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FROM CARDER TO MILLIONAIRE!
Sergey Pavlovich gave an interview to former US carder John Bosick. How did Sergey get into carding? How much did he manage to earn on it? How was he detained by Belarusian special services in cooperation with the FBI? How did he spend 10 years in a Belarusian prison? Why did he decide to write a book about these events? How does carding in the early 2000s differ from modern carding? This and much more is in this topic.
Enjoy reading!
Contents:
Intro.
John:
Welcome. It’s been a while since I’ve been in the studio doing an interview. And this interview actually happened by accident. I’m here with my good friend Sergey. I don’t know what they called us in the story they did about us. They called Sergey my Russian counterpart or they called me the American version of Sergey, because he has a very similar background to me. He was part of a lot of the early carding forums that I was on. And he was kind of at the beginning of carding, like, 25 years ago.
So, I’m really honored to be able to do this interview. So, let’s get started. I have a few questions. I want to say that this was a long, long time ago.
A career in crime. Merchandise carding.
John:
A lot of you weren’t even born then. About 25 years ago, right?
Sergey:
Yeah, I think my career in crime started in 1997. ’97, actually. So those were the earliest times. It was a long time ago. I was maybe 14 or 15 at the most.
I wanted to talk about the very beginning. And talk a little bit about what were the factors in your life that pushed you into the world that you ended up in. The criminal world? Yeah, the criminal world. What were the main influences in your life and what was going on at the time? It was an accident, because there have only been two accidents in my life. The first one was that I was into carding and cybercrime.
And the second one was my YouTube channel. I was a student from Belarus, a small country near Russia, now occupied by Russia. I was a student, a journalism student. And I was a good student, because I had a very good memory since I was a kid. And I was never a criminal either, because I was always making money from some kind of business.
Since I was a kid, I was selling stuff, you know, different things, Marlboro stickers when I was six, Puma sneakers, even unlimited.
Internet access, different things, but legal things. And when I was a student, one day I saw on an online classifieds site like Craigslist, I saw threads on there about somebody selling credit card numbers, stolen credit card numbers.
And I knew they were stolen credit cards and I knew what they were for, and a friend of mine, he asked me if maybe I could help him buy some. And I bought a big batch of stolen credit cards, and I paid about $600 for them. And this was in the '90s, right? This was like the early '90s?
Yeah, I was, I wasn’t even a student, I was a schoolboy, maybe 16 years old, and I paid 600 dollars, it was a lot of money. Yeah, it’s a lot of money, because if you compare it to today’s money, it’s like 3-5 thousand dollars, I think. And I paid for it, but he refused to buy it from me, so I spent my money, but I got a bunch of credit cards.
And I decided that I should get my money back, so I started doing internet crime. And I realized that we have internet stores, online stores, and you can pay there with other people’s credit cards. And I tried it, and the first product was CDs with different western music, like Deep Purple, Pink Floyd… Okay. From Barnzen Nobel.
So music CDs from Barnzen Nobel were the first product. But of course, we didn’t take them for ourselves, we sold them. Yeah, of course. I had a similar situation. When I started carding, it was online carding at first, I didn't go to stores right away. I started with online carding. In our community, we call this type of carding "staff carding" or "merchandising carding", when you buy something online with a stolen credit card, and this type of carding is still relevant.
True, but now it's more complicated. In our time, all you had to do was enter the credit card details and the shipping address, the card number, the expiration date, and the billing address. But now they check the IP address, the browser, the cookies, and so on. And you need to create a proxy server, for example, you need to create an SSH tunnel, and also use an anti-detect browser, etc.
And all this is possible, but it's not for us, it's for professionals who have been doing this for many years. Yeah, it was easy back then, it was like 25 years ago, it was like the wild west, that's what I try to explain to people.
But all the security mechanisms that companies have now, like IP verification, sometimes they only send to the billing address on the credit card, so sometimes you have to call and do social engineering, like "this is a gift" and so on.
Yeah, but as far as social engineering goes, it was very difficult for us because we were Russian speakers and we didn't know English very well, because in schools, in the former Soviet schools, they didn't teach us English. Were you not taught English? Yeah, so it was a very, very bad level of education. And I understood English, I understand English only because I was in the cybercrime business, and I did business with people like you, and also with the Chinese, Brazilians, and so on.
And that's the only reason I understood it, and now, because I live here, abroad. Got it.
Getting into carding. Credit cards.
John:
What was the next step after that?
Sergey:
The next step in carding?
John:
Yeah, how did you get further into all of that?
Sergey:
Well, merchandising carding was cool. But not very profitable. Yeah, it didn't make me a lot of money. Okay. I was making about a thousand dollars max, maybe five hundred to a thousand dollars a month. But it was fun. One day, one day I bought a big bouquet of flowers in a German store. And I forgot about it, because I was not a professional, I did not change the IP addresses and so on.
And for me it was always random, I bought something, okay, I will get the order or not, it doesn't matter. But one day I came back from university, and my mom asked me what this big bouquet of flowers was on our balcony. And I saw a very, very big bouquet of red roses, like this, about a meter high.
Each rose was this long. And I asked my mom how many roses were there. And she said 100.
Sergey:
100 roses. But in Russian tradition, when we give flowers, like 100 or 10 or 2 or 4, it means death, like at a funeral. Got it, even number, even numbers. Yeah, and I asked, and she said 100. So I thought, maybe some enemy of mine gave me this bouquet. Right, because you forgot.
Yeah, like in the Godfather movie. You forgot that you ordered them. Yeah, and I was thinking about who this person could be, who my enemy is. And I thought, if he has the ability to send me such expensive bouquets, what would be his next step. So, my next step was to leave my home country Belarus, because we were buying a lot of things in our city in real offline stores, not online.
And we were buying a lot of things with fake physical plastic cards. So you switched to plastic, that was the next step? Yes, because one day, while on vacation in Ukraine, in Odessa, I met some guys from the Carder Planet forum, it was not the first carding forum in the world, but it was the second, because the first was carding.org.
It was the very first carding forum in the world. And Shadow Crew was one of the earliest. Shadow Crew was at the same time in parallel with Carder Planet, I think they existed in parallel since about 2003. And I met some guys from the forum and they showed me real plastic cards.
And this was the next step, the evolution of what I was doing before. Because before I only carded on the Internet, but now I realized that I have the opportunity to buy anything in any store. Then in those days you did not need a PIN code for every purchase with a credit card. Now you often need to enter a PIN code, but in those days a PIN code was only needed for debit cards.
Now you need it for almost every purchase. You mean in Russia? And where you carded, in Russia and Belarus? Yes, in Russia, but here too, for example. If you pay with Apple Pay, you don’t need a PIN. But to pay with a physical card, you have to enter it. Anyway, in those days we didn’t need a PIN and I learned what real credit cards were.
Credit cards, debit cards – it didn’t matter to us then, because we didn’t know the difference between a debit card and a credit card. For us, it was just a bank card with money inside, with someone else’s money on it, not ours. And it could be a big amount, or it could be a small amount, you didn’t know how much was there. In some cases, because when I was carding and buying dumps, I didn’t have the opportunity to know the limit on each card.
Well, that is, you could somehow guess that if it was, for example, a gold card or a silver one, because you have a bin number, the first six digits will tell you exactly which bank issued the card, whether it is a debit or a credit card, and whether it is gold. Yes, by the bins you understand the type of your card, whether it is a credit or a debit card, you also understand the name of the bank that issued it, for example, Bank of America, and the type of card, for example, Classic, Electron, Signature, Purchase, Visa Gold, Visa Platinum.
That is, you could somehow guess approximately how much is on each card. But not always, because in my life there were many cases when regular classic visa cards gave more money than Signature World. Really?
Yes, and in several cases we knew how much was on each card, but this was only possible when you registered this card on the bank's website. But for that you needed date of birth and full information, full card, date of birth, social security number, billing address and so on, and sometimes you could buy the card information with the full card attached.
Yeah, but for that type of dumps we paid like 15% of the limit. And it was pretty expensive, 15% of the limit. And it didn’t guarantee that you would get the full amount within that limit. No guarantees, yeah, I know. But it was… I remember that in our countries, in Belarus, in Ukraine, in Russia.
American cards didn’t work very well, especially the later ones. But European cards? 2.0.1, yeah. 2.0.1 meant that the card was of European origin. Yeah, because most of the American cards were local, local cards, and international… HSBC, MBNA, Capital One and I remember also I used Merrill Lynch once in Russia.
Merrill Lynch, yeah. Merrill Lynch, Visa Signature, sometimes Boa, Bank of America and Fleetbank. Fleetbank is the same one that is now Chase Manhattan. We destroyed many banks in our time, including Fleetbank. In general, European cards worked well in our countries, as did Japanese and Israeli ones.
The best were probably Germany, UK, Switzerland, Israel and Japan, but I remember Japan and Switzerland came with very sensitive anti-fraud protection, and they worked only once, so with a Japanese card you had to try to pay 10 thousand dollars at once. Play big? Yeah. Okay. 10 thousand? Ok. Or not enough money? Then ok. 5 thousand. Because the second time it didn’t work.
It didn’t work. Yeah. Ever. And that was my next step, but I knew that it was not for me, because I thought that I was too smart a guy to go to stores and card. I was an active member of Carder Planet, Shadow Crew and different carding forums, and then I realized that I should create my own private carding forum, and I already had small private forums where I sold dumps.
And when you owned a carding or a hacking forum, in those days you were like a god. Oh yeah. You could ban somebody, and you could give moderator rights to another guy. And from all sides, you were not only getting money, you were also getting connections. You were getting contacts with different criminals, more experienced and pumped up criminals than yourself, from different countries of the world.
Telegram. Durov.
John:
And that's another thing I wanted to point out, by the way, you worked with some pretty big names in the carding world. I have them all written down here.
So, you said that after you decided that instore carding was exhausted, that is, "I need to move to the next level", what exactly was your role at CarderPlanet, and how did you get to CarderPlanet?
Sergey:
CarderPlanet was an absolutely unique source of information at the time. Like, if you ask now how to card from a phone, no one will tell you. You have to pay for it. Yeah, right, everything is paid now, but in those days, all the tutorials were open source.
Yeah, I learned everything from tutorials. There was a site called The Grifters and it was basically just tutorials. It wasn't a marketplace, it was just tutorials and I learned so much from there, I learned how to write dumps, I learned how to make plastic, I learned how social engineering works, I learned about bins. Basically, everything I learned, I learned from tutorials.
And you're right, the community was very different in those days because everyone just wanted to share information, and now everyone wants to make money from it. Yeah, and the community wasn't very big, I think active carders in those days, in your time or mine, I think we had a maximum of 5,000 people from all over the world, because each of us, you or I, we had different nicknames and maybe two, three usernames on each carding forum.
So back then there were maybe 5,000 active members at most. But now when I talk to different journalists, they ask how many active members there are now. And I see that there are a lot of them, on carding forums and criminal forums, there are hundreds of thousands of users there now. Yes, that's right, the number has increased a lot. Yes, but now the thing is that most of the carding and hacking community is on Telegram, in closed groups and chats on Telegram.
What was underground before has gone even deeper down. Before, you could just go to Google and go to a carding site. That's not possible anymore, everything has gone even deeper underground. Yes, but everyone is sure that Telegram is a safe messenger. But they recently took a guy from Telegram, right?
In France. In France, yes, they took him and he seemed to give them information. I think he gave them information, but it's all very strange, because he positioned himself as a cyber Robin Hood. I am a samurai, and I do not communicate with the authorities and governments of any country, especially Russia. But judging by his actions, for example, the Russian government wants to close down an opposition channel.
