852: Ryan Montgomery | The Hacker Who Hunts Child Predators Part Two

28 Jun 2023 · 1 h 3 min

Ask about this episode

Ask anything about it. ChatGPT or Claude reads this page and answers with the times it was said.

Connect VO and ask about every podcast you hear, including the moments you saved. Add to ChatGPT · Add to Claude

In short

Podcast Summary: The Jordan Harbinger Show - Episode 852: Ryan Montgomery | The Hacker Who Hunts Child Predators Part Two

Episode Overview In this episode, Jordan Harbinger speaks with Ryan Montgomery, an ethical hacker and cybersecurity specialist. This is Part Two of a two-part series, where Montgomery shares his experiences and insights on combatting child predation and online threats. The discussion dives deep into the vulnerabilities of smart devices, personal accounts of confronting predators, and effective strategies for online safety.

Key Discussion Points

Vulnerabilities of Smart Devices

  • Internet of Things (IoT) Risks: Montgomery discusses how IoT devices, such as smart appliances and thermostats, can be compromised by hackers, creating vulnerabilities within home networks.
  • Real-World Examples: Montgomery shares his experiences with smart devices sending information to cloud servers, raising concerns about privacy and security.

Hacking a Pedophile Website

  • Initial Discovery: Montgomery details how he stumbled upon a disturbing pedophile website, driven by a friend’s report of child exploitation on the platform.
  • Data Extraction: He hacked the website, documenting user data without downloading explicit content, aiming to report the findings to authorities.
  • Government Inaction: Montgomery expresses frustration over the slow response from law enforcement despite providing substantial evidence, leading him to seek media exposure.

Direct Confrontations with Predators

  • Real-Life Encounters: Montgomery and his MMA friend confront potential predators in public spaces, utilizing chat logs and evidence to hold them accountable.
  • Community Impact: He emphasizes the importance of community action and awareness to deter child exploitation.

Safety Tips for Online Encounters

  • What to Do and Not Do: Montgomery advises on appropriate actions when encountering predatory behavior online, stressing the importance of communication and reporting.

The Broader Context of Child Safety

  • Understanding Pedophilia: Montgomery discusses the psychological aspects of predation, including the complexities of identifying and addressing such behaviors.
  • Encouraging Communication: He stresses the importance of open dialogue between parents and children regarding online safety.

Key Takeaways

  • Importance of Cybersecurity: Understanding the vulnerabilities of digital devices is crucial in safeguarding personal and family information.
  • Community Engagement: Collective efforts in confronting and reporting child predators can lead to significant changes and improvements in community safety.
  • Awareness and Education: Parents must educate their children about online risks and maintain open lines of communication to foster a safe environment.
  • Frustrations with Authority: Montgomery’s experience highlights systemic challenges in addressing child exploitation and the need for more responsive measures from authorities.

Conclusion This episode sheds light on the critical issue of child predation in the digital age, encouraging listeners to become proactive in their communities and educate themselves on cybersecurity. Montgomery's insights serve as a powerful call to action for everyone to contribute to safeguarding children online.

---

For more information, resources, and full show notes, visit [The Jordan Harbinger Show Episode 852](https://jordanharbinger.com/852).

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Hear the part that matters, and keep it.Open this episode in VO. Double tap your headphones to save a moment as you listen.
Get VO free

Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:28This episode is sponsored in part by 1-800-CONTACTS. customer service and perks like free returns, free exchanges, even free torn lens replacement. Jen loves their Express exam, which lets you renew your prescription online in under 10 minutes. It's a vision exam, not a full eye exam, but it gives you a doctor-issued prescription if you're seeing clearly with your current lenses, no waiting rooms, no dilation drops, remember those things? And with their best price guarantee, if you find your contacts cheaper somewhere else, they'll beat it. Getting contacts doesn't have to be a hassle. Let 1-800-CONTACTS get you the lenses you need right now.

0:56Order online at 1-800-CONTACTS.com or download the free 1-800-CONTACTS app today. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I don't have the answer to pedophilia. I don't have the answer to pedophiles or human trafficking, but I do know that I can offer some of my abilities and some of my network to do something about it on a large scale. That doesn't mean it's going to end it, but even if I make a small dent or like I say, you know, if I can help one kid, it's worth it.

1:30Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional former jihadi, economic hitman, astronaut, national security advisor, or tech luminary. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs is a great place to begin.

2:06These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic, and they'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Topics like negotiation and communication, disinformation and cyber warfare, scams and conspiracy debunks, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. And quick reminder, we just started a newsletter. Many of you are getting it already. A lot of good feedback so far. I'm having fun writing it. I don't really know what the heck I am doing with it, but so far so good. I recap takeaways from older episodes, bring out highlights of things that I think either I missed, make some corrections here or there.

2:42It's actually a lot of fun to go back, listen to something, see how terrible I was, at least according to my own standards, but bring out those lessons again with a fresh eye. I think that's really great. And if you're a fan of the show, I know you're going to get a lot out of it. It's kind of like a quick, fun review written in my trademark snarky-ish, but not too much BSE way. JordanHarbinger.com slash news. Again, would love your feedback on it. So you can always hit reply to any newsletter that I send. Now, part two with Ryan. If you haven't heard part one with Ryan Montgomery yet, it's about hacking, social engineering, and unfortunately, a lot of the dark web, child abuse, pedophilia crap that's on the internet.

3:19So go back and listen to part one. Don't do it with kids, at least not with little kids in the car. I think it's important for younger kids, teenagers, especially to hear, but you know, maybe not like your five-year-old or your eight-year-old in the car for this one. So go back, check out part one. And here we go with part two with Ryan Montgomery. I've got friends who work in really big companies that I can't name. And they work in the security departments of whatever operating systems their devices use. And I said, who's your biggest, what's your biggest sort of a attacker right now? And they're like, well, I can't tell you.

3:55And I'm like, does it rhyme with Iran and China? And they're like, okay, fine. You know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. And one of the things that they're worried about, or that this particular guy's worried about is they're seeing a lot of attacks from things that are not people's computers. they're getting attacked from thermostats vacuum cleaners you know like ii robot typing think basically iot internet of things devices that have been compromised in some way usually made in china maybe they're in use in eastern europe or something like usually they're lower grade versions not the brand names that we maybe have that's surprising i don't mean to cut you off just so i don't forget i i uh i have this pinnacle mop and vacuum that you know it's a combination of two.

4:37And it's, it is, I believe one of the best brands is sold in Best Buy. It's actually behind me right now. It connects to your home network. It communicates with a Chinese cloud server for not only just the, I don't know. And I proxied the traffic from it, which means just, you know, intercepted the traffic between that device's app and my computer. So I could see where, you know, what was going on. Sure. You know, you would think something just as simple as changing the volume on that device would be on the device. Well, it actually sends it to this Chinese cloud server, and then that sends it to the vacuum.

5:08So right now, everything is fine. There's no problem, but it's just everything is being sent back and forth to this cloud server. If I was to connect it back to the internet, at any moment, if somebody changes that, now somebody has a direct pivot point on my home network, it can be your vacuum mop that you have no clue. It just says, hey, connect me to your network and let me update myself or connect me to your network to activate your warranty or do whatever it may be. You put this device in your corner and you may not ever think about it, but it might just be a thermostat. It could be a smart outlet.

5:40It could be anything at all. And those devices could be a point for an attacker or even a nation state actor in a different country or even our own country, who knows, to pivot throughout your home network and see what you're doing. My vacuum being one of them. Yeah, of course. I've got a buddy who's like a, I guess you'd call him a high value target for certain people. And he has cybersecurity experts that he hires because of that. And they found that I don't even know what this thing was, something that goes on your garden hose. It's for gardening. It's literally like a water, like a smart faucet that was compromised.

