#327 - Scammer Payback: Hacker Takes Down $65 Million Global Fraud Empire | Pierogi

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Pierogi runs the ScammerPayback YouTube channel & uses his cybersecurity skills to catch and expose scammers, infiltrate their networks, and gather information to expose them and recover stolen funds for victims. SPONSORS https://shopmando.com - Use code DANNY & get 20% off. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS @ScammerPayback https://www.instagram.com/scammerpayback FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Scammer Payback origin story 07:58 - World's biggest money laundering scam 18:44 - Working with law enforcement 26:00 - The "sextortion" scam 32:25 - Getting revenge on Indian scammers 49:47 - Why India is the phone scam capital of the world 57:52 - Dead internet theory 01:10:38 - Pegasus zero day hacking cell phones 01:19:32 - Double agents inside the scam networks 01:23:40 - Developing new software to outsmart hackers 01:31:32 - Bitcoin ATMs are only for scammers 01:35:52 - How to get into hackers' computers 01:44:10 - Why America is so vulnerable to Chinese hackers 02:04:16 - Can we hack into the Epstein files? 02:15:36 - How to protect yourself from hackers & scammers 02:26:39 - The most secure cell phone 02:38:15 - The grandparent scam Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:07Danny Jones?

  So how did you get into terrorizing scammers?

• 1:10Speaker 03

  That's a good question, man. I guess we have some time, so I don't have to give a short answer, right?

• 1:15Danny Jones?

  No, you don't. Do you have a plane that leaves today?

• 1:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's like, it's super late, so we'll be fine. Yeah, like, I was actually at my, this is funny, like, my origin story, I guess, because when I think about it, you would think it's like some crazy kind of a thing. My grandma got scammed, or somebody took a bunch of money or whatever, but I was actually at my brother-in-law's house. And we were sitting there over dinner, and he goes, hey, check this out. And I'm like, okay, you know, I thought he's really into cars and stuff. So I'm like, I'm not a car guy, but he's like, I thought it was gonna be cars. And he goes, no, it's this guy that calls these scammers on the internet, and he messes with them. I was like, okay, I'll check it out. Because I'm a tech guy, so, you know, it's kind of interesting to me. So I get on there, and these guys are yelling at him. And I'm like, this is chaos. It's

• 2:02Speaker 03

  beautiful. So I stayed up till like four in the morning, watching these videos on YouTube of this guy calling scammers up.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  And then the next night I stayed up till four in the morning, watching this guy call scammers up. And I had a cybersecurity background. So I was like, I could, I could probably do this as well. And so I went home and I got a microphone and started calling scammers. I'd wake up at like four in the morning, call scammers, and then I would do my job. Worked in cybersecurity for like a pre IPO startup company. And then after I was done working, then I would call scammers at nighttime. And I did this like over and over again and started recording it, putting it on YouTube and kind of the rest is history.

• 2:43Danny Jones?

  So you didn't do any YouTube stuff before this? You just decided to do it for fun on your own?

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was like, you know, everybody wants to be a content creator or whatever, you know? And but for me, I was really intrigued because this was like, this is my space. I had no idea that there's scammers out here doing all this stuff. For whatever reason, because I was so into like enterprise security. So like nation state actors going after, you know, hospitals and governments and stuff like that. So that was my world. And then there's this whole, I had no idea about it. There's this whole like consumer security side that nobody talks about ever. So people, you know, grandma getting scammed, you know, a kid in college gets a call up from the social security administration. And then they end up wire transferring $35,000 to a scammer overseas.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Or, you know, everybody hears like the Nigerian prince and stuff like that.

• 3:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  But there's other really gnarly scams that are going on out there. And it's like a $10 billion industry and it's not going anywhere. So I had no idea about it. I found out about this and I'm like, this is so interesting. So I figured I would use my, you know, my expertise, I guess, and my experience and utilize some of these enterprise security skills in this space and like go after it. And then, you know, it was fun making content as well and it just kind of blew up from there.

• 3:59Danny Jones?

  So before you started doing this stuff, you worked for a company that was like a, was like a government contractor or something like this?

• 4:05Speaker 03

  So I worked. I worked in for various like tech companies out of college and one of them was Norton, which is or Symantec, which does a Norton antivirus. And so I worked in that space with like antivirus and like they did backup, which is like enterprise backup systems. And then one of my mentors brought me into like email security. So essentially what we would do is protect governments, businesses, hospitals, you name it, any kind of company that wants to protect their their networks and stuff from these phishing attacks. So there's like super sophisticated phishing attacks like where they will target someone's LinkedIn, see what they like for college football and send them a targeted

• 4:47Speaker 03

  phishing attack, hack their computer, then they have access to the entire network, they could steal data, whatever it may be. So I was like super hyper focused on that. I moved over into kind of this startup security world. There's like so much money in startup, right?

• 5:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  These pre-IPO companies at Silicon Valley are just, they're just funneling billions into, you know, startup and then they go IPO. So I was working in that space because it was super hot at the time. This was like 2012, 2013. And I was, you know, kind of honing my craft. I was learning more about like what makes the world go in the security space because it was super interesting to me. Like for instance, when Target had their, they had a huge data breach in 2013. And essentially hackers had gotten access to all their point of sale systems and they put malware on there and Target actually knew that there was malware, but they didn't know how to find it. There are so many things like, think of it like a Christmas tree with a bunch of lights on it and they didn't know which one to go for first. And the way that the hackers got in was they actually,

• 5:46Speaker 03

  and this is crazy to think about because we heard the story from the FBI, they got in through a third party vendor. So they had a like a refrigerator vendor that had access in the Target stores and they hacked those guys to get into their network and they secured their way through that because those guys had access to their network.

• 6:05Danny Jones?

  That's genius.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:06Danny Jones?

  An access agent.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. So like if you're known as a good guy inside of your network, then you can do nefarious things as a good guy. So that's how they got to their point of sale. Anyway, we I learned so many different things from hospital systems, even down, you know, down here in Florida that deal with insulin pumps, somebody could hack them because they're connected to a network and somebody could die from it. Or, you know, obviously like nation states going after governments and things like that. You know, we try to protect, you know, the data of everybody out there and there's just so much going on. So I learned a lot in the enterprise security space and just how crazy it was. And it's not a matter of, you know, if it's a matter of when. So I worked in this email security space and I went to endpoints, which is like, you know, a physical laptop, a phone, that's endpoint security.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  So how do you protect a phone from getting hacked? How do you protect a server from getting hacked? How do you protect a desktop from getting hacked? Because once they get on there, once a hacker gets on there and we utilize a lot of this in our world and how against scammers, you can hide yourself pretty well and nobody can find you. It doesn't matter what you have on that computer. Nobody can find you.

• 7:11Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:13Danny Jones?

  Do you, so do you now only make entertainment going after scammers or do you actually like help anybody? Do you still help people at all or no?

• 7:21Speaker 03

  No, in 2020, I decided, um, decided to kind of hang the boots up and just do content full time.

• 7:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  It was, it was a big juggle because it's like you're half a million subscribers and you're growing and all these kinds of things and kind of starting to run a business on the weekends essentially. And then you're doing your regular job. So it's, it's too much work going on.

• 7:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  And I actually got, kind of the turning point was I got a message from Jim Browning, who's another guy in the space. So Jim and then Mark Rober, I'm sure you know Mark Rober.

• 7:55Danny Jones?

  I've heard of him, yeah.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Another big YouTuber and they had a project and they invited me on it where we were actually kind of like baiting these scammers into sending money mules out. And there's this whole like money laundering ring that goes on, we can talk about.

• 8:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  And so we did a project with Mark where we sent glitter bombs to these money mules. And it actually, it actually made its way and got somebody in Texas arrested. This lady got arrested. She was thinking she was collecting like $50,000 and she picked up a glitter bomb. She was in an Airbnb and she'd been collecting parcels or cash, you know, boxes for like a week there. So she rents the Airbnb, she goes there, collects money and then launders it somewhere else and gets a cut out of it. So we had like private eyes following people around, like high speed car chases.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  When we talk about the money laundering that goes on, it's like a nine-figure problem in the US that like there's huge crime rings that we've uncovered.

• 8:54Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 8:55Speaker 03

  From calling scammers overseas has led to some crazy stuff.

• 8:59Danny Jones?

  So how are these scammers overseas linked to organized crime in the US? And who's laundering whose money?

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a, it's, it's really crazy because it starts with like a phone call, right? Do you want me to go kind of through how the scam works itself?

• 9:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  So like traditionally, the original scam was like a pop-up scam. So you're on your computer and you're surfing the web and all of a sudden you get this error, error code on your screen and it says it's Microsoft. There's a virus on your computer. You need to call support. Now, the origin of this comes from their call centers overseas in like India, for instance, and they were legitimate call centers, like help desk call centers where they help fix, you know, computer problems and things like that. So I had an insider guy that I've talked with before and he said, like, here's the thing. You have Nike shoes, for instance, and you scuff them up and you want to go get them fixed. You could go to Nike and it's going to be really expensive or you could go to my shop

• 10:00Speaker 03

  on the corner and it'll be, you know, 90% less than when it would be at Nike, if that makes sense.

• 10:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  So they started just being cheaper tech support. But then from there, they were like, well, what if we could force people to start coming to our support based off of a fake premise? So that's where these pop-ups started. So they would create pop-ups to go on people's computers. So there's something like a grandma surfing the web. She gets, she's on Facebook. These scammers have figured out ways to pretty much buy ad space and, you know, serve these pop-ups. You know, there's malware on websites and stuff like that, but it'll serve these pop-ups. And then grandma gets a pop-up. She calls these scammers up. They tell her she has a virus on her computer. The problem is there's no virus. It's a trick. So they've told them it's, it used to start with like, hey, you have a virus.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  We'll clean your computer for like 500 bucks. So that was like the original game. That's what they used to do. And then it evolved over the years, and this is like probably a multi-decade problem now that this was just in the shadows. Nobody really ever talked about it. Then it evolved to, hey, we're the computer company. We're calling you up because we're actually going to refund you your money. We're going out of business. It sounds really crazy, but this is one of their best scams that they do. So they call up the grandma and they say, hey, we are Norton, for instance, or Amazon or PayPal. We're going out of business. We're going to refund you a charge on your account. So let's say it's like $300. So what they do is they connect onto grandma's computer and they're giving her a refund of her money back into her account. Right? So track with me here.

• 11:34Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  So 300 bucks is supposed to go back in grandma's account. What they do is because they have access to the granny's computer, they can manipulate her screen. So she logs into her bank account. They have software on her computer.

• 11:47Danny Jones?

  They like team viewer or something?

• 11:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, team viewer, a bunch of all these different remote tools. So they load like team viewer on there and they hide the screen so she can't see anything. And that $300 now becomes $30,000, however much she has in her account. They can manipulate the bank to look a certain way.

• 12:04Danny Jones?

  So they get her to log into her bank account?

• 12:06Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:07Danny Jones?

  Got it. Okay.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  And this is just for the refund purposes, you know, they, you know, they'll lie and say, hey, we don't, we don't see anything, but they see everything. So the trusting grandma that's like 83 years old, she's like, okay, you can have access to my $400,000 account, right? So they see that and then they're like, okay, ma'am, no, we actually, instead of 300, we gave you 30,000 or 300,000. You need to actually give us that money back as soon as possible. And what they're doing is they're just like tricking the system and they're transferring money between like a savings and a checking account. So grandma goes to the bank, she takes out the 30,000, the 300,000, whatever the dollar amount is. And then she used these money launderers. So like the, the cash pickup I was talking about.

• 12:49Danny Jones?

  They convince them to drive to the local branch and pull out cash.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 12:54Danny Jones?

  That's insane.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  And they, like, we have, it's, it's honestly unbelievable when you tell the, like, when I tell these stories back, it doesn't seem real. And we have like a lot of people in our videos, like in the comments where they say, It's like kinda like shaming somebody like, how could you fall victim to that?

• 13:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  But it's there, they sound preposterous, but it happens every single day, every single day. And granny's going to the bank and they're telling her, hey, lie to the bank and tell the bank branch that you're buying a house or you're buying a car or you're putting your kid in college or something.

• 13:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  And they're taking out huge amounts of cash and they're either transferring it into Bitcoin, buying gift cards, uh, giving cash to somebody else or they're, they're buying gold bars now.

• 13:38Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Um, yeah.

• 13:40Danny Jones?

  Dude, I, I told this story a couple of days ago on the podcast, actually, cause this, this happened to me a couple of months ago.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Uh.

• 13:48Danny Jones?

  I was trying to, and I bank with like one of the top three banks in the U S. And I was trying to transfer a significant amount of money from my, one of my checking accounts to Coinbase. And I went, uh, first of all, I just tried to do the wire online, didn't work. Went to the local branch, brought my I D, everything, sat down with the guy. I'm like, hey, I need to wire this amount of money from this checking account to this account on my Coinbase account. Like, oh, okay, cool. What's the doodle off, did the whole thing.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:16Danny Jones?

  Okay, see you later, it should go through or whatever. I get a call two hours later from the bank. They're saying, hey, this is the fraud department. We want to confirm this, this and this. How did you find out about Coinbase? Uh, how long have you known about crypto? What was the color of your first car? What's your sperm count? Like everything. And I, I answer all the questions and then two hours later declined, you can't do it. Go back to the bank the next day. I'm like, dude, I need to wire this money. And they're like, okay, we'll try it again. I don't know what's going on. Long story short, I end up going to the actual branch like six times to try to wire that money. And every single time I got kicked bad by, by the fraud department.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:53Danny Jones?

  Cause and they were like, they were asking me these obscure questions like, what year did you first learn about Coinbase? Uh, what type of crypto are you buying? Like all these weird questions. And I almost, I got the sense that like, they just didn't want me to take money out of my account. They wanted money to, they didn't want me to take money out of my, uh, my checking account for their bank. And eventually like a month later, I was finally able to get the wire to go through, but it was exhausting.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  So we listen in on phone calls of these scams that are happening. I could actually pull one up if you want later on.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  And a lot of times these banks will just, there's no excuse, they'll just let it happen. So you're, I'm very surprised that they allow, they put you through so many, you know, hoops. But usually it's like they just go in and get the cash out immediately. And I've seen wire transfers that are in seven figures. I've seen they're having victims buy gold bars now, like gold bullion and like ordering it. And these scammers are showing up at these victims' houses and collecting like however many ounces of gold bars.

• 16:01Danny Jones?

  These scammer companies that are based overseas, they will have proxies in the US in every state they can contact?

• 16:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 16:09Danny Jones?

  That's so crazy.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's called Havalet, which is like, it's like an, kind of an ancient money transfer, not ancient, but you know, it's like a, it's like a tried and true money transfer system. And Havalet is a way in like, kind of these Asian countries. It's all built off of trust and they kind of keep a ledger. So you have like party A and party B. And obviously, you know, if one is in the US and one is in India, they can't physically transfer the money necessarily. So they keep this ledger amongst each other. But now with like crypto and stuff, it's getting a lot easier for them to do it. But before with like cash or gift cards, it was like, hey, you have a victim in the US, you have a money launderer in like California, a lot of them are in California and New York.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  And then you have a scammer in India. So scammer in India scamming 50,000 from this granny. So she sends a box of 50K to California. That guy takes 20% and then puts it in an account overseas and it's all hidden from the government. So they don't pay taxes. They don't, obviously they don't get in trouble. It's, it's, like I said, we uncovered like, it's still under investigation. So I can't say all the specifics, but it's nine-figure ring that does this.

• 17:19Danny Jones?

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• 19:07Speaker 03

  It's unbelievable. The network that is out in the States that, that does this, they're a well-oiled machine. And again, they have people driving and these are foreign nationals that are driving all around the US in rental cars, Airbnbs, they're flying people around to pick up cash, gold bars, gift cards, and send crypto back and forth. And it's all under the nose of the government. They use our US banks against us. They use our shipping companies. I won't name any companies, but you name a company, they use them and nobody knows, like nobody can stop it. Well, we can stop it.

• 19:45Danny Jones?

  Does the FBI like reach out to you like, yo, we need your help. We can't figure this out. We need to crack this.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, they've they've shown up at my office before.

• 19:55Danny Jones?

  Did it show up unannounced?

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, like we had the first people's call center and I met with an agency. I won't say who it was, but I had an agency show up and you know, they kind of played like the tough ball thing with me like, we know what you're doing. Cause you know, we live in a gray area, what I do. Cause I used to just do like prank calls and stuff.

• 20:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  And one day I decided to just like go all in, you know, so. So I'm like, I'm just gonna go after these guys. So.

• 20:23Danny Jones?

  So what did these people say to you when they came to your place?

• 20:28Speaker 03

  They pretty much said, we want to come to your office. We want to set up a server. And we want you to send us all your information.

• 20:36Danny Jones?

  Was there at least any pay pay involved?

• 20:38Speaker 03

  No.

• 20:39Danny Jones?

  What?

• 20:39Speaker 03

  They said like, uh.

• 20:41Danny Jones?

  You'll be be a mole for free?

• 20:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And they were like, I was like, well, okay. Like just hear me out. Like. First off, is there any like, you're gonna give me any information back? Because

• 20:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  For instance, like the biggest thing for me is we've run across so many victims.

• 20:55Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  So if I'm going to give you information on a bad guy or a victim, like something that's currently happening, like a grandma just wire transferred $250,000 on her Chase account. They can actually stop that if I get it in time, which is amazing. So we've stopped some huge wire transfers. But I want to know at least like, tell me that my granny's okay.

• 21:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Because I can't like, so we work with somebody now on law enforcement side. That's actually really chill, really good. And they give some good feedback to me, but at first it was like, we're gonna set up a server. And they're probably be mad at me for saying this anyway, but whatever. But like, we're gonna set up a server and you're gonna send us all this information and we're not gonna tell you anything. I'm like, what is that?

• 21:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  Like, okay. And then they're like, can we come to your office now? And I said, no.

• 21:38Danny Jones?

  Well, at least like buy me lunch or something.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  Do something. So like, I don't get paid by the government or anything like that. I, we just want to help people out and we want to catch bad guys. Now, at some point though, like it's great to help granny or grandpa from losing their money. Like, once it gets to like crimine, like the criminals, I don't touch that, obviously. Like, I'm not an agent or anything like that. It just goes to them and they do their thing. So I stay away because like the money laundering rings are, it's ridiculous. Like.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  You know, there's scammers in in India and we if we hack their computers. That's one thing because they're just they just want like money. But if you have this gnarly crime ring in the US that I keep my hands off of that stuff.

• 22:19Danny Jones?

  So what? What is the so what specifically is the is the crime ring in the US specifically dependent on those scammers? Are they touching a bunch of other different stuff like like cartels and all kinds of other?

• 22:30Speaker 03

  Whole slew of other stuff, man.

• 22:32Danny Jones?

  Really? So like?

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Drugs, everything.

• 22:33Danny Jones?

  Weapons, drugs.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:35Danny Jones?

  All kinds of things.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  And they're they're foreign nationals that are here on student visas, all sorts of things. And.

• 22:41Danny Jones?

  From like what countries?

• 22:45Speaker 03

  China.

• 22:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, I would. Oh, yeah, I would guess China would be huge.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  China is a huge one and um. So they've got. Countries that don't like us and they've got people here on school visas and stuff like that. And they have, you know, non citizens that are doing a lot of these crimes and we've caught a bunch of them. And they have all have fake IDs.

• 23:07Danny Jones?

  Human trafficking?

• 23:09Speaker 03

  I don't know. I I it might. There might be that, but these guys always play dumb whenever we catch them. And they have everything set up burner phones, fake IDs.

• 23:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  They're driving rental cars. They're staying in Airbnbs, fake names, code words. And they all coordinate with these scammers like overseas. So they coordinate through like third party. Uh, there's websites where you can like. Essentially say, hey, I have this much cash. Can you give me crypto for this cash? Like if I send you 50,000 in cash, will you give me, you know, X amount of crypto? Or if I send you 10,000 in gift cards, will you send me crypto? So that's kind of where it starts. Um, but there's huge groups out here that's doing it. I mean, it's. It's crazy. Like we we actually had a we infiltrated this one. It's like a banking scam. Where uh, they pretend like your account has been hacked and. Essentially, there's charges on your bank account that are um.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  I don't even like to say it. It's like the most disgusting thing. Uh, there are certain websites that are like super illegal that they're saying grandma and grandpa have these charges on their bank account. Uh, CP essentially.

