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Guest - Sergey Pavlovich. In the past - Police Dog carder, who spent 10 years in prison. Author of the book "How I Stole a Million. Confession of a Repentant Carder". Now - businessman and blogger. We talked about carding, prison, how to survive and change there, life after prison, how the book was written, cybersecurity, personal data breaches and social projects. We analyzed Sergey's main business, the cashback service SecretDiscounter.com: business model, profitability, advertising channels, difficulties and life hacks.
Contents:
Books recommended by Sergey:
1. "The Golden Future" - Rajneesh Bhagavan Shri "Osho"
2. "Quantum Warrior. Consciousness of the Future" - John Kehoe
3. "Block 11. No Exit" - Piero Antoni
4. "The Butterfly" - Henri Charriere
5. "Sentenced to Life" - Marcus Clarke
About the guest
Interviewer:
Hello, our guest is Sergey Pavlovich. Sergey, can you tell us who you are?
Carder:
Yes, it will be easier for everyone. In the past, a cybercriminal, for which he subsequently had to serve 10 years in prison, the author of the book Modest and the founder of the cashback service Secret Discount. I also have a number of other hobbies, I run my own YouTube channel. Well, so, for the viewers "People Pro" are called, but mainly engaged in business.
Is carding easy money?
Interviewer:
Carding, easy money?
Carder:
No. And why? In general, crime is not easy money, that is, it is incorrect to say easy money. Any money, it is difficult, that is, in order to succeed in the same cybercrime, you still need to achieve a certain status, work days and nights, be in touch with hundreds of people, speak several languages, it is desirable to have some kind of information resource of your own, like a blog, for example, or a forum, it is desirable.
And I can agree that in crime money is fast, but it is not easy, it is just as hard work, like any other.
Interviewer:
If we do not take into account the money, why did you do this besides money? Was there some kind of thrill that you were breaking some system?
Carder:
No, because carders are not hackers, that is, the elite of the cybercriminal world, I believe, hackers. But they are not salesmen, you see, they get the database, card numbers, eBay accounts, hack anything there, dumps that are recorded. I was involved solely for the money. I got there by accident, by and large, because it was the 90s, parents worked two or three jobs to provide for the family, yes, and the children were left to their own devices.
They ordered any products from Western online stores, paid with left-hand credit cards. Then there was more selling of documents, selling of numbers, credit cards, dumps on a plastic strip, dumps with PIN codes, cashing out, all that. But all of this was solely for the money. I didn’t experience any particular thrill. I never spent much money that way. That is, I threw away some cash, my grandfather had a hookah suitcase in his garden, a short metal hookah case.
I put the cash in there, in short.
How much did you steal in total?
Interviewer:
You called the book “How I Stole a Million.” Was there a million in it or did you exaggerate a little?
Carder:
No, there was more. The Americans wrote me down 36 million dollars in damages. But how are the damages calculated? They take, somehow find credit cards, let's say, that I was involved with, add them up, calculate the total amount stolen, it comes out to 36 million. But I myself earn much less, because it's not me stealing all this money.
I took it from hackers for 10 dollars, sold it for 50, put 40 in my pocket, and they took one and a half thousand from it, my earnings were 40, so I calculated, yes, that is, I had about a million two hundred in cash all the time.
Is carding dying?
Interviewer:
Can you even say that carding is a dying breed?
Carder:
No. We have the largest carding forum, yes, but everyone hung out there, hackers, carders, virus writers, spammers, in general, such a motley cybercriminal crowd, six thousand people. Now there are forums with three hundred thousand cybercriminals, you know? That is, ten years have passed, and it has grown fifty, a hundred times. Now there are many Telegram channels that teach this for money.
Well, this is also a dubious occupation, they learned to paint someone else's PayPal.
Are carding schools info gypsies?
Interviewer:
Stop, wait. So you want to say that there are carding schools that teach how to card for money?
Carder:
Yes, yes, yes.
Interviewer:
And how many students are there, at least approximately on a scale, can you somehow associate?
Carder:
They graduate 200-500 per month.
Interviewer:
In your opinion, an infopreneur who sells carding courses, what do they make more money on, carding or teaching how to card?
Carder:
Well, like all info gypsies, they make money selling this.
Advice to current carders
Interviewer:
Let's say we're being watched by a person who is involved in carding. What advice would you give them?
Carder:
It depends on the country, if from Belarus, then dry crackers, make woolen socks, buy envelopes, because it's better not to do this at all from Belarus. If you tell guys from another country, neither you nor I will make them quit the profitable activities that they make a living from. Well, you quit. Well, I served 10 years, that's what it took me.
I can just advise them to finish this quickly, collect some necessary minimum amount and move forward with some legal startup.
Why doesn't prison correct criminals?
Interviewer:
You said in your book that prison leaves you an even more experienced criminal. You spent 10 years in prison. Did you somehow manage to break that pattern?
Carder:
When a person gets caught behind bars, he rarely agrees that he screwed up, that he himself is to blame, and that it was his actions that brought him to where he is, behind bars. He naturally blames the circumstances, the authorities, the judge and the prosecutor, who, due to insufficient evidence, but still understanding that he was involved, gave him a term.
He blames all this, he is embittered, he tore up cars, stole once or twice, everything went smoothly for him, the third time he was put in jail, and he analyzes what he got caught for, you know? He does not think that, damn, I need to get out and somehow change my line of work. He analyzes what he got caught for, and he will not make the same mistake next time. Plus, he communicates with other criminals, finds someone of his level or higher, and they exchange experiences, contacts, connections, a kind of networking happens.
And, accordingly, yes, he comes out more experienced. But in my case, if they wanted to get involved in cybercrime now, of course I would be more experienced, you know? That is, I would not have made the mistakes that I made, plus during that time I would have thought through some more security systems and so on. But everything ends someday, that is, it is outgrown, plus I understand that there is still a risk, no matter how thoughtful you are, the human factor somewhere, some kind of accident.
So I just changed my field of activity radically and that's it.
From a criminal to a businessman is one step?
Interviewer:
You noticed such an interesting point, that from a criminal to a businessman is essentially one moment, one step. This is the vector of energy application. Where to get this energy from?
Carder:
Sports and other regimes, doping will give you 10%. I think it is innate. And criminals are the cream of this society, 5% in any prison in the world. But in a strict prison, if you take 95% of all prisoners - this is ballast, which, maybe it is not quite correct to say, but, roughly speaking, tomorrow they slept in a crematorium, but nothing will change on earth. That is, this is ballast, which does not bring anything good to the planet as a whole, who are always complaining, who They see that they themselves are worthless in essence, do not strive for anything.
Well, such, you know, like a worm, it crawls, eats something, well, that's what you can compare. And only 5%, well, let's say 10, yes, people who are active with a high level of energy, who got there because of their actions. Someone did not run a business correctly, someone was closed by competitors, someone because of some professional crimes.
I have a friend there, a professional car thief. He is a smart, educated, very developed guy in all respects. And it is not too late to direct him in some other direction. Perhaps, it happened to him by accident, you know? I dug up these cards on the Internet, the first numbers of credit cards on a bulletin board by accident. That is, if I had an extra thousand dollars there, and if I had come across you, figuratively speaking, we might have already started our own bulletin board, and would have been the second Avito, or the first.
But he needs to understand it himself. As he understood, for me it happened under the influence of a long term and, probably, is the literature correct.
What countries are you not allowed to visit?
Interviewer:
What countries in the world are you not allowed to visit now?
Carder:
This is such a legal loophole. If a person has been punished for something, then he cannot be tried for the same thing twice. But the USA is such a lawless country, in short, completely lawless. If it concerns their interests, they are ready to do anything. Well, we all know about torture and tingon-tangon, they don't give a shit. That's it. In short, they think that you should definitely do your time on their territory.
Or, in extreme cases, they won't recognize you if you did your time in the United Kingdom. That's it. But what happened to me was some kind of idiocy, because I sat in Belarus for 10 years without causing any damage to citizens or companies of Belarus, only to European and American structures. But those structures, those law enforcement agencies of Western countries still have claims against me, as they had before.
They ask, why the hell did I sit for 10 years if I can't now move freely around the world? Naturally, I can't travel to countries that are friendly to the United States and even those that have an extradition treaty with the United States and even those that don't have an extradition treaty. For example, there isn't one in Germany, but there are plenty of precedents there where people are arrested and extradited without any treaties. Or in the Maldives, they don't have an extradition treaty either, but there is Seleznev, I worked with him, by the way, a very talented hacker.
His father is a deputy from the LDPR, he went to the Maldives, and the Maldives, such a funny moment happened, the Maldives were supplied with all these border computers, these scanners, by the USA as humanitarian aid or for money. And they, naturally, entered the database of all their enemies there, put it in these computers.
Seleznev came to the Maldives, well, they, naturally, received some kind of signal that he was there. Well, they arrested him, forcibly took him to Guam, their island in the Pacific Ocean, and officially arrested him there. Well, that is, if you look into the kidnapping of a person, well, it's better not to joke with the States, because they don't give a damn at all. Well, I can go to other countries, there, Ukraine, Azerbaijan. I can go there. Okay, let's not say where, otherwise they won't know that I might go there soon.
But the list of countries is limited. I can probably go to about thirty countries. I can go to China, to Cambodia. But I don’t really want to go there yet.
Charity Ford: books, sports equipment for prisoners
Interviewer:
In one interview, you said that I have an idea to register a charity foundation that would help prisons with sports interviews and books. Let’s say I have Myth’s books. Well, educational ones on e-mail marketing, on personalities, growth, and something else, where would I put them?
Carder:
There is terrible isolation in prison. That is, the worst thing there is that you are cut off from communication with your loved ones, with your family, and these pitiful one or two phone calls a month, letters, and visits a couple of times a year, they, of course, do not save you. And you degrade, because I caught myself thinking that I can hardly even find the words to say on the phone, that’s it. And in general, such an information famine, yes, it is one of the most terrible methods of suppressing a person.
Yes, the Nazis came up with it, maybe even before them, but behind bars it is felt especially acutely. And personally, I believe that my transformation from a criminal to a businessman was influenced by the books that I read during this time. And it was mainly philosophy.
That is, I read Osh, naturally, then a little John Keh, I read several Christian books, one was called "Unholy Saints", it was written by this Putin's spiritual mentor, Father Tikhon. Socrates, Plato, then I also liked Francisco de Sisi, Bertrand Ransel. This passage of mine that you quoted earlier about redirecting energy, it is from Osh, for example, from Buddha, when Buddha essentially turned faith into the most terrible killer in those parts.
He says, yes, you are a strong person, but you need to change the direction of your forces a little. And that is why I believe that behind bars, books are the most important. I have a goal to create a fund, the name has already been invented - Freedom Forever, freedom forever. It is a two-stage goal, at the first stage, with the joint efforts of mine, yours and some mutual acquaintances, we select a list of, say, 500 books that lead to the Transformation of a person, who was amazed in something, made to think.
And when we have selected this list, it is simply purchased with the creators. I think that with many it is possible to conclude some barter agreements somewhere on a charitable basis. And then it is simply driven as a set of 500 books to each prison, to each zone. And this will be useful. And sports equipment in many zones with sports, so, the administration does not really allow it.
Although it’s also in vain, because what is there to do behind bars, that is, they, in fact, you know, prohibit sports. That is, first, they don’t give you access to information, you degrade mentally there. Second, there is practically no access to sports, only a select few have it, and even then it’s illegal dumbbells, barbells, etc. And, accordingly, you degrade physically. When this is done through the foundation, yes, there will already be connections there with the administration, correctional institutions with all sorts of FSINs, DINs, SVRs in law.
