Private Eyes

Speaker 1: Former CEO of Wirecard has been arrested on suspicion of falsifying accounts.

Speaker 2: Let's talk about Nigeria

Speaker 3: and its oil. A dramatic

Speaker 1: turn taking place in the WeWork saga. All of these legal trials have one thing in common, and it all starts in a Hollywood apartment. It's 2013 and Carlos Basileo is working as a bodyguard for a multi level marketing entrepreneur. This guy named Ryan who started a company that sells diet shakes and Carlos's boss. Ryan is embroiled in a bunch of lawsuits with one of his like big competitors, this company called ocean avenue and the boss Ryan tells Carlos. I want to dig up some dirt for this lawsuit. And when you want dirt for a lawsuit, who do you go to?

Speaker 3: Private investigators.

Speaker 1: And Carlos says, I know one of those Because before Carlos was an MLM founders bodyguard, he worked in Afghanistan with the private mercenary from Blackwater. And while he was there, he met this former sheriff's deputy named Mosher who is now a private investigator. So Carlos calls him up and they have this meeting in this apartment in Hollywood. Mosier is an old school PI. He rolls up with like a duffel bag full of spy kit like cameras and microphones, but none of it is quite right for this job. The evidence that they're looking for isn't happening in like a room or over the phone. It was happening in emails and direct messages. But the private investigator, Mosher, tells Carlos about this other option, about this guy that he knows who can help named summit Gupta or main character. Gupta was a hacker. We don't know how Mosher met him, but Gupta promised he could get into ocean avenues, emails and get the evidence they were looking for for the lawsuit. So they all make a deal. The PI Mosier goes on the payroll, gets his 10 k a month retainer, and he starts outsourcing the job to the hacker Gupta. Gupta gets to work, hacking the competition.

Speaker 3: I just wanna, like, maybe I know nothing about law, clearly not a lawyer. But wouldn't a bunch of stolen evidence not be considered evidence?

Speaker 1: Yeah. This story goes terribly for pretty much everybody. Oh, Ocean Avenue finds out that their executives got hacked by Gupta. They sue Ryan's company on extortion, intimidation, hacking charges, who ends up settling for some big undisclosed sum. Then the FBI finds out and says, yeah, a civil suit isn't gonna cut it for what you did. Yeah. And they go after Carlos and the PI Mosier. In 2015, they raid their homes and eventually both end up pleading guilty to conspiracy charges. This whole thing is like a landmine going off beneath everybody's careers. That meeting in that apartment in Hollywood blows up in everybody's faces except for one person, Gupta. For Gupta over in West Delhi, this is a discovery of a huge client base. Analog private investigators and lawyers all around the world tasked with finding digital evidence and dirt to help their clients win lawsuits. Private investigators willing to pay him to hack evidence. So Gupta starts a company, and he names it Beltrox. And over the decade that follows, Beltrox becomes the public face of a giant hacking for hire operation employed by clients ranging from little civil suits to allegedly massive corporations looking for that one piece of dirt that would help them win their case. And all those trials at the start of the show, WeWork, Wirecard, Nigerian Oil, and hundreds of others, they all had one thing in common. Beltrox. Here on Hacked.

Speaker 3: Like, on the face, I and I also love that the hacker is the person who escapes probably least scathed. Like, I'm sure he was scathed to some degree, but, like, you know, being in a foreign country, not being like, that's that is.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 3: I don't know. It seems I can see that the like, we this almost rings this almost brings memories back for me with the, the police that were, like, you know, setting up the, revolutionaries. It's kinda got the opposite vibe.

Speaker 1: A 100%. It's kind of a sister episode to that. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Exactly. It's like, no, no, no. We're just a bunch of black hats that are like it's like we know our competition is doing illegal things. We just need proof of it, so we're gonna do an illegal thing to get the proof of it.

Speaker 1: Completely. And like you said, it's inadmissible in court, but it's still very useful in the context of a trial.

Speaker 3: Sure. And if you drop it in a boardroom in front of a CEO or a board, like a chairperson of a board, I'm sure it's like, oh, wow. Okay.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Where did you get this? Like, we don't have to disclose it, but we know you guys are doing bad things.

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 3: Wild. Wild.

