Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Dark Web Kingpin's Last Interview Before Prison...

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

Dark Web Kingpin's Last Interview Before Prison...

I mean, by the time this comes out, you'll have been sent it. I don't know currently as of right now, but it won't be that much longer. I hop on. We have like $21,000 in sales. So we went from like $500 to then $21,000 just like that. There are services on the dark net that you could go to where you exchange that piece of gold. Well, it turns out the FBI also had control of that service. and they were catching a lot of people trying to wash their money.

Have you considered selling stuff on Etsy, like maybe stuff that's not banned by the federal government? Every law enforcement agency in the world, and you have the most advanced units in those agencies after you. You have every single hacker in the world trying to demand ransom from you, trying to hack you. You have other markets competing with you that will also who are also very technically advanced people

that will try to mess up your website just to drive traffic to their website. Hey, this is Matt Cox, and I'm going to be doing an interview with Colby Cop. He was actually indicted and is awaiting. Actually, by the time this video comes out, he'll have been sentenced and either be waiting to turn himself in or on his way, on a bus. on his way to um uh to a short vacation and so he he was indicted for how can i put this he was a a dark market or what a dark web um counterfeit pill dealer let's put it that way so it's going to be an interesting interesting story every time i've talked to him i've unfortunately I know I'm not supposed to laugh about it, but I've laughed about it.

And it's an interesting story, so check this out. Why are you laughing about my story so much? Because you're telling me when you tell me what happened, you were laughing and you were like, Jovely, not laughing in a bad way, but you're like you're like you're like I'm going to laugh at pretty much anything just because it's just how I get through the day or how I get through anything. I try and I find the humor in pretty much everything. otherwise you're walking around crying all the time you know and right so i'm just going to try and see the

humor and everything you got to say you got to stay calm that's the thing i'm learned going through this process you got to your mental health is paramount because you'll go crazy yeah yeah yeah yeah if you're strong mentally and you go to jail or i mean to prison you can figure out pretty quickly um how to make that time work for you that makes sense um so so let's let's go back let's start at the beginning like i mean you know where like where where'd you grow up i grew up in a small town called a winstead connecticut it's it's rural it's not it's outside of like some mid-sized cities i mean it only has really like 5 000 people in it um wow it's a yeah but it's like a it's eclectic we'll say so like we have a a a lake in the middle of our town where you'll have like

rich New Yorkers come for their summer homes, but then if you go to Main Street, you'll have literally like crackheads wandering around. So it's, it's an eclectic mix of people. Yeah, I think you've got, yeah, that's pretty, that's the last place like that. Even, even where I live, I live way out in the suburbs. You still see guys like, like, I don't know where they're going. Like, this dude's going to be walking for a lot. He's got it. He's got a grocery cart packed another one he's pulling it and I'm like I don't know where that guy's going like you put an Oprah on them to see I don't know this guy he's going to be walking a while but yeah yeah they're they're everywhere so um you know and I'm sure he's a very nice person

um anyway so you grow up in a so small town 5,000 people that seems extremely small but um so so um what you uh you were your parents married you have two brothers you got a sister i grew up with uh only my mother um my father divorced her when i was like two years old and then eventually she met my stepfather and then they had my sister um then over time she divorced him as well and now it's just my mother and my sister and i okay um when did so When did you go to high school? I went to high school in a, it's like it's a semi-private high school called the Gilbert School. The town, we don't have like an actual like government high school.

So they had to pay to send everybody there. So it was, it was good. I had an idyllic high school experienced. I never touched a drug until I was 19 years old. I played football. I had good grades. I had a 4.1 GPA. I did cross-country. I did track and field. I did wrestling. I did a lot of other extracurriculars like Model UN. I got to learn Mandarin Chinese in high school.

We had a lot of exchange students over from China. So that was an immersive experience in learning about other cultures that I really enjoyed. Okay. And so now it's the leap to counterfeit. fit drugs makes total sense to me now no i mean so how that when did so you're 19 you graduate high school you're 19 and you you so i mean so i'm hanging out with my like uh i was part of like i did football and everything but like look at me i'm a nerd right i was with my like a geeky friends if you will so there's my friend named tie and you know in in around where i'm at the marijuana is

not good but he shows up to uh to our social gathering with an ounce of the most beautiful pot i have seen at that point in my life and i know damn well tie does not have the social skills to go out there and ascertains that weed so i'm sitting there just staring at i'm like tie where did you get this because i know you don't you don't leave your house like literally ever hear a shut it and he's like get a laptop i'm going to show you something really cool i'm like a laptop for what he's like just listen stop talking just listen and he opened up a laptop and he uh he used this special software called tour the onion router to access this thing called the dark web which is a portion of the internet that's not normally indexed by search engines you know like

Google and Bing and Yahoo, you need to use the special software tour in order to access it, right? So he goes on there and he proceeds to go to at the time dream market, a darknet market. Darknet market is basically an Amazon for illicit things, you know, counterfeit credit cards, folds, of course, narcotics. So he goes on there and he shows me the, um, the vendor account of the person he purchased the weed from and this dude is making like $15,000 a day just selling weed and I'm like is this real like you bought you how did you get the weed from this guy and he's like well I got some I purchased

some some cryptocurrency some Bitcoin I sent it to him and then he sent me weed once I opened up my package put him like whoa pause pause pause he mailed you drugs yeah through who U.S.PS? Yeah, that's another charge. Yeah, and I'm like, let me get this straight. The mailman brought you this weed. He said yes. And I'm like, okay, can we order some acid?

So we proceed to order acid and marijuana and, you know, various stuff just for ourselves, for personal use. And then one day, while I'm sitting there with my friends and or tripping acid, I look at them, And I'm like, guys, how much is the weed on there? And they told me. And I'm like, you know, I know some people that sell weed around here. This weed is a lot better. And it's literally like $800 cheaper for one pound. So why don't we order it and go to our friends, people that I know that already sell weed, and just sell it to them?

And they all looked at me like I was crazy. And I'm like, no, no, it's very simple. It's just weed. It's harmless. But then as we all know, you start with one seemingly innocent thing. And then you just go, go, go from there, right? So, you know, after a while, we start getting pounds of weed and I'm doing my thing. And I'm selling it.

Through the mail. One day I meet one of my friends. And this is, wait, this is all through the mail. this is all through the mail i get it to the point how long ago is this because you're what how old are you i was 19 at the time but how old are you now i'm 24 currently okay so this wasn't that long ago no okay no sorry i just i haven't heard any recent stories um about like the dark web that is that recent um i mean i guess i interviewed a guy the other day but His was a long time ago.

His happened back, I want to say in 90, I want to say it was in 2008 or something. Like, this is pretty recent. And I talked to a guy, or maybe it was, no, it was still, listen, it was at least, at least 10 years ago. I'm pretty sure. So, and then I talked to a guy who was a reshipper. I didn't interview him, but he was a reshipper. And he was getting orders in and then from other countries. And then they would send him bulk packages and he would reship it from inside the United States.

Because if it shipped from inside the United States, there's less scrutiny. Yes, exactly, exactly. Domestic packages don't really get flagged. You get caught usually getting packages from, let's say, India, China, Pakistan, and then it gets flagged by customs. Right. Okay, so this is cool. So this is only like five years ago, four or five years ago. Yeah.

Well, really up until recently, too, I know. But go ahead. I'm sorry. I don't know. No, no. That's okay. That's okay. Your show.

Well, so I meet a friend, Dan, after a while. and I start selling him weed. And he's like, you know, my dad sells a lot of Coke. And I'm like, Coke. I can't deal with that. That's crazy. What do you talk cocaine? And he's like, hold on now.

He's like, just go on there and show me. You know, eventually, of course, me being an idiot, I go on there. I go on there. I order some cocaine. I get it in the mail. I didn't know it at the time, but this was literally like cocaine around. here on the east coast is is it's it's it's what's called stepped on meaning people have added adulterance to it and they dilute it in order to make more money the cocaine that i ordered was

basically pure in an american context it was it was only stepped on one time and that was from whatever mexican person i purchased it from right so he takes this to his dad who is a large cocaine dealer and he's working for a biker gang locally um and i knew of the dad he was actually one of my neighbors when i was growing up i i i was in high school literally with his kid right the kid that i'm talking about the kid that i'm selling weed with right so we take the cocaine to his dad and he looked at the cocaine he's like how much can you get and i'm like well really how much do you want and he's like you can get consistent drugs off the internet. And I'm like, yeah, he literally looked me in the eyes.

And he's like, if you do that, I can make you rich. And I'm like, really? That sounds great. I would like to be rich. I would love to be rich. And of course, me being a stupid 19-year-old, I keep indulgent. And I keep going down. I keep accelerating, if you will.

Because before, it was just a little bit of weed or some magic mushrooms or something that's harmless. but now it's cocaine can it get any worse well so you know remember how i said that this this gentleman was a was a was a pretty decently sized local cocaine dealer right and he was working with bikers well it turned out the leader of that biker gang was um insane and he one day was driving around was insane because he was on a bunch of drugs And there was an elderly couple that, you know, was driving poorly around him. So instead of just honking his horn like a normal person, he proceeds to point a Mack 10 at them and started saying he's going to kill them. So he gets busted.

And the cops know he's a leader of a gang. They open his trunk and what do you know? There's tons of Xanax. There's tons of cocaine. And he had an illegal firearm on him. So automatically the feds are coming in because of the amount of drugs he had. And it turns out the DEA was already investigating this biker gang and they started indicting tons of people, right? So my friend's dad, he did not have any charges.

They weren't able to get him, right? So we still keep doing our thing for about a year and a half, right? We're just, you know, I'm just living my normal life. I have a normal job, but I'm still ordering shit off the internet. and be selling it that's my real job right right are you still living at home huh are you still living at home yes this entire time i was living at my house your poor mother i didn't ever order drugs to my house okay one day he's sitting with me and he's like listen um we're getting all these drugs off the internet what's like who are we getting it from and i'm like well i don't

exactly know literally who it is but they're like it's like a it's like a seller profile like that you would see on amazon how you see like a screen name and you don't get to know the details of the person sending you whatever you're purchasing you just see an online handle and he's like so they're like online accounts i'm like yeah he's like wait a second is there like an open registration for that and i'm like well yeah anybody could go on there and try to sell something he's like, really? Really? I'm like, yeah. So he's like, open it up and show me. He's like, I have an idea. He's like, when I was living out in Colorado, I knew a group of people that came up from Mexico and they got a pill press and they made a bunch of fake oxies. They're not what were percocets,

percocet 30s. And then they would resell them. So they would take active ingredients. They would manufacture counterfeit percissettes for like 50 cents and then they could turn around and sell them for like 10, 15, 20, 25 dollars even depending on what level of the dealing you're at. Right. So I'm like, really? And he's like, the only problem is we don't have the capabilities to manufacture that. And I'm like, okay, I think I could work on that. So at the time, I was studying computer science at um university of connecticut so i have some knowledge about about computers right so i'm on these websites and i'm trying to attain a pharmaceutical grade pill press and uh no one wants to even talk to me because they can see that my ip is like a normal residential ip the

the IP address for my computer for my router at the home I was at. So I looked up a list of registered pharmaceutical vendors. And then I spoofed their IP, meaning I basically made it look like my IP was their IP. I ordered a pill press, rerouted it to a different destination. And then I ordered the most basic components. so you know if something happened it wouldn't raise too many alarm bells and then i ordered the rest of the more advanced components from china so we can assemble everything ourselves instead of buying a five thousand dollar machine that's just ready to be plugged in and go and ready to go right i just

bought the thing that like presses the pills like effectively and then everything else i purchased from china and had it sent in piece by piece because if you buy a whole pill press from china the DEA will come ask you questions. Men and suits will show up to your house. So you got to be smart with that. And also, I learned that there's a place where I could attain a pharmaceutical compression binder, meaning when you have a pill, right, a pill that you take, let's say blood pressure medication, there's a matrix that the medicine goes into.

Usually it's like a calcium-based matrix that you put. press the pill. And that gives the pill its shape and it makes it hard enough so that it won't dissolve immediately in your stomach and kill you. Okay. Because I wanted an actual pharmaceutical grade time released compression binder because I don't want people dying from the product we're making, right? Yeah, that tends to bring scrutiny.

