Inside Industrial-Scale Cybercrime | Tobin Shea

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Episode Topics:

• Discover how a scientist uncovered a multi-trillion dollar dark web economy
• Learn about innovative biometric solutions for firearm safety
• Get an insider’s look at industrial-scale cyber fraud operations
• Understand how scientific methods apply to fighting cybercrime
• Hear shocking revelations about modern money laundering techniques

 

 

Rick Jordan  

Rick, what’s shaken? Hey, I’m Rick Jordan, and today we’re going all in. I want you to share this with three people today because I was looking through the notes for this show ahead of time, and it’s a crazy, crazy transition. It is from Rare Disease genetic research into dark web monitoring and some other things you know, which are identity theft, data breaches, all that, which is my wheelhouse, of course, along with everything else that I do, being an auto Didact or a polymath. Now, look those words up. We don’t talk about those much either. My guest today is in Walnut Creek, California, right now, I just finished my lunch. He’s about to eat his as soon as we’re done recording this show. Tobin Shay, welcome, man.

 

Tobin Shea  

Hi, Rick. Thank you so much for having me today,

 

Rick Jordan  

dude. It’s good to have you on. And I was looking through everything ahead of time and redoing it. And, you know, my team can see me, you know, when you can’t see me, and the faces I was making, I was like, Whoa. You know, that’s why, like, that’s an interesting transition, man, because I certainly, like, Dang Tobin’s a really, really smart dude, which is awesome. And, you know, genetic disease research, you know, and some of these things, you know, hereditary hemorrhagic, this next word I cannot, I will not, get right. Thank you. Yeah. I mean hemorrhagic Sure, but that what or what? Okay, I’m gonna shut up and not try to read these words anymore. I know, right, but you know, it’s interesting because you develop several patent pending ventilators, right in response to firearm safety devices. That’s

 

Tobin Shea  

sure. Yeah, so during COVID 19 pandemic, I have some patent pending ventilator technology to you know, that was a big issue early on, and then in response to some of the gun violence we’ve seen the US, I also invented some firearm safety devices. So different issues, but I like to think I contributed a little bit

 

Rick Jordan  

that’s interesting. Yeah, I mean, the ventilators are great, but you’re talking firearm safety devices now that this is also my wheelhouse, from having a private protection agency before, too. So what, what specific type of safety devices are you looking at? Sure?

 

Tobin Shea  

So I took a pretty unique approach, you know, I think, I think we get into this dichotomy, especially, you know, mainstream media politics, categorize people as, yeah, right. We either categorize people as, you know, 100% unlimited guns for everyone, or zero guns, never for anyone, no

 

Rick Jordan  

matter what that seems to be, the way it’s presented, isn’t it,

 

Tobin Shea  

exactly, and I, you know, I don’t think, I don’t think it has to be that way. I mean, statistically, it’s just impossible to ignore the fact that there are, every year, hundreds of 1000s of violent crimes, assaults, robberies, that are actually stopped by firearms. So, so I think the pain is so black and wet is, you know, firearm bad is not quite accurate. However, I do also understand that, you know, the need and desire to to, you know, have have some levels of safety and protection integrated. So the device I came up with was a device that was made for the AR 15 type rifle that essentially, kind of bear hugs the magazine area and prevents the changing of the magazine unless you can biometrically verify that you are the legal owner of the firearm. You know, a lot of times in these crimes, it’s stolen firearms that are being used or, you know, a parent’s firearm, a grandfather’s firearm. So by doing this, we cannot disable the firearms capacity to be used in a defensive situation. But by preventing the magazine from being changed, except by the lawful owner, you take a lot of the, you know, potential dangers out of out of, you know, said weapon.

