How persuadable are you? I think most of us think we make complete and logical decisions ourselves and weigh all the consequences and we're not influenced by marketing campaigns. But I think overwhelmingly we're more persuadable than we think. There's this mint study I find fascinating. Some psychologists did this research in restaurants. They found that if the server gave the customer a mint along with the bill, the amount of tips went up by 3%. Why?
Well, it's because the server gave them a small gift. And as a human, when someone gives us something, even as small as a mint, we want to give something back. But check this out. When the server gave two mints with the bill, the tips went up by 14%. But there's more. If the server gave one mint with the bill and then walked away, but then stopped and came back and said, you're nice diners here. Take an extra mint. This resulted in tips increasing by 23%.
Incredible. Such a small gift given at just the right time with the right message has quite an effect on us. And see, these are the things I don't think we're consciously aware of. I don't know how much I'm going to tip until I get the bill and then I do this little math game to figure it out. And if at that same time I'm also given a little gift and told something nice, yeah, I think this kind of stuff does work on me and I don't even realize it.
But those are small things. Surely I wouldn't be so easily persuaded to do something bigger, right? Like turn against my company and cause it to have major financial loss. That's quite a big decision to make. But this story is about a guy who persuaded someone to do exactly that. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.
I'm Jack Recider. This is Darknet Diaries.
Our story today comes from a character. We're going to refer to as paint parrot. It's sort of a nickname he goes by. Paint parrots, a social engineer, unlike any I've ever seen. And if you don't know what a social engineer is, it's basically just someone who can persuade other people to do things they don't want to do through different psychological tricks. But his story starts far away in Afghanistan.
So, I was in a part of the British Army called the Royal Artillery, which everyone assumed straightaway is going to be to do big guns and things like that. But we were actually a UAV unit, so I'm Mandevic, which drones. So, we were a drone unit within the Royal Artillery. And yeah, our job was obviously to, you know, find, fix, finish and kind of build up that intelligence cycle.
for the guys on the ground to then go out and do operations against, I don't know, Taliban weapons caches or, you know, try and track people planting IEDs in the roads, you know, or, you know, trying to find high-value targets for special forces guys to go and, like, knock on the door, basically.
paint parrot said he was only in charge of unarmed drones. No predators launching missiles down on targets. Instead, they're sort of like eyes in the sky and would watch the ground together as much intelligence as they could. So it was a unique and quite exciting role here, mentally quite taxing, because a lot of the time you feel like your hands are tired, you're looking at stuff and you want to be able to do something, especially when you're seeing friendly troops getting in contact with Taliban. And you want to be able to intervene, but what you can do is watch.
It was quite a surreal time. What he was after was good intel that his team could use to have the upper hand, which I guess is like espionage work, a spy in the sky. But after a while, he completed his duty and left the military, which means he needed to find work as a civilian. At first, he assumed he would just do what a lot of his peers were doing. Originally, I wanted to do a lot of ex-army guys to just be a bodyguard.
Because it could be quite lucrative contracting in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. So that was kind of the original plan. But while I was doing the training, I became good friends with the guy who ran a training company. And I started out going back with him as an instructor. And then that evolved into me getting involved in some of his projects that he was doing that weren't training. So it's sort of live operations, if you will. And that's kind of how, yeah, kind of,
So sort of filtered me into less sort of bodyguard stuff and more security and risk assessments and sort of, yeah, following people and gathering evidence for you, whether it's sort of just normal sort of lawyer cases, you only need to get information to discredit the other party.
Now, that's an interesting transition, getting intel for lawyers. This is sort of like being a private eye, but he's trying to find dirt on the other side of legal cases. So he was gathering intelligence for companies, lawyers, court cases. For example, this one time, he said there was a copyright infringement case. Yes, someone had their claim in rights over intellectual property as something of a business or an idea.
and in order to try and catch the other party out with organizers that have a meeting in a conference room at a hotel, no lawyers present and just the two guys that were arguing to talk it out and ask out, all we'd actually done is bug to the room and had
Our lawyer basically downstairs listening to the audio and kind of baited the other guy into admitting that he had stolen the intellectual property and kind of bragging that he was going to get away with it. There's a slight sex appeal to corporate intelligence, I guess. It's kind of like this whole world that was in the military and things like, you never really, you see it in the movies. You don't really know that it exists. You learn a lot of like social engineering because you're constantly having that.
kind of talk your way into places you shouldn't be. You know, you can't see having to sort of, you know, phone somebody up and fish information out of them, you know, and trying to get them to reveal things that they shouldn't do. You're pretending to be someone else. He would sometimes travel around, do training sessions and would teach others how to gather intel like this, covertly. After sort of, yeah, getting more and more into one trip to the state, somebody, a private intelligence company that was a DOJ contractor. And that's kind of where it all
It all kind of escalated from there and became something else. Okay, so this DOJ contractor was an intelligence gathering company, and they wanted to increase their presence in the UK where paint parrot lived. They knew of this London-based company, which was collecting intelligence there, and they introduced paint parrot to this small intelligence firm in the UK to see if he could help them out. And this is kind of where I first got introduced into the world of whistle-blowing, basically.