Yes. Yes, that does. So, believe it or not, there are entire websites dedicated to people that make counterfeit pills. And what do you know? The pharmaceutical grade compression binder is right there. And I could pay in cryptocurrency so it's anonymous. Right? There's the service called BitPay that you could use because I don't want to put any billing information on something like that.

That would be absurd. You'd be on a government watch list. So I attained a couple kilograms of this pharmaceutical compression binder. So over, this took about six months to actually pull off. And then once everything was made, we made a batch of pills. And then we sold them locally. And people loved them. We were one of the only people around here that had the capabilities to make them and sell them for that cheap.

So then eventually we got our stock up enough. to be able to then like, okay, let's try our hand on the dark weather. Right. What is your, what is your buddy's, this is still your buddy's dad? Yes. Is he still, like, I mean, what's happening since it's taking so long? I mean, you guys are still, I'm assuming you're still bringing in the Coke and selling Coke. So you're still doing that operation.

This is just, you're working on this simultaneously. Yeah, so he was still, he was still selling cocaine and marijuana. you know, on a local level, you know, we were just living our lives essentially while we were prepping for our business. Right. Okay. Right. So then I would say, late January, right around my birthday of 2020, we finally turn on a vendor account on a website called Empire Market.

This was the premier dark net market in the world. It had about 2 million people that would use it. The 2 million active users. Okay. The name of my darknet market was Mad Hatter Pharma. Right? That was the screen handle we used. So naturally, if you're just a new player on the scene,

you have to, you have to be. be a businessman if you want to make money on the dark web it's not like traditional drug dealing in traditional drug dealing if you just have the best stuff drugs sell themselves right but if you're on a website where you could see 50 different people that sell the same exact thing then the appeal of drugs selling themselves doesn't work for you you have to actually use business skills in order to do that so i looked at our well i was just say and periodically these guys are are ripping each other off too, right? Yes.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They try to sabotage each other. Yeah, your credibility is a big deal. Everything. Your credibility is literally the determining factor in your success on the dark web. You don't have credibility. You will not make money.

All right. So I go, excuse me. So how did you get credibility? So the ecosystem that exists on the dark web, there are forums that are separate from the markets. And then there are the markets where people go and transact. But there's an independent forum at the time it was called Dread. That was the name of the forum. And there's very, it's like, it's like Reddit, except it's an exact copy of Reddit.

It's just called Dread. So it's a separate service that a person who's called Hug Bunter has control over, right? And he's like the main man on the web. Like if you want to advertise something, you go to this website and you go to the, to the, to the sub. forum in my case it was the opioid forum and i had to talk to the admin and i'm like listen um i'm a brand new opioid dealer and i would like to give away some products in exchange for reviews and then eventually um i could get what's called a vendor flare think of that like a blue checkmark on twitter like people get to know like this is a real certified person right so he's like

listen get get your first 10 legitimate sales after your free giveaway so you know when people review the free stuff you give away i'm not going to count that as a sale but after your 10 organic sales i'll give you a vendor flare and that will lend you a lot more credibility so i'm like okay this is going to be a process so we give away about a thousand pills over a month period right there was hundreds of people that left that left reviews right so i have a name buzzing around me obviously that's going to that's going to drum up some organic traffic and what i mean organic is you're just listed on there and people search you up people actively look for you right so at that time we're only making like three four five hundred

dollars a day with the organic traffic right but is that profit or just sales just sales period. I mean, it only costs us about 50 cents to make each pill, but still like $500 is still $500, don't matter the profit margin, right? So then eventually we get the 10 organic sales, right, when the people clear the escrow, right? So dark net markets, you don't get paid right away the the dark net market holds the money for the buyer right i have to send the buyer the drugs they open it up they're like this is good and then they go onto their account and release my money for me right right it sounds like a sketchy system but it works like 90% of the it sounds better for you know it sounds better for the for the customer for you know you know what

saying it builds credibility like if this guy's got the check he says it's going to ship it's going to ship nobody's getting screwed over you have to trust the administrator of course and we'll get to that later believe me there's a lot of trust in the administrator okay so i get the vendor flare on the forum right so now people know i'm a real certified vendor like when i talk on the forum on dread they see madhatter pharma and i have a little check market in my name. So I do an advertisement campaign on every single darknet forum. Dread is just the biggest one, but there's two or three other ones, right? Honestly, I can't remember the name of the two smaller ones. I only went on them the one time. So I go on all the forums and I present my new

product listing. Now I actually made it now on my vendor account, all I had was a free giveaway as my product listing but now i made the actual legitimate product listing right so i revamped it so now i have tears because before all you could do was buy like 10 pills at a clip you know so i was still making i was still making money off of my samples after i gave away the pills so i had to i had a i had to try to entice people with that model and then i could go to a full scale open model you order as many as you want right there is um remember how i said that this was all organic traffic right you're also able to create i guess you could call it synthetic traffic there's um there's this thing called a sticky if you will for your listing so i'm able to go on empire market i could pay empire market money

in order to take my listing and put it at the tippity top of the opioid ratings right so when people search perk percocet oxycodone you know it goes off the keywords and i get to choose the keywords myself so i put like a thousand different keywords anything relating to pressed pills anytime people would search up press pills in the opioid section my store would pop up so we do the sticky right i wake up the next day after i did the stick you i did the sticky at like one in the morning. I wake up at like 12.30 the next day. I hop on. We have like $21,000 in sales. So we went from like $500 to then $21,000 just like that. I mean, can you make that many pills that quickly? Like don't you have to have them shipped out in a certain period of time? We already had the

stocks already in reserve because what we did is we would have people, we would sell them in person as well to just bolster our supply okay did that at first because we knew we needed to have the inventory in order for this to work because i told him like the way that internet businesses work is it's going to be slow it's going to be slow it's going to be slow but when it picks up it picks up and it does not stop it just goes it's like a rocket ship and another reason i was able to get a lot of customers is i would i would i like to call it gorilla advertisement you know how like the viet con would do guerrilla warfare right i was actually a smaller like 20 000 sounds like a lot right but i was like the sixth or seventh uh percocet vendor at the time

there were dudes making over 150 000 a day doing this they were much much much larger than me but if there's a large business the emphasis on on on your customer relations diminishes because at that point, you're just focusing on getting the products out. So the larger vendors would mess up, you know, they would have bad batches or they would have exorbitantly long shipping times. And I would be sitting on the forum. I would be seeing like a text thread of like 45 people complaining. And I would just go message all of them. I'm like, hey, I'll send you a free pill if you just want to check me out.

And I would do that. I did that to hundreds of people. And then eventually, you know, my turnover rate was about 70 percent because they're already pissed. at their vendor. So 70% of the time, the people are going to come to me. And then on top of that, when they actually search me up, they see like a legitimately established vendor. Like, I don't look sketchy. I don't look like a scammer. All my reviews at that point are good. Right. Right. So you're getting your stuff out right away. You've got your checkmark. You've got your blue checkmark. Yeah, the whole thing. Yes. So that creates a positive feedback loop, right?

So when a random person goes on Empire Market and they just type in Percocet, they're not necessarily going on the forum to vet, you know, like, oh, who's the good vendor? A lot of people don't do that. They just hop on the market and they just want to buy drugs. They don't want to do all that extra work. So now they're going to see me as a credible established vendor. And also being the new kid on the block that's proven himself is advantageous in that industry. because again, you know, the guys that get really big, they're not going to give you the customer satisfaction that I was able to afford

you at first because eventually I was getting so many orders. I couldn't have that mom and pop, you know, air to my business. I couldn't do that. It was just too much. I would wake up and there would be almost a thousand messages to my account daily, if you will so i just couldn't answer all of them that would take hours and hours and hours and hours and i'm already working 12 13 hours a day because i'm hearing that side of things i was doing everything advertising customer relations you know uh the e-commerce um i'm scoping out my competitors

everything you couldn't get an assistant no we're running we're running in the legal an ad in Craigslist. Maybe, maybe I should have done that. This is going to sound sketchy, but I need an assistant to help run my illegal counterfeit pill business. Have to pay in Bitcoin, by the way. He's been known to cure insecurity just with his laugh. His organ donation card lists his charisma. His smile is so contagious.

vaccines have been created for it. He is the most interesting man in the world. I don't typically commit crime, but when I do, it's bank fraud. Stay greedy, my friends. Support the channel. Join Matthew Cox's Patreon. We're starting to blow up a little bit. I wake up to like $20,000 in sales, right?

Right, right. Well, here's the issue with any online business, any escrow-based business, right? any online dark web business that is you don't get the money right away and again every individual package this is going all across the country so the time of delivery it's called toward a door in the industry the how long it takes from the person placing the order to how long they're opening the package that's called toward a door right that that's going to vary for literally every single person based on their region based on like you know what time a year it is so I see $20,000 plus dollars in sales.

That doesn't mean I have access to $20,000 in capital. You know? So it's, it's segmented. It's segmented. So I would wake up and there would be four or five, you know, sometimes $10,000 available to me in cryptocurrency. And that's another issue. I have to take the cryptocurrency and I need to figure out a way to convert that to actual cash.

Right. So you can then turn around and go buy the chemicals to start the whole process over again. Exactly. We didn't have to do that at first because, again, we had our in-person businesses going. But over time, as any businessman knows, you're going to get strapped for cash. You know, you're doing so much business. You don't have working capital to do anything, right? Right. So did you consider going to the bank and explaining this to them and trying to get like a credit line to kind of? Maybe with a fake idea I would, but I mean. Listen, I'm bringing in a lot of money. I'm having a cash flow problem, but I promise it's coming in. Maybe Wells Fargo would do it, you know, looking at the news with all the criminals that you would. So what happened? Would you tour the door?

We would, I mean, we would get bottlenecked. And I would have to go on what's called vacation mode at times, right? Because I would, I would, I would, you know, I pause. I would pause all incoming orders, all people that I couldn't fulfill. I would just refund them their money. I'm not trying to do anything shady, right? Right. So capital would get freed up.

I would go on vacation mode for a week or two at a time and have all the money because I'm, you know, 20,000, you know, 10, 15, 20, 25, maybe even 30,000 some days would come in, right? So on a weekly period, it could be anywhere from like 60 to 110,000. So I would just, I would vacation mode. I would let the money come in, you know, or as much as that would in a weekly period, it would be about $40, $50, $60,000. And then we could just resume, right? Why aren't your buddy's helping you out?

Why, what happened to the biker guy and, and you're his son? And I mean, aren't they in on this? No, his son isn't in on this. Okay. The biker guy is my business partner. I am not touching any drugs at all. Everybody is shipping everything out for me. I'm not even living near the actual, like, the manufacturing of the drugs.

I only exclusively deal with the internet aspect of things. You're practically not even involved. The federal government would disagree. You're like the guy driving, like, listen, I wasn't robbing the bank. I was just driving the getaway car. Oh, you're not even involved. Exactly. I'm just on the computer.

Boop, bobo, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo. Like, that's, that's all I do. do? No, they actually gave me a modifier to my charges just because it's a two-level increase for distributing narcotics on the computer. Oh, okay. I was going to say, access. No, what do they access? Yeah, that's access. No, I got a, I got one of my enhancements was a specialty device, which was a computer. Specialty device. I used the computer. They're like, it's a specialty device. What does that mean? Everybody uses the computer. It's a specialty device. I mean, the federal government can just make this stuff up and what are you going to do they have the guns they have the

prisons and the judges that you've heard i think you've heard me say it you must have heard me say that i said exactly that every time i talk to one of these sovereign citizen guys that say you know you you don't have to pay your taxes if you look at the the the congress never ratified the 13 14 17 stop stop bro they got the guns they got they got the prisons they got the law enforcement like you're going to Jill, you can complain the whole time you're doing your sentence that you shouldn't be there. If you're going to do the sentence. Yep. So it's a bad argument.

Yeah. Yeah. So bottleneck, you're on vacation mode. So eventually I realized something and my business partner realizes something. In order to meet all of the incoming orders, we either need to have more product or we need to drive down our current costs of, you know, of the product, right? In order to do that, we need to meet new suppliers because we're getting it from local people. I mean, we were getting our active ingredient from a gang at the time, but their prices are, that are still terrible

and, you know, relatively speaking. Gangs. They don't know how to do business. No, they don't. They don't. They don't have to do business. That's so hard added. So eventually, my business partner is telling me, he's like, I used to live out in Colorado. I have some friends who are from the south of the border, let's say. And they could really help us with this situation. They could get us what we need. I'm like, really? Are you, I'm like, are you crazy?

