Welcome to Darknet.
Demystified.
My name is Sam Bem.
I'm a former Darknet vendor and market admin.
Now I'm a content creator, author, hacker, and paralegal.
On this show, I dive into topics related to the Darknet.
If you're interested in evaluating your security by looking at a case
in which an individual went against the federal governments of the world,
then you're in the right place.
By looking at Darknet vendors and how they ran their business
along with their mistakes, we can see how they operate
inside of highly hostile environments with adversaries
who have black or unlimited budgets to catch them.
In this episode,
we're going to veer off a little bit, and instead of looking
at a different Darknet vendor, we're going to be looking at my case
in August of
maybe it was a little bit after that of 2022.
I did an interview and it just recently was published
and now because it was published, I'm putting out this full interview,
which is the actual almost three hour interview,
not the one there were shown, which was just an hour.
So the one thing I don't do in this, which is pretty typical of me
on this podcast post, is to point out or, you know, share this video.
This vendor, did
you know this stupid thing?
And my stupid thing was trusting my cousin
and not maintaining
good supervision over her.
So to be fair, you know that was idiotic.
I wanted to make sure that, you know, I was being as fair as I could be
in evaluation of vendors on this podcast.
So there you have it.
Now that any further ado, I'll present you
with the full recording of the actual podcast.
And I want a confirmation.
Is it okay to record this call to put it on the podcast Darknet Diary?
It is okay to record this call and put it on the podcast Darknet Diaries.
Well, thanks, my lawyers appreciate that.
So I'm assuming your
criminal series is over, but I do not want to
know about any future things you may be cooking up
that may be illegal because it puts me in an awkward spot.
Yeah, definitely. Definitely.
Just.
Just like, even even if I did, I mentioned something to federally.
You are literally part of a conspiracy now as you get up to ten years.
So I take it very seriously.
Even like when I was incarcerated, I would have guys who would walk up to me
and they'd be like, Oh, when I get out, I'm going to sell coke right this time.
I mean, like, listen, man, get the fuck away from me. You know, like.
What is wrong with. You, dumb ass?
Like, you're guaranteed to come back.
You gonna look, you know, like.
And because you have guys there who absolutely take that and,
you know, bring it to a United States attorney
and they'll snitch on you while they're in prison.
Dude, try to get a rule 35 B and get out early.
You know?
So it's
just it's like I don't want to hear anything about any of that.
So I absolutely understand that.
That's great that you have that that mindset of, you know,
don't don't try to involve me in anything because,
you know, federal you know, the feds, man, they have a 99% conviction rate.
So, you know, if you get indicted, you're screwed.
Like, you're going to prison, you know? Right.
Unless you tell on a bunch of people. Yes.
And if you didn't actually do anything, you have no one to tell on.
All right.
Well, I'm glad we're on the same page there.
So, yeah, basically what I'll do is I'll try to ask you questions
like you through your story and then
Yeah, and then I'll put it together.
So it's going to take me a couple of months to put it together
before you can listen, and then you'll hear it before it gets published.
That's cool.
Yeah.
So one thing I will tell you, you can feel free at any point
to tell me, Hey, man, like, get back on track.
Because one thing you will notice is that
I do deviate
a lot of the times and that's like because I'm an A.P.
So like, when I'm explaining something,
you know, sometimes there's 20
of the things that created that situation that I feel need to be addressed
in order to have full comprehension of a given situation.
And sometimes, you know, I get lost on that path.
So listen, dude, like you're way off topic, you know,
like where you know, you're talking about spaceships and.
You know, like.
All right, I can do that.
Okay, so let's start out with your name. So.
So what do you want to be known for?
No one has on here as well, because you may you may want a moniker or something.
Oh, no.
So my name's Sam, and it's a matter of public record,
also also known as doing Fed Time
Online and Killer B.
There's my hacker alias for a while
and also 1218902,
which is almost like, you know, talking to Jean Valjean.
But is that that was my Fed number.
So that's I got a couple of aliases.
Oh, so it's it's still a bit like the Wu-Tang Clan, not your A AB.
Right. Yes. Okay. Got it.
All right. So
we got a Darknet story here.
How did you get exposed to Darknet?
What was your first kind of experience there?
So I had known I remember when Silk Road came out
initially, and I remember when Bitcoin came out, I remember
having the BTC faucet around for a while and like begging for cheap BTC for us.
It was basically a website where like you could go
and if you went there every day you would get, you know, anywhere
from like initially maybe 50 bitcoin to buy bitcoin
or then you know, fractions as it went on, but you would get that for free.
So like it had this, this exposure to cryptocurrencies
into the darknet in general for a long time
because I had been in information technology
and cybersecurity, I did a lot of residential work mainly,
but I was always there was always kind of my thing.
I loved I love computers.
I loved how they work.
Like, you know, if you read, you know, you hop on Frack
and you read Bankers Manifesto, you know, whenever I have someone
who's they came in, how do I hack, you know, the super generic question?
It's like, you know, asking an artist how they're an artist, right?
It's just so many possibilities.
Like, what medium are you talking about?
You know,
I think for hackers, it's like, you know, we have like the social engineering.
We have, you know, guys who are like pickers.
We got guys who, you know, they're they're coding, you know, a
buffer overflow and a Sam like they can just incredibly brilliant.
But like, you know, we have different artists
who do kind of the same thing in different ways.
So like that age old question of like how do I hack is like one
that really can't be answered directly because it depends on who you are.
But going back to your question, how I learned about it was by osmosis,
because I had already been in the information technology world, that field.
So when those things came out and they became like, you know,
common knowledge among those people,
the limited amount of people who knew about those things existing,
like I learned
about them, like it didn't have to it didn't have to be on CNN
or Fox News or MSNBC for for me to pick it up and see it.
But when I remember when Silk Road, it came out
like I honestly I thought it was a scam.
You know, I thought it was.
And there was a bunch of feds that ran it and like, it was just a big
you know, it was just a like a big sting operation.
And then as time went on and I learned a little bit more about it,
you know, I realized it wasn't I didn't care
about it at the time because I had no need for it.
Like I had no ambition to be a Darknet vendor.
Wasn't like, oh, man, like, I, I want to do this, you know, in a year
or like it, you know, me becoming a dark vendor was more something that happened
as a evolutionary necessity, which is not true.
But in my mind I made true
through like, you know, so fractionalization,
which I like to think, you know, each of us has an infinite ocean
of self rationalization to justify
whatever we, we end up doing.
And for me, myself, for rationalization, for becoming a dark vendor
was to, you know, get out of a situation that I was in with
a woman that I was with who was just a nightmare.
I've been with her for ten years, and we had gotten into an argument
and she basically told me she was like, I cheated on you seven years ago.
And like because we were arguing about peas, my daughter got,
like you said, I had two stepdaughters and a son and I had made them dinner.
And when I had given them dinner, my ex was like, Oh, you gave her too many peas.
And I was like, I don't think so, know?
And she was like, you know, and she's like, Oh,
well, you know, you obviously did look at the play
And I was like, Well, it says same amount of scoops.
And and she's like, you know, you're an asshole and I'm a logician.
Like, my personality type is and so I'm a logician.
So I, you know, I don't really get emotionally invested in it.
So I was like, you know, I disagree. I think you're wrong.
It's the same amount of scoops as, you know, the other kids go, too.
So it really aggravated her and she ended up,
you know, telling me about how she cheated on me.
And then she was a super miserable person for those seven years
because her guilt ate at her and she would take that out
on everyone else and she would basically never be home.
And when she was, she was just a nightmare to deal with.
So when she ended up telling me that I was like, awesome.
Like, this is, you know, my chance to,
you know, basically tell her to go to hell.
And I use that opportunity to break up with her
by living in rural Vermont and doing, like, these small computer jobs.
I definitely didn't make a ton of money.
It was it was a my own company was called a worldwide
computer consultancy, was a startup.
And just like I didn't have a ton of money.
So I was like, well, I need to make money.
Like if I want to move out and I want to have a good house
for my children to live in, I need, you know, at least 200 grand.
And that was my primary
driving factor and my motive for, you know, becoming a.
Darknet vendor.
Okay. Wow.
That's really we splashed right into it. I love it.
So, yeah, we got so much ground to cover.
I'm hesitant to, like, bring it on sessions, but
I want to go into the future, so I don't really know where to go, but, um.
Okay. So I want to just start from the beginning.
No, I think this is the beginning and I think we're we're already established in
so the the drugs.
How did you get familiar with the drugs?
So prior
to so prior to me being a dark vendor
that goes back into like my history.
So I had, I had been into computers and I had been into computers
for about 10 to 15 years.
That's how long I had lived in Vermont.
Now, prior to living in Vermont, I had lived in Rhode Island
and prior to living in Rhode Island, I lived in Massachusetts.
So like, you know, most people, they moved, you know, from these states
for whatever reasons, economic reasons, job opportunities.
Right.
So I was in Massachusetts.
I call it my first case.
It was assault and battery with intent to murder.
And it was my first charge.
And I ended up litigating it for two and a half years
because my lawyer was like, the longer we litigate it,
you know, the less it looks like, you know, he gets out of ICU
and he can walk again.
And it's like, you know, you didn't really do anything to him.
And I was like, wow, you're incredibly evil.
You know, like, I made it.
I might have, you know,
happy or been to look out and watch this dude get smashed.
I was the only one that was covered for the crime.
So I got to conspiracy charges, too, because that you other guys
that were there, I didn't tell on.
So I ended up getting hit with conspiracy charges
and two counts of assault and battery with intent to murder.
But basically what ended up happening was
I would we I litigated that case for like two and a half years.
I ended up getting the sends to first they were trying to put me in prison
for ten years in Walpole.
And by the end of the two and a half years like this guy
had completely healed and
now when I when like the last offer that we got for going to
pretrial was six months in county jail with two and a half years suspended.
So I took it and I went to the county jail
in Dartmouth, which is like county jail for like New Bedford forever.
It's a it's a nightmare.
Like if you look it up, I think it's responsible
for a quarter of all suicides in county jails in mass.
It's one of the worst places I've ever been as far as like a place to do time.
But when I got out, like right before I got out,
there's supposed to be this big gang war.
So I remember I ended up taking my I.D.
and I used the metal clip on my I.D.
to break apart a razor blade.
And then I cut, like, a half inch strip of my bedsheet.
And then I wound that up, and I rubbed it against my this plastic box, this big,
you know, one foot by two foot by two foot plastic box that you're given.
And I cut through it like butter because I rub this this, you know,
this rope basically, that I had made out of my bed sheet back and forth again.
Same with that.
I was able to cut out these pieces and I cut down to six pieces.
And I basically made these six plastic knives that were, you know, a foot each.
And they were just like, I was like, you know, I've seen people cut.
I've heard, you know, gay people raped in their county jail.
So I'm like, you know, I'm I have a week left in that place.
And I'm like, you know, I'm not going to become a victim
a week before I get out, just not going to happen.
So the guy called my case when I was 17.
I got convicted
like two and a half years later.
So when I got out, right before I got out,
I got caught making those knives like a CEO or past me, seen them,
you know, called SRT, which is basically like the SWAT for sheriffs.
And they came in, they grabbed me, they brought me issue.
So they broke issue and they were like, you know,
sign this paper that says that you're guilty
of possessing weapons inside of a correctional institution.
And this was like my second time going to show.
The first time was for a lighter because I was a cigaret smoker
and they like, sign this paper and we'll give you a week.
In SHU.
I had spent over a month in SHU for a lighter,
so it made no sense that they would give me a week and then,
you know, you, you figure out, Oh yeah, I got two and a half years suspended.
So if I sign this paper now, instead of doing six months
in county jail, I'm going to do two and a half years in county jail.
So I was like, Yeah, I'm good. I'm not signing any of them.
So I got out and when I got out,
I had a court date
with my probation officer and I also had a court date
in New Bedford for destruction of property
and possession of a weapon inside of a correctional facility.
So when I had gone, now
I had to make the choice because I'm like taking the bus, you know,
I just got out of county, so I'm not on my feet.
So I had to make the decision, either go to court or go to my probation officer.
I elected to go to my probation officer because he's an officer of the court.
And when I went there,
I was like, listen, I got to you know, I got a court date at the same time.
And I don't know why he was scheduled for the same day.
And he was like, yeah, it's not my problem.
And I was like, Well, I'm not going to be able to make it to,
you know, New Bedford at nine because like, I'm standing in his office
and it's 930 because I got there at nine and, you know,
and he was like, Yeah, it's my problem.
I'm going to violate you.
And, you know, you're going to get two and a half
and he's going to make sure you go to your next court date.
And, you know, with that, I was like, Yeah, okay.
And I left and I went home
and I got everything that I could, you know, reasonably carry.
I got a ride from a friend and I went to Rhode Island
and I did a little bit of research and I found out there there is a law in place.
I don't know if it's still in place, but there was a law in place at the time
that was called the sister state law.
And with the sister state law, what it said was,
if someone has a warrant
in Massachusetts, it's and it's not for,
you know, murder, rape or a robbery or something like that, that
no warrant, they they won't extra day you.
So if I'm caught in Rhode Island, Connecticut or any state
that borders Massachusetts, if I'm caught in any of these states
or arrested in any of these states,
they will not extradite me back to Massachusetts because you're so close,
they consider it a waste of time to, you know, have
two sheriffs go all the way out there to pick you up and bring you back.
Now, that said, I've seen guys get extradited from Florida to Mass and,
you know, ride in a van for three days all the way out.
So, like, it's a it can be it can be definitely be a nightmare.
But I knew about the sister state law, so,
you know, I was like, I just stay in a state that borders it
and I'll never you know, I'll never have to deal with this.
And like I said, I got arrested in Rhode Island for possession of cannabis
and like vandalism charge.
And each time I was pulled over, arrested, they would run my name
and they'd be like, Oh, Ben, do you know you have a warrant?
And I would be like, No, I had no idea.
And they'd be like, Oh, well, you know, you got a warrant.
And I'd be like, Oh, I'll take care of that.
And they'd be like, Very, you know, get out of here.
Or in this case you go and, you know, you make going to the ECI,
which is the state prison in Maryland, because there's no county jail.
So I knew that I had these warrants,
but I also knew that as long as I stayed
in a state that bordered Massachusetts, that I would never be extradited,
and they'd had this put to the test on a few occasions.
So I been around for a while, and like when I lived in
Rhode Island, I saw I had been way over the statute of limitations at this point.
But I showed coke, you know, powder cocaine and weed and stuff.
And, you know, I moved up to Vermont
because I was like, I was tired of doing that kind of stuff
because, like, it's
a rough life, you know, it's no joke.
So I moved up to Vermont by Mutual Vermont.
I got my high school diploma through a program called Vesak,
which is pretty awesome if you're just trying to get your diploma
easily, like you do like six projects and like one of the projects,
it was like write a 300 word essay about yourself.
Make two and six.
Of these menial projects, and I got my high school diploma.
And then from there I continued on and with my education
when I came up to Vermont, I couldn't turn a computer on.
Like, if you really turn this, you know, turn
this computer on, I wouldn't build generation.
I couldn't reformat one.
I couldn't D for ag hard drive.
I couldn't do anything to do anything about.
So I spent, you know, the next ten years
educating myself about computers and technology.
And when I started getting into it,
it was just for me, it was an absolute it was crazy.
It was it was fascinating for me.
The, you know, the abilities that we had, you know, going online.
It was never really something that I had spent time doing. So
anyways,
fast forward, you know, 15 years later
and, you know, now I'm, you know, my ex.
I, you know, I break up with her and I'm like,
you know, I want to be able to make money quickly.
So, you know, I go when I you know, I become a dark net vendor.
You remember the first time you bought off any drugs off the darknet?
Yeah.
So I ended up and they use an ounce of cannabis that I got.
I ended up getting there for like 150 bucks.
I want to say it was the use from Hansa to buy.
I could absolutely be wrong.
But it was like, Yeah.
So for me it was.
It was something that I wanted.
I had wanted to do it since Silk Road, but like you said, like was silk Road
when it first came out, I just didn't, I didn't know how legit it was. And
yeah, at
the end of the day, that was one thing I like when I started, I sure did.
