#and also paypal me a million dollars so i can move out and have room for all my STUFF (/j) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

prorevenge · 4 years

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A stranger scammed me out of $300 online. I tracked him down, called his dad's work phone, and got my money back.

Long post, TL;DR below. Early last year I was deep in depression, spending the Spring in my room (I work in a seasonal industry which pays just enough to live on during the off months.)

All I did was play video games all day which led to me getting into game marketplace sites and planning on starting a side hustle selling in game items and accounts in MMos. I was brand new to the "industry" and didn't have contacts to learn from, so I just went for it and posted my first listing. I got a few hits back early and found an interested "buyer" (I'll refer to him later as C) who told me he was ready to purchase.

The way these transactions are supposed to go is this: A reputable middleman (There were several known MM in the community that I joined) takes in the product and the payment, verifies both, then distributes both ways after taking a cut for their services. This circumvents the "you first" prolem where you have to trust solely in the other guy to not scam you. -Well.. They impersonated a middleman well enough to fool me. I admit that it was 100% on me, I didn't know what I was doing. I just wanted to start selling so bad and I was glad to see quick hits on my first listing.

So, the "middleman" (To this day I don't know if there was a 3rd person acting as middleman or if it was C all along) takes the buyer's money, then the product which was a high ranked account in a popular competitve game. Suddenly, the MM says there was a problem with the payment and it needs to be redone.

At this point I know game's over and I just got scammed, but I went along with it as a sad parting gift to my first "sale." I message C and asked him how this was going to go. He told me he'll just direct paypal me the $300 now and apologized, which didn't make sense to me (you already scammed me, why haven't you blocked me yet?) I gave him my paypal email.

Conversation goes like this: C- "Sent." Me- "repeats my email same email correct?" C- "F%@& I sent it to the wrong email. I'll call paypal." Me- 3 minutes later "Are you going to send me $300 or no?" C- "I only had $450 in my paypal account, they should be able to refund me over the phone." Me- 5 minutes later "Okay. Progress?" C- "On the phone with them." Me 10 minutes of silence later- ":D" Then he goes offline. I call the MM several times but he's standoffish and won't pick up saying "something something privacy.. you arent giving me a reason to pick up the call." It's clear he's not being real with me.

I don't know what to do at this point as I've never encountered a sudden loss of hard work like that. I'm not a drinker at all but that night when faced with that emptiness while trying to get out of depression, I hit the bottle hard.

The next day I woke up naked on my bathroom floor in the pitch black and sheepishly checked my PC to see if it really happened. Without any hope at all I started googling this kid's two usernames that I knew of. I scanned the internet for every site that had an account with the same username that he used, but only found more scam reports (yep, I wasn't his first victim.) So I gave up.

A week later I came back and did it all over again, but this time I thought to check his discord profile to see if he had any other profiles linked to it (steam, twitch, etc.) and the genius did. I checked his steam profile and wrote down each of his past usernames that looked unique and wouldn't pull a million results.

After hours of scanning each one, I had his name, age (teenager,) city, email, skype, knew he went to chess tournaments as a kid, liked neopets, and found a youtube channel with his class project videos on it. It still wasn't enough though. All the information got me was another two contact methods, and I didn't want to start harassing him.

He ghosted me and emailing him wasn't going to change that. If I was going to get my money back, I needed to contact his parents and I knew this all along. In a last ditch effort I googled his emails again, found his google+ profile, and saw that he had a public photo library (which was discontinued by google very shortly after all this happened.) It had 1 picture. A perfect view of his house, from the street. Street number in view. After some searching without finding much I clicked "More info" on the picture and the the geo-tagged coordinates attatched to the picture appeared.

So now I have the address which I google along with the last name, which leads to me getting the first & last names of both parents. I pop that into trusty whitepages and have everything I need to spring my plan into action. While all this was going on I was updating my friend who lives in the same area as C. He asked if I wanted him to call since he had the same area code. It lined up perfectly so I agreed.

At this point I realize it's March 30th, just two days before April fools and C could probably play this off as some elaborate joke played by his friends so I call my friend off. It was so hard to wait, but we did and we waited long enough that it couldn't be looked at as a joke at all.

Two weeks later in a discord call I give my friend the green light and he calls phone #1. The cell. After a little ringing it cuts to voicemail and we decide to try phone #2, the work phone. This time the phone rang for significantly longer but also cut to voicemail and the message before the beep confirmed we had the right dad. My friend leaves a message saying "Hello Mr. ______, this is _ ______ with (marketplace name's) collection department. We currently have multiple fradulent activity cases open with your son C, totalling x thousands of dollars (I added up all the reports against him which were posted on the site and it totalled thousands, even talked to a couple people who he targeted.) At the moment we're reviewing the most recent case which involved a $300 transaction. If you could please, get back to us between 9am-10pm to resolve these cases. Thank you" All that was paraprased but that was his message.

He was very professional and seemed legit, and even though the dad might listen to it and ignore it we didn't think that was going to happen. It's worth noting that they live in a nice area of a nice state, so there was less of a chance that this would be a financial burden and the parents would likely just want to clear this up.

Two days later, while playing video games (yeah I had a problem.) I get a contact request notification. MY BOY C!

He tells me that he's a good person and he wants to give the account back. I check it and he played 10 games and lost each one which deranked and devalued the account (at this point I pretty much knew his parents were standing over his shoulder watching everything that was said. I could've even been speaking to them directly.) So I told him the account devalued, and I either want what he stole from me (the account at a higher rank) or I want $300. He told me he'll give me the account AND $300 (Parents coming through in the clutch!)

We went through a lot of hoops, trying paypal which he couldn't get to work, a few others and finally got google pay to work after troubleshooting stupid problems which I attriubted to him stalling. It was clear that they were scared of me since I got their info (and regularly called him by his first name throughout the convo as a power move lol) but I assured them I wasn't a bad person and told them to be extra safe of what you upload, especially if you're trying to scam people because when money is involved bad things can happen (playing into his parents who were surely reading it.) I explained the public Google+ upload of their clear to see geo-tagged house which I'm sure his they weren't happy about.

After he sent the money he asked for confirmation that I received it. I confirmed saying "YOU F** DID IT! SO PROUD OF YOU, C!" and he immediately went offline. I danced up and down the hallway and it was probably embarrasingly bad but I didn't care. I don't think the smile was gone from my face for an hour. It was a month long process and with the help of my friend the money was back. I haven't seen my friend in person since then, but when I do I owe him a top notch steak. He refused when I sent him $ online.

Instead of trying to resell the account and start back up in the marketplace I abandoned it all and went another way. I'm currently training for the military and in a much better place, but still have a long way to go.

A lot was left out of this story but it was a long one. I have screenshots of our conversations and I surely won't ever forget it.

TL;DR - I tried selling a video game account to see if I could make a new side hustle and got scammed since I was dumb, inexperienced and decided to trust the internet. I got scammed and took it hard but the scammer left too much of his info public and after a little bit of elbow grease I was able to obtain his & his parent's info and left his dad a voicemail. Two days later the scammer contacted me and gave me the money and the account back, apologizing. I learned from it.

(source) story by (/u/dstrezzd)

#prorevenge #by /u/dstrezzd #pro revenge #revenge stories #pro revenge stories #pro #revenge #last10

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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In the virtual world of Fallout 76, Gun Runners are making thousands in real-world cash • Eurogamer.net

For some reason I’m rapidly accruing a collection of dumb stories about my time in multiplayer games – and seeing as the Rust murder tale went down so well, I thought I’d recount another. This time it’s about my brief foray into the world of Fallout 76 virtual gunrunning, which has since escalated into a detailed look at the life of the traders making serious bank from selling Fallout 76 items. I don’t know how I ended up here.

Back in January, when the first wave of Fallout 76 backlash was at its peak, vast swathes of the Fallout subreddits were busy complaining about in-game glitches – and in particular, a cheating method called duping. It’s a process by which players exploit a bug to duplicate items, with potentially game-breaking consequences if uncontrolled numbers of top-tier items suddenly flood a community and upset the balance. It’s a phenomenon witnessed in other online games, but for Fallout 76 it was perceived as a serious problem by the community – with Bethesda constantly playing whac-a-mole trying to patch out new glitch methods as they appeared.

Over on eBay, some enterprising hustlers capitalised on the mess by creating their own cottage industry. Using the various duplication methods, the eBay accounts started selling dozens of Fallout 76’s most valuable items. Fallout 76, of course, doesn’t sell guns in its Atomic Shop on account of Bethesda’s pledge to avoid pay-to-win microtransactions (although some argue it’s already broken this pledge) – which means there’s a market for gameplay-affecting items such as weapons and armour (and the raw in-game money and materials to acquire these). Then the secret dev room was discovered and unreleased items started appearing – a problem that hasn’t quite gone away, judging by some recent listings.

Looks like a cat burglar’s been in the dev room at some point.

At the time, I’d already started investigating the item duping, as I was intrigued by how this worked. Who were these people? How did the gun delivery process work? And how had they avoided being caught? I then got a little sidetracked by the sight of those unreleased items and Wooby, so I never got around to talking about Fallout 76’s real-money trading market.

Except, I’d already purchased one of the guns.

It didn’t take long to find. A simple eBay search threw up a bunch of options for every platform – and faced with an abundance of choice, I searched for one that looked as overpowered as possible. “Two Shot Explosive Light Machine Gun (2star) (for Fallout 76, PC)” sounded like it would work. It set me back £7.75. The next step in this process was to contact the seller with my Discord name. I can happily report the anime-avatar eBay seller had excellent service: within hours, a Discord friend request popped up and they introduced themselves.

“hello

“im currently delivering an item to another customer, you’re the next in line so will be available right after im done with him

“sorry for the delay.”

Not only incredibly polite, the seller also seemed to have a full delivery schedule. It was a level of professionalism I wasn’t prepared for, and I hurried back from my lunch break to arrange an in-game meet-up.

After a small struggle to add each other as friends, I was instructed to join the game world and fast travel to the seller’s location. They’d chosen to set up shop at Charleston Station – a sensible choice, given it’s typically one of the earliest locations players find in the game. The stations are always fairly enemy-free, and heavily populated by players seeking to access the vendor, stash box and workbenches there.

This didn’t stop the transaction from feeling a bit shady.

As I approached the station, I could see the seller gesturing at me to come over. Entering cautiously, in the gloom I could see them squatting in a dingy corner, gesturing towards a rickety old end table, in which I found my gun. As the glorious weapon whirled around my monitor, the seller gave me a thumbs-up, and momentarily forgetting where the emote button was, I performed the universal gaming symbol to express gratitude: jumping. And there it was, my very own illicit gun.

If you want to see all of this play out in real time, you can, because I recorded it. (Apologies for the keyboard clacking away in the background – I left my mic on.)

youtube

Feeling a little dirty after the transaction, this is where I left this story for several months – until recently, when I revisited Fallout 76 to check out the new Fallout 1st subscription. Then, I started wondering to myself: who are these people selling virtual guns on eBay? Is it actually a viable side-hustle?

So I went back to my messages and found my gunrunner. Having confirmed this previously, I knew my seller had used duping as a method to make a vast quantity of weapons, but I wanted to find out more – and they were happy to oblige.

“I just started selling them out of the blue due to frustration with the game not listening to players,” they told me over Discord, explaining it was a matter of making it “easier for others” while also making money for other games on the side. It was their first time selling virtual items, as in other games they played, the market was already oversaturated with “Chinese gold seller sites” (for games like World of Warcraft).

As the seller was mostly unemployed during this period, they had time to hop between deliveries – taking random customers from eBay and “making some notes on delivery times… in order to make buyers aware of some possible delays”.

But then for the million-dollar question: how much had they made from Fallout 76 gunrunning?

“I’ve made around $2k (£1.5k), have been able to customise my gaming PC and can now enjoy high end better current and future games thanks to Fallout 76,” the seller said. “So for at least that reason I’m happy with the game.

“There are people who made over $10k (£7.7k) or even more, due to them setting up personal sites listing those items, [with] an even broader customer base and no limitations or special costs imposed by eBay (some packs they were selling were even $100 or $300+).”

This Lithuanian company started out in Elder Scrolls Online gold farming, and now sells Fallout 76 guns for £20-30 a pop.

While it didn’t sound like a sustainable long-term earner, I was still surprised by the numbers. Yet it was a gravy train that eventually ended for the seller, thanks to measures taken by both Zenimax and Bethesda.

“The first ones who did something were Zenimax [Bethesda’s parent company] by sending a global notice to eBay to force people selling in-game items related to F76 to stop selling them and end the listings, or they would incur in suspension of the eBay account, at which point I retired from this practice,” the seller claimed. “After I stopped, some weeks later the mass ban happened and I was included in it.”

The seller later clarified they got caught up in the February banwave, which cleared out a significant portion of the dupers. Judging by those dates, the seller must have made the $2k in less than four months.

With a steer from my eBay seller, I spent some time trying to get in contact with traders on the sites where weapons bundles are still being sold for up to £1500, such as G2G, along with privately-owned sites U4N and U4GM where items and weapons are bought directly from suppliers to be re-sold. Generally speaking, the sites sell items and in-game currency for a wide variety of online games (such as WOW, Rocket League and even Pokémon Sword and Shield), and often charge more than sellers on eBay – although the “face-to-face” delivery methods are the same. eBay takes a 10 per cent cut for each item sold – and while G2G starts at 9.99 per cent, it lowers to 4.99 for experienced traders. U4GM takes a more direct approach by purchasing bulk items from players, and then selling them on the platform. On a smaller scale, some traders post adverts on forums and arrange trades over Discord, with payments made via PayPal or cryptocurrencies such as Skrill – thereby bypassing service fees entirely.

After several attempts, I did manage to talk to one of the traders on the website G2G, who had an extensive trading record with over 250 items sold on that site alone. They’re currently listing one of the super expensive packs my eBay seller had talked about – a triple-item pack for £779.32 (although my eBay gunrunner claimed this is far less egregious than some of the listings from earlier this year, before the banwaves).

It does seem that some of these extremely high-price packs are more for show (or perhaps out of hope) than a realistic listing. The G2G seller’s biggest deal to date, they told me, was actually a $250 (£189.96) strangler heart power armour set – which has now been reduced to $60 (£46.53) thanks to increased competition from other sellers. The seller also estimated they’d made $20k (£15.2k) from selling Fallout 76 items – which I found hard to believe, but not impossible, given their activity was split across several trading websites.

