181: Ricky

Imagine driving down the road and your phone loses signal. Not just a lost signal, but it starts displaying SOS. Meaning no service configured at all. You can't make any calls, no data, no service. What goes through your head? In this episode we hear from Ricky Handschumacher who learned how to slip inside a stranger’s phone, and would rummage through it looking for things he thought were valuable. SponsorsSupport for this show comes from DeleteMe https://JoinDeleteMe.com/DarknetDiaries. DeleteMe is a hands-free subscription service that will remove your personal information that’s being sold online to data brokers. Our mission is to provide everyone with the power to control their digital identity. We empower individuals and organizations to reclaim their privacy by removing personal data from online sources. For 20% off our privacy plans, please visit JoinDeleteMe.com/DarknetDiaries https://JoinDeleteMe.com/DarknetDiaries and use code: “darknet” at checkout. This show is brought to you by Doppel https://doppel.com/. Doppel stops AI attacks with digital risk protection, human risk management, and email security on a unified social engineering defense platform. doppel.com http://doppel.com/ Support for this show comes from ThreatLocker https://threatlocker.com/Darknet. ThreatLocker is a Zero Trust Platform that gives organizations control over what can run and what users and devices can access. It combines prevention with real time detection and automated response, helping security teams stop unauthorized activity and quickly contain compromised machines. Learn how ThreatLocker can strengthen your defenses at threatlocker.com/Darknet https://threatlocker.com/Darknet. View all active sponsors. https://darknetdiaries.com/sponsors/ Sources https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7yLKVnQcNg&t=7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7yLKVnQcNg&t=7s https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/getting-cheated-in-a-videogame-led-him-to-a-world-of-online-crime-874392e7 https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/118/ https://whatismyipaddress.com/mobile-security-sim-swapping

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think that when I was a kid, I was a good liar. And don't ask me where it stemmed from. Probably because I was always getting in trouble. And that I learned that if I was a good enough liar, that I could sometimes lie my way out of trouble. But I was reading this post on Reddit the other day, and so many memories came back to me. There was this post. Some dad was complaining about his son being a ding dong. He was like, my son, who's 15, wanted to get some ice cream. So we gave him a few bucks and sent him to the store. And it happened to be buy one, get one free sale. And we all knew that, too. So he went, he bought some ice cream on his own, and he came back with just one tub of ice cream.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  The knucklehead didn't get the free one. He just paid full price for a single tub of ice cream. The store clerk even told him, hey, there's a sale. You know, you can get a second one free. But my boy just said, well, I only want one, and refused the second one. And this dad on Reddit, it was all miffed about how his son could be so daft and ignore free ice cream. He even said, I know that as soon as the boy finishes his ice cream, he's going to want another. So why didn't he just get two? He knows that we all love ice cream. So why didn't he get one for his mom or his dad? Why did he get just one ice cream and not the second free one? It was free ice cream. This Reddit post blew up. Everyone was piling on about how dumb this kid was,

• 1:27Speaker 00

  saying stuff like, in my state, you could disown your child for far less. Someone else said, this is probably because the kid doesn't go buy things very often and doesn't know how to handle money very well or deals. And the dad wrote in the post that he was starting to feel worried because people were saying some real mean things about his son. But nobody was saying what I was thinking. I feel like I know exactly what happened here because I was in the exact same situation when I was a teenager. If you would have talked to my mom then, she would have been just like this worried dad. She would have told you that I'm the worst shopper in the world. Because I'm almost certain that what happened is he ate a full tub of ice cream on his way home and then lied and said he only bought one.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  I mean, it all adds up. The boy was hungry for ice cream before even leaving the house. There's no way he's going to wait until he gets home to have his first bite, grab a spoon at the store, and start on your way home. And also imagine the look on his face when the clerk told him, you know, you can get a second one for free, right? No way. Dang, this is my lucky day. And so he must have gotten two. And on his way home, he started thinking, shoot, mom and dad don't know I got two. They only gave me enough money to get one. So if I come back with one, they won't even know there was a second. So if I could scarf this second tub down before I even get home, it would be glorious. No rules, no regulations, no speed bumps.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Just eat a whole tub of ice cream as fast as I can. Challenge accepted. And I'll tell you, teenage boys can crush a whole tub of ice cream real easy. They can make a dozen cookies vanish instantly. They have the power to inhale desserts like no one else can. And the real tell here is that the dad on the Reddit post even said, we would never let him eat a whole tub in one sitting. And that's the thing. The boy had an unregulated container of ice cream. And he thought, no one is going to know. No one is going to stop him from eating all this in one sitting. Let's do it. So he saw this as his big stroke of luck and secretly slurped it down. And then tried to lie about it when he got home by saying,

• 3:37Speaker 00

  no, no, I only got one, I swear. But little did he know, the entirety of Reddit was going to believe that lie. And he's probably OK with them calling him names and stuff because being misunderstood isn't as bad as being caught in your lies. But I see you, kid. Yeah, I've been in that same situation before. I've been in that situation many times. Two cupcakes I bought at the bake sale became one. Two chocolate bars from the fundraiser became one. And yeah, of course, two ice creams from the ice cream truck became one, too. And my mom could never understand why I would sometimes pay extra for a single cupcake.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  I'm Jack Reisider. This is Darknet Diaries.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  This episode is sponsored by ThreatLocker. The weird part about modern cyber attacks is how normal they look. The attacker logs in from Chrome, uses PowerShell, runs a remote admin tool your IT team already trusts. There's no custom malware, no dramatic movie hacker moment, just normal tools used in the wrong way. That's part of why ThreatLocker exists. ThreatLocker helps organizations control what software can run, what it can do, and how systems communicate. If attackers get credentials or land on a machine, they'll have a much harder time moving through the environment because security teams are realizing something important. Problem isn't always unknown software anymore. Sometimes it's trusted software being used by the wrong person. If you want to see how ThreatLocker works,

• 5:36Speaker 00

  go to threatlocker.com/darknet and book a demo today. That's threatlocker.com/darknet to book a demo.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  This episode is sponsored by Doppel. Protecting yourself from attackers used to be as simple as deleting dodgy-looking emails. But with AI, the attack surface has outgrown the defense that legacy vendors provide. Doppel was founded in 2022 to give companies back control. Doppel is an AI-native, social engineering defense platform. Doppel strengthens human risk management by training employees to recognize deception and provides digital risk protection across every channel. It even delivers agentic email security that doesn't just score the inbox, but takes down the attacker infrastructure behind the message. Those dodgy-looking emails have been replaced by bespoke and personalized texts, URLs, ads, and even social media connections.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  But Doppel can then turn these attacks your business receives to inform campaigns and security awareness training for your employees so that they know what to look out for. Doppel, outpacing what's next in social engineering. Learn more at doppel.com. That's spelled D-O-P-P-E-L, doppel.com.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Imagine going to a high school baseball game in Newport Ritchie, which is near Tampa, Florida. And you see one kid, a center fielder, who's absolutely tearing it up out there. He's catching anything that comes his way. He's got an arm like a rocket. He can hit anything thrown at him. He's built like a tank but runs like the wind. And it just looks like he's in a different league than the rest of those high school players on the baseball field. He's eating them up. It's like all the other kids are in a lower league than him, and they're just all playing in slow motion compared to him. You can tell this kid is the star. That is Ricky Handshoemaker.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  So I played center field, but initially, like, I was really known for, like, getting on base, getting hits, and then stealing bases.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Stealing bases? Is this where all this starts? Is this where all of it starts, stealing bases?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Coincidentally, yeah.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  But were computers interesting to you or not at all?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  No, I was your gamer. You know, like I said, I wasn't like your average nerdy kind of guy who was like antisocial or anything. Like, I was always out with my friends. I was always out on the streets, playing sports, you know, football, baseball, basketball with all my friends. Like, Friday night and Saturday night, I would go roller skating. So like, I was never really home. But like, I did have a passion for like, actual gaming.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  All right, so let's talk about gaming. What was your game of choice?