He's like, listen, listen. These people, they're business people. It's not like, it's not like how it is in the movies. They don't want to come harm Americans. Right. They don't want to do that. They're actually incredibly professional. I would rather deal with those types of criminal organizations over any American organization, to be honest.

Because Americans kill other Americans. They will not. Right. You know? It has to be an extreme situation. Yeah. I hear you. Yeah.

Yeah. They're very much about, like, you can even, I mean, I've, you can, I've known guys that there have been major problems, like millions of dollars missing. And they've gone and gone to them and said, okay, what's your payment plan? Like, how are you going to get us this money back where you would think, no, he's going to end up in a bucket somewhere. No. You know, no. If it happens, again, you've got a problem.

But as long as you start paying and doing what you're, you know. So yeah, it's, it's a, you know, it's forgiving once. No. It's the forgiving. Giving is an interesting word. So what happened? So you've got you got suppliers? So at this whole time, we were on empire market.

You know, we were, we were being bottlenecked. We were going to vacation mode all the time, but we were still making tons of money, right? So eventually, my friend, like, he brought this up to me, and then it was like another, you know, month or two later. And then he sat me down and he was like, okay, listen, we're going to go take a road trip, you and me, we're going to go take a road trip. And I'm like, okay, he's like, put the store on vacation mode, but bring your computer with you or bring your flash drive with you, right? Because there's the normal computer that, like, we're on, right? But the actual store, if you will, was on an encrypted flash drive that I had, right? And I could plug it into any computer.

And it used a special software called Tails operating system. It's known as an amnesiac operating system. Meaning every time I rip it out, it forgets everything, right? It deletes all information. I had to memorize all the passwords up here, right, to get back onto everything. Because if the federal government blows in my door, all I have to do is rip that flash drive. out of the computer. Everything on the local drive of the computer gets white and everything is encrypted in a flash drive. And they would not, it would take a thousand years to get access to that,

mathematically speaking, right? So all I had to do, I had literally, I would wear it on a necklace, right? I would keep it right here. I would always know where it is. I would literally would sleep with it on my neck. Like you never, ever go to sleep or go away from your computer, ever. So many people have been caught because of that silly little mistake. So many people. Right. So I was bringing the flash drive with me. And he's like, we'll just, you know, we'll just get a computer out there.

And we're going to go show my friend. So we're going, we're going on a long 13, 14 hour drive. And we go to a place. It's very rural, very, very rural. It's still in the United States. It's incredibly rural, right? We get to like, it's out in like the desert. So we get to like a mountain complex.

pound if you will we drive up like for like 25 minutes and then we get to a gate with like brahman skulls on it right and you have to like press a button to just have the guy come and i hear i hear a uh a guy someone's like hey ke passa papu how are you doing these guys are old friends so he's like i'm gonna i'm gonna send my i'm gonna send my people to come open the gate there's like three dudes with guns that come open the gate to come introduce us and bring us over there is pot growing everywhere there's probably like i saw probably like 900 pot plants just on this mountain just growing i saw a greenhouse with an indoor pot grow right there too and i'm like okay where am i right so we go inside the uh the house and i got interested introduced to a to a serious serious dude he's very friendly but i could tell just by looking at him i'm like this this dude is he's he's very serious he's a serious guy so we get to talking you know we do a little cocaine we're having a good time we're drinking him and i did cocaine and drink

tequila all night long and then after you know after our pleasantries were exchanged we woke a the next day, right? I'm sitting in the living room and my business partner and this friend is talking about business. So naturally, I just walk away because I don't want to be disrespectful. This dude looks over at me. He's like, come over here. You're a boss too. I'm like, excuse me. He's like, you're a boss too. I know about you. Don't think you'd be at my house if I didn't know about you. Come over here. Let's have a conversation. Right. Remember how you explained earlier that the website has to be a trusted administrator of the funds and the monies. Right.

So again, would you like me to reiterate how the system works just to break it down to the audience? Yeah, just, yeah, they, yes. Okay, so let's say Matt Cox wants to buy an ounce of marijuana for me, all right? I send you the marijuana, no, you place the order on Empire Market. You get $200 worth of Bitcoin. empire market holds that in an escrow account and facilitates all the um the um the um the aspects of the transaction so i see it in a little vendor panel i see you know your name your details and uh you know

i get your package ready i pack it up and i send it to you eventually when you see it you're like wow this is cool so i'm going to open it up i'm going to i like it i smoked it it's good wheat You go on to your buyer account and you release the $200 to me and immediately it gets released to me. Well, here's the issue with that model. There is absolutely nothing stopping the facilitator of this transaction from just taking all the money and shutting down the website. Right. I was going to say, well, first of all, weren't you saying that they hold it for a while, right? They hold it.

They don't release your money. They hold it until the person releases the funds. That's because there's a lot of scammers on there. Yeah, I didn't even understand that. I thought maybe they held it past that date for a certain period of time. No, no, no, no. When the customer releases it, it's in your account. Okay.

And that's why you were explaining the, I thought it was in addition to the tour to door gap, that period. I thought there was an additional period after that. No, no. Okay, cool. Got it. Got it. No. There's like special circumstances where really big vendors can apply to be like, listen,

I want to get my money right up front. But I've already made, I've already, I've already sold like $10, $15 million worth of stuff on your platform. Like you know what, you know, I'm not going to just start scamming people all of a sudden. But that's, those, those guys are unicorns. They're not going to let just anybody do that. Even me at the time, you know, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in transactions, I'm still a small fish in a very large pond, right?

So as I'm trying to log on to the computer, we bought a computer before he went up to the guy's house and everybody's like, okay, open this up and show me. He's an old school type of guy. He thinks all this internet stuff is bullshit, you know. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to get on empire market and it's not working. And I'm like, okay, some, a lot of the times there's these things called DDoS attacks, distributed denial of service attacks. Basically, somebody floods a website with a bunch of fake traffic to overload the website server in order to make people not want to go use it because it's a horrible experience to use. It will take fucking two hours to just do one transaction, whereas it would take 10 minutes normally, right? And usually this is hackers demanding ransom or like other markets trying to direct traffic to their market because this is the biggest market in the world at the time, right? So I'm thinking it's a normal DDoS attack. right because this stuff would happen periodically you would no one would be able to get on for like two days at a clip well here's the thing right since i'm a mid-sized vendor i'm big enough to where the admins of the website would give me and other vendors like me special links to get on the

website right because it can't facilitate the normal traffic of a couple hundred thousand people their time but it could facilitate you know like two or three thousand people the vendors going in there to get their money out because again anytime the website's not working you're thinking immediately they're exit scamming and they're stealing our money so they specifically give you those links if you're a vendor to you know to us to to try to so you could go on there and get your money out right so they don't scare you well i use my i have 10 of those links i used all i tried to use all 10 of those links to get on the website and it did not work. So now I'm legitimately, I'm like, oh my God, we have like $150,000 in escrow.

And mind you, just because we're making $100,000 so out a week, remember how I said, not all of it comes out at once. And also, I have a whole operation we're dealing with. Like, I have people on payroll. There's other ancillary costs we have to deal with. So it does take a lot of money to run this at scale. It's not, you know, you don't just. get to sit with all that $150,000. Oh, that's all profit. About half of it would be profit, right?

Right. Okay. So we're at his house and I'm like, oh, it won't work right now. You spend another day. We party. You know, I smoke a lot of his pot. He shows me. He's showing me like the cultivation process, giving me a little impromptu, you know, like growing tutorial. We're shooting guns. We're going on hikes. We're going into the town, going to dispensaries and fun stuff like that right i go on i go did you go on what what about the other websites that you had accounts on you said we didn't do that yet that's in the future to this i was going on one of those just to show him how it works i did do that i did do that to show him but again he's like unless i see your thing with money coming in it's all bullshit in his mind he doesn't know right he didn't even know what

bitcoin wants really at the time he's like i heard of it but he he called it he literally called it silly internet money so right that's that's yeah he doesn't he thinks it's all bullshit he doesn't think it's real right okay so that whole second day goes by we're just it's like we're on a little vacation again more tequila and cocaine at night you know we're i like i'm trying to make him laugh you know we're doing all the things and he's like my business partner went to sleep at this time he was he was spent you know he's 20 years older than me so i don't blame him so i'm sitting with the guy And he's like, listen, try to show me that again. You know, like now it's you and me.

We're alone. All the other people are asleep. His girlfriend was asleep. He's like, I want to sit with you. He's like, obviously you're, he's like, he's like, our friend isn't going to just bring you here for no reason. He's like, I think it's bullshit, but I also know better. Someone isn't going to be brought to me and, you know, for no reason. And I explained to him the DDoS and everything.

And I'm like, I understand how it looks. please keep an open mind i also showed you the other service too right and i offered i'm like do you want to order anything on there and he said no i don't want to order any packages off there i'm not doing anything until you show me your main stuff you know because i was going to be like well if my stuff's not working i could just show him let's say a magic mushroom vendor and like go by an ounce a mushrooms just to see how this stuff works right he he wasn't he wasn't you know he wasn't he's not going to do something like that he doesn't care it's all in his mind it's all bullshit still and i don't blame him that's how it looked right yeah so after the third day i go on dread you know the forum

we mentioned right you may not be able to leave if you don't get this thing we're up and running you may i would be thinking am i going to leave here at all no it wasn't like that it wasn't like that not at all so i go on dread right and i don't I go on the Empire Market threat, and I see the admin for Empire Market on dread, not the main admin, the person controlling Empire Market, the forum admin. He said death to Empire Market, I have lost server access. I'm like, oh, fuck. That means he lost server access.

He lost backend access. So, like, people that start Darknet markets, they really, out to people to be their intermediaries and their voice, right? If you start a darknet market, you're insane if you're going on the forums yourself. Like that will exponentially increase the chances of you getting caught, right? So you reach out to people that act as your intermediaries and pay them a salary, right? So the person that was the main intermediary for the web, the premier darknet site literally said the ship is sinking. the ship is sinking we're screwed and I'm like oh my god we just lost all of the money we had

I already knew I already knew it was gone people were all speculating I'm like no no no this is gone so immediately I still have my vendor flare and I'm a certified vendor on dread right empire market's gone but people are people still know who I am right you got to strike while the iron still hot so to speak right so I go and I I go get a phone, and I set up an encrypted chat service on that phone called Wicker. Wicker at the time was used to facilitate a lot of off-site deals. So, you know, a lot of vendors like me would get pissed off that these markets would play games with us. So we would try to route as much traffic to other intermediaries, usually intermediaries, that we would directly control ourselves.

and then we would just keep all of the money and not have to play any of their games and get screwed over, right? So I immediately set up a wicker. I go on to my darknet, my darknet account on Dread, you know, the certified, this is the real Mad Hatter pharma account.

And I post my wicker. So I'm like, listen, the dark net, dark net markets, you know, dark net markets are not the place to be right now because when there's one, there's one and big exit scam, there's going to be a bunch of other websites that exit scam immediately after because they have massive influxes of traffic and they will see more money than they've ever seen in their entire lives. And a lot of the people just steal that money

for a big payday instead of actually risking themselves to actually run the market over time to make the money. You know? Right. So I already know there's going to be tons and tons of exit scams. So I set up a wicker. I'm getting decent amounts of people. Like, you know, the first day I got like five, six thousand dollars in orders on the wicker, you know, just from people seeing. I'm not going to get as much exposure on a dark net market as I would on a dark net market because, you know, there's just much less eyeballs. You know, business needs to keep going. I just lost, we just lost $150,000 plus. So you know what I mean? So we're still at. um our friend's house for the period of about i'd say eight dates right we're just chilling we're

relaxing and we're like this i hate to say this where does your mom think you are i wasn't living at my mom's house at the time i i've moved out since then okay okay where does anybody think you are they don't know no one no one knew where i was at okay i wasn't even know where you're at no i don't I didn't even know what was that. So I'm perusing the forums, and there's a market that, a new market that comes out called Icarus market. And I'm like, here we go. Time to start up again, right? But I still have my business on the side with Wicker, the direct business, because now I understand you've got to become a big vendor.

