact about about the gold rush why weren't the miners making money well because listen they had a lot of people like so so the price of gold was constantly fluctuating and they had all these fly-by-night places where you went and they would buy your gold and they wouldn't really give you you know what i mean mean, like the fair dollar value for it. And then the money that they were making off the gold they were spending in the whorehouses and the fucking taverns. And all that shit like that. You know, and like it was rough.

They were dying out there. Like so they weren't, it wasn't like they were going out there and I think they were going to make all this money during Gold Rush. But they were really just chasing pipe dreams. Do you think that has to do with the psychology of the people who were mining versus the psychology of the people who were taking advantage of those people or does it have to do with the fact that there was more money in the pickaxes it seems to me like if anything there's equal money or frankly i'd say probably more money in gold but the type of person doing it psychologically was not one who was inclined to be able to know their value a and b hold on to the money exactly well see the person that's more inclined to chase after gold in the ground that's a whole different kind

of mindset than the person's like oh you know what i'm just going to stand here and sell these pickaxes for fucking two dollars a piece for the next six months and you know what i mean like so that's what you're saying your mindset was more built on long-term building as a businessman and and removing some risk from the table having it consistent exactly okay so how do you get into obviously like there's a market for it because you're fucking buying it other people are buying it it's i don't know how big this game was in the market it was fucking horrible like these guys these were some of the most fucking unreliable motherfuckers i mean obviously it's fraud and you're dealing with fucking scumbags you know

i mean so you can't really how you know how smart can any of these guys really be but it was like doesn't like sloppy fraud yes remember that yeah well he's a whole nother he's a whole different animal that guy there um you know so it's like you would you would message these guys and you'd be lucky if you got a message back in fucking a week and then when you put your money in with them you'd be lucky if you got your cards in a fucking month or if you got them at all if you yeah and that's another thing like a motherfucker a lot of motherfuckers just ripping people off like you could be listen you could do business with this guy for six months thousands of dollars and then all of a sudden you put in an order and he just starts ripping you off like it was like that like

you had no fucking clue you don't have insurance no and you can't and there's nobody to complain to who are you gonna are you going to tell? You can't call the Better Business Bureau. You know what I mean? They're not letting me do my fraud. Yeah. So, you know, and like I said, the customer service for these guys was fucking horrendous, and the product they were putting out was absolutely horrendous.

But in order to do these things, you need to be able to buy the digital numbers, right? That's the first thing. You've got to be able to have the numbers to print, right? No. You don't have to have the numbers. No. People can just order the numbers for you. I can buy the numbers.

I can, yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So you have to go buy it, but then you have to print it. So now the physical stuff. Well, I don't have to because I can just, I was selling blank plastic for a long time because the piece of equipment you need to encode the card and the piece of equipment you need to push the numbers onto the card is relatively inexpensive.

A couple hundred dollars. And it's readily available everywhere on the internet. So a lot of scammers already have that. They already have it. So what they do is they order the plastic from guys who can make it really well and then they just stamp and encode their own numbers to it. So how did you go about learning how to make the plastic and what did you need to do that? Dude, that was like a whole fucking thing in itself, man. Like I had to... First of of all there was no information anywhere there were no tutorials on how to print plastic there was nothing so i had i had to just go online and

just start researching keywords is where i started uh credit card printers plastic printers uh you know track two like just just keywords that I knew that were in the industry. I just started Googling keywords. And then once, you know, I figured I stumbled onto a page like, okay, this information looks, let me follow this rabbit hole. And then eventually it would lead me to like a place that sold, um, ID card printers for ID cards for like employee ID badges and shit like that. So I purchased one of them, but I could never really get it to print the high quality images that I needed to make my plastic look like it was issued from a financial institution. Got it.

You know? So at this time, it was just a rabbit hole and I just started researching equipment, researching equipment. And then I was like, whoa, something struck me. I was like, well, themv prints driver's licenses let me fucking lose my driver's license and go down there and see what printers they're using so i went down there i you know i i air quotations lost my fucking driver's license and i went down the dmv did you even have one by then are you old and you said you got a 25 26 your first license did you even have one?

I don't remember. I think it was, yeah. Well, no, it might have been my identification or something that I played like. I might have had a driver's license at this point. No, it wouldn't even matter if you had it or not. You're just playing like you lost it anyway. Yeah, so I went down there and I wanted to see what printers they were using to make the driver's licenses. So I went down there and I got the model numbers. I seen the model numbers, recorded them in my memory.

And then I went home and I just got online and I figured, can I find these? Is this equipment readily available to the public? Which it was. Really? Which it was. No fucking, now, I mean, I think now there's the restrictions are a little bit tighter on it. But at this point in time, you could just go to the manufacturer and order these fucking, these printers. Like there was no nothing business was

booming for those people yeah like damn there's a lot of printers coming in huh so i ordered yeah so i ordered uh i ordered a printer and i just it was trial and error i just started playing around printing cards and uh now you have to order the raw plastic too you can and that's readily available it's blank you can order yep you can order them 10 000 at a time they come in sleeves about this big and um you know so I just started playing around. I started printing cards and seeing, you know, obviously I have a degree in graphic design, media arts, so I don't have to, that part of the, and that's really what was like, okay, I can do this. Because I had a very, what I deemed to be a very profound understanding of how all of this operated just just on a physical level like i understood how all of the equipment operated physically i understand like the back end of all of like

the designing and like you know the dpi what each you had looked at so many yeah yeah you had done it trial and error you knew it worked yeah yeah so i i knew what i i so like it was just trial and error man i and i would slowly i would have to start with a cheaper equipment first because this is expensive, man. Like some of these printers were like 6,500 just for like, for one part of the process. That was just one piece of the, the equation. But you could also find $500. You could fund that while you're doing some of the two, $3,000 days. You can. And I, and I didn't really have a whole lot of those two or $3,000 days.

Like I fucking, it was, they, they came, but it was, and it started being more far and few in between the more I started doing it. You know what I mean? And then, yeah, man, it was just trial and error. I just, I figured out how to fucking, how to print the cards. I figured out how to do the driver's licenses. That was another. Oh, you figured out driver's licenses too.

I was doing driver's licenses. Maybe you made my fucking ID when I got that taken. I might have. Yeah, I was doing driver's licenses and I was doing credit cards and debit cards. What goes into the driver's license? Because they're different state to state as well. So how would you make a convincing one? I knew a guy who sent me a zip file and it had probably 25 states already done or something like

that in it like the templates were already made of like the holograms and stuff that go on well because you know those those ids are all obviously made to thwart fraud yeah but any you know savvy graphic designer can see exactly what process they use to create the different fucking steps of the layers to create their security features and once you figure that out it's you know it's they're super simple to make i can print it like i'm printing a business card except it won't scan if they scan oh no it'll scan everything i made i made them to where they scan and everything i had barcode generators and i would generate the barcode with the information that's on the front of the card. And then I programmed the barcode and I did them all legit.

Wow. Now, what programs are you using to do this stuff? I'm using Adobe Photoshop. I'm using Adobe Illustrator. This is exactly what they advertise the product for, by the way. Yeah. Those were the main two programs I used. And then there was a few other little uh off

programs for like you know sizing and got it so what you've how long did it take before you had figured out let's even just say credit cards like once you order the equipment you get it in there after you did the dmv thing and then it was about a solid eight months so you spent a long time it was about a solid eight months before i had a product that looked like it was issued from a financial institution. And so what happens then? Now you got to go to market. How do you do that? Well, I started using them.

Because still at this point, I didn't think about becoming a vendor. You know what I mean? I thought you were thinking that right away. No, I was just trying to cut the middleman out. Oh. You know what I mean? I hadn't even occurred to me to become a vendor at that point. At this point, I'm like, I need to cut out the middleman and

that way I can make my own plastic. And now I'm fucking, it's huge, you know, because now my product, I'm comfortable with my product and I don't have to wait for them to come in the mail. If I fucking get a big base of dumps, I could sit up all night printing cards and go out and hit fucking 20 stores the next day instead of hitting only two and waiting for cards to come and getting them declined and all the other bullshit. Got it. You know, so i started using them and then it just came to a point once again where i was getting chased out of stores and i had to go and get a fucking storage unit to hold all of the shit that i'm carding in because you know i got so i had the

i had the process down so good at this point to where i was going and i couldn't fit any more shit in my car like i would have to make trips back and forth to the fucking to the storage unit unload my car into the storage unit and then i'd go back i don't ask any questions over there no they don't give a shit 24 hour access you just type in your code and go to your fucking unit and uh i was filling up storage units man of of shit and i and then i had to list everything and then i had to meet people and fucking do it was just dude, this is too much work. Too much work. It's too much work.

