Modern Wisdom - #503 - Brett Johnson - The United States' Most Wanted Hacker

Episode Date: July 23, 2022

Brett Johnson is referred to by the United States Secret Service as "The Original Internet Godfather", he was the Founder and Leader of Counterfeit Library and Shadow Crew and has been a central figure in the cybercrime world for almost 20 years. Brett has been a lifelong criminal, he was committing crimes from inside the Secret Service's own offices, then after being sent to prison he escaped from prison and went on the run to Disneyland, all while defrauding millions. This story is one of the wildest things I've ever heard. Expect to learn what it feels like to be on the FBI's Most Wanted list, what actually happened with the Solar Winds hack, how Brett was involved in the origins of the darknet, his thoughts on Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road, the closest calls Brett had to being killed, how he evaded capture for so long, whether he thinks Julian Assange is a criminal or a hero and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Check out Brett's website - https://www.anglerphish.com/  Follow Brett on Twitter - https://twitter.com/GOllumfun  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up, people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Brett Johnson. He's referred to by the United States Secret Service as the original Internet Godfather. He was the founder and leader of Counterfeit Library and Shadow Crew and has been a central figure in the cybercrime world for almost 20 years. Brett has been a lifelong criminal. He was committing crimes from inside the secret service's own offices. Then then after being sent to prison, he escaped from prison and went on the run to Disneyland all while defrauding millions. This story is one of the wildest things that I've ever heard. Expect to learn what it feels like to be on the FBI's most wanted list, what actually

happened with the Solar Winds hack, how Brett was involved in the origins of the Darknet, his thoughts on Russell Brick and Silk Road, the closest calls Brett had to be killed, how he evaded capture for so long, whether he thinks Julian Assange is a criminal or a hero, and much more. This guy is like something out of a comic book or a movie. It is a complete force of nature and this story is absolutely insane. Sit back and enjoy. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Brett Johnson. What does it mean to be on the United States most wanted list? Is there a particular type of criteria that you need to meet for that? Is it like being top 10 in the billboard chart? Well, I will say you did not probably do well in Sunday school.

So it's, you're not a good guy. If you've made the United States most wanted list, you are the, uh, the bane of society at that moment in time. And me, I mean, for those who don't know know the secret service they called me the original internet godfather I got that title. I was committed. I committed 39 fellow needs I was placed on the United States most wanted list. I had an escape from prison and what the big thing of all that was is I built and ran the first organized cybercrime community. It was called shadow crew precursor of today's dark net and dark net markets that US most wanted. So Shadow Crew makes the front cover of Forbes,

August 2004, headline who's stealing your identity. October 26, 2004, United States Secret Service they arrested 33 people, six countries, six hours. I'm the guy publicly mentioned as getting away. I headed that ring. They picked me up four months later. They gave me a job. And I'm the guy that continues to break the law from inside Secret Service offices for the next 10 months until they find out about it. I take off on a cross country crime spree, still $600,000 in

four months, wake up one morning, United States most wanted, and that gets your attention. It's one of those OSHIT moments. I was in Las Vegas the night before I'd stolen 160,000 out of ATMs. We'll cook up that next morning, and there's my name on Carter's Market with US most wanted beside of it.

And I sat there and stared at it for a while. Finally I said out loud, I was like, well, Brett, you've made the United States most wanted list. What now? And I was like, I'm going to Disney World. So that's what Idiot did. Went to Disney World lasted about six weeks, secret service they came and got me arrested,

me sent me to prison, then I escaped. Your question, what's it like to be United States most wanted? It is one of the scariest things on the planet. I was already on the run, but you don't have any friends. You're constantly watching your back every day is the highest high and the lowest low. You make it through a day without being arrested and you're like, yes, I've made it. But you're constantly scared of everything. I would just take these long drives.

You couldn't talk to anybody. I would, you've seen Breaking Bad, right? Yes. So there's a scene that last season of Breaking Bad where Brian Cranston's in a cabin and Robert, Robert Forsters bringing these supplies and Cranston looks at Forster and he's like, well, you just stay and talk to me? And he pays him like $18,000 to talk to him for an hour. And that is really a very truthful moment

because I used to pay escorts not for sex, but to just sit there and fucking talk to me. And that's, I mean, it's just a, it's a completely different life and mentality when you've done, when you're on that type of list, because you know your days are numbered. And so you try to make the most of them while you can. And it's just complete despair. I mean, it's really something to be there.

How much of you, the architect of your own anxiety with this? Obviously, you are genuinely being chased by law enforcement, but the overthinking, the rumination, the perpetuation of fear, all of that must be generated, self-generated, almost all the time. You know, you hear about people that go on the run. There was that famous case with it last year of the guy whose girlfriend went missing

and there was a bunch of body cam footage. Right. Yeah, and you think about that, not only do people who are on the run need to do the physical things of not being seen and using cash, which is not trackable and not being recognized, all that stuff, but they also need to get past the sheer psychological trauma and torment, perpetual torment that presumably they're making happen themselves. Oh, what absolutely is, you're driving down the street and you're aware of your environment like no one else. I mean, you're aware when a cop two blocks away pulls in behind you.

So you're looking to get off the side of the road, you're making sure that you're obeying all the traffic laws in the area. You're making sure that you're watching everyone and everything that goes on in your environment. And you're right, it is, it's, you torture yourself more than law enforcement could ever think about because you're always concerned and worried about what's going to happen. And I was constantly moving, I didn't stay anyplace,

unless I was stealing money, which I was. But after the money was stolen, I would immediately leave that area. So you were constantly on the move. You couldn't trust anyone. You didn't have friends. You didn't have family. You know, I deserved it.

Make no mistake. I deserved that. But it's a horrible, you can't even call it life. It's a horrible existence to go through. How did Shadow Crew begin? So Shadow Crew. I guess you have, and I said this on a couple of other shows as well. My life of crime began when I was 10 years old. I'm from Eastern Kentucky and my mom was a fraudster. She was very negligent.

She used to leave me in my sister home all the time and the way my life of crime begins is my sister walks in one day. She's got this pack of pork chops. I'm like, where'd you get that? And she's like, I stole them. And I'm like, well, shit, let's start doing that. So we start stealing food.

Mom finds out about it. And she joins us and starts running. This is a little shop lifters. And I refer to it as that Eastern Kentucky mentality, but that's the mentality in the South is that it's the man's job to provide. So while my sister didn't have to engage in a lot of the crime, as a matter of fact, other

than that one shoplifting experience, she doesn't break them all again. Me, though, I was the male and you're expected to take part. So I grew up committing these different types of frauds from stealing coal to drug trafficking, document forgery, charity fraud, burglaries, all these different types of things. I learned how to do as I was growing up. Branch stuff on my own in the mid-90s, fake to car accident, to get the insurance money, to get married, got married.

