Join me to hear the story of Jordan Dave Persad, a serial SIM swapper who stole nearly $1,000,000 of cryptocurrency from his victims. This is eCrimeBytes.com Season 2 Episode 18 SIM Swapping And Bitcoin Theft With Jordan Dave Persad – Act 1: Tragedy And Opportunity.
PS – I called Jordan by his best friend’s name “Jarrod/Jared” a handful of times because they sounded so alike. Sorry about that.
Sources:
- https://www.justice.gov/usao-az/pr/hacker-sentenced-30-months-sim-swapping-conspiracy-resulting-theft-nearly-1-million
- https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67311139/united-states-v-persad/
Transcript:
00:00:10:01 – 00:00:35:19
Keith
Hey ya crazy bastards. Welcome to this week’s episode of eCrimeBytes. And this is where I research the court documents and roast the criminal. So you don’t have to. This is season two Episode 18 SIM swapping and Bitcoin theft with Jordan Persad. Okay, so the criminal in this case, his name is Jordan Persad. He’s 20 years old from Orlando, Florida.
00:00:35:20 – 00:00:57:12
Keith
So everything I mentioned in here, just think Florida man right. There are a bunch of coconspirators as well. And I don’t know all their names because in the court documentation, they don’t name them. They don’t charge them at the same time. They just refer to them as coconspirators. So do imagine, as I’m describing some of this crime to you, it’s not a one man crime.
00:00:57:25 – 00:01:18:53
Keith
There’s other people that have to help him in order to pull this whole thing off because it’s theft of cryptocurrency. Okay. And in this case, it involves a lot of different tasks to steal that cryptocurrency. And so the government at the end of the day will end up charging him with conspiracy because he conspired with all these coconspirators.
00:01:19:06 – 00:01:43:10
Keith
All right. Hope you’re with me so far. The victims in this case are several individuals with cryptocurrency accounts. We’re not going to name them, but it’s it’s several. The technology we’re going to bring to you in this episode is cryptocurrency. So we’re going be talking about things like Bitcoin and we’re going to be talking about cell phones, SIM cards, specifically when it comes to SIM swapping, which is the attack in this episode.
00:01:43:15 – 00:01:57:29
Keith
And so why did I choose this case? Well, we haven’t had SIM swapping in a while and SIM swapping is so pervasive. I just want to bring it back into this episode just to remind you that this is another type of attack that is out there and it happens all the time.
00:01:57:29 – 00:02:03:09
Keith
Okay, so let’s begin with act number one of this episode.
00:02:03:09 – 00:02:28:22
Keith
And I named this act Tragedy and Opportunity. And there’s there’s a lot of tragedy before we get to this opportunity. I’m just going to warn you. Alright Jordan Dave Persad, he was born in Queens, New York. He grew up in poverty. So his apartment, when he was growing up, imagine roach infested. His parents were never married, but they did live together.
00:02:28:22 – 00:02:52:03
Keith
So Jordan struggled with weight issues. And I paused on this for a moment because I work in the computer world. Weight issues. It’s a pretty commonplace thing. If you remember to season two episode one earlier this summer that we published, there was this individual in there named Jimmy Zhong and he was made fun of because of his weight.
00:02:52:08 – 00:03:15:30
Keith
That’s pretty commonplace in the computer world. You have people that are in the computer industry. A lot of times we sit a lot, we eat a lot and we gain weight. And then other people not in the computer industry especially say a high school will make fun of said individuals with weight problems. And I was also thinking about people with weight problems.
00:03:15:30 – 00:03:35:47
Keith
And obviously I keep saying we because I’m a nice chunky monkey now. But I will say to my defense, to my defense, I was skinnier when I was younger, when I first got into computers, and that was only because I was trying to fucking avoid frozen yellow milk. And if you’re just jumping in on this episode in or previous episodes, you go, What the fuck does he
00:03:35:47 – 00:03:43:22
Keith
keep talking about this frozen yellow milk. Let me take a tangent and remind you what this monstrosity is about.
00:03:43:22 – 00:03:57:34
Keith
I was growing up with my younger brother and my mother would buy a ton of milk on sale and to save it she would freeze it. Okay. And I have a picture of frozen milk here on the screen for you now.