This is not scalable. Again, once again, this is not scalable. But your hit ratio even though you're still getting chased out of stores it was a lot better. It's a lot higher and I'm starting to make a little bit more money. So you're saying you have a moment, I assume, where you say to yourself, I'm better than the marketplace at creating this.

I never really thought about it like that. Yeah. I mean, I just, but that's been the story of my whole life. I've always been able to fucking, you know what I mean? Wiggle my way into a position to where I'm just, you know. So what, when you, at some point you make the decision where you're like, I'm going to sell these to people. Yeah. That's when I was like, uh, I think so, so I'm going to tell this story and I've told the story several times before, but it's, it's just, it's just it's it was the the uh the crescendo if you will you know the cataclysm

the the catalyst uh this event this event was the catalyst that really launched me into wanting to become a vendor um me and my little brother and i'm at this time me and my little brother my little brother chris has he been around he so he's he's now at this at this time me and my little brother my little brother chris has he been around he so he's he's now at this at this time he's like 18 and he's getting a little bit older because he's three four years younger than me and he's lived with your mom this whole time this whole time and now she kicked him out why'd she kick well she didn't get why i mean she kind of she pawned him off and got rid of him because he went away to college and then he got into some like he got into some shit at school and then he was going to Michigan U of M

and then he tried to go back home to my mom's house and she's like, no, you're not coming back here. You're out now. He's going to Michigan. Yeah. He's a brain. He's extremely intelligent. My little brother, his intelligence is on a whole other fucking scale,

way far beyond anything that I'm able to achieve. So you bring him down to miami so he calls me he's like um how much younger is he again three and a half years younger than me okay so you would did you bring him down there right at the start of this yeah well yeah right when i so when i start getting into doing the on like the the physical carding and all that shit he comes down got it so he calls me tells me the situation i'm like dude just drive down i was like you know you can come. I got you set up. Well, I didn't tell him I was doing all that shit.

He didn't know. And then when he gets down here, I kind of tell him what I was doing. And he's like, oh, my roommate used to do that. And he kind of knew a little bit about it. So he just jumps into it with me. And now me and him are going out karting every day. So now you got two heads on it. Now you're scaling a little bit. A little bit, yeah.

Yeah, we're having fun. And, you know, it's a rush, man. You know, it's a fucking rush. You're being able to go to a store and buy whatever you want and not even look at the price. Because I know I have 15 credit cards in my pocket and one of them is going to fucking process the sale. Same kid that used to walk into Publix two days hungry. Dude, I was eating out of trash cans, man. I was fucking dying eating out of trash cans.

So for me, it's turned over a whole new perspective in life. It's given me a whole new outlook on life. You know, things that were important to me at one time were no longer important. Things that I wanted, I didn't want anymore. Like, goals changed. My whole perspective on the way the modern banking system works

and all that shit, all that shit just completely changed. And, yeah, so we're doing it. And so me and my little brother we go we i feel so bad because for whatever reason this day he had the id that matched the the cards that we were using for whatever reason so i would print batches and i'd make myself an id and i'd have an id to match this batch of cards but once this batch of cards ran out i would just get rid of the id and get rid of the cards and i'd start all new and And for whatever reason, that batch that we were using, my little brother had the ID

that matched the credit card. So I had to, he had to go with me or else I wouldn't have been able to do it. And I think like a rent was coming up or something like that. And we needed a couple laptops. So it was like, okay, so I went and I woke him up. He was out of a dead fucking sleep. I wake him up to go and commit credit card fraud with me to go and steal We drive from Coral Springs to West Palm Beach, Florida. We go to Walmart. We walk in We go all the way to the back. We get the laptop. We get up to the counter. Everything's fine We give the guy the card he swipes the card. He looks at it. He goes he picks up the phone He said we got a code red back in electronics. Oh fuck fuck. I knew what time it was immediately I did an about face. I pull out my cell phone and act like I was talking on my phone. I start walking

towards the front door. I glance back. My little brother's still standing at the fucking counter. I'm like, fuck. And you were at the counter with him. Yeah, I just turned around and started walking. I didn't say anything to my little brother and he stayed at the counter. I'm like, fuck. Why isn't he... I think he was trying to get the card back, is what it was.

He didn't want them to keep the card. So he was trying to get the card back, I think, and then once they didn't give him the card back i don't know but i listen i got to the front door the front door is open as i'm walking up to him and i hear somebody running from behind me like flip-flap because he was wearing thong fucking sandals right he didn't have running shoes on so i see him he flies past me two guys chasing him straight out the door and when he looked back the just the look of sheer absolute fucking terror on his face hit me in my stomach. And I felt so bad, man, because I was like, fuck, I fucked up. Because the guys chasing didn't know you were standing at the counter with them.

Yeah, well, yeah, no, because one of them tried to grab me as they got to the front door. And I knocked his hand away. I kind of did like a spin move and shot out the parking lot. And once you make it out of the parking lot, they can't pursue you anymore. So they got my little brother. They snagged, they got him in the parking lot. One of his fucking sandals blew out on him. Like the little thong thing ripped out and they fucking, they got him. They arrest him. Um, you know, I'm, I'm online all night tracking him all around town, seeing which Chicago County jails he goes to and shit. I get him, uh, before he even made the first phone call to me, I had him a bondsman down there and he called me like yo i got a bond can you get me a bond like

listen i already got you a bondsman just sit tight you're gonna be bailed out in like an hour or two i went down there i got him uh and after that i was shook you know because now it's real now somebody done went to jail this is the first time anybody's gone to jail or anything's happened because of it you know and this is my little brother dude i feel bad because i got him into it and i'm just like you know i just felt really bad man you know and and at this point i'm just like dude shit's getting real now you know now the consequences are now shit's getting real and now i'm starting to get paranoid because i got all this equipment at my house and i'm making credit cards and i've been fucking i've been doing it for you know about a year and a half, two years now.

And, um. Now, how much did they know though, when they caught your brother? Like. Nothing. They only caught him with the one card, right? And he shut his mouth. He would not give a statement. He wouldn't fucking, nothing. So they just charged him with basic theft?

Oh, grand theft. Yep. That was it. That's not basic theft. That's, that's, okay. Yeah. So they were, what, what is the level for grand theft? Like how much money? Over a thousand dollars. Okay. Right. So, well basic theft. Okay. So they were... What is the level for grand theft? Like how much money?

Over $1,000. Okay, right. Well, that makes sense. Grand theft. There you go. So did he go to prison or... He got probation. So he eventually got probation and then he took off.

So this whole situation was nuts. So I bonded him out of jail. Like a month goes by and we don't hear anything. Then I get a call from the bondsman saying that they released a bond. was nuts so i bonded him out of jail um like a month goes by and we don't hear anything then we i get a call from the bondsman saying that they released the bond that uh they're not gonna i guess the charges were dropped they're not pressing charges whatever i'm like okay so i went and got my bond money back and we thought we were in the free and clear i guess they thought they just you know didn't have enough evidence i don't know what the fucking deal was then all of a sudden i get a

knock on the door at like six o'clock in the morning one day, and it's a cop. It's a Coral Springs police officer. He's like, is Christopher Boziak here? He was in the room sleeping. And I just, I thought on my toes. I was like, no, he's in Michigan. He went to Michigan three days ago. He took off and went to Michigan.

He's like, well, do you have any ID? So I turned around, and luckily my wallet was sitting right behind me on like a little chase we had in the hallway. Gave my ID. He's like, oh, well, good thing he's not here. He's got a warrant out for his arrest and i and i explained to the cop i was like listen they gave me my bond money back and said that the uh the charges were dropped he's like yeah well uh he's like the state attorney um picked up the charges or whatever like that and they're they're recharging them so let him they can do that apparently if the the county or i don't know how that works if the county or city municipalities drop a charge, then it goes to the state.

