Reply All - #99 Black Hole, New Jersey

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

A mysterious thief has been using the internet to steal a bizarre array of items - watches, scooter parts, clown costumes. This week, Alex heads straight towards his hideout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, Reply, All listeners. Quick note before you start the show, we have something to ask of you. We are looking for your memories of the internet the way you first encountered it. The experience you had that changed your life or the weird stranger you met or the trouble you got in or just the things that shaped you that now feel like they've disappeared. A lot of you are going to know what I'm talking about. We are taking all kinds of stories. We want to hear them from you. If you have one, please send us an email at Replyall at gimletmedia.com. use the subject line 100. Keep it brief, just like a couple of paragraphs,

and we might give you a call to talk about it on the show. Thank you so much. Here's the episode. From Gimlet, this is Reply-Oll. I'm Alex Goldman. And I'm PJ Vote. And this week, PJ, Super Tech supports back. Hi, is this Brena?

Yeah. This is Alex Goldman. How you doing? Pretty good. How are you? Good. So recently I spoke to this girl named Brena. She's 16 years old. She lives in Pennsylvania. She works at a gas station.

and she had a pretty odd tech support issue. So a while back, she decided to save up to get an Apple Watch. Why did you want an Apple Watch? I don't know. I guess I just thought it was cool. And like it's better like when you're driving instead of having to like look at your phone for directions. You can just like look at your wrist. So, I mean, it must have been like six months that you had to save up for that thing.

Yeah, it was like a while. I worked at Subway making $7.25 an hour. So, I don't know, I guess you'd like do the math on that, but I mean, I worked a lot of hours. I actually did the math. It's about 55 hours. So anyway, she buys this Apple Watch, and she decides she's not too into it. And so she goes to sell it on this auction site called Poshmark. It's like one of those sites that's eBay, but it's not eBay.

Exactly. And someone bought the watch, which she was super excited about. And they asked her to ship it to this address in a town called Port Reading, New Jersey. 600 Markley Street Is that supposed to mean something to me? It's not, but it will. So I had my Apple Watch and someone bought it

so I did like what I would usually do shipped it right away because I like to ship as fast as possible. You don't actually get paid on Poshmark until the buyer receives the package so Brina wanted to ship it fast. And then a couple days after she shipped it, the person who bought it sent her an email that said

hey, my Poshmark account's been hacked. Some hacker ordered that Apple Watch. I don't even live at 600 Markley Street. And Brina was just like, oh, God. So she's freaking out a little bit. She gets in touch with the post office and does a thing that I didn't know you could do, which is you can pay $13 to have a package intercepted. Cool.

Basically what that means is they flag the thing. So when they, you know, swipe it with the barcode reader, it will say, this package should not go out, keep this at the post office or return it to the sender. And I called the USPS, like the post office

that it was going to, and they said it'd be intercepted, and then all of a sudden on my tracking it showed that it was delivered. God, you must be really pissed off. Yeah, $400 watch kind of. So this Apple Watch is long gone.

And Poshmark, the company that Brena sold it through, they tell her they're not going to refund the money. But she knew the address where the hacker had the watch sent. And so I started looking into 600 Markley Street. And the first thing that I noticed is that whoever's getting stuff sent there

is insanely brazen and prolific. What do you mean? Well, I Google the address, 600 Markly Street, and a lot of people complain about having their eBay or Etsy or Poshmark accounts being hacked and having their stuff sent to this address. And there's just no rhyme or reason to the stuff that's being sent there.

Like there were scooter parts, a Fitbit $545 in designer clothes someone on Twitter said that a bunch of clown costumes were bought that is so weird yeah it's a weird mix and Brina has a theory which is

she's convinced that this is not just one guy who's hacking people's accounts and keeping all the stuff but that this is some kind of organized crime like it's a hacking ring and that it even has a fake company serving as a front. And the reason that she thinks this is because 600 Margly Street isn't like a street address. It's not someone's house. It's a warehouse, and it's owned by a company called Meest.