The way to really play this game is to be a big vendor. eventually figure out a way to develop your own, not necessarily your own market, but your own store that you control, right? And also list on the markets as well, because ultimately you're still going to make more money on a market that has hundreds of thousands of eyeballs versus your own smaller market. But you can funnel your, funnel your more solid customers to your own. Exactly. And I would incentivize them like, listen, you're going to. going to be paying me up front, but I'm going to drop the cost by like 30, 40%. So it's a win, win for both of us. And you already have the trust with me. I've never screwed you over.

So, you know? Right. So I set up an account on Icarus market. They literally just give me the account for free. Because once you're a large established vendor, the dark net markets will just give you an account for free. On empire market, we had to pay like, I think it was a thousand bucks to get started. If you're just a Joe Schmoe off the street, you're like, you know, if you're just an average dude and you think, no, I want to start being a dark web drug dealer. Take a thousand dollars and go start it, you know, you never know. But you're bringing so much business. Exactly. It makes economic sense for them. That $1,000 they're going to make back many, many times over, right? Because these accounts also, like, you remember how I said there was a sticky on empire market that

would move up my listings right that that would cost like a thousand dollars to do that and it was for 24 hours but that thousand dollars would bring me in 20,000 dollars with the business so that's worth it every single time and like you could purchase like banners on the website and stuff they had they had insulary means to monetize their website and on top of that they're taking one percent of all transactions as well so yeah so eventually we're on icarus we're transacting, business starts flowing in immediately. By this time where we already got home, you know, but before I left, our friend sat me down and he's like, listen, he's like, he's like, the business you're in is a messy business, but there's a different business

that makes just as much money, but it's much cleaner. And that was the cocaine business. And he said that I could get the best cocaine at the best prices, just let me. me know just let me know right and also we still had enough money to purchase a good amount of our active ingredient that we need to drop the costs so we didn't have to deal with local gangs anymore right right we were able to just have a dude just ship it to us you know from texas so win-win you know so we're on icarus market now we're back home we're on icarus market things are going seemingly well. We're still making, it's not $100,000. It's like, you know, $50,000 a week, right? Well, after about three weeks, Icarus market exit scans as well. And you're saying that's because

you think that's because all the traffic had moved over there and they just got blew up and they said, hey, we can take off with a bunch of money. Exactly. Think about this. You're a rogue programmer or a team of programmers. And you make a secondary market to compete with the main market, right? It's a waiting game in that ecosystem, right? Like, dark net markets have short shelf lights. You're, you never are going to last more than like two or three years. You just can't.

You just can't. It's almost impossible. Is that, I mean, what, because you think they get shut down? Is that what they get shut down because of the law? You have every law enforcement agency in the world. and you have the most advanced units in those agencies after you. You have every single hacker in the world trying to demand ransom from you, trying to hack you.

You have other markets competing with you that will also who are also very technically advanced people that will try to mess up your website just to drive traffic to their website. So it's you against the world, literally. Right. So it's only a matter of time until something goes wrong, right? And also, too, if you see $20 million in front of you, which the empire market people did in escrow accounts, they're like, we're just going to take this and run.

Yeah. I think it took like $30 or $40 million in total, actually, that they got that was in the hot wallet of their empire market account. I don't blame them. Be honest. I don't know you guys. Like, I don't know you guys. That was my money. I have said.

I feel bad about that. But I don't really know you. You seem like a nice guy. But there's like $150,000, $200,000 here, along with 20 other million. I, you know, and in order for me to make a clean getaway, it's basically I just have to like pull the plug out of my computer and walk away. Like for $20 million, I'm willing to walk away. And that's literally what they did.

And to this day, they haven't been apprehended. They probably never will be. I mean, I got to, I got to tell you, I, I'm with them. I mean, I feel bad for you. Do you? Do you really? I was like, with my wife, I'm like, I, I, I, I, I, I want to be on your side. But I'm just not.

But you're, this is one of those times when you're just wrong. I mean, you're, I mean, I understand. And if I was sitting in their seat and I see like $20, 30 million, I'm taking it in a heartbeat. I mean, and who am I screwing over? You're bad people. Randolph people. What are you guys doing? I just figured this out.

You guys are selling drugs on my forum. I can't have anything to do with this. I'm sorry, fellas. And I don't feel right about giving you this money that's in my escrow account. It's all wrong. It's dirty money. But I know what to do with it. So, yeah. So it's good times. Good time. Yeah. So Icarus market goes by-bye because they get the same

idea. It's like, let's just steal, you know, like two, three million dollars real quick. So they did that, right? So again, I'm sitting in the same position. How long? And you said it's only like a few months later just no weeks oh three weeks had you gotten back on your feet pretty much yeah quickly yeah yeah because remember like we still had our profit you know we still had our money as well and i'm like i'll invest everything if i have to because i see how viable this really is you know what i mean so at this time i'm perusing the forums again and the individual with the uh the handle Eric Callahan reaches out to me. And this is a person that Eric Callahan, right?

And he offers, he's like, hey, I could start to help you build your own shop. And I'm like, let's do it. I'm game. So I've sent him packages multiple time. And remember how you made the joke about posting an ad on Craigslist and you can get some helpers with you? Well, there's actually an ecosystem on the darknet where you could,

You could get workers and you could pay them either in drugs or in cryptocurrency. Eric Callahan was an opioid addict, so I would ship him packages of bills as his payment, hundreds, thousands of not. Right? And he would, he would, he, he helped me create my own means of transacting. That was 100% mine. He set up server infrastructure and everything, right? This is, by the way, paying him in pills is along the same lines as when I used to interview homeless people for their interview. No, what you did was way worse.

They were not willing. No. I mean, you're up there. Okay. That's not arguable. I tricked them. They didn't even know what was happening. They thought I was doing them a favor.

You're going to give you $20? Thank you. I'm like, I'm a good person. How much money would you put in their names for $20? I borrowed I borrowed $1.3 million in one this guy's name. Listen, I feel terrible. You're terrible. I feel horrible about that.

You live and you learn, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I have my own personal, let's call it a tertiary means of transacting. It's still, it's making five, six, seven, you know, sometimes $10,000 a day. And that's direct money. So it's much better, right? But, you know, every day isn't that good. Honestly, on average, that store for me, style probably was making $3,000 a day.

But that's still over a million dollars a year. You know, if you scale it and adjust it for like yearly, you know, business income, right? So that's not that's not that bad. But it's not, you know, $30,000 a day, which is what I want. you know so we do that for about two and a half months right because i i need i'm like i need to wait for like the insanity to die down because there was there was other markets coming up and they were exit scamming people left and right a market got seized by the police tons of people got arrested it's it's insanity it's like a it's like a fire it's like a forest fire

and I'm sitting in the middle of the forest in a pond, like, this is great. Everything around me is going to hell, and I have my little oasis, if you will, right? So after the dust of chaos settles, right, I'm on the Dread Forum, and I see there's a new market called White House Market, right? It's not really a new market. It's been around for a while. It's been around the time of Empire Market, but it was. was really a secondary market, right?

I'm saying a new market in the sense of they completely revamped it, you know, it's much more technically adept, right? It's much better to transact on. It's much more secure, right? It uses a different cryptocurrency called Monero as opposed to Bitcoin. And Minero is what's known as a privacy coin. Basically, the basically, I'm just thinking these guys could be running scams on multiple levels. So they came out with their own crypto. No, no, no, no, this isn't their own crypto.

This is, I know. I'm just saying that they could be running multiple different scams. You're all, why are you always thinking like a scammer? Come on. I mean, they're asking, they're telling you, look, you can buy on our stuff, which people want to do, but you have to buy this crypto. Yes. They can. I understand. Yeah. Yeah, they could easily lead you down a, uh, a path. that would make it easy for you to be scammed. Obviously, I was scammed myself multiple times, right? So think of Bitcoin, right?

Each Bitcoin, think of that as an individual ingot of gold. Okay. Right? You could cut up that piece of gold and send it as fractions, right? But at the end of the day, there's always a serial number on it, and it's traceable. And ultimately, that led to my capture. but I can I can expound on that at the end of the story because it'll make a lot more sense right so basically since Bitcoin is traceable because every Bitcoin goes on this thing called

the blockchain think of the blockchain as an immutable ledger in which every transaction is publicly broadcasted and there are mathematical proofs that are done in order to literally prove that this is a real transaction, a mathematical, cryptographic sense, right? Right. Basically, it's traceable. If someone really wants to find you, there is a giant company called Cypher Trace that's worth $10 billion that the government employs literally to trace cryptocurrency and link it to criminals, right?

Okay. So basically, the reason that White House market wants to use this new coin called Manero is because Manero uses a different protocol. meaning a different means of transacting and a different means of dispersing the monies, if you will, dispersing the cryptocurrency. So it is not traceable. To this day, the government is offering, I think, like a $750,000 bounty to the programmer that can figure out how to trace Manaro transactions. But I don't really think they have a good grasp on it at all.

They don't know. So obviously, remember, I'm still a certified vendor, right? so white house market gives me a free account right i go on there for a little bit remember how i said i have my ancillary um service right at this point i am completely fed up with dark debt markets right i think they're out there just to screw me over because ultimately they're criminals as just as much as i am they just are out there to make money they're just doing it in a far more sophisticated way right so i start siphoning as many customers as possible into my own ancillary service now the admin team on white house market was much more with it than on empire market so they

found out i was doing this and they banned my account on their service right okay so So I'm sitting here. That's a terrible look to be banned. People automatically assume they're a scammer. But then I went to the forum and I explained, I'm sick and tired of dark net markets screwing me over. I was just siphoning customers to my own service. I wasn't misleading any of my customers.

I was still giving everybody the product they purchased. If anything, I was scamming the dark net market. That's why they got pissed and they banned me. Right? Right. Around this time, there was another dark net market that was a competitor. So sometimes in the dark net market ecosystem,

usually there's just one big market. But other times there's like two, maybe even three big, viable markets that you can transact on, right? At the time, there was three. White House market, dark market, and deep sea market. Deep sea market, it smelled fishy.

It was a scam right away. I could just tell the way it was set up. it was a scam and guess what eventually it exit scammed so i didn't even bother going on there right okay i said immediately set up an account on dark market they gave me you know a free account i'm able to go on there i have my own inciliary service eric callahan at this time goes dark he the server shuts down on my ancillary service right i don't know what happened to him that's it now he just we'll get to that later i i'll tell you what happened to him right so i'm on dark market right we're doing our thing we're transacting you know we're not making

nearly as much money as before because remember i got banned that's a bad look and i was focusing on trying to develop my own service, right? My own market, my own special vendor account, my own, my own vendor account. And again, ultimately, remember how I said you have to strike while the iron is hot, while there's a buzz around your name. It just wasn't the same around me. You know, looking back at it, if I could have done it again, I would have just started, I would have replicated the process under a new handle.

I would have given stuff away again for free, you know. but it you know hindsight is always 20 20 with crime always my thinking at the time was I have I have an established brand with a history of actually being you know good and I don't want to you know have to build everything all over again right right but what does it matter yeah I mean you're you like you said you'd been better off you just didn't want to have to do that all over again and your guy took off so what do you you basically you're both your streams of revenue just stopped yes but that's why i had some remember how i said that my ancillary service was directly paying me so i was able to have enough working capital to start up on dark market

and be relatively competitive you know i was never the number one dude in any category ever i don't want to be i was always number i think at my height i was like number four on empire market when i was crushing right right but number four is still a great great place. Right. You make millions and millions of dollars being number four. Number one makes like, like 30, 40 million dollars. As number one in any given market.

Right. So let's say like a cocaine vendor. There is this dude named XX, Snow White Express XX, right? He in two weeks made like $4 million. So yeah, just to show you how much money like the really big serious vendors can make. It was big, but I wasn't like that. That's absurd. There's some type of hyper-organized, like, you know, they've been doing this a while.