00:03:57:39 – 00:04:18:23
Keith
And I’ve posted this picture before and people will say, well, she tried to freeze rotten milk. It wasn’t actually good milk. No, no. This is actually a scientific process that happens in milk when you freeze it. And the more fat content you have in your milk, the more yellow it turns. And if I remember correctly, it was whole milk that she froze back in the day.
00:04:18:28 – 00:04:47:34
Keith
So it looked exactly like you had on the screen. And actually the one on the screen actually kind of looks nice. It looks uniform and yellow. The ones I remember growing up didn’t freeze so uniformly. There was white spots or darker yellow spots. And a lot of times when you thawed it didn’t go back together as white milk, it kind of went back together as white milk with these yellow clumps because they clumped out when you froze them.
00:04:47:39 – 00:05:10:52
Keith
Just it’s an unbelievable process. But I will tell you, as a child of who the hell wants to drink yellow milk, Right. And we had to choke down an adult sized glass every night of this this junk. And still to this day, to this day, I’m well past middle age now. My brother and I, we still we have trouble drinking milk and we still crack jokes about frozen yellow milk.
00:05:10:52 – 00:05:31:11
Keith
So that’s why you hear me crack these jokes all the time is because it’s been so it’s so traumatizing for me and. Okay. And you stop there and you’re like, okay, I understand why you were skinny when you’re younger. Keith. I understand. Well, no, no, there’s more there are more food issues that this. Don’t even get me started
00:05:31:12 – 00:05:53:40
Keith
on square Wendy’s hamburgers. I’m sorry to you listeners, I’m going to apologize up front, but my mother had a false belief that square hamburgers for some reason led you straight to the shitter. Straight to the shitter. So let me show you a picture. This is a square hamburger from Wendy’s. I’m pointing to the point on the hamburger. This.
00:05:53:45 – 00:06:12:51
Keith
This is the real problem. According to my mother, it’s not anything else in the hamburger. It’s just the square burger. And again, to this day, well past middle age, my brother and I, we do not take risks. We do not shop at Wendy’s and order square hamburgers because you never know. There’s still a chance that square hamburger will hit you
00:06:12:51 – 00:06:36:10
Keith
funny. And the last thing that reminded me of why I was skinny when I was younger as my mother would have these cottage cheese peach salad surprise and I don’t even know how to explain them. But again, this is another one of the things my brother and I make fun of to this day. It’s cottage cheese sitting and a piece of lettuce with peaches on top.
00:06:36:10 – 00:06:53:16
Keith
And then she would pour the peach juice on there. So it was, in my opinion, really gross. You had to eat. She made you eat all of it. And it just was not a good mixture. I like cottage cheese. I like peaches. I like lettuce. I just don’t like them all together. And I’m going to show you what a picture of this monstrosity looks like on your screen.
00:06:53:16 – 00:07:14:55
Keith
Now, this actually looks a little more appetizing. The peaches are cut up. Mine was usually a, you know, half a peach thrown on there on top of the the cottage cheese. And there was one piece of lettuce underneath and it was very wilty. This is this is a very bright, cheery version of what I grew up with. And as I was trying to look for this picture for you,
00:07:14:55 – 00:07:35:27
Keith
I got incredibly, incredibly disappointed in the Army because I searched for cottage cheese, peach salad, and this is one of the first things that popped up as a recipe from the goddamn army. The army has an official recipe for this thing that I grew up with that I can no longer stomach. And it goes through. If you want to make it.
00:07:35:32 – 00:08:05:19
Keith
Here you go. I put it on your screen for you. Here’s all the ingredients. Go to town. And I have to say, for this reason alone, I have to say, What the fuck? Army Go Navy. Just because of that recipe. I really hope somebody doesn’t find a Navy recipe that’s similar because. All right, if you’re wondering why I did this, I had to give you a little bit of comic relief here because the story gets sad pretty quickly, but it does pertain to the whole story.