So here's where we get to Whistleblowers. In a nutshell, the Department of Justice doesn't like it when corporations break the law. They want to bring these businesses to justice, but it's not so easy for the DOJ to know when something illegal is going on inside a company. So the DOJ gives out monetary rewards to Whistleblowers who can provide detailed firsthand observations of misconduct by a company, which results in a successful enforcement action that returns a significant amount of money to harmed investors.
Basically, if someone inside the company comes forward and provides enough evidence that this company was breaking the law and it results in a fine imposed by the SEC, the whistleblower will get a percentage of that fine. But the DOJ can't handle all of this intel being sent at them by themselves. So they contract this workout to companies like this DOJ contractor, the paint parrot, just met.
But this London group that he also just met with was in the process of handling one of these whistleblower cases. Now, this case is still ongoing, so we can't discuss specifics, but he can talk a little about it. First, like in any whistleblower case, there's a company that did something wrong. So, brief overview, you certain large company.
was in order to get a competitive edge was bribing government officials in exchange for access to oil. They were paying off people. They were shipping cash across borders into other countries in order to pay off government officials in order to get their supply over other corporations, their competitors. And
They were also, in the end, it sort of came out. They were also manufacturing, take shipping manifests, the ships that never left or never existed in order to move what we've assumed as large quantities of oil or something.
But they were moving it anonymously in order to bolster their stock, sort of off the record, and things that. So we have a feeling that was then used in another country, basically, in order to shift the balance of whether it be political power or whatever. But they were basically shipping, yes, some oil that wasn't even accounted for. And they were using some of these to ship cash as well that wasn't, you know, sort of off the books. You know, by saying, are we paid for this?
this vessel to leave and this vessel never existed. The manifest is ever never existed, but they can attribute millions of dollars to that that's cost.
and that money didn't obviously went somewhere else in cash. So this giant multinational corporation was doing a bunch of illegal things. But it wasn't public, so nobody knew they were doing this. Only a few people inside the company were aware that this company was breaking the law. But there was this one guy who worked for this company who was upset with this company.
So he was in a certain African country. He was their representative, basically. So he had his own business, but he also had business cards with, you know, his commodity companies, local one. And he was like their in country representative. He was a contractor rather than actually on their payroll. Okay. But I mean, how did they get connected to your company? So how he got approached is
I think he tried to sue the company for money that they owed him when he left. I think that's how I started. He ends up with a grudge against this company and someone obviously caught wind of it and introduced him to where I was working. Let's say this is before I came along and was like,
you didn't win the lawsuit. If you know of anything that they've done wrong, because I think he mentioned some of it in the lawsuit and he was kind of took it, because he lost the lawsuit and he was looking at it seriously. He then introduced this intelligence firm and they were like, okay, if you can prove this and this, then it's a whistleblower case.
And that's kind of how it all kind of started. This guy wasn't interested in being a whistleblower at first. But this UK intelligence firm convinced him that being a whistleblower was the right thing to do. And to come forward with this evidence to the DOJ. He agreed to provide them with testimony and the necessary information for the case. But then things got a little crazy.
So paint parrot gets brought into this UK intelligence firm to take a look at this case. So they have this guy with enough evidence to slap a huge fine on this company. They just need him to come forward with it. But the sky was a bit of a loose cannon. Let's just say this situation was complicated and the witness was at risk.
predominantly at risk of themselves, but they were making threats towards their own family and kids like this. Their star witness had freaked out. He disappeared from his home in Africa, threatened to kill his wife and family, and cut off all contact with this intelligence company that Paint Parrot was working for. It looked like he had gone to the UK where Paint Parrot was.
Oh, and I actually took a look at this guy's Facebook page. He is very strange. He calls himself the old god and goes around blessing people. He thinks are merciful. His pictures he posts are pretty odd too, like some are straight up amateur porn. Some with his face painted in a very crude way and he posts a lot of weird conspiracy theory stuff. So this is what Parrot walked into. As being the new guy at work, this was his first assignment.
You know, it's just kind of, can you secure the family, make sure the house is secured and then can you try and track down and find our whistle blower? I appreciate this doesn't paint this world in a great light, because you know, I'm kind of being brought in on what's essentially a fuck up. But of course, you know, it sounded interesting. You know, I get told that the FBI are involved and all this kind of thing. So yeah, I'm like, OK, let's do this.