6:14Okay. That's enough. You know? Yeah. And what was funny is she's like, yeah, I mean, I don't have too much faith in these guys. I mean, they only hacked my garden faucet. And I had to sort of stop him. I was like, hey, man, I'm pretty sure that that's just like the jumping off point for the rest of your network in your house. Yeah. They probably had physical access to that thing somehow by walking. I don't know. Maybe they trespassed and even got near it, whatever. Or maybe it was exposing something to the internet. Yeah. Who knows what it was? Or maybe, yeah, like you said, physical access. Maybe they factory reset it, connected to it.

6:44Right. Well, I guess maybe, well, if they did that, then they wouldn't have. Right. Who knows how they got access to it? It's all fun and games until your cameras inside your house are broadcasting to your smart faucet and then sending that to a cloud server in China, then you're not laughing at lunch. Right. And that can happen at any moment. So it's, I'm not trying to instill fear in anyone, but it's true. So it's, it's hard to, you know, I'm telling you the truth. And it's, uh, one of those things where like, when I saw the traffic being proxied, I was like, okay, this is kind of cool. I could start the smart cleaning from my phone.

7:15I could do all that, but why not just keep it on my local network? Why does it need to be on some cloud server? Why do I need to be able to see the stats for my mop from the office. There's just no reason for it. So maybe they're a great company. Maybe they have no bad intentions at all. Let's say they have all great intentions and then somebody compromises them. And now every single person that has this specific brand, Tinoco, not every single person is a target and their home networks are easily pivotable if they for some reason could get what they call a shell on that device. And they could scan my other network, look for other devices, the rest of my network and look for other devices on it and try to pivot from the mop to another device.

7:54The same way from the garden hose to a computer or the garden hose to a smart outlet. And then from a smart outlet to a computer, who knows what path that person takes. It's doable. It's even been done at casinos. There was a, I believe it was a thermostat in a fish tank, right? They got, did you hear about that? Oh yeah. I think I did hear about that. I don't know the story though. Do you? I don't know the full story, but I know that it got hacked and they used it for some way nefariously. Wow. A thermostat and a fish tank. Right, and a fish tank. Incredible. I think that the IoT stuff is so interesting.

8:27The internet, like the Nest thermostats and the smart robots, because everything is going in that direction and security is expensive. Nobody's trying to secure those devices because why spend the extra money to have the guy write secure code? It's like an afterthought, especially, and look, even if US companies or Western companies start doing that, Do you think that the company that knocks this thing off, that ends up being the cheaper one that sells$2 million on Amazon, are they going to give a crap about that? No. Yeah, I don't know. I doubt it. I mean, without going into a million details about it, owning a cybersecurity company and seeing this stuff every day, I get to see all these gaping vulnerabilities.

9:05You know, sometimes it's low-hanging fruit. Sometimes it's, you know, massively exploited flaw in a lot of systems. Sometimes it's something like that. And sometimes it's very complex attacks. But seeing it at my company, sometimes it's as easy as, for example, like we have a tool called Darkwatch, where you can put in your personal email address or your employees if you wanted to look and see which passwords are out there on the quote unquote dark web from public databases. But they're a collection of 140 billion different records. So you put your Gmail in there, you put your business email, whatever you choose, it's going to come back with your passwords, some sensitive info.

9:42Sometimes it's your address. It could be your social. It could be your credit card. There's nothing that as a company that we can do to get rid of that data. At least, you know, you could change that password, you know, try to protect your identity the best way that you know how. And what we offer, which we, you know, is something we do privately is if you want your information removed publicly, we can help you with that. But when it comes to these collections of databases, we can't remove them. They're not ours. We just have a collection of them that you can search yourself. And same goes for your face.

10:11So we have another thing, which is important because this is going to go into the next topic. We have a tool called Identity IQ where you can upload a picture of your face. And I could take a screenshot or take a picture of your face right now. It's never been on the internet before. It'll measure 120 plus points of your face. And it'll use that against a large database of other faces and find you all over the internet with links to where you're at. And sometimes that data is valuable for a business owner or for an individual because they want to know where they're being posted. And like one example that I've used before is you could be in a background at a sporting event, not knowing that a picture was taken of you.

10:52And now you know that you are letting people know that you live in this town because you're supporting this little league baseball team. And you're in the back and you're this little speck in the corner. but it's important to just scan and see what's out there because otherwise you won't know. You know, that's pentester.com. There's, there's just some widgets that I'll save all the hassle and I'm talking about the vulnerability scanning and keeping your company safe. The two widgets themselves, I believe are valuable for any person. You know, we, we have a discount if you reach out to us, but it's 50 bucks to sign up.

11:24Yeah. Let's put a link in the show notes with the little discount. Can we do that? Can we arrange? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. I can give you a, I can be happy because we do individuals and businesses. And just like I said, dark watch, looking up your email and identity IQ, looking up your face. Those two things alone are worth you checking out what's out there. Yeah. And that's not just me because I want to promote the business. It's because I genuinely believe you should. It would be scary if my face wasn't all over the internet for obvious reasons. But I think if you told that to like my dad or my wife, she's not going to be thrilled.

11:57For me, I'm like, great. I hope it's in a hundred thousand different places. Of course. Right. because I've got all kinds of stills. I mean, I have Google alerts set up for my name just to make sure that the stuff out there is true or not, whatever. But I think for a normal person who's in a normal line of work, it's probably quite unnerving to see you pop up all over. And sometimes it's probably terrifying. I mean, if you popped up on some kind of weird forum and it's used sunbathing and it's taken from a drone or something, now you're like really freaking out. That stuff is definitely possible.

12:28And then there's people that use photos of you on other websites to sell products. And you may have no clue. You could be on some Russian website that's selling dishwasher fluid. And you have no clue, you know? Yeah, that's funny. That happened to a friend of mine. She went to Brazil and she was getting some ice cream. It's Vanessa Van Edwards. She's been on the show. She's on YouTube and a podcast author. She went to go buy ice cream and she's like, wait a minute. And she took a photo and it's her on the ice cream freezer. Oh my God. But it's from her book. They just cut it out and they put it on there like, ooh, ice cream instead of, you know, like body language.

13:03Yeah, exactly. That's exactly my point. And it's just, there's so many examples of that, but it's just important to check it out. Well, all right. It's a good time to pivot then to you hacked a pedophile website. Tell me about this. I got a bunch of data from a pedophile website that I was alerted about from a friend of mine's wife. She texted me and said, you know, she sent me some horrible screenshots of some forum posts. One of them was including, you know, a father that had his child in the bathtub. You couldn't see, you know, the child naked, but you could you could tell that they were like they were like their back was, I guess, looking forwards.

13:40It said in the title, they have no idea what's going to happen to them tonight. And underneath of it was other people saying what they were going to do to this person's child. And there was more screenshots than that, which, you know, I'll get into them if you want me to read them. but uh you know i i left where i was at and i went home and i didn't know exactly what i was going to do obviously i just knew that i needed to do something whether it be report this website start a petition you know on change or it would change.org is just a place where you can you know sign petitions for things that you care about i didn't know what i was going to do yeah so after she sent those messages i i went home and uh and did everything that i possibly could to find a way to take this thing down and I'll leave the ways that I did it out.