While my seller’s Fallout 76 eBay journey had ended, even checking the site now, it’s possible to spot plenty of people still selling Fallout 76 items in bulk. Some of the most expensive weapons still being sold are called “legacy weapons”: such as the powerful explosive energy weapons Bethesda removed from loot drops at the beginning of the year, but not from player inventories. The most expensive one I saw was a £249.99 “furious explosive gatling plasma” (now £199.99) with god roll stats (effectively the best stats you can get from a RNG drop).

I eventually managed to get in contact with another eBay seller, who provided me with an up-to-date perspective on the current state of Fallout 76 gunrunning on the site. This one told me they’d been involved with duping and in-game trading from the very start, before the practice eventually moved to real-money trading (RMT).

“I have used duping and greatly profited from it – I won’t deny it,” they said, adding they were only aware of one publicly-known throwables duping method at present. “It’s quiet now compared to [the] old days but you can still make some money. I have [a] few deliveries a day and I don’t really play the game itself due to lack of new content. My endgame is effective cap generation methods and trading.”

The seller was unable to tell me how much they’d made from selling on eBay, but it was interesting to learn that after a certain point, duping was no longer necessary to produce goods. Once you get rich in-game in terms of caps and assets, they explained, it’s relatively easy to keep up with the demand for items.

I thought my journey into the world of eBay Fallout 76 trading would end there – but little did I know, I was about to encounter one of the biggest sellers on the platform. Curious about the expensive legacy weapons, I shot a message to the gatling gun listing’s owner, who runs the store eBay store Fallout76Armoury. The seller, a college student who goes by the name Martin Tim in the Fallout community, boasts one of the biggest collections of Fallout 76 items on eBay – with over 140 items for PS4 currently listed for sale.

“I noticed a demand for items and a market I can invest my time in so I took advantage of it”, Martin told me, explaining it had taken a long time to reach the major leagues in Fallout 76 item trading. “The process of me getting where I am now was not easy. I invested a lot of time trading my way up in ranks to access information and items I’m in need of… I’ve had to build relationships and a reputation with people who have knowledge of an upcoming duplication glitches and top tier items I can use to trade and build an inventory that I can sell.”

For Martin, the first few months were time-consuming thanks to the need to build his reputation and promote his store – along with establishing a system to manage 12 different PlayStation accounts and document all his items on spreadsheets. Having built that trust, customers then started to approach him – and he now says there is “no overwhelming aspect” to the trading at all: merely meeting customers in-game to deliver items, and updating his spreadsheets to keep clients informed of new gear.

While Martin has noticed a gradual decrease in demand for items, he says it’s still an extremely profitable industry – claiming he’s sold weapons anywhere from £10-£500 each, making a total of $55k (£41.8k) in the 10 months since he started selling the items. “I consider myself the most successful ‘individual’ seller on the entirety of the platform and I say this as I have spoken to other competing sellers from all platforms,” Martin added.

Although he couldn’t provide records to back up that figure, I manually trawled through the publicly-viewable feedback on Martin’s eBay page, and the sum of these alone is impressive. The most expensive item sold on this list is a custom bundle for £165, and roughly totalling up the items gets you slightly over £11k. This number, of course, doesn’t include sales where best price was accepted (and therefore hidden) – nor does it give us Martin’s total sales, as many customers fail to leave reviews. Martin also claims to sell on platforms other than eBay – with about 60 per cent of his deals made in private DMs to avoid website service fees. Privately, Martin also showed me sales records of the highest-priced items he’d sold, including a gun which shipped for £250. With these factors in mind, the publicly-verifiable figure does make Martin’s claim seem plausible.

While real-money trading seems to be against Zenimax’s terms of service – and selling duped items definitely is – when asked if Bethesda had tried to crack down on their trading, one seller argued there was a difference between duping and RMT.

“They have not and they should not – traders are providing a service that people are happy to pay for… RMT is a just a side effect for any ‘serious’ MMO. They should (and have) cracked down on duping in-game – I had two accounts banned for 100k Ultracite ammo but that is just the cost of doing business.”

Martin, meanwhile, said he’s never been banned. He estimates 80 per cent of his stock is duped (something he says is due to a spate of mass duping crazes previously flooding the market – claiming he’s only been involved in later “more controlled duping”), and he’s managed to avoid hitting the weight cap by spreading his inventory over 12 PSN accounts and 70 different Fallout 76 characters.

“Bethesda has never interfered with any real life currency trading … simply because they couldn’t care less,” he added. “Bethesda is a multi-million company who I assume does not consider from my perspective sellers who are selling items and somewhat promoting their game.”

Of course, the Fallout 76 sellers were probably never going to argue against their own interests – but they did make a fair point about RMT. Given the, um, buzz around Fallout 76 has now calmed down, it wouldn’t make sense for Bethesda or Zenimax to really crack down – and from the sounds of it, the most public duping methods have been patched out, and the demand for items is slowly decreasing. So long as people aren’t using mass duping methods to produce the weapons – which upsets the game balance and has been blamed for destabilising servers – it at least seems relatively harmless.

Eurogamer contacted Bethesda and eBay to ask about the sale of Fallout 76 in-game items for real money, but both failed to comment by time of publication.

Given the amounts these sellers made from selling weapons, it does make you wonder how much Bethesda could have made if it had straight-up sold weapons in the Atomic Shop – a slightly scary thought. But above all else, this experimentation with duping methods and glitches to produce grey-market product – delivered via in-game meet-ups, arranged on Discord – feels very Fallout. “Gun Runner” is even the name of a perk in Fallout 76 – while in New Vegas, the Gun Runners are weapons merchants who supply both the NCR and the Courier. One source told me he estimates 90 per cent of Fallout 76’s wealth is held by less than one per cent of the player base: a small group of glitchers, dupers and traders who all know each other and share secrets. And aside from being strangely similar to our own world, that in-game wealth can clearly be converted into real-world bank through gunrunning. Now that’s post-nuclear entrepreneurial spirit to make Mr. House proud.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2019/12/in-the-virtual-world-of-fallout-76-gun-runners-are-making-thousands-in-real-world-cash-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=in-the-virtual-world-of-fallout-76-gun-runners-are-making-thousands-in-real-world-cash-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

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itsnipkii · 4 years

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Hacking isn’t about finding vulnerabilities in software. That’s what the movies get wrong. Hacking is about finding vulnerabilities in people.

Why bother letting your computer run for weeks or months just to break through one of, like, a million firewalls when you can simply call the unaware receptionist and basically ask for the password to the system. Or you can email one of the IT guys and phish him. Better yet, find out one of their secrets and blackmail them.

Computers are good. They do exactly what they're told to do, exactly how they’re told to do it. Humans, on the other hand, they’re much more corruptible. Oh, John from IT is cheating on his wife? Well there’s your leverage. You can let him choose to destroy his marriage before you move on to the next person, or he can take the much easier route and allow you to have access.

People are dumb in that way, always choosing the easier path. Very rarely will you ever have someone that goes against the grain.

I popped another pill in my mouth, realizing I was beginning to come down from my high. That wouldn’t do. I had to be high, I had to be. I can’t work if I’m not.

My fingers flew over the keyboard as I typed. This was important to me.

I was focused entirely on the task at hand as the pills kicked in, writing lines of code as quickly as possible, trying to finish it before I got locked out. I knew I only had minutes left before I would be noticed, and I had to get in. There was no room for failure here.

Only the light from my monitor illuminated the room as I typed, my head bobbing to the music I was listening to, helping distract me from my tinnitus.

I looked at my watch. Shit, only two minutes left. I was almost done, I was so close. I could do this.

Finally, I finished my program and hit the save button. I stopped the timer on my watch, thirty seconds were remaining.

I leaned back in my chair and let out a sigh of relief. I did it.

I downloaded the file, zipped it and sent it off. A few minutes later I received my reward, an email with the subject “Good job.”

I opened it, and read the email.

“Congratulations, Orion! You have beat the record for the Slater Hackathon by thirty seconds! You will be receiving $150 in your paypal shortly. Thanks for playing!”

I smiled. I just beat my own record for some shitty local hackathon three times in a row. Not that I had to try too hard, but it was fun.

I stretched, and got out of my chair, looking for some food to eat.

I opened my fridge. “Hmm, let’s see. Leftover pizza, leftover chinese food, and more leftover pizza. Wow.” I mumbled to myself. Damn, I really needed to go shopping soon.

Then, my door opened and someone entered the apartment, scaring me. I jumped before realizing it was just Mikey, my friend.

“Hey dude, what’s up?” She said, flicking on a light switch.

“I see you’ve changed your style.” I said, noticing her bright yellow sundress and similarly bright shoes. “You know it’s like, midnight right? Why are you in a dress?”

She flicked her hair behind her shoulder before striking a pose. “It’s never too late to look good. You should try dresses sometime. It would be a nice change compared to your 2006 scene girl thing you’ve got going on right now.”

I looked down at my clothes, a faded My Chemical Romance shirt I had gotten from a concert and a pair of ripped black skinny jeans.

“What? I like it.”

“I’m just saying, maybe if you wore a dress and actually acted like a girl, some guys would pay attention.”

“Shut up.” I laughed. “When’s the last time you went on a date? You look like a second grader who was finally allowed to dress herself.”

She flopped down on my couch, and I looked over at my monitors, realizing they were still turned on. I tried to walk as quickly as I could over to my computer without being suspicious, before turning all three of them off. I didn’t want to have the whole “Oh, yeah I’m kind of an illegal cyber criminal.” talk with her just yet. That could wait.

I stepped over to the couch, lifting her legs up so I could properly sit down, before laying them back across my lap.

“So, what’s the plan for tonight. Are you staying here overnight again, or what?” I asked, putting on Netflix for some background noise.

“Oh, I dunno. Depends what we’re watching.”

I handed her the controller, figuring it would be easier that way. Whenever I chose something she would just argue about it, and I couldn’t be hassled right now. I was way too high for that. Speaking of which. I thought to myself as I tried to discreetly open my bottle of pills.

Clearly I wasn’t discreet enough as I had the bottle snatched out of my hand.

“Cynthia! Come on, dude! I thought you said you were going to stop. Is this even morphine?” She said, pouting.

“I was going to! And then I didn’t. Also, yeah it’s... probably morphine. If you’re going to lecture me, can I at least be high for it? Pass me a pill? Pretty please?” I asked, batting my lashes at her in the most over the top way I could.

“You’re a dork, you know that?” She said, before tossing the bottle back towards me.

I caught it, and immediately threw another pill in my mouth. “I love you too.”

“Shut up.” Was all she said, before playing the second Shrek movie.

We both fell asleep that night about halfway through the movie, and I woke up a few hours later. Mikey was still asleep, so I slipped out from under her legs and walked over to the kitchen, grabbing myself a few cold slices of pizza. Say what you want, but cold pizza is better than hot pizza and you can’t change my mind.

I sat down in front of my computer and turned my monitors on, figuring I wasn’t likely to get back to sleep anytime soon, so I may as well be productive with it. And by productive I mean basically just hack peoples social media accounts for fun.

Who to hack though? Mikey let out a loud snore, and that was all I needed. Snooping on Mikey sounded like fun anyways. Besides, she was my friend, I wouldn’t do anything bad to her.

I already knew her email so that part wasn’t hard. Getting her password would be even easier. I opened the program I had just finished coding for the contest, a brute force password cracker, and set it to work.

I was partial to brute force attacks. They were so simple yet so effective. They simply tried every word in the dictionary, plus a few things that the victim was known to like, such as family members, pets and such.

I leaned back in my chair and watched as the program did it’s job, getting me into her profile in just a few short minutes.

I took a look around, sifting through messages, most of which were just to her boring work friends. I found a couple conversations with guys, and more than a few classy nudes she had sent to them. Boring.

I kept digging through her messages, looking for anything remotely interesting when I stumbled across a thread with some guy named Chevy.

The message that had caught my eye was him saying “Good. Send them to my bitcoin wallet. Once I get everything, nothing will happen to you.” before he sent his wallet address.

Scrolling through the conversation, it seemed that he was blackmailing her for something she had done, but it wasn’t clear what. I wanted to find out what else this guy had been doing to people.

I logged out of Mikey’s profile, and began to work on getting into this ‘Chevy’ guys account.

I traced the IP that his messages had been sent from, and narrowed it down to a house in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, only a few hours away from my city.

I phoned the 24/7 social media support line and asked for an email reset for the account, but was caught off guard when they asked for the answers to a couple security questions. I used my best ‘sad, dumb girl’ voice, and said that I had forgotten my security questions.

“Please, isn’t there anything you can do for me? I can give you my address if that helps at all. Please sir?” I made sure to add a bit of a pout to my voice, hoping that I could win him over that way.

“Technically ma’am, I’m not allowed to do that, but I’ll make an exception for you. How does that sound?”

I gave him my best excited squeal, hoping I didn’t wake Mikey up. “Yes, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, thank you soooo much! You’re like, my hero!” I hated how well I could do this voice. I sounded like a college girl that had just gotten drunk for the first time.

I gave him the email I wanted to change it to, before hanging up and requesting a password reset on the account from the website.

The reset link was emailed to my account, and I changed it to “FuckYouPussy69”. I knew that he wouldn’t ever know what the password had been changed to, but it felt good to say that anyways.

I logged in with no problems, and started to look around. It was fairly blank, with no personal information or photos of any kind. His messages however were filled with various people that he had been blackmailing.

There was one girl where he threatened to expose the fact that she had been sleeping with family members and break her legs if she didn’t pay him $1500 in bitcoin.

Another one was a guy where Chevy said he was going to kill family members of the guy and frame him for it if $2000 dollars wasn’t sent within three days.

Hey, you found the secret message! Make sure to let me know :)

It made me sick to my stomach to see this. Did I threaten people? Yes, but it was always the people at the top of evil corporations that deserved to pay. The people who profited off of death and suffering. I would never physically threaten them either, instead just threatening to expose infidelity or embarrassing personal secrets.

I decided right then that this guy had to be taken down.

I heard Mikey groan behind me, and turned around to see her awake and stretching. “Hey dude, what’s up? Didn’t sleep?”

“Who the fuck is Chevy?”

Her eyes widened for a split second before she caught herself and continued stretching. “I have no clue what you are talking about. I do not know anyone named Chevy.”

“Dude, you’re the worst liar. You never use contractions when you lie. Now, who’s Chevy?”