So he begins his search by getting to know the guy's family. He asks them about the target's typical schedule in any favorite places that he tends to go. And they had to do this safely without bringing any harm to him or the guy's family, which means a lot of his intel that he gathered had to be secret. So he begins scouring the internet to try to find information about this guy. We humans all creatures have it. Let's find out that the restaurants he likes to go to do
Places he kind of normally in his daily routine can't do without, you know, if he always buys a bagel from this one, food shop, okay, well, let's check that out at the sort of time and pay that you would go there. So he's initially just sort of gathering a list and information out of this family and sort of other friends and contacts that we kind of got in touch with to try and track him down.
and then it was like say, say, posting a lot of stuff on social media. You know, he's putting pictures on Facebook almost daily and I'm trying to sort of figure out what's in the background to try and pin down whereabouts. He is in London.
When you take a photo with a digital camera, a bunch of data like the date and time and even GPS location are stored as metadata inside the picture. It used to be that when you uploaded a photo to Facebook, all of that metadata could be downloaded and viewed. Obviously, this raised a lot of privacy concerns, so Facebook and other social media platforms began automatically deleting metadata from uploaded photos.
So paint parrot couldn't just download the photo and look at the metadata and see where it was taken. He had to actually identify things in the background of the photos to try to figure out where these photos were taken and where his target was. So instead of actually identify what was in the background of photos. Looking at the time he'd uploaded it and looking at the frequency of when he was uploading pictures.
It was all right, OK, that was taken this morning. He uploaded it at that time. A couple of hours later, OK, this pitch is a couple of miles away. So we kind of build an idea of what area he's in, and then kind of just try and narrow it down and sort of close the net, so to speak.
So he figured out from the photos, the sky was staying in a hotel. And looking at the background landmarks and stuff in the photos, he narrowed his location down to a general part of town that has a few well-known hotels. So now he has to figure out what hotel this guy's staying in. Maybe to you and I, that's a little hard. But to paint parrot, that's nothing a little social engineering can't figure out.
So, you know, the first thing then is to start calling these hotels, you know, let's pretend, you know, I'm calling them saying I've got the guys laundry, you know, calling, oh, you know, I work for so-and-so laundry, we just quickly Google the dry cleaning company that's down the road kind of thing.
You know, it's like, I'll work for so-and-so. We've got clothes here. He said he was staying with you guys, but we haven't got the room number. I know he's expecting it today. He's very charged, he can give us a room number. We can make sure we can bring a trikeling up to him this afternoon.
Obviously, most of them are like, no, we haven't got a guest by that name, blah, blah, blah. When we eventually found the right one, after about the four, four, fifth attempt, someone on the reception, let it slip, gave us the room number and everything. So we're like, right, cool. And now he's staying here. And now he's in that room number. Excellent success. The car worked. And he had the information he needed. So now he's going to go find the target. Once I had the room number, you know, I just walked straight past reception, walked straight upstairs, found the room.
you know, and just kind of where it was corridor wise. And, you know, just lingered around, I guess, in the right sort of way that, you know, sit on the, I think it was like a sofa at the end of something, you know, just one of those random bits of hotel furniture and just kind of hung around there, playing on my phone into a, you know, confirmed that he was actually staying in that room. So he waited nonchalantly outside the guy's hotel room to make sure it was his room. Yeah, it's not quite a classic spy with the whole
Suddenly, the guy comes out of his room and starts walking to the lobby. Paint parrot sees him, but he didn't want to confront the whistleblower immediately. Remember, they need this guy on their side if they want to use him against his company. Initially, it's trying to talk to him and try and bring him back on board.
So we know he's got his phone on him, we've got eyes on him when he's walked out and I've got like one of the bosses at the company to give him a call and try and talk him around. You can see his phone rings, he takes his phone out of his pocket and sees ignoring it. It's like okay to know we're starting to get like a losing
using the sort of control. So what's your pulse rate in these situations? Like, are you cool and calm or nervous and sweaty? The amount of times I follow someone or be looking at someone for a camera. And you're like, you think, shit, they've seen me. They're looking right at me and you look at the photos and it looks like they're looking right at you. And you follow some of the ages. And because they just casually look over their shoulder at some point, even though you're across the street and
You know, a good sort of 30 metres back or something, because they've looked over, you get that paranoia of instantly thinking, they've spotted me. But the more and more I've done it, once you kind of realise that everyone else around you is nowhere near as aware as you are, because you're in this heightened state, you almost give just feeling that you can go anywhere. You can walk anywhere. And as long as you're confident enough, people are easy. If you look like you belong somewhere, people won't question you.
It's generally that simple. So Pink Perry continued to track and follow this guy for a while. This one on for like a couple of days trying to make sort of a soft approach and just try and bring him back in. Once he was quite obviously established, that's not what he wanted to do. And he started posting more and more stuff on social media now in relation to this case.