M-E-E-E-E-S-T. Sounds like something Gallum would say. M-E-S-T. And M-E-S-T has a website, and if you look at it, it says that they ship to Eastern Europe, Middle Asia, and the Caucasus. Okay. But when you Google Meest, you find tons of people talking about how it's a scam, about how their accounts got hacked, about how stuff is disappearing to this address, and it has like a better business bureau rating of a D-minus. It does not have a good profile on Google. And Breena started talking to other people who were victims of these hacks and started hearing all kinds of crazy rumors.

People in mind were saying it's an abandoned warehouse. Someone comes and picks it up at the post office. they don't actually deliver it to the place. Like, she's saying the post office is pulling the packages aside and then getting kickbacks from this fake company to send the packages somewhere else. And she wanted to go investigate. I wanted to go check it out, but my parents wouldn't let me. I just want, like, this whole, like, the whole scam to stop.

That's what I was trying to do, but no one's really doing anything about it. So Breena's parents wouldn't let her go investigate this, but I'm a grown-up, and I have a car. In 800 feet, turn left onto Port Redding Avenue. So the first place that Brina wanted me to go was the Woodbridge Post Office, which is the post office where they were supposed to intercept her Apple Watch, just to see if they're somehow involved. Like if anything shady is going on, if they're taking bribes,

this is an idea that I was skeptical of, but I wanted to just go make sure. So I got there, and I just walked up to the counter, and I had my recorder rolling. And I said, hi. What's up? I'm a reporter, and I am working on a story about a bunch of packages that seem to be getting delivered to an address in the Port Redding area. Oh, I know what, I bet you it's 600 mark league. Yeah.

How about that? Did you get it right? Yeah, yes, you got it exactly right. Boy, I must be, I'm psychic. Do packages get delivered there all the time? Yeah. You get a lot, a large line. More than, total more than what we would get to all the time.

That specific address gets more ill than all of Oakbridge. Yeah. Oh, my God. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's all blue. Insane. That's great.

It's like the haunted house in the neighborhood. And so I said to the guy who was working the front desk. Are you dirty? I said, you know, someone told me they sent an intercept and the package went out anyway. And he said, what to my mind seemed like a pretty plausible. thing to say. Uh-huh. We deal with lots of packages.

People make mistakes. Yeah, that's what I assume it's the whole time. Yes, me too. But the interesting thing is that the post office, they're also suspicious of 600 Markley Street.

The inspectors do. They were down here checking it out. Somebody in there must be hacking the credit cards. The postal inspectors were down? Yeah. Do you know when that happened? Well, they've been going on and off

for a long time. So, I decided, to go check it out for myself. I drove to 600 Markley Street. I passed a bunch of strip malls through some suburbs, and then down this sort of like industrial park. And there were a bunch of different companies there. One was like a gypsum company.

Gypsum. It's like a metal. Mineral. It's like we're very stupid. Nothing about the world. There's all these gypsum miners listening to be like, you idiot. And at the very, very end of this road, is 600 Markley Street, which is just like this gigantic warehouse.

Is there a sign? There's a pretty utilitarian sign that says Meest America Incorporated. So I go in and there's like a very small waiting area, a couple chairs, there's a table with some magazines on it. And then there's a window like at the doctor's office where you sign in. And I just walk up to the window. I'm wearing my headphones. I have this gigantic microphone.

And I'm pretty nervous. Hi. Yeah, I'm a reporter, and I was hoping that I could talk to someone here about a story that I'm working on. Apparently, a lot of packages are ending up being sent to meast that are somehow being purchased on hacked eBay accounts. And I was wondering if there was anyone I could speak to. Her expression totally didn't change. She picked up the phone, said like a half sentence and what I assume was Russian, and put it back. down. Huh. And then another woman

came out and said, I think that you're supposed to talk to our general manager, Natalia, but she's not in today. So she will be back on Tuesday. Sure. Yeah, because it's not usually, you know, we have some kind of reporters coming. Right, I understand. And then she said something I don't think she was supposed to say. Usually police or FBI is here.

