I don't want to be.
He's got flown back on seven hundred w LW between Super Bowl and everything else. We are now into the second week of the anti Guth three kidnapping. FBI says we have no suspects. The family says they will pay the ransom several million dollars. So you hear that, you go, wow, could they really get away with this? And how does a crypto thing work? Anyway?
Money?
It's untraceable? Is it like one of those Swiss bank accounts that bad guys used to back in the task. If you had a Swiss bank account, you're up to no good, right, same with crypto?
I'm not sure.
So what we see a new wave of kidnapped as a result, because if they get away with it, could you imagine the floodgates opening up on That is Dave the it guy.
This guy is.
A former black hat hacker, which mean he's from the bad guys that would hack and do things that I can't speak of right now, but now has seen the lights of white hat hackers. Who helps he good guys beat the bad guys and especially when digital meets crypt and everything else in blockchain, what it all means Dave, welcome, how you ben, brother? Everything here is lovely? Well, let me put you back on speaker. There you go, everything here is lovely, all right, So let's jump into this thing.
It's it's a bizarre and gripping story. And you hope that she is still alive. Now I would think she is simply because the FBI is saying, look, you know, there's a kidnapping note, there's ransom. I'm sure the family has evidence that she's still alive. Otherwise they wentn't offer the money. But how successful in the passes suspend? As I recall top of my head, I think was it the Colonial pipeline ransom was like two point three million dollars or something like that.
Crypto to me is.
It seems to me like we've done this before, but somehow they've been able to get some of this money.
Back, right. Yeah, you know, it's really kind of a mix. You know, it's not a big difference in a case like this. It is from you know, you get ransomware on your computer and it's time to pay with bitcoin. You know, it's it's traceable, it's not as anonymous as people think. You know, Bitcoin in and of itself, isn't anonymous. It's all a matter of how you set it up
and the steps that you can't. You know, you get to prethink a little bit, you know, if you really if I put my black dad on, if I was going to do something like this, I needed to start months ago by creating an anonymous you know, bitcoin address. But I would need to make sure that I'm bouncing my VPNs around through the tour network, which is the dark web. I want to make sure that I'm not using anything known that you know, it's ever been tied
to me in the past. I'm not using any banking regulation uh countries, you know, at the US in places where you know. You mentioned Switzerland lomily enough, but if I wanted to cash out, Switzerland would be one of the places I would want to cash out too for that reason, Wow, for the anonymity. So all right, so I wouldn't want.
To YEA, let me go through the first steps here, because you know, again we're still most I don't know most people, but younger people certainly have a handle on crypto. Most anybody over the age of forty, I think may struggle with it. And if you're ever fifty, good luck with that. But it's blockchain, it's encoded. It's so they set up a I guess they would set up a bank account in which the ransom money would be paid in crypto.
How does that whole transfer work? What goes on?
So it may not necessarily be a bank as typical people consider. You know, they're bank down the street. It's more of an exchange at crypto exchange, and you know, you get online. There are a lot you know, they're coinbase and binance and a whole bunch of others. And you had to also look at what what kind of cryptocurrency is being asked for? You know, it's bitcoin that we all throw around bitcoin name because it's the most
world no name. But there are other into cryptocurrency. They use different they have they use different blockchains, they have Ethereum, and many others. So even Trump at a mean coin, right that was trading out. So anybody can create a coin of their own flavor and decide what the value is of that coin, and it's up to people to buy and sell it and keep that value flowing. Right,
So that's kind of the beginning. But which have whatever platform that you're going to get your bitcoin for your you know, cryptocurrency from that's where you can transfer that money to different wallets, you know, kind of play chase the funds, hide the money from from law, enfortunate that sort of thing, and ultimately consolidated all back into a traditional bank account.
So somebody, you have a couple of you all these digital accounts, and I requested, why wire me some money? Uh there are a little tiny finger digital fingerprints in there that would be able to trace it to a person. So it's not totally and completely anonymous. So how many layers of laundering then has to go on here?
Uh for for you know, actually to get away with it?
Yeah?
