and charge criminals, we had to buy things from those criminals using the shadowcrew website. albert had a number of screen jam names, but the main screen name was couple ba johnny. they were using albert to purchase contraband from other individuals to build cases against those individuals. we bought credit cards, passports, driver s licenses, cashier s checks, albert had to continually introduce new agents in an undercover capacity and vouch for them. were you a member of shadowcrew? yeah. what was your screen name? i m not giving up my screen name. why can t you tell me? um, i don t know. i can tell you mine. i won t tell you anyone else s. okay. so i was eating one to two chocolate wendy s frosties a
in manhattan who was going to open up an entirely new world for us. and so we offered albert a deal that if we got the charges dropped, he would have to be an informant fighting cybercrime in the federal government s investigation into shadowcrew. when albert agreed to cooperate and became an informant, the idea was to send him back in to the shadowcrew site and introduce a number of us in an undercover capacity so that we could collect our own intelligence and our own information. but there were a number of stresses right up front. one of them being where were we going to do this? it s not like he could walk into a secret service office and plug in and get a secret service ip address and go log into shadowcrew because we knew shadowcrew was blocking ip addresses, and if he had logged in from a government agency, the whole thing would have been blown. so we had to find a location,
and who did it, and that s how he got into computers. and over time, albert became capable of just about anything when it comes to computers, network intrusions, et cetera. we learned that albert had been involved in intrusions or attempted intrusions into nasa and to the government of india also. he was 14 years old at the time. it became a game to him. so what we learned through the debriefings with him was that he was conducting criminal activity through a global criminal website for hacking and fraud with 4,000 members called shadowcrew. this was a completely new criminal enterprise that only operated online. this was so unique and so new and so unfathomable, and they were completely anonymous. so what we learned through the briefings with him is that shadowcrew was started by two
we d amassed all this evidence, and we had built great cases against the members of an international hacking website called shadowcrew. but it wasn t like the traditional investigation. these criminals were able to hide behind the internet. at that time all we had identified was the screen name that would pop up on the chat when we would communicate with them. these are human beings. you need to know their name, their address, where they are and who they are in order to be able to prosecute the individuals and arrest them. some of the nicknames they used were deck, macgyver, develop our, d and d silencer. mintfloss, liquid technique. we can t arrest mintfloss, velo velour, or scarface. you can t arrest somebody if you don t know who they are. many of the shadowcrew members had never talked to each other, had never met in person.
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