Check out this story where the CEO named Jonathan Manzi SIM swapped his competitor!
This is eCrimeBytes.com S 2 Ep 2-3: CEO Jonathan Manzi SIM Swaps His Competitor – Act 3: Manzi’s Plea! Check out the prior acts for the background:
Go back to acts 1 and 2 if you want the background!
CEO Jonathan Manzi SIM Swaps His Competitor – Act 1: Meet The Players
CEO Jonathan Manzi SIM Swaps His Competitor – Act 2: Manzi Strikes Back
Sources:
- https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16178130/united-states-v-manzi/
- https://www.justice.gov/usao-ne/pr/massachusetts-man-sentenced-computer-intrusion
- https://journalstar.com/business/local/ex-lincoln-tech-company-ceo-sentenced-to-prison-for-hacking/article_dfff6348-dfb9-11ed-9927-0ff9db848ce0.html
- https://www.ceotodaymagazine.com/2022/01/jonathan-manzi-the-inspirational-success-story-of-a-precocious-ceo/ (Photo)
- https://homebusinessmag.com/businesses/success-stories-businesses/jonathan-manzi-journey-intensively-driven-entrepreneur/ (Photo)
- https://wikiake.com/jonathan-manzi/ (Photo)
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-manzi-453b298/ (Photo)
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-just-sentenced-18-months-prison-hacking-back-form-cyber-manzi%3FtrackingId=O8m8l%252BzjT3Sd1aMjrnNsVw%253D%253D/?trackingId=O8m8l%2BzjT3Sd1aMjrnNsVw%3D%3D
- https://www.databreaches.net/i-was-sentenced-to-18-months-in-prison-for-hacking-back-my-story/
- https://hackernoon.com/i-was-sentenced-to-18-months-in-prison-for-hacking-back-my-story
- https://www.scribd.com/document/642057205/167-1-3?ref=hackernoon.com
Transcript:
00:00:10:00 – 00:00:16:29
Keith
Hey, welcome back to eCrimeBytes. This is the CEO that SIM swapped his competitor Jonathan Manzi.
00:00:16:29 – 00:00:22:18
Keith
This is the plea and oh boy are we going to find out some shit here.
00:00:22:18 – 00:00:38:25
Keith
The plea usually involves two things. It involves a written document that the government and the defendant will sign and file together. So there’s usually information in there, but there’s also a plea hearing. And the plea hearing is what Seth’s going to talk about.
00:00:38:27 – 00:00:54:03
Keith
And this is where they talk about this document and whether or not this document’s going to be valid, whether the court’s going to accept this document and so forth. So that is the background you need to understand to get into what’s Seth’s about to walk you through at the plea hearing and take it away.
00:00:54:03 – 00:01:22:21
Seth
Seth Okay. So we have a plea hearing in mid December of 2022. And at this plea hearing we find out some shit. So we learn that Manzi may have contacted witnesses in the kiosk printing industry before his plea was entered. That’s a hard no no. We also learned that Manzi viewed the LinkedIn profile for Pepper, and the judge had told him specifically to stop this during his plea hearing.
00:01:22:24 – 00:01:54:08
Seth
So specifically, we have some, I guess, notations here from the court where the court claims the concerns essentially were that you, as in Mr. Manzi, were continuing to have contact with people and working with people that could be witnesses. In this case, as you guys know, there’s obviously a lot of laws at the federal and state level against and prohibiting obviously witness tampering, which is certainly would have been and there were concerns about the court continues, there were concerns about what you had once you moved to Massachusetts is where the concerns really came to a head.
00:01:54:10 – 00:02:20:22
Seth
And they basically say they’re not going to get into what he did or didn’t do, basically that he needs to cut it out. And he tells us he also instructs Mr. Manzi’s attorney to do the same and that if it doesn’t, it’ll definitely impact his conditions of release. So, Mr. Russell, the attorney, states that they received information and verified that Mr. Manzi was at least accessing the LinkedIn account of they were going to say his name.
00:02:20:22 – 00:02:39:11
Seth
They say his initials as TP We know who that is as Mr. Pepper. We do not believe that there was any direct contact, but I don’t want to make it sound like Mr. Vance had contact with the victim. But he is. It is disconcerting to a victim to have the defended check his LinkedIn account, and that becomes a little bit of a it’s just disconcerting.
