This podcast contains explicit language.

Brett Johnson, a career criminal cyber fraudster and con man, has a lot to regret.

I was just this horrible, horrible guy.

Over more than a decade, Brett scammed people in person.

On the side of a road with these buckets, you know, give to the needy abused children,

you know, signs like that collecting money.

He scammed people online.

Pick up a black Sharpie.

Go home and start signing Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire's signatures to these baseballs.

So I print certificates of authenticity, list these things on eBay for $60 a piece, sell every single one.

And he scammed merchants, banks, and the government.

Learned how to launder money internationally at that point.

I was stealing $160,000 a week on income tax fraud. Credit card fraud,

identity theft, passing counterfeit checks, playing a pivotal role in early online criminal

marketplaces, grifts, cons. Brett has done all of these things, ripping off hundreds, if not thousands,

of people in the process. From a moral perspective, Brett's deeds are terrible.

But from a storytelling perspective, they're material.

His criminal exploits make for a rollicking yarn that has the arc of a movie like Catch

Me If You Can, sequences from a heist film, a protagonist straight out of an anti-hero

drama, and a happy ending. Maybe.

And when we first started reporting on Brett, that's what we were intrigued by, how good his story was,

as entertainment. But as we dug in, Brett's story became significantly less fun, not because we

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