And I said it before and I'll say it again, I get the worst parts from my mom and my dad. My dad, I get this fear of being abandoned. My mom, I get the criminal mindset. And what happens when you blend those two together? Oh, it's a nightmare. So when you, when I, those two are blended with me. So with me, I have never been able to show love

in a healthy way in a relationship. I always go overboard. And typically that's me showering money or items on whoever I love. And sometimes it's paying for sex too, but it's typically my love is worth this. This is what I'm worth is whatever I'm giving you. I'm not been able to only recently have I been starting to learn what a healthy relationship is. So back then, it was, you know, my value is in what I can provide my mate materially. And if I don't have the ability

to do that legally, I didn't mind doing it illegally. So I was always engaged in some sort of fraud or crime to satisfy that other side, that fear of the love, people that I love leaving me or abandoning me. Well, I think based on what I know about your background, there was abandonment from your mother that anxious attachment style would be developed from that. And also, it seems like love was at least in part made to be contingent on whether or not you could offer up something, even if that thing was something that had been stolen. So you have the anxious attachment coupled with gifts and money and items are how you show dedication loyalty and love. It doesn't surprise me that that's

what would. I mean, on top of all of that, you must have a genetic predisposition for this as well. If you have a mother that is a career criminal, there is something inside of you that can be switched pretty easily. I would agree that there's certainly a switch there without a doubt. It's, it has not been an easy path for me to give up that criminal lifestyle and learn what it is to be healthy and legal in today's world. You know, back then I had no compunction at all about breaking the law. I didn't mind scamming people. That was just what I did.

My entry into cyber crime, I got married. I'm the guy that, again, I go overboard in a relationship. So it was, I'll do all the work. I'll do all the cooking. I'll do all the cleaning. You just worry about going to school. So I'm a bit of a control freak too. And I couldn't do it all. What gave was the job. I go right back into fraud and start scamming people

on eBay. And my first eBay scam was they had a show on Inside Edition talking about beanie babies. I was watching that. They were profiling peanut, the royal blue elephant, and I figured, hey, what can I do? So I ended up dying. I bought a grave Beanie Baby elephant bought some blue dye when I'm trying to dye the little guy Got him out of the bath looked like he had the mange, but I ripped a lady off of $1,500 Posted a picture of a real one. She thought I had the real thing. She wins a bid and I scammed her out of $1,500 and that's my first This was 90 Probably 96 97 at this point

So scammed her out of that and that's the that's when I start to be involved in cyber crime I got away with that and that's the first lesson that I learned is hey you delay a victim keep putting them off They go away and they don't report anything to law enforcement So that's the first lesson I learned there kept going and got better at it, got where I was selling pirate software and installing mod chips into first gaming systems, then into cable television boxes so you'd watch all the pay-per-view. And then finally programming satellite DSS cards, those 18-inch-A satellite systems, you can pull the card out of it,

program it, turn on all the channels, started doing that. A Canadian judge ruled that Canadian citizens could pirate those signals legally. So I started selling all those cards to Canada, making a lot of money, didn't have enough money to fill all the orders. I mean, didn't have enough money to fill all the orders. I mean, didn't

have enough cards to fill all the orders. And quickly thought to myself, well, I feel any of them, they're not going to complain to anyone. So I stole even more money. I got worried about how much was coming in, figured the best thing that I could do was get a fake driver's license, use that to open up a bank account, laundry the money through the account, cash out at the ATM. What's the money we're talking about here? I was at that point, I was stealing around $4,000 a week. So $16,000 a month in 97, 96, 97.

So not bad money back then. And no upfront cost really at all. So I started looking around, thought I found a guy to make me a fake driver's license, sent him $200 in my picture and the dude rips me off. And I got mad. I got really mad about that. Did you notice at this point the fact that you've been ripped off by somebody on the internet for pretending to give you something to use? Was there any point at which you thought, Was there any point at which you thought, wow, I'm doing this.

What I thought, and this is, I think this is one of the big differences between criminals and legitimate people. I got mad about it, but I also took it as the cost of doing business online. Sometimes you're going to lose money to scammers, but if you keep just that endeavor to persevere, you just keep on going.

At the end of the day, you're going to be all right. So I kept on going, and the result was, I ended up building and running two different websites. The first one was Counterfeit Library, Counterfeit Library transitioned over to Shadow Crew over a few years. There are three sites in general. There are Counterfeit Library, Shadow Crew, and then Carter Planet. I built and ran both Counterfeit Library and Shadow Crew, Dimitri Goldobov, Ukrainian National, Builds Carter Planet, which is the genesis of all modern credit cardceptors. We know it. So before those three sites come into play, specifically,

a counterfeit library and shadow crew, the only avenue you had to commit online crime was an IRC chat session. This internet relay chat rolling chat board, you had no idea who you were talking to, if you could trust the individual, if they knew what they were talking about, if they had a product or service, if they had it, if it worked or if they were just gonna rip you off because everyone there was a crook. So shadow crew specifically solved that problem. It gave a trust mechanism that criminals could use.

I built that. So you had a large communication channel where individuals from different time zones could reference conversations, days months old, they could take part, they could learn from those conversations engage in those conversations. You knew you could look at someone's screen name and you knew the skill level of that person. If you could trust that person, learn from them or work with them. We had vouching systems in place, escrow systems in place, review systems in place, all with that singular purpose of establishing trust with one criminal and another when they didn't know each other's name or what they looked like and they would never meet each other. Shadow Crew goes on and Shadow Crew, so that's the trust mechanism, but Shadow Crew was basically this communication channel and this marketplace and eBay of criminal activity.

Shadow Crew makes the front-code reforms, I can mention in August of 04, a few months later, the Secret Service arrest, 33 across six countries and six hours. That is one hell of an operation for them to coordinate that. It is. So what happens is, is my forum techie, his name is Albert Gonzalez, we hired him to take care of the software on the forum. And he was doing his job, but he was also selling stolen credit card details. And he was engaged in what was called the CBB1 hack.

So the back of your credit or debit card, there are three data tracks there. The first data track is a customer's name, second data track is the card number, forward slash, 16 digit algorithm out side of that. The third data track is called indiscriminate data. No one uses it. What's bought and sold is the second data track. Now we were doing a lot of fishing at that point in time. We were getting the card numbers and the pins, but for you to encode that on a counterfeit card and take it to an ATM and cash it out, you've got to have that complete track to data. That algorithm, you can't guess that.

You can't generate it. You have to know it. Well, back then, we found out, well, the Ukrainians found out through testing that none of the banks had implemented the hash for track two. So what that meant was, is you could take the card number, put a forward slash, and any 16 digits out beside of it, it would encode. You could take it to an ATM, start withdrawing cash.

We started to doing that and making a lot of money. The profit on that, before we were doing that, we were doing what was called CMP fraud, just ordering items online, reselling them on eBay or Amazon, something like that. Well, we started doing the ATM cash outs. For CMP fraud, a good Carter would profit 30 to $40,000 a month. On the ATM cash outs, with that CVV1 hack, we started profiting 30 to $40,000 a day. And that started to get a lot of long-forçment attention. Well, my forum techie, Albert Gonzalez, he started to do this cashout at ATM's.

And the way he got caught, he's a New Jersey one day, broad daylight. He's wearing a wig, he's standing at an ATM for 40 minutes withdrawing cash. He puts one counterfeit card in after another starts pulling out 20 stuff in him in a backpack behind him. Meanwhile, just so happens across the street, two new Jersey cops sitting there watching the guy after 40 minutes. One of them looks at the other and says, let me go see what he's doing. me go see what he's doing and they walk up on the guy and Albert just falls apart. He's wearing a wig, everything else is big disguise. He falls apart. He goes to work for the Secret

Service. Well, no one told us he had been arrested. And that was the downfall of shadow crew. He goes to work for the Secret Service. They didn't know what was going on really. And they asked him, how can we catch these guys? And Albert's like, well, have you tried a VPN? And they're like, what's that? Albert's like, well, have you tried a VPN? And they're like, what's that? Albert explains it to him. They set up a VPN, have all the traffic go through that. And that's how Shadow Creek gets busted.