And if the state chooses to pursue charges, then they could pick it up and then they could have charges. So it went to the state attorney and then apparently he fucking decided that there was enough evidence and there was enough of a crime to press charges. I feel like there's way bigger fish to fry in Florida than like one credit card. I mean, obviously he was doing a lot more than that. It landed on somebody's desk and they were just being a fucking asshole, and they were like, you know what? Let's just, because there's already a system put in place. Hey, look, to their credit, he was doing it on a massive scale, but I'm just saying they

didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's what I'm saying. Like, if they knew, then yeah, fuck yeah, they should charge his ass, but that's just, that's kind of wild. I don't know. I've never learned how that works with like, when they decide not to charge, is their paperwork filed? Is that then legally?

I've never asked that question. And I don't know that either. I have no idea how that process works. So either way, somehow they were legally able to. Somehow or another, they dropped the charges and then they picked them back up. So did he turn himself in or? No. I woke him up.

I was like, dude, the cops are just here looking for you. They said you have a warrant out for your arrest. They picked the charges back up. He's like, fuck. He took off and went to Michigan that day or the next day. Did he ever come back? Well, I was mailing cards up there to him and his roommate in bulk. And so they started carding in Michigan.

So they started doing it up in Michigan. He gets picked up in Michigan. He used a debit card at a Walmart. And this dude, how this went went down this never fucking happens the lady whose debit card he used lived in the city that the fucking walmart the target that he was using it at was in oh wow she seen the charge on her card called the target and was like listen my card was just used at your store for 300 and the store was like well there's nothing we can do about it she called the police department and was like listen my card was just used at your store for $300 and the store was like well There's nothing we can do about it She called the police department and was like listen my card was just used at this target for $300 an hour ago

She's like I physically have my card in my possession So there's some kind of fraud going on here The the sheriff's went down to the target the cameras pulled the cameras got the fucking license plate number found out the address went to The house fucking ran up in the apartment that my little brother and his roommate were in a nightmare they had debit cards everywhere they had fucking stacks of fucking hundred dollar gift cards they had fucking all kinds of shit fucking equipment everything he gets arrested in michigan um they put him on probation in michigan and for that and then they extradite him him from Michigan all the way down to Florida. All the way down to Florida.

And then he gets put on probation in Florida and then, you know. Leaves the game. Decides to go straight. And he's like, I'm done. Good for him. Got probation out of both of those. That's lucky. Yeah, yeah.

Well, because he had never done anything wrong. He had no criminal history at all. Yeah, but they walk in. There's a million debit cards and credit cards everywhere. It's kind of like, yeah. Yeah, yeah. He got lucky. And I think he realized he got lucky. And like I said, my brother's a million debit cards and credit cards i know that's kind of like yeah yeah yeah he's like he got lucky and i think he realized he got lucky and like i said my brother's a lot smarter than i am you know and i feel like um he i feel like he's he has a lot

more options available to him in in way of you know creating uh opportunity and creating income for himself than than i do um or than i did at that. So he quits, just walks away from it completely. And you're still balls deep in it. Well, I'm like, well, fuck, I don't want to go get a job. I'm not going to quit completely. But you were thinking about, oh, he got caught. Is there going to be heat on me? Exactly.

That's at least in your head. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm like, okay, well, I'm just going to shuffle the cards a little bit and rearrange the fucking scam to where there's less risk that I'm taking. What's your money looking like at this point? And how old are you, 24, 25? Yeah, I was in my early 20s, and this is probably about 2004, 2005. No, this has got to be like 2006 because you started.

Yeah, this is late 2005. This is almost 2006 when me and him got busted. Because I remember that distinctly because I remember the apartment that I was living in. Oh, wait. Was he? Hold on. Did he get busted before you started providing credit cards? Oh, yeah.

Now it makes sense. This incident was the catalyst for me wanting to go into vending. Got it. Got it. Okay. Got it. Now the timeline makes sense yep so now you that's how you decide like okay i need the heat off me for not doing this in stores

i don't want my face on security cameras and that's when the pickaxe thing fucking right that's when i was like okay that's when i that's when i got into that train of thought and i tried to figure out how can i make money from this with a reducing the amount of exposure on myself, and B, increasing the profit margin. So what kind of – I forget what the timeline was. Maybe eight months, you said, and you were able to do it. To perfect, yeah. To perfect it. So then you reached out on the open marketplace and said, I'm in business now.

Well, I was already on the forums. I had been on the forums for about a year or two at this point. But now you're saying, guess what, bitches? I supply now. Now I'm a vendor. But going through the whole process and becoming a verified vendor on the boards for about a year or two at this point but now you're saying guess what bitches i supply now i'm a vendor but going through the whole process and becoming like a verified vendor on the boards and all that shit it's not it's not easy verified i was yeah verified check mark for that um you got some kind of it was a credit system that yeah instagram for fraud wow okay so yeah you at some point there a year whatever it was you become a verified vendor and then how customers just start hitting you up for it uh in in the

beginning it was kind of slow um you know because nobody really knew if i was a ripper or you know i was somebody that had the product but then you know after like a few weeks and a few months of me just sending cards out to people and then having them post um you know the they'll they'll get the cards and they'll post pictures of them on the forum be like yo these things are legit this guy's a legit seller you know his quality is um the quality of the product is on point and your customer service was excellent right on a whole nother fucking level my customer service rivaled you know sprint at&t fucking microsoft any of those things rivaled, you know, Sprint, AT&T, fucking Microsoft, any of those things.

It rivaled it. Because A, I used to sleep with my fucking laptop open next to me on a stool with the volume turned all the way up. So that if an ICQ chat came in

or an IRC chat came in, even for somebody just asking about a product, I would wake up out of a dead sleep, deal with the customer, and then go back to sleep. So you were very timely.

You were a good dealer. I was on it. I was on it because I knew that this is where everybody else was lacking so at where everybody else was lacking i knew that i had to step up and that was the only way that i was going to take control of the marketplace essentially because that's after i figured out that my product was better than everybody else's that was my goal was complete hostile takeover the entire fucking marketplace. You know what I mean?

That's, that's the fucking type of shit I was on. And then once I figured out, and then, and then I essentially just sent out an email to all my competitors, letting them know that they were all fucked. You sent an email to all your, like to Sergei and Boris and shit? Letting them know. Did they even, did they even, did they speak good English or like? Oh, they got translated. I good english or like oh they got translate i mean i'm sure they got translated fuck you i own you now yep done cooked put everybody out of business your product was in one year i put everybody out of business i was the only one

how much money were you making at the very pinnacle of what i deemed to be my success i was doing a hundred orders a month on average which how what's the size minimum order with me was a thousand dollars minimum order so for a thousand dollars you got a hundred debit cards and I would work with you on the driver's licenses I wouldn't give you a hundred but I'd work with you on the driver toss in some driver yeah 510 whatever it was and I was doing a hundred orders a month so that's what was your cost it was it was so low that it was i didn't even register like that's not that much money no it was for five hundred dollars i could operate i could print twenty thousand cards holy fuck yeah so you know like i said my very pinnacle i was probably doing like a hundred thousand

dollars a month in business a hundred and a hundred thousand hundred thousand hundred fifty thousand dollars a month in business and where are you putting this money? I have corporate accounts set up. I have, back in the day, I don't know if they have them anymore, but there used to be something called Western Union cards. So, okay. So, if I send you a Western Union, you can go to a store and pick it up. But if you go through like five or six different verifications

with the actual company, Western Union, they'll send you a card so people could send western unions you know go straight to the car right so you don't have to go pick it up so that keeps you out of the store security cameras all that and i had probably 30 or 40 of those corporate accounts what's the source of income well i had so i had set up a um a mobile detailing company so i bought two ford econoline e350 vans i outfitted them with fucking pressure washers all the fucking shit i set up a website i incorporated them i fucking i did all that shit and then i would just i would put in monthly expense reports you know fake monthly expense reports and fucking you know um all the money that the company was making i was pretty much

just giving to the guys running the company they didn't know that but i was just pretty much all the money i was making zero money on that whole that business made me no money like the only reason that business even existed is so that i could have the llc and i could be incorporated and i could have the fucking the corporate bank accounts and shit like that with and i even had like a fucking fake i was submitting fake payroll every week holy with a payroll company yeah it was edt adt or something like that i had adp adp yeah i had adp payroll company, yeah. It was EDT, ADT, or something like that I had. ADP. ADP, yeah. I had ADP, a payroll company.