And he actually posted a list of email addresses and names of people at the DOJ in the US. That's really odd. He's trying to dox the Department of Justice. That makes no sense because that's not the target organization you want his help on. No. As I said, this guy completely lost the plot. He I don't know if it was a mental breakdown or what or whatever. It's just crazy.
Yeah, he kind of he'd done the same for the company that was going to whistle on as well. So he kind of put his hands up and said, yeah, I'm a whistleblower. And he listed their names of DOJ names and emails, FBI names and emails, and names and emails of the top people at the company that he was blowing the whistle on.
At this point, the team decides Skye is no longer worth the risk. So, paint parrot takes all the information he has to Skye's location, text, audio recordings of him making threats against his wife and family, and prepares a nice little file to pass along to London law enforcement so they can arrest him.
You know, we kind of packaged it all in a nice way to sort of present and kind of resolve the situation. They're like, Oh my God, yeah. Yeah. We've never had anyone do this before. It's absolutely brilliant. The police had enough evidence to bring that guy in and question him. So this means they lost their whistleblower. What do you do with this case now? After the break, we'll find out. Stay with us. The conversation shifted over the course of a few days to, well, now we don't have a witness and we still want this case.
And it was like, you managed to find him and track him down. How would you feel about, let's try and find a new witness or two for this investigation?
Now, you might be wondering, why does this UK intelligence firm that paint parrot works for even care about finding a whistleblower and bring this case to justice? Well, it's simple. Money. Check this out. When a whistleblower reports a crime to the SEC and SEC issues fines for that company, the whistleblower will get a cut of the fines collected. In fact, the SEC can reward up to 30% of the fines collected back to whoever brought them the evidence that a crime was committed.
But that's not always just a whistleblower who brings it forward. A company like the one PaintParrot works for would outline all the laws broken, compile all the evidence neatly, and handle the whistleblower. Then PaintParrot's company would deliver it to the DOJ contractor who's based in Washington DC, and that company has an in with the DOJ and the SEC to get the attention of the right people to get this moving quickly.
So that 30% might be split three ways between the whistleblower, the company paint parrot works for, and the DOJ contractor. So that means if a company is fined $500 million, 30% of that is $150 million.
So $150 million split three ways. This is why the Intel firm that paint parrot worked for wanted this case. This was a huge company committing massive crimes that could result in billions of dollars and fines. And that's just a fascinating business model that this Intel firm was doing to go seek dirt on a company and then find a whistleblower in that company who can testify that crimes were committed. Also, this company can get to reward in the end.
At this point, they knew what crimes were committed by this company. Now they just needed to find a person on the inside of the company to come forward with the evidence. This group wanted paint parrot to approach somebody who was part of the company and convinced them to turn into a whistleblower. But they needed to find the right person, someone who's willing to do it, and would have access to the right evidence.
While paint parrot had done some social engineering and intel gathering in the past, this was totally new territory for him, definitely in the moral gray area. Because the new goal is now to create a whistleblower, to find someone who didn't necessarily think to become a whistleblower, and then convince them to detonate a bombshell allegation against the very company they work for.
But paint parrot was up for this challenge. He knew they would have to be really smart about the approach if they were going to do this. It's not like you can just knock on the door of a company and follow someone out and tap them on the shoulder in the street and go, hey, do you want to come forward and be a whistleblower? That kind of doesn't work. You have to cultivate them. So this is what we call human intelligence, but it's basically social engineering.
You've got to build a story that puts you on a like-for-like of the individual you want to target. You've got to very, very quickly be memorable to them and be their best friend before you even approach the subject of whistleblowing. You've got to have enough things in common. And, you know, like, in stupid shit, I like the same movies, the same TV shows go on. Vacation to the same places, to the point where
You know, they're like, Oh my God, I found someone that's into the same stuff as me. Do you want to grab a beer later? You know, and you can then start building on a relationship. And how, how, how much experience have you had with something like that before this to get close to a source like that without them knowing who you are? So I had like a minimal exposure to it, but never done more of a long game like this. What I'd done before was a couple of days, you know, just trying to, you know, maybe just trying to bump into someone and get some information out of them in a bar or
knocking on the door pretending to be someone else or getting a job at a warehouse to try and find someone that's stealing stock. So never play in the game or play in a role to this sort of level. Never tried it at this point. But I was like, OK, I've done it for smaller stuff. So surely it's just you do the same thing a bit longer, right?
Paint Parrot and his team began looking for employees of this company to try to find someone who could be a whistleblower. Now, if you don't know, you can go on LinkedIn, search for a company and see thousands of employees that work for that company. And from there, you can try to find people who would be in the position to know what dirt this company has. Because after all, a whistleblower has to testify in court to say that they saw this company commit crimes. So it can't just be anyone who works there.
So they slowly start going through individuals of this company, narrowing it down. Then, when they find people who would be in the know, they start scouring their social media profiles, trying to figure out if this person could be persuaded to be a whistleblower.
