Carder from the USA: How a homeless teenager became a top carder

[Jollier]

Sergey Pavlovich talked to the American carder in the past and blogger in the present John Bosick.

In what family was John born and raised? How did he get into carding? How did he make counterfeit bank cards and become the best manufacturer of them in the USA? What was he caught doing and arrested for? This and much more - in this interview.

Contents:

• Introduction
• The beginning of a criminal career. Family, difficult childhood.
• Orphanage. Photoshop.
• Where does the attraction to crime come from?
• Childhood dreams
• Relationship with father
• Younger brother
• Parents are Polish
• Propensity for technology. Good memory.
• Vagabondage during college
• Girls on the path of life. A good student. Studying graphic design, editing, programming.
• Pirated versions of programs
• Rich portfolio, brand book. Creativity. First work.
• FBI operation against the company. Money laundering.
• Freelance. Debt burden.
• Carding forums. First steps in the sphere. Online and instore carding.
• Debit and credit cards. Magnetic encoders. Dumps.
• Embossers. Hot stamping.
• Fake ID. Card sample. BIN.
• Printers. Buying goods. Scaling. Distrust of people.
• Card making. Holograms.
• Raids on plastic suppliers and skyrocketing sales
• Dump Suppliers. Significant Revenue. Lifestyle in the Best of Times.
• No addiction to drugs. Caution.
• Sending orders worldwide
• UPS Store. How it got caught. Deal with the FBI.
• Results

Introduction
Pavlovich:
Hello friends! Our channel, if you remember, once started more or less with carding, yes, and it returned to this. And John, he was also in prison, now he will tell how much he spent in an American prison, and he made credit cards, counterfeit documents and so on. That is, he was, in principle, one of the main manufacturers of counterfeit credit cards in the world. And now we will talk about all this. And he now lives in Thailand, runs a travel channel, but in English, though.
That's why write your questions. In principle, since he and I are in Thailand, we can see each other a little more often. Here, the interview, by the way, will be in English, please forgive my heavy exent, yes, heavy Russian exent, here, but I will try to translate everything so that you understand.

The beginning of a criminal path. Family, difficult childhood.
Pavlovich:
John, glad to see you here in Thailand. It's nice to be here and meet you, finally. Two prisoners in a room. How did crime come into your life? And I'm not talking about cybercrime.

Carder:
Yeah, it started really early. I had a really tough childhood. I was a troubled teenager, my father and my mother weren't together.

Pavlovich:
Divorced?

Carder:
No, they never married. So I grew up with just my mother, and she had to work two jobs to pay the bills and put food on our table.
So I didn't really have any rules growing up. Nobody was watching me. I didn't have a bedtime, I didn't have a routine, you know, nobody made me sit at the table and do my homework or eat food or anything like that. So I grew up without any supervision from a very young age. And I had a lot of negative influences in my life. I was influenced by the bad guys in the neighborhood and I was going to school, getting into trouble all the time.

Pavlovich:
Did you go to a private school or a regular school?

Carder:
A regular school, yeah.

Pavlovich:
Not a private school?

Carder:
No, no, regular. I went to public school my whole life. It all started from a really young age, I just started acting up. A lot of it was just trying to get attention, because I didn't get much of it growing up. So it started with just stealing stuff, like bikes, shoplifting at malls, you know stealing candy from candy stores.
It started like that.

Pavlovich:
Just candy?

Carder:
Yeah, it started small. And then as I got older, the crimes got more serious. I started racing cars. I was in a car theft gang, we stole cars. I was 13 years old, I was stealing cars.

Pavlovich:
Like in GTA?

Carder:
Yeah, just like GA. So I was stealing cars, and then it escalated into more serious fraud.
Like, I hacked, well I didn't hack, I got access to the public library, the computer network, and the Fort Lauderdale Public Library. And I had the admin password for the computer system and the public library, so I could add and remove programs whenever I wanted. And I installed Photoshop. The library only had one computer, and I would install programs on it and hide them, so no one knew they were there except me.
So I had my admin access, and I installed Photoshop on it, I installed, in those days they had LimeWire and BearShare for P2P files, for music and all kinds of stuff.

Pavlovich:
Torrents?

Carder:
Yeah, torrents. I would burn music CDs and sell them at school.

Pavlovich:
How old were you?

Carder:
13, when the serious crime really started. I started making coupons in Photoshop for fast food restaurants and pizza places.

Pavlovich:
He says he counterfeited coupons. Kinky Burger and McDonald's.

Carder:
So, I was making coupons, I figured out how the UPS system worked, the barcode system, the algorithm for the barcodes on the coupons, and once I figured that out, how to input the algorithm to make them work, I was taking coupons for food because I was living on the streets. My mother, like, moved back home, moved out when I was really little. She moved back to Michigan and I stayed in Florida.

Pavlovich:
From Michigan to Florida?

Carder:
Yeah, I was born in Michigan, I'm from Michigan.

Pavlovich:
How long did you live in Michigan?

Carder:
I didn't really live there much. I was born in Michigan in 1985, and then in '92 my mother moved me and my little brother to Florida. And then in '96 she went back to Michigan, but I stayed in Florida because I was in a youth detention camp because I got caught stealing cars.
So I was in the camp, and my mother went back to Michigan. And when I got out, I had nowhere to go. So I just stayed on the streets. So I would make coupons to eat at restaurants. I would go to the drugstore, buy... I didn't buy, I stole period pills, the ones you take for PMS. They were white and had butterflies on them. And I would take them out of the package, put them in little baggies, and then I would drive to Miami Beach on the weekends and sell them as ecstasy.
For $20 a pop, you know?

Pavlovich:
So the third thing you ever counterfeited was counterfeit ecstasy?

Carder:
Yeah, it was coupons, and then I started… I started counterfeiting almost as soon as I figured out how to use Photoshop. And I started Photoshop really early. You know, right after Windows 98 and the first early Adobe products.
I was right there when I started using Photoshop.

Orphanage. Photoshop.
Pavlovich:
And who taught you Photoshop?

Carder:
I learned it at a shelter I was at, for homeless youth. For kids that had nowhere to go. One of the people that worked there was a graphic designer. And he just worked there on the weekends and stuff, he volunteered to help the kids. He saw that I had a knack for computers, for design, and we were always talking.
One day he sat down and showed me a few things. And then I remember I figured it out on my own, and once I started using the software, it wasn't that hard.

Pavlovich:
He showed you legal things, and you decided to do illegal things?

Carder:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Where does the criminality come from?
Pavlovich:
Was it in you since you were a kid? To commit crime? Or was it because you had tough living conditions?

Carder:
I think it was mostly because of my situation, my living conditions. I was homeless, I had a lot of problems with food, with safety. Like, I was always hungry, I had to go to stores to steal food, just to eat every day. Of course, this is unpleasant to say, but me, as a teenager, 13, 14 years old, I had to rummage through garbage cans behind a Pizza Hut at night.
And I was rummaging through garbage, eating food, leftovers, it was terrible. It was just a terrible situation.

Pavlovich:
I never tried anything from a garbage can.

Carder:
Yeah, it was either that or go to the store and steal. I had nowhere to go, no one could help me when I was little.

Childhood dreams.
Pavlovich:
I have a question about what your dreams were back then?

Carder:
What do you mean?

Pavlovich:
You were a homeless kid, angry all the time, mom away from home. What were your dreams back then?

Carder:
What was I thinking about, you mean?

Pavlovich:
Your wishes, yeah.

Carder:
You know, I didn't have the luxury of thinking about the future or thinking about anything like that. I was living from moment to moment, you know, what am I going to do in three hours, what am I going to eat, where am I going to sleep.
It was a constant grind and having to figure everything out on the fly. I couldn't think about the future, I couldn't think about my education, I couldn't think about, you know, learning a new skill or saving money.

Pavlovich:
But if you had the opportunity to think about the future, describe that future.

Carder:
In your current state or back then? Back then it was girls, I wanted a nice car, I wanted to be recognized. I wanted people to notice me because I felt like my whole life no one had ever paid attention to me. So I think at that time I just wanted people to notice me, I wanted people to see me. I wanted to have a nice car, I wanted a pretty girl.