Oh, really? You guys have the police and FBI visit. Yeah. And as soon as she said that, the receptionist, the one who who maintained a totally neutral expression, kind of looked at her with a, please shut up face. Well, yeah. Wow.

So I left, I emailed Natalia, and she told me that I could come back for an interview. So I went back and I brought producer Fia Benin. You ready? No. Fia was nervous. Yeah, because we were going to some like weird warehouse in the middle of New Jersey, like nowhere New Jersey.

Like nowhere New Jersey. where all of these stolen packages were disappearing, and we were going to confront some complete strangers to find out what the hell was going on. We arrived at about 5 p.m. just as like the company was closing for the day. Hello, we're back. We have an appointment this time. Yeah, make a sit, please.

Oh, sure. So we both sit down in this little, like, waiting area, and we're just staring at this black door that's in front of us that Natalia is going to come out of. And it also happened to be the end of the day, So there were people pouring out that black door. And every time the door opened, I was like, maybe this is going to be Natalia. But it was a lot of people, mostly women, who spoke Ukrainian or Russian,

and they were saying goodbye in another language, the receptionist. And then, finally... Hi. Hi. I'm Alex. Nice to meet you. Natalia came out into the lobby. What did Natalia look like? She was very put together. She was very well-dressed.

She seemed very professional. She was very polite. How, maybe early 40s? She brought us back into her office, which was a very big room with a conference table in it. And we sat down at her desk. And the first thing that she says is, you're not recording this.

And Fia's like, okay, but if your voice isn't in this piece, it's going to make you seem like you have something to hide. And Natalia thinks it over, and she says, okay. Turn on the recorder. And the first question I ask her is just, can you tell me what MISD does?

MISD America is a mail forwarding company. We are a freight forwarder, a shipper. What does that mean? What's a freight forwarder? A freight forwarder is basically a shipper, a company that ships. So according to Natalia, here is how MISD makes money. They ship packages to former USSR countries, and they do it at a much cheaper rate than places like FedEx and UPS. And one of the ways that they do this is by taking packages that are sent to them in the U.S.

and consolidating them. For instance, I live in, let's say, in Lithuania, and I want to buy goods from three online stores, different goods. What we offer, we receive the goods here, we repackage the goods from these three stores into one box and a customer saves on shipping as well. So according to Natalia, that's how Miste makes. its money. But I wanted to know, if that's the case, why are there so many reports of fraud? Is this something that you guys are aware of? Is this something that you're trying to deal with? And if so,

like, how are you trying to deal with it? Yes, of course it is something that we are aware about. And what we do, when we find out that this happens, and let's say the owner of that account calls us, we immediately return the good to that store or to the owner. But unfortunately, it often happens late. And the goods are already shipped or even deliver it.

And it's damaging our image, the image of our company. Obviously, I'd seen all the pages of people complaining about Meist when I Googled the company. But there was this other thing that I found. It was a website that was in Russian. And there was a post on there, which was basically

like instructions on how to use Meest to steal stuff. And I wanted to show it to her. I found a website that was in Russian that was basically like it was, it was, it's basically a hacker saying like, this is how you, how you steal from people. I don't know. I don't know about this. What is that called?

It's a blogger? It's a forum for hackers. It's like instructions. And if you go down to the bottom, it's. says like do you read russian is this yeah mm-hmm it looks like it's instructions yeah my god and they put our address it how does that make you feel terrible terrible i have to go there and and give them instruction that every package that arrives here was a hacked account or stolen credit cards will be reported to fbi and sent him

Interpol. Oh, boy. Can I have this link? Send to me. Please send me this email. She was very upset. She was rattled. She was super rattled. We try to be reliable and honest. We are honest with our customers. But this online fraud that's happening at the online stores, this has to be fought. What you showed me right now upsets me a lot. The reason that these frauds are so upsetting to Natalia is because even though this fraud represents an incredibly small percentage of the thousands of packages that they send a day, if eBay or Poshmark or Amazon decides to stop shipping with them, like they could

shut down. And even just trying to approach these companies, she's worried that's going to put them on their radar and just they'll blacklist meast and just not let people ship to them anymore. Which seems like a totally reasonable concern. And she said it's happened. before that some companies just don't send to the address anymore. Huh. At one point, Natalia actually reached out to the FBI to try and get help from them.

