Transcript: Ryan Montgomery on Roblox, Minecraft, Discord & the Darkest Online Cult – Shawn Ryan Show (SRS #255)

So that was what the clip was. If, you know, if they play the clip, they’ll see what I was saying.

The problem was I infiltrated this network. I dumped their database. I had all their information. I had a case on a golden platter. Like, literally, I think that’s what I said in the clip. And nobody was taking me seriously, and it took years of me trying.

I went to all media sources, you know, eleven plus media sources. I went to law enforcement. I went to two different attorneys. I went to a task force locally. I tried everything. And then I end up just talking about that in that short clip, maybe a minute long.

And the next day, I wake up and there’s like ten million views on this clip. And I’m like, what the heck? I have all these journalist groups reaching out to me, all these media wanting to ask questions, all various podcasters reaching out to me. And I see in my comments, “check your DMs. Check your DMs from a guy named Sean Ryan.”

I’m like and I checked my DMs, and I see Sean’s in there. And I’m like, wow. This guy’s got a big channel, and he wants to, you know, he wants to talk about this. So we started a conversation.

And, you know, I wanted to get the story out there no matter what way it went out. I didn’t care if it went out from a left wing, right wing, in between wing. It didn’t matter. I just wanted the story out there. And, you know, I didn’t know anything about politics, still really don’t.

But I was very, very blown away by a small account blowing up the way that it blew up. So I reach out. I’m sorry. I start speaking with you. We arrange a podcast, which if you remember, Project Veritas was involved.

The Project Veritas Situation

SHAWN RYAN:

Oh, I remember.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

So this is what I want to get into what happened with that. So, actually, this is the way I really want to put it is nobody had the balls to talk about this story because and I proved that with the media. I showed them what needed to be out there. There was it was black and white how bad this website was, and I had evidence that you could not refute of all of the people involved. And they just ignored me.

And you saw that one minute clip and said, “You know what? I’m going to risk my whole channel. I’m going to risk everything just because I want to get this kid that I don’t even know, meaning me. I want to get this kid’s message out there.”

And you have no idea how much I appreciate that and how many kids that’s actually helped, not just from me, from you. And without you, without, obviously, all the things that led up to you, none of that would have happened. You know? And I am beyond grateful for that, and it’s opened up so many doors, which I’ll obviously get into in this episode.

But beyond blessed, super grateful for it. And, you know, one thing that’s frustrating is and there’s a I have a good and bad thing to say about Project Veritas and why I wanted to tie them into this story is Project Veritas is the first journalist group to reach out to me that I was willing to because they said, “We’ll fly overnight, we’ll be there the next day.”

So they were in New York, I was in Florida, and they said, “We’ll come out and check out the database and we will investigate it.” So of course, I was like, “Yeah, come out. Let’s do it. Anybody who wants to run this story, let’s go.”

This is right about the time James O’Keefe left or was fired, whatever happened there. That doesn’t matter to me, to be honest with you. They fly out to Florida. I hand them the data, and all of their journalists, all their reporters, the ones that I worked with directly, were passionate and wanted to work on this project. And they spent days, weeks, months of their life on this project. So I can’t say a single negative thing about the team that I worked with there. They were all great, and they cared a ton about this case.

SHAWN RYAN:

Mhmm.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

What happened is James’ replacement, her name is Hannah Giles, she came in as the interim CEO while they were trying to figure out what was going on. And at that point, if you remember, there were seven thousand people in that database from the original database.

And Project Veritas, the goal was to go out to confront these people face to face with hidden cameras and ask them about their participation on the website. So, like, that meaning, like, not just you were on the site, but here’s the forum posts that you made. Here’s the private messages that you had with other users, like, expose these people.

So they exposed a couple of them. They put it out publicly, and we identified five hundred of the seven thousand without a shadow of a doubt. Five hundred of the seven thousand were identified at the time when Hannah Giles became the interim CEO.

They wanted her, I’m assuming Hannah, wanted New York Post or New York Times to release a story on it. And that was their main focus, which at that time, remember, you know, we were talking about it when you’re talking about circulation. It’s like social media has a way bigger circulation than them.

Then Hannah says to me, I’m on the phone with her, and she tells me that my story is not a tidal wave. That’s the words verbatim that this woman used, and she shut it down.

SHAWN RYAN:

So, oh, boy. She f*ed that one up, didn’t she?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

She really did. And, you know, not only because of how big this story got and how many kids, how much impact that database made on, you know, some of the predator networks following it as well. But, the sad part of this is with Project Veritas, five hundred of the seven thousand identified, thirteen of which of the five hundred were convicted of sex crimes with children after I originally reported the information to National Center for Mission to Explain to Children, the tip lines, the task force, all the media.

So just ironically, the average offender has thirteen victims in a lifetime, but thirteen different cases occurred after I reported it. And then she shuts it down. So that’s five hundred of the seven thousand. Who knows how many didn’t get caught? And who knows how many more, you know, how many victims just, you know, have been prevented if someone was just taking me seriously.

And you did, man. You did. Project Veritas, as much as they may get some hate or whatever, I don’t have any opinion on anything else they’ve ever done other than what they’ve done with me. And their journalists were good to me. Their interim CEO, I don’t like the way that she treated this situation, and I have no problem saying that.

And, yeah, man, I just wanted to so I guess a long way of saying thank you so much, and I appreciate the balls that you have because nobody else did.

The Episode That Changed Everything

SHAWN RYAN:

Well, it’s my honor, man. But, you know, I forgot about the Veritas stuff because we had to coordinate release of the episode with them. Yeah. I forgot about that. And they, yeah. They there was some other publication that they’re like, “We got to wait and see if this goes.”

And I remember I remember having a conversation with you, and I was like, “Dude, what we have here is ten times any of the publications that they’re talking about, and this is going to f*ing send.” And it did. It wound up being the most viewed, most downloaded, biggest episode I’ve ever done still to this date. And, you know, I remember reaching out to you.

The FBI’s Response and Taking Action

I remember the FBI stuff. The FBI wouldn’t take you seriously. I was so upset. You know? And also, this is like, you were the first person that I dove into this subject with because I had heard so much about it, but I don’t trust nonprofits.

But we—me and you—talk a lot about that offline. I just don’t trust them anymore. I’ve seen too many that started off with good intentions that go, you know, array, and it becomes all about f*ing raising money and not about whatever the actual mission was. And you didn’t have any of that. You know?

And I could tell, like, on that post, I was like, this guy is just trying to get information out. And so, yeah, reached out, tried to coordinate everything with Veritas. They wanted to do the story, and I remember telling you something along the lines like, f* these people, dude. Let’s just run it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. Well, you actually had people that you had in line to put their episodes out before mine, and you rushed my episode for them. Yeah. Like, you did them a huge favor. Yeah.

And then they just screwed it up. Like, they could have done a lot more good. Like I said, their journalists, if it was up to them, it would have happened. I don’t think it could—

SHAWN RYAN:

I don’t think it could have gone any better than it did, to be honest with you. Everything that happened, I think happened because of what we did, you know, like, you enlightened me for starters because I’ve gone on to do several episodes after you about it. I interviewed Jim Caviezel. We went to the premiere of Sound of Freedom together, interviewed Tim Tebow, interviewed Jaren Hudson, interviewed Victor Marks. Like, you were the start of all of that, and I still continue to talk about it, you know, to this day.

But, you know, I think what we did, man, is we just created, like, the perfect storm. And yeah. And also, like, yeah, that was a huge—I mean, I don’t think you wanted to be public. You were extremely f*ing nervous to come on the show.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

One hundred percent.

Overcoming Fear and Taking Risks

SHAWN RYAN:

And I remember trying—I remember going through my head, like, how do I calm this guy down? And but however, whatever, it worked. And it was a big—it was jeopardizing my entire business because this is the forbidden fruit that you cannot talk about on certain platforms. Right. I remember thinking, you know what? F it. We’re not monetizing this. I want to fly under the radar. I don’t give a s. If they shut everything down, it ended trying to pump some good into the world.

And I’m, like, one hundred percent fine with that.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

And that takes balls. Like, for the third time, it takes balls, and I appreciate that. And to be honest with you, and I know I gave you a warning beforehand, but, you know, this one is just as deep and dear to my heart. And I have some stuff that I really, really need parents to know, and it’s going to be rough. And I think that, you know, you guys, whoever’s watching this, you’re going to hear a lot of beeping. Yeah. It’s important that you listen to what I have to tell you today.

SHAWN RYAN:

But, you know, I wanted to say, man, like, you know, we’ve talked about it a lot offline and especially at the very beginning after the episode when you were trying to figure out where you want to go and because I think this was a segue into you having a much bigger role in the fight against exploitation and trafficking.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Oh, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN:

But what we did, man, is, you know, I jeopardized everything you did too. And but what wound up happening was we educated millions and millions of parents. We educated millions and millions and millions of kids on how this happens, prove to them how fast it happens. You know, I’ll—dude, I will never forget when you made the screen name Ashley thirteen because I was like, how—this isn’t like—there’s no way this s happens this much. So I wanted to time you to see how—I figured we’d be there all fing day.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. Unfortunately not.

The Impact of the Ashley Thirteen Demonstration

SHAWN RYAN:

It was, like, five seconds. And that just proved, like I said, millions and millions and millions of parents and kids. Like, this is how common this is. This is how fast it can happen. And then on the other hand, we scared a metric s* ton—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Of predators.

SHAWN RYAN:

Of predators. Oh, yeah. And so it really was the perfect storm. But, you know, some other context. I mean, now I’m, like, going back and forth. Now I’m, like, remembering all the things that happened, like, right after the episode. And, I mean, we blasted the FBI on that episode. Yeah. We definitely did. Actually, we didn’t blast them. We just expressed what happened when you got the information to the FBI and how they totally f*ing dismissed it and how interested they were after the episode came out. Remember that? Remember how much they wanted to help? I know you guys are, like, maybe talking right now. Maybe. I don’t know.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. I mean, everything I do now is in parallel with law enforcement. So, cool. Yeah. Now I’ll get into more of what that means. But, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN:

I remember being extremely fearful. I was like, these people aren’t trying to help you. They didn’t help you the first time. There’s seven thousand names on that list, and that was developed—that website was developed by a politician. They’re trying to—every motherf*er on there is calling in favors trying to get their name redacted from—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I remember. Do you remember? I was so scared because, you know, I took the—as you said, it was a risk for me. I was scared my door was going to get kicked in or like, I don’t have anything to worry about, but I don’t want to lose all my electronics or end up getting charged with something that I go to trial for and all the stuff. And I’m calling you. I’m calling you at, like, eleven, twelve o’clock at night. You got Tim Parlatore helping me out. You got all these people, you know, telling me, like, yo. Do this. Do that. Like, make sure you don’t do this. Don’t do that. Like, I got you—you helped me an absolute ton back, you know, because I was panicking, man. I was panicking because I wanted the information out there, but I didn’t know what to expect because technically, what I did at that time was not legal. My intentions were obviously good. I would say it’s more gray than black hat, but it was—you know, I obtained that information illegally. So I was scared. I was genuinely scared, and it was very new territory to me.

I know now a lot more than I did. And as I said in the beginning, if I had to go to trial for this and I had to stand in front of twelve jurors, like, I have a hard time believing that people would say that I’m a criminal for taking down a predator organization, but I genuinely was scared at that time.

The Aftermath and Success

SHAWN RYAN:

Well, it wound up being a wildly successful piece of content. I mean, with all the clips and the reels and the episode and the downloads, I mean, it’s literally hundreds of millions of views. And then your life just exploded into ways that I think you’d never imagine you would go into.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Oh my gosh.

SHAWN RYAN:

But I mean, I remember seeing you on all the big podcasts, and I was just, dude, through all this s and all the fame that you’ve amassed since we met, dude, I just want to say, man, I am so fing proud of you. Like, you have handled the fame and the notoriety like nobody I’ve ever seen, man. Like, you have stayed true to yourself. You did not turn into a pompous ahole. You are the same man that I met when nobody knew who the hell you were three years ago when we did that interview.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

It means the world, isn’t it?

SHAWN RYAN:

It really does. I just want to, like, say, like, you know, to—I want the world to know, you know, your character. Like, that didn’t turn into a massive amount of money for you, I don’t think. You’re not here to make money. Like, when people ask me about you or I’m talking about you, I talk about you a lot, you know, one of the things I always say is, like, that guy does not give a f about anything but saving kids. He doesn’t give a s if you approach him with business ideas. Like, if that’s your focus, he’s not going to want to do it. Like, all that dude wants to do is save fing kids. He doesn’t give a s about the fame. He doesn’t give a s* about his following. He doesn’t care about anything but saving those kids. And, you know, there’s just not very many people like you, man.

Friendship and Gratitude

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Likewise. Likewise. There’s not many people I consider friends, especially in this space, you know, like making YouTube videos and content and podcasts. I mean, you’re the only one that I would consider a friend, like a real one, a real friend. And people don’t know us off camera. But, you know, there’s not many people that I can ride around with on an ATV and have the conversations we had yesterday. Like, you know, that’s what I look forward to in life. You know, I only get a couple good friends, and I’m grateful and glad that you’re one of them.

SHAWN RYAN:

Likewise, man. I love you, dude.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Love you too, man.

SHAWN RYAN:

You’re a great human.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Thank you.

SHAWN RYAN:

Well, let me give you an introduction here real quick.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

All right.

Introduction to Ryan Montgomery

SHAWN RYAN:

Then we’ll get into the interview. Ryan Montgomery, a powerhouse in cybersecurity in the fight against child exploitation, a top ethical hacker and penetration tester with over nineteen years of experience, ranked number one on TryHackMe’s Capture the Flag leaderboard. The founder of Pentester, a Boca Raton based platform offering online privacy solutions for people and businesses. As CTO of the Sentinel Foundation, you use cutting edge technology and law enforcement collaborations to combat global child exploitation and human trafficking. Known for infiltrating dark websites to expose predators, you’ve demonstrated live hacks right here on my show, which we just talked about. You specialize in ethical hacking, data protection, and online safety, advocating for stronger cybersecurity and protecting vulnerable populations. And one of my favorite people in the world, Ryan Montgomery.

I know we are here to talk about some of the childhood stuff that we missed the last time. A lot of the stuff that you’ve been doing now and know, but I think that the premise of this interview, which will come towards the middle in the end, is the domestic terrorist group, the seven six four group. Correct?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

That’s correct.

The Purpose of This Interview

SHAWN RYAN:

And all of the horrific stuff that they’re doing. So like I said, you know, this is going to be very similar to the interview that we did before. You know? And this is to educate—our purpose here is to educate parents and kids and to scare the s* out of pedophiles and to expose how these things are happening and just educate because the—you know, we’ve talked about this offline too. And I think that the collaboration that me and you did online has saved more kids than any other. Dude, it’s hundreds of millions of people that watch that. Like, so many parents and so many kids. Like, it made it real. I mean, you demonstrated it right here live.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

And I can unfortunately do it again on any platform. I know. Literally any platform.

SHAWN RYAN:

And so, you know, that’s like—it’s my proudest interview, man, because not because of the numbers and not because of, like, the explosiveness of the interview. It’s because there are, who knows, countless kids out there whose parents watch that, who they watch that, they will never have to fing face the trauma that they would have faced if their parents and themselves didn’t implement the things to protect them. And, you know, I know it didn’t get to everybody, but, man, like, we saved a lot of fing kids there, man.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I love to hear that, and I love to believe that as well. And to be honest, like, I’ve been all over the world, all over the country in the last three years and running into strangers on the street, at the airport, at the mall, all these places, people stopping me now, which, you know, is very new to me. But some of them are parents, and they tell me, like, hey. I stopped posting my kid on the Internet for this reason or that reason, or I was a victim of this, or I have a situation. You know, I hear this from not only from people sending me direct messages, emails, literally letters in the mail. There’s so many ways of people contacting me now.

But, like, something about somebody coming up to me in real life and telling me the impact that it’s made. It’s like, what are the odds of just a stranger that runs into me that made an impact? If it happened with that person, it must have happened with a lot more than I’m aware of. You know?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. And that makes me very proud. It makes me happy, and it makes me motivated to keep doing this. Because as you said, I’m not looking for a pat on the back. I’m not looking for money.

If you blurred my face and you changed my voice for this episode, it wouldn’t change anything. It’s really about getting the word out there and making some sort of change because nobody else seems to be doing it. Nobody else seems to… I don’t know. I mean, there’s people that have passion. I don’t want to discount them because there are good people in this space.

But coming on to a show and talking about this stuff in some of the detail that I want to, I don’t really see other people doing. And I don’t see somebody else having the nerve to do it with them. So it’s I just think it’s a very unique opportunity that we showed work for the first time, and it’s for the millionth time a blessing.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, let’s hope it works again. But, you know, Ryan, one of the other things that I loved about you is we both kind of started our journey to Christianity together around the same time. I wouldn’t say together, but timelines really match up. And I know you’ve grown a lot in your spiritual journey and so have I. And so I think we should kick this off with a prayer. What do you think?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Sure.

SHAWN RYAN: You ready?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

Opening Prayer

SHAWN RYAN: Alright. Jesus, I just want to say thank you for my friendship with Ryan and for bringing us together those years ago. And I’m just so proud of him and thankful for our relationship. And Jesus, I just ask you to be in this room with us today and to guide Ryan and myself the way that you want us to expose this 764 satanic cult, what they’re doing to kids.

And we just ask that you distribute the information that we’re going to reveal today to all the kids and all the parents, especially the vulnerable ones who may have an unfortunate future that they’re facing. And we just hope to derail them from that traumatic future and into more beautiful things.

And we just hope that the people that watch this, if they were if their future was heading towards that, we just wanted to head towards the light and for them to take this information seriously and put in the repercussions that they need so that they don’t become a victim. In Jesus’ name, amen.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Amen.

SHAWN RYAN: So cheers.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Cheers.

Hacking Gadgets and Tools

SHAWN RYAN: Alright. But let’s start it with some fun stuff. So, you know, one of the fun things we did last time is you had all these gadgets, and you blew my f*ing mind. So I see all new stuff over here. What do we got?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So we got a lot of new things. I don’t know if it’s going to be exactly the way that we did the first time because I did show you a lot. I blanketed a lot of topics, and I pissed off a lot of people in cybersecurity in that process.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Because, you know, trying to explain some of these attacks and cybersecurity methods to people that aren’t cybersecurity professionals is tough. I mean, try to explain a captive portal to your grandmom. It’s just you have to… and I’m not saying you’re an old…

SHAWN RYAN: Are you calling me a f*ing… are you calling me a geriatric?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: No.

SHAWN RYAN: Alright. I’m pretty close.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: What I’m saying is most people are not tech literate. Most. It doesn’t matter if they’re older or younger. So people got really aggravated with the way that I explained it. They got really aggravated with the “number one ethical hacker” thing. I never said that I was the number one hacker in the world. There’s no way to rank that. You know?

And honestly, I would love if you titled this video “number one ethical hacker” just to piss them off.

SHAWN RYAN: Hey. We can do that. I’m glad you finally reached that point.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I really… I am done. I’m done caring. I’ve tried posting on all of my platforms. I’ve talked on other podcasts about it. I’ve made it very clear. I know I’m not the best hacker. I never said I was. But at this point, I just like aggravating them. So if…

SHAWN RYAN: I’ve learned anything from doing podcasts, there’s one thing. You cannot make the Internet happy no matter what the f* you do.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Not a chance.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t care. Piss them off anyways.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. I’m learning that. I’m learning that. And I call them the neck beards and the “actually” guys. And, you know, so I’m sure they’ll have some stuff to say about some of this stuff, but that’s fine.

So there’s a couple things here, one of which we’re going to need, you know, the thing, you know, to screw it into. I don’t want to ruin what it is yet.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you carrying all this stuff all the time now, like the last?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. It’s always in my pocket.

SHAWN RYAN: So this is the latest and greatest EDC.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you still carrying the flipper?

# The Flipper Zero

RYAN MONTGOMERY: The flipper, that is in my pocket. So at all times, always have the flipper. And the reason, honestly, is that I’ll show a cool attack, which it’ll probably end up being some type of B-roll or something in here because we have to do it in a nondisclosed location or just whatever.

But I have some custom firmware on here now that can break into a ton of different cars, and it’s on a rolling code system. Meaning, every time you hit the button on your key fob, the code changes, and the car only accepts the new code. And this has custom firmware that gets in sync with that rolling code.

But so let’s say you click the lock button. Now I have the lock, unlock, trunk, all of your… all of the buttons on your key fob just from one press. And that was one thing. They lost their minds over saying that that’s a data attack that’s been around twenty years. It’s not rolling code. It’s not this… but it is. It is rolling code. It is a new attack.

So and I’ll demonstrate it on the show, you know, once we get outside or whatever point that is. But the flipper and then this was actually given to me. This is called a… it’s a dual ESP by a company called AWOK Dynamics, I believe.

So AWOK, a guy… I was at this hacker conference called DEFCON, which is the biggest hacker meetup in the world, I believe. And a friend of mine, another YouTuber, Talking Sasquatch, just comes up to me and hands this to me. And it was obvious because I know what these pins mean. They fit in the flipper. Right?

So you plug this into the top of the flipper. They’re called GPIO pins.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, shit.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And it makes this thing look ridiculous.

SHAWN RYAN: Flipper on steroids. Here we go.

# The Dual ESP Wi-Fi Module

RYAN MONTGOMERY: The flipper doesn’t have Wi-Fi capability by default. So this gives it two different Wi-Fi chips that do Bluetooth. They do other things as well. But you’ll see that the flipper, when I turn this thing on, I give it five volts. You’ll see the power goes on.

And then I have a touch screen here now where I can do Wi-Fi attacks. So there’s sniffer scanners, war driving attacks, general, so beacon spamming, rick rolls, evil portals, de-auth, meaning disconnecting devices from the network, de-auth targeted, meaning target a specific device. And the cool thing about this is it can run…

SHAWN RYAN: What do you mean target a specific device?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So let’s say you had a wireless camera outside, and I see that address… that’s coming up as a device on the screen here. I could target just that device.

SHAWN RYAN: How do you know what the device is? I mean, there’s got to be… there’s probably a hundred wireless devices at the studio at all times. How do you narrow it down and go, that’s that f*ing camera right over there in the right corner?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So it depends. If it’s broadcasting BLE, for example, or a MAC address, there’s a thing called an OUI database that you could identify it from the digits there, which I’m just trying to simplify things. But there’s ways you could do that, or you could just do a de-auth flood, which then just hits everything it possibly can. And then you could take a safe bet that if it’s on the frequency that this is de-authing on, it’s going to knock it offline.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: But what’s cool about this is a lot of things because I just… without going into the nitty gritty of it, the Wi-Fi capabilities. It also has Bluetooth capabilities and Bluetooth attacks. And one of them is called SourApple, and I’ll get more into that later. You could spoof an AirTag with this thing to make people…

SHAWN RYAN: You could do what? What do you mean spoof an AirTag? What does that even mean?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So it’ll make your phone believe that there’s an AirTag there. So, you know how your phone will say you’re being tracked by an AirTag. But these antennas versus an AirTag’s antennas are way more significant. I’ll show you more once I get over to this other tool about Bluetooth attacks, but some really cool stuff there.

But the reason why this is called a dual ESP, which means there’s two boards in it, you can use the flipper’s… there’s a custom app in here. Let’s say I wanted to do one attack that’s taking your cameras offline, and I want to do another attack that’s stealing your passwords. I can use two different networks completely doing two different attacks, because this has two boards in it, the flipper knows to use one or the other. So this…

SHAWN RYAN: How are you going to steal the passwords?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I’ll show you. I’ll show you because I have something else for that. It’s unbelievable. But this was a cool gift, and I wanted to show it off because it just looks cool. You know?

And then this right here, I think you’re really going to like this. So a company also Kickstarter related.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m not going to like it, Ryan. I don’t like any of this stuff.

# The BLE Shark Nano

RYAN MONTGOMERY: You might not like this. You might not. Alright. So this is called the BLE Shark Nano. And the company, they… I think they’re for sale now, but they sent them out to me because I asked. It was like, because I really wanted one. It looked cool.

And the guy was nice enough. I think his name was George. He sent it out to me, and I was like, you know, who knows what I’m going to do with it. I just want to play around with it. And I recorded a video at that conference, and it’s got twenty million views of me just showing this thing off. And I was not expecting that at all.

So I’ll show you there’s… what I mean by stealing the passwords. I think that this should do it. Okay. So now check… go to your phone. Just go to settings. Go to Wi-Fi, and you should see a free Wi-Fi there. I just named it “free Wi-Fi.”

SHAWN RYAN: Alright. And my phone’s over here. Shit. There we go.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Don’t worry. Won’t hurt anything.

SHAWN RYAN: Yep. Free Wi-Fi. Got it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So what happens when you click free Wi-Fi?

SHAWN RYAN: Should I click it? Alright. Here we go. “Sign in to your Google account.”

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Okay. So just put in, like, sean@gmail.com. And then just put in whatever password you want. I got it. Should I walk over to you? Because it’s small.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Alright. So we got sean@gmail.com. Password “hacked this.”

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

# Demonstrating the Captive Portal Attack

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. So what… for the people… I don’t know if they could hear me. For the people that couldn’t see this little device, Shawn just got a network that said “free Wi-Fi.” It could have been airport Wi-Fi. It could have been hotel Wi-Fi. It could have been Starbucks Wi-Fi. Could be whatever I wanted to name that network.

And what happened was he got what’s called a captive portal, which a lot of people would be familiar with. They might not recognize the term. You connect to a free network in public, and the screen pops up that says, “I agree to the terms and conditions.” Or if you’re in a hotel room, it might say, “You’re in room 1308, and your last name is this.” And then when you press Submit, it tells the hotel, “Yeah, this is a guest. Give them access to our network.” That’s a captive portal.

In this case, it created a fake Google captive portal that looked like the real Google login. I mean, I don’t think there’s any way you could’ve differentiated that from a real Google login because what you’re taught in phishing attacks is to look at the URL. If the URL doesn’t say google.com, then it’s not real. Right?

Well, in captive portals, the URL just says captive.apple.com as the default. So there’s no way to tell that’s not real.

# Public Wi-Fi Security Risks

Like, you’re not you should never put your credentials in is basically what I’m saying into any captive portal. And another thing to think about regarding hotel Wi-Fi or anything related, let’s say you’re at a hotel or you’re on an airplane and you’re trying to get Internet and you have to put your credit card in to get it. Like, maybe the hotel charges more for faster Internet. I’ve seen that, like, to support streaming or whatever.

I can make a fake network that says and stand outside of a hotel or leave a device outside of a hotel or be on an airplane and require a credit card with a name, with an address, with all this info for them upgrade their connection or upgrade whatever it may be and be stealing credit card numbers as well as their passwords.

And there’d be no way for them to know that I was doing it because the second that they submit it and it’s over with, now they’re connected to the Internet if I route it to the Internet.

SHAWN RYAN:

How many people are doing this? Is this I mean, I feel like this could be happening at every single hotel.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I mean, you would be I think it would be naive to think it’s not happening all over the place. I mean, there’s a lot more cybersecurity people out there now than there were when I was a kid. Like, I don’t know that I can’t there’s no way to tell you how many black hats exist, how many people get arrested for hacking charges. I mean, I don’t have those numbers, but it’s

Was this, like, pretty common, though? I mean, these attacks are I wouldn’t say I wouldn’t say that the attacks are trivial because they’re like, your average person, it would take some time to understand these topics to know how to recreate that attack. You could buy a device that just does it. But, you know, I don’t know. I can’t tell you how prevalent these are, but it like, I could give you that device, and you could do that with two clicks.

SHAWN RYAN:

Well, I mean, the reason I’m asking is, I mean, you travel a lot. I travel a lot. You know, we’re all we spend a lot of time in hotels and airports and sh like that. I’m always connecting to the, you know, to the airplane Wi-Fi even though the sh never works.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN:

I love paying ten bucks, and then you don’t get any f*ing Internet.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. But you put your credit card in there.

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

And how do you know it’s really

SHAWN RYAN:

So that’s what I’m getting at. You know? If you go to if you go to whatever the Holiday Inn Express and you want to get Internet and there’s Holiday Inn guest, Holiday Inn Express guest, you don’t know which one’s the legitimate one. They make them look identical.

Identifying Fake Networks

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. There’s no way for you to know the difference.

SHAWN RYAN:

How can people, like, how can people guard against something like that?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

There’s not a not a great way to do it unless you, like, you know, unless you know a little bit about, you know, computers. Because, like, what I would do in that case is I would I would try to, like in a captive portal on a phone, you can’t, like, view the source of the page. Like, look at the code of the front end client side of the page. I would look at that to see if there’s anything odd there that’s not connecting to to, like because that like, this isn’t connected to the Internet right now.

So for you to see that Google page, that had to load the Google logo from that device. It had to load all of the, like, the text on the page from that device. Whereas if it was actually pulling data from Google, you would see all of the Google links inside the it’s called the source code.

So that like, if you’re on a laptop, you like, in a perfect world, you could right click, you could hit view source, and see if if the in the code, if it actually is going to the name of the hotel dot com or Google dot com. And if that’s true, it still doesn’t guarantee that it’s real, but it gives you a better chance.

SHAWN RYAN:

Gotcha.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

And then inside of these captive portals, there’s a you know, like, sometimes it doesn’t just say captive dot apple dot com. You’ll see, like, an actual name at the top, but, you know, anything can be modified, man. And, I just say that the general way to put this is just don’t trust public Wi-Fi.

So I wish I could give you a solid answer. I don’t think anybody would be able to give you a better answer than that because it’s it’s kind of an up in the air. Public Wi-Fi just there’s way more vulnerabilities than just that.

Secure Internet Device

SHAWN RYAN:

Yep. Yep. Well, I got I got you a gift, Ryan. Oh, yeah. And so I was going to wait, but this seems like the perfect time to give it to you. One well, I’ll give you the other gift later. So here you go. Since we’re talking about public Wi-Fi. So while you’re open to that, let me tell you a story.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

All right.

SHAWN RYAN:

So actually, it probably started with you. I started getting you know, with the FBI stuff, I started getting very paranoid about who’s listening in on my conversations and all that kind of stuff. And then we went to Taiwan, we went to Dubai, we started doing all these overseas interviews. I know China is looking for backdoors into our stuff.

So anyways, I got super paranoid and I started looking for a real black phone. And so what I found was this company, Glacier, and they make a black phone. They do a hardened iPhone. They can do any phone. Any phone you have, you can hand it to them, and they will turn it into a hardened device where it stops data from getting sucked out of you.