That is, all this will be easily resolved. But now it’s all so overgrown with bureaucratic procedures that the same correctional colony would be happy to accept so many books from you, 500, 1000, but it can’t do this. He will have to sign over a kilometer of all sorts of papers.
About cybersecurity, how to protect your data?
Interviewer:
About cybersecurity.
Carder:
The main problem is very easy passwords. The second, even bigger mistake is setting the same password for different services. That's it, email, well, a bunch of email, plus a password, for example, it worked great for Facebook, worked well for PayPal. Sensitive information on the computer can be stored, of course, it makes sense on separate encrypted disks.
These are programs like DriveCrypt, BestCrypt, Veracrypt, now it is the former TrueCrypt, they create a virtual container in one of the sections of your hard drive, very well encrypted, to which you assign a password, preferably different, not the same as the one you have for logging into Windows or Mac, because this password is, in principle, quite easy for special services or hackers in general to pick up, and all sensitive information, passwords, logins, bank scans, some cards, passports, we store there.
Then, of course, we do not transmit passwords in plain text. For example, I tried to send them a password in Viber a couple of times with my server admins, they tell me that you write, create a text document, encrypt PGP through the PGP program, and already log in in this form.
That is, we do not send passwords in clear text in SMS and so on. If you are already entering a password to Facebook, VKontakte, Sberbank, then always check that the URL of the site, specifically the original site, is not some left-hand one. There are a lot of these scams related to pornography. I have been receiving them in my mail for about three weeks, probably, and from my own mail.
A letter comes that we hacked your computer, otherwise how could we write from your mail and you were filmed watching pornography, in short, how are you jerking off, like, and in short, transfer there to such-and-such a bitcoin, but this spammer is an idiot, first of all, it happens that they really have the password to your email, but this is like I said, as I just said, they hack some forum, let's say, and the password to your email is, let's say, the same as on that forum, and then okay, yes, they really write to you from your email and you understand that if there was an email hack, then yes, maybe you watched porn there two years ago, you start remembering, and maybe they filmed it, and in that case, the chances of success are much higher, but in my case, they do not have access to my email, this is definitely true, I look at the service information in the letter from where it came, there are fake servers from MTP, that is, well, they cannot get to my server, it is impossible. They call from numbers that allegedly belong to the bank's security service or the official office of Belarus Bank. That is, the usual number substitution is done and in exactly the same way, that is, a person, many, for example, he has Sberbank support recorded there, yes, he sees that they are calling him from there.
And he is basically no longer afraid to give his card details, some PIN codes and everything. And this is how money is lured. In the case of banks, if they call you, you can, for example, hang up and call back on this number yourself and it will turn out that they did not call you, most likely. But on dating sites, in short, such scams still occur.
They get to know you, with guys under the guise of some girl, such a pretty one. Then they offer to transfer the communication to VK, for example. Accordingly, they find out the list of your friends from there. Well, the communication then moves to Skype, let's say. Wherever there is a video camera. Then she allegedly turns on the video, like herself, in Skype, let's say. Asks you to turn on the camera. But this goes for... You see, at the same time she simply puts a part of the film.
Not her, but the attacker who is behind it. And if the attacker films you doing something like that, then it is all recorded and then simply under threats of sending it to your entire front list, this is extorting money. And there are already amounts, there are 200, 300, 500 dollars, well, depending on who is not caught. That is, someone will pay 10 thousand for this.
But having paid the blackmailer once, most likely you will pay him always.
Interviewer:
There was an article on Habr about checking people, and it collected some incredible number of likes about the fact that you can just go to the forum, order a check of people, and all this is practically in the public domain, you can see how much money a person has in his account, where he is by GPS, check his coordinates and so on. This is not some kind of secret, but for some reason this article caused a furious resonance.
And here is my question, why do you think people write so boldly and openly and fearlessly about offering such services? Are they not afraid that the police will order them?
Carder:
Well, that's what the police themselves write. That is, now I have contacts in several Telegram channels, having checked in Russia, in Ukraine, but mainly in Russia, you see, that is, the guys offer the following list of services, printouts of all your calls and cell phones, let's say, for all mobile operators, for a little more, for any period during which the operator stores them.
That is, this means that they have their own people in all operators, you know, who have access to billing. Then having checked in all your SMS, full information on your bank accounts, how much money, in which banks, car numbers, movements by GPS car and by cell phone, i.e. your most frequent routes. And, in principle, a bunch of other documents, if you are an entrepreneur, then these are copies of all your witnesses, copies of passports.
That is, to take a full set, well, I don’t know, it will probably cost 50-100 thousand rubles.
Interviewer:
In Russia?
Carder:
Well, I don’t think so, you know, because some GRU agent might have a harder time getting through, Belinka Kat is only capable of that for now. But, yes, practically everything.
Interviewer:
And what about Belarus?
Carder:
Well, I don’t know, I haven’t come across Belarus yet, but I think it’s much more difficult. That is, and since I haven’t come across it yet, yes, I don’t specifically look for it. You crawl around somewhere, there are some channels, you come across something like that. The same thing is in Ukraine, but on a slightly smaller scale. But I haven’t seen it in Belarus.
Interviewer:
So in Belarus, in principle, we can assume that there is a chance that our private data will remain with us?
Carder:
There is, yes. And why is that? Because of the general insecurity, yes, how Lukashenko keeps everyone here in fear, despite the fact that all officials steal, and this is no secret to anyone, I can say on any camera and argue, Because where would an official who earns a thousand dollars, let's say a month, get a cottage worth a million or two. The lower level, some policemen, ordinary employees of some holdings, private companies like Welcome, MTS, if we are talking about them, they are intimidated and the risk exceeds the possible profitability.
Having checked, for example, Beeline, purely all your calls for a month, in Moscow it costs, depending on the operator, from 50 to 100 dollars. There it is on stream, you understand? And here, most likely, the cops will turn to him for a check, then they will look, again, who received data on this number on that day, most likely, they will put him in jail. That is, it is not worth the effort, and they are not taking the risk.
Interviewer:
And in Russia, they still take risks?
Carder:
Yes, in Russia, no one cares.
About the book "How I Stole a Million", how much did you earn from sales?
Interviewer:
You wrote that you started writing the book from the first week. A person was sent to prison, even for the second time, and you start writing a book from the first week.
Carder:
What else is there to do? Eat, smoke, drink tea, do a little sports, some yoga, and that's it, read, write. It's funny to live like that in prison, in my opinion. I understood that I wouldn't be able to get out through the court, in any way at all. And I thought that with the help of the book, among other things, I could draw attention to myself, to the fact that I did not cause harm to the citizens of Belarus, companies, but I was forced to sit for 10 years and ask for pardon.
Plus, my grandfather asked for me, my honored forester there in the USSR, all that stuff. But it didn't help, because, well, nobody reads these requests for clemency or anything like that. They can pardon their own friend, a convicted corrupt official, you know, forgive him, send him to manage collective farms. Well, as for pardons of ordinary citizens, they are read by some petty clerk, there, in the presidential administration, you write a standard three-sentence reply for you.
That's why the book started as a diary, continued as just memoirs and to convey some of my experience, just to tell how it was. You know, I had such moral concerns, doubts that it would be a manual on cybercrime. Many of the schemes that are described there, almost all of them have already been exposed, and the people who are written about there, they are either in prison or have served time and been punished.
Those who could not be mentioned, I slightly changed the names, surnames, nicknames. It hasn't become especially important in terms of cybercrime, because I have quite a lot of people writing to me every month, probably 30 people from new readers, and almost all of them, yes, I have never met anyone else, they write something like, that they read your book on a difficult
path in life, crossroads, at a crossroads, yes, I used to do some cybercrime, but in principle it wasn't very successful, and some people even write and everything went well, but not bad financially. They say, then they read your book, in short, and did something else. And basically everyone thanks me. And I want to tell you something else. There are a number of moments when people send money, they send, they say, that I read it for free on the Internet at one time, well, I have the financial opportunity, let me thank you.
Well, I say, okay, let's give part of it to charity, and part of it to me, I don't set the price, but it's different for everyone, you know, someone transfers 35 dollars, one guy from Wargaming wanted my book with an autograph, I'm open to new acquaintances, I also brought him a book with an autograph, I didn't say how much, he paid me
$50, some people transfer $100, but that's just small change, and I earn practically nothing from sales in Russia, right?
Interviewer:
Well, yes, you wrote that you earned $200-300 and gave it all to charity for children at the Wonka dispensary.
Carder:
That's in Belarus? Yes. In Borovlyany. That's the specifics, you know, they download it on torrents and search for it, or forward it to each other. According to our calculations with the publisher, about 40 thousand people passed through, and officially 2 thousand copies were sold, well, maybe around 3.
Interviewer:
How much profit did you potentially lose?
Carder:
Well, I lost about $15 thousand alone. You personally? Yes. Just me. The English version, one of my British journalist friends helped me with its adaptation, I paid several thousand dollars for the translation, it was adapted for the Western reader, they removed it there, there was less about prison, less personal experiences, they added photos.
And it is sold on Amazon, on Amazon it costs $26 for a paper copy, about $11 for an electronic copy, I would like to raise it, but I can’t, somehow Amazon won’t let me raise the electronic version above a certain level, but everything is fine with Amazon.
Interviewer:
And they don’t steal there?
Carder:
So in the West, they practically don’t steal books at all, try to find a book in English on Google, pirated or scanned, it’s very difficult.
What should those who downloaded the book for free do, where will the money go?
Interviewer:
And we can make a list of wallets in the description of this issue, there is a deception index, money, bitcoin, or something else, and people who read the book on the Internet, well, downloaded it, stole it, in fact, they will send you money there if they have a conscience.
Carder:
It will play, yes, good. We are now starting to cooperate with the Belarusian children's hospice, so we will simply transfer this money, then tell them what it is, that a hospice is where people are, where there are hopelessly ill people, yes, children, including the elderly. And they simply die, many do not have, for example, relatives, their relatives refused their leg for some reason. And they must spend their last days, weeks, months of life in a dignified environment, surrounded by people, not alone, under some kind of medical supervision.
Many are in unbearable pain from cancer, they must be injected with morphine. Naturally, all this requires money and looks very ridiculous, pathetic, and it shouldn't be like this in the world and the universe, when for the household a fucking miserable 100 million dollars or whatever, or 50, I don't remember,
well, a small amount, was collected by the whole country and probably the whole world, and for officials for a special clinic some millions of dollars in tens, 14 residences, 5 Boeings, it shouldn't be like this, you understand, people.
What did you write the book on, how many times did you rewrite it?
Interviewer:
You wrote that you physically wrote the book with a pencil on paper, with a pen on paper, right, and that you rewrote it every three or four times?
Carder:
I wrote a lot from my mobile phone, including when I was behind bars more than once, a Nokia 97 mobile phone, it was a mini-laptop at the time, it cost some crazy money, plus it was expensive to get it behind bars, but that's not the point. I wrote a lot from it, but, of course, it's about 15 percent, probably 20 percent. And when they took my manuscript from me, they took it at a time, let's say, when it was already, in principle, all digitized in some form.
That is, I immediately wrote from that phone, accordingly, I sent it to freedom by email, that's it. Then I wrote with a pen, then switched to a pencil. By the way, well, it’s more convenient with a pencil, because with a pen you have to cut something out, write the sheet again, I erased it with a pencil and write on that spot. And then, naturally, I sent it out to freedom through different channels, somewhere through a visit I brought it to my relatives, passed on several sheets.