Speaker 1: So this story, the Beltrac story has been kind of floating around for a little bit now. There's been some really good stuff on it, but the reason we're talking about it now is because of this new data leak that just came out that sheds a lot of light into how it actually worked. Last month, Reuters managed to get ahold of this database of 80,000 emails sent to 13,000 targets over seven year period. Basically everyone Beltrocks contacted and attempted to hack between 2013 and 2020. Beltrocks was like primarily a phishing operation. So a database of all of their emails is essentially a day by day hour by hour breakdown of how this hacking for hire group worked And really importantly, what we're gonna talk about today, which is who they targeted. The journalists with Reuters who kind of broke this story, Rafael Satter and Christopher Bing, they got their hands on this database when some people who worked at the email providers that Beltrox was using agreed to disclose it to the press. And they did so after Reuters reached out to them and said, hey, we're the press. You know, this is a giant illegal hacking ring using your service. Right? And that leak gives us a really interesting look into this whole ecosystem of lawyers and private investigators and hackers working together to acquire evidence. Because the thing about hacking people in lawsuits is that, like, if you're willing to cross that line and hack them, you're probably willing to cross a bunch of lines, including hacking their lawyers, their friends, their families, their whole community.

Speaker 3: Totally.

Speaker 1: Before we get to all that, some of Gupta gets into the world of hacking for hire when he gets a job at this little company called app in India. App in mostly did like mainstream it work, but there's this interesting PowerPoint presentation from 2010 that shows like the moment they start to expand their ambition. It's app and pitch to government and corporate clients on their new service. They're offering a division of hackers for hire. They didn't see like private investigators as the ultimate clientele, but they did see how profitable hacking could be. It seems that Appen was a little bit of an incubator for this kind of thing. Like, Gupta sees this presentation, presumably. He sees how much potential there is in this, how much they're charging versus how much he's making and he decides to embark on his own to start his own company and while we don't know how he gets his first client Mosher the private investigator working for that multi level marketing diet shake company. Mhmm. In 2014, a couple weeks after he starts hacking for them, Sumit Gupta, 24 years old, registers his company in India. Beltrox, Infotech Services Private Limited, their motto, you desire, we do. So first off Gupta starts putting up ads online for an ethical hacking service company, listing their target clients as private investigators and corporate lawyers. He knows who's he's going after and people who worked at Beltrocks, like later described the office as kind of this like weird, it was very heavily surveyed, but otherwise just sort of a rundown call center. Like there were surveillance cameras and key tracking software, but otherwise just kind of a dingy place. My guess is that Gupta spun up his own operation because he saw how much they were charging and how little he was making. And I'm inferring how much he was making by how much he paid folks for context. Belt trucks would charge about 20,000 us for their services. Yeah. A month's salary for his employees was 25,000 rupees, which is about $350 Wow. Which is 700 rupees less than the average in Delhi. So he was making a ton of money, and he was paying folks not a ton of money.

Speaker 3: So wait. He was he was paying under, like, the average salary

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Getting, like, qualified black hats. That doesn't seem right.

Speaker 1: I think when you can kinda get a little bit of a look into the tactics they were using, which was this, like, super high volume phishing strategy Of

Speaker 4: course.

Speaker 1: Each campaign would be like, oh, we're gonna go after so many people. I kinda get how he was able to keep this operation going using that business model.

Speaker 3: Sure. He didn't it wasn't highly, you know, tactical, strategic hacks. It was like blanket phishing scams.

Speaker 1: For sure. This isn't one linear story. It's kind of like three stories from that archive of Beltrox leaks, three different targets, each kind of showing us a different way that a hacker could wedge themselves into the legal system and fit into this whole world of, like, hacking dirt for hire. Story number one, Nigerian oil. Okay. So we gotta be careful telling some of these because they're court cases and those star lawyers. And just because we know every single person who Beltronics hacked, how they hacked them, we importantly don't know their clients. The business side of things was not in this database. So it makes talking about them kind of tricky. So here is just like a fun story about a $1,500,000,000 Nigerian oil lawsuit. Folks can do with it what they will. Avoiding litigation.

Speaker 3: Avoiding here is me wrapping this in conditionals as to limit my liability.

Speaker 1: Many asterisks everywhere.

Speaker 3: If you can't see the the quotes I'm putting around what I'm saying, trust me, they are there.

