Transcript: Ryan Montgomery – #1 Ethical Hacker on Shawn Ryan Show (SRS #56)

He’s a professional MMA fighter.

SHAWN RYAN: We’ll get into that soon. And your goal? Protecting children and trying to make South Florida and the world a better place by catching one child predator at a time. That’s a damn good goal.

You go by Zero Day on Instagram. You’re like a modern day vigilante. Just some stuff about your hacking life. Zero day code for discovered security vulnerability with zero days to fix the flaw. That’s the meaning of it.

19 plus years hacking. You’re self taught. No college, no formal education. You claim to have imposter syndrome. You mentor and teach others on how to learn this trade. You’ve made money from working with Amazon, PayPal and Facebook. And you say that hacking is the best decision you’ve ever made in your life. Sometimes you hack up to 10 hours a day.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, yeah. Or more. But working with some of those big companies there would be through bug bounty programs. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m not.

Understanding Bug Bounty Programs

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That was prior to us starting pentester.com, which is a cybersecurity platform for small, medium sized businesses at the moment, to make sure that they’re safe online. To check for data leaks, to check where your face, where your identity is being broadcasted all over the Internet, which goes hand in hand with what we’re doing with predators. Sorry, I got mixed up there.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s all good. While you’re thinking, every guest that comes on the show gets a gift.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Thank you very much. Oh, wow.

SHAWN RYAN: There you go. Go ahead, open it up.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Got vigilant or no? Vigilance Elite. Gummy bears.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s right. Made in the USA, legal in all 50 states.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Gummy bear right now. And wow. How did you find out about this?

SHAWN RYAN: We researched you. So I know you love Ritz cheese crackers. You eat, what is it? Chicken tenders every day at noon at Burger King. Campbell soup every night.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I quit the Burger King and now I’m on the Chick-fil-A at 12:30. I do eat Ritz bits, cheese crackers every single day. Campbell’s chicken noodle soup.

Actually, I walked two miles last night to Walmart. I could have Ubered, but I walked two miles last night to Walmart to get one single can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and didn’t realize there was a microwave in the hotel room. So I even contemplated putting the metal can on the iron to heat it up so that I could eat it.

SHAWN RYAN: Last night you walked two miles for a can of Campbell’s soup to heat it up on an iron?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: For a 99 cent can of Campbell’s soup? Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: Incredible. Well, if you come here again, I’ll have that wait in your hotel room for you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: No, it’s all right.

The Interview Roadmap

SHAWN RYAN: But so moving on in the interview, you have an interesting childhood. It sounds like overcoming addiction. I want to get into your childhood, how you got into hacking, some of the stuff we can do to protect ourselves from hackers, what hackers are capable of.

And then the second half of the interview, I want to get into all the stuff you’re doing catching these predators. That’s very interesting. This is going to be one of the most informative interviews I’ve ever done.

But keeping it light right off the bat, how did you get involved with Facebook and Amazon and PayPal?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Okay, so that was actually what I was thinking about prior to you giving me the awesome gifts, what a bug bounty program is. So I don’t personally own a bug bounty program, but I work with a team. I have a team of hackers that we all work together on projects and to do that legally, there’s things called bug bounties.

So companies like Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Netflix, all the huge companies out there, they offer a monetary value for a bug or a vulnerability that’s found in their site. So what I mean by help protect these large organizations, it is through their bug bounty program. They may not be a direct client of the company, or some of them may be, but can’t really talk about that publicly. But yes, I’ve helped protect all of the above.

SHAWN RYAN: So basically this is like some type of a red cell program where you try to penetrate these big tech companies and then they basically give you a reward if you reveal how you did it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Right. So you have to reveal how you did it. So they’ll, let’s say it’s an informational bug. An informational bug could be you forgot that a page exists and it shows some of your employees information. So that may be informational if it doesn’t impact anything further than that.

Whereas something very critical like I could get access to your server or all the credit cards or all your clients attached to your company, that would be a critical vulnerability. And these companies are willing to pay depending on the severity of that vulnerability.

So Apple, for example, if you were able to take over an iPhone, they’ll pay you a million dollars for something like that.

SHAWN RYAN: They’ll pay you a million dollars?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. A million dollars. They call it a zero click exploit, meaning I can send you something that you won’t even know happened and I have full access to your phone. Million dollar bug bounty.

SHAWN RYAN: Have you done that before?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: No, I haven’t. I haven’t personally found any bugs in the new iPhones, but if I did, I’d be sure to report it to Apple.

The Biggest Bounty

SHAWN RYAN: So what, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s the biggest bounty you’ve collected and what was it for?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I can’t tell you what it was for, but I could tell you how much because there’s disclosures and there’s non disclosures. I can’t disclose the company or what the vulnerability was, but it was for over, it was $128,000 in credit on a platform. I chose that over the cash.

SHAWN RYAN: Really? So these are good sized bounties?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: How many bounties have you collected?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I don’t know, quite a bit.

SHAWN RYAN: 100, 200?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: If you combine my team, hundreds.

SHAWN RYAN: Hundreds?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, but that isn’t what I focus on anymore. I focus on the cybersecurity business which is all software and that’s a lot more guaranteed. Whereas bug bounty, there’s nothing against people that do bug bounties, but it’s not guaranteed revenue or income.

You have to just keep taking shots at companies trying to find something and hope that you get paid where there’s no stability in that.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: There’s bug bounty hunters that make a million dollars, $2 million a year, but then the next year maybe they make ten grand or less or they spend six months on one project and they make $0. It’s just not sustainable. It’s not sustainable for me.

So I started a company with my business partners, Rick, Sean and Dan. And like I said, it’s called pentester.com. It’s very simple. You just go to the site, you put in the name of your website, you press Scan and it does a preliminary scan, tells you basically if you have any low hanging fruit vulnerabilities and leaks, passwords associated with your emails or your employees. And you can sign up for an account and do a more invasive scan that will give you a lot more information.

Early Life and Background

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. Interesting. Well, let’s dive into your childhood. Where’d you grow up?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I grew up outside of, right outside of West Philadelphia in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. And I lived there most of my life.

SHAWN RYAN: What were you into as a kid?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: For the most part I was a normal kid. But after eighth grade or so, or starting eighth grade, I started to meet the wrong people and I was in the wrong places doing the wrong things and I met some people that were on drugs that were a little older than me and I started to adapt and I started to go to these.

At that time there was a rave scene in Philadelphia and I really liked that. I loved going to the raves and doing drugs, and acting like a nut. And I was just a young kid that nobody knew that I was. And I never told anybody my age back then, to be honest with you. I was lying to people about my age back then.

And those raves turned into getting, doing ecstasy and other types of drugs at the raves. And I found out over time that I didn’t really like the raves as much as I liked the drugs. And then I figured out that when I took something to come down from the ecstasy that I actually liked what I was coming down from the ecstasy with more than I liked the ecstasy. Really? Yeah, which was opiates. And that turned into a bigger problem.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, that can turn into a massive problem. Did you think you were a full on addict at the time?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, I was in full belief that I was a drug addict. I was physically withdrawing from opiates at one point in my life. So yeah, I had every reason to believe that I was.

And I don’t know how far you want to go into it at this point, but there was a time where I realized that I went through a bad phase as a child. But I do know that addiction exists. I have a lot of it in my family, especially my dad’s side. And I did some things to combat that because of those reasons.

But me personally, I haven’t used drugs or alcohol in a very long time. Since I was a child pretty much. And no drugs, just. But I wouldn’t say that I’m in recovery either. I just kind of moved away from that.

Family Dynamics

SHAWN RYAN: What was the family life like? Good family life. You close with your parents?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So I was. I’m very close with my mom. My grandfather passed away a few years ago, and he was like a father to me. He raised me, the best father I could have asked for. I wouldn’t know what a father’s like without him. And he passed a few years ago, and it was very rough, but I was blessed to be there. I was with him when he passed, and he had a great life and was a great man.

My mom is absolutely fantastic, has been supportive with me even at my absolute worst, and I put her through hell.

As for my dad, he’s been in and out of my life. During this interview, while we speak right now, he is currently in jail for something stupid. This time it was drinking. I think he had an open container of alcohol and he stole some stuff from Kohl’s. But my dad and I, I have some stepbrothers and sisters that I love, and he, when he’s messed up on drugs and alcohol, he’s not the best dad. So we go on and off talking to each other.

Introduction to Hacking

SHAWN RYAN: So from what I understand, you’re a high school dropout.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I am, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: What grade did you drop out?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Going into 10th grade.

SHAWN RYAN: Going into 10th grade. So you have up to a 9th grade education?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, technically. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: And you are the number one ethical hacker in the world. How did you get into hacking?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It kind of just happened because I was very young, and it didn’t just happen. I mean, there was a lot of stuff that happened in between it. But when I was very young, my grandparents had a computer at the house. And I don’t know if you remember this, but back in the day, AOL used to send floppy disks in the mail, and they give you a trial.

And I remember the shape of the floppy disk, and I remember seeing the front of this desktop that my grandpa, I think he brought it home from work or something back then. And I remember seeing the shape of the floppy disk and there was a little icon of it on the desktop computer. And I was like, I wonder what would happen if I put this floppy disk in the computer.

And I saw the AOL logo from the mail show up on the computer screen. And it blew my mind as a kid. It blew my mind. I was like, how did that just happen?

SHAWN RYAN: How old are you?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I’m 29.

SHAWN RYAN: No, I mean, how old are you at this time?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I had to have been like 8, 9 years old at that time, maybe. And that blew my mind. And I wanted to know how it worked from that point on. I just had this obsession with how do computers work? Why did that just come from a piece of cardboard and show up on the screen?

And I just kept learning and learning about computers and fixing computers and meeting people on the Internet through AOL Instant Messenger and other apps. And then I found it actually started with a marketing community at first, people that were doing digital marketing back in the AOL days, so just spamming out massive amount of emails, like millions and millions of emails.

But then in that community, there were some hackers, people that were writing automation tools and finding exploits and finding ways to convert on ads better and this and that.

Meeting Rob Moore

And I ran across this one guy who ended up going to prison later for hacking. I believe it was AT&T and a few other major cellular carriers. He stole some prepaid minutes. And back then, prepaid minutes were a big deal. So he stole millions of dollars worth of prepaid minutes with his partner in crime. Edwin was his partner. And the guy that I’m talking about is Robert Moore. And his hacker name went by Moore R.

And he ended up stealing these credits. And Edwin would go to these places all over the malls and the small cell phone stores, and he would resell these credits for a cheaper price than the carriers would sell them for. So they sold, like I said, a ton of those.

And Edwin decided to leave the country. He left the country. He was doing all this fancy stuff, private jets, yachts, hotels, girls, cars, doing it all while Rob was sitting at home hacking for this guy. This guy wasn’t doing anything but selling the minutes.

And then Rob gets a knock on the door. It’s the FBI, and they come in, they seize everything he has. Rob ends up out of all of this, out of millions of dollars worth of sold minutes. Rob ends up with like 20 grand in profit and two years in federal prison. And they confiscated all of his stuff, everything that he had.

And he gets out of prison, and Edwin’s on the run. They finally get Edwin. I believe Edwin got like 10 years or something, which he deserves it, honestly, because he took advantage of Rob in a weak point in Rob’s life, he took advantage. And Rob is not meant for federal prison. And he ended up there.

But yeah, Rob is the person that, from the Instant Messenger chats, Rob’s the person that motivated me to learn about hacking and spent the time with me and showed me some things because there weren’t learning sites like TryHackMe or GitHub.com or Stack Overflow or Google, none of that existed back then. So you couldn’t look up certain methodologies or hacking or how to do reconnaissance. It didn’t exist. So Rob gave me some pointers. It’s not a cookie cutter thing. Hacking is very broad.

SHAWN RYAN: So let’s backtrack real quick. How old? So you’re, I believe you said you started hacking at 10 years old?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: 11?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, 11 years old. At what point are you conversing with Moore?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Probably when I was 11. He might not have known I was 11.

SHAWN RYAN: But how did you guys, how did you find him?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Group chats back in the AIM days.

SHAWN RYAN: How does that, I mean, how does that conversation go? Hey, I’m looking for some hackers to teach me a couple things.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: No, no, I just, I was doing, I was marketing and interested, I was just active in the communities and I knew what Rob was capable of. He could do some really cool stuff with a computer and it was really just asking questions.

And Rob and I got along so well and I actually flew out to see him later in life to Washington State. I stayed with him for a week. But we kicked it off for some reason. I don’t know what that reason was, I can’t remember that far back. But Rob was the person that helped me at least get started in what I do today.

Early Hacking Activities

SHAWN RYAN: What were you wanting to hack in at 11?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I think I was more interested in just shutting people’s Internet connections off, simple stuff, nothing crazy and making money marketing. A lot of 11 year olds would probably not think about selling things on the Internet. But I wasn’t making a ton of money as a kid. I didn’t have rich parents or anything like that. And I wanted to make money ASAP.

And I knew that digital marketing, the groups that I was in, I was seeing all these people making fortunes selling. One example, we were selling acai weight loss berries. And it was a huge thing. Back in the day there were some affiliate marketers making 30 grand a day, doing AOL spams, making millions of millions of emails per day, making 30 grand a day on average. It would blow my mind.