Or if a lot of people, for example, protest in different regions of Russia. And Telegram closed and closed these groups and chats. So historically, Telegram has always been in dialogue with the Russian authorities from the very first days. Understandable. In reality, from the first days, but for the public, he said "I am a cyber samurai, I do not want to communicate with any government."
But now he is forced to communicate with the government when he is facing a prison term. Yes, but this is not a bad situation. Because Telegram really has big problems with support, and very big problems with copyright. For example, my book, or your naked photos, or information from my mother's phone. Everything can be available on Telegram, and you have no way to delete it.
No. You have no way, because they do not answer you. So maybe now after the arrest in France Telegram will moderate content more strictly, that is, I hope so. And of course Telegram as a messenger is not safe, because they have a policy that, for example, if you need to get information about a terrorist suspect, Telegram is obliged to provide information, and for the police
of any country it is enough to say that John or Sergey are terrorists..
Sergey:
Oh, yeah. For any reason. It does not matter. You can be called a terrorist in any country for any reason.
Encryption in Telegram. Messengers.
John:
And what about end-to-end encryption? Does it work as stated?
Sergey:
As for encryption, in Telegram, for example, there is encryption in secret chats. But only in secret chats. Only there and that's it. Exactly, yes. Because I know many guys who had criminal cases with information from Telegram. And it was information only from regular chats, but not from secret ones, they could not read the secret ones.
Yeah, I've never seen a criminal case with information from secret chats. Never. Got it. Yeah, in our time there was basically only ICQ. I've even forgotten about it. And before that there was IRC. Yeah, I forgot, because they destroyed ICQ. I know that the Russians bought ICQ maybe 10 years ago and this year they said that we are closing the project, that it is not commercially successful and we are closing it.
And it was very strange, because ICQ was our main messenger. And it was, but before that there was IRC. Yeah, IRC was before ICQ. But now, in our time, for serious correspondence, as a messenger, criminals usually use Jabber.
But not with public servers, but with private servers.
John:
Private servers, yes.
Sergey:
I think Jabber is the most secure messenger now. And also Signal, but Signal may be more for Russia, may be for the Russian opposition segment, but not for criminals, because Signal is controlled by the American government. Exactly. It's a normal messenger, and of course it's better to use Signal than Telegram if you want to hide something from the Russian government, but definitely not for cybercrime.
Jabber is used most for cybercrime.
Role in CarderPlanet. Dumps.
John:
So you said that when you went to Ukraine, you met guys who were already on CarderPlanet. So what exactly was your role on CarderPlanet, because I assume you were involved in the technical part, in the back end of CarderPlanet?
Sergey:
At first I was just trying to sell something on the forum page, and I was trying to sell dumps, because I understood how it works.
I'm a very open guy and I can easily establish connections with any people. And on the CarderPlanet forum I found a lot of hackers who hack banks themselves and get credit card information and especially. dumps. And a dump, if you don't know what it is, is information from the magnetic strip of your plastic card - from the magnetic strip of a credit or debit card.
Because if you only have a credit card number, you can only buy something online. But for carding in a store, you need a dump with special information from the magnetic strip. And those hackers had millions, millions of dumps, and I tried to sell them on Carder Planet. And I even remember what the price was for me for one dump. About 20 dollars.
For me, the price was $1. $1 is your expenses, right? Yeah, that was the maximum price for me. Wow. Yeah, that's for America. It started at $5, but for big lots, big volumes, it was only $1. And European dumps from Switzerland, Japan, etc. were $30, I think $30-$50 max. That's for platinum, signature, and gold cards. Was that your price? Yeah, that was my price. And I remember I sold one platinum and one gold.
For $80 or $100? I think $100. Japanese gold cards were, like, $200. And that was a lot of money for me. And the owner of Carder Planet, the owner of the forum was Dmitry Golubov, a man from Odessa. And he was also selling dumps. Okay. I think he was the biggest dump seller in the world. Right? And on CarderPlanet.
But it was his forum, so you know, my forum, my rules. Right. Well, I understood that very well, and after a little conflict with him, I started my own forum. But I met a lot of smart and interesting people on the carder planet pages, and like me and other criminals, we didn't just need cards,
we needed fulls, we needed materials for counterfeit credit cards, like you have, and we also needed counterfeit ID, because in those days, for carding in stores, for example, you could buy something under one thousand or five hundred dollars without documents. Without an ID. Yes, without an ID, but if you buy something more than five hundred dollars, you need to show your ID.
Because the cashiers had instructions that the name on the credit card and the name on your ID had to be the same. Yes, they have to match. And also in America, if you make a purchase, say, over three hundred dollars. Three hundred? Yeah, like 300, the threshold was really low because there were so many Frodo's.
And not only did they have to make sure that the ID and the name on the card matched, but they also had to physically take your card and enter the last four digits that were on the card to make sure that the numbers on the card itself matched what was on the magnetic strip. And if they didn't match... Yeah, and imagine the real picture. In Belarus or, for example, in Russia, I wrote dumps on discount cards.
Yeah, me too. Discount cards, for example, Walmart discount cards or gift cards. And one day in a Dolce & Gabbana boutique, the cashier said to me, "I can't sell you jeans because it's not a visa. It's not a master card and it's not a visa. I said, "It's a visa, baby, it's a visa, it's fine," and she tried it and it was okay. But often we used old cards, real visas, master cards, real Diners or JCBs, expired cards.
And obviously the dump information that was inside didn't match the card. Okay, I can make the same name, but I can't make the same numbers. No way. And it wasn't a problem in those days in Russia or Belarus, but in the UK or the States it was a problem. Sometimes it was a lottery,
Sergey:
You know, because sometimes we would go to the store and they wouldn't pay attention, they wouldn't even look, they would just swipe it and wouldn't even look. And sometimes it would be the opposite, they would carefully check every little thing, they would look at the card, they would look at the ID, they would check that they matched, and you would have to figure out which stores it worked in and which stores it didn't, and you would also have to choose the cashiers, because often the older the cashier, the more problems they will cause you.
They will check everything carefully. And the younger cashiers are the ones who are the easiest to fool. For example, I once wrote dumps and I made maybe 15 or 20 cards, and I put them all in my wallet, and I went to the store. And I accidentally put a master card on a visa and it tried to process it as a visa.
But a master card starts with a five and a visa starts with a four and an annex starts with a three. Right, and I had it all on the screen and I had the master cards and the visa cards but I mixed up the stacks because I was just looking at the screen, I wasn't even looking at the stacks, I was just picking up and clicking and swiping. And I mixed them up. But because these were young tellers, they were inexperienced and they weren't checking as hard.
Whereas if it had been an older teller, they probably would have called security.
Carding forum. Arrest. Charges and trial.
John:
And so you went down the path of starting your own forum as a next step because you had a conflict of interest with the owner because he was selling dumps and he didn't want you stepping on his toes. So you started your own forum.
Sergey:
Yes, I started my own forum, and I also knew some Bulgarian guys who made different types of documents, very good quality.
And I didn't pay much money for them then, I had many sets of German IDs, Ausweis and a German passport and a driver's license, and I paid about 300 euros for them, and I sold them for an average price of a thousand or one and a half thousand dollars. And these were ideal documents, not for traveling of course, but ideal.
Only for shopping in a store. And I made a lot of money then, I think it was about 100 thousand dollars every month. Every month? Yes, every month, but it didn't last very long, maybe a maximum of one year, for one year.
This is at the peak of my career, because over the entire time I calculated how much I earned and it was a million two hundred thousand dollars for the entire time. But in my indictment, the Americans wrote damages of 36 million dollars. 36 million in losses. Wow, 36 million, yes.
They always exaggerate it to try to ask you for the longest possible sentence. Yeah, they tried to find all the cards I had, all the cards I sold, because I know it's stupid, but I kept an archive of the cards I sold on my computer. And how long had you been doing that when you started your forum?
I think less than a year, maybe 6 or 7 months. Okay. Maximum. And when they arrested me, it was a funny situation. They arrested me, but all the drives and all the important data on my laptop were encrypted with a program called BestCrypt. It's not a bad program, actually very good, the same as DriveCrypt and TrueCrypt. And they have a very strong encryption algorithm.
TrueCrypt is what I use everywhere. Yeah, but the password for my encrypted drive, or rather half of the password, was the same as my email program, TheBet. And they got my password from this mail client, and after that they easily cracked it, I'm sure they used brute force, because it was only half of the password.
But after that they cracked my encrypted disk in two weeks maximum. It took them two weeks to brute force it? Yeah, maximum, because they had half of the password. And until that day I didn't talk to them in prison, like "I don't understand what you want from me, I'm innocent, open the door, please, bastards."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But after that, the investigator visited me, I think maybe on the 10th or 14th day maximum, and he asked "maybe we can talk again, maybe you can try to talk?" and I said "fuck you."
He said "Okay, I'll show you something," and he took a piece of paper and a pen and wrote it down.
John:
My password. So you know that they know.
Sergey:
Just imagine the situation, and then I realized that they have everything. All my information, and it would be better to talk to them. And was there information for the time? From 2003 to 2004, just one year. All dumps, but for the period of one year, I think there were about 50 thousand, 55 thousand cards.
Wow, so you were arrested in 2004. The first time? Yeah, in September. And I was facing six to fifteen years. Six to fifteen years in prison. But the main reason for my arrest was that we bought a lot of things in Belarus in local.
John:
Stores.
Sergey:
So you were caught instorcarding? Yeah, because in our country there weren't many stores with post-terminals. And we didn't have the opportunity to buy in any store. For example, in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, there were about 20 stores with post-terminals. A watch store, supermarkets, and so on. We bought a lot of vodka and cigarettes, and since we were going to sell it all, one day we bought vodka, cognac and cigarettes in an elite store for 2000 dollars.
And the security guard.
John:
This store wrote down our car number. And this.
Sergey:
It wasn’t our car, it was our friend’s car. And he was a banker, he was a director of a bank. Oh no. And it was a car for transporting money. A special cash-in-transit car. And the security officer wrote down the car’s number, and when the chargeback arrived on that card, when the police came to the store, they said, “Oh, I know that car.”
And after that, of course, they found me. So that was the main reason for my arrest. So, not my fault. And then they just accidentally found other evidence. It was the day I came back from Ukraine to Belarus, because in Ukraine I had a conflict with some gangsters. They were hanging out with me like big brothers, but in reality they were gangsters, and all they wanted was my money.
My money and dumps, because they had their own people for carding in stores in Europe and so on. So all they wanted from me was my money and dumps. And after the conflict with them, I returned to Belarus, to my country, and the police arrested me. And I could have gotten from 6 to 15 years in prison. I was not alone, I was as the organizer of the group and two other people.
And in the courtroom, the judge, or rather the prosecutor, said that he wanted 3.5 years for me and three years for them.
John:
That's not bad.
Sergey:
Yeah, I was lucky, because instead of six to fifteen years, they only asked for three to ten years for me. Because the prosecutor said, "You're good guys, you're good guys and not all the episodes of this crime are yours. And you're not guilty of anything." And we said, "Oh, my God, come on." And the prosecutor asked for 3.5 years in prison for me and 3 years for my friends. But after 2-3 days, the judge gave me 5 years.
This is a rare situation, because most European countries have rules. If the prosecutor asks for 3 years, they give three years or two and a half, but not five or ten. Because the state wants to give three. The government usually follows the prosecutor's proposal. Yeah, yeah, but she gave me five years and my friends three years, not prison, house arrest.
It was a suspended sentence for them. Why do you think that? They thought you were the boss? They said I was the boss because when I was in Ukraine, the police caught them, and they said I was the leader. And actually, in fact, I think I was the leader, but I was doing a more interesting and profitable business, and they asked me to give them the cards because they had no money.
