The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Scam Artist Behind The BIGGEST Cryptocurrency Fraud In History Reveals All | The Connect

Episode Date: January 27, 2024

Ray Trapani is one of the minds behind Centra Tech; a cryptocurrency company that defrauded HALF A BILLION DOLLARS from investors. He and two friends created the business selling the idea of a new tech that didn't actually exist yet. His story has trauma, wild parties, addiction, an imaginary CEO, faked deaths, Floyd Mayweather and so much more! Go Follow Ray! IG: https://www.instagram.com/raytrapani/ Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The money's coming in slow at first. All you're doing all day is just like refreshing the thing where you see the money coming in. Then out of nowhere, like 100 grand comes in. And then another 500 grand comes. And now you're, you know, a couple million a day, right? Like every single day. You're like, whoa, this is different. This is different.

So I was basically like, I'm just going to murder the world. Today's guest is Ray Tripani, star of the new Netflix documentary BitCon. Back in 2017, Ray was involved in a cryptocurrency scam that defrauded investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars. He and his buddies created a fake business centered around a piece of crypto technology that they sold to investors as a revolutionary new idea. Now, by the end, they actually ended up developing that technology. But by then, it was too late. The FBI was already closing in.

Ray chose to cooperate against his co-conspirators, sending them to prison. Now, the documentary goes into details about the scam, but I wanted to know the person behind it. And what I found surprised me. I'll let you be the judge. And as always, for a bonus episode with Ray, go over to patreon.com slash The Connect show. Without further ado, I give you Ray Tripani right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. I basically take like the remaining $120,000 and I just fly to Vegas with it in cash.

And if I win, I'll pay all the debt back and just go back to working in construction. I'm going to just risk it all or die. That's when I see lights behind me start to flash. And I didn't even think. I just hit it. I was driving like my life depended on. Then I parked the car, hopped out, closed the door, and I started running. And he pulls out a burner, shang, it's like six inches.

And he passes it to me. And he goes, here, that's yours. Don't ever leave the cell block without this. He was the reason I made it out of that place alive. Ray Tripani, at long last, star of BitConned. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Yes, we're going to make you the most infamous white-collar criminal, if I have anything to say about it.

Sounds good. Yeah, that did not make you look good, that doc. The dock is great. Very well done. You shine in it. But you and your whole crew look like Long Island scumbags, you know. 100%. So you're here, but I'm glad you're here.

I'm glad you're honest about it. And, you know, we're here to get the full story. So you're a little younger than me. You're 32. So you're from, you grew up. on the internet, essentially. A little bit. Yeah, you had some, you had a couple of years where we didn't have the devices.

But for the most part, you're, you know, you grew up as like a young millennial, we'll say. Grew up on Long Island, which, by the way, your story tracks. This is a Long Island scam classic. You're from a broken home. I don't want to call it a broken home. Your mom seemed very nice in the show. But your father was not in the picture. Where was he?

My father left before I was born. So he basically was just like an iron worker, construction worker, and he left before I was born. And he was just, he had his own addictions as when he was married to my mom with like whatever type of drugs he was on. And then once they got divorced, it was just a bad divorce. And my mom was just a single mom with me and my two brothers. Right, right. Was he mobbed up at all? your father? No. Okay. Did he have like a gambling problem or was he just a blue collar guy with a drug habit?

Blue collar guy with drug habit. And you haven't seen him in years? I now rekindled with him after the documentary came out. It's funny because I recorded that audio before like that clip that's in the documentary. I spoke about that before I rekindled with him and then after that I got close with him and then I when I watched it like before everybody and I was like, oh fuck he's going to see that clip. You know? Yeah. I felt bad. Yeah, because that was just three weeks ago that the doc dropped. Yeah. So this is very new that you're speaking with him again.

No, I've been speaking to him. Like, I filmed that three years ago, that first interview. Oh, okay. So you talked, you, you rekindled your relationship as you were making that. As I was filming with Netflix. I see. Gotcha. Gotcha.

Gotcha. What is he doing now? What became of him? He's just a construction worker that he's still doing the same shit, but he's just not doing drugs. Hey, guys. I hope you're enjoying this episode. I got to take one minute to tell you about aura. Are you tired of constantly receiving?

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Again, that's Aura.com slash my name, J-O-H-N-N-N-Y-M-T-H-H-H-E-L-L to start your two-week free trial. Go use ORA today and protect your privacy, just like I do. What about your grandfather? My grand. Your late grandfather. Yeah. So I can, I mean, from the beginning, my grandfather, like my grandfather now is dead, right? But, yeah, so in the beginning, I grew up, he's like my father.

He's my father figure. And he was like, he started a union. He was first, he was in the elevator union. He was president of the elevator union in New York City. If anybody knows anything about New York City unions, pretty much all connected. Of course, especially back then. Yeah. So he wasn't a wise guy himself, but certainly he was responsible for paying the extortion payments to mafia figures.

I wouldn't, I would say more on the side of actually being connected than it's made out to be. Like, I mean, I don't know. Like it wasn't like Italian mafia, right? There's like the Westies in New York. And that's like who his circle was. I don't know how connected he was. But he definitely, to be able to be able to be. the president of union, you're connected.

Right. Was he a Westie himself? Is he an Irish guy? He's German. Okay. Okay. So maybe he was not in the mafia. Yeah, exactly.

But certainly he had experience dealing with underworld figures. 100%. But you've been money driven. You're just driven by money and power. You know, like material success from a young age and, identity, it seems like for you, it didn't matter how you got it, you just wanted to be rich. Yeah, like seeing my grandfather always just carry around cash, like my mom was always broke, and then my grandfather would just always have a stack of cash, anything that would go wrong,

you know, a couple hundred, you know, those times where like someone would get in a car accident, just, you know, here's it, just, you know, leave us alone type of thing. Situations like that just like always arise and it seemed like money was the solving factor of every single issue in life. Yeah. And that's just like from a, so like when you see pictures of me as a kid, like they have one in the thing. Like even my best friend's family had a collage of me in their house of me with just like

$100 in 20s or like it was just like a joke. Like I was just always infatuated with money for sure. So you saw the power of money at a very young age. 100%. Yeah. In the hood we called it go. Just go. Because when you got it, it's a green light.

Yeah. So, and I agree with you in many ways. I have a similar drive, especially when I was younger. I'm just from a more solid, you know, perhaps morally centered family. But I totally understand that where you're coming from. And, you know, you didn't have a father. So it's like you needed to be the provider, right? So let's move into high school now.

There's a, my bed, but there's a piece there that like I kind of. kind of want to cover that's not in any of the documentary that like I think is important just so we can go through questions right so like around eight my mom remarries and then there's two stepbrothers that come into the picture and then basically one of the stepbrothers sexually abuses me from like eight to 12 so from that point I talked about this in the documentary it's not covered and that's basically the clip where it says I always want to be a criminal it's me talking about being sexually abused from eight to 12 and basically being thought my whole family knew so I always thought like my mom, my brothers all knew and no one was doing anything about it. So I was basically like,

I'm just going to murder the world, right? Like, I'm going to fuck over the world no matter what it took. I thought my grandfather was a criminal. So I was always going to be a criminal. And they just took the clip. I always wanted to be a criminal. And that's like the intro of the documentary. Right. And then they completely left out the sexual abuse part. Yeah. Because that wouldn't have fit their narrative with like, this guy is a dirtbag. Exactly. Because that's a huge humanizing piece. Uh, and a sympathetic part of the, you know, of your story. That's horrible. Yeah. What happened to your stepbrother? He's, I mean, nothing. Like, I first talked about it after I got sober, after I got arrested this time.

So I never spoke about it. And then I brought it to my family's attention that I always thought they knew. And they said they didn't. I believe him at this point where, like, I don't think they knew. They just basically, my mom was working 60 hours a week in the ICU. And my brothers were just doing their own thing, right? So like, it just got missed. What does your stepfather have to say about this? they're not together anymore. So like I'm not going to go reach out and try to fight this point. I kind of worked through it in a way and just like kind of lost that resentment towards him. He was like a 12 year old kid, horny little boy in the house.

Weird shit happens sometimes as a kid and as fucked up as it is, it does me no good to like... You were a good looking boy. Maybe that's why. Damn, that's fucked up though, man. I'm sorry to hear that. And it really explains a lot about your addiction too. Yeah. Because this is all driven by your addiction.

It's addiction to money and then drugs. And that all fuels what happened later with Bitcoin and the company, we'll call it. Wow. So for four years, that was happening. Then when I guess you started probably using at a young age. That same stuff, brother, started giving me weed and like Xanax at 12. Jesus Christ. Yes.

Okay. Yeah, wow. This guy really... Sucked. Yeah, this guy really did a number. So, yes, and Xanax was really later on what, you know, crippled you. That was the big, that was your big thing that you had to kick, right? Well, I was addicted to heroin for a bit there in the way before Xanax.

So I had a really bad opioid addiction all through high school. Are you snorting heroin, like powder heroin? I was shooting heroin. Wow. Yeah. It's gangster. Yeah. I was snorting it in the beginning, but then, you know, you just hang around with enough Puerto Ricans, you start shooting it.

Sure. Yes, that is what naturally the next step to hang out with Puerto Ricans. I always tell people that. Don't I always say that? So, so what does your heroin habit daily cost you? Well, heroin's much cheaper than oxycodone. So, like, if we go back, the oxycodone is really the big expense, right? And then you switch to heroin for the cheap aspect.

of it. So I'm doing like two bundles a day, which is basically $200 plus you get a deal on it, $80 a bundle, $160 bucks. That's not bad. A day though? That's pretty cheap compared to doing. But how does a 15 year old afford that? So no, I was doing heroin by like 17, 18, oxycodone up until that point. And the oxycodon, I'm doing 20 oxies a day. How are you sourcing those? So that's where in the documentary it covers it, right? Like there's the story of me doing that. Like at first, so I get in a bad car accident at 16. I moved out at 16. I'm playing like a lot of high stakes,

like not high stakes, but like two, five poker games, which is like high stakes for a 16-year-old. I got into gambling super young as well. And I got in a bad car accident coming home from a poker game. I'm all zanied out. These other kids driving. The car flips like 15 times.

Face gets chopped up. And I get prescribed 120 oxycodone 30s at 16, which is, I don't know if you've ever taken oxycodone 30s, but they're strong, like maybe a half, like 15 milligrams is more than enough to be given like a 16 year old that much was insane. What would you compare a 30 milligram oxy to like a shot of heroin? Like one, one to one. One to one.

So it's about similar. Yeah. Wow. So you're essentially getting heroin at 16 legally. Yeah. And this is, you know, the mid-2000s, the Sackler family and the oxy-cotton epidemic is ravaging middle America. And I call Long Island Middle America.

It is, right? It's Hick, New York. I don't know about that. Hick New York. Yeah, okay, okay. Upstate New York is Hick, but, you know, Law Island is, yes, there's vast bastions of wealth. The Hamptons are out there, but there's just something,

there's something about working class Long Island that more mirrors central Pennsylvania than, you know, Manhattan or Brooklyn. Yeah, fair enough. But no offense. No, no, I don't take offense to anything. Which I appreciate about you. Um, so you're, so you start off. So now you're popping these oxies.

Uh, you start selling them too. Yep. Naturally. Yeah. I'm still in high school, right? So like you know, like at first I was just taking a few pills like in like ninth, 10th grade, a few oxies fucking around my boys driving blunt rides and we, you know, try a half of a roxy, whatever it is.

And then once I get that prescription, then I'm like, all right, you know, these are going for 20 a pop at the time. And, you know, you just, you know, you got to make some money. It's all profit. All profit. Yeah. And you're the plug now. Yeah.

So you're like the oxy kingpin. You got 130 oxies. You keep five for yourself. You sell the rest of $20 a shot. Boom. That's a great high school income. Yeah. I mean, even like my, like as far as drug dealing, my night, like going into high school, I started selling weed.

I made like maybe like 10 grand my eighth grade summer going into ninth grade. That's really good. And yeah, like I be, yeah, exactly. That's incredible money. For eighth grader going into ninth grade. it was insane. So you were good at drug dealing? I was very good at drug dealing, yeah.

Where did you source your pot? Who were you getting it from? So like at first, like we actually, there's a, my best friend at the time, I'm not going to say names, but whatever, his basically older brother was like the plug for all of Long Island. And basically he ended up years later

getting in trouble by the FBI and he took his own life. So, but he was selling like hundreds of pounds. So like even like eighth grade, ninth grade, we're going in there and smoking blunts and you're seeing like million in cash, hundreds of pounds of weed. So I was just born into that shit, right? My brothers are selling like quops of BC back then. Um, like, but there was just weed everywhere where I grew up. Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine, and evenings on the patio. Before everyone arrives,

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Did you ever consider killing your stepbrother? I'm being serious. No. Like, but, like, my issue was more, like, struggling with my sexuality at a very young age. And then I first got pussy, basically. And I was like, ah, I love pussy. And then I just basically move forward in life and, like, was like, all right, how the fuck do I get out of this house? Because these people didn't help me.

Right. They know what's going on. Oh, okay. So the pussy cured your, your fledgling homosexuality, we'll call it. Exactly. Yeah, like my first high school fight, I fought a gay kid. Like, I was like, I'm taking these guys out. Right.

Yes. That is another very long island thing. Hate crimes. Anyway. Okay, so you've really got a knack for business, though. There's no question about it. So now you're taking oxies, selling oxies. What happens?

Your prescription gets cut off and that's how you get into smack? No, so like there's a point there where like is covered in the documentary the prescription fraud, right? Like I was actually me and my girl both just started going doctor shopping, getting, because back then they didn't have the I-stop program in the farm. like in the pharmacies. So you can just feel like as many prescriptions as long as you went to different pharmacies. So we just went to every doctor in Long Island or in New York, like just all day, that's all we did.