I was like, you know, the best r.o I am ever going to have
is when I make my own product.
Like, like a manufacturing company is never going to be beaten in price
point by a retailer,
you know? Yep.
So I'm like, you know, if I'm the manufacturer
and I'm the retailer, my ROI will be insane.
So like with my moonshine, like I could spend 10 to $14
and I could turn that into $100 at a minimum
and like that.
And then if I made apple pie brandy from that, multiply that by five.
And that was my my return was like, you know, 500 bucks.
But it
was interesting because in order to become a Darknet vendor,
one of the things that you had to do on
Hansa is like you had to you had to pay.
I want to say it was like 200 bucks.
I could easily be wrong, but I wanted to say
it was like 200 bucks and
they had instituted this policy.
Hansa did
so like I had hopped on their side and I was on their side for a while
and when I decided I want to become a vendor, I started making posts.
So I had 10 to 15 years of like information security and cyber
security experience.
So like learning about OPSEC really was kind of
it was kind of second nature for a lot of the stuff that you're
already going to be doing in information security.
So I remember starting
to make posts and like how I ended up establishing my name was just helping
as many people as I could and calling out the people that I knew were scammers.
So, you know, you had a ton of people obviously, that are on that forum
or any Darknet forums that are trying to get people to conduct
transactions with them outside of the escrow system.
So, you know, someone's I go like, I'm looking for this vendor.
He had power on you
to pound a weed or hypothetically get a pound of weed for 1200 bucks.
You'd see, you know, some shark come in and be like,
Oh, I like I have his weed and I bought in bulk.
And also that he was 600 bucks a pound and like this guy is just a random person
like you never know anything and he's just is there to rob you.
You might even be a fed and he's just there
to try to get your address, you know, And he'll rob you too, you know, But.
He'll get your edge because.
So like I used to call those people out, like, if you're
if you said that to someone on the forum, you'll go like, I can beat his price.
And like, you don't have that
vendor star or like, you can't prove that you're a legit vendor,
but you can't provide a signed pjp message saying your vendor
X, Y, and Z from this market.
Then I'd be like, Dude, like you're a fucking fraud.
You know, like you're trying to rip this this dude off, you know?
And like,
they used to hate that because I would call them out
and I made 5000 posts in a month on Hanson, and that was how I established
my name and by establishing my name on just one market
when Hanson,
you know, eventually was taken down.
When it was taken down, like we went to other markets, people knew me
and like it worked out so well that like, you know, you got to pay that vendor fee.
But with me bear vet, because I had I had I had written so much hints,
it came out with a policy and they said in order to talk on our forums,
I don't know if they did this because of me with you
in order to talk on our forums because I wasn't a buyer at the time
and I wasn't a seller, I was literally just there to
brand, to happy times to as a brand
through my PR work of calling out scammers and helping people with OPSEC.
And they
made this policy where they were like, Listen, you can't
you can't post in our forums unless you're a buyer or a vendor.
So I was like, Son of a bitch.
So there was a there was a big cadre, I want to say was Kim
Pickett, his exact name,
S.S. Cloud or something like that.
But he had an ID send me.
He was like, Listen, man, like, you know, I know like you like,
you know, on the forums you do a lot of good.
He was like, if like, if you, you know, are you going to buy something?
That way you can stay in the forums.
And I was like, well,
like, I understand you understand bitcoin's a lot,
but like, I'm not completely sure yet that if I hop on like local bitcoins
that I can buy bitcoins and have it be completely anonymous.
And for me that's a major risk.
I didn't tell him I was considering being a vendor yet,
but like that, that was my intention.
Like if I go and I buy bitcoins and you know, I spend it on something, then
people can associate,
you know, me with that address, you know, and if I become a vendor,
they just figured out who a vendor was by osmosis.
So to me it was like, you know, it's not worth
the cost of being able to post on the forums.
So as go it's a bad hit.
Like I'm not going to be able to post in the forums.
And he was like, Now I'm in like, I'll send you some bitcoin
and just like buy a, you know, buy that.
That's right.
That was made so that technically that was my first purchase on
the darknet was a stolen credit card.
So he had send me the money for it.
I had bought it off him as to happy times.
And then once I bought it, I was now a buyer so I could talk on the forums.
So I'm like, Yeah, I solved that problem, you know, that's awesome.
So and then I sent him his, his card back because I'm not a fraudster like,
you know, I'm a, I'm a drug trafficker, so.
Anima Libra.
So everything has to be equal, right? Thank you.
I did.
I did steal from someone is then it's like,
you know, I'm I feel like I'm morally bankrupt because I'm not giving them
something worth value in return, at least with being like a drug trafficker.
We have that even exchange, Right.
Um, so I sent him, like a stolen credit card number back.
I was like, Here, man, I don't need this.
I'm not going to do anything with it.
Like, I'm good, you know?
So I was like, sweet.
Now, you know, I could post on the forums, though.
So I kept posting on the forums and then, you know, about a month or so later,
it was like, um,
they like I wanted to become a vendor.
And so I go to, like, become a vendor and like, he was like,
Hey, listen, man, like,
you know, if you want to become a vendor, I'll like our friend you that 200 bucks
to do it.
I know you don't want to go buy Bitcoin and, and you know your parents.
Are you going paranoid about it Was a Yeah right Like that's awesome.
Now I appreciate you you know like, like sticking your neck
out like it's 200 bucks and Ibrahim makes that in an hour.
But that's
I thought that was really cool that we had that sense of community with this guy.
Like, we've never met. We don't know each other.
It's like, you know, when you know someone in Iasi, but you've never met them.
And like if you tell like your average person, Oh, I know this guy really well,
you know, I've known him for ten years and like, people like, oh, like,
you know, like, you know, like, what do you guys do?
Oh, no.
I mean, I never actually seen him.
Like, I don't even know what he looks like.
I don't know, like, his race.
I don't know what his voice sounds like and I don't know anything about him.
But like, you know, I know his intellect, you know?
Yeah, I know how this dude would go about owning a system.
You know? I know.
You know, his his methodology for finding vulnerabilities, like,
you know, you know, these super convoluted and complicated things about him.
But like, you know,
you don't know what his favorite clothing brand is because, like,
none of that stuff is relevant on the Internet, you know, like, you know,
well, back then, like, you know, you you were judged by your mind, you know.
And I think that was that was
really to me, that was kind of like the golden age of of the Internet.
Anyways, I digress.
So go, so good.
Let me just catch up to where we are here.
So you, uh,
you're you're struggling at home.
Uh, you're just at the brink.
How old were you at the time when you when you made a vendor account?
Well,
I don't know.
Like, I couldn't tell you.
Yeah, it's like it's not teenage years.
Oh, yeah.
No, no.
So it's very like,
you know, 30,
32, 33 maybe that the earliest 29 to 33.
It's interesting because a lot of people do get started here as teenagers
on to their school or whatever. I right so.
Yeah for sure and I think I think I think like having an adversary
for law enforcement having that adversary that's a teenager kid
compared to,
you know, a man who's went to university for like cybersecurity graduated Now
he works for like Department of Homeland Security, where he works for like,
you know, one of these cyber attacks was like kind of going after
a kid, you know, is like it's kind of laughable.
But like, that's that's kind of honestly, like, what I like seeing is like
when you have a real adversary, right,
who knows about information security, who, you know, employs
these policies, you takes six months of research to set up.
It's like they say stupid cops make stupid criminals,
you know, And, you know, the reverse is true.
You know, stupid criminals make stupid cops.
And I think that's why we see like the majority of,
you know, law enforcement that like they they rely on things like informants,
you know, like, you know, the law.
So a good portion of law enforcement, they couldn't function if if
people stop telling,
you know, like how how quickly do you think
our rate of incarceration would drop if everyone stopped putting people in prison?
You know,
and I'm not like I'm not saying that there are people
that don't deserve to be in prison.
I've met men in prison who I wouldn't want to see in the free world
because they're evil, you know,
and like that exists.
Like pure evil is a thing.
So, like, I definitely I don't think that,
you know, everyone deserves to be free because that's definitely not true.
But I also think, you know, incarcerating
25% of our population in America is absolutely absurd,
especially when you're taking people like, you know, nonviolent drug crimes
and you're putting them in with rapists and murderers.
And you these dudes do in ten years.
And, you know, he comes out and he's as hardened as those rapists and murderers.
So now that's what he's going to be when he gets out, you know,
I think just perpetuates the system, you know, And then you add on,
you know, the fact that the 13th Amendment has basically legalized slavery.
It's all, you know, for profit side issue.
I do agree. I'm going off on a tangent.
Yeah. Okay. So
so it's
one of the things that I struggle with
because I actually was never a vendor or even bought on these markets.
But what I struggle with is getting to know the culture there.
Right?
It's it's, it can you talk about that at all?
Like how do you even begin to understand darknet culture?
I mean, there's a lot of myth and scary stuff that people talk about,
and some of that isn't even true.
So how do you kind of pierce that veil of like, I, I mean,
I understand what like you said, you know, when someone asks, how do you hack?
I understand the idea that even though it seems like a dark veil to pierce,
there are so many YouTube channels, just like, here's how to hack, right?
I mean, I mean, even if you just you don't even watch any like, you just
you just strictly watch def con, you know, and then you get to figure
yeah yeah like info con where you know, you got like what, 700 different,
you know, hacking and cybersecurity conferences that
I mean it's absolutely insane when you you compare it to like you know
like back in the day and it's like, oh you go frac in package storm.
And. I see you know needs your research
but so like the the darknet community
I feel like really the closest thing you can really compare to
is the hacking community because again, like a lot of it goes off of intelligence.
But you know, I like to and this is just me personally, I guess, but
like I think there's a massive distinction between a hacker and a cybercriminal.
And, you know, like that,
you know, and again, like you're the black hat in the white.
And, you know, I've heard people be like, oh, black ads are cyber criminals.
Like, honestly,
I think like a black hat and a cyber criminal or even different because like,
the only thing that really breaks apart
a white hat in a black hat is intentionality and motives.
Whereas like,
you know, with a cyber criminal, for me, I just feel like cyber criminals.
It's a much more financially driven term.
Like when I think of a cyber criminal, I'm thinking of the guy
who's like stealing your credit card information, you know, like this guy,
he doesn't care about coding in Python.
He doesn't care,
you know, about
like,
you know,
the the vulnerabilities that come out.
Like, you're not going to see him, you know, get excited about,
you know, Heartbleed really is just like he's he doesn't care.
And like, the only time he gets excited is when it's
when he can use it, leverage it for a financial gain.
And I think hackers are completely different.
I think, you know, when I think of a hacker, I think of someone,
regardless of their intentionality, I think of someone
who is intelligent, who is super curious,
who enjoys learning and enjoys teaching.
I think those, like all of those things kind of combined
are massive characteristics of a hacker.
You know, it's not like, you know, these, you know, ridiculous movies, obviously,
like I like Swordfish.
This idiot has six screens and any types real fast, you know, like
if the definition of being actors typing real fast,
then like, every secretary is one, they're just like that kind of idiocracy.
Just it drives me nuts because it's really it's really demeaning,
especially in my opinion, especially to a community who,
like you said, my my DEFCON dog is, you know,
they you know,
they they can be there are a lot of people in it
who are very intellectually,
you know, dominating where they enjoy it, you know,
And like, you know, you have an argument with someone.
And I see like the joy that, you know, that other person gets.
And like,
you can even have the reverse where the person
who's losing gets joy out of it because they're just trolling that person.
But again, at the end of the day, like none of it is about emotions
and most of it's always about intelligence
and goals.
But anyways, I think that both of those communities,
both the hacking community and the Darknet
subculture, are very alike
in a lot of ways because, you know, it's like going back to the I.R.S.
days. That's what you have on the darknet.
Like you don't know who these people are.
They have handles.
They don't, you know, like, you know, if you were to hop in a random I.R.S.,
you go and you hop in and you're like, Hey, guys,
you know, and you give like your real name.
Like, no one's going to want. To talk to you.
It, you know, thinking that you're an idiot.
Yeah, I think.
So. Like with that said, it's you the same that's mirrored
in the Darknet community, except, you know, in the hacking community.
If someone breaks, you know, deface the FBI web page or something,
you know, like there are punishments for that.
But like, I think the punishments that we see
for the Darknet community in terms of drug trafficking
can be much more severe than that,
Which, you know, I mean, it's interesting because for the longest time,
I remember seeing like a lot of hackers getting, you know, more prison
time than than pedophiles, which is outrageous to me.
You know, I mean, like, if if you know, if you have a victim, period,
like it's a completely different crime,
especially a child or a woman.
But, um, so like those two, those to the point, Yeah, Yeah, absolutely.
You know, like, um, so, like, like my, my view on it,
a lot of people like, are you left, you write in like I'm like, you know,
dumb neither, you know, you're not going to put me in a box and classify me.
You know why?
Because I'm a unique human being. You know, like.
My fingerprints, unique.
Why care my views on the world be like, you know.
So. So I'm just trying to
kind of describe this culture a little bit.
So I you said and nobody uses a real name, right?
And I imagine nobody's trusting each other either.
They're all like a little keep everybody at arm's length here.
To a point to a point where
that can like like anything else that can be built up over time.
Like you can get to a point where just like in that I
or see chat as a hacker, you really trust this guy
and it sounds absolutely insane to anyone else.
Like if you know this guy and you've known him for ten years
and a great friend of mine sued 12 C,
who's an admin on the circle, that's me.
He was the guy who got me into
hacking culture and like, I've never met him,
you know, But I would trust him with my life,
you know?
And it's just like those kind of bonds that you have.
But like, that's something that I think we will see in time in the darknet.
It's something that I've experienced on a much less intense level on there.
I'm sure like
a good example of it was there was a vendor
that I had done business with importing his hashish and
like we had done so much business together that
like he had I had earned his trust to a point
where like this guy, if I asked him to send over,
you know, 100 keys, he would do it and he wouldn't ask twice.
And like again, like there's no there's no recourse for him if I rip him off you.
No, This is outside of escrows of a private deal.
And like, I'm not putting up any money like he would have to trust.
So, like, you, you absolutely can forge those bonds
of friendship and trust on the darknet, But it's something that, like,
he also knew, because I'm a Darknet vendor, I'm committing federal offenses.
You know?
So, yeah, we. Have like that similarity.
It's like if I'm a if I'm a vendor, it's fairly easy for me to get a job
on a Darknet
marketplace because they know I'm a criminal.
They know I'm not a fed like I'm shipping off
coke, weed, acid, shrooms, hash.
Molly You know, like all this stuff on a daily basis throughout the country.
They know and they can verify that,
you know, I'm not a not a federal agent.
You know, because.
Yeah, so it may I'm trying to find some analogies here
and maybe that the third one is
everyone is criminal.
Yeah, sure.
But it's like, you know,
at the end of the day, like, I've never been in to an I.R.S.
and had someone be like, Hey, man, prove your killer be.
Send me a signed pjp message.
You know, there's no there's no hackers that ever canary that texts you.
Yeah, Yeah.
So, like, you really don't know.
You know, I.
But I think the evolution of the darknet really,
really showed that, like, there are ways that we can,
even in the hacking culture, that we can improve on our own OPSEC
through some of the natural evolutions that we've seen on the darknet, like,
you know, having BGP sign message and, you know,
so and you do have that, but like what I'm saying, it's not a regular thing.
Like, you know, I've never I've never had
someone asked me for a signed message and I was, oh.
Okay.
So what we're working up to be becoming a vendor here,
and it sounds like you spent quite a while,
like months
and I'm understanding the whole OPSEC game and learning
about other vendors and stuff, because before you even make a vendor
account and go through the whole process, you've already
got quite a bit of knowledge.
So I'm assuming you're reading up on kind of like history and how people have
been caught in the past and it's worked and what hasn't worked.
Can you remember any stories that kind of stuck out to you of like,
Oh wow, I guess you should never do that?
Or that's a lesson learned there.
Yeah.