She stopped stretching and looked down at her feet. In a quiet voice, she whispered “No one. He’s no one. Don’t worry about it.”

I got out of my chair and sat down beside her on the couch. I placed one hand on her leg and said in my most calming and soothing voice “Come on. You don’t have to worry, I can help fix this. Who’s Chevy?”

She hesitated for a moment before saying in a small voice “I made a mistake a couple years ago. I was at a work party and ended up getting a little too tipsy. I slept with my boss that night, and we ended up making it an almost daily thing. This was when I was dating Jesse. So, this Chevy guy somehow managed to find out about it and learned about the fact that I had a boyfriend, so he blackmailed me. He threatened to do awful, awful things to me. He knew things about my personal life that I had never told anyone. I was scared, so I paid him.”

She began to cry and hugged me, burying her face into my shoulder. I comforted her until she had calmed down enough to start talking again.

I looked her in the eyes and said “Hey. I’m going to find this guy and kick his ass. I promise.”

“There’s no way you could beat anyone up.”

I scoffed, acting offended. “Um, I’ll have you know I took Tae Kwon Do.”

“That was 8 years ago!

“Yeah, but I still know how to make a fist and that’s really all you need.”

She laughed lightly, and I was glad she was starting to feel better.

After a long, comforting hug, I began to do research. I googled for anyone named Chevy within a hundred mile radius and no one popped up. I looked through obituaries, wondering if he might have died somehow. I mean, his last message had been sent a year and a half ago. But, nothing.

So that led me to believe it was a fake name. Combining that with the fact that he managed to get personal information on Mikey that she hadn’t told anyone made me think he might be another hacker of some kind. So, I reached out to some… unsavoury contacts of mine, asking if they had ever heard of anyone going by the pseudonym Chevy.

Everyone began telling me they hadn’t heard of anyone, and I started to lose hope. Until, just before I was about to give up one of them messaged me saying that they had managed to find him on a forum, linking me to his account.

Clicking on the link led me to his page, and I actually laughed out loud. Wow, for a dude that knew so much about the internet and cybersecurity, he wasn’t concerned about his privacy at all!

It didn’t take me long to find out that his name was Rylan Palahickey, and that he was 23. He apparently had an extensive history in penetration testing, which is essentially when businesses hire you with the express purpose of trying to hack them so that you can point out security flaws.

I guess he had been using his talents for blackmail as well.

I sat back for a second, thinking about what I should do to this kid. Looking through his posting history, apparently he kept all of his bitcoins on a USB drive. I figured that losing all of his hard earned money, and maybe a computer or two along the way should teach him a lesson.

I grabbed my laptop and drove Mikey home, before starting the long drive out to Rylan’s house.

After being stuck behind the slowest driver in the world for 5 hours, I finally pulled up to his driveway. Like come on, it’s 6:30 AM, surely you have somewhere to be, right?

I parked my car off the side of the road where it would be hidden by some bushes so that no one could see it from the house.

I was shocked at how high security everything was at his house. I had been expecting some sort of a run down cabin, but instead I was greeted with a beautiful and massive home. There was a massive wall surrounding the property, with some sort of an electronic gate guarding the entrance. That must be why he wasn’t too concerned with privacy online, it would be a hell of a time for anyone to try and get in. Anyone who wasn’t me of course.

I sat down and pulled out my laptop, using my phone's hotspot for an internet connection. It wasn’t the fastest, but it would get the job done.

I turned on my laptop and began looking for very specific radio waves using a program I had specifically designed for this purpose. Well, not quite this purpose, I made it in case I ever got locked out of my apartment's garage and I needed to hack my way in, but it would work just fine for this as well.

After a couple minutes of looking, I found the frequency I was looking for, and managed to intercept it. Now that I could control what information the gate was receiving, I sent it a very simple command, telling it to open up.

With my path inside now cleared, I shut my laptop and snuck my way in, trying to avoid line of sight from any windows. I rounded a corner leading towards the garage, when I spotted a security camera on the house, forcing me to quickly duck behind the wall surrounding the house.

I sat down and pulled out my laptop once more. I began scanning nearby wifi networks, hoping that this guy was cocky enough to be using wifi based cameras. I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized he actually was.

It was a simple enough job to set up a DDoS attack, taking the wifi for the cameras offline so that I could move around without fear of anyone watching me.

I walked to the garage door, and did my previous trick of intercepting the garage door receivers traffic and forcing the doors to open.

And just like that, I had access to his house.

I took off my shoes, leaving me in just my socks, so that I wouldn’t make any noise as I snuck around.

I entered, and was surprised at how nice it was inside. I mean, it was a nice house from the outside, but the inside was beautiful. It was clear this guy was rich. He had beautiful decorations lying around everywhere, with an insane TV setup in the living room.

I figured if he was going to keep money lying around anywhere, it would likely be in the room where his computer setup was.

I looked around the entire bottom floor, not seeing it anywhere. So I slowly made my way up the stairs, praying to god none of them would squeak. Luck was on my side that day as I managed to stay completely silent.

I looked around upstairs, and didn’t see anything. I was confused, thinking I had somehow gotten the wrong house, until I noticed a door I had missed before.

Slowly, I opened it and had to put my hand over my mouth so I didn’t scream. It led straight into his bedroom, and I could see him snoring in his bed, with a ridiculously high tech computer setup on the other end of the room.

I backed out of the room, closing the door silently behind me while I thought of a plan to get into his room and take his USB drive without him seeing me.

I racked my brain for a couple minutes, before an idea came to me. If his security cameras were wifi based, how much do you want to bet the rest of his security systems were too?

I sat in his massive bathroom while I began to work so that if he walked out of his bedroom he wouldn’t see me sitting down right in front of his door.

With my laptop open, I began to scan wifi networks again. There weren’t any that jumped out to me as sounding like the name for a security system, so I ruled out the one’s that definitely weren’t and began to systematically hack the rest.

I worked top to bottom, hacking into each wifi, and none of them really did anything until I got near the bottom. I was just about to start the process when I heard his bedroom door open, and footsteps start to come down the hall.

I froze. No. There’s no fucking way. I panicked, looking around me for a place to hide. The bathtub behind me!

I hopped inside, and pulled the shower curtain forwards just a little bit so that it hid my body. I was so glad it was opaque, and not one of those half clear ones where you could just see the outline of the person inside. Those ones were creepy.

I heard him enter the bathroom and walk over to the toilet before beginning to pee. It was the most uncomfortable two minutes of my life. Listening to a stranger pee while he groaned every few seconds. Like, come on guy. Peeing can’t feel that good.

A minute of awkwardness and pure adrenaline later, he walked out of the bathroom and went back into his bedroom.

I put my plan into motion. I hacked the last wifi network, and was relieved to see that his security system was also wifi based.

I set off an alarm in the far corner of his backyard. Suddenly, throughout the house I could hear a robotic voice saying “ALERT! INTRUDER IN THE BACKYARD! ALERT! INTRUDER IN THE BACKYARD!”

Rylan scrambled out of his room and began to run down the stairs, cursing the whole time.

This was my chance.

I climbed out of the bathtub, and silently stalked my way towards his bedroom.

I opened the door and made my way to his setup, looking for his bitcoin drive. It wasn’t on top of the desk, so I started opening drawers, the sound of which was masked by the alarm system still screaming “ALERT!”

I opened one of the drawers on the bottom of his desk, and had to hold myself back from giggling when I saw the USB drive, courteously labeled “BITCOIN”. God, this guy really was an idiot huh?

I pocketed the drive and was ready to leave, when I saw his insanely high end computer sitting on the desk.

I thought to myself Hmm… I guess he can’t threaten people if he doesn’t have a computer to threaten them with. I’m sure he doesn’t need a motherboard. I’ll just take that off of him.

I should have just left. As soon as I began to unscrew the panel on the side of his computer, the alarm shut off and I could hear him walking up the stairs, cursing out the “Stupid, shitty alarm system.”

I had no time to think, I dove under his bed and pulled my legs underneath in the nick of time, just as he walked through his bedroom door and jumped on the bed.

He received a call, and started talking to one of his friends. He declined an offer to hang out later that day, saying he was sick and was just going to lie in bed all day.

Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit.

No, he can’t do that! I’m trapped!

Okay, what can I do to get out of this? I thought to myself, my brain going a million miles a minute, trying to come up with some sort of a plan.

I tried to do the alarm thing again, but my laptop died as soon as I was about to push the button to start.

I frantically texted Mikey my location, telling her my situation and that I desperately needed her help.

She simply responded “KK. B there soon :)”

All I could do now was wait, and pray to god he didn’t find me. I wasn’t sure if he did kill anyone, but I wasn’t about to find out today.

Two hours of pure fear later, the doorbell rang, and Rylan got out of bed, grumbling something about “Stupid fucking kids.”

He answered the door and I could hear the voice of Mikey, acting like a lost roadtripper. “Heyyyyy, I’m on my way to Kansas state university and I’m lost. Can you give me directionsssss?” God, she sounded like every girl I hated in college. It was perfect.

I squirmed out from under the bed, and looked for a way to escape from the top floor, finding nothing. I mean, there was a balcony but that was a two story drop.

My only chance was to sneak down the stairs behind Rylan as he was distracted with Mikey.

I slowly walked down the stairs, hearing Rylan say “How did you even get in here?”

“Oh, your gate was just like, open so I just came innnnn.” She really was too good at that voice.

I turned the corner, and flashed Mikey a thumbs up and a smile as I walked towards the back door.

“Hey, listen, I don’t know who the hell you are, but you have to go.” He said, getting ready to close the door on her.

No, I wasn’t out the back yet.

“Oh my god, I reaaaally need these directions though. Is there anything I can do to get you to help me?” She said, giving him her most flirtatious giggle at the end of the sentence.

Come on, Mikey. You can do it girl, just keep him distracted for a few more seconds, I thought as I reached for the doorknob.

I exited the house, and gave Mikey another thumbs up, silently telling her that she could stop talking to this creep.

“Oh, never mind. I have the directions right here on my phone! Oh my god, I’m like, such a blonde! Sorry, mister! Byyyyyeee.” And then she promptly spun around and started to walk back to her car.

I walked around the house, and managed to escape the property safely without getting caught.

I walked to my car to see Mikey standing there. We both giggled and hugged each other.

“Dude, you fucking saved me!”

“Yeah, well. I do what I can. I didn’t expect you to actually go to this guys house though.”

“Hey, I’m not letting somebody blackmail my best friend. Besides,” I said, pulling out the USB drive. “We’re rich now. If I did the math correctly, there’s a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of bitcoin on here.”

She squealed and hugged me again.

“Come on, let’s go celebrate!”

I was about to step into my car when I realized “Oh, shit! I left my shoes in his house.”

Mikey laughed and said “Who cares? You can buy new ones now!”

I laughed with her, before popping another pill in my mouth and getting ready to enjoy the good life for a little while.

Look, I’m not saying that everything I did throughout this story was strictly legal, but I did it for what I believe to be a good cause.

I may threaten people, but only the ones who deserve it. The bankers, the businessmen, the CEO’s. Never am I ever going to extort some random person online.

Was what I did legal? Absolutely not.

Was what I did right? Yeah. Yeah I think it is.

And honestly, that’s all the matters.

#short story #writing #my writing #story

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williamsjoan · 5 years

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Nyca Partners’ Hans Morris hunts for great fintech investments amid volatility

Hans Morris is a name to know in fintech, and as finance and tech sectors prepare for tougher time next year, he has some incisive thoughts to share about the kinds of companies that will succeed (or not) in a financial downturn. The managing partner of investment firm Nyca Partners, Morris also serves as the chairman of the board of Lending Club and is a director of other start-ups including AvidXchange, Boomtown, Payoneer and SigFig. At Nyca, which is on its third fund, Morris spends much of his time meeting with entrepreneurs focused on payments, credit models, digital advice and financial infrastructure.

But unlike many successful fintech VCs, Morris doesn’t have to read about how Wall Street’s history influenced the trajectory of those sectors. He played an active role in shaping them. His experiences — heading Smith Barney’s FIG effort (at 29 years old), overseeing Citigroup’s institutional businesses, serving as president of Visa and advising companies at General Atlantic — have also provided him with an unparalleled financial services rolodex. And for those who believe that financial history rhymes, Morris’ opinions are now especially welcome. Fintech may be entering a new, post-financial crisis phase in which the low-hanging fruit has been picked and macro headwinds outweigh tailwinds. In the discussion below, Morris talks candidly about how he’s approaching investing next year and how he’s viewing fintech M&A possibilities. He was also eager to share his thoughts on ethics in financial services (a favorite topic), the prospects for challenger banks, why he’s branched out into real estate tech, the future of blockchain and some of his favorite bank CEOs.

Gregg Schoenberg: Hans, it’s always good to see you, but I’m especially glad to be sitting down with you now, given that the financial world is convulsing at the moment. Before we get into that, though, I want to kick off with something else: Do you buy into the idea of techfin vs. fintech?

Hans Morris: I don’t. My basic organizing principle, which you and I have discussed before, is around declining information costs. As these costs decline, it disrupts the traditional profit pools in financial services. It’s always been like that. What I would say is that in recent times, some tech companies have done a very good job at building a trusted relationship with consumers, and in some cases with businesses. That trusted relationship obviously provides a significant competitive advantage of information. But that advantage lessens later on. There are so many examples we could point to of companies that were ‘it.’ Then, suddenly, they say, ‘Oh no, our tech is expensive, creates a bad experience and will cost a lot to fix.’

GS: Let’s talk about the present. As you know, the Fed has been tightening, equities are hemorrhaging, the yield curve is getting spooky and talk of a recession is intensifying. To me, Lending Club, right or wrong, was one of the original poster children of the post-crisis fintech boom. But now, I think we’re in a regime change and that the next crop of successful financial innovators will look a lot different. What’s in store for an area like credit delivery?

HM: In credit delivery, I think it’s now pretty well-realized by investors, and certainly realized by capital markets investors, that credit delivery requires capital. So today, I feel that anyone who’s going to be successful in credit intermediation needs to have a very good understanding of balance sheet risk, liquidity risk, and capital requirements. I pay a lot of attention to capital requirements, and the ability to fund something in the teeth of a crisis.

GS: Let’s say we enter a recession next year and see continued volatility across the capital markets. I understand that each recession and bear market is different, but with the fresh capital you’ve closed on, where are you looking to go on offense?