There’s an Overwatch, you get endless amount of burner numbers, you get all American VPNs, you get, there’s like a kidnapping type feature that tracks you more than regular iOS. But anyways, lots of features on that. But another thing they do

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Where did that device I put it right here.

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. Hold that up. So anyways, I called them up. We’re going to partner with them, and those phones are, like, eighty five hundred bucks.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Really?

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. But I wanted so I wanted something. I was like, look. This is becoming more and more of a thing. You see China buying a lot of the VPN companies. You see Israel buying a lot of VPN companies. And so what that thing is, so we’re doing this app, and the app is going to be like a more consumer friendly version of the phone. The phone is really for Intel people, major corporations, for their C suite, stuff like that. It has a secure messenger service.

But anyways, so we are doing a consumer product to that that’s more consumer friendly. It’s going to be an app, and we’re going to call it Glacier App. There’s a link for anybody that’s interested with the waitlist down there. And we’re also developing products.

So that is a secure Internet device from Glacier. It works in one hundred and thirty different countries. Basically, you just turn it on. It puts you on the secure server. Like I said, in over one hundred and thirty countries, they set it up to where all your devices will just automatically link to it. Then you’re not using public hotel Wi-Fi. You’re not using airport Wi-Fi. You’re not using anybody’s Wi-Fi, especially overseas. And it’s all encrypted.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

And this is connected to, like, a cellular network?

SHAWN RYAN:

This is connected to a cellular network that runs through Glacier, and so all of your all of your traffic will be encrypted.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Is there, like, a subscription fee for this?

SHAWN RYAN:

We haven’t released those yet. Great question.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

But I get the free ninety nine.

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. You get the free one. So there it is.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Well, thank you very much. This is really cool.

SHAWN RYAN:

Now you don’t have to worry about public Wi-Fi anymore.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Well, I think it’s more for the other people than me, but I appreciate it. I’ll be using the crap out of this. I promise you that.

SHAWN RYAN:

You’re welcome, man.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Thank you very much. I didn’t realize it did all that. It looks like a power bank, but it does a lot more than a power bank based on what you just said.

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. So we use that in Taiwan. We use that in Romania. We use that in Dubai. Use it everywhere now. I just you know? So

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Congrats on that. That’s good. That’s awesome. I’m pumped.

SHAWN RYAN:

Turn me into a tech guy.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. You’re

SHAWN RYAN:

You were the first tech guy I had on.

The Billion Dollar Bill

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

You know what I will also turn you into? What’s that? I mean, I know you I know you’re wealthy, Shawn, but I don’t think you’re this wealthy.

SHAWN RYAN:

I’m not wealthy.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Hold on a second. I brought something for you here. I got you. A billion dollar, dude. One billion dollars.

SHAWN RYAN:

Use an extra billion. So The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. But you see how it says dollars on that bill? Yeah. So you technically have a billion dollars.

SHAWN RYAN:

F*ing a.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

You’re officially a billionaire. Billionaire now. And I just wanted to make it very clear that that you have it’s in the United States. So, you know, maybe it came from Zimbabwe.

SHAWN RYAN:

For making me a huge target.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Well, don’t we hear about all these problems with billionaires in the United States, people having issues with them and all this stuff, but you’re not going be one of them. And think about people in Zimbabwe, they’re all billionaires too. Good point. Good point. No problems.

But just thought it was a cool thing. We ordered them on eBay at the office because there’s, like, fifty or twenty billion dollar bills, forty billion

SHAWN RYAN:

You ordered these on eBay?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

We thought yeah. We made we put them in a frame. You know? And we just thought it’d be funny to give you one because it’s just unbelievable the amount of inflation that’s happened, but that’s a whole different They don’t use those bills anymore.

SHAWN RYAN:

Right on.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah, but it’s a cool thing

Cellular Security Concerns and Stingray Detection

SHAWN RYAN: to have, I thought. But actually, I got a couple of things about cellular that I want to talk about.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah, let’s do it. It’s nothing against what you said. It’s more just about cellular in general and my worries for it.

So firstly, there’s this thing right here, which is a Verizon hotspot. It looks no different than a Verizon hotspot. That’s what it is. It is a hotspot. I think it’s called the Orbit.

The actual Orbic is the actual model of it. They’re about nine dollars on eBay as of recording right now. And if I plug it in, show you how simple this is.

SHAWN RYAN: So this is the exact same thing as what I just gave you, just on secure?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. So this is just the hotspot.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: But I modified this hotspot with custom firmware called RayHunter.

SHAWN RYAN: Of course, you did.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And for nine dollars, I can—which I know you’re going to want one of these. This is up your alley.

SHAWN RYAN: Is this going to be the framed piece for this episode?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I don’t know. But I bring this every country I go to, everywhere I go. So it’s charging right now. Let me turn it on. Come on. There it goes. Okay. So you see it’s got their logo and everything on it. You would never know this isn’t a real hotspot.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It still does broadcast a network on it. And you’ll see at the top here, you’re going to start seeing a green or red, hopefully green, a green or red line the second that it boots up. Okay. So it has no service at the moment, but it’s loading.

So that green line at the top there? Yeah. So that means that there are no stingrays within proximity to us, which is—going real simple—how the feds or certain people can track your phone’s location, the information that comes from your phone. Just think of it as a way to determine if your phone’s being tracked. And you can just have this running at all times, sitting in your pocket.

And instead it acting as a Wi-Fi router or hotspot, I can take this. I can use my phone. I’ll show you. I could go and connect to the Verizon network right here. And then I’ll go right to my browser. Hold on. Stingray hunter. Where is it at? Come on. I’ll just—

SHAWN RYAN: So this thing basically detects if there’s anything listening or gathering information on you within some type of a radius.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. And you don’t have to stare at it. You know? That’s kind of the good thing about it is you don’t have to stare at it. And if it turns red once, it’s here. Hold on. I’ll show you.

SHAWN RYAN: Like, when you came to the old studio and we had that little piece of shit EMF detector thing, and we found something on the wall and we’re like, where is it?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. This is a whole different thing. Let me just look. I have it in my bookmark. Sorry. Because I have the actual Verizon page, and then I have the page of it where it’s modified. Sorry. Here we go. Alright. So—oh, actually, what the heck? I actually have a warning here.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you f*ing serious?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I am dead serious. Look at this. There’s a red warning. So I’ll download that PCAPP after. I seriously didn’t set this up. I really didn’t. I swear to gosh.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, shit. How do you know what it is?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I’ll download it and try to see, but it just lets me know there’s a device within proximity. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen—I’ve seen—that’s my first time ever seeing a warning.

SHAWN RYAN: This is likely if you just turn your device on, this is likely a false positive.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Well, there’s two other captures above it. So I don’t know. There’s a couple below it and above it. So we’ll have to look into that. I’ve never even seen that.

SHAWN RYAN: Wait a minute. This is my place?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I mean, I didn’t look at—

SHAWN RYAN: July Thursday, July third, Wednesday, September tenth.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Well, then that would be incorrect, unless the top one has the wrong date.

SHAWN RYAN: Top one is Monday, October twentieth.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That’s today?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Then the other one must be—I must have missed it.

SHAWN RYAN: Dude, you can’t be f*ing with me like that.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I barely looked at it. I just saw red and was like, oh my god.

SHAWN RYAN: You—how paranoid I get about this shit.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Well, this is why you need one of these.

SHAWN RYAN: I’ve—yep. I need to buy that.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It’s nine bucks right now. I’ll just give you this one.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s nine bucks?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. It’s a hacked version of a Verizon hotspot.

SHAWN RYAN: But—so you just turn that on anywhere you go. How far is the radius? I mean—

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It’s anywhere. Receives cellular just like a cell phone would. Yeah. So what it’s doing is this interface is because I’m connected to the hotspot as if you would be using it, but it’s on a custom port, it’s called. So, like, if a—do you know how people can root their Androids, meaning giving it more permissions and install custom apps?

This is running a version of Android that’s rooted, and then it’s running that custom software. So you just go in here, you let it run all day, and then you can go and just check, is it green? Is it red? And if it is red, the RayHunter GitHub—where all the developers put their stuff—you can copy the file and put it in there, and they’ll analyze it for you.

You don’t even need to know what you’re looking at. So they’d be interested in this red one that I have because I never even seen red before. I never—this is my first time. But yeah. I thought you would like this because it’s kind of a cool cheap little hockey thing, but all that works.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m getting one of those for everybody on the team.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. I’ll set them all up for you. Alright. So that one—

SHAWN RYAN: What’s that called?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: This is a regular Verizon hotspot, but the software on it’s called Ray Hunter.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And then this is the Orbic, O-R-B-I-C, Verizon Orbic.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. I got mine on eBay. Let me turn it off. But as long as you’re seeing a green line, you’re good. And I didn’t see a red line here. So I was like, as soon as I logged in the portal, it was red. I was like, what? Never seen red—

SHAWN RYAN: If it’s red? Get a new hotel room?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Put your phone in airplane mode or in a Faraday bag real quick.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Because it’s—you know, I never had it happen, but I like to know if someone’s spying on me. You know?

SHAWN RYAN: So they could be sucking info out even—okay.

Meshtastic and the China SIM Card Threat

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Then let’s see. What else can I show you? Okay. So speaking of cell phones staying on that topic, this is something I actually brought as another gift for you.

SHAWN RYAN: And I love gifts.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Have you heard of Meshtastic?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So it’s super cool. And, you know, I don’t know how familiar you are with the China situation. It just happened in New York.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Yeah. Can you talk about that?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I mean, I can talk about it briefly. I wrote some just so I make sure I have the numbers correct on that. There was three hundred SIM card servers with over a hundred thousand SIM cards capable of taking twenty million offline. So—and that’s the tristate region of New York. So not just New York, but the surrounding states too. And that’s just with the ones that they found. So I think it would be kind of naive to think, you know, there’s not more of these all over our entire country.

SHAWN RYAN: So what could that have done?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So it would have been a denial of service attack is the technical term for it, but it would have been—so many—have you ever been to a concert or a big event where everybody’s there and your phone’s going so slow and no calls are going through?

SHAWN RYAN: Yep.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That’s because that’s just so many people are there. Denial of service. This is a distributed denial of service, meaning coming from multiple angles with, let’s say, each one sending one hundred text messages a minute. It’s intentionally trying to flood the towers with so much data that they can’t function. They can’t keep up with it.

So that’s essentially what that was set up to do. And to my knowledge, the way they found that, at least partially, was from a tip. So I don’t think they’re going to get a tip everywhere that China or whoever—I’m assuming China in almost all cases—has these all over our country, which scares the crap out of me. So I started looking into it.

SHAWN RYAN: What would they—okay. So I really want to dive—I have an idea of where this is going, but I want you to describe, like, okay. They shut down all cell phone communications. What does that mean for the population, especially in a city that’s as dense as Manhattan?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It’s absolute chaos is what happened. It’s absolute chaos. Everyone relies on the phone right now in some sort of way to connect with their families, to pay their bills, to get into their cars—myself included—to get into their houses, to pay for things. It gets—you know, could call emergency services. Yeah. Whatever. You know, all of these things. And if you take it away, it’s—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I mean, if China attacks us with an EMP and we lose our power, I mean, some stuff that I’ve read, I mean, people are thinking we’re not going to make it three months without power.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. A lot of people would die off.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. And then it’s sad and it makes sense though. So my—I mean, I could try to go further into it. I don’t know, you know, on the politics and all that. I don’t know a ton about it.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, how long would the server be down for?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: As long as they’re attacking.

SHAWN RYAN: So how would they initiate the attack?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So just as a—this is a guess from me, but if it was me behind this, so let’s say I would have all of these servers ready to go. I would have one computer that had access to all of them or just imagine just like a digital switch. So I remote into a computer somewhere, wherever it is, and I press the go button basically. And the go button tells all of those SIM servers to start sending out text messages at mass volumes, and it’s just going to keep people offline. So it would be somebody remotely detonating, essentially.

And then at that point, all of the phones in the area slash tristate area, according to what I read, would be—you know, they’d be completely useless. Not only with text messages, also phone calls, also data for the Internet completely offline.

SHAWN RYAN: The hardwired Internet as well?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: No. Internet would be okay because that’s not—it’s not affecting the cellular towers, but any cellular connection would be offline. You would see that you had connection, but it just wouldn’t work.

SHAWN RYAN: How long would they—how long could they keep it down for?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: They would have to figure out where all of the places that were distributing all of that—

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. It would take time. It would be substantial enough for it to be a problem. I’ll tell you that much. Especially, imagine if it happened in Utah or somewhere where there wasn’t, you know—I don’t know. I’m just taking a random guess. But somewhere that it—more a little more desolate in certain areas, at least. It would take a while for that to be fixed, I believe.

SHAWN RYAN: Would there be a way to trace that type of a signal? I mean, I remember seeing the pictures of that. And, I mean, it was like tons of antennas and electronics. I mean, is there—do one of these devices go, woah, there’s a lot of text messages coming from that building.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So none of these devices are going to go—I mean, you may be able to pull some general cellular frequency stuff from the HackRF slash H4M, like the new HackRF combination. It’s a whole thing. But you may be able to see something on here, like, you know, like a waterfall display. Is it just like colors going down the screen? You may be able to see a big fluctuation of that, but I don’t know for sure, to be honest with you.

Detecting Hidden SIM Servers

But I do know that with a denial of service attack with a ton of numbers taking twenty million phones offline, I mean, that’s a serious problem regardless if they could find it or not. But the problem is this. The problem is if you’re not sending or receiving text messages on all of these SIM servers, then how are they going to identify that they’re there? Because they’re not transmitting or receiving any data at that point.

If the remote on and off switch I was talking about earlier was off, they’re not going to be able to determine that they’re there yet. But the second they start sending out a signal, it’s probably a little bit easier for them to detect all of this data is coming out of this specific spot. They could just go around with an electromagnetic field detector and say, wow, there’s a crap ton of all this coming out of this building.

SHAWN RYAN: By then, it’s too late.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. At that point, it’s already caused a mass hysteria or a mass problem or the media is already reporting on China’s attacking us or whatever, you know, god forbid, happens. So, yeah, it’s wild, man.

Meshtastic Radio: Off-Grid Communication

SHAWN RYAN: So what is the red thing here?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So this is just a radio that I built for you. I bought the parts, obviously. The nerd details: it’s a Helltech V3. It’s a three d printed case. It’s got a custom antenna on it that gives you a little bit more range because out here there’s a lot more space than in South Florida. We have hurricanes. We have all of the different emergencies that might happen. And we can operate with a little bit smaller antennas than what you would need in this state.

So basically, what this device does is it operates very similar to a walkie talkie, but way cooler. So just hear me out. Like, when you click a walkie talkie and you’re within range of each other, you’re going to hear me. I’m going to hear you. Same with this.

So this doesn’t use your voice. You don’t talk on it like a phone. You text with this. So imagine I send a text and I say, “Hey Sean.” And then let’s say you’re within one hundred feet of me, you receive it. Now let’s say you’re ten miles away from me. This antenna isn’t going ten miles. With a walkie talkie, it isn’t going ten miles.

The reason why they call it Meshtastic is because it’s using all of the devices in between you to mesh together to get that message to the intended recipient. And on top of that, it’s fully encrypted. So the devices that are carrying the message, imagine all the walkie talkies are carrying that message until it gets to you, but none of them can hear your voice until it gets to the destination. Does that make sense?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So there’s a primary channel, which is just non-encrypted. Everybody’s conversation’s in there. That’s great for natural emergencies, hurricanes or emergencies. And then let’s say you and I want to talk about something private off the grid. This has no cellular connection, no monthly bill. This is straight up using its own transmit and receive right from that antenna. And you can be a hundred percent anonymous with this and no way to recover anything.

I mean, this could also be used maliciously, to be honest with you, but so can anything. It’s a super cool device. The way to operate it is actually with that specific one, you need the Meshtastic app on your phone. You connect it via Bluetooth, and then that’s just so you can send and receive messages.

But there are certain ones you can buy that are prebuilt that look like BlackBerrys actually. They have little keyboards on them, and they connect in with the mesh. And then you send a message from the actual device itself and receive messages on the device itself. That is just a Bluetooth. Your phone is going to be your—

SHAWN RYAN: So the phone is the, okay.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. So the message goes from your phone to this through the mesh network.

How the Mesh Network Works

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I’ll show you right now. It’s so easy. So you connect in. SRS mesh. You’re on there. This is going to tell you the nodes that are around you, which we’re in a building that isn’t going to have any nodes. But once we get outside, they would. Messages, channels, primary channel. And then you could just say, “Hey, I need help,” for example. I’ll just say “hey” so I don’t scare anybody.

And then now it’s waiting to be acknowledged. What that means is it’s waiting for somebody to acknowledge that their radio is going to acknowledge this message and relay it to as many people as possible because this is a channel that everyone can see.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And then there’s the secret channel. I made you one called “secret comms,” which is built into this radio that has its own private key. So if I’m, let’s say, a hundred miles away from you, I can send you a message, and it’s going to use a bunch of other people’s radios to get the message to you, but they’re not going to see what I said. It’s just going to use their radios to make it to you, hopping off of them.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn. How long does it take to get that message to somebody?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Milliseconds.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Yeah. It’s radio. It’s a decentralized cell phone network. Just think of it in simple terms like that, that if the power grid went down, if the cellular grid went down, the batteries on these things last so long because they’re low power and they’re long range. And they’re cheap too. I mean, all in on that thing, we’re talking like thirty bucks or less.

Yeah. And just to have that in your backpack just in case something ever happens, god forbid, it can’t hurt to have it. It’s not hard to use. I don’t owe—it’s an open source project. I don’t make any money telling anyone to buy them. But the more people that have them, the further the messages can go.

South Florida has a huge population of them. Missouri, huge population. California, huge. There’s a lot of places that already have a ton of these there. But the more people that have them, the further your message is going to go. Kind of an interesting thing. I really liked it.

The Tron Network in Florida

There was a guy in Florida because I was learning about it, trying to get my house set up. I had a little solar mount with a giant antenna coming off my roof. And my HOA probably hates me. But this guy who has this large infrastructure in Florida, he calls it Tron. He’s got these giant cell towers all the way down the coast of Florida.

And as long as you can get your message to a Tron, one of his locations, then it has enough transmit power to make it anywhere up and down the coast of Florida. So my goal was to get it to one of the Tron towers. So I finally go into their Discord, their chat group, and I say, “Hey, what kind of antenna should I buy? What kind of stuff should I get? I want to make it to Delray Tron.” That was the Tron I was trying to get to.

And this guy, his name’s Eric, reaches out to me, and he’s giving me all this advice. He said, “I’ll come out tomorrow morning at six thirty to the intersection of—” he didn’t know where I lived or anything, but I gave him a general idea. Six thirty in the morning, guy comes out, takes screenshots from his app, takes pictures on his phone, and he’s showing me with a directional antenna. It’s called a Yagi antenna. He’s aiming it at the Delray Tron, southeast, I think it is. And you could see that it is reaching it.

So he proved that with a directional antenna that it would work. And this is a guy I’ve never met before. Somebody that’s just—if you know anything about the ham radio guys from back in the day, it’s like a modern age ham radio group, but way more technologically advanced and the people are younger.

So this guy goes out of his way to help me out, which is like, I’m not used to people doing me favors like that. And to make things even crazier, the guy that came out for me is a guy that owns the Tron infrastructure for all of Florida. So I just had the first guy and he didn’t know who I was or anything like that. He just came out out of the kindness of his heart. He drove a half hour. I found out where he lives because I came to go pick up that equipment from him later in the day.

And super grateful for that. But the guy hooked me up and spent time that he didn’t need to spend. And I recommend if you go out and buy one of these things, make sure you Google the state that you live in and join a community of some sort if you need help setting it up. Because it’s not hard or anything, but just to get advice from people that have already been doing it. Already researched for around here. It’s configured best for this location. But if you have any questions, obviously, call me.

SHAWN RYAN: How do you turn it off?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: You can hold both buttons, but it doesn’t actually go off. It goes into a sleep mode.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, right on. Right on. Damn. Thank you, man.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: No problem.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m going to frame it. But I am. You should use that one. Keep that one.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And especially because of the—you know, without going into detail, you live high enough to reach far.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. Yeah. What else do we got?

Covert Surveillance Tools

RYAN MONTGOMERY: This one—and I’m not, I’m trying to speed through because I don’t want to make this too long.

SHAWN RYAN: Don’t speed through it. This is good shit.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So this is called a Screen Crab. And a Screen Crab, if you notice here, it’s got an HDMI on one side and an HDMI on this side. And basically, this little antenna broadcasts a signal. So I could put this behind a computer monitor, put this behind a TV, and more importantly, computer monitor.

And then there’s an SD card slot in here on this side right here that stores a ridiculous amount of footage, like way more footage than you would imagine because it compresses the video. And this will be in line so you can spy on somebody’s computer screen. And if you put “IT use only, do not unplug,” you know, and put it on a post-it note or something, stick this behind the computer, who’s going to remove this? Nobody. You know? Most people are just going to ignore it.

So I thought this is a cool little covert spy gadget that most—who’s looking behind their monitor either? You know? It’s just a cool little gadget to have, especially when you’re doing a physical pen test and you want to watch people go through their internal systems and see their internal communications. If you can get this thing in there, then you can stand outside their office and wirelessly watch it or store it to the SD card and then watch it later.

SHAWN RYAN: So you can hook that up wirelessly?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Yeah. That’s what this is. So I could take the footage that’s stored on the SD card and download it wirelessly or watch it wirelessly live.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. I just would have to be in range of it, though.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha.

The LAN Turtle

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So that’s the Screen Crab. And then this is called the LAN Turtle. And the LAN Turtle, the way I have mine configured at least, is the second I plug this into USB, so if I went into one of your offices and I plug this into one of their computers, it’s going to immediately try to connect back to my server at my house and give me a connection to this device.

And then from this device, I can try to pivot from this device to your other devices on the network because this is a mini computer inside of here. Without going into the details—because it’s nerdy stuff—I can use this device to pivot on to other devices, to other devices, to other ones. And then I could be a million miles away from you and still have access to this because it’s connecting directly back to me.

SHAWN RYAN: Shit. Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And Hak5 makes—that’s the name of the company. They gave me a bunch of cool stuff. That’s where a guy you interviewed, Mike Grover—yeah, he works with them with his OMG cable.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding. Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And another guy gave this as a gift, J Bo Hacks. Hold on. Sorry. I got your name wrong, J Bo.

The NyanBox and Advanced Hacking Tools

J Bo Hacks and another guy created this. And ZRKRAKEN is their username. They created this thing called the NyanBox, which is three d printed, but it is very capable. It does a lot of what this device did, like the dual ESP, but the DIANA box does Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and then it does jamming as well, which jamming is a federal crime.

SHAWN RYAN: Mhmm.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So but people can still do it. Doesn’t mean people aren’t going to commit that federal crime. So you could jam, which I’ll show you here. I can choose, hold on. Give me a second here. I get into the actual jammers. Yeah. I have WLAN jammer, meaning I can jam Wi-Fi networks. You see that on the top there?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So I can jam your Wi-Fi network right now. And if any of these cameras are hooked up to Wi-Fi, it’s going to knock them offline. Not using that Dauth attack I was talking about earlier, just broadcast very similar to the Chinese, broadcasting the same frequency at such a high, I guess, what’s the better way to explain it? It’s flooding the air with so much garbage on the same frequency that it doesn’t know how to communicate anymore. That’s what jamming, that’s how it works.

And then there’s all kinds of cool features that I’m skipping over, but it can, there’s actually one in here that has protocol kill. Here we go. Kill Wi-Fi, kill video cameras, meaning wireless cameras, doorbells, kill RC, like drones, RC cars, anything that uses a remote controller, just kill that frequency. Bluetooth, Bluetooth low energy, USB wireless, like USB mice and keyboards. This is what does he have here? It’s DIGB, that’s another protocol. And then NROF24, that’s basically the same thing as what I was saying earlier with the keyboard and mice thing, but still a different, it’s all of these different things.

I can choose which ones. So let’s say I do wireless camera. I click it, and then I can start that attack, and it will knock those cameras immediately offline. So that’s one thing. And then the last thing I’ll show you with this device is the sour apple attack. So you’re on the brand new version of iPhone. Right?

SHAWN RYAN: A little bit behind here. They just came out the new one.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: You’re at least above version eighteen. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I’m not going to break your phone. Alright. So I just enabled sour apple. Do me a favor and unlock your phone real quick. You could even put it in airplane mode. It’s not going to change anything.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s in airplane. It already is? Join this Apple TV. Yep. Here. Keep hitting next. You’re in airplane mode right now. Connecting. I hit.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: You’re in airplane mode right now. So you shouldn’t be getting any connections. Right?

SHAWN RYAN: Apple TV keyboard password auto.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Keep going.

SHAWN RYAN: Wireless audio sync.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. I just got a transfer phone number option.

SHAWN RYAN: I just can’t see so you can see the screen.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It probably shows your iCloud ID. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So little things that, little opsec mistakes that Apple makes right there that I could have pop up on someone’s screen. Transfer phone number. Yeah. AirPods. But it makes it so your phone’s unusable even if you’re in airplane mode. And the only way to avoid that is to go into settings and disable Bluetooth, not from the control center or in airplane mode. You gotta go in your settings and turn Bluetooth off. I just assumed, and I think most people do, when you turn airplane mode off, your phone is turning all channels off, but it’s not.

SHAWN RYAN: So this just disrupts just about anything that’s wireless.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Well, that one, I did the attack towards the phone, but I do have some ways that I could do it with Windows computers or Android phones. I have different attacks. But yeah. Yeah. It makes the older versions, it crashes the phone completely. The beta version of the newest version for iPhone, like iOS twenty six, it was crashing that too. But the newest version, it’s not. It’s just it makes your phone unusable. With so many, you can’t use it with that many notifications popping up.

Faraday Bags and Evidence Preservation

SHAWN RYAN: I want one of these too. Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I can ask them to send you one. They three d printed it for me.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you ever think about, you know, when you’re working with Sentinel Foundation in another country and you’re going at your hundred, I mean, do you ever, I’m just curious. Do you ever run, do you ever run the jammer so that nobody can tap into your phones? Nobody can listen in. Nobody can do any of that while you’re having a face to face conversation? Let’s say you guys are doing your brief.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So we use Faraday bags. So I haven’t had, I’ve never had to do that with a jammer. But we do throw stuff in Faraday bags, and I mean, you see me on notes so that I put my laptop in a Faraday bag. I have, that’s actually something I’ll bring up. I know I’ll save the rest of it for the end.

But we donated in collaboration with this company. We donated a hundred and thirty something recently to law enforcement in Peru. And the reason why these bags are important for phones, if no one knows a Faraday bag, if you’re unfamiliar for the people that are watching, it just blocks signal from going in and out. So when let’s say there’s a predator or a trafficker and they get arrested and the phone gets seized. Right? You put their phone just like this in the bag, and then now it is locked. This phone has zero signal right now. It’s not getting in or out of the bag.

So let’s say you’re law enforcement and you are trying to make sure that that evidence stays intact. You now have the ability with Apple, with iCloud, with Android, you can wipe that phone remotely. So before they even get back to the station, somebody could wipe that phone and all your evidence is gone. But if you keep that phone in a Faraday bag, then your evidence stays preserved.

And that’s one thing Sentinel did recently was make sure that law enforcement was equipped with these bags. Because they’re cheap, and certain companies are more expensive. This one’s a little more than others. They’re just a nice brand. But there’s other brands that are, you know, ten dollars a bag, twenty dollars a bag. And that could be the difference between a guy doing, you know, no time in prison or, you know, the rest of his life. So yeah. I think they’re very important.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Let’s take a break.

Back from Break: Patreon Community Support

SHAWN RYAN: Alright, Ryan. We’re back from the break, but now we’re going to get into some heavy stuff on why you came here. We’re going to pick up with some childhood stuff. We’re going to talk about some cybersecurity, and then we’re going to get into everything you’re doing now and more specifically, the seven six four satanic cult. But before we do, couple things. You know, everybody gets a gift even though I already gave you one, but some things never change around here, Ray. Hey. Harriet’s sleep, gummy bears.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Are they still legal in fifty states?

SHAWN RYAN: RFK hasn’t, you know, kicked them off the, off the shelves.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Don’t know how you’re getting away with this.

SHAWN RYAN: Me neither. You know? I mean, all kinds of toxic s* in there, but it does taste good. And there’s no drugs in there, so that’s good. None? But they’re still legal in all fifty states. But and then you know about Patreon. We got Patreon community that had been with us since the beginning, and, you know, I always give them credit. They’re the reason that I get to sit here with you today.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Well, let me say something before you say that. So the Patreon group, one of your staff members showed me some of the amazing comments because I guess you guys put a post out saying Ryan Montgomery’s coming back on if you have any questions. And there was, he said three times the amount of comments that he’s ever seen, which was heartwarming for me, obviously. So I was like, I want to go on there and thank them. So I opened up my phone.

And I guess since I’m a five dollar a month member and I don’t have enough to ask a question or whatever, I couldn’t see my own post. And I’m in the middle of us talking prior to our breaks, and my phone’s, and I’m like, come on, please. Microphone do not be taking this vibration. And I thought people were texting me or calling me, but it’s your Patreon going wild right now.

SHAWN RYAN: No s*?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Yeah. So if anyone hears any vibrations, it’s the Patreon people just being extremely supportive. And so thank you guys.

Patreon Q&A: Getting Started in White Hat Hacking

SHAWN RYAN: Right on, man. So one of the things I do, obviously, you just kinda brought it up there, but we offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. So this is from Jeff Bishop. What are ways that someone aspiring to get into white hat hacking can get experience? What technology can average Americans use to protect themselves or become more efficient in cybersecurity for day to day life?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Okay. So I think that the first thing, the first thing that comes to mind is using all of the resources that are available right now, like Capture the Flag platforms. So there’s a few of them. Obviously, I favorite TryHackMe because that’s the one that I’m quote unquote number one on. I’m number one on their leaderboard, but number one on their platform or whatever. I love TryHackMe, and I’ll explain why in a second.

But there’s TryHackMe, there’s Hack the Box, there’s Port Swigger Academy, there’s a bunch of them. Even, the name is flipping me right now, but a good friend of mine, Nhamsek, has his own platform that he’s building out. Look him up. But there’s a ton of awesome platforms you can learn on that not only are capture the flag style, meaning you have to solve a challenge and get the flag before somebody else, and you get more points where it’s more competitive.

There’s walkthroughs that teach you just the basics of networking or the basics of how to use Windows, how to use Mac, how to use Linux, how to use a cell phone, how do you do forensics on a cell phone, how do, name the category, there’s a walkthrough for it on TryHackMe, Hack the Box, etcetera.