And I don’t remember every specific about names and what programs they were on, affiliate programs they were on back then, but I knew I wanted to be involved in that. And I thought that automating it and finding exploits and in, I guess, websites or people’s computers would enhance my profits. And it did.

But then all the money that I made there, all the money that made, it all went to drugs and doing dumb stuff. But yeah, I wouldn’t take it back because I learned a lot. I grew up quick and there’s some benefits there and some things that aren’t so good there.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, let’s stick with childhood hacking. So at what point in your childhood did you start making money doing this?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Probably 12, 11, 12 years old. I was right into it.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, how much money are we talking?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Couple grand here and there, which is a lot for a kid.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s a lot for a 12 year old.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It felt like a billion dollars to me.

Ethical vs. Unethical Hacking

SHAWN RYAN: And so were you always an ethical hacker?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: No.

SHAWN RYAN: What are some of the things that you’ve done that you’ve hacked into? What’s one of the. Give us some examples.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So I guess depends on what you want to know. Like people or organizations or both.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s go into all of it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I mean, there’s, I’m limited by what I could say here. I know there’s a statute of limitations. I’m sure I’d be fine, but there’s some things that I regret that I would take back. But there is one thing out there that’s public. There’s a rap song that mentions me about, are you familiar with crypto mining?

SHAWN RYAN: Yes.

The Cryptocurrency Mining Operation

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Okay, so I hacked a ton of computers. I had a method. I won’t explain the method because it still could work today, where I could infect computers with malware. And a lot of people that infect computers with malware, which is just people, you know, if you don’t know what malware is, it comes in various forms. But the type that I’m talking about is called a Remote Access Trojan.

And that’s like the equivalent of me standing in front of your computer with full access to it. And I can, you know, I can look through your webcam, I can control your keyboard, your mouse, look at your screen, do anything I want without you knowing that I’m there.

And I infected a ton of computers. And instead of having the Remote Access Trojan functionality where I could do, you know, I could take control of these computers, I decided to do crypto mining. So at that time it was just Bitcoin and Litecoin and you know, I had quite a bit of infected computers mining at all times.

The thing that I did that was, if you could say nice, was that when the computer was idle, it would use 100% of the processor and the graphics card to mine the coins. And when the computer was in use, it would only use 20%. So they wouldn’t, you know, have a horrible experience with their computer just being bogged down the entire time. But that was a, I guess, so you started around that time.

SHAWN RYAN: You had hacked into how many computers?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Hundreds, thousands. Thousands of thousands? Yeah, probably tens of thousands.

SHAWN RYAN: And so all of these tens of thousands computers are mining cryptocurrency and going into your account?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: They were going into a pool. So pooled mining is a lot of people mining together. And then all of the, whoever’s putting in the most, like, I guess the reward is split based upon the contribution. So if you’re contributing twice as much as me, you’ll get twice as much of a profit. So it was all being sent to a specific pool offshore.

SHAWN RYAN: So why did that stop?

The Moral Turning Point

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I have morals, you know, and there was a situation that came up where obviously the bots, you know, if let’s say I had to change a pool or something went wrong, they had to be updated across the board. You know, every single bot would have to be updated to be pointed at a different address. I still had access to be able to do that.

And I was in a community at that time with some bad people who wanted to, you know, kind of buy access to my bots, and I wasn’t okay with that. And it kind of lined up perfectly with another business opportunity that I had in life where I kind of just said, you know what? Screw this. I’m done not taking the risk.

You know, if I get in trouble with what they call a botnet, if I get in trouble with this botnet, I’m doing a long time in prison, and it’s just not worth it to me. I can’t get in trouble. And I stopped. I stopped on my own will. I didn’t get caught. There were people that knew about it. You know, hackers. They may not have known it was me. Now they know it’s me, but at the time, they didn’t know that it was me.

But no, I didn’t get caught, and I’m past the statute of limitations. I didn’t hurt anybody. Maybe your power bill went up a couple cents, but that’s about it. But yeah, that was the extent of that specific hack.

SHAWN RYAN: Was that the one that, was that the hack that changed you, that turned you into ethical or was there?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I would say, yeah, I would say, yeah, yeah. Because around that time I switched to doing cyber security and starting the other businesses that, you know, we’re going to talk about. So yeah, I would say, yeah, yeah. I never really thought of it till now, but that’s when, yeah, I would say that’s when I became an ethical hacker rather than a gray hat or a black hat hacker.

Understanding Hacker Types

SHAWN RYAN: What is a gray hat hacker?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Gray hat is in between. So somebody that, like, for example, if I went to your website, I hacked your website and I sent you an email and said, “Hey, I found a vulnerability on your site,” you could call, you know, the FBI and say, “Hey, this guy just hacked my site and I didn’t give him permission,” or you could say, “Thank you.”

SHAWN RYAN: That’s a gray hat hacker and a black hat?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Black hat just, you know, takes over your website, tells you, “Hey, you better pay me or I’m releasing all your information or deleting your site. And here’s all the information about you and your wife and your family and everything.” Black hat hackers are, you know, they’re kind of ruthless.

The Future of Cybersecurity and Cryptocurrency

SHAWN RYAN: So you’re in the cryptocurrency business being a hacker, or you were. Is this the way of the future? Are we going to, what do you think? What’s your opinion on this?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, yeah. I mean, cybersecurity and keeping yourself protected on the Internet is the future. If you’re not paying attention to that now, I mean, and you’re not seeing your browser that’s warning you, the TV that’s warning you, the constant news, the constant ransomware notices.

I mean, if you haven’t heard about the active breaches right now on all of these major websites and you’re not doing anything about it, you really should start because it is the future and it’s only going to get more intense and it’s only going to get more dangerous.

And everything that you have is attached to the Internet. Everything. Unless you live out in the middle of nowhere with no Internet connection. Even the power in your house is controlled by a remote switch. What if I turned off your power for a week and you live out in the middle of nowhere? You just, you really have to take your security seriously. That’s just a random thought, but it’s a possibility.

SHAWN RYAN: I actually, glad you brought that up, but I actually meant cryptocurrency. What’s your opinion on cryptocurrency? Is it here to stay? It’s very volatile.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Very volatile. I think Bitcoin’s here to stay.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you? Yeah. Are you all in on Bitcoin?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Can’t confirm or deny.

SHAWN RYAN: Would you like to see Bitcoin?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I would love to see Bitcoin hit the moon. I mean, it’s doing well at this moment, it’s around 30 grand. But I would love to see what it was projected to be at in the hundred thousands, possibly a million a coin.

SHAWN RYAN: You think that’s possible?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Absolutely. I mean, it was, when I started, it was only, you know, maybe a couple dollars at the most per coin.

Moving to South Florida

SHAWN RYAN: Damn. Well, what brought you to South Florida?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I started a marketing company to help people get into drug and alcohol rehab. And for anyone that’s familiar with that topic, they’re going to think, okay, we had a marketing company, he was doing a thing called patient brokering, which is a felony, and I was not doing that. I didn’t even know what that was at the time. I just knew I could generate leads from the Internet.

And I started this company called the Treatment Source, which was just a website that they filled out a survey, and the survey would bring them to a 1-800 number. If they had mental health or substance abuse, they changed the term substance use issues. And I would then send those patients or clients to a drug and alcohol rehab in South Florida.

And I was generating a ton of clients and doing really well with the Internet marketing campaigns. And one day I get a call from a guy who says, you know, he was like, “Hey, will you come to Fort Lauderdale Airport right now?” And this is like, you know, right when I’m waking up. And I was like, “Yeah, I will.” Like, I was just, you know, he thought I was joking.

I called him a couple hours later. I booked my flight, and I was like, “Hey, I’m at the Fort Lauderdale airport.” He didn’t believe me. And he picks me up at the airport. And, you know, he was blown away that I even showed up there. But, you know, I just, like a week’s worth of stuff packed with me.

And when I got back to his house, we were talking about, you know, the rehab business and, you know, marketing and all the intricacies of the industry. And we became good friends at that point. And I, you know, I was thinking, well, why don’t I start a rehab? You know, like, maybe I could do this myself. If I can generate the business for a rehab, maybe we can do it together.

So he was like, “Yeah, I own one now,” obviously, because he was one of my customers at that time. And he decided to sell his shares in his rehab and use that to invest into one with me. And we started a treatment center together and I decided to move to Florida.

So I went back to PA, I put my car on the back of a U-Haul, filled it up with all my stuff, drove down to Florida from Pennsylvania and never looked back, and started a drug and alcohol and mental health facility.

SHAWN RYAN: How old are you at this point?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Twenty-two.

SHAWN RYAN: You started a rehab at age 22?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, I think I was the youngest owner in the treatment world at that time. Yeah.

The Motivation to Help

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. What, so what was your motivation for this? Because you are, from what, from our research, you are all about helping humans.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Yeah. So my motivation was, you know, like I said earlier, that, you know, my family, my dad’s side specifically had some serious drug issues. Still, still dealing with them. I went through some serious drug issues. You know, a lot of friends of mine have gone through drug issues, are still going through drug issues.

And I just, you know, maybe I got this from my mom, my grandma, my grandpa, but I just love to help people. I don’t know what it is. It makes me happy. And I guess, what would that be? Hospitality. Hospitality has always just been something that makes me happy.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, you had some pretty tragic experiences as well, if I remember correctly. Do you want to go into any of those?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Well, there’s a lot of them. So are you talking more of the addiction side of things?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. You had a couple friends die.

Personal Loss and Tragedy

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Mm. So I’ve had a lot of friends die due to heroin overdose or carfentanil, fentanyl, butyl fentanyl, acetyl fentanyl, all of the different fentanyls that are getting over here and being put in heroin. And I understand that they chose to use drugs regardless of what was in it, but they definitely weren’t planning on dying, I’ll tell you.

I mean, I lost my Uncle Richie to an overdose. I lost my best friend Ricky Revas to an overdose. And I was, you know, I’ll tell you that story because this is how something else happened. But I got a call from Ricky’s parents a couple years back and they were like, you know, “I haven’t heard from Ricky since this morning, and do you mind going over there and checking on him?”

And he was about a 15 minute drive from me and he wasn’t answering my phone calls.

SHAWN RYAN: Calls.

The Loss of a Best Friend

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And at this time, he wasn’t on drugs. He wasn’t messing up or anything. He worked for me at the rehab, and we spent every day together. So I go to his condo. I walk in the door, and I look to my left, and I see him in the bathroom, and he had his face up against the vanity. He was wearing his shorts. And I saw that he had a needle and a spoon, and it didn’t look good.

So I ran over and I tried to wake him up, and he wasn’t waking up. So I called 911, and I’m running down through the elevator to go get… I didn’t even… I didn’t think anything was wrong with him. So I didn’t bring Narcan upstairs or anything. Narcan’s what saves opiate addicts from overdosing.

So I ran to my car. I grabbed that. 911’s telling me what to do. I get back to the room, and they told me to take him off the toilet and put him on the floor. And his body was still in the position that it was in when I saw him sitting there, and his face was sideways from being on the vanity.

And I’m still in denial at this point. I gave him the Narcan in his leg. I was giving him CPR like they said to do. And I just… I remember when the cops showed up and the ambulance showed up, they didn’t talk to his parents. I did. I told his parents that their son was gone. Which I thought was a little bit ridiculous. I thought that the detective should be the one handling that, especially with how I was. I wasn’t… I was crying my eyes out. He lost my best friend. Sorry.

SHAWN RYAN: I lost my best friend to addiction, too.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Yep. So sorry.

Shared Grief and Understanding

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. My best friend, he was a SEAL. I worked with him at the agency. He experienced a lot of trauma, became addicted to opiates for injuries. Then that just became a straight addiction. They cut the pills, he went to heroin, and I spent a lot of time trying to get him better. Moved in with me, got him back on his feet, got his family involved, got him into therapy. I mean, I love this motherf*er. We’d been through a lot of shit together.

He was a phenomenal hockey player. And I used to live in Boca Raton, too, and so he lived right by me, and he kept telling me he wanted to start this hockey nonprofit for wounded warriors and that he was going to get the Panthers to sponsor it. Now he’s one of the smartest human beings I’ve ever met in my life, even when he was high.

But as it got worse and worse, I mean, just his appearance, you didn’t even want to be around him. He just looked sick. And I was in the back of my head, I was like, yeah, okay, you’re going to get the Panthers on board. Well, I’ll be damned. Son of a bitch got the f*ing Panthers on board. And I think it was the first NHL team to sponsor a wounded war… You had to be a disabled veteran to play on the hockey team.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: He had somebody helping him. The Panthers called the guy that was helping him to tell him, “Hey, we’re going to do it. We’re going to sponsor the team. You got the NHL sponsor. We’re going to sponsor the team.” That guy went over to tell him, “Hey, dude, you did it.”

And nobody answered the door. And trying to keep my shit together here, but…

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I understand.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, he didn’t answer the door. Got on a stool to see the top part. And there he was laying on the floor.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Sorry to hear that, man.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I know.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I know what it feels like.

SHAWN RYAN: I just want you to know I can relate. And I’ve lost a lot of friends to addiction.

The Fentanyl Crisis and Education

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Likewise. That was the first one. Obviously, that happened to me, and I found them, and I can’t explain that, and I can’t bring them back. But what you can do is educate people and try to help more people so that doesn’t happen to them. And you can’t fix everybody. You can’t get it through everybody’s head. They need to stop. And it’s dangerous.

