Open Secret

Speaker 1: Alright. What's up, guys? It's Ami, Zoidear. This video is about a scammer, a liar, and just someone that is pretty scummy. You guys probably know him already. It's Open.

Speaker 2: So this all starts on Minecraft.

Speaker 3: Oh, I love it already.

Speaker 2: Back in 2016, there was this Minecraft player named Open. And Open started to get some flack in the Minecraft community. Take this video from Meezoid, for example.

Speaker 1: They work together and they scam, like, mine gun capes. Like, they sell mine gun capes, and it's a scam. They did it to me. The deal was I'd give him $50 and a shout out for a Minecon Cape.

Speaker 2: Opin had been scamming people, basically saying, I will trade you this rare item for some cash and a shout out. And the only reason, his victims like Mezoid believed the scam was because Opn had a bunch of YouTube subs. He was a streamer who played this super violent variation on Minecraft called Hardcore Factions. But as Mezoid explained

Speaker 1: I I only believed it because of, his YouTube channel, because he has subs. But the thing is, all of his subs are because he fakes his giveaways.

Speaker 2: So Mezoid decided to record open, and we can hear him pulling this scam.

Speaker 4: I'll give you I'll give you the code. I'll give you the link first, and then I'll do the forward the email.

Speaker 2: So Okay.

Speaker 4: I'm actually I'm recording this right now.

Speaker 1: Okay. Me too.

Speaker 4: Alright. That's the redeem.

Speaker 2: Just as quick as Open shows up

Speaker 5: User disconnected from your channel.

Speaker 1: What a

Speaker 3: kid, guys.

Speaker 5: User disconnected from your channel.

Speaker 2: And Open is gone. Open is a story not because of how his career as an Internet grifter began, which was, you know, we think right here on Minecraft. Open is a story because of where his career as a grifter and later hacker would go, which is on to becoming the main character in an international news story that involved, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Jeffrey Bezos, some of the most famous people in the world. There are multi thousand word New York Times profiles on Open and segments on just about every news broadcast in the West on his crimes and eventual arrest. Open is in jail right now. He will be for another year or so, but he was a minor when he did the stuff he was charged with. So we're gonna avoid using his legal name, though it is very, very well documented. But the thing that I find really interesting about this story is the way that his career as a hacker both evolved and also kind of stayed the same. Because the hack that would land him in prison, the hack that had him penetrating the very sophisticated security of a large technology company was kind of just a super involved elaborate version of the same thing he was doing here as a kid on Minecraft. The same thing he did to Mesoid. Conjuring up some Internet clout and using it to get folks to send him something in exchange for something he was never gonna send them. This is the open secret, here on Hacked.

Speaker 3: I got to assume he's big on the Bitcoin.

Speaker 2: Oh, man. You're gonna like this.

Speaker 3: Because, like, if you love a grift, like, how can you not love Bitcoin?

Speaker 2: Well, it's just it's also very useful for a grift. You're that's gonna come back in a big way. You you you predicted something on that one. Nice. So how are you doing, Scott?

Speaker 3: I'm good. How are you doing, Jordan?

Speaker 2: I'm doing good. Keep keeping busy.

Speaker 3: A point of note

Speaker 2: Mhmm. I

Speaker 3: will be out of the country for a few weeks, so I will maybe be missing an episode. So So I apologize to everybody in advance, and I apologize to you leaving you here alone even though we all know that you're much better at this.

Speaker 2: That's untrue. The people the people we'll all miss you here at Hacked, Scott, but we'll, we'll have you back soon. But before you go, I know you probably wanna give a big old shout out to our new patrons on Patreon.

Speaker 3: I love our new patrons. All of them.

Speaker 2: Patreon.com/hackedpodcast. Welcome. Thank you for your support. It means a lot to us. We'll, we'll say hi to you at the end of this show. So there's two parts to this story. First is Open's career leading up to the big hack that landed him in jail. And then there is the story of the hack itself. We're gonna start with,

Speaker 4: you

Speaker 2: know, everything that led up to that. Open grew up as like a normal kid in Tampa with a sister and his mom. His parents divorced when he was seven. His footprint online, however, starts when he's about 10 years old and he starts to

Speaker 4: play Minecraft.