Because you sort of need to find someone with strong morals and ethics who's willing to do the right thing, and is willing to work with the SEC because at the end of the day a whistleblower has to decide. What do they care about more? Does company they work for? Or justice for the crimes that were committed?
Eventually, paint parrot and his team zeroed in on a person. This guy ticked all the boxes. Someone who would know enough to testify has the morals and ethics to want to do the right thing, was American, so he could be patriotic. And as a bonus, the target was living in the UK right where paint parrot was.
This was now their target, and their mission is to convince this guy to blow the whistle on the company he worked for. Now that they've identified their target, paint parrot got to work learning as much about this guy's life as possible. First with that year, this one is usually standard sort of open source intelligence type techniques. Let's try and get
Much information as we can and let's look at his, you know, try and build up who and where his family are. Used Facebook so we can get pictures of his family first and last names, you know, locations. You know, found out it's from a certain state. Okay, so now we're just looking at people who match their names in that state. And eventually you start whittling down the list, the point where I had his mums.
Landline and mobile phone number all just through open-source intelligence. Yeah, we're looking at Facebook, Instagram. Fan has still got an old MySpace. You're all this kind of stuff and we're kind of build up a picture of this guy's life. Where does he go?
When does he go on holiday? When does he travel back to the States? Where does he go on holiday? Is there anywhere he goes regularly? This is all pretty basic research. Most of the information they're getting is just from public social media profiles. But he was also looking up things like voter registration databases, real estate listings, and other online resources to fill out their picture. But most of what they're getting is just stuff that's publicly out there already for anyone to find. So here we've managed to get his mobile phone number by this point. We've got a wealth of, like,
information about his daily life from various social media and his wife's social media and stuff like that.
Oh yeah, that's a good tip. If the target is not showing much on social media, find their spouse. Because their spouse might be posting all the info, like where they're traveling, what food they're eating, pictures of themselves. It sometimes can be a much better source of information than the target themselves. We've got historical data of his family and where they currently are living and his relations and how often he generally travels back to the States.
Because we kind of almost build out what we call a pattern of life on the person. And we use that to then start trying to decide how we're going to fit ourselves life. But basically how I'm going to slog into this guy's life.
That's the question, right? With all this information, how do you approach the person to convince them to be a whistleblower? If you just phone them up and say, hey, do you want to be a whistleblower? That seems odd, and you might instantly lose them. If you want to persuade someone, the best way to do it is to get them to believe it's their idea.
So that's the plan. Paint Parrot was going to enter this guy's life, become friends with him, and then slowly plant the idea that whistleblowing is a great idea. So this means paint parrot needs to come up with a pretext, a backstory as to who he is, and then meet this guy.
paint parrot builds an identity online. He creates a fake LinkedIn profile and business cards to look like he works at another company with a similar job as the guy he's targeting. In fact, he purposely made his profile a bit less accomplished as his target, so his target won't feel intimidated. Paint parrot begins memorizing his pretext. We'd get a load of, like, in the UK, that pay-as-you-go SIM cards and just, like, second-hand phones, sticker, pay-as-you-go SIM in it.
Never really put any money on it as we actually had to make a call from it half the time. Can you just give out that number for people to call you on it?
A lot of these phones ended up with little stickers on. So it put me like a rubber case or whatever, but when you take the case off, they'd all have a little sticker on with various sort of like case names, like the code name would attribute to the project or case. On the back of it, I think at one point, I had like six phones and I had to take the rubber cases off sometimes for myself, for what phone, for what job, and for what personality I am.
Do you, like, stare in the mirror and call yourself by your fake name and, like, try on different accents and stuff? No, so generally this kind of thing. Some people might argue this, but...
I always use my real first name because there's nothing worse than when someone shouts your name and you're not using your real name and you don't respond to it. You know, my name's not Dave and there's no point being introduced to myself. People is Dave because, you know, especially after doing this for a while and, you know, you are going to have a few drinks at some point. You know, if you're talking to someone else and your target turns around to us as Dave and you
Just completely ignore it because it's not your actual name. It can land you in the ship. Or somebody coming into the bar and shouting your real name and then we'll explain yourself. Exactly. If you're sitting there and you've told this guy your name is Dave and someone comes in going, hey Fred! Fred! Why you ignoring me, Fred? And you're like fuck off! You see that sort of stuff in the movies don't you? It just doesn't work like that.
So at this point, paint parrot has spent weeks learning about every aspect of his target. He has his own story cooked up along with fake business cards and a fake social media profile and now he thinks it's time to make first contact.
Here it knows this guy's routine is to go to the bar every Friday night with some co-workers, have a few drinks, and then a few hours later the co-workers leave and his wife comes and a few friends to have a few more drinks. So his plan is to somehow make first contact just as his co-workers leaving and the target's wife is showing up, because at that point the guy would already have a few drinks in him and be comfortable with the territory and wouldn't have any of his work friends around. Paint Parrot knew this was going to be a long game.