And it’s not just heroin and opiates like it used to be. It’s coke, it’s meth, it’s painkillers that are pressed, it’s Xanax. They all are being caught with fentanyl. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s fact. I mean, the number one leading cause of death 18 to 49 right now is fentanyl. That’s more than car accidents. More than anything else. 18 to 49 years old, fentanyl.

So any drug that you’re doing, you have to be careful that… not be careful. You have to just try to get away from it or get a testing kit. If you refuse to stop doing drugs, get testing kits, because fentanyl will kill you. Yeah, it’s pretty rough.

The Drew Badgery Scholarship Program

But with the rehab program around that time, not long before I lost Ricky, I lost another friend, Drew, and my business partner at that time, we both were friends with Drew and I was closer with Ricky, and we decided to start a scholarship program. And it was called, we named it, the Drew Badgery Scholarship Program, which was to help people get into drug rehab that didn’t have the financial means to pay.

And the reason that’s important is because when I was a kid, I didn’t have private health insurance or money. So there was no way I was going to a nice facility like one I had or other ones in Florida or other states that are private. The government facilities, they take Medicare, Medicaid, but some of them have two, three month waiting lists. Addicts can’t wait two, three months. They die. And it could take one bad dose, they’re dead.

So having a private facility and somebody that really wants to get clean, if they don’t have the right insurance or the right money, you have to turn them down. And it just bothered me so much that you can’t help somebody that I was in their shoes. I wanted help or people in my family wanted help and couldn’t get it.

And I started that scholarship program with my old business partner. And we brought a ton of people in, probably over 100 in the seven or so years that I was there, and maybe even more than that, but at least 100. Full scholarship. Not a dollar. They didn’t spend a dollar. And a lot of them did well, some of them relapsed. You can’t fix everybody.

Expanding the Rehab Programs

But we turned that… after time went on, we adapted to how the scholarship program, we built programs around that. We built programs around trauma, we built programs around mental health, specifically co-occurring mental health and substance use disorder, all kinds of different things.

And then we branched out until we opened a detox, which was another facility, because at that point we had partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient and outpatient, but we didn’t have detox. So we were sending them to other facilities and then we would take them. So then we had two facilities.

And then we realized, okay, well, a lot of our people we were getting are coming from New Jersey or Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, up in that area. So we decided to start another facility in New Jersey. And we started, it was called the Shore Detox. But it got changed again. The name of it got changed and I sold my shares in the rehab about two and a half, three years ago, right around the time that I started to catch the predators.

And I got into the software as a service world and buying software companies and operating them and selling them.

Recognition and Continued Mission

SHAWN RYAN: So you are an amazing human being, man. To do something that has that amount of impact at that young age, I mean that’s just… just to do it in general is amazing. And you did it at what, what’d you say, 22?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s incredible. You realize that.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I appreciate it.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re welcome.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I’m still on the mission. It’s not over.

SHAWN RYAN: Good for you, man.

Transition to Software Business

RYAN MONTGOMERY: There’s so much more to come. And one spot that I forgot there was the electronic medical record system that we use. Like the same thing you would see at your doctor when they put in notes about you being at your visit. We used one called, I won’t say the name, but we used one.

And I got involved with those guys afterwards and like after I sold my shares, I went right to their office and I set up one of those plastic tables, put my computer in there. Even though I wasn’t involved at that time in that business, I wanted to work out of their office because I liked the software world.

And at that point I wasn’t sure if I was going to do digital marketing or I was going to do cyber security or both. But being around them every day I was like, I got to do it with them. So I got involved with their businesses and then we decided together we’re going to do a ton of software companies and that’s where we’re at now, like I said with pentester.com and many more. But that’s the one that makes the most sense to talk about here today.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, let’s take a quick break and when we come back, we’ll dive into that.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Okay, cool.

Introduction to Pentester

SHAWN RYAN: All right, Ryan, we’re back from the break. We’re getting ready to dive into your company, pentester. So what is pentester?

Understanding Pentester.com and Cybersecurity Solutions

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Pentester is a software solution for cybersecurity and protection. So, you know, there’s a pen test, a manual pen test where somebody would go into your company or a group of people where they would check down a list of boxes of things for your compliance, look for vulnerabilities based upon your platform, and give you a report of findings. You know, vulnerabilities.

Pentester.com, it can get confusing because pen testing and pentester.com, like pen testing is a term. Pentester.com is the name of my company. And, you know, what we do is we try to automate as much of what a pen tester would do digitally.

So pentester.com is an automated web scanning framework. As of right now, we’re building it out to be more than just a web scanner. Sorry, I’m getting mixed up.

SHAWN RYAN: No, it’s fine. So let me just ask this, then.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So it’s hard to explain. So I’m trying to make everybody understand.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I get it, because I’m a dummy with this stuff, not you. So let me ask you a question, then. So if I go to pentester.com and I type in seanryanshow.com, what kind of vulnerabilities might I have?

Here’s my website. Basically, I sell gummy bears on it, and we post upcoming episodes. Your episode’s going to be on there. We collect email addresses for a database to send out a free newsletter all the time, right? And then we got some, if you want to apply for a job here, every once in a while, we’ll post that. They can run their resumes.

We just did a thing where we’re looking for a new video editor for shorts, and they’re sending in a bunch. We have a competition for it. So for a website like, and we have advertising inquiries for a website like that. It’s run off Shopify.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Shopify.

SHAWN RYAN: What kind of vulnerabilities would I be looking at?

Email Breaches and Botnet Traffic

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So there’s many things. The first thing that came to mind was email breaches. So if you have [email protected], is that your website? Seanryanshow.com? So [email protected] or, you know, Shawn Ryan at the website or anyone that works here. I can look up that domain with pentester and see if it’s been involved in any breaches or if it’s been involved in any botnet traffic where it scraped all of the cookies and passwords from people’s browsers.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, hold on. What is botnet? What? Tracking traffic. Botnet traffic.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Right. So let’s say you were infected with some type of malware and that person grabbed from your Chrome or your Safari all of the saved passwords and all of the sessions. A website, to be signed into a website, you have to have a session. So if I took that session and replaced mine with yours, now I’m you without a password.

So some of that stuff gets released on the Dark Web or, you know, it’s Tor, I like to call it Tor. T-O-R, the onion router. That’s what the Dark Web is. But it gets released there and sometimes on the publicly facing web. And a lot of people aren’t aware of what information is actually out there.

So when you put your website into pentester, you get a preliminary report that shows all of that data that has been exposed related to your domain name. Well, it goes a little further than that because let’s say it doesn’t find anything. Maybe you’re a brand new website and, you know, Shopify is doing a good job with all of the plugins you’re using because remember, each one of those plugins is by an individual creator that could have messed up at any point in their code.

So you’re only as strong as your strongest plugin. So that’s one thing there. Shopify has their own security and then you have your own security based on your plugins.

As for the emails, let’s say I get nothing with the SeanRyanShow.com. Now I’m going to start looking into the Gmail accounts, the Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, whatever of all of your employees, your family, and then I’m going to see breaches associated with them, which I guarantee you that there is.

I am so sure that if I pull my laptop out and I put in one of your personal emails that I will have at least one of your passwords. And that password could be reused for Shopify or maybe it’s used to access that list of data with your customers that you were saying you have, the client list, the newsletters, the applicants for the jobs. Maybe it’s the same password you use for that.

Now I have access to that data that I could either ransom you with, I could escalate my permissions on Shopify with and take over your entire site. Maybe it’s the credentials to your social media platform like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, whatever you’re on. You know, those credentials could be reused.

So it is important, as you said, using a password manager, because all it takes is someone like me with a bad, you know, bad moral compass to take advantage of everything that you have.

Live Demonstration of Breach Detection

SHAWN RYAN: Could you demonstrate that right now? Yeah, just type it in my email.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, for sure. I’ll try the Shawn Ryan show first dot com. Right?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Okay, so we have some sensitive information, but nothing that would be a big deal. I can show you. I could show it to you actually, if you want. It’s not going to hurt anything.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, let’s see it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So it’s not, this isn’t specifically passwords there, but it is what came from, you know, leaks on the Internet. This isn’t, you know, it isn’t anything other than leaked data. So nothing there is sensitive to my eyes.

SHAWN RYAN: So we’re doing a good job for.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: The Sean Ryan show. But if you throw in one of your Gmails there or something, any other email that you may be using for a long period of time.

SHAWN RYAN: Just type it in here.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yep. Take a second to load. It loads over 140 billion records. Nothing on that website. There’s two E’s supposed to be there. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: All right. My IT guy’s going to live to see another paycheck.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Well, it’s not your IT guy, though. Even that one just doesn’t seem to be registered with a bunch of accounts. For example, if you were in 2019 LinkedIn breach or Dropbox, if you use any of that.

SHAWN RYAN: Vigilance.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I keep saying Vigilante. I’m sorry. Vigilance Elite. I do have password and I do have the address. Whose address? I have an apartment in.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I have an IP address. I have an address in where we’re at right now with the zip code ending in 64 and a phone number.

SHAWN RYAN: And then all that sh*t’s on there.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, and I have a lot more than that. If you want to look, take a look yourself.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh yeah, let me take a look.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, I’m halfway through. You can scroll up and down.

SHAWN RYAN: How do we clean this up?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: You can’t. You just got to change, you got to change the information. If you don’t want it there, there is no way to get rid of it.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, so what? Oh my gosh.

Why Small Businesses Are Targets

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So that’s why small and medium sized businesses that don’t realize that they’re a target, they’re more of a target than they think. They get attacked because they either have exposed credentials out there or they’re using old technology and they just get grouped in with a ton of other people that are similar targets.

A lot of them don’t realize they need to take their cyber security more seriously. And pen tester, this is kind of a shameless plug, but for 50 bucks a month it’s worth the money. You know, we are the cheapest to my knowledge in the cyber security world and we’re not only giving you a software solution, but we’re giving you a hands on, you know, manual confirmation for anything that we’re not sure of.

So for 50 bucks, someone would have offered that to me prior to being a hacker myself, I was a little kid, but let’s just say I wasn’t ever, you know, I would be more than happy to pay $50 a month for something like this. This is just one of many things we offer.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. You know, so is my website safe for customers?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That’s up to you to decide. I mean, I have it around a scan. This is just a breach.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, that’s just a breach check.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. And this is, we have more records than literally anyone else on the Internet. So we’re going to be able to tell you more than most people. Some people are going to have access to these private databases that we have as well as the public ones.

But if you download certain other competition websites that say, or, I’m sorry, sign up for other competition websites that say that they offer breach protection or the leak protection, breach or leak protection is what they’ll say, they don’t have a database as big as ours. I’m sure of it. I mean, I’m very confident in that.

And this is without running, as I said, this is without running a scan. So, you know, I’ll keep the computer ready for when you want to see a face, but I’ll show you how wild that can get.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s do that.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: You want to see it?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, let’s do it. So describe what you’re going to do.

Facial Recognition Technology Demonstration

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So I’m going to do, you want, I could do my face. Your face? Anyone’s face that you want to do.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, we can do my face.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Okay. It’s going to be a lot of pictures of you, obviously, because of your podcast.

SHAWN RYAN: But so basically what you’re doing is you’re taking a photo of me. It’s going to do the facial recognition and find every image on the Internet that has my face in it, whether I’m tagged in it or not. Yeah, it’s strict. You could find my face in the middle of the Super Bowl stadium.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: As long as it’s on the Internet. So, yeah, let me take a picture and send it to myself. Okay. So I took a picture of your face and you can see it’s just a picture that this has never been on the Internet. Right.

SHAWN RYAN: That is a really good looking man right there.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Amazing. So I uploaded that to here.

SHAWN RYAN: So you took a picture?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yep. Now you can go through these and see if there’s anything that’s not, I don’t know if there’s going to be anything that you don’t want on there or not, but if you click them, it will give you a link to where that picture’s hosted at.

But remember, I used a picture that was never on the Internet to find those photos of you. So it measured your face, measured 120 points on your face, associated a picture that’s never touched the Internet with you. And for somebody that doesn’t have as big of a following or as many photos out there, there may be less results. But you could be in a photo that you’re not aware of or there could be some stuff out there that you would want to be aware of.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, wow. This is really, this is like everything. Yeah, it just keeps going. Cool stuff that’s insane.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Most people, you’d be crazy not to pay $50 for that as a business. It’s just that getting that messaging in somebody’s brain. When they look at the website or they see an ad for, “Hey, are you taking your cybersecurity seriously?” And then they run their website through a light scan, they see, “Here’s some breach credentials, here’s some pictures that we found on your site. Here’s some vulnerabilities.”

And you have an option to sign up for free, which you get your preliminary report for free. And then you have your option for $50 for a small business. And you just say, you know what? Screw it, I don’t need that. I just, I can’t comprehend why you wouldn’t want that.

SHAWN RYAN: So, yeah, damn.

Exploring the Dark Web

Let’s talk about the dark web. So I hear a lot about the dark web. Drugs on it, you can find child pornography on it, you can, it sounds like it’s just the black market. The new black market, correct?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: So what? I’ve heard about it. I know about it. I know it’s all stuff you shouldn’t be doing, but how do you get on it? What? Where is it?