Pavlovich:
So you just wanted attention?

Carder:
Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Pavlovich:
Like being famous?

Carder:
I don’t know about famous, but I just wanted attention, yeah. I wanted people to notice me.

Pavlovich:
Maybe it’s because your mom didn’t pay attention to you? Maybe that was the reason?

Carder:
Yeah, that’s for sure. I didn’t get attention growing up. My dad wasn’t around and my mother had to work.

The relationship with my father.
Pavlovich:
Do you know your father?

Carder:
Yeah, I have a good relationship with him. He and my mother just didn't get along, they just didn't get along at all.
So I think that's a lot of the reason why he wasn't around when I was little. But I have a good relationship with my dad now, he's older, he's almost 70. He lives in Michigan on a farm.

Younger brother.
Pavlovich:
You weren't an only child?

Carder:
I have a younger brother. Yeah, I grew up with my younger brother.

Pavlovich:
What's the age difference? How many years?

Carder:
I'm about three years older than him. Chris, yeah. He and I grew up together, we were like best friends, and then we kind of drifted apart when I was like 19 or 20. We just kind of fell out of touch for a lot of years until we got back together. In 2005 or 2006, I think, he came to Florida and moved in with me.
And then we started talking again.

Pavlovich:
Was he homeless too?

Carder:
No, no, no.

Pavlovich:
Was he with his mom?

Carder:
Yeah, he was with his mom. I was the problem child. When I was a kid, I was always doing something. I'd run away at night, get caught, the police would bring me home, I'd end up in correctional facilities, in correctional camps. My little brother didn't have those problems. He didn't have the behavioral problems that I had. We just have different dads. So I think a lot of it has to do with genetics.
We're just completely different.

Pavlovich:
Different DNA?

Carder:
Different DNA, yeah, we're built differently, that's for sure.

Parents are Polish.
Pavlovich:
And your parents are Polish, right?

Carder:
Yeah, both my parents are Polish.

Pavlovich:
I told the audience that your last name means Bosy. He says you're Bosyak in Russian.

Carder:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm Polish, grew up in a Polish family.

Pavlovich:
So you're 100% Polish on the inside?

Carder:
Yeah, both my grandparents are Polish.

Pavlovich:
And you know a few words in Polish, right?

Tech aptitude. Good memory.
Carder:
Yeah, I know a few. Anyway, I started doing fraud as soon as I figured out how to use a computer. And I'm talking about Linux, Windows 98, you know, the early, early versions, even before the first Mac came out.
I was on Windows, I just had an aptitude for technology from a very early age. I understand it, and I have the patience. And for some reason, I have a really good memory. People always tell me, “You’re very smart,” and I tell them, “I’m not that smart, I just have a very good memory.” You know, I can memorize information and I can recall that information at any time to make myself sound smarter than I really am.
But really, it’s just a good memory. I think if you have a good memory, I have a good memory. And that’s one of the best things in life, because you have the ability to memorize books and a lot of other things much easier. Yeah, because you retain the information. Same thing with movies and music. I know every word to every song I’ve ever heard.
I remember every line from every movie I’ve ever seen. And it’s not something I try to do, it happens automatically. I remember the last name of every inmate I met in prison. And there were maybe three or four hundred of them, the closest ones. And I remember faces, too.
Faces, yeah.

Homelessness during college.
Pavlovich:
What did you eat most often when you were homeless? What's your favorite food?

Carder:
Well, my go-to was ramen, instant noodles. And at 7-11 in the U.S., they have this machine where you can add, if you got nachos, you open up the nachos and go to this machine. And you can add chili or cheese, push two buttons. So I'd take these noodles, pour hot water over them, and then go to the cheese and chili machine, add them, and stir them.

Pavlovich:
Just one cheese in there.

Carder:
Yeah, one cheese and chili. I'd mix it all up and eat it almost every day.

Pavlovich:
How much did that cost?

Carder:
About a dollar, a dollar twenty-five. Really cheap. And now I have Crohn's disease. I think from all those years of living on the streets and having a really poor diet, no nutrition.
I wasn't taking my vitamins, plus I was drinking alcohol on top of that, just being homeless. And I think a lot of that contributed to the fact that I now have Crohn's disease.

Pavlovich:
And how old were you homeless until?

Carder:
From about 13 until I graduated from college, when I was 20, I was 20. I went to the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale.
And I got a bachelor's degree in graphic design.

Pavlovich:
Graphic design?

Carder:
Yeah, but I was homeless while I was in college, and I lived in my car.

Pavlovich:
But college, I think, is really expensive.

Carder:
Yeah, I had student loans. They're like a loan from the government to pay for college. With an insanely high interest rate. So I got student loans to go to college.
And they have this thing called financial aid for the poor, for low-income kids. They help with financial aid as well.

Pavlovich:
And then you have to pay it back.

Carder:
You don't have to pay back the financial aid, but you do have to pay back the student loans. So I was saddled with a hundred thousand dollars long after I graduated from college. A hundred thousand was about two years of college.

Pavlovich:
So about 50 grand a year?

Carder:
Yeah.

Pavlovich:
My friend was here today in your shoes, interviewing him. And he's looking for a school for his daughter. And he told me Harvard is now 70 grand a year. It's very expensive, yeah.

Carder:
So I was sleeping in my car in the parking lot of the college campus I went to because I just couldn't afford an apartment.
I could barely afford gas.

Pavlovich:
But they were supposed to find you a place to live, weren't they?

Carder:
In theory, yes, but there are no such programs. They just helped with tuition and that's it, no housing, no food, no lunches, nothing like that. So I had to figure it all out myself. So I slept in my car on campus for almost two years while I was in college.

Pavlovich:
How did you wash yourself?

Carder:
I had a gym membership, and I would shower at the gym. Or I would shower at the beach because they had showers there. You know, I didn't look like I was homeless, I always had clean clothes, I always looked neat, I always had friends. Sometimes I would go and stay at a friend's house for two or three days. But you can only do that for so long before people are like, "You need to figure out your issues."
So it was basically every day, just waking up and figuring out how to get through the day. And that was my life for many, many years until I graduated from college and actually got a good job.

Girls along the way. Good student. Studying graphic design, editing, programming.
Pavlovich:
Did you have a girlfriend?

Carder:
Yeah, I had girlfriends every now and then.

Pavlovich:
Different girls?

Carder:
Oh, yeah, sure, yeah. I'd go to their houses, stay with them for a while, you know, they'd give me money. I had to make do.

Pavlovich:
Were you a good student, in your opinion?

Carder:
I was always a good student, yeah. Even in high school, I had good grades. School was never hard for me. I never felt like it was hard. You know, I could sit down, do all the assignments, and I’d usually be one of the first in the class to finish. And then I’d get bored and I’d get restless and I’d start causing trouble because the work just wasn’t challenging. So when I graduated from high school, I had a 3.59 GPA.

Pavlovich:
Is that a high GPA?

Carder:
A 4.0 is the maximum GPA, so that’s pretty high, that’s pretty good.
And then when I got to college, even in my college classes, I was getting all A’s. Because I was homeless, when I wasn’t doing graphic design, I would go on campus and take other classes that I wasn’t supposed to be in. Because if you’re a student, they let you sit in on class, but you don’t get credit for it. So you don't have a degree in the subject you're taking. And in addition to graphic design, I studied videography, I studied color grading.

Pavlovich:
Color in video?

Carder:
Yeah, for video editing. And I studied sound design. So I was studying two majors, but I only got credits in one because I couldn't afford to study the other majors. So I studied video editing and everything related to that, then I studied graphic design. I learned C++, I learned CSS, Adobe. Adobe Flash was very popular then.

Pavlovich:
Coral Dro for vector graphics?

Carder:
Yeah, Coral Dro.

Pavlovich:
Very expensive software.

Carder:
: Yeah, those were very expensive programs. It was like $3,000 at the time. And Photoshop was pretty expensive too. Maybe not that expensive, but still. That's right, but since I was a student, the school gave me the whole Adobe suite.

Pavlovich:
I got their whole suite of programs with my course.

Carder:
I had Photoshop, I had Illustrator, and I had a video editing program, Adobe Reader for PDF.