Speaker 1: The next thirty minutes are all sarcasm or, like, performance art or something. It's 2017, and there's a legal battle unfolding between the Nigerian government and the heir of an Italian business mogul over the fate of a billion and a half dollars. This business mogul from the nineteen eighties was named Vittorio Fabri. Back in the eighties, he bought the rights to pump crude oil in a block of the Niger Delta. And eventually, I think in the nineties, there was like a power struggle that had him boxed out in favor of local management, this company called Pan Ocean. Fabri senior dies and his heirs sue the Nigerian government for over a billion bucks, saying, like, you took my daddy's oil. The heirs are arguing that the Nigerian government and Panosha were colluding to box them out. And their case hinges on proving this conspiracy. On June 11, a mysterious email shows up in the heirs inbox. A correspondence between Panoshen and the Nigerian government's lawyers saying, Hey, don't forget to pay us that money you owe us. A very incriminating email, and kind of a silver bullet for the Italian oil heir's case, which hinged on proving that pan ocean paid off the Nigerian government. The trouble is that email, which came from an email belonging to a lawyer, working for the Nigerian government. The lawyer is the purported whistleblower. It was not as real email. It was in his name, but it was not an account he had ever used before.

Speaker 3: Interesting.

Speaker 1: It seems that someone hacked his account, found this incriminating email, created a fake email under his name, and used it to send it to the Italian oil heirs, who for what it's worth claimed to know nothing about the matter. It's interesting that you called this as being kind of a problematic scheme earlier because the Fabrio family ultimately lost their case. But Nigerian lawyers have argued that the suggestion of collusion, this accusation that was in that leaked email probably led to the Nigerian courts letting them skip out on about $3,000,000 in legal fees that they otherwise would have owed to Nigerian government. So for a while, this is all just sort of a weird incriminating but opaque mystery. It's all but clear that someone hacked the Nigerian government's lawyers, and it was in an attempt at helping the plaintiff. But we didn't know who.

Speaker 3: Sure.

Speaker 1: Now, thanks to this Beltrox document leak, we can see the other side of all this. We can really see the scope of the operation, and that the lawyer targeted and fished was far from the only one. In the Beltrox leaks, we see there were multiple different attempts made to target the lawyers, but they also targeted over 100 employees of Panosian and a dozen other lawyers for the Nigerian government. Then it shows that Beltrox created a WikiLeaks style website called nigeriaoilleaks.com It was sort of set up to expose corrupt Nigerian politicians. And it starts to seem like Gupta's hacking for hire service was growing and becoming part of like an even larger service offering. It expanded into like advertising almost.

Speaker 3: Sure. Like a lobbyist. You take this information and broadcast it.

Speaker 1: Completely. We hacked everybody in this ecosystem. We managed to get one. We leak the data and then we use it to justify this sort of like, of course, yeah. Lobbying effort. So keen eared listeners will notice that the, people who had hired the hackers are right now zero for two. They didn't work in the first story and it didn't work in that story. Bring us to our next story. A little company called we work. This is a short one, but it's got a little bit of star power. How much do you know about we work and its founder? Adam Newman?

Speaker 3: It was in the news for quite a substantial amount of time, especially the investor news.

Speaker 1: I'm not gonna dig into him too much. There's very good podcast series about it, which was adapted into a TV show starring Jared Leto. But Adam Neumann, as most folks know, founded the co working space, we work, it all goes very, very messily. There's a lot of lawsuits, but there's this part of that story. As Adam Newman is trying to court Japan's soft bank for a 4 and a half billion dollar investment. When he, a bunch of the shows about this almost characterize him as, like, descending into paranoia a little bit. Like, he became convinced that he was being monitored during all this. Mhmm. And this is not to vindicate Adam Newman. But when journalists discovered the Beltrox email leaks, and they started looking through everyone who had been targeted, they found that he had. Someone had paid Beltrox a lot of money to hack Adam Neumann. Neumann, it seems, had figured this out in about 2020, and the partnership with SoftBank had collapsed by that point, and he was suing them after being fired and kicked out of WeWork. His lawyers turn around and book a meeting with SoftBank executives, and they grill them about in these depositions. For what it is worth, that grilling, that accusation that he'd been hacked happened just a week or two before Adam Neumann received a roughly $500,000,000 settlement from SoftBank. Mhmm. Whoever hacked Adam Neumann never found the evidence they were looking for, and Adam accuses SoftBank of hacking him, or at least strongly implies it, and walks away with a half billion bucks. Which I find fascinating because, again, right now, the common common denominator in all these stories is that the people who would have benefited from the hacking have not really won in any of these situations. Right now, the common denominator is how terribly all these things blow up in everyone's faces.

Speaker 3: Well, the the the I'm having a hard time not seeing the parallels to last episode where where, you know, somebody gets so much access to private information

Speaker 1: Totally.