And I would recommend as somebody, let’s say you’ve never touched a computer in your life. You join one of these platforms, you click the complete beginner tab, you start going down each one of those tasks individually. Some of them are going to be boring, but the cool thing is a lot of them are hands on.

Hands-On Learning Through Cybersecurity Platforms

So not only are you reading, but you’re learning as you go through each category. And you’re seeing the result of what you’ve done. So one of them is, remember on TryHackMe in the beginning, I brought a lot of people onto that platform. And I don’t own it or anything, but I like the platform. One of the first ones is hacking a bank.

So it’s a fake bank that they have set up, and your goal is to transfer funds from one account to your account. And it shows the vulnerability in that specific case of how you would move the funds over, but they explain it in such a simple way that anyone can understand.

SHAWN RYAN:

Interesting.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

And then it gets progressively harder, but anything that gets harder, you’ve already learned in previous steps.

SHAWN RYAN:

So this whole website is like an education for people wanting to hack?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

So half of it is that, and then the other half is competitive hacking, where already experienced hackers are competing to get the first, it’s called first bloods, but meaning, like, the highest level of permissions on that computer. And the reason why I got first place and why I have the most points is because I got that first bloods on almost all of the three challenges a week for six months straight. And you get double the points per question that you answer if you’re the first person to answer it. So that’s why I ended up in first position.

I have like a twenty thousand point lead, and the funny thing is they had to change their whole point system because of me. So now when you, they have weekly leagues now where, like, there’s a bronze league, they go all the way to like sapphire, diamond, and then like, there’s a weekly winner based on your point numbers. And then once you go to the overall leaderboards, there’s a, it defaults to the monthly leaderboard, whoever’s winning for the month.

And then if you click a button that says all time, and it defaults to the country you’re in. So whoever’s the first number one in that country. And then if you click that and you go to all countries, then you see me at the top.

So you got to go through four steps to see that I’m number one on the platform. Whereas before, it was just you didn’t even have to be signed into the website. You could just click leaderboards, and you’d see me at the top. But they changed it because I get it. It’s not motivating to the users if there’s no way that they can overtake me unless they spend five plus years and I quit.

I understand why they did it, but it was funny to say the least. The reason why I bring up TryHackMe and all these other platforms is it’s a great place for you to learn, great place for you to join a community, which as I’ve talked about in the past, is the foundation of how I’ve learned. Community, mentors, people, actually spending time. And I was never scared to ask questions.

And thankfully, like I was talking about with the Meshtastic radios and off the grid communications, like, those people are, a lot of them are ham radio guys. Like, they’re super willing to help. You just have to ask nicely and try to be part of their community. They don’t expect anything in return from you. And it’s the same goes for these cybersecurity platforms. So highly recommend that he does that.

Offense as the Best Defense

And while learning offense, I think that offense is your best defense. No kidding. Yeah. Because if you know how to attack, you know how to defend. So it’s being aware is one thing, but knowing how that attack works in the first place means you know how to defend against it. So that it kind of answers the question, I think, in both ways.

SHAWN RYAN:

So what is something for people that aren’t going to learn how to attack, for people that aren’t tech savvy, what is something that they can do to take cybersecurity more seriously?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I think educating themselves, watching videos, then if they don’t want to go through learning anything about it, like, on a hands on level, learning, you know, by just listening to people like myself, watching some of my PSA videos, I like to call them because they’re short, like, fifteen, thirty second videos where I just talk about an important topic. This is what the danger is. This is what you can do to fix it. And I keep it really short, simple, to the point. You could do that.

You could Google, like, how can I stop hackers from hacking my Wi-Fi or, you know, watch a YouTube video on it? And maybe there’s something like, if we buy this new router, there’s currently no vulnerabilities. You know? Like, that’s, I guess, the simplest way I can put it.

SHAWN RYAN:

If you just, watching your Instagram, TikTok feed. I mean, it’s, you started putting out these videos after our interview three years ago, and they go crazy. But, I mean, it’s everything from talking about the Bark app, you know, for parents to erasing your residence off Google Earth. Erasing your address. Like, there’s a ton of really good information on all of your social media pages that are, I mean, it’s good stuff that a lot of people don’t think about.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I genuinely appreciate it. And, like, you know, for me…

SHAWN RYAN:

It’s simple too. You make it simple.

Dealing with Online Criticism

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I try to. And that’s that pissed off so many of the neckbeards, like the cybersecurity guys out there that, you know what? I’ll go into this because it’s important to me. When I was a young kid, I was bullied like crazy. I was bullied because I looked different. I acted different. I didn’t really fit in.

And when I say bullied, I don’t mean just them hurting my feelings by saying things to me and whatever. I was physically, I didn’t grow up in the greatest areas, didn’t go to the greatest schools, and I’ll get into more of that too. But I was bullied on a level that most kids wouldn’t make it through. I coped with it in my own ways.

But I’m sorry. I’m missing, I forgot what I was going to say again. It happened to me again.

SHAWN RYAN:

Bullied. You’re getting bullied.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. I was getting bullied, but what was I originally bringing up why I’m being bullied? What were we talking about before that? Sorry. I just lost my train of thought because I was trying to think of something else.

SHAWN RYAN:

Well, we could sit here all day and try to figure it out.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

No. You asked me a question. You asked me a question, and it was, this is important.

SHAWN RYAN:

What can people do? I was talking about your page. I said it’s if anybody looking to learn more…

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

That. Security scumbags. So if you…

SHAWN RYAN:

Neckbeards.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. The neckbeards. So if you, I mean, I would really appreciate if you cut that out because I want them to know. I want, and I don’t want them to make fun of the fact that I couldn’t remember that I was making fun of them.

But so these neckbeards, when I was getting bullied like crazy as a kid, you know, like, on another level, getting, like, you know, the crap beaten out of me all the time by multiple people, getting jumped, you know, and moving all over the place, different schools, never finding a safe place.

The one safe place that I found was the internet. I had the cybersecurity community, the little one that existed back then, which was AOL Instant Messenger and IRC. That was it. There was nothing more than that. In the beginning, slowly a couple of things started to come out. But they were the nicest people to me.

That’s where I felt the most at home. That’s where I felt the safest. That’s what made me happy at the end of the day. And I think Bryce actually said it well. Said, kids go around every day, but they come home and rule the world. That’s what it felt like to me. It felt like a community, and it felt like, maybe it’s a bad way to put it, but it felt powerful, something that I didn’t feel as a kid.

And then for me to come on to this show and start talking about gadgets and talking about cybersecurity and trying to simplify it on purpose, like, you know, and I never claimed to be the best hacker in the world. Never did any of those things. For them to say what they’ve said about me and treat me the way they’ve treated me over the last three years, it’s very disheartening, man.

I mean, now I know I have a lot of support out there and a lot of love out there from people, but it isn’t the cybersecurity community. It’s far from the cybersecurity community. They’ve showed me how ruthless they are, how divided they are, how opinionated they are. Like I said, they’re neckbeards are actually typed. I just can’t handle it.

Really bothered me in the beginning. All of my insecurities, they validated, which I understood. I understand I have two different ears. One’s going one way than the other. I understand I have a dysfunction in my jaw where my jaw doesn’t open wide enough. I understand that I’m skinny. I understand that one of my eyes is lower than the other one. Stop staring at my face, dude. You’re the one watching me. I don’t care.

But I did, though. I’m not going to lie and say it didn’t bother me, but it did bother me at first. It genuinely did. And I care. Now, like I said to you earlier, don’t know if it’s going to make it into the show or not, but I intentionally want to aggravate them. Make the title number one ethical hacker. I seriously couldn’t give a crap less in the nicest way possible. And yeah.

So thankfully, I see that the ninety nine point nine nine percent that aren’t cybersecurity people seem to be getting along with me well. And that makes me feel very good and happy and grateful. And, you know, it’s just once you get on to Reddit and Twitter, like, where the neckbeards live, where they sit in their little basements on their computers mad at the world, I just don’t want any part of it.

SHAWN RYAN:

It’s lonely at the top, Ryan.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I guess so, man. You’re figuring that out. I’m figuring it out.

SHAWN RYAN:

But you’re doing great.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. They’ll love, you know, the gadgets and love them telling me how this one’s wrong or that’s wrong. It’s like, shut up, dude. Nobody cares. You know?

SHAWN RYAN:

That’s the truth. Yep. Yep. Dude, you can’t listen to those f*ing people, man. They don’t have anything better to do.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

We spent maybe an hour about it last night.

SHAWN RYAN:

You got to, you think. They have nothing better to do than to sit there and talk shit about you. Not get better at hacking, not better their life, not go make a better living, not go get a fing girlfriend or a boyfriend. They just want to f with you. That’s exactly right. That’s how pathetic their existence is. They’re going to waste all of their time…

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

And just to talking…

SHAWN RYAN:

…talking shit about you on the Internet, and you will never even f*ing meet them.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

That’s exactly right. And even if I do meet them, I’m not going to know who they are, Shawn. Because they hide behind aliases. They make account, they go out of their way to watch the videos. They make an account, set up a fake email, confirm the email, put a fake profile picture. If they even do that, leave a comment, send a message, do whatever they do. Like, you’re spending more time on me than I am on you. Who is the loser, bro?

Like, it’s absolutely mind blowing. But then, like I said to you yesterday, like, I go to these hacker conventions, like thirty thousand people there. I’ve gone to some that are smaller, but at DEFCON, the last I spoke, I did the keynote the last four years straight. Even prior to our first episode, I did the keynote with, it’s called Red Team Village.

And not one time out of thirty thousand plus people has anyone come up to my face and said something negative. And I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve taken over a thousand pictures every single year other than the first year, of course, because nobody knew who I was. But the last three years, thousand pictures, easy. Lines of people that want to take, not an ego thing, it’s just fact. Not one of them said a negative word to me.

And it’s like, I guess maybe because I grew up in a different spot, a little harder than some of these people. Like, if you’re going to talk behind a screen, and you’re going to say it to my face, be ready to think, you know, I’m not a violent person, don’t get me wrong. But like, if you come at me, I’m coming back at you. I grew up in a spot where that’s how things go. I’m never going to attack somebody for no reason.

But if you’re going to say what you’re saying to me online and threaten me and my family and all these things, then you better in real life do the same thing. So I’m not claiming to be big, bad, or anything like that, but I’m not just going to sit back and let somebody bully me or take advantage of me as a grown man. It’s not happening. That’s the nicest way I can put it. Sorry. I said…

SHAWN RYAN:

It’s all good, man. It’s, can’t pay attention to these f*ing people.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I don’t. I really don’t, and I wanted to make it clear that I did, and I don’t care anymore. And now it’s just entertaining for me.

SHAWN RYAN:

Let’s move on with the interview.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Mhmm.

SHAWN RYAN:

You ready?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I am ready.

SHAWN RYAN:

Alright. We left some stuff out in childhood last time.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yep. We did. What did we leave out? So this is – alright. I made it pretty clear. Had a serious drug addiction at a very young age. And so did most of my family on my dad’s side, not my mom’s side, my dad’s side. And unfortunately, lost a ton of them, lost all a ton of friends. I talked about that a little bit the last time.

Since our last interview, I’ve lost three more family members. And I’d showed you actually today what my cousin on my dad’s side is on one of those random street interviews, you know, whacked out on fentanyl. And it’s my – So just the reason why I say that is I grew up with drugs as a serious problem around me at almost all times, friends and family.

And my mom’s side of the family was probably one of the most valuable pieces because I didn’t have that really as much of a problem on that side.

Growing Marijuana at Eleven Years Old

When I was really young though, just kind of skipping right into a story, I was probably eleven years old and I’m hanging out with the bad kids in the neighborhood, you know, and, like, I won’t name them, but there was three of them. And we decided that we wanted to grow some weed.

And I – you know, that wasn’t a hardcore drug or anything. Like, as an eleven year old, it is. But, like, whatever the case is, we decided we wanted to grow some weed. And I hate weed. I can’t stand it. The feeling makes me freak out. There’s no weed on this planet I’ve ever had a good reaction to. So never liked weed, but I like the idea of growing it. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m a nerd.

But we agree that we’re going to move these plants, these little baby plants between all of our houses and try not to get caught by our parents, of course, you know, because that wouldn’t be good.

One of the kids, skipping a ton of details, one of the kids tells his mom that I have the plants at my house. The mom hated me already. And the mom calls the local police. Police call my mom. My mom gets brought into the station with me.

They happened to do some stuff, some type – they committed some crime and the cops are accusing me of this crime. And then I had nothing to do with it. And then they have my mom kind of cornered and confused and, like, letting her know, like, hey, we know about these weed plants that you have in your house. Just let us know about it. We’ll take care of it.

And they convinced my mom that there’s no big deal. Like, you know, they’re just going to come by and pick up the plants, and it’s going to be over with. Like, that’s what they had my mom thinking. I’m eleven. I can’t tell my mom that’s eleven.

SHAWN RYAN:

Eleven? Yeah. You’re growing pot at eleven? Yeah. Holy shit, dude.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

It wasn’t a crazy operation, but they made it out to be. So what ended up happening was we’re at the police station, sitting there with my mom, and my mom believes that the cops are just going to come in there. And they gave my mom two options. Either let us come pick it up, or we’ll sit out front and wait until a warrant, blah, blah, blah. And then a warrant comes in, and then we can go in and get them.

So either way, you’re giving up the plants. It’s basically what they put my mom in the position of. And she was unaware of this situation. It’s not like my mom’s like, yeah, grow weed in the house. You know? It wasn’t like a thing. And I’m just a little boy.

The cops promised my mom that they’re not going to make a spectacle out of it. It’s not going to be a thing. They just want to get the plants out. She believes it. They come. They take the plants. The whole neighborhood’s outside. They’re taking the plants. They’re little plants, but they’re, you know, maybe this tall. There’s a bunch of little baby plants. They’re just little – they’re called like the German germination stage, like after the seeds start to grow a little root, and you just see a little piece of plant coming out of the soil.

Most of them were like that, and then there was two or three of them that were this tall. And the cops bring them outside with no bags covering them. The whole neighbors embarrassing the crap out of my mom at that time.

And the cops charged me with possession with intent to deliver for that as a drug dealer. They charged me with cultivating marijuana and the charge, it was something to do with vandalism or something, but something I had nothing to do with with the other kids. I wasn’t even involved in it, but they charged me with it anyway.

And that was my first time ever getting in trouble, but that turned into probation. That didn’t turn into any type of facilities or any type of detention centers or anything like that. This was just probation where I had to go pee in a cup with a juvenile probation officer who was strict but wasn’t anything like what I’m going to get into later.

The Downward Spiral on Probation

And when you’re that young, you’re doing the wrong thing, you’re in the wrong areas, you’re hanging out with people that are doing serious drugs, because at eleven years old I was hanging out with bad people, I started doing more, you know, more – what’s the word for it? Sorry.

Being on probation, you’re at way higher risk of getting in more trouble because you have to check in. If you don’t show up on time, if you pee in a cup and you fail for a different drug or any drug for that matter. If you do anything correctly, you’re getting a violation and you’re going to juvenile detention, bare minimum, and then sent to a rehab, residential program, or whatever. And whatever they want to do to you, they’re going to do to you.

So I get in trouble way more times with different drugs and being on probation. I’m failing drug tests. I’m in school getting in trouble getting caught with drugs. And, you know –

SHAWN RYAN:

What – how old were you when you started drugs?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Eleven. You started at age eleven?

SHAWN RYAN:

Eleven?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I started messing with various drugs at eleven, like including weed, you know, and alcohol and all the, like, you know, just stuff that people usually start around fifteen, you know, fourteen, fifteen. Not that it’s okay to start at that age, but that’s the average based on, I think, what I know.

The ecstasy and all of that stuff started very, very soon after just the experimentation phase. Like, don’t even really count weed as the experimentation phase because I hated it from the beginning. It freaked me out so bad that I couldn’t even smoke this stuff.

But for whatever reason, loved ecstasy as I told you the first time. And then the come down of ecstasy sucks so bad that when somebody introduced me to opioids, the come down, it made it way easier. And I realized I like the opioids better than I like the ecstasy. That’s why I stopped going to the raves and all that stuff in Philly like we talked about.

So all of that’s happening and I’m failing drug tests for opiates and benzos and amphetamines because of other situations I’m going to get into. But this is all in a very – because remember, my drug problems were eleven to seventeen. So it wasn’t that long, but a lot happened in that short period of time, if that makes sense.

So long story short on that, I’m on probation, she violates me. And I end up in the juvenile detention center time after time after time for all these different stupid, petty crimes, all revolving around drugs. Nothing violent, nothing anything other than, you know, I’m not saying what I did was right, but, like, stealing stuff or having, like, I got –

SHAWN RYAN:

Self harm. It was all self harm stuff.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. All stuff that I was doing to myself, but then the only thing that wasn’t was actually a pretty crazy story that I’ll tell you was – which actually goes into another one with my dad.

The Car Thief Informant

A guy who was a grown man, who married to a grown woman, who was actually even twice his age, was picking me and those kids up in the neighborhood at a very young age, twelve, thirteen years old, picking us up one, two o’clock in the morning. I remember we had a ladder on the side of my bedroom window. And he would pick us up and we’d get in his car. He would drive us to all these different cities in Pennsylvania.

And he would park at the end of the block and we would just go check all door handles down the block for each car and see all the change, the GPSs, like back then GPSs were in everyone’s cars. They go into their glove box and see if they had emergency gas money in there, whatever they had that was worth something, we would take it, we’d give it to him. And then at one point he would sell the stuff.

So what I found out later about this guy, and I’m wrong for that, it was fueling a drug addiction at this time because remember at this age, opioids are very expensive and then that turned into heroin and we’ve already talked about that story. I’m trying to skip that.

But the guy, the craziest part about this is at one time he tells me, “Hey man, take home some of this stuff.” So I took home a ton of the stolen merchandise. And at one point he had a revolver in his bedroom. And I was like, you know, never had a gun before, never shot a gun before at that time. And he gives me this revolver. There wasn’t any bullets or anything, but he gave me the revolver.

And I had this, and I had all of this stolen merchandise. And the next morning, it’s boom, boom, boom. You hear just knocking at the door like loud. Like, it sounded like the SWAT team was at my house. The cops are at the door, guns out. My family, my mom, my stepdad at the time is out the door and they see guns out. It’s obviously serious. They’re like, “Where’s the gun? Where’s the gun?”

They know about the gun. I didn’t tell anyone about the gun. So they go right up into my bedroom. They know exactly where this gun’s at. They go right to grab all the stolen merchandise. I get charged with one hundred and ten counts of receiving stolen property. I get a weapons charge for the revolver, even though it had no bullets or whatever. Wasn’t planning on using it, but I had it.

I find out this guy that’s been picking us up every night was an informant for a completely different case. So this guy is committing crimes while he’s an informant with children. He’s using children to rob cars to fuel his addiction while he’s a police informant.

So him and his wife end up in the newspaper. His name is Thomas James Gallagher, who actually just got arrested recently for unfortunately murdering a – not third – an eighteen year old girl in a DUI situation. But yeah. So he did that later in life. And but what he did to me was wrong too, but he was in the papers for that too. And it was called like “Kitty Car Thieves” or something was the title of the news article.

My Dad’s Revenge

And whatever the case is, the guy has, he must have had some really bad luck because he ends up on the same block as my dad. And my dad is very different looking than I am. We have similar eyes and features, but my dad is a six foot gorilla, bald head, very different than me.

And my dad finds out that he – that is TJ Gallagher on the block. And my dad and he’s talking about, like, you know, “I know your son,” blah blah blah. My dad punches him right in his jaw, breaks his jaw in the George W. Hill Correctional Facility. His jaw got wired shut. They transferred my dad to a state prison to get him away from this guy.

And my dad was sticking up. I mean, as much as my dad has gone, like I said the last time, done drugs and has been in and out of jail and done some dumb things in my life, my dad cares about me. It’s just drug addiction is tough.

I lost my family to it. I lost my sister, Ariana. She’s my half sister, I call her my sister and my brother Danny. Their mother, Lauren, which was my dad’s, basically his wife, and their parents, she passed from an overdose in a semi recently. And a lot of people have passed recently.

And but my dad, the reason why I say that is he has a lot of problems at the moment. He just got hit on a – he was on an electric scooter. He got hit at sixty five miles an hour by a car, and he broke almost everything from his stomach down to his ankles. And, like, if you’ve seen the pictures, it’d blow your mind that he’s alive.

My dad, on the other hand, has been shot, stabbed, lit on fire, and now hit by a car. And I could tell you every each one of those stories individually, and he’s still alive. The man has a wild story within itself. It’s just still happening current day. My dad’s story is not over. Like, it’s not – it’s still live action. You know?

But my dad has always cared about me and he loves me. I know that. But it’s really hard to be present as a father for, you know, thirty-two years when your main focus is alcohol and drugs.

SHAWN RYAN:

Mhmm. And—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

If you’re in prison or jail, even if you’re in jail at the least for that case, he was in jail for something, but then he got more time for breaking that dude’s jaw. Like, I know he loves me. I know he cares about me, but it was tough.

The Charlie Incident

Going back to another time my dad went to jail though, in the bullying scenario, there was this kid named Charlie. I won’t say his last name because I don’t want to embarrass him because he’s probably older now and doesn’t want—you know, doesn’t probably is very different than he was when I was a little boy.

But in the middle of all this bullying, this kid Charlie, his parents were really rough on him and weren’t letting him stay at the house. So I was letting him stay at my house, but my mom hated him. My mom didn’t want him around because she heard bad things about him from other parents. I just lied about his name and never told her his real name. So she called him a fake name for a long time.

Out of nowhere, the kids that were bullying me got him to join the “I hate Ryan” group. And, you know, it was all over something stupid. If I can remember, it was about like a fake hit of acid that was sold that, like, I don’t even remember doing, to be honest with you. But all of these people just wanted to hate me, and they wanted to arrange this fight to happen at this park. And the goal was for me to fight Charlie one on one.

So a guy that was my friend that I was giving a place to sleep every night, you know, at risk of me getting in trouble for lying about who he was for a while. Now he wants to fight me. So I’m like, all right, dude, let’s go. My mom freaks out about it, of course, because she’s my mother. And she calls my dad, which she never would do unless it’s an emergency.

Because my mom and my dad are like very different people, oil and water. You know, my mom is just an angel, never did drugs, never got in trouble, very different person. Calls my dad. My dad shows up to, you know, and he’s wasted. He’s on drugs. He’s with my sister and brother’s mom, Lauren, at the time, who passed. But she was wasted, had one of those big plastic cups full of vodka and Coca-Cola. Mhmm. Like, exactly what you’d imagine it to be.

And they want to come with me while I fight this kid one on one to make sure everything’s fair. And I was like, okay, you know, that’s that’s all right if you want to do that. We show up at this park. No exaggeration to you, Shawn. I’m not even embellishing this. There were forty kids at this park that were trying to come at me.

Like, there’s a basketball court in the back of the park. And then it’s just a lot of, like, walkway up to it. It’s like playground. There’s a creek. And then, you know, and then in the back was a basketball court. There was no exaggeration, forty kids there. So the goal was to fight Charlie one on one, and I was willing to do that.

My dad comes up. He sees that I’m about to get attacked by a bunch of kids at the same time, and he just starts swinging on kids. Like, he’s punching all of these kids. He threw one into a bike. It hit his head on a, you know, a peg on a bicycle. One of them, like, into the basketball court thing, like, he hits Charlie. All these kids, Charlie’s mom drives by after. She’s screaming out the window, like, “F you,” “F” to my mom. Like, was a disaster.

My dad gets arrested for beating up kids, obviously. Does two years for that, for me, even though I didn’t ask him to go fight a bunch of kids. What he didn’t realize, even though he thought he was doing something good for me, he stopped me from getting jumped by forty people. And, you know, he tried to do what he thought a father would do in that scenario.

But what happened was everybody now hated me even more because I got my dad to go beat somebody up or beat everybody up for me, which I didn’t. But it looked that way at the time. So it forced me out of that school. It forced me out of that town. And my dad had to do two years in prison for it.

And, you know, he’s never thrown it in my face. As much as I—like I said, my dad’s a piece of work. He really is. He’s surprising sometimes when it comes to those things. But I love him to death. I do. But he’s just—he’s not my mom. They’re very different people. You know?

And then like I said, my grandfather was like a father figure to me my whole life where I had stability with him.

SHAWN RYAN:

Who’s side? Mom’s side or dad’s side?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

My mom’s side. My dad’s side, my grandfather was macheted to death in Florida. Yeah. Yeah, man. So my uncle Michael, my dad’s brother, stabbed to death in Chichester, PA. My grandfather macheted to death on my dad’s side in Florida. My uncle Richie overdoses on fentanyl when it comes out by snorting it, not by injecting it.

Uncle Richie’s daughter just was on that interview. All of the other family is still currently on drugs. One of our long—like, my dad’s long-term family friends just passed a couple days ago, three days ago, named Paul Lozak. He just passed—overdose most likely, but not a hundred percent sure. So I don’t want to say that in stone. I know his dad’s like—I just I don’t want to embarrass the family, so I should maybe I shouldn’t even said that.

But the, you know, I feel horrible for his family. And my grandmom and my aunt, they dealt with all of that, you know, losing all their kids. And my aunt grew up with some birth defects, and she didn’t make it very long. She died a couple—in between our interviews within a month or so of my grandmother passing away on my dad’s side. So we had a double funeral, and almost everyone except maybe two people at the funeral were high, maybe three.

SHAWN RYAN:

Jeez, dude.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. It’s sad, man, but that’s what Philadelphia and the surrounding cities look like right now.

SHAWN RYAN:

That is like some serious generational trauma.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. I mean, that’s just—there’s so much more to that to the crime stuff too. So I want to get into that, and I don’t want to cut—

SHAWN RYAN:

You off at all.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I just wanted to finish that real quick. It’s just the—like, I don’t want to make my dad look bad. That’s not why I’m on here because I really don’t—like, I know that in a different world, in a different circumstance, he would not be the way that he is. And if he could beat addiction, and maybe one day he will, I know that he will be just as caring as I will be when I have my first kid.

But as of right now, I know he loves me and I can’t change him as a person. I love it. So I guess I’ll keep it at that with him, and I’ll get back into the legal stuff when you’re done. I’m on a tangent.

SHAWN RYAN:

No. It’s fine, man. It’s fine. I mean, you know, one quest—I mean, growing up with that and still dealing with that side of the family and all the addiction, and I’m kind of curious, you know, you’ve owned recovery centers. Are you still involved in recovery at all?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

No. I mean, I never claimed to—well, at one point, you know, I talked about how many years I was clean and all that. I don’t do drugs. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke weed. So technically, yeah, I’m in recovery or clean if you define it in those words. But I don’t practice it. So I can’t—wouldn’t go to, like, an AA meeting or NA meeting and—Mhmm. And feel confident saying, like, I am—I am something I’m not.

SHAWN RYAN:

Mhmm. That’s not what I meant. I meant, do you—are you still involved in helping people recover?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Indirectly, yes. So like if somebody wants help, if somebody—like, for example, if my cousin that was just recorded in a street interview said, “Hey, I want to go to rehab,” I have the connections that could put her into place insurance or not. I’ll make sure she gets help. And I do that all the time if people need—So in that regard, yes.

I own a healthcare company. I don’t want to go into all the details because it’s a whole irrelevant story, but we audit charts for behavioral health and we do a great job at it. So it’s still indirectly helping, you know, rehab stay afloat, do well, helping people that are in treatment stay in treatment without their insurance kicking them out to the street. So, yeah, indirectly, yes, not directly anymore.

The Fentanyl Epidemic

SHAWN RYAN:

You know, where I’m going with this is, I mean, the fentanyl epidemic is massive. It’s huge. Huge. I mean China. Hundreds of thousands of people are dying from it. Having been through it, having been through recovery, you know—and we talked a lot about this. I mean, you lost your best friend growing up. I lost my best friend. We shared that story. There’s this flag up there. You know? And I mean—Yeah.

And so, you know, I mean, where I’m going with this is everybody knows somebody that’s addicted to heroin, fentanyl, opiates, you know, one narcotic or another, and the addiction problem just seems to be getting worse and worse and worse. And so with somebody who has as much experience as you have, I mean, what is your advice for somebody who has a loved one who is addicted to heroin, fentanyl, meth, anything that’s going to ruin their life?

Because you and—the reason I’m asking is I see—you know, I almost did it. I mean, you will see people with a loved one who’s suffering from an addiction like that, their life will—they will ruin their own life—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Oh, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN:

Trying to save somebody who doesn’t want to be saved. And so that’s kind of what I’m asking. You know? How do you—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Totally understand what you’re saying. And I wish there was the perfect answer for it, but the, you know, you’re going to hear the common, you know, like, “They need to want it.” Like, they need to want to be clean, which is true. I believe that they have to want to go through it. They want to have a new life. They want to have a new future to stop using. I truly believe that.

But on the other hand, they may not realize that they want it because they haven’t been clean long enough to realize what the difference is. Mhmm. Because their normal is high. Or their normal is, what they believe is sober, is high. So for them to want it would be pretty difficult. The only time they may want it is when they’re sick, when they’re withdrawn.

So I think that forcing them to—because certain states like Florida have a Baker Act. If you’re a harm to yourself or others, you could be forced into a hospital. I think in certain cases, especially when you’re doing this new stuff, it’s not just fentanyl. There’s xylazine, medetomidine, all these tranquilizers that are not even opioids that Narcan can’t bring you back from if you’re overdosing.

You want to, you know, if you—like, you may need to—like those—well, I’m sorry. The tranquilizers, even if you are smoking them, if you’re snorting them, if you’re swallowing them, they’re creating holes in your skin like that old—I don’t know if you’ve seen crocodile. Mhmm. Like the stuff that people inject like the old the cheap heroin. It’s not real heroin.

These tranquilizers are putting holes in people’s arms and legs, and they’re walking around Kensington, Philadelphia looking like zombies with actual legs and arms cut off.

SHAWN RYAN:

What?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. Yeah. You can look up videos there. It’s crazy. So they’re at a point where they’re going to die from sepsis or from an abscess or from an infection or septic shock or whatever it ends up being. Force them into a hospital, force them to get over the physical withdrawal, get them into a program if you could somehow pull it off and see what happens. But I can’t make any promises.

Addiction, the only reason that I stopped was because I had enough time away. I was forced. I had no choice. And I want to get into something real quick. So before I got clean, I was still actively using. I got sent to all these different schools. I went to Bucksmont Academy, which was a PetSmart that got converted into a school. And there was no walls. It was just a big warehouse that had rolling dividers for the classrooms that you could reach your hand over and you’d be in the other classroom.