So there were there were some that were like really subtle
and there are some that were like really blatantly obvious, like,
like some of the some of the blatantly obvious ones
where I remember reading about a case I no clue what his name is, but
I'm reading about a case who this idiot had
hit his PDP key as a vendor, and he actually
he also used it as his Gmail PDP
and like the stupid, stupid stuff like that.
But then,
you know, some of the more subtle things would probably be
like just really small stuff, like the kind of the screw
ups to linguistics or seeing like after.
So, you know, Hansa, which is the like my first market
that I really involved with.
When I went down, they had this thing where they had the feds that took it down.
I had said that, you know, supposedly they had
put a in there and like the
recovery keys for the accounts to be able to get your bitcoin back
that like those keys
had malware embedded in them essentially
and like I never
I never saw anything from that.
Blake At the end of the day, it's just like
no one had known that that market had been taken over by feds at the time.
So to use that key,
basically like, oh, there's a lot of vendors who did it
and like I did and I was a small vendor of any money
basically to be able to, you know, get screwed over on on that
when the feds took it over and then exit scammed out of it is
like that was a really interesting thing that.
Should be your they should be your name exit scammed by the feds.
Well that was so that was probably one
of the one of the one of the things that really I think
I hated the most out of darkness vending the whole bowl time.
The thing I hated the most because my big thing
again, like being a Libra, being,
you know, like very, you know, being an AI and TP and like,
being very tit for tat was like, I hated scammers.
And I really wasn't a big fan of the fraudsters.
Like, if you screwed over a bank or credit card company, that's one thing
we're screwing over an individual.
It's a completely different thing.
But like
kind of seeing,
seeing, like seeing people
being screwed over and exit scams like you,
it always it really aggravated me because, you know, those admins, you create
these Darknet markets in an exit scam, they make a certain percentage.
And who who knows that percentage? I have no clue.
But like, you know, there's going to be a certain percentage
of people who at the end of the day become more hesitant
about giving some of their trust to a market,
which was,
you know, one of the reasons why I thought Open Bazaar was really great,
which is a distributed system, that's a whole nother topic.
But I'm
like, when I got raided
and they seized everything
and like three weeks later, you know, I got in the cell phone
and I was able to hop on Jared
and just see what was going on, like get him make any posts or anything like that.
Because like, you know, I'm under indictment Yeah, you might.
Well, I'm going to go make posts.
But like, I saw like my account you have three times to making posts.
So it's the feds who are making posts under my name.
And I'm seeing people like, like, you know, you know, two happy times.
Two is exit scamming, you know, like, cause, like, they're not
they're not allowed to send drugs.
The feds, you know,
So, like, that was like if I saw a vendor account
that was, you know, like with markets, it's kind of easy to see it.
They're exit scamming because all of a sudden all the money gets locked.
With vendors, it's a little bit more difficult
because it's a little bit more delayed and a lot of them will dilute that
by doing like selective scams
prior to doing full on exit scams.
But I always thought, like the people who did
that were just scumbags because like you built up this, the trust
of all these people and these people that buy your product, they supported you,
you know, it's like, yeah,
like you build this relationship and even if it's just with a fake name.
Ray Like, like you made this name honorable
by always fulfilling your obligations, you know?
And then like, right before you leave, you rip a bunch of people off.
Like, I just thought it was it was just such a scumbag move
to do and, like, you're really are you really kind of broke my heart.
Like hopping heart and seeing these people they go to every times to his exit scam.
And I was like, dude, like, it's not that you're I mean, like I
yeah, I got a ten count indictment, you know like and
they like it it definitely
wasn't their like innovative choice and it I would have you know I would have just
I would have stopped and I would have shut it down.
And you know, I guess I, you know, we always have a choice, right?
I just didn't do it soon enough. But.
Okay, so you guys started on Hansa.
Do you remember what you were sold for at first?
Yeah.
So it was a moonshine and cannabis, and, and so my name,
if you look up, if you look me up like my name isn't too happy times.
It's two happy times. Two.
Now, the reason that came about was because, like I said on the forums,
in order to keep posting, I had to become a buyer.
And once I became a buyer, there,
security
on Hansa would not allow me to become event.
Which makes sense right?
Because if like, you know, you want something
to your physical address and your name's out there
with your address, they don't want it or vendor's name and address out there
actually a really good policy to have.
But it aggravated me because I just man, I just spend,
you know, like a month and a half building up this name too.
Happy times.
So now, like, I have to abandon this brand
that I built,
you know, I made 5000 posts and then you name this brand.
So what I did was I was like, Screw that.
So I ended up just going and making two happy times.
Then I put the two at the end of it, and that's how my vendor name
became my vendor.
Yeah, I worked.
So you were making a moonshine, but where were you getting the cannabis.
Was growing it.
Yeah.
So I had, I had imported seeds from the to
I had gotten some master Kush seeds and I refined them
and I studied so and studied botany for
over 15 years
like the prior to the Cannabis Encyclopedia of No one to say
the dude's name was were these were a bunch of the story services
but he had read in a bunch of books prior to that.
I had read every single one of them.
So I learned like I taught myself about like macro nutrients, micronutrients,
deep water, cultures, scribes like all this, all this kind of stuff,
aeration and, you know, nutri deficiencies
and how to tell, you know, nutrient deficiencies of plants.
And so I had I had learned all this stuff
and I had wanted to cultivate cannabis for the longest time.
And then like, you know, when I finally
when I became a vendor, it was like,
now I have a way to distribute this.
Like I can make what I want because I know I have people that I can sell it to.
Whereas like before, if I'm doing it locally,
I have to go out and try to find,
you know, someone out there to buy moonshine, to buy,
you know, this, this cannabis and like for me,
like that's a risk because now, like, this person knows my face.
What happens if they get busted?
You know, they at least.
Excuse. Me,
they at least know like the town I'm from, they know what I look like.
They know what I drive.
That's an issue.
So like with the darknet, it alleviates all that you don't have any of.
And, you
know, so I was able to do something I wanted to do,
which was cultivate cannabis and, you know, produce quality alcohol
and distribute it on a national level.
Okay.
Oh, sounds like you're on your way.
You've got your vendor account, you got a couple,
you know, products you've made, which is pretty, pretty smart
and astute for a while, your first time as a vendor there to make your own stuff.
But yeah, how to go on.
Hansa, how's your first dip into the vendor pool?
Yeah, so I want to say on the first week I made about 300 bucks
and then the second week was crazy, about $500.
So it was definitely it was a slow start.
But had I not spent that month making those posts, I would've had no sales.
So like, again,
you don't, you know, the big, you know, one, the big rules kind of
you see on the darknet is build, trust, verify, right.
Like how do I know you are who you say you are?
Send me a signed PG pic.
Now I know you know a signed message, you know now I know.
So I can verify that with the public priebke that's on record.
I one of the markets.
So like with that said like you
you know you have that kind of verification
when you go from
one market to another
and like I just totally lost track of where I was going with that.
That's okay.
I get yeah.
So the,
the OPSEC really starts to kick in here, right?
Posting on a forum is not a big deal,
but now you've really got to turn it up. So
let's talk about
the packages very far away,
I think, or I mean, so let me just walk through here.
So you got to have
an account on the place.
A vendor approved BGP, you've got all that.
Okay.
What kind of operating system or how what was your access
to the news of the market
using entails or what was the method of gaining access there?
So initially, you know, like where it was at,
the reason that my, you know, my residential company
for the cybersecurity stuff that I was doing, it died out so much
was because where where I moved to
had no Internet access
it was a gorgeous house was a four bedroom,
two bath on the top of a mountain bike.
You could see five other mountains
by looking out the windows all the way around.
It was gorgeous.
You surrounded by mansions.
I found it for 1100 bucks on Craigslist.
What.
1100. Now?
Yeah, that's a typo. So.
So if you're like, you know, you want to check it out,
it's a
delicate room.
The address,
I want to say 1139.
Darling. That's not right.
You'd have to Google it.
You'd find it in my my pacer stuff.
But it's it's a gorgeous house and amazing view.
Like when they do 4th of July fireworks here in Vermont, you'll see people drive
an arc in front of that house
to see it because the view so
so it's it's nuts but it's
it was always interesting to me because like I'm inside committing felonies.
You mean like I'm growing weed, I'm making moonshine.
I'm like, I have 200 people outside on my lawn and,
you know, watching the fireworks as I'm distilling
ten gallons of 170 proof, you know,
moonshine just shipped to, you know, all these different states course.
So like, yeah, like you're you're opsec.
Definitely.
And like, the the thing is, like sending any drugs through
the mail is like, it's not tricky when you know how to do it, but it is
very much so.
The difficulty in sending pure alcohol
through the mail is a little bit different than,
you know, mailing some weed because like you got to think like,
you know, the cabins in an airplane is are pressurized.
You know, is it. Not like if.
If I'm sending a gallon of this moonshine that's in mason
jars to Alaska, how is that going to be transport?
You know, how do you wrap that up?
How do you make sure that, like, if something does happen to it,
that it doesn't leak? So,
like and then how do you make it so that you don't have any overhead
for that?
So like, for me, one thing I came to find out
was that USPS on their website, you can order free
supplies, right?
So like, like if you want bubble wrap, like instead of buying
bubble wrap from Amazon with your credit card,
having it sent to your house and going through a ton of it,
you can order envelopes from USPS or pick them up in person, right?
And now you don't have a credit card purchase.
You know, for one less of your shipping supplies.
Yeah.
So it was like little stuff like that.
So I would do stuff like that.
So, like, and like I would take a jar.
I would make sure that it's filled all the way to the top.
So when I shake it, I don't hear anything,
right?
Because if I take a bunch of liquid
and I put it fill a jar halfway up and I put it in a box and you shake
and you're splashing in the box, it's, you know, kind of a red flag.
So they used to film all the way up to the top, seal them,
and then I would wrap in a like kind of like a big sandwich bag or a freezer bag.
Then I would wrap them in a one of the bubble bags
for the big envelopes a USPS has.
And then I would take I would order like generic
catalogs that were really big,
like Granger or or
what's the other one?
Shipping one.
But I would order like there's there's free catalogs
that had 500 or so 2000 pages in them and I would tear the pages,
crumple them up into a ball and throw them in there
and I would pack it so there's no packing peanuts.
So now I don't have to buy that on Amazon.
You know, like I would make sure that my expenses, you know,
whatever you're sending out, that's one in that you can get popped.
But like you buying supplies is just as dangerous, right?
So all you have to factor in all those things And like,
you know, if you can factor those things in
and make sure that they have no overhead, even better, you know, because now
you're more profitable and like you want to be as profitable as possible
when you're doing this, because that's the point.
You know, the more profitable you are, the less time you have to spend
actually doing all this nonsense and worrying about these things.
Yeah.
Okay, so no Internet.
Let's go back to those. Right.
So accessing the website,
what was the steps of accessing the website upset wise?
So, so I had to do I drove down about them
but I would say about a mile and I ended up I think it was.
Carly Yeah, I think it was.
I think it was Carly At that point.
And if it wasn't, it was backtrack.
But like, you know, I've always been a big fan of, you know,
that distro, especially like offensive security stuff
but like
I when I go I think is why I loaded up
and you know cracked the crack there
the Wi-Fi and that was there
once I had once I had access to it I came back I said to you guys
that I used
one. So who's whose wife? I do.
Did you crack my neighbors?
Yeah. Well,
okay, not technically, not my neighbors, because he was like, a mile away.
Joe is like a guy down the street.
Mm hmm.
But, like, he was So remember I said the house was up on the hill?
Yeah, so the house was up on a hill.
And like, a vantage point, you know, for, like, a snipers up on the hill.
So I was like, you know, if I can see everything that's below me.
I remember I had read one time, and I want to min next books.
I mean, these are movies.
I thought it was a Mitnick book, but how he had basically reverse engineered
a way to get
a phone that had a rewritable
which their like their Social security number
or like a phone though it's like, oh, I am yeah you're some.
So I'm like, yeah, yeah. You want to turn around?
Yeah, I think you're right.
I'm not a phone freak, so I don't know.
But, but like he had gotten this way where you got a developer phone
where you could basically rewrite the serial number of the phone at will
and phone numbers were assigned based on the serial numbers,
and that's how they tracked them.
So like
when he was on the run and again, like I could have this screwed up,
it could be a movie.
I'm not saying this is you know, this is fact.
But the idea stuck with me.
I remember the source.
But you this idea of where could it come from?
But besides this guy
and like,
you know, he had used this and he had hacked into the cell towers
around him and preprogrammed these cell towers that when, you know,
certain phone numbers were within range, he would get an alert.
And those phone numbers were phone numbers
that he had social engineered that were actually fed phone numbers.
So basically, he had like this invisible gate
that was around him for 3 to 6 cell towers,
wherever, like a Fed came in the area and was like ten miles away,
you would basically get an alert on his phone, letting him know.
And I thought that was brilliant.
So I was like, How can I replicate that?
You know, I'm definitely not a phone freak.
I'm not Kevin Mitnick.
You know, I, I don't even like I don't know,
I don't even like talking to people, you know, never mind.
Like social engineering.
I'm so I do I accomplish that.
And so, like, I cracked this, this, you know, this Wi-Fi.
And with the arguing, I could to it from where I was up on the mountain.
But more importantly, I could see it
so I could see this house from up on that location.
And because I could see it, I was like, okay, this is my early warning system.
Like, you know, they had this
the kind of like that running joke of like, Oh, the feds drive SUVs.
And like, as someone, you know, they sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
But you can't really tell, you know, but like, one thing you can tell is
if you see 30 cars pulled up on the grass
and they're pulled up all messed up, they're probably not there for a barbecue.
You know,
it's probably a raid.
So, like, you know, with that in mind and I was like,
that's true, because that's how they rated me.
But so with that in mind, I was like, This is my early warning system.
If this guy
gets raided, first off, then, you know, he's good.
I mean, they probably won't find anything, you know?
But second off, like when I see that, I know to clean house,
you know, I know to grab all the drugs I have and go dump them in a river,
you know, and get rid of everything.
And that was kind of like my my early warning system,
you know, with that with their yagi and basically a yagi,
like you have an omnidirectional antenna, which is an antenna that picks up
wi fi all around you like a sphere, like at 360.
And then
you have a
parabolic antenna, which is kind of like a shotgun blast where like you shoot
a shotgun, spreads out and then a Yagi is kind of like a sniper rifle.
So that's that was the difference between those.
And that's why, like with a Yagi antenna, I was able to get the range
that I got with Wifr.
Yeah, for sure.
They can go pretty far if
okay, so you got on the internet
at that way or step one on the internet
and then existing ex the thing tor and getting on to these websites,
were there any other, you know, additional uptake that you did.
So I had, you know, I had tails
and like initially I didn't have tales initially
I had a bunch to which I preferred I had a buncha
on the actual computer.
And then I had tales on a flash drive that was pretty much how I tended to operate.
Again,
like I do, I would do regular perimeter checks.
So like, you know, pray for a day.
I would walk around, I would look through almost every window in the house
and just kind of look at what was going on outside, you know,
was there a car parked down the street? Was it?
And there were times where, like I saw a car parked down the street.
And what's interesting is, just like in my discovery,
like one of the pictures I have they took is of my house with snow on it.
And like you can barely see a figure in the window.
And I'm like,
I always wondered, like, was that me doing my doing my security rounds?
Because like,
I remember seeing a car parked about where the picture was taken from.
So like.
Yeah, there's a description.
Yeah, there's,
so there's, but there's aside from that, like, yeah, there's a ton of stuff like
I didn't have, like I didn't have a cell phone
and like, you know, if you've watched
a good amount of def con, you know, talks like I wouldn't have a cell phone
and I wouldn't like if you had a cell phone you like, you
somehow knew me and I like, knew you well enough where I trusted
you enough to come to my house like your cell phone stays in the car.
You know,
my wife, who
is an amazing person, she ended up.
She got with me like we've been talking for a while, but,
like, we ended up.
We ended up falling in love kind of that old school hacker way.
We're like, But for us, it was on the phone.
So we had talked a lot and we had fell in love on the phone.
And like with her, Glenn,
when I got
indicted, I told her I was like, you know, I got indicted and.
I got ten counts and each count as like a maximum of 20 years.