How will you take in cash out of an ATM to make it usable for anything larger than shopping and buying TVs and stuff? That is a lot of money laundering. So what we were doing, what I did, I didn't do the CB one cash out. At that point in time, I was doing tax return identity theft. So I would get a list of dead individuals

and follow tax returns in their name, and I would profit about $160,000 a week, 10 months out of the year. So what you do is, is you get you, I got to the point I could file a tax return or fraudulent tax return once every six minutes. I did that three to four days a week. On the off day, I would plot a map of ATMs,

then I would travel to those ATMs the next two days, cash out, put $150,000 in a backpack, come back home to Charleston, South Carolina, take my backpack, throw it in the spare bedroom. Then one day you wake up and you notice you've got a spare bedroom full of backpacks and you're like, well, shit, I've got to do something with all that money. So then it's about learning how do you launder money? And you have to have a lot of cash-based businesses, so think auto detail,

think food trucks. This is the story of breaking bad again, right? businesses, so think auto detail, think food trucks. This is the story of breaking bad again, right? This is the story of breaking bad again. This was 2000, by this point of time, it's 2002, beginning in 2002, is when this was. So, think of that. And I had bank accounts in Canada, in the United States, in Mexico, in the Caymans, throughout Europe, and then finally bounced things enough that it ended up at Bank Latico in Estonia. And the idea was is if you bounce it long enough, hopefully you can make it look legal and obscure it so no one finds it at the end of the day.

So I was arrested February 8th of 2005. My last seizure notice was January of 2010, is when they ended up getting the last seizure from me. When they finally ended up completing the trail that had been left behind you. Right. There's still some funds over in, with Tiko, that hell no one knows the name of their under, neither do I anymore. I was going to say, there must be cash that's out there that's just sat, not doing anything. Yeah, but over the years, you know, it gets lost

and everything else. That's crazy. So it seems like you were incredibly motivated to do these crimes. What motivates you to go and do this? Cause $160,000 five days a week, you can't spend that amount of money. No, you're talking professional athlete money there.

Professional athlete money in 2020, not in 2004. So what motivates you to keep on going? Was it just a game? Well, I mean, you start out with me, the initial motivation was that love thing. How do you give gifts and crap to people that you love? Is the initial motivation? But over time, what you see in those cybercrime environments

is if you can do something that no one else can do. If you can build ransomware and deploy it, if you can build bots to deploy those, whatever you build skimmers, whatever that is. If you can do something that no one else can do, you gain the respect of every single person in that environment. You reach a God-type status where everyone comes to you, everyone asks you questions.

You make and break people and you're with Shadow Crew and with the Counterfeit Library. I ran both of those. I was the head of both of those. If someone wanted to do business, they had to go through me. At one point, I was a part of every single transaction that took part on those websites. Everything went through me. So you've got ego that plays a huge, huge role in that.

That respect and status and people fawning over you and things like that. It gets to the point where, yeah, money's not really the way you're doing it. You've got money. You're doing it for the status and the ego drive is what you're doing. Are you familiar with Wall Street bets on Reddit? I am. Okay, so I've been following them for four years plus right way, way, way before the madness of AMC and game stop and stuff last year.

And I remember watching that and I think the thing that's so fascinating about that subreddit is people are prepared to risk real world fiat money that has taken weeks and years to accumulate, and they are prepared to risk it all on live stream for internet points from strangers that they're never ever going to meet. Absolutely, absolutely. That seems like a similar dynamic.

It is, you know, with Reddit and Wall Street bets or some of the crypto subreddits, it's really interesting the type of echo chambers that are built within those types of environments. You know, we as human beings, we seek out people that agree with us and, you know, continually kind of pump up our egos. And once we find those environments, we don't want to hear anything that might conflict

with that. So we stay in those areas. That's a problem with fake news. In the United States, that's a problem with the left wing and the right wing. So, and it's really kind of, you know, it's, it's Reddit is one of these environments where you can really see that crystal clear. And it's no different in cybercrime environments. So you find that echo chamber where you're told that you are this professional, that you're

the head of everything that you are this basic God in the environment, and you tend to stay there. You don't want to leave that because you leave that environment and you're just a normal everyday person that no one pays attention to. So that helps feed into those crimes, absolutely. What's the relationship when it comes to cybercrime between ability on the internet, coding, understanding of programming, and social manipulation, and real world exploits like that? Because

as far as I'm away, you were okay on the internet, but quite good in the real world. But when you hear cybercrime, you think about some guy with a 200 IQ programming all day. I would say, you know, you're right, there's this perception that cybercriminals are computer geniuses, that they're code savvy, everything else. I would say that there are very few attackers like that. There are some, maybe 1 to 2%, but the

98 and 99%, there are social engineers, or they know how to manage people very well. Cybercrime, when I was a cyber criminal, I'm not a coder by any stretch of the imagination. I break down cybercrime into three necessities. I break it down into gathering data, committing a crime, and then cashing out. When I talk about gathering data, I talk about, that's the PII, the credentials, it's the tools that are needed, things like that, then you gather that stuff, go out and commit the crime, and then finally put cashing pocket. The gathering the data aspect, I was never really great at. I am very good about knowing about what to do with that data

and then laundering the money out from there. I'm exceptional with that. And I'm an exceptional person manager as well, or manipulator if you want to call it that. The thing about cybercrime is you don't have to know how to code. You don't have to know how to build a tool or still data or anything else. You've got a group or a set that does that for you and they do it very well.

We've set time and time again that criminals are very good about using legal off-the-shelf products and services and using those for criminal activities. Well, like VM, pardon me? What like? VM box, the Tor browser. You've got some of these privacy browsers that are out now. So they're very good about using those things and repurposing them for criminal uses. And that's typically what happens. Why would you why go out and build it when you've got a group of people that are funded with millions of dollars that have done that for you, you can just repurpose it for your activity. And that's what happens more often than not. You take

Cali Linux or whatever the new testing software is. Criminals use that all the time. The software that's, I forgot what it's used for. I forgot what the thing is, that's the credential stuff in. But again, a legal tool that's been used or repurposed for criminal activity. Stealing data, what you see about most cybercrime is without social engineering, most cybercrimes fail. There's a reason that ransomware companies, ransomware attackers, any more, they offer that as a service. They build the ransom ransomware then instead of worrying about deploying it They find somebody that can deploy it and then they take a cut of the profit because The deployment is the difficult part the building it's not bad