That was my high school for ninth grade, I believe it was. And then, like I said, I dropped out going into tenth grade. But I did ninth grade at a place called Bucksmont, which was for bad kids. Because I had what was called an IEP. I don’t know if you ever heard of it, an individual education plan.

Early Education and Trauma

It’s for kids that have learning disabilities, whether it be you have trouble reading, you have trouble with math, or in my case, was from trauma or it was called an emotional support IEP. So they realized I wasn’t getting along with kids in my school. There was a lot of fights, lot of problems.

So they decided to send me to Bucksmont, which was a Petco or PetSmart. I think it a Petco. Petco that was converted into a school. Lots of fighting in there. Not the greatest education. Some of the teachers meant very well, but not the greatest education you could get.

Crazily enough, and I know people are going to comment about this and say that I was abused, and maybe it’s categorized as that way. But the guidance counselor at Bucksmont was in college, and I was, you know, like, fourteen. How old would you be in ninth grade? Like, fifteen or sixteen?

SHAWN RYAN:

Ninth grade? Yeah. I think you’d be, yeah, fourteen, fifteen.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. So she knew she was my guidance counselor. She knew how old I was because she was my guidance counselor, and she had the nerve to come to my house one day. Her and I were texting and talking to each other at that time inappropriately. And she had the nerve to show up at my house, meet my mother, and go up into my bedroom.

And my mom didn’t know who she was, so that’s why there wasn’t a fight about this. But the guidance counselor that worked at the college, like, so she I guess she was a college student as well as working at Bucksmont. Technically, would just say, you know, it’s what she did was illegal. I don’t recall being traumatized from it. I would if I was a girl saying the same thing, I don’t think I would agree with anything I’m saying. If a guy I know that it doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t feel—

SHAWN RYAN:

Hold on. What is she saying?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

What do you mean? What what she saying to you? Who? The guidance counselor? Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN:

I mean, she came to my house in my room. So, you know, she was she the whole thing.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

So she wants to have sex with you.

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was, well, it was yeah. I mean, we talked inappropriately. Yeah. Yeah. So I if you want to say—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Did it go into more than talking?

SHAWN RYAN:

I mean, I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble, but it’s there’s another situation that was inappropriate as well with a psychiatrist, ironically.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

What the— with you?

SHAWN RYAN:

With me. Yeah. But it was it was I—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Hold on. How old are you?

SHAWN RYAN:

You’re in the ninth grade.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

You’re in ninth grade. Yeah. And you have a you have a guidance counselor wanting to have sex with you, and, apparently, you guys did some maybe—

SHAWN RYAN:

We were maybe you acted on it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. There was maybe something happened, but either way, with bare minimum, a little relationship we had for a short period of time.

SHAWN RYAN:

How did she show up at your house?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

She drove.

SHAWN RYAN:

To do what? Were you there?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I was home. Yeah. Yeah. She came up into my bedroom, and we I remember I they are I have a vivid memory—

SHAWN RYAN:

She shows up to your house as a friend as a friend, and your mom thinks that maybe this is another ninth grader or somebody?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. It was she yeah. Without going into details of who she is, she was she did she looked younger. She was in college.

SHAWN RYAN:

Shit, dude.

The Reality of Predators Everywhere

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. So technically, legally, what she did was very wrong. I don’t feel traumatized from it nor do I agree with what she did. So don’t get me wrong when I say that. Yeah. But I don’t feel, you know, it’s just everybody has their own thing. Right?

What I do feel a little bit upset about that I thought about later in life that contributed to my addiction problems is because my mom was so against me on being on medications, even before I did drugs, she told the school with that IEP, the individual education plan, she was so adamant that I would be on no medications. She didn’t want me on meds. And I understand that, meds usually are a bad move for a kid.

And the school eventually says he either needs to be on meds or we’re putting him somewhere. So my mom sends me to this psychiatrist who is a doctor. And she, at first, gives me some antidepressants and nothing too crazy. And I have a bad reaction to one called Pristiq. It’s also known as Effexor. It’s an antidepressant SSRI. I had a bad reaction, made me feel really weird, maybe not feel good at all, mentally. I stopped taking that med.

In between then, if you remember the chat application, Skype, she reached out to me on Skype and told me that her husband, she believes is cheating on her. And he is gone. He goes to Philadelphia all the time and goes to clubs. And would I mind checking out his computer to see if he was cheating on her? And I’m a little boy at this point. And I agreed to it because it was, okay, she’s asking me for something. This is weird, but she’s my psychiatrist, you know, whatever.

So I agree to do that. I go through the computer. And now I start to realize, I know more about this woman. I got her logins for things. I all kinds of things that I shouldn’t have. And I’m addicted to drugs and I can get this psychiatrist to give me whatever I want. So I kind of abused the situation because she went too far. She shouldn’t have made anything personal about that relationship. And there’s more to it than that, but I’m going to keep that personal relationship at where it is.

But she ends up prescribing me to this is what I’ll tell you exactly what I was prescribed to as a little boy. Three two milligrams Xanax a day, so six milligrams Xanax. I was prescribed to one thirty milligram Adderall, ten milligrams of Ritalin, and seventy milligrams of Vyvanse every single day.

SHAWN RYAN:

What’s Vyvanse?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Vyvanse is same, it’s called lisdexamphetamine. And when you take it, the proteins in your liver convert it to dextroamphetamine. So it’s just essentially another stimulant. I was prescribed the three different stimulants at the same time with Xanax while I’m doing heroin. And the psychiatrist knows that. She knows I’m on probation. She knows that I’m a heroin addict. She knows that I have leverage on her because of what she asked me to do and some other inappropriate things that she did.

SHAWN RYAN:

What are the other inappropriate things?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I don’t want to talk about it on here.

SHAWN RYAN:

Why not?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Because I don’t want I don’t it’s over. You know? Alright. It’s I’ll I’ll tell you off camera. It’s it’s nothing that I’m traumatized by.

SHAWN RYAN:

Are they sexual?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

It’s nothing I’m traumatized by. And it’s it’s stuff that—

SHAWN RYAN:

Ryan, reason I’m asking is, I mean, what you’re doing right now is going after sexual predators. Yeah. And then you just told me you had an encounter with one. Whether you’re traumatized by it or not, it’s still wrong. It’s still wrong. I mean, she went into your home with her mom there, with her mother there, imposed as a f*ing friend instead of a guidance counselor. Yes. I mean, this shit’s happening all over the all over the world. Yeah. I know. Then and then again—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I minimize it. I get it. I understand. I’m minimizing it for myself.

SHAWN RYAN:

A psychiatrist. And so what you say you’re not traumatized by, I’m I’m I’m I’m assuming that’s another sexual encounter. But these are these are professionals, and I think it’s important to highlight that because that’s what we want to do here. Right? This interview is to bring out how real this shit is, who’s doing it, you know, and and and the point that I’m making here is it’s not somebody from the hood. It’s not or maybe it is. Maybe it is somebody from the hood. Maybe it’s somebody from the trailer park, but it’s also teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, guidance counselors—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Rabbis as you just saw.

SHAWN RYAN:

Rabbis. Yeah. Priests. Yep.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I mean state troopers.

SHAWN RYAN:

State troopers. I mean, it’s it’s it’s it is everywhere. It’s everywhere. You you cannot profile. It’s everywhere. It’s the rich. It’s the poor. It’s every race.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Male, female.

SHAWN RYAN:

Male, female. It is everywhere.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. So I just want to clarify because if somebody else was telling this story, I would be going after them. But I for whatever reason, internally, I don’t care for myself. Which I don’t know how to answer why, but there is no situation where I think that’s okay for anyone else. Does that make sense? Yeah. I know it doesn’t it doesn’t make a ton of sense probably to you because you’re hearing from the guy.

SHAWN RYAN:

Understand it because you you don’t feel traumatized by it, which means you are you are, you know, you you’re dubbing it down.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. I mean, maybe I I don’t feel—

SHAWN RYAN:

For you weren’t you know, you don’t think that they were traumatic.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. Well, they didn’t take away my trust in women. They didn’t take away I don’t know. It just it’s not the average situation for me. But that doesn’t mean that I agree with it. I don’t I obviously, I’m highly against that. So I focus half my life on. So it I know it’s it’s it’s backwards and almost hypocritical. I don’t want to lie to you and say I’m traumatized, but I’m and I don’t feel traumatized.

SHAWN RYAN:

Without going into detail, if and if you don’t have to answer this, but, I mean, did you enjoy it? Or—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. You did enjoy it? Yes.

SHAWN RYAN:

You didn’t feel violated? No. And feel—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

No. No. I I remember clear as day at thirty-two years old wanting to.

SHAWN RYAN:

How did those relationships end then?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Just, I guess, stop talking, me getting locked up. I mean, I I was locked up so many times as a kid.

SHAWN RYAN:

You ended in?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I’m sure it just ended. Because I don’t remember having to be, we’re over. You know?

SHAWN RYAN:

How old is this psychiatrist?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

The psychiatrist was substantially older than the than the guidance counselor. Forties, fifties? Forties at the time. So, yeah, substantially older. But the the guidance counselor was a college student, so not that much older than me, but still an adult.

SHAWN RYAN:

I mean, you know and then and then on top of that, what kind of f*ed up women are these? You know, you got one that’s a guidance counselor and another one that’s a psychiatrist. And hear me out. You know what I mean? Not only are they not not only are they targeting a, what, a fourteen year old, fifteen year old—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN:

They’re targeting a fourteen or fifteen year old that is f*ed up on opiates.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. And with mental health disorders—

SHAWN RYAN:

And, antidepressants. And it’s it’s you were targeted because of the situation that you’re in.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Well, that’s that’s from a an outsider looking in. I don’t feel that way. You know? So, I get what you’re saying, and I would feel the same way that you’re feeling. I just don’t feel that way. So that’s why it’s hard for me to comprehend. And I don’t call it trauma for myself even though everyone I’ve talked to has has reacted in the same way that you do. I just can’t lie and say, yeah. I’m a victim. I’m not—

SHAWN RYAN:

That’s not where I’m going. Where I’m going is is is I’m just, you know, I’m I’m shining the light on it. I’m saying, you know, this is—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I know it’s wrong. Prevalent.

SHAWN RYAN:

And—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

And the reason I’m bringing it up is that circles. I know it’s wrong. That’s why I’m bringing it up. Yeah. And and I I didn’t bring it up ever before publicly ever because I I didn’t want this. Yeah. I I know it’s an awkward thing. But, you know, it’s over with.

Prescription Drug Addiction

The only damage that it did cause me was being hooked on all that Xanax. And the amphetamines, it’s more in your head. The physical addiction isn’t really there with amphetamines. It’s more of you want it and it’s hard to function without them. The benzos on the other hand, taking six milligrams of Xanax, it’s really, really hard to stop. So for her to give me the max dose that I feel you could have given a kid at that time, that was a very bad move.

And then she even got it when I went to the detention center. She was making sure I was prescribed to it in the Lima Detention Center, which is it was in Delaware County where I grew up. She made sure that I was on all those meds in a jail cell. So, I was consistently messed up.

Then eventually, I was in Lima Detention Center and a guy named Dale, he was one of the guards there who I still talk to current day. Dale realizes I’m sleeping every day, all day long. He’s worried about me. He goes to the nurses’ station, they pull me off the meds. But since I was one of, if not the only kid ever to be prescribed to these medications in a detention center, they don’t know how to detox me properly. So they got me on Suboxone to get off of the opiates. They got me on the Xanax and all of the stimulants.

They cut me off all the stimulants and they just halved the Xanax immediately, day one. And then no Suboxone. So I’m going through opioid withdrawal and I’m going through a benzo withdrawal all at the same time in a jail cell by myself on a cement bed with no TV, no extra food, nothing that’s comfortable, but some, you know, the flame resistant blankets that are wool that make your skin itchy.

It was one of the worst places you could detox ever. And I went through that many times at the detention center with heroin alone, then mixing with the medications made it way worse.

But every single time that I would get out, would go right back onto the drugs, promising myself and my mom that I was done. So like I was saying earlier, addiction is really hard. It takes grips that you can’t even imagine. And if anyone’s listening to this episode that has ever done drugs, nobody woke up saying, “I’m going to put a needle on my arm.” Nobody woke up one day saying, “I’m going to be an alcoholic.”

Nobody ever thought that that was going to happen to them, but in certain cases, it does. So just don’t even take the chance. And for me, I never would have guessed with all of the people that I had as examples to not be like that I was going to be just as addicted as they were.

The Devro Facility Incident

So skipping a bunch of stuff because I know I’m going on for a while now about the childhood stuff. I get sent to a facility called Devro, which this is another mindblower, man.

So I’m in Devro, and Devro is a residential facility for kids that got in trouble, and it’s a long term residential. And I end up there for more drug charges, and I’m in class because you still have to go to school when you’re in these places. So this was actually before ninth grade. So I guess eighth grade around then, eighth, ninth grade, somewhere around that time. I can get the exact date when I read this thing to you.

But I’m in the classroom, and I remember I’m drawing a picture of the monopoly guy, like with the little magnifying glass. So I have a piece of paper on top of the Monopoly board. I’m drawing him, and there are the chairs that you sit in, but then there’s a table that goes out in front. And then there’s metal that’s holding the table up.

I’m drawing the thing and I hear this kid behind me talking about that he has a gun and I’m hearing like little pieces of it, but I hear that he has a gun. And I know that he just got back from a home pass, which means like he got the agreement to go home for the weekend and then he’d go back to the facility. Like some of these kids are there for years at a time. So getting a home pass is a big deal.

This kid somehow got a gun, at least at this time I’m hearing the gun thing. And I don’t know if I’m about to get the back of my head blown off, you know, because I’m hearing about a gun behind me. And out of nowhere, I hear, like, metal, but, like, this is plastic, but I hear metal on the table like that. And it was, like, almost like the kid pulled the gun out of the bag, and it hit the table. That’s what it sounded like.

So I turned around. I’m, like, quickly thinking, like, I’m about to die. You know? I see this gun and obviously grabbed everything that I possibly could. He had a backpack that he had the gun in. I’m running down the hallway. I run into the front desk. “There’s a gun. There’s a gun.” And I’m screaming. And, like, because I’m in the school technically with a gun.

The cops come. I’m being held, obviously, in a room by myself at this time. And the cops come, they arrest this kid, they send me home. Like within twenty four hours, they sent me home because they didn’t want other kids to retaliate because they didn’t know what really was going on.

The District Attorney’s Letter

So let me read to you actually the letter from the assistant district attorney at that time. Hold on one second. There’s more to the story that’s unbelievable and how unfairly things were, how I was treated and even my, like, I would count my mom in there too because she tried so hard, and they just kept hammering, throwing the book at me for self harm, as you said.

Oh, here it is. February 25, 2011. So actually, I would have been, I think, seventeen there. So it would have been a little bit later, right before I got in trouble for the last time.

“In the interest of Ryan Montgomery, dear Katie,” who was my probation officer at the time as a juvenile, “I’m writing to advise you in the court that the above juvenile, Ryan Matthew Montgomery, did assist the Commonwealth in the successful prosecution of two other juveniles for the possession of a loaded functional .45 caliber handgun in the Devro facility where Ryan has been placed.

On Friday morning, February 4, 2011, Ryan discovered that a juvenile was in possession of a firearm at the Devro facility and he promptly notified the facility staff who recovered the weapon. Prior to Ryan notifying the staff, other placed juveniles had been aware of the presence of the firearm in the facility but took no action to alert staff.

Ryan’s testimony, if it had been needed, would have been vital to the Commonwealth’s case. Ryan’s actions are also commendable in that he acted where others failed to do so and may have prevented a very serious incident at Devro. Ryan recognized the seriousness of the situation and disregarded any possible retaliation by others for alerting staff. It’s a pleasure to write this letter for Ryan respectfully. Edward J. Gallon, assistant district attorney juvenile unit.”

I’ll show you the letter so you can see it’s a nice letter, like on a nice letterhead. It was obviously very nice of him to write that for me.

Back to Court

So I’m home because they’re scared that someone’s going to retaliate. And they send me back to court, you know, because they got to figure out what to do with me. Right? So I’m sitting at home for three or four days. I go back to court, and I go into Master Kern, was his name, was the guy. I give him that letter. My mom wrote a letter. He knows that I just stopped.

Like, the kid’s plan was, by the way, to shoot up the whole classroom and steal the teacher’s car. To steal the teacher’s car and take a couple kids with him. That was his plan. I stopped that plan. There was only one way out of that classroom. So I genuinely believe that I would have died that day if I didn’t act.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy s*.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And a lot of other kids would have been dead too. So I’m home for a couple days. Obviously, for him to go out of his way to write this letter for me and all these people are commending me for the which was, I think, a good thing for me to do at a young age. Master Kern, where do you think he sent me? He thinks he sent me back home? No.

He sends me back to the juvenile detention center, the worst place he could have sent me, back into a jail cell, back off of all my medications, to sit there for three months, which is the max you can sit there until they place you, till they send me to another rehab, which wasn’t a residential, thankfully, but another rehab where you usually stay about twenty eight days as a juvenile. I was there thirty eight days.

I get out of there, relapse the first night, end up getting put back on parole. And it just it was a disaster, man.

The Parole Officer

And then eventually ends up with a guy named Matt Pifer, who a good friend of mine, Jim, he’s an old man. He went to Vietnam. He’s been in and out of jail a long time, but off drugs a long time. He had the same parole officer as me. And he said he was going to kill Matt Pifer. He ends up getting locked up for saying he’s going to kill Matt Pifer like a long time. He didn’t really mean it. Said it at the VA to his doctor.

And the guy was very hard on me. I remember one day, this is the last thing I’ll talk about legally, but he told me that I didn’t have a real job. And I knew that the affiliate marketing, I was making more money than him. That’s the truth. And he told me I didn’t have a real job, needed to go to an office.

So I found a place called Answering Service for Directors. So it was like for funeral directors. And I started working there, I got referred there by somebody else who was a previous heroin addict. That dude starts doing heroin in the bathroom at work. I get fired for not advancing fast enough on their computer systems. That was the reason they fired me. So that part was funny. But I wasn’t doing drugs, I really wasn’t at that time.

And I remember being in the parking lot and him telling me that if I didn’t have a job, that he was going to violate me, which I didn’t realize he couldn’t do at that time. I guess he could have figured something out, but whatever. I was on the phone with my mom crying my eyes out thinking like, I am so screwed. And he was just so mean to me, man. He treated me so badly.

The Final Violation

And then when I failed a drug test for him, the last time I ever got, ever at seventeen years old, I failed a drug test for him. They put me in a really bad spot. This is what happened. I had a choice between doing house arrest for six months and going home that day while withdrawing. I had to make this choice. Or doing two years in George Junior, a juvenile boot camp.

I chose to go home on house arrest, go with adult parole. I failed two drug tests in two weeks because obviously I was withdrawing as a kid in a juvenile detention center. This dude, Matt Pifer violates me, resentences me for the possession with intent to deliver of heroin, even though I wasn’t selling heroin. I just had it in individual bags. That’s how heroin comes. I could prove that too. Like, literally, that’s not just me saying that to make myself look good. I never was selling heroin. Just had and I was with people that we just picked up heroin.

He violates me on that and resentences me for a failed drug test. Not because I got caught selling heroin or had more heroin on me, because I peed in a cup. And the sentence on that looks at two to four years. So I’m sitting in George W. Hill Correctional Facility. I’m sitting there six plus months waiting on a Gagnon two hearing, which you’re supposed to get in the first two weeks. That’s part of parole or whatever.

And he eventually sentenced me two to four years, and I got out with good time. If you count the juvenile and the adult stuff together, it’s twenty months. And I finally get out of there. I had a couple of years left of parole left to go. And the second that I got off is when I left for Florida. So that was the end.

Breaking Free from Addiction

My addiction, the reason why I stopped, wasn’t rehab. It wasn’t because somebody said something to me that changed something. Wasn’t because I looked at my family and was scared that I was going to die. It was because I spent enough time away from it and in the worst possible scenario you can imagine to, you know, I just didn’t ever want to get high again. It was over. The thought was out of my brain.

And I just left Pennsylvania and never looked back. So that’s the actual stories I’ve never talked about before. And there’s more to it, but I just, you know, I’m on a little bit of a rampage with what I’m saying.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn, Ryan. What more of, sir?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Just all the different times I’ve been in trouble for stupid stuff. But it just it was countless times as a kid. Never as an adult once, but as a kid, countless. I mean, I—

SHAWN RYAN: How do you maintain the relationship with your mom? I mean, you guys are really tight. We talk a lot about her.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Love my mom to death. And my mom was there for me throughout all of this. My mom never gave up on me.

SHAWN RYAN: She never gave up on you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And she never gave up on me even when she got diagnosed with her first round of cancer. Like, she’s like, I don’t want to get too much under. That’s going to upset me. But she’s still sick and still going through stuff. But when she got breast cancer for the first time, she got chemo, radiation, and I was still using it. I was still getting in trouble.

I tried my best to leave her out of it, I really did. But she’s the only one really there for me at that time. And other than my grandparents, which I didn’t live with them because I had a stepdad at the time, which, like I said, my grandpa was like a dad to me.

SHAWN RYAN: But he wasn’t there. Want to, like, your mom is going through cancer treatment, battling cancer, and her son, you are still jamming needles in your arm. I mean, that’s a that’s a lot for a woman to go through a battle.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I know. And I feel horrible. I feel, I mean, if I could take that back, I would do anything to take that back. I can’t change it. All I can do is be a better son, and I think I’m doing a great job of that.

Like, anything she needs now. If my mom wants to go to Bermuda and she wants to be floating around, you know, in a hot tub with in a hot dog outfit, I’ll make it happen tomorrow for her. So I think that maybe it doesn’t make up for the things I’ve done to her, but anything she wants, anything she needs, anything that she’s uncomfortable with, I will make sure that my mom is number one priority because she made me her number one priority when she didn’t have it in her.

My mom was a bartender for most of my life. Like, she worked just so that she could get food on the table for me. And she was, she didn’t have, like, you know, that’s late nights and sometimes working days just because she couldn’t do it and, like, whatever the, you know? But she just did a lot for me, and I owe her the world. And, like, where money really wasn’t a thing for my family, she made up for it in every other way you possibly could. So I love my mom to death.

SHAWN RYAN:

Damn, man. What I’m just curious, you know, when you did get clean, when you cleaned it up, did you know you were clean for good?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yes.

SHAWN RYAN:

You did?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was, I would never, never getting myself put back in a facility like that again. Never putting myself in that situation. Never hanging out with the same group of people again. I was so done. I just wanted parole to be over with because I couldn’t leave the state. So the second that I was able to leave the state, I was out. And that was it. That was the end of it.

SHAWN RYAN:

How did your mom take it?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

My mom was very, all of them. My grandpa, my mom.

SHAWN RYAN:

When you were clean for the final time. I mean, how long do you think it took your mom to realize he’s good?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

She still texts me, “Hey, Ry. Are you okay?” every single day. She shares my health app with me current day. She sees my heart rate, my resting heart rate, my steps, my respiratory rate, my wrist temperature. You name it. My mom’s got it.

So I don’t think that fear will ever leave her, sadly, but she checks it. The second she wakes up, she makes sure that I got up with the health app on the phone. And if I don’t answer her text, then she’ll call me. If I don’t answer, and this has only happened one time. But if I don’t answer her calls, she’ll start calling my friends. Because she knows I live alone. You know? And she lives in Pennsylvania. I live at the bottom of the country.

Like, what if I’m in my house dead? Like, I know it’s an extreme, but she doesn’t know. So she’ll call my friends to make sure I’m alright. And I call her, I can’t call her in middle of the day, but I text her back. And at nighttime before I go to bed every night, I call her and say goodnight, and I’ve done that every night since I’ve left for the last ten years.

SHAWN RYAN:

Wow.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. And I’ve been clean, if you count the years, over fourteen years. So long time.

SHAWN RYAN:

Congratulations, man.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Thanks. Well, yeah, I’ll be seven, I got clean at seventeen, and I’m thirty-two now. So it’s, it’s whatever you, whatever that exact time frame would be. February I got arrested again after that. So if you count whatever that date is in 2011 to now.

The Lamborghini Incident

SHAWN RYAN:

I thought we were going to get arrested last time I was in Florida riding around in that Lamborghini of yours.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Oh my gosh, dude. You were gunning it. You were gunning it. You, we, we were, we put that thing in sport mode, and he was just gunning it back and back. The police. Yeah. Right past the police. And Sean was not, like it wasn’t like he just gunned it once.

We were on Ocean Ave right by the water in a Lamborghini orange Lamborghini Aventador, and he just gunned it, stopped. Gunned it, stopped. Gunned it, like, he was, he was like a kid on a roller coaster. He loved it. I found it fun.

SHAWN RYAN:

It was a good time.

A Second Chance at the Fire Station

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Okay. So before we go on the break, just want to share something with you. So after all of that stuff, me getting in trouble a million times as a kid, my family having a bad reputation with the last name in the area, Montgomery, just having a bad name in Delaware County. Me getting in trouble, like I said, all drug related and petty crimes, but bad reputation with the cops, with everybody.

I end up hanging out with this kid Vinny, who brings me to a place called Lanai Fire Station, which was a very small firehouse down the street from a big mall that I used to hang out at. And there was a guy named Ken Collins who was the chief of Lanai at that time. He was also a police officer. He didn’t know me, never heard of me, never knew anything about me.

I go over to Lanai with my friend Vinny, and I sit down in the office with Ken Collins. And he’s willing to give me a chance to be a firefighter at Lanai Firehouse while I’m on parole, while I have this record as a kid, while he doesn’t know if I’m going to rob the firehouse for all this stuff to support my addiction. He doesn’t know anything about me. He just is willing to take a chance on me, and no one else at this firehouse has any issues like I do.

This guy just must have saw something in me that I didn’t and nobody else must have at the time. And I proved him right. So I became a firefighter at Atlanta, but I didn’t have what’s called fire one or hazmat, so I couldn’t go into any of the burning buildings. I could just go on calls, I could stand and watch and help with the tools, but that’s as much as I could do.

Then Lanai merges with this other firehouse called Lima, Lima Firehouse, which was down the street from the detention center across the street from the mall. It turned into Lanai merged with Lima and became Rocky Run Firehouse. At that time, Ken got the, the same county that’s putting my family through hell. They paid for me to go to fire school. They paid for me to go through fire school.

I didn’t let them down. I showed up every single day, showed up on time. I passed the first time around. I went through the physical exam. I went through the written exam. I ended up my fire one and my hazmat. I became an actual firefighter for two years. And this man, like, he didn’t have to do any of that for me.

I called him later in life, and it was like, “Listen, man. Like, I am so grateful for you, man. Like, you, you showed me that there are good people out there, you know, like, people that care.” And, yeah, that’s, that’s it. That’s it. We can go on the break.

SHAWN RYAN:

That’s pretty cool, man, but I do have another question.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah.

Rock Bottom and Recovery

SHAWN RYAN:

When you were getting clean, what was, what was the thing? I mean, it sounds like you have been in rehabs for a very long time.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I mean, so many.

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. Eleven to seventeen. Right?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

So many. Yeah. In such a short period of time.

SHAWN RYAN:

What was the, I mean, a lot of people are struggling with addiction right now.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yes.

SHAWN RYAN:

Millions of people.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yep.

SHAWN RYAN:

What was it for you that was the, I forgot to clean it up. This was the last straw. This is rock bottom. What was it?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Just be seen being stuck in a cell for all that time. You know, for, for if you count the juvenile time plus the adult time, twenty months being locked away and not being around these addicts, like, around any people, places, and things is what they call it. Being around not being around any of those places, people or things, I think my brain naturally heals itself and realize like maybe you aren’t a drug addict for life. Maybe you just are physically dependent on so many things that you feel like you are.

And that was, that was the truth because I don’t care about drugs anymore. I could watch someone shoot up in front of me, and I’m not going to think about using heroin. Not because I feel like it’s more dangerous than it used to be. I just don’t. I have no desire. It’s gone. So I guess, I guess I just needed the time away.

And as much as Matt Pifer, that parole officer that, you know, I don’t know because he hasn’t answered my calls. I tried to connect with him as well. He won’t answer me even though I’ve left him messages. I would love to know if his intentions were good or bad. I or he just didn’t care. I’d love to know, but he’s never actually answered me.

Like, he inadvertently saved my life, whether he did it on purpose or not. I don’t think I’d be here talking to you right now if I didn’t get locked up for that last time. So, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s what got me clean. It’s not, it isn’t like an epiphany moment that happened that, that changed the way that I felt about drugs. It just was the time away from it.

Advice for Those Struggling with Addiction

SHAWN RYAN:

Do you think there are people that are under the spell of addiction right now that don’t see a way out?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yes. Oh, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN:

What would your advice be for them?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

They need to hospitalize themselves, and they, they need to be medicated and put, I mean, especially the, the, the tranquilizer addicts right now and the alcoholics, and, you know, they, they, they will knock you out so you don’t seize, as you say, you don’t go into seizures and all of the above. Just get yourself into a hospital or a detox ASAP and you’re going go through a very comfortable detox and then see how you feel after your body’s cleaned up and then decide whether you want to go to rehab afterwards.

But nothing’s going to change if you don’t change anything. And if you don’t want to change, you may not realize you want to change because you don’t remember what it’s like to feel good anymore. You just don’t remember. So like I said earlier, just try it. What’s the worst thing? Five to seven days goes by and you say, screw it. I want to go back to this lifestyle. It can’t hurt. Just try. Just try.

There’s people that care about you. Like, you might be somebody’s brother or mother, brother, sister, family, and people care about you. I don’t care who you are. Somebody out there cares about you, and they don’t want to see you destroy your life. And the least you can do for them is try to clean yourself up.

And I know that I’m, I’m hypocritical because I could have done the same thing as a kid, and I really believe that I was doing that. Every time I did get help, I believed I was going to stop, and I couldn’t. But, you know, hindsight’s twenty-twenty. And, and I, I, yeah. Just, just get help is, is really the best I could say. Even if you don’t feel like you want it, just try it.

SHAWN RYAN:

Well, thank you for sharing that.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Of course.

Discussion on Kratom

SHAWN RYAN:

You went down, you did seven zero eight. Right?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yes.

SHAWN RYAN:

This last night?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. So not, not seven zero eight directly. It’s just, it’s an alkaloid in the kratom or kratom plant. So it’s just, it’s seven hydroxymitragynine or it’s pronounced in many ways, but that’s the way I pronounce it. And it’s with opioids, was able to take it was like way back before it was like gas station heroin because there’s different types.