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Halo 3 was like my primary game.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  In 2010, 15-year-old Ricky is up late on a school night. His headphones are tuned in as he plays Halo 3 on his Xbox that's homing away. Ricky doesn't want to disturb his mom, who's sleeping in the other room. On his glowing TV screen, he's trying to escape what looks like a war zone.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  He's destroying all the other players in the game.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  I was good. Like, so I was always playing like MLG and like Team Slayer and like all the ranked playlists, like against the pros and everything like that. And then, um, of course, naturally, once you get to that level, there's like people who cheat on there and stuff. And I was a high rank, but you know, cheaters get high ranks too, naturally, because they're just cheating. So it kept happening to me.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  People would go up against Ricky and see that they can't beat him. So they decided to cheat to win. He didn't know what was happening at first.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  My screen would just go blank. And then they would stop the attack when the game was over, which means they just, they just win by default, pretty much. Cause we can't even move. Or if they hit you hard enough, like we actually like, our whole internet would just go out. I was with my mom. She's like, why is the internet out? And so I had to play stupid. Like, I have no idea. Like, I don't know what's happening.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  I've been in a similar situation. I remember the days when we had a family computer and I downloaded a lot of random stuff and installed it on there. And time and time again, I would break our computer. And I didn't want to get in trouble, so I would try real hard to fix it before anyone noticed. And because of that, I got really good at detecting viruses and malware and fixing it on the family PC. But for Ricky, he was on an Xbox and when he'd play, the internet would go down in the whole house. And it was just him and his mom living there. His dad left the picture a long time ago. But strangely, this pattern kept happening. When he would play Halo 3 against other players, the internet would go out. The game would disconnect. And then when he would finally get back on, he would see that he lost the match.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  It happened to me again and again. And I'm like, alright, like, then, like, through the, through word of mouth, I was like, oh, if they're DDoSing us, like, okay. So I'm like, what the hell is that? Like, I was getting DDoS attacked, like, over and over and over.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  Alright, so they somehow discovered your IP and then they attacked your IP. And that was enough to knock you offline and lose the game.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's kind of where it all started then, like, curiosity, I was like, okay, how are they doing this?

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Remember, outside of gaming, Ricky is not a computer guy. He doesn't know what's going on at all. So he just turns his Xbox off and jumps on the family PC and starts trying to look for answers.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  I started browsing some forums and I was like, okay, it's called DDoSing attacks. So I started looking that up and I'm like, hmm, okay, seems pretty simple. Like, there's a bunch of different kind of like booters, like an IRC booter, a putty booter. Like, you could, or you could just go online to a website and use that booter, which was like less powerful, but, um, it would get the job done. And I browsed the forums, found out what it was, downloaded the programs myself. So I was like, okay, well, if they do it to me, I'm gonna do it back to them.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Eventually, he gets to the bottom of it. He discovers a whole world of doffers and booters and punters and griefers who use malware to attack other players in the game to make them lose, so you can win. Ricky decided, well, hey, I wanna win too. I wanna try. So he downloads a tool. He says it was Can and Able and decides to try to use it to attack other players. He started a match, ran the tool to disconnect another player, then bingo. He sees they just freeze in the game and he can easily kill them. And he wins the match with almost zero effort. This was way easier than actually playing by the rules.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  That's kind of where I got introduced to that world.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so at that point, I mean, you were really competitive in baseball. You're really competitive at Halo. I just wonder, cause you had a sense of pride of breaking up on your own and, and being competitive in sports. And, and where'd that sense of pride go with cheating?

• 12:24Speaker 01

  I don't know. I just let it take over pretty much. I was like, well, this is easier than actually trying.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that's not the sportsmanlike way.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know. I just took the easy way out and.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Were you cheating in sports at all?

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Uh, no, that I was not cheating in.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Alright.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  I was just, I was naturally good.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, you were naturally good at Halo too. You were in MLG and all that stuff.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  And who would have thought that this innocent little victory in Halo was going to lead Ricky down a long, dark path? From here, he tried more Halo cheats like wall glitches, fast travel, reduced hitbox and more. It was fun. This was the new game, not to compete competitively in Halo, but to get around the game rules, to do things you weren't supposed to, to be a god in the game. It gave him a sense of power. He saw the game differently now. He stopped seeing things on the screen like Covenant and Banshees and Needlers. Now he was seeing bytes and ones and zeros and the data behind the game, which gave him an incredible win streak. You know, the type of win streaks that you just have to take a screenshot of

• 13:38Speaker 00

  so that you can look back at from time to time and remember those matches. But even being a god can get boring after a while. And even though he was the winner in those screenshots of his, he would notice that some people seem to be even cooler than him somehow. Everyone looks the same in Halo 3. You're all the same player, Master Chief. It's just everyone has a slightly different color. But there's one thing that sets you apart from everyone else. Your name, specifically your gamertag. These are special, actually. They're unique. There's only one person in the world with your gamertag. Some people call themselves cool things like Shadow Strike or Nebula Storm or Blade of Odin. Fine, but what about that guy that's just called Wolf?

• 14:22Speaker 00

  How did he get that name, Wolf? Now that is freaking cool. Well, it's a first come, first served kind of thing. So Wolf must have made that gamertag a long time ago when Xbox Live was first created. When gamertags first came out, they probably made the name in the first week or maybe even the first day, which makes them OG, right? But instead of original gangster, they're the original gamer. Ricky wanted one of these short, cool gamertags. That would really set him apart from the other normies playing in the game by the rules. But all the good names were taken. So he goes back online into the hack forums and starts looking to see, how do you get one of these? And it turns out, there's a whole underground marketplace of people buying and selling Xbox gamertags,

• 15:07Speaker 00

  but not in the way you might think. See, a typical online market, you'll see people selling things that they've had for a long time or something that they bought from someone else or something they made, right? But this was an underground hack forums marketplace. It operates differently. These gamertags weren't ones that sellers were sitting on for a while. No, all these gamertags were stolen. When Ricky found that out, he leaned in closer. How do you steal a gamertag? Well, there are a few ways, but the easiest is just to get someone's password and username and take over their account, change their password, and now that gamertag is yours. But getting someone's password is tricky.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Maybe an easier way to get it is to trick Microsoft that you're the actual owner of the account and you just lost the password. Ricky saw some people were doing that and decided to try it himself.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  There was a company called Zune, which was like Microsoft's like, uh, music app. And come to find out, what you could do is you could call up Zune and then like halfway through the call, like you just tell them your gamertag that you're targeting. And you say, okay, like, hey, my gamertag is Jack. And then you just stop the conversation and be like, I have to go real fast. Like, I'll call back.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Before hanging up though, Zune's support would give Ricky a reference number for the case that they were working on. And then he'd hang up and call a different number, Xbox Support this time. And they'd say, how can I help you? And he'd say, oh, well, I was on a call, but it dropped. I have a reference number if you want to pull the case details up?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Correct, yeah. You just simply say like, yo, I have a reference number, like, can you pull up my case? And then they would just give you the information like right then and there. Like, there was no questions asked.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  Ah, interesting. So it's almost like a bypass of a verbal authentication. So then when you call Xbox and say, I have this reference number, then they give you the email address. And then you say, can you reset the password?

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, like, here's my reference number, which would validate the account. And then just, you could just literally ask them, like, hey, like, what's the email? That I have on file? And they'd read it off to you.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  How do you get the password?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Okay, so back in the day, like AOL and Yahoo worked, your most popular domains. What's their proof of like ownership of an account of an email was literally like AOL was like, your billing zip code would verify the account and then they would be able to reset the password for you. Same with Yahoo. Um, I think Yahoo was like security questions, which back in the day like, was terrible because people would, a lot of the time, like chicken or pizza would be your favorite food that people would put and stuff like that. So they were pretty much takeable.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  See, that's the thing that amazes me about these teenage hackers. They see the world differently than us. Kind of like when you see motorcycles lane splitting. You ever get stuck on a highway and it's bumper to bumper traffic and you're standing still in your car? And a motorcycle comes zooming past you right in between the two lanes? And you're like, come on. And the motorcycle rider just looks back at you like you're a chump waiting in traffic like everyone else? And they just whiz by, like, there's no cars on the highway at all. These teenage hackers find ways through roadblocks that we just don't see. Like, you don't need someone's password when the password reset question is, what's your favorite food? And you put pizza up there and now anyone could just write pizza on there and they could reset your password for you.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  And it's like, come on, what's the point of passwords if they could just be bypassed so easy? And sometimes it would try to validate it's really you by asking for your zip code. Well, if you have their email address, it's not too hard to use some kind of people's search tool online to look to see what someone's zip code is. You and I don't think like that though, but Ricky does. He's the kind of guy that looks at us like weird chumps for choosing an easy password recovery question. This was all happening in 2012 and Ricky was 16 years old when he stole his first gamertag.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  He found the one he wanted, Wolverine. Yeah, that sounds cool. He wasn't an X-Men fan, he just liked the sound of it. So he called up Zune Support, which is a Microsoft product, and is like, "I have a problem with my account." They ask him for his email address associated with the account. He says, "Well, I don't know. Can you just look at my Xbox gamertag?" And they said, "You know what? That works. What's your gamertag?" Ricky says, "Wolverine." Zune Support says, "Ah, yes, I see your account, sir. What can I help you with?" Ricky says, "Okay, well, the problem is that when..." "You know what? Actually, hold on. Something just came up. Can I call you right back?" And Zune Support says, "Yeah, sure. Do you want a reference number for when you call back? It'll be easier for us to find your details." And Ricky says, "Yes. Yes, I do want that."