And how much would a prescription cost you? So like you fill out like without insurance for, I forget the exact price, but like a couple hundred bucks tops. And that gets you how many oxies? 120. Right. And so. They're selling 2400 back on 120.

You're making $2,400. That's if you sell all of them, but you're doing probably. half of them selling half of them. But still, you're quadruple and your money. Yeah. Wow. Wow.

And you've got your lovely girlfriend who's, you know, strong out as well. Yeah. Terrific influence. Yeah. Oh, no, I think I would probably be the bad influence. That's what I was in continuing. Yeah. You and your girlfriend and you give your ID, did you have to give your ID when you filled

the scripts or did you have fake ID? Did you cover your asses at all? Not even trying to cover our ass. But it was just like back then, the pharmacies were all getting paid off. The doctors were all getting paid off. No one cared. Absolutely. That is totally true.

The corruption was wild when you think about it. How many oxies do you think you moved? I even got charged because when I cooperated at the end, you have to like admit to every crime you ever committed in your life. Right. So like I think they charged me with moving like, I don't know, tens of thousands, kilos of heroin, all sorts of crazy shit. So you, the DEA came after you while you were in high school still. So I The what's covered in the documentary is a prescription fro

Where we stole a prescription pad And then with that prescription pad We just had this Orthodox Jewish kid professional handwriting Copy the doctor's handwriting And we just wrote out unlimited amount of scripts Got every fiend in the hood to basically go Cash those scripts in We'd give them like 20 roxies

Send them on their way And we'd take the hundred and just do whatever you wanted to So that's where we're like my first really big hustle Is like end of high school What do you think you made off that off that racket. So like probably like close to like you don't really remember exact numbers right but like either like a quarter million plus, you know, at least.

But then that's cut like between like three people and then we ended up all getting in charge with prescription fraud at that point. You know, so. By the DEA? No, it was just like the regular cops like Long Island and I don't know if that's DA when like a detective from Long Island arrest. No, it was probably Suffolk County. No, Nassau County.

Yeah, Nassau County. I'm sorry. Yeah. So, and then you just ratted right away. That case, not true. Like, I never ratted on that kid. So that, we both got drug court. We both just went through drug court.

There was no need to rat. I was like 17, my first charge. So, but why did the documentary, I think, insinuate that you had rolled, you had given up your friend. Is that not true? Yeah, that kid is best friends with my co-defendant now. And when they asked my co-defendant to be in the documentary, he just said, interview this kid. So that kid's just like a henchman for my co-defendant.

Okay. And that kid was like my boy in high school. And now he's just basically like that kid's boy. And I've cooperated on another case. I never snitched on that kid in my life. Okay. So you just proffered. You just got caught and said, I'll tell you everything that I was doing.

On that case, I literally just, there was no offer to even do that. Like, you know what I mean? Sometimes they don't just offer you to profit or anything. They just arrest you. Right. You get charged with it. You get a lawyer. You got charged with writing phony scripts.

you didn't get charged with all the distribution, it sounds like. I see. Two prescription fraud charges. I see. Okay. It would have been a whole different story if they had made like a big oxy case on you. That would have been probably federal. Yeah.

Okay. I agree. So this is the end of high school. Are you starting to get into heroin at this point? Yeah. Roughly like, you know, one time like there's just a drought basically of roxies. And then that's kind of how you like try for the first time. Yeah.

Just like my girl at the time's older cousin. Basically, like, we can't get it. We can't get them. But if you want, I know you're a drawing, you know, come by, whatever. You know, you're like, fuck it. You know, I was like, fuck it. Like, shoot. My girl was like, nah.

Like, I was like, I'm going to do it. I'm fiendin fucking whatever. I go. We end up both doing it. And then you're like, oh, it's like the same exact shit, you know? Like, you feel exactly the same. A little bit like stronger in a way, like, depending on how good the dope is. Is it China white or is it like the brown stuff?

Brown. Brown. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so then like it's it's the brown stuff, right? And then from there, you're kind of going back and forth, doing roxies a little bit, doing heroin a little bit. And then one day, like my girl's like working. She's like bartending at this point.

And, you know, like even though like I had made a lot of money from the prescription fraud, like you're doing so many drugs that just, that money just blows, right? Like you can blow a hundred grand in a six months, easy. Like if you're doing roxies every day and heroin every day. It's not even like a. It's mathematics. You spend $250 a day on dope. Yeah, that'll go.

And then apartment, car, you know, buying clothes, whatever it is. And so then from there, one day, like, just basically, like, her best friend is this Puerto Rican kid. And then he's like, come over here. Like, you know, I'm going to call the Connect. And then he's just like, oh, you know, I'm going to do it this way, right? And I'm like, ah, fuck. Banging it, right? Yeah.

Fucking shooting it right in that vein. That's old school style. Hey, I respect that. Because you got to know how to cook it. You got to know how to put the little cotton ball in the thingy and make a rig. And I mean, that's pull fiction stuff. That's old school. Yeah, just like straight in like a spoon or a bottle cap and you just, you know, squirt the water in there and mix the heroin up.

Clean needle? Honestly, my first time, nope. All right. Have you had an AIDS test? Yeah. Many, many. Okay. I've been three, I've like 13 times.

Nice. And what's the results? I don't have AIDS. Thank God. Nice. There we go. HIV. Yeah, or HIV.

Oh, you don't have that either. No, neither. Great. Yeah. So, ooh, main line in it. And that was a different level, I assume. Yeah, like that, you like, it's like basically like first time you come, right? Like, it's just like, as soon as you do it, you're like instant head rush, crazy, you know.

Mom walks in. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good film. And I assume that put you over the edge in terms of the addiction. Yeah, I was already like out of the low right there. Like at that point in my life, when I'm doing heroin, I'm just, like, once you get to the heroin point, you stop caring about, like, the money, making money aspect of life. And you're just like, I just want to do heroin all day. Yeah.

And or you're, because you're like a jacked kid where you kind of sucked up, shriveled up as a dope vene? Yeah, I don't know if you even saw me like in pictures in the documentary. I was like 120 pounds. Yeah, that's true. All my child. But I think you all had, you had abs still, though. I've always had abs. Are you always, are you doing sit-up?

even when you're coming down from heroin? I'm born with that. That's just like natural physique. Sick. So, and how long are you out there shooting dope for before things change? Only like a year of shooting dope before. Like I get in trouble for like a DWI and like having like a thousand Xanax on me. And then I basically go to rehab.

And from there, like I get out and I'm on like two years probation where I'm getting drug tested regularly. And I just get into like the New York City Union. and my grandfather got me like a full book, skip, skip the apprenticeship. Wow. So your grandfather really helped you out, helped you get out of that cycle. I assumed he paid for rehab, too. Yeah, or my mom's insurance or whatever it was. You know, there's a lot of times where, like, my grandfather would help pay for the rehabs.

Because through these times, like, even in high school, like, I would go away for 30 days, come back, just get right back on drugs. Yeah. There's just so many of those cycles. Yeah, and must have broken his heart because he loved you and you loved him. Yeah. Yeah, he seems like a really good guy. He was the man. Yeah.

So you're working in the union now, doing what? Scaffleding. My first job is at the World Trade Center, the new World Trade Center. Wow. Okay. So they just throw you, like, put a harness on. I'm like 120, 25 pounds. Yeah.

You guys are all jacked, like fucking been doing scaffolding forever. The island guys working in the union. Yeah. There's no kid fucking coming off a dope. So you're, that's a good trade, though. I mean, you got a good union gig. How does it elevate from there? Because they don't really talk about that in the dock.

They just kind of go from drugs to now he's in Miami. So lead us into that. Yeah. So I'm basically just like right away, I'm like, all right, let me get on testosterone, catch up to these guys. Sure. You know, we got to catch up. So I'm like probably 1920, maybe 21 at this point, whatever, somewhere in that range. I did way too many Xanax in my life to like know, you know, like my full time sense.

But yeah, so I'm just like on testosterone, on probation. But I'm like, I started like, you know, kind of doing my thing, learning the trade or whatever it is. And I worked at the trade center for like a year. Then you're just like doing like other job sites for like six months. It's nothing like really that exciting. That's why it's not in the documentary I talked about. Right.

Did, you know, going from making all that money and having that exciting life, even though it was coupled with the pain of addiction, did that eat away at you? Did you say, I got to get back to being an entrepreneur. Like, I don't want to work. I don't want to get up every day and commute to the city to work a blue collar job. Like, I got to get back to making money. Is that in the back of your head the whole time?

100%. Like, even like, during the whole time of doing construction, I'm going to AC every weekend to just go gamble. Okay. So, like, I needed some sort of fix of like. You need some sort of addiction to supplant your other addiction. Sure. Exactly. Were you shooting testosterone too?

Yeah. I love it. How else you do it? What are you going to do with gel? That's a great point. Aren't there pills? Yeah, but that's like for, you know, that's the soft way of doing it. Sure, sure.

If you're going to do testosterone, you shoot it. Okay. So, and I assume you're probably buying that on the black market too. Yeah, at that age, yeah. Yeah. On probation. That's like legal, basically. Sure, sure.

So you're going to AC, gambling. Are you any good at gambling? Are you one of these, like, guys that actually can win more than he loses? In poker. In poker. Okay. So do you try to make money when you're there, or are you just there to have a good time? Yeah, no, I was trying to win.

Like, I was, I'm like a pretty good poker player. I played in the world. There's a poker a bunch of times, especially, like, when I had all the money during the crypto part, I'm playing in, like, $250,000 buying cash games pretty much every day. The reason I ask you that is because when I watched this documentary and I saw, the things that you did, part of me was like, this kid didn't give a fuck about the odds. He did not see, he did not care that what he was doing was so flagrant that it was like painting a target on his chest for the feds.

You just, like anybody watching from the outside was like, oh, this kid's going to get caught. But that's why I asked you about gambling, because you've really, you've gambled a number of times in other ventures. So you're doing this. How long after you get your job and you get clean, sort of, do you move to Miami? Yeah, so at the end of the – I'm still working in construction. I'm, like, sick of it at this point. I'm like, I got to get out of this place.

I got – I was like, got off probation. Yeah. And I go visit my boy that was just here. And I'm like, I'm going to go visit my boy down to Miami. That was your friend that was just in the studio before we started filming. What's his name? Bert. Okay, Bert.

Yeah. So he's down there. And I'm like, all right, I'm just going to go visit him, see what's going on down there. His roommate had just got locked up. Just, you know, he's like, yo, come down to visit, right? And I'm like, all right, I bet. I go down there. And right away, he's like, you know, you should move down here.

And I'm like, I just got off probation. I'm like, we go out to like a couple clubs. Yeah. This is like, I'm like, this is dope down here, you know? Like, he's not in Miami. He's like in like in like Boca area, right? And which is like 45 minutes from Miami. So I'm like, all right, you know, but like, let me try.

to put together some money. And then while I'm on the balcony, like, I'm just literally just like smoking a blonde on the balcony, I figured out like this thing with VEMO. VEMO? Yeah, with VEMO. Back then, you were able to just like, without any money in your bank account, send money to another person without having any money in it. So like I just randomly was just like I download VEMO and tried to send him like a thousand

bucks and it just went through. And I was like, what the fuck? Even though you didn't have a thousand in your bank account? It just hit my bank account, bounced. he still got the money. I was charged $35 for overdraft fee. And I was like, oh, shit,

like, what is this? You know? And I sent him the max at that time was $3,000. You can send the VEMO. Sent them another 1999-999-999, 9-9-9-9-9. went through. And he was able to send it to his bank?

Yeah. Crazy. Can you still do this? No, this is like 2016. This is early Venmo. Yeah, early VEMO before. Like, they probably fixed it because of me, right? Right.

Because I just basically exploited that times a million. I started creating fake. Instagram accounts to like get other people to sign up like pretty much like the whole Instagram you know send me this money and I'll flip it for you type of thing but without saying send me any money just give me your information and I'll make you a thousand bucks I remember I would always get DMs like that everybody did back in that era and we're like oh clearly this guy's trying to steal my information you were just trying to steal money from Venmo yeah at least that was against a corporation you know I don't feel as bad sure sure in a way

I mean yeah it's a startup you know employees a bunch of people right they pay a lot of taxes, which, you know, ostensibly go to the, you know, keep the society together. But all right. You know, that morality, whatever aside, that is a pretty fascinating scheme. Yeah. Did you consider moral questions when it came to scamming or cheating or anything like that? No, I mean, at this time, like I'm getting back on drugs, right? I'm starting to take Xanis again. But like my whole life, like ever since the childhood shit, I was always pretty much fuck the morality. of life. People did me dirty as a kid. I'm going to fuck the world. It took until after I got sober to like fully change that and like start working with addicts and shit like that after the fact.

Right. Right. That makes sense. And I don't blame you after what happened to you. So how do we move? So you're getting back on zanis. You're smoking, going down the wrong road, scam. And you got some money in your pocket from the Venmo hustle. How much do you think you made off that? A good like, we probably did it over like a few months, probably doing like 20 people a month, roughly, you know, sometimes, so that's like 60K. You're doing like 200K, sometimes more. Like I don't see like exact numbers. I don't know.

But we had stacked like over 100K that like after the bread. We were just spending every day and going out to clubs. So like you have like, you know. But you're back on your feet. Back on my feet. Exactly. Right. So move us from there to the rental car business.

So like during the course of VEMO, we're like, all right, let's parlay this into like like he was a so he had a business before all this with the kids sorbby Sharma that he had a car business in New York bird that was like his business right so he was basically like let's get into the car industry the rentals right and I was like sounds good you know the hard part about rentals is that you need like a lot of credit right so like we basically drew up like a whole business plan to present to everybody to try to get them to like allow us to use their credit to get cars And what exactly was the business?