Speaker 3: They waste it. Yeah. And here you've got people spending piles of money Yeah. To get access to confidential information. You know, to end, you know, it not to waste it, but then it's kinda going sideways for them.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So it's

Speaker 3: like this hilarious game of, like, these people knew what the value was, but have failed to, like, you know

Speaker 1: Completely.

Speaker 3: Harvest the value. Or the other person didn't know what the value was and failed to do anything really of use with it.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It kind of just reminds you that these folks think they're probably getting a world, a very high level service because they're paying a very high level amount of money to get it. And they don't know that on the far side of it, there's kind of a boiler room happening. Story number three, and this one doesn't go any better. Wirecard. This concerns a private investigator and former policeman named Avira Mazari, one of Beltrox's best customers and one of the few people to actually go down in this whole mess aside from that opening story. There was this now defunct German financial firm called Wirecard. They started processing payments for like gambling and porno sites before you know, sort of rebranding themselves and becoming like a fintech darling in Germany. Wirecard boss, Markus Braun gets arrested when €1,900,000,000 goes missing and I don't know many companies that could withstand losing 1,900,000,000 anything. Wirecard is no exception. It collapses. Yeah. When journalists started digging into the Beltrox emails, they found that Beltrox had been hired to target short sellers that were short selling Wirecard. Reporters that had been writing negative stories about Wirecard, and financial analysts who had voiced skepticism over Wirecard's business practices. In a bunch of different instances, all of these hacks lined up pretty much perfectly with legal threats made by Wirecard while Braun was still CEO. And, the courts found a similar pattern, which is why Azari was arrested by the FBI in 2019, and why Braun is currently facing a laundry list of legal charges relating to conspiracy, fraud, and hacking. So the really wild thing about all these different stories, Nigerian oil, we work wire card is that these were discovered in Beltrocks is like corporate emails. These were contracts that came in through Beltrocks, a company with a website, public facing registered Corp. We don't know who paid Beltrox, but we know that Sumit Gupta's company did these jobs based on this 2022. But in 2017, this other group bumped into Beltrox coming kind of from like a different angle. If Beltrox was public facing, they discovered Beltrox's tracks sort of coming up from below. Mhmm. And they didn't know they were initially looking at Beltrox. They were looking for the people behind the hacking for hire group that had gone beyond lawsuits doing corporate espionage and spying on activist groups. Citizens Lab in Toronto nicknamed this group Dark Basin and what they soon discovered was that this mercenary group had very strong ties to a public facing company based in West Delhi named Beltrox. That whole side of the story right after the break. Starting some new isn't just hard. It can be downright terrifying. You put a lot of work into a thing. You're not entirely sure it's gonna work out. You're taking a huge leap of faith. I've started a few things. Now I know I was right for believing in, you know, the idea, the product, despite all of those fears and hesitations, but boy, does it sure help when you have a partner like Shopify on your side. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 of all e commerce in The US. From household names like, well, hacked podcasts merch, to brands just getting started, you can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready to use templates. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. Did I mention that that iconic purple shop pay button is used by millions of businesses around the world? I don't know why I wouldn't. I should. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It also helps boost conversions, meaning less carts, sort of getting abandoned in the parking lot and more sales for you. It's time to turn those what ifs into sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com/hacked. Go to shopify.com/hacked. One more time, That's shopify.com/hacked.

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Speaker 3: Coming up.

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Speaker 3: As a young cyber cybersecurity fan, we always joke that the retirement goal was just to, like, be able to read an administrator's email at, like, a mergers and acquisitions firm in in, like, Wall Street. You know? So you're pretty soft touch there. Mhmm. You just read some email, get a bit of information, know something that's gonna happen, little insider trading, and bam, you're rich. And it's like, you know? So the value of just a little bit of non public information can go a long way if used correctly.

Speaker 1: Yeah. A secret is worth a lot more money than it's like any anytime I see a person who's made their living telling you what's gonna happen next, I'm like, no. If you really knew what was gonna happen next, you wouldn't be telling me. Like, that's the that's the essential tension of those people is like, no. If you really knew, why would you tell me? Because it's it stops being a secret.

Speaker 3: I'm not a futurist.

Speaker 1: It's like, well, but if you

Speaker 3: And I'm

Speaker 1: Like, I don't think you are.