Quite a bit, quite a bit. I say, somebody that would put something like that together, if they just did it off the tough because they paid you know, at the end of something like this Guthrie thing, then you know, you might fall enforcement might have an easier way to trace them, you know, easier time. I mean, not in a fair way, but uh, you know, because they are not they didn't think it through right. They made a
mistake somewhere. But yeah, I could take you know, if if I you know, said hey, uh get me five bitcoin and you shent me five I could split that up to be, you know, half a bigcoin here and and there's a big coin there and whatever, and spread
that out to payment. But all of those would you could see those on the blockchain, which is basically you know, if you think of an old ticker tape hype, but think it's like a ticker tape floating by going by on your screen, it says, you know, this amount or one point seven big coin went from wallet A to wallet be. That's all it would show is about to
randomize wallet numbers and not necessarily people's names. And then that's where the investigators have to really get busy, because now you have to go faring where have those wallets UH contacted and you're connected to in the past, What base, what what? What scryptocurrency companies have they connected to, et cetera,
et cetera. And like I said, if somebody did their homework up front and we created all this stuff months ago and then let them go what we call dark, which means nobody's using them, nothing's happening with them, they kind of fall off the radar. Then when you go to tase me use them and law enforcement tries to trace them, then they've got no history to look at, right, there's nothing there. It's been dark for months or years
or whatever in case y be, you know. And then that way it makes it mutt harder to figure out who's assigned to And by the time they do check it down, you had time to kind of wash that through, you know, wash it through a different place.
So there's there's no way to flag that ahead of time that the count's active. Like you see the typical bank, you'd have to keep an eye on it all until you have to matter all the time.
And you didn't know what it is, oh right, I mean, I mean a wallet address can be up to like thirty five characters long and it would just be random X Y, thirty seven, E five, you know, et cetera, and you'd have to know what that address is going to be a headed tied which you're just not going to know.
Yeah, no, And it's I know, it's really hard to describe for those of us who aren't savvy with crypto exactly what's going on here. But you know, for those of us don't live in that world that there are different ways, as you said, multiple wallets, different block shape converted, different forms of change. If you do that enough times, does it become practically untraceable, unrecoverable it does?
You know? You could you could take bigcoin and uh exchange it into Ethereum, exchange it into Solana, et cetera. And when I start filling out these names of other cryptos, I mean think about there there are thousands on a global scale, and you know, of these well known cryptos, thousands, and so I could take you know, that one big coin and bring down so minutely that in a way
few to trace it. You have to you know, tase a point zero zero zero seven five three segments of Bigcoin that got transferred into Solana, that got transferred into uh, you know, Ethereum.
And then different wallets on top of that. It sounds like you're totally trying to find not even a needle in a haystack, but you know, maybe just the very tip of the needle in the in a world of haystacks. It sounds almost untraceable if they're doing it right. You know, it's really early in this investigation. We also don't know exactly what the FBI knows. We never will until maybe later at some point in years and years and years
from now we're still around, hopefully Nancy Guthrie is. But does it sound does this looks like like this is a lot more organized than a snatch and grab, like they put a lot of thought on this. Does does it come off as you and again we don't know anything behind the scenes here, but do you have that suspicion that this is a really well organized operation?
You know, I I don't know, And I'll say it for two reasons. Well, when I know that there was some guy his name is Steves me, it's already been you know, got in trouble this week or sometimes you know, last week of a fraudulent crypto claims, right, he right, you know, and and and so obviously that idea came out and somebody started to cash in on the idea.
But it also does to me like it took it took a long time to get to the crypto piece of this puzzle, you know, whereas I used my uh well, so my experience was ransomware and not necessarily extortion via happy but you know ransomware, you immediately know, hey, there's
a ransom for block for crypto. You know, uh, it's right out there, communience street, pay this big coin by this day or it goes up, whatever the case is, so you know pretty quickly and if if that type of extortion or that type of organization is getting into the physical kid that being a crypto world, then you know, gosh, they were very patient, right, you know, to plan out that kid that being do it and then wait a little bit before they have throughout the whole cryptos gall show.
I think, you know, it's hard to say. I mean, gosh, it feels like it's maybe maybe it's not an entirely new world for he's into all enforcement people, but you know, when they started bringing in their IT people, in their their people that trace this thing, getafe actually do flavor it is.
Uh, it's pretty jaw dropping because you know in the past, as we mentioned earlier, it's Dave, the I T guy in the show on seven hundred Wow. He's our black hat, white hat hacking expert here on the show, and uh knows a lot of things about the deep and dark web and things, you unbelievable stuff that he's seen online.
And unfortunately he's working on the good guy side of this thing, has no hand in this investigation, but it's kind of taking us through what the FBI is up against here in the ransom for Nancy Guthrie, who we presume it's still a lot of the family, came out and said, we'll give you the six million.
Uh.
It's going to be in bitcoin or etheum or whatever the digital wallet, whatever the crypto is, and it'll be converted and laundered in a bunch of different ways, making it really really hard for anyone to get traced. So, you know, typically we've all seen the heist movies where they've got duffel bags full of hundreds in jenas Jason Stadium being a badass or something like that.
Uh.
In this case, it's all digital, So you don't have that transportation issue.
You don't have the physical cash issue.