Pirated versions of the programs.
Pavlovich:
By the way, did you know that in Russia we could buy thousands of programs on one disk for $3?

Carder:
Yeah, yeah, I've heard of that. Pirated, of course.

Pavlovich:
Yeah, I had pirated versions of all the Adobe programs too. Did you have to get a key or whatever it was called?

Carder:
A crack for the program. Yeah, like cheat codes. Yeah, and then you had to go into the program files, delete certain files, because they told the program to look for a key, I remember all that.
And I downloaded them from torrents, and the crack came with them.

Pavlovich:
A lot of hackers used torrents to distribute viruses.

Carder:
Oh yeah, I know, I had a couple of computers that just broke because of it.

A rich portfolio, a brand book. Creativity. First job.
Pavlovich:
Okay, those were your childhood crimes. Bicycles, then you talked about cars, but what about cyber crime? How did you get into it?

Carder:
Yeah, that's how it happened.

Pavlovich:
And at what age?

Carder:
I was, let me think, this is 2005, I think that's when I started doing this, so I was 20, now I'm 40, I'll be 40 soon, so yeah, 20 years ago. And when I graduated from the Institute of Arts, every graduation they organize something like a job fair at the end of the course.
And during those two years of school, I did some trial projects, so by the end of the two years, I had a portfolio of all the projects that I had completed while I was there. I did corporate identities for companies, I did a logo, a letterhead, I did an employee handbook, corporate graphics for a company, for a company that didn't exist.

Pavlovich:
The whole brand book and so on, I understand.

Carder:
Yeah, yeah, I did all that. Yeah, basically, I had all these projects that I had worked on until I was 20. And so when they had a career fair, you take your portfolio to the career fair, and potential employers come to the institute and talk to people who were graduating. Because they might want to hire you.

Pavlovich:
They come?

Carder:
Yeah, employers.

Pavlovich:
So this is an American practice? Every college and university?

Carder:
At the art school where I went to, they did. And the idea is that they try to help you get into the job market right out of college, give you the opportunity to meet people who are in the field that you're studying for, that you're getting your degree in. And when I went to a career fair, there were all these different companies with booths, and I'd go up and say, "Here's my portfolio, this is what I've been working on for the last two years."

Pavlovich:
Was it a really good portfolio, in your opinion?

Carder:
Yeah, I think so, because I felt like I had a better understanding of what you were trying to teach me than anyone else. Because I'd already been doing it.

Pavlovich:
Because it's your talent?

Carder:
It's just what I like to do. I'm good at it, I'm a creative person, I've always been an artist.
I've been painting since I was a kid, I started painting when I was like 9 or 10.

Pavlovich:
Do you have any paintings now?

Carder:
Yeah, I do, I do paintings on canvas, but they're in the States, they're not here with me. So I was painting, and then when I was introduced to digital art, I was amazed.
Because here you take something, you can only create on a two-dimensional surface. And now I had all these different dimensions to create in Photoshop, you know, all these layers and stuff. So I was just good at it, and I was good at it. So the portfolio that I had, I think it was a little bit better than the other guys in my class. And when I went to this career fair, I presented my portfolio and I told them, this is what I'm working on, this is what I'm good at, this is what I excel at.
And then the representative of the company was like, this is what we do, this is our business, this is what we're looking for. I went there and I didn't get any calls. And two or three weeks after I graduated, one of the counselors at my school called me and said one of the companies I had talked to wanted to hire me. They were looking for a lead designer, but I wasn't the lead, so they hired me.
I was right under the lead guy, so there's the lead, and then there was me.

Pavlovich:
Second to the lead.

Carder:
Yeah, and it was a screen printing company, they made t-shirts, they made banners, they made flyers, they made car wraps. They had these huge printers the size of this table, and they printed all the wraps at once.

Pavlovich:
Plotters?

Carder:
Yeah, plotters. And they did pretty much any kind of printing. There was screen printing, there was supplementation printing, there was DTC – direct to fabric. And that’s where I learned a lot about printers and printing, which came in handy later when I started making credit cards. And when I went to work for this company, they offered me $80,000 a year.

Pavlovich:
Was that a lot of money?

Carder:
Well, for me, a 20-year-old guy who’d been homeless his whole life, $80,000. I thought, holy shit. And that’s graphic design, it’s not like I’m hanging drywall on a construction site.

Pavlovich:
And it’s not programming.

Carder:
Yeah, and it’s not programming, I don’t do anything like that, it’s just creativity. Yeah, $80,000 is a good amount of money for graphic design. Yeah, and I do all these projects there anyway. Projects come in and I'm bringing everything out, I'm working with the client, I'm managing the projects, and I ended up working there for about a year.
And then the guy who was directly above me, he had some visa issues, so he had to go back to his country. The people who owned the company were from Panama, or Colombia, one of the South American countries, because this is Miami, and Miami is a predominantly Spanish-speaking city, nobody speaks English, everybody speaks Spanish.

Pavlovich:
Do you speak Spanish?

Carder:
Yeah, I speak good Spanish, I'm from Miami. And I worked there for about a year, and the guy I was working under, he had some visa issues, so he had to go back to his country. And then they put me in charge, I was the lead graphic designer. And I had to hire two people to work under me.
So now I had my own team of graphic designers. So at this point I was basically a project manager. I wasn't even doing any of the work myself, I was just organizing it, and then delegating it to my team and making sure the project was delivered on time, etc.

Pavlovich:
I understand, we have a lot of project managers in our business.

FBI operation against the company. Money laundering.
Carder:
Yeah, that was basically my main position at the time. And one day I come to work, I pull into the parking lot, and there's the FBI everywhere. And they have jackets with FBI written on the back, and there were black SUVs.
And I thought they were filming a movie. Because in Miami, they film movies everywhere all the time. I thought, that's cool. I walk around the building, I go inside, and there's the FBI everywhere. They dragged me into a room, sat me down, and talked to me for about an hour. They interrogated me, how long have you been working at this company, how did you meet the people who hired you, all sorts of questions.

Pavlovich:
And what was the reason?

Carder:
Turns out they were using the company to launder drug money. Well, I kind of suspected it because the company has Porsches, Lamborghinis, all these luxury cars, and I started seeing all this money coming through the company, and as a project manager, I knew how much these projects were going to cost. So I knew there was something wrong with the accounting, but I get $5,000 every month, so I get $5,000 or $6,000 in salary, so I didn't ask any questions.
So apparently they were using the company to launder money for some South American cocaine cartel or something.

Pavlovich:
It's a very serious crime in America, money laundering, and maybe because Miami has a lot of Hispanic people from the Mexican cartels.

Carder:
Yeah, and they sell a lot of cocaine in Miami, and also San Diego. The San Diego police charged me, and I know San Diego has a lot of Hispanic people too. Yeah, it's close to the line. So I had no job, and the owner's wife showed up when all this was going on, and she wrote me a check for the rest of my paycheck for the rest of the year. And she says, "Go to the bank and cash it right now." She says, "Don't wait, get out of here, go to the bank and cash it."

Pavlovich:
Okay, because tomorrow they could freeze all your accounts.

Freelancing. Debt load.
Carder:
Exactly, so I went there right away and cashed the check.
And it was like $60,000 or something, the rest of my paycheck. And at that point I said, "Okay," I went from living in my car to having a nice condo on Brickell in downtown Miami, I had a new Cadillac, a 2000 or something, but it was a nice, new Cadillac. I had some nice stuff and some money in the bank. And I thought, I can find a new job, now that I have years of experience with this company.
I was a project manager, and I know the niche. I have a really strong portfolio, I have a good resume, and I have a good work ethic. So I started applying.

Pavlovich:
Were you ever considering starting your own design studio?

Carder:
Yeah, I thought about that too. I was going to do some freelance graphic design, so I was looking at all these different options.
And I started applying to all these graphic design jobs. And they all wanted to pay me $10 an hour. That's $300 a week. And I make $80,000 a year, I have a freaking condo that costs me $3,500 a month. My Cadillac payment is a thousand dollars, I can't do that. But I couldn't find another job that was making me the kind of money that I needed to support the lifestyle that I was living.
And I wasn't going to go back to living in my car, I wasn't going to go back to the street.