And the only thing that ultimately came of it is they did an audit of Meest. That sucks. So she's reached out to the FBI and has not had a lot of luck. Huh. We talked to Natalia for like 45 minutes. And toward the end of our conversation, I told her about Brena and the missing Apple Watch. And I said, would you be willing to give. us like the name or the phone number or any kind of contact info for the person who stole

her watch. And she was like, we have a whole list of accounts that we've closed because of fraud. Would you like us to give you that contact info? And we were like, yes, of course we would. And so she said she'd send it along. But in the meantime, we were trying to come up with some other ways that we could get to Brina's watch thief. And Fia came up with a brilliant idea. She was like, why don't you send a package to Meist, care of Breena's hackers account, and put a tracking device in it and see where it goes. What? That is brilliant. It is brilliant, right?

I mean, the other thing you could do, do they have a weight limit on packages that they'll send? I don't think so. You want to send me? Yeah. My battery life is not 12 days. You can put some water and some food pellets. I will say you were not the first person to make that suggestion. Oh, man. I think it could be really good.

So on Tuesday, me and Fia and Tim and Shereena decided to buy five GPS tracking devices. These are the cutest little GPS devices in the world. Looks like it could be like a cute little bleep blorp thing in Star Wars. Fia means a droid. We sent one to Brena's hacker and then four to other accounts that we knew were used in hacks. And we sent each of them with an account number of. associated with it with a Miste account numbers. And you sent them to account numbers that had shown up in frauds before.

Yes. Put them in boxes and we got a Russian speaking friend to translate a note for me that so hello criminal. I mean, honestly, it's very close to hello criminal. I basically wrote like, hi, I'm a reporter. I wanted to know how you hack this account, how easy it was. why you chose Miste. And also, I was curious about where this package was going. So I put a GPS device in it.

Please get in touch. Oh, man. It's so many of imagine a much of freaked out criminals reading your note angrily. So we sent them out. So here is the web interface. I've got the password typed in. So now I log in? So yeah, just press log in, and it'll tell you where all five of them are at the moment.

I'm at SpyTech. Log in. This is exciting. Oh, 600. Markley Street. They haven't left the reshipping place. Right. So we'll tell you if they go somewhere. Cool. After the break, the case goes international.

Welcome back to the show. So it's been a week since we sent out the GPS devices, and I've been checking in on them intermittently. And while I've got you in the studio, why don't we just take a look at how far they've gotten? Give me just a second. I'm going to log into the tracking site. Weird. Okay, so how many? We sent five. Five.

The fifth, the third, the second, and the first are all at Mists. And their batteries are all either like dead or nearly dead. The fourth package, on the other hand, made it all the way to the airport. I think that that package actually is going to get delivered. The batteries at 38%. Unfortunately, that's not the package that was headed to bring this hacker. And on top of that, I think the battery's probably going to die before it reaches its destination. So some person is going to receive a thing that says, hey, this was purchased

from a hacked account. Here's a dead GPS. Here's a dead GPS. What a stupid waste of money. What a stupid, stupid waste of time and money? Kind of, yeah. I mean... No, not kind of. Totally, yes. But I actually have some good news. Natalia emailed me and she gave me info on the specific hacker who stole Brina's watch and she gave me everything. She gave me his name, his email address, his phone number, and his mailing address. Where is the address? The address is in the city in Russia called Izhevsk.

Izhevsk. Izhevsk. It's the home of the Kalashnikov. The Kalashnikov rifle. Yes. It's a pretty big city. There's about 600,000 people. It is known as the electronic music capital of Russia.

Really? Yeah. I feel like electronic music is big in Russia, too. At least in the stereotype that I haven't really filled in in my head. In my head, I was thinking like very minimalist craftworking stuff, but you're probably right. It was probably like EDM music. Hold on.