There’s the type that is not banned because it’s not like, it hasn’t really killed anyone by itself. There’s been deaths with it in their system with other drugs. But I don’t recall any deaths that were strictly related to kratom or kratom itself.

SHAWN RYAN:

Mhmm.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I took it to help withdraw from opiates when I wasn’t in facilities, and it was very, very helpful for me as well. I mean, you know, because it gets rid of withdrawal symptoms.

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. I just, I just did an episode on this with a, with a investigative journalist out of Maine and Steve Robinson.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Okay. I’ll check it out.

SHAWN RYAN:

And he was talking about how he was talking about how bad it is, how many people are getting addicted to this and don’t realize how addictive it is because it’s over the counter. And so I was just curious what your experience was with that.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it’s, I’ve never done seven zero eight. I’ve never done any, like, the extracts you would get at a gas station. But I’ve, like, drink like, I’ve made Kratom tea, and I’ve, I’ve tried that. You know? Like, I’ve tried, like, the natural ways of it, and it’s been very helpful for me when I was in that state.

SHAWN RYAN:

Gotcha. Gotcha.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I’m not saying it’s a good idea because it’s, it’s an even though it is natural, I don’t think you can overdose on it. It’s not a, like it is physically addictive. It is. That’s true. But it’s like a very minor physical withdrawal to my knowledge. I wouldn’t recommend it for an opioid addict because it’s going to not satisfy your needs. Like, you’re going to expect it to do more, it’s not going to do what you’re expecting. And it’s, you’re going to end up just relapsing. So I wouldn’t recommend it.

SHAWN RYAN:

Gotcha. Gotcha.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

That’s the truth.

SHAWN RYAN:

And then last question before we go on a break. You know, your mom sounds like she’s the only person in your life that just never gave up on you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

# Formatted Document

My mom and my grandparents. They were like, my grandparents, my grandpop, you know, like, my grandpop fathered me. My grandmom was like a second mother to me. And then there was a period of time where I had a stepdad and my mom had a house with him where I seen them, but I didn’t see them every day like I did for two different portions of my childhood.

So I would say my mom, my grandma, my grandpop were the keystones, if you combine them together, the keystone of the only safety net I had to fall into.

And current day, like, they are my mental safety net. And I love them to death, all of them. And then my grandfather passed, and I told you that story already. But, you know, I had, I got the blessing of having somebody as a great father figure as I talked about. But my dad, you know, missing some aspects of being a father.

He showed me that he loved me, but then my grandfather taught me a ton of valuable lessons in life and was there for me for all the other things. So I was blessed in many ways.

SHAWN RYAN:

Did your mom watch the first episode we did together?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

My mom is, like, my number one supporter. My mom, like, my mom has probably watched that episode multiple times. She’s read all the comments. My mom, she, I don’t do any of that. I don’t read comments.

I don’t do any of that with any of these things that I do. Not only can I read my own social media comments, but my mom, she’s on it. Like, I could ask my mom, what happened in the forty-fifth minute of the first Shawn Ryan show? And she’d like, well, you were, you were leaning to your right side, and Shawn was asking you about, she’ll know.

SHAWN RYAN:

So let me ask you this. What’s one thing you’ve always wanted to tell your mom that you haven’t told her? And you know she’ll be watching this.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Well, I know she’ll be watching it. Because I, I mean, I, I guess it, I don’t have a fancy one, but the first thing that comes to mind is, is like, I’ve said to her a million times, and I’m sorry. I’m very sorry, but I know that she’s proud of me now. And I hope that she is proud of herself because she did all of that on her own. Like as a single mother.

Yeah. I have my grandparents and they were very helpful, but my mom got pregnant just turning eighteen years old. You know? And to have the terror that I was, you know, it was not easy for her. And I know that my story is far from over as well, but it is night and day from what it was before.

And without her, I’m nothing. So love my mom. I love your mom very much.

SHAWN RYAN:

I’m sure she is very proud of you, man.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yep. She is. She is. The show is getting me all emotional. We need to take a break.

We got to take a break. I don’t know how you do this to me, Shawn. Let’s go blow some shit up. Yeah. That’ll help.

SHAWN RYAN:

Pretty sure my forehead just got blasted with a piece of brass there.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Really? Yeah. Yep. I can feel it. How’d that happen?

SHAWN RYAN:

F*ing things got some power, buddy. Do you have a gash up here?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. You do. I’m pretty sure I see it. Perfect. Yeah.

You got hit in the head.

Back from the Break

SHAWN RYAN:

Alright, Ryan. Back from the break. Dude, your shooting has improved tremendously. Nice shooting out there.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Thank you. Your shooting was great too, and I don’t know if we should address the elephant in the room.

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. I mean, we’ll get some new, we both battle scars out there on the static range.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

So we, for the people that can’t, or this is going to be for Patreon. Right?

SHAWN RYAN:

I think we’ll probably release this one to the masses. But, yeah, we do this with almost every guest, but I’ve only, I’ve only dug out the golden fifty caliber Desert Eagle special for you, Ryan.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Thank you. And we both did hit with…

SHAWN RYAN:

Now we have. Yes. So apparently, the brass kicks straight up and smashed us both in the forehead.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I got a lump. I feel the lump, but Shawn got burnt and he got hit with it. So he’s got a combo deal. Mine, I feel it, but I don’t know if you could see it on the camera.

SHAWN RYAN:

Oh, yes, I can see it. Clear as day, buddy.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

It’s got some kick to it. I’ve never shot a point five zero caliber handgun, so that’s a little wild to me. Now you have. Now I have. Thank you.

SHAWN RYAN:

And a forty-four and a three fifty-seven.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

A lot of things.

SHAWN RYAN:

F*ing a, man.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

A lot of things. But you were impressive out there. You, I can’t believe you hit all of them targets with no buttstock, with no sight. And wow. You beat me by a couple points, but, like, I had, I had sights and a buttstock.

You know?

SHAWN RYAN:

It’s not that impressive, Ryan. It would be really impressive. It would be unimpressive if it was, I spent a long time, a large portion of my life shooting guns and doing tactics and shit. It would be like, you know, it’d be like, it would be like if I beat you in a hacking competition. It’s just it’s not going to happen.

But you f*ing crushed it out there. But let, hey. Let’s get into, let’s get into some more stuff about what happened after our initial interview and talk a little bit more about Pentester and everything you guys are doing, wiping people’s data from the Internet. Okay. And all that kind of stuff. And then we’ll move into, you know, what you’ve been doing with Sentinel Foundation and the seven six four stuff and Roblox.

Roblox. Yeah. Is it row, r o, or r o a d? It’s Roblox, r o. Okay.

Pentester and Data Protection

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. Yeah. Lot of people think it’s roadblocks, but it is Roblox. And it’s not just Roblox, but we’re like, I’m going to focus on that for now, and I’ll blanket it because it’s all of these games, all of these platforms. So starting, I wanted to, you know, if you remember last time, we talked about, and the reason why Pentester came up for me at that time, like, I can tell you, man to man, like, there wasn’t a conversation with the business partners before I came.

Like, this is how you’re going to say things on the show so that we can get, like, it wasn’t that. It was, and honestly, Pentester was only built for businesses back when I came on your show. So at that time, it was forty-nine dollars a month no matter who you signed up. And you had to either put a website or email in. It would do a scan.

It would tell you if there’s any low hanging fruit vulnerabilities on your site or some data that was breached about you. And I showed you the reverse facial recognition technology at that time. We looked up Vigilance Elite’s website. We found some identifiable information from it. And back then, our database was, like, a hundred and thirty billion records, which was still the biggest at that time.

And now it’s been three years, and we’re, like, two hundred and forty billion plus records, which we’ve gotten way larger when it comes to the data that we have access to. Our reverse facial recognition has tripled in size. So, I mean, I could show another example with somebody else here because, obviously, there’s so many photos of you online. It’s not that impressive to, you know, to show it. But, like, we could grab anybody you want here, and we’ll find them.

And I just want to show that, and I want to show the new feature that we learned with Pentester over time because we had a ton of people sign up, and then we had this one specific breach that happened, which are you familiar with National Public Data? What happened there?

SHAWN RYAN:

No.

The National Public Data Breach

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Okay. So this is very important. And a lot of people are not familiar with it, which is a problem. So the National Public Data breach happened a little over a year ago, and what happened was there is about three hundred million Americans in this country.

That database had two point eight billion records in it that included full names, date of birth, phone numbers, every address you’ve ever lived at, and your entire Social Security number. So it was leaked onto the Internet for anyone to download this. And we created a tool. We were, we were actually in Vegas, and we were talking about it. And we’re in Vegas, and we’re like, we want to build a tool so people can search to see if they’ve been impacted by this data breach, which I’ll show you in a second a demo of it.

You put in your name, your last name, your year of birth, and what state you currently live in or state you’ve lived in in the past. And then you press search, and it would show you the data. And if you were in it, we’d recommend what to do about that. We weren’t trying to sell you on Pentester. We were just trying to get you to either freeze your credit and try protect your identity at the best of your ability or freeze your credit and sign up for Pentester to know about other data that might be breached.

So it was kind of a dual purpose thing, but the main priority was freeze your credit. And I’ll explain what that means in a second. So the National Public Data Breach happened because they released a file that had credentials in it, and those credentials were easy. There was a, I think it was pass one two three was their password. And the database had all of this horrible, you know, not horrible, all of this very private information in it.

So, like, two point eight billion records is with three hundred million Americans, that means people that have passed away. That means multiple addresses for every, like, where do you see how many addresses it has for you? And once that data is out there, it’s out there. It’s like you can’t, you can remove data from data brokers, like white pages, for example, or all of those background check websites. You can remove that because you have a legal right to request removal of that.

But when it comes to dark web data or, you know, breached data, all you can do is be aware of it and take action based on your knowledge of it. So we released that tool, and we weren’t expecting it to be as crazy as it was. So going on your show, we had a ton of people signing up for business plans, like, as individuals because they wanted access to the tools I was showing on the show, and they were willing to pay that forty-nine dollars a month just to do reverse facial recognition to search themselves in our databases. And we didn’t even have any removal services at that time.

So we learned from your show that we had a need for personal use, like for consumers. So we made a nineteen dollar plan, which I said before, like, if I had this option, forty-nine dollars a month, like, most people spend twenty dollars on lunch every day.

Pentester’s Comprehensive Features and Pricing

So I was saying that with forty-nine dollars, I said that even more so with nineteen dollars a month. Not only are you getting all of the breach data out there associated with you, your phone number, your addresses, your email, literally all your identifiers, and then you can add your family members. So you could add your wife. You can add your parents.

You could add your grandparents. And then even another thing that people don’t know is you can add your children. They may not be in the data brokers yet, but their accounts will show up. So we have this tool where we can discover if you have accounts created places. And let’s say you have a kid and you told them they’re not allowed to have a Snapchat account.

You put their email and phone number in there. Now we can confirm if they have a Snapchat associated with that email or phone. And there’s no one else that has that integration with a data broker removal tool. So that’s a really cool feature.

SHAWN RYAN:

No kidding. So parents can use Pentester to see if their kids are messing around on social media behind their backs?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. That is one use case. The other use case is at nineteen bucks, you’re still getting all of what you got before with all the breach data to see your passwords, your social, your credit cards, all of that stuff that’s happened and stuff you can take action on. But we’re also removing data from data brokers on your behalf.

So it’s not instant. Immediately as you sign up, you’ll see some exposed records, but over time you’ll see there’s pending removals and then removals that have happened. I’ll show it all to you. But I highly recommend anybody signs up for it because there’s a ton of data removal companies out there that do this exact thing. But what they don’t do is show breached data, and they don’t do facial recognition.

They don’t do account discovery. So that’s something the Pentester does very well. And the reason why we do it so well is because it’s built on the methodology that I used along with some of my business partners have used to identify predators and traffickers. So using it in the opposite sense to see what digital footprint you have out there, it’s the same methodology I would use to identify these people based on minimal identifiers. And I’ll show you a demo of it so you understand what I mean.

Pentester SMS: Text-Based Privacy Protection

But what we actually learned last minute was because you got to remember, the NPD breach coming out, we had all of that built. People were searching through it. And we had people signing up for various ages, like forty, fifty, sixty, seventy year old people are signing up for Pentester that don’t know how to use computers. And we realized through support, if we could read the support tickets coming in, and we have a support team that handles that, we’re seeing a lot of people don’t know how to use a website at all. So they need the service, but they don’t know how to navigate no matter how easy we make it.

They just, there’s no getting them to use it. And we can do a lot of stuff on their behalf, but they got to sign in and put in their information for us to automate it. So we decided to make Pentester SMS, which is essentially just Pentester through text messaging.

SHAWN RYAN:

No kidding.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

So you text a phone number, and that phone number, you can talk to like a human. So you could text them and say, hey. And it will take your phone number, try to identify who you are, find your emails, find your leaked information, tell you what’s out there, say, hey, do you want to start removals on this information? And this is our recommendations with changing your passwords or deleting accounts here or all of the recommendations you would get.

And then that is only nine dollars a month because they don’t have access to all of the extra tools. If they want, then they could upgrade their account. But I’ll show you the example for your phone number, and it’s got everything on you. I mean, it’s literally got everything. So let’s say you want your wife or a parent that you know isn’t going to sign in. They’re not going to look at the dashboard. They’re not going to use any tools. Tell them to text the phone number and sign them up for it, and then they’ll get notifications via text.

Like, hey, a password was breached. Your password was summer 2025 exclamation point. Make sure you’re not using this anywhere. And you just get a text every once in a while from Pentester SMS that says, hey, you need to do this. And then, let’s say, biweekly, you get a text that says, you’ve been removed from forty-seven data brokers. If you want to see the full list, click here. But at least you know something’s happening at all times. You don’t have to sign in. You don’t got to do anything. Just text the number. So for you, this is what I’ll do is I’ll screen record this, and then I’ll hand it to you. Yeah, you’re going to like this one.

SHAWN RYAN:

No, I’m not.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

No, you’re not. Alright. So here’s an example right here of this is the phone number that you would text at the top, and this is the conversation that you would have. You’re welcome to text it now, but I figured there’d be a bunch of delays and you having to respond. But this is how it would start the conversation and then how it would end.

SHAWN RYAN:

Okay. I’m going to show this. Okay. Cool. We’ll put, we’ll overlay this on the screen.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Awesome. That’s just from your phone number. So let’s say we gave it more and you were like, hey, check this email, check this one, check my wife’s. You can get deeper into that conversation with the chat. We call it Pentester SMS, but let’s just say it’s a chatbot.

You can talk to it just like you’re talking to me, and it will respond to you like a human. It has access to our tools. So you could say, what about my wife’s email or what about my wife’s phone number? And then it’ll start answering questions about that as well. So it’s like having a twenty-four seven breach slash data privacy support agent in your pocket at all times for nine bucks.

But I’m sure you’re seeing your full Social Security number’s there. And your previous addresses, I’m sure, are there. An email that isn’t public is there.

SHAWN RYAN:

So how the hell do you get your info off?

Data Removal and Credit Protection

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

So we automatically remove data for you. So all of the data brokers that have that data, anyone could just go on Google and start searching. That gets automatically scrubbed that we’re going to deal with that for you. So you already have a Pentester account, so we’ve removed a ton of it for you already.

When it comes to breached data, like data that’s already out there, that’s on somebody’s hard drive somewhere, literally, you can’t remove that. You can’t. So you can just, in the event that it’s your social security number or something like that, you have to just freeze your credit. Freezing your credit, if you don’t know what it is, it just means go to Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian individually. They legally have to allow you to create an account for free and press the freeze button.

And then what all that does is stop people from being able to query your credit. So if somebody goes and says, hey, my name’s Shawn Ryan, and I want to buy this car, or I want to open a credit card, it stops them from being able to query your credit or pull your credit report because it’s frozen. Doesn’t stop your credit from going up or down. Doesn’t stop you in any way. I believe the whole country should be frozen, and I think that you should have to unfreeze it when you know, because all you do is you sign in to all three. You press unfreeze. You run your credit, and then when you’re done running it, you freeze it again.

And that’s the fix for your social being out there. There is nothing else you can do unless you go through the whole process of changing your Social Security number, which you can do, but it’s a process. But yeah, that’s one thing. The passwords, use a password manager, change your passwords, and then your addresses, unless you move your house, they’re out there. But the data brokers are something that we do that we can control. And in certain websites that have your photos on it, if you didn’t want them there, we can request removal of that information.

Major Data Breaches: AT&T and NPD

So that’s one thing I wanted to show you. The AT&T breach is another one that happened between our interview and now. And there was seventy something million people affected by that, but it also included, hold on one second. Here is me. I didn’t even take myself out of it. All of my information in the AT&T breach, they got my full social, my current address, my emails, everything. So all people need to do is go to npd.pentester.com or att.pentester.com. They’re individual scans to see if you were affected by these breaches. If you were, I would highly recommend freezing your credit.

Make sure when you’re doing a search, search every state you’ve ever lived in. Don’t just search in Florida. If you’ve lived in Florida, make sure you search in everywhere you’ve ever lived, even if it was for a week. Because it could be in that database, and then search your loved ones as well. And then with the AT&T one, att.pentester, search your phone number and make sure that you’re not affected.

SHAWN RYAN:

I don’t understand how these companies that are getting breached are not held accountable for any of this stuff. But this could ruin your entire life because they’re not securing their data properly. Correct?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yep.

SHAWN RYAN:

But they have no liability?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

They do. They do. They have class action lawsuits, but then they end up having to pay out whatever millions of dollars to these individuals who do file the lawsuits. And then they have to give, well, they offer free credit protection as, that’s basically all you’re getting from them. And that just means tell you your credit score and tell you if somebody’s in, when it’s too late. So it’s not really—

SHAWN RYAN:

Who offers free credit protection?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

The companies that get breached, so they’ll pay for all of the people that are part of the class action lawsuit or were affected by these breaches. They’ll offer your credit report for free for whatever amount of years. They don’t do a ton for you. So there is no liability? Well, they have to pay a certain amount of money, but that’s it.

SHAWN RYAN:

To who?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

So I guess it would, with a class action, they got to pay everybody involved. Whatever it ends up being, twenty bucks each or fifteen dollars each.

SHAWN RYAN:

The f*, man?

Live Demo: Personal Data Exposure

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

But yeah, I mean, this is my own personal information, so I don’t mind showing it. My account has eight hundred and fifty-six exposed records, four hundred and seventy-two are in progress, and three hundred and eighty-four successful removals from different data brokers all over the world. All my IP addresses, all my accounts that I have connected to things.

SHAWN RYAN:

Woah. It has all this stuff?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Oh, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN:

Man, this has everything you’ve ever signed up for.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yep. And all my passwords from things I haven’t changed, has all my IP addresses, credit card numbers, addresses, Social Security number. It has my whole life. But thankfully, everything that I could possibly remove has been automatically removed by Pentester. And that’s for the nineteen dollars a month plan, so you really can’t go wrong with that.

And then, like I said, Pentester SMS, you just text 337-337-4100, and that’s only nine dollars. So you get the same thing with the removals for nine dollars. You just don’t get the reverse facial recognition, and you don’t get the ability to search in the database without adding them as a family member to the account, or an identity is what we call it. So, yeah, let me stop the recording on that. Is there anything else here that I’m forgetting? No, that’s a, so we could do the reverse thing, but I think we already have a clip showing reverse facial recognition.

Facial Recognition Technology and Privacy Concerns

So if somebody out there doesn’t know what that means, it means that I could take a picture of Shawn or you. I mean, facial recognition means I could take a picture of you, and it may be a picture that’s never touched the Internet before. And it’s going to measure a hundred and twenty points of your face, and it’s going to look for your photo anywhere that’s ever been posted on the Internet.

So that could be in, like, you know, the background at somebody’s wedding sitting at a table and only half of your face is visible, or it could be on, you know, a tweet that somebody created before this show, before you even had the podcast. And it’s something, you know, about your personal life that you don’t want out there.

Like, it could be a million things. And now that our database has, you know, tripled in size, we have way more data than we did even back then, which was a lot. So I highly recommend people check that out, but minimum, just text the phone number once they see it and see what kind of response you get. And if you don’t like it, you don’t like it.

But I think privacy is kind of important nowadays.

SHAWN RYAN:

I mean, yeah. Me too. That’s why we’re creating this whole app. But, I mean, so I’m curious, you know, with the face—I mean, can you get photos pulled? It would like awareness. Like, hey. This is where, this is what’s there.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

So we can—it’s a combination of both. So if you really want a photo taken down, you know, you can reach out to our support team and say, hey, I really don’t want this up here and we will reach out to them on your behalf and ask for removal. We can’t guarantee that it happens, but we have a better shot at it than, I think, an individual trying on their own because we’ll find them. You know? Even if there’s no way to contact them, we’ll find a way to contact them in almost all cases.

SHAWN RYAN:

And then if you—I mean, if something like your social’s been compromised online, then the only, the only really, the only two options are freeze your credit or get a new social.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. Unfortunately, yeah. Yeah. Which I wish there was something else I could say, but that’s the truth of it. And going back to the NPD data breach, when that happened, we had all of these media sources that were running stories.

I was on call after call with news reporters, recording videos for all of these local news stations. Like, you name the news source, it ran it. Like, all of them. Literally. And there hasn’t been a person that I think I’ve run into in real life that knows about it.

The NPD Data Breach

So it’s like we had eleven million people hit our website in seven days, but people just don’t know. And this is such a huge violation of privacy that no one has any clue about that I talk to. And, yeah, we’re the only website you can go and search it on right now and see how breached you actually were. Like, there’s another site out there that will tell you, like, you’re in it potentially, but it doesn’t tell you the details. And what if your name’s John Smith?

Or if there’s somebody else named Ryan Montgomery, I can’t tell if it’s me, Ryan Montgomery, or the five hundred that live in Florida with the same name. At least we show you the addresses, we show you the social, or at least a piece of the social. In your case, I showed you the whole thing, but we don’t show the full thing on the regular search so people don’t abuse it to give people socials. But, you know, it’s wild to me. It is absolutely wild.

Damn. Yep. Crazy, crazy stuff. But we had congresspeople. We had congresspeople and politicians and everything on the news demonstrating how to use npd.pentester.com.

It was like, we were blown away by it. That’s awesome. Yeah. We were blown away by that. And it worked.

It did really well for the company. Obviously, not discounting how much you have done for the company as well, bringing me onto the show, letting me talk about it. Got a lot of people—it helped a lot of people with their digital footprints too. Like, not only did it help the business, but we help people clean up something they didn’t even know they had a problem with until they signed up. Yeah.

So yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that, man. And the NPD breach was the biggest thing after that, and now it’s Pentester SMS, which makes it so easy. Anybody can—

SHAWN RYAN:

Successful.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Anybody can text.

SHAWN RYAN:

That’s awesome, man. You know? That’s awesome.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

SHAWN RYAN:

What is—I mean, can you go into VPNs and why they’re important and all this stuff?

Understanding VPNs and Privacy

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. So VPNs, it’s a virtual private network. So it’s essentially you’re connecting to a network from your—let’s say you’re at your house. You’re using your home connection to connect to another computer somewhere else. And then that computer somewhere else is sending all of the traffic to the internet on your behalf.

And then wherever—like, let’s say Google is here and you’re here and the VPN is here. It’s sending the traffic from here to here saying, I want Google. This is saying to Google, hey. Give me, give me your page. Google sending it back to the VPN here, and the VPN sending it back to you.

So Google never sees anything but the VPN. And then your Internet service provider, like the person that is—you know, they can track what you’re doing, can’t see what you’re doing because it’s being routed through a different IP address encrypted. And, like, they can see that you’re using a VPN, but they can’t see what you’re doing on it. And the VPN companies, most of them don’t store logs.

So if they’re subpoenaed and said, hey. I want everything that Shawn Ryan did on this day to this date, almost all of them, minus the few that have lied and they do store logs or they’re fed honeypots where they’re storing logs on purpose, you know, they really don’t have anything to give. Like, if there’s a subpoena, there’s nothing to give.

SHAWN RYAN:

Do you have the names of any of the companies that do hold?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I can—I know, somebody—I mean, let me double check before I say this? I don’t want to, I don’t want to tarnish someone’s reputation to be wrong. So yeah. IPVanish was one of the major ones. They were caught storing logs in 2016 and provided them to the FBI after a court order despite a zero log policy at the time.

And they were a big, big one. And then on the other hand, there’s one called iVPN that—iVPN was subpoenaed, and there’s a—like, it’s on record. They all they had was an account number. They didn’t have anything else. So they proved it in store logs, which is nice because, you know, like, it’s hard to prove it.

Like, you could say whatever you want, but until you’re faced with a subpoena and sitting in a courtroom, there’s no way to know if they’re telling the truth or not. So that’s iVPN is a good one. And then Mullvad is one that I really like a lot. Like, they claim they don’t store logs. I believe that they don’t.

The reason why is you can send them cash in an envelope and just put your account number on the envelope, and they’ll actually activate your account. And if they even if they did store logs, they don’t know where that cash came from. They just activated an account number. So there’s nothing they could do even if they did, which makes me think they don’t even store logs. So I like that a lot about them.

Foreign Governments and VPN Companies

SHAWN RYAN:

Is it—I mean, we’re seeing China buy a lot of VPN companies. I mean, Israel just hit the news buying VPN companies. Do you think when foreign governments or maybe not even governments—I mean, look, China’s communist. Right? So it doesn’t matter if it’s a company or the government.

They just get access to whatever the hell they want. I mean, is that what they’re doing? Are they mining our data from us by, you know, by providing us with bullsh*t VPNs to use?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I mean, I think it’s a very educated guess. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can’t tell you with absolute fact because it has—like, I haven’t seen it with my eyes yet, but it makes sense for them to buy these companies if they’re trying to spy on us because the people that are using VPNs, it’s either they are worried about their privacy overall or they’re doing something that they just, you know, nefarious or they’re doing something that is very sensitive that they don’t want people to see, and these countries want that data.

So it would make sense for them to buy it.

SHAWN RYAN:

Gotcha. Gotcha.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. I agree with you there for sure. Man. Man.

SHAWN RYAN:

Well, let’s move into Sentinel.

The Formation of Sentinel Foundation

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

So let me explain how that even happened. Because back—remember, when I originally came into this, the original studio with you, I had what was considered at the time to be a vigilante group called 561 PC. And I was doing that with my friend Dustin Lampros. And we were just individually catching one predator at a time.

And, you know, we were doing—I, you know, we’re doing it as well as we possibly could at that time. And that’s how I ended up on that podcast and ended, you ended up here. So all this stuff’s going on. I come on to your show, and I guess a ton of federal agencies watch this podcast. And my phone is blowing up.

You name it. It’s DEA, which is drugs. I got CIA. I got even the Secret Service. FBI have multiple field locations all over the country.

HSI. I had HSI show up at an ATM on me. Don’t know if you remember me calling about this.

SHAWN RYAN:

Oh, no. I remember. They showed up at an ATM. They surrounded you at the hacker event. Yep.

And they came to your house, correct?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

They didn’t come to my house. But the other two things, yes. They—at the ATM, they came in two different cars. Their office is in Miami. That’s about an hour drive at that time.

They came in two different cars. I don’t know how they legally could figure out that I was at the ATM if there was no target on me. But I turned around, had a badge in my face. I have a picture with the guys. I was—I always like, I asked them if I can take a picture with them, and they were like, just please don’t post—so I could show you if you want to see—

SHAWN RYAN:

Just put it up. No.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

You’re just kidding. But, yeah, I mean, they couldn’t have been nicer. But turning around from the ATM to a badge in my face, I was like, I’m going to jail. This is it. You know?

And my phone would not stop ringing. So something that—you know, something I want to just clarify now for anyone that works in law enforcement that’s watching the podcast. No disrespect. I love all of you, and I want to help all of you. But last time I was on the podcast, I got so many calls.

I couldn’t work with everybody at the same time. It just wasn’t possible. So as of right now, you can reach out to, you know, Sentinel Foundation who’s working in parallel with the Marshals, and we have a case number for the stuff I’m about to talk about, very shortly. And I don’t have any of this evidence locally. It’s all stored in a cloud that’s shared with the team, with the Marshals.

If you want to call me and need my help with something, I’m all ears. But if it’s about this specific case, just reach out to the appropriate people because I can’t work with a million people at once. I mean—

SHAWN RYAN:

What—why was there a badge shoved in your face?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I—he wasn’t shoved. I mean, he just had it up when I turned around. Why? Guess to tell me he was HSI? For what?

Don’t know. Don’t know. He just wanted to talk. He and he kept hitting me up. I still got a text so I could show you.

He just wanted me to come down and sit down and talk to him. He never told me why, but I assume it’s the database. What else would it be? I mean, if there was something criminal, he would have arrested me.

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. I mean, I was really—well, I was extremely worried for you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Because it seemed like I was getting arrested. Well, sh*t.

SHAWN RYAN:

I mean, I remember when we went to the Sound of Freedom premier with Jim Caviezel, you know, for the—there. Yeah. They’re f*ing harassing you. Yeah. They’re texting you.

Hey. Don’t be alarmed, but we see you over there. Dude, I was f*ing pissed.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I remember how pissed you were.

SHAWN RYAN:

Pissed when that, when that sht started because one, I’m sitting right next to you. Yeah. Two, I’m just like, this is fed up. Like, you guys had the opportunity to do your f*ing job years ago.

# Confronting Federal Harassment

You didn’t do it. More kids got fed, more kids got exploited, and now you’re sitting here fing with my friend who’s trying to do the right thing. Maybe go do the right fing thing and save some fing kids and quit following Ryan around fing Nashville and harassing him. F you. I know you’re f*ing listening to this.

F* you. Man, that shit pissed me off, dude.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I remember you were heated. You were definitely heated.

SHAWN RYAN:

It makes my f*ing skin crawl.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I’m sure it does. I mean, from your side, you’ve been in—you were on the other side.

SHAWN RYAN:

It makes me angry. Like, oh, man. It just fing makes me angry. Like, it was straight up fing harassing you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Oh, yeah. It wasn’t just the Nashville. It was all everybody. And it was for me, it wasn’t anger at that time. It was fear because I didn’t know.

SHAWN RYAN:

What are you even doing at a fing movie premiere? Like, if you’re—what are you looking for? Traffickers at a fing movie premiere that’s about trafficking? Go do the fing job. Go do your fing job. Man, this shit makes me f*ing angry, dude.

There’s so many fing people in federal law enforcement agencies that don’t do shit. They just fing harass people. They don’t do their fing job, and then they want to know why nobody trusts the fing federal institutions or even fing state. Right. It’s just fing ridiculous.