HM: Among the thousands of fintech companies that have gotten some funding, there are companies that are really struggling to get their Series B or Series C done.

GS: Names that have lost their momentum?

HM: Yes. They’ve lost their momentum, and they’ve lost the perception of momentum among venture investors. But in some cases, these companies still possess some very good fundamentals, yet the valuations are a lot more attractive. If that dynamic becomes even more extreme, I think there could be some good opportunities.

GS: Isn’t it also true that the fintech names that suck up a lot of the venture money aren’t always the best underlying businesses?

So when you talk about high-valuation companies, I think it’s unrealistic for banks to be acquirers.

HM: It’s an interesting dynamic. Generally, as long as companies can continue to raise capital, they will keep going even if that isn’t necessarily a rational thing to do. But in some cases, where you see a bunch of companies pursuing a similar strategy, it would be better to pursue a merger because we don’t need tons of companies doing personal financial management, etc…

GS: Do you see the big banks with strong balance sheets, the JP Morgans of the world, getting the green light from regulators to be more aggressive in M&A?

HM: Regulators have clearly been one reason there hasn’t been more activity. The second thing is goodwill. Keep in mind that for a bank, goodwill is a 100% reduction to tangible Tier One capital. So even for JP Morgan to say, ‘We’ll take a billion dollars of our Tier One capital and invest it in a company with no income and maybe positive EBITDA, but maybe not—

GS: —That would take a ton of capital or a ton of conviction.

HM: Well, that company would have to be a very powerful growth engine or solution. So when you talk about high-valuation companies, I think it’s unrealistic for banks to be acquirers. Where banks can be acquirers, and this is what we’ve seen, is where you have a company valued at $60 million, maybe a $100 million, etc…

GS: A Clarity Money.

HM: Yes, a company where the acquisition moves a bank much further along in a development cycle. Where the the bank can say, “Instead of us taking two years to get our real product out, we can get out a state-of-the-art product right now, and it comes with a great team and DNA. That’s appealing.

GS: Appealing, but realistic?

HM: It’s hard to pull off. Often, the team leaves, everything dissipates, and the acquirer ends up writing off the whole thing.

GS: Moving forward, who do you think is poised to make M&A work?

HM: There’s a couple of examples where it’s worked. One is PayPal, which in recent times has done an excellent job of acquiring things and integrating talent into the company. I’m quite impressed in terms of how Bill Ready, who is now COO, Dan Shulman and the management team have changed the tech profile of PayPal.

GS: Well, they’re not a 200-year-old financial institution founded on a winding alley in downtown New York.

HM: Yes, but it was very old-school Silicon Valley, and they had a lot of technical debt. Of course, they had this great mafia 20 years ago, but all those people are gone. I don’t think there’s a single person in the top 100 at PayPal that was there 15 years ago.

GS: Let’s talk specific themes. You’ve already mentioned personal financial management, which I share your skepticism about. What’s your take on the prospects for challenger banks?

HM: I think we’re likely to have a war for deposits with too many different types of firms competing for deposits. Just look at the United States last year. All of the deposit growth we saw was explained by Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JP Morgan Chase. Everyone else shrank. But if you have Monzo and Revolut come to the US and you look at Acorns, MoneyLion, Chime and fifteen other prepaid models or fully chartered bank models, they’re all going to have a pretty slick interface, and they’re all going to be out there competing for deposits.

GS: How about the robos and free trading platforms? As you know, a lot of the younger customers on these platforms haven’t experienced a sustained period of tumultuous equity market conditions.

I pay a lot of attention to capital requirements, and the ability to fund something in the teeth of a crisis.

HM: I think a great majority of American households should be using a roboadvisor. However, the question is around the relationship between the customer acquisition and the revenue opportunity. In fact, a big part of our thesis with SigFig was to really help drive the pivot over to enterprise-based customers. But generally, and without knowing the details, my sense is that Betterment, Wealthfront and maybe Personal Capital have enough brand to get to the scale necessary to be self-sufficient. I think most of the others are not in that position.

GS: Turning to the mortgage and broader real estate sector, is your view that even if we have a deepening downdraft in housing, the real estate start-ups backed by you and others can do well anyway? Because they are essentially taking an industry stuck in the 1980s and ’90s and dragging it into the modern era.

HM: There’s a lot of room for tech improvement in real estate, and that includes residential real estate as well as institutional real estate. The problem with real estate, and mortgage-related models, is that the capital needs are also significant. So if you end up owning property, the bill adds up very quickly.

GS: I guess it depends on where a company buys them.

HM: True. Look, we remain bullish on them, but I share your concern that if activity stops or if you start having real decreases in property values in certain sectors, some of these companies may end up holding the bag.

GS: When I saw the Ribbon deal, I was wondering how you and other backers looked at the opportunity at this point in the cycle.

HM: Well, for one thing, you can estimate the likelihood of someone getting a mortgage pretty efficiently. You can be right 99 percent of the time, but even if you’re only right 90 percent of the time, you’re going to be fine. That’s because the certainty that the company offers to the customer is worth it. They also have a great management team and a CEO who is really smart. They’re not naive.

GS: So given all the hype and ups and downs we’ve seen in blockchain, I’m wondering if you remain a long-term blockchain guy.

HM: Here’s the simple fact: The whole financial services industry is composed of ledgers. The reconciliation between entities of that information is a significant expense, particularly in the capital markets businesses. But I don’t buy into the view that it’s going to work better in all cases. The evidence so far is that it works well in some cases.

GS: Where can it work well?

HM: Distributed ledgers can work well when having synchronous data is an essential attribute, and when speed is not necessarily a central attribute.

GS: So, even if the implementation takes longer than the the hype machine suggested it would, financial institutions will get there?

Because money attracts crooks.

HM: They will get there. The cost of change is very, very high. The benefit of it is real. The question is, ‘How’s that cost of change compare to the ongoing benefit?’ In enterprise applications, the ones that will succeed are not ones where you say, ‘Lets rebuild everything within the core functions,’ because the cost and complexity are too great. The much better way is to start at the edge of an enterprise delivering immediate value, and then become an architecture for more things to move over to that.

GS: It’s easier said than done…

HM: If you take the capital markets area, I think it often requires an individual who has a bigger-than-life personality and the leadership skills to match it.

GS: Speaking of leadership, let’s talk about that within the context of fintech, where, as you know, we’ve seen mixed outcomes. You and I have talked a fair bit about how fintech isn’t like other tech sectors, because you’re dealing with money and livelihoods.

HM: Yes, and the activities are regulated, for a very good reason.

GS: When you look at a deal, does the character of the leader trump everything else?

HM: I’d say that the character and capabilities of a leader make a big difference. And to me, in financial services, the errors made, whether it’s 10 years ago or today, are similar. I mean, you have to tell the truth. You have to.

GS: Why is it so important to you?

HM: Because money attracts crooks.

GS: On that note, when I look at some of those who subscribe to the whole blitzscaling ethos, I see it as incompatible with our current climate and especially problematic to financial services. Blitzscaling doesn’t endorse breaking the law, of course, but this whole idea of consciously letting fires burn is a recipe for disaster in today’s financial services sector, right?

HM: Yes, I think so. I’d add that we have a rule in our firm: Don’t invest in any business model where you’re tricking the customer into a profitable relationship. But unfortunately, I feel that there are many business models that do just that.

GS: That’s a bold rule given that terms of services agreements remain dark dens of iniquity.

HM: Well, it’s more than just that. Look at Robinhood. I think it’s a remarkable company made up of unbelievable entrepreneurs. But I do feel that if you say, ‘Payment for order flow is the business model,’ or ‘Margin lending is the business model,’ you’ve got to spell that out. I mean, ‘payment for order flow?’ Most people would be like, ‘What does that mean?’

GS: You might as well be speaking in Ancient Greek.

A VC once said to me that we have too much knowledge about some things. I think there’s some truth to that.

HM: Exactly. I feel, in financial services, the best companies, the most successful long-run stories, will do the right thing for their customers, always. That also means not making a high-profile release of a new product, like a high-interest checking and savings account yielding way above anyone else, before you’ve actually checked with the regulators.

GS: On that latter reference, how accountable is Robinhood’s board for the company’s recent blunder?

HM: I honestly don’t know in what way the board was involved in this, but I think it’s a good example of where a board should put the brakes on an idea until the risks are clear. Sometimes management teams, and investors, don’t want to hear that, but it’s an essential role for financial services companies.

GS: In your career, you have seen your fair share of financial icons rise and fall. Have you ever passed on a deal that wound up being a huge success because something didn’t smell right?

HM: Yes, we have passed on things that turned out to be really good investments, but that’s part of our equation.

GS: In 1997, Howard Marks—

HM: —He’s fantastic, isn’t he?

GS: He’s phenomenal. In one of his famous memos, he asked ‘Are you an investor? Or are you a speculator?’ Given that there are quite a few VCs who have come to fintech in recent years, I’m wondering if you see a lot of speculators.

HM: Most of the folks that I interact with are investors, not speculators. The crypto stuff is pure speculation by almost everybody.

GS: Yes. I wasn’t implying that we discuss crypto.

HM: To the core of your question, I’ll tell you this: There’s this very, very successful VC investor I had a debate with over a deal. My point was that the company in question would need to raise a lot of capital to scale. But that long-term consideration wasn’t especially relevant to him, because he felt the company would have options down the road. We passed on the deal, but now, I look back and regret that decision.

GS: Are you suggesting that you could benefit from having a little more of a speculative instinct?

HM: A VC once said to me that we have too much knowledge about some things. I think there’s some truth to that.

GS: I’m sure that your institutional knowledge has been an important asset on many other occasions. I’ll move on to our last topic, Hans, because I know you have a fund to manage. You know all of the big bank CEOs, right?

HM: Yes.

GS: There’s Jamie Dimon, who defies easy description. At Goldman, you’ve got a banker as CEO. At Morgan Stanley, you’ve got an ex-management consultant. At Citibank, you’ve got—

HM: —You’ve got Corbat. Michael is just an excellent manager who gets things fixed. It’s interesting: Jamie is a fantastic manager of people too, but Jamie brings in his team. Corbat is very good at taking on an existing team and just making them better. Brian [Moynihan] is also really good. I mean he was a lawyer, and when he got the job, I had no idea what he was like. But I’ve noticed that the people who have worked for him are really loyal.

GS: I think the CEOs of the big banks tend to be a reflection of the times in which they operate, right? We went through the period of the trader CEO, which is now gone. As you look down the road, what are the heads of the big banks going to look like?

HM: I’ll answer that question by turning you to Microsoft. What explains the turnaround there? Is it because Satya [Nadella] is such an amazing engineer? No; he’s a great people person. He’s a fantastic manager who put in place a high-quality decision process, which is key to managing a complex organization.

GS: Implicit in my question is whether or not these organizations are going to be as big and complex as they are now. Specifically, I’m referring to the supermarket model that you were involved in helping to construct. Does that remain in place?

HM: Keep in mind that liquidity is a very, very important aspect of a financial marketplace, and having access to core liquidity that doesn’t change frequently is very important. The professional money obviously switches very quickly. But things like core deposits, pension flows and corporate cash tend to have the longest time-frames to build access to. But when a bank has access to deposits that don’t move much, it enables it to fund the liquid financial assets. That’s so important for when you hit a liquidity crisis.

GS: So the big bank model is here to stay?

HM: Yes, I think it’s going to be around for a long time.

GS: Well on that note, Hans, I wish you luck in navigating whatever the future brings. Thanks for sitting down with me and sharing your wisdom.

HM: It’s always a pleasure speaking to you, Gregg. Thank you as well.

This interview has been edited for content, length and clarity.

Nyca Partners’ Hans Morris hunts for great fintech investments amid volatility published first on https://timloewe.tumblr.com/

0 notes

cryptswahili · 5 years

Text

Nyca Partners’ Hans Morris hunts for great fintech investments amid volatility

HM: Among the thousands of fintech companies that have gotten some funding, there are companies that are really struggling to get their Series B or Series C done.

GS: Names that have lost their momentum?

GS: Isn’t it also true that the fintech names that suck up a lot of the venture money aren’t always the best underlying businesses?

So when you talk about high-valuation companies, I think it’s unrealistic for banks to be acquirers.

GS: Do you see the big banks with strong balance sheets, the JP Morgans of the world, getting the green light from regulators to be more aggressive in M&A?

GS: —That would take a ton of capital or a ton of conviction.

GS: A Clarity Money.

GS: Appealing, but realistic?

HM: It’s hard to pull off. Often, the team leaves, everything dissipates, and the acquirer ends up writing off the whole thing.

GS: Moving forward, who do you think is poised to make M&A work?

GS: Well, they’re not a 200-year-old financial institution founded on a winding alley in downtown New York.

GS: Let’s talk specific themes. You’ve already mentioned personal financial management, which I share your skepticism about. What’s your take on the prospects for challenger banks?

GS: How about the robos and free trading platforms? As you know, a lot of the younger customers on these platforms haven’t experienced a sustained period of tumultuous equity market conditions.

I pay a lot of attention to capital requirements, and the ability to fund something in the teeth of a crisis.

GS: I guess it depends on where a company buys them.

GS: When I saw the Ribbon deal, I was wondering how you and other backers looked at the opportunity at this point in the cycle.

GS: So given all the hype and ups and downs we’ve seen in blockchain, I’m wondering if you remain a long-term blockchain guy.

GS: Where can it work well?

HM: Distributed ledgers can work well when having synchronous data is an essential attribute, and when speed is not necessarily a central attribute.

GS: So, even if the implementation takes longer than the the hype machine suggested it would, financial institutions will get there?

Because money attracts crooks.

GS: It’s easier said than done…

HM: If you take the capital markets area, I think it often requires an individual who has a bigger-than-life personality and the leadership skills to match it.

HM: Yes, and the activities are regulated, for a very good reason.

GS: When you look at a deal, does the character of the leader trump everything else?

GS: Why is it so important to you?

HM: Because money attracts crooks.

GS: That’s a bold rule given that terms of services agreements remain dark dens of iniquity.

GS: You might as well be speaking in Ancient Greek.

A VC once said to me that we have too much knowledge about some things. I think there’s some truth to that.

GS: On that latter reference, how accountable is Robinhood’s board for the company’s recent blunder?

GS: In your career, you have seen your fair share of financial icons rise and fall. Have you ever passed on a deal that wound up being a huge success because something didn’t smell right?

