Every scam succeeds for the same reason: it makes someone believe a lie long enough to act on it. Brett Johnson spent years perfecting exactly how to do that — as the architect of ShadowCrew, the precursor to today’s dark web markets, before landing on the U.S. Secret Service’s Most Wanted list.
In this opening session of Off the Record: Cybercriminal Confessions, Brett draws on real cases from his own career: the targets he chose, the lies that worked, and the ones that didn’t. No vendor pitch. No script.
What you'll learn
- How attackers choose a target and decide it’s worth pursuing
- The psychological levers that make a scam work — urgency, authority, familiarity, and fear — and why they still work in 2026
- What defenders consistently get wrong about why people fall for social engineering
About the series
Off the Record: Cybercriminal Confessions is a three-part series of candid, unscripted conversations with Brett Johnson:
- Session 1 — August 27: How Criminals Weaponize Trust and Your Brand (this session)
- Session 2 — September 17: How Criminals Manufacture Trust at Scale
- Session 3 — October 8: How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Impersonation
About Brett Johnson
Former United States Most Wanted, Brett Johnson has been a central figure in the cybercrime world for over 20 years. Brett built and was the leader of ShadowCrew, the precursor to today’s darknet markets. He was instrumental in developing many areas of online fraud while helping design, implement, and refine countless social engineering attacks, breaches, and hacking operations.
Today, Brett is one of the world’s foremost authorities on cybercrime and identity theft. He has been featured in the book Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen and on numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, NBC, CNN Money, Wired Magazine, Vice, RT TV, ArsTechnica, The Independent, and more.