00:02:39:19 – 00:02:50:21
Seth
And they basically asked him to cut it out. So, again, at best, it’s just somebody poking around the Internet trying to see what’s going on with a former colleague. But at worst, it’s witness tampering.
00:02:50:23 – 00:02:52:05
Keith
And I want to add.
00:02:52:07 – 00:02:58:01
Seth
Yeah, LinkedIn is the ability, of course, to communicate via a chat function or messaging.
00:02:58:03 – 00:03:24:05
Keith
Yeah. And I want to also point something out to people that don’t use LinkedIn because not everybody does. I do. And I can tell you, it allows you to see who looked at you. So if I were to use this profile on LinkedIn, Seth could go to his profile and said, Who were the last X number of people that looked at me?
00:03:24:05 – 00:03:46:01
Keith
And the reason why I said X is it really depends on what how Seth’s account is set up. If he has a free account, it gives him something like out of the last ten people or something like that that saw him that went to his profile. If he’s a paying customer, I think it goes back 90 days or longer that you can go back and see every person that’s viewed your profile.
00:03:46:04 – 00:04:17:22
Keith
So if you use things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, pretty much any other social media doesn’t have who viewed my account. LinkedIn does. Even when you try, you have to be a paying customer to try to get that information to go away where you can. When you can view people’s profiles, your information doesn’t show up. That’s basically one of the higher level tiers of a paying customer, if I remember correctly, on LinkedIn.
00:04:17:22 – 00:04:44:29
Keith
So that’s why this information’s being seen by Troy Pepper, because he goes, Hey, who looked at me? And he goes, Oh my God, Jonathan Manzi. He came to my profile. This is weird. So, you know, obviously he reported that to the government’s attorneys and now the government’s attorneys are bringing this up at the plea hearing, which is a time where Jonathan Manzi does not want this information brought up.
00:04:44:29 – 00:04:49:10
Keith
I’m pretty sure.
00:04:49:12 – 00:05:10:25
Seth
Yeah. I mean, I think that kind of covers it. So continuing on with the hearing from mid-December 22 and continuing to find out some stuff, you know, the question became of why Mr. Manzi is looking up information about Mr. Pepper, especially when the question is whether you’re going to trial or whether you’re going to be pleading guilty and whether he’s supposed to be testifying.
00:05:10:25 – 00:05:32:19
Seth
So again, to understand that, to understated, it sounds like why the court makes such a big deal about who went to LinkedIn and what it’s like, that if this was still not necessarily a locked in plea agreement and it could have gone to trial. And Mr. Pepper not only was a witness, but likely the witness. Right. He was the reason that Mr. Manzi went on his revenge or hack back, you know, brigade.
00:05:32:19 – 00:05:50:23
Seth
There certainly would have been problematic for have him contacting Mr. Pepper. There’s something that doesn’t really get brought up a lot in the security world, but in the legal world, and especially in the litigation world, especially in criminal law, it is obviously a big deal to not contact a witness. This happens and it is a big problem.
00:05:50:23 – 00:06:36:03
Keith
Yeah, And so that was a plea hearing and there was a plea agreement and it was accepted. So in the U.S. court process and I’m saying US specifically here because I know a quarter of our audio listeners are from overseas, you plea to something, but you don’t necessarily plead to a specific sentence. You don’t say, I’ll plea to this if I only get 30 days, usually plea to something and you could possibly have a range that you plea to. Now in an episode coming up in an episode or two, there is a plea that I researched where they said, Hey, if it’s over two years, then this plea agreement does not exist or it doesn’t
00:06:36:03 – 00:06:49:21
Keith
hold or I won’t plead guilty if it’s going to end up if I end up getting sentence over two years, we’re going to go to trial basically is what that said. I’ve seen that, but I’ve never seen anything very specific where, you know, they are locked in.
00:06:49:21 – 00:07:16:12
Keith
They might know a slight range and they’re hoping for the best and hoping it’s not going to be the worst. And we know the best possible case is going to be six months for Jonathan Manzi here. So we get to the sentencing hearing, which is where the judge listens to both sides and then makes his decision, makes his or her decision on what the sentence is
00:07:16:15 – 00:07:44:28
Keith
they’re going to get the defendant. At the sentencing hearing. I guess the defendant’s attorney, so Jonathan Mann, his attorney, made this analogy, which I, I listen, I researched this case months ago, and I’m still pondering this analogy where he said, hey, this is kind of like someone who burglarized a home to get back his wife’s stolen wedding ring.