Speaker 2: My math is right, that video we heard in the intro, he would have been about 13, maybe 14 years old. Open's reputation on Minecraft had like two big elements to it. He was, like, kind of a grifter, and he had a reputation as being a pretty, like, angry dude online. To start with his grift, it didn't typically involve rare items like the Minecon cape. He didn't use those as his bait. The commodity that Open liked to use, was rare usernames. For starters, his. Open. He got his hands on others too. Feed, I think was one of his. I can't pretend to know what was going on in his head, but it's hard not to look at this whole story zoomed out everywhere it goes and wonder if it all started with the fact that he got a good username when he was a kid.

Speaker 3: So wait. So he began his, like, online presence and online in, like, a a very enterprising way? Like, he was essentially doing domain squatting, but on usernames? Is that essentially what you're saying?

Speaker 2: Domain squatting is usernames. Look. We talk a lot about usernames in this episode. Domain squatting is a really, really good analogy. Like, he got a high clout, like, kinda name you want, and he that was his commodity. That was what he bought and sold. That was what he traded in.

Speaker 3: Interesting.

Speaker 2: Because people wanted that username, and it had some value. And he kinda figured that out.

Speaker 3: Well, not even that. If if you've used a username on one system, you obviously want it on other systems.

Speaker 2: Bingo.

Speaker 3: You could even you know, you could just like they do with domain squatting, you could probably write an algorithm that takes care of it it for you, and you could bill everybody $5 to get their usernames, and it would be a huge nightmare. And you'd probably cause a bunch of policy legislation on, you know, terms and conditions on websites

Speaker 4: in the

Speaker 3: future, but whatever.

Speaker 2: But the best insight we have into those early days is he would just run this, like, same kind of hustle over and over again. Like, oh, you want my username? Oh, you want this thing? Send me this or do this, and it's yours. And then he would just vanish. Over and over again, permutations of the same thing, which I find very interesting. He found that scam very young. The other part of his reputation on Minecraft and kind of in real life, was he seemed to a bunch of folks that have been interviewed about him since his arrest, like, kinda just an angry dude, like, a a kid with a temper. A defining trait of a lot of the YouTube content he would churn out after starting his channel in '16 in 2016 was he would just fly off the handle of people. And there's, like, Internet streamer, YouTube thumbnail angry. And there's what his friend James Zhou, described as, like, he would get mad mad. Like, the streamer, oh my god. I can't believe this happened mad. And then there's just angry. Mhmm. And Opin would just get angry. And he would kind of act fast based on that anger. He would fly off the handle a little bit, and I think that impulsivity is important for this story. After a while, Open is growing up, his interests start to drift away from Minecraft. For a little while, he gets into the Fortnite community, but the next big online space that he finds is not a game. It's this place called OG users. You heard of OG users, Scott?

Speaker 3: I haven't.

Speaker 2: It's interesting. I don't think we've talked about it before. There's a really good Reply All episode that spends a lot of time there. But it's kinda just this classic old school ugly hacker forum, like, just like a basic looking message board, some Discord channels blooming out of it. But the thing that they specialize in OG users, the the commodity in the middle of it is what they call OG handles, really flashy, cloudy usernames, which our boy, Open, has some experience in. Totally. And like you said, it kinda becomes about stealing those cool usernames. Not just buying and selling them, but how you get them from people that already have them. How to do it, how to hack people for their cool usernames, and how to sell them anonymously. What starts as this community all about these cool flashy usernames becomes a hacking forum dedicating to stealing people's accounts, not to take money from them, but to have their good usernames. In 2017, Open signs up for an OG user's account. According to the online forensics firm, EchoSec, he does so from the same IP address where he signed up for a Minecraft account as a 10 year old, presumably in his childhood bedroom. Would you would you like to know what a 15 year old Open's, bio on Ochi users was?

Speaker 3: I would love to know. I I don't even wanna try and guess.

Speaker 2: It's it's very, like, hustle culture. It's like it's very Internet Bugatti vibes. I think you're gonna

Speaker 4: like it.