They're obviously, that's like super organized crime, right? He built some of the nation's largest banks out of an estimated $55 million because $50 million wasn't enough, and $60 million seemed excessive. He is the most interesting man in the world. I don't typically commit crimes, but when I do. it's bank fraud stay greedy my friends support the channel join Matthew Cox's Patreon so we went on dark market and we're transacting it's not nearly at the level as it was before you know I spent far too much time off of the markets you

know white house market was the premier the number one and they banned me so they had a million one and a half million people that you use their service. Dark market had like 650,000. And that's all throughout the world. So in America, there was probably only 300,000 potential customers. Probably only like 60, 70,000 of those would be willing to buy opiates. So my market share has severely diminished. And at this time, there's a lot more competitors that have cropped up. And they are brutal. So remember how you said earlier about how like vendors would try to screw each other and play games and whatnot like I would have vendors like this was on every single market I was on they would order like I had to do it order like 10,000

pills one time it was like a like it was like a 40,000 dollar order and he just kept delaying paying me he kept delaying and then he disputed the transaction right you're able to dispute the transactions on these websites so he was trying to screw me over by holding up my money as long as possible. Well, you, there's a, so there's a dispute process and the intermediary, the market is the ultimate arbiter on who wins that dispute process. Overwhelmingly, they always side with the vendor because ultimately, like the customers come and bring the money, but the vendors have this, have this stuff that gets them the money, you know? Right. If you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you,

like they're already vendors already hate going on the markets as it is if you if you screw me out of $40,000 I'm definitely leaving your site right this was on empire market by the way the dude lost the dispute because I'm like I shipped here's the tracking number for the package so he literally got the order I don't know why he's complaining and also too like I have I had other bulk like bulk people who gave me right it wasn't like this was a one time thing you have a track record of sitting this stuff Yes, of course. Hundreds of thousands of people at this time have bought for me. A couple hundred of them are like buying lots like thousands of pills, hundreds of pills at a time. So I already like obviously I could handle transactions as large as that. So why do you have an issue whereas all these other people don't have issues? It's not no. The marketplace knew that this person was scamming me. And I suspect I can't prove it obviously. Any can just go on there and make a seller account, but I suspect that it was another vendor

trying to screw me, right? Because what's 40 grand to them? Because if they're thinking, they're thinking is if they, if we jam them up for a few days, that's potentially like $100,000 of traffic that we could direct to ourselves. Right. And it may end up we're actually working and they may side with them. Yeah. So now they're going to have now they're going to have thousands of free pills that they can just turn around just sell themselves. So yeah. So we're on dark net market. We're on we're transacting. It's going reasonably well. We're making about $10,000 a day. Again, remember, that doesn't always clear at once. So the actual monetary value that clears every day is probably about $2,000. Well, one day, dark net market gets seized by the

German authorities. So they actually apprehended the individual. That's not good. That is very not good. Luckily, I didn't purchase an account. They just gave me an account. But here's the thing. The FBI now has access to all the back-end data and they're just sitting there like, okay, time to just capture a bunch of people. So they launched Operation Hunter. Ha-ha, get it, Hun, Tor? Yeah. They're very clever. Guess who was part of, guess who was one of the people of interest with Operation Hunter? Well, was it you? Maybe.

Possibly. Who knows? So I go about my day, you know, I go about my normal business. I'm like, you know what? I'm fed up with this stuff. I have a little, you know, I had a small chunk of change. And I just, you know, went away and did my thing. You know, my business partner and I, we, you know, he's like,

Like, I'm going to go, I'm going to go move and start a construction company, and I'm like, that's good. You know, I'm going to go live my normal life. I went, eventually I moved back home. I was estranged from my family throughout this entire process. I made up, moved back home. I was living my normal life until one day, there's a strange piece of mail that comes from FedEx. And I have to sign for it. So I rejected it like six times until, you know, and the FedEx truck kept coming.

kept coming and it was a packet like a manila packet right so i'm like what the hell is this right remember how i said that my mother uh divorced my stepfather i was thinking it was some like you know like you know like like like like something i had to sign for for like some like small court perceiving here for child support or something but then again i'm like why would i have to sign for that i'm not involved in that so i i open it up and you did sign for it yeah oh yeah but when i open it up it's a letter from an fbi agent saying i was tapping target target letter yes a target letter from one of the phones i had like seven phones at the time but you know they were tapping one of them at the time right and they and the dude put in his card and said call me if you

want and i was like yeah i went and burned it i burned everything i'm like i am not calling you i'm just going to pretend this never happened right what did the letter say just that you're letting you know you're a target of the investigation as a result of this a target letter and it said that like it presented the uh the warrant for like the phone number at the time and it was like this t mobile device like we were we were like pursuant to this law this law and this law we were looking at this phone number you know so at the time previously up until that letter i thought i got away scott free you know right every criminal thinks they're getting away scot free when you're in the act of doing crime no one really ever considers oh i could get caught you think that's always other people other

people get caught i don't get caught every criminal really thinks that way yeah yeah yeah so i i literally i'm like i'm like i'm about to shit my pants like these are the feds i'm like do i call the number do i not i decided against it because i'm like this dude like this dude is literally trained to get me to say things in which he can arrest me. If he's sending me a letter right now, clearly he doesn't have enough to just come blowing my door and get me. And also, why would he send me a letter after I'm done with everything? Why wouldn't he come get me while I'm in the middle of doing everything? Because they're still, I mean, I understand you don't know why, but at the time you didn't know why. But yeah, like they don't have enough to arrest you.

Exactly. And they're hoping you'll come forward and provide them and for like, had you gone, there and provided them for information up front, you could have entered into a pre-trial or a, shoot, I forget what they call it. Pre-trial intervention? Pre-trial intervention, yeah. And you could have maybe avoided being indicted at all. Well, it turns out 10 other people did that to me. Well, then you couldn't do that. Exactly. I couldn't. You should have signed for that first letter. By the time you signed, it's too late.

Exactly, exactly. But I didn't, again, up to this point, I was ignorant of how all of this worked. Now I've had a crash course in that, but. When those people, they signed this or they got their letter, they called, they went in, they cooperated. Again, I don't, but what about the street code? That doesn't really exist. No. Of course.

What is it? Like 98% of people in federal cases like cooperating? Listen, I saw a law and order one time. I saw a law and order and I watched the first three godfathers and they were very adamant. Okay. Well, I mean, if you're caught with like three ounces of weed and you're facing a ticket, yeah, you're not going to snitch. But if you're looking at like 15 or 20 years, then I'm going to be curious if you're going to be reciting the same mantra of I'm tough and I'm not going to snitch. 99 literally 98% of people cooperate in the federal system literally so and you know it's funny is

is that people say a lot of people because the number of people that get a benefit from the cooperation is lower it's like 85 that doesn't mean that 99% didn't try of course not everybody gets something sometimes you go when you tell them everything and they go we know that like your your co-defendant jimmy and todd and bill already told you us that. So what do you have this extra? And you're like, well, I don't have anything extra. And they're like, yeah, you don't get anything then. And you're like, well, I cooperated. They're like, yeah, did you? You're going to go to. Now you better just plead guilty. You go to prison. You're not going to get anything. You should have come in sooner. So yeah,

it's a, you know, being first is being first, second or third really is the best. Because after that, it's like, yeah, we don't really need you. So, yeah. So there's 12 people. up ready to talk telling on you yeah there was like like when i was going through my affidavit and like the paperwork with my lawyer he was like there are the there's like nine people listed as unindicted co-conspirators and i'm like what is that he's like well picture this scenario you're a low level like you know like drug addict you know going about your daily business and all of a sudden five agents and suits show up to your house and it's like hey you're going to talk with us and sign every paper we have and we're not going to charge you and arrest you or you could be tough

and then we're going to drag you away and you know add you as an element to a conspiracy what do you want to do right so obviously you know you already know how that goes yeah but by the time you figure this out it's too late oh yeah and also too you know you read my PSR you probably saw i also have a four level modifier for being the uh the organizing or leader of an organizer. Yeah. You were barely involved. You were just the,

I didn't even see the drugs. I was way over there. You can tell to judge that when you get in there. Your Honor, there's been a huge miscarriage of justice here. Yeah. I was just a computer guy. Yes. That's not going to go over well, by the way.

So this was about January, no, this was, early February of 2021 when I got the letter, right? Okay. So I went, I'm back home. I went and I got a normal job. I worked at a factory for about a year, right? But then, you know, after a while, I'm like, I don't, I'm like, I should just move states. So I saved up money from that job and then I moved to another state, right?

Yeah. You did, I don't know, I mean, I don't know how much you know about law enforcement, but the, the FBI is it's national. I yeah I understand that but I'm thinking if I remove myself from the locality it's still going to be harder for them this is this is an idiot thinking like you the FBI can go anywhere and get and I hear I hear you but it's still national I understand that they'll make the drive they have vehicles they they have their own vehicles nice I know that but if you're the person that actually gets the letter you're going to be thinking of crazy things like that. Like, oh, if I go move halfway across the country, maybe this will all just go away magically. Turns out, no, it doesn't. How many states over? Huh? How many states away did you move?

I live on the East Coast. I was living on the West Coast. Oh, you could have gone any further. No, no. You'd have been in the water. You could have gone to, well, Hawaii. Yeah. Pretty sure they have a field office there, though.

They have field offices everywhere. Yeah. So after a couple months of me living out, you know, in this place, February 11th, 2022, that's when my arrest warrant was issued. I didn't know that. I was literally in a whole other state. Now, remember how you just, you know, you made the joke about how they could drive and everything?

They went to my old address, not my mom's house, but the old address I was living at. at Connecticut, the place I was at on the computer, right? Okay. They went to that old address. So I was somewhat right. So I was literally sitting on the West Coast. I had no idea for months because, again, I went off the grid completely. I wasn't talking to anybody for a couple months of time.

I roughly explained my situation to all the loved ones in my life. And I'm like, I need to go spend like a year or two or somewhere else and just, you know, I'd still talk on the phone and stuff like that, but very minimal. like minimal footprint just be a normal dude living in normal life you need to reset you need to reset exactly after a while though it become um it's brought to my attention that hey the my mom was like hey the FBI just showed up to our house and there was like 30 dudes with machine guns and then other like 10 other dudes in suits and they were asking for you and I'm like did you tell mom what did you do Well, unfortunately, they asked for me by name, so I couldn't, I couldn't, you know, make that joke.

So I love the one guy I interviewed, like the Fed showed up at his house and they were like, do you know why we're here? Yeah, I do. My girlfriend's running an illegal operation. No, I'm just joking. But my girlfriend's selling drugs. Thank God you're here. You could have done the whole, I know exactly why you're here. My mother is selling counterfeit pills on the internet.

It was crazy. Thank God you're here. I had to move across the country to get away from her. You make me, I feel so terrible, too, just explaining this. I feel I'm a terrible son. My God. So eventually it's brought to my attention, and I retain a lawyer for $50,000. So I'm like, okay.

I'm on the phone with him, and he's like, yeah. He's like, let me contact the district attorney. in your case. You know, my case is out of Washington, D.C. So I'm like, are you serious? It's out of the capital? And they're like, yeah. Yeah.

Washington State? No. No. No, no, no. So my lawyer is like, you're going to need to, he's like, listen, he's like, you could turn yourself in in a field office, but you're going to be introduced to a phenomenon called diesel therapy. And I'm like, what is that?

He's like, oh. Where it would take you, you know, six days on a bus to get here from where you're at. But if you turn yourself in and your locality, it'll take like six months to get here. You're going to hit each prison, each county jail. You know, you're going to sit there. They're going to book you. And then right after they book you, they're going to throw you on a bus or a plane. And they're going to bring you to the next place.

And it's going to be a long, inefficient process. And book you again? Yes. and yeah every place you go you get booked and it's miserable miserable so that's why he's like don't drive your car take the bus take the greyhound bus get over here you know and then i will pick you up in my car and we will go directly to the court the federal courthouse and you will surrender directly to the marshals because the marshals have field offices in every federal courthouse you will surrender right there and you will be arraigned that

day and you could have a bond hearing within I was an idiot and turned myself in on a Friday so I had to spend a couple days in jail before my bond hearing right right yeah he didn't tell you that that's an issue no he did tell me that but I'm like I just I need to leave let me get the bus ticket I don't care a couple days in jail oh well you know it doesn't matter acclimate you to the environment you want to get a little in there so you kind of know I get it. I hear you. Baby steps. Precisely, precisely, right? So I go to the courthouse and immediately my lawyer goes over to the field office room and then like seven marshals come out and I'm sitting on a bench and you're like stand up, hands on the wall, spread your legs. We need to search you. They searched me. They cuffed me. They brought me into the back holding area. They swabbed my mouth. They took my picture. They took my fingerprints. They cataloged my scars. They asked me if I had tattoos or anything like that.