You know, I was like, you know, like, we can be friends, but like,
we're not getting married, you know, like, I'm not going to waste your life.
You know, I'm going to be in prison for the rest.
And like, it's not how feds work at all, but it's a it's a
another topic.
Again, I get off sobbing.
And what would you would you ask me?
Yeah. So you were using tails.
So here's the question. I r right.
So if you, if you load up tails, is it fresh like in the morning
and then you have to PDP key so and your bitcoin private address
like all this stuff if takes extra work to get back into tails.
Right. It takes the whole like hour is the set up.
I have to be able to even log in to the website.
So how, what's the what's the status there?
There's not always something I don't understand.
So, you know, external.
So I would just have a
I would have my, my flash drive that I would always keep on me
and I kept it on me because I also had like, you know,
first off, you have to, you know, figure I'm I'm, I'm, I'm a moonshiner. So,
you know, I,
I there's, there's 170 proof alcohol
around me all the time. So,
like, it's possible for me at any time to,
you know, take this flash drive out of my pocket or 170 proof alcohol on
and light it and hopefully melted to a point where it can't be recovered.
But really, obviously, that's hard to guarantee.
You know, as I gave thermite sitting around,
even though that was an idea of mine at one point um
this like, you know, magnesium strips.
All right. Okay. Okay.
This makes sense, though.
You've got a way to dispose of it if you need to.
And you've got an early warning system. I'm like, in this.
This.
This satisfies me for getting on the site.
And clearly,
you have completely alternate personas from, you know, who you are
because you learn from other people's using their Gmail address that up.
So you've got your own email address, probably one of these more secure
email providers. No, no email address. Okay.
You don't need it for anything.
Yeah.
No, I mean, the only communication that you're going to be doing
is on Darknet forums, and that's all with a signed BGP key anyways.
So there's really no reason
for you to have an email address.
I had an email address later on
and I want to say it was proton,
but that was very completely different alias
that I used for cashing out bitcoin.
Okay, got it. So,
so now, now we could talk about packages, right.
So what was the, what was kind of your research that you did to figure out
how to package this stuff up?
So there was actually there's a lot of turns out
there's a lot of interesting stuff on YouTube
that I had found.
One, I think I want to see the name of one of the videos.
So there is an ex-cop.
So like 99% of this stuff
you're not going to find on the clear like OPSEC for the darknet.
You really don't see a lot of this discussed on the.
So with that
said, one of the things that I found interesting that is about that
a lot of the stuff you talked about was absolutely applicable
was a guy who made a
he made three different movies and you can find them for free on YouTube.
And I remember one of was called
Never Get Raided Again.
And basically he was he was a narcotics officer.
This guy was a top narcotics officer in the country.
And like he had raided he had raided homes.
He had like, you know, like he might raid the home of a guy who's growing cannabis.
Right.
And, you know, back in the nineties
or in the early 2000, and they give this guy like,
you know, 20 years, you know, for growing weed and like
this top narcotics officer,
like, looked at it and he was like, you know, this guy didn't hurt anyone.
There's no victim.
This stuff.
Like no one's ever died from cannabis.
It's a schedule one drug. It's federally.
It's it's on the same level as heroin, you know, But no one's ever died from it.
And he's like, you know, this guy is now he's this guy doing, you know, 25 years.
His family's completely broken apart for what
he grew up a plant, you know.
So he basically he walked away from being a police officer.
And again, he was a top narcotics officer.
He walked away from there and he ended up making these videos.
And in them, he broke down a lot of the intelligence that law enforcement uses
for finding, locating and apprehending drug traffickers.
So there was some of the little things that he would talk about, like
you're following your car as a cop
and you see on the back left of the windshield,
this guy has four stickers where he donates to the police organization.
And for him, that was a red flag.
Like, why do you donate to the police organization?
You know, I read like like because a lot of people do it thinking.
They're going to get out of the ticket or the cops not going to pull them over.
So those kind of things, yeah.
The things you would be looking for would be like, you know, a car
traveling and another car is traveling behind it.
But like the car that's traveling behind it, maybe it's two or three
car lengths in back of it.
But what we see is when the lead car
switches a lane on the highway, the follow car,
that's two or three cars behind it goes in and goes into the same lane.
And we're watching these cars follow each other throughout these lanes
and they can say, okay, so the front car is probably
the drug addict who the drug traffickers paid,
you know, 400 bucks to drive five keys, a blow in the trunk,
you know, to Maryland and the guys in the back,
the follow car are the drug traffickers that are paying them.
They're showing these little
subtle patterns that they would pick up on for things like that.
Then you have things like, you know, law enforcement, which is completely illegal.
But they you know, they do it anyways, is grabbing a flower camera
and blur stands for forward looking infrared.
So a flower camera is basically if I pointed
at like your house, like let's say you just got home,
you park your car, you go inside, I pull up with a flower camcorder.
I pointed at your house and I look at it,
the things that are the coldest will be the darkest.
So, for example,
if there's snow on the ground, the snow will appear to be black, right?
Your exhaust pipe will appear to be white because it will be brought.
So but
with that flare camera, if I pointed at your house, I can see,
you know, it's like I was the best way to put it.
So if you you know, you can't see he with the human eye, right.
It's invisible.
But if you look at a wood, if you have a woodstove
and the sun's hitting the woodstove and you look at the shadow
behind the wood stove, all of a sudden now you can see ripples.
It's like looking at pavement and seeing ripples.
You're seeing the heat bend the light and now you can see heat.
You see those those invisible rays coming up.
I don't know the technical term for it is, but you could see
you could see the heat.
So with a flare camera, it makes it so you can literally see them.
And if
you're if you have like a grow up, like you're growing weed,
a lot of people will just hook up of then
like so the light that
lights up your flowering room typically is like a high pressure
sodium light and it gets very, very, very hot.
And if you don't ventilate it with an inline fan, it'll catch fire.
So a lot of growers hook up these inline fans
and then they'll pump that hot air outside.
So if I drive past your house and I look at it with a flare camera
and I see hot air being pumped outside,
I can be like, All right,
you know, maybe you're just doing laundry.
I do it again the next day. I do it again the next day.
Now, I came by your place four times.
I will do your please.
Four times this for camera again, totally illegal, but they do it anyway.
Now I see every time I come through
hot air is being pumped out of your house.
So what I do is I turn around as law enforcement,
they turn around and they pull your electrical records
and they see that you have spikes in your electrical usage for 12 hours
a day, which is the same flowering period as cannabis. You
they start putting all these little things together.
Now we're going to pull your purchases and we see that you bought
$600 worth of nutrients from Amazon.
We see that you bought ten submersible pumps.
You I mean, it's a pretty safe bet that you're growing hydroponics.
And like after a while, they can build up on this
until the point where they have
enough reasonable suspicion that it turns it into probable cause.
And then once they have that,
they have the ability to go apply for a search warrant raid, you
and again, all of this started with something illegal.
And I'm pointing this is where a camera.
Barry Cooper Right.
That's Barry Cooper is the guy who made those videos.
Don't ever get busted.
That could be a mirror.
I don't know. He's I don't want to tell you the wrong name.
If you look it up, you'll see it.
All right.
Um, yeah.
So I was hoping you'd tell me story about
trying to figure out what the what the cops think is a suspicious package.
Yeah, So.
So just real quick, Show the show him that guy with.
With his kind of view on narcotics officers
and what they look for was really insightful.
Then the other place that I think is the best source of information
was on the Darknet itself just by like, it's like, you know,
if you don't know Spanish, but you watch Telemundo for 45000
hours, you're going to know Spanish, right?
So it's osmosis.
You kind of learn it by osmosis.
And like a lot of the stuff I learned the specifics about packaging
and stuff like that was learned through this process of osmosis on the darknet,
reading on forums and and seeing what people say, what people say,
and the point of views that people have and kind of taking all of that in and like
like Bruce, Bruce Lee says, take in what's useful and discard what's not.
That's kind of at the end of the day, like if your
you know, if you're looking at making, you know,
a forward plan for OPSEC or a good information security policy
as a vendor,
like that's the best way to go about it in conjunction
with whatever you can find
on the clear net in addition to like those cases.
Because in those cases, you know, you look at like Darknet news,
like you're going to you're going to see
exactly how
those vendors got caught, you know, And at the end of the day,
like there's only again, going back to the whole thing with law enforcement,
there's only so many tricks that they have up their sleeve, Right.
It's like, you know, a magician
only has so many magic tricks, comedian only has so many jokes.
You know, a football team only has so many different plays.
So but if you know them all,
you can anticipate what their moves are going to be.
And if you know how they operate, you know what their next move is going to be.
And you can counteract.
And like that's why I think, you know, in conjunction with kind of all that
kind of 21st century stuff that we talked about from the YouTube
videos to the dark net information, then go all the way back to like Sun Tzu,
right?
I mean, as hackers, you know, you got to throw that in, you know, do.
Yeah, for sure.
There's that.
And then there's like, you know,
green are these names Allen Green you know, the 49 laws of power
all those kind of things I think are essential,
you know because if you know how human beings operate but you know,
you know what to expect, then, you know, you can kind of plan out
what's going to happen and, you know, to the best of your ability and
so I'm sorry, what was your was your other question.
The suspicious package.
It's an interesting anecdote.
You talked about figuring out this.
Yeah.
So what's crazy is that I didn't know until I figured it out again.
And a lot of my inspiration was Drew from a McNair book.
When he talks about,
you know, basically social engineering,
the operator of the National Criminal Database
to run searches for him like he's pretending to be law enforcement.
And because he uses the terminology they use,
like I need a deck research run on, you know,
because he knows that terminology deck we like they automatically
assume that he's legitimate but it's only because he's read the manual you know
and it kind of goes back to that old school hacker motto of like art form,
you know.
And I think when you do that
for anything you are immediately empowered.
It's like if you want to learn about, you know, I want to I want to be a,
you know, a master of Linux, I want to be a master Windows.
I want to be a master at Python.
Like, you know, go grab an. O'Reilly Right.
Or whatever, you know, like grab,
grab that manual and go through it and you're going to be, you know, way
more empowered than you are just hopping on trying to figure your stuff out.
So like, for me, that was like the
the postal inspector's manual and like, you know, their their policies
and practices and all of that kind of stuff is it was public.
And like me going through and seeing
now it's like, I know what the feds are doing,
but here's 50 other things they could be doing.
But they're not you know, they're just not smart enough to see this.
You know.
But like, I'm planning for my adversary.
So, like, I'm looking at things that they might do and like, you know,
a lot of stuff in there, like they make it so that they can classify any package
as suspicious, right?
So like, they'll classify something as suspicious.
But you have to have more than just suspicion.
You know, you have to have reasonable suspicion.
But in order to apply for a search warrant, you also need probable
coupled with that reasonable suspicion.
So like maybe like, you know,
you know, this package
is reasonably suspicious because it has excessive teeth
and we have probable cause because there's white powder leaking out,
you know, So then they would go and apply for a search warrant
to open it and, you know, probably be granted.
And then once it's opened and they do like a field test on it.
Oh, yeah, it's Coke.
All right, cool.
Like, now we're going to look at the videotapes.
If that post office has cameras
or we're going to pull graphics
and we're going to see,
you know, the license plates of the people that drove around there
and try to match them up with the person that shipped that package out.
Then they'll do surveillance on the house.
So like but like going back to a you were saying, like
making a package safe to ship was actually is kind of difficult
because they try to make it as generic as possible
so that they can classify almost any package as suspicious.
So like if you use quote unquote, too much tape, what's too much tape?
Well, that's arbitrary. It's up to them.
So, like, if you use too much tape,
if you have a fake return address, if you have a handwritten address,
if it's not an official USPS box.
Right. Like
all of these, you know, a fraudulent return address, a fake
sender address, like all of these things
culminate to create a suspicious package
and then pairing them together
makes it so you can add up
these individual variables to, you know, make it something where
now you can say you have probable cause
and plead their case to a federal judge and hopefully give him,
you know, he'll bring you a warrant to open it up.
So, you know, when you're
when you're preparing to try to fight that, you are
making sure that you're aware of all of those things
that they can possibly do and you're having countermeasures to them.
And then you have to factor in, too, like,
you know, at the end of the day, if I go print off your address
on a regular inkjet printer, you have micro printing.
My IP address is going to be in that that label.
What about which which
carrier to use?
Oh, for packages shipping.
Yeah, USPS only. Why?
Because it's run by the federal government,
which means they require a warrant to open it.
If you ship DHL, UPS,
FedEx, any of those are private companies, they can open your package as well,
whereas with USPS they require a warrant
and they need reasonable suspicion
with probable cause in order to apply for that search warrant.
And as a federal judge signed off on their ability to even open that package.
Okay.
So when you're shipping these things, you
carrying the
you know, the is is the mailman coming to your house
and picking these things up and you're like, oh, go.
I got a whole bunch more packages here. What's the process here?
And are you using a real name or what.
So, so the the process for that essentially,
Absolutely not from the house.
So in the
in the
Department of Homeland Security investigation was conducted,
the only thing that the Department of Homeland Security
knew about me and the post
office knew about me
was that I worked with computers.
So by the time they actually investigated me, the only thing
my local post office knew was like, Yeah, he's a computer guy.
He fixes computers and works on computers.
And like, that's a result of good OPSEC mixed with, you know, having a good cover.
And those two things are completely different.
You know, with a cover, you employ deception, right?
With OPSEC, you know, So like, anyway, side issue.
So going back to that, sure.
How we would ship them is
initially, I was going to ship them on myself.
And so I'm at this point like I'm cultivating cannabis.
I'm, you know, producing shine and, you know, I'm starting to
I've already at this point, I've studied also mycology,
which is the art of science, of of fungus, fungi,
so that I can do things like agar
transfers and, and practice proper sterile technique
in order to cultivate hallucinogenic mushrooms.
So, like,
as my business grows, so does my knowledge.
And diversity.
You know, my, my portfolio constantly evolves in different things.
And typically those things come from intellectual stimuli, right?
So learning how to be when you are bonding,
learning about distillation,
you know, learning about, you know,
sterile technique, all those kind of things.
But so as things evolve,
I don't have time to ship packages.
So I had reached out to my cousin and they talk about this.
She was indicted too.
So it's all a matter of public record.
None of it's secret, But so I contacted my cousin
who at the time of the island, and she worked in a dead end job.
And I said, Hey, listen, like, you know, I got a plan.
Do you want to come up for a weekend and I'll talk to you about it?
And she drove up that weekend and I told her, you know something, I'm
not to talk about selling drugs on the Internet over the phone now.
Yeah.
I might as well just ahead of, you know, call the NSA and let.
Them know, you know.
But again, that's that's kind of a fallacy, too,
because I really have in my my, you know, research, I've never seen
really intelligence agencies cooperating with law enforcement.
You know, they I just I've never seen like the NSA contact
the FBI or the DEA or the ATF for the the Department of Homeland Security.
Like, hey, you know this guy.
So and panels, we you you know, like, they just don't care how the really don't
seem to care about anything except for data collection.
So anyways going back to the story
and so I told her about it and I said listen like how it'll be is like
I will pay you a, you know, a certain percentage, 5% or whatever.
I'm shipping out 5% of that profit margin that that package is yours
plus a standard fee.
We'll do like $5 a package plus the percentage
plus gas money all the expenses, car payments.
And we had a spare bedroom.
So she if she wanted, she could live there.
So she had you very well taken care.
Plus like, you know, unlimited alcohol, moonshine,
weed, shrooms, ecstasy, acid, like basically whatever you want.
You could take, you know.
So that was kind of the arrangement that I had.
And then she would go and I would in the morning,
I would wake up, I would check my orders,
I would print out addresses on thermal labels
because thermal labels don't use micro printing, which means my IP
address won't be on that label.
I explain that.
So if I print out
if I print out on an envelope right now.
To send you a letter with micro printing
bill, your printer will put your IP address
into that text.
You won't see it.
You have to zoom in,
but you have a thing called micro printing and it's a security thing.
Well, like if I kidnap you and I send a ransom note and I printed it out
with a printer, like they can see the IP address inside of the text
that the printer used to print. Wow.