• 19:44Speaker 00

  And he hangs up. And then he calls Xbox Support this time and tells them, "I was on with support, but I got disconnected. Can you look up my case if I give you a reference number?" And they said, "Yeah, go ahead." And he reads the number to them, and they see his details. Xbox Support's mode of operation then was that if someone had a reference number, they must have already verified they are the account holder. So they ask him, "What's the problem? How can I help you?" And Ricky says, "I just forgot what email address I used for this account." He makes up some story about why he can't remember. He happened to be a good liar. Maybe it was that he got a new computer and didn't have those details on his new one. Xbox Support thinks, "You know what? This is a harmless request. Sure, your email address is blah, blah, blah at AOL.com."

• 20:29Speaker 00

  "Great," he says, "that's all I wanted." And he hangs up. Now, he has an email address associated with that gamertag. All he needs now is the password. Trying to get the password for an Xbox account is tricky, though. So he has a better solution. Try to reset the password on AOL.com's email address. And once in there, he can reset the Xbox account and get control of that gamertag. And this is where he uses different tricks to get into an AOL account, by telling the website, "I forgot my password," and it asking for his favorite food or zip code to verify it's him. And from there, bingo. He can now access the email account

• 21:10Speaker 00

  and reset the password for that Microsoft gamertag and get into it. This is how he became Wolverine.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just thought it was cool, like a cool alias to have. And that was like the first one I ever took. So I was like, "You know what? That's what it is."

• 21:26Speaker 00

  So Wolverine?

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's my alias.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  Ricky didn't have steel claws like Wolverine did. His weapons were his keyboard and telephone. And once Ricky got his first taste of stealing a gamertag, he wanted more. He went back to that marketplace on Hackforms where people were selling gamertags. People were selling things like Gang, or Spirit, or Booty, or Boss, for a few hundred bucks each. Ricky started stealing gamertags and then selling them for money on the site, for Bitcoin specifically. He started making some money off this. Not bad money either. A couple of good gamertags might sell for around $1,000, but many were just a few hundred bucks. And he'd play with them, too, just to dunk on people. He'd log in with a stolen gamertag, totally pwned some other players in Halo 3 by knocking them offline with some DDoS attack, and then just laugh at it all.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  But sometimes, people would report him for abuse, and this would bring the party to a screeching halt.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  And I thought it was funny, just like hit them offline and stuff like that. But eventually, you just get banned. Like, back then, like Xbox was big on like just banning your accounts and stuff for DDoS attacks. So like, I would just get banned over and over, which then led to my consoles being banned. So I was always at GameStop and whatnot, just trading in consoles for new consoles and selling my banned consoles and stuff like that.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  He told me this happened over a dozen times, and he would just keep selling banned Xboxes at the same GameStop, and then go to another one across town and buy another. And I just can't believe that they didn't catch on to him for constantly selling them banned Xboxes.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  They would plug it in to make sure it turned on, which was fine with me. But they never checked, like, connect it to Xbox Live and stuff like that.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  And he would do this again and again.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  So I would typically trade it in at one store and then go to a different GameStop and then buy the new console. I've probably went through at least 10, maybe closer to 20.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  You would think after a while that Ricky would be like, "All right, all right, enough of this getting banned. I'll stop attacking people." But for some reason, he was just so addicted to it that he would not stop attacking people and just kept getting reported for abuse again and again and again. And like, you would think after five times, it's like, "Okay, I'm tired of going down and getting a new Xbox." But not Ricky. He would just keep doing it. Now, eventually, he graduated to stealing something even more valuable. It wasn't just gamertags anymore. His attention turned to Instagram handles.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  I was always just the old-school Halo guy, like Xbox guy. Like, I didn't want to transition into Instagram. I just stuck to what I know. And then, just one day, like, a couple of my people were like, "Yo, like, why are you not doing Instagram? Like, it's the new wave." So they kind of persuaded me. And they were like, "Listen, here's like, here's an AOL email address. Like, it's for the Instagram @bro, just like B-R-O. Nobody can take it." And I'm like, "Dude, it's an AOL. Like, what do you mean, nobody can take it?"

• 24:25Speaker 00

  At the time, Ricky felt like he could steal any Xbox gamertag he wanted. "So what do you mean? You can't steal this Instagram name, Bro. It's tied to an AOL address account. Those are easy to get into." But this idea sparked something in Ricky. If he could get any gamertag he wanted, then how different would it be to get Instagram names? It's the same social engineering techniques that he figured out how to recover someone's password, but there's just way more money in it.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  With the Instagram Bro, like, how nobody could get it that was, like, trying to get it, it's because it was linked. It was an adult account on AOL, but it had, um... Like, it was like the parent account, and under the parent account, it had other accounts. And it was one of those emails under the parent account. That's why nobody could get it. And I was able to realize that. I realized it. Once I reset the main email, and I was like, "Yo, like, this isn't my email. Like, you have other accounts under that email." So, once I was able to match everything up, I was like, "Yo, it's that specific one. I don't remember the exact email." But I was like, "It's that one." I reset it, and the Instagram was right there. Funny story, though. The security question on it.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  I remember this conversation for the... Probably if you're ever, I'll remember this. The lady was like, "The security question is your favorite mythical creature." And I was like, "You know, I put something random. I apologize. I don't remember what it was." She's like, "Okay, well, it's big and hairy. As you can guess, I guessed Bigfoot." She started laughing, and she goes, "No, it's another word for Bigfoot." I said, "Sasquatch." She goes, "Yeah, that's right." Gave me the password reset.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Man, I absolutely hate how easy this is for him. That customer service person really failed at keeping our accounts safe. I hope they got fired for giving Ricky this Instagram account, Bro, because that's ridiculous. And that's how he got it. The way he'd steal an Instagram account is that he would get access to it, and he would log into it. And then he would have a second browser open with a brand-new, fresh Instagram account that he just made. And he would change the username of the stolen one to something else. And then he would quickly switch to his fresh account and change its username to this stolen username. That way, the person, when they figure out that their Instagram account got stolen and they recover it,

• 26:48Speaker 00

  they still have all their DMs and their followers and all that. It's just that their name was changed because Ricky stole it.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  I would genuinely, like, let them just keep their account. Like, I don't want to mess with their pictures and like, take down their Instagram and close the account or anything. Like, they can keep that. Like, I just, I got what I wanted, and that was it.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  A stolen Xbox handle might get you a few hundred dollars, but a good verified Instagram handle can go for a few thousand dollars. When Ricky stole the Instagram account, Bro, he says he sold it for $8,000. People were paying him in crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum. And Ricky was liking this. In an afternoon, he could steal a few accounts that would earn him maybe 10 grand. This would become his main focus, all the ins and outs of how to steal accounts and how to sell them. He learned verified accounts, sold more than non-verified. He was stealing usernames left and right. Of course, Ricky wasn't the only guy doing this. In fact, he wasn't even discovering how any of this stuff worked. He was just learning from others who were doing the same thing. There was this one SIM swapper that Ricky met online named Joseph Harris,

• 27:52Speaker 00

  who I interviewed a while back. If you want to hear Joseph's story, you can listen to that episode. It's episode 118 called Hot Swaps.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  So me and Joseph were like, kind of in the same world, you know? Taking usernames and whatnot like that. We never really, like, talked or anything. Like, I knew him, he knew me type of thing. But then, like, I ended up stealing a couple of his, like, PlayStation names that he had. And like, he asked for them back, and I was just like, "Fuck off," pretty much. And then, he was like, "Okay." Like, and then I felt bad, and we talked. But I never gave them back. But we talked, and then we became friends.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Never gave him back, he became friends. Yeah.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  This is a strange world that he's in where you earn respect for being a great liar. You earn respect for stealing things. Even if you steal things from other forum members, their reaction is like, oh, man, he caught me out. I should have secured my username better. Man, he's good. Him and Joseph became friends and they would swap strategies for stealing usernames and they would help each other out. But what makes all this so scary to me is that I don't even think Ricky was particularly good at computers. You have someone with very little computer skills that can just come at us and steal our stuff so easily. And it was really hard for victims to do anything. Instagram customer support is always overwhelmed and I bet so is Microsoft.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  And they often side with the thief by telling them, yeah, there's nothing we could do to help you get it back. It takes a lot of effort to recover a stolen username. So victims often would just give up and stop trying and they'd feel helpless in all this. And it just makes me wonder, how can I even protect myself when the company who keeps my stuff safe has these flaws? I mean, think about it like this, suppose I go and stay at a hotel and I leave my valuables in the room and I leave for the day. I'm assuming my stuff is nice and safe behind a locked door. But we've seen stories where criminals will target a guest in a hotel and they'll go to the front desk and say, ah, sorry, I'm staying in room 1020 and I locked myself out. Can I get a new key to get in?

