New Burner Phone

Normally one would not talk about clients but in this case it’s such a circus I can share some of what I’m doing without causing trouble.

Six weeks ago the Securities Exchange Commission nailed ONPASSIVE, a $108 million pyramid scheme. When there’s a large fraud like that all the little fish cluster around, looking for victims among those discussing it. I found almost 40,000 associated accounts on LinkedIn. This ONPASSIVE is just the largest of a swarm of companies using the imagery.

One of the people who was interested in ONPASSIVE got approached by a fraudster, they were taking in, and they’ve had a little bit of a loss. They appear to have actually lost control of their phone, but their bank interdicted any major theft. Today was calls to bank and otherwise shutting things down and tonight or tomorrow we’re going to talk via Signal, both of us having new devices, and move all of her stuff to a secure environment.

I take on things like this and I charge about what a detective agency would get for an hour. Usually the victims don’t have the resources for a full throttle professional response, but I like doing this at a deep discount for a couple reasons. This puts me into new situations where ID assumption and ID theft is happening, which is a good learning experience, because similar tradecraft is required for investigations. I also typically end up with a new burner phone, a couple months of service, and a new persona that’s been planted.

The personas live on for a while until I find something else they need to investigate, and they often end up casualties. Sometimes they’re destroyed outright, suspensions and the like, but other times they’ve acquired history that makes me reluctant to employ them again. I think I mentioned in an earlier article I’m considering a virtual assistant in a developing country, but that’s not a clear cut direction. What if I end up interacting with some geopolitical thing and my assistant comes to the attention of their counter-intel agency?

And that’s where I stop looking like a case officer and revert to activism. There are no boy scouts in that business. Here’s a primo example - the guy driving the explosives disguised as the plastic trim for furniture had no idea he was signing up for a suicide mission. Ukrainian intel routed that load counter clockwise around the Black Sea in order to hit the Kerch strait bridge from the Russian side.