And I rewrote it 3-4 times not for this reason, but because I didn’t like it. I wrote some chapters practically the first time, but I rewrote some 15-20 times. You find a very beautiful quote, for example, by Dovlatov or Solzhenitsyn, which, it seems, could not be said better about this moment.
That is, the greatest description, let’s say, of this umbrella in the history of mankind. And you try to insert it into the text, one phrase, one. And so, in order to fit it into my text, I don’t know, sometimes I spent several days. Imagine, and you think, donkey, what are you doing? Well, write in your own words. You'll have written five chapters in that time, while you're trying to insert this one phrase from someone else, like a brick, into this tab.
I don't earn any money from the Russian-language book, just a pittance. They pay me about ten dollars a month. Well, tears, of course.
Interviewer:
Ten?
Carder:
Yes. But the book gave me much more, yes. It gave me many interesting people, acquaintances. In the end, I can even give the book to someone now, saving money on gifts. That's it. And it gave me many worthy guys, with whom I'm happy that I know them. And some of them have become my partners. That is, we cooperate in serious matters now. Is it worth writing a book, right? I answer that if you have something to say, then it's worth it.
Why did you stop writing?
Interviewer:
And why did you stop writing?
Carder:
I can't keep up with everything. And on paper, so to speak, in my blog Carding.pro, I am already stating what I can't keep silent about. My kid was in the army, and in the army it is much worse than in prison. Much. The abuse in the army can probably only be compared to that in the prison zone, where there is complete lawlessness. And at that time Korzhich was killed, that private in the ovens, near Boris, and it all hit me.
And I wrote about what kind of whoredom is going on in the modern army. In the Belarusian, respectively, in the Russian, in the Ukrainian and other. Because nothing has changed. That's it. And I compared the key points, how they look in the army and in prison. Probably six to eight points. And the comparison was clearly and far from in favor of the army. And I met guys behind bars, by the way, who had just left the army. There, yes, let's say, they served for a year and a half.
About the army
Carder:
And they talk in comparison with the army. They say, I'd rather steal something or punch someone in the face. They would have given me arrest for three or six months, but I wouldn't join the army. In general, such an army is not needed at all, we are not a country at war. So I asked Maly himself, what did you do during your year in the army. Do you know what he did? He walked around with a baton, guarded a warehouse. With a baton, with handcuffs, with a gas canister. He guarded a warehouse with weapons. Any saboteur would have given him a stone under the Civil War, he doesn't even have a machine gun, which they don't give them.
Secondly, they repaired all sorts of crap, well, fences, buildings, that is, mainly small construction work, not qualified. They painted, by the way, I always thought this was a myth, but it is not a myth. They painted either grass or leaves, I don’t remember exactly, and they tore out, there are granite slabs there, paths, between them, of course, sand and grass growing, and they tore out by hand, every blade of grass, you understand, that is, God forbid you take some kind of glass or find a nail.
And plus hazing. That is, hazing in order to move on, like, to the next master, well, like these pheasant spirits there, the grandfathers there and all that. That is, for this, it’s all on a commercial basis. Pay 250 dollars there and so on. The grandfathers can do everything there, if you haven’t paid them, then they can wash you there every day, you there once a week.
Well, in short, there’s no need for such an army, that is, at all. And they kill people in the army. That is, like this murder, and it wasn’t the only one, just one, which became widely known. You see, in this whole law enforcement crowd, there is a principle there, one hand washes the other, plus one crow will not peck another out of the eye. Everyone always tries to hide it, they do not take their quarrels out in public, because this means depriving generals of their ranks, bonuses and cushy jobs, respectively.
About showing off, how he spent money
Interviewer:
You are not looking for golden toilets, you can dress in a second-hand store, you can walk somewhere or ride in a public transport car.
Carder:
Well, that's after prison.
Interviewer:
What was it like before?
Carder:
Well, there used to be a show-off, but teenage, again, it's not because I was spoiled like that since childhood. In the summer, like I had when I was seventeen, I already had a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, it was twenty, somewhere around twenty-one, you're not ready for it yet, and you want to have a nice expensive car, and everything, there, some designer clothes, there, to go to the islands with chicks, that's it. But then you understand, especially after sitting around, that, there, expensive clothes won't make you better, there.
The car should already be, there, not super, there, a nice German one with a three-pointed star, yes, but one that you can drive, and preferably drive calmly, so as not to kill yourself, there. When I was involved in cyber crime, I earned about, when I was already at a normal level, 100 a month. But at the same time I spent only from 3 to 5 thousand dollars. That is, I always put it aside, I was preparing for some kind of prison, always in reserve, and then it helped to hire good lawyers somewhere and solve other issues.
I think now, you know what I'll do? I'll sign the first advertising contract, now the subscribers will appear, I have a thousand, probably four hundred, well, not much, in short. I even hid it. I had, damn it, almost three thousand, they already wrote off the lessons.
Interviewer:
Yes, by the way, why? Why are your subscribers hidden? You had three thousand?
Carder:
Well, my channel was slightly fueled at the start. I fueled it six months or a year ago, so that there would be a thousand subscribers, to turn on monetization. That's it. And I fueled it. But I fueled two or three channels using the same methods. None were written off at all, only from this one. Maybe it was, you know, the last one, like, the last wave. Yeah, maybe he's just active.
Why did you create a YouTube channel?
Interviewer:
Why did you even start a YouTube channel? Why?
Carder:
Yeah. Oh, well, I couldn't sleep at night because of Dud' and Transformer's advertising revenue. You know, I went to see Transformer recently. Did you talk to him? Well, I did, I talked to him yesterday at the Institute.
About your business, how does the cashback service work?
Interviewer:
About your main business, about cashback. A person bought something on Aliexpress, ordered $100, and of that, for example, he can get $4 back.
Carder:
That is, the mechanics of the business itself are such that we bring a customer to the LaModa store, you have the 21st century, 24 shopbytes, we bring a client there, the store sees through technical tricks, there is tracking by cookies and other containers, it sees that we brought this buyer for this specific purchase, they pay us a commission for this, let's say, 10%.
We keep half of this amount for ourselves and return the other half to the client as cashback. But taking into account taxes, taking into account payment system commissions and taking into account the fact that many of our users already have loyalty statuses, we return more, that is 65%, and taking into account taxes and commissions, probably somewhere
up to 8-10%.
Interviewer:
Listen, it turns out that if we take the secret of a discounter from the side of traffic arbitrage affiliates, for an affiliate this is an ordinary affiliate.
Carder:
Webmaster.
Interviewer:
Webmaster, yes, to whom the affiliate pays a commission, and the service shares this commission.
Carder:
Yes.
Interviewer:
And instead of spending money on traffic, this money….
Carder:
Well, or on advertising on billboards, on TV.
Interviewer:
Yes, this money is returned to the person who bought it.
Carder:
Yes.
Interviewer:
But you still buy traffic.
Carder:
We don’t buy traffic at all now.
Interviewer:
Stopped?
Carder:
Well, we tried it, you could say. You know it better than me, even. In a semi-test mode. Because the cost of a lead is very high. Attracting a client. $10-15 for one development. Probably $1,100 plus has gone. Maybe even under $150. A product showcase will be launched now. Like Yandex.Market. This is a small turn, and I am doing it because I used to have a concept of making cashback with a bunch of additional functions.
That is, this is cashback from online stores, we also launched cashback from offline stores, by the way, we were the first in the CIS. There you come, just show the barcode from your smartphone, the cashier reads it, or manually enter the purchase amount, enter it into your smartphone, and that’s it. Then free promo codes, coupons, parcel tracking.
That is, I gradually grew all sorts of additional functions into it. But I saw that there are many cashback services in the world, probably already if we take 300-400 in the whole world, but there are not many product showcases like Yandex.Market, and now the search results are basically filled with product showcases, aggregators, all sorts of reviews.
If you enter there, for example, in Yandex, and in Google in principle too, a search query like coffee maker mili tam m11, for example, then you will be given one site of the brand mili tam de or an Austrian brand, I don’t remember, well, let’s say one brand will officially give you one some kind of reviewer, one maybe YouTube or there are three of them now and the rest will be all sorts of aggregators and product platforms like Yandex Market and my platform because well
Well, you know, they cleaned it up, Gubsky told me, they cleaned up the issuance of top codes of commercial companies, so that they would bring them money for advertising, you know? And that's why I saw this trend at that time, and we made the only one in the world, I'm talking about 300-400 cashback services, but it's the only product platform in the world with a cashback function, and now we will no longer
have cashback plus a showcase, but on the contrary, the primary function will be a product showcase and cashback, because we are now adding to the showcase, I calculated, there will be approximately 120 million products.
Interviewer:
Well, that's practically everything that can be bought.
Carder:
You see, 120 million products are Russian and Western, CIS and Western, and I sat over the product card for 120 million products so carefully, I wrote the title myself and formed each block myself, that almost all of them, those that we have today, I added about 300 thousand pages in test mode so far, well, products, almost all of them got into the search results, almost all of them.
And this means that the page is of high quality and if we have 120 million products, then let 80 of them get into the search engine results, and this means in turn that low-frequency traffic, well, targeted, you know, it will come and give us a flow of users. We understand that we cannot compete with established competitors in this indicator, who launched several years before us, because they are already earning 4-5 million dollars a year net there.
Now, let's not name these mastodons.
Interviewer:
Why name it, the link will be to yours anyway.
Carder:
Oh well. And we can’t compete with them on the price of an advertising click, because they will always set a higher price, they will always be higher.
Interviewer:
And can they set a higher price per click because they monetize each client better or because they simply don’t count the money and flood traffic from everywhere?
Carder:
Yes. The second thing. They don’t count. A cashback service client brings in $1.70 a year. And what about you? It’s less for us. So far, it’s $1.20 a year for us. Their monetization for one client is higher for now, but they also work very well with mailings. That is, mailings via email and push notifications plus promotions. That is, they stimulate repeat sales.
We were busy expanding the platform’s functionality, because we are now moving west.
Interviewer:
Listen, why didn’t you start doing cashback for the English-speaking market right away?
Carder:
Well, that's definitely a mistake. The average bill there is 4-8 times higher, you know? This is in the rich countries of the USA and Western Europe. I recently told my students why make a startup for the CIS market, for the poor, that is, do it from the start with an eye on the international audience.
Interviewer:
One more question, I don't know if you'll answer it or not, but if you're looking for secret discounter reviews, you go to the site, almost any site. There are reviews, there are reviews where you don't hide that it's your photo, and it says laudatory tribute to the secret discounter.
Seriously, why do you write reviews for yourself, especially ones that are clearly written for yourself, a straight history of the company, how you developed.
Carder:
Almost everyone works with reviews. If we look at the same megabonus, I talk a little with the owner of the company, you write a negative review about them, anywhere, on cashback ratings, on otzyvnik, and so on. They have people on salary, copywriters, as a rule, ordinary. Three positive ones will fly from above. When we need to seriously work with reputation, we will definitely work on it.
We cannot compete with many grandees yet due to the advertising budgets in their volume, but we win many due to the fact that we hack sales channels.
We use non-traditional types of traffic, which we get from all sorts of popunders, which our competitors, due to their fatness, simply spit on, and that is, we are forced to dodge, you see, we cannot flood the entire Internet with money, buy up all the YouTube bloggers and so on. Can you give a couple more channels? Here is PopUndertraff. Yes, PopUndertraff works well.