Understanding the Dark Web and Tor

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Okay, so the Dark Web itself isn’t a marketplace like what you’re thinking. The black market, or whatever you want to call it, once you’re connected to the Dark Web Tor, the Onion Router, what I was explaining before, you still need to know where to go to visit these horrible websites.

They’re like, you know, imagine a very long string of letters and numbers and the website, instead of dot com, it’d be dot onion. You can’t visit those websites in a regular browser. You have to do that while you’re connected to the Onion Router, which you could download at the Tor website.

And then you could go to a thing called like the Hidden Wiki. And the Hidden Wiki will show you all different categories of these websites with a link to them. And there’s marketplaces. There’s horrible things on there, like you said, for kids and even like murder for hire. There’s counterfeit money, there’s fake IDs. You know, there are all kinds of different websites that do horrible things.

SHAWN RYAN: What is the Onion Router?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So the Onion Router is a tool, an open source project that was created to anonymize your traffic on the Internet. And it decentralizes, I think, I believe decentralized would be the word for it, your Internet traffic. It keeps you anonymous beyond a VPN.

I would still recommend that you use a virtual private network on top of Tor if you want to be anonymous. But it’s just a layer of security that’s free and it keeps it. For example, let’s say you use Comcast for your Internet service provider. They could see that you’re using Tor, but they can’t see what you’re looking at.

If you use a VPN and then you use Tor, they can only tell you’re using a VPN, but they can’t tell you’re using Tor. So it’s, you know, it’s just an Internet within an Internet.

SHAWN RYAN: So can I get on, can I check my email through the Dark Web?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yes. You can go to any website.

SHAWN RYAN: Would you recommend using the Dark Web to just do regular Internet stuff?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It’s slow as hell. It’s very slow. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could, but it would keep you safer, but it’s not going to, it’s not a foolproof way to keep yourself safe. And it’s painstakingly slow.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Do you use the Dark Web for investigations? Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: What kind of investigations?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: For like the predator, predator and pedophile cases. Yeah.

Tracking Predators on the Dark Web

SHAWN RYAN: So are you able to track these guys down from the Dark Web even though they’re technically anonymous?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: A lot of times it doesn’t need to go that far. A lot of times these guys will use their regular emails or they’ll use an IP address that’s been, you know, they’ll reuse for multiple emails or their face that they’re using as their profile picture. I can, you know, find them from the same way I just found your face, where they’re using a phone number that traces right back to them.

The Dark Web, you know, it’s not really a huge part of catching predators and pedophiles. One thing, I guess the only thing on the Dark Web, quote unquote, I hate that word, but the Dark Web, quote unquote, that I had access to was when I originally hacked the website that we’re going to talk about.

They branched out to have not only a website on the clearnet, on the regular Internet, but their website was mirrored on the Dark Web. And I had three back doors in their system and it branched out over to the Dark Web. So I had a backdoor on the Dark Web too, which was kind of a cool thing to have because I needed to be connected to Tor, the Onion Router, to connect to my back door.

But that was, I was only using that back door to exfiltrate data every single day, which was just user information because I didn’t want to get their posts or anything. I didn’t want to be in possession of anything horrible that they were sending each other. But their user info was enough for us, as I’m sure you’ll learn shortly.

Daily Vulnerabilities and Hacking Risks

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. What are some things that people can do to protect themselves from hackers? What, let’s actually, let me rephrase this. Let me back up. What are some vulnerabilities? Just let’s go through all the things that you personally could hack if you wanted to.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I mean there’s, it’s countless, but I could give you some major daily things.

SHAWN RYAN: Absolutely. Let’s talk about some of the devices, those devices you have right here. Let’s talk about all the stuff you can hack into and then we’ll get into maybe how we can prevent that a little bit.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So I guess we’ll just start with a daily routine. You know, you wake up in the morning, you make your coffee, or maybe you take your phone off the charger and you check your phone in the morning. You might check your email, you might have, you got to make sure every email that you have while you’re half asleep is coming from real person. It’s not a phishing email, someone pretending to be a company that they’re not stealing your credentials.

Then you go outside to your garage, you get in your car and you have to make sure that there’s nobody out there listening for your, you know, your car key frequency while jamming your car so that they could steal your car later or access your car later. And then when you go hit your garage door button that somebody doesn’t capture that frequency on 433 megahertz. And those rolling codes have already been broken for most of the models.

So then you get in your car and you’re driving to your office or to your kids’ school doing whatever you want and you know, you could get out, you let your kid out to school. And now somebody, as you walk into school just skimmed your back pocket and stole your credit card information.

So I mean all of that plus you know, anything remote, infrared, like a TV remote, that goes for projectors, audio devices, ceiling fans, I mean very simple stuff along with access control badges, anything sub gigahertz like key fobs or remote controls for anything, parking gates, so much everything. Everything. I mean everything. Anything with a battery and a connection or remote connection in any type of way where it reaches the outside of that device is hackable or has been hacked.

The Flipper Zero Device

SHAWN RYAN: What are these devices here?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: This is a water bottle. So this right here is a, this is a Flipper Zero with some custom modifications and it does a lot. So this is just a proof of concept device. But when you start to add your own little additions onto it like this, let me enable, for example, Wi-Fi. I’m not going to hack your Wi-Fi.

But I’ll give you a little example of what I could do. I’ll just do something stupid, but. Okay, then we’ll do. I’m not going to shut your network down. Okay? So now I can show you on my phone, or you can look at your phone, but you’ll see that instead of me mirroring your network, I just created a bunch of fake networks. So all of these networks here, they probably appear to be legitimate, right? Yeah, but they’re not.

SHAWN RYAN: These are all fake networks.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: They’re all powered by me. So as soon as you connect to any of those, I have your password, I have anything in between. So that’s one thing that’s just Wi-Fi and you just.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, man. So this is, so this is, is this how people are stealing information?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: This is one of many ways.

SHAWN RYAN: In an airport.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: In an airport. Oh, yeah. I mean, airport Starbucks, when you, it’s called a man in the middle attack. So if I’m on the same network as you, I can essentially control the traffic, you know, as if I was the modem or router.

So instead of, when you type google.com, instead of your computer telling the router you want google.com, you’re telling my computer you want google.com and I’m giving you what I’m telling you google.com is. So it would be called a DNS attack.

Man-in-the-Middle Attacks

SHAWN RYAN: So is this what people are using in the airports when they’re, not this specific device?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: This is just something that I concocted together. But the Flipper, you can buy this thing on the top here is custom.

SHAWN RYAN: I guess what I’m asking is this the method they throw. So could you, can, so let’s, what is what like Wi-Fi flight?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Or Go Go, Go Go Inflate.

SHAWN RYAN: Yes, Go Go.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: They’re actually, I mean, you can, obviously you can hack anything, but Go Go Inflate, they have a pretty good segment on their network. So you’re pretty safe with Go Go. There’s a chance of getting hacked, but not the same as like a Starbucks or here. You know, your network has to be segmented into chunks.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And Go Go segments it pretty well.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. I guess what I’m saying is could you create a fake Wi-Fi network with that thing that says Go Go Inflight One?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: People are like, oh, that must be it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I could do that here. I mean, it’s a, I can make any, any, they’re called SSIDs. SSIDs. The name of a network, you could do that with any name, but instead of that, what you do is you just scan the local area and then, you know, I know all the networks names around here and then I’ll target all of them at the same time.

So that way anyone in this complex or where we’re at, you know, anyone that connects to a network is going to think it’s their network and they’re going to connect to me instead.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That’s just one of many Wi-Fi attacks. So there’s many ways.

Additional Capabilities of the Flipper Zero

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. What else can this thing do? This thing’s like the size of the palm of your hand.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, well, with this, with this little, you know, custom extension, especially when I have my big, these aren’t the big antennas, but I got big antennas because, you know, I want to get long range. But, you know, that’s Wi-Fi.

This side of things is also Wi-Fi, but also it’s an NRF24, so it does wireless mice and keyboards. So if you use a wireless mouse and keyboard, not every single one of them is vulnerable. A lot, but a lot of them are. I’d highly recommend you go back to wired. Even though it sounds old school, that’s what you should do.

Because I could control your mouse and keyboard with this device and send keystrokes way faster than you can type them and take over your computer without even having to see you or it. So I could do that through the wall.

SHAWN RYAN: This is scaring the shit out of me.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And then, you know, the sub gigahertz stuff with bigger antennas, of course, I can go further away. So with car keys, garages, gates, anything that’s radio frequency could do with this. RFID, that’s access control, badges for doors and pool keys, you know, anything that has like a little beeper where you beep into the door.

And NFC is credit cards and access control. And it does also some more things too. You could also, like, I could tap your phone and give you my Instagram, or tap your phone and give you my business card. So NFC is a little more versatile than RFID, but they both essentially are, I believe it’s called passive devices. They’re powered by the receiver. They don’t have a battery in them.

SHAWN RYAN: So what? Let’s just run through just a list of all the things you can hack with that one little device.

Advanced Hacking Devices and Capabilities

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I mean, I don’t want to make it into an ad about Flipper, because it’s not Flipper itself. But I’m just saying that Flipper itself, if you’re going to go online and buy one of these and experience to be able to do everything that I’m talking about, you need to have custom firmware or software, whatever you want to call it, that allows you to do that. And you need to know how to modify it.

So don’t go out spending $180 on this device thinking you’re going to hack somebody’s car or steal their credit card, because that’s not going to happen. But if you want to go down the list, I mean there’s a ton of things. There’s all the radio things I just told you about, the RFID stuff, the NFC which is the credit cards and more infrared, which is TVs, projectors and many other devices.

GPIO which is just anything that connects to the outside of this device. So I can make devices work and this be the controller for it. I button, which is a form of authentication that uses these things, these little metal prongs as a key. Bad USB which emulates a keyboard types a couple thousand words a minute.

And then it also has some use cases that aren’t hacking, like two factor authentication. This is an offline device where you can generate your two factor without needing a device that’s connected to the Internet. So it does that too. And then there’s a ton of other sub applications that are on here, like hundreds of them that do little things. So a lot just with this one device. This thing does just radio, but it does a lot more than this thing.

SHAWN RYAN: Really.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: What does that one do?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: This one you can hack airplanes with. I mean, that’s an extreme, but that’s something that you can actually accomplish with this. Using ADS-B, you can choose to either receive or transmit. So you can choose either receive or transmit ADS-B with this device. And that’s the frequency to tell a plane its call sign position and more. And it’s very illegal to do that, of course.

But if I wanted to go outside right now, I could even demonstrate later. I pull this antenna out. This is just a small antenna and we can receive airplanes, see where they’re at. There’s nothing illegal about receiving them. Transmitting is where it gets a little bit funky.

But yeah, ADS-B. This one does a lot. Something like a joke, for example, Touch Tunes. They’re at a bar, they’re little jukebox machines that you pay for. This device brute forces them, meaning goes through 0000 to 9999 looking for a pin code. And once it gets it I can fully control that jukebox, like I’m the owner of it. So just for fun.

Or Subaru cars. Some years of Subaru I have this pre-programmed that can unlock and lock a Subaru no problem. I could do that with this as well. But this thing, way stronger, bigger range, way more support, way more programs out there. This device is a lot more dangerous in my eyes than that device.

SHAWN RYAN: Really?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, you are a… I think this is the fifth time I’ve said it. I think you are a dangerous man.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Well, I’m safe. Safe, you know, ethical.

SHAWN RYAN: You could be if you wanted to be.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I’m trying to go into detail about these things just for the nerds out there like me that are listening. I’m not going into exhaustive detail about these devices because most people are not going to care. So I’m just giving the general overview.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, I think they’re going to care when they realize how vulnerable they are.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: No, I don’t mean they don’t care about what they can do, but I care about the technical specifics.

Chinese Electronics and Security Concerns

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, we get a lot of our… Pretty much everything that we have is from China.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, all of our electronics, everything. What do you say? 90% of it probably comes from China. Do you think we need to worry about what they’re putting in our electronics?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Yeah. I mean I’ll give you one example. I bought this awesome vacuum and mop that’s in one, all in one vacuum mop called Tineco. And it completely connects to a Chinese server to transmit and receive information.

I actually have a video of it where you could turn the audio on for it. When you plug it in it says “charging started,” “charging stopped.” When you turn it on and off, I can control that with my computer through a Chinese cloud server. There’s no reason that that vacuum and mop should connect to a Chinese cloud infrastructure whatsoever. But it does.

And at any point they could change the way that functionality works and take over my home network with this vacuum mop.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious? With a vacuum mop?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: How many devices do you think have these things in them?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Anything with a Wi-Fi connection. Not everything’s going to be China beaconing back and forth. But anything with Wi-Fi capability is going to open up an attack vector.

SHAWN RYAN: Washing machines, refrigerators…

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Oh, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Why does a vacuum mop need Wi-Fi capability?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I don’t know. I have the video. I could show you. I have that and then I have the app. I could show you. I could adjust the volume. I could check when the last time I used it. Does it need to be cleaned? It tells you all that stuff. But it’s using a Chinese server that I can control from my computer now that I’ve captured the traffic between the mop and the server.

SHAWN RYAN: How many devices do you think we have that are connected to a Chinese server? And what would they be getting out of it?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I mean, it’s all about data nowadays. So I think that data is the most important thing to them because it’s worth money and advertising dollars would be spent better with targeted demographics. So I think that they’re using that information to target you on the stuff that you need.