Fucking 30 employees that didn't even exist. Your detail was incredible. Listen, I had shell companies set up with working legitimate websites for companies that didn't exist because a lot of my cards were going overseas. And to get anything through customs, you had to have something called a BOL, a bill of lad I didn't see there's so many things I wouldn't even think of because again oh yeah I made a credit card for it but it's a whole fucking it's a whole thing dude like it's not easy and you learn it's not you gotta you gotta put in hard work yeah a lot of dedication diligent dedicated very good very diligent so how long were you up and running like making your money about four years

fuck now are you spending the money as fast as it comes in no man i wasn't one of those guys man i was to be honest with you i was fucking terrified once i started like when the real money came in dude i didn't know what to fucking do like i was smart enough to know that I can't go buy a Ferrari and drive it up into the apartment complex. Right. I can't go buy a half-million-dollar home. I wanted to. Like, I wanted the big house. I wanted the nice cars.

But I just knew that I couldn't do those things. So, honestly, a lot of the money just sat collecting interest. You know what I mean? I had a little bit. Now, listen, Bitcoin's just coming into play now. This is 2009, 2010. So, all the cryptocurrency, you know, that's just starting to take now this is 2009 2010 so all the cryptocurrency you know that's just starting to take off ground floor and i was in um i was in liberty reserve i was in

wmz and those things don't even exist anymore when did you buy bitcoin for the first time 2010 do you still have it on my hard drives that got got fucking all the keys and everything yeah i had probably yeah We'll get there. And I get crucified in the comments over my Bitcoin timeline. But yeah, I had probably $3,500 in Bitcoin in 2010, which it was less than 50 cents

a Bitcoin or something like that. Yeah, hundreds of millions of dollars right now sitting somewhere in a fucking Secret Service fucking shelf. Or it's already been auctioned and fucking, you know, because they get rid of all that shit.

I'm thinking that the other one...'ll get to it but the other one with the girl who threw everything away did she throw that away too oh i had bitcoin then too that got thrown away yeah so i've had bitcoin twice taken from me yeah it's a hard it's a hard one i don't even i don't even like to think about any of that stuff i guess you deserve it but still yeah it's just one of those things you compartmentalize and it's like you know i had the money i don't anymore i'm never going to get it back so it doesn't even doesn't exist yeah it is what it is like throwing away a winning lottery ticket it happens so you're up and running four years you started this in roughly end 05 beginning of maybe 06 somewhere you start actually being a producer and so you're have clientele, you don't even know where they

are. They're just ordering through you on this thing. You're doing everything through a VPN. Were you using any other layers of security besides VPN? So I would never even boot my laptop up at my own home or anywhere near my home. I would never use my own IP address. I was using SOCKS 5 and SOCKS 4, SOCKS 5 proxies on top of a VPN. And then on top of that, I was using a public Wi-Fi. Got it. And so you end up settling down with a girl at some point. Yeah.

Yep. And you moved out of Miami. Yep. Moved out of Miami. Moved to a small town in South Carolina because that's where she was from. And you were cool doing that. Yeah. Well, because I still had my place in Miami,

and I bought a townhome in South Carolina, and I could still go back and forth all I wanted to. So I had equipment set up in Miami for counterfeiting. I had equipment set up in South Carolina for counterfeiting. In my mind, I can do this wherever. I don't have to be anywhere. I can go wherever because as long as I have somewhere to ship from. You know? have to be anywhere i can go wherever because you know as long as i have somewhere to ship from you know so you just continue everything as is when you when you go there and you have a kid to south carolina yeah you just had a kid i just had a son at this point my son aiden was born

or i'm sorry my son nicholas was born and um aiden's the youngest one right aiden's uh aiden's 10 now yeah right and nicholas is what? He'll be 15 in March. He just turned 14. So you have Nicholas with this? Melissa, yep. With Melissa. He's about two years old at this time, and we're in South Carolina. How soon did you get caught from moving there?

After moving to South Carolina, it wasn't that long. Maybe three or four months, five months or something like that. And what happened? So in South Florida, when you go to to a ups store to send your packages out uh you walk in you say i got a package one going out they scan it you pay five dollars they put it in their outgoing mail and it goes out when the ups guy comes and picks it up that's normal happens every day they don't bat an eyelash at it now when you're you're in Florida and you type in UPS store on your GPS, it's like the map has chicken pox. You know what I mean?

There's 10,000 of them. There's one on every fucking corner. There's one every three miles because they're a franchise. So people open them as independent businesses all over the fucking place. And they make money. It's actually a business that actually makes money. Right. So in South Carolina, there was two in the town that I lived in.

Or I would have to drive over an hour to Charlotte to ship my packages out. So I started, I got comfortable and I got complacent and I started using these two UPS stores to ship all my packages out because up until this point, there had been never no heat on me by the secret service or anything like that. I wasn't aware of any open investigations on me. I had no close calls. You know what I mean? I'm dealing with people that are anonymously online. I'm packaging all my shit good enough to where it's not drugs or anything like that so nobody has no you know reason to open any of my boxes or my packages so i've never had a package get stopped at customs everything has always gone through so i'm just i'm comfortable

when i'm complacent at this point so i start start using the same two UPS stores to send my fucking packages out of the old man at the UPS store, which I didn't know it. He was the owner and he was working the front counter. Oh, you got to look out for them. And in South, in small town, South Carolina, we don't like your con. Exactly. And that's what it was. And he, he didn't like, he thought he was just got suspicious of me. He never fucking led on that. He was suspicious of me. It was always, he was always super polite with me when i went in there and i was always really polite with him when i went in there and you know i went in i opened a box i told him i um i own a company that refurbishes um you know computer equipment and i resell it on ebay you know so i had a reason to be in there shipping packages every other fucking day and they were going all over the world you know russia

fucking south america everywhere fucking chile uh brazil all my cars were going that's not happening in that small town in south carolina too much so apparently he got suspicious one day and opened one of my packages is he allowed to do that nope sure the fuck isn't and i got like 15 years knocked off my prison sentence okay so we'll get to that so so you walk in normal day of business as you've been doing. You hand off a package. You leave. Leave. You find out later he opened it up.

My customer didn't get the package, didn't arrive. And my customer called me. And my customer service is like, so when my tracking didn't start tracking on that package, because I track the packages too. And to make sure, you know, because I know exactly how many days to get to this step how many days to get to this step once it hit customs if it doesn't clear within 24 hours it's not going to clear you know what i mean so i knew so i always watch the packages as they go if it's a big one the littler ones i don't really give a shit about but the bigger ones i do because you know i'm dealing with a lot of money and i want return business for my customers because

they're spending thousands of dollars with me on on a regular basis so i'm tracking this fucking package and it did it just didn't track all it said was ups has created a shipping label which i know because i create the shipping label because i had a i had fucking a way about you know pitney bows the shipping software yes why i know how to hack the pitney bows and get free shipping i could ship anything anywhere for free in the United States. How do you do that? Freight, doesn't matter what the weight is, doesn't matter anything. I understand, once again, going back to understanding how the UPC and barcode labels work, and then understanding how the Pitney Bow shipping system works, and being able to generate that fucking barcode.

It'll scan into the system, and once it leaves its destination, the postage isn't paid for. Right. But the label looks like the postage was paid for, and when you scan it in, it'll scan into the system. So the package will make it to wherever it's going anyway. And I never have to pay for postage for anything. You know what I mean?

And it's just another way. And the packages are harder to track that way as well. Yeah. The postage isn't legitimate. Yeah. So that was my roundabout way of doing that. And so I would seal and package and put my own shipping labels on the packages before i took them to the ups store so he had to open up one of the fucking boxes went in found the fucking cards and he contacted the

postmaster general the postmaster general contacted the secret service and then they set up a sting on me that's pretty much how i got caught so this thing is you go to walk in to do the next mailing they send me an email telling me i had a package waiting for me which coincidentally i did have a package because it was kind of some other shit coming in from mexico some stamps some other shit i was fucking on and um fucking uh didn't help my case any because i had to explain that fucking package too while they're sitting there they made me open it um yeah dude so yeah they set up a sting on me. I had one of me. I got I went showed up to pick up my package. Was he there? The old man?