• 24:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  And like, cause I have to deal with these scammers. I have to hear them say it's, it's disgusting. And what they do is they wipe out people's entire accounts. They get that, like one of the guys we, one of the victims we just met up with. They were asking him if he like his mortgage and stuff and refinancing his home and getting like equity loans and stuff out to pay back scammers. To like, give them money.

• 24:43Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  Because he's been hacked and all this stuff on a fake. It's all a trick and they're, they're playing on people's emotions. When you, so the government is definitely like very interested when there's, they do those kinds of allegations, you know? And use that and then they pretend to be the FTC. They pretend to be the FBI. They pretend, pretend to be all these three letter agencies. And they're, it's the million, well, it's billions of dollars, the billions of dollars that get stolen every single year. It's nauseating and the victims, dude, they're afraid to say anything.

• 25:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Like.

• 25:19Danny Jones?

  Cause they're embarrassed.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. They lose everything. Like people have lost, they've taken their lives.

• 25:24Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 25:24Speaker 03

  Yes. Taken their lives.

• 25:27Danny Jones?

  Over what? Oh, just, just losing everything they've had and they're just like so depressed.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  Like imagine being 80 years old and you gave away everything. You have no job. You have no future.

• 25:39Danny Jones?

  Right. And there's nothing, there's nothing law enforcement can do to take, get your money back.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, like the banks don't do anything.

• 25:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Law enforcement. So you have, this is one of the problems. These scammers use our institutions against us. So they use our banking against us. They use shell companies. They use our shipping. They use our rental car companies that use Airbnb. They use everything against us, all under our nose without anybody knowing. So what happens is granny loses a hundred thousand dollars and she calls her local police up.

• 26:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  And they've created a police report and they go out to her house and they go to the bank. And then XYZ bank says, hey, yeah, you willingly took that money out.

• 26:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  Like, what can we do?

• 26:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  And it's, and then what happens is the money trail is gone because she handed physical money to somebody. And then that guy. Fake identity, obviously, takes that money and go puts it in crypto or something and it's gone.

• 26:39Danny Jones?

  Right, right. What incentives does the bank have to catch this criminal? They just want, they don't want to have to pay you back money that was stolen from you. What are they gonna do? They don't care about you.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  It's all a risk thing for the banks. Like, how do we mitigate? Yeah, exactly. How do we mitigate from getting sued? There's been a couple cases, but they always put their hands up and say, well, it's your money. You're the one that took it out.

• 27:00Danny Jones?

  Wasn't there a case of some hackers that got extradited to the US?

• 27:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:06Danny Jones?

  In like somewhere in Africa or something? What was that story?

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there is, they're called sextortionists. So there's a lot of these call centers. So we go after Indian call centers a lot, but there are call centers in different countries, obviously. And this was a call center in Africa and they were targeting teenagers. So what they do is they get them on these social platforms and start messaging, you know.

• 27:33Danny Jones?

  I get those before.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:36Danny Jones?

  I get like a Twitter account of like some girl, some young girl who has, she's following 4,000 people and she has 200 followers and she's like, hey, cutie.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah.

• 27:47Danny Jones?

  Like trying to bait you into like.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, one.

• 27:50Danny Jones?

  It's so dumb.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  One tweet. Yeah. And so they get these people on like Snapchat and stuff like that. They're messaging with them. They send pictures and then they ask for pictures back. And then they say, hey, we got you. We've got your nudes or whatever. And we're gonna send it out to your entire friends list or all the people you know. And if you don't give us money, we're gonna send it out right now. Your life will be ruined, et cetera, et cetera. And teenagers are in such shame. There is one, I think he was in Wisconsin and he ended up taking his life. And they don't tell their parents because they're in such shame. It's like the, again, if anything, I want people to know that this is not about like a couple hundred dollars in gift cards anymore.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  It's like, not to be too dramatic, but it is life and death. Like people are taking their lives because of the shame that is involved with these scams. And to target, you know, teenagers, that they don't have any money in the first place.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  To target them from the sextortion route of like, give us money or else, give us $200, give us, and what they do is like, they get that first hundred or 200, then it's give us 300, give us 300 more, give us 400. And then they start to ratchet up like the attacks of like, hey, you know, this is your mom's name, this is your dad's name, this is your address.

• 29:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  And the kids can't, they don't know how to mentally like, can't even handle social media.

• 29:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  How do you handle somebody extorting you out of that money as a teenager?

• 29:21Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah. Two Nigerian hackers were extradited to the US to face charges related to sextortion ring that led to the suicide of a 17 year old Michigan high school student, Jordan Demay. The brothers were extradited on August 13th, 2023 and entered not guilty, please during their arraignments. Jesus Christ. They targeted over 100 victims. Um, Demay is being the most tragic. That's so crazy, dude.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Like if, when I'm, when I'm on phone calls with scammers, none of the stuff that they say bothers me. I've been doing it for six years now.

• 29:59Danny Jones?

  You've heard everything.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  I've heard them say the most ridiculous things. They don't bother me, but when I think about, like what made me change while like to go from like prank calls into like this more, I guess, offensive approach. Somebody has to do it, you know what I mean?

• 30:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, of course.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  So like, is here, like the victim stories and stuff like this, like it, somebody has to fight back.

• 30:23Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  And that's why we call like, taking the fight to these guys, joining the fight against these guys, because it's a, it's literally everyday battle. It's like good versus evil. And a lot of people will say, yes, it's like maybe like underprivileged countries and stuff like that, but there's gotta be a different way. Like, there's gotta be a different way to make money.

• 30:41Danny Jones?

  Hey, guys, if you're not already subscribed, please hammer the subscribe button below and hit the like button on the video. Back to the show. I got one a couple of months ago where it was just an email. Uh, and it was this long email that basically said, the dude was trying to tell me he has video of me from my webcam, uh, jacking off on camera, watching porn or something like that. And he's gonna release it to the whole world.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  Yep. Send me money to Bitcoin.

• 31:04Danny Jones?

  Oh, God. Yeah, exactly. Send me this money or else everyone's gonna see this. All your loved ones are gonna see this. And I was just like, and it was so, it was like such an arrogant email. The dude was like, he was just being such a dick in the email. I just, I mean, it smelled such bullshit. And what I do, when I get emails like that, I'll go on Reddit.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 31:23Danny Jones?

  And I was like, copy and paste the, the subject line. And then usually you'll see like tons of threads, but like, oh yeah, I've gotten these.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  Hundred percent. Yeah, we, we like to take those and send links back to them that hopefully they click on and then we can see their computers.

• 31:37Danny Jones?

  So. That's amazing.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  But yeah, we like to, we like to flip the script on them a lot. And I think part of, like, our, our channel is obviously called Scammer Payback. So it's one thing to protect people, but to get payback at some of these guys.

• 31:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  Like exposing them and like, we'll get on their cameras and we'll show their faces and we'll show their Instagram and we'll show them flaunting money.

• 31:59Danny Jones?

  Dude, the one that you did, the one, I forgot which one, well, I forget who the guy's name, but you did one I watched last night of this dude. You, you got onto his webcam and then you were like, just terrorizing him for weeks to where he just had to shut his laptop down for like four weeks.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  You know, it's a, it's fun, man, because like, they don't, they don't suspect it.

• 32:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  And then all of a sudden, like, imagine you're sitting here, it's like three in the morning, because they're like 10 and a half hours ahead of us. It's three in the morning, you're trying, you're trying to get $20,000 from somebody. And all of a sudden, your laptop, the little light goes on. And you're like, well, that's, but that's me. I'm turning the camera on because I'm taking your picture. And the next day, maybe he doesn't think anything of it. The next day, he's trying to scam somebody and all of a sudden, we start talking through his computer to him. Can you imagine how freaked out you would be? And then on top of that.

• 32:58Danny Jones?

  And you're like talking to him and like a muffled like terror terrifying sounding voice.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  From my computer through his computer. We can talk to him. We can do all sorts of things. Imagine we could find your exact location in a matter of minutes. I just get on the phone with you. You think that you're connecting to my computer, but we got a connection back to yours like within seconds. And then we can find out exactly where you are. So anywhere in the world, we can find your coordinates within minutes. So we find these guys and like India is starting to come around where we collect information on these guys and then send it over. And then they'll go and like raid some of these places and get some of these guys arrested.

• 33:36Danny Jones?

  So the Indian authorities actually cracked down on it?

• 33:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  They're trying because a lot of his like saving face, in my opinion, because the YouTubers in this space, we put a lot of pressure on scammers, especially these. There's some really big call centers, like, I don't know if you're familiar with Kolkata, India. But it's kind of near, it's in like West Bengal, which is like on the, I guess the eastern side, north, not fully northeastern, but eastern side, like kind of near Bangladesh.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  And Kolkata became this hub for scams. Now, what happens is you have this rich call center boss that's in the huge, like a beautiful building, like big, beautiful building, right? And there's legitimate businesses running in the heart of Kolkata. And that's during the day and they have computers and phone systems and they might be a marketing company or they might actually do like, you know, call center jobs where they take phone calls and stuff and help actual customers.

• 34:35Danny Jones?

  Actual like a legitimate telemarketing.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Yes, legitimate. You might be annoyed by it, but it's like legitimate.

• 34:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  And then at nighttime, it's 10 o'clock at night. Nobody's working in India, except for the scammers. So then that business then flips to a scam call center at nighttime. And you have a whole nother shift. And these huge buildings and these huge businesses that are fronts for scam operation.

• 34:59Danny Jones?

  That make the real money.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  A thousand scammers in a building. And nobody says anything about it. Nobody does anything about it because there was a lot of corruption that was going on for many years.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  So a lot of the YouTubers, we started putting pressure on the city from a lot of our videos. One of the videos that we did, myself, Jim Browning, Mark Rober. There's like hundreds of millions of views on our videos together. And it highlighted these call center bosses and these buildings that were running these huge operations that were there making a lot of money.

• 35:33Danny Jones?

  You were able to figure out who the bosses were?

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's a group of people that had insane access at the time to these guys' computers. And we actually will even send somebody into the call center. So this is like.

• 35:45Danny Jones?

  What? You filmed this?

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, God, like, could you imagine they're on the phone trying to scam you and then like someone taps on their shoulder?

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:58Danny Jones?

  Hey, motherfucker.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Like on the Mark, Mark Rober, he actually, like, he did some pranks inside one of the call centers. So he had like roaches and all these kinds of things going throughout the call center and like fart spray and all the stuff. So he did some of that. But like all the jokes and pranks aside, we will actually have people in these call centers. Like right now, myself and my team, we have 15 call centers around India that we're watching right now. And this is, they're running various scams all day, every day. And we, it's probably six or 700 computers of scammers over in India.

• 36:33Danny Jones?

  When you say you're watching them, do you mean you're just like, you're tracking everything they're doing on their computers? Or do you have like people on the ground there?

• 36:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're tracking, uh, tracking everything. We watch their scams. We do things to mess with them and troll with them. So, uh, we play pranks on them ourselves and have fun. We stop any kind of scam that's going on without kind of burning the operation. Cause really the long-term goal is to have India hopefully raid these call centers. Like in Kolkata, what had happened was all this pressure was put on them and they ended up raiding these call centers. And the bosses, there's two bosses, two main ones. One was named Rajesh Goinka and he ran a company called VRM. Another was Kunal Gupta out of Kolkata. And they had all these other companies. So they had like a poker, uh, Kunal had like a poker team and like a horse club.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  And he had a hotel on the west side of India. So he was moving all of his money, obviously. And

• 37:29Danny Jones?

  Is he a real estate guy?

• 37:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, he turned into real estate and they seized all of his money. So he had millions of dollars. So it was stolen money and they seized all of it and they're facing charges and I don't know what will happen with it, but at least there's some kind of justice that's happening. So we're trying to replicate this. We had another call center in December 23 that we got raided and they were doing about a million dollars a month stealing from people.

• 37:52Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  And this is the pop up scam that turns into the crazy stuff, the, you know, crazy hackers on your bank account, buying very illegal things on your bank account. And they were just flipping money left and right. They were stealing so much. So we had their CCTV cameras. We were watching their call center every day and

• 38:14Danny Jones?

  CCTV, there are security cameras in their building?

• 38:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 38:17Danny Jones?

  You hacked into those?

• 38:21Danny Jones?

  Dude, you guys are the real fucking deal.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  There are some, so we have, there's, there's a group of like 40 of us. There's really brilliant minds, absolutely brilliant minds. And, um, but like, I'll tell you, for instance, on this one. So there's a person I was working with that got the initial CCTV. Then there was a second, they had multiple buildings. So there's a second building that had a CCTV. So I was watching one of the guys and some of our software allows for us to, so the guy that was like managing the, the CCTV.

• 38:50Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  So we didn't have the password for that yet, but I was watching him for hours and hours and hours one day and I had a thing. It's called a keylogger. It allows you to, you know, see their keystrokes. So he went into the CCTV and we saw his password, copy, paste, login, and then you get visibility. So we get to see these guys scamming. We get to see when they come in. We could see when they leave. Some of them actually slept there and they're hiring, by the way, dude, they're hiring, this is the part that's so inhumane in my opinion, because these call center bosses are hiring like

• 39:25Danny Jones?

  Poor people.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Poor people that are 18, 19 years old and these people, they want to take care of their family, like legitimately. And a lot of times it's, it could be like even human trafficking.

• 39:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  There are stories of that. But like they just want to take care of their mom and dad.

• 39:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  And they've been sold, you know, hey, come here and make this money. And they get there and they've left their family behind. And now they're scamming people for like, like this call center that was doing like a million a month. Their payroll for like 50 people was $7,500.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  And these kids, I call them kids because they're 18, 19, they're like on drugs. One of the, one of the kids overdosed. And his family was asking for the money that he was owed and the bosses just like spat on them, didn't give them anything. And they're living in these terrible conditions.

• 40:14Danny Jones?

  Taking advantage of desperate people. Which is what the worst, the worst operations, the worst criminal operations around the world consistently do. Like put the poaching problem in Africa. It's the same thing. It's just the poor, most desperate people.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:26Danny Jones?

  Trying to feed their kids that are starving. Like, do I kill this endangered elephant or do I let my kid die?

• 40:30Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that's. It's a very, again, man, like, as I was kind of thinking about this before, before I got here, like, because I've been doing this for six years and this. Shift in what I've been doing from, you know, prank calling them and messing with the scammers and, you know, doing some funny videos. Cause we try to bring some humor, but the actual, the gravity of the situation, man. Like this is, there's people's lives that are, they're losing their lives here in the US. They're losing everything in the US and you got some bosses that are making millions. And then the poor people that are the frontline guys. That are risking it all for pennies.

• 41:10Danny Jones?

  Right. It's a, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's the problem that never seems to get solved in any aspect of the criminal underworld. You know, I have, I have a good friend who's an attorney down here and he, um, one of his biggest cases he ever did was, um. This guy, this ship captain, who was a cargo ship captain, driving a boat from Columbia to Tampa, right, right here.

• 41:33Danny Jones?

  And poor guy, just like a very, you know, low income Colombian ship captain. And he got hijacked by pirates on the way here cartel.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 41:41Danny Jones?

  And they loaded his ship. They basically held a gun to his head, said, we're gonna murder you and your whole entire family unless you take this 500 tons of coke into the port of Tampa. So of course he did it.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:53Danny Jones?

  And then they, the prosecutors, they just tried to, to sentence him. They didn't go after anybody but this guy. Right? And my lawyer friend ended up getting him off, letting him stay at his house for like six months, whether we're working the case or whatever. But now he, he represents a lot of these people in this drug trafficking cartel cartel world with, you know, Mexico and South America and all this. And he's now like, he's representing the heads of these cartels, like going like, meeting them at like, like, he'll meet them at some random, like Ritz Carlton, somewhere in South America. And he'll go up and like, talk to them and do all this stuff. And these guys never get in trouble. They never get caught. They never go to prison.

• 42:35Danny Jones?

  And all of these poor people, like these fishermen and these people that just get caught up and have no other choice but to traffic drugs for them are the ones that end up in prison.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 42:44Danny Jones?

  Like the vast majority of them.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I mean, that's a good point because, you know, we've tried to highlight these bosses, like that's, they're getting smarter too. Um, because they see the videos that we do, because we're like, we try to show everything that we can. And, um, like the, this call center that was in, it's Lujana, which is in the Punjab area. It's kind of in between like Pakistan and India. It's on the Indian side, but it's in Punjab. And come to find out, one of the owners was literally, um, like a congressman in the, in the city.

• 43:17Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  And then the other owner, we got him arrested. There's actual documentation, like it was on the TV news, like the police raided, all this stuff. It was a huge thing. And the owner, uh, his name is Sanpreet Singh.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  He actually, his grandfather was the mayor of Ludjana. So the mayor of the city and a congressman. You can't make like, so they're making a million dollar US.

• 43:45Danny Jones?

  A month.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Yes. And we have, we had all of the, we have so much evidence on these guys. And this is the, the hardest part, like what you're talking about getting these guys in trouble because this is a whole nother country.

• 43:55Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. And they have unlimited wealth and resources.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  And my, what I've heard back is like, some countries will not extradite their people. They just won't like, not as friendly with us, even if we have like slam dunk evidence. So we're dealing.

• 44:14Danny Jones?

  That's what CIA extradition teams are for.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Sure. Yeah. Like go, go get those guys. We'll show you their location.

• 44:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  But it's like, you know, the interesting thing about it is like, I was, I had to learn so much about this. I went from prank calling to like, why can't we go get these guys? And they're having like, the government's having to tell me like, hey, um, like there's a whole process in India. And actually the, like the judicial process, I guess, in India is very different than the US.

• 44:41Danny Jones?

  See, you need to start working with like some, uh, ex paramilitary, like SEAL team guys. And just get them to just go off. You guys fund it yourselves. They can just go kidnap these guys and drop them off in, in fucking the north of the South Pole or something.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  It's like, yeah, go do Antarctica, you know, expedition and see if the wall's out there, you know, but like, man, it's, it's crazy because I didn't even know, like, I thought like you just go to CBI, which is like the FBI of India. And just tell them, hey, this is going on. Go get them. Like, don't you care? And they're like, no, no, this is not how it works. You have to start local, which is very weird to me. So you have to start almost backwards to build up a case for CBI to go do something. That was the feedback I was given.

• 45:24Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  So I, it took us 389 days to get this one call center. So 389 days, I had to go into the office. I had to watch them quietly. So I had, we had like 60 to 80 computers.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  Which that's very difficult to watch to see if somebody's getting scammed on each computer. Think about that.

• 45:47Danny Jones?

  They had sixty to eighty computers?

• 45:48Speaker 03

  So they had different scammers in different buildings working. So you're trying to collect evidence on scams that are happening so you can build up a case. Cause they also want actual victims too.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  So if I save somebody, they're not a victim anymore.

• 46:05Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  The wor- one of the worst things is when like we hack a scammer's computer and I go on there and there's a wire transfer for seventy eight thousand dollars like two months ago. Cause I'm too late. I can't do anything.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  I had this guy's computer, but granny already lost everything and she can't get it back. It's just gone forever.

• 46:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  So you're trying to build this case against these guys and at the end of the day, you have to have actual victims, at least three. For them to like start working, cause then you have to go back and you have to get statements. So you have to have the victim actually agree to make a statement that they've been scammed. Even though we just have a slam dunk of evidence. There's all of this. And then you're, again, you're working with another country. So their rules are different than ours.

• 46:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  And they don't extradite them to the US. I don't know why. Maybe it's not enough in their eyes, or it's not what's on everyone's radar, I guess.

• 47:01Danny Jones?

  How many people every year get scammed? So you said it was ten billion dollars a year?

• 47:07Speaker 03

  FBI put a report out for ten billion.

• 47:09Danny Jones?

  And that ten billion, is that specifically people in the US getting money stolen from them?

• 47:13Speaker 03

  Yes, that's just the US.

• 47:15Danny Jones?

  Why wouldn't, why wouldn't the US government care about that?

• 47:18Speaker 03

  And that's just, that's not even like, so I don't even touch like romance scammers and like, I don't touch or like crypto scammers. That are like out of like Eastern Europe and stuff like that. I don't touch any of that.

• 47:29Danny Jones?

  Why?

• 47:30Speaker 03

  Cause that's a whole nother level. That is like.

• 47:32Danny Jones?

  Like shit, the Ukrainian scammers and stuff like that?

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, like there's like, uh, I was out in, uh, this like global scam conference in Portugal, uh, last year. And there is a prosecutor from Germany. They went after a call center in, uh, Georgia, not US Georgia, but Georgia. And they were crypto finance scammers and it ridiculous numbers, ridiculous organized crime that like. You don't want to mess with. I don't want to mess with. I'm just like a, at the end of the day, I'm a YouTuber, right?