So when you're going to share, like this is kind of the level
that you're looking at, you know, as far as like operational security.
So for me, I would I bought a thermal printer
because with a thermal printer it doesn't use ink.
It basically just comes in strips
and it prints, but it doesn't use ink.
It uses thermal paper and there's no micro printing with those.
So in the morning I would wake up, I would print out
like, let's say I'm sending you,
you know, half a pound a week, I print out your address.
And on the back of it I write half about a week.
So I throw it into like a little bucket that I have.
Then I go upstairs and each bucket is organized for each drug.
So I know when I go to access my cannabis
and package my cannabis and packaging all my cannabis orders for the day.
And what I do is I pick it up.
I see. Okay.
Uh, you know here is, you know,
here's Jack's name and his address.
What's Jack ordering?
And you flip it over half a pound a week, a package up a half a pound, a weed.
I have a blue shield up in my clean room.
Usually I have it sealed up in my clean room
and I package it.
I have, you know, my fake return addresses.
Slap it on there, Then I peel it off
and I slap your
destination address on that box.
And I throw away the back side of the label, which says half a pound.
So now you are guaranteed
to get the product that you ordered,
but I know you're not going to be send
the wrong item.
And like I know like made my printings on point.
So like you can, you know, with, with sending out a package example
if your fingerprints are on the outside of a package.
So like one of the things my cousin was concerned about, she was like,
if I'm sending out these packages and like the FBI fingerprints them,
they'll see my fingerprints as it gets through as a force.
That's true. Yeah.
And she was like, well you know, like, that's
kind of an issue, right?
I was like, no, because at the end of the day,
if you're at the post office and you touch a box,
you have you still have plausible deniability.
Right now, if your fingerprints
are inside one of those, you know, the plastic
and seals the drugs or on the inside of the box,
not so much.
So for me,
I would seal the package because I'm working with it on the inside of it.
I would seal it and I would have like, you know,
two or three pairs of latex gloves on.
And I had a shorter beard at the time.
But, you know, if I had hair and I wouldn't shave my head,
I would have had a hair net.
But like I
bleached the area that I did it in on a regular basis,
made sure there was no, you know, DNA.
Like there is a ridiculous amount of stuff
that kind of goes into this and then actually packaging it up.
So let's say I'm packaging up just an ounce a week.
I'm taking I'm taking a sandwich bag
and putting the cannabis in them, sealing it up, getting the air out as best I can.
And then I'm taking that and I'm wiping it down with rubbing
alcohol with the new pair of gloves.
And the reason I have to do these new pair of gloves
is because at the end of the day that those the THC is microscopic,
like if there's even the smallest amount
on a layer that is exposed to the air,
if there is a dog around, that dog can alert to.
So what I would do is I would take the package and I would
I would seal it up in a in a like a sandwich bag
or freezer bag, get as much air out as I could.
Then I would wipe it down with rubbing alcohol.
I would stick it inside a vacuum seal bag.
I would vacuum seal bag, and then I would dip that whole bag in
and the solution of rubbing alcohol let it dry off.
Then I would seal it in another bag.
And then the last bag that I would in
would be what's called a visual barrier.
And a visual barrier is just a
it's a vacuum seal bag that's a solid color.
She can't see through it.
So I would vacuum sealed his last bag
and I off my thermal printer, I would print off a label that says
organic dried fruit, and I would slap it on that visual barrier.
Now, if I can this to you, you look at it and you squeeze
it, it feels like dried fruit.
But you can't see it because the visual barrier.
So if law enforcement
or a postal employee was curious about what was in a box and stepped on the box
to look inside of it, Oh, it was in actually.
And we didn't know. We stepped in the box by accident.
You can step on this box all day.
And that visual barrier is not going to the visual barrier.
So you could literally open the box.
And what you're seeing is just this thing that says organic dried fruit.
You have to open this box and cut through this, you know, two mil
thick plastic in order to get the other place to go.
And even then, it's still so opaque that you can't see what it actually is.
So you have to go through all these layers to see what it actually is.
Now, the reason I would do that is because you have a thing called permeation,
so I can take a pound of weed, I can put it in a bag,
I can stick it in a PVC pipe and I can stick it in a block of concrete,
stick that block of concrete in a gas tank.
And if I leave it there for long enough, a drug sniffing dog
will smell that smell of that cannabis through the metal of the gas
tank, the gas in the tank, the concrete, the pipe
and the plastic bag because it permeates out breakers.
Nothing in this world is actually solid.
It's all held together by but nothing is technically solid, right?
Even the inside of an atom is comprised of basically nothing but empty space.
So permeation goes through everything in anything.
Some substances. It takes longer.
Now, mind you, I don't have to put it in concrete
or steel or any of this crazy stuff that you see. Like
a lot of the cartels do that that are shipping,
you know, large quantities because at the end of the day, I use two.
To three days shipping here.
No, and. It's sealed in four layers.
So it doesn't have time to permeate those bags
in order for a dog to be able to smell it.
And I can assure you there's no microscopic residue
on the outside of it because I've changed my gloves
and I've killed whatever it is, rubbing alcohol and completely cleaned it
multiple times on that same package.
That's that's really informative.
Thank you. I love that.
So you gave your
you gave all these packages to your cousin and she would drive him to work
like in the town.
And so so what would happen was every show.
That every.
Three packages would have a different return address.
So I would maintain a list
and the list was like a list of counties.
And in the counties, you know, you have towns.
So what I would do is I would pick a county.
It could just be random.
I'd pick a county off this list and I'd say, okay, this town,
this town, this town, this town, this town.
And then from that list, I now have five different towns
now in, you know, rural Vermont, not, you know,
not every some towns are actually villages and not like.
So yeah, it's just it's so from each one, what I would have to do
is one of the alerts for law enforcement
is a fraudulent return address.
So I had to find a database of legitimate
return addresses and like,
you know, me like if like you're an honest guy, like you're
not a citizen, you're 9 to 5 guy, you don't break the law.
You're not you know, you're not evil. That I know.
You know, like, so like I didn't want to send out, you
know, a bunch of coke with Jack's return address,
because if I did that, you know, you may
you know, it may not be the best thing when Homeland Security busts
down your door at 6 a.m., you miss work
where someone tells your boss about how they saw you getting raided.
You lose your job, you know.
What do you do?
Say, Oh, I didn't do it.
Everyone says that, you know,
and like the stigma, the trauma that your kids are going to have, like,
you know, all that kind of stuff that goes hand-in-hand with it.
So like, for me, I needed a list of people that I could find,
and I needed this list to be of people in every state, every county, every town.
And I needed this street address.
I needed their real name, and I had to be a legitimate address.
And like my
solution for that
was looking at the sex offender registry
and finding like level three sex offenders, the worst sex offenders,
and, you know, putting their name as a return address.
And what this did was it made it shows a legitimate address, a legitimate return
address where I could be pretty sure, you know not guaranteed, but
excuse me, reasonably sure that kids didn't live at
and that, you know, this guy got raided I really didn't care,
you know, because I have no sympathy for
you know, Chioma was like this are like all federal prisons, like child molesters
or, peatos, as they call them on the dark day and everywhere else.
So, you know, I was like at the end of the day, like,
you know, I there's news a great list have because no matter where
I'm shipping from in the country, there are sex offenders.
And I didn't
feel guilty about using them
for my nefarious purposes, you know because at one point
they would use someone else for their nefarious purposes.
You know.
And I just kind of saw it as karma.
So I would print out with each package, each package.
So each post office at a maximum
would have three packages going out.
Right.
So, you know, if we shipping nine packages
that day, she would probably be visiting
three or more post offices.
So our, our maximum was three packages per post office.
So she would go, she would, you know, ship out these packages
from these three different offices.
She would get receipts and she would bring them back
and I would cross off the name of that town.
And then the next day I would pick a different county.
Right. And that's how I rotated.
But it's also how I ensured that I did not visit
that same post office for at least six months,
because I figured, you know, if the feds are going
to, the feds say, we ship out this package from this post office,
the feds catch it.
And they're like, Well, we didn't get any video footage.
Like, so we're gonna set up shop. Where do surveillance?
That's what they do, right?
We set up surveillance at this location.
Our fun is we're not going to be back for six months.
How big is your budget?
You know,
we're not we're not sending out, you know, five gallon buckets of Fed all.
In fact, the most dangerous, the most harmful drug
that I shipped, I think, was alcohol
other people would say was powdered cocaine.
I think I honestly I think alcohol is worse.
You know, it's legal.
But like, I didn't sell heroin.
I didn't sell meth.
I mean, meth.
They didn't sell then? No,
I tried not to sell drugs that I thought took people's souls.
I tried to sell what I to be
party drugs and again, bulimic, You know, that's that's you just trying
to, you know, rationalize your bad behavior
and you could absolutely say that I wouldn't contested.
I wouldn't say it's wrong.
You know, that's what it is.
But at the end of the day, like,
for me, that was my moral,
you know, and I was proud of myself for even having one,
because there's a lot of guys that don't, you know.
Yeah. When? No.
What So they had a moral line of which drugs you would sell
and which ones you wouldn't.
Buy and whose return addresses.
Yeah, many of the moral lines.
Like,
is there somebody who wouldn't you wouldn't sell you.
Well so that's the thing, right? Everyone's anonymous.
You was kind of like it's kind of like if I sell a knife on Amazon,
how do I know you're over it?
You have?
Mm hmm.
Yeah. So you really can't tell. Right?
I mean, and only that man.
But you have, you know,
you know, for the people, like, well, you know, you're selling dangerous drugs.
Okay.
Are you going to tell me that no child's ever been prescribed oxycodone?
At least I'm not in a position of trust, right?
I'm not your family physician.
Like it's like having a soccer mom come to you and trust you.
You've got tennis, all right?
So she just doesn't play tennis for a few days.
She'll be good and like, you know, a doctor to try to make
it feel like he's actually done something and to justify his,
you know, what he's going to charge her, you know, prescribes OxyContin
and she becomes up like this is not
a far fetched story.
Right. Right.
This is a fairly common story.
And That's you know, it's my they're I'm of the opinion that
that's one of the reasons we have this, you know, opioid crisis here in America.
This is profitable for
the pharmaceutical companies.
And those pharmaceutical give big donations to doctors.
And, you know, at the end of the day,
those same pharmaceutical companies will turn around with the treatment.
You know, when says that person, oh, we can't give you this OxyContin anymore,
you know, because you're obviously an addict
now they're going to go get heroin and then at some point
they're going to try to get off the heroin and they're going to go with something,
you know, like mescaline
or I'm sorry, namaste methadone,
you know, And they're going to be on that for the rest of their lives.
Now, why when, you know,
there are studies that show that, you know, hallucinogenic mushrooms
can help or completely alleviate opioid withdrawals.
Well, because at the end of the day,
a treatment is much more profitable than a cure.
And in my opinion, that kind of premeditation
is barbaric in comparison to a guy selling some weed
and some, you know, alcohol on the darknet.
And that's that's how kind of like
I would justify to myself, you know, Now, is it wrong?
Yeah, is absolutely wrong because it's it's illegal.
Right.
But I was also of the belief that an unjust law is no law at all.
You know, And I was also of the belief that
all of us have an inherent right to our own bodies.
You know, if you want to go in McDonald's for
the rest of your life and, you know, become £400
and die of a heart attack, you're free to do so as an American.
You know, and I'm of the belief that
if you want to do drugs, you should be free to do so.
As an American, you have a right to put whatever you on your body know.
Unless someone else owns your body, no one has a right to tell you what to do
with.
It's like me telling you, you know, you can't wear your glasses over your eyes.
You have to wear them on your forehead. Who am I?
I have no right to your property.
Who am I to tell you which so?
That was kind of like my contention on that whole thing.
I think I'm going way off topic.
No, I think that's good.
I think it kind encapsulates, you know,
the libertarian view and Russell Brooks view and stuff like that. So.
Well, I think it does that at the same time like you know
it just pro prohibitionist stupid because it doesn't work.
You know the war on drugs
you spend billions of dollars every fiscal quarter and you know, we have
we have locked up people for life for cannabis, and it's done nothing.
It's like, you know, you can execute people all day.
Guess what? There's still going to be murders.
You know, the tough on crime stance does nothing but get politicians elected.
And in my opinion, like to be a doctor.
You need ten years of school to be an architect.
You need ten years of school to.
You know, to to be a lawyer, you need seven years of college.
Right?
You know, what do you need to be a politician?
You should apply to you.
But you know, this is going to be.
Willing to betray you and July
and to put on like this
holistic attitude of how you're virtuous and wholesome.
And it's just disgusting to me.
It's like, you know, you'll see,
you know, you see a school shooting and you see some horrible tragedy.
Right.
And, you know, there's a comedian who said this much better than me.
But like,
you know, you see these people who will
hop on Twitter and, you know, they'll be like like.
Oh, you know. Prayers and, you know, wishes.
And my heart goes out to the victims.
And so and so it and it's like,
you know, when I see that post, don't see someone who genuinely cares
about people who are killed or, you know, suffered some god awful tragedy.
I see someone saying, you know, social media is about what's it about?
Look at me.
You know, I see someone saying, hey, I know this horrible thing happened,
but don't forget about me.
I'm important
to, you know, like, it's just it's disgusting to me.
And like, like, I don't know, just like.
You know.
You when you have a prohibition on anything,
you empower those who are willing to walk
outside the lines of the law.
You know,
So like, you know, we make alcohol.
Well, you know, now you have
your people like.
Oh my God.
Someone's
who's a dude in Chicago, gangster
alcohol.
So like, you make alcohol legal, right?
And you know, you empower Al Capone, right,
to make millions of dollars of this product because now it's illegal,
which means it's more profitable because it's more rare.
And things like, you know, the Valentine's
Day massacre happened.
Yeah.
I mean, I was just reading the other day about,
you know, nicotine kills 400 people a year.
Why not just make it illegal?
Well, if you did, then need to have
dangerous nicotine in the world and not,
you know, regulated and safe and,
you know, store bought stuff is going to be a lot safer than speed.
But nicotine.
And I mean, at the end of the day,
you cannot listen, this world is not a safe place, you know,
And like you can try to childproof
the world for adults.
But it's it's all it's going to do
is give rise to predatory action.
You know, So like you can say we're going to make every harmful drug illegal.
And what's going to happen is someone's going to come up out of that
and make a black market for it, where they're going to make 100 times
what they would have, you know, what it would have been had it been regulated.
And not only that, when it's regulated, you know, it's in a store.
So people are going they're showing ID for it, right Like like
no one's selling cigarets to kids at playgrounds.
Right. Like, no one's going there with Lou.
She's trying to sell single sell single cigarets.
But you do have crack dealers that go to schools
that hand out free crack or free heroin.
Hello.
Okay,
so let's switch gears a little bit here.
There was a slide that you had on your talk, which was I want you to talk
about is know what your boundaries are and your goals as a Darknet
vendor.
Yeah.
So for me, my boundaries were the ethical boundaries
that I spoke about.
You know, for other guys it might just be like
not shipping to a certain place, which was another thing.
I didn't ship internationally and only ship nationally
because I didn't
want to have to deal customs like I can send anything through the mail
if it's in the United States, it's not going through customs.
Now, that said, if I don't know how to ship it properly
or I failed to ship it properly
out of complacency, then it doesn't matter.
But the whole thing people like, oh, like what about drug sniffing dogs?
Like drug sniffing dogs don't work in eight hour shifts.
They can't.
It's like try to go to a candle shop and smell candles for longer than a half hour.
They're all going to smell the same,
you know.
So I'm kind of going back to like, what what can, you know, your boundaries.
For me, it was like no international shipments, no selling stuff there.
You know, heroin, meth, fennel,
things that kill people
and, you know, not ripping people off, giving them
the best quality product that I could source on a global scale.
You know, so like, the theme of my shop was in quality.
Like if you came in, you buy it from Dubai Times two.
Like you didn't buy for me because my prices were competitive.
You bought from me because I sourced the best acid or the best.
Molly Or the best, you know, boosted jack mushrooms,
cannabis or, you know, strongest alcohol or whatever.