Pavlovich:
Because you've already tried better?

Carder:
Yeah, I'm used to living well now, I wake up in the morning and I have my own apartment.

Pavlovich:
You finally feel like a human being.

Carder:
Yeah, that's right. Anyway, like I said, I couldn't find another job that was making that much money.
And part of the problem was, now I have all these bills to pay, and I have all these student loans to pay off. I've already paid off most of my student loans. The company actually helped me pay off most of my student loans, that was part of the deal when I went to work for them, that they would help me with that payment. So I've paid off most of my student loans, but I still have a lot left. And then I thought, what am I going to do? I'm not going to work in construction.
You know, I'm 5'7 and 145 pounds. There's no way I'm going to go climb around on a construction site and hang drywall or roof or anything like that. Especially in the Florida heat. I'm not cut out for physical labor, I'm not going to do that.

Pavlovich:
You had good opportunities to make money with website design, web design.

Carder:
Yeah, I could do web design.
Like Craig Zate. It's so outdated, his design is like 40 years out of date.

Pavlovich:
I know, it's just minimal. But it's the second most visited website in the United States, second only to Facebook, maybe. Right. Just imagine.

Carder:
Yeah, it's crazy that they never changed their design. So I had a few different options. I started freelancing a little bit, but that was in 2004. I mean, it's not like now, where you have Fiverr, Upwork, all these different platforms where people come and you can just hire contractors.

Pavlovich:
At that time, finding clients was extremely difficult.

Carder:
Yeah, because you needed a lot of good reviews. In Russia, we have two platforms for freelancers, you mentioned Fiverr and Upwork. These are world-famous platforms. And in Russia, we have Fiverr and Upwork. But now the problem is that there are a lot of Indians in every niche who do it for pennies.

Pavlovich:
It’s hard to find a good job, because of them, and also for us, companies, it’s hard to find a good worker. Right?

Carding forums. First steps in the field. Online and instore carding.
Carder:
And I didn’t know what to do at that time. And also at that time, one of my friends was kind of doing carding, but he didn’t really understand what he was doing.
But he told me about it, and he said, you can go on these websites, these carding forums, you can buy numbers. And it's all done online, and he kind of explained to me that he knew about this, and he told me about it all the time. And that led me down the rabbit hole of carding. So I started my own research, and that's when I found DarkMarket, that's when I found CarderPlanet, and that's when I found Carder.su.
I started finding all these carding forums and I started just reading tutorials. And I thought, shit, maybe I can make some money doing this. But I didn't know where to start. I was thinking about printing counterfeit currency, I was just trying to learn everything. So I was studying up on bank fraud, money laundering, counterfeiting currency. And then I came across carding. And online carding. And I read like 2 or 3 tutorials on how to do online carding.
I learned all about IP addresses, I learned about bins, I learned how to use the card depending on who issued it. And I thought, okay, let me try to buy some cards and see what I can do. And that was a whole other story. I got scammed so many times trying to buy card numbers that I almost gave up.

Pavlovich:
On forums?

Carder:
Yeah, I got scammed 3 or 4 times and I almost gave up. I thought this was bullshit. But then I got a really good batch. I bought a good batch of about 50 cards, $2 to $5 each.

Pavlovich:
Were they American cards?

Carder:
Yeah, American, and they came with first name, last name, credit card number, expiration date, CVV security code on the back of the card.

Pavlovich:
With the full billing address?

Carder:
Yeah, the full billing address and zip code.
That was the full package I got, all the information. It wasn't just a birth date or a social security number.

Pavlovich:
Because you didn't need it?

Carder:
Yeah, I didn't need it. So I bought a really good batch. And at first, I didn't even know what to do with the cards. I didn't know whether to get expensive electronics or something more niche so there would be less suspicion.
So it was also a research process, to try to figure out what products to take to resell. But there was so much work there, because you need a shipping address to get things sent to, and then, you know, sometimes orders wouldn't go through and they'd get cancelled. I'd have maybe two out of every five or six orders that would go through and actually get the product, but there was a lot of repetitive work.
So I started reading more tutorials, and that's when I learned about in-store carding. In-store carding.

Pavlovich:
In the Russian tradition, we call it real plastic.

Carder:
Yeah, in the states it's called in-store. And I found a couple tutorials about it and I thought, I guess I'd like to do this a little bit more because I felt like the profit margins would be higher than online carding.

Pavlovich:
Were you excited the day you found that?

Carder:
Oh yeah, absolutely obsessed, I didn't sleep for 2 or 3 days, I was up until the wee hours of the morning just reading tutorials, my mind was blown by it, I was like, "Are you kidding, this is amazing."
And then once I started doing it and I started working and I started getting successful orders, I remember that day and it still excites me when I think about it, even 20 years later, I still get goosebumps when I think about my first orders starting to go through. And that's when I switched to in-store carding, to real plastic.

Debit and credit cards. Magnetic encoders. Dumps.
Pavlovich:
And did you have any experience using your own real credit card before? Because, for example, in our country, we didn’t use credit cards before the counterfeits. We didn’t have any cards, only cash. In our countries, only cash, because we didn’t have enough stores with terminals. So we didn’t even have the experience. And my first experience with a bank card was a counterfeit card, not a real one.

Carder:
I’ve never had a credit card, but I’ve had debit cards.

Pavlovich:
Yeah, but it’s the same.

Carder:
Debit cards and credit cards weren’t the same, because debit cards only gave you access to the money in your bank account.

Pavlovich:
Yeah, I understand that, but when you do the payment process, it’s the same.

Carder:
Yeah, it’s practically the same. Anyway, I switched from online carding to in-store carding because I felt that the profit from instore carding would be much higher. And then I started buying dumps instead of full locks.
I bought an MSR-206 Reader and Writer on eBay.

Pavlovich:
Yeah, we had that same model. And we also had a 106, the MSR-106. I don’t remember the difference, but it was the worst model.

Carder:
Yeah, the 106 was the big, bulky one, and then there was the 206, and then the mini came out. After a while, they were called the MSR-306. Magnetic encoder. Magnetic encoder, yeah. And then I went on the carding forum and started buying dumps. And at first it took a while to find the right batch of dumps that were region-specific, because I started realizing that the bins were region-specific to the United States.
And once I figured out which bins worked in which region of the United States, my carding success rate went up dramatically, and I ended up finding a great bin to use in South Florida where I lived, and it happened to be some teachers' credit union. It's a shame, I know, because I was stealing from teachers, and they don't make much money anyway. I feel so ashamed of that now.
But for some reason, this little credit union didn't have good security, because every card I used, I would just max it out. I would just take it out until it stopped working. And at that time, in the beginning, I wouldn't buy plastic because I didn't have the money for it. And instead, I would go to Walgreens, Womart, CVS, and they had Visa gift cards.

Pavlovich:
Gift cards.

Carder:
Yeah, and you had to go to the register to activate them. But what I would do, I would just take the bag and I would just take all the cards off the rack. And I would steal them all. I would take them home, I would take them all out of the packaging, and I would write dumps on them. And then I would go to the stores with them.

Pavlovich:
And there was no name on it, right?

Carder:
Yeah, there was no name on it, it just said "gift."
So when I was writing the dump, instead of typing in a name, I would just type in visa gift or vice versa gift visa, so that it would look like a real gift card.

Pavlovich:
I should point out that he's not lying about visa gift, because he knows the difference, because in the dumps, the last name comes first.

Carder:
Yeah, separated by a slash, and then two asterisks on either side, and then six zeros. I can write dumps in my head right now. I know track 1 and track 2 by heart.

Pavlovich:
I'll tell you in Russian. Anyway, that's what I'm talking about. He just, you see, few people know, for example, yes, that in the dump inside, that which you put on the magnetic strip of the card, the last name comes first. And it is taken in asterisks, in short, and he knows all this stuff, so, well, in everything that follows, he is not an amateur, and to be honest, I would not remember such nonsense. Well, so many years have passed. And now we are talking about track 1, track 2. But I remember that for an ATM, only the second track is enough.

Carder:
Yes, for an ATM, you only need the second track, because the second track is what allows the post terminal to communicate with the bank. You don’t even need the first track. Yes, track 1 is only for slips. Yes, because track 1 is just the information that was on the card. There was the card number, then the expiration date, then the name and then 6 or 7 or 9 zeros.