14:24I didn't know about the site prior. I've never seen anything like this in my life. But when I did see the forum post there, there was no... This was on the clear web, by the way. So anyone could visit the site. You didn't need an account to access any of the data. I believe you needed an account to access any of the private messages, like any other website. But everything was publicly facing and you could see this very large group of pedophiles. And, you know, after I did some digging and I found my way into their server, I installed a few backdoors. And my first thought was, okay, well, I don't want to download this whole site.

15:02I don't want to download images because I don't want to be in possession of CSAM or child pornography. I want to download all of the users out of the database. But that is as far as I'm going to go. I'm going to take the identifying details, which includes their emails and usernames and more. and I'm going to reach out to the government and they're going to come. In my brain, this is what I'm thinking at the time. The government's going to come. They're going to take these back doors that I have because they have no idea they were compromised at this point, at least that I was aware of. And they're going to take over these back doors and they're going to grab all this information themselves.

15:36But I'm going to notate everything with timestamps and this and that. And if I get in trouble for this, then it is what it is. I was doing it to protect the children. and I'll get into the details of the site, but I wasn't really scared of getting in trouble at that time. It was more of like, this needs to go. This website is so bad and it needs to go. I'm going through the users that I dumped and the first user, user ID one, which is the administrator of the site, used his personal Gmail address. Wow. Yeah, and his name was Nathan Larson, who was a politician. And I found that by Googling him and he ran for Congress twice.

16:14And I believe, you know, you could fact check this, but I believe at one point he got 2 % of the vote in Virginia, which I know 2 % is not a big number, but it's a big enough number for this guy. He was publicly a pedophile, publicly pro-incest, publicly against women, publicly a white supremacist. You name it, this guy was it. Wow, he's like a collector of terrible titles. Yeah, and not only that, but I think at one point he sent a letter or email saying and saying he was going to kill the president. He did time for that. This guy just overall was like a horrible person. So when I seen him in the database of running the site, I reported that immediately.

16:50I got my tip line number. And you can see that on Project Veritas. They have a screenshot of my original tip to Cybertip.org, which I believe is NCMEC, like National Missing and Exploited Children. I reported it there. And I really, in my brain, I'm believing they're going to knock on my door and gather this data. and they're going to be just as antsy as I am to get this thing taken down. Because not only was there pedophiles on here, there were children, or at least people claiming to be children. In my brain, I'm thinking, okay, there's kids on here trying to sell their bodies to these people.

17:20This needs to go. You saw kids on there basically prostituting themselves or trying to? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, you know, like I said, I can read you some of this stuff. Like I have one here that says, Hello, guys, I'm a 16-year-old boy from Iceland who wants to sell pics or videos of me doing anything you want me to do. Send me a DM if you're interested. and the title of the forum post was 16 year old boys selling pics or vids. Who knows if this was really a 16 year old or not at that time, but I'm reading stuff like that and many more. This is just one I just picked to have some open in preparation to the show.

17:50But that stuff made me very sick to my stomach, knowing that kids are being exploited and victimized, whether they know it or not. But like, you know, going back into what I'm saying here, I was really under the impression that the government was going to just show up or call me or do something to take this thing down. And nothing happens. So I was like, okay, well, then I'm going to go to the media. I'm going to make this public and I'm going to force their hand, basically, is what I felt at that time. I talked to countless media people and all of them seemed very interested in running the story.

18:19I didn't have a single one that actually answered it. I probably spoke to 12, 13 different news agencies. And if you want me to tell you the specifics, I will. But I talked to a lot of them and all of them were interested in running the story and all of them had the exact same response. And it was that they couldn't run the story because their legal team was not okay with it. And I was like, okay, well, if you can't run the story with what you guys are considering, the illegally obtained material, like the usernames and the emails, then just let parents know that this site exists. If you see your kids on this website, get them off of the site.

18:54And they still wouldn't run the story. I was so pissed off. At this point, I was incredibly angry that nobody wanted to do anything. I called my lawyer. My lawyer reported it to the task force. I called a lawyer in Virginia. That's where the owner of the site, Nathan Larson, lived. I tried to figure out what their recommendation was. She didn't have anything that she could offer to me. I ran out of options eventually where there was just like, I can't do anything. And all I can do is sit here and wait and hope that somebody is going to show up. Well, I waited six months and I see on the news, Nathan Larson's arrested.

19:27And I'm thinking, oh, great. They did some. Yeah. Right. So I look at these articles and they don't bring up the website. They don't bring up anything about that. They just bring up the fact that he kidnapped a 12-year-old girl and allegedly raped her. That's the one that he got caught with. Six months prior, I don't know how long he's been a pedophile or was a pedophile, but that's the one he was caught raping or caught kidnapping. Wow. I'm sure I can say with confidence that this guy has done worse. You don't just get caught on your first time doing anything. Right. Whatever the case was, I believe that could have been stopped if I would have just been heard.

20:03And I understand the government a lot more than I did at that time. Now, it's just slow process. And the tip lines are just blasted with tips all day long. And maybe they did see it. Maybe they were investigating. I don't think I'll ever know. But at that time, I really was upset with the government. So I took it in my own hands and I started to look for groups out there that were helping, you know, expose these people. if you want, you know, I can talk about that right now or continue reading about the site. I'm still, I'm curious a little bit about the site because there's the one offending image, but I assume when you went in there, you came across, and I know you didn't export this or peruse the materials much.

20:40You mostly went for the users. Uh, and we'll link to the Project Veritas video on the, in the show notes where they track down one of the users and he admits everything on camera, which is crazy. Oh yeah. Just that's one of many, but yeah, that's just part one. It's one of thousands of guys on there, right? Well, one of many that have been confronted already. Yeah, I see. Okay, interesting. Yeah. I mean, this guy, he is a sort of a pathetic soul. He just like had a non-functional life, porn addiction, but like OCD to the point of, I think there was a quote from the video where he said he can't even brush his teeth.

21:11Yeah, yeah. He's so obsessed with watching porn that he can't even brush his teeth, literally, like not even figuratively. Yeah. Literally, he's that addicted to porn, But either way, it's no excuse to be looking at and soliciting children for, you know, for photos. No, of course. No. What else did you find on the on the site? I mean, how did how did you know that wasn't like, oh, this is 4chan. Someone's trolling. Absolutely. Because, you know, I got a picture I'm looking at right now. And the title is, do you want me to be graphic here? Yeah. So pause now if you have kids in the car, even though I warned everybody at the top of these shows that not to have kids in the car.

21:48If you're listening in public, pause this now, because people are going to give you a side eye once they hear this. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, definitely, definitely pause it or wait till later to listen to the rest of this. So this title was in the category of JB pill, which I learned recently means jailbait pill. And jailbait means kids. The title of the post is, Who Wants to Anally Gangbang These Little Sluts? And the content of it says, I've got first dibs on the little whore in the middle. And then it says at Joseph Fritzl, who was Nathan Larson, that was the name, one of the two names he went by on the site.

22:25He said, pick a whore for yourselves. And it's a picture of three little girls in bathing suits, holding hands. Oh man.

22:34You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Ryan Montgomery. This episode is sponsored in part by Vital Proteins. You've probably heard of Vital Proteins. They're the number one brand of collagen peptides in the U.S., and for good reason. A lot of people, myself included, take it pretty much daily to support things like healthy hair, skin, nails, bones, joints, all the good stuff. That starts to matter more the longer you've been walking around on this planet. But now Vital Proteins is shaking things up, literally. You can tell a dad wrote this copy with a brand new collagen and protein shake.