I had a boutique, like I sourced the best product that I could find global,
and that was a point of that was my maker thing.
So that was I guess kind of my boundary was don't ever sell a cheap drug.
Don't ever sell something that kill people
and you set boundaries and what else was a
goals.
So my so my goal initially that's a great question getting into my goals like my.
Only goal with.
This was to make like 200 grand
because like in Vermont, you could buy a house for a relatively
like you can find a cheap house for like a hundred grand.
So I was like, I buy a $100,000 house
and I have $100,000 left,
which will let me pay the taxes and, you know, live off of it
for long enough until I can find something to,
you know, keep me afloat permanently.
So my goal was like 200 grand starting out.
But it was like between,
like my cousin's fee that I paid
and having to, like, upgrade my
my cannabis set up and upgrade my alcohol
and pay for shipping and,
you know, kind of evolve with the business.
I always found myself always reinvesting.
So like if I sold something, I made 800 bucks off of that,
I would be like, All right, 400 bucks is going to be
for shipping fees.
And the other 400 of that is going to be for gas money
for my cousin to ship $400 worth of stuff.
Hopefully.
So like I made enough to make a profit.
But like between my cousin and my ex, who I was still living with,
it was I never got to that $200,000 line.
Now, I did get to a point where like towards the end,
like your money starts to come in exponentially.
So like basically the first week was like 300, second week was probably 500.
And then like eight weeks where it was nothing.
And then you have weeks where,
you know, you got Bitcoin and guess what?
Bitcoin dropped 20% and you Yeah.
So now you got to hold that.
Till it goes back up at least to that at least 20%.
And like I'm not a millionaire, I don't have a lot of money.
So like
having that
being held, it kills you
because now like, you know, you're eating your profits now.
Now you got to put that money there.
You have to hold in Bitcoin.
You put all the rest of the money that you made into stuff like shipping,
shipping supplies, you know oh, I need more nutrients.
I need my pump died.
Oh, I need, you know, this or I need that.
And like, you know, you have these constant feeds.
Never mind the car payments and you know, everything else rent.
You're I mean, like you still have your regular bills, so, like,
you have all these
things and it's just like that person who works that 9 to 5, you know,
you're on the wheel and you feel like you're not going anywhere.
Right?
The only difference between me and that guy is like, you know, I'm
risking 30 years in prison.
Yeah.
And I'm hoping that by doing that and risking more,
I can make more in a shorter amount of time.
And it's just
it's not always the case. So.
So like.
Yeah, yeah, I would, I, I don't know.
I have I'm trailing off in my own mind. Out. Yeah.
So one of the things I wrote down as a no I can watching your show
or talk is don't drink and type.
Yeah.
Yes absolutely.
Yeah yeah it's it's more dangerous than drinking and driving.
Absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah. What's the danger here?
So like, let's say, you know, you're, you're to a point now
and you know, we know like as people who are in security on a regular basis
right on you know on the left side of the scale
we have security right
And on the right side of the scale,
we have
what's the word I'm looking for?
Ease of access.
I, I want to say it is the usability.
Yeah. Like like usability, right. So,
so we have these two extremes and they really are,
you know, like if you get up, you get up in the morning
and you walk outside your apartment in the city
and you don't close your door,
it's really easy to come back in your apartment,
but it's also really easy for anyone else to write.
Think you're not. Going to have anything left.
But there some crack is going to steal everything.
And so. You know, you.
You're going to be at a total loss.
But like, it's going to be really easy to get back into your own apartment.
So you know?
But now on the flip side of that,
you have three medical locks.
You have, you know, a bar that goes across the middle of the door.
It's a solid steel bar and all the windows are barred.
And you have two alarm systems
with, you know, motion sensors, pressure plates, all this other stuff.
You invest a ton of money
now like you have when you get in, you have to use 20 years.
Don't lock your door.
You have to get in here to punch in this access code that you read in
is scared me all these things that you have to do.
So it's it's very it's not very can be right and like you know good
operational security and functionality
and like information security policies
they try to find like that happy medium between secure and convenient.
Yeah.
And like, it's an extremely difficult
thing to do.
And when you get complacent, like, you know, right now you,
you know, your first purchase on the dark new market, you're going to be
it's like losing your virginity.
You know.
It'll be super nervous.
You're going to be clumsy. You don't know what to do.
You don't know how to do it.
You know, you look Yeah.
And then you.
You know, you now you fast forward 20 years later and,
you know, obviously not 20 years later, but 20 years,
maybe an hour metaphor or whatever you want to call it.
And now it's like you made 100 purchases on the darknet
is super comfortable, right?
You know, you're doing you know how long it takes.
You know, how to use BGP, you know, when you should a vendor
for a tracking number or if you should ask a vendor,
you know, what your vendors terms and conditions are,
You know how to spot an exit scam somewhere?
Well, you know how to tell a fraudulent vendor somewhere.
Well,
and you've gotten to this point where you're kind of comfortable
now, you know, and now you've been on these forums for so long,
it's kind of like you saw that evolution with Fortune
and Anonymous where these people talk to each other for so long.
They're all anonymous, but they've talked to each other for so long.
They you know how this one guy always kind of talk.
She has this linguistic thing and always does.
He always uses a certain phrase or he always misspells their,
you know, her like, well, you pick up these things about him.
You know, he's anonymous and you start to learn about each other,
even in this anonymous setting.
Now, as human beings, we have this propensity to,
over time, as we know someone to questions, right?
Unless you're social, you or psychopath.
Right.
Like so we tend to grow closer to the people that we've known for longer.
And we've been through stuff with for longer.
Well, like if you're on the darknet for any prolonged period of time
and again, like there's an exit scam
and you're a customer and you get robbed,
like there are other people go rob you, that's a bonding experience.
But to some degree you all got robbed together.
And like what tend to notice with human beings
the worst stuff you go through together, the closure of the bond.
So like if me and you go out to a club together
or like we meet each other at a club and, you know,
we become friends, we talk, you know, boom, boom,
we'll have a relatively close, you know, maybe relationship, right?
But their friendship might not last that long.
Now, if me and you sign up and we go to Iraq together
or or you know, we're both in prison and we're you know, we're you know,
fighting for our lives, this is a big ask, you know, war or whatever.
Like when we get out or we get out of that war,
we get out of prison, we're going to have an extremely close bond.
Yeah.
And those are bonds that in some cases can last a lifetime.
So the more you go through with someone and the worse it is
that you go through the close to the bond, you know, it's to some degree.
So at some point I read it banned Darknet markets.
And then I think Fred created just.
Then yes Yeah. Were you involved with dread right.
Yeah so so
like even use it even before that?
Well, we were we just started to.
Don't drink and type.
Oh. So to get to your point like the point of not drinking
and taping is what happens is that complacency.
So you get comfortable at a certain point with me, just like me and like me.
And you might know each other in years, four years and I or she.
Right.
And then you wasted one night and
you know, I call you by your handle.
They say, Oh, no, man, it's cool.
Just let me jack up a right. And
it's like, you know that situation.
But on the darknet, right?
Well, like I very well could be a fed.
Now I know something I know in identifying piece of information about you,
and maybe
I've seen you say something a certain way that you need to a certain area.
Now I know where your first name is and a roundabout where you are.
And as time goes on, like there will be more information leaks
than I can capitalize on. You figure it out.
And that's why I said to answer your question.
That's why I said don't drink in time, because whatever complacency you have
is exponentially increased,
which means the chances of you
basically being a data leak on yourself
increases exponentially with.
So give me a quick rundown of some of the
some of the roles you've had here on Darknet Markets. Right.
So 5000 posts just as a as a contributor,
a buyer, a vendor,
Dredd admin and a PR for another Darknet market.
Go on.
So yeah, PR and then also
I've been like arbitration.
So like arbitration
dispute resolution.
So basically when you would have a customer
who would dispute a sale
and you would have a vendor
who would either agree or dispute it
and I would, I would manage some of the sometimes on some of those markets,
I would manage those disputes
and I would be the one to decide like, do you get a refund?
Do you not get a refund?
Do you get a percentage of a refund?
Like how how is that figured out?
And we would do that by looking at, you know, obviously
the reputation of both the buyer and the seller.
We would also look at like the account age.
We would look and see if like
they had accounts on
other Darknet markets, how reputable they were.
And then there were like there are some like
there are some of them that were very easy because like,
you know, someone who puts in a, you know, they put in to buy something
and five days later they open a dispute and it's like, you know,
this is an Amazon,
you know, well, next day shipping here.
I mean, like I mean, there are vendors
that have it, don't get me wrong, they reach for shipping.
But like,
I'm not granting your dispute, you know,
because you haven't gotten in five days like you're going away.
And if you don't want to wait, then if this vendor is cool with it,
he can give me your tracking. No.
And I'll look into it and see if he actually shipped it.
And if he did ship it where it is or like, you know, you should be asking
if he's cool with giving it up. Yeah.
And you should be asking, you know,
so there was a lot of ways to figure out disputes,
but like you do have those ways where it's like
he send me this box.
I got it in ten days.
The box was full of rocks.
Okay, Do you have pictures of the box?
Did you video the opening of it? No.
All right.
Like in that case, I have to look at their reputation
and it might just be like, you know, kind of like that story in the Bible.
We, you know, you really do, you know, cut the baby in half.
You know.
Like.
Depending again, depending on reputation of the vendor, reputation of the buyer.
You do that into consideration about like,
you know, as a dark vendor, you should have your terms and conditions
so solid that that's not even signed up for.
Oh, yeah.
I'm like, I know I would ship without tracking.
I'm like, if you wanted like, you know, an eighth of read or something
or like a gram of coke, I would be like, Hey, listen, like I can ship with tracking
or without a really small amount, but my terms and conditions,
if you don't want to pay the extra $10 for shipping
and I'm sending you without a tracking number
you have no ability to dispute,
would you have the tracking number?
You just didn't give it?
No. So like, I wouldn't have it.
I would.
I would mail Miller would just would just stamps.
So like, I might take it and like, break up your cannabis, compress it
into a flat, rolls of a dollar and seal it up with the plastic bags
and put it in a literal way envelope, put some stamps on it and mail it out.
Now you're shipping is 1 to 2 bucks instead of,
you know, 15 bucks, but
you don't know when it's going to arrive and if it doesn't arrive.
So my problem.
Is it's.
Clearly stated in my terms and conditions that
if you elect David ship this way
and that's on you and I have multiple ways of of shipping.
So you could have had that insurance and had a guarantee.
Now if you elect to have shipping
tracking
and when I ship if you're like hey man it's been ten days, I didn't get it.
First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to look up that package
and I'm going to say, Oh, okay, it's being held right now for like
it was delivered on the 23rd at 1015 and it was left on the porch.
Well, I didn't get it, but that's not my problem
if it's delivered, it's delivered.
It's up to you to supply a legitimate delivery address
where you can get a package.
So if you don't get it, that's on you.
Now, if it was never delivered,
that's totally different.
Like now this is a delivery.
I'd be like, okay you had two options.
I'll either resend like, you know, you bought half a pound a week,
I'll send you another half a pound, a weed
completely free,
no charge for shipping, no charge for the product or resend you
the full purchase at a different address or with a different name
or I'll give you 50% of your money back.
But you make that choice.
Yeah, that's good. I'm.
I've interviewed you other
vendors before and I'm always like, Man, I wish you were my hookup.
Is that what everyone's against?
That's like, you know, the Civic?
Like, very.
I don't know.
They're very careful and calculated it and they just imagine buying something
from some wacko and nothing comes right and it's all trash.
Yeah. Yeah.
I never mind the fact that, I mean you, you're know, if this douche bag sprayed
fender on it like the guy you got it from, like.
Like real life dealers.
I can't, like, I can't stand them.
They should be one.
But, like, I can't stand him because it's like,
you know, even if it's, let's say, it's something simple, like an abyss, right?
I go, I buy cannabis off someone and he's like,
you know, I'm really back in the day.
You be like, Oh, like what kind of, you know, kind of how he uses OJ Drew.
Okay, dumb ass.
Listen, Jarrod is sure for hydroponics,
that's the method of growing, not the strain it is.
You idiot.
You're you mean.
I mean, it's like saying it's like saying a.
A. What kind of operating system are you using?
It uses electricity.
Well, what's it.
What did you just say to me?
It. There's no way you're this stupid, you know?
I mean, it's like.
It's like listening to Dual-Core here to help at the end of the song,
you know, the guy who's complaining about I was Mouse doesn't work,
and it's still in the package, you know, like you're a moron.
You know, like, you know. And.
But this is the guy.
You're buying it off and but that's my point.
Like, he has no clue what kind it is, where it was.
Does it have pesticides sprayed on it?
Does it have that No. Sprayed on it?
It is no, you know, is really no much of anything.
That's why he's doing what he's doing.
Okay. So
what kind of
what what kind of payment were you accepting?
So yeah, Bitcoin Bitcoin only.
Yeah. That was it.
I know a lot of guys they go Monero and like I say, if I was doing it now.
Monroe Like when I was vending, I remember Monroe being $19 right?
So it.
It was not what it is today,
but you did have like Libertas, which was a Darknet
that was exclusively accepting Monroe as payment.
It wouldn't accept anything else,
which my understanding is they moved to
HP and then got busted,
which I actually just learned the other day,
making a documentary about dark
and like going through the history because it's crazy.
But I'm
yeah, I figure, I figure whereas.
You know, okay, so washing money is what I want to know.
How what did you do to cash out?
Super easy.
Yeah, that's, that's probably one of the easiest things.
So there's a ton of guys who like,
Yeah, convoluted ways. But
I think the simplest way to out
is with drugs
and be like, what.
The hell you.
So it was so I.
You know it's it's super easy like you know
at the end here's here's the thing right so in Vermont
where like around where I live like a really good grade.
Good, good, good.
So we buy run you like, you know,
to 25 to 50 a show on the darknet.
Like I can go and
like one of my favorite vendors, he retired
and he's awesome.
He's awesome.
A. Would list.
Like, I remember the best deal I ever got from this guy.
He was selling popcorn buds of Blue Dream,
and he would only he would sell quantity.
So you going to have to buy read to £10
at a minimum from this guy at the time.
But that's great.
You know, so but like the best deal I ever got, I forget how much I bought,
but I remember I did the math on it and I ended up being 30 bucks an ounce
and it's seedless, you know, very few sticks.
But the buds were just they were small.
They were like your thumb but like 30 bucks an ounce.
So like,
like my
cashier would be like, buy a bunch in is weed.
And anyone that I knew in my area
that I knew was like a social butterfly, you know, and I knew
would keep their mouths shut, I would turn around.
I would say, Hey, man, listen, you know, I will sell you, you know,
a pound of this weed for 1600 bucks and I'll give it to you upfront.
Now, that's 100 bucks an ounce.
Again, the typical price in that area was due 25 to 50.
This guy can turn around, sell ounces for 150, undercut everyone
by almost a hundred bucks and make a good amount of money.
And he never put up any money and he would be able to do that
and come back with that in like a week to two weeks.
So I'm getting cash
from all different sources.
You know,
that has no
and I know there's no traceable route.
You mean as he goes through the proxy, which is this local dealer
who, you know, if this guy does get busted, he's not going to rat me out.
The guy, he's selling him a pound for 600 bucks, 100 bucks an ounce.
He's not going to round me out.
He's going to rat out the guy selling him an ounce for 175.
Why would he burn his best connect
if he's going to snatch, he's going to snitch on the guy who's screwing over.
He's going to snitch on that guy who is to sell him Grams for 20 bucks.
Know?
So I'm going to buy his loyalty, but I'm also tripling my money.
Yeah.
So, I.
Mean, so that's one way of cash. Now, that would make sense.
I like it.
So alternatively, aside from that,
like one of the one, the things that I had to do
was, you know, there's a ton of sites that accept Bitcoin
and use Bitcoin to buy just about anything.
And I did.
But like the precursor to any Bitcoin trends,
any Bitcoin transaction or spending
that dirty crypto anywhere
is for me.
I've never used a bitcoin tumbling service.
I think they're retarded.