He didn't think he was just going to be able to meet this guy in a pub one night and convince him to be a whistleblower that same night. So his plan was just to become friends with him at first and gain trust. So Friday night comes, paint parrot and a few of his coworkers head to the pub where they know this guy will be. So, you know, I'm in this bar initially with a couple of other colleagues just kind of, you know, be seen in the bar and not be that creepy weirdo that's on his own.
Because that also doesn't work. And once I feel like he's drunk enough and you get to a point where the bar's busy that you've actually got a queue to get served.
I kind of slipped myself in front of him at the queue and I'm just on a fake phone call to whoever. And I'm talking about trying to get this place booked. So that's up and coming ski trip. I'm right in front of the guy. He's literally on my left shoulder kind of thing. I'm talking about loud enough that you can hear somebody hit a bar.
And I'm starting a really mode and complain at Kark. This is get this place booked. You know, I've heard great reviews about it. I've been there another time of year. I really wanted to do the run up to Christmas, which was like the dates that he does. You really want to do it, because I've heard it's amazing.
See, paint Parrot knew so much information about his target. He knew that this guy booked that exact room just weeks earlier. So he's being all loud and rude on this phone call, and putting on a show about not being able to get that room. Yeah, so I'm obviously making a scene set off the fuck's sake you're rude.
I'm gonna tell you guys there, you know, I can't get it booked. I'm sorry, I made these promises to you guys, you know, I'll try and figure it out. You know, it's supposed to be an amazing place. It's beautiful. It's done in the ski and it's brilliant. And I'm just saying it's loud enough that the guy can hear him, you know, subtly repeating the name of the villa a few times in this, like, make vocal. So it kind of re-established, isn't it? You know, because you might hear it once in Boston, he might miss it.
And so are you looking at this guy to see if he's, like, picking up on you or watching what he's doing? No, so I can obviously, I'm aware he's still just buying my left shoulder. And I'm trying to sort of use the drinks and the mirrors behind the bar and, you know, whatever is there. I try and catch a glimpse of his reflection here and there. And slowly see, you know, he's starting to twig. So I kind of carry on talking about, I can't book it. You hang the phone up, I'm like, this fucking bollocks kind of thing. And the guy's like, and you're right.
I'm like, ah, nah, man, it's bullshit. I've been trying to book this place and it's already booked out. I promised my friends I was going, oh, I guess I was just too slow in doing it. You know, someone else swooped in and booked it. And he kind of said, oh, I heard you say, you know, so and so, like, the name of the place. And I was like, yeah, that's it. I was like, well, what do you know? He's like, oh, I'm the fucking asshole to booked it. And it's, dang, there we are. You know, conversation started.
The magic of this is the fact that paint parrot didn't approach the target. He got the target to break the ice. You want them to make the first conversation with you, okay? Because people are inherently suspicious. You know, if I go up to this person and go, oh, hey, you're so in the sew, here we will generally get their guard up. But if they're over here, you talking about something in a bar or whatever that is so unique and
tied into their lives. They almost feel, especially after a couple of drinks, obligated to say, oh my God, I know that, or I know where that is. I go there. And it's them then starting the conversation, which instantly makes them feel at ease. It's a psychological thing, I guess.
So back at the bar, paint parrot got the guy to initiate conversation. But that's just the first step. Now he's got to capitalize on this opportunity. He's got this one shot to cement a friendship with this guy, or else he might lose months of research and work that he built up for this moment. Obviously, I'm at the bar. I get served before him. It's obviously a cue. I'm like, dude, I just want to drink kind of thing.
He's like, yeah, and we're kind of talking at that. One of my colleagues, one of my drinking buddies in the park, comes up, taps you on the shoulder and says, don't worry about me, we've got to go. I'm like, okay, I guess I'll stay here on my own kind of thing and just finish this drink. And I'm talking to this guy, he's obviously, don't be stupid, come and sit with us. That's it now. I've now sort of put myself into this guy's life.
Paint Parrot got a seat at the table. He was in. And once he sat down, this is where all of that research on the target and his wife comes into play. Paint Parrot already knew their favorite bands and he knew where they like to go on vacation and what they like to do. So he was finding ways to casually bring this up into conversations. To make himself look like the perfect friend, they never knew existed.
You're just trying to show that you're into the same things as they are. Everyone wants someone that says all the same stuff as they are, don't they? You could go anywhere and do anything with them. You're going to have a great time. That's how you want them to arrive at that kind of conclusion in their minds. Stay chat, laugh, have a few drinks. All of a sudden we've got so much in common.