I said no. And then they tried like asking me a bunch of strange questions. And then I'm like, I have an attorney. And then they just left the room after I said that. But I'm like, oh, I see what you guys were trying to do. I see what was happening. Right? Yeah, they bolt.

The moment you say attorney, they bolt. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, when they asked me, are you, are, you know, who you run with? to run with they said who you run with are you with are you with a gang and i said i i'm i'm with the the florida the florida uh florida or mortgage brokers association i'm a mortgage broker the most violent criminal organization in all the florida

where they yeah they yeah so they said uh you're not dangerous i said ask bank of america So, okay, what happened? They brought me to a holding cell. I'm sitting there. There's a little white guy who's like, you know, you've been to prison. You understand. There's like the normal humans and then there's the insane people. This is the first time I met someone who was like legitimately, like medically, clinically

clinically insane, right? This dude is sitting there screaming, they're stealing my face. they're taking my documents and they're going to clone me and i'm just looking at i'm like what bro what are you talking about like get me out of here and then about 30 minutes later after i'm sitting in the cell with this insane dude right it's dc right so like everybody gets federally charged even with misdemeanors right yeah yeah yeah so like all of like the normal normal criminals if you will were being brought there as well so they brought in this dude that really didn't speak English, right? He was a Colombian national. I speak Spanish. So I get to strike you up a

conversation with him. And I'm like, why are you here? I'm like, you told them immigration, but you're Colombian. I know that's bullshit. And he's like, okay, in reality, I got caught piloting an airplane. And I'm like, illegally, like in U.S. airspace. And I'm like, yeah, I'm like, that's not that bad. You know what I mean? He's like, well, they found 20,000 kilos of cocaine in the you're playing. I'm like, oh. And then I realized the gravity of the situation I'm in. I'm like, if I'm in a cell with this dude awaiting an arraignment, I got myself into some serious, serious trouble. I'm sure you have that one defining moment as well when you first got apprehended, when you realized the gravity of the situation you're in. Like, oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a,

it's an issue. And I didn't get to turn myself in. So, yeah. Really? Oh, they just, they just arrested you. Arrested me. Just fucking pulled up on me, pulled the guns out. Get on the ground. Get on the ground.

Get on the ground. I was like, the FBI or the Secret Service? It was the Secret Service. Okay. Which were actually extremely, you know, like, in retrospect, in comparison to the FBI, they were extremely professional. Most of the FBI agents, with the exception of maybe one FBI agent, have been almost like thubs.

all the secret service agents were polite, professional. You know, it's like they were just, I was like the guys, and you'll realize it's like the guards that you meet. You always like the guards that are basically there to just check in and check out. Like, I'm just here to do my job. Like, I'm not taking it personally. You have to do this. Don't do that.

Like, you know, they're not upset about it. They're not taking a personal interest. And same thing with the police. You have some cops that are just like, hey, look, I got a handcuff. you here's what we're doing here's how this works and then you have the ones that just hate your guts and it's like they think it's their job to make you miserable and talk down to you and be a jerk to you it's like like you don't have that you don't have the attitude for this job like you're you're a horribly aggressive angry person well unfortunately you're lock in the cage and those are

the people that are bringing you your food so right yeah yeah well you listen i'll tell you right now when you actually get to prison, you will like prison 100% more than you like being locked up. I think in your case, you'll probably be able to either self-surrender or they will take you at sentencing. I will be able to self-surrender. I know that for a fact. Well, that's going to be, that's way better because you don't have to go through the U.S. Marshall's holdover, which you could be sitting there for a few months. And that's basically county jail.

And county jail sucks. When you go to prison, you almost have, you almost have almost. know, once you get into where your housing unit is, you almost have no contact with the police. Like you'll get a job, you'll get a little routine. Before you know it, you'll be like, this is like a, this is like a summer camp. I mean, it's a shitty summer camp, but it's like a summer camp with guys that might stab you, but as long as you're polite to everybody, it's not a big deal. As long as you don't run up a bunch of debts and start talking shit about people, you'll be fine. And they'll love you because you,

you've got a great story and you're a good storyteller but i digress go ahead what were you saying so you turned yourself in when you got in front of the judge what happened i wasn't able to appear in front of so you know how they bring you in front of federal magistrates first for a bond hearing the federal magistrate was like i have no jurisdiction in this you have to go in front of a circuit judge so they they they they held me for the weekend i got my little dose of like prison life for the first time ever i was in the shoe for like like, I'd say a day until they, they brought me to Gen Pop. And the facility I was at was 100% indoors.

So I go into the pot, if you will, and I look around. And it's like, there's like 200 dudes just all in a small, relatively small room. I'd say the size of a probably like a high school gymnasium. And I'm like, okay, this shit's real now. Now, luckily, all the dudes in there were, they were completely respectful. you know no fights or anything like that happened the worst thing that happened was like people screaming at each other and stuff but you know all the guards there too they were sheriffs so they weren't like private prison guards so they all had they were incredibly respectful at that

facility the guards had the utmost respect for you if you were respectful to them all the other inmates it was a mix of federal hold inmates and virginia like just normal you know like people that had small like under a year sentences or people that just got off a long stretch and they're brought to there for like the last year or so of their sentence right right so i met a couple dudes i met a bunch of of of people that were in a federal rico murder gang case and they were called the reckless tiger gang they were a group of they were an Asian gang right and i met this dude and i'm talking to him and he's super nice i mean he has a bunch of tattoos and everything i don't really judge that well find out later i find out later that he just straight up

just like executed somebody so i'm like i was talking to a literal murderer and he was perfectly cordial and nice yeah so the nicest people are guys that have murdered somebody my cellmate was a turkish national who got indicted for espionage because he uh he dealt in defense and somehow drone technology that he attained ended up in the hands of iranians and he's like I went to on vacation to Spain and then Interpol just came to my hotel and took me away. And I'm like, well, what do you think was going to happen? You can't go to any place that would extradate you. You know, there was like, you know, there was hackers.

There was like Russian mobsters and then there was gang members and everything. It was my first like, I'm like, okay, this is prison is like, it's just you'll take a person like me. I did a mid-level, well, you know, people would say it's big, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not that big, right? But you send someone like me. Not small. True, but there's people that make billions of dollars. You know what I mean?

There's a few, but mostly you're going to meet guys that brought a gun to a $10 crack sale and ended up getting 10 or 15 years. And you're going to be surrounded by, you're going to be surrounded by guys that you're like, so this guy stole, you know, $500 million and he got, you know, eight years. And this guy has been arrested three times and happened to bring a gun to a crack deal for less than $100 and got 20 years. Wow. That's insane. And then, yeah, you like the, the disparity between.

the sentences are so outrageous and then you'll be like this guy looked at some little kids on the internet and he gets two years yeah he got three years this guy you know like you just there's just no but you'll meet some guys there that you're like this guy's a complete lunatic and he's insane and he should never be let out and he's getting out next year and then you got this guy who's the nicest help most helpful person ever and he's got 30 more years to go. Yeah, you'll meet some great guys and you're going to get in good with a group of guys that you like and you hang out when you'll get a routine and, bro, that time's going to blow by. It'll be cool, but it'll be good. I mean, it won't be, it won't be great.

But once your expectations are lowered, which sounds horrible, you'll be, you'll be like, oh, I'm okay here. Like, there will be a day you'll just wake up after, you know, whatever. It could be six months, could be a year and a half and you're going to be like, yeah, I'm all right. This is going to be all right. It's not a, this isn't horrible. Like that first, but it's until that point when you're like, this sucks. So what happened? So, sorry, go ahead.

The point I was trying to make is you take someone like me who messed up, right? But then you're going to put me around. You're sending all of the people who have gotten, who did all these things and you're putting them together. And you think they're not going to be sitting there. Networking. Networking, excuse me. scheming learning new things oh yeah some great conversations like you'll you're you're you'll get around a group of guys and once you guys start talking you'll be like oh my god well wait a second here's what

i did and then that guy will be like did you ever think about doing this you're like oh my god you can get fake ideas yeah i can get fake oh my if i could have done that i could have you know then like what about can you open up bank accounts yeah bro i opened up 15 bank accounts like and you're like, oh, your mind will get go nuts and then you kind of have to talk to yourself down. We laying in bed thinking, and then I think, wait, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So I have to, I have to throw a surprise into this story, right? Okay. Remember how I said there was the worker Eric Callahan?

Yes. He was an undercover federal agent the entire time. Are you serious? 100% serious. But he just, and this is a guy that helped you set up your thing. So he helped you set it up. So were they watching you the whole time? Think about it.

The way I structured my story, like there are some glaringly obvious things that if someone really thought about it's like, wait a second, you're telling me a random opioid addict is going to have the capability to set up server infrastructure. Really? And then he's only going to accept payment. He might. Listen, I knew one of the smartest guys I knew who was a professional hacker and can build you websites and computers. and do all kinds of he's a programmer everything that guy was a heroin addict he's like it was like a 19 year old heroin addict so that's very so i don't think that's so crazy that's possible you're you're right you're right but in my experience right like meeting technically like people

who have those technical skills they they tend to not be they he's unique in that regard he really is well plus and his ability to follow through like most strongly diminished because exactly and that's what I'm saying. This dude was getting hot. You know, like every drug dealer is going to have their funny story. This dude must have had 60 root canals when he was met. Oh, I just had a root canal. Send me some extra pills. I'm like, okay, whatever, man. You're helping me do all this stuff. I'll send you extra stuff all the time. It turns out that was being sent to an undercover FBI agent. And then they were taking those pills and sending them to the DEA analysis lab. And they were just sitting there tacking on the charges, tacking on the charges. You didn't have a root canal? No. No. Are you telling you, I'm not going to sit here and listen to you tell me that an FBI agent lied to you. You're telling me that a CI lied? That's unheard of. It's typically so honest.

So, all right. So what happened? So your lawyer, so you got out on bond, right? So, okay. So I find, the reason I'm bringing this up now, right? I have my little three days in jail on Monday they put me in the van and they drive me to the courthouse

which is like 15 minutes away from the holding facility right and I remember the Asian individual I told you about that's the gang member he is with me because he's from my pod so he also had the court date on the same day right so we all went there he was going for sentencing though right turns out he got a life sentence

it's terrible it's so terrible being near someone and seeing them even though he killed somebody though but it's like the humanity of it looking at this 20 this dude who was one year older than me it's like you're going to spend the rest of your life in jail it's just it's sad man and i um a brief a brief point before i explain everything else when we're driving back he literally looked at everybody in the van he's like crime isn't cool man and just sunk his head and i was like that's terrible that you realize that now you know so so back to like when i'm having my bond hearing they bring me in

front of an actual federal judge like circuit judge and the u.s district attorney is there and this is the first time i see face-to-face the fbi agent in my case he was the c i'm not going to name his name of course i don't know if that could blow back on me but uh he's sitting there explaining reading the ad this is the first time i got to see the affidavit in my case too and i'm like oh my god eric callahan wasn't undercover this entire time i thought i was i thought eric was going to walk in and be like, hey, what's up, Colby? Handed you your indictment.

You're like, well, he did. He did. I never, I never shared my name with him, but essentially Eric Hallahan didn't say, come in and say, what's up Colby? Because he was the undercover CI. So essentially he did do that.

Was that shocking? Looking back at it, I'm like, that just makes so much sense. I mean, of course, like, it is shocking but like in again hindsight is always 20 Tony with crime sitting there thinking back I'm like of course he was a CI with the questions he was asking and every single day right I had him remember how I said I had Eric Callahan set up my own proprietary means of transacting yeah he just also happened to work at a print shop while he was doing this and was able to print up flyers for me to send them out

to my i had him i was going to have him mail me the flyers and i could include them in all of my orders on white house market instead of using the uh the internet to say hey this is my store i was just going to be like i was literally going to stick a flyer in their package and like look at my store and this code is a good guy to know huh eric's a good guy to know he's connected he's just being you know just being a good business partner i never had him send me those by the way because i've even thought about him like that's terrible operational security i can't ever give him an address to send me anything and then he was like well you could send me pills and i could then you know ship everything out and then i'm like no no no you're an opioid addict i'm never sending

you stuff you can't handle my business you know what i mean you could handle like the online some online aspects but literally dealing with like products no you can't do that i wouldn't trust someone to do that and i already had that down like that network established myself right now looking back he was trying to if he if you know that he was just trying to tack on as many charges as possible yeah they're trying to run the numbers up right so um the you do you know the literal argument for the that the u.s attorney used to keep me out in jail The U.S. attorney said that I was a danger to my community and my family because I smoked marijuana daily. Okay.