• 29:53Speaker 00

  And the front desk sees these situations happen every day where a guest gets locked out of the room and they want to help the guest. So if a criminal is posing as a guest and they're convincing enough, they'll likely get the key. And it might play out like this, the front desk will ask for a photo ID, of course, but if you say, oh, yeah, you know what? I was, I left it in the room. I was going to the pool and I didn't bring anything and that's the problem. I left everything in the room. And that's a real scenario that happens all the time. So the hotel is used to this kind of thing. So the hotel front desk might say, well, can you give me some more details about yourself? Like what's your phone number, email address, full name? And if you can verify those things, you are absolutely getting the key to that room. And who would be good at doing such a crime? Liars would be.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Someone who can lie to the front desk person's face to get the room key. Which it sounds like Ricky must have been a really good liar to convince so many customer support reps to give him the information he wants so that he can get into an account. And it just makes me wonder, how do you protect yourself when a company that has your stuff doesn't have good security controls to protect their customers? So Ricky's progressing through this scene, making a few hundred dollars with each Xbox gamertag he steals. And then moving up to a few thousand dollars for each Instagram name he steals. But he started having trouble getting into some email accounts, like some he just could not get into because his social engineering skills just didn't work there or his password recovery tricks just didn't work.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  Especially when two-factor authentication was on for some email accounts. So he told a friend, do you know more ways to get into email accounts? And that's when his friend told him about SIM swapping.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Then as like securities and stuff like escalated, that's when like SIMing, like SIM swapping became a thing. So if we couldn't get it through like a password reset or anything through like security question, we could just SIM swap them.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  You've probably legally SIM swapped yourself a few times. Anytime you get a new phone and you have to move your number to the new phone you get, well, that's SIM swap. That's all it is, moving a mobile number to a new device. But what Ricky wanted to do was pose as the customer and convince the carrier that he just got a new phone and he wants to move his number to this new phone. I went into SIM swapping more in depth with episode 112 called Dirty Comms, which by the way, just took the lead for the most downloaded episode of mine. It has now achieved 1.2 million downloads. And if you haven't listened to episode 112, you should absolutely go do it. But basically what Ricky learned is that he can call the mobile provider and trick them into moving someone else's phone number to his phone.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  And if he can get that, then he can get into their email account, say something like, oh, I forgot my password. And it'll text them a code to generate a new password. And he can read those texts now. And from there, he can reset the password to the inbox and look at it and start rummaging through it, looking for usernames and gamertags to steal.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Once I had like the target that I was going for, like usually I had their name or something or their email. And I needed the number or like address or something, I would just usually typically call up like Amazon, PayPal or eBay. And those are like, I was going to get their information from one of those three companies as long as they had that on file or that person used like one of the three. And like social engineering, I would just be able to get the person's information.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  Okay. So you call, you call up Amazon and, and what information do you have? What information are you looking for?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm specifically probably targeting the number.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  You want the phone number?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  Associated with an email address?

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if I knew like you had Jack on Instagram and I had your name, I would be able to call up as you. I'll probably, at this point, I'm probably going to have a little, a little bit about you, maybe like an email address or something. And I would just see if you had any three of those accounts, PayPal, Amazon, eBay. If you had one of them, I was going to call them up as you. I would say like, hey, my name is Jack.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  I need help verifying my account or something like that. Or if it was eBay, I think I would say I need help with an order. And then they'd be like, okay, what order? And once I verified them and the name and the email on file, what I would do is like, oh, like make conversation. But oh, by the way, um, what's my number ending in whatever your number ended in? Because we would be able to see like the last two digits or something. And they would just read off the number. I'm not going to say there wasn't people who like haven't gotten away. Like I couldn't find them or something, or I just gave up because it was too hard and on to the next. But 90 something percent of the time, like it was successful.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  That's such a hard number to believe because nobody's taken my Instagram yet. And I, and I know people would love to have that feather in their hat to hack Jack.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, from personal experience, I, I like what you guys do. But this was also back in 2015 or so. And if you had the username Jack and somebody came and asked me

• 34:58Speaker 01

  for that handle, I was probably going to get it.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  It's real interesting to me how Ricky pieces all this together, isn't it? I mean, he's grabbing at a single digit of a phone number from this place or that place. He's grabbing at just a few digits of a social security number from here or there. And then he's connecting it all together to get a more complete detail view of his victims. Like for instance, he might go to Amazon, not knowing if this target of his has an Amazon account or not. And he would say, hey, I forgot my password. And the website would say, okay, what's your email address? And he would put in the email address and then I would say, all right, well, we just texted you a code which ends in these two digits, three, four, or whatever.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  And he's just like, great, that's all I wanted to know, the last two digits of the phone number associated to this account. Like you might think, what's the big deal if someone knows one of my social security numbers, right? Or the last two digits of my phone number? This is why, this is why right here, because people like Ricky are grabbing at every little detail to steal things from you so that it's just enough information that they can social engineer someone to give them the rest of the information. And they are persistent and clever and incentivized. I mean, how many times have you been asked to provide only the last four digits of your social security number to get something done? So the goal here was that Ricky needed to convince the mobile provider, he's actually the customer.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  And they would ask him to prove it by providing things like a social security number or personal details. And Ricky would be able to get this kind of information off you because he had access to a people's search database that for three bucks, he could enter in whatever little info he had on you and they would give him back a ton of details, which drives me nuts that we're so relaxed about our personal data and just give it to anyone who asks nicely. Because our lack of care about our own personal data translates to a lack of care for other companies to keep our personal data private. And that translates to criminals like Ricky who are exploiting our lack of care for his personal gain. We should be way more protective of who we're giving our private information to.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  All you have to do is put like your name in, in the search and it would show me all your addresses and stuff. That's how I would be able to buy the correct social. Because like, let's say your name is like a very common name or something, but I can match up your docs, like your address and stuff on the page, that's how I know what social to buy.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  So I'm not just blowing through every, everybody named John Doe and there's a hundred of them. I would just specifically target the one that had the correct docs and buy their social for $3, call up AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile or Sprint and give them the last four of the social, verify the account and just SIM swap them.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  Okay, is it that simple? You could call up this place and say, hey, I got a new phone number.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Back then, yeah.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Okay. And then you, can we verify who, that it's actually you? Okay, what do you, what information do you need? Well, let's have your social, okay, here it is. Let's have your phone number, okay, here it is. That's all we need, sir.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was it. And then they would ask for the new IMEI and the new SIM card number. And I had a burner phone and that was it. I'd get the text and I'd be in and out.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  When Ricky started sim swapping in 2015, he was going after video game accounts and social media usernames. And this is when his efforts really kicked into gear. He was taking over dozens of phone numbers and stealing lots of usernames. But after a while, he started to connect some dots, and his friends did too. All these usernames he was selling made his Bitcoin wallet keep getting bigger and bigger. And at the time, in 2016, Bitcoin was on this massive bull run, rising steadily and quickly, which meant a lot of people were getting into Bitcoin. And if you went anywhere online back then, you would definitely hear someone talking about Bitcoin.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  It's called Bitcoin, but it isn't really a coin, okay? It's an intangible thing. It's a logarithmic number.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  Bitcoin has outperformed every other investment around.

• 39:07Speaker 04

  Trading never ceases. Every 10 minutes, Bitcoin's heart beats. And transactions are processed. The exchanges never close.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Social media and YouTube was going nuts about cryptocurrencies. If you were holding Bitcoin then, in six months, your money would have doubled. And it was rising exponentially. It would have doubled again four months after that, and then doubled again three months after that. A lot of people were jumping in, fast, investing, holding, and surprisingly, telling everyone else what they're holding.

• 39:36Speaker 05

  I personally, I own Bitcoin in my hedge fund. I own Bitcoin in my fund. I own Bitcoin in my private account.

• 39:44Speaker 05

  It is a huge deal.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  I will show you my trend trading strategy for crypto. Ricky had Bitcoin and Ethereum himself. So he was watching videos like this, and he was seeing this new surge of holders come onto the scene. And he understood crypto enough to be familiar with how it all worked, how it's stored, how to transfer it, how to secure it. See, Bitcoin is electronic money. To transfer it, it's really no harder than just sending an email. And when it's sent, there's no way to undo it. So Ricky and his online friends got the idea that instead of hacking into people's stuff to steal something, to then sell it to turn it into Bitcoin, why not just hack into their crypto wallets directly and just steal it?

• 40:31Speaker 00

  Because after a while, social media handles and gamer tags just weren't enough. It was time to go bigger, something with greater payouts and an even greater risk. It was time to target people's crypto wallets. Well, you would sim swap them to get what, a username?