HM: Yes, we have passed on things that turned out to be really good investments, but that’s part of our equation.

GS: In 1997, Howard Marks—

HM: —He’s fantastic, isn’t he?

HM: Most of the folks that I interact with are investors, not speculators. The crypto stuff is pure speculation by almost everybody.

GS: Yes. I wasn’t implying that we discuss crypto.

GS: Are you suggesting that you could benefit from having a little more of a speculative instinct?

HM: A VC once said to me that we have too much knowledge about some things. I think there’s some truth to that.

HM: Yes.

GS: There’s Jamie Dimon, who defies easy description. At Goldman, you’ve got a banker as CEO. At Morgan Stanley, you’ve got an ex-management consultant. At Citibank, you’ve got—

GS: So the big bank model is here to stay?

HM: Yes, I think it’s going to be around for a long time.

GS: Well on that note, Hans, I wish you luck in navigating whatever the future brings. Thanks for sitting down with me and sharing your wisdom.

HM: It’s always a pleasure speaking to you, Gregg. Thank you as well.

This interview has been edited for content, length and clarity.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

#cryptocurrency

0 notes

theinvinciblenoob · 5 years

Link

HM: Among the thousands of fintech companies that have gotten some funding, there are companies that are really struggling to get their Series B or Series C done.

GS: Names that have lost their momentum?

GS: Isn’t it also true that the fintech names that suck up a lot of the venture money aren’t always the best underlying businesses?

So when you talk about high-valuation companies, I think it’s unrealistic for banks to be acquirers.

GS: Do you see the big banks with strong balance sheets, the JP Morgans of the world, getting the green light from regulators to be more aggressive in M&A?

GS: —That would take a ton of capital or a ton of conviction.

GS: A Clarity Money.

GS: Appealing, but realistic?

HM: It’s hard to pull off. Often, the team leaves, everything dissipates, and the acquirer ends up writing off the whole thing.

GS: Moving forward, who do you think is poised to make M&A work?

GS: Well, they’re not a 200-year-old financial institution founded on a winding alley in downtown New York.

GS: Let’s talk specific themes. You’ve already mentioned personal financial management, which I share your skepticism about. What’s your take on the prospects for challenger banks?

GS: How about the robos and free trading platforms? As you know, a lot of the younger customers on these platforms haven’t experienced a sustained period of tumultuous equity market conditions.

I pay a lot of attention to capital requirements, and the ability to fund something in the teeth of a crisis.

GS: I guess it depends on where a company buys them.

GS: When I saw the Ribbon deal, I was wondering how you and other backers looked at the opportunity at this point in the cycle.

GS: So given all the hype and ups and downs we’ve seen in blockchain, I’m wondering if you remain a long-term blockchain guy.

GS: Where can it work well?

HM: Distributed ledgers can work well when having synchronous data is an essential attribute, and when speed is not necessarily a central attribute.

GS: So, even if the implementation takes longer than the the hype machine suggested it would, financial institutions will get there?

Because money attracts crooks.

HM: They will get there. The cost of change is very, very high. The benefit of it is real. The question is, ‘How��s that cost of change compare to the ongoing benefit?’ In enterprise applications, the ones that will succeed are not ones where you say, ‘Lets rebuild everything within the core functions,’ because the cost and complexity are too great. The much better way is to start at the edge of an enterprise delivering immediate value, and then become an architecture for more things to move over to that.

GS: It’s easier said than done…

HM: If you take the capital markets area, I think it often requires an individual who has a bigger-than-life personality and the leadership skills to match it.

HM: Yes, and the activities are regulated, for a very good reason.

GS: When you look at a deal, does the character of the leader trump everything else?

GS: Why is it so important to you?

HM: Because money attracts crooks.

GS: That’s a bold rule given that terms of services agreements remain dark dens of iniquity.

GS: You might as well be speaking in Ancient Greek.

A VC once said to me that we have too much knowledge about some things. I think there’s some truth to that.

GS: On that latter reference, how accountable is Robinhood’s board for the company’s recent blunder?

GS: In your career, you have seen your fair share of financial icons rise and fall. Have you ever passed on a deal that wound up being a huge success because something didn’t smell right?

HM: Yes, we have passed on things that turned out to be really good investments, but that’s part of our equation.

GS: In 1997, Howard Marks—

HM: —He’s fantastic, isn’t he?

HM: Most of the folks that I interact with are investors, not speculators. The crypto stuff is pure speculation by almost everybody.

GS: Yes. I wasn’t implying that we discuss crypto.

GS: Are you suggesting that you could benefit from having a little more of a speculative instinct?

HM: A VC once said to me that we have too much knowledge about some things. I think there’s some truth to that.

HM: Yes.

GS: There’s Jamie Dimon, who defies easy description. At Goldman, you’ve got a banker as CEO. At Morgan Stanley, you’ve got an ex-management consultant. At Citibank, you’ve got—

GS: So the big bank model is here to stay?

HM: Yes, I think it’s going to be around for a long time.

GS: Well on that note, Hans, I wish you luck in navigating whatever the future brings. Thanks for sitting down with me and sharing your wisdom.

HM: It’s always a pleasure speaking to you, Gregg. Thank you as well.

This interview has been edited for content, length and clarity.

via TechCrunch

#IFTTT #TechCrunch

0 notes

fmservers · 5 years

Text

Nyca Partners’ Hans Morris hunts for great fintech investments amid volatility

HM: Among the thousands of fintech companies that have gotten some funding, there are companies that are really struggling to get their Series B or Series C done.

GS: Names that have lost their momentum?

GS: Isn’t it also true that the fintech names that suck up a lot of the venture money aren’t always the best underlying businesses?

So when you talk about high-valuation companies, I think it’s unrealistic for banks to be acquirers.

GS: Do you see the big banks with strong balance sheets, the JP Morgans of the world, getting the green light from regulators to be more aggressive in M&A?

GS: —That would take a ton of capital or a ton of conviction.

GS: A Clarity Money.

GS: Appealing, but realistic?

HM: It’s hard to pull off. Often, the team leaves, everything dissipates, and the acquirer ends up writing off the whole thing.

GS: Moving forward, who do you think is poised to make M&A work?

GS: Well, they’re not a 200-year-old financial institution founded on a winding alley in downtown New York.

GS: Let’s talk specific themes. You’ve already mentioned personal financial management, which I share your skepticism about. What’s your take on the prospects for challenger banks?

GS: How about the robos and free trading platforms? As you know, a lot of the younger customers on these platforms haven’t experienced a sustained period of tumultuous equity market conditions.

I pay a lot of attention to capital requirements, and the ability to fund something in the teeth of a crisis.

GS: I guess it depends on where a company buys them.

GS: When I saw the Ribbon deal, I was wondering how you and other backers looked at the opportunity at this point in the cycle.

GS: So given all the hype and ups and downs we’ve seen in blockchain, I’m wondering if you remain a long-term blockchain guy.

GS: Where can it work well?

HM: Distributed ledgers can work well when having synchronous data is an essential attribute, and when speed is not necessarily a central attribute.

GS: So, even if the implementation takes longer than the the hype machine suggested it would, financial institutions will get there?

Because money attracts crooks.

GS: It’s easier said than done…

HM: If you take the capital markets area, I think it often requires an individual who has a bigger-than-life personality and the leadership skills to match it.

HM: Yes, and the activities are regulated, for a very good reason.

GS: When you look at a deal, does the character of the leader trump everything else?

GS: Why is it so important to you?

HM: Because money attracts crooks.

GS: That’s a bold rule given that terms of services agreements remain dark dens of iniquity.

GS: You might as well be speaking in Ancient Greek.

A VC once said to me that we have too much knowledge about some things. I think there’s some truth to that.

GS: On that latter reference, how accountable is Robinhood’s board for the company’s recent blunder?

GS: In your career, you have seen your fair share of financial icons rise and fall. Have you ever passed on a deal that wound up being a huge success because something didn’t smell right?

HM: Yes, we have passed on things that turned out to be really good investments, but that’s part of our equation.

GS: In 1997, Howard Marks—

HM: —He’s fantastic, isn’t he?

HM: Most of the folks that I interact with are investors, not speculators. The crypto stuff is pure speculation by almost everybody.

GS: Yes. I wasn’t implying that we discuss crypto.

GS: Are you suggesting that you could benefit from having a little more of a speculative instinct?

HM: A VC once said to me that we have too much knowledge about some things. I think there’s some truth to that.

HM: Yes.

GS: There’s Jamie Dimon, who defies easy description. At Goldman, you’ve got a banker as CEO. At Morgan Stanley, you’ve got an ex-management consultant. At Citibank, you’ve got—

GS: So the big bank model is here to stay?

HM: Yes, I think it’s going to be around for a long time.

GS: Well on that note, Hans, I wish you luck in navigating whatever the future brings. Thanks for sitting down with me and sharing your wisdom.

HM: It’s always a pleasure speaking to you, Gregg. Thank you as well.

This interview has been edited for content, length and clarity.

Via Gregg Schoenberg https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

0 notes

itsworn · 6 years

Text

Take 5: 1320 Video’s Kyle Loftis

Few things are more synonymous with street racing than 1320 Video. Kyle Loftis’ green-tinted home videos put the viewer in the streets with some of world’s quickest and fastest street cars, brewing 1320 Video into a name known today by every horsepower fiend for dramatic upsets, hilarious sleepers, and wild horsepower. Go back far enough and you’ll see several of the Street Outlaws before the cable TV cameras turned to them. Nowadays, the program has grown to almost a dozen full-time staff, and their YouTube channel has grown to more than 2-million subscribers with nearly a billion total views. Few have seen the grassroots end of drag racing culture and media evolve so much around them, so we managed to catch Kyle as the crew drove up to Street Car Takeover for a look behind the curtain.

HRM] How long are you on the road?

KL] I’m going to say 30-percent of the days in the year, maybe 40 – it’s hard to keep track.

HRM] How big is the staff these days?

KL] We have one main crew, but we can split up in two. Then I’ve got friends at home who can help us. We’ve done three events in one weekend

HRM] Where did it all begin?

KL] It started with our local group, we had a message board called Omaha Racing. I started by taking pictures and video of SPL (stereo) competition, back in like 2002. I worked at a stereo shop in Omaha, NE, one of the bigger ones in the country, and one of the guys there took me to a street race. We got to the meeting spot with two or three-hundred cars. I didn’t get to see street racing, it was busted immediately, but I was hooked. Then more and more message boards showed up that liked the same thing, so a couple years into it I was sharing my videos to 20-30 message boards every time I uploaded a video – guerrilla marketing at its best. I wasn’t making any money on it, it was just for fun.

HRM] How did you come to the name 1320 Video?

KL] I started under Howdy-Ho Productions. My nickname was Howdy-Ho because of South Park’s Kyle and Mr. Hanky while I worked at that stereo shop. After about a year of that, I realized as a marketing person, trademark infringement wouldn’t be a good idea long-term. One of my friends came up with 1320 Video on our local Omaha Racing message board because of a quarter-mile — which is actually not that well known of a stat; people don’t know where the number comes from.

We put up a picture on our Instagram that’s like, ‘The moment you realized 1320 is a quarter-mile.’ And it’s one of our most liked photos. There’s not that many people actually knew it.

HRM] How did you gain access to drivers and races?

KL] It was more of a building trust thing. They saw my videos and saw that I was good at leaving out details, being as secret as we could. I heard about a street race in St. Louis on a message board, and these guys invited me to come down to film it. It was a thousand dollars on each car. So I think it was $12,000 pot. I was like, I’ve never filmed a street race for any money, let alone $1,000 a car. And the term ‘Cash Days’ hadn’t really been invented at that point, I don’t think, but that’s basically what it was: was like a drop-of-a-hat, buy-in elimination thing. And that street race is probably the biggest pivotal moment for me because Trent, the guy that runs King of the Streets in Chicago, was there along with some of the racers like Boosted GT, Limpy, (who came up with Cash Days) was helping run the race. Monza was there, back when he had a Chevrolet Monza.

We only got two races off, then the cops came at 6 in the morning, so they split the money between the remaining racers. It was a charitable race, no one got anything done, and everyone drove 13 hours back home. I made a video of it anyways, since it was such a cool experience, and Limpy called me down to Dallas a few days after I released it, asking if I wanted to film their Cash Days [race]. It was their second or third one, and I came down six or seven times after that. Shawn Wilhoit, The Mistress, actually pitched my plane ticket to come down and Boosted GT picked me up and let me stay at his house while being a taxi for the weekend — back before filming street racing was cool, and back four or five years before Street Outlaws.

HRM] When did you start on YouTube?

KL] I think my first video I uploaded was in 2006, but I was pretty hesitant to move over to YouTube, because I would upload a couple of my videos to a server and then put a page up on my website through HTML with a link to it so you could download it. Then from that website you can also order shirts and stickers, so it helped pay for my travel cost. I was really hesitant to upload to YouTube instead of going to my website and make money to help fund my obsession. It wasn’t untill like 2008 or something when they started allowing you to monetize video. And so I started putting more videos on YouTube. Before that, I actually crashed my dorm’s Internet. Like in 2004, when I was staying in the dorms I crashed the server because I had a video that went viral. That was when I had to move over to a legitimate hosting company. It was a dorm of like 200-something kids, and everyone was wondering why the internet was so slow. I didn’t realize that it had been running slow for a couple of days. I think it was a quarter-million views on that viral video of being downloaded from our server under a desk in the network room.

HRM] What was it about that early era of YouTube that kind of stood out to you?

KL] There were a few street racing channels here and there, but few who took it super seriously. I wasn’t taking it super seriously either; I was hooked and I just loved doing it. So I went out more and more, whenever I could take off work and afford to travel. Street Fire was a huge website back then, and I actually think I got more traffic on there for a while. But Street Fire never monetized. They had a message board, and that’s where I got the bulk of my traffic on Street Fire, and then Car Domain bought it and shut it down. There weren’t really that many other car channels out there that I knew of, at least there wasn’t really anything tying it together like modern social media out there, like MySpace didn’t really have amateur video company pages like Facebook now does. So it was a big unknown. You could sometimes find other people doing the same thing on message boards, but that was a different world.

HRM] With the shifts to online media over the last decade, what’s changed for 1320?

KL] I did my first DVD in 2005, though I didn’t really want to. I didn’t know how to do it, I assumed it would be too much work. Then finally someone I went to high school with knew how to offer DVDs, and I started asking questions. He said, ‘Yeah, you just put this stuff together, and I’ll finish it up for you.’ He helped me on my first DVD videos and then I finally figured out how to do it on my own.