After a few drinks, it's like, hey, I really should shoot. I've got some stuff on my desk that I've got to try and get on top of over the weekend. It sucks to work over the weekend. I've got to do it kind of thing. And I kind of hope that they come up with let you on my grandma drink again sometime or whatever. If it feels like they're not going to do it,
You know, I just went with the, look, there's my card. Give us a call if you fancy catching up or something like that. And I think within about 10 minutes to leave in, it dropped me a, you know, it dropped me a text and I said, Hey man, it's good to be kind of in blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, yeah, definitely this grab a drink. We're doing something, something or like later on that, that week is like you should totally come. Boom. Wow.
I can't tell if I'm more impressed or terrified by this whole thing. To think that a stranger you meet in a public space might actually be part of a team of people who have spent months researching every part of your life with this specific goal of manipulating you and influencing you to do something, to make a major life decision. This is pretty crazy. Stay with us because after the break, we'll hear how he plays the long game.
Paint Parrot has completed step one of his mission. He has successfully initiated contact and made a connection with the target. Now he needs to slowly build up a sense of trust before he can say anything about whistleblowing. You've got to really get that trust with him before you can move on to the next step. So yeah, the next few weeks, I am the person he met in that bathful intensive purposes and going for drinks and slowly you start building up more stuff about work.
Unfortunately, this company had made the press because the case had already started. There was a subpoena issued, so they were aware of it in their office and things like that. You can slowly start building up about, oh my God, you were so uncertain, I forgot. Aren't they under US investigation or something at the moment? You build that into conversation slowly.
I kind of slowly, slowly brought it up and I think was that a barbecue or something on a Sunday and sort of.
mentioned it quietly to one side to him. I have to laugh at this point, because it's only been a couple of weeks. And paint parrot is at his target's friend's house hanging out with the gang at a Sunday barbecue. I just imagine him wearing like a floral shirt and sunglasses, music playing, holding a beer and a hotdog. And that's him on the job on a Sunday afternoon. This is his career now.
because he wasn't at this barbecue just for fun. This was a moment for him to start closing in on his final goal. So we're there having like this barbecue and you know, I kind of call him and his wife to one side and I'm like, look, you know, just this investigation, exactly. You know, it's a US investigation, but is that going to affect you guys? You know, could you end up being arrested and sent back to the states that, you know, kind of suck kind of thing?
kind of just plant the seed and a little bit of fear on it. Just left it with him to simmer and the key thing is like mentioning it in front of his wife. If you can get the wife to worry, then he's going to worry more. He's not just going to worry at work, he's going to worry at home. And that's kind of what you want. And once we start again worried, we met up, I think it was the next time we met up, we were just having drinks for three of us. And
I kind of said, I know like a lawyer who deals with all this kind of stuff and he deals with a lot of like American cases and things like that. You know what I mean? Have a chat with him and see if I can find out if there's any way he can kind of help you out. And he's obviously like, yeah, yeah. He's, if you could have even helped us, that'd be amazing.
So Paint Parrot has engineered this whole situation so that it looks like he's just helping out a friend in need. He hasn't said anything about whistleblowing. He's set it up so his target feels like he might be in trouble. Unfortunately, his new friend, Paint Parrot, might be able to save him. At this point, it's time for Paint Parrot to make his final move. So obviously I got away. Yeah, I know exactly what we're going to do because it's a lot of planet at the end of the day. So I leave it like a few days.
And I sort of get in touch with him, like, hey, you know, don't think we spoke about? I was like, I can introduce you to someone that can kind of help you out. And he's like, oh, we've got a brilliant. So we arrange a meeting, like a conference centre, a set of, like, nice apartments in London. And I basically walk him up and introduce him to the lawyer that deals directly with the, he's British lawyer, but deals directly with the DOJ on these cases. And I basically like, make an instruction.
instead of about five minutes for just kind of even a room and even into it. So as we know, that lawyer was there to help him blow the whistle on the company he worked for. And it must have been a bit of a shock for this guy to realize this wasn't just some friendly lawyer, but a person who knows this case inside and out.
In that room, the lawyer explains to the target that the DOJ is looking for a whistleblower and promises that he will be granted full immunity from any of the company's wrongdoings if he works with him. The whistleblower agreed to cooperate. And just like that, months of research, planning, chasing and deception was over. I think the next thing I know is I met up with him after that to give him burn a phone and a few other bits of equipment.
and obviously the whole dynamic's changed. He's kind of weirded out. Do you ever tell this guy, like, look, I just did this because it was my job? No, I have no contact with him after. Yeah, once he kind of gets handed off and... Well, you ghosted him? Like, did he text you? Like, bro, aren't we hanging out this weekend? You kind of... they get told. I will guess explain to him, you know, and he gets told, you know, not the ins and outs of my role, but you know, but you won't have any more contact with this guy. Yeah, you knew him as whatever.
you know, if you are to like bump into the streets and time or anything like that, just, you know, you never met him. You know, and it's kind of, that's that, you know, the phone number that was being used, that SIM card gets pulled out, snapped, and that's it. I wonder if he felt used at that point or what? Probably, but I mean, you know, at this point, he's been, you know, he's doing a patriotic thing, you know, helping a US investigation. He's
Yeah, he's obviously had the carrot of the huge financial reward dangled in front of him. Yeah, so I think that's probably enough to calm most people's doubts about it.