Interviewer:
Advertising networks.
Carder:
PopCashNet, PopUndernet, PopAds, AdCash, with AdCash it was not bad by the way, PropellerLeads. You can extract a client in popandras, but you need to bother with the tracker settings. Now we took this keytar, that is, we will cut off through the keytar. But this is really just fooling around. And what is not fooling around? Not fooling around, those are private traffic sources that I cannot talk about, because competitors will simply suck them up.
But so you understand, one registration from there becomes about 20 cents. And compare the 20 cents that a client now costs with 10 dollars from contextual advertising. It turns out to be purely profitable with 500 percent. Yes, this is very cool. And that is why I am now launching a small investment fund, it is semi-private, private. As for investments, part will be invested in some topics, part in traffic to a secret discounter.
How to open your own cashback service?
Interviewer:
Let's say I want to launch a cashback service. What do I need? First, what resources do I need, and second, what do I need to do to create a cashback service that doesn't lose money, but earns money?
Carder:
It makes sense to do this, you know, for those who already have their own channels with traffic. If someone is a popular blogger, like me, for example, I really want to talk to Buzova personally, because Buzova, she is like that, she is cool, you know what? She is easy-going and she gets into all topics where there is some profit. She was told, Olya, let's launch a restaurant, she is in partnership there.
She is not responsible for this, she is just a face there. Buzova has 14 subscribers there, millions of subscribers on Instagram. I just need to make cashback with Buzova and that's it. Because you will not go far on paid traffic. Due to the fact that one registration, one registered client brings little per year, if you do not have a cheap long-term loan for 50 years, you will never get off the ground on paid advertising.
You will have to either look for unconventional, non-obvious channels for attracting clients. Okay.
Interviewer:
And how to develop? How to negotiate with partners and so on?
Carder:
Some of our stores are connected directly, especially, and this concerns offline stores, and some, naturally, through CPU networks, through aggregators, where you connect them with a click. The cashback service script is inexpensive.
Interviewer:
How inexpensive? You spent, you say, about 150 thousand on development and you say that the script is inexpensive.
Carder:
Well, the script in its simplest form, we just have a lot of functions, online cashback, offline, coupons, promo codes, parcel tracking, a product showcase now, that is, six already. I also want to add offline coupons there, everything is ready for them in principle, I don’t have time, it’s just like the cream of the crop, yes. This is also a point about synergy, about cooperation.
I came to the director of Slivka Bai and said, let's make a cashback section on your website, where we will simply broadcast our stores, and we will broadcast your offline promotions to ourselves, well, we will simply cross our audience, yours and ours.
Interviewer:
To share audiences with each other.
Carder:
Well, of course. I said, we will give you 60% net. That is, taking into account taxes, we will leave 20% of the bills for ourselves. We give you 60% of the net profit from the cashback. But for some reason he decided that I came to him to get a job. He asked about your last place of work, something else. -
How many hours a day do you work?
Interviewer:
And how many hours do you work on average per day?
Carder:
I can't single out, because I am always working. My loved ones and family always get offended at me for half-listening.
That is, I work all the time, that I don't sleep. That is, when I go to the gym, let's say, to the park, I stop, let's say, at the exercise machine there and take my smartphone in my hands and read something, some article, well, something, I read something or watch some video on YouTube.
Top 5 books
Interviewer:
Of the 500 books that could be in the fund, can you name the top 5 and tell us what kind of books they are?
Carder:
The first would be Osha, “The Golden Future.” Osha is a very controversial figure. Some consider him a sectarian, a fraud, etc. But I can’t help but agree that he is one of the greatest sages who ever lived. Because his books, like Robert Greene’s books, many have read “The 48 Laws of Power,” “The 33 Strategies of War.” Reading Robert Greene, let’s say, when he was writing it, he was in 150 libraries around the world, let’s say, in the Vatican, and he read those manuscripts and all sorts of ancient ones everywhere.
Reading one book, you seem to get acquainted with the authors of 150 different strategies, books, works. The same thing with Osha, he expounds the wisdom expounded before him by Jesus, Socrates, Buddha, then Kabir, Muhammad.
In the book "Golden Future" he sets out his very progressive views on ecology, euthanasia, the development of society as a whole, politics, there is a very sober view that politics is all evil and there should be a meritocracy, when people occupy their positions, no matter in business, among officials, the highest government positions due to their abilities, due to their knowledge and their potential, and not due to the fact that he shouts louder than everyone else and makes promises or has a very bushy mustache, for example.
The second - this is, perhaps, not as interesting as Wash's books, but it complements them, this is John Kehoe "Quantum Warriors". It sets out some principles of quantum physics, which are now being confirmed, and string theory and the fact that everyone is connected to everyone, that is, every particle in the Universe. And it makes you think about the purpose, how you can cause harm to another person.
There it's like hitting yourself on the hand with a hammer, yeah, well, the same reason, they say, the other person just needs to understand it, that's why Osha and Kekha in this case go together, and then I really liked the book by Piero de Li Antoni, it's called, I would dream of filming it, it's called Block 9.11, I think it's about a German concentration camp, where by the will of fate a part of strangers gathers, a certain group of ten or nine people who don't know each other.
And whoever survives, in the morning they prepare to escape, I don't remember word for word what, a very large part of the people gathered there, and they decide who of them should die. And why exactly like that? And they argue about it.
This is the kind of book that makes you think, because sometimes somewhere in life you come across questions, or on Facebook someone you know writes that if you were with a friend, for example, or it doesn’t matter, with a friend, with a stranger, and you understand that the value of his life for the planet, for the world as a whole, is much higher than yours, because in terms of potential, in terms of energy, in terms of influence on the lives of millions of people, it is much higher, and you, for example, are a simple guy working at a factory.
And did you agree to give him, roughly speaking, your heart? Somehow he would die tomorrow, such a metaphysical question. And this, who will die tomorrow, let's say, yes, and why them, and why not me, or vice versa, this is what struck me about the book. And in a purely adventure style, this is, of course, "The Butterfly", this is a book about a convict ... We'll write down the fourth. Yes, the fourth book is about a convict who escaped from a French penal servitude many times, that is, this is a book about adventures, how difficult, easy, interesting it was, about the will to freedom.
That is, he was in prison, by the way, for a crime he did not commit. That is, in principle, for what he did commit, it's even offensive and you don't want to sit, yes. And for what he did not commit, to be sentenced to life imprisonment for murder - this is generally harder in the throne, or 10 times harder. I dream of getting rich enough to rent it.
But from this book, from it they need to make a series exactly like "The Count of Montcrist" or "The Godfather" 3-4-5 episodes. But this is the book that I read in prison under the blanket with a flashlight. I did this only when I was 6 years old, and I was in the first grade. My mother made me sleep, and I read books under the blanket with a flashlight. That's why this book is worth it, believe me.
And the last book, it is from the same series as "Papillon", also about a crime. It is called "Convicted by Life", this is a book by the British writer Marcus Clarke about a man who, in order not to cast a shadow of dishonor on his mother, there was some kind of affair, he has to keep silent, they pin a murder on him, he did not kill, but in order not to reveal this underground affair of his mother, he is forced to take it upon himself.
And so he bears this cross all his life in this British penal servitude, I don’t remember, and in Australia by the way, but he doesn’t try to escape, well, it just so happens that he suffers all his life innocently and there you are so much, also a thick book, and you empathize with the main character so much that you just want to stand back to back with him and protect him from all enemies.
What do you need money for?
Interviewer:
You said that after 40 you don’t want to do business. You need money. What do you need this money for?
Carder:
I need money only so that I can roughly calculate how much I need, so that my family and I don’t want for anything for the rest of our lives, let’s say. That is, figuratively speaking, I’m 40, and I plan to live there until I’m a hundred, well, not forty, but thirty-six now, until I’m a hundred that’s another sixty-four years, I need twenty thousand dollars a month for the family.
That is, I need fifteen million today, just to never think about money. But due to the fact that I will still be doing projects for the planet, for society as a whole, well, I need a little more, so if I had fifteen, twenty, well, over 15 million dollars now, I would not do business, because I consider the work of earning money, making money, somehow, you know, not the most important thing, why I was born into this world.
On the meaning of life
Carder:
And in general, not the most, well, in prison, a mission was revealed to me, probably, such as mine, that again, after reading all these books and other philosophical treatises. Here's what, you know, I'm tired of looking at how much evil there is in the world as a whole.
And that history teaches nothing. In the world, so you understand, 35 thousand people die of hunger every day. 35 thousand. Of them, 20 thousand children. And I can't quarrel with Katya now. Not anymore, but before, when she throws away a piece of bread, or cooks a little more than necessary, but it is not eaten, you have to throw it away. That is, after prison, although I did not need anything there, I still had to go to a detention center for a phone, starve, undernourish.
And knowing that 35 thousand die every day somehow, I want to change something. Or people kill 40 million sharks a year for the sake of soup from their cartilage, from their fin, supposedly it makes you erect better. In fact, it probably makes you erect better from Viagra, I have not tried it yet.
But people kill, and in fact it is a myth, it is boiled in chicken broth, there are no properties for potency left, but we kill 40 million sharks. Sharks attack us 300 times a year, and not always fatally. 40 million and 300 times, you understand, but we shout such things, let's raise hell. That is, the example may not be entirely successful, but it debunked the fact that this is a myth.
Here I told you, here are the others present in the room, yes, I told about 100 more people before you. But if Elon Musk or, okay, Buzova, who has 14 million, were sitting with us as the third one, and they take it on faith, take it as their life dogma, that this is wrong, they convey to their 14 million and more subscribers, or Cristiano, yes, who will write a post on his Instagram, and that’s already 250 million.
I see my goal in debunking myths in any area, especially very dangerous ones, religious ones in particular. Debunking myths so that there is less evil in the world. And this can only be done through education and the involvement of opinion leaders.
Competition
Carder:
We can raffle off a book.
Interviewer:
Are you ready?
Carder:
I’ll give mine with an autograph. Of course, I’ll send it to her.
Interviewer:
Will you send it? With an autograph? And what are you sending with an autograph for?
Carder:
We need the comments that were written under the release, it's higher, then it will be more difficult for you. Get irritated.
Interviewer:
Well, they also need to watch until the end. We've been chatting here for a long time. What would you like to see in the comments?
Carder:
I'd like to see some interesting question, and probably related, at your discretion, either to business, yes, well, an interesting question that I'll answer, or specifically about the meaning of life in general, that is, some kind of life question.
Interviewer:
Let me take the one about the meaning of life in general.
Carder:
Go ahead.
Interviewer:
A question about the meaning of life in general, which you choose and, in fact, the author of the question will send a book, right?
Carder:
Yes, yes. Your book with a signature.
Interviewer:
We can also give a link to a secret discounter in the description of the episode and some kind of promo code for this link, so that a person has, for example, a longer free premium period, if you give it out for free at all.
Carder:
Yes, we have a free 10-day one. A platinum account? We'll give them, okay, we'll give your subscribers a lifetime platinum account.
Interviewer:
Lifetime? Yeah. Good.
Carder:
So from the start they'll get the maximum account in our system. Forever.
Interviewer:
Okay, that's it, let's wrap it up. Thank you very much for agreeing to chat.
Contents:
- About the guest
- Is carding easy money?
- How much did you steal in total?
- Is carding dying?
- Are carding schools info gypsies?
- Advice for current carders
- Why doesn't prison reform criminals?