Like, go do your fing job and catch bad guys. Quit following around a guy that’s trying to save kids and fing harassing him. What is that shit? Like, how the f* do you even sleep at night?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. I appreciate that.

SHAWN RYAN:

I know this fer too. I wish I fing knew him. I’d fing release his name and tell everybody who he is. I remember—what is that shit? Hey, I’m at the fing movie premiere. Just so you know, I got eyes on you.

Buddy, what? F* you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

It’s over with in my mind. You know? And thankfully, I appreciate that you care. And I, obviously, I would care the same for you. I just can’t let it bother me if I want to work with them.

SHAWN RYAN:

I know, man. It’s just so f*ing unimpressive. Like, it’s just—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

For me to have any impact and to be able to do things legitimately, I have to work with law enforcement.

SHAWN RYAN:

I know, man. I know. I’m not making a generalized statement that they’re all bad, and they’re not.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

No. I get what you’re saying. I get your frustration, and I’m sure there’s way more to it that I don’t know because you were on both sides at some point. So you got to see stuff that I didn’t. You know? So I’m sure there’s things that piss you off that I have no idea about. You know?

The Sentinel Foundation Story

But as for the Sentinel stuff, I want to tell you the story of how that happened. Because at that point, like I said, it was a vigilante group that the intentions were all good. And when I think of vigilante, I think of somebody that is trying to go out and beat people up and take the law into their own hands, like tie somebody up and put them in a closet.

Like, I don’t know. I think of vigilante as a more extreme thing, not just like a guy thinks they’re talking to a child on the Internet. They go to meet at a public place. They’re instead met with grown men who want to confront them on it until the police come. Like, I think that as a civilian, I don’t see what’s wrong with that.

But when it comes to the law, even though some convictions are happening regardless of it being evidence or not evidence or vigilante, convictions, I’m glad convictions are happening. I’m glad people are getting exposed. That’s all that matters to me. If anything that I could change about it would be longer sentences for the cases that happened from any of the predator catchers. But that’s one thing.

The Rise of Predator Catcher Channels

Another thing I want to bring up about predator catchers—if you’ve noticed since our interview, like, I’m not saying that I’m the pioneer of predator catchers because I know I’m not. There’s Chris Hansen, Dustin Payne, Courtney Elizabeth, all like, a million people, Anxiety War, all of these people that were doing it before Dustin and I started it. But after our stuff started to go viral, a lot of other groups just popped up. And, like, you know, there were a couple others before that too. So I’m blanking.

But what I did notice is, let’s just say a hundred new channels pop up. A couple of them already had very large followings. So they’re shifting what they currently do to start catching predators. And instead of them taking it seriously and talking to these people like what they deserve to be talked to as, they would rent an Airbnb, for example, and get a decoy in there that looks younger. And they’ll be wearing a clown costume with a mariachi band.

I’m not even exaggerating. Like, while the predator’s coming in, or they’ll be asking them at the front door to take their clothes off so they show up naked at the door so they can get a good thumbnail, or all of these things. But what they’re not realizing is, yeah, maybe you’re exposing this predator. Maybe you get him arrested, maybe not. But you’re exposing him bare minimum.

Do you realize what was going to happen if you weren’t there that night? Do you realize—I guess maybe I’m a little bit jaded to the subject or more informed is a better word to the subject because I know what would have happened to that child. And, like, when I—and I don’t want to get too graphic here, man, but, like, think of a toddler with blood running down their thighs because a grown man is hurting them physically.

I think of stuff like that and these little girls and little boys, and what would actually happen to them if that man or in most cases, but in some cases, a woman were to be there. Like, do you think a mariachi band and a clown costume fits in that equation? I genuinely don’t. I understand it’s going to get you more views. I understand it’s a better thumbnail. I get what they’re trying to do, but there’s nothing funny about this. This isn’t humorous to me.

Like, this is not a joke to me. You know? So like I said, half of it, I respect. I respect that they’re exposing people, using their platform to do it, but I don’t think it’s funny. And I wanted to make that very clear. Some people have gone to the levels where the cops aren’t doing anything so much so that they’re beating the crap out of them, which they deserve.

But when you beat them up, you can’t—like, now you can’t call the cops, and you can’t get them convicted. And, yeah, it’s great for views and all of that, and they definitely deserve getting beat up. But, you know, like, something’s got to happen. And you had Tim Tebow on here, which is an awesome guy. Love that guy.

SHAWN RYAN:

Tim’s amazing.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. That’s really good, dude. Like, I don’t think anyone can say anything bad about Tim Tebow.

SHAWN RYAN:

They try.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. I’ve heard.

SHAWN RYAN:

They try to say shit about him.

The Scale of the Problem

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

It’s crazy, man. It’s crazy. But, like, I don’t know Tim personally. I know I’ve talked to his vice president, Camille. But, you know, he brought up situations with the amount of people that we have in this country looking at that material at ages, what, under twelve.

And if I can remember correctly, was one hundred and eleven thousand unique people in this country in less than thirty days. Yep. So that’s the people that are recorded from whatever software is monitoring that based on statistics that are public. That means there’s way bigger number than he’s aware of and that I’m aware of. It sickens me, and the problem is not getting better.

What’s happening is the problem is getting worse because the material is going to spread regardless if there’s less victims because there’s still material out there. Like, there was just a case in Florida with one point two million photos and videos that were being sold for a hundred and something dollars. Like, that’s not going anywhere. It’s going to keep circulating all these communities for a very long time regardless if there’s new victims or not. So catching those guys is a priority, obviously, because they’re going to revictimize other people or re-offend.

But it’s just like an endless loop of disgusting horribleness. But, like I was telling you last night about the state trooper that just got caught a couple days ago with twenty-three videos having sex with his toddler in full state trooper uniform and sending the videos on Telegram. Like, that was a few days ago. There’s just so much going on.

SHAWN RYAN:

Are you seeing this stuff? I mean, I didn’t—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Not that one I didn’t see, but I’m seeing the worst of the worst all the time. And it’s for sure, but that’s a topic I actually do want to talk to you about at the end of this if you’re cool with it. Because, yeah, it’s, you know, I’ve been doing this almost seven years now, three years of which have been working in tandem with law enforcement and the Sentinel Foundation. But yeah, it definitely got more intense when I started to work with law enforcement and work with groups like Sentinel, for example.

And so sorry. I missed the entire beginning of this point. So having a vigilante group in the eyes of the law, at least, I wanted to do that, and I also wanted to work with Sentinel Foundation. I had six—I already looked in my phone. I had six organizations reaching out to me. One of them was Sentinel Foundation.

And I got a call from a guy named Jim Cole, who’s a very respected fed that worked with HSI.

SHAWN RYAN:

I know Jim.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

You do? You know Jim?

SHAWN RYAN:

Yep. He’s at Operation Light Shine. Was. I don’t know if he still is.

Making the Choice

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I’m not sure. I haven’t talked to him in a while. But back then, all them years ago, he got on a call with me. I know he was in HSI for a very long time, and he says to me, “Hey, man. You can’t be a part of any of these groups or work with law enforcement if you’re going to continue to do the vigilante stuff on YouTube.”

And having to explain that to Dustin while we have Five Sixty-One PC going was hard to do because it’s like, dude, I have a choice right now to help more people unless people see me doing it. Like, I’m not going to be public about it. You’re not going to see videos of me saving kids and arresting traffickers. I’m not going to be putting stats out of my progress.

Whereas with YouTube, you’re going to see each one, one predator getting caught at a time. You’re going to see more action from me, but I know I’m going to make more of an impact. And in my heart, I can’t say, you know what? I’m going to push that opportunity aside because I want to continue to work on the YouTube stuff. So I chose to go with the best group that I had available to me at that time, which was Sentinel Foundation.

At the time, the guy that was running it was Glenn Devitt, a very nice guy. I like him a lot. He’s no longer involved. And, you know, we stay in touch. He’s a Delta guy, I’m pretty sure, or Special Forces bare minimum, but I could be wrong on that one. I am not super knowledgeable when it comes to military stuff, but I know for sure that he’s involved in some way.

Sentinel Foundation’s Mission

So with Sentinel since we started, I’ll get into the granular stuff that I got involved in, but just the general stuff. Sentinel is a nonprofit dedicated to fighting sex trafficking and child exploitation domestically and internationally, which was important to me. We have partnership with law enforcement agencies across multiple states. We combat human trafficking, missing persons, exploitation cases. We have joint operations MOUs with all kinds of places. We’ve rescued a ton of different women and children, particularly in operation between July and September, so I’ll keep it at that.

Integrated advanced OSINT and cyber tools for real-time targeting of traffickers—meaning some of the methodologies that I use and some of my friends that have their own custom databases and tool sets, I’ve helped integrate into Sentinel’s workflow and train law enforcement in many countries on how these things work because you’d be surprised, man. Like, you may not be surprised, but they don’t know.

Like, even the ones that are dedicated to Internet crimes against children, they don’t really know what they’re doing or the methods that they’re using are antiquated. And it’s not their fault. They have the passion. They just don’t have the tools. They don’t have the resources.

# Sentinel Foundation Operations

They don’t know. With Sentinel, what we were able to do is travel to – I mean, right now, we’ve had operations in Thailand, Uganda, Haiti, Peru, Jamaica. There was at one point when Glenn was involved. There was Philippines. There’s a ton of stuff domestically going on.

SHAWN RYAN:

And there is stuff domestically going on.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yes. Yes. So it’s mostly local and the marshals right now. It’s been HSI at one point. We had some people involved there too.

It kind of skips around depending on the need. But my purpose in Sentinel Foundation was to bring something new, and this is in the beginning, to bring new technology to the space. And that turned into getting involved in a ton of operations that I never would have had the opportunity to be involved in without going public with this stuff. Because I would still be catching a predator one by one, although I still believe is effective.

Now we’re able to – like, if you look on, like, Fox, there’s an article with the Thibault Foundation and Sentinel where we pull fifty-nine kids out of Haiti. You know? Haiti is a pretty rough place to be, and I’m not the biggest guy in the world. So having a team that can go in there while I do recon on a computer gives me an opportunity that I wouldn’t have sitting in my living room trying to track down one local predator at a time.

SHAWN RYAN:

Gotcha.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

So not devaluing that, but it’s just a different opportunity for me.

SHAWN RYAN:

Well, it’s like I said at the beginning. Right? There’s not much you care about other than saving kids. You don’t give a shit about fame, notoriety, money, none of that stuff.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. I don’t make a dollar from – that’s all I care about.

The Reality of Exploitation Organizations

SHAWN RYAN:

Appreciate recognizing organizations. I’m going to say it. You’re not going to say it. But I know a lot of these organizations have come knocking on your door, pretending like they want your expertise, but really, they just want your notoriety to make them more f*ing money.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

That’s exactly right.

SHAWN RYAN:

And that is a damn shame.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I don’t mind saying it either because I know it’s true. I know it’s so blatantly obvious to me now. In the beginning, it was hard to know because it’s like opportunity, opportunity, opportunity. And now it’s just like, okay. I get –

SHAWN RYAN:

You want to do the work, not be a f*ing poster boy. Right. I commend you for that because – thank you – ninety-nine percent of the people would take the poster boy route every single time.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Got it.

Why Aren’t We Focusing on the US?

SHAWN RYAN:

And I do have a question, though. You know, I mean, you’re the first person that I’ve talked to about sex exploitation and child trafficking and that kind of stuff. Then, you know, like I said, that was Victor Marx, and then, you know, Tim Tebow, Jared Hudson, Jim Kvisel. Like, it’s been – after my discussion with you, it’s turned into, I have to hit this every so often because it’s the most important issue in the f*ing world.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Wait till you see what I have to show you next. Why it’s the most important issue.

SHAWN RYAN:

I know. Not only what you already know. But what I want to ask is – and look, I don’t want this to come across the wrong way. Saving a child is saving a child. It doesn’t matter if it’s in Thailand, Peru, Ethiopia, where – Uganda. I don’t care. It’s a child.

One thing, though, and I’m just curious as to why, if you know why. So many of these organizations operate out of Haiti, Philippines, Thailand, you know, Colombia, Peru, you know, third world countries, countries in poverty. But every single – I believe it’s every single time that I breach this subject, the commonality, the one commonality is the US is the biggest consumer of kiddy – we’re the biggest problem in the world. The United States is the biggest problem in the world when it comes to sex trafficking and sex exploitation. Correct?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Well, with the consumption of CSAM, like child sexual abuse material.

SHAWN RYAN:

Why isn’t all of the focus on the US if that is the number one problem? If we are the number one concern –

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I would love to tell you. Bringing what Tebow – Tim Tebow said in here, there’s seven people working in C3. And there’s roughly sixty Internet Crimes Against Children locations in the entire country. The people that are making the most impact, I believe, are some of these organizations that are working with, you know, FBI, HSI. And that’s – it just needs to be better than that. We need to do better.

SHAWN RYAN:

What – why – why is it, though? Why are so many foundations going to Haiti, Thailand? Like, all the places that I just mentioned and very little, if any, here in the US. It’s just – is it the red tape? Is it – is our federal government harboring this shit? Are they encouraging it? I mean, that was a rumor for a long time, especially with the southern border. You know? I mean, what – what is it? What is it?

I mean, we just saw one of the – one of the top guys at the Israeli, like, cyber fing command or whatever – got caught luring in fing kids to have sex within a hotel room. I tweeted this out. Did we prosecute that individual? No. We packaged him up and fing sent his happy ass back to Israel. No consequences whatsoever. What the f is that? What the f* is going on?

Why are we – why are we packaging this guy up and handing him back to Netanyahu? Here you go. Here’s your pedophile. Take care of him. We don’t want him to get hurt.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN:

What is that? What is that? There’s a fing justice for the kids, man. Right. Where is it? Like, what the f is going on in our country, man? And why aren’t these – why aren’t these organizations – why aren’t they focused on the US? It’s the biggest problem.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

So my guess, just based on my experience, my guess is there’s not access to a lot of the information. So if there is a group being ran in the United States and we – like, for example, if I get involved in it, it’s going right to a federal agents agency. And at that point, it may not ever go public. So that is happening.

When it comes to, like, these big media cases that – like that, like, you know, sending someone back to Israel or whatever – what is that? I can’t answer it. There’s so many things that I wish I had an answer to. Like, I –

SHAWN RYAN:

See the shit with the Epstein files?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

It keeps –

SHAWN RYAN:

Getting swept under the rug. Like, it’s like, what the f* is going on here, man?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. And it’s either a conspiracy or it’s not.

SHAWN RYAN:

It’s definitely not a conspiracy. The shit I’m talking about is real. I know. I’m just not up for yourself.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

People – but the people watching, they got to make that decision for themselves or that assumption for themselves. Do they think that this country is holding out on the details or not? Yeah. I just –

SHAWN RYAN:

I mean, I just don’t understand it. If it’s – if we’re the – if the United States is the biggest consumer of sex crimes and sex exploitation and trafficking, and all these other things, then this would be the easiest spot to make a dent. Right? If we are running rampant in this –

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Well, think of it like this. Don’t – another good example to add to your argument. Every single airport you go in, what’s the sign you see in the bathroom, on the walls, over the intercom? What do you hear every single time? If you see something, say something. Human trafficking is a real thing. Human trafficking is a fight. Call this number if you see this, this, or that.

Do you think they would be using that space in the airport for human trafficking signs over making ad money from advertisers? Absolutely not. It’s a real thing. It’s very real. The reason why we’re not hearing about it, I couldn’t tell you other than there might be something that’s above both of our heads.

And, like, I can tell you that we work on cases domestically for sure, and we work in tandem with law enforcement on those cases. That happens. But I can’t answer, like, what happened.

Law Enforcement and Accountability

SHAWN RYAN:

I’m not saying all law enforcement. I don’t want to come across like that. But you know what I mean? When I see shit like after the first interview we did and then you got a couple of FBI agents running you around at Nashville and fing tailing you and surveilling you and harassing you. It’s like, hey, bud. Maybe, like, go save some fing kids and, like, leave this dude alone. Like – like – like, go make something of yourself. Like, do something positive. Like, go save a f*ing kid or anybody. Just do something. You’re the FBI. Like –

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. Be –

SHAWN RYAN:

Be an admirable f*ing human being instead of –

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

The ones that were tailing me around were the HSI guys, but they were nice. No. They were –

SHAWN RYAN:

I mean, obviously, the FBI tailed you under the damn –

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. They did. Premier. They – they didn’t want me enough. Wasn’t all right there.

SHAWN RYAN:

It was – it was – I remember now. I don’t remember the guy’s name, but it was their boss who happened to be there at that time. Oh. Yeah. So that was that was the situation. But I remember you being pissed. I was f*ing – I was in the bathroom. Remember? And then in the bathroom, that’s when I got the text. And then you – like, at that point, we were in the hallway, and you were pissed. You just wanted to leave. Yeah. I remember it. But, you know?

SHAWN RYAN:

And then – and then you see a guy like Jim Cole who spent his entire career doing this. Yep. You know what I mean? And so it’s not at the workers’ level. But when you know what I mean? I mean, Jim Cole, he’s – I think he’s very similar to you. You know?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

That’s all he cares about. He is a black and white guy, straight to the point. He would never – that man would not jaywalk.

SHAWN RYAN:

All he wants to do –

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Save kids.

Honoring Those Who Serve

But another person I want to give credit to while it’s on my mind because I know Jim knows her as well. Someone I work with current day that I’ve known since the beginning of this, her name is Yvette Thomas. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her. She’s like the godmother, like – like Jim Cole is the godfather of this space. There’s not many people that have made it around.

She’s been in federal law enforcement for thirty-six years, I believe it was, twenty of which have been in specifically child crimes. So she recently, like, you know, she helped me identify a bunch of victims in a case that we were working. And it was a case in Cleveland where a guy was getting girls, little girls and boys, on FaceTime and group calling people, and they were getting paid. Like, this scumbag was getting paid to have them do sexual acts via FaceTime.

The phone of that suspect got dumped and there was a bunch of children’s faces and more on it, but all I received at the time was like a hundred and forty photos of children’s faces and different, you know, some were looking this way, that way, some were blurry. But the ones that I could identify, I identified. I identified a bunch of them and she’s got some tools I don’t have. So I sent her the files. She identified a couple of them as well. I sent them back.

And since they’re all in the Cleveland area, they were able to identify, I’m assuming, way more. I don’t – I don’t have my – I don’t have a direct contact with the guy right now. I’d have to wait till I text him out through the interview. But just think of, like, all of the girls and boys in that area. A lot of them go to school together. They do things together. They’re going to be able to identify each other. So I feel really good about that.

And her and I have worked on a bunch of cases like that where she’s just thrown at us randomly. Technically, she’s retired right now. She’s doing this just out of the kindness of her heart, and there’s not many of hers. There are not many of Jim Cole’s. There are not many of Ed Thomas’s. Yeah. It’s a – it’s just a blessing to have those people in this country.

The Impact and the Need for More

SHAWN RYAN:

It’s just – it’s odd. You know? I mean, we’ve been screaming at the top. I mean, dude, the episode we did, hundreds of millions of views – yeah – with all the clips, all the reels, every – the episode, the downloads, like, altogether, it’s hundreds of millions of views. And that’s just one – that’s just two people talking about it for less than three hours. Yeah. Right?

Now there’s lots of people talking about it. I just – I just did a music video with John Rich who’s singing a song about child exploitation. I met this woman who was trafficked, and now she’s – she’s kind of doing what you’re – not with the tech and stuff, but, you know, she’s going after traffickers. She’s doing – she’s helping with rehabilitation. And I’m hoping to actually get her on the show. Name’s escaping me right now. Wish I knew it.

And then anyways, what I’m saying is like all these people are screaming at the top of their lungs at how often this is happening, and you see it. I mean, f* half, fifty percent of the people I interview here, you included, some type of—you don’t call it trauma. I don’t know what else to call it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah, I get what you mean. Sexual trauma. So you can call it—everyone. It’s not trauma to me, but it’s—

SHAWN RYAN:

I get it. I get it. You know what I mean? It’s at least—I just had Tig from Benghazi here. You know? And he was talking about how many—it was like, I can’t even remember how many times he was sexually assaulted before he was an adult.

I mean, I was like, Tig, like, f*, man. This is—it’s like a monthly occurrence for you. This is horrible.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. You know? And a lot of people are scared to talk about it.

SHAWN RYAN:

And then Tim comes on, and just like you said, seven. I thought the number was actually nine, but only whatever. You know? Seven, nine, less than ten people in the entire country dedicated to this.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. Less than ten.

SHAWN RYAN:

Like, yeah. Somebody’s stopping that from growing. Somebody is f*ing stopping that from growing.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

But don’t forget about like—yeah, you’re right. There are some things that are out of—that are definitely, I don’t know, but there are the FBI and the HSI, and even Secret Service have a tower of crimes. They all have a little piece in this fight.

SHAWN RYAN:

A little piece?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

A little piece. They need a big piece.

SHAWN RYAN:

Why is this not growing?

The Sniffies Problem

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Sean, I could pull my laptop up, go into a teen chat. I could go on a dating app right now. Let’s give you an example. And within like—I could just put my laptop down to the side. If I open that up, it shows a map of where you’re at.

And it’s a whole other topic that would take me an hour to explain, but it’s a great app for decoys to go on because it shows—it’s not a good app for—it’s a horrible app for children. It’s an app for gay people. And very similar to if you’re familiar with Grindr. Grindr is a dating app where they swipe yes or no, or message the people and, you know, their conversations delete when they’re done. They hook up with each other, and they never see each other again. It’s not really like a relationship app.

SHAWN RYAN:

Mhmm.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

This one is—it’s called Sniffies.

SHAWN RYAN:

Sniffies?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. It’s not an app. It’s a website that can work on mobile or computers, and you can press the button “use anonymously.” You don’t need to put in any email. You don’t have to sign up. You have to do nothing. You click “use anonymously.” You end up with this map around you because you share your approximate location, which is pretty spot on to your exact location, especially if you’re on a phone. And it tells you everyone around you that’s using the app.

If I throw up a picture of myself using a filter that makes me look young, I’ll get DMs from people in this area, not just somebody in a teen chat that’s anywhere in the world—people here. And then they’ll message. You have to go in, you have to have a little bit of a conversation back and forth. They’ll ask you how old you are, you tell them you’re under. And let’s just say eight out of ten times, they’re fine with it and they want to meet up.

So for the decoys out there and the other agencies out there, if they could just automate Sniffies, they would find a ton of these guys. They could automate the process and literally go and just set warrants and pick them up. It’s that easy. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

SHAWN RYAN:

F*. Why aren’t they doing this stuff, man?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I really don’t know, man. That’s the part that frustrates me.

SHAWN RYAN:

They don’t want it to happen.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I don’t—I’d hope not.

SHAWN RYAN:

I hope not too, but when I mean, it’s like—I mean, what else can you think? It’s weird. Shit’s been going on forever. And it’s getting louder and louder and louder and louder, and nothing’s being done, man. Yeah. It’s just nonprofits setting up all over the place. It’s all these nonprofits, which, you know, which is great. Thank god somebody’s taking it into their hands, but it should be our f*ing law enforcement that’s doing this shit. That’s who it should be. Yeah. And it’s not.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. I agree. And I don’t want to speak negatively here and be wrong. But, you know, when I get into the 764 case, the FBI has, to my knowledge, 240 different active investigations right now regarding the 764 case. I can tell you that within the short period of time that we’ve started an operation at Sentinel investigating 764, there is more than 240 different things that we found that, you know—so with just passive reconnaissance.

FBI vs. Sentinel: The Numbers

SHAWN RYAN:

Say that again. The FBI has how many?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

They have 240—let me get the numbers for you just so I want to be a hundred percent accurate.

SHAWN RYAN:

What a joke. What a f*ing joke.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I don’t want to talk negatively, but it’s true. So I’ll read it straight from here.

SHAWN RYAN:

Here we go. Get ready to get pissed off, everybody.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Okay. So 764 adjacent Discords and—because remember, I’m not giving these people credit by username. Not giving them credit by their group names. The only one that I’ll talk about is 764 because it’s only giving them what they want. They want recognition, these people.

SHAWN RYAN:

Mhmm.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

There’s a ton of subgroups, a ton of them that all are doing exactly the same thing, but they—I’ll get into the whole story in a minute. But the FBI is part of 250 probes tying these streams to global ranks. 250. So I was off by ten. The FBI. The FBI.

SHAWN RYAN:

Just found 250.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Probes is the word that I’m reading. So I can tell you that there’s way more than 250 people doing this. There’s more than 250 people in just one server that I would join to get some screenshots that I’m about to show you.

SHAWN RYAN:

That’s what the FBI has. What has Sentinel done?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Sentinel, just in the last month and a half, almost two months, we’ve infiltrated three different groups that I don’t want to name, but you’ll see them. I would say there’s a thousand different users. The minimum—minimum a thousand.

SHAWN RYAN:

So you’ve probed a thousand users. And the FBI’s probed 250?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I don’t know if they’re talking about—they’re not really clarifying here. It’s 250 probes. That’s all it says. So I don’t know if they mean users, groups, arrests, communities. I mean, there’s a lot I don’t really know.

SHAWN RYAN:

Well, it’s definitely not arrests. Otherwise, it would say arrests.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

No. It’s not arrests.

SHAWN RYAN:

Correct.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

It’s not arrests. The FBI hasn’t done nearly as many arrests as they need.

SHAWN RYAN:

250 in a lifetime. Sentinel does it in two months and gets a thousand. And watch what happens. How many people work at Sentinel? Roughly.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

They’re working on this case specifically. This is an operation that I got to kind of cherry pick people involved. If you don’t count one of the main guys that’s overseeing it with the feds, there’s six. Six.

SHAWN RYAN:

Six. Six people.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Six people on this operation.

SHAWN RYAN:

Six people. Wow. Wonder how many people at the FBI are working on it. Must be less than six, right? I mean, if you guys got a thousand in a couple of months and they got 250 in, I don’t know—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

You’re going to get my house blown up, Sean.

SHAWN RYAN:

Well, that’s—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I agree with you. It’s frustrating. I just—and what can I do about it? You know?

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. Somebody needs to sound the alarm, but it ain’t yours.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN:

Government agencies. It just—it doesn’t matter who’s in there. They’re just worthless. They’re just worthless. I had a lot of hope for this one. I did. I had a lot of hope for that things are going to change, and they’re going to be great. We’re going to go after all the bad guys.

Prevention: The Most Effective Solution

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Speaking of that, going back on a positive note, what has changed, but—like you just got done saying, the preventative side of things, I truly believe and said to you in the beginning, I believe that preventing it from happening in the first place, if possible, is the most effective solution to this problem. Yeah.

So by letting parents know that this is a thing, by letting parents know what they can do about it, how they can talk to their kids about it, educating them about it, there’s a very strong chance you’re going to stop something that you would have just thrown the iPad at your kid or put them on a computer not knowing, like, oh, it’s a kid’s game, Roblox, little cartoon squares running around the screen. How dangerous could this be? Yeah.

If they don’t know any different, then they’re putting their kid in a dangerous situation, and they don’t know it. But if they know and they’re listening to the words that you and I are saying and they take action, I feel like that’s making change. Yeah. So I think that that is valuable, but that’s just my opinion on it.

SHAWN RYAN:

It’s definitely making change. I just wish that the government would take this shit a little bit more serious. Agreed. You know? They’re the ones that really have the keys to make this shit go away. Yes. And they aren’t f*ing doing it. They are not doing it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I agree with you. It’s frustrating that more can be done. That is for sure.

SHAWN RYAN:

Are we getting ready to—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. I want to show you one more thing, though—

SHAWN RYAN:

Okay.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

—regarding that because it just kind of brought it to my attention.

SHAWN RYAN:

We’ve got to take a break before we do that because I’m already about to lose my f*ing mind, and this is really going to—

Google Subpoena Data

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

This is something I want you to see because you’re already pissed off. And I’m not trying to piss you off more, but it’s something that you need to know. This is straight from the Google website, and this is the global request for user information. So you could see here subpoenas is red. Look at—so back here is 2010, barely less than 10,000.

Going all the way to 2015, we’re at 20,000 requests—less than 20,000 requests for subpoenas. Right? Then you start getting into these later years. Holy shit. The biggest difference—triple, quadruple, you know, quintuple.

So this information—this is just Google. This isn’t all the other places that are receiving subpoenas. And this is, you know, primarily, I would say, the United States. So who else is sending subpoenas to Google? I mean, other people are.

SHAWN RYAN:

Jeez. Is that an image?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

It’s an image, but it’s on Google’s website. You can—we’ve got to overlay that on the screen.

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. I could send it to you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Alright. So we’re getting ready to dive into the nasty shit.

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Alright. Let’s take a break. Get some water.

SHAWN RYAN:

Okay.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Take a lap. Yeah. Get ready.

SHAWN RYAN:

We both need it. Cool. Oh, before we do that—before we do that, hold on. I want to give you this hoodie. So it’s a Pentester hoodie. Yeah. A little Easter egg in here. Check this out. So you got the Pentester P logo, but then on the other side, you’d be rocking Zero Day.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Nice. Love it.

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. And then on the back, I asked your assistant, and she said you wear a large. So hopefully, this fits you. Perfect. “Hack all pedos. Hack your local pedo.”

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Love it. Love it.

Scammer Payback Connection

SHAWN RYAN:

Yeah. And, you know, another—the reason why I actually got that idea was a good friend of mine. His name is Scammer Payback. He’s got a YouTube channel as well. Yeah. He catches scammers that are going after elderly people.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

You were telling me about this guy. Yeah. He’s awesome. I want to get him on the show.

SHAWN RYAN:

He is awesome. His name’s Pierogi. It’s his username. I don’t want to say his real first name because he doesn’t—do you guys get along? Oh, I love him. He’s a really good friend of mine. He’s a believer in God, which matters a lot to me. And he knows the Bible inside and out, so he teaches me a ton.

And one time, I was over at his office. We’ve done a bunch of videos together now, all in the last three years that we’ve done a bunch of videos together.

The Cash Mule Sting Operation

One of which was an interview where one of his team members was interviewing me. And in the middle of an interview, he’s got a connection at HSI that he deals with named Scott. Scott calls him, says, “Yo, we got some people here. HSI is outside, and they want us to go.” One of the other people that work in the office has this cash mule on his way to pick up what he believes to be forty thousand in cash from an elderly woman.

I’m doing an interview just like this, but with his team member. And they say, “Yo, we’re about to leave. We got to go catch this cash mule in a parking lot.” HSI, we’re thinking is involved. HSI, last minute, says that they don’t have anybody.

So they back out of the situation last minute. Not Scott’s fault. Scott was trying. He’s in a whole different state. But I leave the interview, mid interview, get in the car.