00:07:45:01 – 00:08:05:26
Keith
And I sat there and I was like, Holy shit, I hope that was an informal conversation with newspeople and not in the court. Transcript. Because even if it was stolen by somebody, you have recourse in that case where you could go to the police officers and go, Yeah, my stolen wedding ring is in this guy’s house. Please go get it.
00:08:05:29 – 00:08:14:18
Keith
Just like you could do in the computer sense. And it was just a mind blowing in my mind.
00:08:14:18 – 00:08:39:22
Keith
All right. So at the end of the sentencing hearing and I didn’t give you the date, the sentencing hearing was April 21st of 2023. So we’re now in this year that we recorded this podcast, but we fast forward a month or two after the plea. The plea was, let me tell you, it was December 14th of 2022 sentencing is April 21st of 2023.
00:08:39:22 – 00:08:44:19
Keith
God damn, what a long time to wait to find out your sentencing.
00:08:44:19 – 00:09:12:24
Seth
okay, so now we are at late April of 2023 sentencing. So how much did he get? Well, it’s actually worse than you think. It’s a total of 18 months. He received nine months on Counts one and then nine months as to count two. But they are to be served consecutively, not concurrently. So the court recommended that he report to a federal facility somewhere near his home in Beverly, Massachusetts.
00:09:12:24 – 00:09:32:21
Seth
I’m not sure where that is in Massachusetts. So he got 18 months now. It also comes with some conditions here upon release. He has to be involved in some supervised release scenarios so he cannot act or make any agreement with a law enforcement agency to act as a confidential human source or informant without first getting permission of the court.
00:09:32:24 – 00:09:53:11
Seth
He is prohibited from incurring any new credit charges or opening additional lines of credit without prior written approval of the PO or probation officer. And this one I thought was interesting. You must attend successfully complete and pay for an approved cognitive behavioral based program as directed by the PO, which means he simply needs to deal with his anger management issues.
00:09:53:11 – 00:10:19:08
Seth
I guess the way I read that and then we you know, we see sometimes these restitutions are either absurdly high, you know, that, you know, for somebody who was essentially otherwise, a penniless perpetrator, you know, has to pay back $1,000,000 or something small, like $10,000, right? He got a fine of $630,000, which I think directly ties to how much money he deprived Wepa and their business side.
00:10:19:11 – 00:10:38:24
Seth
We know apparently about 400,000 had already been paid, which is based on a civil lawsuit to whether so he’d owe the remainder of that. So that we thought that was interesting. If he continues to be a millionaire CEO, that shouldn’t be a problem. Although it would make me give pause before I worked with somebody who was a CEO of a company to know that they owed money related to a criminal proceeding.
00:10:38:24 – 00:10:41:03
Seth
But what do I know?
00:10:41:06 – 00:10:45:25
Keith
Yeah. He also owes Troy Pepper $25,000 personally.
00:10:45:27 – 00:10:53:08
Seth
Right. Thank you. I left that out. Yeah. TP is also owed $25,000. Personally. Thank you.
00:10:53:08 – 00:10:59:15
Keith
And that’s it for Act three, because in Act four, we’re going to talk about Manzi’s response.
00:10:59:15 – 00:11:22:22
Keith
And you say his response to what? His response to all that shit we just told you about. So he thought his minimum was six months. I thought he possibly was going to get 6 to 12 months based on what we knew about the case at the time. He got 18 months, so he’s probably a pissed off motherfucker at this point.
00:11:22:24 – 00:11:42:17
Keith
And he writes an article that’s on his public LinkedIn, and we’re going to read it to you because this is just the other side of the story. And I think it’s important. We’re going to read you all the reasons why he thinks he was okay to do what he did, which was hack back. And I’m using my air quotes again.
00:11:42:23 – 00:11:51:01
Keith
So thanks for listening to Act three and hope to see you in Act four of the CEO, Jonathan Manzi SIM swaps his competitor.
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