- From criminal to businessman is just one step?
- What countries are you not allowed to go to?
- Charity Ford: books, sports equipment for prisoners
- About cybersecurity, how to protect your data?
- About the book "How I Stole a Million", how much did you earn from sales?
- What should those who downloaded the book for free do? Where will the money go?
- What did you write the book on, how many times did you rewrite it?
- Why did you stop writing?
- About the army
- About showing off, how he spent money
- Why did you create a YouTube channel?
- About your business, how does the cashback service work?
- How to open your own cashback service?
- How many hours a day do you work?
- Top 5 books
- What do you need money for?
- About the meaning of life
- Contest
Books recommended by Sergey:
1. "The Golden Future" - Rajneesh Bhagavan Shri "Osho"
2. "Quantum Warrior. Consciousness of the Future" - John Kehoe
3. "Block 11. No Exit" - Piero Antoni
4. "The Butterfly" - Henri Charriere
5. "Sentenced to Life" - Marcus Clarke
About the guest
Interviewer:
Hello, our guest is Sergey Pavlovich. Sergey, can you tell us who you are?
Carder:
Yes, it will be easier for everyone. In the past, a cybercriminal, for which he subsequently had to serve 10 years in prison, the author of the book Modest and the founder of the cashback service Secret Discount. I also have a number of other hobbies, I run my own YouTube channel. Well, so, for the viewers "People Pro" are called, but mainly engaged in business.
Is carding easy money?
Interviewer:
Carding, easy money?
Carder:
No. And why? In general, crime is not easy money, that is, it is incorrect to say easy money. Any money, it is difficult, that is, in order to succeed in the same cybercrime, you still need to achieve a certain status, work days and nights, be in touch with hundreds of people, speak several languages, it is desirable to have some kind of information resource of your own, like a blog, for example, or a forum, it is desirable.
And I can agree that in crime money is fast, but it is not easy, it is just as hard work, like any other.
Interviewer:
If we do not take into account the money, why did you do this besides money? Was there some kind of thrill that you were breaking some system?
Carder:
No, because carders are not hackers, that is, the elite of the cybercriminal world, I believe, hackers. But they are not salesmen, you see, they get the database, card numbers, eBay accounts, hack anything there, dumps that are recorded. I was involved solely for the money. I got there by accident, by and large, because it was the 90s, parents worked two or three jobs to provide for the family, yes, and the children were left to their own devices.
They ordered any products from Western online stores, paid with left-hand credit cards. Then there was more selling of documents, selling of numbers, credit cards, dumps on a plastic strip, dumps with PIN codes, cashing out, all that. But all of this was solely for the money. I didn’t experience any particular thrill. I never spent much money that way. That is, I threw away some cash, my grandfather had a hookah suitcase in his garden, a short metal hookah case.
I put the cash in there, in short.
How much did you steal in total?
Interviewer:
You called the book “How I Stole a Million.” Was there a million in it or did you exaggerate a little?
Carder:
No, there was more. The Americans wrote me down 36 million dollars in damages. But how are the damages calculated? They take, somehow find credit cards, let's say, that I was involved with, add them up, calculate the total amount stolen, it comes out to 36 million. But I myself earn much less, because it's not me stealing all this money.
I took it from hackers for 10 dollars, sold it for 50, put 40 in my pocket, and they took one and a half thousand from it, my earnings were 40, so I calculated, yes, that is, I had about a million two hundred in cash all the time.
Is carding dying?
Interviewer:
Can you even say that carding is a dying breed?
Carder:
No. We have the largest carding forum, yes, but everyone hung out there, hackers, carders, virus writers, spammers, in general, such a motley cybercriminal crowd, six thousand people. Now there are forums with three hundred thousand cybercriminals, you know? That is, ten years have passed, and it has grown fifty, a hundred times. Now there are many Telegram channels that teach this for money.
Well, this is also a dubious occupation, they learned to paint someone else's PayPal.
Are carding schools info gypsies?
Interviewer:
Stop, wait. So you want to say that there are carding schools that teach how to card for money?
Carder:
Yes, yes, yes.
Interviewer:
And how many students are there, at least approximately on a scale, can you somehow associate?
Carder:
They graduate 200-500 per month.
Interviewer:
In your opinion, an infopreneur who sells carding courses, what do they make more money on, carding or teaching how to card?
Carder:
Well, like all info gypsies, they make money selling this.
Advice to current carders
Interviewer:
Let's say we're being watched by a person who is involved in carding. What advice would you give them?
Carder:
It depends on the country, if from Belarus, then dry crackers, make woolen socks, buy envelopes, because it's better not to do this at all from Belarus. If you tell guys from another country, neither you nor I will make them quit the profitable activities that they make a living from. Well, you quit. Well, I served 10 years, that's what it took me.
I can just advise them to finish this quickly, collect some necessary minimum amount and move forward with some legal startup.
Why doesn't prison correct criminals?
Interviewer:
You said in your book that prison leaves you an even more experienced criminal. You spent 10 years in prison. Did you somehow manage to break that pattern?
Carder:
When a person gets caught behind bars, he rarely agrees that he screwed up, that he himself is to blame, and that it was his actions that brought him to where he is, behind bars. He naturally blames the circumstances, the authorities, the judge and the prosecutor, who, due to insufficient evidence, but still understanding that he was involved, gave him a term.
He blames all this, he is embittered, he tore up cars, stole once or twice, everything went smoothly for him, the third time he was put in jail, and he analyzes what he got caught for, you know? He does not think that, damn, I need to get out and somehow change my line of work. He analyzes what he got caught for, and he will not make the same mistake next time. Plus, he communicates with other criminals, finds someone of his level or higher, and they exchange experiences, contacts, connections, a kind of networking happens.
And, accordingly, yes, he comes out more experienced. But in my case, if they wanted to get involved in cybercrime now, of course I would be more experienced, you know? That is, I would not have made the mistakes that I made, plus during that time I would have thought through some more security systems and so on. But everything ends someday, that is, it is outgrown, plus I understand that there is still a risk, no matter how thoughtful you are, the human factor somewhere, some kind of accident.
So I just changed my field of activity radically and that's it.
From a criminal to a businessman is one step?
Interviewer:
You noticed such an interesting point, that from a criminal to a businessman is essentially one moment, one step. This is the vector of energy application. Where to get this energy from?
Carder:
Sports and other regimes, doping will give you 10%. I think it is innate. And criminals are the cream of this society, 5% in any prison in the world. But in a strict prison, if you take 95% of all prisoners - this is ballast, which, maybe it is not quite correct to say, but, roughly speaking, tomorrow they slept in a crematorium, but nothing will change on earth. That is, this is ballast, which does not bring anything good to the planet as a whole, who are always complaining, who They see that they themselves are worthless in essence, do not strive for anything.
Well, such, you know, like a worm, it crawls, eats something, well, that's what you can compare. And only 5%, well, let's say 10, yes, people who are active with a high level of energy, who got there because of their actions. Someone did not run a business correctly, someone was closed by competitors, someone because of some professional crimes.
I have a friend there, a professional car thief. He is a smart, educated, very developed guy in all respects. And it is not too late to direct him in some other direction. Perhaps, it happened to him by accident, you know? I dug up these cards on the Internet, the first numbers of credit cards on a bulletin board by accident. That is, if I had an extra thousand dollars there, and if I had come across you, figuratively speaking, we might have already started our own bulletin board, and would have been the second Avito, or the first.
But he needs to understand it himself. As he understood, for me it happened under the influence of a long term and, probably, is the literature correct.
What countries are you not allowed to visit?
Interviewer:
What countries in the world are you not allowed to visit now?
Carder:
This is such a legal loophole. If a person has been punished for something, then he cannot be tried for the same thing twice. But the USA is such a lawless country, in short, completely lawless. If it concerns their interests, they are ready to do anything. Well, we all know about torture and tingon-tangon, they don't give a shit. That's it. In short, they think that you should definitely do your time on their territory.
Or, in extreme cases, they won't recognize you if you did your time in the United Kingdom. That's it. But what happened to me was some kind of idiocy, because I sat in Belarus for 10 years without causing any damage to citizens or companies of Belarus, only to European and American structures. But those structures, those law enforcement agencies of Western countries still have claims against me, as they had before.
They ask, why the hell did I sit for 10 years if I can't now move freely around the world? Naturally, I can't travel to countries that are friendly to the United States and even those that have an extradition treaty with the United States and even those that don't have an extradition treaty. For example, there isn't one in Germany, but there are plenty of precedents there where people are arrested and extradited without any treaties. Or in the Maldives, they don't have an extradition treaty either, but there is Seleznev, I worked with him, by the way, a very talented hacker.
His father is a deputy from the LDPR, he went to the Maldives, and the Maldives, such a funny moment happened, the Maldives were supplied with all these border computers, these scanners, by the USA as humanitarian aid or for money. And they, naturally, entered the database of all their enemies there, put it in these computers.
Seleznev came to the Maldives, well, they, naturally, received some kind of signal that he was there. Well, they arrested him, forcibly took him to Guam, their island in the Pacific Ocean, and officially arrested him there. Well, that is, if you look into the kidnapping of a person, well, it's better not to joke with the States, because they don't give a damn at all. Well, I can go to other countries, there, Ukraine, Azerbaijan. I can go there. Okay, let's not say where, otherwise they won't know that I might go there soon.
But the list of countries is limited. I can probably go to about thirty countries. I can go to China, to Cambodia. But I don’t really want to go there yet.
Charity Ford: books, sports equipment for prisoners
Interviewer:
In one interview, you said that I have an idea to register a charity foundation that would help prisons with sports interviews and books. Let’s say I have Myth’s books. Well, educational ones on e-mail marketing, on personalities, growth, and something else, where would I put them?
Carder:
There is terrible isolation in prison. That is, the worst thing there is that you are cut off from communication with your loved ones, with your family, and these pitiful one or two phone calls a month, letters, and visits a couple of times a year, they, of course, do not save you. And you degrade, because I caught myself thinking that I can hardly even find the words to say on the phone, that’s it. And in general, such an information famine, yes, it is one of the most terrible methods of suppressing a person.
Yes, the Nazis came up with it, maybe even before them, but behind bars it is felt especially acutely. And personally, I believe that my transformation from a criminal to a businessman was influenced by the books that I read during this time. And it was mainly philosophy.
That is, I read Osh, naturally, then a little John Keh, I read several Christian books, one was called "Unholy Saints", it was written by this Putin's spiritual mentor, Father Tikhon. Socrates, Plato, then I also liked Francisco de Sisi, Bertrand Ransel. This passage of mine that you quoted earlier about redirecting energy, it is from Osh, for example, from Buddha, when Buddha essentially turned faith into the most terrible killer in those parts.
He says, yes, you are a strong person, but you need to change the direction of your forces a little. And that is why I believe that behind bars, books are the most important. I have a goal to create a fund, the name has already been invented - Freedom Forever, freedom forever. It is a two-stage goal, at the first stage, with the joint efforts of mine, yours and some mutual acquaintances, we select a list of, say, 500 books that lead to the Transformation of a person, who was amazed in something, made to think.
And when we have selected this list, it is simply purchased with the creators. I think that with many it is possible to conclude some barter agreements somewhere on a charitable basis. And then it is simply driven as a set of 500 books to each prison, to each zone. And this will be useful. And sports equipment in many zones with sports, so, the administration does not really allow it.