But you have to be able to trick someone into getting it on their system that takes a social engineer to do that What do you mean when you say deploy? Get it installed So I'm gonna to, if it means plugging in a thumb drive, it means you visiting a site, if it means getting you to click on a link, giving me remote access to something, whatever that is, that's what I'm talking about. You know, there are, so social engineering plays a part, the other thing that plays a part, because again, media is very good and then all the security

companies are very good about trying to paint cyber criminals as hackers. That's not really the case. The case is social engineering. The case is also an environment where a tax, 90% of every single attack uses a known exploit. It's not zero-day attacks, it's not unknown vulnerabilities. It's stuff that typically has been talked about for years that no one's done anything about that creates that threat landscape that attackers all the time, ping. For example, you take something like Equifax. Equifax, the breach happened after Apache announced that there was an update for a vulnerability. No one knew about the vulnerability until Apache announced it, but criminals really understood that, hey, there are probably a whole lot of companies are probably going to lay off on

and stalling the update. They're not going to do it immediately. So that understanding created the Equifax problem all of a sudden. And that tends to be the way it is across the board. What do you know about what happened with the solar winds? problem I know that solar winds let me let me get a drink here because it takes a minute Solar winds I've got I've got the class action. I'll see if it's been filed against them. I've spoken to the whistleblower as well

Solar winds is will be the largest breach in history when all everything's said and done. It was a supply chain attack, the way they got in, there were some sophisticated techniques that were used, but entry to that falls right in within what I was saying about that 90%. These known exploits, the password, for example, was widely available online. The password was solar winds one, two, three. They had had audits by security professionals saying,

hey, you've got these issues. Those people were either dismissed or not listened to. They were warned over and over again that they had security vulnerabilities. They were never addressed because they were more interested in selling product than securing their system. So what happened was, I think, was Fancy bear that got access to the solar winds backbone. You had them, they got access to it and they were able to get snapshots of basically every single email of every client that solar winds had, which was basically the entire Fortune 500, several US government agencies read every single email they got to them, got IP, got

everything else that they needed and the damage that was done from that will last for years absolutely for years. It feels to me like the serious damage that was done that that feels like a more technology heavy attack than what you were talking about earlier on. It seems like it is. It is. The ransomware, the code, the ability to shut that down and remain anonymous, also assisted by being in Russia. So, and you've got, so you've got that, and that's a nation state attack. All right, so that's, that I think it was, you think that it was mandated or at least allowed by the state.

I think it was allowed, absolutely, along with not pedia. We know not pedia is a nation state attack, So you take both, not Petia was where the Russian sandworm group, they take over the, basically the quick books of the Ukraine by faking a Microsoft certificate, they take over its update server, then they put out an update, except it wasn't an update. It was a program that looked like it was ransomware, but it wasn't ransomware. It was a program that was designed to destroy hard drives. And it uses a variety of known exploits. It uses mimecats to harvest credentials out of RAM.

It uses eternal blue and eternal romance, which were NSA vulnerabilities that were patched a year prior. It looks for outward facing SMBs, which have been talked about for years and how people needed to turn off those ports. No one had and it causes $50 billion worth of damage. So between that and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and any of these other cybercrime environments that go out at all. But even though it's sophisticated, and it is, it still uses a variety of known exploits to gain that control or that access to that environment.

Who in the, if you were to take all of the countries in the world when it comes to cybercrime, what would you rank the leaderboard as in terms of effectiveness and who would be committing the most? Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, you've got the Ukraine, you've got Brazil, then it goes down from there, you've got the United States. USA, not be up there, you think that those countries are doing I don't think that so I think honestly I think that the US doesn't have the testicular fortitude to do what Russia or China or North Korea does. I mean, we certainly don't assign blame to those countries when we're attacked by them.

And I don't think that we would do the the same types of things. That is a really good point. The fact that it almost feels like this is the price that you pay for having that country on this planet. Right, right. So, and think about it. I mean, so, so who was the guy, John McCain? John McCain referred to Russia at one point as a gas station over in Asia.

You're a Asian. But that's what he said. And if you think about it, you're seeing the conflict with Ukraine now, you're hearing these tales about Russian planes having GPS taped to the console because it doesn't work in the plane itself. You're hearing all these stories and you're like,

you know, it's pretty screwed up over there and we've yet to really assign blame for any of these attacks that have went on. We let not Petia go, we let SolarWinds go, we did raise some hell about the colonial pipeline ransomware attack, we raised some hell about that, but still we don't really like to assign blame and we really don't like to enact any Consequences which might cause more trouble and because of that, I think that gives kind of a you know a Free pass to these countries that seek to attack us. You know, we're not we don't worry about North Korea Reach it out and still in Bitcoin. We don't really do anything about China, still in all the intellectual property and these things that they do.

We just kind of let it happen. And I think there's something wrong with that. Was there anything unique about the colonial pipeline hack? No, except, no, an exploit. I mean, they got the password for the VPN off of pastebin or something like that. But that's Not really. It is strange to think about the fact that when those hacks do come from those countries, it does seem a little bit just like that's what we expect from them. That's the way that their

culture calls these people who have access to the internet to do it. I was listening to calls these people who have access to the internet to do it. I was listening to the Lazarus Heist, which is a podcast series, and in it, they're explaining about how these super, super smart kids from North Korea that go and do maths competitions over in Asia are basically locked in houses, working as computer hackers. They're the only people that have got access to the internet, the proper full internet, and a number of defectors, these young guys, mostly guys, some girls

that go and do these maths competitions, they've lost, I think maybe three or four of their best and brightest, who when they get released into China, and they've got handlers and they're supposed to go from place to place, and they've managed to evade somebody at some point and finally escape the clutches of North Korea. But yeah, make no mistake about it, despite the fact that it is basically a third world country

run by a dictator. Right. They are still incredibly sophisticated. They're just sophisticated in a very bureaucratic, totalitarian way. Very. You know, when I was, when I was a criminal, I'm the guy who brought Ukrainians kind of made that connection between Ukrainians and the United States as far as cybercrime goes. Those Ukrainians at that point in time, just at that point, they really had no other way to make a living to provide or get money in other than committing crime.

They all wanted jobs and they just couldn't get them. As a matter of one of the ways that, so there's a gentleman at former FBI guy, Ed Hiddleston I think is his name, something like that. There's a wired article about it. But what he does is he captures, they arrest one of these Ukrainian cybercrux. And this cybercrux tells him, hey, we just want to work. So they ended up advertising for employment on monster.com and all these other employment websites.

And you had these Ukrainian cybercriminals that would just apply hoping to get a job. So they just wanted to work. They weren't really about breaking the law. They just needed money. That's changed these days. These days, you see these Ukrainians or these Russians that their entire focus is, how can I become a cyber criminal?

Because of the money that can be stolen, because we're allowed to do it as long as we don't do it in our own country. Let's do this to make money, to have a career. I suppose, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If your domestic country isn't going to prosecute criminals that are acting against other foreign nation states, the US isn't going into Russia to try and take one of its citizens and bring it away. Yeah, that's very interesting.

What's your thoughts on the Julian Assange debacle, the entire arc of that? So I had the, I had the, the, the, the, I was able to meet Julian Assange, I virtually, during a conference that this has been probably five or six years ago. He was at the Ecuador Embassy at that point in time. And my initial reaction to that gentleman is he is extremely brilliant. He truly is. I mean, just hearing him talk and being able to engage with him, I've never really met

anyone that is as bright as he is. I think that at some point, Mr. Assange started out as a journalist, but I think he was so adamant about exposing the United States and some of these other countries that he stopped being a journalist and started to engage in that activity of getting the information. And that's why he's not that in the United States. So he was working with Bradley Manning and he advised Bradley Manning about how to get the information

and what to do to get the information. At that point, you stopped being a journalist and you become a criminal at that point. I think it's unfortunate. I think that Assange's heart initially was in the right place, but it got skewed somewhere along the way. I got to be honest with you, these days I'm the guy who if you've broken the law, you need to have your day in court.