• 48:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  I'm one guy. We've got a few guys on our team, but like.

• 48:06Danny Jones?

  What makes them so much more advanced?

• 48:09Speaker 03

  They are willing to.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  They're not just so. I, I think like the Indian scammers, they are. They just are powered by money. And they're. They'll talk a game, but they're not really like, not like the Mexican drug cartels that'll like.

• 48:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  Do something to you.

• 48:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  So I kind of equate like that and some of the Eastern European. You know, scammers that are out there, they're pretty.

• 48:37Danny Jones?

  Right, a little bit more muscle.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, a little bit more muscle, like, you know, get you at your kneecaps kind of thing.

• 48:42Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:44Danny Jones?

  I had a friend, not a friend, I don't know if he was my friend, he came on the podcast a few years ago. This dude named John Boziak. Who lived in Miami and he, he, he was doing credit card scams. I forget exactly how it worked, but he was working with a lot of Ukrainian hackers.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:00Danny Jones?

  And like. Somehow. Stealing people's credit cards and like reprinting new credit, he had like a credit card printer machine in his apartment.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:09Danny Jones?

  And he was printing tons of fucking credit cards, dude.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 49:13Danny Jones?

  And, and he would just go and just like blow, like spend all the money he could, just buy everything he could, like go to Best Buy.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:20Danny Jones?

  And just start buying stuff.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:21Danny Jones?

  And he did this forever, but he eventually, he eventually got caught by the FBI and did a few years in prison.

• 49:27Speaker 03

  The amount of fraud, though, I'm telling you, man. Like, I know, like Doge was trying to do its thing with finding stuff inside the government. I'm like, the amount of fraud that goes on at like. Banks. And shell companies and like the gift card stuff, like there's even a scam where.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  Scammers will go up to the gift cards and they will. Put new codes on the back. So someone goes and. They'll buy a $500 gift card for Christmas, but the, the thing has already been like scratched off. So the scammer already has the code and someone's paying for it. And then once it gets activated, they just steal the money. And these companies can't do anything about it.

• 50:05Danny Jones?

  Oh my God.

• 50:07Speaker 03

  Because they're still getting the revenue. They're getting the 500.

• 50:10Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Why would they want, why would they care?

• 50:12Speaker 03

  And what can you do? You can't do it like, I guess you can look at the cameras and see somebody that did it, but they'll come in and they'll replace these gift cards with, you know, already scratched off things or already taken, like the little codes on the back and it's easy ways for people to take money. Same with like creating bank accounts and LLCs and all this stuff. And what these scammers will do is they'll think, they'll have someone in the US that they think it's a legitimate business, like a side hustle. Oh, you're doing this and they're, you know, they're pretty much tricking someone to be a money launderer for them.

• 50:43Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  And they don't know, they just get a cut out of it. So.

• 50:46Danny Jones?

  That's so crazy, dude.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:48Danny Jones?

  What, what is it specifically about the, the culture in India that enables so many Indian scammers? You know, because that's like, like India is just known for phone call scams.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:00Danny Jones?

  And like these, just these cheap text message link, link scams where you click it and you get, you get hacked and targeting old people.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:08Danny Jones?

  What is it about India that, that enables that?

• 51:11Speaker 03

  So I think, I think first and foremost, it's because there are so many bright people in India. And they're great with technology, great with math, great with science, computer science, you name it. So they have a base, a foundational base of really good knowledge. That's why we have a lot of people that are moving here in, you know, to the US, working for tech companies that are from India and they're super smart. So like, kind of like what I was saying earlier where.

• 51:38Danny Jones?

  India is like, they're, they're systems smart, right?

• 51:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:42Danny Jones?

  They're like really good with systems, not necessarily known for like creativity or like ingenuity or, or like innovation.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's kind of like that personality type where, hey, I need you to go do this. And there's some people that can, like, if you tell them the task, go do it, get it done. And they're really good, really proficient with it.

• 52:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  And then you have another person that's kind of like, hey, here's a couple of things, go figure it out.

• 52:07Danny Jones?

  They're so smart. They can do so much. They're so good at hacking. They can make millions of dollars, but they, I'm surprised they haven't figured out a barrier with that accent.

• 52:16Speaker 03

  There's the meme, there's like the dam. It shows like Indian scammers, billions of dollars.

• 52:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  And then the dam is Indian accent. Well, they're actually to that point, they're starting to utilize AI.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  And there's voice changers and things like that. And I, we're actually watching a call center. This is really funny yesterday and they're watching YouTube videos on how to change their accent.

• 52:37Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  So.

• 52:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's, they gotta do that.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  Once they get there, it'll help, but like, you know, they do things like they take on like American names. So the guy's name might be, you know, Akash Sahar. Sorry if you're Akash Sahar out there. That's one scammer we went after from Kolkata. So that's one of the names I remember right now, but like, he goes by David, but his real name's Akash. And, you know, if he's Akash from Microsoft, they're not gonna believe him or, or whatever, right? So he'll be David from Microsoft and that just helps to keep that relationship.

• 53:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  With the victim at the time. Another person I was on the phone with yesterday, when I was doing a scam bait or a phone call with one of the scammers, he was saying his mom's from India, but his dad's from the US. So they're trying to adopt ways to kind of like deflect from the whole accent thing.

• 53:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 03

  But there's some of them that have, they go to like very nice schools, like in Kolkata specifically, there's like St. Xavier's, there's all different schools there that teach very, like, English is like the first language now in India.

• 53:42Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 53:43Speaker 03

  So only, you would think it's all like Hindi and stuff like that, but only a certain part of the population. They have so many different dialects in India. So from Bengali to Urdu to Hindi, all sorts of things. But the majority of them speak English first. They do speak their native languages in the local areas, but English is becoming, now they still have the accent, but they're all learning English.

• 54:04Danny Jones?

  That's so interesting.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:07Danny Jones?

  What is this, Steve? Oh, that's the meme. Indian scammers, their accent, millions of dollars. That's hilarious.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  But like.

• 54:13Danny Jones?

  That's the best meme.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  With all that said, though, there are all these barriers, like. Here's the thing, there's so many other things outside of the accent, like the sound quality of like, a lot of times they're in, they could be in a call center where it's super loud and you just hear all these other people just like screaming in the background.

• 54:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  Yelling and talking and dogs barking and like traffic honks and all this stuff. And you're like, what is that noise? If I was on the phone with like, let's just say my bank or something, I want peace and quiet. And I'm hearing all this chaos. I would not trust whoever's on the phone.

• 54:46Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  And even just. The way some of these guys, they do their process, how they talk to the victims, they get really angry because it's super late at night. They're frustrated. They may maybe haven't

• 54:58Danny Jones?

  This dude was cussing you out in this video.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:00Danny Jones?

  And he's like, thinks you're still gonna go to the bank for him.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Exactly. Because, so they are taught and trained that like, no matter what, you stay on. No matter what, because there could be a chance that you're gonna get money at the end of this. You stay on that call. No matter what happens, you stay on. And we use that to our advantage because, you know, we know what buttons to push. Like, if we want to make them mad, or make them use this one piece of software so that we can hack them. Cause, you know, there's a, the whole aspect of social engineering that I utilize from my cybersecurity days to, you know, coerce these guys. Uh, like for instance, um, we were going after ticket scammers. So like, if you go on Facebook, there are scammers that will actually pretend like, oh, the Taylor Swift concert, right? And they'll go on Facebook and someone's trying to buy tickets.

• 55:46Speaker 03

  And they'll say, hey, I got really great tickets. I'm not gonna be able to go. Give us a thousand dollars, which normally they'd be 10,000 or something.

• 55:52Danny Jones?

  Wow, I've never seen this one.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Somebody sends a thousand bucks and then the money's gone. They cash app it, Venmo, whatever. The money's gone. So we actually, at our people's call center, we went after some of these, uh, ticket scammers. And so the social engineering side is we pretend like we need to buy tickets to something. And then they ask for money. We send them a receipt. But the receipt is a link that goes to a file. The scammer downloads the file. We can see their entire computer in just like seconds. So it's like, you use their game against them, right? Use the greed against them.

• 56:24Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:25Speaker 03

  So we're always trying to find different angles. Uh, you can do that with like, kinda giving away some stuff, but it is what it is. Uh, like wire transfer receipts or like gold purchases. We could send like a receipt, but it's really a virus.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  A computer virus. So, yeah.

• 56:45Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's amazing. One of my favorite ones too, is like, on Facebook where like, and this has happened to one of my friend's grandmas.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:53Danny Jones?

  Where like, Beyonce's DMing me. She says she needs money for her next tour. They fall for it.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's Those are, that's what I was kinda saying, it kinda goes towards like the romance scam.

• 57:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  And.

• 57:09Danny Jones?

  Just like these celebrities telling you they need cash.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  It's tough because like even our landlord, he had a friend that came over to our office and he was telling me, he's like, my mom, she's 93. And she thinks she's talking to Jason Aldean. And I'm like, okay. And like the whole thing was like, she's talking to Jason Aldean and she's helping him to create a new album. So he's in Nashville or whatever, and he has no money supposedly to create his own album. So he needs money from her and she's sent like a hundred thousand dollars to him to build an album. And she's helping him and all the stuff. Meanwhile, she's buying phones and shipping them to random places in the US that these money launderers are then taking. So she's helping them do more scams. She doesn't know.

• 57:52Speaker 03

  But like, those are like big head scratchers to me because they work off of like the emotions. You know, that's the tough part about it is you have lonely people on the internet.

• 58:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  And they just want somebody to talk to you and goodness gracious, Keanu Reeves is messaging me. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, he's such a nice guy, right? It's like Keanu Reeves gives away all of his money and scammers use that like they pretend to be me. Like they pretend to be Mr. Beast. They pretend to be all sorts of people.

• 58:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  And like, we have to deal with that all the, all the time, man.

• 58:23Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, the internet is such a weird thing, bro. Like it's. It's like, I mean, this is like the best evidence that things that are like super innovative and like a complete game changer for like human civilization and communication and they can do like amazing, good things for humanity can also be equally as devastating.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:48Danny Jones?

  And bad and bring out the worst in people.

• 58:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:51Danny Jones?

  And the worst in human nature.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  We had a conversation in our office about dead internet theory. Have you heard about that before?

• 58:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, explain it to people who don't, haven't heard of it.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  So this is my best explanation of it because my guys did a video on it, just like internally in the office and.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  It's essentially that companies and governments have created a bunch of bots to talk with people on the internet and what people think they're communicating with where they think it's a real person, but it's just something to farm engagement. So whether it's in the comment section of a video or an article on CNN and you know, you doom scroll to the bottom and you there's like comments for whatever reason on our like news articles and people are like, this is what I think about that. And it's not a real person and people think that they're engaging with the internet and people think they're engaging with people, but they're engaging with corporate interest and government interest of how people, how the governments and corporations want to shape you to think and

• 59:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  interact and react and all that. So that's, that's how I took it. And it's like 99% bots. So they went to like Facebook and X and all these other places and saw that like the numbers of actual users, it's like, it's way less than what they report to everybody.

• 1:00:12Danny Jones?

  Wait, that's real though?

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. Like the amount of users on Facebook, like they, I don't know how the numbers of how much they report within the whatever hundreds of millions or billions, but it's really like 40% less because they're all bots.

• 1:00:24Danny Jones?

  Dude, the bot thing is blowing my mind lately because I've been noticing, especially over the past year, just more and more bot behavior in comment section, specifically on YouTube, where I can go in and specific videos, I'll notice you can see that their cadence is all the same. The cadence and how they talk, certain words they use and how they'll be like, just like the structure of the sentences, you can tell.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Danny Jones?

  And there's so much of it. And I always want, I mean, I am, it has to be, I know there's foreign governments that are trying to manipulate discourse in different countries. Like they would, they would have reasons to do that. Right? Um, but like, it's just the internet comment section is such a cauldron of bullshit. It's, it's so hard to cut, to parse through it. And so much of it seems like, it just seems disingenuous and seems not natural.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:21Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, um, it's like,

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  I want to think like you're talking about like systems that are being put in place like AI, for instance, and like, but you can tell, you can tell when it's not a real person that's written, like there's even AI that there's like, um, I won't name the company because I'm not going to put them on blast like that, but they were actually writing like AI articles and posting them as like original articles on the internet. And then they were utilizing like comments and just this whole thing that we're talking about to boost the, to boost on rank, Google rankings and all that kind of stuff. Wow. So they get more advertiser money and things like that, but they were writing.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

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• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  Pretty much all AI articles, which are like, that's fine, I guess, but it's so that they could pump out more things quicker and get more advertisement money and clicks and all that kind of stuff. So like, at the end of the day, like, who do you trust? Like, who do you trust as a news source? How do you trust that this is even a real person that's reporting this? Right. And then.

• 1:03:19Danny Jones?

  People just do things for money now.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's such, that kind of freaks me out as I'm saying that because it's like, you're in this reality that somebody's created for you of like this article that's written by a computer that's maybe based off of a couple nuggets of fact or something, or maybe opinion. And then the comments aren't even real people. So you're engaging in a complete.

• 1:03:40Danny Jones?

  It's the Truman Show.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're living in it, man.

• 1:03:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah, where does that go? That goes to like books and movies ultimately being like you take some, somebody wants to make a movie. Ask the AI, hey, make me a super engaging, compelling movie that's gonna smash box office numbers and do well. And then it just, you're engineering from like, you're reverse engineering it from like, what's gonna be good, make good money, whatever. And there's like, there's no art or soul in any of, anything anymore. It's just all engineered to make money and get more attention from people.

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think.

• 1:04:13Danny Jones?

  God, that's crazy.

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  I think too, like,

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  I think what's gonna happen, especially even in like content creation, I know we've been talking about scams and stuff like that, but we also make content and like, I think that true content creators that they have a genuine connection with their audience and not a manipulated or fake or whatever, AI driven, you know, these, a lot of these faceless channels, it's not even a real person and they're just putting in things.

• 1:04:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  Those will, those will always rise to the top. The, the, the true genuine connection, whether it's news or whether it's content, like the true connection with the audience will always run out. I feel like, because you know, you go and look at like ChatGPT, I've been spending way too much time on ChatGPT. My wife and I are like constantly.

• 1:04:57Danny Jones?

  Have you used Grok?

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  I, I have.

• 1:04:59Danny Jones?

  I heard Grok's better.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  I have, I've heard it as well.

• 1:05:03Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, they've put Grok in the Tesla now, so you can talk to Grok.

• 1:05:07Danny Jones?

  What?

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  While you're driving, you could talk to Grok.

• 1:05:10Danny Jones?

  Oh my God, I had no idea.

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  I'm pretty sure they just put that in the update.

• 1:05:14Danny Jones?

  That's insane.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Danny Jones?

  I, I think, I don't know if it's better or not. I haven't used Grok. I've used ChatGPT more, but Grok's slower for sure.

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  I want to, I personally, it's not there yet. I want to automate my life better. So for instance, I want to be able to put inputs in. To optimize my day, for instance, like I want to be able to get six things done today. And here's what my schedule is, my typical schedule. And maybe I was late. Oh yeah, there we go.

• 1:05:44Danny Jones?

  Grok is now available in Tesla cars built with certain limitations and requirements, obviously.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I've driven with my knees too many times in the self-driving mode. So I don't know if they gave that to me. They don't think they trust me yet.

• 1:05:54Danny Jones?

  Well, that's funny. They can give you a score based on how good of a driver you are.

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. It looks at your eyes and stuff while you're driving.

• 1:06:00Danny Jones?

  Fucking scary, dude.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Danny Jones?

  I'm not down with that.

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  It's got a little camera at the top. So like based upon, so you can put in the full driving. And I've typically done that with like, if I, if I need to open up like a sauce packet, you know, from Chick-fil-A or something like, and then put it back down, you know? But I actually like driving just the regular because it's, I enjoy driving. So it's like one of my favorite things.

• 1:06:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  You know, interstate and all that kind of stuff. And Teslas are fun to weave in and out. So.

• 1:06:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  But yeah, so it'll, if you look away for a second, like people trying to text and drive, there's no way you can do that. You cannot do that.

• 1:06:35Danny Jones?

  I watched a video on Instagram yesterday of a dude playing a video game on his screen while, while the car was driving him down the highway.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  Okay, well, he's broken the terms of service or something.

• 1:06:45Danny Jones?

  He had like a PS5 controller and he was like playing Call of Duty or something.

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  Funny. That's funny. Yeah, it's.

• 1:06:50Danny Jones?

  That must have not been. Maybe it was AI. I don't know.

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  It may have been, but it's, you know, when I think about it, it's, I'm excited to see where like technology is going to drive because technology is exponential. And what I mean by that, the leaps and bounds that it makes, like when we're, you know, who would have thought? I, you know, you look at iPhone, I think it was released, what, 2007?

• 1:07:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  Maybe?

• 1:07:10Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  And even like supercomputers and quantum computing and all these things that are happening right now. And the leaps are just crazy leaps. So what AI is going to do from cars autonomous driving, the taxis and all that kind of stuff to the robots, like, you know, my, my guys at the office, they'll laugh at me because I'm, you know, I'm like, I'm getting that dang robot. I'm getting the robot in my house. It's going to go get my groceries and all that stuff. But like, I think there's going to be really great uses for technology to make our lives easier, but not to take over our lives. I know that's what everybody's fear is. But I think there's going to be a good balance.

• 1:07:45Danny Jones?

  Well, you know how, how? The internet and YouTube and just content is just so oversaturated right now. Like, there's an overwhelming amount of information everywhere. I think that with technology and with the advancement of AI and all these things, people are gonna get lazy. And we're gonna see more of these articles that are created by AI. And we're gonna see more people creating YouTube channels, gamifying it, and just having YouTube build them videos to try to like, get more views and make more money like that. And I think that's gonna open up a hu- a fucking huge lane for people like you that are genuine and actually like are doing real things and putting time and money and thought and like blood, sweat and tears into their content.

• 1:08:28Danny Jones?

  And that's gonna help, like, that's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna create an opportunity for that kind of stuff to just catapult to the top. And everything else is just gonna kind of fall flat, I think.

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, everybody kind of chase in the, at least on YouTube. I don't, I can't talk for all the other social medias, that's just not my thing.

• 1:08:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Um, but for YouTube, it's like, you know, there's some big dogs out there that everybody's kind of chasing, the Mr. Beast of the world and all that stuff.

• 1:08:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  And everybody tries to copy his formula and how he does stuff or whatever. But for us, if, if, it's, it's like making music for us. We're going in the studio.

• 1:09:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  We're saving lives, hacking scammers, like that in and of itself is pretty fun.

• 1:09:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  Pretty cool. So if we can articulate that to the audience, um, like, we're pretty proud because we hit over, it's like almost 1.2 billion views on calling scammers.

• 1:09:17Danny Jones?

  Do you use the one YouTube channel?

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, just one.

• 1:09:19Danny Jones?

  Okay, yeah. Yeah, you guys have like eight million subscribers, it's insane.

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a, it went, it went pretty crazy. One of the years, we did like three and a half or four million subscribers. It was just like, um, it was crazy. And like really big videos and, you know, the videos, they drive the subs and stuff like that. So if you get big views on videos and it drives the subscribers. But, you know, we've just been focused on like continuing to invest back in and make good stuff that people want to watch so that they can learn. Like, there's been so many people that have come up to me and they say, hey, because of the videos, I was at the bank and, and I heard somebody sending a wire transfer and I helped stop it because I knew what to look for. Or there's a kid in South Carolina that was in a Publix. And he heard a grandpa in the bathroom on the phone talking about gift cards.

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  He's like 12 years old and he stopped the guy from getting scammed and losing his money.

• 1:10:09Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  So I think like that's, that's something that makes me really happy when the community of people that watch. It's not just entertainment, like mind numbing entertainment. It's something that you can like really sink your teeth into and like make a change like. So that, that makes me pretty proud.

• 1:10:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Have, um, have you ever gotten like, what's like the worst retaliation, if any, you've gotten from these scammers? Like, have they ever tried to like fuck with you back or like try to do like dox you or try to like swat you or anything like this?

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, I've, I've been doxed before.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  You know, you get more worried about like fanatical people, I would say. I'll just kind of leave it at that. You get more worried about that.

• 1:10:52Danny Jones?

  Like people that are fans?

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, cause you know, they want to know everything. Cause I don't, they want to know everything about you. They want to know like where you live, what you're doing, like it's, they get pretty fanatical. And especially if you're behind like pseudonyms and stuff, that's like one of the first thing you want to find out who they are and like all that kind of stuff. Yeah.