You're purchasing rental, you're purchasing luxury cars to re-rent on the market, right? Yes. Okay. You're financing as many possible high-end cars to be able to rent, right? At first you get a couple cars and then you like start like reach it. First thing you do was like you buy like two cars, right? And then you reach out to like all the car companies that are in Miami already. And you basically get broker pricing from all those companies.

So you can just put, make a website and say you have every car. Right? So you have like basically every car on your website and then pretty much you're trying to always make sure your cars are rented out 30 days ahead of the month. So like if someone's like, oh, I want a Lambo, once they come to Miami, you're like, oh, the Lambo gone, take this car. Right. Okay. So you're actually don't have any of this inventory. Or you maybe have a few cars. A few inventory. But the rest is like made to order almost. So you have a deal with a Ferrari dealership at a broker price to you. And then you, if somebody from New York is coming down and says, hey, I want to rent this from your website, you just go get them the Ferrari at the broker and rent it out to them. Yeah. And keep the spread. Okay. So nothing illegal about that. Fully legal. Okay. And your family, you go to your family to raise money. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us about that. This is a big part of the documentary. Yeah. So I basically just like reached out to like everybody in my family. I was like, you know, would you? you guys allow me to purchase, you know, cars with your credit, right? And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, uh, or, like, take out capital to fund my business. Pretty much everybody was like, yeah, let's do it. Like, you know, you look like you're doing well down there. And, and, and, and so, like, through that,

I was able to, like, more cars, you know, so, like, you build your fleet up to, you know, three, four, five cars. And you have, like, a few hundred grand of capital to, like, run the business, build websites, marketing, all that type of stuff. And how much of your own cash did you put in? Um, so, like whatever I had built from a VEMO, which is like 100, 150K. Yeah. And Sorby is in on this with you? So in the beginning, I don't want him in because me and Sorby never had a good relationship. In high school, I, like robbed him during a dice game.

We had like a bad relationship our whole life. During a dice game, you robbed him? Yeah, like a Sele game, you like took all my boys' money. And then I was like, bro, just here, I'll give you the 1,000, just roll him for a thousand, win or lose. I'll just take it all. Sorby rolled 4, 5, 6, or trip fives, I think it was. And I just basically was like, go fuck yourself.

Yeah, strong-armed him out of a dice game. Well, if you go watch the documentary, and I really encourage you to, Sorby is one of the most disreputable, unlikable people that I've seen in media in a long time. Okay? And I include like Rachel Maddow in media, okay? This kid is no good. So, and big fake white teeth, like all you guys, you go to the same dentist. My teeth are way better than anybody in that documentary.

Right, okay, sure. But it's like, it's just you look at him and you, I see a scam a mile away in this kid's face. Which one is you talking about, though? Talking about the Indian guy, Sorby. Indian guy, Sorby, yeah, because there's the other kid that's in it that's actually in it. Then Sorby's like the one that's, he's on like a lot of the film, but he didn't film for the documentary. Sure, but yeah, that guy in real life. So this is the kid that he robbed in a dice game.

This is some real uptown. Harlem South Bronx shit that you white boys pulled out on the island, by the way. But so, yeah, I just want to paint the picture of this person, the character of this person. I'm talking about he's a used car dealership Indian kid basically from Long Island, right? That's the character. He checks all the boxes. Yeah. So used car dealer Indian, you know, not Indian from Long Island.

That's the guy that you go into business with. And I don't want to, right? that was Bert's partner in those used car dealerships, right? So Burr was a used car dealership with him. Sorby's like the leader of that. And Bert's like his partner. And they did decent, right? But then like, you know, gangs got involved and they were selling all their cars to the

Crips Bluffs, this type of shit. And then it got fucked up. What was your function? If they already had this business going, what was your role? This is before I was dealing with them, right? So this is back in New York. And then, so like when I moved down with Bert, they had already separated. And Sorby's like head finance manager.

of Lexus. Okay. So at that time, and then he's, but he's like broke, right? So like, then he wants to get involved in the business because he sees them getting all this access to capital again. And he's like, what are these guys doing? And he was like helping us get some of the, like, Burr was like hitting him up, like, you know, how can we get these cars?

And he was just really good at like the financial end of getting approvals from banks. He was good at like bullshitting on documents, this type of thing. That was Sorby's role. He was the king of that shit, right? Like he's literally the king of, he took. taught me like everything I know as far as like Adobe PDF editor fraud. Right. That aspect of it.

Like I didn't know shit. Right. And later on, he was the spokesperson for the Bitcoin company. And he was, he is a good bullshitter. Like he's a good salesperson. He was a good like, you know, he would be like a politician in some local, you know, Long Island town. He was, he was the mouthpiece.

Yeah. So you raise you, so basically you, you out of all three of you guys, are the only one that has your personal money in it and then your family money how much did you raise from them um there's a lot of car loans right that ended up just getting paid back off or the cards got sold but like say like uh at least four 500 thousand dollars in like capital that's like from family right and then from your grandfather who else uh my aunt's my grandmother's credit card like like everybody's basically getting miami's out of credit cards for us so like there's just like my my stepfather or like my he's basically like my mom's boyfriend.

So just everybody that like is in my circle all we're looking out and signing off on getting cards. And Sorby's just like basically just send them a credit card, like a like a car application, right? And then once we had their information, Sorby was just like so good at this, like where he would just like reach out to every bank and get like a maximum approval from every credit card company. I was just like, I didn't even know it was going to be like that much money borrowed for my family. He just was like had that ability of just. And I was like, all right, I guess we'll use this capital. So he used your family's money to get loans as leverage to get loans. And then what were you guys doing just building up the fleet?

How many cars did you guys own? Did the company own? By the end, we owned like 10 cars, but then we partnered with a company that had like another 20. So we have a showroom of like 30 cars and we had like better than broker prices on those cars, right? Like basically cost. And then we basically, if they needed to rent our cars, it was just like a partnership deal that we worked out. What kind of cars did you have? And how much were you able to rent them out?

for. So like a Lambo is your payment on it is say 2000 or like not even like if you get like an older lamb you're trying to get the car is a little bit older right. Just say a Lambo payments 1500 you're able to rent it for like 25 or like Aston Martin payments like 1,200. You're able to rent it for like 600 a day. So like that's the thing like an Aston Martin is like a perfect example because that was like our number one renter. It was like the first car we bought. So the payment on it was 1,200. The insurance on is maybe like another five, six, seven hundred. So then you're renting out for like six, seven hundred a day. So like you basically pay that payment back in three days. So then if you rent it out for 30 days, you're eating. All cash. All profit. Yeah. Wow. That's good business. Great business. And you guys

in Miami, it's ridiculous because everybody goes to Miami just to spend all the money that they don't have. Yeah. And show off. And so you guys are killing it. And of course, you manage to fuck it up. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're killing it. There's like by the time we have 10 cars and between like, marketing costs and all this type of shit. We're making like 60K profit. And that money is literally being more than that as being spent just in personal expenses. Right. And that's basically what it was.

You guys didn't have the discipline to reinvest it. You were just spending too much. Yeah, exactly. Which is the easiest mistake to make. And also the easiest, it just depends on what your constitution is. For me, that's the easiest thing not to do. That's just how I'm built. Right.

Like I high income, low expenses. That's wired. my DNA, but I mean, this is not how Long Island kids are. This is not how you're wired. You gamble with life. And you have fun too. And you're also drug addicted. Yeah, I'm drug addicted. They're not. Right. Right. So like, I'm drug addicted and I'm also gambling. And they're like bringing me out to club. So like I was getting my first experience hanging out with celebrities, all this type of shit. You know, you're driving sick cars. You're fucking all the hottest girls. You know, you're pulling up everywhere in the sickest cars. It was a life, right? Like that, that,

aspect of it is like unmatched as far as like fun right like you can't really have like an existence that like in your 20s in your mid 20s to have like a better life it's pretty much what every kid is shooting for totally but like as far as sustainability and like building capital it was absolutely retarded but it seems like you guys could have just spent half of what you spent and thrive become millionaires parlayed that into bigger businesses right a hundred Because it was a successful business. Yeah, that's where like people, it's not in the documentary, but like, there was checks getting cash that like were, and like I didn't know if it was Sorby or Bert, and I'm like

trying to figure out who it is, right? And then basically what was happening was Sorby was cashing checks in Bert's name. So the whole time and then they were basically blaming, like he was blaming Bert for it. And that's where like this, all this hostility came from. And then like, you know, Bert's overspending like, there's the thing in the documentary about him buying a dog, you know, like just stupid expenses like that. Night out in Miami can cost you $10,000 at a club. Easy.

What is a dog? 10 grand, you know? But like, just like, it just was like something that was like, we were like already, this is like months after like we're overspending, overspending. And he bought came home with a fucking brand new Frenchie that was 10 grand. I'm like, fuck you. You know? Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Frenchie had a wicked Coke habit too. Yeah. It was nuts. So like. So what was he cashing these checks? What was Sorby cashing checks for?

His own personal pocket. Okay. Oh, wow. So he was embezzling. Yeah. Okay. He was stealing. Yeah. That's this tracks. That's Sorby for you. Right? So at a certain point, when do you guys look at the books and say, uh-oh, we were spending double what we take in? So there's a point there where like, out of all the capital that I had put together, it's between like two, three bank accounts, right?

And credit cards are starting a max. They're not like at first we were just paying them off and full, paying them off and full. and like that slows down and then it gets to a point where like you're like have like a few hundred thousand left in capital and then it's just like getting worse and like you're all arguing at this point everybody's blaming each other and we're all like have this like uh slightly narcissistic ways about us all three of us you know so like it was like i was getting down it like almost like overwhelmed like i'm like on drugs i'm like i don't know what to even say like who to believe i had no idea right and i'm like fucking up myself or i'm like disappointed in my own self. So I'm like, I'm just going to take all this money and just say, fuck you guys. Like, I can't

go any more in the hole. Well, what about your parent? What about your family? Don't they want to return? Are they asking where they're not profits. Okay. They're not asking for any. There wouldn't, there was no like, they weren't asking for like, are you returning a principal to them though? So, no, like they're like, all right, if we take out a loan for you for 250,000, just pay that 250,000 when you make the money. Okay. So you're not in trouble with them at this point. Not at all. Okay. They're literally just thinking the business is running fine. You know, like, all right, yeah, he's just getting more cars, you know, like really just not even paying attention. Okay.

So you decide to take whatever's left of your cash in the company and split? So, yeah, then there's a point where I'm just like, fuck these guys. I basically take like the remaining $120,000 and I just fly to Vegas with it in cash. And I'm like, I'm just going to basically risk it all. And if I win, I'll pay all the debt back and just go back to working in construction or I'm going to lose it all and kill myself. Well, how much in debt were you? This is like you're in like 400,000 in debt roughly, like 300,000 in debt. To creditors, credit card companies.

Credit cards, home equity line of credit, which is like my grandfather's house. You know, so like this is like, and that's like my dad or my idol. So it hurt. So like I'm like, fuck these kids. Too much money is going missing. I can't control it. I can't make enough money to pay this shit back. We're never going to square this away, right?

So I'm going to just risk it all or die. Like I was like, that's it. How were you going to kill yourself? I had like 100 sannics on me. Yeah. I just, I bro my drugs and I just went down there. And I played in the World Series of Poker. Like it made it, you know, I was like made it like day two, you know.

Fucking some good stories. Like I bluffed out like that guy, Michael Mizrahi and that. And it's like, and then I, whatever, sooner or later got stacked and lost my chips. And then I played back rat all night up, down, up down. And then sooner or later lose it all. And at this point, like, I'm. The more I lose, the more I drink, taking more Zanis. I'm probably like 15, 20 Zanis in plus like, you know, a bunch of drinks.

So I'm like just like ready to die. Did you know your limit before you actually could die, like the number of Xanax? I was taking at that time 20 bars pretty much every day, 15, 20 bars a day, like two milligram Xanax. But like tolerance is people underestimate how much of a talent you could build. I wasn't like, I would take 20 bars and people wouldn't be like he's spart out. Like, they would be like, he's just, like, functioning. Like, I don't know. Like, I'm taking, like, right when I wake up three, you know, every couple hours, three.

And just like, I mean, if you see me on video or audio, like, even like the New York Times calls, you can tell him barred out in my voice. But I was, like, still there to an extent, like, you know. What does that feel like 20 bars a day? Constantly pushing through you. You just basically have no worries, no anxiety, no thought of, like, fear or anything like that, right? You're just like, everything is just like whatever is in the moment. You're doing that in the moment, right? Like you're not thinking 10 steps ahead behind you.

It just whatever. Sounds very Zen. It is very Zen. Wow. That's like what the Buddhists strive for with meditation. I could just take a bar? Pretty much. It really is true.

I mean, Xanax is a great drug you've taken responsibly. What is it? What are they prescribe it for? Like anxiety? It makes sense, right? So intellectually, you're not physically worried, but in your mind, you're like, oh, if I lose this money, I'll have to kill myself. Yeah.

Okay. So you've crapped out, so to speak, you've lost all your money in Vegas. What happens? You try to kill yourself? Yeah, I go up to the hotel room and I just pop like 60s annies straight. Like I just take like a handful, 30, another, I pour the rest of the bottle on my mouth, lay in the bed, think about like whatever I can think about for that 30 seconds before you just pass out. And then like 20 hours later, 18 hours later, I just wake up. And did you, were you glad?