If you or someone that you love is looking up something, obviously Google’s going to figure out how to target you on that thing and then sell that data to other people and they call it retargeting. Whereas if they have access to your direct network and they can see things that you didn’t even fully search out, or you’re typing on a different application, like a chat application, where you’re not even searching about it, you’re just talking about it. That data is very valuable because they know about something before Google does or some other large data broker.

Five Simple Security Measures

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. What are five simple things that people can do to protect themselves from hackers?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Use a password manager, install an antivirus, or consult with an IT company that has cybersecurity expertise or a cybersecurity company. One of those many options. But talk to somebody, unless you’re an expert yourself.

Use an RFID blocking wallet. And potentially, if you want to be extra safe, use a key fob that has an RFID shield on it. That way your key fob doesn’t work outside of that shield, can’t be cloned. Some cars require tap to start. So use something like that.

Be careful with the websites that you’re visiting. If the browser is telling you the site looks unsafe, then it’s probably unsafe. And if you’re told otherwise, make sure who’s telling you otherwise is legitimate. And just be careful. I mean, just use your common sense. If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Spam and Zero-Click Exploits

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, what about… We live in a day and age where you’re getting spam calls every five minutes, you’re getting spam texts every five minutes, and a new marketing email is coming in every two minutes. It’s ridiculous.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Mm.

SHAWN RYAN: Do we need to worry about that stuff? If I open a text, could I be hacked just from opening the text?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Technically, yes. I mean, like I said earlier, the zero click text that they’re willing to pay a ton of money for, there’s government agencies that already have them. There was one going around for quite a long time called Pegasus. And then there was another one called Pegasus 2.0. And it didn’t require any user interaction from anyone. You would just send to a phone number. They’d have full remote access to your phone.

SHAWN RYAN: Even without opening the text?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Without opening anything.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy s*. How do you defend against something like that?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: You can’t. There is no way to defend yourself. That’s why they’re so valuable, because there’s nothing you can do.

SHAWN RYAN: How do most hackers get in? Do you have to click a link?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I mean, sometimes it’s a link, sometimes it’s a file, sometimes it’s a photo, sometimes it’s a chain of exploits of multiple things that turn into it. It could be a Word document, it could be anything.

When it comes to zero days and zero click exploits, it doesn’t require any user interaction and you will not know that your phone’s infected.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, so I can’t even give you a good answer for it.

SHAWN RYAN: This is scary stuff.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I might as well have it on my phone right now. I have no clue. I mean, I’d likely see the traffic going in and out of it, but there is still the chance that it could have it.

The Beginning of Ryan’s Mission Against Child Predators

SHAWN RYAN: All right, Ryan, we’re back from the break. We just got a whole class on hacking and all the stuff that you’re capable of and all the things we need to be worried about. But let’s talk about why you came here and that’s what you’re doing now. You’re basically hunting down these people that are exploiting children sexually on the Internet and in person.

Yeah, I know you have a couple of horrific stories. One guy that was, I think it was his daughter in the bathtub.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, yeah. So I’ll start, you know, kind of where that all came from. I was at a friend’s house, and I got a text message from my friend’s wife. And it was multiple photos of screenshots of this website that was, it was clear from the screenshots that the website was on the regular Internet. Anyone could access it.

And should I name the website? Yeah, it was, it’s no longer up, but it was co. So co. Then that website went down and it ended up being to like T as in Thomas O as in Oscar.

So I see this website and I see the content in these screenshots that my friend’s wife sent me. She doesn’t know anything about computers, but she has kids herself. And she was like, can you do something about this?

And I read this content and one of them was talking about a mother that wanted to have kids and then have the kids be so that when the kids grew up that they could, you know, have and go even further. I mean, I’ll pull up the screenshots because I’d like to explain like where my head was at that time.

But as soon as I read these messages, I like, I guess a switch flipped in my brain and I left my friend’s house immediately as I got the text and I was. I went home. I didn’t know for sure that I was going to be able to get into this website. I just knew I wanted to do something about it.

And I found a vulnerability in their platform. I got in and from that point on I started to exfiltrate the data every single day. All the users. I noticed that a lot of people were soliciting on the site. So I didn’t want to download those messages in case of the fact that I pull in some images that I’m not allowed to have and nor do I want.

So I made sure to only download the publicly facing stuff, which didn’t include. It had some very graphic text but it didn’t include anything illegal, which I think it should be illegal to talk that way. But it was horrible stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: What were some of the. So you started this basically from a text conversation with a concerned moment. That’s what got you into it?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: What’s some of the text that you saw on.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I’d like to read them to you if you want. I still have them.

SHAWN RYAN: Read them.

Disturbing Content That Sparked Action

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So this is before I was. Before I ever caught a single predator in my life. This was the beginning. And what set my brain off to want to help that. This is before I even heard of this website. Before I heard of anything and anything to do with it.

Okay, here they are. So the title. Should I read these? Like they’re graphic.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, read them.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So the title of this post is “who wants to bang these little.” And then somebody replied underneath. “I’ve got first dibs on the Joseph Fritzel Maximilian.” Which is. There’s two different users there. “Pick for yourselves.” And this was the photo that they used.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh my God.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That’s just one of three techniques.

SHAWN RYAN: These girls look like they’re six.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Very young. Yeah. And then there was that one story where I told you about the. I can’t see it, but the story I told you about the bathtub situation where there was a father who posted their child in the bathtub. And it said underneath of it “they have no idea what’s going to happen to them tonight.”

And then underneath of that there were people that were part of this website who were saying what they were going to do to this child. And this wasn’t just some fantasy. This guy was talking about this was a guy posting his child in the bathtub. Like for real. It really was his child. I assume he was a man, but it was a parent so that really got to me.

And then I got another part of this text message. I’ll just read one more of the three and this one says that they are a 16 year old. A lot of these people were role playing to be children. And in our investigations we found out there was a lot of actual kids on this website. Real kids that were under 18 at the time of this. This when I hacked the site.

SHAWN RYAN: What are they doing on there?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: They’re selling their bodies for money to these kids. To these people? Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s kids prostituting themselves.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yes. Yeah. So one of them. I don’t know if this is a real 16 year old or not, but what was said was pretty disturbing. Regardless. It said “God, I really want to be a mom. I need someone who wants to 16 year old when I have our daughter. I’d let you do whatever you wanted from whatever age. Make me watch as you. Teaching her how to lovingly. Don’t worry if it’s a boy you can watch teaching him how to properly woman Teaching him how to slap and hurt me to. He’d be so cute trying to so little.”

SHAWN RYAN: Oh my God.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So when I got these text messages and reading them even current day right now, it makes me sick to my stomach to even think about and. And I know they’re gone. So I mean not all these people are still out there. But the website’s down.

The Scale of the Problem

SHAWN RYAN: How many, how many people are on this website?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: At first I thought it was a couple thousand. When I cleaned up the database and figured it out, there’s about 7,000 people in just this one website and we have a total of five.

SHAWN RYAN: You have 7,000 people on one website. You’ve.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And you couldn’t become a member of this website unless you answered an application where you, you had to enter a question that was something like “are you okay with, you know, doing something horrible with a 3 year old? And in all of their holes” you had to answer that question in detail.

I forget the exact verbiage of the question. It’s posted somewhere in regards to this interview or Project Veritas, one or the other. But you had to fill that out to become a member of the website you just saw. Which would tell me that either you’re an undercover cop or you’re an actual predator on the site. I mean who would answer a question like that even if they were just.

SHAWN RYAN: Curious, is there multiple. So it’s a whole questionnaire you have to do to get into the site?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, there was a few questions, I think two or three that were really horrible, but you had to answer them or they would not approve you to join the site.

SHAWN RYAN: Is there any other prerequisites to get on sites like these?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yes. So what I learned in this process, doing the investigation and exporting everything that I could legally export, I found that they used a chat app called Telegram and they were going back and forth talking about. And they would call it “cheese pizza” and use all kinds of different phrases for it.

And I realized there was these moderators in the chat rooms outside of the website where if you would send them, they would let you into another group which was full of. But of course I couldn’t do that. So I never got to see past that part. But I do have evidence of that being a thing when I have. Because I exported all the chat logs so I can. It shows that if I were to send something horrible to one of those moderators, I would have seen something even worse, which is hard to imagine. Then, you know, we are already seeing here.

Breaking Into the Website

SHAWN RYAN: What did you. What did you do with that information? Actually, let me backtrack. I’m sorry, How. How long did it take you to crack into that website and get this information?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I wasn’t sure. Like I said, when I got the text messages and I wanted to try to take. My goal was to just take the site down. And I knew I could make that happen because it was on the clear net, regular Internet for anyone to visit. I knew I could do that, but I didn’t know if I could actually get access to their server once I found the vulnerability.

Maybe an hour, two hours at the most, if I could remember correctly, it wasn’t long. And they never found out they were hacked. So to this day they never found out. And they will never find out. I mean, unless somebody in that database is watching this now. You know, you’re on your. I have your data and we will find you. I actually recommend you come forward so we don’t have to make the story up for you.

SHAWN RYAN: What did you do with this information?

The Investigation Begins

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So as soon as I got the information, I thought it was slam dunk. I thought like these people were going to jail. You know, I thought that maybe I solved something that the FBI or somebody was working on for a long time.

And I instantly went to the exploited children tip line and I submitted saying who the owner of the website was, that I had access to all the data and that they were welcome to have it, basically. Then I reached out to a bunch of news stations and talked to a ton of reporters and all of them were super excited to talk to me.

SHAWN RYAN: What news stations?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Sun Sentinel, Daily Mail, Business Insider, Fox, some influencers. Ronan Farrow, Candace Owens. They both didn’t read my messages.

But as for the news stations, they, you know, I had full conversations with the reporters. They knew what they were getting themselves into. They were very excited about reporting on it. And once it got back from legal, they weren’t allowed to report on it.

And I said, well, okay, if you’re not allowed to report on the illegally obtained material that I have, just let parents know that this website exists and who, you know, whatever you want, but just keep whatever illegal out of it. You know, I just want parents to know that this website exists. You don’t need to put my name, you don’t need to put the material that I obtained. Nothing.

Every single one of them completely disregarded me. I sent a lot of those notes over to Project Veritas with some evidence of that, but not a single person until now has done anything about this.

SHAWN RYAN: Not one. Not any conservative media, not any liberal media, because unfortunately, that’s the day and age we live in now.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Right?

SHAWN RYAN: None of them, none of them would touch this.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: No.

SHAWN RYAN: None of them want to be involved in saving kids.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: When I say I tried, I tried so hard and nobody wanted to do anything.

Law Enforcement’s Response

SHAWN RYAN: So what wound up happening with the information? So law enforcement didn’t want to get involved either?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: No. So I called my attorney locally and I called an attorney in Virginia because the owner of the website happened to be a Democratic politician, ran for Congress two times. His name is Nathan Larson, and I’ll explain more about him in a second.

But I talked to a lawyer in Virginia because I knew that’s where he lived, and I wanted to see what I could do from there. So the lawyer in Virginia basically told me she didn’t know what to say. She never heard of anything like this.

The lawyer in Florida reached out to the local task force, let them know that I had access to the information and then as well as doing that tip line. So from that point on, you know, all of these news stations and all the law enforcement connections, whatever you want to call them, they all were fully aware that Nathan Larson was running this website, that he ran for Congress twice, that he was an extremist. He did crazy things.

But he did run for Congress two different times in Virginia. So I thought that they would take that seriously. Well, completely ignored.

SHAWN RYAN: Completely ignored it. Project Veritas gave me access to some of the stuff you guys are working on together. And in one of those videos you’re reading a quote from Nathan Larson. I’m going to read it right now.

This is from Nathan Larson, Democratic politician, who ran for Congress multiple times, ran a website for pedos to discuss their dark intentions and fantasies. Here’s the quote: “It’s not enough kids and take their innocence. You also need to reproduce the next generation with them. Let them see that you prefer the offspring you have with them than to continue to have with a woman who is no longer jail bait.”

The quote continues: “But you can still sometimes just let her know though that what you love her for the most is producing with you a fresh new young girl. And that this is her main value in contribution. That you think fondly of her. This is disgusting. I’m sorry. You think fondly of her because that beautiful daughter reminds you of her.”

The Reality of Online Predators

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It’s unimaginable. It’s like, how do people think this way? But there’s so many people that think this way that it’s alarming is the word for it. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s way more people than you’d think, than you’d like to believe.

SHAWN RYAN: Code words. Pizza and cooking and cheese pizza stands for…

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: This is disgusting.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. It gets only worse than that. You know, it’s really bad.

SHAWN RYAN: How much worse does it get?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Worse. I mean, people, this is a person talking about it and it makes me uncomfortable just as much as it makes you uncomfortable. But you know, these people, what they’re talking about, they’re doing.

You know, this guy isn’t some guy with a bunch of fantasies. This guy got arrested six months after nobody did anything about it. And you know, like I said, I tried my best. He gets arrested six months later with a 12-year-old at a layover at an airport after he kidnapped her.

So not only did he talk about it, he did it and he got caught. You know, as for some other people, I don’t know how much more I can go into it. But one guy we’re investigating as of 2020, which is after I submitted the data, he got in trouble for doing something horrible to a child as well. Became a fugitive.