And I gave them the cards and made some profit from it. I was the organizer, the leader of this carding group. It was my fault. So I got five years, but I had a second criminal case in this court.
Was it tried at the same time? – No, not at the same time, after. Because in the first case I was with my friends, but in the second case I was alone. I was going through a case of selling dumps and counterfeiting credit cards. – Got it, yeah. – So I was going through the case alone, but the prosecutor was different. And he asked for eight years in prison. Last time, both the judge and the prosecutor were women. But this time, the prosecutor was a man, and he asked for eight.
Eight years in prison. But the judge was the same woman. The same judge. And I thought, she gave me five when the prosecutor was only asking for three and a half, in this case she gave me five, and now he was asking for eight, so I was getting ready to get ten,
and I was 21 then, maybe 22 in those days, but she only gave me one extra year, so my final sentence was six years, six years, and a week later there was amnesty. And the amnesty took one year off my sentence, so I got five. They knocked a year off.
Yeah, and that was my first time in prison.
Second arrest. US Secret Service agent.
John:
And how did you get arrested the second time, how did that happen? Did you start a new forum?
Sergey:
No, no, I was already in prison, by that time I had served half of my sentence in prison. I spent 2.5 years behind bars, 2.5 and was released straight from that prison. And it was not like a penal colony, for example, it was more like a pre-trial detention center.
Okay. Yeah, but I spent a lot of time in court, and I was released straight from the pre-trial detention center. But I didn’t understand anything, I didn’t understand my mistakes and so on. I started… I had about 300 thousand dollars in the piggy bank. And I decided that I can go back into the criminal business.
But I was very afraid, so I only made a few deals with my…
John:
Very old clients. And one of those clients…
Sergey:
Was an undercover US Secret Service agent. Holy shit. Ryan Knisley. And he was hanging around us, maybe for… around me and my brother, maybe for about four years. True, he was buying a lot of dumps from us, thousands of dumps and constantly. And he was also sending us different gifts, like laptops, expensive cameras, watches, a luxury Alf Lauren T-shirt, perfume and so on.
And imagine how it was - you are a secret agent, and you ask, “Give me your address, I will send you a laptop, for example.” And I say, “Okay, no problem.” And of course, I did not give him my address, but the address of my mother, for example, or a friend, but it is still a tip on me, which leads to my real identity.
This is a detail that could be caught. And I sold him a few thousand dumps, maybe five thousand at most. And they opened a criminal case against me. From the United States? Yes, from the United States. And it was at the same time when they opened parallel cases against Shadow Crew and against Albert Gonzalez.
And he got 20 years in prison in the end. And then they opened a case against me. And in 2008, the Belarusian police arrested me again. But there is an interesting thing. I have never done anything bad to Belarusians, Belarusian people or Belarusian companies.
Never. But in the Belarusian criminal code there is an article that if a person commits a crime while on the territory of Belarus, then he must sit in our country. They did not want to extradite you to the United States? Yes, and all the episodes, and all the information in the second criminal case, it was directly from the United States.
The Secret Service sent all the information to the Belarusian government. And I got 10 years for it. But the worst thing… Yes, I got 10 years. Those were very, very difficult days for me, because at that time I was in a penal colony and I was trying to file a lot of complaints and appeals. And do you have to work in a penal colony? Do they make you work or is it just like in a regular prison? In Belarus, in some colonies, you have to work.
In some colonies, you can only work if you want to, because they don’t have enough space to work. There are not enough jobs for everyone. Got it. Yes, but for me, it’s better not to work, because then you can read books every day, you can write books every day, you can do sports near the colony building.
It was really difficult. In the fifth or sixth year, I thought I was going crazy. Did you feel like you were going crazy after six years there? Yes, after six, and I’m sure if you’re, like, 20 or 30 years old, and you don’t have, say, children and you don’t have elderly parents.
Right, it’s easier that way. Yes, it is so easy, and if you got a term of no more than four years, because, for example, five, six or seven is bad, but I think one, two, three or four is quite easy, in my opinion. And I had ten. Ten years.
And I was also in love with a very beautiful girl and I was crazy about her. Yes, it complicates everything. And I tried everything, I tried all the ways to get out, all the ways, appeals and so on. Special programs? No, we don’t have them. At all? No, no, appeals, appeals to the Supreme Court, I appealed first to the City Court, and then to the Supreme Court.
And all was unsuccessful. And I also tried to get a pardon from the president. You know what that is, right? Yes. Yes.
Writing a book. Two types of colony.
Sergey:
And for this reason I wrote the book. Not only for this, but one of the main reasons was that if I ask for a pardon from the president as an ordinary prisoner, he will not pay attention to me. But if the author of the book and, for example, a journalist, a famous prisoner asks for it, then he is more likely to give you a chance.
Yes, more chances. I thought so, and this was one of the reasons why I wrote the book. And the second reason was that it helped me a lot at that time. Because when I was writing my book, I was far from my cell. I was in the Maldives with my beloved, and I was immersed in the times of carding with friends.
Mentally, did you escape from there? Yes, I understand you. Yes, it was a kind of escape. And I served, I think, three or four years and the term was over. And I was lucky, because in several village colonies in Belarus or Russia you had the opportunity to get a mobile phone. Illegally, of course, of course. And in my first colony, and it was the best colony in the country, it was a black colony, because in the Russian tradition we have two types of colonies – red and black.
Red and black. Yes, black – that’s where all the power is in the hands of bandits. Got it. And in the red colonies, all the power is in the hands of the police. Why is that?
What’s the difference between them? I don’t know, but for prisoners, black colonies are better. Because in the red ones, you have to get up at 6 a.m., and if you don’t get up at 6 a.m., you’re sent to the isolation cell, to a solitary confinement cell. Yes, they call it “SHU” in the United States. In Russian, we call it “SHIZO”, a punishment cell. Penalty Isolator, for those who are interested in English.
Punishment cell. And it’s probably for a day without the possibility of leaving. Yes, you never leave this cell, and it’s a very cold cell, a very, very cold cell, no comfort. Of course, you don’t even have a mattress there. Do they give it out at night or at all? No, no, never. And you sleep on a wooden surface, just like that.
But, for example, look, if, say, the table has a flat surface, ours was something like that, right? Yeah, and how can you sleep on that? I mean, everything was crooked there. Yeah, it was more comfortable to sleep on the floor, but it was very cold there, but more comfortable. And the same with the lighting, if you want to read something, you don’t have that opportunity, because there’s no light.
At all? There’s very, very little lighting, very dim, and you don’t have the opportunity to read or write, because they don’t give out books. You only have one small towel and also toothpaste, toothbrush and soap, and that’s all. And it’s very, very cold there.
And in such conditions, you sit alone or with other lucky people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you sit there for 10, 20 or 30 days, and I even know people who've been there for 90 days, 90 days, but after the police, like after a month, they have to release you, but they can only release you for half an hour, half an hour a day.
John:
After one month.
Sergey:
Yeah, and straight back. According to the law, they have to release you. But they have the ability to bring you back. So they let you out for half an hour, no problem. And then back. I was lucky because there were a lot of cell phones in this colony, and we paid about two or three hundred dollars for a phone to buy it right in prison. And that's actually a very small price.
It's not expensive, because if the police catch a corrupt guard who brought you a phone, he himself can get five to ten years in prison. Holy shit. Yeah, so two or three hundred dollars is nothing. I was writing my book on a cell phone.
And after it was ready, I sent it to a publishing house that I found on the Internet, and I was lucky because I sent it to only five publishing houses and one of them agreed to print my book. And they published it while I was behind bars. So it was published before you got out? Yeah, yeah. They published it in 2013, but I came out in 2016.
And I had problems in the colony, because they asked, "You're sitting here, how did your book get published in Russia?" And I said, "It's not a problem, because you caught me with a prohibited mobile phone and I paid the fine for using a mobile phone, so I paid all my debts in full, and they said, okay, no problem.
Career on YouTube. Moving from Belarus to Russia. Starting a channel.
Sergey:
Yeah, it was a funny situation, but in reality, the book gave me a lot. It gave me a lot, because after it, I became known to a lot of guys on carding forums and hacker forums. And yes, of course, many knew who I was, and they knew who you were, but these were the old carders of our time, old but my book helped new generations to know who I was, and when I started my YouTube channel "People Pro", it was my chance, and it was much easier to start a career on YouTube.
And it happened by accident, because, as I said before, I accidentally got into the criminal world. Right. And I accidentally got to YouTube, because, of course, I knew about its existence and how much Google paid for YouTube once. 1.6 billion dollars.
Of course, I knew about all this, but it was not interesting to me. Before starting my channel, I only saw a few videos on YouTube about what exercises to do for the press and a few clips of Lady Gaga, that's all. But one day, when I lived in Moscow and I think the smartest move after I got out of the Belarusian prison was to leave Belarus. Okay. And move to Russia, change the environment. Because Russia is a much bigger country, and with corruption, and no one in Russia knew who I was. I was not a criminal in Russia. And regarding my home country, which is quite small, only 10 million people, there are interesting statistics.
Every 50th citizen of our country is a policeman. Really? Every 50th, yes. So many policemen. In countries like the United States, for example, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, there are 200 policemen per 100 thousand of the population. More precisely 300, 300 per 100 thousand. In the Soviet Union there were 200 policemen per 100 thousand of the population. But in Belarus it is every fiftieth.
Every fiftieth. Is it because there are few jobs in Belarus except for a policeman? No, no, of course, they get a lot of money compared to workers in factories, for example. I think now they get about a thousand dollars or one and a half thousand dollars. Ordinary policemen.
But this is the policy of the state, because policemen of different departments are the strength of the government of President Lukashenko.
John:
Got it.
Sergey:
He is afraid. He is afraid of the people. He is afraid of the people of Belarus, that is why there are many policemen there. I moved to Moscow and everything was fine. And one day my friend from Sweden called me and asked – have you seen this video on YouTube? Then one famous Russian business blogger made a video about my competitor in business, because I launched a lot of online businesses at the time, cashback services, coupon sites and so on, and online stores.
And I said no, I haven’t seen it, but then I watched it and it was a very good video,
John:
Because this blogger was very cool. And after.
Sergey:
So I called him and asked how much it would cost to make the same video about my business, and he said 45 thousand dollars. And it was very expensive, because when I got out of prison that time, the second time, I only had my last money, 30 thousand dollars. It was all the money left from a million 200 thousand.
And I lived in Moscow, and Moscow.
John:
A very expensive city. And 30 thousand dollars is almost.
Sergey:
Nothing, and he tells me 45 for a video on YouTube. And I thought, damn, for 45 thousand I will make my own channel, no problem. And I launched my channel. What year did you launch your YouTube channel? In 2018. 2018. Six or six and a half years ago.
And that was the second coincidence in my life and one of the best coincidences, because YouTube… in general, I launched very quickly, because there were probably many journalists from different newspapers, magazines and TV channels, such as CNN, Fox News, Fortune Magazine, Forbes and so on. Store. They came to me in Moscow, from America, from European countries, from Sweden, France, for example, Arte and other European channels. You were already a little famous before launching your channel.
Yeah, and maybe that's why I'm not afraid of the camera. They used to come to me a lot, and when I started my channel, it grew really fast because there were a lot of carders, a lot of journalists, a lot of people knew who I was. And in the first year, I got 100,000 subscribers. Yeah, you grew fast. And now I can say that I'm an expert on YouTube because I teach other bloggers and so on. I have a lot of friends who are bloggers.