Were you like, oh my God, what did I do? Not really. Like, you're not really glad you wake up. You're like, I have no more drug. First off, as an addict, you're like, the first thought you have is like, I don't even have more drug to like, like, I'm going to start with drawing. And then you're like, now I have to like face my family or what do I do here, right? I just like called my mom and cried. You know, and then I'm like, what do I do?

I'm like, all right, let me fly back to Miami. Let me see what I can figure out because it's only so long you can just talk to your mom about like anything, you know? And I fly back to Miami and so he's like, all right, what we can do is like, we can sell one of the cars. And then he figured out this way to like basically sell a car and give the guy a fake title so we didn't have to pay off the car. So we basically- And you claim it stolen? No, you just basically get the guy just, he was so good at documents. Like where like the guy basically used the title, got a registration and everything and just still to this day.

That guy probably has like a fake title on a Bentley. So he's, but who's making the payments to the creditors? We continue just making the payments. and he just gives us the lump sum of $150K. Right, and then you only have to pay whatever, two grand a month. Yeah, there's a whole hustle with that in the car business. They call them ghost loans where, like, basically,

they'll give you, like, a check to go get a car, and then you basically never get the car and you just make the payments. So you get, like, because, like, a lot of times you applied for a loan right now, you say a person that can get a $10,000 actual loan would be able to get a $50,000 car loan. Right. So that must be rampant. Yeah, that was like, they call them ghost loans. You just basically never get the cars.

And then once they really come after you for the title, you just pay that one off and do it again. You guys could have been very valuable to mafia families and mafia organizations because these are on their face, very good mob scams, you know? Like that's how the bread and butter sides like gambling. Were you ever approached by organized crime to like, never?

Wow. But they were dealing with gangsters, crips and bloods, selling them cars before you came into it. Yeah, I was running around with crips and bloods, myself for a while. They're like it like a completely different sets but like um and this is like early on like where I was running around like a you know a little 22 and yeah like uh my my best friend at the time was like one of the leaders of the Crips in far Rockaway. Hmm. Wow. Okay. So, uh, are you able to, because I don't really remember this part. I watched the doc, but that was three weeks ago. I can't remember.

What, what came of that? Were you guys able to recoup some of your money? So yeah. Then you get that $150,000 back, right? So now I'm like, all right, so what do we do from here? And he's like starting to get a little bit distant. And I'm like, how do you even have money? Like, where are you getting money from that? You're like, and then he's just like, oh, yeah, like, I'm investing in crypto. But basically what he was doing, he invested in crypto.

And he's just like day trading with money that he stole from Miami Exotics. Right. Right. Because, like, he was broke, came down there. And now he just has this money that, like, wasn't through our company. So he's basically day trading. And then like, did you consider going and. reporting him, like literally going to the feds and be like, this guy's stealing for my business.

That's embezzlement. That's real. And for the amount of money he stole, which I think is in the hundreds of thousands, that's like a big sentence. Yeah. So the thing is then you have to tell your family and your business, like you never have, like, I was still in the hopes that like somehow I'd be able to make this money back. And that's kind of what parlayes into what Centrotech winds up being. But you were stolen from though. I know. But like if you were going to cooperate through the whole, you know, dirty business of ratting and your story of cooperating, I would say that is probably the most justifiable. When you're making legitimate income, yes, you're being irresponsible with your profits, but we can fix that. You have a profitable business still. We can make that back. This guy's stealing, but you never thought you just didn't want to expose your failure to your family. That was pride of that. More of the failure part than was like the biggest thing. I didn't like, and then I didn't like, and then I also was unsure if it was bird or sorby right and like it wasn't until later that i figured it out that it was sorby um so so from there then like basically in the crypto like he's trading crypto

and he's talking about it and i'm like what the fuck is this nerd talking about basically right like this is like some magic money indian shit exactly and um and then one day he basically just lost it all there's like a flash crash which is basically like ethereum drops down to one cent and then just shoots back up. Right. It's like some scam that back in the day was able to run on those like exchanges and shit. And, um, he's basically broke again.

Right. Right. Did, did you sell all the cars that you bought? No, still have cars. And like, I was still trying to run Miami Exotics.

And I'm like, yeah, why aren't you helping with Miami Exotics anymore? Like fucking, I need help running this shit. Yeah. And he's like, oh,

yo, this crypto shit. Because he was just doing well in trading for like this short couple couple week period. Right. Okay. Um, And when did you, when did the light bulbs go off that, oh, this is a real, this is an even better hustle, this new Bitcoin shit?

Yeah. So he loses that money and that flash crash. And then he's trying to basically find out a class action suit against Coinbase. Right. And through that on Reddit, he finds out about ICOs, which is like, what is ICOs? It's just basically this unregulated market of people raising a ton of capital, bunch of nerds, basically just with no fucking product that are raising 100. million dollars, 20 million left and right. For, in order to purchase cryptocurrency.

Yeah, so basically it's the same thing as an IPO. You come up with a concept, right? You come up with a concept and then you take it public. You take it public, right? But like not actually to like with the exchange, securities and exchange committee. So at that time, no one was being touched by them. Right.

Okay. That totally makes sense, right? what an IPO for a company, a regulated company is, is an initial public offering. It's when you've built up a private business enough to where you offer shares of the company to the public. And they buy the shares in hopes that the stock goes up and then they can sell it for profit someday. So is that what all of these investors, these individual private investors and later institutions,

investors is that was their hope in buying into center tech was that your your price was going to go up the price of your bitcoin company was going to go up and so they could sell for a profit correct absolutely okay so but it's also view yeah it's also viewed almost like as crowdfunding right like it's like not like public companies that already been around established it's basically like crowdfunding combined with going public right so it's like this weird combo and then also like cryptocurrency doesn't hold shares of your company. You have literally, you create a corporation, Centrotech, and it has its own shares, like when you create a corporation. Cryptocurrency has nothing to do with shares of a company. Right. So were you- People get that idea conflated, and it's not true.

Were you selling shares of your company or of the Bitcoin? So I'll explain how that works, right? So you basically create a coin, right? So you go on, you, you, Ethereum blockchain, you can get a developer to build a coin off of the Ethereum blockchain and you basically make a smart contract and you print as many coins as you want to print. Basically print money, right? You're like, all right, how many centric coins do you want to make? We chose to make 100 million centric coins. You pick your price of what you want to sell it at. So now basically we're like Ethereum, it goes off like cryptocurrency value. So like every time someone invest one Ethereum into this smart contract, which is just an address that they send the Ethereum to, it automatically sends

them back centric coins. So it's basically a dollar a coin. for that's where that was our starting price of what we were going to sell centric coins for so you essentially printed a hundred million dollars at that point right okay so because i'm a moron i'm like a boomer when it comes to this stuff so you know i'm just trying to clarify for the listeners so a center coin was the product just like a doge coin just like a bit i wouldn't say that's the product though that's where like there's a misconception right is because there's a product that we're creating and then those centriccoins are almost representative of a share of the company that we're making this product.

But what's your product, though? We're making a card that's going to be able to spend in stores. Right. Okay. Hang on there. Boom. So what about Bitcoin, though? Because Bitcoin is just the most popular crypto?

Yeah. And literally has nothing to do with the documentary. Got it. You just called it that for click. You're going to be out, yeah, for clip paid 100%. You're going to be able to spend. your Bitcoin on the card, but it has nothing to do with this story at all. But you could spend your Ethereum on the card.

You could spend your Center Tech on the card. You could spend your Dogecoin, whatever it was. Right? Correct. Got it. So you were raising you, you, Center Tech was the company. Centra Tech was your company and your product was going to be this card that you could print off all of your crypto on and receive cashback. right away and Centra coin was your cryptocurrency.

Are shares of that company. Got it. Got it. Almost representative of shares of the company. That's how crypto is all presented, even though it's not the real shares or like a real public company. Got it. That's where like that has to be figured out like on a legislation basis.

Right. They haven't figured that out yet. And this is what year? This is 2017. Right. So the the crypto bubble, you guys got in like at the perfect time. The bubble is just starting to inflate. There's, you know, a thousand companies like you.

You know, the documentary at the very end says that during that boom, I think there were like 500, you know, Bitcoin companies like yours, crypto companies like yours that were just made up out of thin air that had ICOs. I think about 80% of them were scams. Still to this day, 80% of the cryptocurrencies are all scams. Just people like you that don't have a product. Yeah, if I didn't make a documentary, it would have been forgotten about, right? Like, every company in crypto is a, I would only, still to this day, if it's not Bitcoin or if it's not Ethereum, it's a scam in my eyes.

Yeah. There's no point of having that many coins. There's only one real use case. The government's not involved and you can send money to anybody anywhere in the world instantly, right, without like any sort of government involvement, any bank involvement. That's really the only good use case for cryptocurrency. Yeah, because there's no other value. Yeah, what the fuck do you need it for? So it's just Bitcoin and Ethereum, in your opinion.

Yeah, you have, like, the internet that, like, you can build technology off. You can build the technology off, like, without it. Right, right, right. Okay. Great. So, and this was Sorby's brainchild or your brainchild or both. So what happens is through finding, trying to figure out, like, oh, what is an ICO? We basically like, oh, what can we make an ICO off of, right?

So we basically find a company in Singapore that was making a card and a wallet that we just basically stole their website. So it wasn't like a brainchild essentially, right? It's just like copy and paste change it to CentroTech. And this was, okay, they were, and what of this coin, what did this company in Singapore? What were they doing? They were taking that card. They were trying to make a card with a wallet. And the same concept, you could take your Bitcoin on this card and go to a,

an ATM and get cash from it. Or go to the store and buy clothes with it. So, like, that's how it works. It's just like you have like a wallet on your phone, right? Where it just shows you all your cryptocurrency. And you basically pick which cryptocurrency you want to use. And then you go to the store, swipe your card. And it converts on your thing.

And yeah, it just shows the conversion rate. And it just withdrawed in cryptocurrency. And that's a great business. That's a great idea. Yeah. And, but they, this company in Singapore, that, they were just developing it. It sounds like they didn't have it all figured out yet. Yeah, but there's a sick part of this, right?

That company is just trying to figure it out. They never got there. Then there's another company that's saying they have Visa and MasterCard also, which is now the company that owns Staples Center, but they were lying in the beginning about Visa and MasterCard. They just settled with the SEC civilly and now they own Staples Center. What company is that? Now it's Crypto.com.

Crypto.com, the crypto arena in L.A. Wow. They did the same thing as us. Wow. So you guys, it's kind of a visionary thing to be able to see that and say, oh, wow, that's a great service. Yeah. That's a great, legitimate service if we can figure it out. If we can figure it out.

That's a big if. That takes a lot of investment, a lot of research and development, a lot of infrastructure, a lot of nerds doing the back end coding and stuff like that. So you steal, copy and pasted, uh, the web, website of this company in Singapore that was trying this technology and take it from there. How did you start to build up? Yeah. So we just basically from that point where it's still in like an apartment, just like renting a couple of cars here and there, but focusing on this, right?

And then like you basically just go into like all the different Bitcoin Redits. There's like a ton of them like Bitcoin talk like random or in Slack channels. And you're just basically pumping your coin. Right. You're just like everybody check this out, check out our website. And you're just slowly getting investments. Right. 20K would day, 50K one day, but super slow for like the first month.

And the documentary, they talk about how you guys set yourselves up as like, you know, CEOs on LinkedIn. You said you had a master's degree from Harvard. Sorby had a business degree from Yale. You know, you guys made yourselves, you completely inflated and lied about your resumes. Who is the CEO? So we created a, like we didn't want to be. the CEO because we were too young. So we created a fake CEO, which is like, we basically just found

like a stock image of like an old white guy. You just Googled old white guy. Yeah. And took the picture that came up. Yeah. Took that picture and made him, his name was Michael Edwards. Right. And we just created him as a person. And who was the real Michael Edwards? He was just like some Canadian professor. We never even knew who he was. Yeah. He was like a professor in Manitoba. Yeah. I feel like that guy, I feel really bad for it. Yeah. They're supposedly like came to his house like on horses. Oh, the Canadian FBI.

FBI, yeah. Mounties. So you, so, and you posted, you copy and paste it. You swiped his picture and then pasted it into the website. And he's the first face you see when you see like, okay, CentroTech. He's the CEO. You're the. I'm the chief operating officer.

Right. And Serbia was the chief technical officer. Right. And then you basically had like, you know, HR, like a bunch of fake out. There was a couple other fake pictures on there, like just random people. And to the untrained eye, it looks, the website looks fine. Like I would look at it without doing a deep dive and I could say, okay, that looks like a real company. 100%.

And did you guys file like articles of incorporation in the state of Florida? Yeah, in Delaware, because it's like more protected as far as like no one can find your corporation or who owns it. So this is, in fact, a company. Yeah, it's a real company. You've just taken the technology from somebody else and you're purporting to, you're purporting that it works already. Yeah, well, not really reporting that it works. We're basically saying that we have the deals with Visa and MasterCard to make it and we're in beta testing. Right.

So, like, that's why not people aren't anticipating getting their card right away. That's down the line. We put out like a timeline of when people are going to get it. And we just need to raise capital to build out the company even more. I see. Okay. Not a lie, actually. Not a lie.

The only thing that was lied about was just the CEO and the fake deal with Visa MasterCard, which is the most, the CEO thing is really doesn't, like, maybe people will like, oh, that looks like a real guy. Right. And like R, you know, saying I went to Harvard, he went to Yale, this shit. But it was really that Visa MasterCard. If that was true, the company is official. Without that, it's not. Right.

Like, that's like the hardest thing to get no matter what. Right. So you're now, yeah, raising money online, going to all these, you know, chat rooms and Reddit and pumping up your new company and this new idea. And you start raising money and explain that. Yeah. So then we're like, you know, the money's coming in slow at first. And then there was just one day, I'm literally sitting on my balcony, like smoking a blunt. And like all you're doing all day is just like refreshing the thing where you see the money coming in.