Ejews electronic music. Do you want to hear the sound of Ejewsk? Yeah. Okay. This is from Ildeuf. our space healer. He was, just for the record, he was born in EJevsk, but now he lives in inner Iskar. Okay.

This song's called Old Computers. This is way more what I was imagining. Really? Yes. Okay, so that's E-Jewsk. Yeah, the point is that's where our hacker lives. And what is our hacker's name? His name is Abdullah Maxim.

M-A-X-M, like the magazine? It was M-A-K-S-I-M. But I think that that's, since it's written in Survecker, Ehrlich originally there are a lot of different spellings, including like the magazine. Okay. Do you want to see where he lives? Yes, I do. It's on Google, it's on Google Street View.

What a weird world we live in. Yeah. So, here's a picture of it. It is a big, sad. It's just like a big block apartment building. Like it looks like, it looks like familiar in the, the Russia scenes of the Americans type apartment building. So obviously we wanted to call this guy.

And to do that, we brought in a hired gun. Who? A reporter named Ashley Kleeck, who also speaks Russian. And? And she's great. And she came into the office. And the first thing she said to us was, listen, here's what I can tell you. Abdullah Maxim made up name.

Why? Because Abdullah is, like, the most generic. like Muslim sounding name. Huh. And Maxime is one of the most generic Russian names. I mean, I know it doesn't seem like it to us. Okay, so it was like John Smith lives here. Yeah, except for it was like,

Hussein Bubba. You know? Like John Hussein. Two first names. Oh. So Ashley took all the information that Meest gave us, the phone number, the physical address, and she just started searching online.

And eventually, she found some accounts that were connected to the phone number and they were associated with this guy named Nikita. Nikita? Yeah. Okay. Not Abdullah Maxim. Nikita?

Yeah. Also sounds like it could be just like a made-up generic Russian name. Sure. But it's not. No, it's not. And we know that because we called him. Hello.

Hello, good evening. You're Nikita? Yeah. My name is Ashley. I'm from New York. So Ashley told us that he was super polite and sweet. And when she asked him, have you ever used this company called Miste?

He was like, no. I didn't want to ask him. So I'm not sure if it's, it's possible, that my partner done, use for registration, probably so. He said he doesn't have an account with MIS.

That means I don't work with MIS. Wait, if he did it doesn't work with MIST, then why was his phone number on there? Exactly. I said they gave us your number and your phone number and your account number. That's why we're calling you. And he was like, I don't know why.

But Nikita had a theory. He told Ashley that back in March, someone had hacked his bank account and his email. And he thought that maybe someone was using his identity on Meist. And his best guess was that it was someone in Ukraine. I said, are you in Ejewsk? And he's like, no, I don't even live near EJefs. I live in a town that's many kilometers away. And I said, where do you live?

And he said in Orenberg. He said, I'm 17, I don't go to school. My mom cleans floors in the hospital. I'm trying to get work cutting wood in the forest because apparently there's a lot of forests around there. And after about 10 minutes or so, he told us that he had to go. So after they got off the phone, Ashley relayed to us everything that he said, and we just sat in the studio, sorted through it, tried to figure out whether he was telling us the truth or not. I don't believe him.

What do you think? I believe him. You trust him. I trust him. I don't believe him. I did until the forest. Ashley just felt like he was laying it on too thick. The only thing I'll say in favor of maybe telling the truth,

I mean, first of all, like, you just don't know. But if you are him and you are a scammer, you could just hang up the phone too. You know what I mean? Like, you don't necessarily need to tell a story. Right. So we called him back. Hello.

Hi. And Ashley said, can you prove to us that you were hacked recently? You said your email address was hacked. Can you give us your email address? And he said, oh, I, I, I, you know, my email. I don't know if I'm not going to go to go and I'm not going to use your. And he said, oh, I don't remember it.

Okay. And she said, how can you not remember it? Did the hacker steal his memory? No, I don't know, I, this email. We said, can you give us your email address? He said, there's very little Internet in Russia. It's very hard for me to remember stuff like that because I don't use the Internet very much. So I just have it saved into my browser.