Pavlovich:
Different banks had different lines. Yes, I even still remember some of them.

Carder:
So yeah, I was just dumping Visa gift cards and going to stores and using them. But it got to the point where, you know, you could only card a certain amount of money because anything over three or four hundred dollars, not only did they ask for the card, but you had to hand it to the cashier, and the POS terminal wouldn’t let the cashier process the sale until she entered the last four digits that were on the card into the terminal to make sure that they matched.

Pavlovich:
What were the last four digits?

Carder:
Just the last four digits of the credit card number. She had to enter them, and she had to look at the card and swipe the card to make sure that they matched. There was a limit to how much I could take out. So now I had to look at buying plastic.
Real plastic. And that’s when I started going on forums, researching buying plastic, and plastic was, I think it was like $50 a blank. Maybe $30 a blank. But it was not embossed and it was blank. It was just a blank.

Pavlovich:
Like Visa Electron?

Embossers. Hot stamping.
Carder:
Yeah, they sold me a blank, and then I had to order an embosser. An embosser is an expensive thing. I bought a Matica Z3, it was like $6,000. And you also had to have an embosser and a tipper, but the Matica Z3 had a tipper inside. A tipper is a thing for foil stamping, so that the letters were silver. But one more thing. They didn’t have a special V for Visa and M for MasterCard.

Pavlovich:
Right. And we made our own tool.

Carder:
Yeah, I had one of those too. In the beginning, when I couldn’t afford an automatic one, I had to use a manual one, with a wheel, where you had to punch each digit. And if you made a mistake, you’re screwed, you just pull the card out, throw it away and put in a new one.
So the spacing between the characters had to be right. That's how I started. And then I had a manual tipper, which is one where you have to set the temperature on the hot stamping machine. So after the embosser, you had to use the hot stamping machine, and sometimes if the temperature was too high, it would flatten the numbers on the card. So that was a learning process, too.

Pavlovich:
You'd just burn them off.

Fake ID. Card proof. BIN.
Carder:
Yeah, man, it was like an iron. And you're looking at these numbers on the card and you're like, what the fuck? So there was that learning process in the beginning.
And after I bought the card blanks, I bought a hand embossing machine, then a hot stamping machine. And now I was ready to go out there, and of course I had to buy a fake ID, because I didn't have a printer at the time. I wasn't making cards yet, but I had to buy fake IDs, and they were like three hundred dollars each.

Pavlovich:
I think that was expensive.

Carder:
Yeah, and I was probably getting scammed, but there were only one or two sellers on the site, and they were selling them for $300. So I had to buy the fake IDs, and then all this equipment, and now I was ready to go instore carding.

Pavlovich:
And here's another thing, guess what I'm going to ask you, right before I go to the store.

Carder:
You mean the UV protection on the cards? Just to check if the card works.

Pavlovich:
Yeah, because it's a very bad situation when you have a code of 0.7 or 0.4.

Carder:
Co-hold, I know, I've had a lot of such cases.

Pavlovich:
Yes, detain him and call the police.

Carder:
And what did you do to check the cards?

Pavlovich:
In Russia, we used public Comstar phones.

Carder:
Yes, there were car washes where you could just swipe your card, that happened, I also went to McDonald's and tried the card there. For a small amount.

Pavlovich:
Yes, 2-3 dollars, to make sure the card worked. Before a big purchase. Yes, because for us it was a big problem then, not every city had phones with card payments.
And we also used online checkers, for example, payment systems for porn sites.

Printers. Buying goods. Scaling. Distrust of people.
Carder:
But after such checkers, and we paid about one dollar for one check, the cards were often blocked. And you call the seller and say that he sold you some crap, and he replies that the card worked when he sold it to you.
But your online checker killed the card. This is where bins come in. Some bins work well in certain regions. If the card is local, it is more likely to work. Learning the bin system really helps to increase the success rate. So I was ready to go to the shops, I had good cards and I could buy almost anything I wanted if the card worked.
I had no doubts about their validity, because I made them myself, they looked great. I had to buy a separate printer for UV printing, because only Zebra printers supported UV tapes. Other printers, for example Fargo, could not print 3D images. I do not remember the model, but only Zebra printer could do such UV printing.
And once I had a product that I could card, I started buying TVs, PlayStations, everything. Even regular groceries in stores. And it was like free floating for 6-8 months. And I remember thinking, I want to scale up.

Pavlovich:
And what did you feel after your first successful shopping spree?

Carder:
I was like high. You have endorphins in your head, and this incredible feeling of walking into a store and buying whatever I want, without looking at the price. Yeah, I felt like I was rich now and I could buy whatever I wanted. Yeah, yeah, travel wherever I wanted, go to any restaurant.
Of course, not yachts and private jets, but household goods, anything. Clothes, shoes, technology, yeah, it was cool. I didn’t buy jewelry because I was afraid, I stayed away from watches, jewelry, expensive bags. I kept it simple.
Big TVs, laptops, phones. Things that are easy to sell. I would sell them on Craigslist and they would go in a couple of hours. I would meet with people all day and sell.

Pavlovich:
What kind of discount did you give your customers?

Carder:
About 50-60% off the retail price. I would just take 40% off the retail price and they would go fast. And in order to scale my business, I needed to attract more people.

Pavlovich:
Like, drops that would go to stores.

Carder:
Yeah, but given my childhood, I didn’t trust people. I didn’t want to involve others in criminal activity because I was afraid that they would turn me in or rip me off and rob me. I go through life with the belief that everyone is out to screw me.
That’s just the way my brain works. Everyone is out to screw me or take advantage of me. So I was always on guard.

Pavlovich:
And you decided to grow your business?

Carder:
Yeah, I needed to find a way to scale it, I wanted to make more money.

Pavlovich:
How much did you make on your own?

Carder:
I was making about $5,000 to $6,000 a week on my own.

Pavlovich:
Well, it wasn't much, because when I was going to jewelry stores, I could make a lot more.

Making cards. Holograms.
Carder:
Yeah, it wasn't much, but it was a lot of work. I had to go to stores myself, and my face was on camera all the time. I could buy five laptops in a day. And that's cool, but the next day I had to do it all over again and again and again. And I couldn't go to Walmart forever, because eventually I'd get recognized and go to jail.
So I didn't have any other options but to get other people involved. So I went on the forums, and when all this was happening, I was thinking a lot about, I heard a story about the gold rush in the 1800s.
People were riding out west in the United States on horses to mine gold, because there was a gold rush out west, in California, Colorado, people were becoming millionaires overnight.
And I remember somebody told me a story, or I heard it on TV somewhere, that the people making the most money weren't the people mining the gold, it was the people selling the picks and shovels. They were making all the money. And I was looking for some way to scale the business, some model that I could base my business on and scale.
And I thought, well, I'm buying these cards, I was buying plastic online, but a lot of the time the quality wasn't that great. The print quality wasn't that great, sometimes you'd have to wait two weeks to get one or two cards.
The sellers were unreliable. And I realized that I can make a better product and offer better service. And then I decided to become a vendor, because everything that was offered at that time was crap. We also had bad plastic until we studied offset printing technology, because it is generally used for printing newspapers and magazines, it is very high-quality printing and you can print a small font.
Microprinting, yes. For example, a very small font for the Visa inscription. In general, I looked at the market and I saw opportunities. I thought, maybe it would not be difficult to make these cards if I could bring a good product to the market and not only the product itself, but also customer service.
I thought that I would be great at making cards and selling them. And that's when I decided to stop doing in-store carding and become a vendor. And I began to study everything related to card manufacturing.

Pavlovich:
And please remind us, what were the prices for plastic in America then? Not the one you were selling.

Carder:
At that time, there were no vendors in America at all that sold plastic. All the suppliers were either in Russia or Western Europe. Only there was plastic.

Pavlovich:
Romania?

Carder:
Yeah, there was no plastic from the States at all. Nobody was doing it. But like you said, it was 25 years ago. It was underground, basically a subculture.
Nobody really knew anything about it. I went to the forums, and there weren’t many tutorials.

Pavlovich:
What about the prices?