You know, like every 10 minutes you're like, all right, let me check more money came in and then go back into the chat rooms. right fucking and then uh out of nowhere like a hundred grand comes in and then another 500 grand comes and you're like whoa this is different this is different right and then what happened was there was just this guy this like old nerdy crypto guru guy that basically fucked up his like uses like a web bot type of thing that like is like AI almost and it like combined us with a bank because like centra is like the word in latin or some weird shit like that and then he put out a press release without doing his own due diligence and and it basically said centra tech is are partnered with the bank. And then his, he's such a big name that people would just

automatically dumped in like two and a half million within like 24 hours. Right. From that. What is that guy's name? Cliff High. Right. And you can find him, he's all over the internet. He's like supposed to be the crypto guru. Yeah. So he has a bunch of these individual investors who saw that and they follow what he's invest. They thought he was investing in you guys. Yeah. And not even that what he's investing. It's just like he's, when anybody takes his shit at face, they're like, oh, shit, this is her bank. I'll dump my money there.

So overnight, you had millions of new dollars into the company. So, like, it went from, like, shit to a bit, like, oh, shit, like, what do we do now? Right. Like, we weren't even expecting. Like, for my whole thing going into is, like, I just need to make back my, like, half a million,

pay off my family shit, and then I'm gone. So then you were going to just dump the money, cash out, and then shut everything down? Like, that was my, not Sorby's plan. That was my whole ideology going. into the company was just like I need to just make back the money for my family I don't care about Sorby I don't care about any of this shit I just want to fucking pay back my debts so that's still fraud so your your thought was I am stealing I'm going to commit fraud to basically pay back

my debts and then I'm just going to try to get my way out of this got it okay so that's criminal intent so yeah 100% criminal test so now at this point after that big influx of cash how much are you guys sitting on so now you have like two and a half million or three million at this point, right? And now you're like, oh, shit. Like, now there's really eyes. Like, your chat rooms go from 200 people to 2,000 people. And that's just like constant talking, right? And that's where we bring on, like, the third guy, um, which is basically Sorby's girlfriend's brother, the kid that's in the documentary. He comes along. He starts working for us. Also white ass teeth. His teeth suck, though. His are like straight, no, like, you know, he got like instant veneers or whatever.

Right. You guys got the plug on veneers. No, he got him way after, but like I got my shit done by like a professional place where they send up molds and all that type of shit. Okay, so, and he was the C-O-O. He was the chief operating officer or he was more like- I think they brought him in as chief marketing officer at first. There's some shit like that. And what was his function in the company? So at this time, we're still, we have $3 million and we're still in like a apartment that's literally half the size of this room, like a room that's half the sides of this room.

and he's sitting on like a milk crate. You know, like, we're on computer chairs. He's like on a milk crate on a laptop. And we're just basically like trying to control the chat room of like what people are saying. Like, oh, now they're starting to ask questions, right? Right. Like real questions. Right.

Like who's the CEO guy? Why, when can we meet him? Right. And that's when you're just like, fucking this is getting nuts, you know? Right. And we're like, we have to go legit. You know, like, this is where like people, it's not covered in a documentary, but we were trying to go legit.

You mean like you were like, oh, we have all this money for a product that we claim to be developing, let's go develop it. Correct. We go get a sick office. Like, you know. One of those glass offices, right? I think was it on Miami Beach? Yep, on Miami Beach, glass office, you know, 15, 20 grand a month type of office.

We hire it out probably 40 developers or like 20 developers, customer service agents, everything you can imagine. Right. And we just like even, it was funny. Like, we went and bought 20 MacBooks for our developers. They came in. They were like, we can't develop on Macs. They're just like, put them in a closet and just go buy 20 PCs. Right.

We need big computers. Yeah. Yeah. They're like, Max are for like fucking pictures and shit. Yeah. Yeah. And then you hire the guys over and where were they, Moldova? Those guys were like, they're overhyped in the documentary also.

They just want to make it seem like a bigger thing. Yeah. Who were they? They were just like the guy. They even built our Miami Exotics websites. Right. So they were coders. Yeah, just like two decent coders from fucking Lithuania or whatever the fuck they said they were from.

And wasn't Lithuania. I could tell you that. I think it was like Moldovia. It was one of those weird Eastern Bloc countries, though. Some shit like that. And why them? Were they just cheaper? You know, I don't know if you've ever used Upwork,

but you just basically put in what you want to get done. And then people reach back out to you and, you know, we just picked them. Yeah. There's no like signs behind it. They just said they were good at this type of coding. Yeah. But they weren't, they didn't even build like the blockchain aspect of it. Okay.

They built like our website and then like they would put up. the fake pictures or like they would just like constantly be on call to like change anything that we needed to be changed. We actually had a guy that was like another guy from Upwork that built like our blockchain tech. I see. I see. So those guys in a documentary over Moldova, they were, they knew this was a scam or a fake company that you guys needed to build, build out. They didn't even ask that question ever, right? So like they're just whatever. You're paying us, you know, thousands of dollars. This is our price. We do what you say. Got it. Okay. So. So, yeah, you hire all these guys. You're trying

actively to produce a card where that will exchange cryptocurrency for cash. Yeah. Did you guys get close to that? By the end, by the end, we actually had it. Fully working card wallet everything. Right.

Because you got Floyd Mayweather, I believe. That was with the fake card. Oh, so Floyd May okay. Let's talk about this. Yeah, this is a huge middle here. Yeah. Okay, okay. Well, at one point you were getting celebrity endorsements. One was DJ Khalid, hilarious, and Floyd Mayweather. Yeah.

And he posted on his, on his Instagram, him taking this, what do you call it? The central card? The center cards. And going and buying, purchasing something with his Bitcoin at a store. Yeah. He did that knowing that it didn't work. Flayy Mother doesn't know anything where that's going on. So like what we-

He's retarded. We all know that. Yeah, yeah. The guy can't read, you know. Yeah. That 50 cent thing is hilarious when he does the ice bucket challenge. But yeah, so. So yes.

So he didn't, he knew he acted because he had to give the money back at the end. Yeah. So he actively, he took your money. How much did you guys pay him? Like a million dollars. He took that knowing or not caring if it worked. I don't, it was just knowing, not knowing, right? Like they didn't care.

He does a million promotions like that. Right. So you speak to his manager. Yeah. He's like, this is. Floyd's price and you send the money over. The manager makes his little cut from it. And he just says, what do you want me to say and what do you want me to do? Okay. And you just basically give him his script and he just does it. So what we did is we just

took our debit cards from our pocket, sent it to a place in California that would just like rebranded into like a metal Centra card. It says Centra. They just changed the chip. Right. So like it's basically just a debit card. It's like our debit card and it's just going to come out of our bank account. And then he's just holding up a app that just has like some, something that we programmed to make it look like it's actually working. Right. Right. So then he just makes the video saying, you know, look, use my, you know, buying underwear

and my censure card. And it just shows the app. And that was like his first commercial. Then he posted like a picture with him all his belts. Just bought my censure coins. But that blew you guys up. Yeah. That was what like we were smart with like as far as marketing aspect.

Right. Like we took that few million dollars that we parlayed off of that cliff high movement. And we just basically got a sick office. developers started really building and started taking like unlimited videos of our office like look what we're doing here this is sick like a sick big company right that floy mayweather came involved dj call it came about this looks now from an outside perspective the fraud just escalated to like the top of the top yeah and then now the money is pouring in constantly yeah so now you're you know a couple million a day right like every single day and then i also on the back end this is like not covered in the documentary, I figured out how to control the price of Centra on like a black, like a dark, not a dark web, but like it was just like this underground exchange where it allowed

me to like jump the order book. Like for this is like too, maybe too technical for some people to understand. But like typically on an order book, if a price is $2, you have to buy that $2.01, $2,002,000, before you can buy the $2.50. On this, you can basically, I would put a sell order for centric coins of my own centric coins at $250. And then I'd be able to buy my own. order at 250 with the Ethereum and it basically create everybody thinking that now Centric coin is 250 and the price is up 25% today. Why would you want the price to be higher? You because you own. Of course, because you own a ton of your own stock. How much of your own money did you put into your company? So to like to pump the price you're saying? So you don't

end up, it doesn't cost you money to do. You only spend like the transaction fee because you're buying your own transactions. I see. So, like, it was the sickest loop ever because you say you own 30 million of this coin now, that's, say, $2, right? So that's $60 million worth of your coin. Now you can make it $2.50 in a day. You instantly just print $15 million.

Right, right. Wow. How many times did you do that? Every day. Every day. What do you think your net worth was at the peak? Close to a billion. Close to a billion.

Company worth. Wow. Close to, like, yeah, because we had two. 200,000 Ethereum, which ended up, like in the beginning was $250 a token, went to $1,500. So now you do the math on that, that's $150,000, say then we own 30-something million, maybe half a billion. What is it? Is it a half a billion? It's a half a billion. If you do the math, right? Because like, so say 150 million per 100,000 Ethereum, that's 300 million. Then we have like Bitcoins and shit like that. But I don't even count that in because that was just like not as many. And then you have 30 million times, say five. What is that math? That's another 150. So say realistically 450, right? Okay. So if you got a half a million dollars in the company and you got a third of that, or did you own more? Or was the company evenly split between you, Sorby and the white teeth kid. The white teeth kid. What is his name?

Farcass. Robert Farcis. R.J. Got it. So he never makes a penny the whole course of the company. Oh, no wonder he hates you. Yeah. He just slandered you throughout the entire documentary. Yeah, and he's also Sorby's fiancee's brother. Okay, got you. And they had a joint defense. And I basically, the director, like, showed him clips of what I was saying about him, just basically calling him an idiot. So he basically was like,

Oh, he's stupid. You could tell, like, just he's a dumbass. Yeah, he was getting centra, like, central tattoos and he's all, you know, stupid. Yeah. So, yeah, then basically, Sorby's the one that controls the investor funds, which is, like, $300 million worth of funds. Yikes. You don't want Sorby control on that.

We know that. Yeah. And people, like, still to this day, there's, like, lawsuits going. Like, I, like, I basically, now, like, FBI sees the $100,000 of it. there was 200,000 raised. I've been actually working with a guy to try to recoup. Sorby cashed out all this money. Hang on,

let's save that because this is important and really glossed over. That was the big glaring part of the documentary at the end. We were like, does Ray have money left? Did the government let him keep it? Sorby, why did he do all that time? He definitely seemed like the bigger criminal. but yeah, there's just a lot of unanswered things. So, but let's just save it for the end.

You were saying that you, in fact, were by the end able to figure out the technology. You said you were able to figure out a way to make that card print cash for crypto. Explain that. Yeah, so we were consistently like applying to new credit card processes to try to get a card that would work, getting denied. Crypto wasn't being accepted. like, you know, this whole thing. And then we finally found one that was a prepaid card. The one thing that they wouldn't let us do is like rebranded into a central card. So we just have to use like this shitty plastic card. But it would work with our wallet app that we had created.

So it was basically the same thing that card just wasn't metal like an app. What was the company? It was a at the end. It was like Galileo or one of these like random prepaid visa master card companies. But it was a visa master card. Visa master card. Yep. Okay. So but then why did you start take, why did you, before then, what was the decision to take the Visa logo and start printing them on your own debit cards? So we had said from day one that we had to deal with Visa MasterCard, right? And we ended up getting a cease and assist like in the beginning with that.

And we were taking it on our website off our website, just like trying to appease the chat rooms and the people that were investing. But at what point did you say, oh, yeah, we have to, this technology is not getting developed fast enough. We need to fraud and make it look like, and start putting Visa on your website, putting Visa onto the cards,

showing that black card, you can go look it up or watch the dock, says Centra card, and right on the corner, it looks very real, is the Visa logo. What made you guys say, yeah, we have to take that step? Because that's

real obvious fraud. You know what I mean? That was basically a step to basically be better than our competitor. In the very beginning, we made that decision, right? With 10X didn't have it. We were going to be the American company that had Visa MasterCard already. Who was 10X? 10X was just the company we copied in Singapore. Gotcha. Okay. I see. Oh, so you guys printed that, you guys will call it cropped that Visa logo onto the card from day one. Day one. Got it. Okay. So now, and the whole time you're strung out on Xanax. It's fully strung out literally from day one of Centra to the very end.

Okay. And then what was the turning point? What was, when did it all begin to unravel? So the New York Times guy, Nathaniel Popper, he puts out an article. Basically, he got us, right? Like, he hits us up and he's just, like, being friendly. He's like, all right, I'm going to send down my photographer. He had spoken to Farkas.

Then he puts me, Farkas put me on the phone with him. Like, yeah, like, it seems like he wants to do a good article on us. I'm like, all right, New York Times. Like I'm from New York, just like this ignorant kid. And he got me. Like he like basically pitched me that like it was going to be a good article, sends the photographer down. We all take these pictures.

And then after like the pictures were taken, he starts like pressing me on questions. Who's the CEO? You know, do you have Visa MasterCard? I called the bank corpers who we were saying we were getting from in the beginning. I called them. They say you don't have a deal with them. And that's when we like, all right, we have to kill off Michael Edwards, right?

that that's uh we're like so we say Michael Edwards died in a car accident and uh yeah why did you choose hang on why did you choose those are the such obvious things that a lay person can investigate when you say it's like saying i have a i got a movie deal right now with jZ that can be we can look that up like that was one of the most obvious dumb ass things you guys did were you just too high or were you too high off the money the adrenaline We raise $20 million without, as easy as it is to investigate. But why wouldn't you? But yeah, but this is clearly, you're raising money from speculators.