A normal situation on YouTube is when you get a thousand subscribers in the first year. In the second year, it's normal to get up to 10,000 subscribers, and in the third year it could be 100,000 or a million. But in the first two.
John:
Years is normal, to have 10,000. It took me.
Sergey:
Three years to get 10,000. And now I have about 14,000. And that's normal. It's not a small number, but it's very depressing. Exactly, you put in a lot of work and a lot of effort, but you see very little results. Yeah, you think you work every day and you work hard. But you don’t get enough results. I know, yeah. But I was lucky and in the first year I got 100 thousand subscribers. In the second year, I think it was about 300 thousand.
But now I’m going to get to a million. I’m going to get to a million. Are you close to it? And this is only after 7 years, after 7 years, and of course, I had depressive moments before. Maybe somewhere after 2 years I thought that I work every day, but where are the results? But then I realized one thing, I realized one thing, because I know a lot of my subscribers, they are my friends.
And I even have a business, a joint business with some of them. And I understand the profile of my subscriber, is he like you or like me. He is a guy between 30 and 40 years old. This guy is either from business, or from carding, or from hackers, or from online business. And he has a wife or a girlfriend and I think he has a child or several children.
And he is very busy. For example, for me, I can watch YouTube maybe once every two months maximum. Maybe once a month if I'm good. And they are like that too. And when I realized this, now I know that 40 thousand views on my video or maybe 20 or 100 is normal, because these are real viewers, this is real.
Yeah, this is a real interaction between you and you found your target audience. When you find your audience, then your channel starts growing. And on my channel, 92% of men. 92%? Wow. Yeah, 92 and the main age group is from 25 to 34 years old.
And this audience is the best in the world, not only in Russia, in the whole world. Because this is the best audience for advertising. Better, you can sell them cars, watches and whatever you want. And this was the second random event in my life. And I'm glad it happened, because YouTube gave me more than just money, although it gave me a lot of money.
Monetization. Life in Moscow. Wanted by Interpol.
Sergey:
For example, last year we made money, and we don’t have monetization from views in Russia because of the war.
YouTube stopped monetization. And before that it wasn’t a lot of money, it was somewhere around 8 thousand dollars. Per month? Yes, 8 thousand per month. Now they pay me only one and a half thousand. Because they stopped monetization for Russian accounts.
Yes, Google did it. Yes, and I understand that it’s sad, but not for me. I understand the situation, that it’s because of the sanctions, and everything is clear. I heard that it hit a lot of content makers in Russia hard, that they removed monetization, because they don’t have their own products to sell and no services. Yes, but monetization works in such a way that in the US, for example, you and I, we make the same videos, but you will get five times more money, because your viewers are from the US. In the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – the most expensive.
My CPM is now about 44 dollars per thousand views. 44. Yes, 44 per thousand. My maximum is 10 dollars. 10 dollars per thousand views. Not even per thousand, in fact, the maximum I received was 3 thousand dollars.
3000 per million views. That was my maximum. 3000 per million views, and that was before the war. But for Russian-speaking bloggers, and I use Russian because it is our native language. But many of us are not Russian. I am Belarusian, and he is Ukrainian, but in our tradition we use Russian. Of course, a common language.
And most Russian-speaking bloggers do not earn from views.
John:
YouTube, because, for example, last year I earned.
Sergey:
About 15 thousand dollars from views, but I earned a million one hundred from advertising, with integration into our videos. Also, I think we make maybe one or two million from different affiliate programs, because I advertise my e-commerce projects, make-services, coupon sites, and we also advertise a few apps from our friends.
And they pay us a lot, they pay us about $100,000 or 150 every month. It's not bad, for example, for product placement and advertising their services in yours.
Speaker 4:
Video. Yeah, so YouTube has given me not only money,
Sergey:
It has given me an opportunity to meet interesting.
John:
People like you, for example. It's an opportunity to establish.
Sergey:
Connections with different businessmen, as well as people from the government and so on. And a lot of other interesting things. And one more thing, no matter if it's in the Maldives or Antarctica, I will always meet my subscribers now, in any country.
And one more reason to be a blogger, maybe it doesn't work everywhere, but in the former Soviet territory it gives you influence.
John:
You have rights,
Sergey:
Because on our territory you have no rights. You have no rights, all the rights are with the state, and you don’t have any, you’re like an ant. And I used my YouTube power several times, against big companies like banks and so on. And now I live in Thailand, and before that I lived in Moscow, and I spent 7 years in Moscow, and Moscow is one of the best cities in the world.
Yes, I heard about it. It’s true, it’s really… It’s true, it’s really so, it’s a very convenient city to live in and to do business in. And it’s not a cheap city, it’s expensive, I think I spent 10 to 15 thousand dollars every month in Moscow. Quite a large sum.
It’s comfortable to live in Moscow with a salary of 5 thousand dollars.
John:
But Putin destroyed all of that.
Sergey:
He destroyed it, and of course we don’t support his words. Because I’m Belarusian, and we were in an alliance with Lithuania at the time. And with Poland in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. We had alliances with European countries. Always. Always before the Soviet Union, I think. And when you ask Belarusians about the war, about Putin, 90% of our population is against it.
Because our country is also occupied by Russia. President Lukashenko and Putin, they are friends, and we understand that. But as for Russians, about 80% of them support the war. Really? Now a little less, now less, I think now a maximum of 50%. Do you think it's because of propaganda?
Yes, yes, of course, because it's hard to be in a state of war for 3 years. Hard for the economy, for people, very hard. So now a maximum of 50 percent, maybe 40 percent. But at the very beginning it was about 80 percent. So now this percentage has decreased. Yes, and for me too it has become really difficult to continue living in Moscow. But another strange situation in my life, a very strange situation was that I spent 10 years in a Belarusian prison.
10 years. Yes, 10 years. But America still wanted me. And I was wanted by Interpol for 19 years. 19 years.
John:
Still wanted by the US.
Sergey:
Yeah, from 2004 until last year. And what was it like when you went through customs somewhere? I couldn’t travel. And that’s the reason why I spent 7 years in Moscow. Just imagine, and it’s a very bad situation. Right now, a lot of Russian government officials are like, “Oh, sanctions, fuck you, we have the biggest country in the world, and we have many ways to travel around our country.”
But they don’t understand, and I understand, because I’ve been there. I understand when you have money, you want to travel around the world, not just your own country. I know all the places in this country, because I’ve spent a lot of time here. You want to go somewhere else.
And just last year, my American lawyer, and I paid him a lot, and he spent about three years to show the American authorities that I fully paid all my obligations in the American cases. We spent three years on this, and since last year I am free. They closed the case, and now you can travel. And you were recently detained at customs when you were returning from Bali.
With Bali, yes, it was a strange situation, because while I was writing my book, I mentioned that in reality we have cases when people are already in the Interpol database for a year or a year and a half, but they cross many borders without problems. But my situation is different - when I was no longer wanted, they deleted my data from Interpol.
But in reality, I can face problems, and in Bali ... In Bali, it was a strange situation, because this year I have been to 10 countries, but in Bali I am always stopped. True. But I can tell you a secret. My friend, he was with me in Bali, he came there with an expired passport.
And when we were returning to Thailand, the officer said, “You can’t go to Thailand because your passport has expired.” And he has two passports.
John:
But.
Results.
Sergey:
But in Bali with an expired passport – no problem. And this is my life, and now I’m happy, now I’m happy, and I’m happy that I had this experience of life. Sometimes I ask the heroes of my interviews or one of them asks me if I have any regrets about my life, about my situation. I think no, because in prison you don’t have the opportunity to just get out, but you have the opportunity to think, analyze your past, dream, think about your future and make business plans.
You have all this. Yes, you don’t have the opportunity to go outside, but you have a maximum of free time and you can use it for yourself and your future. You have a lot of freedom, yes. And I think you don’t have any regrets either? About your situation? No, absolutely not. I wouldn't change anything if I could.
But I think young people have a lot more opportunities now than I did. For example, because you were in a normal country. A normal country, and we were in our countries after the Soviet Union fell apart. Right, that was '90, '92, right? '91. And our parents worked two or three jobs just to feed their families.
And no one said anything about moral principles. I heard my mother say "never steal" many times, but why, why? She didn't explain to me why, because it was morally wrong. Yes, yes. And now, when someone steals money from my card, it makes me uncomfortable.
Now I understand, of course. I understand when they come with s**t attacks on my businesses. I understand that this is the wrong way. But we were young, stupid and poor. And now, after 16 years in prison in total, right? No, I got 16 on the sentence, but I only spent 10 years and one month in prison.
John:
And the first time?
Sergey:
2.5 years the first time and 7.5 the second time. And after 10 years in prison, you are free. You have YouTube. What are you doing now and where do you see the direction in 5-10 years? Plans for the future? I get you, I don’t think about it. Yeah, I'm the same. Because I'm a fatalist, I'm a fatalist, and I believe that I have to be a good person for my family, for my friends, for my business partners and for the locals in this country or in any other country.
I have to be a good person. And I have many businesses, not just YouTube. We have over 2 million subscribers on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Telegram. And we have about 1 million in Telegram channels. We have a lot of media projects, but the media business takes up only 5% of my time, but we have about… I didn’t count exactly, but 20 to 30 projects on the Internet in four different directions.
E-commerce, cashback, coupon sites, also cybersecurity, because now we have a VPN service. Do you have a company that provides VIN services? Yes, VIN, because in Russia they have blocked Facebook, LinkedIn, blocked Instagram since the first day of the war.
And now they want to block YouTube. I heard about it. Yeah, so when they tried to block YouTube, my VIN business almost tripled. Really? Automatically.
And I also have several crypto businesses – this is monitoring of crypto exchangers, and also an AML bot for checking the purity of your crypto wallet.
John:
Got it.
Sergey:
And I also have two services for bloggers, tools for bloggers and in particular different tools for YouTube bloggers. Mainly for YouTube bloggers. And we will also hold an ICO and a crypto ICO for our mobile app for bloggers, I think in January, maybe in February. Do you think that crypto is the future?
I think not, but… Or blockchain, rather decentralization. Yes, the thing is that crypto enthusiasts want to use blockchain everywhere. In my businesses, almost in all my businesses, I do not need blockchain there, I do not need it, because it is a regular database, for example, in MySQL, and that is enough. But for international payments, of course, yes.
For international payments and for personal finances too, because I do not want the bank to control my money.
John:
Exactly, yes.
Sergey:
Because in Russia, for example, I have to report, or in Europe, especially in Europe, you have to report to your bank and your government about every penny, every cent in your wallet.
It gives us the ability to transfer money abroad for a very small fee, a very small fee, and very quickly, instantly. Yeah, no waiting. Because in the case of a bank, as you remember, it’s 2-3 business days. Are you crazy? Two-three business days, and I’ll pay 25 or 50 dollars, like 25 for an international transfer. And two-three business days. So I think crypto and blockchain are not the future, but it’s a very important part of our future.
Yeah, I get it. Well, it was nice to finally meet you. We’ve been talking for, what, two years, something like that? I think so, and we started on Instagram. On Instagram, which is blocked in Russia. Yeah, it was really cool to come here and hear your story and talk to you, even though some of my followers might have a hard time with a Russian accent. But that’s okay. Sorry for my strong Russian accent.
And I’ll tell you a secret – this was my first interview in English. This was your first interview in English. Well, that's it, friends, thank you for inviting me, I really appreciate it. Yes, I wish you maximum views for this interview and for every interview on your channel.
Sergey Pavlovich gave an interview to former US carder John Bosick. How did Sergey get into carding? How much did he manage to earn on it? How was he detained by Belarusian special services in cooperation with the FBI? How did he spend 10 years in a Belarusian prison? Why did he decide to write a book about these events? How does carding in the early 2000s differ from modern carding? This and much more is in this topic.