00:08:05:19 – 00:08:36:57
Keith
So I had to go through it. All right. So let’s get back to Jordan Dave Persad. When he was a child between ten I’m sorry, between 12 and 13 years old, his mom separated from his dad and moved to Pennsylvania to live with their new boyfriend. His name is Justin. Now, his mother and Justin, they met each other online and you would say, probably like plenty of fish or tinder, whatever people meet online these days.
00:08:37:02 – 00:08:59:52
Keith
Nope, they met online on World of Warcraft. And if you’re a layman coming into this and you’ve never heard of World of Warcraft, just imagine it’s kind of like a it’s almost like a role playing adventure battle type of world video game that you can play in and people get real serious in it and they’ll get money involved.
00:08:59:52 – 00:09:28:54
Keith
And I’ve read about fights in the real world based upon stuff that happens in World of Warcraft. It’s just it’s very serious to a subset of people. And this is how mom and dad met. And this is important to the story because now Jordan, the criminal we’re talking about in this case, he got more into computers because he’s around Justin and, you know, he starts sharing this whole love of gaming with his stepfather, which sounds really nice and wholesome.
00:09:28:54 – 00:09:38:10
Keith
Right? I mean, who wouldn’t want a father figure in their life playing video games with them? Video games as a 12, 13 year old boy? I mean, it’s like one of the coolest things ever.
00:09:38:10 – 00:09:57:32
Keith
So there’s a point where Jordan started spending more time in virtual worlds than he did the real one. And I mean, I can relate to this just growing up, I back in the day, even before Internet with bulletin boards and so forth, when I was a teenager, it was just really nice when you had stuff you want forget about in the real world just to get on your computer.
00:09:57:37 – 00:10:25:49
Keith
You could do other things and not worry about whatever is bugging you in the real world. So this is very, very relatable and very common in the computer world. So here’s where things take a dark twist. Jordan’s step stepfather, Justin, hung himself. They were living together with Jordan’s grandpa. So I’m not sure if that’s the stepfather’s father or the stepfather’s father in law.
00:10:25:49 – 00:10:47:04
Keith
It doesn’t really matter here in the story, but that’s the general family tree you’re dealing with in this story. So the suicide happened at the house. The rest of the family chose to move out of the suicide house, but Jordan stayed with his grandpa and lived there. And during this time, Jordan then got more
00:10:47:04 – 00:10:54:14
Keith
secluded and escaped further into computers and then eventually around the age of 16.
00:10:54:14 – 00:10:59:54
Keith
So I imagine it’s about a couple of years later, he moved with the rest of his family to Florida.
00:10:59:54 – 00:11:24:04
Keith
Now you’re probably saying, my God, that poor guy. That’s horrible, horrible tragedy. And I. I absolutely agree with you. There’s more. Okay. So through gaming, through online gaming, this is how Jordan met his best friend, Jarrod Crass. He met him online, probably in some type of game like World of Warcraft or some analog equivalent.
00:11:24:09 – 00:11:46:27
Keith
They probably enjoyed this gaming, got in some chat room and they were like, Hey, you know, we have a lot of similar tastes. Love gaming, and they just talk all the time and they just sort of became best friends. Happens all the time. Also, Jordan met his girlfriend Ruba online, so you can imagine now a big chunk of his real life is now starting to come from online as well.
00:11:46:32 – 00:12:20:27
Keith
Jordan and his best friend Jared planned to meet. But then one night, his best friend Jared, and his best friend Jared’s brother, died from a fentanyl overdose. This poor guy, right? He just lost his stepfather. Now he lost his best friend and his best friend’s brother makes him more secluded and more depressed. Eventually, he and his girlfriend Ruba, they break up, makes him more depressed and get more into computers just to escape the real world problems that he has.
00:12:20:27 – 00:12:57:34
Keith
Now. One fact I read in the court documentation that Persad wanted to grow up to be an FBI agent. And as you listen to this case, you’re going to learn that there’s quite the twist of events, right, Education wise, persad he he didn’t like school. I don’t know a lot of kids did, but it seemed like he really didn’t like school so much, so that at some point, either before or during the beginning of his last high school years his senior year, he dropped out and it sounded like it wasn’t just him doing it.