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I said, if we couldn't take the email or something, like, but we had the number on file, we would just sim swap it and then reset the email.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  And that was the whole point to the sim swap, to access their email account. By saying, "I forgot my password," and it would text them a code to reset it. And once he got into the email account, it was suddenly a high stakes, mad dash kind of moment. And typically, it was a group effort. A few of his close friends would also be part of this. Once the phone number was moved over to his new phone, suddenly, everyone was engaged. First, they'd crack into the email address. Then that username and password would get shared to the group, and his crew would start looting the inbox, looking for anything crypto-related to try to see where their Bitcoin was stored.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  If we're in your Gmail, like we're searching inbox. If we're in your iCloud, we're searching like pictures, text pads, like drafts and stuff like that. For Gmail, like specifically, a lot of people save passwords on Gmail. So we're gonna like, we're gonna like, check all those passwords and see if they work. I will say, there was one time that me and a couple of friends, we were able to get into an account. So he had a blockchain account, and we were like, okay, let's go. So we went into blockchain, reset the password. We're in. It had mid-seven figures in it. And he had a password to send the money out. And we could never find that password.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  So we never, like, we never took anything. But we're sitting there looking at, we're looking at that much money, and we never got it.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  People will typically store their crypto in one of two places, either on an exchange or in their own private wallet. And if it's on an exchange, well, that would quickly be discovered because he's in their inbox. And so he's just searching for every major exchange to see if that person has an account there. And if they found an email like, "Welcome to Coinbase," then they'd know this email address has a Coinbase account. And they'd just go into Coinbase and say, "I forgot my password." And they'd say, "No problem. We'll, we'll email you a recovery link." And they would recover the password. And boom, he would get into Coinbase and then have full control of someone else's money. And if the person is storing it in a private wallet, then to get access to that, you would need the private key for that wallet, or a seed phrase, which is what's used to generate the private key.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Ricky and his team understood what these keys and phrases look like. And so he would look for them in the inbox. Because these are things that you never want to lose if you're holding crypto. A lot of people will just email themselves the private keys. So surprisingly, searching for "private key" or "seed phrase" resulted in finding crypto wallets. But sometimes, people would take screenshots of these things and store them on their iCloud or Google Photos account, you know, for safekeeping. Surely, no one has access to your photos, right? Well, this crew would rummage through those photos, looking for anything that looked like a photo of a password, or a key, or a wallet, anything sensitive like that. And eventually, they would find a crypto wallet and drain it.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  The people that would, that were in the email would do that. And then they would send it out to like one of our fresh wallets that we all had.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  And then from there, split it however many ways?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, from there, then you split it separately. We're a group, so we always split everything. But like, I'm busy, I'm working, like, they have to just wait for me to be, to be ready. Because I typically had the burner phone.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Ricky doesn't remember the first crypto heist he did. He says it was probably something low, like probably under $20,000. And if you split that four ways, it's way less, right? Because he was in this crew, and Ricky had a certain skill set that complemented his crew.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Mine was probably doxing the person, finding the information. I had the burner phones.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  And this was the beginning of Ricky's crypto heist spree. We're gonna take a quick ad break here, but stay with us. Because when we come back, I'm gonna introduce you to his mother.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  This episode is sponsored by Delete Me. Have you ever thought, "I should really be doing something to protect myself from stalkers, scammers, and hackers?" But you're not sure what? Here's what you do. Go to joindelete.me/darknetdiaries and enter code DD20, and you'll get 20% off Delete Me. A few years ago, I signed up. And ever since then, Delete Me has been busy scouring the internet for my name and giving me reports on what they found and deleted stuff. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now, at a special discount just for my listeners. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to www.joindelete.me/darknetdiaries and use promo code DD20 at checkout.

• 45:27Speaker 00

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• 45:47Speaker 00

  While researching this episode, I met this guy named Mark.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  My name is Mark Reitzman, and I'm pretty much a lifelong tech guy.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  And I sat down with him to listen to his story. His story takes place at the same time Ricky was doing all this stuff.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  At the time, you know, I was working on something in the crypto space. I had been interviewed a couple of times. I was interviewed on a couple YouTube channels. I had, you know, my name and persona on the website that I was developing at the time.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  And there was this night in 2018 that permanently burned into Mark's memory. He remembers driving through the Arizona desert on his way to visit his dad.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  And I was actually talking to my father, and then all of a sudden, the line's dead.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  But Mark doesn't freak out. He's driving through the Arizona desert, far from civilization. The reception isn't great out there, so he's thinking, you know what, maybe I'm just out of range of the towers.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  I was sitting there on my, on the dashboard, so I could see the, I could see the front of the phone. It said, uh, it was like a network disconnect error. And, and an SOS at the top.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  How strange. But he can't do anything now. There's no cell service to call customer support, even if you wanted. And he's still driving to his dad's house. Maybe it'll start working when he gets there. Mark concentrates on the road in front of him. His headlights carve out a small bubble of light on the road. About 10 minutes go by, and still, his phone isn't connected to anything. Panic starts to sink in. He knew about sim swapping attacks, and now his thoughts were starting to eat him up. What if someone targeted him? His heart started racing. But this can't happen to Mark. He was smart about this. He put safeguards in place for this exact attack. It is not possible to sim swap him. He thought about this, and he was ready.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  I knew that it could happen, and I, and, but I thought, you know, I had set up my account profile with the carrier to where if, if I wanted to make a change on my account, I would have to go into a store physically and have my driver's license and my passport.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he set up his account to acquire two forms of ID, and he had to be present in the store for it to happen. There was no way to change his number over the phone. But despite putting those safeguards in place, his thoughts were still racing about what if, what if it did happen? There was no one around to help, and he had no working cellphone. He was all alone on the road with his thoughts. Maybe it's just a network connection issue? Maybe the bill didn't get paid? Maybe the credit card got marked as stolen? What is it? What's wrong? A little over an hour goes by with no connection. And he finally arrives at his dad's house.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  As soon as I got close to my parents' house, the wifi kicks in, and six password resets went right up my phone. So that's when I knew that it was an actual nightmare. You know, my dad opens the door, he's, he wants to greet me, you know, give me a hug. And I'm like, "I got an emergency." I hadn't seen him in, you know, two years. And, and it was panic. So as soon as I got my mobile phone working, you know, now I have to go deal with all the accounts. Like the email they got into to make sure they didn't set up some CC, where it's like every email I send out, you know, they get a, they get a copy without me knowing.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  So when you see that, now you, now your suspicion is confirmed. And so I imagine your, your heart sank.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I was, I, I mean, I still have PTSD over it today.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Six accounts, one attack. It all happened so fast. All while Mark was stuck behind the wheel in the middle of the desert, unable to do a thing about it. By the time he made it to his dad's house, he called the carrier to try to find out what happened.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Hey, I think something's wrong. I think my mobile account got stolen away.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  The person on the line jumps into liability mode and wonders if Mark is the one lying.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Well, how am I, I called you on my phone. I was in such a panic that I rushed inside the house and called you for my cellphone. So how am I even able to call you?

• 49:49Speaker 00

  Good points, says the carrier. Mark quickly starts trying to recover his account. He knew he had been SIM swapped. He knew his accounts were taken over by someone else. He knew people were trying to steal money from him right now. There was no time to say hi to dad. He rolls up his sleeves and gets busy trying to get control of his accounts again. Lucky for him, he was able to get his phone reconnected rather quickly, but the hackers had an hour head start. So he's racing to do damage control. He did a password reset on his email. He got back in. He looked to see what emails came in. There were password resets for a few accounts.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  It was a bank account. It was two crypto accounts, two cloud accounts and an email account. And so I have to reset them and check the details.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  One was his Coinbase account. Someone changed the password on it. That's where he kept his Bitcoin. It's not good to see that someone got access to his Coinbase wallet. He resets the password there and gets into it to see what happened.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  The only thing I had at that point was Bitcoin. It's the only thing I cared about. I wasn't doing anything else. It was pure Bitcoin. So they just took, you know, the 2.2 Bitcoin away.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  Dang, they stole all of it. It was everything he had. That wasn't worth a lot of money at the time, but still they got him for everything. And it all happened so fast. Mark was mortified. It's like coming to your house just to see the place ransacked, your valuables stolen. Suddenly you feel so vulnerable. You feel defenseless. You don't know if they're coming back or what's next.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  At that point, my mobile service is working, but then every time I went to sleep, I'm thinking, well, are they going to like SIM swap me, you know, an hour later and then, and then port it back at 4:00 AM? And so for about 60 to 90 days, every day I woke up, whether it was three in the morning, six, seven in the morning, I would look at my phone and see if it had LTE. And I didn't use wifi for about 90 days because I was afraid that would mask it where I'd wake up and I've got Twitter updates, email updates, whatever, you know, comes in on the phone. Over data, I might get tricked in thinking that, you know, the voice and the SMS is still working.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Mark became obsessed with trying to find out who did this to him. He called the mobile provider over and over again, seeking answers, but they refused to tell him anything. All he wanted to know was what employee or what store authorized this SIM swap? Because he put those protections in place. So how did all that get ignored? But they were protecting their employees by not saying which employee did it or how it happened or what department did it or what store. But after a lot of persistence and a lucky break, he traced it back to an employee at a third-party phone store in Memphis, Tennessee. You know, the ones that say like they're authorized resellers of a mobile provider. Nowhere near where Mark lived. It happened to be that employee's last day at work.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  And it looks like someone paid them to SIM swap a few phone numbers before leaving. So while it says very clearly in Mark's account, "Do not SIM swap this customer unless they show two types of photo ID and are there in person," the employee had enough privileges in the system to simply type, "Yeah, I saw both IDs and he was here in person." And he was able to conduct the SIM swap. Because at the end of the day, that's all this really is. It's a confirmation on a computer somewhere that you saw both IDs. Mark says that's as far as he got with his investigation. He doesn't know where his money went or who actually stole it. Just because the guy in the store did the SIM swap doesn't mean that he's the one who stole the crypto. He just got paid his cut for doing the swap, which is known as an innie, an insider,