Enjoy reading!
Contents:
- Introduction
- Criminal career. Merchandise carding.
- Diving into carding. Credit cards.
- Telegram. Durov.
- Encryption in Telegram. Messengers.
- Role in CarderPlanet. Dumps.
- Carding forum. Arrest. Charges and trial.
- Second arrest. US Secret Service agent.
- Writing a book. Two types of colony.
- Career on YouTube. Moving from Belarus to Russia. Launch of the channel.
- Monetization. Life in Moscow. Interpol wanted.
- Results.
Intro.
John:
Welcome. It’s been a while since I’ve been in the studio doing an interview. And this interview actually happened by accident. I’m here with my good friend Sergey. I don’t know what they called us in the story they did about us. They called Sergey my Russian counterpart or they called me the American version of Sergey, because he has a very similar background to me. He was part of a lot of the early carding forums that I was on. And he was kind of at the beginning of carding, like, 25 years ago.
So, I’m really honored to be able to do this interview. So, let’s get started. I have a few questions. I want to say that this was a long, long time ago.
A career in crime. Merchandise carding.
John:
A lot of you weren’t even born then. About 25 years ago, right?
Sergey:
Yeah, I think my career in crime started in 1997. ’97, actually. So those were the earliest times. It was a long time ago. I was maybe 14 or 15 at the most.
I wanted to talk about the very beginning. And talk a little bit about what were the factors in your life that pushed you into the world that you ended up in. The criminal world? Yeah, the criminal world. What were the main influences in your life and what was going on at the time? It was an accident, because there have only been two accidents in my life. The first one was that I was into carding and cybercrime.
And the second one was my YouTube channel. I was a student from Belarus, a small country near Russia, now occupied by Russia. I was a student, a journalism student. And I was a good student, because I had a very good memory since I was a kid. And I was never a criminal either, because I was always making money from some kind of business.
Since I was a kid, I was selling stuff, you know, different things, Marlboro stickers when I was six, Puma sneakers, even unlimited.
Internet access, different things, but legal things. And when I was a student, one day I saw on an online classifieds site like Craigslist, I saw threads on there about somebody selling credit card numbers, stolen credit card numbers.
And I knew they were stolen credit cards and I knew what they were for, and a friend of mine, he asked me if maybe I could help him buy some. And I bought a big batch of stolen credit cards, and I paid about $600 for them. And this was in the '90s, right? This was like the early '90s?
Yeah, I was, I wasn’t even a student, I was a schoolboy, maybe 16 years old, and I paid 600 dollars, it was a lot of money. Yeah, it’s a lot of money, because if you compare it to today’s money, it’s like 3-5 thousand dollars, I think. And I paid for it, but he refused to buy it from me, so I spent my money, but I got a bunch of credit cards.
And I decided that I should get my money back, so I started doing internet crime. And I realized that we have internet stores, online stores, and you can pay there with other people’s credit cards. And I tried it, and the first product was CDs with different western music, like Deep Purple, Pink Floyd… Okay. From Barnzen Nobel.
So music CDs from Barnzen Nobel were the first product. But of course, we didn’t take them for ourselves, we sold them. Yeah, of course. I had a similar situation. When I started carding, it was online carding at first, I didn't go to stores right away. I started with online carding. In our community, we call this type of carding "staff carding" or "merchandising carding", when you buy something online with a stolen credit card, and this type of carding is still relevant.
True, but now it's more complicated. In our time, all you had to do was enter the credit card details and the shipping address, the card number, the expiration date, and the billing address. But now they check the IP address, the browser, the cookies, and so on. And you need to create a proxy server, for example, you need to create an SSH tunnel, and also use an anti-detect browser, etc.
And all this is possible, but it's not for us, it's for professionals who have been doing this for many years. Yeah, it was easy back then, it was like 25 years ago, it was like the wild west, that's what I try to explain to people.
But all the security mechanisms that companies have now, like IP verification, sometimes they only send to the billing address on the credit card, so sometimes you have to call and do social engineering, like "this is a gift" and so on.
Yeah, but as far as social engineering goes, it was very difficult for us because we were Russian speakers and we didn't know English very well, because in schools, in the former Soviet schools, they didn't teach us English. Were you not taught English? Yeah, so it was a very, very bad level of education. And I understood English, I understand English only because I was in the cybercrime business, and I did business with people like you, and also with the Chinese, Brazilians, and so on.
And that's the only reason I understood it, and now, because I live here, abroad. Got it.
Getting into carding. Credit cards.
John:
What was the next step after that?
Sergey:
The next step in carding?
John:
Yeah, how did you get further into all of that?
Sergey:
Well, merchandising carding was cool. But not very profitable. Yeah, it didn't make me a lot of money. Okay. I was making about a thousand dollars max, maybe five hundred to a thousand dollars a month. But it was fun. One day, one day I bought a big bouquet of flowers in a German store. And I forgot about it, because I was not a professional, I did not change the IP addresses and so on.
And for me it was always random, I bought something, okay, I will get the order or not, it doesn't matter. But one day I came back from university, and my mom asked me what this big bouquet of flowers was on our balcony. And I saw a very, very big bouquet of red roses, like this, about a meter high.
Each rose was this long. And I asked my mom how many roses were there. And she said 100.
Sergey:
100 roses. But in Russian tradition, when we give flowers, like 100 or 10 or 2 or 4, it means death, like at a funeral. Got it, even number, even numbers. Yeah, and I asked, and she said 100. So I thought, maybe some enemy of mine gave me this bouquet. Right, because you forgot.
Yeah, like in the Godfather movie. You forgot that you ordered them. Yeah, and I was thinking about who this person could be, who my enemy is. And I thought, if he has the ability to send me such expensive bouquets, what would be his next step. So, my next step was to leave my home country Belarus, because we were buying a lot of things in our city in real offline stores, not online.
And we were buying a lot of things with fake physical plastic cards. So you switched to plastic, that was the next step? Yes, because one day, while on vacation in Ukraine, in Odessa, I met some guys from the Carder Planet forum, it was not the first carding forum in the world, but it was the second, because the first was carding.org.
It was the very first carding forum in the world. And Shadow Crew was one of the earliest. Shadow Crew was at the same time in parallel with Carder Planet, I think they existed in parallel since about 2003. And I met some guys from the forum and they showed me real plastic cards.
And this was the next step, the evolution of what I was doing before. Because before I only carded on the Internet, but now I realized that I have the opportunity to buy anything in any store. Then in those days you did not need a PIN code for every purchase with a credit card. Now you often need to enter a PIN code, but in those days a PIN code was only needed for debit cards.
Now you need it for almost every purchase. You mean in Russia? And where you carded, in Russia and Belarus? Yes, in Russia, but here too, for example. If you pay with Apple Pay, you don’t need a PIN. But to pay with a physical card, you have to enter it. Anyway, in those days we didn’t need a PIN and I learned what real credit cards were.
Credit cards, debit cards – it didn’t matter to us then, because we didn’t know the difference between a debit card and a credit card. For us, it was just a bank card with money inside, with someone else’s money on it, not ours. And it could be a big amount, or it could be a small amount, you didn’t know how much was there. In some cases, because when I was carding and buying dumps, I didn’t have the opportunity to know the limit on each card.
Well, that is, you could somehow guess that if it was, for example, a gold card or a silver one, because you have a bin number, the first six digits will tell you exactly which bank issued the card, whether it is a debit or a credit card, and whether it is gold. Yes, by the bins you understand the type of your card, whether it is a credit or a debit card, you also understand the name of the bank that issued it, for example, Bank of America, and the type of card, for example, Classic, Electron, Signature, Purchase, Visa Gold, Visa Platinum.
That is, you could somehow guess approximately how much is on each card. But not always, because in my life there were many cases when regular classic visa cards gave more money than Signature World. Really?
Yes, and in several cases we knew how much was on each card, but this was only possible when you registered this card on the bank's website. But for that you needed date of birth and full information, full card, date of birth, social security number, billing address and so on, and sometimes you could buy the card information with the full card attached.
Yeah, but for that type of dumps we paid like 15% of the limit. And it was pretty expensive, 15% of the limit. And it didn’t guarantee that you would get the full amount within that limit. No guarantees, yeah, I know. But it was… I remember that in our countries, in Belarus, in Ukraine, in Russia.
American cards didn’t work very well, especially the later ones. But European cards? 2.0.1, yeah. 2.0.1 meant that the card was of European origin. Yeah, because most of the American cards were local, local cards, and international… HSBC, MBNA, Capital One and I remember also I used Merrill Lynch once in Russia.
Merrill Lynch, yeah. Merrill Lynch, Visa Signature, sometimes Boa, Bank of America and Fleetbank. Fleetbank is the same one that is now Chase Manhattan. We destroyed many banks in our time, including Fleetbank. In general, European cards worked well in our countries, as did Japanese and Israeli ones.
The best were probably Germany, UK, Switzerland, Israel and Japan, but I remember Japan and Switzerland came with very sensitive anti-fraud protection, and they worked only once, so with a Japanese card you had to try to pay 10 thousand dollars at once. Play big? Yeah. Okay. 10 thousand? Ok. Or not enough money? Then ok. 5 thousand. Because the second time it didn’t work.
It didn’t work. Yeah. Ever. And that was my next step, but I knew that it was not for me, because I thought that I was too smart a guy to go to stores and card. I was an active member of Carder Planet, Shadow Crew and different carding forums, and then I realized that I should create my own private carding forum, and I already had small private forums where I sold dumps.
And when you owned a carding or a hacking forum, in those days you were like a god. Oh yeah. You could ban somebody, and you could give moderator rights to another guy. And from all sides, you were not only getting money, you were also getting connections. You were getting contacts with different criminals, more experienced and pumped up criminals than yourself, from different countries of the world.
Telegram. Durov.
John:
And that's another thing I wanted to point out, by the way, you worked with some pretty big names in the carding world. I have them all written down here.
So, you said that after you decided that instore carding was exhausted, that is, "I need to move to the next level", what exactly was your role at CarderPlanet, and how did you get to CarderPlanet?
Sergey:
CarderPlanet was an absolutely unique source of information at the time. Like, if you ask now how to card from a phone, no one will tell you. You have to pay for it. Yeah, right, everything is paid now, but in those days, all the tutorials were open source.
Yeah, I learned everything from tutorials. There was a site called The Grifters and it was basically just tutorials. It wasn't a marketplace, it was just tutorials and I learned so much from there, I learned how to write dumps, I learned how to make plastic, I learned how social engineering works, I learned about bins. Basically, everything I learned, I learned from tutorials.
And you're right, the community was very different in those days because everyone just wanted to share information, and now everyone wants to make money from it. Yeah, and the community wasn't very big, I think active carders in those days, in your time or mine, I think we had a maximum of 5,000 people from all over the world, because each of us, you or I, we had different nicknames and maybe two, three usernames on each carding forum.
So back then there were maybe 5,000 active members at most. But now when I talk to different journalists, they ask how many active members there are now. And I see that there are a lot of them, on carding forums and criminal forums, there are hundreds of thousands of users there now. Yes, that's right, the number has increased a lot. Yes, but now the thing is that most of the carding and hacking community is on Telegram, in closed groups and chats on Telegram.
What was underground before has gone even deeper down. Before, you could just go to Google and go to a carding site. That's not possible anymore, everything has gone even deeper underground. Yes, but everyone is sure that Telegram is a safe messenger. But they recently took a guy from Telegram, right?