If that didn't happen, you'll be able to show that and hopefully not be convicted. But if you did that, you know what, you need to have your day in court and figure out what's went on. I have a lot more respect for Bradley or Chelsea Manning than I do for Edward Snowden. And Snowden, because Manning, Manning believed in what she did so much that she stuck around and faced the charges. She didn't run for it. Snowden did not. Snowden stole the data, then he immediately ran to Russia where he could not face prosecution. Manning stuck around and faced the music. And because of that, I don't agree with what either one of them did, but because of that,

I have a lot more respect for manning than I ever will for Edward Snowden. That's interesting. It's somebody that used to be on the run a lot. respect for Manning than I ever will for Edward Snowden. That's interesting as somebody that used to be on the run a lot. I know, right? I kind of have the critical, but that's still what I believe. Was the CVV exploit, was that the most profitable thing that you run?

The most profitable for me was the tax return set. I never engaged in the CVV once. That's what I meant. But the most profitable for me was the tax return stuff. I never engaged in the CVV one. That's what I meant. But the most profitable for me was the tax return identity before the group at large, it was a CVV one stuff because we were, I mean, we had tons of information. You were getting hundreds of thousands of debit card numbers and the pins and then just to put that on a white plastic card and take it out to an ATM and start withdrawing cash was very easy. And the profit went, I think, 60, at that point, 60% of it went to the Ukrainians that were

supplying the data, the cashiers and the money mules in the United States got to keep 40% of it and everyone was stealing as much money as they possibly could. Where were they getting the original data from, the Ukrainians? From fishing, fishing attacks. Right. Okay. So they were kind of doing the brute force legwork of acquiring the information. And then you're not...

Yeah, so you got to figure these days people know what a fishing attack is. Back then, they didn't. So you could send out an email that looked like it came from a bank saying, hey, we need you to research your security But you need to answer these questions and you could ask them 30 different questions And they would fill out every single field they would you tell the driver's license the date of birth the mother's maiden name The social security number all the account passwords They would give you every single detail that you wanted at that point and not question it

so we were able to get all that information and it was very profitable and very easy to do at that point. Nowadays, when you're fishing, you're basically just looking for credentials. That's what you're looking for. What's that mean? I just the log in and password. Okay. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. You can you can't get by anymore with asking every single detail of someone's identity. You have to ask very specific things like the social security number, the log-incredential, something like that. How much violence was there in this? Back then, no violence.

We started to see violence as shadow crew was coming to an end. Demetri, he went by the screen name of script, he's the guy that started Carter Planet, that genesis of credit card theft So what happens is as shadow crew was coming to an end Dimitri comes in and starts to post pictures of an individual that he had kidnapped and had tortured Then this individual had owed him money or stolen money from him or something like that and Dimitri said Hey, this is what happens when you steal money from me That was the first instance of violence that we saw in those criminal communities at that point.

Up until that point, we were just people who stole money and scammed people. What happens, though, is that's the first instance of violence, but we started to see the profit potential of allowing drugs in those environments as well. For years, we had banned drugs, and we started to first allow marijuana, then we allowed ecstasy, and then finally, we started to deal in opiates as well. That brings an entirely different clientele into that environment. So you start to see gangs start to be involved. You start to see people that if they're caught, they're going to do 20 or 30 years in prison because of the dollar amount, because of the drugs that are involved. And

when you're looking at that much time, you are more likely to commit violence against an individual so that you're not arrested. So it's so today's environment, to quote Monty Python, violence is inherent in the system. It's part of it. What happened where you were somehow stealing money from the secret service while working for them? So I was arrested February 8th, 2005, three weeks before I was supposed to get married. And they let me sit a week in the county jail. Two agents flying from New Jersey, they pulled me out of the cell, and they tell me they've got my laptop.

I'm like, yeah, and they're like, you got anything on your laptop. I'm like, yeah, and they're like, you're going to be charged for it. I'm like, yeah, I figured. So then the next question out of their mouths is, can you do anything for us? And my exact words were, you let me get back with my fiance and I'll do whatever you want me to. Well, again, I'm the guy, my motivation is to I buy love. So that's my main motivation. Nothing else, just that. So they let me out. The only thing I've got left is that fiance. I don't want to lose her. So the day I get out, I go back into committing crime. That same night, they moved me up from Charleston, South Carolina to Columbia, South Carolina. And I'm working

in office anywhere from in the Secret Service offices, anywhere from four to six hours a day, six days a week. They've got me hooked up to a laptop connected to a plasma monitor on the wall, outside internet line beside of me, they've got a desktop system, outside line as well. Two secret service agencies, agents in the room at all times, a South Carolina law enforcement officer in the agent in the room at the same time. And that's I was supposed to be monitored. My computer had a Camtasia on it and it had spectroprosal. They could record the keystrokes and then take screenshots of the screen every

night, every few seconds. So the first two weeks, they're very diligent. They're asking questions, everything else, then after two weeks, they start to get bored. What are they getting you to do here? What are you actually doing for them? My job is to surf the web, find targets, and start investigations. So, for example, there's a Netflix show called Web of Make Believe, which is about Daniel Rigmaiden. He's a guy I taught while I was working for the Secret Service. I taught him how to do tax return identity theft, and then I set him up to get arrested. So that was my job, is to find targets so that we can arrest, build cases against them, put them in prison. Daniel Rigmaidem was one of these individuals.

So that's what I did 46 hours and I was very fast about doing that. I would have multiple screens open up, bounce around between the screens, everything else. Two weeks of watching that, they get bored and they start to watch porn on the side. Well, I'm sitting there watching them like, well, shit, no one's watching me and at the same time, all the data that they're recording every night on my laptop goes on a DVD on a spindle. They don't catalog it or anything and I'm sitting there going, shit, no one's going to look at that.

So I start breaking the law from inside secret service offices. And I do that for the next 10 months until they find out about it. What you do in terms of breaking the law and then what happens, how do they find out? I'm buying stolen credit card details. I'm getting the information to commit tax return identity theft. Anything that I need to try to make money is one of, or still money is what I'm doing. The way they find out about it, a contact of mine, his name is Sean Mims out of Los Angeles. I told him out of due tax return fraud. They were set to arrest him.

I think it was like March 17th. The operation was called Operation Rolling Stone. They were set to arrest nine individuals across the United States. They go to arrest Sean. They pick him up and it is apartment. His apartment manager comes out and says, Hey, don't know what went on. But last night this guy had a you haul truck and loaded it up full of stuff and bugged out.

There was no evidence in Sean's apartment whatsoever of anything that he had been doing. So they come back to me and they're like, hey, we need you to take a polygraph to make sure you didn't tell this guy anything. I, I filled the polygraph. They revoke the bond. I go back to the county jail. I was only under state charges. I hadn't been federally indicted at that point. So the judge, a week later, the judge lets me out because they revoke the bond improperly. And I'm of the opinion, hey, if you're going to fuck me, you're going to have to find me. So I take off on a cross country crime spree with the idea that I'm going to bug out to Brazil.