00:12:57:34 – 00:13:14:29
Keith
It sounded like his dad or something. Maybe his birth dad said it was okay, so he was allowed to actually drop out. Now, the the positive side of this is I did read later on in the paperwork, this is one of those things he said he really regretted
00:13:14:29 – 00:13:17:17
Keith
the criminal here. He said he wants to go back and get his GED.
00:13:17:32 – 00:13:39:53
Keith
So if I don’t mention that later on, he does want to turn this part of his life around. So you can imagine Jared is now not working, not in school, not really employable because he dropped out before a high school diploma. And he’s really young and he has no real experience in anything. So he goes online and tries to make money.
00:13:39:53 – 00:14:05:23
Keith
He tries to make money through gaming and investing online. And that’s why I mentioned that whole World of Warcraft and all that kind of stuff upfront, because there can be currency that can trade hands in these games where somebody will spend 24 hours trying to complete a quest and get some certain thing in that game, and then they’ll sell it for real money to somebody else and people will actually make real money off of this.
00:14:05:23 – 00:14:28:05
Keith
And this is what I read between the lines. That’s how he’s making some of his money here. And then he’s also investing online. And I guess gaming could also mean like betting, but they didn’t specify if it was online gaming like World of Warcraft or online gaming as a betting. So I’m I’m willing to bet it’s probably the former.
00:14:28:05 – 00:14:53:16
Keith
All right. So why why did I tell you all this? Why does this even relate to his crimes? Because all of this all of this is background and leads up to the reason why he did his crimes. So let’s sit down and talk about his crimes for a second March of 2021 through September of 2022. That’s his crime spree timespan that we’re going to be talking about.
00:14:53:21 – 00:15:28:31
Keith
Jordan had many coconspirators. He had at least three people that I have initials for, and then it says others. So I’d imagine three or more coconspirators that he would work with in this hacking group. Okay. Now, this hacking group had a bunch of different tasks that the individuals could do in it anywhere. Well, I don’t want to tell you too much about the crime upfront, but you do know it’s a SIM swapping and so forth.
00:15:28:31 – 00:15:54:49
Keith
So let me give you some generalities. There are different roles that this crew would have where one person would identify a victim target. Another person would actually do the SIM swap, another person would actually hold the physical phone. I guess that would be the person taking probably the most risk. Another person would then cash out the cryptocurrency. Another person would kind of be, you know, the manager and you name it.
00:15:54:49 – 00:16:20:37
Keith
There’s all these jobs that were given to people. Jordan started out low level in the crew doing these various jobs, but eventually he gained experience and started orchestrating his whole crew and the whole scheme. So all these different jobs that I explained to you, he did them. But then he also started managing them as well. So when I’m bringing you his crimes, it’s not like he was the guy that just happened to have the cell phone.
00:16:20:42 – 00:16:45:16
Keith
He was intricately involved in this whole scheme. So what would happen here is Jordan and his crew would buy lists of victim email credentials. And what this means is usernames and passwords. If you’ve never seen this, it’s kind of like hackers would go to work and somehow get usernames and passwords to email accounts like Outlook.com or,
00:16:45:16 – 00:16:47:20
Keith
you know, what are some of the other ones?
00:16:47:24 – 00:17:09:12
Keith
You know, Google.com, Gmail, like Yahoo.com. They would get these lists of people. So one of them might be Keith Jones at Google.com and then next to it, it would just have my password and it would that username and password would be captured somewhere else. It could have been through malware on my computer. It could have been through network sniffing. Somewhere else.
00:17:09:17 – 00:17:36:42
Keith
But people like Jordan would buy this from other attackers, these giant lists of usernames and passwords. Okay. So he would have tens of thousands, tens of thousands of victims in these lists. So I gave you one example of Keith Jones. Now imagine tens of thousands of those victims. So they would take these lists of tons and tons of people and they would start to identify who would be a good target.
00:17:36:47 – 00:18:00:55
Keith
And you’ve got to ask yourself, who would be a good target in the scheme? Well, it’d be people that would have substantial cryptocurrency holdings, I’d imagine people that would hold tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars of cryptocurrency in their accounts. So not the Bob or Sally out there with like 50 or 100 bucks buying some illegal drugs online that doesn’t keep much in their account.