• 1:11:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah. The layer of mystery makes it more fun.

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  And the blue hair.

• 1:11:17Speaker 03

  It's funny because my wife actually said like, he's definitely going to ask the first question, why do you have blue hair? And I'm very surprised I didn't get that asked yet, but.

• 1:11:26Danny Jones?

  Is there a good answer?

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  No, it's, there's really not a good answer. It's just more like, I'm kind of stuck with it now because, um, I just, once I left my cybersecurity career and did YouTube, I was like, I'm gonna, kind of as like a celebration, being my own boss, I'm just gonna like do blue hair. I'm just gonna go blue. And it kind of stuck with me and you know, it doesn't hurt.

• 1:11:47Danny Jones?

  Do you ever switch it up or you keep it blue?

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  Uh, I mean, I do, my wife does my hair, so she does various colors and yeah, so, um, she, she used to do hair and stuff like that, but, um, so I've had like blonde, so I'll do like the bleach blonde and then all that, just to change it up. But if I, if I let it grow out, it goes pretty gray. So I try.

• 1:12:05Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  But, um, yeah, so. You know, it's um.

• 1:12:09Danny Jones?

  Keep people on their toes.

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, like the scammers, they haven't, as far as retaliation, they, I mean, they just say they're gonna, you know, hey, we're gonna, whatever.

• 1:12:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  Like, they're just talk. That's what I'm saying. The Indian scammers, their, their talk. They wouldn't dare, like, try to do stuff here in the US to a citizen, like, the repercussions.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  So, you know, I always do my best, though, to protect myself.

• 1:12:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  As much as possible, uh, from a security standpoint and all that. Like, we, we stay on top of things.

• 1:12:38Danny Jones?

  Have you ever messed around with, um, any of those programs like Pegasus? Or anything like that? There's also, there's one that Mexico has that they think they got from, like, what was it called? Luis Chaparra was in here. He's a cartel journalist.

• 1:12:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55Danny Jones?

  And he, uh, he like embeds with the cartels and talks to them about everything they're doing. And one of the things they're doing is they're buying this, um, basically Mexico's version of the FBI. They have this software that they buy from Israel. I forget what it's called. But it basically lets them, if they have somebody's phone number, their cellphone number, they can track exactly where they are and like pull up all their info. So now the Mexican police or the Mexican FBI is literally selling that shit to the cartels. So they can track down their enemies and shit. It's insane.

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, um, to that, you actually, when I was in, I was working for an Israeli company.

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  My last job before I went full-time YouTube. And they actually uncovered a, uh, cybercrime group that was a part of hacking, like, the telecom industry. And what they were able to do was they had, yeah, and I can, yeah, Pegasus, by the way, is like, Pegasus is like the most gnarly.

• 1:13:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  Malware and it costs like.

• 1:13:58Danny Jones?

  A million dollars.

• 1:13:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's, and it's, it's custom. So you buy it, like, it's custom and it's very difficult. It's very expensive, obviously.

• 1:14:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  But you could, like, you can get any phone, you can get any computer, you can, and it's, it's very easy. And then you just.

• 1:14:15Danny Jones?

  Is it easy to, it's easy to get Pegasus? Like, if I wanted to get it?

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  It's easy to get the person. Like, I could get, you could get anybody you want with it. Because it's, it's like a zero day, essentially, because they're, a zero day attack, essentially. Is a piece of code that doesn't get, let's just say like the antivirus is on a computer. It doesn't get recognized by them.

• 1:14:35Danny Jones?

  And it also, you don't have to rely on anybody to click on anything.

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's just auto, it goes and does its thing.

• 1:14:42Danny Jones?

  You just type in the person's phone number and you're in.

• 1:14:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, if you get it, you get it over to whatever device and they don't have to, they don't even have to click. Like if I sent you a phishing email with, with this embedded in, you don't have to, that's the crazy part. You don't have to do anything. Like you don't have to, like typically if you send a virus to somebody, they have to like,

• 1:15:01Danny Jones?

  Open it.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  Open it and yes, I want to run this and all these kinds of things. Pegasus is like, that's why it's so expensive.

• 1:15:08Danny Jones?

  Have you ever used it?

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  I have not. I've asked for it like a hundred times. I've like, can y'all get like, cause a lot of the scammers, they run on, they run a lot of their money laundering on phones. So they have like telegram groups and stuff like that. And we want to infiltrate their phones. Getting on phones, it's getting easier, but it's still very difficult. So they have a lot of these burner phones and I'm like, can y'all give me something to work with, but you know, there's a line that they don't go with me, I guess.

• 1:15:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah. You think if the US government was using you to help, you know, catch these bad guys all around the world, they could at least like hook you up with Pegasus to get them back.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  That'd be cool. Now.

• 1:15:42Danny Jones?

  They don't, they don't care about giving you their technology. They want to, they want to steal what you're doing.

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Danny Jones?

  They want your expertise.

• 1:15:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, they.

• 1:15:48Danny Jones?

  Titan, that was what it was called. That was the Mexican one. It was called Titan.

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Because this is, this is actually something that's actually very scary. This actually has really bad repercussions because like, obviously there's issues going on between, you know, cartels in the US right now, fighting on the border and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:16:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:16:08Speaker 03

  And ICE agents and border patrol and DHS and all that. So that's a very messy situation. And when you throw this into the mix and you can start to track people, that's what the, uh, these groups, these Chinese groups that my company uncovered at the time, this is a number of years ago, they were actually using this data from these telecom companies to track anyone that they wanted to.

• 1:16:34Danny Jones?

  Chinese groups were stealing data.

• 1:16:37Speaker 03

  Right. So they could hack a telecom and then they were geolocating in real time where politicians were going to be without anybody knowing. That's what the capabilities that they had. So these guys can do the same exact thing if they wanted to with the same types of like what you're talking about the geo tracking and all that. It's very, especially all the towers that we have. So you don't even have to have the device if you if you even have access to the telecoms. So that's a whole nother data is a whole nother problem that we see is everybody's data is out there. And, you know, you could search your name and find your address, your parents, your siblings, everything.

• 1:17:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God, it's a problem. I got an email yesterday of a guy, a guy, actually, he called me. And then he texted, I didn't answer, he texted me random number. And he just texted me a screenshot. And he just like, he Googled Danny Jones, concrete podcast, contact info, and it listed three email addresses and my cell phone number right there on top of Google.

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  It's, I have a actual personal vendetta with these kinds of companies, these data brokers.

• 1:17:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  And people who watch my channel will probably laugh because we talk about the data brokers all the time. But they will buy your, your information from data breaches. So this is from the dark web. They're buying your information, selling your information to anyone who wants to buy it. So stalker, anybody could go and buy

• 1:18:00Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:18:01Speaker 03

  All of your information.

• 1:18:02Danny Jones?

  American companies are selling this stuff.

• 1:18:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. And they're selling it and making, so there's some data brokers, the stat that I was told was they make more than the NFL, the MLB, and the NBA combined. Data brokers. Off of our data, and it's not illegal. And then if you want to go to them and say, hey, take my information off, they're like, okay, but you got to do this, and you got to fill out a form, and you got to do a link, and it's going to take 72 hours. And then it could come back. There's a certain website, I won't say, but it comes back like every month, and you have to keep going back. So that becomes a full time job, getting your data off the internet.

• 1:18:41Danny Jones?

  Are there any good companies that like are out there that can help you scrub all that shit off?

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a number of good ones. I've got, one of my good buddies actually runs a company. His name's Ryan Montgomery.

• 1:18:54Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, I've heard of him.

• 1:18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he runs, he runs a company. And they do a lot of that as well. It's called Penn Tester. And they will actually scrub a lot of that data off, but it's really, you know, there's so many companies that do it. He's just a personal friend of mine, so. But like.

• 1:19:13Danny Jones?

  He's the one that catches like the child predators, right?

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:19:16Danny Jones?

  That's dark shit.

• 1:19:17Speaker 03

  He starts, yeah, it's.

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  I feel, I feel for him because I know what I go through with like granny getting scammed. And you start, that's like something like Eastern European countries and things like that. With all the crazy stuff that goes on that he's having to deal with and. I wouldn't wish that on anybody, like the amount of darkness, man, that's a dark place. And he has to, like, he's protecting a lot of people. Protecting a lot of people.

• 1:19:46Danny Jones?

  Are these people in the US or are these people outside of the US that are doing this stuff?

• 1:19:52Speaker 03

  There's people, it's honestly scattered everywhere.

• 1:19:55Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:19:55Speaker 03

  It's, um. I know that he found, he found like politicians in the US that were a part of groups and stuff like that. And there's a lot of stuff in Eastern Europe and then some in like Central America and things like that as well.

• 1:20:07Danny Jones?

  Politicians?

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:10Danny Jones?

  US active, US politicians?

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  I don't know about active anymore. Yeah.

• 1:20:15Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God, dude.

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. That are whatever active subscribers or whatever it is. I don't know how to describe it, but. Yeah, it's, it's a dark, it's a dark place and. Whether it's exploitation or scams or sextortion, there's so many that, that makes the internet so bad. So it's such, it's supposed to be such a great place, but there's all this and like. Especially like even with like the grandmas and grandpas out there, they're from a generation. This is something to think about.

• 1:20:45Danny Jones?

  That doesn't understand this stuff.

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  They don't get it.

• 1:20:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  And like, they're so trusting. They're so sweet. Like I'm telling you that like.

• 1:20:53Speaker 03

  The grannies and grandpas that we talk to, they're like so sweet and they have no idea. And they're like, well, yeah, this guy, he, you know, he told me he was from Microsoft and that there was a hacker, but like, I didn't know I, I've never bought gold before. I'm like, well, I know. You know, the only guy that, who's that guy on TV that does the gold bullion all the time? The commercials, you know, that's what I always think about. There's some guy.

• 1:21:18Danny Jones?

  The late night, the late night ones?

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's, you know, one of the channels that has like the buy gold is like your investment.

• 1:21:24Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right. There's a lot of them.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  So, but you know, it's like the, the world is so, these people are so trusting and it's a dark place. So.

• 1:21:33Danny Jones?

  Have you ever had any people in these like scamming organizations defect? And like, want to leave them and come work for you?

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a, I have actually. We had eyes in that Punjab call center. So I had a guy that contacted me because a lot of times they'll like, I'll call them up and then they'll call me out and then they'll have my phone number. They'll write it down and then they'll text me. And they'll say, hey, I don't want to work here anymore. I'm going to leave. Call this guy out. This is the boss. This is where we're located.

• 1:22:08Speaker 03

  And then some of them will go as far as, hey, the boss is going to be here on this day. Or this is where they're going next. Like for instance, we had this call center in Punjab. We were going to get them raided. This is some stuff I feel like maybe not cut out for sometimes. This is not what I signed up for. You know what I mean? So like, sometimes I'm like, is this like real life, like, you know, Beekeeper, you know, like the movie Beekeeper? I don't know if you've seen that, the Jason Statham movie where he goes after scammers and stuff. But it's like this real life spy kind of stuff that I like. I didn't know I was going to be getting myself into like espionage, like sending someone in and like, I had no, I'm not trained for this.

• 1:22:53Speaker 03

  Like, I'm like, can somebody teach me, you know? And so we have this guy in there and we were trying to get them raided. Lo and behold, they just shut down. All the computers go away. The cameras shut off.

• 1:23:06Danny Jones?

  Before the raid?

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  Yes. Like not months before the raid, like hours before.

• 1:23:13Danny Jones?

  They got tipped off.

• 1:23:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. And um, so not safe to say I was, I was pretty pissed, honestly. But like, my guy hits me up and he's like, hey dude. And he was the one that was telling me about the kid that overdosed and they like, didn't give him any money to the family. And like, dude, they were living in like, the worst conditions. And he's like, I want to get these guys, he's like, the bosses are pieces of trash. So he was giving me all, that's how I knew all this information, because it's like a human asset at this point, you know? And he's like, look, just protect me. So we get like, got him like, money to get back to his house. He's like, I just want to get back home. So we helped him get back home, you know, helped pay for him to get back home. And like, essentially, he's like, okay, they're going to this place.

• 1:23:57Speaker 03

  They know that you guys hacked them, so they're moving over to like iPads. They're moving to this other location, so we'll tell you when they're there. And they were exactly there. And that's how we were able to raid them like, a couple of months later. So they're waiting, just like any criminal, right? They, when they know something's hot, they'll go quiet for a little bit. Wait for it to cool down and then they'll come back.

• 1:24:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  Because the money's too good for them.

• 1:24:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  And the greed, always, you go after the greed and you use the greed against these guys. I feel like as I'm saying this, I, I watched something like your ex CIA stuff. I'm like, I feel very ruthless in my mind. You use it against them. But like, it becomes that and it's like.

• 1:24:34Danny Jones?

  Well, it's a, it's, you're using a very unique skill and talent to do goods, to do good.

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:41Danny Jones?

  So I mean, I don't think that's sociopathic at all.

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have, dude, we have this guy that we just hired that works with us. And he like, reverse engineers malware and stuff like that for like, fun and stays at the office really late to do this. And yeah, I'm like, dude, go, go home. But he's, he and I share such a passion for this. Because eh, like, we want to help people and we want to get the bad guys in trouble, obviously. And it's like, this weird cat and mouse game that we play with these scammers.

• 1:25:12Speaker 03

  But um, the capabilities, what I'm getting at, that we have against these guys. The tools, the capabilities, um, without any. Help from any law enforcement necessarily that homegrown stuff.

• 1:25:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Speaker 03

  That allows us to now use the scammers' systems against themselves. Use what their process is against themselves.

• 1:25:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  To now expose them and get after them. Uh, it's, it's, it's a game changer.

• 1:25:40Danny Jones?

  Have you ever met anybody who is as good at hacking as you are?

• 1:25:44Speaker 03

  A lot of, a lot smarter people than me, dude.

• 1:25:46Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:49Danny Jones?

  Like in other countries?

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  Like, uh,

• 1:25:51Danny Jones?

  Are these people just like?

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  Just even in the space, I'm telling you. So like we have, there's a, there's a, uh, a person in the space. She's in, uh, Europe and she built a software. So there's brilliant minds in the space, man. Such brilliant minds. She built a, um, so they have these like phone systems that they use. And she built something that would pretty much hack all of their phone systems. I won't say how, but she could actually go in while they're on phone calls with people and change the pitch of their voice. While they're on phone calls with people. So they're talking to someone and then all of a sudden they're dying like this, like Mickey Mouse and like all the stuff. And she can change the pitch up and down while they're live on a call with someone. It's unbelievable. And then she can get access to their computer too, on top of that.

• 1:26:37Speaker 03

  There's people that, again, they get access to these CCTV cameras.

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  There's some methods, social engineering methods to do this and it is so freaking cool, man. There's such an aspect.

• 1:26:50Danny Jones?

  Are these, is this woman doing the same stuff you're doing basically?

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, she stays pretty, uh, private.

• 1:26:55Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  Like, so she doesn't do like all the YouTube stuff, but she works kind of on the backend with all the other scam bait people in my space. And

• 1:27:02Danny Jones?

  She's working on like behalf of her government or something like this?

• 1:27:04Speaker 03

  Uh, she goes after scammers in other countries. Um, and then she just kind of works to like, you know, she helps people like just in tandem to what they're doing. She just wants to help out. So she builds these really incredible programs and some of the guys.

• 1:27:18Danny Jones?

  She doesn't get paid to do this?

• 1:27:19Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:27:20Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  She does it because she loves it.

• 1:27:23Danny Jones?

  That's amazing.

• 1:27:23Speaker 03

  There's another, there's another guy that they're building a half a million dollar AI. Something or other that's going to be crunching data because that's what I was getting at earlier. It's all about data where it's going to be. And we're actually building stuff on our side to collect information in real time from all of these scammers, computers. Call it what you want. I'm sure some security people will call it botnet. But essentially, we're going to be able to ask any question of any of these scammers, computers that we have access to. Download any other files, find where their locations are and put it into like a big database that we can search and run AI against. So that's what we're going towards in the future.

• 1:28:05Speaker 03

  Not just getting access to their systems and helping people, but being able to like pull intelligence and information from them when they're scamming, what times, who they're talking to, what their systems are, what they're using, where the next payment's going to go, all that kind of stuff. So we're trying to get ahead of the game there.

• 1:28:22Danny Jones?

  So you're going to use AI to basically process all this information and what they're doing? And then, and then what next?

• 1:28:30Speaker 03

  Put it in that server and let the government do their thing.

• 1:28:34Danny Jones?

  So the government would have access. So you would just hope that the government does something about that?

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like, I don't want to just give away all the information that we have. Like we,

• 1:28:45Speaker 03

  I don't want it to like go into like a black hole and then I don't know what happened to all of our work. I want to be helpful.

• 1:28:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:52Speaker 03

  So I want the scammers to face justice for what they've done, like the bosses. I want there to be jail time. I want there to be extradition to the US. I would love to see that. And then as many people as I can be saved because like, think about it this way. If we have access to a computer, we can run software that will essentially kind of monitor the screen. So I don't have to be watching it. So we can get screen captures and maybe there's a live scam that's happening and we'll take information from that and then get notified in real time. So that's what we're building out to get towards so that when you have 700 computers with a few guys, we can't watch all of that.

• 1:29:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:29:31Speaker 03

  So it's like, um, take this information.

• 1:29:34Danny Jones?

  I see.

• 1:29:35Speaker 03

  Try to find the.

• 1:29:36Danny Jones?

  Scale it.

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm trying to take like my enterprise security approach because that's what happens is in enterprise security, you have all these like viruses and crazy things happening. Like say like a hospital's getting hacked. They have all these alerts of stuff that's happening. And you have to figure out what the most important thing to go after is like, what's the the biggest fire to put out?

• 1:29:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:29:57Speaker 03

  There's a bunch of smoke.

• 1:29:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  What's the biggest fire? Um, if, for instance, on my scam stuff, if there's just a grandma on the phone with a scammer, that's it's bad, but it's still not terrible.

• 1:30:07Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  If there's a grandma that is waiting for somebody to drive to her house to, so she can hand them gold bars, that's kind of a big deal.

• 1:30:15Danny Jones?

  Urgent.

• 1:30:16Speaker 03

  So we're trying to figure out the best way to build out those systems to find all that in real time, run AI against it and save more people.

• 1:30:24Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:30:24Speaker 03

  Cause again,

• 1:30:27Speaker 03

  the worst feeling ever is when you get to something and it's too late.

• 1:30:32Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:32Speaker 03

  And they can't stop it.

• 1:30:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  And I feel, I feel personally responsible. Cause I would, I would have stopped it if I could. And if I can't, it's the worst feeling.

• 1:30:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:30:44Speaker 03

  It hurts.

• 1:30:46Danny Jones?

  It's still so crazy to me that like, you don't hear anything about, you don't hear anybody in Congress or anybody in government saying anything about this stuff.

• 1:30:54Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:30:55Danny Jones?

  You know, it's like you are the, one of the only people that's talking about this.

• 1:30:58Speaker 03

  I, I.

• 1:30:58Danny Jones?

  It's pretty insane. And I know so many people in my family, friends of family that get screwed over by these people constantly.

• 1:31:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I could pull up my computer and show you all the scams that are going on right now. And these scammers.

• 1:31:14Danny Jones?

  You could live see all the scams?

• 1:31:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, if we go on wifi, I could show you.

• 1:31:19Danny Jones?

  Wait, you want to do it?

• 1:31:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Danny Jones?

  Can we hook it up? Can we hook them up to HDMI and show on the screen?

• 1:31:22Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:23Danny Jones?

  Oh, that would be sick.

• 1:31:24Speaker 03

  I'm gonna have to tell you what to blur though, after if that's okay.

• 1:31:27Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:27Speaker 03

  There's some things we have to blur.

• 1:31:28Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:31:29Speaker 03

  Um, but yeah, like they remote access into people's computers and I could like, there might be bank accounts and stuff too. So we don't have to be.

• 1:31:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:31:38Speaker 03

  You know, whatever on that. But yeah, it's like it, if you ask somebody about scams or the pop ups, everyone knows about it. And then you go to these, like I've been to some of these government, um, Conferences where three letter agencies are there and like, yeah, we doing this about it and that about it and there's nothing because everything is it's so difficult to keep up with like there's no centralized like information source if you think about it so if a victim is going to a bank for instance, she's going to Bank of America.

• 1:32:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:32:11Speaker 03

  Not to pick on Bank of America, just a big bank.

• 1:32:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:32:13Speaker 03

  She's going to Bank of America.