The sales of our DVDs didn’t generally change up until about two years ago. We’d been doing digital downloads before; it was actually a popular thing. I knew that there was an international audience that didn’t want the $10 in shipping and waiting six weeks for it to show up. Then we finally started really releasing digital downloads years ago and it was at that point where it started to like flip-flop. So at first we sold like 60 percent physical and 40 percent digital and then the next year it was the other way around. Then last year it was like 80-percent digital, which is really interesting. I think it’s because we offer it now people are becoming used to it. The other part of it is just people wanting it instantly- they want to watch it now. It’s nice because digital is usually a lot easier to first edit and get up then DVDs. We moved from doing three to four DVDs year to just one because we don’t need them anymore. People aren’t buying them.

HRM] What are some of ways you’ve been able to keep ahead and figure it out?

KL] Just living in the space and knowing how our fans and everyone else lives. Watching and breathing this stuff is important. Just like getting on YouTube early was important. I reached a point where I figured, “All right, I’ll try it.” Then Facebook- not many people had Facebook fan pages until a year or two after I created mine. I did that just because my friends were annoyed with car posts on my personal profile every day. So I decided to post it somewhere else and not have to have a bunch of creepers following my personal page. Then it just happened that I ended up with four-and-a-half million fans on Facebook. That really, really helped us out a lot when took off. It definitely helped.

HRM] What a lot of people don’t realize is you started 1320 while working full-time at PayPal. What was it like working 9-to-5 to support a budding business?

KL] Starting a business today is a different game than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Going out and getting a business loan on a gamble is not a way to do it anymore. I was able to run my business through having the right jobs. Just like when I worked at a stereo shop, I wasn’t really traveling that much. When I was at PayPal, I was lucky enough to be able to work from home or from the road. So I’d be in the car on conference calls with Fortune 500 companies helping them with technical questions on setting up PayPal. If we traveled on Thursday I’d have to take off Friday, not a big deal. Then on Monday, I worked on the way back home. Without working 80, 90, 100 hours a week, it wouldn’t have been possible. Luckily I liked both jobs, so it wasn’t too big a deal.

HRM] Did it ever come to a point where they didn’t know that you were involved in street racing?

KL] Every time I got new job, I would tell my boss what I did right away and they’d say, ‘Well that’s cool. As long as it doesn’t interfere with your job, it’s no big deal.’ That’s really the way it was the whole time, which was perfect. The best part about working at PayPal was that I was helping some of the largest companies in the world with optimizing their online sales platform. Not just like how to take payments, but other things outside of that; conversion and marketing. So as I was learning there, I was able to apply that and learn on my website, taking those ideas back to PayPal — so it’s like a give and take. That worked out really nicely.

HRM] When did you start building a team?

KL] It was probably about three years into it. I was shooting by myself for the first years, but I decided it’d be fun to take a friend with me so I could have someone to help drive or just share the experience with. I had an SLR I was shooting with and I taught them how to use it, so I was able to focus on video. They’d be able to focus on the photos, because I would sit there with a video camera and shoot photos my left hand, doing both at the same time for the first five or six years. Even today you’ll still see me shooting on my phone while I’m videotaping, getting still photos as well as video. At first, it was just friends helping here and there just kinda going on trips to have fun. Once we started making decent money with merchandising, it was a no-brainer to start paying people so they can take off work and not do a year’s worth of work for free. Now we’ve got 10 full-time employees. I hired my first when I left PayPal about three-and-a-half years ago, I hired two or three more the next year, then five or six more the next year.

I don’t like to jump into things with too much risk, so it’s a little nerve wracking trying to make sure that you’re able to support all your friends’ livilihoods and have fun on these trips as something that was once really just a hobby for me. With what we’ve built and it’s been pretty easy, and pretty crazy to just look at the whole thing work.

HRM] Well it’s funny you mentioned hopping into things without too much risk because it’s exactly what 1320 Video is. How do you guys go about vetting the cars you ride in?

KL] We’re pretty careful about who we go out with at night and the kinds of cars we’d consider riding in. There’s plenty of cars owners who wanted to give us a ride or we wanted to ride with, but the car didn’t have seat belts or just didn’t look safe, or people just don’t seem like they should be driving a thousand-horsepower car on the street – we’ll shy away from them. Obviously, there’s always the unknown things that are going to happen.

There’s been a few spinouts, just freak accidents. I hit a wall while riding in Houston; I’m not sure what happened, an axle snapped, or something on the road, I’m not really sure. We had a actually had two guys out in St. Louis last year, one was in a car that blew its motor, spitting oil on the ground, and one of the other guys just coming up in a pack of cars a few miles behind. They decided to race right at that spot, and spun out and almost hit some trees. So there’s just that unknown factor we can’t control.

HRM] Stand out match-ups?

KL] My favorite so far was Matt and I hopped in cars in [Mexico] two years ago. One was in a Lamborghini with about 1,700 horsepower. The GTR made about the same power, and we were literally side by side, at 225mph, inching it back and forth. It was the craziest race ever.

HRM] What’s it been like getting involved with the Ice Cream Cruise?

KL] A lot of people actually don’t know that we run that event. We don’t try and overly brand it, it’s ‘presented by 1320’ with our other sponsor, Stereo West, which is actually stereo shop I mentioned earlier.. That was actually an event we used to film back the day, it’s all about the underground culture that started on the street with about 40 cars. The second one was like 80, the next one had 160; then it was 400, 800, and finally 1,200. At that point, my friend didn’t want to deal with it. It got so big we couldn’t be on the street anymore. The police shut it all down, and made us go home. So I picked it up the next and ran it for two years before it got shut down again. So we did it a baseball stadium and over-sold it- it was just a traffic jam. Finally, we’re now at a racetrack, parking over 1,500 show cars on the road course for the weekend and then having a full day of drag racing and roll racing the next day. It is really cool to be able to support our local community through it. Last year we raised $23,000, and the year before that was just under $20,000. We always try to find a local charity that’s special to us somehow, like an organization that’s helped someone in our group or community.

HRM] What’s it like paying it forward to your local car community?

KL] It’s pretty cool. It’s also a very unique event because it’s not like a hot rodder show or a Mustang show. It’s literally anything and everything: bikes, muscle cars, classics, and there’s a lot if newer cars, slow cars. There’s also a mix of fast cars, really weird cars, literally anything and everything under the sun you can find. We’ve tried our best not to change that over the years. We want to make it so everyone feels like they’re welcome.

HRM] Where do you think today’s more cohesive car culture comes from?

KL] I think it’s the awareness- there’s many different kinds of cultures out there. The Internet has done a lot for that. I think it piques people’s interests to consider other types of cars and types of racing. I notice plenty of things that would be cool to go see, but car events have never been bigger, especially with social media. With Facebook events being a thing, people know that shows are out there and they can go experience something. The Internet also does the opposite, too. It also gives people the power to divide our community, but I think it’s more positive than negative in the long run.

HRM] You’re known for owning Corvettes, but you’re also kind of known for a Dodge Neon – what cars have you owned?

KL] Not many people know I started with a Neon. I had about eight different car stereos in that thing! I bought it when I was 16… it was a gem. I sold that and I wanted a boosted car, but I made the mistake of buying the first one I saw, which was a 1989 Ford Thunderbird Super Coupe – the biggest pile-of-crap ever. It blew up three weeks into owning it. I had bought a beater for $2,500, put $5,000 into fixing it, and then sold it for $3,500.

After that, I bought a Mustang and ended up turbocharging it, blowing up the motor and transmission, spending a bunch of money on that. Then one winter I went out to the garage, and thought, “I don’t need this anymore.” I sold it and bought a ‘Vette, and that’s when that’s when I fell in love with Corvettes. I bought that one sight unseen. I’d never driven a Corvette in my life. It was just like the car I wanted, so I flew Chicago with my dad and drove it back. It was a half second quicker in the quarter-mile then in my Mustang, so it was nice.

HRM] You’ve been through the wringer with your current Corvette. Does racing something that powerful give you a new perspective?

KL] Oh yeah. Immediately when I took the car out for the first time. I’ve raced at drag strips just casually, but nothing where people really cared what I was driving. It was really interesting being in the driver’s seat and thinking about how I would normally film myself driving. How the guys are filming me? What I realized is how nervous you are in the staging lines about to go into eliminations. Some guy sticks a camera in your face, you’re like, ‘I don’t have time for this.’ Other times it’s the opposite. Sometimes it’s kind of calming; it takes your mind off of what you’re doing, and you have a little bit of fun with it. That’s what I’ve really started to take away from working with some of these racers we see regularly. There’s a different level of enjoyment of racing when we’re there to share it with them while competing and then eventually share it with the world. It’s like we’re there partying with them. It kind of breaks things up, but it was a steep learning curve, and it’s definitely given me that different perspective to help me realize how it looks from the other side of the lens. You know when they’re busy or are angry. Like when there’s an accident, there’s a fine line of documenting it and letting people know what happened, letting people know the driver’s safe. We talk to the driver when they’re safe- when it’s okay and they’re in the right mindset. For example, when I had the fire in the Corvette just a couple of months after we finished, it was a pretty big fire, but one of the first things that popped into my head first was to get out of the car. Second was, “My new laptop is in the passenger seat.” Third was, “I hope the cameras are rolling! This really sucks, but I hope I at least have it on video,” because it’s just a part of racing. To go through something like these drivers we filmed: wrecking, catching on fire, whatever it was, it was really interesting to see that whole process then coming back to race again. We often see drivers total their car, then two weeks later they’ve got a whole new car, and it’s mind blowing. They gave me a different perspective on how that goes down.

You think you’re invincible when driving, then something happens and it makes you re-think everything. Like the first pass I went down after that fire was very nerve wracking. Part of me wanted to take it easy on that pass, and at the same time I felt I needed to be back where I was before the fire. That’s what I did and it felt amazing; I was like, ‘Cool, no smoke!’ It was also a wake-up call because we rushed to get the car down there and skimped on a few safety things, and when that fire happened, I made it very obvious why these different things should have been in place to prevent or shorten the amount of time that fire burned.

HRM] What were those things you pointed out?

KL] Well, the first one is a battery cut-off. When I stopped, I could see the fire and smoke, and I immediately just wanted to get out of the car. The engine had stopped, but it didn’t occur to me that the ignition was still in the on-position and there was power to the battery and the fuel pump, and it was pumping out the injector that’s leaking. So, that was the first one. The second one is a fire suppression system, which is kind of overkill for the car I have, but at the same time, I have suggested it to anyone at 1,000hp-plus. I had a fire bottle, but that it wasn’t going to do anything against a fire that was being fueled by a fuel pump. Also, a fire suit; I had a jacket on, but no fire pants, or gloves… or shoes.

HRM] Is there anything you want to get off your chest or that you always wanted to talk about?

KL] I think the most important thing that really makes what we do work is that I’ve got a really big team of talented people. Most of them have worked with me for at least two years, some five years. The biggest thing making this so big and making it work has been my team of friends that jump on whatever job or something’s filming or whatever, I’ve got a big team of people helping them look out for, for me, the company and for themselves. And so it’s been a fun journey.

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nancydhooper · 6 years

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Randazza: Trump, Twitter, The NFL, and Everything

By Marc J. Randazza

The NFL says that players must stand (or remain in the locker room) during the National Anthem. No more "taking a knee." In the same week, Trump lost a case that says that the "interactive space" in his tweets is a "public forum" and thus he can't block people who criticize him. And, perhaps I did too much LSD in the 80s and 90s, but I see the two as intertwined. The real problem we have is that freedom of expression is the crown jewel in the American enlightenment, but that jewel is tarnished by the fact that our public square is increasingly privately owned. Privatization of the "public square" threatens to render the First Amendment meaningless.

We gotta fix that – or the First Amendment will only really exist in a few tiny spaces — "free speech zones" surrounded (literally or figuratively) by fences to keep the nasty stuff inside.

The NFL

The whole "take a knee" thing needs little explanation. Starting in 2016, some NFL players protested racial inequality in policing by taking a knee during the national anthem before games. The protests began with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick who initially sat during the anthem. He then had a talk with Nate Boyer, a veteran and former NFL player, who convinced him that sitting during the Anthem was disrespectful. However, the two agreed that taking a knee was a more reverent way to get the same message across.

Personally, I find the whole thing rather ineffective. Take a knee, don't take a knee. Nobody ever changed their mind about how cops behave or racism or anything over an NFL player taking a knee. But that isn't the test for whether the speech has value.

I may find the protest foolish, but I respect the hell out of Kaepernick for doing it. I support any player who wants to do it. If there's one thing that is supposed to differentiate the USA from the rest of the world, it is our purple-mountains-star-spangled commitment to freedom of expression. The second most patriotic thing we have is the National Football League.

Don't start with me with baseball, a boring ass adaptation of a crumpet-eating fairy-assed game from England that is primarily played by Dominicans. Basketball? Yeah, we invented it, but at its core it is a stupid game. Sure, we're the goddamn best at it, and unless we're playing it against the Croatians, we're going to win 101 times out of 100. The Canadians may have a "football league," but it would more appropriately be called the NFL's recycling bin. No other country even tries to compete with us in football. It is America's game. So it goddamn ought to reflect American values, as best it can.

Allowing protest and dissent ought to be ingrained at a chromosomal level if you think that you're amber-waves-of-grain entitled to wave the red, white, and blue.

So fuck the NFL for this policy.

And let me slap you across the face right now if you're starting with a comment like "well actually the NFL is a private employer, so it can have any policy it wants." This morning, I downed an entire mug of espresso, and 10 minutes later I took a huge shit that knows more about Constitutional law than you and your entire family ever will.

This isn't about what the NFL can do, it is about what it ought to do.

And dammit, the NFL ought to let its players take a fucking knee if they want to.

I will go get that shit out of the toilet and throw it at you, as if I were a caged chimp, if you start with the "oh, the NFL policy is just like Nazi Germany!" If that's your view, then correct it in the next 3 minutes, or you get sterilized when I am dictator. No, no, no, no, you fucking imbecile. Sure, Trump has expressed his view that you should "get out of America" if you don't stand for the anthem. That is a dumb-ass-moron position. But, it is hardly the government extending its hand down and pressing on the scale.