I’m in the car with my back like this because I grew up in the hood and I ain’t getting shot. So I look nuts in the video. I’m all the way back like this. And we’re in this parking lot waiting for the cash mule to show up, driving four hours north to meet where we were supposed to meet. And we’re looking around the parking lot.

We see this. We didn’t know what they looked like. We just knew they were coming to collect the cash. And we knew that they were going to most likely have a different—they were either driving from Florida. So we knew that they were going to have a most likely have a Florida plate.

And eventually, a Florida plate pulls in, and we see it circle around the parking lot a couple times. And then they start going into this other parking lot, and then we start following them. Guy gets out of the car. He’s a heavier set Asian guy. Goes into the Lowe’s, and he walks around the store, comes out again.

And we’re like, that’s definitely the guy. That’s definitely him. It’s at the plates there. He’s acting suspicious. And nobody wants to get out of the car at this point because everyone’s scared.

And I’m the same guy, like I said, hiding because I don’t want to get shot just in case. Now I see the guy out of the car. I don’t think he’s got any firearms on him or anything like that. So I’m like, I have tattoos. I could probably come off like I’m a scumbag that has forty thousand in cash to hand off to him.

So I get out of the car. I literally said that. That was my words. I get out of the car. I go right up to—

SHAWN RYAN: Come off as a great scumbag.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That’s exactly what I was trying to get at. So I go right up to the dude’s windshield, and I’m like, “Yo, man. What’s up?” And he gets out of the car. I bring him out, and I’m like, “So you’re here to pick up forty thousand.”

I start to go at him. And I was like, “Yo, lift up your shirt.” I didn’t tell him I was law enforcement or anything. I just said, “Lift up your shirt.” And he lifts up his shirt. He actually listens to me, and I make sure he doesn’t have a firearm. I was like, “Give me your ID. Give me your ID.” And he shows me his ID. I take a picture of it.

At this point, I find out he’s on a visa here. He’s got some type of license that I’ve never seen before. It’s like a visitor’s license. And then he starts walking, not running, but walking. Now he doesn’t know how to speak English. He only knows how to speak some Asian language. And I don’t know. Guess he understood everything I said, was talking fine prior to realizing he was getting in trouble.

But at this point, no one in the local area, no local PD, and HSI were coming to pick him up. So it was like, the only thing I could do at this point is just film the guy and ask him questions and use Google Translate to try to get his responses.

So I’m chasing this dude around the Lowe’s, just walking around, watching him pick up—like, he’s driving four hours from Florida to get a—I think he grabbed rubber gloves. I think he grabbed Tide laundry detergent or no. I’m sorry. A clothes detergent and nothing else.

I was like, “You drove four hours to Lowe’s to pick up some laundry detergent and rubber gloves? No, dude. Just tell the truth. What were you here to do?” And then the team that Pierogi works with is Scammer Payback. He started taking the screenshots of, like, saying, “On my way,” where you see the GPS screenshot and matching up the route and everything to where the Lowe’s would have been, and it was all spot on. So it’s one hundred percent correctly the guy.

Information was sent along to the feds. Not sure what happened with it, but the video is on YouTube if anyone’s interested in seeing. You could see me in the middle of the interview. Have to—

SHAWN RYAN: Check this out.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. It was like the same way you and I are talking now. Imagine someone opens the door and is like, “Yo. We got to go. There’s a cash mule. HSI is outside. Boom.” And we just book it right out the door, we’re on our way. It’s like—damn. Yeah.

So big props to Scammer Payback, Pierogi. Big props to him because that man, he’s a holy person, a good person, a charitable person, and all he cares about is saving elderly victims. And nobody’s perfect. I’m sure he’s made mistakes in his life, but the guy is a good dude. And I’ve spent time with his wife and kids, and I’ve spent a week at his house before, working, but at least spending a week at his—I really like this guy.

SHAWN RYAN: Dude, you got to connect me with this guy.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Connect you with him. I will.

SHAWN RYAN: If you’re running with him, he’s got to be great people.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: He is great people. You’ll love him.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s take that break.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: All right. Sounds good.

Introducing 764: A Satanist Cult

SHAWN RYAN: All right, Ryan. We’re back from the break. Now we’re getting into the heaviest sh*t of the interview.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. The most important to me, personally.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. So we’re talking about—we’re going right into 764?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I think that’s what we should do. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. So what is 764? What is it?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So I’ll tell you in my own words first. 764 Group is a satanist cult group that focuses on extreme violence. And one of the main things that they focus on is towards children. They’re labeled as a nihilist group. And for anyone that doesn’t know what a nihilist is, it just means they believe that nothing matters.

There’s a group called it, but no lives matter. No human life matters. Nothing matters. That’s what a nihilist is. And these people have proved over and over again that they fit exactly the description that they’re labeled as.

And there are a ton of offshoots of this group, which I want to make it very clear that the main reason why they do a lot of the things that I’m about to show you is to get the recognition for it. There is—is to get the recognition individually, even if they’re part of a group or a group that, they just want their group out there in any way, whether it’s negative or positive. This group isn’t looking for positive attention.

They’re—I’ll just be candid about it and just tell you—they extort children out sexual material. They extort children into cutting their wrists, hurting themselves, cutting areas of their body, engraving their names into their chest, their legs, their arms, their faces. They’ve had children commit suicide live on camera in front of audiences of people while they get cheered on.

They convince children to kill animals in their house, like their pet cats or pet dogs. They try to convince them to kill their family members, commit mass murders, bestiality, incest, you name it. A lot of it has already been done. And I have a lot of examples of that to show you today.

And that is only with two of these groups that we’ve been doing passive reconnaissance on for a short period of time. There is plenty other active investigations that are going on with other organizations that I may or may not have involvement in. But what I can show you today is based on what Sentinel and I have found in a relatively short period of time, and it’s going to blow your mind. It’s absolutely disgusting.

And there’s just—there’s more to it, but it was created by—I create—it was unbelievable, but a fifteen year old boy started this group in Texas.

SHAWN RYAN: A fifteen year old boy?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Fifteen year old boy started the group. He was the beginning of it. And he, from what I read, was a nonverbal kid that had some issues. I don’t want to glorify this kid or talk about him in any way where anyone would feel bad for him because he created something that is the worst thing next to all other things that we’ve talked about. This is probably one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life.

And we’ll see how you feel about it when you see it. But it was all started from this kid, and there’s something called—I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it, but it’s called the Comm. And the Comm is a collection of mostly teenagers, but there’s adults in there as well that congregate on the Internet. The Comm is short for the community.

The Comm and Its Activities

And they congregate on the Internet, and they dox, meaning release personal information on people. They SWAT, meaning they send SWAT teams to people’s houses just to scare them and to get recordings of them being swatted so they can use it to brag.

Like, for example, they’ll call in to a local department and say, “Hey, my name is John Doe. I have bombs strapped to the windows. I have my family strapped to the chairs. I’m going to shoot them all if any police enter the door.” They’re going to say all these horrible things so that a SWAT team responds. And that’s what swatting is.

I’ve personally been swatted three times, two of which police actually showed up, and it was a big deal. I had a video of one of them, but I never gave them the recognition that it happened. There was no proof that it happened other than my recordings of it that I saved on my phone. I never put—I didn’t want to give them the credit.

So that’s the Comm. The 764 Group actually came from the Comm, and that doesn’t mean all of the people on the Comm—the people on the Comm have their own problems. They do their own stupid stuff. They’ve been torturing me since I was on your show three years ago, releasing my credit report, my personal information, sending pizzas to my houses, USPS boxes to my houses, and on—like, pretty much thousands of boxes. No. Literally thousands.

Sending what to your house? USPS boxes. Why? Because they’re free. So you can order them on the USPS site, and they’ll just keep sending pallet after pallet after pallet of these boxes. It’s just to be annoying, though. They do it to be annoying and to get a reaction out of you.

That’s the Comm. And a lot of them don’t like me. And that’s—I’ll keep the Comm pretty short because they’re a whole different topic, but they’re usually just annoying. I wouldn’t say that they’re hackers. I would say they’re more annoying, and they have technical abilities.

Getting information on people, the way that they mostly do it is they like to use the term TLO, which TLO is just something TransUnion offers to run a report on somebody. And they’ll use a stolen private investigator’s account to run somebody’s name, get their social credit report, and all of the above. And if they don’t have access to one, they’ll pay fifteen bucks to someone that does.

And that’s how they got my information, which I don’t care. I genuinely don’t. My credit’s frozen. My address is out there publicly. There’s nothing about me that they’re going to find that isn’t already out there. It doesn’t matter to me. You can dox me all you want. You could try to SWAT me. But I know all the police all around my area. They’re fully aware that people are going to try swatting me and have continued to try to SWAT me.

The Seven Six Four Group and Sextortion

I’m not really worried about them. It’s more so the seven six four group that stemmed from the comm, which is a whole different set of evil that I’ve never seen, where they want to sextort children. Usually for the people out there that are not familiar with that term, sextortion is when somebody sends naked photos, could be an adult or a child, and the second that those photos are sent, they say, if you don’t send me x amount of dollars, I’m going to send this to your family, your friends, your school, your loved ones, and they try to extort them out of funds.

Most of those sextorters, not that it’s okay by any means, but most of them are just trying to make money. They’re not trying to do anything evil. And nine times out of ten, they’re never going to send that to anybody because they’re never going to get paid if they do, number one. And number two, if they were the child that they have nude images of, they would be distributing CSAM, like child sexual abuse material.

So, you know, it happened. The reason why I say that is I have a family member very close to me that it happened to. He sent stupid pictures. He was an underage boy. And I won’t say his name, obviously, but I had to coach him through how to deal with these people. And they wanted money. They didn’t want any of this all other evil stuff.

And I got them to click a link, the scammers. I found out that they were in, you know, a foreign country. I believe it was Nigeria. It was a couple years ago. But I think it was Nigerian scammers. And I told him, just ignore them. Just don’t say anything to them. Ignore them. I know it’s hard. I know you probably feel like they’re going to ruin your life, but they have no benefit in sending your photos to anybody. And they didn’t.

That doesn’t mean that doesn’t happen. It just didn’t happen to him. And most of the time, why would they? It’s wrong, and I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not trying to make it sound okay. But in comparison to what these sextorters do, it’s not even comparable, man.

SHAWN RYAN: I remember you telling me about these guys the last time we met in Florida. How bad this s* is.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I’ve been working on this for a long time. And with Sentinel, it’s been a few months, but I’ve been working on it for a long time.

SHAWN RYAN: How did these guys pop on your radar?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So a federal agent actually gave me a heads up about them. And from there, I never heard of them at that point. And I started digging in, just reading the public stuff out there, and it blew my mind. It was like the clearest definition of, you know, evil. I keep saying the word, but it is just pure evil. And that’s what they want. That’s what they’re going for.

But it’s just hard to believe that people out there exist that are even worse or if not the same level of evil as the other people that I’m fighting against. And a lot of them are teenagers and young twenty somethings, but, you know, there’s the random thirty, forty year plus year olds that are involved in this as well that they just want to cause harm. They want to cause destruction.

The Escalation of Violence

And what is the next level? It starts with, and I’ll get into some of the terminology, but they call it “cut signs,” or I’ve heard in some of the groups “cut slots” is what they’ll call the little girls, where they cut a username into their arm or their breasts or their legs or whatever part of their body. And it started with that. And then it was okay, what’s the next step? Kill the animals and then hold up a username on a piece of paper and then hold the dead animal in the other hand.

That group will then send that message everywhere. And then the person thinks by doing that, the child thinks by doing that, they’re going to stop. They’re going to leave them alone. And what ends up happening is they know that that victim is just going to keep doing whatever they ask because they’ve already done it, and now they’re in possession of the nudes. And these people will send it to your family and friends.

And it’s just unbelievable. There’s more to it. But I want to show you some of the content and some of the questions that I’m sure you’re going to have. I can answer and I want to. There’s just so much to this that I could go on, like, an hour tangent trying to explain it. But can I just start by showing you this situation and then we’ll take it from there?

Origins and Ideology

So I went into the fifteen year old that started it. He started luring minors from Minecraft. That’s where it all began. It all started with him luring minors on Minecraft to, you know, sextort them and make them self harm.

The group was influenced by Order of Nine Angles, which is a Satanist group outside of the Internet, which is a combination of Satanism, neo-Nazism, occultism, and all kinds of things. So, you know, obviously, that goes with, if I want to just read a list, it’s rejected empathy, promoted ritual violence, belief in culling, which if you know what culling is, that means that real power comes from harming others without hesitation. So that’s like a whole Satanist belief.

And then there’s a ton of offshoots, a ton of these other groups that I have notes on that, no exaggeration, this long, full of different groups that are doing the same thing full of members.

SHAWN RYAN: How many members does this seven six four group have?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I don’t have an exact number on it, but if I had to guess, twenty thousand, thirty thousand.

SHAWN RYAN: Twenty thousand people?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It’s huge. There is no shortage of these scumbags. No shortage. The average vulnerable target that they’re going for is nine to seventeen years old. Nine to seventeen. That’s the average. They’ll go for anybody, but that’s what they’re, that’s usually what they run into in these games like Minecraft and Roblox and other social media apps.

Targeting Vulnerable Children

And without going into more of these notes, because I’m just trying to hit some key points and not forget them, they’re targeting minors, and I have a few screenshots to show you this, on mental health forums. So they’ll go to a mental health forum where they see somebody who’s struggling as a kid saying that they’re either being bullied in school and they don’t want to live anymore or that they’re self harming already.

And they’ll pretend, so they lure from those groups, they groom them by trying to be their friend or pretend to be their boyfriend and give them actual mental health therapy. I’ll read those conversations, some of the grooming that they do. They even have playbooks on grooming and they have an over two hundred forty page manual on how to do this to children that they share amongst each other.

And like I said, they’re all in mental health forums. I have a tweet that I took a screenshot of, I’ll show you, where it’s a group where they’re saying, join here if you’re struggling with mental health. And it’s just a direct link into one of these horrible groups that as soon as that person or child, mostly children, believes that that person is their boyfriend or their friend or their girlfriend, one or the other, and they send those nude photos, the second that happens, then they go right into the extortion and extreme violence.

All they want, they want to create what’s called, and like I said, I’ll get into the slang, they want to create what’s called a “lure book.” So it’s like a collection of all of their extortion material that they could use against them.

So, okay, and these notes, over two hundred fifty ongoing investigations by the FBI, briefings at Europol Conference. FBI classified seven six four as a domestic terrorist group. Terrorist group. Yep. And then there’s a bunch of people that were arrested. But where do you see, where do you see the time that a lot of these people got? It’s nothing, man. It’s nothing. And some of them are having children kill themselves. Like, it’s mind blowing. It is absolutely mind blowing.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you talking about time they got in prison?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Time they got in prison. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: They’ve had people kill themselves through extortion and what, I mean, what is the sentence? What is it?

Victim Stories

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So I’ll read you some of the stories. Okay? So these are just notes that I wrote for this podcast, and I figured that I would do a lot of it off the top of my head, but it gets me so worked up that I’m probably better off just making sure I get this on point.

But fourteen year old, and I’m just going to use their first names, the victims, even if it is public. Fourteen year old Elliot joined the Black Metal Music Forum during a tough family transition and started a new high school. Seven six four members pretended to be supporting, quote unquote, “friends,” directing him to gore sites, which later escalated to him carving satanic symbols into his skin and producing hundreds of self harm photos categorized as CSAM.

So that was one and something that I learned is that self harm pictures within themselves, even if it’s children, from what I read, is not considered CSAM, like child sexual abuse material. But if it is sexualized, it turns into child sexual abuse material. So that’s a weird thing for me. I don’t fully understand that.

Another one. A teenage girl named Eve was found in another Discord server, Discord’s a chat application that a lot of them use, by a seven sixty four member posing as a friend. He faked giving her a ton of affection, support she desperately needed at that time, which is what she said. Then extorted naked photos and forced her on video to carve usernames deeply into her skin, slash and strangle and behead her pet hamster.

A member said, “Bite the head off or I’ll f* your whole life up,” end quote. And later, she cut herself deeply in the bath to, as they told her to, turn the water red. And there’s, you know, a video of her in a bathtub that’s red, full of her blood. They even sent a SWAT team to her home, as well as leaving permanent seven sixty four scars all over her body. She’s still in therapy. And she did all of this in her bedroom closet. And I have the pictures to show you this with this particular victim.

A twenty five year old man deep in depression was targeted by a female who was also recruited into seven six four, so likely a victim herself that was converted into an extorter, which happens often, by the way.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s common? That’s common because these kids, they’re already a lot of them struggling with mental health issues.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: They find a group that they think are their friends somehow, and then they start extorting other kids. So it’s a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.

So in this particular case, the twenty five year old man deep in depression was targeted by a female recruited into seven sixty four. She started daring him to commit self harm videos, which later escalated to him dousing himself in gasoline, lighting himself on fire in his hotel room as the group watched and laughed at him. He passed away.

See the screenshot I wrote of the virtual funeral because that’s what he said. “Watch my virtual funeral.” And I want you to hear these idiots in the YouTube video. As this guy lights himself on fire.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Bishkek called Tashta Ata. He found a spot in the snow, set up his phone, and lit himself on fire. The entire ordeal played out live on a Discord call. At least twenty nine users were in the server while it happened as he was propping up his phone, sitting on the ground, praying, then dousing himself. Some were recording. Others were cheering. In one clip, someone shouts out the group. Another calls her by name.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: He took you so f*ing long. It is six three. Two three is better than seven six four.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: That’s the worst death possible, man.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

RYAN MONTGOMERY: You hear that? So he said that is the worst death possible, man, and they’re laughing about it. And what you didn’t see on the screen is a blurred video of him lighting himself on fire dead on the ground as these people are laughing at him and naming out their groups that are so that they’re not associated to seven six four, but offshoots of seven six four. So that’s from a public YouTube video, but relates to that story I was just telling you.

Another one, in one case, the person who was already arrested threw a brick through the window of a pregnant teen’s car that was lured from Roblox.

The Dark Reality of Online Extortion Groups

She threatened to report the group to NCMEC, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the shock put her into cardiac arrest, killing her and the baby. The guy was arrested for being part of the comm, meaning the seven sixty four group, and he had his own offshoot and was charging fifty dollars to two hundred dollars for bricking, swatting, and doxing services.

So bricking, like I said, I’m going to go over these terms. But bricking means show up at somebody’s house and either throw a brick through their window, shoot it up with a gun, vandalize it, break windows, do something, record the video, and post it. And sometimes when they do this bricking thing, they’ll do it to their own members to see if they’re loyal and won’t call the cops.

And if the cops come, they won’t snitch. They’ll literally do it as a loyalty test, which gets even worse in a bit. But that’s what bricking is. That guy is arrested. A twenty-two year old member of one of the groups kidnapped and robbed a twelve year old girl in Virginia.

He was convicted and sentenced to this is a good sentence, a long sentence, to three fifty years in prison. The seven Sixth War Group also leveraged animal torture, incest, self harm, bestiality from their victims. Seventeen year old member Nino livestreamed himself attacking an eighty-two year old man. And two weeks later, he murdered a seventy-four year old woman on video who he believed to be Roma to prove his loyalty to the group. He was only sentenced to fourteen years, and I have a video of that, which is very disturbing.

He murdered, he hurt an old man terribly and murdered an old woman gruesomely live on Discord, the chat application, just to prove to these people that he had what it takes to be part of their group.

SHAWN RYAN: What the f* is wrong with these people?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And did you hear the sentence? Fourteen years. Fourteen years. Where was that? Don’t know off the top of my head.

Fourteen years. I would imagine it wasn’t the United States because if he believed in the Roma, that’s like usually other countries. So another one, a thirteen year old girl, this happened three days ago, four days ago. Where? In Washington state.

A thirteen year old girl was found hanging in a parking lot in Washington while livestreaming her suicide. The chat was encouraging her to take her clothes off because they said it would be hotter, quote, unquote. And I have the article about that, but the criminal that convinced her originally to livestream this was dubbed with hundreds of crimes, and he victimized more than thirty children alone by himself, this one guy. The thirteen year old girl was hanging in a parking lot dead while the chat was telling her to get naked because it would be hotter. And that just happened, so I don’t know about an arrest on that yet.

Understanding the Terminology

Slang, which I’ll get into the videos in a second. So cut signs, cut slots, carving names, group names into their skin very deeply, not like scratching a little bit, like going in. You know?

SHAWN RYAN: That that that one girl was swallowing razor blades.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: A little boy. Yeah. Or a boy. Yeah. A little boy was swallowing razor blades on camera.

A lure book, victim of a vic, I’m sorry. A lure book is a victim collage of CSAM that they will use to threaten to show family, friends, and school. Luring via social media, online games, leverage for news and later extort via self mutilation, suicide, and all the other things. One of them is lighting a homeless person on fire with a Molotov cocktail. That’s something else that I’ll show you.

Swatting, sending a SWAT team to a victim’s house, tricking the local PD into believing an actual crime is being committed in their house. Tradecraft, that’s the evasion playbook. So meaning they’re, like, they’re encrypted chat rooms, and you need proof of crime to enter. So, like, you know, either it’s a combination of you doing self harm, showing the victims that you’ve had do things to themselves, murder videos, if you’re doing things to animals or people, something that, you know, that they call that tradecraft.

To get initiated into these groups, you need to prove, it’s I’m sorry. Tradecraft is the evasion side of things, like how to hide. The proof of crime to enter is what most of them require for you to join these private groups where these people are at. Unless you’re a victim, they’ll just bring you in, obviously.

Bricking, I explained what that is, throwing a brick or gunshot at the house or multiple gunshots where one of the cases was a teenage girl pregnant with a baby, and the brick went through her back windshield, gave put her into cardiac arrest and killed her and the baby just from a brick going through the windshield.

SHAWN RYAN: Why would a victim want to join this? Do they feel like they that they don’t belong anywhere else after they’ve become a victim because of the extortion?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It could definitely be the case.

SHAWN RYAN: Like, why would you want to do that to somebody else after you’ve just been through it?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I don’t know. I can’t put myself in their heads because I can’t comprehend this as a human being how you could even do something like this.

SHAWN RYAN: Me neither.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So I don’t know how a victim could turn into one of these scumbags, but it happens often, unfortunately. And they’re young impressionable kids. So the way I look at it as I was young at one point in online chat rooms, and thank God I never had anything like this happen to me. And I never sent a naked photo in my life. So I never had as a possibility, but I could see with some of the hacking communities I hung around doing illegal things.

I could see myself doing something stupid that I normally wouldn’t be doing otherwise because I wanted to fit in with that specific group. And, you know, you talk about a twelve, thirteen year old girl or boy, maybe these people have convinced them what they’re doing is okay. So I don’t know. I’m just trying to rationalize why somebody could be that evil, but it is a thing.

And then the last one I want to add here, Sean, is blood writing, which is a very common thing they like to do, which is smearing blood on the wall, usually satanic symbols, usernames, and group names in their own blood from the cut signs. So from there, I kind of want to put it in your hands here where you can see like, what do you think the best way of doing this is. Because I have them organized in folders for the different categories of stuff. So do you have any questions before I show you that stuff, or do you want to see it and then talk about it?

SHAWN RYAN: Just flip it around and show it to me.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That was a lot. Like, it’s going to take a second to go through. So…

Examining the Evidence

SHAWN RYAN: What am I looking at here? So and I don’t…

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I don’t have them in order because this is a shared cloud thing. But luring, grooming, like, if you start with luring, and you see here, maybe just double click it.

SHAWN RYAN: Join cool friend yeah. If you want to read them. Join cool friendly server to help you go through your hard times.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And not the direct link. Yeah. Direct link for one of their communities, and then you hit the right arrow key here.

SHAWN RYAN: Outpatient wellness center.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And then if you read their description…

SHAWN RYAN: No CP, gore, leaking, no drugs, guns, or nudity, no advertising. Join group.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: F*.

SHAWN RYAN: Cultist Discords thread. Join if you are any of the following, mentally ill, fatherless, daddy issues, schizo, borderline personality disorder…

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And then stem cells, like some like, you know, you act like a girl or feel like a girl or something like that. So that’s just some of the luring. It’s easy. They know that this is how kids could join a group and not know, like, what they’re joining in advance. They think, wow, this is a group full of people that might help me with whatever I’m going through. Me scroll. Sorry. To grooming. Here is one of their, this is one they share amongst each other.

The Grooming Playbook

SHAWN RYAN: Grooming. Grooming is very commonly used and easy way to get content. Usually, when you have groomed your victim, she will do exactly as you say no matter what. You have to make your victim think that you are her god and that you own her and forever will. You can find victims on games like Roblox or on social media platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram, etcetera.

Once you have found your victim, you have to spend a lot of time on her, make her think you can relate to a lot of stuff, and play games with her. Call her cute nicknames when you have talked for a little, like princess, darling, honey, etcetera. This will make her more attached to you because females love being called nicknames. Once you have talked for a while, you are going to ask her to be your girlfriend, which she most likely is going to say yes to. Now that she is under your control, you may start asking her for stuff like nudes, personal information, etcetera.

If she doesn’t do self harm already, then you must extort your victim. But if she does, she will almost guaranteed cut for your dirty needs when you have done all of this.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yep. And then here’s if you just skip that one, this is just the you don’t have to read the whole thing. Just this is a guy grooming a victim.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m really sorry, and I love you a lot. You’re the most beautiful, cutest, sweetest, most adorable girl in the world. But the only problem is that you’re not my girl, and I want you to be. I know I’m somewhat demanding of things. I’m sorry for that. And I’ll work on that issue of mine. I’m just saying, I really want you. You’re the sweetest girl in the whole world, and I’m, like, obsessed with you. I don’t know. But I’m sorry for threatening you. I thought I was going to lose you, so I just started saying stupid s*. I would really like you or anything. You’re too sweet and cute for me to do something like that to you. If you gave me a chance and we date, I promise and vow on my life, I’ll make it the best RLS you’ll ever have.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I have no idea what that one is.

SHAWN RYAN: And hopefully, the last. We can have fun all the time, and I’ll text you nonstop. I’ll block every girl on my friends list, even the guys if you want that. I won’t talk to anyone for you. I really like you a lot, and I’m really sorry. Ma, ma, ma. Is it the same guy?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: No. It’s a different person. Each one’s different.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t understand this s*, but what are you talking about? LOL I totally want totally want…

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Stalking your account. What you’re doing? Totally. And I’m in bed right now. Papa finna get in shower. She says, I’m tired. He says, take a shower with papa. Or he says, take a shower with papa. She said, I’ll be naked. Scary. He goes, papa will be naked too. It’s okay. Daughter’s supposed to take showers with papa’s. Papa will make you squeaky, make you squeaky clean. Okay? She says, yes. Clean me. Touch all over me. He says, I will. Papa will have to touch your privates, though.

And this is in the grooming stage, remember, where they don’t know they’re about to get extorted. Jeez. I mean, there’s as you can see, please don’t leave me. I’ll do anything. I’ll do it fine. I love you so much more than anything, anyone else in the entire world. You make me so happy when I hear your voice. I smile so much. Your voice is so pretty. You’re the most beautiful girl in the entire world, and I hope you know that. You make me so happy. I hope you know how much I love you so much. I’m really sorry for the things I’ve done. Please forgive me. I love you. Respond. I’m sorry.

He just is blowing up her messenger because she’s not answering them. And that’s the grooming side of things, which, you know, appears if you were to not know anything else, that appears like a guy that wants to get you know, hook up with a girl that’s young. Sorry. Skip some of that. And then from here, let’s go to things that are a little more rough. So here’s some of the guides. You already read grooming. Extortion one, if you want to read that.

The Extortion Process

SHAWN RYAN: To start off, for you to be able to extort, you must also have the ability to groom without grooming. You won’t even get any information or any nudes. And if you groomed your victim, you pretty much have control of her. To extort a female properly, you must have the following, you must have the following, personal information, addresses, names, phone numbers, and nudes. Once you have this stuff, you may start threatening your victim with, for example, sending her nudes to her parents, swatting, and leaking personal information, etcetera.

If she doesn’t do as you say, examples, make a blood sign, make a cut sign, kill your cat, and kill yourself. At the end, if you have done everything correctly, you should have gotten exactly what you want to. Remember, never say content is content because no one wants to see some s*ty cat scratches.

The Dark Reality of Online Exploitation

Right. Meaning, there’s content as content. What they’re saying is they don’t want you to grab, like, a paper clip and write a username into their arm. They want you to deeply cut it into there where it’s going to permanently scar and bleed badly.

You read that. There’s a website, and I won’t name the website, but there’s a website that has—look how long that takes to read the average. They have a whole handbook on—they train each other on how to extort minors into doing these horrible things. It’s unbelievable.

SHAWN RYAN: Jeez. This is the prologue of—

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Handbook.

The Exploitation Handbook

SHAWN RYAN: The handbook is a comprehensive guide that provides deep insights into the tactics and strategies that can be used to blackmail and exploit victims, primarily through the use of compromising photos or videos. It delves into aspects of coercion and highlights the various methods to maintain control.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Oh, coercion.

SHAWN RYAN: Core coercion. Instill fear and coerce victims into complying with the perpetrator’s demands. Additionally, it offers step by step instructions for everything there is to know about carrying out a successful scheme, from identifying potential targets to executing the blackmail process to creating convincing fake identities, maintaining anonymity online, monetizing and safely storing content, ensuring that the perpetrator remains untraceable.

This is not a handbook to teach victims how to protect themselves or seek help, but rather to teach perpetrators how to locate and exploit their victims. So my dear reader, if you choose to go further, it is at your own risk. You’ve been warned. But on the other side, you may find a way to unleash your deepest desires. We can all only hope. Right?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. So I cut the book at that point, but there’s a two hundred and forty page book, and here’s what they would talk about for a fourteen year old, and they rank it based on—you can read it. It’s great.

Targeting Young Victims

SHAWN RYAN: “Choose this age if you’re specifically seeking young victims who can be controlled for a long time. Fourteen year old identity. Victim reach, three stars. Receiving nudes, three stars. Success, five stars. Long term victim, four stars.”

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. And they’re doing that for a fourteen year old. They’re saying that’s the odds of all of them things happening. This is—yeah. So a girl—if I can skip right to it. Well, here I am making another video. It should be around—

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I just saw her.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Well, this is not it. Here’s that girl right here.