Speaker 3: Crypto crypto bro. Glamas over over love.

Speaker 2: 15 year old Open describes himself as, quote, full time crypto trader dropout focused on just making money all around for everyone.

Speaker 6: Wow. Nailed that. You called that one a mile out.

Speaker 2: And Open immediately tries to run a variation on his typical hustle. He he he tries to, offer to sell something to someone and then not give it to them. But for the first time, he is not, dealing with Minecraft users. He's in a hacking forum. So he's immediately banned from the community, according according to some posts uncovered by that firm, EchoSec, after some moderators said he failed to pay another user some Bitcoin who had already sent him money to complete a transaction. But he had found his way into a community of people who are really up to a much more advanced version of the same thing he'd been on to since he was, like, 13. People blurring that line between Internet clout and real commodities you can buy, sell, and steal, and willing to kinda hack and and and dig into stuff to make money in that fuzzy space in between. Open used a bunch of aliases online, you know, obviously, one of which is open, most of which we're not using here to keep this followable. But there's one other one we will mention. He went by the name of Skrim because Skrim is the name he uses when he shows up again in 2019, his next big appearance. For two years or so, he has been, like, descending into this OG users online community. And when he pops back up again, his scam has, as it tends to, both stayed the same and evolved. In 2019, a guy named Greg Bennett gets his phone hacked using a little thing that we have talked about here before called a SIM swap. Broadly speaking, what is a SIM swap?

Speaker 3: Well, Jordan, I feel like this is that moment in the movie where we, like, cut out and we go to somebody else. Who's, like, sitting in a pool and gonna explain something to you.

Speaker 4: But Yeah.

Speaker 2: 100%. Big Short.

Speaker 3: Exactly. I'm glad you got the reference. The, a SIM swap is essentially when you clone a SIM or cause a SIM's universal ID number to go to a new SIM to allow communications going to the original device to come to your device. And, you know, this is used to bypass, two factor authentications and, you know, other various things, you know. Also just to to pose as a person or and be able to communicate as them, which, you know, is wonderfully powerful in social engineering. But I I think that's probably the the nitty gritty of it.

Speaker 2: That's the nitty gritty. So Greg Bennett, a Seattle technology investor, gets his phone hacked via SIM swap. And within a few minutes, the hacker had secured mister Bennett's, like, all of his accounts, his Amazon, his email, as well as a crypto wallet with 164 Bitcoins that at the time was worth a little $5,000,000. Yeah. And then he gets a note from the hacker saying, we just want the remainder of the funds in Bittrex. We are always one step ahead, and this is gonna be your easiest option. Signed, Scrim. I won't get into how Open was caught, like how he got caught doing this because, this one is a lot less documented a crime than his next one, but it is Open's first encounter with law enforcement. According to government forfeiture documents in April of the same year, the Secret Service seized 100 Bitcoins from Open. They had found him. A few weeks later, mister Bennett gets a letter from the Secret Service informing him that they had regained 100 of his Bitcoins. And when Bennett asked them if anything was gonna happen to the person who'd stolen the coins, they said no, because he's very much still a miner at this point. I think 16 may be about to turn 17. A minor who had stolen the better part of a million dollars, but a minor nonetheless. So, what we know is that Open, according to folks that knew him was pretty startled by this whole thing. But that was at odds with the fact that he was still making money doing this kind of stuff. He was, by this point, I guess, living on his own. It's hard not to look at this and see this as the point where stuff could have forked for him.

Speaker 3: Right.

Speaker 2: According to his friend, James Zhou, who we quoted earlier, you know, like, shockingly, he was pretty shaken by the Secret Service coming and reclaiming almost a million bucks he'd taken. But he was living in a condo in Tampa. Like, lord knows what he did to get that lease signed as a minor. He had a flashing like, a flashy gaming rig in a balcony with a nice view of the park. His neighbors said that he drove a neighbors said that he drove a Beemer. His Instagram showed him, like, starting to get into sneaker head stuff. He'd had this close run-in with the law, but he'd made it out alive and he was kinda doing well otherwise.