Speaker 3: I mean, I'm probably insulting I'm probably insulting some some fraction of our audience, but yeah. Exactly. If you knew exactly what was gonna happen, there's much better ways to make money than charging people to tell them what's gonna happen.

Speaker 1: A 100%. So there's this environmental campaign called Exxon new, a network of different like environmental orgs have been publicly battling with ExxonMobil for years about whether or not the company had been engaging in this decades long effort to mislead the public about climate science. ExxonMobil is of course denied this, but about five years ago, several of these environmental groups, Rockefeller Fund, three fifty, Center for International Environmental Law, started to notice that their staff and membership had been getting really weird emails. Fake Google news articles and links to climate related content specifically to do with Exxon. And these emails came from accounts that seemed to belong to their colleagues and their lawyers. Citizens Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog group at the University of Toronto, started to kind of dig into this a little bit. And what they figured out, kind of turned on the URL shorteners that were used to make those fake news stories. The shortened URLs were not created with a publicly available URL shortener. It was a custom tool. Importantly, it created URLs with shortcodes that were sequential. Like if you made one that was something something one two three, the next one would be something, something one to four. And the next one you made with the tool would be something, something one to five, so on and so on. So citizens lab was able to start testing them in numerical order,

Speaker 3: timelining them,

Speaker 1: timelining them and seeing how many of them there were really, really were and what they found was, it was vast. The people behind these Exxon new hacks had overall created 28,000 unique URLs using this tool they've made. And the same way that Reuters got a glimpse into Beltrox's activity through this email leak that happened this last month, a couple years ago CitizensLab got there through this giant URL database that they were able to reverse engineer. The database revealed that amongst the hundreds of people this hacking operation had been targeting, the attacks on Exxon new campaigners was not a one off project. It extended not just to people at the dozen or so orgs running it, not just to their volunteers, like people that just volunteered for one of those groups. In many cases, it extended to their friends, their family, their legal representation. In one case, a child of one of the organizers, a miner was targeted. Ginormous incredibly well funded hacking campaign. Citizens Lab named this hacking campaign Dark Basin. It targeted activists, media, also people with financially sensitive information, bankers, traders. Anyone who, like the Beltrox files, could cost or with the potential to make someone somewhere money. Anybody with a secret. Exxon, of course, denies any connection to this. But those URLs, that list of 28,000. When Citizens Labs set out to figure out who was behind Dark Basin, kind of coming up from below, they started with that repository of URLs. The vast majority of them were used in phishing scams and they kind of revealed this network of tools. Some would point to credential phishing sites that looked like a fake login page for Facebook, phishing emails, all the standards. But early on when folks were first like making and tightening up this URL shortening tool, they were using test documents in place of the bait content they would later use. Someone was just making sure that it was working using a PDF or a doc before using the URL shortener on their hacks. The test documents were in many cases, personal documents that the people had in sitting around in a folder. And in a lot of cases, they were CVS and resumes from the folks using

Speaker 3: them. I I don't know what it is, but even then I can just say this to myself, is that when I have to, like, upload something to test something, I all Yeah. For some reason, I use my CV. And, like, I haven't updated it in, like, ten years. But it's like Interesting. I feel like that's I I wonder if there's just something programmed in us. It's like, oh, I need a PDF. What PDFs exist on my computer? It's like, okay, bank statements and, like, my CV. So you use your CV because it's the least personal.

Speaker 1: It's somehow more private than your bank statements.

Speaker 3: It still

Speaker 1: has Exactly. Your name and employer on it, but it doesn't have your bank account info.

Speaker 3: Exactly. So it's like, I just wanted I I just knew it. Before you even said it, I was like, guaranteed it's resumes. Guaranteed it's resumes. And you're like, yeah. Test documents, resumes. And I was like, ah, man.

Speaker 1: Feel like it's resumes. I

Speaker 3: was like, I would have been this person. This would have been me. Like, oh, I gotta test this. Make sure to accept PDF. Oh, yeah. Resume. Yeah. Perfect.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And you're not you're not thinking you might not even have been the exact person of the company to develop it to know that the URLs are sequential. Mhmm. There's a little bit of there's enough information loss that you don't think the test document is ever gonna get seen by someone. But whoops, it did. Yeah. And every single one of them all shared one thing, all pointing to one company, Beltrox. The dark basin hacking group that Citizens Lab had been investigating and the public facing quote unquote ethical hacking company that Reuters would later look into were one in the same. And bizarrely, tragically, despite the volume of both of these leaks, despite how about how much we can see into how they operated this giant phishing network, we still can't see who hired them. Even with all of this information, that is the last missing piece of the puzzle.