SHAWN RYAN: What is this?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: This is just a girl. Doesn’t hurt herself, but listen to what they say.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Just please no.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Well, listen to us, babe. Come on. We’re trying to help you out.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I just—I just want to be left alone and—

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Leave the service. But it’s not that simple.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Can I please just do that?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: You want to leave the server? I don’t know if you asked, but I think she’s got to work for it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yep. Definitely.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: The f is that? Are you, like, dyslexic or something? Holy s.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I’m looking in the camera to do it.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: You’re stupid. Hey. Can you hear us? Hello?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. I can hear you.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Hey. What’s up? Yeah. I’m twenty-seven years old, by the way, and I want your daughter to do stuff for me.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Okay. That’s fine. I’ll report you to the police.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Oh, I’m sure you will, Fatty. Can you leave the room, though?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Mhmm.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I’m busy talking with your daughter. I just saw her tits since she’s, like, sixteen. I’m twenty-seven. Make her lift up her shirt.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: You’re making it with Angier. Right? Watch what happens. The girl’s back. The dad gives her the computer back. What? Yeah. Watch. Watch.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I don’t want them to talk to me.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: See? You want to die. In fact—

SHAWN RYAN: Do you want to die tonight? Do you?

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And he ends it with “do you want to die tonight?” And but the dad gives that girl the access to the Internet after he just saw and heard not even her hurting herself, but them threatening her. That—that’s a bad parent in my opinion.

This one, this girl is just cutting her ponytail, but it’s very sad.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Oh, no. Should we press send?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Hi. It’s much okay. Go.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Start cutting. Chop. Chop. Chop. Chop. Safety scissors.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Yeah. They are really bad.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Keep going. No.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Please just leave me alone.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

Evidence of Self-Harm and Abuse

RYAN MONTGOMERY: This is the extortion side of things. I wanted to show you some, you know, not as—I don’t want to show you videos of, you know, what you’re thinking because it’s just—it’s too much for—it’s too much. These are some of the cut signs.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh my gosh, dude.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That is the name of a person.

SHAWN RYAN: That is f*ing deep cuts.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And that’s the name of the group. That’s another name of the group with, you know, just pointless hate. This is very deep. Holy s*. And if you read this one—oh, no. Hold—let me get you the first one so you can—it makes sense. Right here. It’s hard to read, but it says—

SHAWN RYAN: “Laughing as they called me names, reposted my videos and pictures. I stripped myself down. I don’t recognize a single square inch of my body. It’s all branded, cut up, and bruised. I hate them so much.”

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And then that’s the name of the group that’s cut into her stomach that—that part of the groups. Here’s some—they’re called blood signs, them where they cut themselves and put the blood on the wall. And a lot of times, it’s satanic things, which I have one you can read.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you want to read it? I don’t want to read the wrong names.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: The username made me paint the walls of Eden with my blood, snuffed my humanity. “Where is your god now?” And it’s a wall covered in their blood with satanic symbols that they drew onto the wall. Very, very graphic of the—you know, they cut themselves deeply and write this into the walls.

“I sold my soul to the group name” written on this wall with handprints of blood, upside down crosses, pentagrams. “I sold my soul to that group name” again. Completely different victims.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you want us to put these up?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I mean, you’re welcome to take all of this.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, has anybody done this? Is this—

RYAN MONTGOMERY: There’s some of this is like, almost all of this is public. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t putting anything illegal on your show.

SHAWN RYAN: Public where? Is this—

Animal Abuse and Murder

RYAN MONTGOMERY: On different forums and stuff. Animal abuse. There’s a girl holding up her cat, covered the head of the cat, but that’s the guy’s username. Very popular in this—in this, you know, all of these cults, all these groups. And that’s just a victim, but she literally murdered her cat.

This is a guy, completely separate situation. He killed his cat victim. That’s the cat—dead cat’s body part, and they used its blood to write the group’s name.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: There’s some rough stuff, so get ready for this.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Yeah. I’m—I’m going to do it.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: What?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. It is wrong, dude. This is on a call with somebody random in the group. So this dude—

SHAWN RYAN: Can’t flip that up. Obviously. This dude just stomped on an old woman’s head until she was dead and then slit her throat.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yep. Just to prove to that group that he was worthy. Here’s a suicide from somebody that was trying to do, you know, his own version of anti extortion. He wrote a suicide note, put himself online, puts up the note to prove himself, and it’s—that’s a suicide note, and then he just ends it. And that’s it for him.

The guy that was, I guess, already knocked out. I don’t know if he died or did not die, but these are all different individuals, by the way. Like, the criminals.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy s*.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: That’s somebody—I took the video off of this because I didn’t want you to see someone burning alive. But that’s a homeless person fully engulfed in flames and murdered. And then him in the chat bragging about it.

SHAWN RYAN: Jeez, dude.

Threats and Violence

RYAN MONTGOMERY: So that—and then the last one that I’ll show you is the miscellaneous, which same username from earlier, “has me and my two year old sister captive. He’s a sick man,” and then you see her with her child.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: One day, I will record it, and I will fing show everybody. I will show everybody. Haley, either I myself or I will you. I’m not fing joking. This s over an e-girl, Tory. Over an e-girl over fake s. I promise you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: You’re absolutely—

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Die or you fing die, and you watch me laugh, smile at you crying in pain. Stupid fing b*. You are worth nothing. Nothing.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Okay.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I promise you, Tory.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s—you will be there to watch.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Okay. Okay. Calm down. Okay. Bro, I—I’m—

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

RYAN MONTGOMERY: He’s threatening her life. I mean, it’s just a group chat full of people that are talking. We’re almost done. Here’s somebody right here who—if you read this one.

Confessions of a Predator

SHAWN RYAN: “Little information about how I started this. I’ve always been a psychopath and always wanted to watch girls and flip paint upon themselves for me. My earliest cut sign I’ve ever got was a single K back in 2016. Over the years, I’ve stopped taking breaks, come back on new aliases, but I have a total of over two thousand six hundred plus groomed victims. My goal is to reach three thousand before I get feted.”

RYAN MONTGOMERY: “Welcome to my suicide chat. I’m trying to host my own virtual funeral.” This is the guy who lit himself on fire in the hotel and had everybody there. There were, I think, was thirty something people watching.

To enter this group, you have to give either cut signs, deep cuts, blood signs, suicides, or bricking. You have to do arson, stabbings, or graffiti, and you need all these different amount of pieces of each thing to get into certain levels of these groups to prove that you are real. So that’s part of what I was talking about with the crime proof. And then this is someone admitting to things.

SHAWN RYAN: “I have little children cut themselves, Martin, and do weird s. And, like, I might have people, like, strangle themselves with their fing table or kill their pets or just do weird s and I record it. I have other people record it and then, like, I’m part of a cult, like, really bad people cult. But I’m also part of some other s too, just like—like lame s*.”

Roblox and Platform Exploitation

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Oh, who knows? With that guy, that was just a random piece of evidence. Here’s Roblox, which I’ll get more into after this. But you see, that’s—that’s their logo right there. And then that’s his shirt that says “I love CP,” and it’s in the game itself.

And then me—not a victim, like, all of these things that should be censored by the game, not being censored, this, this, and this. “Donate for CP.” And the thing about Roblox is they’re making thirty percent of every single sale that goes through their game. And I’ll explain that more too once this is over. They’re making money off of this.

“Why stop here? There isn’t a drought of kids on Roblox.” So this person is talking about how many kids there are, and this is a known group for these people. This is a username that if you put that in the ChatGPT, I guarantee you it would know exactly what it means. But if there’s no AI doing moderation on Roblox, that stuff gets by, which for—if the people can’t see it, it’s—it’s pedophile rapist. That’s the username, but it’s spelled wrong.

This person saying, “Do you like play? Because if you did, I’d you.” And this one, this is unbelievable. So this—imagine a premium service for a free app. So Discord, the chat application is a free application. It’s about ten bucks for their premium features. And all you get in their premium features is emojis, like different, you know, little emojis, being able to color your profile with different colors and stuff, and maybe a larger file size limit to send.

But that’s all you get for Discord Nitro is what this is called. And this conversation says, “I got a two week Nitro trial if you want one.” Guy says, “Give.” He says, “Yes.” Guy says, “Will she cut for me?” He says, “Yes. We’ll cut on camera.” He says, “All right.” Other guy says, “If I tell her to,” he says, “Can you tell her to?” He said, “Nitro first.” He said, “All right.”

So he traded a victim for ten dollars and the ability to send emojis in a chat application. That’s how petty and ridiculous this is. Here’s an eleven year old victim there selling for money.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, man.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: What do you mean they’re selling her? Read it.

Human Trafficking

SHAWN RYAN: “For sale. Eleven year old girl. She is very naughty girl, has been deflowered yet still in yet still in ripe enough condition. No visible signs of abuse. We’ll listen when she is put under enough pressure. Make sure to give her enough attention, and she’ll never leave you. Price, twelve hundred dollars. Only accepting Monero payments.”

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Which is an untraceable cryptocurrency. So but you see how she’s got the group name written here? Yeah. So it’s—she’s not only being sold by people that are into children, adults, but she is being sold by these satanic scumbags that are doing that.

SHAWN RYAN: So is she a hostage, or is this or is—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

It’s hard to tell that she may have been forced to take a photo like that, or she may actually be a hostage. Yeah. So I think that is all of that I have in this folder at least. Is there anything that I didn’t elaborate on there?

SHAWN RYAN:

Well, I think we need to get these to my guys so we can put some of this, at least some of it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Some of it. And I want to show of the room camera.

SHAWN RYAN:

So dude, what the f*, man? So this is, oh, man.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

It’s rough, man. I’m sorry you had to watch that. I just wanted you to understand how severe this actually is. And these are little kids. Little girls. Little kids.

SHAWN RYAN:

And boys. So how, okay, so what game, what are the most popular games that the 764 cult is luring their victims out of?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Roblox, Minecraft, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat.

The Dangers of Roblox and Minecraft

SHAWN RYAN:

Okay. Tell me about Roblox and Minecraft because I don’t know anything about gaming. I don’t game. I don’t—

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Understood. I don’t either, but it’s part of the investigation. You got to, you know? There’s a lot of times I’m investigating, I end up on these games or apps, and Roblox is the one that I focus on the most because that seems like the majority of the issues right now. I know little kids have used that game. There’s 75 million active daily users. So it’s the largest children’s game in the world right now.

SHAWN RYAN:

I’ve been telling people too about what you’ve been telling me for, what, at least six months now about 764 code. None of their kids are off of it yet.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. Most people just throw their iPad at their kid. They put them on Roblox. And like I said earlier, little cartoon characters running around the screen, no harm in it. But, you know, something that most people, like, most people see like, you didn’t seem to even know, but they just banned a guy. There’s a young guy who was actually groomed and had issues himself on Roblox, who has a popular YouTube channel.

He started catching predators on Roblox. Just regular old predators that are interested in children, not these guys. And he got, from to my knowledge, there could be more, there were six arrests. I saw six mug shots that came from this one guy. His name is Schlepp. And he went mainstream on the media because Roblox sent him a cease and desist letter for being a vigilante on their platform.

They did a press release saying that they’re banning vigilantes from Roblox. Did a whole statement. You should see this press release. It’s unbelievable that their excuse, all their excuses of why they think vigilantes should not be a part of Roblox. There are a ton of predators that they’re—

SHAWN RYAN:

Is it publicly available?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah, it is. We’ll pull that up right now too. Absolutely. So this is the official statement from Roblox saying why vigilantes shouldn’t be taking down pedophiles and predators off of their platform.

Roblox’s Controversial Stance on Vigilantes

SHAWN RYAN:

They want these people on there. They want these fing people on there to prey on your children, and your children are on here. And I’m fing telling you, you better get them off. You better f*ing get them off. It is going to happen to you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yes. It’s, these people, they’re sitting predators. If you’ve noticed, every parent—

SHAWN RYAN:

What fing parent keeps their fing kid on there after we’re telling them this shit?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I don’t know, man. I don’t know. But it’s unbelievable to me, and predators hang out in spots where they can prey on victims. That’s why there’s so many teachers, why there’s so many police officers, why there’s so many parks that things happen at or gym teachers or people in positions of power where they have access to children. That’s where predators end up. And then people are surprised by it. They wonder why.

Like, why do you think these people took the job in the first place? You think that they weren’t a predator? They weren’t a pedophile prior to taking the job? Like, they’ve always been one. So when they’re on Roblox, and it’s the largest children’s game in the world—

SHAWN RYAN:

It’s the largest children’s game in the world?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. Yeah. Largest in the world.

SHAWN RYAN:

So when the largest children’s game in the world doesn’t want people on the platform saving fing kids. Are you fing listening to this shit, people? The largest video game platform in the world doesn’t want to take any measures, any f*ing measures at all to save kids. In fact, they made a press release discouraging it. A cease and desist.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Cease and desist. And a press release. Both. Both.

SHAWN RYAN:

And you’re paying this platform money. There’s millions of people that are going to listen to this, and I’m f*ing telling you, you are complicit in this shit.

How Roblox Profits from Predatory Behavior

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

One hundred percent. And let me tell you some more, Shawn. So Roblox, if parents have their kids playing on it, if you’re familiar with Fortnite, there’s a similar in-game currency called the V-Bucks in Fortnite, and Roblox is called Robux, like R-O-B-U-X. So if you went to Target or Walmart or CVS right now, we could go buy a Roblox gift card that a kid can cash in the game, and they get a Robux balance.

So they’ll get it for their birthday presents or their parents will buy them these cards, which allows them to buy outfits in the game or access to do fun things in actual kids’ games. Right? Well, there’s these public games where developers, like you and I could be a developer for Roblox by just signing up to be a developer. Put out a game. Roblox will host the game, and then everything that’s purchased by these children within game, in-game purchases, they make 30 percent commission on.

So when they leave up a server that is talking about child, in that example, they use CP as the term. And then there’s other servers where they’re blatantly wearing 764, you know, shirts as characters. They got upside down crosses. They got satanic symbols. They have people in the chat logs talking about grooming. They have all these things, but they’re profiting directly off of this stuff.

And, you know, being the largest game in the world comes with some responsibility, you know, for kids. And I believe you should have a full team full of people that are familiar with child crimes working in your content moderation team. And if you don’t, then you should be hiring these quote-unquote vigilantes that you’re kicking off the platform that are getting arrests on your platform. You should be hiring them because, obviously, they’re making more of an impact than Roblox is, at least publicly.

SHAWN RYAN:

Roblox doesn’t want to make an impact. They want this shit happening. They want this shit happening.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Hard to believe.

SHAWN RYAN:

Otherwise, they wouldn’t be sending f*ing cease and desist letters to people who are trying to save kids.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. I mean, let me just pull up the press release.

SHAWN RYAN:

They’re f*ing supporting this shit.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I want you to hear the title of this. It’s f*ing wild. The title of this, wild. Roblox press release, vigilance. Like, this is not something I’m just coming up with off the top of my head. Let’s see. I want you to hear the title of it. “More on Our Removal of Vigilantes from Roblox.” And it goes into a very long press release that explains why they’re removing vigilantes from their platform.

Look at this. “Why We Remove Vigilantes. The Importance of Accurate Reporting. Help with Roblox Remove Bad Actors.”

SHAWN RYAN:

What happened after this?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

So they lost, I think it was, I might be off by a little bit, but $13 billion in market cap. I believe it was in 24 hours after releasing this and doing a cease and desist. The guy Schlepp went very public with the media. Chris Hansen partnered up with Schlepp, the YouTuber, to talk about this specific problem because it made no sense. That makes zero sense why they would want to get rid of vigilantes on their platform if they’re not causing any harm other than just exposing the predators.

People, you know, a lot of people, I’m sure, took their kids off of Roblox, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that there’s 75 million daily users. And another thing outside of child predators, Roblox actually, I’ll show you a picture with it. But before I show you the picture, excuse me. There’s a ton of assassination simulators in Roblox that are publicly facing that any child can join. They are very graphic. Some are photorealistic. Some are cartoon where they can play the role of the shooter. They can watch in the crowd as he bleeds out. They can, you know, any child can join this, and I have photos of it so you can see.

Disturbing Content on Roblox

SHAWN RYAN:

This is on the most popular kids’ game in the f*ing world?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yes. So here’s some screenshots of Roblox. “If you join my Discord server, you’ll see real CP.” That’s just one. “Swat us. We dare you. You’re based in your mother’s basement,” but look at that. That’s, there is another, the Roblox in-game chat references sexual fantasy, 764, and the age of young gamer. So if you look in there, join slash that name, that’s a very popular group for the cult.

SHAWN RYAN:

So they don’t even hide. They don’t even hide.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

“Cult girl on cam slash where the cult girl’s at?” Cult girl meaning like a girl—

SHAWN RYAN:

They’re telling you what they’re going to do before they do it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Well, not all the time. Sometimes they lure them straight in here. They don’t, in this case, they’re straight up saying where to go watch it. And this is in-game, like in a children’s game that should be blocking all of this. “Kirk knew it was coming. Hi, Gabby.” And you can see the photo of it happening on this character’s shirt. There’s a game. You can literally go on the Roblox website.

SHAWN RYAN:

Assassinate Charlie Kirk.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

And just press the play button and just play it, and you see this.

SHAWN RYAN:

Holy shit.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. You can use real Robux to buy these t-shirts, which I’m not, I’m sorry, Robux to buy these t-shirts. And, you know, that means Roblox is making 30 percent off every sale of that t-shirt.

SHAWN RYAN:

So Roblox is making 30 percent off selling gamer, what do you call that? Like a skin?

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

A skin. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN:

A gamer skin, like an outfit for your character to wear that is Charlie Kirk shot in the f*ing neck bleeding to death. If, they make, Roblox makes money off this shit.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

They make money off of all the predatory behavior.

SHAWN RYAN:

And parents are supporting this. That’s fing genius. It’s unbelievable. Because they’re too fing lazy to watch their own kids. That’s what this is.

Parental Responsibility and Protection

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

And they’re too lazy to watch their own kids, and they think that it’s not going to happen to them. And their kids are smart enough to not fall into this trap. It’s all these things. That is not the case. They’re wrong. They’re wrong. And I can tell you with absolute certainty. I do this every day. Six, almost seven days a week of my life is dedicated to this topic. And I don’t have a child.

And when I do, I don’t know how I’m going to act as a parent. But I could tell you for absolute sure, this is not going to happen in my house. It’s not going to happen. My kids are not going to be part of these games. They’re not going to be part of social media until a later age. I understand. There’ll be friends that are going to hand them the phone. I know they’re going to break the rules.

But I want my, and look, I can’t speak on what I don’t know. Maybe I have a kid that defies everything that I say, and I’ll eat my words at that time. But right now, I can’t understand why you would even let your child play the game. Why would you buy them Robux in the game? Why would you give them access to a computer if you see they’re even playing it? Knowing what you know right now.

So not just Roblox, Minecraft too. Any game where they’re talking to strangers that is unrestricted, you should not let them play, especially at a very young age where they don’t even know right from wrong. So that’s, I could go on or I can keep going on a rant, but parents are going to make decisions for themselves.

And the question that I’m going to get asked, and I get asked by everybody, is what can you do about it? Well, the answer is two things. I wish I had a better answer. It’s either sign up for a monitoring software like Bark, because Bark is very good for what it does. It monitors for bullying, monitors for sexual type of activity, and monitors for suicidal ideations, all of those things. I have no partnership in Bark. I just like their company. I think they do a great job.

Taking Care of Mental Health While Fighting Online Predators

Custodial is another one that also monitors devices, but Bark is the one I know the most. They both, I’m sure, are great. And the most important one is being aware of what this stuff is. Do your research. Watch the news or Google search some of these terms on the news.

764 Group, the com, Roblox, predators on the Internet. Watch some of these podcasts. Listen to some of Shawn’s episodes. Get yourself familiar so that when you have a conversation with your kid, when you decide this is the right age to talk to them about this or that, then you have less of a chance of them falling into this vicious cycle. And if they do fall into it, they feel comfortable enough about it to come to you about it and tell you.

And that’s the best advice that I can offer you. I don’t have a button that just erases predators off this planet. If I did, then half of my life would be a lot more free than it is right now.

SHAWN RYAN: I got something about this. This needs to spread. And so if you’re a parent, when your kid’s hanging around with other kids, because everybody’s addicted to their tablet, because all these—I don’t know what the f* kids are dealing with phones anyways. I mean, you said it perfectly the first episode.

When you hand your kid a phone, you’re not giving your kid access to the world. You’re giving the world access to your kid.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: I’ve said that many times since I’ve heard that come out of your mouth.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. I’ve heard you on that one.

SHAWN RYAN: But, you know, you need to be asking all the parents that your kids hang around with if their kids on Roblox. If they are on Roblox, then you need to educate them. If they still don’t give a shit, then you need shame the f* out of them. That’s ridiculous.

This shit’s f*ing crazy. Don’t let your kids hang out with anybody that’s playing that shit.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Well, I mean, remember, we might be old school, but there was a time when going outside and riding around on your bike was what hanging out with friends is. I know that’s not the case anymore, and I know that parents are going to use that as an excuse, but it should be.

SHAWN RYAN: We do at my house. We play outside. We do fing bikes. We do creeks. We do woods. We do hikes. We do camping. We do forts. We do all that shit. We don’t f around on the phone.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. We do not f* around on the phone.

SHAWN RYAN: And same thing with my business partners. They don’t play that at all. Same as you. There’s a lot of parents that don’t—that will not allow it.

The Importance of Age-Appropriate Content

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Another thing that’s—and this is a whole different topic, but I just want to just breeze over it real quick. It could get very sensitive for people. And this has—if you’re watching this, please do not take offense to this because it has nothing to do with you being into men, women, being trans. I don’t care what you’re into. You can look at me as a Christian or a right wing extremist or whatever else that I’ve read about myself online. I don’t care if you’re gay.

I don’t care if you’re trans. I don’t care about any of the other things, gender fluid, all of the things I’m not thinking of right now. What I care about is if you’re attracted to children, I don’t like you. It’s as simple as that. I don’t care if you’re a girl, a guy, a strawberry, whatever. I don’t care. But when you bring these books into kids’ schools at extreme young ages—I’m in Florida, which as most of you know is a pretty wild state and usually against a lot of things that—I mean, a lot of people don’t like Florida.

I’m walking through Barnes and Noble, and I see that there’s the gay ABCs in there, bi, binary. And I’m looking at the table of contents of some of these books, and one of them is talking about AIDS. It’s like, how do you explain to your four, five, six, seven year old kid what AIDS is without telling them what anal sex is?

Yeah. You can’t. You can’t. So why bring these children’s books into a school and expect kids to—I didn’t learn about sex ed until maybe seventh, eighth grade in gym class, and it was cartoons on the screen explaining what the body parts were. These kids are learning—for you to know what the opposite sex is and for sex is to be attracted to the same sex, they have to understand what sex is.

And the only people that should be teaching their kids about anything sexual is their parents. So I don’t know. That’s a whole different topic, a whole different tangent. But I don’t like these books. It’s got nothing to do with LGBTQ. It has nothing to do with that. I really genuinely—I don’t care. But I do care when it comes to kids. I think they should make that decision as grown adults.

SHAWN RYAN: This is why so many people are moving to homeschool.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It makes sense. But—

SHAWN RYAN: Tons of people are moving to the homeschool program because of shit like that.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Sorry. I’m just—it’s gotten me pissed off.

SHAWN RYAN: We’ve covered that stuff several times, Ryan. You don’t have to cover it again.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: It just got me frustrated. Well, because it wasn’t too long ago that I found out there was in, you know, Florida bookstores.

SHAWN RYAN: Stuff’s been going on for a long, long time. Very frustrating. But that’s why you’re seeing this wave of people moving to homeschool because they’re just tired of the shit. They’re not going to deal with it anymore.

Understanding the Severity of Online Cults

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And the last thing I want to say real quick is when talking about these cults and satanic groups and some of the stuff that we talked about and read, I understand the people that are watching, some of you are not going to be able to see these videos in full, pictures in full, but I want you to understand how graphic this stuff actually is, how much damage they’re actually doing to children, to animals, to their family, to strangers, how volatile this could be. And remember where it starts. It starts on these games like Roblox, like Minecraft, websites masquerading themselves as mental health support groups. It could even be an actual mental health support group that they groom your child off of.

So remember those things. If you don’t see any of the content and you don’t believe it’s as severe as I’m saying that it is and Shawn saw with his own eyes, just trust me when I tell you that it is. And I pray to God that your kid never becomes a victim of any type of sexual crime as well as any sort of crime or murder—all of it. I don’t even know what to say, Shawn. I—it’s got me. I can’t—I’ve never spoke on this topic.

SHAWN RYAN: We’re doing it. Ryan, we’re doing it. The parents that care are going to watch this. Their kids aren’t going to be on Roblox anymore. They’re going to be educated just like the last time.

And then there’s going to be a handful of parents who just don’t give a f*.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: And that’s on them. That’s on them. They can regret it when they figure it out themselves unfortunately.

SHAWN RYAN: Look. If it’s not—let’s say, Roblox disappears tomorrow. Let’s just say 75 million people watch this episode, and they’re all on Roblox. They’re like, f* it. I’m out. Then it’s just going to move to something else. Yeah. So you have to be a vigilant parent. You have to pay attention to what your kids doing online. But I think, you know, the majority of at least this audience, people take action.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: I believe it, and I know it. And I meet people all the time that watched our first episode. And like I said, I’m repeating myself, but have said that they’ve made changes based on what they saw on our episode, on other things I’ve done. But it doesn’t matter where they hear me. I don’t care if they hear me in a bathroom stall in Jamaica or Haiti. It doesn’t matter. As long as they’re hearing it from somebody, it doesn’t have to be me, and they make a change. That’s all I care about.

Brand Army: OnlyFans for Teens

SHAWN RYAN: I did want to cover one more topic here.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Absolutely.

SHAWN RYAN: We were talking about it. We were chatting about it last night. OnlyFans for teens. Yes. Brand Army. I had no idea this shit was going on either. Yeah. What the f* is this? I mean, you educated me on it last night, but I’d like you to educate the audience on it.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Sure. So the brief—because that’s a whole investigation within itself. So if you’re not familiar with OnlyFans, it’s a website where people can sell their bodies for money. That’s for adults. Adults only. There’s a site called Brand Army that you can join the site as early as thirteen years old, and they have a policy of how many bikini revealing photos that you can post before—so you could post, let’s say, one bikini photo, and then it has to be two normal photos, and then another photo that’s revealing, and then two more normal photos.

And these are thirteen year old, you know, girls or boys. But the other part of it is to subscribe to their content where they’re paying for these—the child’s content and the parents are actually directly profiting off of it. You have to be eighteen years old to subscribe to the children’s content. So it’s so backwards. There’s a house in Florida called the BOP House, B-O-P house, that BOP is a slang term kids are using for a slut or whatever.

And there’s a lot of OnlyFans girls living in there, but one of them was under eighteen, and they were waiting for her to turn eighteen to bring her on to OnlyFans, and they were using Brand Army before that.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you f*ing serious?

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Yeah. So they knew exactly what they’re doing. It’s not a misunderstanding. The parents that are doing it and letting their kids use Brand Army are fully aware they’re selling—they’re sexualizing their children and profiting off of it. They’re fully aware of it. I didn’t think I was going to get this worked up this episode. My apologies.

The Toll of Fighting Child Exploitation

SHAWN RYAN: Ryan, what are you doing to take care of yourself? I worry about you, man.

RYAN MONTGOMERY: Not a lot, man. But I got some advice recently to—there’s a great therapist in Texas that I was told about who specializes in some of this specific type of stuff. And a lot of this, I feel like I compartmentalize. And I’m having some physical issues I talked to you about. I don’t really want to get into that here.

But even if I really feel like I’m able to compartmentalize and focus on this being a good thing, I keep convincing myself it’s worth it because it’s a good thing, and I don’t let it affect anything in my life, that’s what I really believe, it’s now physically proven to me that that isn’t the case. It has to be subconsciously affecting me, so much so that it’s becoming a problem I need to get help for. And I’m not saying that to pity me or to feel bad for me, but take many years of dealing with the most gruesome stuff that’s probably worse than murder every single day. And I think anyone is going to have some type of reaction to it. If you didn’t, I think there’d be something wrong with you.

So at some point, I will seek out the right type of help. Therapy is a tough topic for me. As you know, I’ve owned three mental health facilities. So finding a good therapist is a little harder for me than your average person because I got some internal feelings about them. And then growing up with therapists, they weren’t the most trustworthy. They were more my friends than they were my therapist. It’s tough for me to believe anything anyone says that’s a therapist. But if and when that one in Texas works out, I’ll be happy to do it. And any other thing, I’ll update you and I’ll let you know. But yeah, I need to take care of myself.

SHAWN RYAN: Ryan, I want to bring this up because we’ve had several conversations about this. Last night, you were telling me stuff, and I’m not going to get specific, but it is very much affecting your life and people who are close to you that are around you. And, you know, I know, dude, different sector, not as dark as the shit that you’re in, but spent a lot of time at war. I just want to f*ing tell you, man. I get it.

I know that every time that you need to take off to get help, you think of that as there’s one more child that’s not going to get saved. Dude, you cannot f*ing think like that. You have to take care of you because if you don’t, this shit is all going to come crashing down, and then you will not be able to function. And then there’s going to be a shit ton of kids that aren’t going to be saved because you’re not right. So you have—look, dude.

You have to f*ing take care of yourself. You have to go on vacations. You have to be around people that love you. You have to get help. You have to clear your head.

You have to do these things, or it’s not going to end well for you, man. It’s not.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I appreciate

SHAWN RYAN:

you saying that. And I want to say this in front of this audience because they’re going to back me up.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Yeah. And I respect you. I respect you. And I know that you know what PTSD looks like. I know you know what trauma is.

And if you’re telling me I need it, I believe you. I take your word for it. There’ll be a time where you get a text from me randomly, and I tell you, I’m doing this. I’m doing that. It’s going to happen.

It just I pushed it off for long enough that you’re right. I get what you’re saying. It’s just so much easier for me to push it off because of the reasons you just stated. We talked about them last night. So I need to focus on myself because if I yeah, I don’t even want to get into what I’m going to say.

So I

SHAWN RYAN:

Just started. I need help.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

You don’t do it for you? Something. That’s what you’re saying. Okay?

SHAWN RYAN:

Do it for you, do it for your mom. Do it for your girl. Yeah. Do it for me.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Do it for everybody.

SHAWN RYAN:

Do it for everybody. Just f*ing take care of yourself, man.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

I can’t help anybody if I can’t help myself, so I’ll keep it at that. Alright. I will definitely get help. I appreciate that. I love you to death, and I appreciate you very much.

SHAWN RYAN:

I love you too, brother.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Thank you, man.

SHAWN RYAN:

I’m proud of you.

RYAN MONTGOMERY:

Proud of you too. That’s an honor.

Taking Care of Mental Health

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