Yeah. Yep. So he said, hello, you're fucked. Oh, no. He said hello. And he's like, I signed for my package. He's like, all right, have a good day. And I turn around.

I went to go walk out the door. And here come two Secret Service agents walking in. I was like, fuck. They tackle you? No, it didn't even register with me because they were wearing regular clothes at that time. And I was going to walk out and they were wearing i seen a gun and a badge on their hip and it still didn't register with me because i was so comfortable that i was like it still didn't register that

these people are here to arrest me were you offended they didn't send a bigger team nah i didn't think about that but anyway at some point they grabbed me i guess they wouldn't let me they wouldn't let me they wouldn't let me out the door one guy stepped in front of me and then i i went to go step because i thought it was an accident so i went to go step to go around him and he stepped again and he's like mr pearson and that was the name i was using at that time and he was like mr pearson i was like fuck i was like yeah he's like uh well we need to we need to talk to you about what you've been sending out of here so what i tried to play stupid for a couple minutes i'm like why are you

talking he's like well let's just go on back and have a conversation. So we went back and I sat down and I was just like... And that scene from Blow, that scene at the end when he's like, all right, fuck it, let's do it. When he knew he was fucked, that came out of my mouth. I was like, all right, fuck it, let's do it. He's like, what's your name? I said, what's your real name?

Because he's like, we know you're not Ryan Pearson. He's like, we looked up the name Ryan Pearson. We got the picture from the DMV. It's not you. And I was like, we know you're not Ryan Pearson. He's like, we looked up the name Ryan Pearson. We got the picture from the DMV. It's not you. And I was like, John Boziak. And at this point, I knew that they didn't really know anything. How'd you know that? I would have been in cuffs.

I would have been in handcuffs. There would have been no conversation. If they knew what I had been doing and how long I had been doing it to the extent, there would have been no conversation. I would have been getting arrested. Hold on. I'm fogging up. You good? Yeah, i'm starting to sweat and fog up my fucking glasses all right we'll be back in one second all right we're back go ahead if they had known the full extent of what i had been doing uh there would have been no conversation they would have just

arrested me right you know so i knew i knew that they didn't know anything so at this point I was like okay well they have the cards in my brain I'm just like okay they have the cards um but they don't know how long I've been doing this they don't know you know anything so I kind of I honestly obviously I minimized everything to the to the as much as I could I'm like yeah I've been printing cards for about six months um you know I've been doing out of my six months. I've been doing it out of my closet, my apartment. I knew that they didn't believe me, but they didn't have enough evidence of anything else to really do anything. And they're like, well, if you cooperate with us, you're not going to go to jail today. I'm like, I'm not going to go to jail.

At this point, I'm like, I'm fucking going to jail. Biggest quarter in America. And they're like, well, just tell us what we want to know. And if we feel like you're lying to us at any point, we're i'm fucking going to jail carter in america and they're like well you just you know tell us what we want to know and and if we feel like you're lying to us at any point we're going to take you to jail but he's like we're not going to take you to jail he's like obviously you're going to have a court date you mean you're gonna you're in trouble he's like but um you know really what we want we want the we want the lab they kept saying we want the lab we want the lab what lab like oh because they didn't know you were the lab no they didn't because they't. I think what they thought was I was one small wheel and a very much larger wheel.

They didn't realize that I was just a solo. This is very poor interrogation work. So then they just started asking me questions. I was like, yeah, I've been doing this for about six months. I'm selling on this one forum, blah, blah, blah. Did you try to play it up, though, act like act like you were doing a lot fuck no listen i know i'm saying not no hold on let me restate that not a lot for what you and i know is a lot i'm saying did in selling the small time stuff that you're selling did you try to act like because you were caught and you said okay fuck it let's do it did you try to act like you were a hot shot at doing it no not at all because i knew

just from my experience with being in trouble my whole entire life that you know the the more you can minimize something and make it seem less as a big deal the more of a chance i'm not going to be in my mind that's how that's why i'm processing the information you might have been wrong on this one yeah okay maybe you ended up being right yeah if you'd run into good agents you'd have been wrong oh i've been fucked and um so you know they were like okay well um so they made they left they went and one guy stood and the other guy went and made a phone call i guess he went and talked to somebody and they were like so they came back they printed off a bunch of papers and you're just in the back of the post a back of the ups store ups in the back office yeah they fingerprinted

me in the back of the ups store they had printed fingerprint cards mailed so faxed in they fingerprinted me they did my whole they booked me pretty much booked me in the back of the ups they took me outside of the back door they made me stand there they took pictures of me front side like a mug shot on the side of the ups i got booked in the back of the ups store pretty much i've never heard of this neither have i neither have i neither have i because they needed to run my fingerprints and everything to make sure They got booked in the back of the UPS store, pretty much. I've never heard of this in my life. Neither have I. Neither have I. Because they needed to run my fingerprints and everything to make sure I wasn't fucking, you know what I mean, telling the truth.

Dumbest shit I've ever heard in my life. Okay, so they don't even, you never got cuffed. You told them this shit. Did they say anything to you else? Like, we're going to talk to you again? No, yeah, they faxed, they had some paper faxed in and they were like, listen, you need to sign these papers saying that we can come to your house right now and search and seize anything that's been used to commit this fraud, the printers, anything with removable storage.

We're taking it. Or what? Or you're going to go to jail right now. We're going to take you to jail. So it was either go to jail, because at this time they don't know where I live. My vehicle isn't registered to my address. My driver's license I have in my pocket isn't registered to my address. Where my lab was set up at.

So if I would have said, fuck you, take me to jail right now, they would have never have known where that house was. Yeah, so why didn't you do that? Because they kept telling me, you're not going to jail. You're not going to jail. And in my mind, I'm like, listen, if I can get out of this situation and get away from these motherfuckers, they're never going to see me in my mind i'm like listen if i can get out of this situation and get away from these motherfuckers they're never going to see me again ever because i gotta i gotta i got a storage unit with a with a vehicle and money and a passport and everything fucking sitting in it as

as a contingency plan in case i ever need to run that how much money was that was another tutorial about 80 grand and you have a you have a car a full-blown car in the storage unit yeah yep what kind of car uh i had a cadillac cts at this time a 2004 cadillac cts but that's not the car you're driving around every day you just had it in a store yeah so i read a tutorial online about fucking about you know um having a backup plan and keeping a vehicle and was this a wiki how it's pretty much what it was no back in like 20 years ago that's exactly what all of this was like this information doesn't exist anymore oh my god so yeah guys used to go and i read a whole tutorial google search history was bad this is oh yeah i had a tutorial that i read i'm like fuck i got 50 extra grand laying around right now i'm fucking so i went out that weekend i bought a car i bought a storage unit i fucking got some cash i fucking

i put it up put it all away and was like okay now because that just made me feel safe just having that there made me more it made me more fucking reckless to be completely honest with you you know what i mean because now even though i wasn't actively thinking like yeah i got this now i can be reckless in my mind that it was just added an extra layer of comfort to what i was doing if that makes any kind of sense to you so they tell you you're not getting arrested today apparently you gave them sufficient information so that you give them permission though to go raid your house are you there when they put me in the back of their car and drive me to my condo do you get out with them

yep and i go in and they sit me on the couch and one guy fucking sat in the living room with me while the other guy completely tore the whole fucking house apart and they took everything everything they took my safe i had probably 10,000 cards already pre-printed up in the safe but they didn't take your guns or weed they didn't take my my dope or my guns they're like we're not the atf we don't care about that stuff that's exactly what the fucking secret service said to me i had assault rifles i had a shit these were real cops that's another thing oh you know they were because when i got down to the, I had to go down to the Secret Service headquarters in Columbia, South Carolina and give a statement and get interviewed and everything and they were there.

I know, but maybe they could have found a way. Yeah, I don't know. But man, they didn't give a shit, dude. They were like, we're not the ATF. We don't care. I had like a quarter pound of weed and I had like fucking, I had an AK-47, I had an AR-15. Was it legal? Well, I had my concealed weapons license at this time.

