Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He Got Caught AGAIN // The Maximilian Schmidt Story

Episode Date: May 16, 2026

Maximilian Schmidt is a German cybercriminal who, at age 18, single-handedly ran a multi-million-euro international drug empire named "Shiny Flakes" from his childhood bedroom. Over 14 months, he sold roughly one ton of illegal narcotics worldwide using his website and standard postal services.

So this German teenager, he's in big trouble. Now the kid's name is Maximilian, and Maximilian is 18 when this story starts, and he's living in Leipzig, Germany. His thing about Maximilian, he doesn't really have a lot of friends. He's not very social. In fact, most of the time,

he just chills in his room on his computer. But one day in 2013, he's online, and he comes across a site on the dark web called Silk Road. And we've talked about Silk Road before. It's a marketplace online. where people buy and sell illegal things. You know, like drugs and weapons and body parts and stuff like that. So Maximilian looks through this site and pretty quickly he realizes,

damn, the people who run this place must be making a ton of money. You know, profit margins must be insane. And he also notices something else. The site itself isn't all that impressive. And that is when he comes up with an insane idea. What if he creates his own version of the Silk Road? makes it better and sells illegal drugs on it, and, you know, charges more. He feels like he's going to get so rich off that.

So he gets to work on this plan. First, he starts looking for a supplier, someone who can actually provide the drugs in bulk. And he reaches out to a shady guy he knows. We'll just call him supplier. So Maximilian hits up supplier, and he's like, can you get me some drugs in bulk? I'm trying to start an online drug empire. And supplier's like, all right. Not too long after, supplier sends Maximilian a package of Coke and MDMA.

So now Maximilian has the products. Then he builds the site, and he calls it Shiny Flakes for some reason. And he's certain that Shiny Flakes is better than Silk Road. And he adds like a clean, easy to use design, he adds high quality photos of the drugs, he adds a rating system, he adds an FAQ's page for people new to the site. He makes it look almost like Amazon, just, you know, for illegal substances. And the crazy part is, while Silk Road is hidden on the dark web, Shiny Flakes is actually on the regular old internet.

So people can just straight up access it right from Google. Like if you were just to type Buy crack into your search engine, it would bring up Shiny Flakes. So anyway, he launches it and people find it and they start using Bitcoin to make the purchases. And Maximilian, he'll ship everything straight to them, as he does all the shipping himself from his bedroom, and he doesn't use some shady covert delivery guy. He just mails it all using the regular standard postal service. And, you know, the site's a little new at this time, so business is a bit slow. He's getting about one to two orders a day.

But as time goes on, he starts getting more. The numbers start climbing. He starts getting around five to ten orders a day. Then he starts getting more than that. And soon, his customers start requesting a variety of products. So Maximilian has to expand his catalog. He adds more types of drugs to it, like crack and LSD and hash. And he keeps going.

And he keeps selling more and more and more. And over time, his little site blows up. And he has a ton of customers, and a lot of these customers are happy with the service, and they recommend it to their friends. and more people join, and then they recommend it to their friends, so even more people join. And soon, Maximilian is getting 40 to 50 orders a day. And he's shipping his products worldwide, China, Australia, Indonesia, Colombia, my house. And as demand grows, so does the business.

So he's got to expand his catalog even more. Now, he's also selling prescription drugs without a prescription, like fentanyl and whatnot. And apparently Maximilian is very customer service focused. He likes making people happy. So he adds a little something extra to every order. A little package of gummy bears, you know, to spice things up. And as goofy as that sounds, it actually works. His customers love it.

Like I'm sure they all get high and just eat the gummy bears straight away. Regardless, they're into it. And they leave reviews on his site and those reviews pull in even more customers. And at this point, he's handling thousands of... of orders a day. And he sold about 4 million euros worth of narcotics. And as you can imagine, with all this business coming in, Max a million is making serious money. Allegedly, he's made about 3 million euros in profit during the course of a year. But here's what's interesting. He doesn't really spend any of this money. He doesn't do a flashy lifestyle kind of thing, no fancy cars,

no nice clothes. Unlike a lot of the drug dealers we talk about, this guy keeps a low profile. In general, he just looks like any other normal teenager that you'd see out on the street. In fact, he's such a normal teenager that while all of this is going on, he still lives at home with his mom. And she somehow has no idea that he has this successful business in his bedroom. Apparently, she never steps foot in his room. I guess she just likes to give him his privacy. But here's where things start getting a little bit complicated for Max a million. So it's now 2014 and his bedroom drug business is still going strong and one day he mails out a package, you know, like he always does, and I don't know if this package gets delivered to the wrong address

or if the intended receiver just wasn't at home at the time. Either way, a random woman receives the package, she opens it and she finds a bunch of drugs. And she starts freaking out and immediately she reports it to the local police. So police start looking into the this and they realize that this isn't an isolated case. Similar packages full of drugs delivered to the wrong address are showing up all across Germany. Of course, Maximilian isn't careless enough to put his own home return address on the packages. He uses a fake return address. So every time the police try to chase where these packages are being shipped from, the return addresses lead nowhere. But police do notice a pattern. A lot of these packages are being routed through the

dispatch mail center in Radafeld, about 20 minutes from where Maximilian lives. So police go and place some of the local mailing stations under surveillance. You know, to see if they notice any shady characters showing up to ship things. But Maximilian, he's careful. He mails things from a lot of different mailing locations, so this method isn't all that effective for the police. But then one day, they catch one of the packages and they track it to its recipient. They then investigate that person, and they notice he had been frequently visiting one very specific website, a website called Shiny Flakes. And so they try and figure out who runs this site.

And so they try contacting the hosting provider, but they don't get any information that they can actually use. So it looks like Maximilian might actually get away with running a whole ass drug empire. Until... Until 2015. Around this time, police. have been monitoring supplier, because remember, he's in the drug business too. And they surveil him and they spot him attempting to send some suspicious packages. And they track those packages. And that

trail leads them straight to Maximilian. So now police know exactly where Maximilian lives. And so, boom, they bust in and bam, they arrest him. And I don't have a mugshot, but here is a picture of him in in real life. And so he gets convicted and he gets sentenced to seven years. And about four and a half years later in 2019, he gets out. And of course, Maximilian can't help himself. He launches another drug website, this time called Candy Love, and he goes right back to online drug dealing. And in 23, bam, he gets arrested again and he gets found guilty again. And he got sentenced, but that sentence actually got overturned, so now he's waiting on his new sentence, but I'm sure he's going to be in prison for a while.