Speaker 3: So he made decent money in the in the in the username scams.

Speaker 2: And increasingly, just the hacking people world.

Speaker 3: Oh, of course. Of course.

Speaker 2: And I don't know how a guy this young with no other experience or way to make money except what he'd been doing keeps this whole lifestyle going. So that path does not fork. It forges ahead in a pretty spectacular fashion. And Open comes up with his next big scheme. And it starts just a few weeks later when an employee at Twitter got a message from someone claiming to be a coworker in the IT department, asking the employee to provide some credentials to access the back end customer service portal. Open had decided to hack Twitter.

Speaker 3: Wow.

Speaker 2: What would go on to be the great Twitter hack of 2020 that had the Twitter accounts of Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, some of Twitter's biggest users posting tweets hawking crypto.

Speaker 3: Oh, I remember this.

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Speaker 3: I remember when all these things happened. Joe Rogan.

Speaker 4: Like, I

Speaker 3: think it was like a bunch of these, like, huge Kanye West Yeah. Like, ultra high profile accounts. I think the president was didn't

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: The president posted?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh. And it

Speaker 3: was, like, everybody, but, like, essentially, like, a cryptogrift. It

Speaker 2: was a cryptogrift. And it feels like a long time ago, but it was like a really, really big story when it happened. People thought it was like a nation state level attack because the president was tweeting about crypto. I I do remember

Speaker 3: I do remember this. It does feel like it was so long ago, but 2020 wasn't that long ago. That's like a

Speaker 2: Time broke again.

Speaker 3: Pandemic away. Yeah. Exactly. The, yeah, that's fascinating. K. Great. I love this.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It seemed like such a big thing when it was happening, and the truth is so much dumber. Like, not I'm not saying the people who did it were dumb, but, like, what they did with the amount of access they got, considering how catastrophically and publicly this blows up, it's very, very silly.

Speaker 3: Well, I remember when this happened. I remember mentally thinking, like, what a strange way to leverage all that power. Like, I remember being like, you've just taken control of, like, literally an like an infinite audience. And what you do with it is, like, promote crypto.

Speaker 2: It's like breaking into Fort Knox and stealing the pens. Like, it's just it's really

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: It's like breaking into a casino and stealing the cutlery. It's like breaking into the Louvre and stealing from the gift shop. I wrote so many of these, man. I

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. That's that that's good, actually. Breaking the Louvre and stealing from the gift shop. Stealing like a tiny little moment.

Speaker 2: Ones. Yeah. Like a

Speaker 3: like a like a cup with it on it.

Speaker 2: It's unclear exactly how Open managed to work his way up from this, like, initial breach all the way to the toolset he would end up using to do this. But the best info suggests that the initial credentials he got were actually access to an internal Slack channel, where somewhere in there, somehow posted a username or a password, kind of constituted enough of a foothold into their system that he was able to start factor authentication on those credentials.

Speaker 4: But the exact steps of what he did

Speaker 2: are still kind of foggy. Exact steps of what he did are still kind of foggy. But what we do know, is in May 2020, one of Open's eventual accomplices, Lol, gets a message from someone going by the name Kirk, who authorities now believe was actually open. Lol was from the OG users community where Open hung out. That's where, you know, his alter ego Kirk reached out to Lol. And Lol gets a message that reads, yo, bro. I work at Twitter. Don't show this to anyone seriously. The account and alias Open was using, you know, Kirk, had been created the same week he started reaching out to Loll and the other accomplices in the Twitter hack. They didn't know they were talking to Open who was prominent in the OG users community. He was going incognito in his own, you know, ecosystem for this one. Yeah. Over the next day, Loll decides there's no way Open slash Kirk works at Twitter. He was too willing to mess with the company. He seemed kinda young, but he did believe that Open had the access he claimed to have. Open had proven it by actually going in and adjusting settings on their Twitter accounts. He proved he had control of some very high level tools capable of giving him access to even the most sensitive Twitter accounts. As we've said, it is buck wild to think about what someone, sort of going a little bit more slowly and a little less impulsively could have done with that power.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Seriously.