Speaker 3: Nobody's managed to phishing get access to their email?

Speaker 1: Sure would be cool if someone did.

Speaker 3: Or some three letter agencies shows up and, takes takes the mail servers.

Speaker 1: Let's talk about why that specifically might not happen by talking about some of the people who have endorsed Bell trucks over the years prior to it blowing up and becoming this toxic brand name. Amongst its endorsers prior to that point, an official in the Canadian government endorsed them, an investigator at the US federal trade commission did, a contract investigator for the US Customs and Border Patrol, current local and state law enforcement officers in The US, and as we discussed, a laundry list of private investigators, many with prior roles in the FBI police military and branches of government. All prior to Bell trucks being revealed as a not so ethical hacking service said you should use this ethical hacking service.

Speaker 3: We're recommending.

Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah. It's not a great look.

Speaker 3: Good for Beltrox.

Speaker 1: Totally. Quite the logo farm.

Speaker 3: Yeah. No kidding. It's like we take money from anybody. It doesn't really matter.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. What do you want us to do?

Speaker 3: Yeah. We're mercenaries. It's like they

Speaker 1: don't give a shit if you win. Like but they'll take your money to hack someone.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, it's actually we're we're providing evidence to both sides of this case. You know, it doesn't

Speaker 1: matter. Totally. Totally. Visalis, the company that Gupta worked for in 2013, is currently challenging a better part of a billion dollar class action, judgment for robocalls. Its CEO Ryan, who hired Carlos, left the firm in 2016. That former bodyguard director of security Carlos, now runs a fitness retreat in the mountains of Japan. Wow. And Nathan Mosher the private eye is working on his mental health at a Utah rehabilitation facility. Wish him the best. But what I find fascinating, and some of this is just the sample list of companies that you know got discovered engaging in this but is again like we said how many of these stories do not work out for the people who would have presumably hire Beltrox? And it's kinda like if you reach the point where you're desperate enough to hire these folks, to cross that line, to break those laws, it was probably going pretty poorly for you. And you're still probably not likely to win. By the time you get to Beltrox, you're looking at a hail mary. But the thing about that is that Sumit Gupta still gets paid whether or not you win. Gupta was indicted in 2015 for that case from our opening story. He remains a fugitive from The US courts. He is very free living his life in India. Social media sites have attempted to cut off Beltrox's sort of, like, damage. Last year Facebook meta, removed 400 associated pages that they had created over the years as part of their, lobbying efforts as you called it. Mhmm. Beltrox website is now shut down. That brand has died.

Speaker 3: I see I see on on Google that they are temporarily closed. Not not out of business. Temporarily closed.

Speaker 7: Any day now.

Speaker 3: They'll be back.

Speaker 1: They're gonna stage a revival. You know, they'll be back. And just check out their logo farm then.

Speaker 3: You know, you think about you think about the stealing of information and and access to information. Fifty years ago, you know, in a predigital world, this was all in folders and, you know, admissions and and lawyers' offices and in accounting records and books, you know, And now it's all digital. Everything's digital. We leave digital fingerprints everywhere. The twenty first century, you know, private eye is is likely just a hacker.

Speaker 1: I would bet that somewhere there's probably a new website that is not closed for business for a different company offering quote, unquote ethical hacking services with a client roster of private investigators and lawyers and a slogan to something to the effect of, you desire, we do. Whether or not you win, not their problem. Thanks for listening everybody. Fun little Easter egg for everyone who made it to the end. Could you hear me becoming increasingly heat delirious over the course of recording this thing? As it goes on this like ascent in how many sentences I just completely say out of order or say the wrong thing. I had the AC off for the microphone and the windows and doors to my little room all tightly snugly sealed. And I'm pretty sure if this went on for more than ten minutes longer, I would have passed out into the microphone. Stay cool. Everybody stay cool out there, especially our patrons on Patreon. That's patreon.com/hackedpodcast. Best way to support the show. Trevor Strom, thank you very much for being a patron. Brian Schultz, thank you. Thank you very much. Colin Small, thank you. Paul Gangler, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Tommy Hovey, thank you so much. And Mark Northgraves, thank you. Thank you for your support. It means a lot. Patreon.com/hackedpodcast. Best way to support the show. That is a another one. So, odd one. A heat boiling like a crawfish episode. Another one in the bucket. We'll catch you again next next time. Thanks for listening.

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