 

Rick Jordan  

That’s interesting, man. Now you’re talking biometrics right now, I’m gonna give you real world scenarios here, because I have a biometric gun safe right next to my it’s a small safe right next to my bed, right? Sure. And within it is a Glock 19 ready to go, already chambered, you know, it’s for defense, just in case something happens. Right? The only thing I don’t like about it, maybe it’s just because of the type that I have, you know, but it’s, it takes a little bit, you know, to so I’m comparing this, what you’re talking about, like, to actually read my fingerprint, you know. And when it comes to that, I mean, I’ve been trained, of course, you know, I’ve been licensed to carry in 37 different states that that’s great. I’ve had a private protection agency where I could carry full time, even open carry if I wanted to, because of the legality of the business and the protection nature of that security role, you know. And two to three seconds is like life changing, you know. And this is something that I was taught, and data shows that somebody can run 21 feet in just a matter of two to three seconds. You. Yeah, that’s all it is. So that’s when I look up like, Can’t this thing move any quicker, you know? But then is it quicker to punch numbers in and open the thing, whatever it is. But how does yours change? That, you know? Because I think it might be different with changing a magazine, you know, because you’ve got you can obviously take cover real quick. Obviously, I’ve been training these scenarios, you know, to change out the magazine, but it’s still two to three seconds wouldn’t appear as yours quicker. Yeah,

 

Tobin Shea  

so you’re right, you know, with any technology, there’s going to be some some lag time. And, you know, I’ve seen the biometric safes too, usually Holding, holding, click, okay, there it is. So my, my, you know, imagined use case would be that you would actually, you know, like you said, your Glock 19 is ready to go, locked and loaded next to your bed. You know, unloaded gun doesn’t work. That’s, that’s just true, yeah,

 

Rick Jordan  

or even a gun with a safety on, for that matter, because, again, like, that’s precious time. Yeah,

 

Tobin Shea  

exactly. So my imagined use case would, the gun would actually be loaded, and the device would not hamper the loading of the gun. So if you wanted to keep it, you know, hot in the safe, that’s fine, and you should have, depending on your state, you know, 10 to 30 rounds all ready to go for whatever defense situation you need. That being said, if someone does steal it, they will have a maximum of 10 rounds of, you know, potential damage to inflict before that gun is locked out and now useless to them. So it’s not a perfect system. You know, if someone steals it, they would have 10 rounds to inflict some damage. But you look at every live shooting scenario, there’s mag change after mag change after both. Police are getting under control. So this, again, it’s a little bit of a compromise, but the compromise will allow for a lawful gun owner to to still be safe and defend himself. And it gets it puts a big wrench in the works of, you know, someone trying to use this for, you know, immoral purposes,

 

Rick Jordan  

no doubt. And I know we talked about before the show, having the real talk, right? You know, there’s not much editing that happens on the show, and it’s because I love the non political conversations about topics that are heavily made political. Yeah. So when you mention data, you know, I love looking at the data of these things, because I’m always just in search for what the actual truth is, you know, and then you can formulate an opinion, of course, based upon that. But the, but the no guns to the let them run wild and free, there’s really no data that backs up either those perspectives. Is there

 

Tobin Shea  

no, absolutely not. And, you know, I totally agree with you, you know. And I think if we’re going to find the solution. That means we need to accurately diagnose the problem first, if we just keep making things up that are very emotional and, you know, I understand the plea by both sides, but if we’re just going to stay in these emotional arguments, we’re not really honing in on the real problem, which means whatever solution we come up with isn’t actually going to address the problem because we didn’t take the time to actually investigate. So I like to look at numbers and try to, you know, de politicize things wherever possible, because that usually doesn’t lead to productive conversations. De

 

Rick Jordan  

politicize then humanize. That’s the best way to take it, man, it’s a cool conversation we’ve developed just off of literally three words of your bio firearm safety devices. It’s awesome, man. I take a look back because Illinois was talking about data, right? I love data. Illinois was the last state, the very last state, to hold out on a concealed carry license, and it even had to be overturned by the Supreme Court in 2013 and went all the way to the United States Supreme Court because the state of Illinois very similar politics to California, of course, in New York, you know, which happens to be the state that I’m in here, is Illinois. It’s it’s interesting, because as soon as that was done, you saw a sharp drop in the amount of home invasions in the data of home invasions, because these were, of course, firearms that the the offenders acquired illegally. You know, whether it was a stolen weapon or something from a family member to perpetuate the crimes. But all of a sudden there was almost, it was like a playing field leveler. And they were they started at least. This is perception and opinion. Now, the data was that home invasions dropped substantially. Then perception of opinions from my side, it’s like, well, they can get shot back at now, you know, they’re very concerned. It’s, it’s, you get into the conversation like, do nuclear deterrence really work, you know, in those scenarios, and it’s like, well, it’s held things at bay for about 80 years so far, the nuclear deterrence, you know. But where’s the middle ground on these things? And I love finding that, you know. And I think even in something like what you’re in with rare genetic disease research, there’s probably data that scatters the whole realm of theories and hypotheses. Isn’t there? And then how do you settle on something in any. A sort of data research project to get to where it’s like, Hey, this is it