Carder:
Oh yeah, sorry, for one card, not embossed, not tipped, just a blank, about $25.

Pavlovich:
With a hologram?

Carder:
Yeah, with a Visa or MasterCard hologram. A normal quality hologram, I mean. Well, it wasn’t a heat press, it was just a sticker.

Pavlovich:
And was it possible to peel it off?

Carder:
Sure, it was easy, so the quality wasn't that great. And when I was learning how to do all this, there weren't a lot of tutorials that explained DPI, what printer to use, what technologies. There wasn't a lot of information, so you had to figure out what printers to use, how to set them up, what temperature settings to set. And since I knew graphic design, I understood how to make the Visa logo and the card design, how to make the stripe on the back of the card that you need a special printer for.
And once I figured out how to make plastic, I had to buy all the equipment. I had to buy a Fargo printer. And that's how I figured out which one. When you go to the DMV...

Pavlovich:
What's the DMV?

Carder:
The Department of Transportation in America, where they issue you a license.
And they make them right there, right there in the department. And when I went there, and it happened completely by accident, because while I was learning all this, I accidentally lost my license, and I had to go to the DMV to get it back. And it so happened that I saw the model of printer that they use. I remember when they gave me my license, the card was still warm, from the printer. And as soon as I went out to the parking lot, I was already looking for this model of printer on my phone.
I wanted to see if I could just buy it. Or only the DMV could buy such printers.

Pavlovich:
Only official ones.

Carder:
Yes. And of course, these printers were available on the Internet. True, it cost six and a half thousand back then. It was a Fargo DP5000. I initially started printing on it, the same as the Department of Transportation. And I remember I had just enough money to buy the printer itself, ribbons for it, which were also very expensive. About $ 325 apiece. And I still had enough for a tipper.
A big, automatic one, like this big. In general, I bought a Fargo HDP5000 printer and I also bought a Zebra printer for Hologram. And then there was a process of trial and error. Playing with different settings, DPI, I figured out microprinting. I think the hardest part was making the signature strip on the back of the card.
It had to be raised, but not peel off. So you could pick it up with your fingernail, but you couldn't peel it off. And the printers I used could print it, but you could tell it was just printed. And so what I did was I covered the card with film and sprayed paint on that strip.
There's this matte spray that you put on the canvas when the painting is finished. I knew this because I was painting, and the canvas had a characteristic texture after you sprayed it on. And I would tape the entire card except for that strip and spray this thing on it so it would have a raised texture.

Pavlovich:
So that it would be like the original, where it was made of metallic foil.

Carder:
Yeah, exactly, eventually I figured out a way to print it with a special printer. It printed labels, it was basically for printing stickers on envelopes. Like if you have a permanent address and you don't want to write it down every time. And I realized that this printer printed these stripes perfectly. I made myself a template, and now the stripe was always embossed.
And once I had a product that was indistinguishable from the cards issued by financial institutions, I was ready to put it on the market. But I had to figure out not only how to sell the product, but also how to advertise it. And how to become a vendor on all these carding forums. Because you can't just start posting and selling right away, you know, you have to get vendor status.
And I had to contact the forum administrators and send them samples, I sent them about five to ten pieces. Samples. Yeah, samples of what I was doing. And so, finally, they approved my vendor status. And the very first forum where I started selling was Carder.su.
My nickname there was usplastico. Which really pissed me off in the long run.

Pavlovich:
Why usplastico?

Carder:
I don’t know, bro, I thought it was witty.

Pavlovich:
Maybe ruplastico?

Carder:
I don’t know, I thought it was cool since I live in the States, like a US plastics company, but abbreviated. I thought it was witty, but in the end it turned out badly for me. Anyway, I started selling on Carder.su.

Pavlovich:
What about holograms, because in Russia we also had problems with holograms? One very experienced team that dealt with cards, they started with Visa Electron, because it didn’t have a hologram.

Carder:
Yeah, that’s how I solved that problem. First, I ordered stickers. And they were terrible. They stuck out too much.

Pavlovich:
They weren’t 3D, right?

Carder:
No, they were real holograms, they had multispectrality, but it was still clear.
You swipe the card a couple of times, you can already see the marks, and the stickers start to peel off.

Pavlovich:
Do you know Alibaba? Yes, and the subsidiary Aliexpress.

Carder:
Exactly. And then I went to Alibaba, and I found sellers who were selling foil holograms, for Visa or MasterCard. And they came in these big rolls, and they were foil, for hot stamping.
I decided to take a chance, and I sent them what I needed. I sent them Visa and MasterCard pictures. Just by mail. And I sent about 100 of these letters. And eventually one seller wrote back. Like, "How many do you need?" and the minimum order is like 10 thousand. So I ordered a roll of 10 thousand Visa logos, and they just came in the mail.
And they were awesome. I spent hours cutting them, because they came in one roll, and I cut and cut them for hours.

Pavlovich:
So the quality was good?

Carder:
Yeah, perfect. But there was trial and error, because the tipper that I originally had, before I bought the automatic one, which did everything itself. I used mine to put holograms on the cards.
And sometimes, if you set the temperature settings incorrectly, it would melt the holograms and burn them off. So, it took me about three months. Understand everything by temperature settings, printer settings, and so on.

Pavlovich:
And what were the costs for one card? For example, half a dollar for a hologram.

Carder:
Yeah, I think the holograms were like 25 cents, and I bought 10,000. And I bought the plastic in these big boxes, where there were maybe 500 of them.

Pavlovich:
White blank cards, yes, with a magnetic strip.

Carder:
Yeah, and I also bought silver ones.

Pavlovich:
For Visa Platinum?

Raids on plastic suppliers and a rapid increase in sales.
Carder:
Yeah, and Bank of America. I think two or three dollars per card. And like I said, when I had a decent product, I started contacting the admins, and I finally got vendor status on Carder.su, and right around that time, there were raids on plastic vendors in Western Europe, and I remember, I even saw videos on forums where these guys were arrested, they were using ATM skimmers, they were working on NSR ATMs, these big skimmers that they would stick on top of the ATM. I remember there were raids and they arrested two or three people in Europe who were supplying plastic. And suddenly there was this vacuum in the market. So I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I came right when these guys were caught. And there was no one else, I mean plastic vendors, when I started.

Pavlovich:
Do you know my prices? The Chinese were making me the best quality seals.

Carder:
Hong Kong, yes.

Pavlovich:
They were about $3-5. How much did you pay for the finished product?

Carder:
Yeah, for me it was $3-5. I was paying $3,000 max for a thousand cards. And it was perfect offset printing, holograms, the best quality. Just like the original. So it was really cheap. And they were probably going for $40-50 a piece.

Pavlovich:
How much were you selling them for?

Carder:
Yeah. And like I said, there was a vacuum. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Nobody else was selling plastic at the time. I was the only one. And I saw my sales go up overnight from maybe one or two orders a month, and I was setting a minimum order of a thousand dollars. I wasn't selling one card for twenty dollars, like fifty cards for twenty dollars.
I was selling a hundred cards for a thousand, a minimum order of a thousand dollars. And I was supplying a hundred cards, pure plastic, no embossing, no embarrassment, just regular plastic.

Pavlovich:
When we were selling the same thing, the most common thing that clients would ask me to do was to burn the dumps onto the cards and emboss them so they were ready to use.

Carder:
And I did that too, but it was an extra service, and I charged extra for it, because obviously it was more work.

Pavlovich:
Just like with escorts?

Carder:
Yeah, it's an extra, so pay more. And I also had a dump supplier that I worked with.

Dump suppliers. Significant revenue. A way of life in better times.
Pavlovich:
And who was your dump supplier? Because I know them all, they were all Russian, all the carders, all the dump sources were Russian.
I think I had it written down somewhere.
And there were a lot of resellers, of course, like me, because I was a reseller too, but the dump sources were always Russian.

Carder:
I'm trying to remember the name.

Pavlovich:
I remember Script. It was Maksik. I think Maksik was my main dump source. Maksik, I remember him, he came after me, back when I was in for the first time. He took my place. Do you know what happened to him?

Carder:
No.