In France. In France, yes, they took him and he seemed to give them information. I think he gave them information, but it's all very strange, because he positioned himself as a cyber Robin Hood. I am a samurai, and I do not communicate with the authorities and governments of any country, especially Russia. But judging by his actions, for example, the Russian government wants to close down an opposition channel.
Or if a lot of people, for example, protest in different regions of Russia. And Telegram closed and closed these groups and chats. So historically, Telegram has always been in dialogue with the Russian authorities from the very first days. Understandable. In reality, from the first days, but for the public, he said "I am a cyber samurai, I do not want to communicate with any government."
But now he is forced to communicate with the government when he is facing a prison term. Yes, but this is not a bad situation. Because Telegram really has big problems with support, and very big problems with copyright. For example, my book, or your naked photos, or information from my mother's phone. Everything can be available on Telegram, and you have no way to delete it.
No. You have no way, because they do not answer you. So maybe now after the arrest in France Telegram will moderate content more strictly, that is, I hope so. And of course Telegram as a messenger is not safe, because they have a policy that, for example, if you need to get information about a terrorist suspect, Telegram is obliged to provide information, and for the police
of any country it is enough to say that John or Sergey are terrorists..
Sergey:
Oh, yeah. For any reason. It does not matter. You can be called a terrorist in any country for any reason.
Encryption in Telegram. Messengers.
John:
And what about end-to-end encryption? Does it work as stated?
Sergey:
As for encryption, in Telegram, for example, there is encryption in secret chats. But only in secret chats. Only there and that's it. Exactly, yes. Because I know many guys who had criminal cases with information from Telegram. And it was information only from regular chats, but not from secret ones, they could not read the secret ones.
Yeah, I've never seen a criminal case with information from secret chats. Never. Got it. Yeah, in our time there was basically only ICQ. I've even forgotten about it. And before that there was IRC. Yeah, I forgot, because they destroyed ICQ. I know that the Russians bought ICQ maybe 10 years ago and this year they said that we are closing the project, that it is not commercially successful and we are closing it.
And it was very strange, because ICQ was our main messenger. And it was, but before that there was IRC. Yeah, IRC was before ICQ. But now, in our time, for serious correspondence, as a messenger, criminals usually use Jabber.
But not with public servers, but with private servers.
John:
Private servers, yes.
Sergey:
I think Jabber is the most secure messenger now. And also Signal, but Signal may be more for Russia, may be for the Russian opposition segment, but not for criminals, because Signal is controlled by the American government. Exactly. It's a normal messenger, and of course it's better to use Signal than Telegram if you want to hide something from the Russian government, but definitely not for cybercrime.
Jabber is used most for cybercrime.
Role in CarderPlanet. Dumps.
John:
So you said that when you went to Ukraine, you met guys who were already on CarderPlanet. So what exactly was your role on CarderPlanet, because I assume you were involved in the technical part, in the back end of CarderPlanet?
Sergey:
At first I was just trying to sell something on the forum page, and I was trying to sell dumps, because I understood how it works.
I'm a very open guy and I can easily establish connections with any people. And on the CarderPlanet forum I found a lot of hackers who hack banks themselves and get credit card information and especially. dumps. And a dump, if you don't know what it is, is information from the magnetic strip of your plastic card - from the magnetic strip of a credit or debit card.
Because if you only have a credit card number, you can only buy something online. But for carding in a store, you need a dump with special information from the magnetic strip. And those hackers had millions, millions of dumps, and I tried to sell them on Carder Planet. And I even remember what the price was for me for one dump. About 20 dollars.
For me, the price was $1. $1 is your expenses, right? Yeah, that was the maximum price for me. Wow. Yeah, that's for America. It started at $5, but for big lots, big volumes, it was only $1. And European dumps from Switzerland, Japan, etc. were $30, I think $30-$50 max. That's for platinum, signature, and gold cards. Was that your price? Yeah, that was my price. And I remember I sold one platinum and one gold.
For $80 or $100? I think $100. Japanese gold cards were, like, $200. And that was a lot of money for me. And the owner of Carder Planet, the owner of the forum was Dmitry Golubov, a man from Odessa. And he was also selling dumps. Okay. I think he was the biggest dump seller in the world. Right? And on CarderPlanet.
But it was his forum, so you know, my forum, my rules. Right. Well, I understood that very well, and after a little conflict with him, I started my own forum. But I met a lot of smart and interesting people on the carder planet pages, and like me and other criminals, we didn't just need cards,
we needed fulls, we needed materials for counterfeit credit cards, like you have, and we also needed counterfeit ID, because in those days, for carding in stores, for example, you could buy something under one thousand or five hundred dollars without documents. Without an ID. Yes, without an ID, but if you buy something more than five hundred dollars, you need to show your ID.
Because the cashiers had instructions that the name on the credit card and the name on your ID had to be the same. Yes, they have to match. And also in America, if you make a purchase, say, over three hundred dollars. Three hundred? Yeah, like 300, the threshold was really low because there were so many Frodo's.
And not only did they have to make sure that the ID and the name on the card matched, but they also had to physically take your card and enter the last four digits that were on the card to make sure that the numbers on the card itself matched what was on the magnetic strip. And if they didn't match... Yeah, and imagine the real picture. In Belarus or, for example, in Russia, I wrote dumps on discount cards.
Yeah, me too. Discount cards, for example, Walmart discount cards or gift cards. And one day in a Dolce & Gabbana boutique, the cashier said to me, "I can't sell you jeans because it's not a visa. It's not a master card and it's not a visa. I said, "It's a visa, baby, it's a visa, it's fine," and she tried it and it was okay. But often we used old cards, real visas, master cards, real Diners or JCBs, expired cards.
And obviously the dump information that was inside didn't match the card. Okay, I can make the same name, but I can't make the same numbers. No way. And it wasn't a problem in those days in Russia or Belarus, but in the UK or the States it was a problem. Sometimes it was a lottery,
Sergey:
You know, because sometimes we would go to the store and they wouldn't pay attention, they wouldn't even look, they would just swipe it and wouldn't even look. And sometimes it would be the opposite, they would carefully check every little thing, they would look at the card, they would look at the ID, they would check that they matched, and you would have to figure out which stores it worked in and which stores it didn't, and you would also have to choose the cashiers, because often the older the cashier, the more problems they will cause you.
They will check everything carefully. And the younger cashiers are the ones who are the easiest to fool. For example, I once wrote dumps and I made maybe 15 or 20 cards, and I put them all in my wallet, and I went to the store. And I accidentally put a master card on a visa and it tried to process it as a visa.
But a master card starts with a five and a visa starts with a four and an annex starts with a three. Right, and I had it all on the screen and I had the master cards and the visa cards but I mixed up the stacks because I was just looking at the screen, I wasn't even looking at the stacks, I was just picking up and clicking and swiping. And I mixed them up. But because these were young tellers, they were inexperienced and they weren't checking as hard.
Whereas if it had been an older teller, they probably would have called security.
Carding forum. Arrest. Charges and trial.
John:
And so you went down the path of starting your own forum as a next step because you had a conflict of interest with the owner because he was selling dumps and he didn't want you stepping on his toes. So you started your own forum.
Sergey:
Yes, I started my own forum, and I also knew some Bulgarian guys who made different types of documents, very good quality.
And I didn't pay much money for them then, I had many sets of German IDs, Ausweis and a German passport and a driver's license, and I paid about 300 euros for them, and I sold them for an average price of a thousand or one and a half thousand dollars. And these were ideal documents, not for traveling of course, but ideal.
Only for shopping in a store. And I made a lot of money then, I think it was about 100 thousand dollars every month. Every month? Yes, every month, but it didn't last very long, maybe a maximum of one year, for one year.
This is at the peak of my career, because over the entire time I calculated how much I earned and it was a million two hundred thousand dollars for the entire time. But in my indictment, the Americans wrote damages of 36 million dollars. 36 million in losses. Wow, 36 million, yes.
They always exaggerate it to try to ask you for the longest possible sentence. Yeah, they tried to find all the cards I had, all the cards I sold, because I know it's stupid, but I kept an archive of the cards I sold on my computer. And how long had you been doing that when you started your forum?
I think less than a year, maybe 6 or 7 months. Okay. Maximum. And when they arrested me, it was a funny situation. They arrested me, but all the drives and all the important data on my laptop were encrypted with a program called BestCrypt. It's not a bad program, actually very good, the same as DriveCrypt and TrueCrypt. And they have a very strong encryption algorithm.
TrueCrypt is what I use everywhere. Yeah, but the password for my encrypted drive, or rather half of the password, was the same as my email program, TheBet. And they got my password from this mail client, and after that they easily cracked it, I'm sure they used brute force, because it was only half of the password.
But after that they cracked my encrypted disk in two weeks maximum. It took them two weeks to brute force it? Yeah, maximum, because they had half of the password. And until that day I didn't talk to them in prison, like "I don't understand what you want from me, I'm innocent, open the door, please, bastards."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But after that, the investigator visited me, I think maybe on the 10th or 14th day maximum, and he asked "maybe we can talk again, maybe you can try to talk?" and I said "fuck you."
He said "Okay, I'll show you something," and he took a piece of paper and a pen and wrote it down.
John:
My password. So you know that they know.
Sergey:
Just imagine the situation, and then I realized that they have everything. All my information, and it would be better to talk to them. And was there information for the time? From 2003 to 2004, just one year. All dumps, but for the period of one year, I think there were about 50 thousand, 55 thousand cards.
Wow, so you were arrested in 2004. The first time? Yeah, in September. And I was facing six to fifteen years. Six to fifteen years in prison. But the main reason for my arrest was that we bought a lot of things in Belarus in local.
John:
Stores.
Sergey:
So you were caught instorcarding? Yeah, because in our country there weren't many stores with post-terminals. And we didn't have the opportunity to buy in any store. For example, in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, there were about 20 stores with post-terminals. A watch store, supermarkets, and so on. We bought a lot of vodka and cigarettes, and since we were going to sell it all, one day we bought vodka, cognac and cigarettes in an elite store for 2000 dollars.
And the security guard.
John:
This store wrote down our car number. And this.
Sergey:
It wasn’t our car, it was our friend’s car. And he was a banker, he was a director of a bank. Oh no. And it was a car for transporting money. A special cash-in-transit car. And the security officer wrote down the car’s number, and when the chargeback arrived on that card, when the police came to the store, they said, “Oh, I know that car.”
And after that, of course, they found me. So that was the main reason for my arrest. So, not my fault. And then they just accidentally found other evidence. It was the day I came back from Ukraine to Belarus, because in Ukraine I had a conflict with some gangsters. They were hanging out with me like big brothers, but in reality they were gangsters, and all they wanted was my money.
My money and dumps, because they had their own people for carding in stores in Europe and so on. So all they wanted from me was my money and dumps. And after the conflict with them, I returned to Belarus, to my country, and the police arrested me. And I could have gotten from 6 to 15 years in prison. I was not alone, I was as the organizer of the group and two other people.
And in the courtroom, the judge, or rather the prosecutor, said that he wanted 3.5 years for me and three years for them.
John:
That's not bad.
Sergey:
Yeah, I was lucky, because instead of six to fifteen years, they only asked for three to ten years for me. Because the prosecutor said, "You're good guys, you're good guys and not all the episodes of this crime are yours. And you're not guilty of anything." And we said, "Oh, my God, come on." And the prosecutor asked for 3.5 years in prison for me and 3 years for my friends. But after 2-3 days, the judge gave me 5 years.
This is a rare situation, because most European countries have rules. If the prosecutor asks for 3 years, they give three years or two and a half, but not five or ten. Because the state wants to give three. The government usually follows the prosecutor's proposal. Yeah, yeah, but she gave me five years and my friends three years, not prison, house arrest.