All right. So it's at least legal. All my firearms were registered to me and they were legal. But they're looking at you for a felony. I'm surprised they let it. Yeah, they did. But do they have to let it until you're tried in court? I think until I'm actually charged with, or if they felt like the guns were being used in the-

They can make that argument. For the felony. Yeah, they could. They could say like, yeah, he's using it to intimidate witnesses so we're gonna hold on to it and then they never give it back because you get charged and yeah but yeah so they didn't take my guns i didn't take your weed salt yeah i salt rifles everything they didn't take any of that they left all that there they took was your girl there while this was no thank god my my my girl and her my son were at her mother's house when all this happened and i called her they allowed me to call her and tell

her not to come home i was like can i are these the worst cops in america i don't know man they were like you ran into the two worst cops in america they were secret service they were united they shouldn't be anything they are the this is the worst one of them okay so the two guys that were on my case one of them got sent up to washington to be on president's detail which and he's surprised the president's still alive and he's in a whole bunch of shit right now there's a whole bunch of a whole bunch of controversy surrounding him this guy's a double agent i'm telling some shit this is the worst police work i've ever heard on any level that didn't involve literally like a corrupt cop in my life and they they allowed me to call my wife and tell her not

to come not to come home don't come home that That's the number one person that any not brainless cop should want to interview. And they never talked to her. They never once even interviewed her or talked to her throughout this whole fucking process. Something is up there, bro. Right. So, yeah. So, it was weird. So, they took my safe.

They took all my equipment. They took all my laptops. Anything with removable storage on it, they took. So, back at this time cell phones didn't have cameras on them or we were using the digital cameras remember the digital cameras yeah so i had a bunch of those they took all those um i think i had like an xbox they wanted to take the xbox i'm like come on what fucking gotta leave you with something you know what i mean fucking no they left your xbox it's got a hard drive. Did they take it? No. They left the Xbox.

It had a hard drive. It had a hard drive on it. You complained and they left it. They left it, yeah. Just weird, man. Fucking weird shit, dude. Like, there's a lot of

fucking shit with this case that I just, like, I got a lot of luck. You know? I tripped and fell into a patch of four-leaf clovers, if you will. I mean, that's kind of lame.

I want to go fire these cops myself. Yeah. I mean, my tax dollars are going to these fucking two morons. Yeah, so they just emptied me out, and they left me a business card, and they said that you're going to get a phone call in a couple of days, and you're going to have to come down, and they're going to ask you some questions, and you're going to have a court date, and you're going to be charged with we don't know what yet

until we figure out everything. But I was like, all right. And that was in 2009 i i mean i guess you just you said the one guy you know for a fact went on the president's details so he's real because my guess would have been these were competitors who then leaked the information to the cops well it's when when the actual when the postmaster general called the secret service and the secret service is the one that one that dispatched fucking officers to wherever, so I'm sure they were legit.

And one of the Secret Service agents that was on my case was on Brett Johnson's case. Oh, the shadow. He got busted out of South Carolina, too. Son of a bitch. Yeah, he was at the same field office, everything, that I was at. Okay, so you get you're at home ripping a ball they just took all your shit did they take all your money minus everything yeah minus what was in the storage unit yeah i only i only had about

12 or 13 000 on me at that time in cash at the house yeah but they got my hard drives and they got all of my debit cards the information which. Which had all the information for all my bank accounts, everything on it. And they took all the printers. Everything. Every file. So they didn't think they found the fucking lab? You have everything there. Yeah.

I don't know. And this was in 2009. And then I didn't hear anything for three years. Dumbest cops in the history of history. Okay. So you... They fumbled the ball. But wait, no, you had to go give a statement.

Yeah, like a week later, I had to go down to the headquarters in Columbia, South Carolina. Did they give you a call and say, come down? Yep. And so you go down there. Mm-hmm. And if I remember, you walk in

and they have all the images on the wall of all your shit. They got this long conference table and they got all the screenshots of all my posts on the fucking forum spread out on the fucking... in the center of the table so that i could see it when i walked in and they still didn't think you were the godfather of this whole thing no and then i i just fucking talked my way i was like listen man i've only been doing this for six months you know fucking you know again i i i

minimized and i just tried to explain the best way i could um you know out of the whole thing and it was like the whole time in my mind the only thing I was hyper focused on was what have I already said? I cannot contradict anything that I've already said that they've written down. So I was so hyper focused on just not contradicting myself and sticking to my fucking story and not deviating at all. Even though they tried to get me to deviate. Whoa, you said it was this date but what it was in this state i'm like listen man you know so i just stuck to my guns i stuck to my story and i just minimized the shit out of it and at the end of the day what do they have they had

some posts from the one forum that i told them i was on all your fucking equipment they had all my hard drives they had all my cards right but like i said i've been doing what do they have they have everything right but they have nothing to prove that i've been doing this for four years they have nothing to prove that information is not doing this for four years. They have nothing to prove. That information is not on anything? I don't keep records. I mean, you know. That's true.

I mean, I'm smart enough not to keep sales records. I mean, what am I, paying taxes? That's true. That's very true. So they let you walk out of there? Again. Well, I didn't know. It was touch and go there for a little while.

I don't even know if they thought they were gonna let me go because there was a couple minutes there where we all just sat there in silence after they would ask me questions and then they would all be like and then he'd be go he'd be shuffling papers and they'd be sitting there and then they'd be like okay what about and i'm like fuck okay here we go again let's another round of questioning but listen the first probably 10 questions i answered when i got into that room let me know that they didn't know shit so i kind of just felt this relief kind of just wash over me and i'm like okay i got these motherfuckers and you walked out of there i walked out of there and they said you're going to get a

court date he's like he's like eventually you're going to have a court date you're going to have charges no i didn't get charges ready for you there was no grand indictment there was nothing nothing i walk out that door and it was three and a half years before I even got indicted or picked up or anything. So you go home. Was this your wife or your girlfriend? We weren't married. We weren't married, but we were together for two years, yeah. So you go home.

Obviously, she knows everything that you told her because all the shit was gone. Yeah. Well, I called her when I was at the house. I was like, listen, there's two Secret Service agents here. Don't come home. Yeah, don't come home. Right. And she didn't believe me, and she sent one of her cousins over.

And he knocked on the door. And the Secret Service agent answered the door. And he didn't fucking interview the cousin? Well, he didn't know it was a cousin. It was just somebody knocking at the door. And the dude looked confused when the Secret Service agent answered. Yeah, it was Jehovah's Witness. Oh, my God.

Yeah. So he knocked on the door. And they were like, yeah, he can't come to the door right now. And they closed the door. I hope that guy's listening. I want to let you know you are one of the dumbest wastes of tax money I have ever heard of in my life. And you should never have a job in the government under any circumstances. I looked so innocent back then.

I don't look like how I look now. I wasn't covered in tattoos. I'm fucking – I'm small. I'm fucking – you know what I mean? Like I'm not – Still, dude. It doesn't matter. this is the worst police work i've ever seen in my life so so you walk out of there they say they're gonna send you a court date nothing happens oh by the way didn't you you broke up with with your girl right she left me uh

like a couple days after that happened she was done because in her mind i think she thought maybe somehow she was gonna to get in trouble. Or they were going to take my son away or something like that. And she took the kid and left. Yeah, she just dipped on me. Told me to go fuck myself, pretty much. So you go back to Miami? I go to Detroit.

From South Carolina, I go up to Michigan at this point. Because I didn't know if I should go back to Miami and start just printing credit cards again. You know what I mean? Like fucking... Because I had more equipment. I had shit set up in Miami. So I went to Detroit and I just was like, you know, I didn't know what to do for about a year, to be honest with you, because I didn't know if they were watching me.