Like when a mainstream person, right, the SEC, a New York Times reporter, the FBI, like these are, when you say you have deals with Bank Corps, that's a phone call to verify. Like, didn't you have a backup plan? Didn't you say, ah, maybe we ought to like not announce. these things. So Bank Corps was like out of all the companies that had Visa Escorted, they were the hardest to verify through. We tried calling it. We did like verifications where we would call them and they wouldn't give like really clear answers on their website. It was hard to look up. So we did like a little bit of diligence as far as that, right? Like they they just they were the hardest to verify

through. That's why we use them. But the New York Times guy, he got right through. Right. Yeah, that's how it works. Right. Once you have like a real deal person that knows what they're doing, they were able to easily get through. Right. Okay. So, you know, I cut you off. Continue. How does, how does that New York Times article manifest? So, sooner later, so at this point, you probably raised 20 million, right? Like, we're not at, like, but like 20 million had turned into 60. Because, like, prices of Ethereum, we're raising it in Ethereum. So, like, people have to understand the fluctuation of the price is always going up of how much we raised based off of that, right? So we had, so at that point, like, say, 60, whatever the hell of the

amount is, right? But then he puts out this article and like you to anticipate like a just complete fall apart. Like we killed off our CEO right after that happens. He also put out an article. It's not covered in the documentary. It's like, Sorby had got his like fourth DWI and then in New York. He asked me to lie on the stand from and I ended up going coming to New York lying on the stand from. I got a perjury case. Oh, what were you supposed to be lying? Just saying that he didn't really have that many drinks. Oh, wow. And that you were with. him and you can verify i wasn't even there it happened like before i was even hanging out with him did he lose that case yeah i got like right arrested right there on the spot wow are you serious yeah they

like had it like on camera everything like i don't know did they get his blood alcohol level uh i think he didn't blow okay yeah it was like one of those things and it was like his fourth the third dw i right so he was stumbling around it was obvious that he was drunk yeah so i know he was driving you know he was driving yeah he got fucked and it's like and then so like the first article from the new york times is like two glasses of wine and a mazora, white mazoride. It's like what I said on the stand. Wow. And so then we're like, all right, we're going to step down from the company, but we're

going to just continue on from the shadows, but we're going to step down. We got rid of Michael Edwards. We put my grandfather as the CEO. There's these big shifts that are coming, right? And we're hiring like real deal, cheap technical officers and like the best of the best, like as far as like quality people to run the company. You hired actual business people. Yeah, real lawyers, everything.

Like, at this point, we're trying to go legit, but we just were built on such of a house of cards that, like, it was bound to just crumbles. Had you paid your family back by this point? At this point, I paid some of it back. What a piece of shit. I know. I know. That's what just like, but like, $300,000.

You raised $60 million already. So throughout this time, Sorby has the money, the access to the investor funds. I don't have the access to it. Sorby's breaking me off here and there. I have actress just centric coins. So like I'm, I'm not rich really at all yet. Sorby's rich. He's buying me Rolexes.

This all, you know, like. Does that worry you? So this is always like a worry because I, Sorby and me have this shit relationship. Right. And you know the guy's a thief. I'm puzzled out of your rental car company. So I'm basically plotting, plotting this whole time of like, how can I stack enough, like, outside of this to make sure that I'm good no matter what.

So I'm just basically stashing centric coins throughout this whole time. And like I don't want to sell them off because it would just crush our price. Right. So I still haven't paid it back because I haven't made enough money to pay it back. In liquid cash. Yeah. And I'm asking him throughout and we're fighting over this same topic throughout. Right.

So there's beef between me and Sorby throughout. I go lie on the stand from still like, and then like he's like, all right, we're going to step down. And this is where he tries to like cut me out of the company. Like, and my grandfather is the fucking CEO. Like we had been through all this. I know everything that's wrong with the company. Like if I just went public, the company's shut down. we're all going to jail.

But I didn't do that. I just basically like just pay this fucking debt, you know? Like, let's figure this out. And he starts giving me like, oh, here's like 50K towards it and just like piecing it together. And then they ended up getting to the point where like the card and wallet start working, but then we start getting SEC and subpoenas. And that pretty much is at the same time, right? Like by the time we figured it out and that's where Sorby's like, this is like a government hit job on us

because they don't want this car to really go out to the public. And I'm like, you're ridiculous. Like we did something illegal and that's why the SEC is investigating us. But if you had a card that's working, it's the product that you told all of these investors that you guys were developing. Yeah. So you developed it. So if that's true, I assume it is because you had to tell the government everything. You wouldn't be on the podcast lying.

What was the crime? Is it lying that you was. The initial intent? Yeah, lying to raise money is security fraud. I understand. I understand that. So it was the initial lying. Yeah.

Because you guys changed. We got all the money. You said, okay, let's actually go do it. Yeah. But the initial lying saying you were developing it when you were just sitting in a studio apartment in Miami on a milk crate, that that's where the criminal aspect came in. All of, we weren't even charged for like the price control, any of that. We were literally just charged for just those two misrepresentations pretty much, just like the Visa MasterCard and the fake CEO and like the LinkedIn fake Harvard and stuff like that.

That was like security for a wire fraud conspiracy to commit both of those things, four counts, and that was it. We never like had nothing to do with how realistic the company became or like how legit the company came. They didn't give a shit about any of that. They're not like, that's not their job to care about. Yeah. What was interesting in the documentary that had one of the heads of the investigation, your investigation on there, and he admitted he was like, there was thousands of these scams going on. We just needed to make an example of one. And you guys were one of the biggest, or at least the most out there, the most obvious, the most flashy.

Yep. What were those SEC investigations? Because the SEC is not the criminal division of the FBI. what was their function and what happened with them? So what happens there is I left the company. He like basically like cut me out. And I basically at this point have like $3 million worth of centric coins. So this is where like this big fight happens between me and Sorby.

I'm like, let's pay this fucking debt. He basically won't pay the debt. And I just basically cash out my centric coins. And I'm like, fuck this company. Right. I just left and made my millions. How much did you sell that? Like $3 million.

Okay. One for one for one. You had $3 million. I had $3 million worth of centric coins. So that's why my restitution is $3 million. That's like what came to my personal account. Of course there was watches bought this type of thing and random money that Sorbia hit me off with like throughout the time. But like that's why my restitution is what it is.

So I cashed out. I forget like exactly how many tokens it was, but I made $3,000, $3 million. So that's just a click of a button? So yeah, pretty much. but I could only cash out like 50K a day. So basically I have like 50K a day coming to my bank account for like two months straight. Unbelievable. And I can't imagine the red flags that's popping up in the FBI office.

You know what I mean? Just that's insane. And are you paying taxes on that? I hadn't paid. Yeah. I still owe the IRS ton of money. Still to this day. Still to this day.

Were you paying taxes during that time when you were getting in the investor funds? No. I don't know how much Sorbios and taxes or how that aspect of this all worth. fucking mess. It's a fucking mess. Now, for these investors, you know, if you're stupid enough to invest with a couple of judge rules like you guys, I don't really have a lot of sympathy for you if you lose your money.

A lot of people made a fucking shit ton of money. Because people were cashing out. They were buying low and selling when it went up. Yeah, like still to this state, people don't realize in these crypto communities. There's just a ton of guys that you basically pay to shill your coin or promote your coin. So like we were giving people hundreds of thousands of dollars. So there's like so many people complicit in this fraud. Like literally hundreds of people that made hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Every single YouTuber that ever put out a bad article about us, I'd pay them 20 grand and then they put our article out how great we were. So you would give people money to buy your coin? Not to buy our coin. We're giving them free our coin to basically promote our coin. Oh, okay. To promote that our company. And then like these people, we'd even send them our debit card made into a central card.

They do unboxing videos, regular people that just were like, I'm making like 100 grand off this fucking company. I'll make a video of me spending my car using my central card. Oh, yeah, people have no morals. Yeah, that's not what it's about. You guys are just the conspirators that, you know, began this big fraud. Yeah. So you cash out of your share of Centercoin, Central Coin.

You've got $3 million now. Did you pay off your family? Yeah. Thank God. Yeah. So that is good. Do they know what's going on? They have any suspicion about what's going on?

Does your grandfather know he's the CEO? He's basically dead at this point. He dies, like, right here at this point. So, like, he was like, I don't give what fucking make the CEO. I'm, like, about to die. Right. He's just already a gangster. He's just like, go ahead, whatever.

I'm literally having cancer for the third time. Like, I'm dead. Wow. So when he died, did you guys keep him up there? Yeah. Or did you kill him off, too, like Mark Edwards? He got it. He died, like, actually, like, probably a month after I left the company.

And then we got shut down, like, a month later after that. So it was just like, Are you happy that he went before you got arrested? I, like, talk about this, like, with people that are close to me that, like, it meant so much to me that he died knowing I was, like, in his mind, I was doing really well. Right. Right. Like, I paid off all the debts. Family was, everybody was good.

And I, Rachel Penny, his favorite grandson, or, you know, I don't want to say favorite, but was, like, killing it in life, right? His little man. Yeah, exactly. Did he know that you had relapsed? No. Like, they, you know, older people are, like, kind of ignorant to, like, knowing what it looks like. Like, you know, if you're just wearing a nice suit and, you know, they don't even pay attention. Right, right.

Did any of your family reinvest after you gave their principal back? No, there was no need. Like, they weren't trying to make money. They were just trying to help you get off the ground. Yeah. Okay. So you paid them back at least. Great.

Now, did they ever get in trouble? My family? Yeah. No. Okay. So after you paid them back, you're sitting on a bunch of cash. what happened um so i'm basically at this point this is like my my best party story is degenerate like i'm like gambling every single day like quarter million a day uh just like these huge poker

games basically at the hard rock every single day in my life just unlimited hookers cocaine i'd wake i'd wake up basically my day was like i'd wake up at the casino i'd drink like a couple bloody marys pop a bunch of zanax go to the mall buy a couple outfits come back to the casino gamble go out to the club you know that's like my my cycle right get a bunch of like Miami strippers to come back to the hotel yeah this is great yeah so this was like

I don't disapprove of any of this yeah that time is like amazing right like realistically like I'm like having this is like my dream there's no way you don't have herpes me I have nothing wow I was like I would go to rehab like after when I go to rehab I'd be like

they'd be like you want to do your all your SDD tests I'd be like I'd like no I guess You know. We didn't have to detract onto this road. We didn't have to go so far down this dead end. I was just kind of having some fun with it. Yeah.

But yeah. So you are essentially out of the business, of Centrotech. Yeah, I'm out of the business. And like, I hate Sorby at this point, right? Like I lied on the stamp from him. He cut me out. And then he has all the big capital where I'm like, this is fucked up. Like, I should have some of that money.

Like, we built this company together. Right. And that's when, like, he hits me up. like, yeah, the SEC is investigating. And he's like, you have to go meet with this lawyer in the city. I'm like, SEC, like, whatever, it's civil, you know? Like, fuck it. Like, whatever I have to do, just let me know.

And he, like, gave me, like, he sent me like 20K. And he didn't even know I made millions of dollars off the century. Right. Why would you do any favors for him? He basically was just, I was subpoenaed also. Oh, okay. So you were subpoenaed? Yeah.

All right. But I didn't even know because it went to his, the office. So he's just like, oh, I hired us all lawyers. They subpoenaed us. Go down to this lawyer in New York City. And this wasn't the fake lawyer? The fake lawyer thing is just like a moment. Like we hired that guy in the very beginning to give us a ruling.

And then when the SEC investigation was going on, Sorby mentioned that was a lawyer off Upwork that so he paid like two grand to. Okay. And they just wanted to like talk about it because he was like a Trump lawyer guy. Oh, okay. Yeah. So in the dock, just real quick. So for the people that haven't seen the dock, basically you guys needed a lawyer. Why?

Some other coin I got it charged by the SEC. Okay. So we were just trying to find out a ruling. we were going to be considered a security. Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah. And then, Sorby found a lawyer on Upwork, and it looked like his credentials were amazing. I think he'd been to, like, Cornell Law School or something like that.

He had all these good reviews in the state of New York. And so he sent him a bunch of money, and it turns out it was just like a freshman in college. Yeah. It's just some kid in his dorm room doing what you guys do. Exactly. Rip people off. And he was scamming like DC politicians, all sorts of shit. That's hilarious.

He was killing it. Then he ended up. The only reason he got caught was because Sorby at the SEC investigation was like, this is the lawyer I spoke to telling us that we're not a security. And then they were like, who the fuck is this kid? We looked him up. Can't find any record of him in the New York bar. Do you know what happened to that guy?

He got arrested. And then he ended up getting out. And at the time he was like a lawyer, students for Trump. And now he's supposedly like a liberal. Oh, interesting. So did he get a... Did he get a... Right, yeah. Gang rape. Makes you want to vote Democrat.

No, did he get arrested because of what happened to you guys? Did that come out? Did you guys give him up, too? We didn't give him up. Sorby said, this is who gave us the ruling. And then they got, they did an investigation based off of Soapy telling him that's what we used. Right. Okay. It wasn't like a give up type of situation.

Gotcha. Okay. Okay, great. So bringing it back now, the essence. SEC, you get subpoenaed, you go down to me with a lawyer, a real lawyer in Miami. In New York. Like, so it'll be hired a New York lawyer's, whatever. But so, like, I go meet with her. And I'm just like, at this point, I'm max addiction. Like, if not more than 25 bars a day, drinking every day, like, just fucking a mess.