And I think they eventually got him, but, you know, we’re not even close to through the list yet. And you know, we got a lot more people to expose and they’re not just talking about it, they’re doing it.

Nathan Larson’s Arrest and Death

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s backtrack real quick because you kind of breezed over what happened. So the guy with the daughter in the bathtub, what happened?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That guy with the daughter in the bathtub, I don’t know where he went. He’s part of the database.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m talking about the guy that got arrested in Denver.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Oh, that’s Nathan Larson. Okay, so Nathan Larson, he got arrested six months after the fact, after I hacked his site, after I submitted it to the authorities, to all the news stations. He gets arrested with a 12-year-old girl and gets arrested for kidnapping.

And I don’t think he got charged with rape, but he got the kidnapping charge. Nathan Larson then went to federal prison for that. And you know, the website went down and, you know, he just sat in prison for, I forget what the sentence was, but it was quite a long time.

And to my knowledge, when you’re a person like him, you are going to be separated in a federal prison from the regular inmates. And you know, spoiler alert, but Nathan Larson’s dead.

And the reason why he’s dead is due to starvation. The news says that it’s suicide. If I had to guess, the inmates that were responsible for feeding him just let him starve to death. And I believe he deserved every second of that pain.

SHAWN RYAN: You and me both. So there’s been five other sites that you’ve cracked into.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So when I hacked Rapey, Nathan left backups of his previous websites on the same server. So it really only took one site to get all five.

SHAWN RYAN: How many names altogether?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I can’t give you an exact number, I’m not sure, but it’s…

SHAWN RYAN: Tens of thousands?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Tens of thousands of people.

SHAWN RYAN: And are these people all in, do you know where they’re all at? They’re from all over the country.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: All over the country. Some are international, but most of them are in the country.

The Birth of 561 PC

SHAWN RYAN: So when did 561 PC start?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So 561 PC is an organization that I created with a friend, Scrappy. He’s an MMA fighter. It started because of the frustration that nothing happened from this original, this whole ordeal.

You know, we’re talking two and a half years after the fact. I’ve been looking into information on predators for organizations on YouTube, anonymously, with my name not attached whatsoever. Just finding information and sending it over to the organizations, and then they would go and confront them themselves.

And I did that for many organizations, like I said, completely anonymously. I wasn’t looking for recognition or my name to be attached to anything. I meet Scrappy, Dustin Lampros, whatever you want to call him. He’s a really good dude.

SHAWN RYAN: Hold on, Scrappy’s a professional MMA fighter in the UFC, correct?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Well, he didn’t get his call for the UFC yet, but he’s, you know, eight and zero, undefeated, seven knockouts. He’s likely going to get the call.

SHAWN RYAN: He’s on the way.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, yeah. And even Dana White knows who he is, I believe. He’s a good dude. Outside of fighting, he’s a very nice guy. Gentle heart, you know, religious guy, you know, great person in my eyes. So he was a good partner to pick for this upcoming project.

And I brought up, I was like, hey, man, you know, do you know how bad it is on the Internet? Like, I told him the story that I just told you. He was blown away by the fact that nothing happened.

And I told him, I said, like, you know, let me show you. Let me show you how bad it is, not just tell you. So I was like, Google search teen chat room, Florida, or, you know, it was something similar to that. So he Googled it. I told him, click any chat room. I don’t care which one it is.

He clicks the chat room. He clicked Guest. You didn’t have to make an account. Made his name Ashley, 13, female, Florida, something like that, and just said hi in the chat room. And within five minutes, he must have got 40, 50, 60 messages from grown men, some naked, some trying to video chat, some saying that, you know, they want to meet up, very horrible things, like grown men hanging out in these teen chat rooms.

From that point on, he realized how serious this actually was. And I was like, hey, well, you know that it’s not just these chat rooms most of the time. It’s social media apps like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Tinder, you know, all of them. It’s anywhere a kid has access to. Roblox, Minecraft, their Xbox, when they’re talking to their friends. These predators are on everything.

So I said to them, hey, if we get some decoys in there, and they, you know, grown women or grown men, they pretend to be children, we can go and try to catch these people and expose them in real life just the same way I’ve been helping organizations for two and a half years do it. Except instead of me sending it to them, we’ll do it ourselves. We’ll clean up our, you know, at least try our best to clean up our town in South Florida.

And he was like, yeah, man, I’m definitely down to do it. And of course, you know, at first you think when somebody says they’re down to do something like that, it’s a hit or miss. But he was on point, ready to go.

And, you know, we’ve caught 14 people now in a couple months of doing it. And, you know, local law enforcement, Delray Beach Police have been incredible, and we’re just going to continue to grow. You know, if anybody’s interested in checking that out, it’s at 561 PC, like 561 Predator Catchers on Instagram, same as for YouTube. And, yeah, you’ll find me there. And you’ll also find Scrappy there.

The First Catch

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s rewind. What was your first operation like?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: My first what?

SHAWN RYAN: Your first operation. The first guy you guys caught together as a team. How did that go down?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So the first guy we caught as a team was just a complete test. Scrappy and I used an app called Grindr, which is a gay dating app for the most part. Not only gay, but mostly gay.

And we both used a filter to make ourselves look younger. And we just started talking to any guy that messaged us. We didn’t message anybody first. We waited for people to message us.

And one guy, eventually, within an hour, decided to talk to us. And we went out, met him, called the cops, and the guy ran to the bathroom. We couldn’t film in the bathroom.

SHAWN RYAN: Where’d you meet him?

Confronting Predators in Public

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Right on Atlantic Avenue in Delray, in front of a million people. And I embarrassed. I screamed at the top of my lungs at what he was there to do, and I don’t do that anymore because you can get a disorderly conduct for that. I didn’t know that at the time, but that was my first encounter.

Guy just ran into the bathroom, though, and hid until the cops got there. And at that time, the cops had no clue what was going on, so they just let him go.

SHAWN RYAN: Have you gotten anybody arrested?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, multiple people.

SHAWN RYAN: How many?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Three so far.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s go over the first one that you got arrested. What did that operation look like?

The Case That Got Thrown Out

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That one is actually. No, actually. Do you mind if I go over the guy that I know the full story of right now? Because some of them are active. So one guy, we have a YouTube video and we made him do push ups and sit ups, to distract them while the cops were on their way. And he said that the girl had breathing hips. And I believe he said something about wanting to take a shower with her or something like that.

And how Florida works is they have the police station and they have the state attorney. Some states have district attorneys. Some states have state attorneys. I think they’re the same thing, but they’re just named differently. But the state attorney is the one that ultimately makes a decision on if the person is going to be convicted or charged with these charges. But the cops make the decision on what they’re being charged with.

So we meet the guy. He admits to everything that he said in the chat logs. He admits to maybe even a little bit more. Then he admits it again to the police officers. He goes in the interrogation room. I send the chat logs and the video to them while they’re interrogating. He admits everything to them because it’s not evidence until the predator says it.

Our evidence isn’t valuable because we’re vigilantes. So it’s not technically evidence unless the police obtain it. So all that went well. The cops spent, Delray Police spent a ton of time building the report out for this guy. State attorney was kind of iffy about it, it seemed. And the entirety of the case was thrown out because there’s no shower inside of Walmart, so there’s no way he could have showered.

SHAWN RYAN: You’ve got to be sh*tting me.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s a little bit rough. We had a meeting.

SHAWN RYAN: Who’s responsible for that case getting dropped?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I know it’s the state attorney for Palm Beach County. But yeah, I don’t know the exact name.

SHAWN RYAN: Is that an elected slot?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I believe so.

SHAWN RYAN: We should look that name up and post it right here.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It’s wild to me, but the one thing that I can say is that one of the sergeants, who used to be a detective, did have a meeting with us right after that and told us what the state attorney would be looking for to secure a conviction. So we are trying to fall within those guidelines now. We call the cops regardless, every time. But we’re not sure if we’re going to get an arrest or not unless it falls within the guidelines that we’re told.

Live Demonstration: How Fast Predators Appear

SHAWN RYAN: Ryan, do you think you could demonstrate right here, right now how fast these sexual predators will show up in a chat room?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Fire your computer up. Let’s do it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I’m recording. So now I’m just going to say hi, who wants to chat? I named myself Ashley, female, New Jersey. 13, female, New Jersey. Let’s see how many private messages come in. Two. Already three.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s been like 10 seconds.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yep. Hey, want to fool around? Hey, how old are you? Let me just copy that and send that to everybody because we got other messages coming in.

SHAWN RYAN: What chat room are you in?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Just a teen chat. Hey, want to cuddle a bit? I didn’t, I mean, I’m taking, I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt right now that they didn’t read the. Oh, he’s 47.

SHAWN RYAN: 47 years old in a teen chat room. You got him in what, five seconds? He’s already messaging in.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Oh yeah, there’s a ton. I can’t even keep up with them here because every time I click one there’s more on the list. He says he’s okay. I said, are you okay with my age? He says, yes. Age 13. Like my profile says. I got two more messages. So now we’re at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I’m 19. Let’s ignore the 19 year old even though it’s disgusting.

SHAWN RYAN: It hasn’t even been 60 seconds yet.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Okay, there’s another guy. Here’s the other guy. This guy’s 15. Ignore him. That is a real teenager. In a teen chat. The 47 year old says, he said age. I said 13. Like my profile says he said name, Ashley. Another guy just messaged. How old are you? Okay, this person’s a child too.

So out of all of these, there’s one guy here who is 47 years old, less than a minute, who wants to talk to a child in a teen chat. And I only said hi in the chat room, nothing else.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy sh*t, dude. You jumped in a chat room, you called yourself Ashley, 13, New Jersey, literally less than 10 seconds. We have a 47 year old wanting to have sex with a 13 year old girl.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, yeah, that’s how quick it is. I googled teen chat. I’m in a different state. So I get different results here for the local teen chats. There’s no way for me to set it up. All I did was say hi in the chat room and press Enter. And a bunch of messages came in. Some were from actual teenagers, as it should be in a teen chat. And one of the guys, which, who knows if they really are teenagers, that’s another thing. But one guy was open about that. He was 47 years old and he was completely fine with the age.

Where This Is Happening

SHAWN RYAN: Where all is this happening? Is this happening? Just list off where this is happening that everyday people use all the time.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Kik, WhatsApp, Roblox, Minecraft, Xbox, PlayStation.

SHAWN RYAN: Xbox and PlayStation.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, because you can chat with random people and games. They could represent themselves as whoever they want. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s just the list goes on anywhere where a human can communicate with another human. The child is not safe.

So parents need to be watching that and not just assuming. If your kid says, hey, I’m on the phone with my friend, which friend is it? Is it one that I know? You can’t be scared of being a helicopter parent because if your kid’s aggravated at you for a couple of minutes for being overprotective in these scenarios, I think it’s worth it.

It’s not your fault, regardless of what happens. But to save them from a life of trauma, I think it might be worth the extra couple minutes or aggravating your kid to see who they’re actually talking to, see who their friends really are and just spend that extra time because it could save a lifelong battle with trauma.

SHAWN RYAN: This happened to somebody I know in Parkland. Remember I used to live in Boca, so I got a lot of friends down there. Happened in Parkland. He’s got a daughter, a couple daughters, and she was blackmailed by somebody and had taken pictures.

It’s everywhere, just as you just demonstrated it. I mean, 10 seconds, less than 10 seconds, and he’s on there. Is this the case every single time?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Yeah. Some of the guys want to chat for longer before they meet up in person, but yeah, it’s that easy. It’s not good that it’s easy, but it is that easy to find them. They’re out there and they are being predatory.

The Success Rate

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t know what to call it. I don’t want to call it a success rate, but what is the percentage of people that you’re talking to on here that will come and meet?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Depends on how long you talk to them and if you can convince them that you’re not a police officer.

SHAWN RYAN: Would you say the majority of them?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Way more than the majority? Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: 90%. Yeah, over 90%.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It depends if they ask to meet or not yet, because sometimes it takes a while for them to chat. So I would say yeah, if they ask to meet, 90, 95% plus if they ask to meet up.

SHAWN RYAN: 95%, you think?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn.

Project Veritas Collaboration

SHAWN RYAN: How did Project Veritas get involved with it?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: They saw a viral podcast of me talking about the website and they were interested and they said, well, I want to help you bring justice to this. To what the other stations failed to bring justice to and the FBI even failed to. Or everybody, everybody failed me. I felt like they failed me.

And Project Veritas said, hey, well, we will do something about this. We’ll put our whole team on it. We’re going to bring light to this. We’re going to bring these people out of the dark corners of the earth. And it made me feel like, okay, I have a team here. I have people that are willing to fly across the country and meet me on a 24 hour notice, which they did, to have a conversation.

They flew me out to New York to do an interview. Just off my word. I could have been lying. I could have been a member, that’s who knows what. They didn’t know who I was, so they just took my word for it. And they gave me the most compassion and love that I, more compassionate love than I would have ever expected and still are to this day.

SHAWN RYAN: What does this collaboration between you and them look like? How are they? You’re obviously feeding them all the information that you’ve uncovered so far. Are you still getting more information?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So no. So right now we’re going off the data that I already have, which is so much, especially with Nathan Larson’s websites. The one we’re focusing on at the moment is Rapey Co. And so anyone that was on that list is going to be investigated. We have all of their information or ways to find it.