Pavlovich:
He got 30 years in prison in Turkey because the Americans, the US Secret Service, they invited him to a meeting in some country, maybe Thailand, let's say Thailand, but through Turkey. And when the US authorities told the Turkish government to extradite him to the US, the Turkish government refused, because he was selling not only American cards, but Turkish ones as well.
And they gave him 30 years in prison. And Turkish prisons are terrible. I saw a movie about Turkish prisons. Midnight Express.

Carder:
Yes, Midnight Express. I saw that movie too.

Pavlovich:
Yeah, so he was in jail for, I don’t know exactly how many years, I think five to seven. And then he was extradited to Ukraine, because that’s where he’s from, and now I don’t know what happened to him.

Carder:
So he didn’t do the full 30 years?

Pavlovich:
No, I think five to seven, and the Ukrainians released him. But Maksik was a big dump seller, although he was a reseller just like me.

Carder:
Oh, I see. He was one of the main guys that I got dumps from. So, like I said, I just became number one in dump sales. Probably from 2005 to 2009. Yeah, about four years. That’s all I did. I know for sure that I was number one in dump sales in America. I
don’t know about the world, but in America for sure. And at the peak of my success, I was probably doing about a hundred orders a month. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But on average, about a hundred orders a month. So, about a hundred thousand dollars a month.

Pavlovich:
Do you remember Akihiko Tobo? The Chinese guy who sold go-kart equipment.

Carder:
Sounds familiar. But it doesn't matter.
Yeah, it was 20 years ago, so it's hard to remember. Anyway, I was doing about 100 orders a month, averaging about $100,000 a month, at the peak of my success.

Pavlovich:
How old were you at the time?

Carder:
I started when I was 20 and went up to 24, so I was about 24 at my peak, and during that time I probably saved up between three and a half and four million dollars.

Pavlovich:
What kind of lifestyle did you have in those days when you were making a hundred grand a month? Describe it, please.

Carder:
I had a new car, I had a really nice condo.

Pavlovich:
What model?

Carder:
I had a Cadillac STS, cream colored, new sunroof, leather seats, everything on the gate.
I had a really nice condo in the Briccola Center in Miami. I rented it and paid for it in full, I had the best of everything.

Pavlovich:
How much did you pay rent?

Carder:
My condo was $3,200 a month. That was 20 years ago. That was really expensive back then. Now a typical condo is $3,000 a month, but that was something back then. I had $7,000 leather couches.
I had the biggest TV that Best Buy had. I had all the gadgets, everything I wanted. I had the latest phone, I was going on vacation all the time, I was flying all over the world.

Pavlovich:
And back in those days, you didn't use counterfeit cards to buy things for yourself at stores?

Carder:
No. When I started selling plastic, I stopped using them.

Pavlovich:
Me too. Because it was too risky.

Carder:
And then I had enough money to buy everything I wanted. Yeah, why use cards? It's just a stupid risk. So once I started selling plastic, I stopped using them, because I had money to pay for everything I wanted.
I flew all over the world. I flew private jets. Instead of commercial flights, I used private jets.

Pavlovich:
I never flew private jets. I'm not rich enough for that.

Carder:
Yeah, in the States there is such a service, you pay them, like, 100 thousand dollars, and you get so many hours of flying. I had a phone number, and wherever I went, I could call this number, and they would send a private car to pick me up, which would take me to the Fort Lauderdale airport.

Pavlovich:
And how much did one flight cost, for example, from Florida to New York?

Carder:
Private - about three and a half to four thousand dollars. But I bought packages, for example, for a hundred thousand I got thirty hours of flying. So every time I flew, they just took hours off my package.

Pavlovich:
So, like, flying from L.A. to San Diego would be quick?

Carder:
Yeah, it's like an hour-long flight, an hour and forty-five or something like that.

Pavlovich:
So you were able to travel on a private jet from L.A. to San Diego, for example?

Carder:
Yeah, it's a couple hours' flight, and I had a package of 30 hours available to me for, like, 100 grand.
I had this number, and I could call it, and they'd send a car, like a Lincoln, to take me to the airport, and I'd get on a private jet and go wherever I wanted. It was cool. That was probably the coolest thing.

Pavlovich:
You were like a rock star.

Carder:
Exactly.

Pavlovich:
You know that song?

Substance Abuse. Discretion.
Carder:
Sure. "Partii Laika Rock Star." Post Malone, one of my favorites. Anyway, I was flying all over the place, I had cool cars, and the good thing is I was never into drugs. I was just lucky that I didn't have that addiction tendency. I tried cocaine and stuff, but I could stop at any time, I just don't have that addiction.
So I was lucky. I was never into heroin, pills, or cocaine. I smoked weed every day, but that's different.

Pavlovich:
Was it illegal to smoke weed back then?

Carder:
Yeah, illegal. And I wasn't a big party animal. I wasn't going out to bars or strip clubs, I was quiet. I knew not to buy a million dollar piece of jewelry. I wasn't doing any stupid shit that was going to get me jail time. I was afraid to spend money and I was afraid to buy a house because the IRS was going to ask where I got the money from. So I didn't buy a big house, I had a nice car, but it wasn't new.
I didn't go to a dealership and buy a zero car, but it was new and had low miles. I didn't wear jewelry, I didn't go to parties. I value experiences in life more than material things. I'd rather fly somewhere on the weekends, hang out by a pool, go to restaurants, ride jet skis or go on roller coasters.
I'd rather do all that stuff than go buy jewelry or go buy a new car or a new watch or something. So I was always on the go. When I needed to print cards, I would just fly home. I would print 500, 600, 700, 800 cards in 2-3 days, and I would just print and print and print.
And I had all the cards in a safe, so when the orders came in, I would just take them out, ship them, and get paid, I didn’t have to work hard.

Shipping orders worldwide.
Pavlovich:
Describe how you shipped orders. When we shipped internationally, we used DHL or FedEx. It didn’t matter which company. We would pack the cards in speakers or DVD players, we would always use some kind of equipment.

Carder:
Yeah, I used routers. I would buy 100-something routers on eBay that were broken or missing parts. I would take the guts out, put the cards in, put the router back together, pack it in a box, and seal it. And I even made a real company that I set up online.
And I told everybody that I sold refurbished computer equipment. Because a lot of the cards were going overseas. And to ship internationally, you had to have a BOL, a Bill of Landing, and a manifest that said what was in the box, what company it was from, the weight of the package, etc. And I made a website, I don't even remember what I called the company back then, but we sold refurbished computer equipment.
I made a website, I registered an LLC, a real company, opened a business account, and all that stuff, like a real business.
Yeah, it was a real company on paper, but I was actually using it to ship cards. And one day, a UPS employee did something.