It was a suspended sentence for them. Why do you think that? They thought you were the boss? They said I was the boss because when I was in Ukraine, the police caught them, and they said I was the leader. And actually, in fact, I think I was the leader, but I was doing a more interesting and profitable business, and they asked me to give them the cards because they had no money.
And I gave them the cards and made some profit from it. I was the organizer, the leader of this carding group. It was my fault. So I got five years, but I had a second criminal case in this court.
Was it tried at the same time? – No, not at the same time, after. Because in the first case I was with my friends, but in the second case I was alone. I was going through a case of selling dumps and counterfeiting credit cards. – Got it, yeah. – So I was going through the case alone, but the prosecutor was different. And he asked for eight years in prison. Last time, both the judge and the prosecutor were women. But this time, the prosecutor was a man, and he asked for eight.
Eight years in prison. But the judge was the same woman. The same judge. And I thought, she gave me five when the prosecutor was only asking for three and a half, in this case she gave me five, and now he was asking for eight, so I was getting ready to get ten,
and I was 21 then, maybe 22 in those days, but she only gave me one extra year, so my final sentence was six years, six years, and a week later there was amnesty. And the amnesty took one year off my sentence, so I got five. They knocked a year off.
Yeah, and that was my first time in prison.
Second arrest. US Secret Service agent.
John:
And how did you get arrested the second time, how did that happen? Did you start a new forum?
Sergey:
No, no, I was already in prison, by that time I had served half of my sentence in prison. I spent 2.5 years behind bars, 2.5 and was released straight from that prison. And it was not like a penal colony, for example, it was more like a pre-trial detention center.
Okay. Yeah, but I spent a lot of time in court, and I was released straight from the pre-trial detention center. But I didn’t understand anything, I didn’t understand my mistakes and so on. I started… I had about 300 thousand dollars in the piggy bank. And I decided that I can go back into the criminal business.
But I was very afraid, so I only made a few deals with my…
John:
Very old clients. And one of those clients…
Sergey:
Was an undercover US Secret Service agent. Holy shit. Ryan Knisley. And he was hanging around us, maybe for… around me and my brother, maybe for about four years. True, he was buying a lot of dumps from us, thousands of dumps and constantly. And he was also sending us different gifts, like laptops, expensive cameras, watches, a luxury Alf Lauren T-shirt, perfume and so on.
And imagine how it was - you are a secret agent, and you ask, “Give me your address, I will send you a laptop, for example.” And I say, “Okay, no problem.” And of course, I did not give him my address, but the address of my mother, for example, or a friend, but it is still a tip on me, which leads to my real identity.
This is a detail that could be caught. And I sold him a few thousand dumps, maybe five thousand at most. And they opened a criminal case against me. From the United States? Yes, from the United States. And it was at the same time when they opened parallel cases against Shadow Crew and against Albert Gonzalez.
And he got 20 years in prison in the end. And then they opened a case against me. And in 2008, the Belarusian police arrested me again. But there is an interesting thing. I have never done anything bad to Belarusians, Belarusian people or Belarusian companies.
Never. But in the Belarusian criminal code there is an article that if a person commits a crime while on the territory of Belarus, then he must sit in our country. They did not want to extradite you to the United States? Yes, and all the episodes, and all the information in the second criminal case, it was directly from the United States.
The Secret Service sent all the information to the Belarusian government. And I got 10 years for it. But the worst thing… Yes, I got 10 years. Those were very, very difficult days for me, because at that time I was in a penal colony and I was trying to file a lot of complaints and appeals. And do you have to work in a penal colony? Do they make you work or is it just like in a regular prison? In Belarus, in some colonies, you have to work.
In some colonies, you can only work if you want to, because they don’t have enough space to work. There are not enough jobs for everyone. Got it. Yes, but for me, it’s better not to work, because then you can read books every day, you can write books every day, you can do sports near the colony building.
It was really difficult. In the fifth or sixth year, I thought I was going crazy. Did you feel like you were going crazy after six years there? Yes, after six, and I’m sure if you’re, like, 20 or 30 years old, and you don’t have, say, children and you don’t have elderly parents.
Right, it’s easier that way. Yes, it is so easy, and if you got a term of no more than four years, because, for example, five, six or seven is bad, but I think one, two, three or four is quite easy, in my opinion. And I had ten. Ten years.
And I was also in love with a very beautiful girl and I was crazy about her. Yes, it complicates everything. And I tried everything, I tried all the ways to get out, all the ways, appeals and so on. Special programs? No, we don’t have them. At all? No, no, appeals, appeals to the Supreme Court, I appealed first to the City Court, and then to the Supreme Court.
And all was unsuccessful. And I also tried to get a pardon from the president. You know what that is, right? Yes. Yes.
Writing a book. Two types of colony.
Sergey:
And for this reason I wrote the book. Not only for this, but one of the main reasons was that if I ask for a pardon from the president as an ordinary prisoner, he will not pay attention to me. But if the author of the book and, for example, a journalist, a famous prisoner asks for it, then he is more likely to give you a chance.
Yes, more chances. I thought so, and this was one of the reasons why I wrote the book. And the second reason was that it helped me a lot at that time. Because when I was writing my book, I was far from my cell. I was in the Maldives with my beloved, and I was immersed in the times of carding with friends.
Mentally, did you escape from there? Yes, I understand you. Yes, it was a kind of escape. And I served, I think, three or four years and the term was over. And I was lucky, because in several village colonies in Belarus or Russia you had the opportunity to get a mobile phone. Illegally, of course, of course. And in my first colony, and it was the best colony in the country, it was a black colony, because in the Russian tradition we have two types of colonies – red and black.
Red and black. Yes, black – that’s where all the power is in the hands of bandits. Got it. And in the red colonies, all the power is in the hands of the police. Why is that?
What’s the difference between them? I don’t know, but for prisoners, black colonies are better. Because in the red ones, you have to get up at 6 a.m., and if you don’t get up at 6 a.m., you’re sent to the isolation cell, to a solitary confinement cell. Yes, they call it “SHU” in the United States. In Russian, we call it “SHIZO”, a punishment cell. Penalty Isolator, for those who are interested in English.
Punishment cell. And it’s probably for a day without the possibility of leaving. Yes, you never leave this cell, and it’s a very cold cell, a very, very cold cell, no comfort. Of course, you don’t even have a mattress there. Do they give it out at night or at all? No, no, never. And you sleep on a wooden surface, just like that.
But, for example, look, if, say, the table has a flat surface, ours was something like that, right? Yeah, and how can you sleep on that? I mean, everything was crooked there. Yeah, it was more comfortable to sleep on the floor, but it was very cold there, but more comfortable. And the same with the lighting, if you want to read something, you don’t have that opportunity, because there’s no light.
At all? There’s very, very little lighting, very dim, and you don’t have the opportunity to read or write, because they don’t give out books. You only have one small towel and also toothpaste, toothbrush and soap, and that’s all. And it’s very, very cold there.
And in such conditions, you sit alone or with other lucky people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you sit there for 10, 20 or 30 days, and I even know people who've been there for 90 days, 90 days, but after the police, like after a month, they have to release you, but they can only release you for half an hour, half an hour a day.
John:
After one month.
Sergey:
Yeah, and straight back. According to the law, they have to release you. But they have the ability to bring you back. So they let you out for half an hour, no problem. And then back. I was lucky because there were a lot of cell phones in this colony, and we paid about two or three hundred dollars for a phone to buy it right in prison. And that's actually a very small price.
It's not expensive, because if the police catch a corrupt guard who brought you a phone, he himself can get five to ten years in prison. Holy shit. Yeah, so two or three hundred dollars is nothing. I was writing my book on a cell phone.
And after it was ready, I sent it to a publishing house that I found on the Internet, and I was lucky because I sent it to only five publishing houses and one of them agreed to print my book. And they published it while I was behind bars. So it was published before you got out? Yeah, yeah. They published it in 2013, but I came out in 2016.
And I had problems in the colony, because they asked, "You're sitting here, how did your book get published in Russia?" And I said, "It's not a problem, because you caught me with a prohibited mobile phone and I paid the fine for using a mobile phone, so I paid all my debts in full, and they said, okay, no problem.
Career on YouTube. Moving from Belarus to Russia. Starting a channel.
Sergey:
Yeah, it was a funny situation, but in reality, the book gave me a lot. It gave me a lot, because after it, I became known to a lot of guys on carding forums and hacker forums. And yes, of course, many knew who I was, and they knew who you were, but these were the old carders of our time, old but my book helped new generations to know who I was, and when I started my YouTube channel "People Pro", it was my chance, and it was much easier to start a career on YouTube.
And it happened by accident, because, as I said before, I accidentally got into the criminal world. Right. And I accidentally got to YouTube, because, of course, I knew about its existence and how much Google paid for YouTube once. 1.6 billion dollars.
Of course, I knew about all this, but it was not interesting to me. Before starting my channel, I only saw a few videos on YouTube about what exercises to do for the press and a few clips of Lady Gaga, that's all. But one day, when I lived in Moscow and I think the smartest move after I got out of the Belarusian prison was to leave Belarus. Okay. And move to Russia, change the environment. Because Russia is a much bigger country, and with corruption, and no one in Russia knew who I was. I was not a criminal in Russia. And regarding my home country, which is quite small, only 10 million people, there are interesting statistics.
Every 50th citizen of our country is a policeman. Really? Every 50th, yes. So many policemen. In countries like the United States, for example, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, there are 200 policemen per 100 thousand of the population. More precisely 300, 300 per 100 thousand. In the Soviet Union there were 200 policemen per 100 thousand of the population. But in Belarus it is every fiftieth.
Every fiftieth. Is it because there are few jobs in Belarus except for a policeman? No, no, of course, they get a lot of money compared to workers in factories, for example. I think now they get about a thousand dollars or one and a half thousand dollars. Ordinary policemen.
But this is the policy of the state, because policemen of different departments are the strength of the government of President Lukashenko.
John:
Got it.
Sergey:
He is afraid. He is afraid of the people. He is afraid of the people of Belarus, that is why there are many policemen there. I moved to Moscow and everything was fine. And one day my friend from Sweden called me and asked – have you seen this video on YouTube? Then one famous Russian business blogger made a video about my competitor in business, because I launched a lot of online businesses at the time, cashback services, coupon sites and so on, and online stores.
And I said no, I haven’t seen it, but then I watched it and it was a very good video,
John:
Because this blogger was very cool. And after.
Sergey:
So I called him and asked how much it would cost to make the same video about my business, and he said 45 thousand dollars. And it was very expensive, because when I got out of prison that time, the second time, I only had my last money, 30 thousand dollars. It was all the money left from a million 200 thousand.
And I lived in Moscow, and Moscow.
John:
A very expensive city. And 30 thousand dollars is almost.
Sergey:
Nothing, and he tells me 45 for a video on YouTube. And I thought, damn, for 45 thousand I will make my own channel, no problem. And I launched my channel. What year did you launch your YouTube channel? In 2018. 2018. Six or six and a half years ago.
And that was the second coincidence in my life and one of the best coincidences, because YouTube… in general, I launched very quickly, because there were probably many journalists from different newspapers, magazines and TV channels, such as CNN, Fox News, Fortune Magazine, Forbes and so on. Store. They came to me in Moscow, from America, from European countries, from Sweden, France, for example, Arte and other European channels. You were already a little famous before launching your channel.
Yeah, and maybe that's why I'm not afraid of the camera. They used to come to me a lot, and when I started my channel, it grew really fast because there were a lot of carders, a lot of journalists, a lot of people knew who I was. And in the first year, I got 100,000 subscribers. Yeah, you grew fast. And now I can say that I'm an expert on YouTube because I teach other bloggers and so on. I have a lot of friends who are bloggers.