Do you think NFL players should shut up and do their job? Ok, fair enough. But, what makes you think that an NFL player can't be a voice of moral leadership? Remember Chris Kluwe? Back before it was cool to say you were in favor of gay rights, Kluwe had the balls to stand up and voice his support (I respected him for that). Did it matter? I think it did. Kluwe doesn't say much now, except for stalking articles about me, whining about who my clients are. Whatever, Kluwe, start shit with me and I'll just have my friend, Mercedes Carrera, intellectually kick your ass again.

But back to the subject at hand: If you think that the players ought to shut up and do their jobs and keep politics out of football, then lets try that.

No, lets really try that.

In 2015, Arizona Sens. Jeff Flake (R) and John McCain (R) revealed in a joint oversight report that nearly $5.4 million in taxpayer dollars had been paid out to 14 NFL teams between 2011 and 2014 to honor service members and put on elaborate, “patriotic salutes” to the military. Overall, they reported, “these displays of paid patriotism [were] included within the $6.8 million that the Department of Defense (DOD) [had] spent on sports marketing contracts since fiscal year 2012.” (source) (other source) (other source)

The NFL took millions of dollars in propaganda money from the military. So the WHOLE FUCKING THING is one big ball of political propaganda. At least the kneelers are honest and open about it. You fucking rubes who stand up during the anthem don't even remember that it wasn't even a thing until 2009. And, can someone remind me who was president during 2011 and 2014 when we were shoveling barrels full of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of billionaires to make sure that the uneducated slobs in the stands were sufficiently reminded of the message that "America" means bombing the living shit out of people thousands of miles away?

So lets put a pin in that… millions of taxpayer dollars flowing toward the NFL for propaganda purposes. And lets add in the billions that the NFL and its teams get in taxpayer subsidies.

Twitter (and all of Silicon Valley) – the New Censorship

After the 2016 election, the Left freaked the fuck out. Quite honestly, none of us thought Trump could be elected. And the morning after, the Trump derangement syndrome set in. Nowhere did it set in more heavily than in Silicon Valley. So, the platforms immediately got to work making sure that they did their part to ensure that we would have a "blue wave" washing away our sins. They got to work banning anyone perceived as "alt-right." It started with literal Nazis, and then it continued to those who might associate with them, to others who simply harbored conservative views. All of this was under the opaque guise of "safety."

It was all bullshit, and we all knew it. If you didn't know it, you were willfully blind.

I don't have a lot of love for Richard Spencer's speech. I don't even like Andrew Anglin's speech, and I'm his goddamn lawyer. I do like Milo Yiannopolous, but that's beside the point. The point is that they started with speakers that would be easy to ban — speakers who lots of people disliked. And they proved that there wasn't a goddamn thing we could do about it.

And very few people saw this as the alarming move that it was. But, as Twitter, Facebook, GoDaddy, PayPal, Stripe, etc. all got into line — shaving off a large percentage of right wing speech, the left cheered. Yay! Maybe we can win next time! Yay Resistance! Go fuck yourselves — you're not a member of any "resistance" unless you just might get captured or killed — and you're certainly not part of any "Resistance" when you control most of the new public square, and you use that virtually monopolistic power to shut down debate.

The fact is, Twitter, Facebook, and Google are the new public squares, and that gives them incredible power. And they are using that power exactly the way a power-drunk dictator would use it — to try and suppress speech they don't like. If you're on the Right, you bemoan. If you are on the Left, you're probably cheering it (just the opposite of the tribal alignment on the NFL issue). But, if you're on the Left and you're cheering it, you're also probably the kind of person who would let a rabid chimp out of its cage if you thought it would tear off your enemy's face — not realizing that it will also turn on you and rip your face off, and your balls, and then probably sodomize you as it ate the back of your head.

Because one day, the CEO of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, or Google is going to want to run for president. And then, you fucking idiots, they'll have nothing stopping them from suppressing any and all speech that supports their opponents. You'll have the equivalent of Silvio Berlusconi buying power by owning all the private networks.

A few of us see this danger. That's why I volunteered to work on a case for Jared Taylor, suing Twitter for banning him. Twitter filed an Anti-SLAPP motion, and we just got our opposition in. (Complaint, Memo ISO Anti-SLAPP, Opposition to Anti-SLAPP). The case went pretty well so far – if you want to read the transcript, here it is. At least one judge found that the suit has some merit — at least enough to move forward.

Naturally, many have criticized the case — especially since there are many who find Section 230 to be something worthy of religious devotion.

Section 230, for the uninitiated, is a law that was passed during the Clinton administration, which gives Silicon Valley immunity from virtually all lawsuits based on content provided by others. This is why you can post something obviously defamatory on Twitter, and even if Twitter knows it is defamatory and knows it is harming you, it can, and will, say "Fuck you, See 47 U.S.C. § 230."

Now when the Silicon Valley giants said "Fuck you, Section 230" in the past, it at least had some semblance of philosophical honesty in it. Until recently, Silicon Valley loved freedom of speech. The whole promise of the Internet was that we were going to see an explosion of diversity of thought. For a brief period, we did. Some of it was awesome — and some of it was not. We got more porn, more humor, more political engagement, Mr. Spock Ate My Balls, and we also got racist websites, sexist websites, and every other kind of scoundrel online that we could think of. But, we all expected that the marketplace of ideas would flourish. I would like to say it did.

Then came 2016.

In the lead up to the election and in the aftermath of it, the Left lost its fucking mind. Campuses went into overdrive banning speech they didn't like, and Silicon Valley gleefully followed suit. And we on the Left, who once hated corporations and hated the control they might have had over the market, cheered. (I didn't, but as a Leftist myself, I have to accept guilt for my tribe's sins).

Might Trump's Thin Skin Save Us?

Trump is the first "Twitter President." It makes me want to bash my head into the wall to type those words, but here we are.

He got sued for blocking critics on Twitter, and much to my surprise, a judge in the Southern District of New York held that Twitter is a "public forum" — well, at least in part. You see, she couldn't bear to actually rule that Twitter is a new public forum. I think it is. My view is consistent with the old Pruneyard decision. Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980). In that case, since the California constitution has an affirmative right to free speech, it could be interpreted as requiring private property owners to allow petitioning on their property, if it is a public space. This decision is not without its detractors. If you're a private property rights guy, you might hate this decision — because it does force a private property owner to allow speech it doesn't like on its private property. But, I think that if free speech means anything, it can't simply be the victim of progress moving the town square to an enclosed shopping mall, or even online.

The judge in the Trump case held:

we consider whether forum doctrine can be appropriately applied to several aspects of the @realDonaldTrump account rather than the account as a whole: the content of the tweets sent, the timeline comprised of those tweets, the comment threads initiated by each of those tweets, and the “interactive space” associated with each tweet in which other users may directly interact with the content of the tweets by, for example, replying to, retweeting, or liking the tweet. (Op. @ 41)

She had to rule against Trump. So, she created a new "public forum" limited to the comment threads in public officials' twitter feeds.

I think her decision is open to attack. I could see a pretty clean "Twitter isn't a public forum" decision. I could also see "Twitter is a public forum." But, this half-way decision is bullshit. Lets look at it this way: Twitter bans you because you make fun of Leslie Jones' face. Now you're banned also from the "public forum" of your President's tweets. If we were to analogize it, lets say there was a public park, designated for free speech activities. We privatize the area you have to go through to get into the park. The company that owns that area you have to go through just lets anyone go in and out. But, one day they decide that they just don't want to let anyone in who has ever been a proponent of legalizing marijuana, or who claims that there is a "wage gap," or who supports "Black Lives Matter."

Hey, it is a private property owner. Tough shit if they won't let you on their property. The free speech zone is there for you if you can maybe teleport into it.

So, the Trump decision is, perhaps, the crack in the wall. But, that leaves us with the NFL, and it also leaves us with the possibility that the 2d Circuit throws out this intellectually dishonest decision.

We have the power to break this

So what the fuck do we do?

The First Amendment is a wonderful thing, but what happens if the government just decides to give away all its public spaces to corporations and individuals who support its views? Don't laugh… in San Diego, the government let a huge crucifix go up on public land in a clear establishment clause violation. Federal court ruled against the government, so the government "sold" the little circle of land that the cross was on to a private group. Private group then kept the cross up on its land. That was deemed constitutional by a three member panel of the 9th Circuit.

So how do we fix it?

How about the First Amendment restoration act?

"No private entity may receive any governmental funds nor receive any statutory immunity unless it agrees to be bound by the First Amendment as if it were a government actor."

Why not?

Imagine if the NFL had to choose between receiving taxpayer funds or allowing its players to exercise their First Amendment rights. Imagine if Facebook had to choose between Section 230 immunity and incorporating the First Amendment into its terms and conditions.

Imagine if the First Amendment got the shot in the arm that it desperately needs.

Are there problems to be worked out here? You bet. How would I apply this to the comments section here, at Popehat? Maybe that's a bit too small of an actor to be subject to this Act? I've run this by some smart people — one suggested having it only apply to any companies that might be publicly traded or federally or state regulated. That way we would have just the giants, banks, etc. That might work.

What is clear is that what we have now is a road toward disaster. Because these private constraints on public speech are getting worse, more opaque, and more restrictive — and if we don't do something soon, we won't ever be able to get a handle on it.

And then you'll be left with a First Amendment that only applies in the gazebo in your public park, on alternate Thursdays.

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thisthinghappened · 7 years

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An Account of My Year With Orlando

This is not a story that I relish writing down, but the time has come for me to finally do it. I have attempted to simply turn my back to the details of this experience in the hopes that it would fade, but time and time again history has proven that it is not going to just go away, and I need a resource both for my own catharsis as well as something to have to refer people to so that I don't have to keep telling it over and over again.

Almost all of the names in this story have been changed to protect absolutely everyone. The only name unchanged is that of my accuser, Orlando. There are racial epithets and other hate speech used without censorship in this story when directly quoting the individuals who used them, which can be triggering, or be an unintentional microaggression. There are upsetting depictions of abuse and violence.

Somewhere in the range of eleven years ago I first moved to Philadelphia from New York City. I'd just come off of doing a television show for the LOGO network. I moved here on a whim, living briefly in a hotel while I searched for a room to rent. I found one in a brownstone in West Philadelphia.

The home was owned by a blind musician named Orlando in his early 30's. He lived there with his 21 year old girlfriend Katie, also his caretaker. He was an odd character with a lot of loud opinions. At first it seemed like it might be entertaining to live with such a quirky guy. I also formed a fast bond with Katie, an intellectual who was really only a few years younger than I.

However it became clear that something was a bit off with Orlando. He was extremely demanding of everyone around him, and had some questionable feelings about women and minorities that made me uncomfortable, so after living there only a few months, I moved out to my own apartment. I stayed in touch with Katie from afar but 6-7 odd years passed and that was that.

...until I found myself renting an apartment where the landlord let the water get turned off, and the city refused to turn it back on. I had also fallen ill, and wasn't making any money to move into a new place. So I reached out to Katie to find out if Orlando happened to have any rooms for rent. She said he did.

I went to meet with him, and the first thing he did was hug me and then exclaim: “Oh! You got fat.” Really, I should listen to the warnings the universe gives me, but I was desperate.

Orlando explained his current situation to me. Hold onto your butts, by the way, because this is where things immediately begin to devolve into a chaotic bit of insanity that gets worse and worse literally every day.

Orlando said that he and Katie had stopped being in a romantic relationship years earlier, but she continued to live with him as his caretaker. He explained, however, that over the last year she had stolen/embezzled nearly ten thousand dollars from him. She was in charge of his finances entirely, and there was a bank account in his name as well as one in both of their names.

In addition, he had just moved a 19 year old girl from the Caribbean to be his girlfriend and new caretaker; but he said that he was afraid of her, and that she seemed volatile and he feared it could blow up at any minute.

Thus it was that I moved in a few weeks before Christmas of that year. It had become clear that Katie had devolved into alcoholism, getting drunk every single day and barely holding down a part time job. She had unquestionably utilized household funds for a variety of personal things, but Orlando admitted that after they broke up he had offered her ten thousand dollars to do with as she pleased, so whether or not these funds were appropriated or accepted was questionable.

What was not in question is that Katie had let the ball drop on paying the mortgage for the home, which had fallen into arrears by nearly a year. One of the responsibilities Orlando passed to me was to get his mortgage situation back in order. I offered to help as best I could, but being that I have never had a mortgage and also am not an accountant, I had no real clue what to do.

I made Orlando sign a document outlining my responsibilities as well as our personal arrangement. It was clear he expected me to be a live-in caretaker on numerous levels, a full time job for which payment would far surpass the cost of renting one room in a six bedroom home. He wanted me to cook, clean, run errands, help with his personal and romantic life (more on that below,) and essentially be on call 24/7 for whatever whim may come up at any given moment.

Our agreement, of which I have provided a scan at the link below, stipulated among other things:

sign documents on his behalf

authorize checks on his behalf and deposit them into his bank account

use his debit card to pay household bills, withdraw cash, pay for Katie's gas (she often ran errands for him,) and any other use at my discretion

use his bank account to pay for things for myself including my World of Warcraft account, my mobile phone bill (he demanded I get a plan on his account so he could always reach me,) my web hosting, my personal fees for various online services like Amazon or eBay

to open and manage eBay/Paypal accounts in his name for selling items of his own that he wanted to get rid of

to withdraw or otherwise utilize $500 cash from his bank account/debit card as payment for my personal services throughout the month as well as the waiver of a rent payment

to use his bank account to deposit and withdraw my own money and access that money at will, rather than open my own bank account

Link to document is here:

http://imgur.com/a/g02G0

Last names have been redacted.

Orlando signed this agreement in the presence of the 19 year old girlfriend who read it aloud to him to make sure he understood it's contents. It's important to note here that even if she had not been present to read it to him, being blind does not absolve one from being obligated to honor a contract one has signed. It is up to the party who is blind to make sure they understand what they are signing before signing it.

I made sure to get this agreement in writing because it was clear that Orlando had put Katie through the wringer, and I didn't want to end up in the same position she was in, being accused of defrauding him after working for him for a length of time. Note that despite this allegation she continued living with him. He used the threat of having her arrested to keep her there.

After living in the house for just a few weeks it became clear that Orlando was being honest about his situation with the new girlfriend, though they were equally to blame for the violent nature of their relationship. She drank heavily, and every day there was a new blow-up over something minor. One occasion saw them arguing over the fact that she bought ranch dressing, resulting in the dressing bottle being swung around the kitchen with a lid, dressing splattering all over the walls/artwork/decor and ceiling.