Speaker 2: But Opin went straight to what he knew. He had a plan, and it was a plan to make a buck fast.

Speaker 3: Grifting.

Speaker 2: Grifting. Opin gets Loll and some other guys named Anxious and Rolex together in a Discord, and he makes them this proposal. He wants them to be his middlemen on OG users. Opin was going to use his Twitter back end access to steal the commodity that he knew, OG usernames. Flashy, cool usernames that that community would pay a bunch of money for, and LOL and the gang were gonna be his middlemen to sell them to folks on the forums. Open does the stealing of the accounts using his access. They do the selling. Open takes a cut, and they all say, sounds good. You got a deal.

Speaker 4: In one

Speaker 2: of the first transactions, Loll brokered a deal the money, later forensics would show, went to the same Bitcoin wallet that Open was later using. The group posted an ad on ogusers.com offering Twitter handles in exchange for Bitcoin. Ever so anxious, one of his accomplices even got in on the thing. He got the the screen name at anxious that he clearly really liked. And as the morning goes on, customers start seeing this traffic, this new person selling, and they start coming in. And the prices that Open was asking for start to kinda creep up. And while he's hawking these names, he's also demonstrating to folks just how much access he has to Twitter's back end. He could really mess with the fundamental security settings on just about anybody's names and sent out pictures on the forums of Twitter's internal dashboard as proof that he had all of this power and control. People are watching. He's showing off as this, you know, new username, is puppeting Twitter like he developed it. He's doing all of this to buy and sell usernames over this little spree the crew took control of hundreds. At dark, at the letter w, the letter l, at number 50, at vague. Really good usernames. You're just selling off dozens of them. So the scam is going well. They're moving these OG usernames. The day is winding down, and a few members in different time zones say, okay. We gotta call it. It's the middle of the night here. We gotta go to sleep. And they all log off. And while they're gone, open is still at it, and he eventually comes up with this new idea. Something that requires no middlemen, something that he thinks is gonna be untraceable, and is really, he thinks, gonna make this all worthwhile. At 03:30PM that day, some of the biggest cryptocurrency companies in the world, starting with Coinbase, start tweeting variations on the same message. That is a charitable response to COVID nineteen. They would be making a match donation, to the donor. Like, if you sent them crypto, they would send it back doubled just to help people out. The tweets all read, all Bitcoins sent to the address below will be sent back doubled. If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000 and then a link to a crypto wallet.

Speaker 3: Oh my god. I remember this.

Speaker 2: They all start tweeting it. Or rather, Open, controlling their accounts, starts tweeting it. A minute after the first one goes public, Loll gets a message on Discord from Open saying we just hit Coinbase. And quickly, crypto starts to come in. He grabs control of a selection of high follower accounts. As you mentioned, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Musk, Kanye, Bill Gates, Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, Floyd Weymouth, Kim Kardashian, the official accounts for Apple and Uber, all of them posting that same message in a flurry of, you know, copy paste copy paste. Send Bitcoin to a specific account, and we'll send back your money doubled. Overall, open to control of a 130 accounts and tweeting from a boda, a curated set of 45. He was able to download some kind of undisclosed private data from eight of the accounts, which considering the sensitivity of some of those accounts is a mystery I have not really seen looked into.

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: When at anxious woke up just after 02:30AM in Britain, he looked online, saw what had happened, and sent a disappointed message to his other middleman law, saying, quote, I'm not sad. I'm more just annoyed. Because from all of this, he only made 20 Bitcoin. Referring to Kirk's Bitcoin profits from the scam, which had him basically hacking the president and only translated to about a $180,000.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Seems like a light payout.

Speaker 2: It's a lot of money, but not for what they did. I feel

Speaker 3: like just the access to people's DMs alone. Mhmm. Like, if you know what Elon Musk is up to with his stock portfolio Kinda. That that you could make way more than a $180,000 at that. Yeah. You know? You you have so much intel. Like, just the sheer value of the information would have been so much more valuable

Speaker 2: I know.

Speaker 3: Than flogging something that everybody instantly knew was just scam based. Instantly. Instantly knew.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't wanna tell people how to do crimes better,

Speaker 3: but, like But you're bad at it.