I think I don't see that. That's silly, but okay. The judge literally just stared at the U.S. attorney like, excuse me? And the person reiterated their point. And he literally looked over at my lawyer and I, and he's like, you guys have not demonstrated sufficient evidence that Mr. Cop actively attempted to, elude arrest he he literally came in and turned himself in with his attorney right you guys just went to the wrong address you could have had them literally they literally did and also i was living at

my my my i was living back at my my home you know that i grew up in for over a year so how do you not know where i was at right so all right so i mean so how is this progressed so far what i mean they let you out they let me out I'm on bond. We were, I, I, I pleaded not guilty during my, my, my arraignment. You know the thing right after arraignment when they like give you like, this is the judge in your case and you're, like, what is it, initial appearance or? Yeah, yeah, your first appearance. First appearance, yeah.

I entered a not guilty plea because I have one of the best lawyers in the area. So I'm like, he's like, he's represented dark net cases before and has won. So he's like, I think they have some holes in their case. Well, remember how I said that the U.S. Marshals took my fingerprints and everything? Right. The one package I ever touched myself happened to be sent to an FBI undercover. And they had my fingerprint on the U.S.PS mail envelope. Listen, you have a lot of FBI guys buying drugs from you.

Well, it's a public forum. anybody could go on there and purchase these things right that's that's how they catch these people and also too remember how i said like the remember how i alluded to earlier that the cryptocurrency is eventually what got them on to me right so remember how i made the analogy with that bitcoin is like a piece of gold with a serial number right it's traceable right there are services on the dark net that you could go to where you exchange that piece of gold, that Bitcoin, if you will, or the fraction of the gold bar, the fraction of the Bitcoin, you exchange it for many other pieces of gold for a small fee, right?

Yeah. Well, it turns out the FBI also had control of that service too, and they were catching a lot of people trying to wash their money. I feel like the FBI is not playing fair. Like, you know, it's, that's not right. It's, I mean, it's an open. I mean, yeah, they've caught so many people like that before. So many people.

Yeah, it's homeless. Yeah. Well, that's what they do. Because I should have went to multiple different services to do that. I went to one service thinking I was okay. And then I could take the crypto and do whatever I want with it. Because on paper, it's just, you know. Have you considered selling stuff on Etsy?

like maybe stuff that's not banned by the federal government so actually i would like to start um an amazon store when i eventually get through my situation because like my reasoning is if i could if you can make money on the dark web i think that's more competitive and harder actually to make money on the clear web the clear web being the normal website that we're on right now with normal websites like google amazon you know if i could i know how to source products i know know how to facilitate like build infrastructure I know how to navigate and learn about the ecosystems that could facilitate e-commerce so right that's what I want to do ultimately that's my goal is I want to have Amazon businesses after after I deal with my situation that's the goal I

would like to work towards what you're going to sell um I need to figure out how to know what to sell I don't know yet right so once I learn how to do that then i can remember how i said i know i've learned mandarin and everything right well i have already developed a relationship with some chinese manufacturers of let's say like kitchen some like minor kitchen appliances or like let's say like you know like phone chargers and stuff like that i'm trying to develop the raport and to be able to purchase stuff from them get it over here and use amazon to facilitate that transaction but the different is is the feds won't

blow in my door if I'm selling phone chargers. True. That's true. Yeah, listen, you know, I wrote a book for a guy named Devereoli. He was selling I mean, he was selling all kinds. He was selling guns but that's what got him in trouble. But

well, actually munitions, but he also started just selling accessories to weapons. You know, just accessories. Doing the same thing. He's selling he was buying them from China. He'd get them, you know, they're making them. They're making him for a $1.75 and he's selling them for, you know, $22 a piece. And it was, you know,

it's amazing. And, and still undercutting the, the competition. And he was doing just drop shipping and everything. It was all just through, through the internet, through different services. So when are you going to be sentenced? I mean, by the time this comes out, you'll have been sentenced. Yeah. I don't know exactly. They moved up my date and I'm awaiting. It's kind of the air right now and we're waiting moved it up or back up like i don't know like they canceled they canceled like my previous sentencing date and they're gonna they have to they have to work out their schedule to see it might be a couple months in the future you know and i you know i don't know currently as of right now but it won't be that much longer right okay um

good times good times uh yeah you got time to write a book yeah you know you can make it sexy it doesn't have to be super huge were you dating anybody during this time yeah i had i had various girlfriends sometimes multiple girlfriends at a time honestly i mean then did you travel no no it was a lot of work doing this because again i i solely handled the internet portion of it basically by myself like i would work 12 hour days not stop seven days a week yeah well you're selling a product like fraud's not a full-time job like

i had a lot of downtime on my time so i traveled a little bit um uh let me think yeah okay that could be a good book do you have a nice car did i have a nice car yeah driving like a Toyota camera? What are we driving? Like, we driving multiple vehicles. Some of them were unregistered. Some of them were registered.

None of them were in my name. Yeah, you could write a good book. You write a good book. That doesn't have to be super long. My book was pretty long because, you know, it's like 330 pages, I think. Which, that's really, that's not even a long book. No, it's nice.

Yeah, but, you know, But, but, yeah, you know, all the intricacies that you've done and the close calls and the, you know, and you get to write the backstory. You could ask, did you get, you got your discovery, right? Yes, I believe so. I have to talk to my lawyer about all that. Yeah, if you get your discovery now, like ask your lawyer for your discovery and then have it sent. Ah, damn it, hold on. Decline.

That is. Hold on. somebody called um if you get your discovery and give it to you you're like your mom then when you get to where you're going going where you're going to be a while like that you're probably going to go to a low then have her send it to you then you can write a story about not just what happened with you but what was happening on the other end because you'll have all the documents from the FBI and they'll explain like you know at this point they heard about you at this point you know they'll have the dates and the names and so to be they knew about

me pretty damn quickly like they were watching me for years well then that's great then that that ends up being cool because now it's kind of a cat and mouse game why do they not i don't think it's cool other people may think it's cool i think it's terrible i mean yeah you know work with what you got so uh at this point you know you got to you got to work with it yeah um yeah yeah you know some downtime learn to play the guitar I like chess. You've been just tons of guys. Listen, they play chess in prison.

Like, you've never played chess like this. Like the, you know, you know, chess to me is a game of kings. It's a sophisticated game. It's a game of, you know, rules and, you know, it's a game played by the upper echelon of society. That's not how it's played in prison. In prison, these dudes, they. move the, you know, boom, oh, yeah, I got your bitch, bro. I got your bitch.

And then, oh, oh, oh, yeah, what you're going to do now? I'm in your house. I'm in your house. What you're going to do? You ain't going to do shit. That's right. Oh, I mean, you're like, like, it's, it's, it's, I mean, I don't know how you take that game and make it aggressive.

But everything is, I assume, aggressive in jail, though, everything. It's not to be, listen, you'll get a group of guys like, you know what it's like. Like, it's like being a non-enemy combatant, right? Like, you know, in a war zone. So you're just like a guy that lives in this town where these guys are shooting each other. You just, you know, I live in Ukraine. I live in Ukraine. Exactly.

And you're just trying to go to your job and make bread. I'm just trying to go to my, to the bakery and make some bread today. These guys are shooting. I had to stand over here while they shot and, oh, they blew that up. I got to go home. I can't make it there. I'll make it, I'll go tomorrow. And then you go tomorrow and you have a good day. You go, you work three days in a row and you're good. And then one day you're walking home from work and

two guys are shooting each other, only in prison. They're just stabbing each other or getting into a fight and you walk by and you go. And you'll, you will become kind of desensitized. I remember one time I was, I just got into the low. I was the medium and I had just gotten to the low. Maybe I'd been there two, three weeks. This guy name, this guy's name is Kiki. You're going to meet about 50 got, well, you got 10 years. You got, you'll take, did you take, are you taking the drug program? Yeah, I qualify for our death because of cocaine use. Right. So, uh, you'll get the, if the drug, the, hopefully, you know, get the judge to recommend it. You'll get a year off of that. You'll get good time. Did they ever give you

halfway house or they, is that just bullshit? No, you'll get halfway house. You'll probably get six months to a year halfway house. You know, you're literally, you're whittling, like you'll end up doing whatever six years so so let's say you do the six years um you're going to in that time period you're going to meet about about 50 60 guys named kiki so uh you're going to meet some pookies um but anyway what happened one time i was i had just walked in my cell and this guy this big black guy named kiki was kind of walking down the hallway right and walked right in front of my cell and drop dead of a heart attack. Boom.

Oh, God. He was like 30-something. Was he doing drugs? He'd been to medical several times of the last few days complaining about chest pains. And they kept saying, come Monday, come Monday.

You got to come back Monday. So he died like Saturday. I think it was like Friday or Saturday. So, you know, it was just inconvenient for them to look at him because of the chest pain. You know, it's the weekend. So Kiki died and hit the ground, boom, died and slid about a foot.

And I remember looking down and thinking, like he was right in front of myself. I thought, fuck, they're going to lock this whole place down. And I'm going to be stuck in my cell for the next all night. I better go get some coffee. So I stepped over Kiki's body, walked down the hallway, went in, heated up some water in the microwave and stood there. By that point, they called medical and they'd come running up. They got there pretty quick, but Kiki was definitely dead when he hit the ground.

So they put him on a stretcher. Kiki was a big guy. So it took like four of them to pick him up and bring them down. As soon as they got them out there, they said, you know, lock down. And so I walked in my room and drank my coffee. And then I kind of was sitting there drinking my coffee. And I was thinking, did I just step over a guy's dead body to go and get some coffee? like you're a cold motherfucker i was like i'm that's nothing like nobody shed at a tear

tear for kiki there were guys that were walking around like damn kiki dead man i known him 10 years kiki made the best pizza it was like he's just upset because his pizza partner is gone there'll be another kiki so you're there's like there's gonna be another kiki um yeah it's you're gonna get desensitized i remember one time this guy there was commotion people are screaming and hollering and running around. You can tell when something happened because people are trying to heat up coffee and borrow stuff from other cells because, you know, you're going to get locked down. Like something happened in the wreckyard.

And they were screaming lockdown. And this guy comes running over. And he goes, Cox, Cox. And I go, yeah, what's up? And he said, yo, he said, my cellie just got stabbed in the wreckyard. And I said, are you telling me that there's a two-man room available? because that means that he's sad they're going to move him he's going to shoe at least so and I now know there's a two-man cell that has one bunk available and he goes yeah bro and he

hands me a cop out and says fill it out right now stick it under the counselor's door before we get locked down so I filled it out stuck it under the counselor's door ran back to my cell and by the time I got we got out like the next day I had a new cell were you in a cell alone but prior to that no no I was in a three-man cell at that time oh god I was going from a three-man cell to a two-man cell. There's no one-man cell. Yeah, yeah, you're going to be like, this is like, you hear that and you're like, that's horrible. But I mean, that's just, it's a survivor mentality.

But, you know, once you get into, you'll get a little job. You'll get a bunch of buddies that you hang out with. When you get there, do not tell them, oh, I'm here for a computer crime. No, no, they're going to think I'm a chomo. Yeah, white, you're a soft. white guy yeah bad idea um it's gonna go bad and even what's so funny about that is i've known guys that have done that or not told people what they're there for like they'll say um they'll go oh my lawyer said not to talk about my crime and guys immediately you guys not have

your jackets in federal no no you're gonna get there with nothing well you can mail off for your your pre-sentence report you can try and have it mailed in, but a lot of times they won't mail it in. Like they'll catch it. Now listen, I've had mine mailed in twice. It got in both times. But sometimes they'll catch it and they'll say, hey, you can't have this. We're mailing it. We're throwing it away. They'll tell you can't have it. How do people like join gangs and everything then if there's no like the like the verification process? I mean, you figure out a way to get it in. Like you have somebody shuffle up the papers or mail in a couple pages here. Two days later they mail in three or four like, you

You know what I'm saying? You can get it in. Okay. Just mail it in, like, just in an envelope that says PSR on it. That's never going to happen. That's probably going to happen. So, I mean, that's going to be my application for the Aryan Brotherhood. So, I mean, I need to get it in. When you said gang, I was thinking, there's not going to be any gangs.