• 1:32:16Speaker 03

  They have their internal things that they have to do to like, hey, what are you doing with that money or whatever, right? She takes it out, but there's no like, hey, granny took out a hundred thousand that it's not going to the local police. It's not going to the feds. There's no like smoke there. It's just at the bank. Now it becomes something when it becomes a police report after way after the fact.

• 1:32:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:36Speaker 03

  So you're sharing all this information and the guys are already gone to the next thing. They're so good at what they do. So that's why what we do is so valuable because it's proactive and we're getting there.

• 1:32:47Danny Jones?

  So you're saying, once the money is gone, there's no way to get it back.

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  There's no way.

• 1:32:51Danny Jones?

  You have to solve it before the money is gone. Otherwise you're just spinning your wheels.

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  And that's the $10 billion question.

• 1:32:57Danny Jones?

  And also, once they get their money, they're basically invisible. You can't find out who they are. Is that right?

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, they're using so like, like I said, the Hovola transfer system that they use. It's cash, which is very easy to move like, you know, $30,000 cash. Get it out, go pass it somewhere else. Gift cards. Those are like, you can kind of track them, but they're they're moving these through these like third party websites that do crypto so fast and there's so many crypto mixers and all that. Like, once it goes, it just goes to an exchange and it's gone. And then they're having victims go to like Bitcoin ATMs. There should not be Bitcoin ATMs in the US right now.

• 1:33:36Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  It's all fraud. I'm telling you, it's, it's gotta be like 95% fraud. Bitcoin ATMs. Nope. Do you know anyone that's used a Bitcoin ATM?

• 1:33:45Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:33:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's like all criminals, man.

• 1:33:47Danny Jones?

  Who would use a Bitcoin ATM? What's the point? How does it? How is it supposed to work?

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  They get the grandma to get.

• 1:33:53Danny Jones?

  No, I mean, like, like, I'm saying, you're the guy that's in charge of installing the Bitcoin. You're selling your Bitcoin ATM to fucking Circle K.

• 1:33:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:59Danny Jones?

  What, what's your pitch?

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  Uh, we're going to pay you a thousand dollars a month to have this year, I guess.

• 1:34:05Danny Jones?

  And why do people use it?

• 1:34:07Speaker 03

  To launder money.

• 1:34:11Speaker 03

  There's no other one, there's, I, there's no, I've tried to think about it, like, oh, crypto's big now and, like, can you imagine, I'm gonna go to a crypto ATM to send my friend, like, nobody does that. Nobody does, like, I'm gonna send a birthday present.

• 1:34:26Danny Jones?

  That's the whole point of crypto, to not have to go to an ATM.

• 1:34:29Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. You just do it from your phone. You get the wallet and they're having these grandmas go and take cash out. Like, imagine this, you're at Circle K and you're getting paid a thousand bucks a month from the crypto ATM company. And this person comes in with $25,000 cash, like, shoveling hundreds into this Bitcoin ATM. And on the phone with some guy like, ma'am, please, okay, send a picture, ma'am, and you can like, hear all this stuff. And they just sit there and watch it happen. Like, it, there's only, the only things that happen, just like, nothing good happens after 12 o'clock, nothing good happens at a Bitcoin ATM. Like, these things are like, like, it's all money laundering.

• 1:35:11Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 1:35:12Speaker 03

  Like, I have battles with them. I have, like, I have battles with the crypto ATM people, because what we do is like, we can see where the scammers are sending the victim. So they are searching these Bitcoin ATMs on the victim's computer, so we can see what's happening. Oh, they're sending them to, like, Circle K or wherever, liquor store. So we send, like, the feds, like, we say, hey, this is where they're going. And then they send, like, local police in. And then the police blame it, or the vic, you know, they figure out a way to, like, not burn the connection, I guess. So they blame it on the police versus, like, somebody who's watching, if that makes sense, so that we can still watch the scammer. It's like-

• 1:35:52Danny Jones?

  Imagine the plot twist, that the CIA are the ones that are using this stuff to, like, fund black ops.

• 1:35:58Speaker 03

  Well, we've got a lot of money that's gone missing in the government.

• 1:36:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, a few dollars have gone missing. What is this, Steve?

• 1:36:06Speaker 04

  Oh, it's just one of those stories.

• 1:36:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, Officer Foyle's scam attempt.

• 1:36:11Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:36:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, we see that top right one too. Seventy seven year old woman takes $25,000 to Bitcoin eight. That's a, that's.

• 1:36:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, is that yours?

• 1:36:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was one of ours. Um, and the one above that is the, um, the one we did with Mark Rober where the we glitter bombed the money mule.

• 1:36:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:36:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you can see her pants have the glitter all over it because she thought it had a bunch of money in it, but it just had a glitter bomb. So.

• 1:36:35Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:36:36Speaker 03

  This happens. It's very sad because again, it's all about like data and numbers and you can't stop everything. So like what happens is like grandma is on the, on the, on the hook for 25,000. And I'm on the phone for three hours trying to contact her. So I'm calling her over and over and the scammers they're watching, sometimes they're on their phone. And I'm calling and the scammer is like, ma'am, do not pick up. That is the hacker.

• 1:37:05Danny Jones?

  While you're calling.

• 1:37:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I'm calling saying like, emergency pick up. And they're like, ma'am, that is the hacker. Do not pick up. I promise you, because they've already sold them the story. Sorry. They've already sold them the story that a hacker is on their system and taking their money and all that stuff. So then I'm coming to save the day and they're lying. So I will call like a thousand times. I will send text message. Text messages kind of can be bad because what happens is send a text, the victim goes, someone just texted me and said, I'm on the phone with a scammer from India. And then the scammers, they shut down their computer. I have no eyes anymore. I can't hear anything because we can listen in on the conversations too. So we hear everything. We see everything. So there's some tactics you can't do because it burns the connection and then you can't save the person. They're screwed.

• 1:37:51Danny Jones?

  Oh my God. So you can get into their stuff without, you're, you're using a zero day, right?

• 1:37:57Speaker 03

  We are abusing the stupidity.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  I mean, we're, we're using.

• 1:38:03Danny Jones?

  The guy in India who you got into his webcam.

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:05Danny Jones?

  Did he have to click anything?

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

  There's things I can't necessarily say.

• 1:38:11Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:38:12Speaker 03

  But we're essentially, so what happens is they connect to us first.

• 1:38:15Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:38:16Speaker 03

  And then we send them a request and we have to socially engineer them into accepting.

• 1:38:20Danny Jones?

  Ah.

• 1:38:21Speaker 03

  If they do.

• 1:38:21Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  Then we're in. And then what we do from there is.

• 1:38:25Danny Jones?

  Get out.

• 1:38:26Speaker 03

  We make ourselves very pesky in their, uh, on their system. So if they find one of the pieces of software, then we have four others. And we're all embedded in their computer. And then from there, we actually will run scans on their network, just like any, uh, hacking group would, for instance. Like when they're trying, they're in like a hospital system or something, they run scans. It's called discovery. So we'll run discovery scans and see what else is out there, what open ports. Cause if there's open ports that, uh, like for instance, CCTV has certain ports. There's also another port that's very near and dear to the heart of Scambaiters. I won't say that port because it gives away like certain softwares and stuff. But if we see that, then it's go time and we can find other computers on the network.

• 1:39:10Speaker 03

  So we go from one system to 20 in like a day. So we find the entire call center. So then we have eyeballs on all the Scammers computers from one phone call.

• 1:39:20Danny Jones?

  That's incredible.

• 1:39:20Speaker 03

  And it, it goes, it goes just like that. And it uses their software against them. It uses their systems and they don't know what hit them. They can't get us off, they can't get us away. And we are there forever after that.

• 1:39:32Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:39:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's, it's, it's really fun. And it's a lot of like responsibility, I guess, because then if you think about this, we have 700 computers that come on, on and off during a time. So you have to watch those every day with a couple of people.

• 1:39:52Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:54Speaker 03

  Or else Granny's going to lose her money.

• 1:39:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:39:56Speaker 03

  Keep up with that, so.

• 1:39:58Danny Jones?

  Well, it's amazing how you're, you're able to turn it into entertaining content so you can fund it all. I mean, it's a brilliant, brilliant operation.

• 1:40:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, we, like I was saying earlier, you know, the growth of the channel has allowed for us to like, cause we don't have like government grants. Obviously we live in a gray area, so. The government can't say, go do this, you know, because then all of a sudden you're like telling someone to go after, not go after another country, but you know what I mean? Like.

• 1:40:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:40:26Speaker 03

  Go do this in our interest. Like they want to help people, but they can't tell me to go do, like tell my guys or whatever to go do something. But they will go and help someone if there's like an emergency, go stop the scam. So they like that information, but like, um, so I don't know, we make the videos and we try to get good views and things like that. So it can fund what we're doing because we have a big team. And, uh, yeah, so it's, it's fun. It's enjoyable and it's we, we in the office, we say it's you can do good and do good at the same time. So like we're from, you know, from the South. So it's like, you can do good and do good. So like you can do good for others and actually do good like for your business. So you know, we run it like a business. Um, if we don't get good views and we can't keep making videos. So.

• 1:41:11Danny Jones?

  Now, what specific things do you do in like your, with like your personal life as far as like your personal computers and phones and like, I'm sure you have security cameras around your house and your office. Like, do you have a specific type of products you use or ways that you protect yourself against hackers or even like, you know, I don't know, there's like, there's stories out there where I don't know how serious to take them. Yeah. Where they say that like, there's microphones in the Google Nest and stuff like this, that those kinds of stories just freak me the fuck out.

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. You can get, you can get paranoid pretty quickly. Uh, are you a paranoid person?

• 1:41:46Danny Jones?

  I'm not. On the scale of one to 10 of paranoia, I'm probably a four.

• 1:41:50Speaker 03

  Okay. If I, if I go down the rabbit hole, like you can get me revved up pretty quickly. Like I'm paranoia. But like normally I'm chill. But like if I start thinking and thinking and thinking, because like, for instance, if you went on to your.

• 1:42:05Danny Jones?

  Depends how stoned I am.

• 1:42:07Speaker 03

  Sure. If you like, so if you think about it, like, if you went on your network and everybody's got a smart TV, most people have 10 smart TVs or whatever it is. And they've got, everyone's got an iPhone now. Everyone's got an iPad and everyone's got a computer. Everyone's got a micro or microwave that connects to wifi and 10 Alexas and all these things, right? And they're all connected to the internet. Like, why in the world does our washer and dryer? Or why does our, you know, steam mop need to be connected to the internet?

• 1:42:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:42:38Speaker 03

  And then all of a sudden you look into it. What's the company that owns that steam mop? Where are they located out of?

• 1:42:44Danny Jones?

  China?

• 1:42:44Speaker 03

  China. Why in the world does China need access? When you do the terms of service, I won't say because I actually have that mop, that steam mop. It's a really good one, but you don't want to connect on the wifi because

• 1:43:00Speaker 03

  it gives them permission to, just like I was talking about, scan the network to look for other things. They could scan anyone's network and look for other devices and probably go on them if they wanted to. Pull information. So what if you were targeting, just like the telecom, right? You're targeting someone, you knew what kind of devices they had. What if there's a vulnerability one day in one of those devices? It could be anything. It'd be a toaster. You could set it on fire or whatever, you know, there's all sorts of things that you could possibly do. If you wanted to really be paranoid, if a bad actor wanted to go after somebody. Now, the regular person in the world, probably not. You're gonna be okay.

• 1:43:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:43:39Speaker 03

  But, you know, like, if you want to get paranoid, it's pretty easy to, like.

• 1:43:44Danny Jones?

  Well, this is like the, the whole idea of the internet of everything.

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:43:47Danny Jones?

  Right? Where everything is connected to wifi so some, anybody can get access to you.

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:43:52Danny Jones?

  At any time.

• 1:43:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:43:53Danny Jones?

  It's funny, I had this dude on the podcast a couple of months ago, who was explaining to me this whole story. It was such an elaborate fucking story that he went through. He kept evidence and, and receipts through the whole thing, where some Chinese hackers just started contacting him out of the blue and were like, telling him things like about his personal life that no one else would know, like stuff that he would do in his apartment and stuff like this. Like, apparently, they were like watching him through his TV and listening to him through devices he had in his house. And even like, a couple of times he saw a drone outside of his window and they were like trying to convince him to like be a Chinese spy and do all kinds of things.

• 1:44:37Danny Jones?

  And this was all connected to like 5G and all, I mean, I don't remember it all perfectly. But do you remember, um, do you remember that dude, Steve?

• 1:44:45Speaker 03

  That was.

• 1:44:46Danny Jones?

  What was that gentleman's name?

• 1:44:47Speaker 03

  Max Lebo.

• 1:44:47Danny Jones?

  Max Lebo. Yeah. See if you can find like a, a summary of his story. He made a whole podcast about it. It was fascinating. But I mean, that, that shit got my paranoia level to like a 12.

• 1:45:00Speaker 03

  You know, there's, I, I think too that. Like when I worked in email security, you could have like, we call them mousetraps. You could have the best mousetrap, like on a computer, like an antivirus that would catch it. You know, malware or virus, right?

• 1:45:16Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 1:45:17Speaker 03

  However, if I really wanted to go after you, I could go after you. I could find where you live. I could find your LinkedIn. I could find your favorite sports team. I could find your, you know, mother's maiden name and I could craft something that was so specific. I knew you're going to the Florida State football game this weekend. And here's the updated tickets because I know you're a season ticket holder because you post it all the time on Facebook. And if somebody wants like, it's that human intelligence is what I'm getting at.

• 1:45:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:45:46Speaker 03

  Somebody wants to go after somebody, they, they can. And I think that's where a lot of these like bad actor nation states. Yeah, they're sending people like work visas or student visas here to infiltrate the U.S. I firmly believe that infiltrate, get information. And that human element is a very difficult thing to protect against.

• 1:46:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  Because that could come from anywhere, you know, like they, they caught somebody recently for bringing a dang. Like biomedical or bio warfare. Did you see that from like China? It was like a student in Michigan, like two students in Michigan that are like biomed students.

• 1:46:23Danny Jones?

  When was this?

• 1:46:23Speaker 03

  It was like past couple of months.

• 1:46:25Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:46:26Speaker 03

  They brought a like a biochemical weapon for testing and they illegally smuggled it into the U.S. And they're like facing charges now.

• 1:46:34Danny Jones?

  Oh my God.

• 1:46:35Speaker 03

  And China sent them over here to do it.

• 1:46:37Danny Jones?

  See if you can find that, Steve.

• 1:46:40Speaker 03

  I don't know if I described it well enough, but when I saw that I'm like.

• 1:46:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:43Speaker 03

  I mean, that's, that's it, man. The human, the human side of it. There we go.

• 1:46:48Danny Jones?

  Students in Michigan, uh, the University of Michigan has become the center of a controversy involving Chinese scholars allegedly attempting to smuggle biological materials into the United States. Raising concerns about the national security of foreign influence in academic institutions. Two Chinese nationals were arrested in June 2025, holy shit, for attempting to smuggle a potential.

• 1:47:10Danny Jones?

  Agro terrorism weapon. Fu, fusarium and gre- gromanarium into the country, which could devastate crops and pose a threat to food security. Holy shit, dude.

• 1:47:25Speaker 03

  Nobody talks about.

• 1:47:26Danny Jones?

  How did I not hear about this?

• 1:47:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  And again, you start to think about food security. You start to think about what happened with the pandemic last time, how everybody freaked out. Nobody talks about the electric grid. Nobody talks about the water supply. Those are the most vulnerable.

• 1:47:45Danny Jones?

  Vulnerable.

• 1:47:46Speaker 03

  And if.

• 1:47:47Danny Jones?

  And people can hack the electric grid, right?

• 1:47:49Speaker 03

  If, here's the thing, if you start to hear anyone talking about it, it means something's already happened. When I worked in cybersecurity, the average, this is the average for a company to find out that they, something's happened in their network. So like someone's hacked them. The average days is 179 days for a company with all these tools and stuff to find out they've been hacked. That's just to find out that they've been hacked. That's not to investigate, to know who did it, to know what was taken, just even find out that something happened. So when you start to hear about anything about the grid, anything about food supply, any of that, something's already, they already know.

• 1:48:26Danny Jones?

  Well, there was that crazy story that came out a couple of years ago, maybe it was a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago.

• 1:48:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:31Danny Jones?

  Where they, they found out that through just pure incompetence, I think, that the government was buying Huawei telecommunications gear and installing that on cellphone towers right near our nuclear bases.

• 1:48:45Speaker 03

  That's another, that's another, like, that's another thing, that's actually a really good point because then you start to look at, oh, this is absolutely, this is crazy. I was thinking about this, you made me think. You look at like manufacturing.

• 1:49:02Speaker 03

  Manufacturing in the US is completely vulnerable, like the supply chain and all that kind of stuff. That's why we're trying to fix it right now as well.

• 1:49:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:49:10Speaker 03

  We learned some lessons from the pandemic.

• 1:49:12Danny Jones?

  Pandemic, yeah.

• 1:49:13Speaker 03

  And the hard thing is you cannot protect these devices very well. They're getting better at it. From a cybersecurity standpoint that are running these supply chain and manufacturing lines and stuff like that. Cause they're not like your regular laptop or something, but they're connected devices that are running these machines and stuff. So protecting those, like the, it's kind of like having a microwave that's connected to wifi. But this is, this is a machine, a computer that's not fully like a Windows machine or something that's connected into. A supply like a company's network and if it goes down, the whole thing goes down. So how do you protect those? There's all sorts of things. But my point is with this are these chip manufacturers there.

• 1:49:51Speaker 03

  That's why there's like such a race to like, figure all that out and like, make the US like, try to lead in this space.

• 1:49:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  Because that is a huge security concern. When you have chips that are being made overseas, different countries. There is actually, there's on one of the mother or one of the chips, you know, there's like AMD and Intel. On one of the chips, there's actually a thing where you could turn the computer on via the motherboard without the person even being there.

• 1:50:21Speaker 03

  And it's built into the chip.

• 1:50:24Speaker 03

  And it's literally like a checkbox to turn it on.

• 1:50:26Danny Jones?

  And this is one that's manufactured in China?

• 1:50:28Speaker 03

  Well, it's like a, it's one of the chip come, I think it's, I think it's Intel that had it. It might be AMD, but I remember when I was working at HP at the time, that was one of like our selling points was like, it was called like always on. So like, if you wanted to work on XYZ employee's computer, it had this always on thing. As long as it was like connected to the internet, you could turn it on without anyone.

• 1:50:51Danny Jones?

  If I was China or Russia and the United States was buying computer chips from me, of course I would build a backdoor into all those computer chips. Especially if they're giving those to all the people that work for the FBI and CIA and the Congress, whatever, anybody in government. And that's exactly what we did with the promise software. Remember the, you ever heard of the promise software? It's the, it's this, it was the first software that was developed, I think it was in like the eighties, early eighties. Where they basically needed to put all the court records, all like the legal documents around the country on like an online database. So that all the courts could like, just search, keyword search for specific files on specific people. Because people were like slipping through the cracks all the time.

• 1:51:35Danny Jones?

  So when they developed this, they started, we started selling it to other countries so they could use it. And we built a backdoor into it so we could spy on their government.

• 1:51:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, very smart.

• 1:51:44Danny Jones?

  So that's crazy if they're, you know. That's why I think Taiwan is such a such a like a important thing for this this whole thing with Taiwan and the race to get it like with the tug of war with the US and China.

• 1:51:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we have so many critical components. Now, I'm not saying that everything's going to be manufactured here in the US, but like we have so many critical components that are just they're manufactured overseas. Not to say that every country is like doing all these bad things, but you want to have a critical look at the stuff like even every hard drive like there's big companies that buy hard drives for servers and stuff like that that are going in our cloud environments from overseas like and if there's a shortage so it's we need to look at that better. And that is that's like the Trojan that's a Trojan horse to get in through the actual chip manufacturers and hardware components and things like that. So it's going to be interesting because there's a ripple effect if one thing

• 1:52:42Speaker 03

  goes down, man, whether it's grid or food supply or water supply. Think about like the local municipality or whatever that runs the water for a small city and they get hacked.

• 1:52:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Oh, my God. Imagine how much that would fuck shit up, dude.

• 1:52:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, like it's that stuff. That stuff scary to me.

• 1:52:57Danny Jones?

  You can't get clean water anymore?

• 1:52:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:59Danny Jones?

  Now what?

• 1:52:59Speaker 03

  It's it's tough.

• 1:53:00Danny Jones?