Although it’s also in vain, because what is there to do behind bars, that is, they, in fact, you know, prohibit sports. That is, first, they don’t give you access to information, you degrade mentally there. Second, there is practically no access to sports, only a select few have it, and even then it’s illegal dumbbells, barbells, etc. And, accordingly, you degrade physically. When this is done through the foundation, yes, there will already be connections there with the administration, correctional institutions with all sorts of FSINs, DINs, SVRs in law.
That is, all this will be easily resolved. But now it’s all so overgrown with bureaucratic procedures that the same correctional colony would be happy to accept so many books from you, 500, 1000, but it can’t do this. He will have to sign over a kilometer of all sorts of papers.
About cybersecurity, how to protect your data?
Interviewer:
About cybersecurity.
Carder:
The main problem is very easy passwords. The second, even bigger mistake is setting the same password for different services. That's it, email, well, a bunch of email, plus a password, for example, it worked great for Facebook, worked well for PayPal. Sensitive information on the computer can be stored, of course, it makes sense on separate encrypted disks.
These are programs like DriveCrypt, BestCrypt, Veracrypt, now it is the former TrueCrypt, they create a virtual container in one of the sections of your hard drive, very well encrypted, to which you assign a password, preferably different, not the same as the one you have for logging into Windows or Mac, because this password is, in principle, quite easy for special services or hackers in general to pick up, and all sensitive information, passwords, logins, bank scans, some cards, passports, we store there.
Then, of course, we do not transmit passwords in plain text. For example, I tried to send them a password in Viber a couple of times with my server admins, they tell me that you write, create a text document, encrypt PGP through the PGP program, and already log in in this form.
That is, we do not send passwords in clear text in SMS and so on. If you are already entering a password to Facebook, VKontakte, Sberbank, then always check that the URL of the site, specifically the original site, is not some left-hand one. There are a lot of these scams related to pornography. I have been receiving them in my mail for about three weeks, probably, and from my own mail.
A letter comes that we hacked your computer, otherwise how could we write from your mail and you were filmed watching pornography, in short, how are you jerking off, like, and in short, transfer there to such-and-such a bitcoin, but this spammer is an idiot, first of all, it happens that they really have the password to your email, but this is like I said, as I just said, they hack some forum, let's say, and the password to your email is, let's say, the same as on that forum, and then okay, yes, they really write to you from your email and you understand that if there was an email hack, then yes, maybe you watched porn there two years ago, you start remembering, and maybe they filmed it, and in that case, the chances of success are much higher, but in my case, they do not have access to my email, this is definitely true, I look at the service information in the letter from where it came, there are fake servers from MTP, that is, well, they cannot get to my server, it is impossible. They call from numbers that allegedly belong to the bank's security service or the official office of Belarus Bank. That is, the usual number substitution is done and in exactly the same way, that is, a person, many, for example, he has Sberbank support recorded there, yes, he sees that they are calling him from there.
And he is basically no longer afraid to give his card details, some PIN codes and everything. And this is how money is lured. In the case of banks, if they call you, you can, for example, hang up and call back on this number yourself and it will turn out that they did not call you, most likely. But on dating sites, in short, such scams still occur.
They get to know you, with guys under the guise of some girl, such a pretty one. Then they offer to transfer the communication to VK, for example. Accordingly, they find out the list of your friends from there. Well, the communication then moves to Skype, let's say. Wherever there is a video camera. Then she allegedly turns on the video, like herself, in Skype, let's say. Asks you to turn on the camera. But this goes for... You see, at the same time she simply puts a part of the film.
Not her, but the attacker who is behind it. And if the attacker films you doing something like that, then it is all recorded and then simply under threats of sending it to your entire front list, this is extorting money. And there are already amounts, there are 200, 300, 500 dollars, well, depending on who is not caught. That is, someone will pay 10 thousand for this.
But having paid the blackmailer once, most likely you will pay him always.
Interviewer:
There was an article on Habr about checking people, and it collected some incredible number of likes about the fact that you can just go to the forum, order a check of people, and all this is practically in the public domain, you can see how much money a person has in his account, where he is by GPS, check his coordinates and so on. This is not some kind of secret, but for some reason this article caused a furious resonance.
And here is my question, why do you think people write so boldly and openly and fearlessly about offering such services? Are they not afraid that the police will order them?
Carder:
Well, that's what the police themselves write. That is, now I have contacts in several Telegram channels, having checked in Russia, in Ukraine, but mainly in Russia, you see, that is, the guys offer the following list of services, printouts of all your calls and cell phones, let's say, for all mobile operators, for a little more, for any period during which the operator stores them.
That is, this means that they have their own people in all operators, you know, who have access to billing. Then having checked in all your SMS, full information on your bank accounts, how much money, in which banks, car numbers, movements by GPS car and by cell phone, i.e. your most frequent routes. And, in principle, a bunch of other documents, if you are an entrepreneur, then these are copies of all your witnesses, copies of passports.
That is, to take a full set, well, I don’t know, it will probably cost 50-100 thousand rubles.
Interviewer:
In Russia?
Carder:
Well, I don’t think so, you know, because some GRU agent might have a harder time getting through, Belinka Kat is only capable of that for now. But, yes, practically everything.
Interviewer:
And what about Belarus?
Carder:
Well, I don’t know, I haven’t come across Belarus yet, but I think it’s much more difficult. That is, and since I haven’t come across it yet, yes, I don’t specifically look for it. You crawl around somewhere, there are some channels, you come across something like that. The same thing is in Ukraine, but on a slightly smaller scale. But I haven’t seen it in Belarus.
Interviewer:
So in Belarus, in principle, we can assume that there is a chance that our private data will remain with us?
Carder:
There is, yes. And why is that? Because of the general insecurity, yes, how Lukashenko keeps everyone here in fear, despite the fact that all officials steal, and this is no secret to anyone, I can say on any camera and argue, Because where would an official who earns a thousand dollars, let's say a month, get a cottage worth a million or two. The lower level, some policemen, ordinary employees of some holdings, private companies like Welcome, MTS, if we are talking about them, they are intimidated and the risk exceeds the possible profitability.
Having checked, for example, Beeline, purely all your calls for a month, in Moscow it costs, depending on the operator, from 50 to 100 dollars. There it is on stream, you understand? And here, most likely, the cops will turn to him for a check, then they will look, again, who received data on this number on that day, most likely, they will put him in jail. That is, it is not worth the effort, and they are not taking the risk.
Interviewer:
And in Russia, they still take risks?
Carder:
Yes, in Russia, no one cares.
About the book "How I Stole a Million", how much did you earn from sales?
Interviewer:
You wrote that you started writing the book from the first week. A person was sent to prison, even for the second time, and you start writing a book from the first week.
Carder:
What else is there to do? Eat, smoke, drink tea, do a little sports, some yoga, and that's it, read, write. It's funny to live like that in prison, in my opinion. I understood that I wouldn't be able to get out through the court, in any way at all. And I thought that with the help of the book, among other things, I could draw attention to myself, to the fact that I did not cause harm to the citizens of Belarus, companies, but I was forced to sit for 10 years and ask for pardon.
Plus, my grandfather asked for me, my honored forester there in the USSR, all that stuff. But it didn't help, because, well, nobody reads these requests for clemency or anything like that. They can pardon their own friend, a convicted corrupt official, you know, forgive him, send him to manage collective farms. Well, as for pardons of ordinary citizens, they are read by some petty clerk, there, in the presidential administration, you write a standard three-sentence reply for you.
That's why the book started as a diary, continued as just memoirs and to convey some of my experience, just to tell how it was. You know, I had such moral concerns, doubts that it would be a manual on cybercrime. Many of the schemes that are described there, almost all of them have already been exposed, and the people who are written about there, they are either in prison or have served time and been punished.
Those who could not be mentioned, I slightly changed the names, surnames, nicknames. It hasn't become especially important in terms of cybercrime, because I have quite a lot of people writing to me every month, probably 30 people from new readers, and almost all of them, yes, I have never met anyone else, they write something like, that they read your book on a difficult
path in life, crossroads, at a crossroads, yes, I used to do some cybercrime, but in principle it wasn't very successful, and some people even write and everything went well, but not bad financially. They say, then they read your book, in short, and did something else. And basically everyone thanks me. And I want to tell you something else. There are a number of moments when people send money, they send, they say, that I read it for free on the Internet at one time, well, I have the financial opportunity, let me thank you.
Well, I say, okay, let's give part of it to charity, and part of it to me, I don't set the price, but it's different for everyone, you know, someone transfers 35 dollars, one guy from Wargaming wanted my book with an autograph, I'm open to new acquaintances, I also brought him a book with an autograph, I didn't say how much, he paid me
$50, some people transfer $100, but that's just small change, and I earn practically nothing from sales in Russia, right?
Interviewer:
Well, yes, you wrote that you earned $200-300 and gave it all to charity for children at the Wonka dispensary.
Carder:
That's in Belarus? Yes. In Borovlyany. That's the specifics, you know, they download it on torrents and search for it, or forward it to each other. According to our calculations with the publisher, about 40 thousand people passed through, and officially 2 thousand copies were sold, well, maybe around 3.
Interviewer:
How much profit did you potentially lose?
Carder:
Well, I lost about $15 thousand alone. You personally? Yes. Just me. The English version, one of my British journalist friends helped me with its adaptation, I paid several thousand dollars for the translation, it was adapted for the Western reader, they removed it there, there was less about prison, less personal experiences, they added photos.
And it is sold on Amazon, on Amazon it costs $26 for a paper copy, about $11 for an electronic copy, I would like to raise it, but I can’t, somehow Amazon won’t let me raise the electronic version above a certain level, but everything is fine with Amazon.
Interviewer:
And they don’t steal there?
Carder:
So in the West, they practically don’t steal books at all, try to find a book in English on Google, pirated or scanned, it’s very difficult.
What should those who downloaded the book for free do, where will the money go?
Interviewer:
And we can make a list of wallets in the description of this issue, there is a deception index, money, bitcoin, or something else, and people who read the book on the Internet, well, downloaded it, stole it, in fact, they will send you money there if they have a conscience.
Carder:
It will play, yes, good. We are now starting to cooperate with the Belarusian children's hospice, so we will simply transfer this money, then tell them what it is, that a hospice is where people are, where there are hopelessly ill people, yes, children, including the elderly. And they simply die, many do not have, for example, relatives, their relatives refused their leg for some reason. And they must spend their last days, weeks, months of life in a dignified environment, surrounded by people, not alone, under some kind of medical supervision.
Many are in unbearable pain from cancer, they must be injected with morphine. Naturally, all this requires money and looks very ridiculous, pathetic, and it shouldn't be like this in the world and the universe, when for the household a fucking miserable 100 million dollars or whatever, or 50, I don't remember,
well, a small amount, was collected by the whole country and probably the whole world, and for officials for a special clinic some millions of dollars in tens, 14 residences, 5 Boeings, it shouldn't be like this, you understand, people.
What did you write the book on, how many times did you rewrite it?
Interviewer:
You wrote that you physically wrote the book with a pencil on paper, with a pen on paper, right, and that you rewrote it every three or four times?
Carder:
I wrote a lot from my mobile phone, including when I was behind bars more than once, a Nokia 97 mobile phone, it was a mini-laptop at the time, it cost some crazy money, plus it was expensive to get it behind bars, but that's not the point. I wrote a lot from it, but, of course, it's about 15 percent, probably 20 percent. And when they took my manuscript from me, they took it at a time, let's say, when it was already, in principle, all digitized in some form.