Like, you're going to a low. There may be gangs, but you're certainly not going to have to be a part of a gang. Like, hey, you ready? You want to join the woods? Yeah, I'm good, bro. Who's going to protect you? Come on, man. Stop.

How segregated is it in federal prison? Like, can you was like, I mean, it, if it was a pin or something, it would be, but even then they'll mix a little bit, you know, they'll talk, they'll this or that, but they don't really want to share things. It's not like, it's not like you're going to a pin in California. No. You're going to a federal, probably going to a federal low. And that low is going to be, it's going to be soft.

There are going to be some guys that are walking. around acting like it's a tough place but everybody kind of thinks they're a joke like like all right yeah i get it i get it it's yeah we you know everybody's a stand-up guy but you know really you have to kind of know like look if there's i used to say this all the time at the at the low i you know guys would be talking about oh that guy over there bro he he he uh i heard he snitched on this guy heard he snitched on that guy and they'd be looking at i'd look over at the guy and i'm like that guy over there. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. And I'd say, well, hey, I have a question for you. You guys good at math? And they'd be like, well, I'm all right. Why? I go, well, 90, let's assume that 90% of

people cooperate and get cooperative. It's even more than that. I know it's higher than that. And they'd be like, all right. And I'd say, so if 90% do cooperate, I said, so let's go ahead. I said, and there's 160 guys in this unit that means that you know and i said that means that you've got out of this unit out of 150 160 guys you've essentially got um i think it ends up being whatever it's like 106 guys i'm like so there's a hundred and i'm sorry sorry there's 16 guys in this unit sorry 16 guys in this unit that didn't cooperate and they're all like so no five guys standing around me and they're like right right i'm like we can exclude some of those guys immediately because some 10 of the because some of those guys went to trial so they didn't have an

option to cooperate because they went to trial so we know who they are and i could just name them right red bull so and so um w but and we'd name them off you'd name off like like 10 guys 11 guys and i go so that means that there's five guys in this unit five that didn't cooperate and didn't go to trial and have the most time out of everybody right well and I would look and I'd look

at the guys around me and I'd say I'll bet it's I'll bet it's you guys isn't it? I'll bet it's you guys what are the chances that all five of those guys are standing right here what does Shakespeare say

thou doth protest too much exactly listen And that's what it is. So, you know, like, even getting in that conversation is just so much still. Like, I didn't, I didn't partake in the, you know, the politics of who did what or this guy or, you know, it's, to me, it's like, look, I'm getting a routine down. I'm going to find something to do that I enjoy doing every day. I'm going to get a group of guys that I like talking to. I'm going to get a routine.

I'm just going to go through the motion. and whittled this time away. And I did, and it was, listen, it was, and honestly, this is going to sound horrible, but for what it is, taking into consideration, it was prison, but for what it was, it was a good experience, it was the best experience that you could have had. So for me, I had the best experience, given the situation for what I could have had. And in a lot of ways, I look back on it, and I think it was, it was a good part of my life. Like, I wouldn't want to redo it.

But for what it was, it wasn't horrible. So, okay, I, I, it's, yeah, I see where you're coming from. I see where you're coming from. Yeah. How many people tried hitting you? Tried what? Try it, like, like, because like, I could tell you, you're very witty. So there would be a giant, brutish dude who's saying something stupid.

And then you're like, oh, that happened. Shut up. That happened several times. Yeah, I got, I got knetted up a few times. Like, literally, I realized. going in, it was like, I can, I can either make smart ass cracks and get slapped every once in a while or I can just keep my mouth shut for the next 20-something years. And I went, yeah, I'm not going to do that. Like, I'd rather just take an ass beating every once in a while. So I was probably,

really, there was only one time a guy actually physically like, like, I want to say he punched me. He bitch slapped me from behind. Because, you know what I'm saying? walked up behind me and went bam and just hit me because i mouthed off him and i had another guy one time that poked me in the eye but he was mentally off like he couldn't be in the regular unit they kept him in the shoe and i was in the shoe with him i didn't realize he's crazy so um other than that i didn't you know i really didn't have any any any issues okay luckily i'm a much i'm a bigger guy so i don't think people are even just come screw with me right well and the other thing is honestly like i i don't know if you've ever watched any of my stuff but but literally if you

get stabbed in federal prison you pretty much had it coming like you did something you did something like people think someone randomly ran up and did something no no you you you ran up a debt or you gambled and ran up a debt didn't pay you um you know you can run up store debts like guys will have stores they'll sell stuff out of their locker like they'll keep extra commissary locker so you're free calendar who sorry what are they called they're called the shopmen right yeah yeah so you can do that you know and you run up people will run up a debt and not pay and then they'll be like yeah what you're going to you know what you're going to do and it may be some old man who's not you're not scared of he'll have somebody just come beat your ass like you know so or you talk shit

about people you start mouting off about people or spreading rumors that'll catch up with you like there's lots of things that will catch up with you so you know you don't talk about people you don't run up debts be polite to everybody you'll be fine you're being a low you're a big guy you know you're you're going to be it's going to be you're to meet a bunch of people that you're like I can't believe I'm talking to this guy right now I can't believe like you're going to want to say almost stop the guy and go bro I can't believe I'm talking to you right now you're insane but don't I've already been I've already been there in the holding cell when that that dude was talking about he's like they're going to turn me into

the next jfk i'm like what are you talking about i don't know what that means i'm scared you know what he tried burning his school to the ground they caught him trying to burn a high school to the ground and he got a federal arson charge what an idiot um yeah yeah it's gonna be all right it's gonna be all right hey i appreciate you guys watching and And I appreciate Colby coming on and telling me his true crime story. And if you like the video, do me a favor and hit the subscribe button, hit the bell so you get notified. Also, leave me a comment in the comment section. I've been slacking on comments, but I'm going to jump back on it and really start trying to answer as many as possible.

I really need to incorporate my wife and have her answer some questions because she could probably answer some. And sometimes she actually looks through them and says, hey, you need to answer this comment. So that's cool. Her name's Jess. And also, I wrote a bunch of true crime books. And so do me a favor and buy one of my true crime books and check out the trailers. Using forgeries and bogus identities, Matthew B. Cox, one of the most ingenious con men in history, built America's biggest banks out of millions.

Despite numerous encounters with bank security, state, and federal authorities, Cox narrowly, and quite luckily, avoided capture for years. Eventually, he topped the U.S. Secret Service's Most Wanted list, and led the U.S. Marshal's FBI and Secret Service on a three-year chase, while jet-setting around the world with his attractive female accomplices. Cox has been declared one of the most prolific mortgage fraud con artists of all time by CNBC's American Greene. Bloomberg Business Week called him

the mortgage industry's worst nightmare, while Dateline NBC described Cox as a gifted forger and silver-tongued liar. Playboy magazine proclaimed his scam was real estate fraud, and he was the best. Shark in the housing pool is Cox's exhilarating first-person account

of his stranger-than-fiction story, Available now on Amazon and Audible. Bent is the story of John J. Boziak's phenomenal life of crime. Inked from head to toe, with an addiction to strippers and fast Cadillacs, Bozziac was not your typical computer geek. He was, however, one of the most cunning scammers, counterfeiters, identity thieves, and escape artists alive, and a major thorn in the side of the U.S. Secret Service as they fought a war on cybercrime.

With a savant-like ability to circumvent banking security and stay one step ahead of law enforcement, Boziak made millions of dollars in the international cyber underworld, with the help of the Chinese and the Russians. Then, leaving nothing but a John Doe warrant and a cleaned-out bank account in his wake, he vanished. Boziak's stranger-than-fiction tale of ingenious scams and impossible escapes, of brazen run-ins with the law and secret desires to straighten out and settle down, makes his story a true crime con game that will keep you guessing. Bent. How a homeless teen became one of the cybercrime industry's most prolific counterfeiters.

Available now on Amazon and Audible. Buried by the U.S. government and ignored by the national media, this is the story they don't want you to know. When Frank Amadeo met with President George W. Bush at the White House to discuss NATO operations in Afghanistan, No one knew that he'd already embezzled nearly $200 million from the federal government. Money he intended to use to bankroll his plan to take over the world. From Amadeo's global headquarters in the shadow of Florida's Disney World,

with a nearly inexhaustible supply of the Internal Revenue Services funds, Amadeo acquired multiple businesses, amassing a mega conglomerate. Driven by his delusions of world conquest, he negotiated the purchase of a squadron of American fighter jets and the controlling interest in a former Soviet ICBM factory. He began working to build the largest private militia on the planet, over one million Africans strong. Simultaneously, Amadeo hired an international black ops force to orchestrate a coup in the Congo while plotting to take over several small Eastern European countries. The most disturbing part of it all is, had the U.S. government not thwarted, his plans, he might have just pulled it off. It's insanity. The bizarre, true story of a bipolar

megalomaniac's insane plan for total world domination. Available now on Amazon and Audible. Pierre Rossini, in the 1990s, was a 20-something-year-old, Los Angeles-based drug trafficker of ecstasy and ice. He and his associates drove luxury European supercars, lived in Beverly Hill's penthouses and dated Playboy models while dodging federal indictments. Then, two FBI officers with the organized crime drug enforcement task force entered the picture. Dirty agents willing to fix cases and identify informants. Suddenly, two of Racini's associates, confidential informants working with federal law enforcement, or murdered. Everyone pointed to Rossini.

As his co-defendants prepared for trial, U.S. Attorney Robert Mueller sat down to debrief Racini at Leavenworth Penitentiary, and another story emerged. A tale of FBI corruption and complicity in murder. You see, Pierre Racini knew something that no one else knew. The truth. And Robert Mueller and the federal government have been covering it up to this very day.

Devil exposed. A twisted tale of drug trafficking. corruption, and murder in the City of Angels. Available on Amazon and Audible. Bailout is a psychological true crime thriller that pits a narcissistic con man against an egotistical, pathological liar. Marcus Schrenker, the money manager

who attempted to fake his own death during the 2008 financial crisis, is about to be released from prison, and he's ready to talk. He's ready to tell you the story no one's heard. Shrinker sits down with true crime writer, Matthew B. Cox, a fellow inmate serving time for bank fraud. Shrinker lays out the details, the disgruntled clients who persecuted him for unanticipated market losses, the affair that ruined his marriage, and the treachery of his scorned wife,

the woman who framed him for securities fraud, leaving him no choice but to make a bogus distress call and plunge from his multi-million dollar private aircraft in the dead of night. the $11.1 million in life insurance, the missing $1.5 million in gold. The fact is, Shrinker wants you to think he's innocent. The problem is, Cox knows Shrinker's a pathological liar and his stories of fabrication. As Cox subtly coaxes, cajoles, and yes, Khan's Shrinker into revealing his deceptions, his stranger-than-fiction life of lies slowly unravels. This is the story Shrinker didn't want you to know.

Bailout, The Life and Lies of Marcus Shringer, available now on Barnes & Noble, Etsy, and Audible. Matthew B. Cox is a conman, incarcerated in the Federal Bureau of Prisons for a variety of bank fraud-related scams. Despite not having a drug problem, Cox inexplicably ends up in the prison's residential drug abuse program, known as Ardap.

A drug program in name only. Ardap is an invasive behavior modification therapy, specifically designed to correct the cognitive thinking errors associated with criminal behavior. The program is a non-fiction dark comedy, which chronicles Cox's side-splitting journey. This first-person account is a fascinating glimpse at the survivor-like atmosphere inside of the government-sponsored rehabilitation unit. While navigating the treachery of his backstabbing peers, Cox, simultaneously. simultaneously manipulates prison policies and the bumbling staff every step of the way. The program. How a conman survived the Federal Bureau of Prisons cult of Ardap.

Available now on Amazon and Audible. If you saw anything you like, links to all the books are in the description box.