And she was like, oh, so, like, you have to give us, like, a statement. And I, like, she was like, you can't even give us a statement. Like, you're, like, can't even talk. I was like, I don't know what you want from me. You know, and then from there, about like a month goes by, I'm playing like a high-stakes poker game and I get a call from Sorby from jail, which like I didn't get arrested. He got arrested. Him and Farkas got arrested like a month before me. And they raided the office in Miami, right?

Yeah. He was trying to like support. He was like on a flight to back to South Korea. Oh, we skip that story. Oh, right. Tell us. What, yeah, how did Korea come into play? So what happens is like we had been almost sold out, but we still have like the rest of our coins.

We had been doing really well at this point. Then a bunch of these Asian names come into the chat room. And we're like, who the fuck of these guys? They're like, we want to invest like big money. And everybody says big money, you know, like in the crypto space. You're like, okay. You know? And they're like, we want to invest $15 million.

We're like, all right, you know, sounds good. They're like, come to Korea. We're like, okay, we're not coming to Korea. Right. And then they're like, all right, we'll give you $5 million right now. Now, like this, send $5 million. I'm like, all right, you know, I guess we'll come to Korea, right? And we look them up.

There are no website. We're like, who the fuck is this? Chip off the block. You're like, these are archive of gods. Exactly. That's what people don't realize. That's who that was, right? Like, that's just like some shady Korean money.

And so why did you need that money, though? Wasn't it kind of coming out in the chat rooms that you guys were shady? Is that why you, this was like a savior? So this is like basically our selling. out point of the rest of our coins. They just reach out to us. Even though like things were coming out about us, people just tend to like,

as long as you, I was controlling that price, no one gives a shit like what's coming out about you. Right. And how many coins you printed, you basically offered a million coins? 100 million. 100 million.

Okay, 100 million. How many had you sold to this point? So we were supposed to keep a reserve of 32 million. That was like our, in our white paper, which is like what you draw up for investors. and we had sold probably so that's 60 we had probably been at like 50 million

so right so we have like another whatever it is 16 million more coins to sell okay um you're getting there you're close yeah we're getting there we're close and then basically they invest that 5 million and we give them like a little bonus like of like 20% more than the iCO price or whatever it is and then they're like come down to south korea

and i'm like i'm not going to south korea like me with these guys sorbby's ballsy as fuck jumps on a plane by himself with a backpack goes down to South Korea. And basically, like, the days leading up to him leaving, we're like, all right, we have to have something to actually present to these people because the card and app weren't there yet. Right.

Right. So we had created like this basically a prototype of what we were building. You know, it was like we were really trying to build the app at this point. So we had like a prototype that we just needed to function with Sorby's debit card. And so we got, once again, Sorby's debit card printed into like a censure card. And we just needed the app to work alongside of it. But the issue was is that for the APIs to connect on like a technical basis is you just needed to press like the button after it hit his bank account and it would automatically transact and show on his phone. So he goes to Korea and basically the plan is as soon as he swipes, I'll see it on his bank account and all I have to do is just press the button.

And then it's going to show on his app in his presentation, which is going to be a live presentation on camera. Right. And you're talking to your coders in Moldovia are now like saying, hey, this is of utmost important. that this API works. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's like our fraud coders, right? Like the guys in-house are doing like real developing our app.

And then we're like, all right, wherever the fuck these guys are from. Yeah. We'll use them to like build this like bullshit thing. Right. So the people working in your office in Miami think your company is straight. It's only these coders in Transylvania that think, that think you're, that know that this is a fraud. Exactly. Right.

Okay. So Sorby goes over to Korea. He's, he's, you know, taking videos with a bunch of these funny looking Korean guys. They take him out to dinner. They court him. Yep. Yeah. So then he's basically like, all right, time for the thing. And he texts me. He's like, you know, just be ready. Right. And me and Farcas is sitting there, like, just we're ready to press the button, you know? Yeah. And then, so he's basically there. Then, like, out of nowhere, you just, we're just watching the bank count. Boom. You see, you know, whatever Korean vegetables, fuck. and whatever he bought, and we pressed the button. And then Sorby just goes, you know, black, right? No answer. We're like, Sorby's dead. You know, 100% Sorby's dead in Korea by these crazy fucking... Yeah. Button didn't work.

Yeah, button didn't work. Clearly, I mean, he would have told us it worked and everything's good, right? So, like, clearly it didn't work. So what did happen? His phone died? Just, no, like the AP... It's just like he was just connectivity issues, right? Like, he's so far away that it just didn't work properly.

Yeah. And these guys aren't the best coders, I guess. Right, right. And but they got the money anyway. Koreans gave him the money anyway. Yeah, but like that, so like you think he's dead for like 10 hours. He doesn't answer you. You're like, and then you get a text.

Yo, it didn't work, but they still invest. We're like, what? Like, he basically pitched them to be complicit in the crime as well. More of this shit, right? Like, this is like our story is literally everybody just became complicit. So he told them, he was able to like translate to them. Yeah, they just became. That this company, we're just going to keep pumping the stock.

You'll make money. Well, like, yeah, we're trying to build it app. This is like the real app, but it's not there yet. Right. Not like we're just like, you know, like it wasn't like the day one like people that were involved in the fraud. We're there almost. Yeah, you were like, it's kind of a, we're kind of telling the truth.

Yeah. We're kind of lying. We're kind of not. You know, we are trying to develop it. We're just not as far along as maybe we led you to believe. Exactly. Then they film like a whole new video that's like properly. edited to look like it worked the whole time and now we have you know centri tech partnered with

bitset or whatever the fuck they're name this is just a perfect example of the corruptibility of human beings you guys get so many people to say ah for the right price i'll tell you it works exactly you know so uh so they give you all these millions now you've got another 15 we oversold our coins like we were supposed to keep 32 million uh we ended up like because it didn't work we had to give them like an extra little bonus. So we were like, fuck it. Like we'll keep them in this, this other account. We'll split the 32 into two 16s and we'll just tell the investors that that's us holding it,

but you guys won't sell it. Right. So like, well, you guys can sell the ones that you already got, whatever. There was like this thing to make it look like it was okay to the rest of the investors and not really ever got suspicious of it. Right. Right. And then, you know, from there, like shortly after we get the, you know, this whole thing,

between me and Sorby happens. We split up. I'm out of the company. I'm still like following what's going on. The app, they finalized getting it all working. Same month, pretty much the SEC investigation comes in.

And that's where like, shortly after that, I'm playing now, like, fast forward to where I was was where I was like playing poker and Sorby hits me up from jail. And he's just like, yo, I got locked up.

I'm like, for what? Like, I don't know if we got locked up for DWI or what the fuck happened, you know? And, um, he's like, like, oh, you know, for security fraud, he's like, can you throw away my girl? Wasn't even to speak to me. It was literally like he could have called anybody else, not his co-defendant, like who he knew was involved in the crime. He didn't give a fuck about me at all, right? So like, and I just threw away

his girl and I'm like, I guess they're going to come get me, right? Like a month goes by and they never come get me. Did you lawyer up? I didn't lawyer up yet. No, like, I'm just still like speaking to the SEC. But if you got the technology working, if you had the card, that's huge. Like, why wouldn't you be waving it around? Like, this is, this is like... They're charged for the fraud of the beginning. Yeah, but if you have, they don't know your intent, though. Like, unless they have, you know, the South Koreans or some people on the inside that can prove that your intent at the beginning was just to raise this money and then sell out without having the product that you said you had. That wasn't even the plan was to just sell out or really, like there was no plan. But I'm saying

that's a defense, though. I'm bringing up a defense. for you. Is it, though? Is that a defense? If you just blatantly commit fraud or then you have a defense that like we were going to actually try to use the money to, it's not. You can't blatantly raise money through fraud and then say, oh, I was trying to really build a real product. But what was your fraud though? Your fraud was building this technology. We made full misrepresentations that we had Visa and MasterCard deals and a CEO that never existed. Yeah, yeah. That's blatant for- You're arguing very well for your culpability. I worked with the FBI for fucking eight two years. All right. See, there was no mitigating circumstances. Like, hey, guys, okay, sure, yes, but technology, like, we did it. Are you overstating to me that, are you telling me the truth? You guys had this technology. It fully worked at Dan. Why would I even care to say it? It's literally props to Sorby. I left. He finished it. So now, to this day, is that a technology? It works for Crypto.com.

So Crypto.com, they use that. Yeah. So I can go get a card with all my crypto. want it and go get cash out of it. Yep. So you guys did it. We did it. That's historical. We did it before crypto.com. Wow.

We did it before crypto.com. They made the same misrepresentation in a different country as FBI couldn't arrest them. Then they just basically paid off the SEC like civilly. Right. Why couldn't you guys have done that? Sorby lied to the SEC about how much money we raised and that led to the FBI investigating. Oh. So if Sorby would have just come clean.

at the SEC level. We were on stable center today. Wow. And you never would have done jail time. You could have just paid the fine. And then you could have paid, you could have given all of the money back and then just started, you have the technology now. And then just kept going and built up this legitimate product. 100%.

Sorby's the, like I said before, at the beginning of this show, he is one of the most unlikable. If anybody deserves to die, Sorby is a good, there's a good, there's a good, case to make that Sorby should have his head in a guillotine. I mean, the kid, he has no morals, he's a criminal, he's a sociopath, and he's a fucking retard, you know, but, you know, I mean, you, you, you, you, you went, you know, you yourself have a lot of, a lot of blame in this. A hundred percent. Yeah.

Yeah, I, I fully take blame and responsibility and I, you know, I, I feel sorry for what I did, right? But, um, so where, where it goes from there is then after that, we all, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I fully take blame and responsibility. Where it goes from there is then after that we all get arrested. I soon or later, the FBI comes and gets me. And I basically get, after like a week, they sent me to rehab. And I had been on drugs from 12 to this point, short periods of sobriety, but always on drugs. And this time, like, I was having, like, seizures up until my arrest, like, when I would run out of Xanax or whatever it was. I go to, I get arrested and I'm in jail.

And I'm like, I didn't even have, like, bad withdrawals. I don't know if it was, like, the gravity of the case, if I was going. going against, but like, or God or whatever the fuck you want to call it. Fucking, I was just like, okay, I like slept that night. I was able to eat. I'm in there with like 25 Kodak Blacks in Broward County Jail. Oh, that's a rough jail. Broward County, Florida, I think, has like the most pedophiles per capita.

It's wild. That's where they have the pedophile parks. I was in like the suicide part. So like I'm in like the Spartan fucking because of them coming off drugs. Oh, okay. So it's like drug suicide. Right. And like it's basically just like.

me and like bunch of guys coming off lean yeah right right and they were like fucking nice guys you know i mean i was just chilling fucking i love kodak you know it's like one of my favorite uh did fbi i want sorbi is that why you were able to flip so uh farcus like met with them and then i was in rehab at the time and like they're like yeah like someone else is trying to cooperate they always wanted sorby because he was the lead ringleader they could see that he was really the ringleader because he I guess he was the one that originally was

taking money from you guys his rental car company. It's not clear in the documentary of how much more involvement he had in the company and like coming up with things than he did like it's just because I'm the one telling the story that it looks like I was like the ringleader. It's just not true. So they didn't come to him and say

we want you to flip on on Ray. They didn't even think about going to him. Okay. They wanted him. They wanted him. Yeah. Gotcha. So then, like, I get out. I get a great lawyer.

Joseph Bondi, shout out to him. He's like, now he's like the number one marijuana lawyer in the country. And you're being tried in Florida? No, I'm being tried. Esty and Y picks up the case because it's a fraud case. So they pick up all the biggest financial crimes. Okay. And like with wire fraud, it's, we invest.

If one investors from New York, they can pick it up. Yeah. Wow. And that's the downtown courthouse. It doesn't get more federal than being at the federal court. house in the southern district of New York, yeah. All the big mob cases, all the big financial cases, uh, from Bernie Madoff to SBF, who's like the big crypto guy.

Was that wild being in a suit, like walking into that building? Just like, that's the halls of the power, you know? That court is beautiful too. It's like so beautiful. Yeah. Um, how long, how long before you decided to flip? Did you give it any thought? No, I was, I would have flipped like, I'm like not ashamed of flipping in that case.

at all. Like he had fucked me over so many times over. Farkas, I knew, like I was telling that, but he shouldn't even go to jail. Like, he didn't even know. He's too dumb to even know what the fuck was going on. I hated Sorby. I was like, of course I'll cooperate. I was in rehab. And I'm like, I'm getting sober. I'm like, yeah, whatever, I'm down. Like, get me the meeting with them. The original whatever proffer or whatever the fuck they call it. Yeah. And then he's like, like, I get out of rehab a couple months later. He's like, all right, yeah, come to New York. They want to me with you. And where is Sorby in jail the whole time or did he bond out?

So he basically, in the very beginning, he had, they had, they were trying to get the rest of the Ethereum that the company had. And it was supposed to be during the SEC investigation, given to the lawyer and given to somebody else to put in like two different lock boxes. And then the FBI went to get it. And there was a fake password. And they were like, all right, Sorby, we know you have it. We're not letting you out of jail until you give us the real password, right?

And then they ended up like finding. finding it in his house, like under his thing where he keeps his silverware, like under, you know, like on the bottom. And that was the access to the rest of the Ethereum. Yeah. And how much was left? 100,000 Ethereum, which at today's value is like $250 million. Wow. And that was all you guys had. That was that was in the company or that was the coin. That was the remaining coin you had. No, the coin, that like went to zero right away after we all got arrested. Right. So that value just completely collapsed. worth nothing. Ethereum has a million other things going for it. It's its own coin. And that's where all

the value that we had left that was going to be able to give back to investors. That's what the FBI wanted. And they seized that. They took it from Sorby. They got it. And they sold it like at the worst price, though. They sold it at like the very bottom of the market. Right. They're idiots. Yeah. Like they, it's almost like they do that on purpose. So you have to pay more money, even though they could have sold it higher. So did what are the total loss? for the investors. It's unknown, realistically. Like, they said we raised,

we were charged with $32 million of fraud. They sold that for, like, roughly $32 million, the $100,000, which was the bottom of the market. Yeah. So, like, they could have, like, said we made a profit. Like, it was like, that's where this fraud case was, like, very weird. Because there was never, like, a clear distinction of, like, how much we made.