That is, I immediately wrote from that phone, accordingly, I sent it to freedom by email, that's it. Then I wrote with a pen, then switched to a pencil. By the way, well, it’s more convenient with a pencil, because with a pen you have to cut something out, write the sheet again, I erased it with a pencil and write on that spot. And then, naturally, I sent it out to freedom through different channels, somewhere through a visit I brought it to my relatives, passed on several sheets.
And I rewrote it 3-4 times not for this reason, but because I didn’t like it. I wrote some chapters practically the first time, but I rewrote some 15-20 times. You find a very beautiful quote, for example, by Dovlatov or Solzhenitsyn, which, it seems, could not be said better about this moment.
That is, the greatest description, let’s say, of this umbrella in the history of mankind. And you try to insert it into the text, one phrase, one. And so, in order to fit it into my text, I don’t know, sometimes I spent several days. Imagine, and you think, donkey, what are you doing? Well, write in your own words. You'll have written five chapters in that time, while you're trying to insert this one phrase from someone else, like a brick, into this tab.
I don't earn any money from the Russian-language book, just a pittance. They pay me about ten dollars a month. Well, tears, of course.
Interviewer:
Ten?
Carder:
Yes. But the book gave me much more, yes. It gave me many interesting people, acquaintances. In the end, I can even give the book to someone now, saving money on gifts. That's it. And it gave me many worthy guys, with whom I'm happy that I know them. And some of them have become my partners. That is, we cooperate in serious matters now. Is it worth writing a book, right? I answer that if you have something to say, then it's worth it.
Why did you stop writing?
Interviewer:
And why did you stop writing?
Carder:
I can't keep up with everything. And on paper, so to speak, in my blog Carding.pro, I am already stating what I can't keep silent about. My kid was in the army, and in the army it is much worse than in prison. Much. The abuse in the army can probably only be compared to that in the prison zone, where there is complete lawlessness. And at that time Korzhich was killed, that private in the ovens, near Boris, and it all hit me.
And I wrote about what kind of whoredom is going on in the modern army. In the Belarusian, respectively, in the Russian, in the Ukrainian and other. Because nothing has changed. That's it. And I compared the key points, how they look in the army and in prison. Probably six to eight points. And the comparison was clearly and far from in favor of the army. And I met guys behind bars, by the way, who had just left the army. There, yes, let's say, they served for a year and a half.
About the army
Carder:
And they talk in comparison with the army. They say, I'd rather steal something or punch someone in the face. They would have given me arrest for three or six months, but I wouldn't join the army. In general, such an army is not needed at all, we are not a country at war. So I asked Maly himself, what did you do during your year in the army. Do you know what he did? He walked around with a baton, guarded a warehouse. With a baton, with handcuffs, with a gas canister. He guarded a warehouse with weapons. Any saboteur would have given him a stone under the Civil War, he doesn't even have a machine gun, which they don't give them.
Secondly, they repaired all sorts of crap, well, fences, buildings, that is, mainly small construction work, not qualified. They painted, by the way, I always thought this was a myth, but it is not a myth. They painted either grass or leaves, I don’t remember exactly, and they tore out, there are granite slabs there, paths, between them, of course, sand and grass growing, and they tore out by hand, every blade of grass, you understand, that is, God forbid you take some kind of glass or find a nail.
And plus hazing. That is, hazing in order to move on, like, to the next master, well, like these pheasant spirits there, the grandfathers there and all that. That is, for this, it’s all on a commercial basis. Pay 250 dollars there and so on. The grandfathers can do everything there, if you haven’t paid them, then they can wash you there every day, you there once a week.
Well, in short, there’s no need for such an army, that is, at all. And they kill people in the army. That is, like this murder, and it wasn’t the only one, just one, which became widely known. You see, in this whole law enforcement crowd, there is a principle there, one hand washes the other, plus one crow will not peck another out of the eye. Everyone always tries to hide it, they do not take their quarrels out in public, because this means depriving generals of their ranks, bonuses and cushy jobs, respectively.
About showing off, how he spent money
Interviewer:
You are not looking for golden toilets, you can dress in a second-hand store, you can walk somewhere or ride in a public transport car.
Carder:
Well, that's after prison.
Interviewer:
What was it like before?
Carder:
Well, there used to be a show-off, but teenage, again, it's not because I was spoiled like that since childhood. In the summer, like I had when I was seventeen, I already had a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, it was twenty, somewhere around twenty-one, you're not ready for it yet, and you want to have a nice expensive car, and everything, there, some designer clothes, there, to go to the islands with chicks, that's it. But then you understand, especially after sitting around, that, there, expensive clothes won't make you better, there.
The car should already be, there, not super, there, a nice German one with a three-pointed star, yes, but one that you can drive, and preferably drive calmly, so as not to kill yourself, there. When I was involved in cyber crime, I earned about, when I was already at a normal level, 100 a month. But at the same time I spent only from 3 to 5 thousand dollars. That is, I always put it aside, I was preparing for some kind of prison, always in reserve, and then it helped to hire good lawyers somewhere and solve other issues.
I think now, you know what I'll do? I'll sign the first advertising contract, now the subscribers will appear, I have a thousand, probably four hundred, well, not much, in short. I even hid it. I had, damn it, almost three thousand, they already wrote off the lessons.
Interviewer:
Yes, by the way, why? Why are your subscribers hidden? You had three thousand?
Carder:
Well, my channel was slightly fueled at the start. I fueled it six months or a year ago, so that there would be a thousand subscribers, to turn on monetization. That's it. And I fueled it. But I fueled two or three channels using the same methods. None were written off at all, only from this one. Maybe it was, you know, the last one, like, the last wave. Yeah, maybe he's just active.
Why did you create a YouTube channel?
Interviewer:
Why did you even start a YouTube channel? Why?
Carder:
Yeah. Oh, well, I couldn't sleep at night because of Dud' and Transformer's advertising revenue. You know, I went to see Transformer recently. Did you talk to him? Well, I did, I talked to him yesterday at the Institute.
About your business, how does the cashback service work?
Interviewer:
About your main business, about cashback. A person bought something on Aliexpress, ordered $100, and of that, for example, he can get $4 back.
Carder:
That is, the mechanics of the business itself are such that we bring a customer to the LaModa store, you have the 21st century, 24 shopbytes, we bring a client there, the store sees through technical tricks, there is tracking by cookies and other containers, it sees that we brought this buyer for this specific purchase, they pay us a commission for this, let's say, 10%.
We keep half of this amount for ourselves and return the other half to the client as cashback. But taking into account taxes, taking into account payment system commissions and taking into account the fact that many of our users already have loyalty statuses, we return more, that is 65%, and taking into account taxes and commissions, probably somewhere
up to 8-10%.
Interviewer:
Listen, it turns out that if we take the secret of a discounter from the side of traffic arbitrage affiliates, for an affiliate this is an ordinary affiliate.
Carder:
Webmaster.
Interviewer:
Webmaster, yes, to whom the affiliate pays a commission, and the service shares this commission.
Carder:
Yes.
Interviewer:
And instead of spending money on traffic, this money….
Carder:
Well, or on advertising on billboards, on TV.
Interviewer:
Yes, this money is returned to the person who bought it.
Carder:
Yes.
Interviewer:
But you still buy traffic.
Carder:
We don’t buy traffic at all now.
Interviewer:
Stopped?
Carder:
Well, we tried it, you could say. You know it better than me, even. In a semi-test mode. Because the cost of a lead is very high. Attracting a client. $10-15 for one development. Probably $1,100 plus has gone. Maybe even under $150. A product showcase will be launched now. Like Yandex.Market. This is a small turn, and I am doing it because I used to have a concept of making cashback with a bunch of additional functions.
That is, this is cashback from online stores, we also launched cashback from offline stores, by the way, we were the first in the CIS. There you come, just show the barcode from your smartphone, the cashier reads it, or manually enter the purchase amount, enter it into your smartphone, and that’s it. Then free promo codes, coupons, parcel tracking.
That is, I gradually grew all sorts of additional functions into it. But I saw that there are many cashback services in the world, probably already if we take 300-400 in the whole world, but there are not many product showcases like Yandex.Market, and now the search results are basically filled with product showcases, aggregators, all sorts of reviews.
If you enter there, for example, in Yandex, and in Google in principle too, a search query like coffee maker mili tam m11, for example, then you will be given one site of the brand mili tam de or an Austrian brand, I don’t remember, well, let’s say one brand will officially give you one some kind of reviewer, one maybe YouTube or there are three of them now and the rest will be all sorts of aggregators and product platforms like Yandex Market and my platform because well
Well, you know, they cleaned it up, Gubsky told me, they cleaned up the issuance of top codes of commercial companies, so that they would bring them money for advertising, you know? And that's why I saw this trend at that time, and we made the only one in the world, I'm talking about 300-400 cashback services, but it's the only product platform in the world with a cashback function, and now we will no longer
have cashback plus a showcase, but on the contrary, the primary function will be a product showcase and cashback, because we are now adding to the showcase, I calculated, there will be approximately 120 million products.
Interviewer:
Well, that's practically everything that can be bought.
Carder:
You see, 120 million products are Russian and Western, CIS and Western, and I sat over the product card for 120 million products so carefully, I wrote the title myself and formed each block myself, that almost all of them, those that we have today, I added about 300 thousand pages in test mode so far, well, products, almost all of them got into the search results, almost all of them.
And this means that the page is of high quality and if we have 120 million products, then let 80 of them get into the search engine results, and this means in turn that low-frequency traffic, well, targeted, you know, it will come and give us a flow of users. We understand that we cannot compete with established competitors in this indicator, who launched several years before us, because they are already earning 4-5 million dollars a year net there.
Now, let's not name these mastodons.
Interviewer:
Why name it, the link will be to yours anyway.
Carder:
Oh well. And we can’t compete with them on the price of an advertising click, because they will always set a higher price, they will always be higher.
Interviewer:
And can they set a higher price per click because they monetize each client better or because they simply don’t count the money and flood traffic from everywhere?
Carder:
Yes. The second thing. They don’t count. A cashback service client brings in $1.70 a year. And what about you? It’s less for us. So far, it’s $1.20 a year for us. Their monetization for one client is higher for now, but they also work very well with mailings. That is, mailings via email and push notifications plus promotions. That is, they stimulate repeat sales.
We were busy expanding the platform’s functionality, because we are now moving west.
Interviewer:
Listen, why didn’t you start doing cashback for the English-speaking market right away?
Carder:
Well, that's definitely a mistake. The average bill there is 4-8 times higher, you know? This is in the rich countries of the USA and Western Europe. I recently told my students why make a startup for the CIS market, for the poor, that is, do it from the start with an eye on the international audience.
Interviewer:
One more question, I don't know if you'll answer it or not, but if you're looking for secret discounter reviews, you go to the site, almost any site. There are reviews, there are reviews where you don't hide that it's your photo, and it says laudatory tribute to the secret discounter.
Seriously, why do you write reviews for yourself, especially ones that are clearly written for yourself, a straight history of the company, how you developed.
Carder:
Almost everyone works with reviews. If we look at the same megabonus, I talk a little with the owner of the company, you write a negative review about them, anywhere, on cashback ratings, on otzyvnik, and so on. They have people on salary, copywriters, as a rule, ordinary. Three positive ones will fly from above. When we need to seriously work with reputation, we will definitely work on it.
We cannot compete with many grandees yet due to the advertising budgets in their volume, but we win many due to the fact that we hack sales channels.