And I end up stealing $600,000 in about four months. And that's where I make the United States most wanted list at that point. What's it like going to jail? It's an experience. It's I've referred to it in a few different ways. One of the ways I've referred to it in the past is it's a lot like kindergarten,

except there's some third and fourth graders with knives. So that's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is it's an extremely frightening environment. County Jail is probably the worst because you're mixed in with inmates who are only there for a couple of days and then you're mixed in with inmates who are going to never get out. So the violence is through the roof in county jails, but a county jail educates you on how you need to serve your time in a real prison. So you get to the real prison

and you find out pretty quickly that guards are just there to do their job, who runs the prison is the inmate and you're met at the door by whatever race you are. So I'm a white guy. I was met at the door by the treasurer of the area and brotherhood. Did you have a skinhead as well then?

You did. There were skinheads there. Absolutely. Did you have your current? Oh, no, no, no. This is just because I'm folically challenged. No, back then, I had the main, but I was losing it. I was going to say if you turned up, if you turned up looking like that, they would have thought that

they'd seen another one of the brothers already. I know, right? So Nick Sandefur was that guy's name. I, he meets me at the door and he was like, how many more white guys come in? I'm like, hell, I don't know four or five. His next question was, is what are you in here for? And idiot that I'm in, that I am, I looked at him, I'm like, hell, I don't know four or five. His next question was, is what are you in here for? And idiot that I am, that I am, I looked at him, I'm like, computer crime. Well, it turns out that you can't say computer crime. Back then, that didn't mean credit card theft

and skimming and everything else. When you said computer crime then, it meant child pornography. So he goes and gets all of his shot colors. They gather around and they're like, what the hell did you say you're in here for? So I'm trying to explain it to him. What saves me is unless they know for sure

that you're a pedophile, they won't attack you. So no one had told them that I was, they were waiting on the guards to confirm that. What took within that first month, wired magazine hits the compound. I'm in it. And it's talking about the hacking, the financial cybercrime, everything else. And I'm like, hell, I'm saved. And then it's got one line in there that says Brett Johnson, secret service informant. And I'm like, oh, shit. So he's shut down the compound and Warden calls me and he's like, did you give an interview to Wired?

I'm like, yeah, and he's like, don't you know they'll kill you here? And then he asks me, he's like, do you feel safe? Well, I just got through doing eight months of solitary confinement because of the escape. And if you tell him you're not safe, they put you back into solitary for another eight months until they transfer you. So I'm like, oh, yeah, completely safe. So they try to, they do a locker search, try to get the magazines out.

They can't. He tells me that if anyone says anything to come back to him. So I go back to the bunk the next day I walk into the unit. There's the treasurer of the brotherhood. He's got the magazine on his bunk reading it. I'm like, oh, shit. So I walked up to him. I'm like, hey, Nick, what you doing? He's like, oh, doing some reading. Anything interesting? It's getting there. I was like, well, let me save you the trouble. Point at the line to him. And he's like, man, I already knew. And I was like, are

we going to have any issues? He was, and he asked me, he's like, did you snitch on anybody that's here right now? And I'm like, no, he said until someone gets here you told on, we don't have a problem. But we need you to do something for us. So the something was, in federal prison, everyone works. Doesn't matter what job you get, you gotta get a job. So my job was in education, teaching a literature class.

And I taught it every Wednesday,-8 30 p.m. All the areas signed up for the lit class few the guards used to attend to and what I taught was not literature What I taught every Wednesday 6-8 30 was fraud help me help you whatever you guys need to know I got you so because I did that I was not beaten and The other thing I did was as, somebody called me on my YouTube channel. They said, you were the liaison between the pedophiles and the areas. And that was my job. You'd see a bunch of white guys come off of bus.

The ones that looked like they were pedophiles, you'd walk up to them. And my job was, hey, I don't know what you're in here for. I don't care what you're in here for. But if you're in here for something fucked up, you need to tell me because if you mess with those guys, they're going to kill you. And usually if they were a pedophile, they'd just look at you and say, Hey, man, I just want to do my time. And you would go back, I'd go back and tell the area and say, that guy don't want to mess with him. And they would leave him alone, except for maybe extorting him

But he was not allowed to like work on the he could not lift weights. He could not watch television I thought I thought that Peter Files would be KOS. I thought that they would be kill on site So what happened the reason and and a lot of the times they are beaten before I got there At big spring so who ran that compound was a Mexican Mexican gang called the Paisas. All right. The Arians had a population there, but they didn't control the compound. They were so tired of the pedophiles that were being sent to Big Spring. The population of pedophiles was about 20% that they paid the Paisas to attack the pedophiles. And they had this bright idea.

They thought that by beating up all the pedophiles, that the pedophiles would be transferred out of big spring. That didn't happen. What happened was is the pauses beat up all the pedophiles and who got transferred out were the areas. So the areas had a very small population when I got there. And because of that, they were very scared to beat up any pedophiles. So the thing was is, we'll extort them. We will not let them watch television.

We won't talk to them. They're only allowed to talk to their type. And that was the way the environment was at big spring because they had tried to attack and kill them previously and had failed miserably at that point. What happens if one of the, one of those inmates tells you a lie? Depends on who's telling you the lie. Um, you know, if it's a pedophile telling you the lie, and I, I just spoke about this on a show that I recorded this morning.

We had an inmate, his name was Wesley Evans, and he came in, he was a pedophile, but he came in and I had this talk with him and he told me, he's like, no, I'm not a pedophile. I'm in here for selling marijuana on eBay. And I was like, how much time did you get? And he's like, I got 18 years for selling pot on eBay. And I've sit there looking like, really?

And he's like, yeah, really? So that was a lie that he told, and all the inmates knew it was a lie because you had people that were serving time for selling dope on eBay and they didn't get anything like that. So everyone didn't believe him. What happens is, is because it wasn't confirmed, they didn't beat the guy yet. wasn't confirmed, they didn't beat the guy yet. Ultimately, they catch the guy gone from his bunk. They break into his locker, get his appeal paper workout, and then find out he's a pedophile at that point. And then they planned on literally killing him. But word got to him beforehand, and he was able to check himself in before he got attacked. What does check himself in mean? He goes up to the warden's officer up to a counselor or a garden he says,

hey, I'm in fear for my life. They sent him to solitary confinement for eight months until they transfer him out. That's a heavy price to pay. That's a choice between two pretty terrible options. It's a heavy price to pay, but at least you've got your life at the end of the day. heavy price to pay, but at least you've got your life at the end of the day. When you were talking about the escape, is that the release from the improper bond being taken away? No, I was, I was sent to prison, but there's nothing romantic about a doll. I escaped from a minimum security prison.

So a camp is where I escaped from. I went to prison, got a job working outside of the fence, and one day I just left. I escaped like that. I lasted about three weeks. US marshals, they camp us a three-state area. Finally, find me and hold up in a hotel and arrest me and send me back to prison. I spent eight months in solitary confinement, and they sent me from, I was in Kentucky at that point. They sent me from Kentucky out to Big Spring, Texas, where they know how to build prisons. Would it have been an easier prison journey?