And we made way more than that. Like, we made way more than the $32 million because we raised double. that amount first off. And there's just a whole back and forth now, like them trying to sue me. Like I found a guy that basically does like these token investigations to find out how much our company actually raised. And right off the bat, he found like double the amount of money that we raised. And basically it's like a whole ongoing thing legally right now that I'm dealing with.

So are you getting sued? Because I imagine. By Sorby and Fargus because I'm just basically trying to point out that Sorby cashed out double that amount of money into his own accounts. and now the whole Farcas family doesn't work. And they're living like on yachts and fucking partying. And the government couldn't find that money. They didn't seize any of that stuff?

I've said it on the documentary on purpose to like bring awareness to this situation. And it's just like cut out. It's a fucking whole thing. And like call me a snitch, call me whatever you want to do. I really could care less. Like in this case like fuck Sorby. I really don't care. I'm no longer a criminal.

I do nothing wrong in life. I have family and kids. But that there's like a lot of money there that like could be given back to investors also. I'm going to pay my restitution, my 10% of, which is how much? I owe like $3 million. Right. And it's 10% of every dollar I make I pay towards the government.

Right. Right. What about Sorby? So Farkas clearly got away with a bunch of money. They gave him a year. They gave him a year. But he never made money through the company. He's making money now just like basically living off Sorby.

Like this like Sorby's basically just controlling that family. of this now that that's like pretty much what's going how much was seized from sorby he got had like an extra like 10 million i think that he owes in restitution on top of the 100 000 ethereum um but there's really like i don't know what value sorby could have sold it at right but there was at least like another 20 30 maybe like it could be it all the value of the market like it matters so much of like when he possibly could have sold it right it could be fucking 200 million that he has but how much did he have in do you know do you have any knowledge of him cashing out his own coin when the SEC started to like was he sending money overseas or

doing anything to hide I don't know I know I know when they raided his house he had a million in cash like you know then he they said like 10 million to his bank accounts so that's what I do know as far as like how much more and when he sold the cryptocurrency at what value I have no fucking idea but I know a hundred thousand Ethereum was sent to an exchange yeah Gemini which is like a major exchange, which could be figured out. And it's uncovered. They didn't find it. Yeah, I've even spoken to, like, the guy from the documentary, Nate Daniel Popper is a whole thing that's going to, like, continue on through me doing, like, interviews and shit. Wow. Wow. So remind me, did it go to trial? No. So he copped out. Yeah. And they gave him eight years. Yeah, they gave him three felonies instead

of four. He thought maybe he'd get less than that. I don't know. He ended up getting eight years. And the full amount of his, like, I guess you guys didn't embezzle you committed fraud. So they don't put an amount on it. Or do they? They said $32 million. They said $32 million. Which is just like such, like, that was just the value of it at the bottom of the market when they sold it. So it was just like.

So you think you probably raised $65 and that was, and your Ethereum was worth about $250, $250 million? Yeah. Okay. So, no, yeah, we raised like at the very beginning. It's say $250, but Ethereum was just increasing every single day. So there's a point where we have 200,000 Ethereum and Ethereum was worth $1,500 a coin. So that right there is $300 million. So they could have said we did a $300 million fraud.

Yeah, it seems like they could have, like I guess an opportunity cost. Yeah. They could have. Yeah, 100%. Do you, were any of the investors given their money back or had money returned to them? So that was put in the documentary that no one's gotten money back. I know when it first was sold they put up like a thing like this is where you can claim money

I don't know if it's due to like there's like a lot of shady money in crypto that people aren't claiming it yeah I know there's a class action suit that's like trying that's like tying up some of the money does that affect you at all or do you just you just that's what the government lump it into a restitution you just pay 10 cents yeah 10 cents on every dollar yeah and and what about people suing you individually that's just sorbion forcas I could care less I have no assets But in the documentary, they show you just buying a new house, like the day after court or something like that. First of, I paid the restitution on the money that I made to buy that house. I bought a house with a mortgage.

Right. That's your mother or your mother-in-law? Yeah, my, my father-in-law co-signed the house and he put up half the money. And then I worked. And then I also got help from family. And I basically just bought a house with a mortgage. Right. There's nothing shady there at all.

No. The fucking, people think that, like, they put that in there, that clip right there, I was talking to the director about how today's society is very hard from, like, millennials and the younger generations to buy houses. And I, in a separate time, I'm talking to him like, what do you want me to say? I bought the house off doing something shady, like off camera. And he just clipped that together. Right.

So it's not. I would never say what I said in the documentary. Did you expect to be made to look like the villain? Yeah, I didn't give a fuck. Like, I knew, I just said, make it as good as possible. You could like sell it as much as possible. I'll just take the exposure and I'll speak to everybody and people will have their stances. Like, you know, fucking pretty much like all exposure is just pretty much there's a silver lining to it.

Right? Like the 48 laws of power line. Yeah. Right? Like I just, I know of like you put me in front of enough people. There's going to be people that like me. There's going to be people that hate me. And then like the people that like me, I'll just grow with.

That's right. That's right. So what do you, first of all, just so everybody knows, you didn't do any time. I ended up getting no time. Right. And people, like, miss also during my whole time leading up into sentencing, I got my case at, came a drug counselor, and worked with, like, sexual abuse and drug addicts. Yeah.

And that seemed to nourish you in a way. It saved my life. Like, I kept me sober. I worked with the FBI day and day out, like, really helped them put away Sorby, essentially, right? Like, call me right, I could care less. Like, that kid deserves me in jail. Of course.

I wanted to change my life around. I got sober. I became a drug counselor. And then I also, like, film the documentary throughout this whole time. So, like, it was like this weird moment. And then, like, yeah, it's all on camera. My wife's water broke the day of sentencing, which was like a crazy scene in the documentary. That happened fast.

You met her. You knocked her up. That's our second kid. Yeah. This isn't a matter of, like, three years. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, I got two. And you maintain your sobriety? Yeah. Great. Yeah, I still, I drink. I'm not like drugs.

I'm just clean from drugs. I just don't do any drugs. And you're able to drink? I never had a drinking problem. But you're able to drink and not think about Xanax? Not at all. I literally like, I have no thought of drugs at all. But what I have to really watch out for is when I'm off probation.

Right. It's easy for me with something so big over my head. Right. I have this, like drinking like I have like a vodka, like once a week or whatever. So your PO lets you drink? Yeah. I didn't have a drug charge or a drinking charge. I'm just shocked because P.Os are notoriously ballbusting to where, like, they don't give a fuck.

They just want to make sure you have no fun. Oh, no. That was, there was never, like, any sort of restriction against drinking. Right. Like, unless you're in, like, in the very beginning when I'm, like, going to, like, a drug counseling place. Yeah. But I've finished all those things, like, years ago. So how long is your tail?

How long are you on paper for? I have another year. Okay. And what are the things that could violate you? drugs. So if you, if you piss dirty, they would violate your probation? With federal, like, you're on pretrial probation right after you get out of rehab, right out of jail. Right.

So I've been on basically pretrial for like three years leading up into my sentencing. And then another two coming up in April will be two years. So I've been on like pretrial and probation for five years. And I've passed every single drug test and abided by every single law, have done nothing illegal. So, I mean, there's a real reason I got no time. people don't want to like value some of the things I say in that regard like cooperation means a fucking shit ton I'm like you've been through the system you know how that goes I never cooperated no I'm not saying you did I'm saying you've been through the system of like being yeah I think

everybody knows you didn't but uh yeah like like you know how it works like people that cooperate of course crazy saying like you know guys have murdered people and got out of jail yeah for cooperating the bull yeah um yeah no I'm I'm not judging at all and and like I said I wanted to really have everybody, all the listeners, understand the kind of person that Sorby is. You know what I mean? He's no good. Kids no good. Yeah. You know, so, yeah, no, I'm happy.

He would have cooperated against me. Oh, a thousand percent. There was not even, there's not a question. He's not like a gangster. No, he has no scruples. He's unscrupulous. He's unprincipled. He's a used car salesman from Long Island.

Exactly. So we're going to, let's switch over to the Patreon now. There's a couple of questions and stuff that I want to save for the premium members. But, Ray, you killed it, man. Thank you for coming on here, baby. Thanks for having. Appreciate it, man. Yeah.

So what now, first of all, what are you doing for work? Me? I'm just doing it. They said you're a lone shark in the documentary. Fully made up. Fully made up. There's a blank, a dark screen, and then like a post log note saying that you are a money lender at a 50% Vig. Which I believed.

You're from Long Island. Yeah. Are you doing that? That is the new hustle, but no, I'm not doing that. What are you doing? Me? Like, for a while there, I was just working in construction. Like, I was literally working, like, my dad got me a job.

I rekindled my relationship with him. And I was doing the KSAC work. And then I was doing the documentary and writing a book. So what are you doing for work now? I've been working in construction. Then once the documentary came out, I've just been like, it's been like three weeks since this came out. I've been just trying to do social media and see where I can grow.

Right. So, like, I don't know if I'll go back to construction, but I'm just kind of just playing out this moment. Why did they say you were a money lender? Like, he was like, oh, what do you? Like, I was just basically pitching him like, this is what the new hustle is. Like, what everybody's doing is like this new cash advance thing.

And it's basically like 50% loans. And I was like, he was like, oh, like, would you create a business? I was like, I can create a business in two seconds and do that and kill it. I would never do that on probation. And I was like, I'm not trying to be in like shady industries. Right. And he just basically like, I was just telling him like, how you could do. What would the new Bitcoin, the equivalent of the new hustle look like, not crypto?

And he just like, that's why it's not, you don't see my word like me saying it. He just wrote it. And I was just like telling him like, this is like, listen, I'll come up with a name like this. I was just showing them how easy I could come up with a new hustle if I wanted to. I see. But I have no interest in that. Okay. So you're, you're trying to get into media, it sounds like. Yes. Okay. So you're, you're going to start promoting on podcasts. You're writing a book. Yep. So we might see that coming sometime. Yeah, my book is finished.

It's basically finished. Like I have, I'm just trying to get it edited. Then I had a little bit of an issue getting a publisher because of the son of Sam laws. So I'm having it like rewritten through my best friend. I see. I see. Okay. So what should we plug right now?

Go ahead and tell people what in the immediacy, what they can do. I would just say follow me on Instagram at Rachel Penny. And everything there is in my bio to like follow me on other platforms. Okay. Cool. So we'll post a link in the description. And yeah, you know, you'll, I mean, clearly you're going to figure it out. You know, you're a sharp kid. You made a lot of dumb choices, but, but you got a business mind. Like, and, and it's impressive. Yeah. What I plan to do is, right, is to grow my social media for like the next year, get off probation and then just parlay my following into whatever business venture I want to do next. Right. Right. Like, that's like literally 100% mapped out what I'm going to do. Yeah. There's just no question. I just don't want to open a business. while I'm on probation. Yeah. Yeah, I get that.

I get that. Maybe a podcast down the road. 100% have like some sort of podcast. Once I, like this thing with IHart Radio comes out, that will go wherever it goes. And then I'll open, I'll have like my own show that I want to do. I can see you being like a reduced version of like Andrew Tate, like being like a business coach. You know what I mean? Give me money and I'll show you how to sell stuff online.

You know what I mean? I get this. I get this a lot. But that's how people need to make money now. People need people have to be rich to survive the new. Let's talk about some of that on the Patreon too. Like something that like an ordinary motherfucker can do, you know, people our age and our generation, nobody wants to work with good reason. Your money's not worth anything, right?

Like the society's falling apart. So it's important to have a business. So, no, I think you could actually do good work out of that. Like truly help people, you know? Yeah. And it's okay to make money doing it. No, I'm 100% going to do something along those lines as well, right? Like that's like, like even if I just had a talk show and it was giving out free game of people calling in with business advice, I would love to do that.

I also would love to give like relationship advice to like men that, like struggle in that area. You know, like I've done well throughout the course of my life in that field as well. I think it would be like fun and I would make it humorous, right? Like just like I just also like as far as like the Red Pill community type of shit like that whole world, I just don't want to be like shitting. not women. That's like not my thing. Right. Like I'm more of like a lover boy approach to like sure that whole thing. Sure. Sure. Last question. Does your step brother, your former stepbrother, is he aware of everything that's going on? I have no idea. Have you forgiven him? Yeah. Like through working with like other sexual abuse victims, I noticed that there was people

like 60 years old that like still wanted to kill whoever did something to him as a kid. I kind of just look at it as like he was like a couple years older than me, horny kid in the house. you know, maybe he's gay, maybe he's not, I don't know what his thing is now, but it just does no good for me to, like, hold that resentment. Like, I'm able to, like, have a good life. And I don't think my, the real resentment was thinking my family knew about it,

more so than, like, this random, he was, like, kind of half-retarded, you know, like, in, like, special programs and shit. Yeah, so, like... He might have just thought he was petting you, combing her hair. Yeah, so, like, that is, like, it does me no good.

I, like, and then, like, I've always, also like made back out of my father. So like I'm pretty like good. You know, like have my family, my kids. And like I'm chilling. You got a good life. Yeah.

Got a good life. Awesome. Uh, you guys switch over to the Patreon. Patreon.com slash the Connect show. Rachel Pawnee, you killed it. Thank you so much, brother.

Thank you. Take care, guys.