Read the full transcript

23:02And this isn't your average protein shake that tastes like chalk and sadness. This one's light, chocolatey, super smooth, and it's got something pretty unique going for it. high quality protein, 30 grams of it plus collagen. That's pretty good ROI. Usually you're choosing one or the other, but Vital Proteins gives you both a ready to drink shake you can toss in your bag or fridge, zero added sugar, no artificial sweeteners, and no carrageenan. And I don't know what that is or if that's even how you say it, but you're supposed to avoid that. If you're already taking collagen or you're just curious about how it might support your hair, skin, nails, joints, and you don't want any carrageenan, this is a super easy, tasty way to try it.

23:38Get 20 % off by going to vitalproteins.com and entering promo code Jordan at checkout. This episode is sponsored in part by Dell. Introducing your new Dell PC with the Intel Core Ultra Processor. It helps you handle a lot, even when your holiday to-do list gets to be a lot. Like organizing your holiday shopping, searching for great holiday deals, customer questions, customers requesting custom things. Luckily, you can get a PC with all-day battery life to help you get it all done. That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel inside, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Get yours before the holidays at dell.com slash deals.

24:12Terms and conditions apply. See dell.com for details.

24:18This episode is sponsored in part by LinkedIn. If you've ever hired for your small business, you know how important it is to find the right person. That's why LinkedIn Jobs is stepping things up with their new AI assistant. So you can feel confident you're finding top talent that you can't find anywhere else. The best part is that these great candidates are already on LinkedIn. In fact, employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. That's a big deal when every hire counts. Early on, I learned that hiring isn't headcount.

24:45It's do I see my family this week? Do we actually release episodes on time? Can I take a few days off without everything falling apart? When I've hired the right person, my life got easier. They took real work off my plate, caught problems early, and treated the business like it was theirs. That's when we actually grow. With the wrong hire, I've spent months training, fixing mistakes, having the same conversations, and still ended up letting them go and starting over, you don't just lose money, you lose momentum, you lose morale, and you lose time. That's why I'm big on hiring right the first time, even if it takes a little longer.

25:14Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash harbinger. Then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash harbinger to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week. It's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. This course is about improving your relationship skills, and you're inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you.

25:48It's not cringy. It's down to earth. It's not awkward. It's not cheesy. Just a lot of practical stuff that's going to make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. Six minutes a day is really all it takes, five really, but five-minute networking was taken, and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. So hey, come join us. You'll be in smart company. You can find the course at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now back to Ryan Montgomery. By the way, do you know who Joseph Fritzl is? I don't. So you probably heard about this. There was a guy in Austria and they found that he had dug out his basement.

26:24He put his daughter in there and she had given birth to like five kids and they'd never been out of the basement. Oh my gosh. Yeah, and so they caught him, and he had this elaborate underground network, and I guess his wife or somebody else was like, I just never knew it was there because he had always secret work down in this basement. He had multiple fake doors. I'm just horrifying. Yeah, that is horrific. He picked that name for some reason. Maybe he admired this guy, given his own proclivities. The guy is absolutely disgusting, and I'll read you another post here. It was horrible. how to coax daughter without it being weird or her telling mommy the guy says my daughter 13 years old is into anime and all that and i have her on weekends dot dot i know she is interested in sex but how do i coax her into us playing together without it making our relationship weird or her running back to her mother and telling her or anyone else for that matter and someone replies and says, what anime does she like?

27:26And he says, not really sure. She writes her own stories. And that was the end of that screenshot, but I'm sure that went on. This was all, like I said, publicly accessible for anybody to read on the clear web for anybody, whether it be kids, adults, pedophiles, anybody could have seen this content. It's so gross. And you know it exists because you hear about it, but you don't really, we don't hear these kinds of details. And I've seen a very small amount of child abuse material, it's horrible. I have nightmares about it. To clarify, this wasn't something I was looking for. It wasn't like on a website I was looking at.

28:00This is something I saw under very specific circumstances that I can't get into, but suffice to say, I would love to unsee it, to unsee it if I could. And that was, I saw one image that was displayed to me for a moment by accident. And afterwards, I had to ask the investigators because that was the circumstance. I was like, hey, I saw that out of like the corner of my eye briefly, and you look at this stuff all day. You know, are you are you OK? And they're not OK. These guys are not OK. No, I can understand why they wouldn't be OK. And I'm not even looking at what they're looking at. I'm just reading about what these people talk about.

28:35I'll read you one more because it's upsetting me to even talk about the title of this is a five year old undressed before my eyes. And the guy says it happened earlier in this year. No one else was around and it could have been the perfect opportunity. but the situation was so unexpected and absurd and my inhibition so strong that I couldn't bring myself to act. I have masturbated furiously to this memory ever since for many months and hit myself for not having the strength of mind. I have developed myself greatly since and positive that I could do something now if another opportunity came. Then Joseph Fritzel replies, you know, and Larson, and says, your only hope is to redeem yourself by creating another such opportunity and acting upon it this time.

29:20Otherwise, this memory will torment you forever. Oh my God. Just to clarify to some of you guys, I'm reading you stuff about Nathan Larson, but there's roughly a little over 7 ,000 people on this website that are not Nathan Larson, that are as bad as him. I'm just reading you the stuff that's a lot more public. And it's not just him that's bad. There's a lot of bad people here. And to address another thing, just before I forget it, a lot of people are commenting on my pages and commenting on these videos, and I'm sure they'd be commenting on yours if I don't say this. People are saying, well, release the database, release it.

29:57We want it. Well, I made a good decision, I believe, a couple of years ago to not release this publicly because my original reason was because there was this website called Ashley Madison where husbands and wives could cheat on each other. And not that I'm in support of that by any means, because I'm not married. I've never been married. That website got hacked, got breached, and a lot of data got out there and it broke up a lot of marriages. But more importantly, people killed themselves because they were on that website. And I had a friend who was on that site, just curious, an internet marketer guy who was curious to see how their site was going.

30:32And he wasn't even married at the time. And his email is still in the database. His work email is in the database. and his wife knows that he wasn't even married to her at that time. It made no sense. But, you know, there was people that died because that list was released and they killed themselves. So I didn't release it for that reason back then. And now going through this database of Project Veritas and finding out that there's a strong, I'm sorry, a large number of people in this list that were actually children. Like they were really kids, not just portraying kids or role-playing children.

31:08Some of them are 18 now, and the data was from 2020. Oh, I see. They're victims, and you might dox them, and then they look like pedophiles, and their lives are ruined, and they were already obviously hurting when they were on this website in the first place. 100%. And I have an entire telegram export. They had this public telegram, and if you were on the site, you could find a link to it where you could see all them talking to each other, referring to child porn as cheese pizza and pizza, and they would refer people that take photos of child porn as cooks or chefs and all these, you know, stupid terms that I'm learning more about because we're investigating it.

31:45But I joined that telegram without them knowing, you know, with an anonymous account. I didn't never interacted in there in the public chat, but I exported all of their chats that just, you know, as evidence if the government needed it. And I saw that there was a person on there named Cherry, a username named Cherry. that was a moderator, that if you sent them pornography, that they would invite you to another telegram group. Or like child abuse material, to be clear, right? I also have conflated those terms, but not just any, the gross stuff, not the basic stuff. Any type of CSAM, yeah. Right.

32:20To prove that you're not an officer, to prove, you know, whatever their rules were, you had to send CSAM, child abuse material, to a user named Cherry, who is one of the, I believe, two moderators, if I'm not mistaken. and Terry would then let you into another telegram group, which I presume had some really bad stuff in it. I just didn't get there because number one, I didn't have CSAM. And number two, even if I had, it just doesn't sit right with me to even look at that stuff. Well, yeah. I just, I couldn't do it. I just, you know, I think I had enough with what I did. And I find out now a couple of years, almost three years later that Cherry was a child.