• 53:27Speaker 00

  to help you get someone else's phone number. And while this absolutely terrified Mark and infuriated him, he didn't feel like it was a big enough loss for him to open an investigation and go to court. Even if he somehow recovered his Bitcoin, it would cost way more in lawyer fees and it just wouldn't be worth it. So he let it go. The thieves got away cleanly with his 2.2 Bitcoin. And it's been over a decade now since this attack and still Mark can't fully shake this. Like every time he flies, he gets a little worried that his phone service is going to be disconnected for a few hours. Like a 20-hour trip to Asia is pure agony for him after being a victim like this.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  I, I mean, I still have PTSD over it today. Like not to take away from real PTSD, but sort of this digital PTSD of, you know, not knowing, like every time I wake up, it's like, okay, I'm going to log into my computer, log in, you know, open up my phone and, and, you know, fortunately, everything has been safe since then. But yeah, I was, I mean, it was painful. I was very angry for months. I couldn't sleep for months.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  But despite this being a traumatizing moment for Mark, he used it as sort of an origin story of his own. He was so sick of mobile providers being pointless at protecting us against SIM swaps that he started his own service to stop people who try to hijack phone numbers like this. His company is called Ifani. It's a mobile carrier that resells AT&T and Verizon service with one big difference: extra protection against SIM swap attacks. And as we heard from Ricky Handshoemaker, the social engineering starts long before the phone call even starts. As he told me, he found many of his targets because they were just too public about their crypto. Someone would post on Twitter excited that their coin is going up or spoke on a panel about investing in certain coins and then posting that to YouTube.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  Or they would share tips on what to invest and how to store your coins. It's all an attacker needs to hone in on their targets. The more they know about what accounts you have or what coins you have or what software you use, and the more they can use that to craft an attack just for you. I always tell people the number one rule about having crypto is don't tell anyone you have crypto. Because even if your digital security is tip-top, I've heard stories about people getting drugged or robbed at gunpoint to get someone's crypto. It's brutal out there. And for Mark, all that became a very painful lesson that he still thinks about nearly a decade after his attack.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  With crypto, like my wife knows that when I'm going to do anything with crypto, it's like stay 30 feet away from me. I don't want any distractions. I don't want anybody asking me a question. And I'm just really, very conscious now about the fact that most hacking, you know, a lot of people think that hackers are trying to hack into your laptop or they're trying to hack into, you know, the backend of your Android phone, your iOS phone. But the reality is, is that, you know, it's probably like 99% of hacking is hacking the human mind. And it's trying to get you to make a mistake or, or a company, somebody that works at a company that you rely on for them to make a mistake.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  And it really just comes down to like hacking the mind.

• 56:39Speaker 00

  We have no idea if Ricky actually hacked Mark or not. He probably didn't. But I wanted to talk with Mark because I wanted to get a feeling of what that scenario is like for the victim. What does the SIM swap look like from the other side? And it sounds awful. Nobody should have their stuff stolen like that. Ricky didn't just stop at one heist. Once he got a taste of the money that he could steal, he was hooked. He wanted to do this again and again. And very quickly, the money started adding up. In 2018, the year Mark was targeted, Ricky Handshoemaker and his crew got so good at this that they were bringing in millions of dollars from their victims.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  We found the money, we send it out. And a couple million here, a couple hundred thousand there. And, you know, it adds up.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  These numbers are startling, right? You've had, you've had to be surprised by a first big hundred thousand dollars or a million dollar lick.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. When I started doing it all, like actually SIM swapping and crypto and stuff, like late teenager, maybe 20? And I was like, damn dude, like I'm making more like than people make in a lifetime or like more than their decade of a salary. And I'm making that in 10 minutes.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  Ricky said that he would sometimes pay an employee at a cellphone store a couple hundred bucks to help them do a SIM swap. An insider who could bypass the security protections, just like what happened to Mark. This insider, he says, didn't know exactly how much was being stolen in crypto. They were just happy to get a few hundred bucks to change someone's phone number in the system. But that was nothing compared to the lion's share that Ricky and his crew would get from the heist.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  So once I had a couple million, I was like, damn, like, my, my moral compass checked in. I'm like, I'm like actually screwing people's lives up. Like I have my own kid, like my kid's going to be set for life. Like just, just living life now. But we just kept going. It was like, almost like an addiction at that point.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  While all this was going on, Ricky was living a double life. He had just turned 18. He had just finished high school. He did not get the baseball scholarship for college. He did get a girlfriend and they had a kid together. And he was still living at home with his mom. And he had a nine-to-five job for the county's park and recreation department. You know, to keep up with the ruse that he's got some normal job with a regular income. But of course, that job was boring compared to his online world where millions of dollars were passing through his fingers.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  So like, I was just like changing trash bags and stuff like that at a park, sitting in a work truck. So I had like all the time in the world to just be on my phone, like talking to everybody on Discord or Skype or something like that.

• 59:23Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  And while I'm at work, like we're just hitting targets for crypto.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  I had no idea. You have a boy that works for the city. This is Debbie, Ricky's mom. He had a county job. Wasn't the best money, but I was happy he had it.

• 59:39Speaker 05

  He had good benefits. He had retirement with it and he went to work every day.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  She had no idea her son was living this double life, bringing in anywhere from a hundred thousand dollars to a million dollars from victims. But having all this Bitcoin was pointless unless Ricky could spend it. And this is where he had to be careful. Crypto exchanges require KYC, which stands for Know Your Customer. They want your full name and picture of your ID before they will let you exchange cryptocurrency for cash. So that wasn't going to work. His Bitcoin wallet was likely marked as fraudulent. And if he used an exchange and gave them his name, then they would probably call the cops on him. So he needed a new plan, a way to cash out Bitcoin without using an exchange. And basically, he just found another person in the world who would do it. Like he would send them the Bitcoin and they would hand him cash.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  And he met them through localbitcoins.com.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  I had a guy in the Tampa area. If I needed 20,000 cash or less, I can go to him. Or if I needed more, I had a guy that was in Miami. And he never scammed me, but I would send him the crypto and he would mail me the cash.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's talk about both of these, right? So when you go to meet someone, how does this meet go down?

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Typically, it was at like a McDonald's or something. We would just go sit in the booth. I would send him the Bitcoin. We would wait for the confirmations and for him to get it in his account. And he would give me the cash. Prior to that, though, we had like the deal locked in at like a certain amount because like, you know, Bitcoin go up and down. But I would typically just lock in the deal. And I'd be okay. We'll meet at seven o'clock. This is where we're going. He would send me an address and I would just go there.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  And then he just hand you an envelope?

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, or just straight cash or envelope and whatnot. But it was always like a public place. Like it was never like in a dark alley or anything crazy like that.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  That's the classic way local bitcoins worked. You meet someone in person, you send them the Bitcoin and they hand you the cash. Of course, they'd take a percentage for doing this deal. Maybe they'd give Ricky 95% of the money and keep 5% for themselves for the trouble of having to launder these Bitcoins. So you actually had a lot of people making decent money on local Bitcoins, just buying crypto off people. But eventually Ricky needed to cash out bigger and bigger amounts. And this person he was working with wasn't able to cash out what he needed. So Ricky had to find someone new. And this new person was like, send me the Bitcoin. I'll send you the cash in the mail.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  It typically would just come in like a vacuum sealed, like clear envelope, wrapped in like another envelope kind of thing. Sometimes it would be like inside of a book, like a big like Harry Potter book or something like that. And like the pages would be cut out and the money would be like in there. And what's funny is like I lived with my mom, so like packages are coming to the house, but you know, I'm 18 years old. Like she's not going through my mail. So she would just take the envelope, put it on my bed and she'd be like, hey, the mail came for you. She had no idea what was inside of it.

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  All right, so you're loading it up in crypto here. Things are coming in hundred thousand dollar, million dollars at a time. So you're leading a double life here. You're living with your mom. Does she have any idea that you're doing any of this stuff, involved with this?