You might be wondering where all these laws come from. In 2010, the United States passed a Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This was just a little over a year after the 2008 financial crisis, when Wall Street executives and shady mortgage companies tanked the world economy. And so the Dodd-Frank Act was designed to stop something like that from ever happening again.
And one part of that bill had to deal with corporate whistleblowers. The people who come forward when they see their organization are doing something wrong or illegal until the government. Whistleblowers had already received protection from the feds when they came forward. But this bill did something new. To encourage more people to flip on their companies and report wrongdoings, this new law said
Whenever a whistleblower comes forward to provide good information in a case that results in a fine of over a million dollars, the whistleblower is awarded a bounty of anywhere from 10 to 30% of that fine. Which, if you do the math at 10% bounty on a million dollar fine, is $100,000. But these fines are often way up in the tens of millions of dollars, meaning that whistleblowers could be in a position to make a lot of cash by telling on their companies.
In this case, paint parrot said the DOJ was estimating the fine could be in the billions of dollars because of how much corruption this company was accused of. And 10% of $1 billion is $100 million.
paint parrot said that in situations like this, the reward would actually get split three ways between his British intelligence company he worked for, the American company that partnered with the DOJ, and the whistleblower himself. Even if this was split three ways, that's still life-changing money for everyone.
Looking at the SEC's website in October 2020, the SEC paid out the highest reward ever to a whistleblower. $114 million. And to date, they've paid out over $700 million to different whistleblowers.
And that's why this company Paint Parrot worked for was in the business of bringing whistleblowers forward, because they wanted a chunk of this change. And that's one of the weirdest business models I've ever heard of. A company in the business of making whistleblowers?
Yeah. And let's, let's back up for a second. So this is the whole impetus of why your company, your agency wanted to do this is because they wanted to get cash in on this sort of bounty. And that's why they're like, let's, let's make the whistleblowers. Let's find the whistleblowers before they're even ready to whistle blow so that we can cash in on this bounty. Cause that would be a lot for that company. Exactly. You know, that's retirement money for the guys that own the business.
These things take years and years and years to pay out. It's not a quick, it's not a quick or a get-rich, quick scheme for them. I think only like 20% of them or something like that ever pay out. So it kind of becomes a game of volume as well. The more whistleblowers or more cases they can find, the more chance they have one of them paying out. Obviously that's not something we say to the whistleblowers that there's only a percentage chance that it's actually going to pay out.
You lose that whole financial incentive for them.
Yeah, these groups don't even know if the SEC will for sure pay out a bounty or not. So on one hand, more whistleblowers might come forward to protect from sketchy business practices, which is obviously good. But you've also got this weird secretive industry now of professional whistleblower chasers and groomers who are gathering information on people and convincing them to upend their lives, knowing there's a chance they won't receive anything from it.
As for the specific whistleblower in this case, paint parrot says the SEC is still investigating this, so we don't know if he'll get his payout or not.
So, so let's zoom out a little bit. So after this, you know, this seemed to be, uh, he said still ongoing. So these things take a long time, but it seemed to be a successful mission for this agency that you're working for. Right. Let's go find a whistle. Let's go make a whistle blow where you found made one. And did they say, okay, let's do it again? Yeah. So basically right after finishing that, destroyed that SIM card right down the phone and I probably took a weekend off and before I knew it, it was like, ah,
Actually, that one's so well. It's starting to look at this company. And kind of the same process starts all over again.
Wow, paint parrot kept on doing this sort of whistle-blower cultivation with that company for a few more years until he decided to go his own way and start his own company, which does surveillance work. He says he's mainly given up on the corporate intelligence beat, and instead, he mostly focuses on penetration testing, social engineering, and red teaming.
A big thank you to Paintparent for sharing his story with us. This one was wild, wasn't it? If you like this show, if it brings value to you, consider donating to it through Patreon. By directly supporting the show, it helps keep ads at a minimum. It helps get people to make the show and it tells me you want more of it. So please visit patreon.com slash darknet diaries and consider supporting the show. Thank you.
The show is made by me, the public eye, Jack Recider. This episode was produced by the not so green, Christian Green. Sound design and original music was created by the mesmerizing Andrew Merryweather, editing help this episode by the slow dancer, Damien. And our theme music is by the bouncy breakmaster cylinder. And even though I would sometimes get in trouble for reserving a conference room all day because I thought my cubicle was just too small, this is darknet diaries.