32:58Oh, wow. So Cherry was a victim herself And she was the gatekeeper to this horrible community that I presume existed. I just can't even imagine. I would not have imagined that underage, that actual children were also running child sexual abuse material websites. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know how it's going to go with the whole Cherry situation. We do know who, what her real name is now. I don't know exactly how we're going to go about it. She's, I definitely am not going to expose her, you know, whether she was doing something horrible to somebody or not. She was a kid and kids can't make decisions for themselves.

33:34That's why there is an age of consent. And that's why they're kids. They're not adults. If anything, I would reach out to her or have somebody that's trustworthy reach out to her for information rather than expose. I have no interest in trying to ruin a kid's life. Maybe they're predators still. Maybe they're pedophiles still. Who knows what they are, but they'll be found eventually. I don't want to be a part of destroying a child's life in any regard. So where's Nathan Larson now? People are probably wondering. Nathan Larson is dead, thankfully. When he got arrested with that 12-year-old, he went to federal prison.

34:11And according to the news, he died from self-starvation, which I find very hard to believe personally. It'd be hard to do that. Yeah, very hard to kill yourself by not eating. Because being starved by itself has got to be very difficult. So let's just say you're locked in a cell. I would assume with his charges, he was in protective custody of some sort. And in protective custody, you're fed by inmates, to my knowledge, which they'd be considered trustees in certain prisons. They may have starved him to death. And I believe if the prison knew that this quote unquote politician was being starved to death or was refusing to eat one or the other, they would have put him in a padded room and gave him a tube down his throat and forced him to eat so they didn't get sued over it.

34:54they can say suicide. I'm not going to believe that personally. That's up to you to decide. Either way, the man's dead and I'm not losing sleep over it. That was his justice, but there's a lot more justice to be served. And luckily, you know, I can't talk about it specifically, but, you know, law enforcement is involved now and things are being taken care of. Yeah. I think it's really, it's shocking that it took so long. And like you said, I get it. The tip lines are full. They don't know about the credibility. There's chain of custody, the evidence stuff. But when I told my buddy, he was a former federal prosecutor about what you had when we first talked, he's like, yeah, I would investigate that immediately.

35:31So he was mystified as to why no other DA took that up or a USA took that up. Nobody did. And then it took, I guess, going viral a couple of times for people to take me seriously, but it is what it is. I mean, like I said, God's got a plan for me. If this is his planned and that's it. You know, I'm, and I'm not going to stop until I make as much impact as possible. I'm going to try to help as many kids and people that are being victimized and trafficking, not just children, but, uh, you know, I, I have a skillset that I can use for good. And like I said, I've been doing for a few years now, um, just completely under the radar, you know, not breaking any laws or anything, but assisting other organizations to help find these guys because I had no luck in my own endeavors in the beginning, but, you know, it ended up working out.

36:20I started a little organization locally a couple months ago, maybe six months ago now. And, you know, we caught a ton of people that were thinking they were meeting a child in real life and police would arrest them. And that was called 561 PC. This is interesting. So this is something I saw when we first got acquainted. I was looking you up on Instagram and followed this. And some people have seen this on YouTube, right? So you, you and your MMA buddy who looks like kind of a, just the dude you wouldn't want to get punched in the face by, generally speaking. He's undefeated. He's, uh, he's got, I think he's got seven knockouts, eight wins.

36:54He actually doesn't look that scary, but you just know that he is. Oh, he's an animal. Absolute animal. Yeah. But he, he looks like just kind of a normal athletic dude in the, in the photo. I go to church with him twice a week. He's a great dude. He must be. And, but at the end of the day, if you are at a Walmart to meet who you think is an 11 year old girl and you and that guy come up and say, are you looking for Ashley? You know, you done screwed up at that point yeah yeah and the way that we did it was uh you know every single time i'd be holding the camera and he would he would be reading the chat logs that would be collected by an adult an adult would decoy as a child we never used real children but obviously they would decoy as a child and then the decoy would act like a child and and nothing more not talk sexual not reach out to a guy first these guys reach out on their own and it is scarily fast how quick this all goes down.

37:43Sometimes the guys that are really bad will be a little more careful and they'll want pictures. They'll say, put three fingers up in front of a TV to prove that you're real. Those guys are the ones that seem like they've probably done this before or they do this often. We've caught a few of those and a lot of them got arrested on the scene. You can find that on YouTube. But yeah, so we would meet them and instead of being a child, it would be us with a camera and we'd start reading the chat logs off to them and they'd either walk away or they'd admit it. But we've only had two people walk away from us.

38:16And the reason for that is because I do my, it's called open source intelligence or for short OSINT. I know who they are. It doesn't matter if they're using a username or just whatever. You send me a picture of your face, which goes back to what my company does. I have your phone number, whether it be fake or real. There's many ways for me to figure out who you are with just even just a logo of where you work on your t-shirt. you know you'd be surprised at some of the stuff that can be put together with the tiniest detail well you caught that one dude who basically just gumpily strolls out of walmart and gets into his prius and almost runs you guys over yeah and you're like brent we know where you work we know you work at whatever and he's like uh i don't know what you're talking about it's like so he just has this panic reaction you just realize i said to myself when i saw that video this was the last time this guy's gonna do that and then you're like actually they caught brent 1200 miles away 10 days later in another state 10 days later yeah so he left and uh i got the chat logs from another organization and brent since he never he didn't say a word to us when he sprinted out of the walmart he thought he was being chased by police even though we make it very clear dustin and i do we say you know we're we're not police officers you're free to go you're not being held against your will we make it very clear that we're not you know holding them because it's yeah we don't want to get in trouble for trying to do the right thing for sure yeah brent i knew he was a teacher beforehand.

39:36I knew that he had a bachelor's degree in some type of teaching. I knew he worked at two different schools. I knew all of this going into it. I knew who his family was. I knew where he currently worked. I knew all of his social medias. I knew everything about him. So when he was walking away, I was trying to say some of the details that most guys would say, oh, crap, he knows a lot about me. Let me stop and talk. Maybe I can talk my way out of this, which in reality, no matter what they say, the police are on their way. So Brent just takes off full speed and I chased him to his car. And since we never got a word in about whether we were police or not, he just assumed that we were.

40:12And, you know, Scrappy and I get a text message and we find out that the guy was caught again, 1200 miles away by another predator catcher. And in the chat logs, he said, I was chased out of Walmart by two police officers. So it was just like, wow, the guy didn't even know, but just imagine about him driving. He probably ran out of Florida of thinking he was wanted, if I had to guess. Imagine the times, like I said earlier, imagine the times he was not caught. If he's caught twice in 10 days, 1 ,200 miles apart, what about the times he wasn't caught? The guy is still walking the street right now.

40:44He's not arrested. This guy is still, you know, he may listen to this. Yeah, I'd like to think the demographics of this show don't include a lot of pedophiles, but statistically speaking, there's got to be at least one, right? I mean, this is a... Somebody's going to listen to this, and they're going to be in this, you know, do you want me to name the website? Yeah, why not? Yeah, so the website was rapey.to.so.co and.su. There was four different versions of the same domain name. Wow. But they all were exactly the same thing. So if you are a member of one of those sites, I guess you have every reason in the world to be scared.