The Christmas holiday came, and I was on a brief vacation that involved house/pet sitting for a friend. Orlando knew to only call me in an emergency, and the girlfriend was to take care of him for those few days. On Christmas Eve/Morning, Orlando called me to say that this girlfriend had accompanied him to a dinner party where she got extremely drunk. This lead to a fight during the cab ride home, and he alleged that she had physically assaulted him on the porch. As a result the police were called and she was thrown out into the street, leaving him with no one to take care of him for the Christmas holiday.

Despite the Jerry-Springer like circumstances around the situation, I gave up my holiday to return home and take care of Orlando. A dear friend who does not celebrate Christmas, Patricia, came over to keep me company. Orlando aggressively hit on her for the duration of his visit which was very uncomfortable.

Eventually Orlando informed us that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of his girlfriend, which we took on face value, though we never saw or hear from her again. He began aggressively pursing her by stalking her on the internet. Any information he had been given during their brief relationship about her relatives was used to track them down and call them, leaving aggressive and explicit messages about her sexual history and personal life. It was a gleeful act of revenge on his part, something he considered justice.

As time moved forward, it became clear that this was a very serious pattern for Orlando. He would, with my help, post ads on Craigslist seeking the companionship of women. These women would agree to come to the home, and he would IMMEDIATELY fall 'in love' with them. He would ask them to move in right away, becoming aggressively possessive and controlling straight out of the gate. Inevitably these women would see him for what he was and call it off, asking him to leave them alone.

He would not. Sometimes he would accuse them of breaking the law, saying that by agreeing to be his romantic partner they had entered into a “contract” with him that they were now violating. Sometimes he would accuse them of moral failings, because how could they leave a blind man to be alone and fend for himself in the world? Sometimes he would slut shame them. No matter what though he would find a way to aggressively pursue these women beyond their consent, always finding excuses as to why this was okay.

There was also a disturbing racial component to these situations. The women were often black women, whom he referred to as his “little nigs”. When using racial slurs of this nature, he justified it in different ways. “It's okay because I'm Latino,” or “I go to an all black church so I'm an honorary nigger.” Instances of questionable feelings around a variety of minority groups often came up. Orlando watched a documentary about the Holocaust and developed a theory that the only reason six million Jewish people died is because “those kikes were weak. If it were me I would have fought back and been shot waiting in line for the ovens.”

I could not begin to recount to you the countless women Orlando engaged over the year long period in which I worked for/lived with him. He would have me cook them romantic dinners, or help him buy them gifts.

One instance that stands out involved a platonic woman friend he had who made the mistake of mentioning she had a single friend she had. This friend of his explicitly told him setting them up wasn't a good idea and to please leave it alone, but she made the mistake of mentioning this woman's name. Thus Orlando had me find contact info for the friend-of-a-friend (without my knowing why,) and then stalked this woman by calling her suggesting they become romantic. When the full situation came to light (and his own friend cut him off forever,) he justified it to me as such: “Why should I deprive myself of an opportunity to potentially find my soulmate just because someone else asks me not to contact this woman?”

Entitlement around everything, but particularly access to women, was a constant theme. If a person was a woman, Orlando would pursue her romantically and always find justification for why it was okay. No amount of being told to stop would prevent his pursuit. One such woman documented the exchange on her web log, which can be viewed at this link:

http://annafromcraigslist.tumblr.com/tagged/orlando-fiol

There is also an accounting of his interactions with women in the polyamory community, seen here:

http://alt.polyamory.narkive.com/bVR9QdAt/orlando-fiol-is-a-creepy-creepy-stalker-if-you-already-knew-that-skip-reading-this-post.5

Another thing which was a constant was the coming and going of tenants. Orlando had one long-term tenant, an older woman named Doris, who managed to avoid all of this conflict by simply not engaging in the household. Of the five bedrooms available, Doris lived in one, Katie and I occupied two more, which left two bedrooms available for rent.

Inevitably it was my job to find people to rent these rooms, usually younger college students or people who were otherwise desperate for somewhere to live. The rental of these rooms plus money Orlando was receiving for a research grant from a college were his only source of income.

Generally women who rented a room would leave in two months at best because of the creepy sexual vibe Orlando put out to them. Men would leave once it became apparent that they were not simply going to be allowed to rent a room, but in fact would constantly be called upon to assist him with whatever he demanded. One man moved out after Orlando broke the lock on his bedroom door to let himself inside because he wouldn't come help Orlando with something. A woman fled after just one month and then sued Orlando for her deposit and rent money back. This revolving door of tenants was constant, and became doubly desperate after some months when the grant money was discontinued.

It became clear that Orlando was not bringing in enough income to sustain his lifestyle. Shortly after I moved in, his mortgage was sold from one bank to another. I had worked out an agreement with the first bank for him to make some sort of a payment on his back-due mortgage, and in so doing they would take the remainder of the debt and apply it to the back end of his entire mortgage without penalty, allowing him to get out of arrears and start moving forward making normal payments. However the new bank refused to acknowledge or honor this agreement, and it became clear that he would need a colossal amount of funds all at once to prevent repossession by the bank.

I explained this to him numerous times, and conveyed to him that he needed someone more experienced to handle the mortgage situation because I was at a loss to fix it. He told me that he would have his mother, who lived in New York, handle the mortgage moving forward, and thus I left it in their capable hands. As letters from the bank continued to roll in month after month, it was clear that no one was actually doing this, but it was out of my hands. I was having enough trouble helping him to keep current with his normal bills.

You must understand that Orlando had absolutely no sense of money. For all practical points and purposes, he was bringing in around $1,000 a month from tenants, which barely would have covered the mortgage, let alone electricity, internet, groceries, prescriptions and doctor's co-pays, the $500 a month he had promised me, car gas for Katie, and then the money he was expending trying to woo various women. He was in arrears with so many different bills, and frequently his bank account would go into the negative by nearly $1,000 overdraft just to keep the lights on.

Around six months into this situation, it was clear that Orlando was getting worse. He met a woman who he got engaged to after a few weeks. She had several children of her own and he began talking about moving them into the house. Katie and I kept explaining to him that this was an impossible situation. If he moved a woman and her children into the house, there would be no rooms to rent and he would literally have no income. He was insistent, and the woman did begin to live part time in the house. He demanded that she be bought a ring, and even paid to have it inscribed. This woman remained for some months until we finally convinced him it was an untenable relationship, and then he went back to posting on Craigslist to find new women.

Orlando became more and more abusive towards me specifically. It had already devolved to the point where I was more or less a live in indentured servant. As I had no income, I had no way to save up money and move out. If I attempted to get any free time or have any kind of a life, Orlando would violently berate me for “abandoning” him or otherwise not being there for him; always framed as his being a desperate blind man who could not do for himself. Orlando did not leave the house for any reason other than the very rare musical performance (once a month at best.) He refused to even fill his own water bottle, screaming out for me to come get it and refill it at the sink when it was empty.

The various incidents that unfolded during the last three or four months I lived with him could fill a novel. One that stands out was an evening in which Katie was helping me prepare Orlando's dinner in the kitchen, and we had an ipod on shuffle. Orlando happened to come into the kitchen while the comedy song “Short Dick Man” was playing. It's a fairly harmless song in which the vocalist sings “Eeeny weenie tiny little short dick man.” It may not be grand opera, but it's hardly offensive. Orlando demanded we turn it off and went on a screaming tirade about how the song was discriminatory against men with small penises, and it should be banned and the singer should be arrested for hate crimes. He then went on a triade asking “How would you like it if I wrote a song and the words were “Kill all the gays! Kill all the fags! Protect the children! Murder the queers!” This chant/singing went on for some minutes and he proceeded to goose-step while Nazi saluting. It was his attempt at making some kind of point, but it was bone chilling.

In the last month that I lived with Orlando, my friends had all become extremely concerned for my well being. My mental health was clearly taking a toll. They all described it as a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. What had started as me posting humorous if disturbing stories on my social media about what went on in the house turned into frightening accounts that had them worried. I finally told Orlando it was time for me to move on, which got him extremely upset.

He moved a homeless woman into the house to be his live-in maid/caretaker, and was abusive to her from the start. It devolved quickly and frighteningly. In one instance, she bought him a new water bottle that was glass instead of metal. He was so enraged that he threw it at her head, narrowly missing her as it shattered on the wall behind her.

Katie, meanwhile, had devolved so badly that she was starting to commit crimes for thrill. She recounted that her current boyfriend (also an alcoholic with whom she drank) had her be the getaway driver when he went to his former place of employment, broke in and robbed the cash register. I found myself desperately trying to help he break free from a lengthy period of emotional abuse while also trying to extract myself from the situation.

One of my closest friends and her partner were moving into a new apartment, and they extracted me from the situation and moved me into their spare room for a temporary arrangement in which I would be safe.

For the first month that I moved out I continued to try and help Orlando from afar as he phased in yet another girlfriend, this time moving a woman in with her son. However this woman took an interest in his finances immediately, and as they went over the last year of transactions in his bank account, she convinced him that I had stolen from him. The magic number? Ten thousand dollars over the course of a year, an identical accusation that he had made toward Katie.

Around this same time the bank finally sued over the unpaid mortgage, which Orlando also blamed on me. Suddenly my worst fears started unfolding. Orlando accused me of fraud, of stealing his identity to use his bank account and debit card of the last year. He accused me of grand larceny, and began ruthlessly stalking me in emails, calls, texts and internet posts. Anything he could find to try and paint me as a criminal was fair game. He said that I opened a phone line on his account without his permission, something he DEMANDED that I do. He said that I got an internet connection installed in the house without permission, something he also demanded because the third floor tenants had trouble with the existing connection. Literally anything that could be fodder for an accusation, or any of his own failing that he could blame on me, came out.

My friends gathered around me to try and protect me. I went into therapy. I cut off all ties with Orlando. Katie had made arrangements to go and live with her parents in another state. We agreed that for our mutual protection we would cut ties forever, because that way if he found one of us he couldn't use it to his advantage to find both of us.

And find me he did. As the past 2-3 years have gone by, Orlando has repeatedly “found” me again and again and stalked and harassed me. It is a pattern I witnessed him devolve into with countless others in his life. He will forget about certain people until something triggers a memory of them, and because he is bored, it becomes a project to hunt them down and try to mess with their lives.

For six months I moved to another state to be with a man I'd met, and he found me there, calling and leaving frightening voice mails. This happened lots of times in various places I lived. However the absolute worst was an incident that still has me suffering from PTSD.

Around a year ago (this is being written mid-2017 by the way,) he seems to have met a woman and become “engaged”. I am not going to name this woman because even though she has played a role in his harassment of me ever since, I don't blame her for taking the word of someone she seems to care about. Be that as it may, she is active in social media and she saw a post I put up on a “Freecycle” style page. There was an address attached to this post – not my address – and later that day the two apparently drove by together and called me from outside. I got a 3 minute voicemail while they were there: “Come to the window, fucker...”

She also posted a lengthy message on that page detailing all of the accusations Orlando has made against me, and claiming there was a warrant out for my arrest. The posts were deleted and she was removed from the group, but I also left the group for my own safety. A day or two later, a group of men showed up at that address dressed in SWAT gear. A man who is a friend of mine and lives on the first floor apartment there came to the door, where these men dressed as police officers here to arrest me. Because I had gotten the voicemail I had let this man know of the potential that Orlando may continue to show up at the address thinking I lived there. This man also happens to be fairly anti-police, and is extremely educated on his rights and how to deal with them. He denied any knowledge of who I am and demanded to see a warrant and asked what the charges were. These men pushed their way into his apartment, refused to show any such warrant or give badge numbers. They mocked his clothing and nail polish, and eventually they left, leaving him pretty shaken up. He texted me to let me know this had happened, and said he was absolutely certain that they were not real police officers and that Orlando had sent them there to intimidate me (or worse.) No “police” have returned to that address since.

At this point I was living in complete terror. Friends were sheltering me from the situation by keeping me distracted, but no one knew what to do. Was there really a warrant out for my arrest? If there was, what exactly would I do? How does an able person sit down with the police and say “I know a blind man has told you I stole from him and such, but I swear it isn't true, and here's a contract he signed with me, and please don't lock me up?” I was fearful that I would be put behind bars regardless of the truth, where no one would be able to bail me out, because this is how the system works. You get locked up until you go to trial unless you can afford bail, and for major fraud charges, well...bail is not insignificant.

After a few months passed, a dear friend convinced me to go to the police and ask if there was in fact a warrant for my arrest. She promised that if I got locked up, she would post the bail and we would take it from there. So despite the fact that I was terrified, I did just that.

There was no warrant, and (of course) no record of the police being sent to arrest me.

I moved ahead with my life, and it did finally seem like a lengthy period of time passed where I did not hear from Orlando or anyone connected with him. I actually found out in early 2017 that he and his fiance had moved away to another state, and I truly thought perhaps this chapter of my life was behind me.

But now in June of 2017, the fiance has resurfaced in yet another social media page in which I was formerly active. (She was able to see my posts because I left the group, but people continued to reference my name which was no longer linked to a profile and thus visible despite having blocked her.) Though I am told this post only stayed up for 30 minutes or so, it apparently got very ugly. People from that group reached out to another group in which I was actively a member, and the admins removed me and blocked me (who can blame them?) In many ways this speaks to my fears expressed above: Who would question accusations from a disabled person about being taken advantage of?

That's why I'm writing this lengthy story today. 11 pages, and it easily could be 11 more. It seems like Orlando is never, ever going to let me live my life in peace, and although he can't really use social media (Facebook is not friendly to software that reads aloud to the blind,) his fiance, for however long they are together, is going to be acting as his mouthpiece and come after me time and time again.

This is my story, and I hope one day it will stop haunting me. This man has hurt countless people in his life, causing them grief and often abusing them while simultaneously making them feel sympathy for him. I don't know how long I can reiterate my lack of guilt every time he (or she) finds me and hurls these accusations, so I am putting this online to be referenced the next time it happens.

- James B, June 5th, 2017 Sub-note: If you have been sent to this link, please don’t redistribute it to others. Please do not attempt to intervene and contact Orlando or his fiance on my behalf. Engaging him is the same thing as antagonizing him, no matter how you approach, and not only will it simply stir the pot and have him coming after me again with renewed interest and aggression, he will also start to come after you.

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