Had you have just stayed in that minimum security thing? I'm going to guess you would have been, would you have just been held in that? Had you not have contravened the rules? I would have done my time there and served out at that camp, but I've got to tell you I was very fortunate that looking back because hindsight's 2020, time there and served out at that camp, but I've got to tell you I was very fortunate that looking back because hindsight's 2020, looking back, if I would have stayed in that camp environment, there's not a doubt in my mind that I would have gotten out and committed

and crime again, went right back into cybercrime and everything else. I was very fortunate that I escaped, got sent to a real prison, and then had the opportunity to think about my life and also to take this cognitive behavioral therapy course that was a nine-month course in prison that teaches you that your thoughts determine your feelings, feelings determine your actions. And that really changed my life along with the help of my sister, my wife, and then finally the FBI. How long will you in prison for then? Sentenced for seven, half years, I ended up doing right at seven.

Okay, and then you get out and what happens? Are you scared about the prospect of getting out and being back in the real world? Well, no, I'm like everyone else. I'm getting out, thinking everything is gonna be fine, but when you're released, you're released from prison with the exact same tools you go in with. And while you're hopeful of doing the right thing, you find out pretty quickly, you're not going to get a job. No one's going to hire you,

especially if you're the guy who steals everything. So could not get a job selling cars or anything else had job offers from Deloitte, from No before fishing, from a couple of payment processors. My probation stated that I could not touch a computer. So I couldn't take those jobs. I get to the point where I'm trying to apply for fast food positions. No, that cash register is a computer. Can't do it.

Then it's like, well, what about a waiter's position or something like that? Well, no, that's credit cards and a computer. No. So I couldn't get a job and got to the point where I was bumming money from my dad and my sister. I had a roommate that was taking care of half of the rent. I was on food stamps. So I had something to eat. And they tell you when you leave prison, Hey, get a job, get something you care about and you won't recidivate. Well, I couldn't get a job and what I had that I cared about. I had a cat.

And I had enough money to feed my cat and didn't have the money to buy toilet paper. So I went to the store, dollar store, bought the cat some food on the way out, they had a key Oscar out by the door, had some toilet paper there. And that's the first crime I committed when I got out. And again, I look back now and it was all very, very fortunate for me that I did that because I bet the same time my wife now, she ends up finding me. I ended up moving in with her. Finally, the only job I could get was manual labor, push and lawn mower and busted my ass

doing that and was thankful to have it. And the unfortunate thing is the job ended because when it gets cold, the grass doesn't grow and I go back into crime. What year is this? This was 20, I was released in 2011. This would have been 12, 2013, 2013 was when this was. Go back into crime. I get it in my head that, you know,

I've got a shower that I'm worth it. I got to do something and I figure, hey, if nothing else, I can bring food in the house. So I get some stolen credit card details, start ordering food, get arrested, go back to prison for 10 months. And at my sentencing for that, the only people at my sentencing was the US marshals, the judge, the probation officer, the prosecutor, me, and then Michelle was there. She stands up and she tells the judge that I'm a better dad to her kids and their father is. I'm sitting there crying.

Probation officer stands up and he's like, we think he's a good guy, we think it's a good one-time thing. Prosecutor says the same thing. Judge gives me a year probation officer stands back up and he's like your honor. If you can give Mr. Johnson a year in a day, he can get the good time and he can get back to his family quicker. And the judge of man's sentence. What's that mean? That means the judge has sent me to a year. I was going to serve 365 days. The probation officer stood up and said,

judge, if you'll give him one year and one day, he qualifies for the good time. So he gets two months off. So I get out, I served 10 months instead of 12. And that's when I find out for the first time in my life that someone wanted me not for what I could give them, but just for me. I'd had it with my sister, but I'd never had it

in a relationship before. That was one of the big changes for me right there. I served my time, get out, we get married shortly after I get out, they killed probation, so I could touch a computer, and I can't get a job because I'm the guy who steals everything. And I know, even, I know what my triggers are. Back then, I knew I'd go so far before I committed crime again. So I told my wife,

I was like, let me see what I can do. Signed up for LinkedIn, reached out to this FBI agent by the name of Keith Mularsky, cinema message. I was like, Hey, man, you did a great job on all these arrests, nothing but respect for you. By the way, I'd like to be legal. And the guy he responded within two hours, took me under his wing, gave me references advice, and that's where it starts. It starts with him. From there, the CMP group hires me to be a keynote speaker.

Microsoft hears about it, hires me to be a consultant. And today I've got the show behind me, I'm in talks to the television show. I'm on Netflix right now. Speak across the planet. I'm the first chief criminal officer in the world. I'm a spokesperson for AARP. I lead a truly blessed life that I probably don't deserve, but I'm grateful to have. And I say it on every show deserve but I'm grateful to have and

I've say it on every show But I mean it too. I work hard to protect businesses and consumers from the type of person that I used to be and I take that shit very seriously One of the triggers for you The triggers are that pressure of not being able to provide. It's not an ego trip anymore or anything else like that. I just want to be able that the people that are around me are taken care of and not having stress or worry or anxiety. I just want to be able to pay my bills and make sure that there's food on the table, that

the power is running and not cut off, you know, stuff like that. So during the pandemic, that was one of the big things. I, you know, you're not speaking during the pandemic, all those consulting gigs are going to end. So March, one of that began, I called the family in the kitchen, my two step sons and my wife and I was like, Hey, the way this story ends is with me back committing crime and imprison for 20 years. And because I voiced that I didn't just tell them, I told my FBI contacts, I told all the people that I worked with, and that was the first time in my life that I had ever voiced that concern before. And when I did that, everyone kind of rounded up and kind of took me in under their wing, they would call me

and check on me. The FBI about every two weeks, they'd call and say, Hey, Brad, how you doing? Let's have lunch. And it continued from there. And we got our mortgage delayed. We got all of our car payments delayed. I had $2,000,000 loans from the stimulus program that helped get us through and everything else. Credit went through the, I mean, credit bottomed out completely, but I didn't break the law and found out I was a lot stronger than I thought I was. Well, that's really beautiful to hear. I mean, the brutal thing is that it kind of highlights the vicious cycle that people who are potentially coming out of prison or people who are generally struggling to find work and maybe coming from deprived or like malign upbringing have in that the thing that

they need to be able to get themselves going is the exact thing that they can't find and the solution to getting the thing that they can't get is to do a thing which is going to further ingrain them into a lifestyle which pushes them more toward crime. You know, what I've seen time and time again, and I get a lot of people on my channel and responses to interviews talking about how criminals are sociopaths.

I do not believe that. I do not believe that most criminals are not sociopaths. They've just made very bad decisions. That have resulted in being convicted and serving time in prison. The people that I served time with, 99% of them just wanted to do their time and they were very hopeful that they would be able

to get out and lead a productive, healthy life. The problem is, is that, and I said it before, you're released from prison with the exact same tools you go in with. Unless you've got a support or a safety net outside of individuals that are willing to help you, that can help you. And unless you take the assistance that they're offering, the chances of you recidivating, I think it's almost a hundred percent. You're going to go back.