So we’re just going to go down that list, keep exposing them in person. And we found quite a few already, so it’s only going to get more extreme, especially as the team gets bigger and hopefully we do some justice, put some more in prison, uncover some secrets.

SHAWN RYAN: How are you getting. How are you guys? So they sent me. So this interview is timed perfectly. When Project Veritas starts to release this information, we’re right behind him. We’ve talked to him. We’re collaborating with them. We want to just dump gas and amplify what you guys are doing to get this word out.

So what does this collaboration look like between you and them? You’re feeding them the information, and then how are they reaching out to these guys and how are they getting them to come in and confess to this stuff?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So they have their own ways of dealing with undercover operations and filming undercover. But when we find the information on the people, we’re going off the database, we’re taking the information per user. We’re tying that to, we have some archived images of when the website did exist. So we can say this user said this at this time or replied to this at that time, figure out who that user is and then organize a team to go out there and meet them.

But the process of finding out who they are is called OSINT or Open Source Intelligence. And Project Veritas has been doing that already for years. As well as me, I specialize in OSINT. And obviously being a hacker, it just comes with the territory. So working together as a team, finding these people has been no different than what I would do on a daily basis, except it’s just making a bigger impact.

SHAWN RYAN: How many guys have you guys put in prison so far?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I don’t think I can talk about that part yet.

The John Lewis Confrontation

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. Yeah, we’ll wait. Let’s talk about the John Lewis confrontation.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: He was on rapey to website with his email link to it. He says he found the website through a telegram group.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: First he admits to having a fetish to young children. Went to therapy for help with that addiction. Has been going for many years and has made a little progress with his addiction.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Addiction to porn. Right.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you want to talk about that interview at all? Have you seen that?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, I watched the interview, and the guy is in a facility for his addiction to porn, but was completely cognizant and coherent. He’s not a mental health case to where he couldn’t, he didn’t know right from wrong. He definitely was fully aware of what he was doing.

Like I said, he’s one of 7,000 on that list. But he did admit on an undercover camera that he was soliciting and that he was a member of not only that, but those telegram groups I mentioned earlier that were trading and soliciting. He admitted all of that clear as day on camera. So that will be forwarded along to the police and we’ll see what happens from there. But that was very recent, his confrontation.

SHAWN RYAN: The application question to join the group. We’ve already gone over this. “If a man wants to his three year old daughter in every while she is. Do you have a problem with that? Please elaborate on your thought process so we can better judge your suitability for this site.”

John Lewis’s response? “I do have a problem with that. That’s disgusting.” Then they exposed the conversation, make a video in the school basement. Denied it. It was a lie. Denied receiving. He only admits to having seen but did not distribute it. And then confessed to have looked or seen images, never physically acting on those urges. And then later confessed.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Right. And says that he never did any of that. What he says that he did on the forum, he legitimately says that he kid in the basement across from the school, and just by chance that’s where he lives, across from the school where his parents live.

So he could say he didn’t or he did, but the fact that he admitted to, I’ve been in some very, very tough spots in my life but I’ve never thought about a child ever. And I doubt you have either. It’s, if I don’t trust anything you say. So if you tell me on a forum that kid in the basement, you probably the basement. That’s what I’m going to safely assume.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you know what happened to this guy?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That’s like I said, it’s so, that one’s so new that I’m not sure what’s going to happen to him but…

SHAWN RYAN: Hopefully he’s still out there right now though.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

How Do We Solve This Problem?

SHAWN RYAN: How do we solve this man?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: There’s no way to solve it for sure. It’s never going to go away and unfortunately we have some states that are trying to normalize it. We have states that are trying to make it a sexual orientation and then we have other states, California being the main one that I know of.

SHAWN RYAN: What are they doing?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: They’re trying to make it a sexual orientation. I think they’re calling it something attracted minors or something.

SHAWN RYAN: Making this a thing. They’re making it. Okay, we need to accept. So now we need to accept people who are little kids.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yes. That’s what they’re trying to do.

SHAWN RYAN: Accept that now.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. California is one state that they’re trying to make it part of a sexuality to be attracted to children.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s a sexuality to be attracted to children. Do you know any other states that are doing this?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I could Google it, but California is the main one that I know of.

SHAWN RYAN: Not surprising.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, not surprising.

SHAWN RYAN: Not surprising at all.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. So that blows my mind that that’s even a thought. And then there’s people that defend these guys. “It’s a mental illness. It’s a sickness. It’s this, it’s that.” I don’t care what it is because it affects somebody else. It’s going to ruin somebody’s life forever.

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you think these states are pushing this shit?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I don’t know. I don’t know. But Florida, I’ll give you a good example. I mean, DeSantis is trying to pass a bill to issue the death penalty for sex crimes against children.

SHAWN RYAN: From what I understand that’s in place. Is that in place?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Is it locked in? I mean, it must have been recent, if so.

SHAWN RYAN: But I don’t want to misspeak. But the way I understood it is that it is in there now and that if you’re doing this shit and you get caught, they’re going to f*ing kill you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I love that.

SHAWN RYAN: Why?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Why is it that should be the case everywhere, in my opinion.

SHAWN RYAN: Why are all the Democrat states trying to legalize this shit and make this normal? I don’t f*ing understand that.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I don’t know.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t know how you can vote for that shit. I don’t know how you can affiliate with that shit. I don’t know how you can think it’s okay. It’s f*ing disgusting.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. I agree with you. It’s, they’re normalizing kids. Yeah. And they’re creating people and people voting this shit in. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Fing Newsome. Gavin Newsom got recalled and they voted him in again. And look at this shit now. He’s making this shit normal. I mean, I hate to get political, but what the f is wrong with these people?

Protecting Children Through Education and Monitoring

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I agree with you. I can’t explain. I wish I could. I wish I could explain why we just got a message in 10 seconds in a random chat room from a 47 year old man wanting to, but I can’t. I have no explanation.

And all I know is that we need to find a way for parents to be educated and for kids when they get old enough to be educated so that this doesn’t happen to them. That’s all I know that I could do.

And the only other thing I know I could do outside of educating parents, schools, children, is help some organizations out that human trafficking and victims of any type of sexual assault, whether they’re children or adults. I have the resources and the team and the skill set to be able to help people. I just need those people to be put in place, as well as, let’s say, parents monitoring their child on an app.

I have some ideas in my head for apps, but I don’t want to plug a specific app if I don’t know if it’s great or if I can trust them.

SHAWN RYAN: Even if you don’t plug an app, Ryan, what do these apps do? So if I put this app on my son’s phone, what do I get?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So you’re going to know where he’s at at all times. You’re going to be able to read his text messages, you’ll be able to check his app usage. He’d be able to lock down certain parts of the phone that you don’t want him to be on. And just basically as if you have access to the phone, but you have more access than him.

It’s really more, I think it’s more important to do that and have your kid aggravated at you than, like I said, the latter.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I mean, I would 100% agree with you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So basically, with the, like, the 1 in 10 people before the age of 18 are sexually assaulted and 40% are 12 years old or under.

SHAWN RYAN: I didn’t know that. Yeah, I mean, that’s 40%.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: 40% are under 12. So it’s important to do this stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: So with these apps. So the way I’m understanding what you’re saying is if I put one of these apps on anybody’s phone, I basically get control, just like you were talking about earlier. People’s computer. I can control everything they’re doing, what they’re looking at.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It’s like a commercial remote access Trojan.

SHAWN RYAN: How easy is it to manipulate the app? I mean, because here’s my concern. I’m getting old, and my son’s going to be a lot more tech savvy than I am.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: So he’s going to learn how to defeat that.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, for sure. So I don’t think that it’s going to be easy as of right now. I know it’s not easy. I know of one that my uncle is using and it hasn’t been beaten by his daughter. So I don’t think it’ll be that easy. Nothing’s impossible.

But they could always get on a computer, which is other ways to protect the computer. If it was me as a kid, maybe I’d get a little more crafty because that’s what I like to do. I like to have computers. But I don’t know, it would stop me and make me second guess what I was doing. If I knew my parents or parent was watching everything that I was doing online, I would second guess my conversations and who I talked to.

The Dangers of Online Deception

SHAWN RYAN: Damn, man, this shit is…

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I’ll give you one example. A guy was talking to our decoy. This is like the second or third person that we caught talking to our decoy in a normal chat room. Not like that, like a regular social media site.

And was using a photo of some guy that was in a band as his profile photo, using a fake phone number, fake age and a fake name. And we were like, we can’t find information on him. Like, we can meet up with him, but we’re not going to know anything about the guy.

So we eventually got the decoy to get the guy to send pictures of his face. And he sent some real pictures of his face. I was able to find him on the Internet, found his real name, found that he was not the age that he said, not the name that he said. He wasn’t even using his real photos.

He booked a hotel room. A hotel room. He ordered, he even actually ordered pizza to the hotel room thinking that he was meeting with an 11 year old at that time. And it’s, you got to remember that the 11 year old he thought he was talking to was under the assumption they were meeting some guy from a band that was younger, that got a hotel for the night that just ordered pizza, when in reality it’s some guy in his mid-40s.

SHAWN RYAN: Them.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It’s unbelievably messed up.

Confronting Predators: Real Cases

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s take a break. I need a break.

All right, Ryan, we’re back from the break. Sorry, man, I had to. I was getting a little too angry before the break, so I wanted to cool off for a minute.

But while we were on the break, I want to clear a couple things up. We were talking about the California law and the Florida law, so we printed some stuff up. This is from the Liberty Champion. I didn’t realize this got signed into law in California in 2020, right?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, I don’t know. You know, God knows what more they’ve done since then.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Who knows?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I know the LGBTQ+ community, from what it says in one of those articles, they were not happy at all about this decision. So it seems they’re not in support of, or at least the LGBTQ movement is not in support of the sexual or sexually attracted to minors. I can’t remember.

SHAWN RYAN: Plus, is that what this is?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I believe so, but I don’t want to be wrong.

California vs. Florida: Contrasting Laws

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, let’s just stick to what we know. So I’m just going to read this. This is a report from the Liberty Champion. It is an opinion poll. I think this portion is factual. You can look it up. We’re on a time crunch, so whatever, look it up.

But according to this, a couple of weeks ago—this is dated October 12, 2020—a couple of weeks ago, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law that would allow judges to decide whether or not to list someone as a sex offender for having sex with a minor.

According to the bill, it only applies to consensual sex, whether it be between a minor 14 years old or older. So as long as they’re 14, you’re good in California? Well, I guess.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, I guess you’re not good.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s up to the judge.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, it’s up to the judge. And they believe that children can consent at that age. And then from just, you know, from what I know, just hearing things or reading things, that there is a push to make it a sexuality in certain states, one being California, that you’re attracted to minors overall. And I don’t believe kids can consent personally. Not in the slightest.

SHAWN RYAN: This goes on to say, yeah, it looks like this is an opinion poll, so I don’t want to get too far in the weeds, but, yeah, it looks like they’re adding it to the LGBTQ community. “Minors deserve the right to consensual sex, too.”

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That’s ridiculous.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s not from me. That’s from this.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: I totally disagree with this sh.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I agree.

SHAWN RYAN: Somebody tries to make a weird sound.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, I don’t agree with it either.

SHAWN RYAN: But then we go. And then the Florida thing. This is April 20, 2023. This is from ABC News. They’re really upset about this, if you read the whole article.

But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday signed a bill that will allow juries to impose the death sentence even if all 12 jurors do not agree. He is also likely to approve a second bill passed by the lawmakers on Tuesday, next Tuesday, that would make sexual battery of a child under the age of 12 a death penalty offense.

It’s quite the difference between the two states there.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Agreed.

SHAWN RYAN: I know where I’d want to live.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. And I do live in Florida and totally agree with what he’s trying to do.

SHAWN RYAN: I still, I just can’t believe people are into this sh, you know?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, I do it every day, and I still can’t believe it.

Case Studies: Repeat Offenders

SHAWN RYAN: But so we’re going to kind of wrap things up here. There’s a couple of things that we haven’t talked about yet. I know you got a couple of facts, statistics that you want to rattle off.

Before we get to that, real quick, let’s go over a couple of examples. On our break, you were talking about confronting a man in Delray Beach.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yes.

SHAWN RYAN: Who then was later caught. And then we also talked about a letter that you got from a—I don’t want to say a gentleman’s attorney—a pedophile’s attorney.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: Basically standing up for him, trying to pay you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I’ll—

SHAWN RYAN: I’ll leave it to you from here. Let’s start with the—

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So I’ll start with the guy. The video as of recording now isn’t on our YouTube channel, but by the time this is released, people will be able to watch this man’s video.

He showed up after talking to our decoy and, you know, talking sexually. He was fully aware of the age, and I looked into the guy. The guy went to school to be a teacher. He has a bachelor’s in teaching, to some degree. I don’t know what specific topic or if teaching is just a degree, but he is a teacher. He taught at two different schools.

SHAWN RYAN: What schools?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I have them on my computer. I don’t have them off the top of my head.

SHAWN RYAN: Local Florida schools?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: One is an online tutor school and another one’s not. But he has two properties, one in Massachusetts and one in Florida.