A normal situation on YouTube is when you get a thousand subscribers in the first year. In the second year, it's normal to get up to 10,000 subscribers, and in the third year it could be 100,000 or a million. But in the first two.
John:
Years is normal, to have 10,000. It took me.
Sergey:
Three years to get 10,000. And now I have about 14,000. And that's normal. It's not a small number, but it's very depressing. Exactly, you put in a lot of work and a lot of effort, but you see very little results. Yeah, you think you work every day and you work hard. But you don’t get enough results. I know, yeah. But I was lucky and in the first year I got 100 thousand subscribers. In the second year, I think it was about 300 thousand.
But now I’m going to get to a million. I’m going to get to a million. Are you close to it? And this is only after 7 years, after 7 years, and of course, I had depressive moments before. Maybe somewhere after 2 years I thought that I work every day, but where are the results? But then I realized one thing, I realized one thing, because I know a lot of my subscribers, they are my friends.
And I even have a business, a joint business with some of them. And I understand the profile of my subscriber, is he like you or like me. He is a guy between 30 and 40 years old. This guy is either from business, or from carding, or from hackers, or from online business. And he has a wife or a girlfriend and I think he has a child or several children.
And he is very busy. For example, for me, I can watch YouTube maybe once every two months maximum. Maybe once a month if I'm good. And they are like that too. And when I realized this, now I know that 40 thousand views on my video or maybe 20 or 100 is normal, because these are real viewers, this is real.
Yeah, this is a real interaction between you and you found your target audience. When you find your audience, then your channel starts growing. And on my channel, 92% of men. 92%? Wow. Yeah, 92 and the main age group is from 25 to 34 years old.
And this audience is the best in the world, not only in Russia, in the whole world. Because this is the best audience for advertising. Better, you can sell them cars, watches and whatever you want. And this was the second random event in my life. And I'm glad it happened, because YouTube gave me more than just money, although it gave me a lot of money.
Monetization. Life in Moscow. Wanted by Interpol.
Sergey:
For example, last year we made money, and we don’t have monetization from views in Russia because of the war.
YouTube stopped monetization. And before that it wasn’t a lot of money, it was somewhere around 8 thousand dollars. Per month? Yes, 8 thousand per month. Now they pay me only one and a half thousand. Because they stopped monetization for Russian accounts.
Yes, Google did it. Yes, and I understand that it’s sad, but not for me. I understand the situation, that it’s because of the sanctions, and everything is clear. I heard that it hit a lot of content makers in Russia hard, that they removed monetization, because they don’t have their own products to sell and no services. Yes, but monetization works in such a way that in the US, for example, you and I, we make the same videos, but you will get five times more money, because your viewers are from the US. In the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – the most expensive.
My CPM is now about 44 dollars per thousand views. 44. Yes, 44 per thousand. My maximum is 10 dollars. 10 dollars per thousand views. Not even per thousand, in fact, the maximum I received was 3 thousand dollars.
3000 per million views. That was my maximum. 3000 per million views, and that was before the war. But for Russian-speaking bloggers, and I use Russian because it is our native language. But many of us are not Russian. I am Belarusian, and he is Ukrainian, but in our tradition we use Russian. Of course, a common language.
And most Russian-speaking bloggers do not earn from views.
John:
YouTube, because, for example, last year I earned.
Sergey:
About 15 thousand dollars from views, but I earned a million one hundred from advertising, with integration into our videos. Also, I think we make maybe one or two million from different affiliate programs, because I advertise my e-commerce projects, make-services, coupon sites, and we also advertise a few apps from our friends.
And they pay us a lot, they pay us about $100,000 or 150 every month. It's not bad, for example, for product placement and advertising their services in yours.
Speaker 4:
Video. Yeah, so YouTube has given me not only money,
Sergey:
It has given me an opportunity to meet interesting.
John:
People like you, for example. It's an opportunity to establish.
Sergey:
Connections with different businessmen, as well as people from the government and so on. And a lot of other interesting things. And one more thing, no matter if it's in the Maldives or Antarctica, I will always meet my subscribers now, in any country.
And one more reason to be a blogger, maybe it doesn't work everywhere, but in the former Soviet territory it gives you influence.
John:
You have rights,
Sergey:
Because on our territory you have no rights. You have no rights, all the rights are with the state, and you don’t have any, you’re like an ant. And I used my YouTube power several times, against big companies like banks and so on. And now I live in Thailand, and before that I lived in Moscow, and I spent 7 years in Moscow, and Moscow is one of the best cities in the world.
Yes, I heard about it. It’s true, it’s really… It’s true, it’s really so, it’s a very convenient city to live in and to do business in. And it’s not a cheap city, it’s expensive, I think I spent 10 to 15 thousand dollars every month in Moscow. Quite a large sum.
It’s comfortable to live in Moscow with a salary of 5 thousand dollars.
John:
But Putin destroyed all of that.
Sergey:
He destroyed it, and of course we don’t support his words. Because I’m Belarusian, and we were in an alliance with Lithuania at the time. And with Poland in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. We had alliances with European countries. Always. Always before the Soviet Union, I think. And when you ask Belarusians about the war, about Putin, 90% of our population is against it.
Because our country is also occupied by Russia. President Lukashenko and Putin, they are friends, and we understand that. But as for Russians, about 80% of them support the war. Really? Now a little less, now less, I think now a maximum of 50%. Do you think it's because of propaganda?
Yes, yes, of course, because it's hard to be in a state of war for 3 years. Hard for the economy, for people, very hard. So now a maximum of 50 percent, maybe 40 percent. But at the very beginning it was about 80 percent. So now this percentage has decreased. Yes, and for me too it has become really difficult to continue living in Moscow. But another strange situation in my life, a very strange situation was that I spent 10 years in a Belarusian prison.
10 years. Yes, 10 years. But America still wanted me. And I was wanted by Interpol for 19 years. 19 years.
John:
Still wanted by the US.
Sergey:
Yeah, from 2004 until last year. And what was it like when you went through customs somewhere? I couldn’t travel. And that’s the reason why I spent 7 years in Moscow. Just imagine, and it’s a very bad situation. Right now, a lot of Russian government officials are like, “Oh, sanctions, fuck you, we have the biggest country in the world, and we have many ways to travel around our country.”
But they don’t understand, and I understand, because I’ve been there. I understand when you have money, you want to travel around the world, not just your own country. I know all the places in this country, because I’ve spent a lot of time here. You want to go somewhere else.
And just last year, my American lawyer, and I paid him a lot, and he spent about three years to show the American authorities that I fully paid all my obligations in the American cases. We spent three years on this, and since last year I am free. They closed the case, and now you can travel. And you were recently detained at customs when you were returning from Bali.
With Bali, yes, it was a strange situation, because while I was writing my book, I mentioned that in reality we have cases when people are already in the Interpol database for a year or a year and a half, but they cross many borders without problems. But my situation is different - when I was no longer wanted, they deleted my data from Interpol.
But in reality, I can face problems, and in Bali ... In Bali, it was a strange situation, because this year I have been to 10 countries, but in Bali I am always stopped. True. But I can tell you a secret. My friend, he was with me in Bali, he came there with an expired passport.
And when we were returning to Thailand, the officer said, “You can’t go to Thailand because your passport has expired.” And he has two passports.
John:
But.
Results.
Sergey:
But in Bali with an expired passport – no problem. And this is my life, and now I’m happy, now I’m happy, and I’m happy that I had this experience of life. Sometimes I ask the heroes of my interviews or one of them asks me if I have any regrets about my life, about my situation. I think no, because in prison you don’t have the opportunity to just get out, but you have the opportunity to think, analyze your past, dream, think about your future and make business plans.
You have all this. Yes, you don’t have the opportunity to go outside, but you have a maximum of free time and you can use it for yourself and your future. You have a lot of freedom, yes. And I think you don’t have any regrets either? About your situation? No, absolutely not. I wouldn't change anything if I could.
But I think young people have a lot more opportunities now than I did. For example, because you were in a normal country. A normal country, and we were in our countries after the Soviet Union fell apart. Right, that was '90, '92, right? '91. And our parents worked two or three jobs just to feed their families.
And no one said anything about moral principles. I heard my mother say "never steal" many times, but why, why? She didn't explain to me why, because it was morally wrong. Yes, yes. And now, when someone steals money from my card, it makes me uncomfortable.
Now I understand, of course. I understand when they come with s**t attacks on my businesses. I understand that this is the wrong way. But we were young, stupid and poor. And now, after 16 years in prison in total, right? No, I got 16 on the sentence, but I only spent 10 years and one month in prison.
John:
And the first time?
Sergey:
2.5 years the first time and 7.5 the second time. And after 10 years in prison, you are free. You have YouTube. What are you doing now and where do you see the direction in 5-10 years? Plans for the future? I get you, I don’t think about it. Yeah, I'm the same. Because I'm a fatalist, I'm a fatalist, and I believe that I have to be a good person for my family, for my friends, for my business partners and for the locals in this country or in any other country.
I have to be a good person. And I have many businesses, not just YouTube. We have over 2 million subscribers on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Telegram. And we have about 1 million in Telegram channels. We have a lot of media projects, but the media business takes up only 5% of my time, but we have about… I didn’t count exactly, but 20 to 30 projects on the Internet in four different directions.
E-commerce, cashback, coupon sites, also cybersecurity, because now we have a VPN service. Do you have a company that provides VIN services? Yes, VIN, because in Russia they have blocked Facebook, LinkedIn, blocked Instagram since the first day of the war.
And now they want to block YouTube. I heard about it. Yeah, so when they tried to block YouTube, my VIN business almost tripled. Really? Automatically.
And I also have several crypto businesses – this is monitoring of crypto exchangers, and also an AML bot for checking the purity of your crypto wallet.
John:
Got it.
Sergey:
And I also have two services for bloggers, tools for bloggers and in particular different tools for YouTube bloggers. Mainly for YouTube bloggers. And we will also hold an ICO and a crypto ICO for our mobile app for bloggers, I think in January, maybe in February. Do you think that crypto is the future?
I think not, but… Or blockchain, rather decentralization. Yes, the thing is that crypto enthusiasts want to use blockchain everywhere. In my businesses, almost in all my businesses, I do not need blockchain there, I do not need it, because it is a regular database, for example, in MySQL, and that is enough. But for international payments, of course, yes.
For international payments and for personal finances too, because I do not want the bank to control my money.
John:
Exactly, yes.
Sergey:
Because in Russia, for example, I have to report, or in Europe, especially in Europe, you have to report to your bank and your government about every penny, every cent in your wallet.
It gives us the ability to transfer money abroad for a very small fee, a very small fee, and very quickly, instantly. Yeah, no waiting. Because in the case of a bank, as you remember, it’s 2-3 business days. Are you crazy? Two-three business days, and I’ll pay 25 or 50 dollars, like 25 for an international transfer. And two-three business days. So I think crypto and blockchain are not the future, but it’s a very important part of our future.
Yeah, I get it. Well, it was nice to finally meet you. We’ve been talking for, what, two years, something like that? I think so, and we started on Instagram. On Instagram, which is blocked in Russia. Yeah, it was really cool to come here and hear your story and talk to you, even though some of my followers might have a hard time with a Russian accent. But that’s okay. Sorry for my strong Russian accent.
And I’ll tell you a secret – this was my first interview in English. This was your first interview in English. Well, that's it, friends, thank you for inviting me, I really appreciate it. Yes, I wish you maximum views for this interview and for every interview on your channel.
