Brett Johnson

Johnson says his criminal life began with shoplifting at the age of 10 and moved on to insurance fraud as an adult, and that in 1994 he paid for a wedding with a payout from a staged car accident; he later sold non-existent merchandise on eBayeBayeBay Inc. is an online marketplace company headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar; it started out with person-to-person online auctions and listed on Nasdaq in 1998. As of the end of 2025, it had 135 million active buyers, and its platform’s gross merchandise volume in 2025 was nearly $80 billion.Open the full entry before moving to identity theft.⁠[1]

He says he grew up in Hazard in eastern Kentucky; around 1996–1997 he took orders for satellite TV cards from Canadian customers and stopped filling them, taking about $4,000 a week, and his search for a fake ID to open a bank account and launder the money led him to the online forgery forum Counterfeit Library.⁠[2]

Johnson was a co-creator of ShadowCrew, a website launched in 2002 that supported the sale of credit card numbers and hosted forums sharing the latest information on hacking tricks, card fraud, virus development and phishing.⁠[3]

He says he had by then become a senior member of the Counterfeit Library forum who vetted sellers, and that ShadowCrew was initially set up by another member who later handed the site to him.⁠[2]

On October 28, 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that a federal grand jury in Newark, New Jersey, had returned a 62-count indictment against 19 people alleged to have founded, moderated and operated ShadowCrew; the department said the site had about 4,000 members who allegedly trafficked in at least 1.7 million stolen credit card numbers, causing losses of more than $4 million, and that 21 people had been arrested in the United States earlier that week.⁠[4]

Johnson was not caught in that sweep; he was picked up in North Carolina in February 2005.⁠[5]

After his 2005 arrest he agreed to work for the Secret Service as an informant, but he worked for federal authorities by day and committed identity theft at home in the evenings, and was rearrested when this was discovered.⁠[1]

Agents who searched his apartment in Columbia found 63 prepaid cards, a fake license and cash; he then fled, was placed on the Secret Service’s Most Wanted list, kept filing fake tax returns on the run, and was arrested at a condo in Florida on September 16, 2006.⁠[6]

His arrest was for cybercrime and laundering US$4 million.⁠[7]

In 2007 Johnson pleaded guilty to fraud charges, was sentenced to six years in prison and was ordered to pay restitution to victims.⁠[6]

He escaped from prison during his sentence and was put behind bars again.⁠[5]

He was released from prison in 2011.⁠[6]

After his release he was barred from working with computers and was soon back committing crimes with stolen credit cards, receiving a sentence of a year and a day; after that release he reached out to an FBI agent on LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry and got a response, a validation he describes as the main turning point.⁠[5]

By 2017 he was offering darknet intelligence gathering, blackhat auditing, penetration testing and social engineering services through his consultancy, Anglerphish Security, advising Fortune 500 companies; he gave a talk at the University of Hull’s business school, some weeks after a talk at the University of Tulsa in partnership with the FBI.⁠[7]

In July 2018 he gave the keynote at the Midwest Acquirers Association’s annual conference, showing on screen personal information about several attendees that he had gathered from social media and other databases knowing only their names and where they were from, to illustrate social-engineering risks.⁠[3]

On September 27, 2018, AARP’s podcast The Perfect Scam aired an episode about him; on the show he acknowledged that the Secret Service had dubbed him the “Original Internet Godfather” and said he was not proud of the title.⁠[8]

On March 27, 2022, he appeared on episode 272 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, which introduced him as a former US Most Wanted cybercriminal; topics included his early years, phishing and social engineering, ShadowCrew, the dark web, prison and life after prison.⁠[9]

His own website presents him as a keynote speaker, states that he was convicted of 39 felonies and sentenced to 90 months in federal prison, and claims that in 2024 he assisted the FBI in the arrest of more than 300 cybercriminals.⁠[10]

Personal website: Public link: https://anglerphish.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

X: Public account: https://x.com/GOllumfun (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gollumfun/ (opens in a new window)⁠[10]