God, that is not credible. And then we said, okay, so, you know, we're not the police. We're reporters. But we're going to send someone to this address and we're going to ask for you and see if people know. know you. Okay. And his response was to say, like, when are you going to send someone? Is it going to be tonight? Is it going to be tomorrow? Are you going to send the police? Is it going to be you that's coming? And this is a person who just a moment ago claimed they'd never heard of this address. They live 400 miles away. Yeah. So Ashley says to him, look, we want the watch. And he

says, I don't have the watch. And so Ashley says, fine. All we want is an apology. And he says, Well, if you find the hacker who has the watch, tell him I want an apology to. And eventually, it just wasn't going anywhere, so we hung up. Okay. Thank you. We got off the phone with him, and we actually found his Facebook page. Really? Yes.

We found a Facebook page also associated with that phone number. Yes. Also with Nikita's full name. Is he wearing an Apple watch in his profile picture? Let me just show you. Let me just show you. Let me say. He's got this stupid anonymous mask.

Oh, what a dork. He's got an anonymous mask that's like actually in plastic packaging. Like he just bought his anonymous mask. Yeah. So at this point, I thought it was time to just call Brina and let her know everything we'd found out. Hey, is this Brina? Yeah. How's it going?

I'm pretty good. How are you? I was super excited to tell her. Sabrina about everything that I discovered because like I knew everything about this guy. I knew everything about where her watch had been. I knew the name of the person who'd taken it. I knew the final destination of it. So I'm curious, given all of this information, how you're feeling right now.

It kind of bummed that like that guy won't send my Apple watch back or even like apologize or anything. But I guess like kind of like relieved that like Miste isn't like a big hacker company or anything. Right. But it's still like kind of like bums me out a lot. So like the purse, because like I could have sold it to someone who actually like really wanted an Apple Watch but instead it was given to a guy for free who doesn't even deserve it. Right. Do you feel like this is solved? I felt like a conquering hero. Managed to figure out all of this stuff. But then I guess I didn't think for like two seconds

that the thing that I didn't come back with was the, the watch? The thing that she lost? Yeah. But what she did say was, she was like, you know, I mean, now that we have all the info, like maybe I'll go to the local police

in EJewsk and see if I can get this guy in trouble. Really? Yeah. She's just going to call the Ejewsk PD. If it weren't for her parents, she would have driven to this warehouse and been like, where's my watch? It doesn't seem like Breed is really afraid of anything.

Reply All is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. The show is produced by Shrethy Pinemanani, Fia Benin and Damiano Marquetti. Our editors are Tim Howard and Jorge Just. Production assistance from Sharina Ong. We're mixed by Rick Kwan. Special thanks this week to Brandon Garcia, Bobby Dieton, Vitali Kremis,

Yelena Bocchko, Julia Meador, Runa Sanvik, Emily Kennedy, Ephraind Diappa, Greg Climish, and a huge, extra special thanks to Dalia Wolfson and Dennis Vichowski. Matt Lieber is a potluck dinner at a picnic table in the shade on a balmy evening.

Fellow Gimlet podcast Science Versus just released the last episode of their season, and it features me and PJ talking about our addictions to artificial sweeteners. You should check it out, and you should check out their entire catalog. That's Science Verses. You can get it wherever you get podcasts.

Our theme music is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder. Our ad music is by Build Build Buildings. The song that played us out at the end of the episode is Simplicity by Macroform, also known as the greatest old music in the world. Reply All is now available on Spotify. Go check us out. You can also listen to the show on Google Play, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in two weeks. With no internet, at the edge of this planet, is supposed to be an interdimensional portal somewhere. We found a piano singing in a crater. We think it might control the portal. Just not sure how it works yet. Okay, let me try.

C-A-B-B-A-G-E C-A-B-H-E C-A-B-H-E-A-T-E Would you like an egg? Do you want to see your dead dad? D-E-A-D Actually, that was my dead dad. Well, this is thoroughly entertaining and useless,

which is mostly how I feel about the universe anyway. You know what I really want right now is just a phone. Can't spell that on a keyboard though. Sure, give it a try. I'll be damned.