 

Tobin Shea  

absolutely, yeah. So in science too, it’s funny, you know, during the COVID 19 pandemic, science as a weird abstract that, you know, kind of trust the science. That was such a funny phrase to me

 

Rick Jordan  

to but I like you.

 

Tobin Shea  

Thank you, Rick. It was just a funny phrase to me, like, where is the science? Can I look at this? You know, it was weird, but in the science, if

 

Rick Jordan  

you’re not watching this on YouTube, please go to at least check out Tobin’s facial expressions. It’s awesome. Anyways, continue.

 

Tobin Shea  

You know, it’s just so interesting because, you know, being, you know, I’m hardly going to call myself, you know, in academics, but as someone who’s who’s done research and spent a lot of time, you know, learning, learning about science, nothing is absolute. You know, everything is the best leading theory, data supports the idea that, you know, nothing is nothing is so absolute, and it was weird to see it presented that way in the media, but you’re right. Everything comes down to the data. The best possible idea we have for now and then, usually in a few years, another study comes up and says, Okay, wait. Maybe that was all wrong because new evidence. So it’s this ongoing conversation, and it’s really not as concrete as you know it’s been presented. So I think that’s important for people to understand that most of science is just based on the data. What seems most likely is that, you know, insert hypothesis here, or insert theory here, for

 

Rick Jordan  

sure. And sometimes you take your best guess, and then you can get lucky when it comes to data too. No joke, I was just,

 

Tobin Shea  

yeah, that’s, that’s how you know. That’s the scientific method, right? You have a hypothesis, you which is more or less a guess. You’ve observed some stuff, and you say, Hey, I think this is what’s going on. And then you test it, and you might be right, it might be wrong, or maybe somewhere in between, Dude, you

 

Rick Jordan  

just don’t you. I mean, you, I love how you’re doing the air quotes with the science, right? You know? Because it seems like a lot of the last two years just completely through the scientific method out the window, because it came to, yes, you have a hypothesis out of observation, but then there was never any testing after that to either prove or disprove the hypothesis, you know, and whether that was, and I’m not going to get, I’m not going to go on a political soapbox with this, but you know, if it was masks, vaccines, whatever, there was near really, never any testing to see what the rates Were of transmission, or if these things actually functioned, it was just using the data that was made to put in to generate these things. And it’s like, Okay, here’s, as you said, the science. You know what was the science? Because the science has to include after a hypothesis, it has to include the testing phase to prove or disprove. Yeah. And then when I said, like, you just get lucky, there’s an article I was reading the other day about a medication that was for endometrial cancer, you know, because now we’re back into the into the disease, disease research here, right? And they had a hypothesis that was based upon some data, then they went and tested it, and, dude, they got freaking lucky, because they got so lucky that it cured 100% and it was rectal cancer. They used a drug for endometrial cancer, had some data, formulated a hypothesis, then tested it on a group of people, and it was a 100% cure rate, you know. So that was the thing. It’s like. We’re going to try to prove this. Nobody was ever expecting that, because it’s never happened before. They got lucky by actually just saying, but the only way you got lucky is actually by doing. Oh, man, I did. That’s true. People have told me, Oh, you’re just so lucky. I’m like, No, it’s momentum. No, it’s momentum. But dude, you only get lucky because you actually did in the first place, you actually took some kind of action. Sure.