We use non-traditional types of traffic, which we get from all sorts of popunders, which our competitors, due to their fatness, simply spit on, and that is, we are forced to dodge, you see, we cannot flood the entire Internet with money, buy up all the YouTube bloggers and so on. Can you give a couple more channels? Here is PopUndertraff. Yes, PopUndertraff works well.
Interviewer:
Advertising networks.
Carder:
PopCashNet, PopUndernet, PopAds, AdCash, with AdCash it was not bad by the way, PropellerLeads. You can extract a client in popandras, but you need to bother with the tracker settings. Now we took this keytar, that is, we will cut off through the keytar. But this is really just fooling around. And what is not fooling around? Not fooling around, those are private traffic sources that I cannot talk about, because competitors will simply suck them up.
But so you understand, one registration from there becomes about 20 cents. And compare the 20 cents that a client now costs with 10 dollars from contextual advertising. It turns out to be purely profitable with 500 percent. Yes, this is very cool. And that is why I am now launching a small investment fund, it is semi-private, private. As for investments, part will be invested in some topics, part in traffic to a secret discounter.
How to open your own cashback service?
Interviewer:
Let's say I want to launch a cashback service. What do I need? First, what resources do I need, and second, what do I need to do to create a cashback service that doesn't lose money, but earns money?
Carder:
It makes sense to do this, you know, for those who already have their own channels with traffic. If someone is a popular blogger, like me, for example, I really want to talk to Buzova personally, because Buzova, she is like that, she is cool, you know what? She is easy-going and she gets into all topics where there is some profit. She was told, Olya, let's launch a restaurant, she is in partnership there.
She is not responsible for this, she is just a face there. Buzova has 14 subscribers there, millions of subscribers on Instagram. I just need to make cashback with Buzova and that's it. Because you will not go far on paid traffic. Due to the fact that one registration, one registered client brings little per year, if you do not have a cheap long-term loan for 50 years, you will never get off the ground on paid advertising.
You will have to either look for unconventional, non-obvious channels for attracting clients. Okay.
Interviewer:
And how to develop? How to negotiate with partners and so on?
Carder:
Some of our stores are connected directly, especially, and this concerns offline stores, and some, naturally, through CPU networks, through aggregators, where you connect them with a click. The cashback service script is inexpensive.
Interviewer:
How inexpensive? You spent, you say, about 150 thousand on development and you say that the script is inexpensive.
Carder:
Well, the script in its simplest form, we just have a lot of functions, online cashback, offline, coupons, promo codes, parcel tracking, a product showcase now, that is, six already. I also want to add offline coupons there, everything is ready for them in principle, I don’t have time, it’s just like the cream of the crop, yes. This is also a point about synergy, about cooperation.
I came to the director of Slivka Bai and said, let's make a cashback section on your website, where we will simply broadcast our stores, and we will broadcast your offline promotions to ourselves, well, we will simply cross our audience, yours and ours.
Interviewer:
To share audiences with each other.
Carder:
Well, of course. I said, we will give you 60% net. That is, taking into account taxes, we will leave 20% of the bills for ourselves. We give you 60% of the net profit from the cashback. But for some reason he decided that I came to him to get a job. He asked about your last place of work, something else. -
How many hours a day do you work?
Interviewer:
And how many hours do you work on average per day?
Carder:
I can't single out, because I am always working. My loved ones and family always get offended at me for half-listening.
That is, I work all the time, that I don't sleep. That is, when I go to the gym, let's say, to the park, I stop, let's say, at the exercise machine there and take my smartphone in my hands and read something, some article, well, something, I read something or watch some video on YouTube.
Top 5 books
Interviewer:
Of the 500 books that could be in the fund, can you name the top 5 and tell us what kind of books they are?
Carder:
The first would be Osha, “The Golden Future.” Osha is a very controversial figure. Some consider him a sectarian, a fraud, etc. But I can’t help but agree that he is one of the greatest sages who ever lived. Because his books, like Robert Greene’s books, many have read “The 48 Laws of Power,” “The 33 Strategies of War.” Reading Robert Greene, let’s say, when he was writing it, he was in 150 libraries around the world, let’s say, in the Vatican, and he read those manuscripts and all sorts of ancient ones everywhere.
Reading one book, you seem to get acquainted with the authors of 150 different strategies, books, works. The same thing with Osha, he expounds the wisdom expounded before him by Jesus, Socrates, Buddha, then Kabir, Muhammad.
In the book "Golden Future" he sets out his very progressive views on ecology, euthanasia, the development of society as a whole, politics, there is a very sober view that politics is all evil and there should be a meritocracy, when people occupy their positions, no matter in business, among officials, the highest government positions due to their abilities, due to their knowledge and their potential, and not due to the fact that he shouts louder than everyone else and makes promises or has a very bushy mustache, for example.
The second - this is, perhaps, not as interesting as Wash's books, but it complements them, this is John Kehoe "Quantum Warriors". It sets out some principles of quantum physics, which are now being confirmed, and string theory and the fact that everyone is connected to everyone, that is, every particle in the Universe. And it makes you think about the purpose, how you can cause harm to another person.
There it's like hitting yourself on the hand with a hammer, yeah, well, the same reason, they say, the other person just needs to understand it, that's why Osha and Kekha in this case go together, and then I really liked the book by Piero de Li Antoni, it's called, I would dream of filming it, it's called Block 9.11, I think it's about a German concentration camp, where by the will of fate a part of strangers gathers, a certain group of ten or nine people who don't know each other.
And whoever survives, in the morning they prepare to escape, I don't remember word for word what, a very large part of the people gathered there, and they decide who of them should die. And why exactly like that? And they argue about it.
This is the kind of book that makes you think, because sometimes somewhere in life you come across questions, or on Facebook someone you know writes that if you were with a friend, for example, or it doesn’t matter, with a friend, with a stranger, and you understand that the value of his life for the planet, for the world as a whole, is much higher than yours, because in terms of potential, in terms of energy, in terms of influence on the lives of millions of people, it is much higher, and you, for example, are a simple guy working at a factory.
And did you agree to give him, roughly speaking, your heart? Somehow he would die tomorrow, such a metaphysical question. And this, who will die tomorrow, let's say, yes, and why them, and why not me, or vice versa, this is what struck me about the book. And in a purely adventure style, this is, of course, "The Butterfly", this is a book about a convict ... We'll write down the fourth. Yes, the fourth book is about a convict who escaped from a French penal servitude many times, that is, this is a book about adventures, how difficult, easy, interesting it was, about the will to freedom.
That is, he was in prison, by the way, for a crime he did not commit. That is, in principle, for what he did commit, it's even offensive and you don't want to sit, yes. And for what he did not commit, to be sentenced to life imprisonment for murder - this is generally harder in the throne, or 10 times harder. I dream of getting rich enough to rent it.
But from this book, from it they need to make a series exactly like "The Count of Montcrist" or "The Godfather" 3-4-5 episodes. But this is the book that I read in prison under the blanket with a flashlight. I did this only when I was 6 years old, and I was in the first grade. My mother made me sleep, and I read books under the blanket with a flashlight. That's why this book is worth it, believe me.
And the last book, it is from the same series as "Papillon", also about a crime. It is called "Convicted by Life", this is a book by the British writer Marcus Clarke about a man who, in order not to cast a shadow of dishonor on his mother, there was some kind of affair, he has to keep silent, they pin a murder on him, he did not kill, but in order not to reveal this underground affair of his mother, he is forced to take it upon himself.
And so he bears this cross all his life in this British penal servitude, I don’t remember, and in Australia by the way, but he doesn’t try to escape, well, it just so happens that he suffers all his life innocently and there you are so much, also a thick book, and you empathize with the main character so much that you just want to stand back to back with him and protect him from all enemies.
What do you need money for?
Interviewer:
You said that after 40 you don’t want to do business. You need money. What do you need this money for?
Carder:
I need money only so that I can roughly calculate how much I need, so that my family and I don’t want for anything for the rest of our lives, let’s say. That is, figuratively speaking, I’m 40, and I plan to live there until I’m a hundred, well, not forty, but thirty-six now, until I’m a hundred that’s another sixty-four years, I need twenty thousand dollars a month for the family.
That is, I need fifteen million today, just to never think about money. But due to the fact that I will still be doing projects for the planet, for society as a whole, well, I need a little more, so if I had fifteen, twenty, well, over 15 million dollars now, I would not do business, because I consider the work of earning money, making money, somehow, you know, not the most important thing, why I was born into this world.
On the meaning of life
Carder:
And in general, not the most, well, in prison, a mission was revealed to me, probably, such as mine, that again, after reading all these books and other philosophical treatises. Here's what, you know, I'm tired of looking at how much evil there is in the world as a whole.
And that history teaches nothing. In the world, so you understand, 35 thousand people die of hunger every day. 35 thousand. Of them, 20 thousand children. And I can't quarrel with Katya now. Not anymore, but before, when she throws away a piece of bread, or cooks a little more than necessary, but it is not eaten, you have to throw it away. That is, after prison, although I did not need anything there, I still had to go to a detention center for a phone, starve, undernourish.
And knowing that 35 thousand die every day somehow, I want to change something. Or people kill 40 million sharks a year for the sake of soup from their cartilage, from their fin, supposedly it makes you erect better. In fact, it probably makes you erect better from Viagra, I have not tried it yet.
But people kill, and in fact it is a myth, it is boiled in chicken broth, there are no properties for potency left, but we kill 40 million sharks. Sharks attack us 300 times a year, and not always fatally. 40 million and 300 times, you understand, but we shout such things, let's raise hell. That is, the example may not be entirely successful, but it debunked the fact that this is a myth.
Here I told you, here are the others present in the room, yes, I told about 100 more people before you. But if Elon Musk or, okay, Buzova, who has 14 million, were sitting with us as the third one, and they take it on faith, take it as their life dogma, that this is wrong, they convey to their 14 million and more subscribers, or Cristiano, yes, who will write a post on his Instagram, and that’s already 250 million.
I see my goal in debunking myths in any area, especially very dangerous ones, religious ones in particular. Debunking myths so that there is less evil in the world. And this can only be done through education and the involvement of opinion leaders.
Competition
Carder:
We can raffle off a book.
Interviewer:
Are you ready?
Carder:
I’ll give mine with an autograph. Of course, I’ll send it to her.
Interviewer:
Will you send it? With an autograph? And what are you sending with an autograph for?
Carder:
We need the comments that were written under the release, it's higher, then it will be more difficult for you. Get irritated.
Interviewer:
Well, they also need to watch until the end. We've been chatting here for a long time. What would you like to see in the comments?
Carder:
I'd like to see some interesting question, and probably related, at your discretion, either to business, yes, well, an interesting question that I'll answer, or specifically about the meaning of life in general, that is, some kind of life question.
Interviewer:
Let me take the one about the meaning of life in general.
Carder:
Go ahead.
Interviewer:
A question about the meaning of life in general, which you choose and, in fact, the author of the question will send a book, right?
Carder:
Yes, yes. Your book with a signature.
Interviewer:
We can also give a link to a secret discounter in the description of the episode and some kind of promo code for this link, so that a person has, for example, a longer free premium period, if you give it out for free at all.
Carder:
Yes, we have a free 10-day one. A platinum account? We'll give them, okay, we'll give your subscribers a lifetime platinum account.
Interviewer:
Lifetime? Yeah. Good.
Carder:
So from the start they'll get the maximum account in our system. Forever.
Interviewer:
Okay, that's it, let's wrap it up. Thank you very much for agreeing to chat.