Speaker 2: Distortion. Like, you're you didn't do a good you did such a good job, and then you just whiffed it at the finish line. Like, you got into Twitter, and then you did this with it.

Speaker 3: Yeah. The infrastructure of the of the scam, huge. Impressive. Yeah. The execution of it, not creative. You

Speaker 2: know? By that point, Open had stopped responding to his middlemen. He'd gone offline. He disappeared. And the world was just sort of watching as seemingly the biggest users of one of the most influential social networks had all been hacked. And the speculation as to who did it kicks off.

Speaker 4: The day following, Twitter

Speaker 2: filed a formal criminal complaint with the authorities, and the FBI and Secret Service immediately start an investigation. Based on court documents, we know that the FBI started looking at data shared on social media and by some news outlets to get work their way back to chat logs and user details from Discord. OG users was hacked back in April 2020, and so the FBI was able to get a copy of the OG useums form, like, form database from that leak. The database contained details on registered form users, emails and IP addresses, and some private messages. Then working with the IRS, they were able to obtain data from Coinbase about the Bitcoin addresses involved in the hack, as well as, like, crypto addresses used, and mentioned by those three hackers in the Discord channels from the leaked OG users data. All they had to do then was just triangulate and correlate that data from those three sources, track the hackers' identities on the three sites, link them to the IP and email addresses from the leak. Authorities didn't initially link open directly to the Kirk Discord user, but a few weeks later, July 31, three different US government sources published reports saying they had corroborated it. Not Russia, not China, not a nation state, but a 17 year old from Tampa, who went by the name Open on Minecraft, was the mastermind of the 2020 Twitter hack. And he did it all to sell swaggy usernames and hustle for crypto donations. Open was arrested, and in 2021, then 18 years old, he was sentenced as a youthful offender, avoiding the minimum ten year sentence that would have followed if he'd been convicted as an adult. His middlemen, Loll, Anxious, and Rolex were all charged with federal crimes related to the scheme. I said this at the start, but the thing that I found interesting about all this was, like, the consistency of his hustle, even as the scale grew and grew and grew. It always had to do with clout. The clout of a Flash username, the clout of a high profile Twitter account with some trust. At age 18, he finally goes down for a very involved version of the same kind of thing he was pulling on Mesoid when he was 13. And like that part of the story, the Mesoid video we opened with, this all ends with this very timely 2020 Internet livestream.

Speaker 10: A hacker hearing hacked.

Speaker 2: Except this time of a court trial because he was going through court during COVID, during the dawn of Zoom trials before they knew that you really needed to password protect those things.

Speaker 10: Today, the attorney for the Tampa teenager accused of taking over Twitter accounts of world famous people tried to get his client's bond slash to get the alleged hacker out of jail, but people kept breaking into the video conference, disrupting, even shutting the hearing down at one point.

Speaker 2: This is audio from his sentencing appearance before a judge. You can hear it being interrupted with people Zoom bombing in.

Speaker 6: But the hearing was hijacked by people who sought to repeatedly interrupt judge Christopher Nash and attorneys as they talked about the accused Twitter hacker mastermind.

Speaker 7: Goes, when

Speaker 2: Someone comes in and starts playing music over a lawyer. Someone screen shares and starts streaming porn, obviously. And I like to imagine they're his buddies from OG users coming in to say hi. Or maybe it's the people he was scamming on Minecraft. Maybe it's Mesoid checking in on his old pal. Thanks for listening everybody. Big old shout out to our new patrons on Patreon. That's patreon.com/hackedpodcast. As always, just a very, a great way to support the show. Jonas Defries. Defry. Defree. Thank you. Hass Lady Seven. Thank you. Lucas. Thank you. Noco Loco. Thank you. Thank you. Danny, thank you very much. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We really appreciate your support as we continue to tell weird tech tales. It means a lot to us. Thank you for listening. Thank you for making it to the end of another one of these bad boys and coming to the end credit music where we just like to hang out after the story is done. This is another one in the bucket. We'll catch you in the next one.

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