He showed up to meet. His name was Brent. And I walked up to him with the camera, Scrappy behind me, and we called his name, and the guy just starts walking away while he’s on the phone with our decoy.

And we’re like, “Hey, we have all your information. We know where you live.” Instead of just saying we know where you live, we’re giving him the address. We’re telling him his name, we’re telling him where he’s worked, we tell him his age. Like, this guy knew that we knew who he was, and he kept walking and kept walking.

Then he goes into a full sprint. He’s full sprinting through the Walmart. And, you know, I’m not a big runner, so I just start chasing after him. I’m running as fast as I can to catch up with him. I got the camera in my hand, and I’m screaming at the guy saying, you know, “What are you doing here? What’s going through your head?”

Guy gets in his car, he drives away. Didn’t get a word out of the guy. So we thought, okay, let’s just report it to the police. We’ll put the video up. It’ll just be a short video. We’ll attach some of the chat logs so people see he was a teacher. And I thought that was the end of it.

A couple days later, I get a text message from a friend that says, “Hey, didn’t you just catch this guy?” Her name is Courtney Elizabeth. She’s a predator catcher. She texted me a screenshot from another predator catcher 1,200 miles away, Pennsylvania.

So we’re in Florida originally. This guy drove to Pennsylvania for whatever reason. I don’t know why he was there. If he was on his way to Massachusetts, I don’t know what he was doing there, but got caught again by another predator catching group.

And I reached out to that predator catcher, Luzerne County Predator Catcher. He just does his county and is known in that specific area. And he sent me all the chat logs. One of the chat logs said that he was chased out of Walmart by two police officers.

And the guy has no idea who we were because we didn’t get a chance to say—we didn’t get a chance to even tell him what we were doing. So just, you know, the point of the matter is he didn’t get the point the first time.

He likely ran from Florida because he thought he was being investigated or wanted by the police. And then you also have to think, if he got caught twice by two predator catchers, which is not the most common profession or niche in the world, how many times has this man not been caught?

So it’s disgusting, you know, that he’s a teacher and disgusting that he’d do it twice. But just think of the amount of times this man has probably not been caught. So that was one thing.

And then we caught another guy that I wanted to reference. We caught another guy named Steven. We went to his job. We asked for him.

SHAWN RYAN: What was his job?

The Legal Battle Over Predator Exposure

RYAN MONTGOMERY: He was a manager at a seafood restaurant. And we showed up there. We sat at the table. He was supposed to meet with our decoy. At that point, it was 13 or 14 years old, if my memory serves me correctly. And he bailed last second that day.

A lot of times these guys will bail and then they’ll come back. They never really disappear because they can’t. They can’t control themselves. This guy was very sexual. He said that he wanted our decoy to sit on his face. He wanted her to come back to his house. Horrible things.

So we were like, you know what? We’re not going to let this guy just bail and disappear. We know where he works. We have his information. Let’s just go there, order two glasses of water. We know he’s the manager, so he’ll come up after we request the manager, and we’ll bring him outside and have a conversation.

So we did that. He was fully aware that it was being recorded and everything was very transparent what was going on. We asked questions, he told us the answers to them. He knew we weren’t police. He knew he was free to go at any time. And he offered a ton of information that was up to him.

So that gets over with. Police come, we give the police all the information that we have, and some time goes by and I get an email which the original email was saying to take the video down off of the Internet. And it went originally, that went to Scrappy’s cell phone. And he didn’t see it at first, but then when he did, he sent it to me and then I replied to it.

But the first email was straight to the point, like, take this video down. It’s in violation of this statute, of the privacy laws of Florida. And last time I checked, you can record in public. You have no expectation of privacy in a public place, audio or video. And so I wasn’t too concerned about the threat from the law firm who’s representing our predator.

So I sent the reply back and I said, take a look at the person that you are representing. Here are the chat logs, if you want. If you want to be clear, because I didn’t release them with the video so the attorney could read all of the horrible things that the guy not only admitted in the video, but that he said himself in the chats with pictures of his face.

Then they reply a few days later, and I’ll read you their reply. They said, “Thank you for your response. In accordance with Florida Statute 934.03, we are requesting that you remove the video. As stated in my previous email, this video is exposing Mr. Blank to an increased risk of physical harm. In the video, you have exposed his face and full name without his consent, which is a violation of privacy laws. See below.”

And then this is from the statute: “In Florida, it’s illegal to record an in-person or telephone conversation without the consent of all parties. Violating this law constitutes either a misdemeanor or third degree felony, depending on the offender’s intent and conviction history can also subject the offender to civil damages.”

And then at the bottom, this is the kicker: “We respect everything that you do and acknowledge your mission of doing what is right and protecting the public. In fact, we would like to offer you $1,000 to support your cause and for the administrative costs for their removal. I will also be at your service if you need our help in the future if you face any legal issues with your channel. Again, we’re not looking for a battle. We’re looking for your help. Respectfully blank.”

So I will not release their firm’s name. I don’t respect the fact that they’re representing a predator, but they haven’t filed a lawsuit against me at this point. If they do, this email is in my possession. It was sent to me. I can release this email. It’s not a threat by any means, but I will release it to let the public know that somebody’s representing a predator and trying to make my life and Scrappy’s life more difficult about exposing a local predator.

And number two, the fact that they said that they would want to represent us. Why would we ever want legal advice from somebody that would take most likely 500 bucks from a predator to take down a video that is educating the people in the area who’s dangerous? Why would we want to be represented by somebody that’s okay with that?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So I just wanted to let you know that one blew my mind.

Statistics on Child Exploitation

SHAWN RYAN: This stuff just goes on and on and on. And Ron, I want to get you back here again to dive into this more maybe in six months or so because I know there’s going to be a bunch of stuff that develops. But yeah, so I know you have a couple of statistics you want to rattle off. Let’s rattle those off and then let’s try to end this with something positive.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Okay? Yeah, agreed. So these are just some statistics about human trafficking which goes, is, goes, it coincides with exactly what we’re doing. Catching predators and these pedophile ring websites.

One in five US teenagers who have received an unwanted sexual solicitation online. That’s Crimes Against Children Research Center. Thirteen years old is the average age at which a child first encounters an explicit website which comes from GuardChild. 75% of children are willing to share personal information with strangers. That comes from eSafety Commissioner.

SHAWN RYAN: 75%.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: 75%. 50% of sexual exploitation incidents involving children that begin on social media platforms.

SHAWN RYAN: What was that percentage?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: 50%. They begin, which I believe it’s higher. Yeah, 27% of online child exploitation cases involving a perpetrator who is a family member or acquaintance. Source: National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The people that ignored me.

But yeah, 27% of people are cases involving family members and acquaintances, which I think that number’s higher, too. So they’re just statistics. They’re not always accurate, but either way, they’re still horrible, regardless of which way you look at it.

Solutions and Hope

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, you know, it’s something to try to wrap your head around and understand the severity and how much this sh happens. But moving on, let’s get into some good news. Let’s talk about how we solve this thing, which seems when you look at it and you see you can enter just any chat room and somebody shows up in five seconds to literally within…

RYAN MONTGOMERY: 10 seconds we had that message, or it might have been five. We’ll find out.

SHAWN RYAN: And yeah, we’ll find out when the video, when we edit. But you know, just to bring some hope to people, we actually, the videographer came up with a great option, at least to start. And he was saying, you make a database. You know, we pull all of your information, intelligence that you’ve yanked out of these, out of these sites, and hopefully you’ll continue to exploit these sites with that information and make a database, a public database that has all the people that are associated with these sites. Names, addresses, pictures, if we can get them, all of it. And then people, schools, businesses, people that are looking to hire parents. Anybody can just go under this database, type in a name, see if it pops up.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Or a face.

SHAWN RYAN: Or a face.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Or both. I think, I think that’s a phenomenal idea.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, of course. I mean, like we were saying on the break, it’s not like these people are innocent by, like, there’s no possible chance of them being innocent. There’s chat logs of them talking sexually to what they believe is a minor, and then there’s video evidence of them showing up. They’re at the time they say they’re going to be there most of the time on the phone with what they think is a child while they’re walking through the store or through a public place to meet who they think is a kid.

So the database of, if a cop can’t, if a cop can’t get a charge to stick or the state attorney doesn’t want to go through with the case. Well, then the public should know regardless, because then they can make their decision based on the evidence that was gathered by the public.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, I don’t know what the legalities would be either, but if you are an attorney who knows this subject and you want to help, reach out to Zero Day, reach out to Project Veritas, reach out to us. All those links will be in the description. But I think that would be… You know what else? I think we should shame the attorneys who are representing predators.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s ridiculous. I mean, there’s no money in the world that you could pay me to get rid of this information, to stop the journey that I’m on right now. I don’t care what you offered me. It’s not happening. It’s not worth it. There’s, I care too much about kids. I don’t even have a kid.

And again, off the break, I said I can’t, I don’t know how I’m going to act when I have a kid. I’m already crazy. And it’s about my friends’ kids. I’m going to be, I need to find a balance between being a crazy parent and letting my kid have their own space because I’m just, I’m terrified.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, me too. You know, I don’t, I just, I don’t even. This stuff really gets to me. And when we connected, I told you my goal this year is to dive into this subject and bring a lot of awareness to it. And man, this eats me alive. And then you breed stuff like what California is doing, and it’s, I mean, they’re making this, they’re trying to normalize it. So if you’re a pedo, move to California, right?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: If you’re not down with that, move out of California. Like, it’s getting to be that simple. They’re going to look what’s going on there. Yeah, everything. The whole, anyways, whatever. But you know, I want to, I really want your word to get out. And I want to, I want to connect you with some people. I want to connect you with my friend Matt Murphy, who’s doing Operation Lightshine. He’s making a huge dent in this stuff.

I think, I think how this ends, obviously government’s not going to get involved.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: Especially in particular states. I guess Florida is getting involved.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Florida might, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: But whatever. Government moves as slow as a snail. So I think what it’s going to be is, it’s going to be this collaborative effort from citizens, people like you, people like Matt Murphy going after these guys. There’s other organizations out there, and it’s this big collapse turning into this big collaborative effort to get rid of these people and expose what they’re doing and educate the public on how to keep your kids safe.

And just, Ryan, just with what you’re doing, I think I may have brought this up at the beginning, but I mean, if you think about the impact that you’re having, you’re educating kids. Kids are going to wise up to this stuff. That’s going to drop the numbers. Parents are going to be listening to this. They’re going to wise up to this. That’s going to drop numbers.

Predators are going to watch this and realize we’re coming for them. They are heavily, and they’re going to get scared, and some of them are going to stop. So just by doing this show, this one show, it’s going to stop, it’s going to stop a handful. It’s going to, it’s going to save at least one kid.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I can guarantee you that one kid is good with me.

Building Connections and Networks

SHAWN RYAN: I want to also, actually already sent the text, but I want to introduce you to a podcast that’s, they do phenomenal work. It’s called Concrete. It’s run, their host is a guy named Danny Jones. I think he’s somewhere in the Tampa area.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: I’d love to connect you with him. I haven’t, I haven’t even met him in person, but I’m a huge fan of their podcast. That’s one that I watch.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: They’ve actually seen it. I’ve seen it with, I met one of the, one of the guys. Oh, good. Yeah, I didn’t meet any of the, I’m sorry, the producers of the show, somebody that was interviewed. So he was a fraud guy, but…

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah. Well, I’d like to introduce you to them because I think they’ll, I think they will have the courage to help you get the word out. And there’s another guy, Julian Dorian, who I’m actually going on his show here pretty soon, and I want to make that connection, too, because that guy, he does some really, really, really good work. And I’d love to, I’d love to make all three of those connections with Matt, Concrete guys and Julian Dorian.

The Power of Resources and Community Support

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I really appreciate that very much. And yeah, the more noise we make, the better. And like I said, the resources that I have and the abilities that I have and the abilities my team has, you know, especially with cyber security company and my hacking team combined. The more resources, the more we can do. I mean, it’s very simple.

If I don’t have access to these missions or I don’t have access to some tips, I can’t do anything.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So, yeah.

Speaking Up and Taking Action

SHAWN RYAN: I want to end this. I want to say, if you have fallen victim to this or you know somebody that’s fallen victim to this, speak up about it. Get in touch with Ryan Montgomery. All your links are going to be in the description. Zero day. Your Instagram with a zero not spelled 0,561pc that’ll be linked. Project Veritas and everything that they’re doing, all that stuff is going to be linked in the description.

And if you don’t want to reach out to them, you can reach out to us and we’ll put you in contact with them because they’re the ones doing the real work. And this is how we battle this sh*t. You got to speak up. You’ve got to get to people that can lead you to the right people. And we got to expose these people, you know, the predators, man, what a heavy subject.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Unbelievable.

What’s Next

SHAWN RYAN: What do you got coming up?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Well, hopefully, you know, this release comes out and, you know, I have some people reaching out and, you know, not entirely sure I want to do them based on some things we just researched. But, yeah, more to come. More to come. I think that I’ll start with your connections.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on, man. Well, Ryan, I just want to say, man, it’s you’re just a great human helping addiction, helping people that are addicts out. And then it morphed into this. And you obviously have a heart of gold, and it shows, and I’m just proud to know you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Likewise, man. Likewise.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Appreciate you.

SHAWN RYAN: All right, brother. Best of luck and I’ll see you soon.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: See you soon.

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