  I think we take a lot of things for granted in the US.

• 1:53:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:03Danny Jones?

  You know, a lot of things like life's so easy here and we don't live in a part of a war torn part of the world.

• 1:53:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:08Danny Jones?

  And I think we get we get comfortable because we're surrounded. We have these two big oceans on each side of us. We're not worried about boots, people like storming the beach of New Jersey.

• 1:53:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:17Danny Jones?

  But like now in today's day and age, that's like, fuck, man, the the tides are turning. And it's scary to think like how what's going to happen with technology like a guy really laid it out to me perfectly before on this podcast, a former CIA guy. He was he was explaining to me this exact thing and he was saying like, if the US is no longer the global superpower, say like China or something like their their GDP and you know, everything overtakes us as far as like military superpower and GDP alone and we become number two or number three. Well, now what happens is when your kid is born and you're a US citizen, now you have to.

• 1:53:59Danny Jones?

  Teach your kid a second language like it's you. You almost have to if you want to like in any of these other countries. And you have a you have a kid and you don't don't teach them English, they're automatically at a disadvantage.

• 1:54:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:54:11Danny Jones?

  So like, that's not something we think about in America. We don't we don't. We're not worried about teaching our kids a second language so they can survive and like thrive.

• 1:54:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:19Danny Jones?

  But those are things you just don't think about.

• 1:54:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're I mean, we're the, you know, like even I don't know what the the median income is in the US, for instance, but like,

• 1:54:30Speaker 03

  you know, what we consider to be poorer downtrodden here.

• 1:54:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:54:34Speaker 03

  Pretty dang good in a lot of other countries and a lot of times too, like we got a good one. People are worried about whatever we fight about in today's day and age here in the US. We've got like these non fundamental things where people are fighting for like, for instance, I was talking about like the scammers in Kolkata when the pandemic hit their unemployment rate was forty five percent.

• 1:54:58Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:54:59Speaker 03

  Like, do you know? Do you know the amount of chaos in any big city if it was forty five percent unemployment rate?

• 1:55:04Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:55:04Speaker 03

  Just it would be anarchy.

• 1:55:06Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:07Speaker 03

  And we have anarchy when people don't like who gets voted in and you know, like, or whatever's happening.

• 1:55:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:55:13Speaker 03

  We have people doing stuff.

• 1:55:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:55:16Speaker 03

  And like real hurt and real pain that people are feeling, you know, like over in India or whatever, like imagine that if that hit the states. That would it would be terrible. And like, that's, you know, that's why I try to look at, you know, all of the stuff from a different lens, because yes, we are extremely fortunate and it's not some guy like the approach we take is not, you know, just some dude making YouTube videos to make money. What we do is we're trying to help people and we try to even help like, for instance, we had a guy in Kolkata that I was on the phone with him and he thought I was like a grandpa and he started like crying on the phone.

• 1:55:55Speaker 03

  And he said, hey, I don't want to do this. I just started like, I'm really sorry. Like, a lot of them are BSing, but this guy was like very legit. He was just now getting married. So and this isn't a pat on my back or anything. I'm just kind of telling you the story like we paid for like he quit scamming. We paid for him to have um like we we got him a gift for his wedding and then we paid for him for an apartment complex or for apartment for he and his wife for like a whole year.

• 1:56:22Danny Jones?

  In Kolkata?

• 1:56:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And.

• 1:56:26Speaker 03

  I don't know, it just, it touched a certain part in my heart because you can tell when someone's being genuine about something or just BSing. Like a lot of the scammers, they'll be like, I'll tell them where they're located. They're like, we're not here. We're in Pakistan. We're in Lahore, Pakistan. And you're like, you're not in Pakistan. I know exactly where you are. And then you have a guy like this, his name is Karan, and he's sending me pictures. He got a new job. He was sending me pictures of he and his, you know, wife after the ceremony. Both his parents died. One of them died during the pandemic. Another one died, just, I don't know, sickness or whatever. I don't know the whole story. But he showed me all of these things that were going on in his life. And it just, it brings like the realism, like the, the gravity of the situation to me. Like, there are people over there. They're

• 1:57:11Speaker 03

  not bad people, right? Not all people from India are bad or scammers or whatever.

• 1:57:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:57:16Speaker 03

  There are people that are just trying to survive.

• 1:57:19Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:57:20Speaker 03

  And I tried to take a lens, like, it's heavy, like, on these calls, because we're, you know, joking and doing all this stuff. But like, there are people-

• 1:57:30Danny Jones?

  If you were him, if you were in his situation with his life, would you do anything, would you do different, think differently? Who knows?

• 1:57:35Speaker 03

  I mean, as a, as a family man, like, with a wife and with kids, like, that's my number one priority. I would do anything to fight for my family.

• 1:57:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:57:46Speaker 03

  And, like, I can't, I can't imagine, like, there, even from like, clean water and air condi-, like, we have such good lives here.

• 1:57:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:57Speaker 03

  Such good lives. And, so, that's one of the approaches I try to take, is one of

• 1:58:07Speaker 03

  humanity, like, people are people. I try to see people, like, how God sees them. And we're all children of God. And I try to see through that lens, no matter what I may be feeling. I try to see differently, if that makes sense, right?

• 1:58:20Danny Jones?

  That's a good thing to do.

• 1:58:21Speaker 03

  And, call it spiritual or whatever, but like, I try to see just differently. I do get frustrated at these guys. I get mad. Because I see the stuff that happens, but I try to also, they're people too.

• 1:58:35Danny Jones?

  Totally. Yeah. And then like, a lot of this stuff can be like, going back to like what we were talking about with this internet of everything and everything being connected to wifi. And things like this, like it's all not necessarily like, it's easy to look at it and say, oh, this is evil. They're trying to control everybody. But the other thing is people are just trying to make more money and, and figure out ways to, to be more efficient. Which could be, this stuff can be taken and used for evil, but like the initial idea of it might not be evil. Like, like these things where they want it like using like health devices, like what like eye watches or the Apple watches or whatever.

• 1:59:17Danny Jones?

  And like insurance companies trying to get the data from Apple on this person's like daily heart rate or whatever, or their, their respiratory rate. To see like, okay, are we, how much are we going to fucking make this person pay for on their, their monthly premium? Because we, we can hack into their, or we have access to all their health devices, their watches and see what their health is and like. Yeah, people are going to use this stuff to make money. And that's the problem when you have these multinational corporations and these billionaires. Who it's, they just want more control over people so, so they can gain more money or more political power. And that's the problem with everything, you know, that's, that's the problem with, and they use this stuff as like a political football.

• 2:00:02Danny Jones?

  To try to like buy influence in the government, to try to push their objectives and to try to further their, their financial goals. Or whatever it is.

• 2:00:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, a lot of, a lot of life goes down to like money and greed, unfortunately.

• 2:00:19Speaker 03

  And from money, there comes power and power could be political or whatever it may be. And that, I think that is going to be the interesting thing is.

• 2:00:32Speaker 03

  Like first thing, they always put the agreements that all the click through that you agree to like right at the most like, oh, I need the software installed right now. So we're going to say like, do you agree to everything? You know what I'm saying? Like it's at 99% installed and you need the app.

• 2:00:47Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Am I going to read 16 pages?

• 2:00:49Speaker 03

  Exactly. No, I just want to get the, I want to get the watch working.

• 2:00:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:00:52Speaker 03

  You know?

• 2:00:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:00:53Speaker 03

  But you're just giving your life away now.

• 2:00:55Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:00:55Speaker 03

  And even with the cookies now, go look at every website you go to now. They had some, I don't know what they did, but there's some, I guess there's regulation or something around data protection or something. But now all these websites, whatever one you go to, they're going to pop up cookies.

• 2:01:10Danny Jones?

  Every website.

• 2:01:10Speaker 03

  And you got to choose which ones you want. So now you've got to tell every website which cookies you want, which ones you don't want, accept all, reject all. It's ridiculous.

• 2:01:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:01:21Speaker 03

  And to, to your point, it comes, it comes with power, like even like social media. That's how they, their number one goal is to keep you on.

• 2:01:29Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:01:30Speaker 03

  So that they can, and that's in and of itself inherently manipulative and controlling.

• 2:01:35Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:01:36Speaker 03

  And you're controlling for what reason? Because you want them to have a good experience? No.

• 2:01:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:01:39Speaker 03

  You want them, you know, consuming your advertisers.

• 2:01:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:01:43Speaker 03

  To make money for, why is that? Because you're publicly traded, you know, to keep your revenues up and your growth up and your, you know, users. But again, half of your users are bots. So like, you know, it's just, it's all interesting, but it comes down to agreed money control.

• 2:02:00Danny Jones?

  The scary part about it to me is that these big social media companies are, are openly, and it's been exposed, are infiltrated by the government to find like their excuses to find bad guys.

• 2:02:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:11Danny Jones?

  Who knows what else they're doing? Like, I don't know if you saw like the whole Twitter files debacle that happened a couple of months or a couple of years ago, where they basically find out that like Twitter's whole moderation staff was having like weekly meetings with FBI.

• 2:02:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:23Danny Jones?

  And CIA to like, like control discourse and like getting incentivized to ban certain people around certain speech or whatever, whatever it was.

• 2:02:34Danny Jones?

  And, um, you know, it's just like if Twitter had was manipulated or infiltrated by, by government agencies to that degree, imagine what, you know, how bad Google is, where Google actually makes the products now. They gave, they make the phones and the computers and stuff like this. And it was, Google was like, was, was funded and incubated by the CIA. And like the whole page rank thing came from DARPA, which was a government, like military contractor.

• 2:03:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

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• 2:03:59Danny Jones?

  So if this is their product and that's where all this stuff came from.

• 2:04:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:05Danny Jones?

  It's like, it's just like, what, what point do you just give up and just say, whatever? Just spy on me all you want. Like, it's just too much work to try to protect yourself.

• 2:04:13Speaker 03

  It's a, yeah, it's like, that's what I was saying earlier. Like, if you're, if you're the common, whatever, common person, I don't know how to describe it, but like, if you're just, you know, Bobby from Massachusetts.

• 2:04:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:04:24Speaker 03

  You know.

• 2:04:25Danny Jones?

  And you have, you have kids and a wife and you have a date, you work a nine to five. You don't have time to focus on this.

• 2:04:29Speaker 03

  No, you don't. And you don't have time to go through the cookies and you don't have time to like, read the, you know, what Instagram is collecting on your data. And you don't have time to, to read all that stuff. It's, it's so much over, my wife and I were talking about this, like, it's overload. It's all like a sensory overload, all this social media. Like, I don't have any social media except for, I mean, I have YouTube.

• 2:04:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:51Speaker 03

  It's too much, man. And they're collecting all our data. They're watching us there. And yeah, it's like, at one point, you're like, just take my, just take my data. Like, you know, you want to know. Everything that we're doing, like you're gonna find, like if somebody wants to know, they're gonna find out if it's the government. I think like when you think about like the Twitter files, for instance, it does put a chill up your spine because I'm not saying there's rogue agents or whatever. However, like whose decision is that? You know, like who's deciding, hey, go and talk to Twitter now and make sure that this is moderated? And then who's moderating that person of like what's right and what's wrong? What's the moral compass of what is good and what is bad? Is it the constitution? What is it? What's the the moral compass?

• 2:05:36Speaker 03

  Cause I assume most of the stuff is freedom of speech unless somebody says this isn't freedom of speech. This is whatever terrorism or something.

• 2:05:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:05:44Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't know. And that's a really crazy, cause they didn't have social media back then.

• 2:05:50Danny Jones?

  Right, exactly. They could never have anticipated all this.

• 2:05:53Speaker 03

  I, yeah, it's just, it's crazy to me that there's, and the other thing too, like I would have maybe been a little bit more chill. If they came out and said, hey, we were doing this versus like somebody had to buy the freaking company and, and show everybody after that.

• 2:06:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:06:08Speaker 03

  Like, that's kind of crazy. It took a billionaire to buy a company and have all the scrutiny and then just release all the files.

• 2:06:15Danny Jones?

  Well, that's the crazy thing about it. Like if you have, i- if someone gives you a cloak of invisibility and secrecy, does that enable good behavior or bad behavior?

• 2:06:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you know, you're not getting in trouble.

• 2:06:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:06:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:25Danny Jones?

  And a lot of this thing, it's not like some, you know, some big evil monolith. The government is like, there's like two million employees in the US government. So of course there's going to be bad apples that are gonna like paint it in a bad light and it's easy and, and you know, people can get compromised. And, uh, and you know, that's an institutional rot that is so deep, it's so rooted, so deep. And I think we're seeing that, like what's going on with this whole Epstein file debacle right now? Like, I don't think I've seen anything that is like so bad that could actually cause like a real revolution in the country. Unless like you figure out that everyone who's running the company is a pile.

• 2:07:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:02Danny Jones?

  Then I could see like an actual like violent revolution happening.

• 2:07:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I, I was watching some of the stuff that you're talking about on it and I, I'm trying to think like,

• 2:07:14Danny Jones?

  can we hack, can we hack somebody and figure out that, can you get the Epstein files?

• 2:07:19Speaker 03

  There's, like I said, there's a lot more smart, smarter people than, than myself, but like if. I don't know what the answer is with all this because it's either somebody like has the hard drive somewhere with everything. And it's never going to just like, we're never going to see like our gold reserve or whatever, right? Like you're never going to see this. And it's so bad that everybody is somehow tied to this thing. Um, I, I just, I, I don't know. I, I think that, you know, I've been thinking a lot about, and this is maybe my conspiracy side or whatever, but like, what is really happening if they're pointing in this direction? What's happening on that direction? And, um,

• 2:08:02Speaker 03

  cause we do this on like our scam calls, we try to point the scammer one way so we can do something else. And these types of distractions that go on, like the timing of things, um, like especially with all the, the wars and stuff that, you know, with Iran and with Israel that were happening anyway, and the bombings and all that. And then all this stuff starts to happen right after, you know, and Israel's coming, you know, to the US to talk to the US. And it's just, it's a crazy scenario that I, I think that the American public though, they want clarity, whether it's good or bad. I think that's something that we can all agree upon is like, if it is the bad news, just like tell us the bad news and we'll

• 2:08:43Speaker 03

  try to figure it out. Like as a country and as a people, like tell us about, like give us the transparency of, uh, who was spying on who and, and, you know, was Russia true? And, you know, all this stuff, like the Epstein files, who's on the list? If you had the list and who did this and who did that? Cause everybody knows that people went to that point to the island.

• 2:09:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:09:09Speaker 03

  Like they've seen the photos and all that kind of stuff. So I think people just want transparency and it doesn't matter what political party. That's the annoying thing is like, everyone's playing it like a political football of like, um, dangling it. Oh, see, we're in a, a senate hearing and we put this up for motion and then somebody rejected it because yeah, you threw it on them randomly. And then you make them look bad as if they're hiding something.

• 2:09:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:09:34Speaker 03

  And none of them know. Anyway.

• 2:09:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's such a convoluted, complicated, sick game.

• 2:09:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:40Danny Jones?

  And like, you know, even the idea like of of people like supporting certain parties like, no, I support this president. I support that president. Well, it's not supposed to be that you're not supposed to like support these people. They're supposed to support us.

• 2:09:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:09:54Danny Jones?

  You know, it's supposed to be by the people for the people. We're not supposed to be in these two cults that worship these idols.

• 2:10:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:00Danny Jones?

  You know, it's just, it's so backwards.

• 2:10:02Speaker 03

  And and when you get into social media and AI like we've been talking about and and data and like the internet of whatever the all bots essentially.

• 2:10:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:12Speaker 03

  That's where you start to talk about manipulation and people need to wake up and understand that you're arguing with a computer.

• 2:10:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:10:19Speaker 03

  You're not arguing with like, go step outside and look at the, you know, heliocentric or geocentric world, whatever you want to believe, right? Go look outside and take a deep breath and that person that you're talking to with two first names that has no followers is not a real person, man. Like, don't get so upset. Don't get so riled up. And yeah, we live in a very, you know, that tribalism, just like, it's like almost, almost worse than like sports teams now. Like, everyone's got their sports team and their player on each team.

• 2:10:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:10:51Speaker 03

  And if you don't like that team.

• 2:10:53Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 2:10:55Speaker 03

  You know.

• 2:10:56Danny Jones?

  That's exactly what it is. Anyway, yeah, it's a way for them just to divide people so that they can control us easier, I think, you know?

• 2:11:02Speaker 03

  We have commonalities. We, everybody wants to like make good money, take care of their families.

• 2:11:07Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:11:07Speaker 03

  Have a house.

• 2:11:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:08Speaker 03

  Have a future. Be safe, have food, basic things. Like, everybody wants those things. And that's why, like, you made a really good point that kind of stuck with me where our country in particular, I mean, there's other countries like this, but our country in particular.

• 2:11:26Speaker 03

  We are very, we got it dang good and we don't know. And it takes, again, like the pandemic to show like, hey, we got it good. Remember when everybody was afraid if you went to the supermarket and you had to spray down your, you had to spray your tables down at your house because it was, it could supposedly jump from your hands to the table and stay for two weeks.

• 2:11:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:11:47Speaker 03

  That was the world we were living in for a while.

• 2:11:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:49Speaker 03

  Like, it's gonna be okay. There's some hope. There's light at the end of the tunnel, right? There's hope. There's a future, you know? There's a God that protects us and looks over us, like, loves us and like, we need to go more towards that versus like the tribalism and the hate, like, there's so much hate. And there's a reason. There's something that's driving that, man. You know, there's, there's a force that drives that hate. And people want us hating each other.

• 2:12:14Danny Jones?

  And I think the bots actually add fuel to that fire too. Because there's a, there's this phenomenon that happens in like the comment sections of videos that I've noticed.

• 2:12:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:24Danny Jones?

  To where like, if there are 10 bot comments saying one, like saying one thing about the, uh, the video, like, oh, this person's a fed piece of shit retard or whatever. And somebody new comes in, like a real person comes in who actually has a mo, a brain, like a, uh, independent thought, capable of independent thought.

• 2:12:47Danny Jones?

  It's still like a psychological phenomenon where there's like this pylon effect where you don't want to be the only person who like disagrees by using rational thought.

• 2:12:57Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:12:57Danny Jones?

  You just want to pile on to that narrative. So then it just becomes more in this, it just becomes this, this crazy snowball effect. Where it's like, now like, I'm going on, watch, reading the comments, which a lot of people do on YouTube. They wouldn't even watch it. They'll just go straight to the comments. And they say, oh, everyone's saying this. This must be real. Look at this. Look at this comment. And you'll send it because it's funny or whatever. Now like, it becomes like this weird thing, like, it's like impregnated in your mind. To where, you know, this was totally manufactured. Like, it's not even real.

• 2:13:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. What's your reality? Your reality becomes what somebody fed to you versus your, like, that, that's what I'm saying. Like, we don't even experience things. Like, I, I think about like, people, for instance, like somebody that goes to a concert. And they're obsessed with taking video and photos of the whole concert. I'm like, why aren't you just enjoying the concert? Like, listen to the music. It's the last. You know, the last Blink one eighty two concert and the guy came back from having cancer and all this stuff and you're taking videos the whole time. So you can post it somewhere to get likes and that's the realm that we've moved into.

• 2:13:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, because I get dopamine from people thinking that they're cool, you know, like, oh, you went and saw this. That's so cool. Like, I'm gonna leave a comment or a like and it makes me feel good about it.

• 2:14:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, look what my life is, like, like, experience what my life, even though I'm not experiencing it, I want somebody else to experience my experience, even though I'm not, I'm taking a video of it. I'm not even living it. That's so backwards to me. I have such like a thing. I feel like Larry David sometimes. Like, I'm like, I've got such a thing against that. Like, I feel like, you know, I'm like, why do people do that? Like, we, we, that's what I was saying, like, go outside and like, look up at the clouds and look at the sky and look at the beauty of the, of the earth. Like, we have to create our own experiences to live in, to live within. And we get sucked into, like you're saying, these realities, social media comments, what everybody else is

• 2:14:48Speaker 03

  manufacturing for us to believe and think and like piling on. Like, it made me think about, like, there's some CIA thing, I think that they did with regards to, you had like sixteen CIA people and one regular person and they're all in a room and they all had a piece of paper with a, like a square on it. And all the CIA people said it was a triangle. And then it got to the last person and then that person said it was a triangle because everybody else said it was a square or whatever, or triangle. And even though it was a square and they saw the square and they called it a triangle because they were manipulated. And people don't have that, it's like, um, they don't have that foundation anymore. Like, we're so easily swayed by what somebody, like, we see something, right?

• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  You see something on social media, like, for instance, the, whatever the, I don't know, whatever it is, like, the Epstein file stuff and everybody has an instant opinion on it. And yeah, like you said, someone goes to the comments and then you form your opinion based off of like, whatever the top thing is anyway. You haven't read the story. You haven't watched the video. You haven't done anything. And you're piling on and somebody's made your reality. So.

• 2:15:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I think that's like, if anything, I think that the overwhelming growth of technology and AI and using AI to do stuff is the one thing it's going to suppress is the use of independent thought.

• 2:16:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:05Danny Jones?

  You know, like actually sitting there and thinking through something.

• 2:16:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:16:09Danny Jones?

  Which I've noticed has like, it's degraded a lot over the past few years.

• 2:16:15Speaker 03

  I blame Jersey Shore for that.

• 2:16:18Speaker 03

  I have a whole thing on that, but anyway.

• 2:16:20Danny Jones?

  The Jersey Shore.

• 2:16:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, the MTV show.

• 2:16:22Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, I'm familiar with it.

• 2:16:24Speaker 03

  I blame them.

• 2:16:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:26Speaker 03

  It's, it's because like, so my point with it is like, people like crave genuine connection.

• 2:16:35Speaker 03

  In relationships, friendships, life, business, they want genuine connection with somebody. That's why like your show does really well. You have genuine connection when you're talking with somebody, right? And like, it's this idea that like, at first, like Jersey Shore was like, oh, these people, they're going to the summer house and yelling at each other. And it's like, this is so real because we do this with our friends, you know? It's so genuine and real. And then all of a sudden you're like, wait,

• 2:17:01Speaker 03

  that person seems like they're planted. This is like the seventh season and they're still doing the same thing and all these cra- it's like crazier every year, just like The Bachelor, right?

• 2:17:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:17:09Speaker 03

  This is the most ridiculous rose ceremony ever. And I, that's where like, I have, I have a point with all this, but like, we are craving genuine connection with people. That's why like YouTube, for instance, I think it's not reality TV. It's not these manufactured scripted, unscripted shows that people just mind numbingly watch. They want information. They crave information. They crave connection.

• 2:17:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:17:34Speaker 03

  They crave to hear stories. Like they go to your podcast and listen to these incredible stories. They want that. People want that. So I, that's why I think it's going to continue to win out. There's so much brain rot. However. People that are like connected into reality and are above like that like kind of like lower frequency thinking.

• 2:17:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:53Speaker 03

  And like are creating like moments in life and like creating with others and living their lives versus like this live vicariously through the masses.

• 2:18:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:18:05Speaker 03

  There it's gonna win out. It's gonna it's gonna be it's gonna be really cool to see.

• 2:18:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I think so too, man.

• 2:18:10Speaker 03

  Do you really quick question? Do you guys ever get scammers in your comments? Like pretending to be you?

• 2:18:15Danny Jones?

  I oh, oh, yeah, definitely. I've seen that a bunch.

• 2:18:18Speaker 03

  If you want, you can send some to me. We'll we can go after them if you want.

• 2:18:21Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:18:22Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And I can show you some scammers if you want to.

• 2:18:24Danny Jones?

  Steve, you want to try to do that? Let's take a quick break. We'll take a bathroom break and then we'll Steve, see if we can find some comments and maybe we can fuck with some people.

• 2:18:30Speaker 03

  All right.

• 2:18:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah. All right, cool. We'll be right back. The other thing I want to ask you is like, as far as devices go, like what types of devices do you typically use that are like, what are what kind of devices are like the most safe for protecting yourself against this kind of stuff?

• 2:18:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, I mean, I think the biggest part is like cyber hygiene, if that makes sense. So like equate it to like brushing your teeth and flossing. Nobody likes to do it, but it's good for your health. Okay, I like analogies.

• 2:18:59Danny Jones?

  Allegedly.

• 2:19:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, allegedly. So like, um, the way I think of it is so when I talk about cyber hygiene, I talk about like managing your data. It's like the data brokers, like figure out whatever program you want to use to like get, you know, get those like taken care of. Your data is off the internet. The second thing is like email and password management. So everybody has like 20 passwords for 20 different websites, you know, like Amazon, Target, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. The hardest thing is, for instance, say there's a data breach. Um, the MyFitnessPal app has a data breach. You know, that one that like tracks all your fitness. I think it's MyFitnessPal. Anyway, it's like a workout app or something like just whatever app, let's say.

• 2:19:46Speaker 03

  They have a data breach and your password and your email is a part of that. So a hacker has your password and your email for that app. Now, what they do is they take that information. They go to any other website. So they go to like target.com. And they use that same email and password and all of a sudden they're logged into your target account and your target account has your credit card in it because nobody likes to put in their credit card multiple times.

• 2:20:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:20:13Speaker 03

  So they save it in there and then all of a sudden someone's buying TVs and shipping it to New York at a target to pick up using your credit card because of a data breach from another app and that's a problem.

• 2:20:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:26Speaker 03

  So that actually happened to us. I was notified by American Express about that because somebody took information from a data breach, used it on another site, had our credit card stored. So my, the point is from a cyber hygiene standpoint is you want to have different passwords for, um, for like all of these different kinds of websites and it's kind of a difficult process, but it's not really like, I was talking about proton, for instance.

• 2:20:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:51Speaker 03

  So like proton mail. So you can actually have like family kind of email accounts. So you have this encrypted email and they have a password function. So like you can go to Amazon and it'll create a, it'll create a crazy password for you, like 20 characters that nobody will be able to figure out.

• 2:21:11Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:21:12Speaker 03

  So that's the first step. The second step, it'll save it and encrypt it for you. So you can save it.

• 2:21:17Danny Jones?

  Proton will.

• 2:21:17Speaker 03

  Correct. So you don't have to have it memorized. Third thing, you could share it between your family members. So if you want your wife to have the Amazon password, here's the encrypted password. Now when she goes to Amazon, it's all there in her phone encrypted safe and all that. So you don't have to have one password for everything.

• 2:21:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:21:37Speaker 03

  So then you can go to all of these different sites and use all different passwords. So if there is a data breach, you're not screwed. I hope that makes sense.

• 2:21:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:45Speaker 03

  The other part about it is our email addresses are like our social security number nowadays. So.

• 2:21:53Speaker 03

  Whatever, [email protected], right? So let's say there's a data breach and that Gmail is screwed now because everybody knows [email protected]. Now, what you can do with like Proton, for instance, they're called email alias. So you can create an alias.

• 2:22:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:22:10Speaker 03

  So you have your main Proton account and then you can create an alias literally for any website that you want. So let's say you're on Amazon and just to keep with the theme and you want to protect your Amazon account. You don't want to give them your real email. So you give them this alias and now every time you log in, you log in from the alias and it's automatically saved and all that kind of stuff. So if there is a data breach or you start getting spam to that, you can just kill that alias and create a new one. So your actual physical, or not physical, but your actual email is not messed with.

• 2:22:40Danny Jones?

  So you create a separate, like an alias email for every single login?

• 2:22:44Speaker 03

  And automatically, Proton automatically makes those. I think it's absolutely genius.

• 2:22:49Danny Jones?

  So, but like, does, when you have an email address with Proton, does it have to be at protonmail.com?

• 2:22:54Speaker 03

  No, you can have it at like, if you had like a family domain.

• 2:22:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, you can connect a domain to it?

• 2:22:59Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:23:00Danny Jones?

  So I had this guy, Robert Epstein, on the show. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. He has this, um, this thing he's been doing for a few years where he's, um, he's basically like, his whole mission is to like, protect people from Google spying on you, right? And one of the biggest things that he, uh, discovered was that like, they can access all of your stuff with like, not just your Gmail, but like, if you have like the Google Workplace like we have.

• 2:23:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:29Danny Jones?

  He's like, they can get into that easily. They, not only that, but they, they own Nest, who makes the security cameras and all this other stuff. So it's like, he was like, telling, he was looking at me like I had three heads when I was telling him that I use Gmail. He's like, why the hell would you use Gmail? And I was like, I don't know. I don't think about this stuff like you do.

• 2:23:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:45Danny Jones?

  But he was, he only uses Proton Mail.

• 2:23:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's um, it's, it's like a mental shift to kind of get out of the zombie realm of everybody uses Gmail.

• 2:23:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:23:56Speaker 03

  And they've, Proton's made it actually really easy. You click a single button and it moves everything over. It moves all your emails over from Gmail to your Proton. It's, it's super easy.

• 2:24:04Danny Jones?

  So if somebody's emailing me my old email address, we can make, you can make that forward to Proton?

• 2:24:09Speaker 03

  You can, you can make it forward over if you want. And then you can move everything over just so you have a historical, like, you know, oh, this is my email from my grandma from 10 years ago. If you want to move all that stuff over, you can.

• 2:24:21Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's amazing.

• 2:24:22Speaker 03

  And then they have a documents as well. So just like Google Docs, they have that. Um, they have a file transfer. So you can securely, uh, transfer files to people. You could password protect files, all sorts of things. It's all encrypted. Um, and you don't have, again, these are, these are set upon like the Switzerland, like data protection laws. So there's a lot of strict laws with regards to that. I know there'll probably be people that are like, oh no, if, if a government wants to, then they can get it. But they're not like scanning, like actively scanning.

• 2:24:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:24:52Speaker 03

  Everybody's stuff, you know, to sell to an advertiser. You're like.

• 2:24:54Danny Jones?

  You're making it a lot harder.

• 2:24:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. I was in the shower singing and all of a sudden I'm getting an ad. You know what I'm saying? Like they're listening. You know, those times when you're like, how is my phone listening to me? Because it is listening to you.

• 2:25:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:25:06Speaker 03

  That's how like Gmail's listening and watching and scanning and the Nest, the Nest knows when you leave. The Nest knows when you come back, the, the, you know.

• 2:25:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:15Speaker 03

  They all know.

• 2:25:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:25:16Speaker 03

  So they can sell you, so they can advertise to you. And that's, you know, that's what they want to do.

• 2:25:20Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Yeah. So I would imagine that you have, uh, lots of crazy precautions that you have for like, I'm sure you do, you don't use any Nest shit, I imagine.

• 2:25:28Speaker 03

  Oh, I love the Nest, man. I love, I mean, like, yeah, I love the Nest, like, cause at some point you have to live your life a little bit.

• 2:25:35Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:25:36Speaker 03

  And not be, not live in fear. So I don't live in fear of like, the big bad government, like.

• 2:25:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:44Speaker 03

  Watching and like, cause if they want to get information, they could subpoena and get your information if they want to or what, you know what I mean? Like if they want to, they can find a reason to. And I like the, like unfortunately, I like the convenience of some of these things that we have. I like the convenience of going on an app and changing the temperature, which we kind of talked about earlier, how like spoiled we are to be able to change the temperature or tell.

• 2:26:08Danny Jones?

  Come on in. This is Forrest. Forrest is here. He's here to find a charger. Oh, wait, you find one?

• 2:26:15Speaker 05

  Is that the right size?

• 2:26:16Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 2:26:17Danny Jones?

  We're gonna check. Da, da, da, da, da. We're trying to charge, uh, Pierogi's computer so we can do some live hacking.

• 2:26:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's like, um. Yeah.

• 2:26:26Speaker 05

  Okay, give me a minute.

• 2:26:26Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:26:27Danny Jones?

  Forrest will do it. He's a wizard.

• 2:26:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:26:29Danny Jones?

  He'll figure it out.

• 2:26:31Speaker 03

  Cause a lot of them are saying, uh, incompatible.

• 2:26:36Danny Jones?

  You got the right brick? You just need an adapter?

• 2:26:40Danny Jones?

  What about, um, your webcam? Do you tape your webcam?

• 2:26:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think like, that's always. I think that's always someone's probably like number one fear is like, he's watching through the camera, you know?

• 2:26:53Danny Jones?

  But it's on your phone too. You have a forward-facing camera on your phone too.

• 2:26:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, and like, what, you know, what kind of embarrassing times? You know, like, what if somebody had access to my phone and, you know, I'm walking around with my shirt off or, you know what I mean? Like, it's, it can be tough. Yeah.

• 2:27:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it does.

• 2:27:13Speaker 05

  Can you charge through it?

• 2:27:15Speaker 03

  It was giving me.

• 2:27:16Danny Jones?

  Sorry Tyler, you're gonna have to edit this one, brother.

• 2:27:18Speaker 03

  Recognizing it, but it was like.

• 2:27:19Speaker 05

  I might have one of those. Let me check that one.

• 2:27:21Speaker 03

  It was recognizing it, but giving it problems. So, but yeah, like.

• 2:27:26Danny Jones?

  Actually, just leave it in. I'm just, I'm talking to the editor right now who's gonna be editing this. Just leave all this in there, it'll be fine.

• 2:27:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's. It's.

• 2:27:34Danny Jones?

  If you try to chop it, it's just gonna make it, uh, unmanageable, so.

• 2:27:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's fair. Um, it's, I left my charger.

• 2:27:40Danny Jones?

  This makes it more fun.

• 2:27:40Speaker 03

  It's my fault.

• 2:27:42Danny Jones?

  Next time.

• 2:27:43Speaker 03

  Computer guy doesn't bring a freaking charger. But, uh, yeah, like, that is something, like, again, I don't get scared or, maybe it's paranoid if I continue to think about it.

• 2:27:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:54Speaker 03

  But like, there's certain, there's things that you can do, like, for instance, if you have, like, we were talking about, like, hacking the CCTV, like, we have cameras in our, uh, in our office.

• 2:28:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:28:02Speaker 03

  And you can make, like, those, they call them IOT devices, Internet of Things, you can make those devices only, like, run internally on your network and not be like, outwardly internet-facing, if that makes sense.

• 2:28:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:28:13Speaker 03

  So like, some of these cameras and stuff like that, they're, they just talk out to the internet. So, the routers are getting. Better where you can say, hey, this can't go out to the internet. This can, this can't talk to any of these other devices.

• 2:28:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:27Speaker 03

  So it's called like, the way I think about it is like network segmentation.

• 2:28:30Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:28:32Speaker 03

  That like a lot of enterprise security does, where they will take like a hospital. For instance, they'll take like insulin pumps and all these things and they'll segment them out on this little virtual network that like nothing else can talk to.

• 2:28:44Danny Jones?

  Right. What do you got?

• 2:28:45Speaker 03

  What's up?

• 2:28:46Speaker 05

  This is a hundred watt. Let's try this real quick.

• 2:28:47Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:28:49Danny Jones?

  Forrest, what are the cameras that we got in the, in the warehouse?

• 2:28:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:28:52Danny Jones?

  Ubiquity? You ever heard of those?

• 2:28:54Speaker 03

  It's good. Yes.

• 2:28:55Danny Jones?

  That's good?

• 2:28:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:28:56Danny Jones?

  Fuck yeah.

• 2:28:57Speaker 03

  Ubiquity is great.

• 2:28:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he just put a bunch of ubiquity cameras in our new place. Yeah, they're badass.

• 2:29:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29:03Danny Jones?

  And it's like, it's like, I think it's almost the, the UI is like better than Nest.

• 2:29:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29:08Danny Jones?

  You can like scroll through all of it like super fast.

• 2:29:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, uh,

• 2:29:12Danny Jones?

  No lag.

• 2:29:12Speaker 03

  Ubiquity is nice. It, uh, if you have a, they have a dream, it's called Dream Machine that has like a big hard drive in it and you can record, it's in VR. You can record all the CCTV footage and cameras and stuff.

• 2:29:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:23Speaker 03

  But it's also bad if you have a hacker that gets in and they can get to all that footage and download it essentially.

• 2:29:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:29:30Speaker 03

  Excuse me, but I mean, I like, as far as at my house, I mean, we do stuff at our office.

• 2:29:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Um, what about phones? Are you, uh, are you one of those people that's, that doesn't like iPhones or Apple stuff? And only does Android or?

• 2:29:45Speaker 03

  I love Apple, man.

• 2:29:46Danny Jones?

  You love Apple?

• 2:29:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29:47Danny Jones?

  Is Apple the, the, the most secure?

• 2:29:50Speaker 03

  You know, like there, here, the tech space is, there's always these like wonderful debates, I guess, and everybody's got an opinion.

• 2:29:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:58Speaker 03

  On, it's almost like politics sometimes, in my opinion, like this side versus that side, Droid and

• 2:30:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it is.

• 2:30:04Speaker 03

  This one's more secure, this one's open source and that.

• 2:30:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:30:08Speaker 03

  For me, it's like, can you make my life easier?

• 2:30:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:12Speaker 03

  I don't think that, I think if you're using a phone and the purpose that needs to be used for,

• 2:30:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:19Speaker 03

  You're not going to get hacked.

• 2:30:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:30:20Speaker 03

  Like, I think if you can do the cyber hygiene around your data and your passwords and your email, that is

• 2:30:26Danny Jones?

  The basic stuff.

• 2:30:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is like the most critical.

• 2:30:29Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:30:29Speaker 03

  Cause people don't do that and then they've had the same password for like 19 years.

• 2:30:34Danny Jones?

  That's me.

• 2:30:35Speaker 03

  You need to, well, Proton will tell you, man. I mean, even iPhone, you can go into your passwords if you have them stored on your phone and it'll tell you if they've been part of data breaches or if it's a weak password.

• 2:30:47Danny Jones?

  It'll tell you. I use a, a third party app that stores all my passwords for all my websites where it saves all of them for everything.

• 2:30:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:30:54Danny Jones?

  So if that place ever got data breached, I'd be.

• 2:30:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was one, there was, um, who was it?

• 2:31:01Speaker 05

  Oh, I don't know.

• 2:31:02Speaker 03

  There was a data breach, uh, one of the big, uh, password managers got hacked. But that's again, at the end of the day, that's, there's gonna be the.

• 2:31:11Danny Jones?

  But Proton does the same thing. They manage all those passwords for you too.

• 2:31:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's all, it's encrypted and all that kind of stuff, but like, I trust. Yeah. Who was it? Yeah. Last pass got breached 22. Yeah.

• 2:31:23Danny Jones?

  Shit.

• 2:31:23Speaker 03

  Sensitive data through compromised employee account. So again.

• 2:31:26Danny Jones?

  No, wait, I have last pass.

• 2:31:28Speaker 03

  Well.

• 2:31:29Danny Jones?

  Don't tell people that, Steve. Jesus.

• 2:31:32Speaker 03

  But yeah, that like, because what they're, they're trying to get into like for here, it says it was linked to cryptocurrency high. So they're trying to get anything that has access to crypto. Like that's what these people want. They, they don't want the everyday person. They want to find like, they're looking for something in particular. So like, do we need to worry about? Yeah, we need to, like, you need to do cyber hygiene things like you're at the airport. Don't plug in your phone into like the USB thing. Don't, like, there's a random cable laying around that don't plug that in. Like, we have cables, uh, that you can plug into any computer, any phone and it will give you access to it. And it looks just like an iPhone charger. Yeah.

• 2:32:15Speaker 03

  I'll send you one if you want. It's, it looks, it's incredible.

• 2:32:19Danny Jones?

  You see, so how does it work? You plug it into any phone?

• 2:32:21Speaker 03

  And it works like it's charging. Like I could give you one, you'd plug in your iPhone to charge and we would have access to it. Or your laptop.

• 2:32:29Danny Jones?

  Over the, over the air.

• 2:32:30Speaker 03

  Yes. It creates, um, it creates like a wireless connection back to wherever we want to connect to. So you could, um, even like wifi networks, like you could be at Starbucks, airport wifi, Starbucks, you could spoof a Starbucks connection and then people go in, hey, in order to use Starbucks wifi, you need to sign into your Gmail account. It's a spoof Gmail, super easy to do.

• 2:32:53Danny Jones?

  What about hotel wifi?

• 2:32:54Speaker 03

  Hotel, same kind of thing.

• 2:32:55Danny Jones?

  So just use your phone, the tethering from your phone?

• 2:32:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you, if you're paranoid about it, um, I wouldn't trust, obviously the network, don't do anything too crazy on there. You could surf the web, I guess, if you want to, but like, don't go onto your bank account on the hotel network.

• 2:33:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:33:09Speaker 03

  You know, like use, those are kind of like common sense things to do if you're accessing like super sensitive information, tether off your phone. You know, if you're watching the basketball game, yeah, you can use the, you know, use the wifi, it's fine. But yeah, don't plug into stuff like if you need to charge, like, sorry, just like, don't, don't plug in.

• 2:33:32Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:33:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, the OMG cables, yep.

• 2:33:34Danny Jones?