How much you took the money from the storage unit, I guess, to fund yourself? Yeah, I had money. You know, I had a car. I had money. I had all that shit. You know, I left her with the car and all. I left her with the townhome, the car, the furniture. I left everything. I just packed the bag and I left her and the kid with the apartment, the car, and a little bit of money. And I went to my storage unit and I got my car and I just drove up to Michigan. And I was in Michigan for a while. And it's like for a year, I really didn't know what to do. Like I didn't know because I'm waiting on a court date. But they also don't even know where you live. They should be tracking you, but they don even know where you live they should be tracking you but they don't know where you live yeah well yeah well they had the address in south carolina and i'm still in contact with

melissa so if they sent something in the mail or something like that for a court date she might not tell you bro she told you to fuck off and said you can't see your kid anymore true true i'll bet they sent that shit there and she just fucking threw it away no for three years so what happened was is the the dude the main guy got sent up to to Washington. My case got sent up to Washington. Whatever was going on with my shit got put on a shelf. No grand indictment, no investigation, no nothing. It just got fucking filed

away somewhere and they walked away from it for three and a half years. So for three and a half years, I'm out there. I don't know what's going to go on. I have no court dates. I'm not talking to anybody. You've got to be blowing all the money. Well, I've ran through the money fast. Yeah, the money went pretty fast. So how did you get more?

I had to start carding. I had to start making cards again. So how long before you start carding? I had no choice. How long before you start carding? I think it was almost a solid year before I was comfortable enough to get back on the forums. Because what they told me when they left my leg, listen, if you get back on the forums, we're going to know. If you start selling cards again, we're going to know.

I was like, okay. And they had me shook for about nine solid months. I didn't do anything. And then you ran out of money. Then I ran out of money. And I'm like, dude, I'm not getting a job. Because I'm not a 9 to 5 guy. You know what I mean?

Like I can't. No, you are not i cannot go to a building and clock up put you know push in and get my paycheck at the end of the week and be a productive employee and all that i can't that's not the environment that you i can't i tried i've tried i've tried i've been fired from every job i've ever had yeah it's just the one where they got arrested i actually probably would have done pretty well there had they continued business you had a good business yeah you had a good you had a good look i was doing all right you could if you picked another one that no one else would have paid you well there had they continued business. You had a good business there. Yeah. You had a good look. I was doing all right.

If you had picked another one that no one else would have paid you 80 grand, but if you picked another one and they paid you 80 and they weren't criminals, I think your life would have been different. To this day, I'd probably still be doing it. I'd probably own my own company. Yeah, yeah. You'd be. You're talented. So you start carding again. You back up to making 100k a month so i start i start carding um physical carding a little bit just to get my money back up and then i start i i reach out to one of my contacts who i fucking

owed like 2 000 cards to or something like that i dipped on him with the money uh i contacted him again i kind of told him the situation like listen man i got fucking i got pinched about fucking nine months ago but i'm trying to fucking make a comeback and then he didn't even want to fuck with me after that because he thought I was an informant. You know what I mean? So it took me a bunch of coercing to get him to believe me that I wasn't the police. And then once I finally convinced him that I wasn't the police and I sent him the 2,000 cards that I owed him plus another 1,000, that kind of opened the floodgates again for all the rest of my orders. Because this guy, this one guy I was going through was pretty much, I didn't know it at the time, but he was a buffer for the Russian mob. Oh.

So, yeah. That was the dude, that was your number one customer, effectively. Yeah. Shoulder Surfer was his screen name. And that's all I knew him by. Shoulder Surfer. Yeah, Shoulder Surfer. And he was a buffer for the russian mob

how did you find that out uh through operation open market was like another whole thing that came down and when they shut down all the carding forums now that was going on while you were recording again yeah and not in jail yeah so that can you explain to people what that was so operation open market was a joint venture between the united states secret service the russian fsb and the uh chinese um csp or whatever three governments that today would never be working together and they just decided that they were gonna shut because at this point it was fucking out of control like the fraud boards were in like there was like the dollar amount being lost and like it was just out fucking control. So they had to do something.

There was pressure coming down from... It started getting political and everything. So they launched this Operation Open Market where they actively infiltrated and shut down every single carding forum that existed. And this is when Brett Johnson... No, Brett Johnson got caught a little bit before and he turned informant

and he started working for the Secret Service. And then I think that's what led to Operation Open Market. I'll bet. He was the kingpin. Yep. That's what led to Operation Open Market. And then when Operation Open Market came down, I seen when everything became, when the grand jury and indictment became unsealed, and you could kind of read into it, I seen that Shoulder Surfer was fucking who he was and what he was doing. And I was like oh fuck it was one of the guys i was had been dealing with you know that was my main guy i had been dealing with so you put two and two together yeah and i and i'm almost positive

i'm one of the john does in the operation open market uh indictment that just didn't get caught this is while the indictment hadn't come down while you're still carding again the first no the second time the indictment and people were starting to get arrested but the full indictment hadn't come down so you didn't know everything you didn't know that you were john yeah yeah exactly okay yeah so you get people are starting to get popped at this time and operation open market wasn't open open but it was like people were like starting to get arrested and like it's being like news headlines are like oh they just busted 10 guys here they just busted five guys you're still going and i'm still going you didn't stop

no i didn't stop fuck it fuck them i'm i'm even more i'm even more fucking going down on the sword yeah well i'm even more confident now than i was before because i'm like okay well i know what mistakes not to make now at this time you know so i'm even more confident now i'm even more cocky um and then one day i'm driving and I get pulled over. And I get pulled over and believe it or not, as cliche as it may sound, there was a fucking expired tag on my plate, on my car. And it was just an oversight by myself. We got pulled over. I'm married at this point. I had met another girl and I had gotten married and she fucking was pregnant.

My son was just born. And we get pulled over and the cop was like, he walked up to him like getting my driver's license and my registration he goes back to his car and i'm i'm talking to my wife i'm both like listen and i'm laughing i'm like when the second cop car pulls up that's when you know you're fucked five minutes later goes by i'm like this is taking a while then the second cop car pulls up then the third cop car pulls up then the fourth cop car pulls up i'm like fuck there's four of them i'm fucked i know i'm going to jail at this point in time you never killed anybody right no no no no no no i've never been a violent person i know and um i know i'm going to jail at this point like something's fucking going on now and when

he started walking back to the car without my driver's license in his hand i knew i was going to jail so in my mind uh when he walked up to the window he's like uh you know he's like man i'm real sorry man can you step out of the car he's like you have a federal warrant out for your arrest did you know that i was like no i didn't he's like i'm telling you they were sending they were sending this shit to your fucking ex's house and she was throwing it away i think so i think so because you had a federal warrant out there was no need for them to put a warrant out they said we're going're going to contact you. You're going to show up to court. That's what happened.

Yeah. Yeah. As you're not lawyer, I'm telling you. Yeah. He said, well, you know, you got a federal warrant out for your arrest. And at this time, I had forgotten about the shit in South Carolina. Like, it wasn't even. Ancient history.

Yeah. Like, I wasn't even, you know, I wasn't even thinking about that. So you think you're getting arrested for this. Operation Open Market. Oh, shit. Yep. Oh, my God. And I just start start panicking you didn't run and no well i believe me there was a split second there when i seen him walking back to the car and he didn't have my driver's license in his hand i was gonna fucking go but there was four cop cars like

there was you know and i was on like i was on a main street i wasn't getting anywhere yeah and uh i told my wife when he was walking up to the car without my drivers i said go back to the house get everything out of the fucking house you were married to her yes okay i said go back to the house when i was like they're my driver's license, I said, go back to the house, get everything out of the fucking house. You were married to her? Yes. I said, go back to the house. I was like, they're not going to arrest you. I said, when I go back to the house, get everything out of the house. All the equipment, everything. Get everything out. And throw it away. Throw it away. So I get arrested. I go to jail.

It's a Friday. I get arrested on a fucking Friday. Because you know you're not going to court on a Monday. Not going to court until Monday. So all weekend, I'm sitting in jail. I don't know what's going on. I finally get in front of the judge on Monday. He's like, blah, blah, blah, case number, blah, Boziak, John Boziak, federal warrant out of the District of Southern South Carolina. And I'm like, oh, fuck.

Just this one, though. Yeah, he's like, federal warrant out of District of Southern South Carolina, blah, blah, blah. We're going to remand you to the custody of the the marshal service and i didn't even know what that meant at the time means you're gonna get extradited to south carolina so i'm sitting there and then so the marshals come they show up i'm at falconberg road jail in hillsborough county florida they pick me up they take me to pinellas county jail in pinellas county florida which i guess is where they hold all the federal inmates. Okay. So I get to there.