41:15Yeah. Wow. And also, really gross name, rapey.to. Like right on the nose, not trying to hide it at all. I mean, I know that sounds kind of funny, but I don't even mean it to be, it's just really gross. They're not even trying to sugarcoat it. It's just like open rape of kids. Of course. And the stuff that I'm reading to you, anyone could see. Remember, so all this stuff was publicly accessible for anyone to read. Did you get to the point in the video that you watched where you saw who was hosting this website? Yeah, I saw that it was hosted by somebody who hosted the Pirate Bay, which for people who don't know is basically like a BitTorrent kind of software movies website.

41:52Everybody who's 40 or so and went to college with fast internet and has done BitTorrent even once in their life was probably on the Pirate Bay grabbing music and movies, not gross stuff or illegals, but literally like Pirates of the Caribbean DVD rips. Yeah, exactly. So the Pirate Bay was just a completely different thing. And he was one of the three creators, founders of the Pirate Bay. And, uh, I, I have some communications between him and the administrator of the site where he, you know, says that he manually reviewed the site, which if you're hosting a website, you have more access to it than what the public does.

42:26So my point in saying that the stuff I'm reading you was publicly accessible for anyone to read, he had access to read the private messages. He could look on the server. He could have grabbed any images. And he said that he reviewed the site and all he saw was troll comments and holiday photos of children. And he said that he didn't see anything offensive there. I'm not going to say that if Frederick is a pedophile, because I don't know if he is or not, But I know that he was okay with hosting a website that was creating, soliciting, and showing child pornography. And he was accepting money to not only host it, but set it up.

43:02He actually configured the server based on the logs I have. And the thing is, web hosting is not that expensive, I would imagine. So it's not like he was getting paid millions of dollars to host this and he just looked the other way. That's what makes me think he's a pedophile. Yeah, well, he may be. He lives in Thailand. So that's also a red flag in my eyes. but there's no way to actually prove it. Well, to be fair, a lot of people live in Thailand. Yeah, well, a lot of criminals move to Thailand, though. That's what I know. I'm just kidding. I'm giving you shit because it's like, well, he lives in Thailand.

43:33It's like, all right. Not everyone in Thailand is bad. I'll make that very clear. Lovely place. Yeah. Lovely place. I have no problem with people in Thailand, but I do have a problem if you're hosting a pedophile ring and you live in Thailand. I think all 71.6 million Thais can also agree that running a child porn website from Thailand is not okay. Thailand, don't hate me. I didn't mean it offensively. No, no, I'm just giving you crap. I'm trying to keep it a little bit lighter because this is such a heavy show, right? I'm grasping at the humor straws where I can get them. I appreciate that because I've been talking about it for a couple weeks straight now.

44:08It's getting to me. It genuinely is getting to me. This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ryan Montgomery. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors, all of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show. Those are all on one page, jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And you can always search for a sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website as well, jordanharbinger.com slash AI. It's not always right. It did tell a few people, myself included, that my mom was racist, but otherwise it's quite useful.

44:46Jordan harbinger.com slash AI is where you can find it and check it out. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Ryan Montgomery. You showed me a demo of going into a chat room and seeing the predators basically pop up. What is a Google like teen chat room, Florida. And you click on the first freaking link, go in there and you're starting to get DMS or private messages right away. And I've told this story on the show before, so I'll keep it super, super short. But, and I think I told you as well offline that when I was young, I was working at a security company and the guys were asking me how I meet women because they were talking about real dating.

45:25And I said online on AOL and they're like, what, how does that work? And we just got to talking that I was DMing women on or instant messaging women on America online. And one of the guys is brilliant. He said, Hey, if you want to learn how to stand out from the other guys, cause I was like, they're like, what do you say? I'm like, uh, hi. And you know, like, oh, it's lame. Right. You know, you need to pick up lines. They said, if you want to stand out from the other guys, make a profile as a girl and see what comes your way. And that was how I discovered exactly what you demonstrated in that chat room.

45:53Yeah. So for those who haven't seen what I demonstrated in the chat room, it was within 10 seconds, a 47 year old man was, was interested in talking sexually with a 13 year old girl. And, uh, you know, that's reproducible at any moment at any time, because I've shown so many people just to show an example of it. And a lot of people might think, well, there are some weird chat rooms on the internet. That's where the predators are hanging out. Well, this is not just the teen chats. This is Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Xbox, Roblox, Minecraft. I could go on for hours with all the different platforms.

46:25These guys are in, you know, especially if you're a little girl, but little boys too. It doesn't matter what your gender is, any gender for that matter. You know, it's very prevalent anywhere. and if you have the stomach to deal with it, try it for yourself. Set up an account. There's nothing illegal about making an account saying you're a child and just wait for somebody to message you. You'll be blown away at how quick it happens. So it's important for your kids to know that it's okay to come to you about this stuff. You're not gonna get mad at them because you're gonna protect them at the end of the day.

46:59And then secondly, I also wanna make it very clear that I don't believe personally that you'd be a helicopter parent is the term for it. If you are going through your kids' devices or asking who their friends are, and not just taking their word for it, you know, figure out who their friends are. And like when I was a kid, my mom was very, very lenient and not very strict whatsoever. But if I was staying at someone's house or if I was hanging out with somebody, like when I was very young, she would call the parents and make sure that I was where I said that I was. And, you know, there was no such thing as an iPad babysitter back when I was a kid.

47:30Don't judge me. I feel attacked. You know, that's what most people are doing nowadays. You know, they just hand the iPad over. And the problem is the iPad is connected to the internet most of the time. And, you know, kids are a lot more advanced than they were when I was a kid. And when you were a kid, I'm sure. Darn right. It's just important to make sure you know what your kids are doing and not just taking their word for it. Because remember when you were a kid, I mean, how often were you honest with your parents? Sure. And now they can hide a chat app in a fake calculator or something. fake calculator app on their phone.

48:01Yeah, absolutely. I've seen this. It works. It functions. The calculator app will actually function unless you put the right pin in, and then you put the pin in, you hit the right button, and then the other app opens. It really is amazing. I know about this because one of my buddies is kind of like a, he's an older guy, he got divorced, and he's like, look at these young lassies that I'm dating. And I'm like, okay. And he busts out a calculator app. And I'm like, what are you going to, oh, got it. I don't need to know all these details, man. It was like, they weren't young girls that he was dating.

48:32I mean, he was just dating regular women, but he kept like the photos hidden in an app, which actually, I guess maybe is for when the girl that he's dating that day looks in his phone when he's in the bathroom and finds all the 83 other girls he's talking to online or women, I should say, because he's like 50. It's his hidden stash. Yeah, it's his stash. And if a 50 year old man, or he's probably pushing 60 can do that, then a teenage kid who is born natively into with a frigging iPhone in their hand is going to figure out how to chat with somebody in a gaming app that you don't even know exists.

49:06Exactly. And for parents that don't understand, you can start a game and immediately as you start a game, you are you're matched up with complete strangers. And these strangers could be nine year old kids. They could be 50 year old men or women or whatever gender. They could be anybody. So there is no there's no matchmaking. You know, I'm sure there is in some games, but most of the time there's no matchmaking that's matching kids up with kids. And a lot of times kids, they want to see the adult stuff. They want to see the mature game. So they're going to lie about their ages, you know, sure. Maybe they might have a squeaky voice or whatever, but they might lie about their age and their profile, get into certain things that maybe a matchmaking software that otherwise would have put them with other kids, puts them with adults.

49:51You know, not every game is that way. I'm just guessing there, but you know, it's just be careful is all I'm saying. Just make sure you know what your kid's doing. For sure. Megan Phelps Roper, who escaped the Westboro Baptist Church cult. Do you know about this cult? Oh, I know all about it. Yeah. Yeah. So she was on the show episode 302. One of the ways she got out and I'm going off memory here is I think she was playing words with friends. Okay. And it matched her with a guy who was just really nice and chatty and talked to her and like added her on the app and they used to play all the time.

