The Grifter

Decoder Ring

Slate Podcasts

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2019

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn. Sign up now to listen and support our work. Brett Johnson was a career criminal: a fraudster, a con man, a cyber criminal, but now he’s a legal person operating on the right side of the law, helping companies stop people like he used to be. His story is the stuff of a movie like Catch Me iI You Can, it involves wild scams, narrow escapes, redemption, and even a trip to Disney World. Throughout his criminal career he defrauded people on the street, on eBay, on criminal web forums, within the justice system, and even inside the United States Secret Service. There’s great entertainment value in Brett’s story, but there’s also a great deal of complication to it, too. Real life isn’t as neat and tidy as a movie, and the ending is yet to be written. Today we explore Brett’s story, first by letting you enjoy it, and then we deconstruct it, to decide if we should. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast contains explicit language.
0:09.0	Brett Johnson, a career criminal cyber fraud fraudster, and con man
0:13.0	has a lot to regret.
0:14.7	I was just this horrible, horrible guy.
0:19.8	Over more than a decade, Brett scam people in person.
0:22.8	On the side of a road with these buckets,
0:24.8	you know, give to the needy abused children,
0:27.5	you know, signs like that collecting money.
0:29.5	He scammed people online.
0:31.3	Pick up a black sharpie, go home and start signing Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire's signatures
0:37.0	to these baseballs.
0:38.4	So I print certificates of authenticity, list these things on eBay for $60 a piece, sell every single one.
0:45.8	And he scammed merchants, banks, and the government.
0:48.6	Learned how to launder money internationally at that point.
0:51.4	I was stealing 160,000 a week on income tax fraud.
0:54.3	Credit card fraud, identity theft, passing counterfeit checks, playing a pivotal role
0:59.5	in early online criminal marketplaces, grifts, cons,
1:03.4	Brett has done all of these things,
1:05.4	ripping off hundreds, if not thousands of people in the process.
1:10.6	From a moral perspective,
1:12.1	Brett's deeds are terrible.
1:14.0	But from a storytelling perspective, they're material.
	...

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