They let me... I finally see a judge. They let me out on fucking... on my own bond, on a PR bond, personal recognizance. I'd have to pay no bond or nothing. They let me out. Yeah, they let me out.

Just walking. They let me walk. But I had pretrial services. So I had to go down and I had to call... Piss in a car. I had to call every single day and I'd do all that shit, which I ended up absconding on that before i even went to court to get but you didn't even you didn't they didn't let you talk to attorney like to an attorney over the weekend or

something before that first hearing monday morning nothing something i sat there for three four days i didn't know what was going on i had no idea i believe it's your right to ask though you should ask uh they have something called an expedient trial like you have the right to a speedy trial right but i mean you have a right to an monday through friday right but you could have asked monday morning ahead of the hearing before you went in there i five minutes before i went in to see the judge i attorney came and seen me and was like uh i'm your attorney we're gonna be going up next uh blah blah blah and that was it and he's like i'm gonna try and we're gonna try and get a bond he's like do you know what you're here for i says no he's like well i don't really know either because that's what he said to me he's like i don't really know either he's like the the

paperwork really doesn't tell me much so then yeah monday i got in front of the judge and they sent me to pinellas county so it was like another day or two i had to get transferred and then i had to go see another judge a federal judge because that was just like a local magistrate you know get out on bond though so i get out on bond and my wife comes and picks me up. And then I just don't know. I'm lost at that point. Like, I don't know. I have no money.

It's all gone. I had a little bit of cash. Oh, because she threw it. So when she threw everything out, she threw out all the debit cards and shit too. Hard drives, debit cards, printers, laptops, everything. Yep, gone. And I had cash. We had cash, but not much, everything. Yep, gone. And I had cash.

We had cash, but not much, like 20. Maybe 25. Maybe 25. Threw away all the Bitcoin, too. Everything. Well, yeah. Well, she followed directions well. I'm just picturing the scene in Goodfellas.

Karen! Listen, I... Oh, exactly, yeah. Why would you do that? That's all we had. Why would you do that? That's all we had, Karen. Ah!

And, um... But, yeah, it was... And, listen, I was like, dude, I might go to the dump. I was thinking about driving to the city dump and fucking, but I was like, dude, so I don't know, I don't know how they process the trash. You were the Bitcoin guy going through the dump trying to get the trash. Listen, I sat online for three or four days after that trying to figure out the, how they managed the local fucking waste management system and how fucking, where they dropped

off the trash at. And I got a pretty good, just for four days of studying that i had a pretty good understanding of how like the truck routes and like what trucks did why found out what trucks did what routes because there's like corresponding fucking numbers on the dumpsters that correspond to routes and like i had that whole system figured out i was going to the fucking dump to get my shit back and i just never never did never did it's like fort knox dude believe it or not getting into a dump is like fort knox believe it or not i believe it but you you have charges so you're this is now it's official and you're right so you go to court sometime soon you're not carding obviously i'm

done i got everything gone like i have no resources at that point in time i'm completely depleted of all resources but the charges are based on that south carolina incident where mother old motherfucker opened up the stuff illegally. So, didn't you think of that? No, I didn't know. I had absolutely hit him in the crossbow. Because I didn't know how they caught me. I didn't know.

I didn't even know that until I got my discovery. Oh, shit. All the way when I got to South Carolina and I got my discovery. And I'm going through my discovery with my lawyer trying to figure out wiggle room or you know and that's when I read like fucking the report and it when they how the whole thing went down about how I actually got caught I was like oh and I didn't even know like it didn't even occur to me that he wasn't supposed to because I didn't know that he wasn't supposed to open my package my lawyer my lawyer was the one that realized she's like wait a minute something's not right here there's a chain of command that, you know, because she knew

and then... They couldn't listen. How did you get charged with anything? So here were my charges. My charges were possession of counterfeiting equipment, possession of a fraudulent transaction device, manufacturing of a fraudulent transaction device,

wire fraud, mail fraud, and aggravated identity theft because i had my picture on someone else's driver's license that i opened the ups store for yes so initially they had to get rid of all of that shit everything but then they were like the only thing they can make stick is the aggravated identity theft because i did have my driver's license on somebody else's i had my picture on somebody else's driver's license that carries a mandatory minimum of 24 months really mandatory minimum yep that's a mandatory minimum 24 months aggravated identity theft aggravated identity theft aggravated identity theft on the federal level is a mandatory minimum sentence unless you have

a fake person on there um that's not aggravated because you're just making somebody right yeah then it's not aggravated all right that actually makes sense because i i didn't i never knew anyone who had a fake id like in college where it was a real person or anything okay mine was tied to a real social security number everything oh so okay because you got to put down your social security number date of birth when you go to sign when you go to log in for the so then they whacked you they wh minimum. They got me for the mandatory minimum, 24 months. But originally it was 150 months, my sentence. But, wait, wait, wait. Hold on, hold on.

Yeah? The sentence was 150 months for aggravated identity theft? No, no, no, with all the charges. It was going to be 150 months. Yes, those were my guidelines. Yes, yes. You weren't sentenced with that. No, no, no, with all the charges, yeah.

Those were my guidelines with all my initial charges. That makes makes sense that's like 15 years or something like that they came with an initial plea of like 150 months right so then your lawyer realizes all this is my words like listen let's look we gotta look at this a little bit closer because listen you've never been in trouble let's look at the discovery let's fucking let's dig into you've never been grew up in a boy's home like your dialect all that shit sealed all my entire juvenile record was sealed so they had no idea the chaos i had caused in my life all they had was my adult record and i had nothing i might i'd never been arrested ever as an adult so you hold on you get charged with this you get the mandatory too but maybe there's this is not a real thing

but i'm just thinking if the the predisposition for this, for everything that happened, was the old dude opened up your package. So if they throw that out, can't they throw out the fact that, you know, you deserve to go to prison, to be honest with you. I had been sitting there for 13 months in the worst county jail I had ever been in in my entire life. I was in Lexington County Jail, South Carolina. I was on 23 and 1. I was in my cell 23 hours a day. I only came out one. There was no windows.

I didn't get headphones, no music, no TV, nothing. 13 months. So when they came with that plea of 24 months and I already had 13 months in, which they were counting that towards my sentence. Oh, shit. Yeah. I only had like another...

I can do 11. I would be out in 11 months. I'd be free. In be free in a better prison fuck yeah and i would be actually getting sentenced and go to prison i was like dude i gotta get the fuck out of here and i signed it i probably could have been like fuck you you probably could have fought that because they would have never checked the id if they hadn't illegally checked your shit yeah yeah yep so you know i was like whatever i signed it just to get the fuck out of there and get to the yard because i needed to get the hell out of that that jailhouse it was the worst jail house i've ever been in my life worst cops in hard time man oh yeah they dropped the ball in

secret service like i don't think they took the whole thing serious like i don't really they didn't take the whole thing they just didn't take it serious at all i don't think i wonder if they like watch your podcast now like motherfucker motherfucker, son of a bitch. Yeah, and they gave me three years of paper. So I got 24 months of incarceration. I had 72 months of paper. Probation, right? Yeah, federal probation.

Okay. And once that happened, I made the decision right then and there that I was just going to not do anything to send myself back to prison. And had you always been into, like, tattoo artistry? Yeah, I actually did my first tattoo in, like, 2001 or something like that. And it's been an ongoing thing ever since. So it's always been like a hobby. It's always been something that I've done, but I've never really taken serious. So you then just stunk.

And now I'm like, this is the only skill that I have that's not going to send me back to prison so you just sunk your teeth into it yeah and i'm all in now and i'm doing pretty well with it yeah yeah you're good i'm doing extremely well it's really good yeah that's awesome well look i mean that's it's a hell of a story you have for sure so a lot to unpack for people today and i think think you told it very, very well. And I appreciate you coming in to do it. No problem. And I wish you all the best luck on YouTube as well. You and Matt Cox down there.

It's a grind, man. Hotel content creator. As much as you know, it's a fucking grind, man. It is a grind. But you're doing well getting on a lot of other shows too and doing your thing. So thank you for going through everything today. No problem, man.

I appreciate it. Yeah. All right. Everybody else, you know what it everything. Not a problem, man. I appreciate it. Yeah. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. And if you haven't subscribed or liked the video, make sure you do those two things.

And I will see you guys next week.