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  First of all, she doesn't really understand like what the hell crypto was. And she was like, Ricky, like, what are you doing? Like, how do you have all this money? Like I was, I bought like a hundred thousand dollar like F250 Ford truck. I had jet skis. I had side by sides. I got a lot of toys and stuff like that.

• 1:03:09Speaker 05

  It really got my attention when he came home with the truck. I said, what is going on?

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  I would just lie to her. I'd be like, I invested back then. And you know, at the time when I started, Bitcoin was a couple hundred dollars and now it's let's say 3,000, 6,000 dollars. So I made a lot just from that, that little growth. So I was able, but that's what I told her. Meanwhile, I'm stealing, I'm stealing it, but. So she has really no idea like the severity of it.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  So my mom, she believed me. She believed that I was saying like, there's no reason for her not to believe me.

• 1:03:45Speaker 05

  He never gave me a reason not to believe what he was doing was wrong. Because he wasn't that kind of kid.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  Ricky's crypto investment explanation wasn't a total lie. He did have Bitcoin investments. And Debbie didn't have any reason to question it. After all, her own mother, Ricky's grandmother dabbled in Bitcoin too, so she knew it was real. Ricky also had a young kid at home. And Debbie thought, why would he do anything to throw his life away?

• 1:04:10Speaker 05

  I was a single mom. I, you know, I did the best I could growing up with him. He was a very honest child, never got in trouble, never was in like the principal's office. He didn't get in fights. So when he came home with the truck, I just said, you know, I don't know what you're doing or what's going on. But that's not normal. And all I know is if you get in trouble, there's not much I can do.

• 1:04:34Speaker 05

  I mean, I didn't, you know, and I said, you had, at that time, it was just his daughter. And you know, between the mom and my son being the parents to this child, they were both younger. And I was very involved with my granddaughter. And I just said to him, you know, it's just not your life anymore. You have a child involved here.

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  Debbie believed her son and was proud of him and had no reason to think he would lie to her. In fact, she thought Ricky's crypto savviness could actually help others. At the time, she worked as a nurse in the Pasco County Jail. And one day she overheard some sheriff's deputies yapping about crypto.

• 1:05:13Speaker 05

  I assumed at this point my son was doing really good with crypto, you know, because that's what the vision I was getting. And you know, I kind of went into work and was saying, yeah, my son, you know, does crypto, Bitcoin and you know, he's done really well and they've matured. And I remember one of the deputies, you know, was really interested and he's like, really?

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  And they were like, oh, we'd love to talk to him.

• 1:05:36Speaker 05

  And I was like, yeah, he's doing really good with it. And one of the guys, one of the deputies wanted to get with him and speak with my son.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  So next thing you know, my mom is like having me call these police officers and they're coming to the house to ask me about crypto. They're asking me about investing. They're asking me like, what do I think? I just went along with it. Like, yeah, you know, crypto is great. Like this is what I recommend or I recommend Bitcoin or Ethereum. I think XRP was actually blowing up at that time too. I think I made a lot off XRP actually, like which, not legitimately, but like I used my dirty money and put it into XRP and XRP blew up. And I was telling them about that and they were, they were loving it. So they were just like, okay, cool. Like, you know, thanks, thanks for chatting. Like they had no idea I was stealing it.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  And how are you feeling inside?

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm nervous. I'm like, mom, that's what I told her. Like, yo, never again. Like, don't, like, don't tell people what I do.

• 1:06:28Speaker 05

  And I said to Ricky, and you let this deputy come to the house and like talk to you?

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  By 2018, the walls started closing in on Ricky. He says he has a hunch of when it all started to unravel. One night he was doing a SIM swap, a crypto heist with some other guys online, his crew. And one of the guys was a younger kid. And this younger kid was posing as an AT&T employee, trying to social engineer someone into doing the SIM swap for him. But little did this kid know, his mother was listening through the door and she heard him trying to scam someone on the phone. That kid's mom called the cops on her son and that kid got arrested in Michigan. Ricky and his crew did not know this. All they knew was that kid suddenly went missing. That's strange, but they had no idea he got arrested.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  But then that kid came back out of the blue and really, really, really badly wanted to get in on the action again. Ricky suspected that's really weird that this kid got a bunch of money from a crypto heist and then disappeared for a while and now really wants back in? They kept that kid at arm's length, but that didn't matter. Another one of Ricky's friends was arrested shortly after, who was also present on that same call where the kid's mom overheard them. Joel Ortiz was arrested for SIM swapping and stealing millions of dollars in crypto from victims. He pled guilty and a judge sentenced him to a decade behind bars. Prosecutors said that he was the first SIM swapper to ever be sentenced to prison in the US.

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  And after hearing about Joel's arrest, Ricky was worried that he might be next.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  I've known Joel. I've talked to him and I've done stuff with him and stuff where it was like, hold on, like this is a huge red flag. And I remember I was eating at Ford's Garage when it happened, when I found out that Joel got arrested. So that's what kind of raised my suspicion. I'm like, oh shit, like Joel got caught, like.

• 1:08:27Speaker 00

  After, after hearing Joel went down, you would think that it would give you a spook of some kind and be like, okay, I'm gonna lay low for a couple of weeks or clear some stuff or get rid of some of the evidence.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  But you didn't do any of that?

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  Just a day after learning about Joel's arrest, the dominoes started to fall. There are moments in our life that stand out forever. Maybe it's when your first child is born or first kiss or playing a video game for the first time. For Ricky, that day was July 18th, 2018. On that day, Ricky was still living at home with his mom and he had broken up with his girlfriend that he had a child with, but he had a new woman and a new child with her. I think the baby was a few months old at that point. And the day started just like any other day. Ricky was getting ready to go to work at the Parks and Recreation Department and his girlfriend left the house just before him so that she could go to work.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  I used to live by like a cul-de-sac area. And when she went to work, she's like, hey, there's a lot of cops in this cul-de-sac. I was like, okay, come back. Like that's, that's weird. That's, that's off to me. So when she went around the block the other way, she's like, yo, they're also on this side of the house, like on this block. I was like, all right, like I'm pretty sure they're coming.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  I walk outside to go just act like I'm going to work. Like I knew at that point that they were probably like coming for me. I could see them coming down the road and I was like, just, just try to play it off. And I went to go get up on my truck and they were like, don't go in your truck. Don't run, don't run.

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  Ricky stayed still, standing next to his truck as officers handcuffed him. If you want to lean against your truck or something.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  If whatever, I mean, I'm just.

• 1:10:22Speaker 06

  The big one might, the little one's hurt.

• 1:10:26Speaker 06

  You have anything on you that might hurt us if we bash you down or whatever? All right, just hang tight. You understand right now you're just being detained.

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  This is body cam audio from Ricky's arrest by the Pasco County Sheriff's Office. It's the very same sheriff's office where his mom Debbie worked as a nurse.

• 1:10:43Speaker 05

  When they came here that day and, you know, they, I guess it would be a raid the house, but they were very, you know, doing the search warrant stuff, but they did not like break down our doors. They didn't do anything. So now I kind of like get up out of my bed and I look into like the kitchen area and there's two cops standing in the doorway. And they're like, hey Debbie, I need you to come out here.

• 1:11:07Speaker 00

  They know you?

• 1:11:08Speaker 05

  They might, yeah, they knew my name. They knew everything. Now, yeah, I knew some of them from coming in and out of work.

• 1:11:15Speaker 05

  I think I kept saying, what is going on? What is going on? What is happening?

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  And when they finally tell you, this is what we think is going on, what was your reaction to that?

• 1:11:23Speaker 05

  We have a, my reaction to that was like, well, isn't Bitcoin, isn't this legal? Like, that was my first reaction, like, but I thought it was legal. So I kind of like looked at him and he goes, he was not, those coins and the money that he was getting Debbie did not belong to him. He was stealing them. And that's when I really realized like, oh,

• 1:11:48Speaker 05

  okay, so, so now what?

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  Debbie sat outside the front of the house with Ricky as deputies collected evidence. Some of Ricky's burner phones, his iPhone, his crypto wallets and some other SIM cards were taken.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  They took, um, my truck. They took two side by sides. They took a trailer I had, the trailer and haul everything.

• 1:12:07Speaker 00

  Ricky was taken away in the back of a squad car to jail.

• 1:12:10Speaker 06

  Post in four of one male adult, 1012.

• 1:12:16Speaker 06

  Nothing else is in your pockets?

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Uh, no, sir.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  They drive off to jail. The 25 minute ride is mostly quiet. Ricky is alone with his thoughts. But he does ask the officer behind the wheel what to expect.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  Do you know how all this all goes? Like, do I see a judge and then?

• 1:12:35Speaker 06

  You'll have, you'll have advisors.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  I will?

• 1:12:39Speaker 06

  And that's, that'll be done by video, like chat or whatever.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  That'll be today, right?

• 1:12:47Speaker 06

  Should be.