The UPS Store. How he got caught. The deal with the FBI.
Carder:
Anyway, let me tell you how I got caught. Like I said, I was working from 2004 to 2009. And in 2009, I meet a girl.
She gets pregnant with my baby, has the baby, and then my son comes into the picture, and she's from South Carolina, and she wanted to move back to Carolina to be near her family, because her family didn't really know my son, and she wanted him to grow up with her mom and her brothers and all that, and I thought, I can do this anywhere. Okay, let's go to South Carolina. I still have my condo in Miami. And we go to South Carolina and buy a cottage.
And anyway, in Miami and South Florida, there's this thing called the UPS Store. And it's a franchise. You can rent a post office box, get mail in it, send mail in it. And there are hundreds of them in South Florida, they're everywhere. You hit a UPS Store and there's one every five miles. And I used them to mail my cards. I sent all my packages through a program called the Pitney Bowes.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it’s like… you have your own scale at home, you weigh the box, you pay for all the shipping with your credit card, you print out a shipping label, you put it on the box, and then you just take it and you go to the UPS Store and you say, “I need you to ship this,” and they ship it. And I never had to use the same UPS Store twice because there were so many. And even though I had probably 15 or 20 packages a week, I could just go to a different UPS Store and bring them in and drop them off.
They scan them and that’s it, no problem. When I got to South Carolina, there were only two. Two UPS Stores in this little town that I was shipping packages out of. And I had to go to the same UPS Store. I was there all week long, shipping packages. And my packages were going everywhere. They were going to Europe, to South America, all over the United States.
And I think the guy who ran this UPS Store thought I was shipping drugs. And so one day he went into one of my boxes. I show up to ship a package, he opens it up, unpacks it, finds the cards, finds my cards. And he contacts the manager of this branch, he's the main guy that handles all the postal service stuff. He handles all the fraud stuff, he handles all the operations of the United States Postal Service.
And in every city there's a manager, one guy that's in charge of everything. And the guy went to him. He showed the manager what I was shipping. And then the manager contacts the US Secret Service. And they show up at UPS and I was using a fake driver's license, so somebody's driver's license had my picture on it.
Because at the time, I was also making driver's licenses. And I was making really good quality ones. And I was selling them too. So, the secret service comes, and they go to the UPS Store, and they find my picture on someone else's driver's license. They run the name on the driver's license, and obviously it shows them a picture of someone else. So at that point, they don't know who I am. They sat in the parking lot of the UPS Store for five days from open to close, waiting for me to get there to mail a package or to pick up.
And finally, on the fifth day, I got an email saying that I had a package waiting for me there. And it was. Because when you get the mail, they send you an email saying you got two packages today. So I went in, signed for the package, and I was about to walk out the door, and there were two guys standing at the exit, blocking the door.
And they were not in uniform. And when I went to open the door, I saw a badge and a gun. And then it still didn’t hit me, you know, because I’d been doing this for four years, I felt super confident. I was calm, I never looked back, I didn’t worry about anything. I didn’t worry about the secret service or anyone watching me. Because I used a VPN, and when I connected to all these carding forums, I never used my home internet.
So they didn’t have my IP address or anything like that. And you know, when I would talk to clients, I wouldn’t tell them who I was or where I was from. I mean, I wasn’t trying to be friends with them, you know? And a lot of them would ask me weird questions, like, “What are you doing today?” or “Where are you from?” And I’m like, “No, that’s not going to work, I’m not answering that.” So I knew I wasn’t going to get caught through the forums.
There was no way they were going to know where I was, I was anonymous. The only way they could have figured out where I was was a fucking UPS Store, there were only two in town.

Pavlovich:
But he did an illegal thing, right? Yeah, 'cause he didn't have the authority to open your package.

Carder:
Yeah, only the manager has the authority to open the package after they pay the postage. So I go to the UPS Store, like I said, to pick up the package.
And these two guys walk in, they have badges and they have guns. And they say Ryan Pearson, 'cause that was the name he was using at the time. And I say yeah. And they say, "We need to talk to you about what you're shipping from here." And that's when it hit me, and I'm like, "Oh, shit." That's when I finally realized I was busted. They're like, "We need to talk to you about what you're shipping from here," and I'm like, I tried to play dumb at first, you know, I'm like, "I don't know what you're talking about, I have no idea."
And they're like, "Listen, we have your package, we know what you're shipping from here, we have your cards. You know what? You know what?" And then, for a second, I just zoned out. You know, I didn't know what to do. I didn't have, like, a story in my head because I never planned on getting caught, so I never rehearsed it. It's not something that I ever prepared for, and I should have, but I just didn't. And they take me into this office in this UPS Store in the office and they're like, "Okay, what's your real name?" And I sat back in my chair for a minute and I'm like, "They don't know who I am. They don't know what I do. They don't know how long I've been doing this." They don't have information, because if they did, I'd be in handcuffs. And we'd be having a completely different conversation. And in my head, I'm like, okay, how much information can I give them without giving myself away completely? Because I wasn't going to turn myself in, you know? I wasn't going to just lay it out there.
In my head, I was like, okay, how do I get out of this? I'll lie as much as I can.

Pavlovich:
But I think you had one weakness, because you were a juvenile offender and your fingerprints were in the police database.

Carder:
Yeah, I've been arrested before. So yeah, my fingerprints were definitely in the database. And like I said, they had my cards, and if they'd run my prints off the cards, they could have found out who I was, but they just didn't.
And I was like, how do I get out of this, how much information can I give them to try to get out of this. I gave them my name, and they ran a phone check on me. They called, got a copy of my real driver's license, my Social Security number, everything. And they go, okay, you're telling us the truth. But I just downplayed it, I said, I’ve been doing this for about a month, I have printers, and I print credit cards in my closet, I haven’t made a lot of money.
They just refused to believe that I was doing this by myself. And I tried to tell them that several times, and they were like, “Okay, you need to cooperate with us.” And I was like, “Listen, I’m going to jail, so I don’t need to cooperate with you.” I said, “Let’s just go to jail, I’ll deal with the judge, get a lawyer.”
And they said, “No, if you cooperate with us today, you’re not going to jail.” I said, “Are you going to send me to jail?” They said, “No, you’re not going to jail.” And then I said, “Okay, I need it in writing.”
And they made a call, they talked to their boss, and he faxed a paper to the UPS Store saying if I give a full statement and sign this document, I will not be arrested. today. And yes, I will have to go to court and give a statement and they will question me. But if I can get out of this situation now, I will just walk away. I was not going to give a statement, I didn’t want to go to court. I wanted to just walk away. And I had to tell them, “Okay, I’ve only been doing this for a few months, I have printers at home and everything.”
So they faxed another document.

Pavlovich:
You had all this in Carolina?

Carder:
Yeah, South Carolina. I had a printer set up, and I bought another one because everything was set up in Miami, and I bought more printers and embossers and everything. I had a lab in my house, I had a spare room, and I had a three-bedroom house, so I had one room completely set up.
The printers, the embossing machine, the heat press, I had it all at my house. At home. So I had to sign another document saying they could come to my house and search my house, seize anything that was used to commit crimes. They put me in their car and they drove me to my house. Luckily, my girlfriend wasn’t home. They came in, they searched my entire apartment, and I told them before we came in, I have marijuana and guns in my house. I had multiple guns, a couple pistols, an AK-47, an AR-15, but at the time, I had no criminal record, I was not a convicted felon.
I had a concealed carry license, so I had every right to carry a gun in the United States. And when they came in, they didn’t even pay attention. They said, “We’re not the ATF, we’re not interested.” I had about a quarter pound of marijuana in the freezer and guns all over the house. And they left it alone.
They took my printers, my embossers, everything that had removable media. All the laptops, phones… and there were no phones back then, this was before smartphones.

Pavlovich:
Basically, everything for carding.

Carder:
Yeah, we had digital cameras back then, because phones didn’t have cameras yet. This was 2009 or something like that. They took everything that had removable media. They took all my printers, my laptops, they took everything. They completely cleaned me out.
They gave me a business card and said “you need to be at this address on this day to give a statement.” Then they left and took all my passwords for my Carder.su account. And they made me give them my ICQ login and all my logins. That was part of the deal, otherwise I would have gone to jail. So I had to give them all my details. Luckily, I’ve always been paranoid. I never saved my ICQ chat history, so when they logged into my account, there was nothing there.
Luckily, there was nothing in there, otherwise, it would have buried me. I would have been finished, because I had every conversation between me and the clients in there. I never kept any papers in the house, any bills or anything like that, everything was digital. And I had a warehouse where I kept my car and some money. That's where I kept my cash. So after that, I was just going to run.
I just wanted to leave and get away. But my girlfriend, who I was with at the time, she said, "Listen, they would have arrested you. They would have arrested you by now." She said, "Just go and talk to them. That'll buy us a little more time. If you don't go, they'll put out a warrant for your arrest right now, and they'll be looking for you right now." So a week later, I went there to testify. And I remember walking into the room, it was the Southern District, the South Carolina District.
It was like the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters for that region of the United States. Bro, I walked into a room and there was this long table and there were a bunch of guys sitting around it. They flew in from DC, Las Vegas, California, all over the country, inspectors from all over the country, and the US Postal Service.
Financial Crimes Unit from California, data analysts from DC, they brought all these people in for one meeting. And I walked in there and they had screenshots of all my posts from all the forums laid out on the table, all my posts about sales on Carder.su. Every time I commented on someone's post, any tutorial, they had it all. Someone was specifically doing this to collect all of this.

Results
Pavlovich:
And if you want to know the rest of the story, leave a comment.
In general, write questions, whether you liked it or not, and we'll just make a second part, because this is where the real adventures begin, prison and all that. Hugs, bye!