OM DENNE EPISODE
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James McGibney is the man who took down Hunter Moore, the "King of Revenge Porn" behind the notorious site Is Anyone Up. He infiltrated Moore's operation, bought the site out from under him for less than $15,000, and turned it into an anti-bullying platform. That story became the hit Netflix documentary The Most Hated Man on the Internet.
But that was more than a decade ago. Today James, a former Marine and cybercrime investigator, is going after something much bigger and much darker.
In this episode of The Hidden Third, Mariana Van Zeller sits down with James to talk about his current investigation into two loosely connected online networks called The Com and 764. The Com is a sprawling group of mostly young people, some as young as 15 and 16, who trade stolen data, run crypto scams that have drained hundreds of millions of dollars from ordinary people, swat their enemies, and in some cases prey on underage girls. 764 is the offshoot that has captured the FBI's attention for coercing minors into producing sexual and self-harm content, sometimes pushing them to suicide.
James walks Mariana through how he traced these networks from low-level "script kiddies" all the way up to what he calls the head of the snake in Pakistan. Along the way he uncovered a billionaire's son who allegedly trafficked a 16-year-old girl into Miami and beat her on tape, a teenage girl who laughed on a recorded call as her crypto scam victim killed himself, and a group of young men flashing quarter-million-dollar nights at Miami clubs while underage girls walked past bouncers uncarded.
The conversation moves through the sextortion crisis pushing American teenagers to suicide before their parents ever find out, why crypto scams have quietly surpassed drug trafficking as the most profitable criminal enterprise in the world, and somewhat of a disagreement between Mariana and James over cheaters.com and the question of who the bully actually is when you publicly out someone for cheating. It also goes somewhere personal. James opens up about his own childhood in foster care and about watching his foster sister be sexually abused. He talks about why every case he takes on today, he takes on for her.
There is a lot more in this one. A guy in Texas moving faster than the FBI because subpoenas take months and he doesn't. Living armed, with private security at the house, because that is now the cost of doing this work. An ISIS hit list. More than a thousand death threats sitting in his Instagram inbox right now. And a very simple explanation of why you should never, ever connect to the free Wi-Fi at your hotel.
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