00:18:01:00 – 00:18:09:54
Keith
They’re probably targeting the cryptocurrency traders out there. Okay. If you’re if you’re trying to imagine who they are, who their prime victims would be.
00:18:09:54 – 00:18:27:19
Keith
So this is the point as a computer programmer that I just found incredible and I apologize if it doesn’t if it’s not as interesting to you guys, but imagine they have tens of thousands of names, right. And they have to identify victims. And you thinking through this would probably say, okay, I got to sit down.
00:18:27:24 – 00:19:07:18
Keith
I’ll probably have to take line number one, go online, check to see if that person has cryptocurrency accounts. In order for me to say, hey, they’re a victim, to then try to attack them. And that sounds like a lengthy process, right? Well, this crew did it differently. They went about it with computer programs. So they made computer scripts, which are like computer applications that would read these giant lists and would automatically go out there on the Internet and do a little reconnaissance on that individual to identify if they might have cryptocurrency accounts and if they might have substantial holdings in the crypto.
00:19:07:23 – 00:19:35:58
Keith
In those crypto currency accounts. And then those computer programs sorted the victims into buckets based upon the balances available in the victims accounts. So you can imagine all this stuff happens behind the scenes, probably less than a second a victim meaning within milliseconds a victim and gets these answers and then sorts the list and says, Hey, this is your victim at the top.
00:19:36:13 – 00:19:57:00
Keith
This is the one that has the most cryptocurrency holdings based upon the information we have. So that’s your biggest bang for your buck when you’re going to hack somebody, which to me was just amazing that they decided to try to cut down and make their time the most efficient as possible by having a computer program do what you would think
00:19:57:01 – 00:20:18:23
Keith
a human would do. So yeah, I wanted to highlight that because it was pretty interesting. So Jordan and his crew would log into the victim email accounts. He would use these usernames and passwords to log into the email accounts. And you can imagine what you may have in your email account. He would read them.
00:20:18:23 – 00:20:44:09
Keith
He would gain important information about the victim’s personal lives, and they could use that information to use in their social engineering exploits. So, for instance, let me give you a little more of a concrete example. If they’re in there and they see that, you know, other services have been sending you
00:20:44:09 – 00:20:51:58
Keith
information about your accounts, all of a sudden, you know, what other services this victim has subscribed to.
00:20:51:59 – 00:21:20:11
Keith
And that might become important when you’re trying to social engineer another service or you might get maybe somebody who writes down a note that says, my password is X, Y, Z, People do that. That might be a problem, you know, and that would be what they would find in there. Or, you know, maybe they would find in there that they had their birthday is, you know, such and such a date and they would know that birthday information to try to reset passwords on that victim’s account.
00:21:20:11 – 00:21:31:38
Keith
So you can imagine any personal information in these emails. These criminals would gain information about the victims and then try to exploit the victims later on using that information.
00:21:31:38 – 00:21:50:03
Keith
So when police later on did a forensic search of the defendant’s computer, they found that he had over 450 different email addresses and like related fields at various websites listed out for victims.
00:21:50:08 – 00:21:52:11
Keith
So you can boil it down and say he had at least
00:21:52:11 – 00:22:05:29
Keith
450 victims on his computer alone that they know about that they know about. So he went from the tens of thousands to at least about 500 victims.
00:22:05:29 – 00:22:18:23
Keith
Hey, with that ohhhh we’re getting to the good parts, aren’t we? I want to get into how he made his fat stacks, but I have to pause here because we’re at the end of Act one, which was tragedy and opportunity.
00:22:18:28 – 00:22:28:40
Keith
And Act two is actually called make fat stacks. So you’re going to have to come back for Act two to hear about how he actually monetized all what I just explained to you.
00:22:28:40 – 00:22:37:29
Keith
So if there’s anything that you like in this episode, please like subscribe, thumbs up, follow whatever positive thing it is in your application.
00:22:37:29 – 00:22:50:18
Keith
That’s really that would mean so much to me and help this podcast bubble up the charts and it’s the easiest thing I can ask you for that and doesn’t involve any money. Just clicking a couple buttons and it helps me on a lot. I really appreciate it.
00:22:50:18 – 00:22:52:20
Keith
All right, Thanks. Bye.
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