A number of people that do that right. You have to, people have to be willing to help you. You have to accept the help that they're offering. It takes that village. You can't do it yourself. You cannot do it yourself. You have to have people helping you. You've got to be, and the people that are out there, they have to be willing to help

you too. Do you think that there needs to be, it almost sounds like when you're talking about the fact that you've got your FBI guy that checks in in you every couple of weeks and that you can have this conversation with the family and the kitchen and stuff, I'm getting AA vibes from it almost. I'm getting 12 steps. It actually sounds like, well, I've got a kind of like a sponsor. I have somebody that I can call if the credit card fraud, Gremlin appears or whatever, like in the back of my mind. I'm wondering whether there needs to be a more formalized version of this, whether there needs to be a rehabilitation program for people who are

using crime as a method to help them get love or recognition or status or identity in the world, because it really does seem like you've cobbled together not through design, but simply by trial and error, a lot of error. Right. A format that works for you, where you have a structure, you have support, you understand the triggers, you're able to verbalize it, you've got external accountability, you've got external support, you've got internal frameworks

that you can rely on. That, I mean, that to me seems like something that potentially could be scaled out to help ex, criminals and people that are coming from a life of crime to perhaps try and integrate themselves more effectively. Actually, I think you're right. I do. I think that, and I put some thought in that, but how I wouldn't know how to go about doing

that. What I do is, if someone gets out of prison or someone needs help, like there was a gentleman on LinkedIn that I talk about on my show today that I'm releasing later today, but he reached out to me. He's a computer science kid, and he's got some problems. You know, he's thinking about because times are hard,

he's thinking about going into crime. And I gave the kid, I was like, hey, here's my phone number. Give me a call. We will talk about it. I'll listen to you. I'll give you advice whatsoever. Just keep your chin up. It's gonna be all right.

You know, and I agree if you could come up with a structure where you're able to do that like an AA type structure, I think it would be a great thing. I think it has to have that cognitive behavioral therapy aspect to it. Because there's a lot of cognitive dissonance in the world, but I think you have to have that. And you've got to be you've got to be that mentor. I really take it seriously. If I see somebody that I think that is really trying to turn things around, I'll sit down and I'll talk to them as much as they want to talk. I'll listen to everything else. And I'm adamant about telling them, hey, you're right now in this recovery mode.

And recovery is never a straight line. You're going to backslide at some point. You're going to, so understand that. And that doesn't mean you failed. That just means, hey, this happens. As long as you're moving forward at the end of the day, that's what matters. You're going to get there. You know, I think there's so much negativity in the world.

You know, we look at people who have made these mistakes, who have ended up in prison, and we judge them and we think they're never going to change, but we have to be willing to give them the opportunity to change. I think that's what matters. And I understand budgets, I understand our economy, and I understand we've got a whole shitload of people out there that have never broken the law,

and they deserve to have these opportunities too, but I will tell you this, that person who's broken the law, you're going to pay for them one way or the other. You're either going to help them rehabilitate and lead a healthy, productive life that helps people or you're going to pay for their incarceration time when they recidivate again. So where do you want to pay that bill? Is what I would say. And we have to start understanding that or things are just going to continue to spiral and get worse. It's strange at the moment, the relationship, I think the general public has with criminals in the criminal justice system generally. It still feels even though

really, it still feels even though it's anybody that's read anything about this topic knows that retributive justice is kind of pointless. You don't need to take the free world as an existing determinism red pill to get that. Simply just look at the stats at what you are achieving through that. And yet, I can completely see that if you were the subject of a home invasion or of a stolen car or of a whatever, there is a sense of righteous, venge, vengeance that kind of needs to be delivered. And this is the balance. I mean, I've said it before on the show, it reminds me slightly of the abortion debate that both sides of the fence have incredibly compelling arguments. Absolutely.

I listen to a Ben Shapiro talk about life conception at birth and such like, and I go, bloody hell, that seems pretty compelling. And then I hear someone who is pro-choice talking about dangers to women's health and the terrors of the foster care system and all this stuff and I go, well, and that there is no easy answer to the position I'm supposed to take with that and I get the same energy from the discussion around rehabilitation for criminals as well. Yeah, you know, and I agree with you completely

on the abortion thing. I mean, both sides have extremely compelling arguments and both sides have a skewed philosophy that they try to support as well. And I won't give my stance on that. I think it's just unfortunate that we can't reach some sort of common middle ground where both sides are somewhat upset,

but it's a satisfactory answer. Instead of going to the extreme ride or extreme left of that equation. Well, when you optimize for an absolute, you end up having very strange externalities. Kyle Newport told me about this to do with email. He said that he feels like almost all of the problems that we have with email would be fixed if every email cost one pence or one cent to deliver.

The issue is when you drive the proximate cost of anything down to zero or when you optimize for an absolute, you end up with these really bizarre externalities because there's always going to be some situations that this doesn't apply to. And whenever you hear conversations, you talk about the gun control, right? Whenever you hear any of these, it turns from a practical discussion into a philosophical debate where you use the reducto-o ad absurdum to try and take this to the most extreme version of whatever you can talk about. And then you go, well, I can't defend that position anymore. So and it breaks down. But I think generally the conversation now is people are using extreme views just like

its weapons, right? They're picking up whatever the most extreme point of view is. And it works as a show of loyalty to your side and a threat display to your opponent. That's what these positions for a lot of people are. It's like flying a flag of fealty. It's not to do with the specifics of the position. It's to do with the tribal signaling both to your compatriots and to your opponents.

And yeah, I mean, that's a... It's an unfortunate position. And again, when you add in the emotions that are brought out from somebody that's potentially been the victim of a crime of some kind, whether it be virtual or in real life, it's going to be difficult to get that person to see why they should be the ones that don't get the satisfaction of seeing whatever righteous vengeance they feel should be the ones that don't get the satisfaction of seeing whatever righteous vengeance they feel should be enacted. I agree. I agree. I love the way you detail that out. Truly.

It makes the police sense. Let's bring this one home, man. I appreciate the heck out of you. I'm not surprised that Discovery Channel and Netflix and people are picking you up. I think you're an amazing communicator. Your story is super compelling. Thank you. Sean Atwood, have you been spoken to by him? Do you know who he is? I have. I spoke to Sean's co-host or buddy that he ponds people off on and the show went really

well so the producer was like, we need you to talk to Sean. Yeah. He'll be great. There's him and there's another guy called James English who's a Scottish dude. So I'm gonna send I'm sure if Sean's already got you then I won't need to but James is a James the great guy And he absolutely adore stories like this man I really hope all the best for you in the future. I think that the story is super compelling I hope that the discovery series goes ahead well and I'm gonna be looking forward to watching your Netflix as well

If people want to get more of you check out out your show and all of that, where should they go? Sure. So my show is the Bret Johnson show on YouTube. Just search for it on YouTube. I'm going to pop up. I've got 35 episodes as of today. And we talk about cybercrime, cyber security, stuff I may want to bitch about. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. Just look for Bret Johnson or Google or anything else like that. I'm very easy to find. Let me end with this, Chris, and say that for people out there watching to protect yourselves, I need you to do three things. Freeze your credit.

Freeze your credit. Every single person in the house, it's free. Okay. So freeze the credit across all three bureaus, mantra accounts, place alerts on those accounts, and then finally use a password manager. Do those things and you're going to be okay. You won't be as victimized as 97% of the population that's out there. Right, I appreciate you. All right. Thanks again. Take care. you