First off, I'm not paying
anyone a percentage
who's going to take double digit percentages to clean
my money and I have no verification that that's what you do.
But it
so what I'd much rather do is take my bitcoin
and like back in the day, I don't know if they still do it.
I have a massive crypto as you know, it went to prison and I'm like,
what I would do is I would hop on.
You got like shapeshift at IO, right?
ShapeShift IO is a site that
you to you I know again, I don't know if it still exists used to be able
to exchange cryptocurrencies, you know, with no account information.
So like I can take bitcoin, send it to them, exchange they send me
whatever cryptocurrency I tell them to send me, which for me was Monroe.
So I would exchange like that.
And then like the the rate is ridiculously low. Like
I remember exchanging like ten grand I think one time and it was like,
like five bucks, you know, Hey.
It's like. Like a money. Launderer.
Like in real life is probably going to charge you like ten.
So like 25%, you know, way more
the depending on who they are and you know who you are. But
so I love that because I could do it almost instantly.
I could do it with no account information.
But so here's the thing.
So I mentioned shapeshift.
I oh,
again, going back to OPSEC and security,
you know, you don't just Google a site, find it and use it.
That works great. You're not doing anything illegal.
But like if you're doing illegal stuff, you need to look them up.
So like, I looked up, shapeshift, audio and like, I found out that,
you know, a basically any time the feds ask for anything, they bent over.
No, and they had no qualms.
It's like they like beefs with the feds, like, you know, just like, you know,
Sprint and AT&T, you know, they're all you know, they're all in love together. So
it was I guess screw them, show the other side that.
I looked at I was Changeling and I had found like
some stuff on them, but like, it was significantly less.
So even though, like, I'm, I'm accessing the site
through Tor
so it doesn't really matter
if they are talking to the feds, but
I just I was, you know, I was security conscious.
So like
as many gaps as I could create
between me and what I was doing was exactly what I would do.
And that's kind of like the definition of OPSEC.
But I would switch my currency
from Bitcoin tomorrow back to Bitcoin,
and then I would spend it pretty much wherever I know.
Towards the end I ended up ah,
like found this one vendor on the darknet called Gold, Gold and
what he would do is
he would charge you 5 to 10%
and you would send him your bitcoin and he would send you cash mail.
And I love that system.
And at the end of the day,
that's the reason the feds try to say,
for me, being busted is they be like, oh, like we busted these dirty
three darknet vendors through Operation Dark Gold
and like,
if you if you actually look at this, if you look at the history of it,
if you go into Pacer and you look at like, you know,
when for like they proposed a fringe hearing and all this other stuff,
you'll see that that wasn't the case and this is the big thing.
So at the end of the day, back then KYC or a know
your customer policies existed, but they were only applicable.
I don't know if they still are,
but they're only applicable to banking institutions.
So like
there were some states that implemented it, but they weren't heavy on enforce it.
So like local bitcoins had it there.
It was like, like you could make a local bitcoins account and do like
$2,000 worth of transactions and you didn't have to verify at all,
you know, So like there were days where I spent the whole day
making local bitcoins
account, you know, like, I'm going to this today.
I am going to spend all day
and I'm going to make 400 local Bitcoin accounts.
Yeah.
So and it was really convenient because it was like local bitcoins.
I can switch my I can switch it up, I can use fake information
and I'm swapping, you know, my bitcoins, which I've already cleaned out to
an Amazon
credit card, out to a direct deposit, out to cash in the mail, out
to meeting someone in them, handing me cash
so you could do this.
I mean, you had a little bit like, I would like to go out and buy Bitcoin
and do it consistently and then build up enough rapport with that seller where
now I have his cell phone and we do private sales.
Yeah, you know, that's. Where you need to get, to.
So like that's kind of, you know how that, how it all works.
But like I'm getting like going back to it like,
you know as long as you so anyway so they would be like,
oh like, you know, we caught him because he was showing
his Bitcoin and, you know, that's how we caught it.
But, but it was nonsense because
you can me bitcoin legally all day know.
Yeah. It's not illegal you know.
Yeah. So but they were like but they were.
Like there's this guy.
And did you work with him?
Did you, did you buy bitcoin from him or sell.
Bitcoin to him. No. So I sold bitcoin. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
So he got caught, right?
And then he worked with the feds catching other people that were on the darknet.
His people would send him bitcoin and obviously, like
who is going to send bitcoin to a guy advertising on the darknet?
Probably Darknet vendors, right?
Or people want to, you know, cash out Bitcoin Anonymous.
Right?
So like they were let go Bo because this guy
was buying Bitcoin on the darknet and because they the United States
attorney's big thing was you paid 10%
your cash are your bitcoin and that shows
criminal intent.
And I was like, the one thing I said to my defense lawyer, I'm like,
Dude, you know, there are Bitcoin ATMs that charge 10%, right?
Like. And it's not.
And I'm like, that makes no sense.
You know
what?
Like it's like, Yeah, I'm going to sell you
a, you know, a $250
microphone for, you know, $200.
And that guarantees that it's stolen the feds idiotic, that is.
And like, I like to apply that and say like, you know, like,
like you put that in like a viewpoint of like the law where it's like,
you know, where you're trying to hold someone to
guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, Like you have no stance
because there is so much doubt built into that right.
So, so,
so so you you've told to this guy and then what was the first
like contact from the police?
Did you ever get a love letter before that?
No, I never got a love letter ever.
All right.
So what was the first contact from the police?
So I went one day and so I used do.
All right.
So at my house, obviously, I'm very careful like, I never invite
no one ever comes to my house.
You know, no one comes to me.
So, like,
the only people that ever came to my house,
if you knocked on the door, like, try so paintings
because again, like where I'm living, it's an affluent area, right?
So people would knock on door, try to sell paintings,
or they'd knock on a job as witnesses would come and knock on the door.
So I get a knock on the door.
So like I'd say like
715 in the morning.
So the guy just stole my coffee.
I'm like a sip of my coffee.
I walk to the door, I open the door expecting it to be Jehovah's Witness.
Only people in the last three years have came to my door.
So I open the door.
We always witnesses like I open the door
and there's this dude standing there.
He's got a bulletproof vest, he's got a badge that's sewn
into the bulletproof vest that I've never seen this pair.
And he's holding up a piece of paper,
and I won't say his name, but he's like, Hi, my name's so-and-so.
I'm a special agent with the of Homeland Security.
And this is a federal search warrant.
And like, I'm sitting there and I'm holding my coffee
and I'm looking back at this guy and I'm looking at 30 people that are behind
this guy and have amplifiers and ski masks
with skulls on them on and like
like this is before college.
So seeing someone with a mask is is weird.
You mean so, like, I see all these people behind this guy
and they're all looking through the windows, also the nonsense. And,
you know, he's like, Oh, I'm with the Department of Homeland Security.
I have a federal search warrant.
And I was like, Oh, okay.
I guess you want to come in there now?
And he was like, Yeah, how's it going?
So as he starts walking in, I'm like, Listen,
there's, you know, there's two adult females, you know, one's my cousin
and one's my ex, and then there are three children
in the house because I don't want them, you know,
they like to play like they're in Iraq.
You know, I don't want them running through,
you know, pointing an MP five, you know, my sons and my daughter,
you know, and like, you know, you know, scaring the shit out of me.
I want them to know who's in there
so they're not scared, you know, because if they're not scared,
they might be a little bit more relaxed when they were.
And they were they were there's a pretty courteous, calm.
And that was that was my first interaction with them.
And just as a step back here,
kids in the house with the whole drug lab.
Yeah. Yeah.
There's no there's, there's no lab.
And it was like the room that I had like
the cannabis in was separate from the main house.
So that wasn't something that they were around.
And the packaging and all that.
They never and there wasn't a that was in a clean room, right. Yeah.
So they didn't see any of that.
And all the narcotics that I have were kept in a safe in there.
Okay.
All right.
So, so they come through, they see all this stuff.
Yeah.
So what they do is they, they raid, they go through, they find this so.
All right, so moving back a little bit, one thing like my
that my cousin had been worried about, but she was like, all right, let's see.
We do this and like, we get caught.
I was like, listen, if we get caught because I screwed up,
I'm in charge of everything.
You know, I'm in charge of the security.
I'm in charge of everything that goes on.
So if something doesn't go right and it's my fault.
So I was like, listen, if so, if they come and they raid us, like,
I'll tell them it was all.
Me because at the end of the day, why am I not you know,
if I don't, then they're going to put it on everyone.
So like when they came in, you know,
they searched and they're they're going through
and they come and they see me like, oh, any, any drugs in the house.
I was like, Yeah, they're upstairs.
They're in my safe.
No, they're all mine on the dark. Never.
And were like, What?
And they're, they're blown away.
But like again,
I had an agreement with my cousin prior to this that if this happened,
worst case scenario, we had a ton of contingency plans.
That's part
of having good operational security and having good information security.
Boss.
It's like, you know, do you have an incident response policy to your work?
So didn't we you know, and this was agreed to prior to anything.
So like that was the thing like reiterated I admit everything was mine.
And I did say, listen, I'm a darkness vendor, everything's mine,
which is a combination of the safe game. The
what do I do?
Say No, I'm going to open it anyways.
So like, you know, so they opened it up by a bunch of hash,
which they like, Oh, there's a bunch of heroin in here.
Ash, Like, Oh, it looks like tar heroin.
All right.
It was really they feel tested.
It comes back against huge morons.
But But like,
so that was that was my first interaction.
But like I admitted, you know,
like what I what I had, who I was
and what I had done,
that I was a Darknet vendor
and that like, you know, I had sold drugs,
but that was it.
That's where it ended.
And they left his like they they knew about my cousin.
They had seen her go to the post office, but they didn't know
they knew I existed but they thought I worked with computers.
They weren't expecting what they found, you know, like they
they were expecting prior to to find her with drugs.
And that was it.
Now, did they.
Take your take your cousin or take you.
Know, they didn't take care of us because they didn't arrest warrants at the time.
They just had a search warrant.
But so they took every then they lab tested it, documented everything,
and then they took off
and like, you know, we'll be in touch.
And, you know, they were
they came back a short while later and they were like,
you know, they made this.
They said, listen, like
in the time that you were a vendor.
So I think is like in total was like a half, two years.
They were like, in the short time that you were a vendor,
you have crawled into more crevices
and learned more about this culture and seeped into this culture
than we've been able to do six years.
Because like in my short period of time, I inserted myself into the community
and, you know, I ended up working with these kids and, you know,
starting up dread.
And like I had become I had made myself an indispensable
part of the community by contributing,
you know, and contributing in meaningful ways.
And that's of, you know, made me
valuable to the community and and,
you know, they said, hey, listen, like, you know,
someone with your knowledge, like, we could absolutely use that.
And, you know, going forward, we'd like to bring you a laptop And,
you know, you can you can continue taking orders and and, you know, vending, you're
not actually going be sending drugs, but you're just gathering information.
And and I was like, yeah, I'm fine.
I'm what?
Yeah, I'm good.
Yeah.
I remember I had been to County before.
I had been in state prison. Really?
And I'm I'm served in Italy.
Yeah. Are you kidding me? Like I work with cartels.
Do you mean I work with multiple cartels?
You think?
Oh, like.
Like, I don't know. I'm going to tell on people. Think
I'm good.
I have a family, man.
You mean like.
Like I did this for my family.
Now you think I'm going to risk their lives to get out of
whatever punishment's coming?
Yeah. Yeah.
You're delusional.
I'd die for them. I'd kill for them.
They're my family.
You mean so,
like, you know, they.
They obviously didn't like that.
And what ended up happening was
I had I borrowed some money from a family member
is now at this point like that house they planned on getting.
Obviously I'm not getting it.
Feds took their bubble's burst.
So, like, you know, I had moved to an apartment.
You know, in a in a in a different city, which, you know, going from
like the mansion that I was actually this the Shiraz apartment was horrible. But
one thing that
I had, I had had that I had never had,
and doing that was my wife,
who I had met on the phone through my actually through my cousin.
And we had spent two years talking
and like she didn't know, obviously she'd know anything about what I was doing
because it would be in the eye
sockets to be a massive OPSEC risk grade to tell her.
So like I just told her that like I had a business and I wasn't specific about it.
And like, we learned a lot about each other
as I was like doing my venting and she was, you know, completely unaware of it.
And like, after I got raided, I lost all my electronics.
So I, like, lost her number. I lost all her info.
So I had to go, like, you know, find it all.
And my cousin was able to do it through her Facebook.
And like, I remember contacting her and being like, you know,
she was like, Oh, like, you haven't talked to me in like four days.
Like, is there an issue?
And I was like, No, I got raided by the feds,
you know, And it's like it's like, you know, those Jews are like,
like, breakable with a woman and tell her that like, Oh, I'm a spy.
Oh, yeah, it's true.
I was like, You get.
Raided by Department of Homeland Security.
They came in 30 deep in cooperation with
the the state police to be a backup state.
Their backup was state police.
And like the cyber crimes task force came in and.
And she's like, Yeah,
all right, whatever, Sam.
Like, listen, if you don't want to talk to me, you just tell me.
Like, I swear to God,
I got raided by the Department of Homeland.
You know, obviously.
You know, she ended up learning that it was true.
Then where did you take in?
And then she ended up
moving from where was living up to up here
with like, with me,
because I told her I was like, listen, like I have this indictment.
I was like, just forget about me.
I'm probably going to do 20 years,
you know, like, like cause we wanted to get married.
We had learned we'd fell in love
by talking to each other, and we fell in love intellectually.
I didn't know what she looked like.
And I didn't think she knew what I look like.
We spent two years talking to her.
I hated I wouldn't take a selfie because of my opsec.
Yeah,
it so. So
like, after I got raided, like, I ended up talking to her,
I said to her, Sophie is now like, Who's going to raid me now?
You know?
And she's like, Oh, look, I know.
Yeah, I know you look like that
because like your cousin and showed me a picture of you,
like a while ago, I was like, Are you kidding me?
That was great.
All that stuff.
It's This she sent me a picture of herself in, like,
and she was like, way out of my league, you know, She was like.
Like, dude, I'm like a three, you know, She
using easy ten?
Yeah, I was like. What the hell? She's like.
Usually gets No, look, this is like, there she is.
She's like, You're handsome.
And it was a guy.
It whatever.
Like, I'm not going to argue with you.
I got.
Imposter syndrome. Okay?
I'm like, No way. But
but she, you know, I was like, Listen, I'm going to get 20 years.
And she was like,
I was like, Yo, just forget about me. You know?
We be friends stuff. And she was like,
she's like, Listen, it's not all about you.
I was like, What did you think?
I love you?
Like, I'm not I don't I don't care how long you get know.
And that was that was pretty incredible.
But like, it was I had I had had people in the past who had been in my life
who had said they were stick with me through a a prison term.
And they did.
And so, like, I was very leery of it.
And that's why I kind of like just didn't want her have to deal with that.
I knew how much pain and agony was going to be going forward, and
she did.
Man, it was crazy.
She stuck with me
through my everything, through my sentencing,
through my actual prison incarceration.
Like, so when I was in prison, I ended up putting in a motion
for compassionate release after I spent 18 months studying law.
But like, I would have never done that.
Like, the only reason I did it was because she encouraged me to do it.
He was like, You can't quit fighting. You can't quit fighting.
That's how like that you're that hacker mentality of like,
you're going to fail 99% of the time, you know?
I mean, like and and you but you just keep trying because it's
it's about that 1% that you make it And like she encouraged you.
She's like, you know, don't give up you're going.
And I kept going and
I filed and, you know, I won my freedom.
But like she was a massive part of
of all of the good things that came out of it.
So she was your girlfriend going in and then you later married her?
Yeah.
So so we we had been talking for like two years.
Like the whole time I had been venting, we had been talking.
She had no idea about it.
But like, I learned her life story by talking to you,
we had had conversations where we were talking for 12 hours a day.
You know, she like, I'm trying to like trim cannabis.
Plants that fill up, you know, a 20 gallon water buckets and,
you know, point out labels and managing.
To still talk to her for 12 hours, you know, and that's addition to,
you know, three children.