  That's it, OMG cable?

• 2:33:36Speaker 03

  Those are amazing. We have like

• 2:33:39Danny Jones?

  So how do you use them?

• 2:33:41Speaker 03

  Well, so what I was saying was like the guys, so, uh, Ryan, actually Ryan Montgomery used this to hack us.

• 2:33:50Speaker 03

  So I'm like, I'm sitting there and we're calling scammers and all of a sudden I see like an additional like network adapter pop up on my screen. You know, like you're watching the screen and you see something like, what is that? So he went in and he plugged one of these into my USB on, uh, like in my little server room.

• 2:34:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:07Speaker 03

  And it just pops up as another network connection. So I had some other security tools on my computer. And the unfortunate part is it just sees it as a network connection. It doesn't, it's not malware or any, like, it just looks like a network connection, but he has like a tunnel back to his computer.

• 2:34:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:34:21Speaker 03

  He starts opening my notepad and talking to me and all this stuff in like minutes. And again, it just, it goes to, there's always going to be a way, like just something like this. You could like, think, think about this, you could go, there's, you could go to, um, like a hospital, like using those examples. Cause hospital actually have, they have really bad security hospitals because a lot of them, there are like, um, like not government run hospitals, but like, you know, like local ones, like even down here in Florida, there's ones that are tied into the, like the city and stuff like that.

• 2:34:53Speaker 03

  And they don't have great funding for security. You could go in here and you could drop a USB drive that says like sensitive what doctor like with a name, da, da, da, da, da. Somebody plugs it in and then they get the computer gets compromised right there without like, and that's where a lot of security tools are going towards now is they're trying to look at devices that get plugged in and make sure like nothing can run off of them. So, uh, but that's, that's, that's not very difficult. You just bring somebody over, drop a USB drive and then walk away.

• 2:35:21Danny Jones?

  Somebody came in here the other day and gave me this and told me to use it. I'm afraid to plug.

• 2:35:27Speaker 03

  I would be, I would not plug that in. Dude, I don't, especially if you don't know who they are, I would never.

• 2:35:32Danny Jones?

  I mean, look at the name.

• 2:35:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I would never touch that. Can you share the camera?

• 2:35:38Danny Jones?

  No, I'm not.

• 2:35:40Speaker 03

  I mean, I like, it's, it's unfortunate because you want to trust people, but in this space, you have to not trust people.

• 2:35:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:35:50Speaker 03

  And or the stuff that you see.

• 2:35:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:35:53Speaker 03

  It's tough. And so it comes down to like devices, your home network, all that. Like iPhones are fine. Don't, don't download nefarious stuff. And like, I mean, I don't know. I guess Androids are fine too. I just, I'm an Apple guy because I like having like Apple TV and iPhones and you know, AirPods and all that kind of stuff. It all kind of connects together. Like it's fun to share your audio. Like I can share music with my wife through the AirPods, you know, it's kind of nice. So.

• 2:36:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it is. The Apple ecosystem is great. Yeah. Too. Like even on here, like I had to convince Steve for like three months to get an iPhone because it's so much easier. I can just send him stuff and he can pull up on his laptop with iMessage.

• 2:36:33Speaker 03

  You know, the best bit to do on an airplane?

• 2:36:36Danny Jones?

  What?

• 2:36:36Speaker 03

  Airdrop. You ever done that?

• 2:36:38Danny Jones?

  Oh, I've heard about this, but I haven't, I haven't done it. I heard there was a story where a bunch of girls sent like naked photos of themselves on the pilot.

• 2:36:46Speaker 03

  Oh, no. So, yeah.

• 2:36:47Danny Jones?

  Pilot got on the intercom. He's like, uh, you ladies need to stop it or I'm going to ground this airplane right now.

• 2:36:52Speaker 03

  Yep. They, uh, so people were sending out like, it's just, I guess a spoofed image or something of like a pilot that was like shirtless or naked or something. And he sent it out on, or somebody sent it. And said like, hey, we're ready to take off. I'm ready to take off or something like that. And they sent it to everyone on airdrop and they thought it was the pilot like naked in the in the cockpit.

• 2:37:10Danny Jones?

  Oh my.

• 2:37:11Speaker 03

  So like when we, when my team and I, whenever we're traveling, we are always airdropping. And it's hilarious because people just leave their airdrop on and you can like, you know, like, I don't know, it's just silly. We just have, yeah, like it's not, it's nothing nefarious, but like, it's just a fun, that's why I like stuff like that. It makes it like, it makes like, that's why gadgets are fun. That's, you know, having fun.

• 2:37:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that story about that, that thing was like, I guess the, the pilot, they thought he was hot or something. So like these girls were like on a, on like a bachelorette party or whatever. So they sent a bunch of like titty pics to this guy. He was, he was threatening to ground the airplane.

• 2:37:45Speaker 03

  Really? Oh my gosh. I didn't know. I, I always knew about the other side. I didn't know that. I thought it was the, they're trolling the pilot by making him like, look like he was the naked one.

• 2:37:55Danny Jones?

  Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. That must've been a different story.

• 2:37:58Speaker 03

  But yeah, that's, you can, there's so many stories of even like the, uh, the wifi, like, you know, Delta wifi and all that kind of stuff. Not to say it's not necessarily, yeah, that guy.

• 2:38:10Danny Jones?

  He sent that out?

• 2:38:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, he didn't send it. So somebody sent that as,

• 2:38:16Speaker 03

  or maybe he did send it. No, there's no way. There's no way he sent that.

• 2:38:20Speaker 04

  Right. Now somebody else is doing it on his behalf.

• 2:38:23Danny Jones?

  Oh my God. That's hilarious, dude.

• 2:38:26Speaker 03

  And then everybody panics. And you can see like people's reactions when they're getting these airdrops because it's forced to like their screen and they have to like either accept it or whatever.

• 2:38:36Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:38:37Speaker 03

  But we would like take pictures of people like just like behind their head and like send it to them. And then they're like looking around to see who it is, you know? We're just like, uh, yeah, see he's.

• 2:38:47Danny Jones?

  Oh my God.

• 2:38:48Speaker 03

  That's funny.

• 2:38:49Danny Jones?

  Hey, Steve, show, um, show Pierogi the video of that, that app, that voice changing app.

• 2:38:58Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:38:58Danny Jones?

  There was this app that Steve just found where, yes, that's right here. Have you seen this? He just found this. Watch this.

• 2:39:04Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 2:39:05Danny Jones?

  All right, press play.

• 2:39:07Danny Jones?

  No, no, turn it off first. There you go.

• 2:39:09Speaker 06

  And I'm the elder one, like I'm ruling the family right now. And like I'm really very glad that I have got this opportunity to rule my own family being a girl. Like I'm glad that I have got this opportunity.

• 2:39:22Speaker 03

  Dang.

• 2:39:23Danny Jones?

  Watch.

• 2:39:23Speaker 07

  Hi, my name is Annie Carrera. Thirty-one years old, from Kapitain Pepe, Kaptenatuan City, in Waipia.

• 2:39:34Danny Jones?

  It's not that great.

• 2:39:35Speaker 07

  Then you're a work-

• 2:39:35Danny Jones?

  I thought it was better.

• 2:39:36Speaker 03

  Is this, is this all through web?

• 2:39:39Speaker 04

  This is real-time AI translations for, uh, like telemarketers.

• 2:39:44Danny Jones?

  It's like a hardware, uh, audio device?

• 2:39:47Speaker 04

  No, it's a, it's a, it's an AI service that you, um, it, what, what, Sanus is just a, an AI service.

• 2:39:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but wouldn't you need an audio, or wouldn't you need a hardware device to like filter that?

• 2:39:58Speaker 03

  Well, so the reason I was asking is because we have, I was using a, a voice modulator that does AI and it is so intensive on the computer. And it's like you'll say something and there's like a three-second lag because it has to process everything and, and, and not translate it. It has to, um, whatever, like if you're trying to be a grandma or something, it has to change the pitch of my voice and all these kinds of things. So I could like, I could make my voice sound like Betty White. So I could say, hey, make me sound like Betty White and then I start talking in my voice and then it's like, ah, you know, hey. But it takes a while. So that's why I was asking on this because if you're, like, you could theoretically route, if this is what it does. But it sounds like it's, it sounds like it's all through the web.

• 2:40:42Speaker 03

  So you could route, you could route, because a lot of the scammers use these like web-based, um, like tools and stuff like that. They could route their audio possibly through this, which would be interesting. I just don't know if they technically, like if their computers are good enough to handle these kinds of things. I really don't.

• 2:40:59Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:40:59Speaker 03

  Like-

• 2:41:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah, they're super taxing on the processor.

• 2:41:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they use like throwaway computers because I wonder why. So.

• 2:41:08Speaker 03

  But that's, I mean, that's where, where that stuff goes is so one of the scams that is a very scary one is like the grandparent scam. And they actually almost got my grandma on this a number of years ago where they call up, they like go through the Yellow Pages and like call up folks and they say, hey, I'm your grandson or granddaughter. I've been in a car accident. I hit somebody and they're suing me or like, there's all different kinds of stories. You need to go get money out and help me like as soon as possible so I can get out of jail. And the grandparent will then go get this money out and somebody will drive to their house and pick up the cash. And it's like, they've caught a bunch of people in the US doing this, actually. So these are like US-based scammers doing it too.

• 2:41:53Speaker 03

  And the crazy part about it now is they're doing like, this one's really sick too, to be honest with you, like the, it's almost like a hostage. It's really sad. So they will take, this is what I'm talking about, like the targeted, it's really sad. So they'll target people. They'll find someone on social media and they will take the, like somebody, this is why your kids need to like, watch out what you're posting, like private your dang profiles. So they'll take like the kid's audio from like a video that they post. They'll take that, they'll put it through AI and then they can use this AI voice changer and talk to like the parents of the victim and say, hey, I'm in trouble right now. I'm trapped,

• 2:42:36Speaker 03

  da, da, da, da, and hold this person like hostage.

• 2:42:39Danny Jones?

  Bro, there was, there was just a story I just heard about with crazy enough in the Ukraine war, the Russia-Ukraine war, where Russia was using this technology to get Ukrainian soldiers, like call them as if they're their family members, convincing them to lay down their weapons and desert the war.

• 2:42:58Speaker 03

  Really?

• 2:42:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah. It's, that's crazy. See if you can find that story, Steve.

• 2:43:02Speaker 03

  That's, it's interesting to me because like,

• 2:43:06Speaker 03

  Like even they're doing, they're doing stuff with, they're doing stuff with audio. They're also doing stuff with video. So they've even AI'd me. So I've seen image, I've seen videos of these scammers in like Nigeria that pretend to be me. That's I was asking if you had any scammers that are pretending to be you because they will AI like they'll make it and I'm like, it's like I'm talking. And I'm like, hey, Brian, this is pierogi. I need you to send and it like my face is moving like this and everything. I need you to send $1,200, please. This is not a scam and it's my voice. So it's the audio of my voice and it's my face and it looks like I'm sitting in my office, talking to them like on a FaceTime.

• 2:43:45Danny Jones?

  Wow. But does it look a little bit bullshit?

• 2:43:47Speaker 03

  It looks a little bit off.

• 2:43:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:43:48Speaker 03

  Like, but to the person that wants it to be real, it's very real to them. And then all of a sudden they're mad that I've scammed them or something.

• 2:43:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:43:56Speaker 03

  But behind the scenes, it's a guy from Nigeria, holding a camera up to him. And then there's like a filter in front of it and it's, it's crazy what they do, but whatever to make some money.

• 2:44:06Danny Jones?

  Dude, yeah, the AI stuff keeps getting better and better.

• 2:44:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:09Danny Jones?

  Have you heard like the podcast, like they've, they've done AI podcasts with like Joe Rogan interviewing um, the CEO of Steve Jobs. And it's like indistinct, they on his voice, it's unbelievable. But with hit with Steve Jobs, you can tell they sampled like some of his like uh, talks that he does.

• 2:44:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:27Danny Jones?

  In front of, in the front of groups of people. So it's like a different kind of cadence. But like, if they could sample anyone else's voice who's, who's talked on a microphone for as long as he has.

• 2:44:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:35Danny Jones?

  It's almost indistinguishable.

• 2:44:38Speaker 03

  I, I think it's cool, like, because there's something to be like from a business standpoint. I think someone could turn this into like memories for like lot, like loved ones. Then they, maybe someone's passed away a long time ago and they want a new memory of that person, if that makes sense. Like, hey, like my mom passed away and gosh, 2009 and like, oh, it'd be cool to see an AI version.

• 2:45:00Danny Jones?

  To have conversations with her.

• 2:45:02Speaker 03

  You know how cool that would be? Just like.

• 2:45:04Danny Jones?

  God, that would be scary.

• 2:45:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. But it would be. Cause I like you have as time goes, you have like very faint memories unless you keep like watching videos or something, you know what I mean?

• 2:45:15Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:45:16Speaker 03

  So it's like, and back in my day, all we have is VHS, but you know, so like,

• 2:45:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:21Speaker 03

  We don't have, yeah, but my point is, is that it would be really cool to like even the Steve Jobs thing, cause he's passed away.

• 2:45:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:27Speaker 03

  To have uh like a chance to interact with some of these people. I think that's, that's pretty cool. Uh, but obviously too, like after a while it's AI and it's made up and you can kind of tell it's, you know, not the.

• 2:45:39Danny Jones?

  Well, did you see this, the guy who proposed to the AI and it said yes, and he started crying, tears of joy?

• 2:45:45Speaker 03

  I saw a story about that.

• 2:45:47Danny Jones?

  And he's actually still married. He's married. He's got a wife and kids and they interviewed his wife and she's just like, I guess I can't do it for him anymore. He's just found love in this AI robot. And he's literally like, it was the most terrifying thing. Like you watch that, it's hard to just not think humanity's fucked.

• 2:46:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's because like,

• 2:46:08Speaker 03

  it like the AI is too directable, I think right now, like you can tell it. I don't know how to describe it. Like you can say, hey, you're, this is your point of view. And this is who you're going to be and this is how you're going to respond. And this is how you're going to treat me. Like you can like set all these parameters and these people that are lost and lonely. And they maybe haven't.

• 2:46:27Danny Jones?

  People.

• 2:46:28Speaker 03

  Vulnerable, haven't been outside, maybe, you know, they want companionship, whatever it is. And that's going to be a tough place if, if people are looking for real, like that's what kind of the theme I've been talking about a lot. It's like real, genuine connection. That's what people want.

• 2:46:43Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:46:43Speaker 03

  And.

• 2:46:45Danny Jones?

  You gotta keep that balance. You gotta keep one foot in nature. You can't be, get lost in technology.

• 2:46:49Speaker 03

  The tech, the tech dopamine rush, whatever that is, is not like, it's not real.

• 2:46:54Danny Jones?

  No, man, we're losing people every day.

• 2:46:56Speaker 03

  And think about this, this is the other part, like we talk about like data collection on people. Imagine what all these AI, you are inputting all these inputs of what you like and all your conversations with it. Think about that from a security standpoint.

• 2:47:11Speaker 03

  What happens when a bad nation state or a bad actor has all of your conversations with someone that you're trying to, whatever this guy like proposed to or something? You know what I mean?

• 2:47:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:23Speaker 03

  And you have everything on this guy.

• 2:47:25Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:47:26Speaker 03

  And he thinks he's talking to his fiance.

• 2:47:29Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 2:47:30Speaker 03

  And he has, you know, it's talking back. What do you, what is this? Like, like, what are all your? I don't know, like, just like.

• 2:47:38Danny Jones?

  That's why I don't want to drive a Tesla because I think it's got to record your conversations you have in there.

• 2:47:42Speaker 03

  I wouldn't be surprised.

• 2:47:43Danny Jones?

  Like, I mean, when you're driving on long road trips, conversations you have with people, you know, like if it's recording that and has video of you like, ugh, and plus they can control it. They can turn your Tesla off. Like, I can't imagine that this Tesla stuff won't turn into like, you know, what they're trying to do with those 15 minute cities in the UK where they try to make everything within a certain driving distance. You've seen this stuff?

• 2:48:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:48:03Danny Jones?

  So, so they can maintain your carbon footprint. They track your carbon footprint. So you can't go out like.

• 2:48:09Speaker 03

  That's.

• 2:48:10Danny Jones?

  Is that what they're going to do with Teslas? I mean, imagine they could definitely do it if they wanted to.

• 2:48:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, it's one thing. You got me thinking about this actually. So with regards to like listening to people's conversations and stuff. So there's software, like back when I worked at Symantec, it was like, it's called e-discovery software. I'm sure it's like even crazier now, but you could take like audio recordings. So for instance, you work at a call center, like a legit one, not a scam one. And, you know, this call is being recorded for quality purposes and you take all the audio of that. And you can turn that into searchable, scannable. I'm sure you know this, but you could like even like a video, you could rip the audio, right? And you can make a transcript out of it and you could search it. So think about that. If you're recording every phone conversation.

• 2:48:54Speaker 03

  And let's just say you were China and you had access to telecoms and you were able to possibly record phone calls or get that information and search across it, you could find any kind of information. It's crazy. What is searchable? What you can find, what you can discover from even voice conversations is what I'm getting at.

• 2:49:12Danny Jones?

  Right. Cause you can transcribe it and do a search for specific words, especially if China's selling that telecom technology to the US.

• 2:49:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:49:19Danny Jones?

  And they can get right into it.

• 2:49:20Speaker 03

  And that, again, at that point, you're like, what are you going to do? Right. Hand me the Tesla. Hand me the Nest. Hand me an iPhone. Like, let me like.

• 2:49:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah. It's like that meme of the guy on the beach trying to squeegee all the water back into the ocean. It's just like, at what point do you just give up?

• 2:49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, like.

• 2:49:36Danny Jones?

  Build a boat and sail away.

• 2:49:38Speaker 03

  Again, like I said, like if. My number one thing though, man, is like, oh, like you can

• 2:49:44Speaker 03

  physical hardware and all that stuff. I can't do anything about that. What I can do is like my passwords and like all that. So like people can feel safe if they take care of like good cyber hygiene with that. Like have a bunch of different passwords, protect your email, change stuff up. That's that. That'll keep you like really good for a while, in my opinion.

• 2:50:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:01Speaker 03

  So.

• 2:50:02Danny Jones?

  Well, look, bro, it's five o'clock. You gotta get to the airport. Thank you so much for coming, man. This has been fucking awesome.

• 2:50:06Speaker 03

  That's what I had a blast. This was really fun, actually. And we got to touch a lot of topics that I didn't even, you know, thought we were just gonna do all scams.

• 2:50:14Danny Jones?

  Well, we gotta do another one. We gotta do another one with a fully charged laptop and let's do, let's, let's catch some scammers on, on another podcast.

• 2:50:20Speaker 03

  Yes, we'll, we'll catch some scammers, open up the cameras, maybe do some jump scares. We'll have a good time.

• 2:50:26Danny Jones?

  So for people that don't know, he can literally pull up scammers across the country and just tap into their webcam and see what they're doing at any given moment. It's insane.

• 2:50:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll send you some footage and you can show it.

• 2:50:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll do that. Show, show his YouTube channel and all that stuff. Mainly just YouTube is what you do, right?

• 2:50:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, youtube.com slash payback.

• 2:50:45Danny Jones?

  You guys publish like every week or every day or?

• 2:50:48Speaker 03

  Yep, every week. We've also got a, so, you know, we, we have a podcast that one of my guys runs. So every single, pretty much every month, we have someone interesting in the cybersecurity space or the tech space. And we just, you know, ask them questions they haven't been asked before. And so we're building that out.

• 2:51:05Danny Jones?

  Dude, your thumbnails are incredible. Those podcast thumbnails are sick.

• 2:51:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, we, we, we, we spend a lot of time trying to engage people and make people interested in, you know, the stories we want to tell. So we have a good time, man. But yeah, no, we, we appreciate the chance to be on the podcast and, and share our perspective and point of view and, you know, scammers were coming after you, by the way. So we ain't, we ain't letting up.

• 2:51:30Danny Jones?

  You can run, but you can't hide.

• 2:51:32Speaker 03

  And we got a song, actually, we have a, an album on Spotify called The Payback. And our main, our main song is, you know, the payback and the lyrics are, you can't run away. It's too, it's too late. And this is the payback. So they're all like scam related songs, but it's kind of like synthwave. So it's pretty cool if you want to check it out.

• 2:51:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, hell yeah, dude. Thanks, man. Cool. We'll let it go all below. Good night, folks.

• 2:51:56Speaker 00

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