• 1:12:47Speaker 00

  I can't get over how calm Ricky sounds. He had been cooking up these schemes for years to steal things from who knows how many victims, starting with a few hundred dollars in gamer tags to millions of dollars in crypto wallets. And it all came to an end here in the back of the squad car? Maybe he was feeling relief, like his big secret's out. He doesn't have to lie to his mom anymore or try to walk quietly in the shadows of his double life. But sitting in the back of the car, you have to wonder what else is going through his head? What's gonna happen to me? What about my family? What about my money? He quietly listens as the officer driving him to the jail spells out the next steps for him.

• 1:13:27Speaker 06

  I would think it would be this afternoon.

• 1:13:31Speaker 06

  And that's when they'll basically just announce what you're charged with. And then, uh, you know, whether you're gonna, whether you're gonna retain your own attorney or whether you're asking for a public defender.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:43Speaker 06

  And then, uh,

• 1:13:46Speaker 06

  but that is, again, I don't know if you're, if you're being charged federally.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:51Speaker 06

  Which makes a difference, so.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  All right, thank you.

• 1:13:55Speaker 06

  Yes, sir.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  Ricky was booked in the county jail. His mom was so distraught though. She didn't want to see her son in jail. What mother would? So she went down to jail to see if she could bail him out.

• 1:14:07Speaker 05

  I just knew it had to be done. I wasn't leaving him in jail.

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  Did he go to the very jail you worked at?

• 1:14:11Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, he sure did. All my nursing staff friends, they all were like, oh my God, Debbie's son's here. What's going on? And then like the sergeant, like they all knew, like, you know, when it's like posted bond for him,

• 1:14:26Speaker 05

  you know, get him out of here. Yeah, they did, they did do a little bit of, let's say courtesy for, you know, I shouldn't say courtesy, but they treated him knowing that he was my son, let's move him along.

• 1:14:38Speaker 05

  You know?

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, that must have been embarrassing.

• 1:14:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, a little bit embarrassing, a little bit of shocking, embarrassing. Um, the only thing I, I mean, I wasn't actually physically working there anymore. I had just left like six months prior.

• 1:14:52Speaker 05

  But, I mean, it was still fresh. I had worked there for, you know, almost 10 years.

• 1:14:56Speaker 00

  They said his bail was a hundred and $10,000. The cost of a bail bond is usually 10 to 15% of the total amount. Debbie ended up paying that to a bail bondsman to get him out. She didn't even hesitate. She just immediately was there for him. Prosecutors charged Ricky with grand theft and money laundering. The case against him dragged on for four years. He had to wear an ankle monitor during that whole time and follow a strict curfew. He pled guilty to federal charges of computer misconduct and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. By the time he went before a judge for sentencing, Ricky didn't know what to expect in the courtroom or how it would affect his family. His mom and fiance were there during the sentencing.

• 1:15:36Speaker 05

  It was horrible. It was, I think, one of the saddest days of my life. I mean, I remember standing in front of that judge. I just cried and said, look, I, I know my son did wrong. I, I know he did wrong. Believe me. I can't believe he did all this, but he's, that's not my, like, that's not the kind of kid he is. It was horrible.

• 1:15:56Speaker 00

  What did the judge say to that?

• 1:15:59Speaker 05

  She was a woman and I could almost feel her sympathy for me and getting it, but the law is the law. And I agree. And the law is the law. And my son broke the law. And he had to pay his consequences and I let him know, you did not just do this to yourself. You did this to your whole family. We are all suffering through this. We're suffering more than you are.

• 1:16:24Speaker 00

  The judge sentenced Ricky to four years in federal prison and ordered him to pay $7.6 million in restitution, which is what the courts accused him of stealing.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  I knew it could have, I knew it could have been worse and it should have been worse. And I was thankful that I got the 48 months. Like I knew it was coming and I knew it had to happen because like all the havoc I caused. And I was like, you know, I gotta deal with it. I did what I did and now I gotta do it.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Like, I lost, like, I had to leave, like, everybody, like my family, my mom, my grandparents, my kid, like, everybody.

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  So your child was four or five months old when you went away?

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  Correct. And then that's like super hard because like all those like, like I've always said, like the money, whatever, like the money can't buy back those memories that I missed.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Like, there's nothing I could do, like his first walk, his first talk, like stuff like that, that money can't buy.

• 1:17:24Speaker 05

  It was so hard coming to see him in, in prison and having to leave,

• 1:17:29Speaker 05

  knowing that my kid's in prison. Me and his fiance, we went and saw Ricky at least once a month, if not twice a month. We'd pack up the car, we'd leave early one morning, get there, we drove, you know, six hours, whatever it was, with two kids in the car, me and her only, no man, nobody to help us. And, um, we drove down there and, you know, had to do what we had to do. And then spend, spend the night in a hotel. I mean, it was horrible. Embarrassing, horrible, a combo of everything.

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  So many criminal hacker stories go the same way. There's a video game, a cheat, an underground community, an exploit, a payday, and then the knock on the door. They don't usually have the foresight to see how it will inevitably end. What do those millions of dollars really buy you? A couple of years of wealth that you can't really show anyone? Some screenshots of good old times? The skills to find gaps in security through social engineering?

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  Whatever it is, the windfall is worth a lot less when you factor in what you lose. That's the real cost. No cryptocurrency can buy back lost time or memories with your children. That's what Ricky learned. What was the worst part of this whole experience?

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  The worst part was the victims because, I mean, they didn't deserve it, like, you know? So that was the worst part, like dealing with, I was like doing terrible things. But like, as you have a chance, like in prison, you're like, dude, like looking back on like this shit that you caused. Like, I can only imagine if I was in their shoes with a kid, like that could have been used for like, my, like their kids, like college funds or retirement or, you know, whatever the case may have been that they had that much money for. And like, I just came by and took it all.

• 1:19:30Speaker 00

  I, if it was me, I think I would have been, the saddest or the worst part of it was just not seeing my child in those early day, in those early years. Did that have an effect on you?

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that's like the second part of it. Like the first part was like, how I ruined innocent people's lives. The second part now is like, I went to prison, I affected more people than just myself. Like, I lost, like, I had to leave, like, everybody, like my family, my mom, my grandparents, my kid, like, everybody. They were devastated. Like, I know they were devastated, like, and it hurt me knowing that I hurt them like that. Like, my actions caused all that.

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  After serving just a little more than two years in prison, Ricky got out early in 2024. And these days he's thinking a lot about the time he has now. Since his release, he's tried to turn his story into something useful to reach out to the very gamers like him who may follow a darker path of social engineering. He's spoken at anti-fraud events and security conferences like Black Hat and DEFCON. And Ricky, what would have made a difference to you as a teenager that would have stopped you going down this pathway?

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  Probably like companies who could intervene, like get you before you're, it's too late. If you had a chance to use your skills for good and like actually help companies and whatnot where they could be like, hey, like, like we offer you, you know, a job, said job into this world where you don't have to do what I was doing.

• 1:21:01Speaker 00

  I agree with that. The people in his bubble at that time were all criminals and they used their skills for bad. But if he had more exposure to people, mentors, for instance, who could show him that these hacking tricks he knows, the cleverness of his social engineering skills and his OSN skills can be used for good? And here's how? I think that kind of stuff does influence a lot of people to turn away from their life of crime and to find a new home, to be a productive member of society. And so he's trying to do that now. He's trying to build a pen testing company with another former SIM swapper named Joseph Harris, one of the people Ricky met in the hacker forums. And they're hoping to get this company up and running next year.

• 1:21:51Speaker 00

  A big thank you to Ricky and Debbie Hen Schumaker for sharing this story with us. And also thanks to Mark Kreitzman for telling us about one of the worst days of his life. You can learn more about what he's working on at ifani.com. If you liked this episode, go listen to our most popular episode we've ever made, episode 112, called Dirty Comms, which goes into more details about this whole underground world. Or listen to Joseph Harris's story, which is episode 118 called Hot Swaps. Hey, have you listened to my other podcast yet? Lo? It is wild. A lot of feedback from people are saying, I'll pass, which is fine. It's not for everyone. But I'm getting even more feedback from people saying, well, here, let me actually pull up one of the quotes that came in today. "The end of episode one left me speechless."

• 1:22:33Speaker 00

  And someone else wrote, "It has moved me in a way that I did not think a podcast could." I mean, when is the last time you heard a show that moved you in a way that you didn't know was possible? If you need that in your life, open your podcast player and type in Lo, L-O-W. I made it as easy as possible to find. Go find it, go listen to it and tell me what you think. This show is created by me, The Ghost in the Groceries, Jack Reiser. This episode was written and produced by the packet snacker Sean Powers, assembled by the fridge freaker Tristan Ledger, mixing by Proximity Sound, theme music by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. All right, question. If you dug up a tomb that was in a pyramid, does it become unencrypted? This is Darknet Diaries.