50:23And he slowly started asking her questions. And then I think it was like a rabbi or something. Those questions made her think. And then she was like, wait a minute, this is insane. I'm in a cult. And she escaped. Yeah. Well, thank God she got out because they're horrible people in my opinion. She's in a cult. She's in a high control situation. Imagine your normal parent with your kid. You're not controlling everything they do. You don't know about words with friends or whatever the equivalent is. She was in a high control situation where they were looking at her texts and phone calls. They just didn't see the chats inside words with friends.

50:53Right. And that's why it's super important for not, like I said, not only to go through your kids devices to make sure you know what they're doing, but let them know that it's okay to be honest with you about that stuff specifically, because this stuff, you know, for these predators, it's a couple minutes if, you know, if that of their time, but it's going to cause trauma for that child for the rest of their life. You know, it's not your fault if it happens, you know, it's, it's the pedophile's fault or the predator's fault. But you know, if you can prevent that, just prevent it. What was interesting is during that demo that you did with the chat rooms, whenever I have done a similar demo years ago, it's been years, but whenever I did a similar demo years ago, cause I had to show my parents, I showed the FBI, these chat logs, we ended up in trapping somebody.

51:36so that's what we have in common is uh we entrapped this guy i shouldn't say entrapped because it was his own thing it wasn't entrapment yeah well you're not law enforcement so you can entrap right let me back up because this wasn't the demo this is when i started getting the instant messages as a girl on aol and i was like oh look at these i printed off transcripts or i should say i went to work and i told the guys what losers were dming me i was 38 and i'm talking to a 14 year old my boss was like whoa i know you think this is a laugh this is not funny these guys are predators. Print the transcript of the chat if you can.

52:07And I was like, yeah, I can. It's all saved. It's AOL. It's just like a thing I can print right from when I'm doing it. And so I started saving them in text files and printing them off. And we had to fax them to the FBI. The Detroit office was like, we don't handle cyber crime here. Can you imagine? That's a bygone era. We've handled computer stuff at the Detroit office. So they faxed it to D or they sent it to DC. And I remember that agent Forrester at the FBI was like, Hey man, this is bad. How many of these do you have? And I'm like, every time I log in, there's email messages waiting and I'm going to a chat room and I get 20 of these.

52:43Yep. Trust me. I know. And I haven't been a decoy myself other than a few times just to show examples of it. And our first guy we ever caught Scrappy and I was, we decoyed for that one because we, we, we just wanted to make it happen that night. But yeah, I totally understand. And reading the chat logs, even not interacting with them is hard enough. It's creepy. Yeah. It's super creepy. We got this guy to go drive across state lines, Michigan and Ohio, or at least where I was, south eastern Michigan. That's a felony in itself. Yeah, you get to delete it. Well, that was the idea. Because the local cops were like, oh, it's not us.

53:16It's AOL. They're in Virginia. And the FBI finally was like, OK, the locals are not going to know what the hell is going on with this. Right. So we basically just came up with the idea to get them to cross state lines. and then the FBI could say, oh, now you're crossing state lines to pay a minor for a sexual encounter. You know, it's a traveling charge for a felony, sex crime. What always kept me up at night and still does to this day was I saw so much incoming and there's no way we even got one in a thousand of them. No. And that was in the 90s. That's definitely the truth. I don't believe it's stoppable, but I believe that, you know, Whatever impact you can make is good enough.

53:56If you just let it go rampant and hope for the best, it's just going to continue to get worse. I don't have the answer to pedophilia. I don't have the answer to pedophiles or human trafficking. But I do know that I can offer some of my abilities and some of my network to do something about it on a large scale. That doesn't mean it's going to end it. but even if I make a small dent or like I say you know if I can help one kid it's worth it I mean recently in the past few weeks since you know my stuff has been going pretty I guess viral for other words I've had two mothers come up to me from like just two different areas too that you know would have never known me otherwise that hugged me and thanked me and like you know like I'm not doing this for recognition by any means but it felt good to know that I made a difference.

54:44And maybe their kids won't have this problem because of something that I said or did. So that stuff makes me feel good. And the flip side of that is, do I recommend anybody else do vigilante justice, go out there and catch them on your own? No, I don't. I think that it's dangerous. And I think you're putting people, well, they're putting themselves in a situation, but they're the most vulnerable people in the world because they know they did the worst crime impossible. And unfortunately, they hurt people. They kill cops. They do really bad things. So do I recommend that you go out and do it? Absolutely not.

55:19Backing somebody like that into a corner could be dangerous, right? If they're desperate. I would imagine if you're one of those guys, you have a nightmare scenario and maybe you have a plan for that scenario, which is kill the person who's after you and then possibly just kill yourself later. And you just don't want to be there. Yeah, and that happens a lot. It happens a lot. I mean, you can look up cases about it all the time where they're serving warrants on this type of stuff, and they'll blow their heads off, or they'll kill the people serving the warrant. It happens all the time. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

55:49Yeah, so I'm not saying that I'm some fearless guy, because I'm a skidding computer geek, and Dustin isn't going to out-punch a bullet. Nah, but you turn sideways, they can't hit you. You're that thing. Yeah, exactly. I can just float through the air. Superpower. Exactly. If for some reason something did happen to me, At least you guys know I was trying my best. You know, that's the best I can say. You know, I really don't have a better answer for anybody on that one. Because a lot of people are messaging me saying, be safe. You need 24-7 security. You need this. They're going to suicide. And they have all these things that people keep saying to me.

56:22And it's like, if that happens, like I said, God had a plan for me. And I don't know why this was his plan for me. You know, I have a passion for helping victimized children and victimized people. And I guess that even goes back to drug addicts. But this is my goal right now to not only run my companies, which is a separate thing, but in the time that I do have available, focusing it all on this. Knowing that you've done something similar to what I was doing when I was 17, 18 years old with the chat room stuff, let me bounce this off you because there's nobody I've ever been able to bounce this off of.

56:54So people used to ask me, why do predators in the chat rooms, some of them will say they're a 17-year-old boy and they're talking to a 17-year-old girl, but others will say, well, they'll just tell you that they're 53 even though they think you're 14. And my theory, and this is just a theory, I have no real basis for this other than experience, is that the ones who lie about their age, they either aren't gonna do anything in real life, they're just perverts, they're looking for a LARP kind of experience, or they're inexperienced and they have some sort of like vague, terrible plan to deal with their real age gap at some point later when they meet up.

57:29But the guys who admit that they're 50 and they're talking to a 14 year old, those guys are scarier because they're admitting their age for a reason. And I think the reason is because from the jump, they're planning on a real life encounter and they don't want to break trust. Right. Because otherwise, why risk scaring away a kid in the chat room if you're just going to stay in the chat room? They know they have to disclose because they're grooming the target. Well, I have a story for you there. I mean, and I agree with you to some degree, but I've seen the opposite. one of the first people i caught in south florida for example he was using a picture of a guy that was in a band and he was portraying himself to be 19 he was using a fake name and he wanted to meet what he believed was an 11 year old girl at a hotel in pompano beach florida which is you know not one of the best areas around here but either way he wanted this little girl to meet him at the hotel i already found out who the guy was by you know osin and uh i knew that he was a 40 you know In his mid-40s, he was working where he worked.