So at that same time, I'm also like,
you know, making them breakfast, lunch, dinner, they're homeschool.
So making sure they're doing their own schooling while I'm managing this
empire.
And, you know, learning about this amazing person who.
You know.
Was one of the first people to ever have faith in.
And I've you know, that I've met in my life.
And it was just
it was a it was a really interesting experience.
But like, yeah, so like after I got raided, like, I told her,
you know and then, you know, my, my endgame and all that, and then like,
like things with my ex got really bad, so I ended up moving out and me
and her moved in together and that's like really when we solidified
that, you know, we had, we had one.
We had been engaged on the phone before I even matter,
like me going to Mass like, so she lived in Rhode Island.
So me going to Mass was risky because I still had warrants.
So if
I got pulled over in Mass, I'm not leaving.
I'm here. Yeah, you know.
Okay, So you end up marrying her, right Yeah.
She was crazy enough to actually say.
Yeah. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. And you stayed.
You stopped by me through my my little sense and,
you know, to this day, she's my my biggest advocate, my biggest fan.
Whenever.
Whenever, like, cause I get into these crazy projects
and she'll be that one that know they're encouraging me
and, you know, help me through it all.
Oh, oh, I'm going to try and wrap this up next ten, 15 minutes.
Okay. So.
So how did they know about your cousin?
Oh, so so my point
with the with the whole previous of the story was
we didn't know she lied to feds.
Like, oh, like, you know, we caught him because he cashed out Bitcoin,
which makes no sense because, again, it's a legal transact. And
so what actually happened
was my cousin got complacent.
What a shock.
You know, as as security people, you know, like and some were very used to,
you know, give me your password for a choco bar, you know.
So like,
what she was doing is she would go to the post office
with, you know, 12 packages.
I remember what I said.
Repackages would have one return address on them
the next three would have a different return address from a different town.
So she's going there with all.
Okay, I'm back.
Can you? Me? Yeah. Okay.
So She's
going to the post office with like our agreed upon number was three packages
and now those three packages had the same worker.
Now she's going to the post office with 12, 15, 20 packages.
And remember, every three packages has a different return address.
So she's going in some cases with,
you know, six different return addresses.
So like, they're like, what the hell is this?
But again,
that is not enough for a warrant.
It's suspicious and it's reasonable suspicion,
but it is not probable cause.
So what ended up happening was the United States
postal inspector just cut open a package with no warrant.
Cut open the the package.
He cut open the visual barrier, cut
open the three layers of vacuum sealed.
And he found some coke.
And then they used that Coke
to apply for a federal search warrant for the house.
After They followed my cousin back to the house.
And the.
So, like, for the longest time, I was angry at my cousin
because I was like, you know, you didn't follow security policy
and now you're potentially costing me
200 years in prison
because you were too lazy to drive, even though you built for it.
You were too lazy to do your job and drive to these different.
I was like,
I came to the realization that at the end of the day,
it's not her fault.
It's my fault.
I was in charge, right?
That it was on me to supervise her
and I didn't do a good enough job doing that.
And that's why we are raided.
So even my OPSEC at the end of the day and
my information security policies were so on point
that I would have never had an issue with Bond for ever,
which was of toe. To
toe to kind of prove that answer went down.
Your stuff is all over that database that was taken over by the Fed. Yep.
They did a massive arrest on that. Yep.
Hundreds of people in the U.S.
and so it was European, but they never.
Should be an NGO.
That did hundreds of arrests in the U.S..
Or dealers, mostly vendors.
Yeah, you weren't one of them.
So that kind of proves that you were
upset was right.
Right, right.
And like I said, I had sure had gotten in my discovery.
I got in times where hello to my discovery
and the feds actually bought drugs off me like 20 times.
They bought coke, they bought LSD, They cannabis.
And the only thing they didn't buy was moonshine, but they bought pretty much
everything.
And like,
there was nothing for there's no fingerprints, there's no hair,
not even microscopic DNA, like nothing.
And, you know, at the end of the day, again, it was like
that smallest thing, you know, is what caused it.
And that was her complacency and
my being overwhelmed, doing all these jobs, you know,
having my attention so divided
that I did not do a proper job in
monitoring her
and making sure that she was doing her job correctly.
So the real kicker, this is their
we get raided.
I tell them, you know, it's all mine.
So I go for my arraignment, right?
So now I move out of the house.
I was in to a different apartment.
So this the Department of Homeland Security showed up on the day
of my arraignment to that old house because they didn't know I moved.
They wanted to arrest there and bring me into court
and handcuffs, but I didn't live there anymore.
And the geniuses didn't know I didn't live there anymore.
And so, you know, the rock stars, they are
you know, they had no clue where I was.
So my ex had told them,
oh, he moved in, you know, with his fiancee.
And this is the address.
And by the time they got to this address, I was already halfway
to the federal courthouse to go turn myself in to the U.S.
Marshals for my arraignment.
So I go
I get out of the car at the United States District Court in Burlington, Vermont.
I see my lawyer, who is amazing.
Stephanie Green lives a nominal federal lawyer.
And well, I know.
All right.
So going back a little bit.
So what ended up happening was
I had admitted to everything and I was the only one charged.
So what ended up happening was my lawyer had applied for what's the Franks hearing?
A phrase hearing is
when you can show law enforcement broke the law in order to catch you.
This was my security policy from the start
it was like, if you guys are going to catch me,
I'm going to make this maze so complicated that
you're going to have to jump over a wall in order to do it.
And then, of course, like it's that whole thing you see, like on Law and Order
where it's like, oh, fruit of the poisonous tree.
You know, they broke the law in order to do this, so everything's invalidated.
And that was another part of my plan.
That's why I was ready to admit to it so readily.
I knew my rights.
I knew I wasn't under any obligation to talk.
I knew that I was better off asking for a lawyer.
But I also knew that they would most likely have to break the law
in order to bust me.
And that if that's the case and I admit everything
and they get everything everything's got there's nothing else they can do.
If every if everything from that arrest, from that original search
warrant is thrown out, there's no case.
Now, keep in mind,
the feds have a conviction rate of 99%.
They don't lose.
It's like you playing chess with me.
And I tell you all my pawns are queens.
I'm not going to lose, you know?
So that's what it's like playing them.
So now I got this Franks hearing scheduled.
Now that said, with this Franks hearing scheduled,
a Franks hearing is very difficult to get.
It's super, super hard to get.
I couldn't find one case
where someone got it when I was in feds looking at the law library.
So it's extremely difficult to get to the United States.
Attorney Dresher contacted my lawyer
and tells her, I don't want to go to this Franks here.
So my lawyer contacted me.
She's like,
Oh, he said, he doesn't want to go to this Frank sharing as a guy, but he woman.
Couldn't
resist hearing,
you know, like, we're going to prove like, everything that.
They do.
Virtually everything you got was it was so illegally.
So I guess he told her he was like,
listen, tell him that if he pleads guilty,
I'll give him a maximum of 108 months, which is like nine years.
I'll give him a maximum of 108 months.
So if he doesn't and we go to this rank sharing,
he'll get nine of the ten of his charges dropped,
but he won't get his conspiracy charge dropped.
And I was like, Well, what do you mean?
And she was like, Oh, did you read your PSR?
So PSR is a pre-sentence report.
It's basically the background of your life.
So I was like, no.
So I when I looked at is like page and like on that page
it said Geneva's proffer.
So when I had first gotten arraigned after I got out,
I released on my own recognizance.
After I got out, my lawyer had called me up
and she's like, Oh, do you want to come in and do a proffer?
I was like, What's a proffer?
And she was like, Well, proffer.
Like when you come in and you tell them what you did, who you worked for.
Who like, who bought off you, who did what.
What vendors that you worked with and what you know about them.
I was like, Yo, man, that sounds kind of like snitching to me.
And she was like, Well, we don't call it that.
And I was in with the people I work with.
Would you?
Yeah.
No, I'm not doing that.
It's a death sentence for me, but my family.
But aside from.
That, like, I'm just not on that kind time.
Like, I'm good, you know, I'm not going to put people in a box
because I'm scared about being in a box, you know?
Like what?
I I'm a man.
I was so what?
I did accept responsibility for.
So it was a very so like when when they were like,
oh, did you read your PSR or read page 15 or whatever.
And I went back and I see Geneva's proffer
immediately.
I know what a proffer is. Now.
And I go to her and it says, like,
she confesses to all this stuff, like,
you know, like he had me send these packages out.
I didn't know it was in the packages.
And like,
I'm like, you get a percentage of every, you know, everything
that was in the package, you had a percentage it
you know, and.
Like you like you help me with the labels, you know what?
So it was just completely mind blowing. But
yeah, so, so I showed went into court,
you know, with this plea deal.
So I guess like so he was like, you know, your cousin proffered on you.
So at the end of the day,
if you go to this Frank's hearing, you'll get your nine charges dismissed
and like you was like possession with intent for a bunch drugs.
Then the three last
charges were money laundering, but the first charge was conspiracy.
And the reason I had that conspiracy charge was because my cousin
had already proffered on and they also charged her with conspiracy.
And I told her, If you don't say anything
and I don't say anything, they can't prove there's a conspiracy.
You have to have an admission
or you have to be able to prove that we conspired.
And as long as you don't say anything, they won't be able to prove that.
And that was.
But unbeknownst to me, she'd already said something
and she live with me while I was on pretrial for like a year.
And the whole time she was giving know, she was talking to the feds,
giving them evidence.
So it was absolutely crazy, man.
But like,
you know, the the one takeaway that I got was like, you know what I did?
I did and I did, you know, out of desperation,
I had done it for my family, but it was definitely the wrong thing to do.
I did it so that I can have a good place to be with my family.
And like the irony of me
becoming a drug trafficker or an international drug trafficker
because I didn't want my kids to have to live next
to a house full of crack addicts.
You know, that irony is not on me.
The fact that, like I was taken away from all of them,
you know, I lost I lost my family.
I lost everything that I had worked for.
I had lost with the of that one constant,
which was my wife, who, you know, remained in my life.
And and you know, how help get me through a lot of those rough patches.
And I think at the end of the day, that's really the big difference between
family and relatives.
There's people who aren't just blood related, but the ones who,
you know, stick it out with you through the worst worst of times. No.
Yeah.
So any idea how much you made through all this?
I know I've.
I have no idea.
Like you said, I think the first week is 302nd week it was 500.
There's a bunch of dry spells in between, but I think I'm like the last
last week it was probably like
last month, maybe it was about 20 grand
by every two, three days.
Well, I was going to say it's
probably less than the 200,000 that you were receiving for.
Right?
I mean, so if you were to add up, like all the equipment and the like,
the drugs and like stuff like that,
yeah, I would I mean, I made a good amount,
but like, yeah, I was I would have been much better.
I'm like my sentencing judge.
Basically when I went in front of music, I've never seen a crime
like this before.
And like after he sends me, he was like, When you get out, Mr.
Bennett, he was like, You know, I hope when you're on the street,
like, you come up to me and you like, Yo, introduce
to your family and like, he's like, you're highly intelligent.
I look forward to seeing you put your mind
towards, you know, doing productive and and good things.
And that's kind of
I mean, I've
that's pretty much like what I my goal has been
this entire time with getting out kind of letting people know
about federal prison letting like my big the the main motivation
for giving my def con buck
con on you know the U.S.
state's attorney said that these a going you're teaching people how to sell drugs
and it's it's an idiotic say
because it's like I see a guy on YouTube picking locks
and it's like that guy is teaching burglars how to break into houses.
Listen, that burglar knows how to break into your house already, okay?
He's not going to YouTube to learn how to do it.
You know,
it's like, you know, the guy who's breaking into
security systems is like, go into def con to learn how to do it.
You know, he most likely here he has a pretty.
Good idea of what.
A vulnerability is and how to leverage over the next. Now.
So that's moronic.
But like my point with there was like listen, a lot of the people who are at Def
Con, they're highly intelligent people, but we can be highly intelligent.
But when we were put in a situation
where our back is against the wall, a lot of times,
you know, we make an irrational choice and that was my case.
It was an irrational choice and my old went with it.
It's a very easy transition to go from hacker to vendor
because you already know about encryption, you already know about,
you know infosec, you already know about a lot of these things.
So it's it's not a difficult transition to do.
And my whole goal was really to show people like,
I hope you know, you know, because
it's not beneficial and
you had pointed out like the money that you make is
pathetic in comparison.
You know, like go learn how to break into systems
go to def Con, do the black bag black bag challenge and,
you know, get a company that's, you know, trying to recruit you for $150,000.
Year,
you'll be.
Much better. Off
or make a podcast, you know.
So I think we're running on time here.
So I'm going to cap it with some of the stuff you said in your talk,
you know, such as staying on prison and getting out early and six month
and But I want to leave you with a last thought here.
Maybe.
And maybe it's the one you could take our where you to go.
But I give you a thought bubble to get started with
which, you know, is there such thing as perfect opsec
and does it matter when you're breaking the law?
So I think I think at the end of the day, there's definitely so
I mean, that's basically like saying can one army be better than the.
And the obvious answer to that is yes.
I don't think there's such thing as 100% secure.
I think anyone
and it tries to sell those
wolf tickets is, you know,
ignorant to security.
But I definitely think that one army
can overcome.
And that's that's that's essentially what it is.
It's two opposing forces.
You know, how good are your moves in comparison to your enemies?
You're playing chess.
One of you is going to win,
you know, like it's not always going to be a stalemate.
And like there's evidence of that.
I would say no. At the end of the day,
I met a ton of drug traffickers in federal prison.
Not surprising, considering the fact that like some like 70% of people
are in federal prison are there for drugs
or drug trafficking.
I didn't meet one Darknet.
But I bet as well
you weren't went there that long.
So surrendered
October 1st of 2090 and I had six months.
There's no parole in feds.
I mean, so I should be there until one,
three, 20, 24 is my release date.
But because I studied law and I learned that the powerful,
you know, the the lawyers programing.
I learned it, you know.
And I wrote a buffer overflow.
I wrote a Georgia page motion and I sent it in and,
you know, the last
the last part of that buffer overflow was let me out.
And I worked.
Well. Nice job there.
That was the way to do it.
I'm super impressed with that part.
Okay. I want to leave it here.
I think we covered enough for me.
I just feel for you.
Yeah, I mean, I think.
I think.
I mean, I.
It's been if you've watched any of my YouTube videos,
it's been a while since I talked this fast.
And that was mainly to try to cram in as much information as possible.
But 3 hours.
I mean, dude, honestly, we could go on as like a Joe Rogan, you know?
I mean, yeah, we, we could go on for another 4 hours on these things.
I mean, it's absolutely insane.
So they give,
you know, if you ever run out of gas or like,
you know, the the one you have disappears or whatever, man, you want to
you want to jump back it, let me know because I will be
I'm working on a by myself.
So yeah, it's fucking insane. But like
but you're the kind of guy to do that.
You're the one figure things out and to, like, say, all right, this
I mean, other people can figure it out. I can figure it out.
Yeah.
So, um, I have a 600 page book that I'm about to publish,
and it has all the lore, all the key sides,
and how to structure a compassionate release motion
so I can empower all those guys that are still stuck
in federal prison to get themselves out like I did.
And like what the some of the dirty shit the Bureau of Prisons does
is they block you from being able to go to the law library and they blame it on it.
So like me making this book and putting it out there will empower them
to fight that system and get out then my next move
as I'm doing that and I'm at 600 pages right now
and I'm editing it right now, it's and so we're about to publish it.
Probably I'm going to publish in like 2 to 3 months at the longest.
But at the same time, I'm doing a massive documentary.
I've never made a documentary before, so I'm teaching myself
after Effects and Premiere Pro as I do my YouTube videos and audition
and writing
my book and working 60 hours a week.
I'm closing on a house tomorrow.
Looking.
Yeah, you're a high powered guy.
So like, and I'm still trying to run my blog, make my blog posts.
And then after this book is published, I'll be I'm
still working on that documentary, but then I have to start my second book,
which is everything that you just I just told you about
is basically going to be in that just more verbose.
Yeah,
well, cool.
I'm going to hit the start button here. Yeah.