You rob a bank, right, they throw the bundle in that it has the tracer on or the die pack. Can can you have a digital equivalent of that? Knowing that they're going to give these people or person bitcoin or whatever it might be, can they can they fbiack? Can the Feds actually put a little bit of a I don't know, a digital fingerprint in that particular transaction or is that untouchable?
It's it's not necessarily the FDI have put it there. It's more so that by default electronic guide was put them there. You know, like your computer has an ideaddress that's okay, but it also has a MAC address and that it is a fingerprint for your computer or your or anything in technology that that such is the Internet. So you know, there are different figure plants, the routers
that a signal goes through, uh, leaves of drifts. So there are you know, you know lower as you said, tracing package that people can hear that you know, law enforcement could use that, all the people can use the kind of be a bigger picture. But again, if somebody's planned it out well enough, you know, it would be the same as you know, if if you went and buy yourself a house and put it under a shell corp that was owned by a shell corp owned by
a shell corp, et cetera. You know, somebody can ultimately figure out that you own that house. Let's won't take them a while, and by the time they figured it out, you may not care, you know. So you know, different different analogy, but trying the same same idea as to how hard it could be. So is it impossible? Absolutely not. You know, they're the law enforcement takes down these ransomware games, you know, on an annual basis. So it happens, it gets crazy. It just isn't as fast usually as most
people want it to be. But again, this kidnapper person, whatever this whole deal is, you know, not not be as tech savvy as they they they are. They might be uh scrambling or yeah, it's completely hyperbo Now they're going to mess it up and give themselves away.
Yeah.
Now, in the past, you know, we we've seen a rise in these things, largely as you mentioned, it's ransomware colonial pipeline.
I just looked this up.
FBI got two point three million back from that, uh and six million of the fifteen paid for the Chicago crypto case. But now now this is a high profit, high profile individual, national attention on this whole story. If this is successful, I mean, it's like a I don't know, maybe a modern day version of the Lindberg baby kidnapping, right where the FBI said enough, uh, we're going to stop this. Because back in the twenties and thirties it was rampant with kidnappers or the same thing until it
became a federal crime. If indeed this looks and it turns out to be successful over a long period of time, Dave, did, do you think that other people look at this and go now it opens the fund base for kidnappers?
Absolutely, I mean you've already got you know, kidnapped being an extortion is going on and Eastern European countries, you know. And then just like you said, this has been a high perfouer enough that you know, I watched BBC and other international channels and this has shown up on the international stage. And it may be that it's already happened in Eastern Europe at a local level where we are
not hearing about it. And it could be that you know, the FBI and ANSA and whoever else has had to reach out across the pond to get some experience or to get some ideas or tips. You know, this could already be a thing that we're just in a dark because you know, typically America is behind Europe just about everything right techno from.
A technology perspective.
But on that I look at this and go okated In nineteen thirty two, I believe it was when the Lindberg baby disappeared as kidnapped and Charles brutal. Hopman was the one who was caught and summarily execute as a result of that capital crime. That changed federal laws. They changed right away. It became a the preview the FBI, and now you could go across state lines and the death penalty was part of this whole thing, and it
stopped a lot of the kidnappings. We saw a little bit, you know, Patty Hurst back in the seventies with different types of movements, but now it looks like it's back in a crypto form. Is there anything again new to change laws to do what they did in nineteen thirty two with Lindbergh to prevent more kidnappings or are our hands tied when it comes to this.
It's a good question. Again, I only played an attorney on YouTube, so I have a guest here, but I think, you know, when it comes to me being if I was an ex kidnapper and I said an email or some kind of note about ransomware as soon as I involved the if the cryptocurrency world, in my esteem, I believe that the fans already have some walls already wrapped around in place too to make that a federal currents. You know, we have that. We have that with ransomware.
As soon as you do that, the fans get involved, Uh, be involved if they want to be at least so I think to some extent that that rapper is already there. But would they now, you know, the law having any catch up the technology you know that we that we see every you know, every year and every everything that happens, It wouldn't surprise me that some new kind of wist or or additional you know, adendum or something would would get looked at or something like this, especially if it
just becomes effective. I really, I hate, I hate to say that I'm interested in see how this turns out, but I'm interested in how this turns out.
Yeah, well I think we are too, because it feels like that might be hanging in the balance here.
Uh.
And the as you said, the FBI has really got their work cut out for them. He's Dave, the it guy in the Scotts Loan. Appreciate you jumping on this morning, buddy, Always great information, all the.
Best, Thank you, Thank you.
Take care of yourself. We'll do a news update here momentarily. Weather's gonna get a lot warmer real quick. It's gonna Maty, we're gonna be walk around neked this time. Tomorrow we'll find out just how warm. Slowly seven hundred ww