58:30I knew everything about the guy going up there. And I found out that he had a room book specifically for that girl to stay the night. He ordered food. He admitted to everything on camera. He admitted to all of his intentions. Wow. Nothing happened from it. But the guy, just think of it like this. If it wasn't us that showed up, an 11-year-old girl would have seen a man in his mid-40s, not some 19-year-old boy that wasn't even the picture that he was using. Right. He had like a slight resemblance of the guy, but like not even close. Like very, very slight resemblance. Maybe the same haircut, maybe.

59:03So his plan was to just hope for the best at that point? I don't know. What is his plan? Could have well been grabbing the girl as soon as he saw her and bringing her to the room. We don't know. But instead, it was it was actually wasn't just Scrappy and I was one other guy we brought. Because he happened to be with us. And he was I don't believe he was in the video. He might have been. We never published that one yet. We still have it. But I don't know what his plan was going to be with that 11-year-old girl. That's scary. I just always assume the guys who disclosed, they were like, eh, if I tell them up front, then it's one less way for my plan to fail because they're already comfortable meeting an old man.

59:39It goes both ways because some of them don't want to meet. They just want you to send them pictures or talk sexually, whatever they want. And they don't ever want to meet up. They could talk about their real age because for some reason, it's not illegal to do that. It's not illegal to fantasize about kids. Yeah, it's just extremely gross. But it is illegal to act on it. So it's just a really weird set of rules there. And I'm learning more about it as I go. Indeed. Look, I'm no professional when it comes to how the government handles this stuff. I don't know the psychology of a pedophile or predator.

1:00:12And I've been doing it now for three years, and I still don't understand it. But I'm picking up pieces, you know, while especially doing these investigations. Well, we've gone quite a ways here. This is going to be a two-part episode for sure. And I will say it made me feel a little gross. I'm sure you used to that, but I am so glad that you are doing what you are doing. And next time I find myself in Florida, I'll come hang and I'll take you to dinner, but I am not going to eat Campbell's chicken noodle soup. You're going to have to expand your palate, man. For God's sake. Yeah, maybe, but I feel like I'll bring some Campbell's with me to the restaurant.

1:00:43Yeah. If you bring a can of Campbell's to a Morton steakhouse, we might get kicked out, but it'll be a good story. We're going to find out. We will. Look, I'm going to steal a comedy bit that I think is relevant and lighten the show up right here at the end. I did not ask Gianmarco. Don't sue me, Gianmarco. This is required to lighten things up, but it's very relevant. You'll hear. I have a girlfriend right now. Thank you. Thank you. Neither of us has very good taste in music. So whenever we're about to make love, I put on a random Spotify playlist. And a couple of months ago, I put on an R &B playlist.

1:01:18I was feeling ambitious.

1:01:25and R. Kelly came on. Yes, you've heard the news?

1:01:33And my girlfriend was like, oh, no, we cannot listen to R. Kelly. R. Kelly is a pedophile. And here's the thing, and just hear me out for one second. Technically speaking, technically speaking, R. Kelly is not a pedophile. Just give me one second. I promise this goes well. Just hear me. The term pedophile refers to people who are attracted to those that are prepubescent. Then there's something called a hebophile. That's people who are attracted to those in the early stages of puberty, like 11, 12, 13, 14. And then there's something called an e-fiebophile. That's people who are attracted to those in the later stages of puberty, like 15, 16, 17, 18.

1:02:18But I think the reason we don't make those distinctions is because it's very hard to explain the difference without sounding like a pedophile.

1:02:35Yeah, that is exactly right. That's a great one. I hope I don't get friggin' canceled for stealing this, but I thought it was so good. And I'll link to that in the show notes. Gianmarco Sarese. I love that. Yeah. I've never heard that before. That is so true, though. That is so true. Yeah. Imagine somebody tries to, imagine like, dude, you're kind of a pedophile. No, actually, I'm an ee-hee. You're like, okay, no, never hanging out with this guy again. Yeah. Ryan, thank you so much, man. I'm proud to know you. You're taking a real risk to expose this in the way that you have. And I think it's admirable.

1:03:07Thank you so much. And I appreciate you having me on the show, man. I've got a lot of thoughts on this episode. But before we get into that, here's what you should check out next on The Jordan Harbinger Show. There is no pill that cures malignant narcissism. There just isn't. You can't take a pill for it. Character flaws are fixed and rigid, and they remain with us, and it would take heroic efforts on the part of the person to overcome these things. Only they can fix themselves. The point is things will not get better, so document everything. The person with the best set of records of events wins.

1:03:48I have to be honest and say, look, as you said, Jordan, it's not going to get better. Things will get worse. And unfortunately, it usually does. And the person that pays the price are those that are closest to the malignant narcissist. Once I teach you to look for these behaviors, you will never forget them. You will be more aware and you will be able to notice them. And when we begin to accumulate these behaviors and we aggregate them and they go into that checklist, you know, there's 130 something items on the predator checklist. And you say, wow, this person tops 50. This individual will put you at risk.

1:04:36They will victimize you. It doesn't matter where you're at. There is no safe place. There is no safe church. All it takes is one predator to undo all of that. For more on dangerous personality types and how to spot them before they can do damage to you or those you love, check out episode 135 with Joe Navarro here on The Jordan Harbinger Show. Dark topic. I'm not sorry for bringing this to you. I think it's extremely important. Adults, we need to realize that this is out there and probably worse than we thought. But kids and young folks, you need to smarten up on the internet. I thought I knew a lot.

1:05:16I met a lot of kooky people from the internet. It's a million times worse now, way more dangerous. Not that the internet is dangerous. You just have to be damn careful that you know what you're getting. And parents and kids, talk to each other. If you're not sure about what's going on, open up those channels of communication. Just better safe than sorry. I'm gonna put some apps that keep kids safe or help keep kids safe in the show notes as well. Recommendations from Ryan. So those will be in there as well. We'll have a look for those. Also, of course, there's a discount code for Ryan's company, pentester.com.

1:05:46You can get 15 % off and secure your websites and companies, but more importantly, your kids. All things Ryan Montgomery will, of course, again, be in the show notes. You can also ask the AI chatbot at jordanharbinger.com. Transcripts in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Our newsletter, jordanharbinger.com slash news, highlights and takeaways from some of the popular episodes of the show going all the way back. I reply to you when you reply to me there. Send me your snarky comments, passive aggressive, and even, dare I say, constructive feedback.

1:06:23jordanharbinger.com slash news. Don't forget about six minute networking as well. Also at jordanharbinger.com slash course. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram or hit me on LinkedIn where all the normal people with more than two brain cells seem to be hanging out these days. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

1:06:58If you know somebody who needs to keep their kids safe online, is interested in hacking, social engineering, penetration testing, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Conspirituality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation.

1:07:28It's called the Conspirituality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies. An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that.

1:07:57From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics. Find Conspirituality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.

From the publisher

Ryan Montgomery (@0dayCTF) is a professional cyber security specialist, the founder of Pentester (JORDAN15), and an ethical hacker known for exposing online predators. [This is part two of a two-part episode. Be sure to catch up with part one here!]

What We Discuss with Ryan Montgomery:
  • How vulnerable are your "smart" appliances to savvy hackers?
  • What did Ryan discover when he hacked a pedophile website?
  • How did the authorities respond when Ryan tipped them off about what he found on this website and who was involved?
  • How Ryan and his MMA friend directly confront predators who think they're meeting minors in the real world.
  • What should you do (and not do) when you encounter would-be predators online?
  • And much more...

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/852 

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals 

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! 

Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

More from The Jordan Harbinger Show

All 575 episodes
852: Ryan MontgomeryThe Jordan Harbinger Show · 1 h 3 min
Listen in VO