 

Tobin Shea  

Yeah, definitely. So you know, you’re right that it’s one thing. Have hypothesis. It’s one thing to go through the testing and then support, you know, your hypothesis, and kind of graduate to it to a theory, more or less. And I think in the last two years, especially around COVID, I think I think two things kind of happened. One, I mean, it is, it is difficult to do tests, especially when it’s non laboratory setting. This was, this was real people, you know, really experiencing a virus. So obviously, there’s ethical, I don’t want to call them boundaries, but, but parameters to take into account. You couldn’t, for example, say, Okay, we have 100 people with COVID. We’ll treat half of them and not treat the other half. That’s unethical. So that does make it harder to test things like like that, especially when we’re going through it now, on a, you know, quite literally pandemic scale. So I’ll give the scientists a little bit of slack there. But the other thing that I

 

Rick Jordan  

won’t give the politician slack though, I’ll give the scientist. I’ll give the scientists some slack, but not the politicians I

 

Tobin Shea  

agree with. You there the and that, that is my next point. The science also got politicized. And I think that is a great disservice. And a lot of the big publications, you know, I don’t, I don’t want to name the specific one, but one of them actually came out and said, you know, for our first time, and however many decades, so and so, journal is getting political. And they kind of framed that as a good thing, like, we’re entering politics, this is a good thing. And I read that, I said, this is horrible, yeah, science and politics, you know, should have very little to do with each other. You know, that’s just bad when our scientists are going to have, I mean, science, Aren’t we trying to eliminate bias? Yeah, by entering politics, we’re entering a realm of almost peer bias. So right

 

Rick Jordan  

1. And that was one of the reasons why NASA stayed private for so many years, too, is because it was able to have the separation. Of course, there was federal funding that goes into it, you know, does it? But that’s, that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? Is that private and public are supposed to have this cohesion together in order to do the best for mankind. I

 

Tobin Shea  

think so too. In theory, in theory, it’s a great system. And, you know, execution, usually things don’t go, Yeah, I’ll be

 

Rick Jordan  

a little ideological today for you. How about that? Tobin, dude, thanks for indulging me and all that. But yeah, I appreciate that we’re on the same page on all these things too, because it’s just the page of truth. You know, it’s down the middle. Just give me the hard data. I agree. I

 

Tobin Shea  

agree. I you know, I think if everyone was willing to sit down with each other, and, you know, put aside the passion behind, you know, whatever, whatever point they’re arguing, I think, I think the middle ground is a lot more reasonable than people think, and it’s easier to arrive there if you’re willing to give that conversation time today, that’s that’s what I like to think, very

 

Rick Jordan  

eloquently said, my friend. Now, let’s shift gears real quick, because you’ve done all these amazing things. And by the way, I feel everybody that I’m really talking to a genius right now, just because of everything that he’s gone through. It’s incredible, incredible brain on zoom right now in front of me. So you went from all of these amazing things, right? You know, rare disease research and firearm safety devices, and now you have something going on with Dark Web surveillance. You know, that’s a heck of a shift, man. You know, how did that first? We’ll get into what you’re doing in a minute. But why that shift? How’d you make that shift?

 

Tobin Shea  

Sure, so kind of, you know, behind the resume, something my whole life that I’ve been, you know, very interested in, fascinated by, is, you know, computers and and cyber security and, you know, kind of all the things going on under the hood that we don’t, we don’t interact with on every day, like, like the dark web. So certainly, while I was, you know, getting educated and stuff all, you know, all that is very transparent on the resume, but again, behind the scenes, I just have this deep fascination for for this sort of stuff and and, you know, credit, where credit’s due. Mostly, our co founder is, he’s a real computer genius here. And we actually grew up as great friends together and kind of as a pet project, actually, we were curious. We thought, you know, but by exploring the dark web, we’re seeing, you know, kind of fraud on the industrial scale, really, yeah. And we were kind of curious, Hey, I wonder, how many, how many credit cards do you think are getting sold on the dark web? I don’t know. That’s a great question. Let’s find out. So just as kind of a pet project, you know, my our co founder, developed a kind of monitoring technology, and we’re just looking at how, how quickly cards were turning over on the dark web. It’s very quick, by the way, and seconds very quickly, yeah, and very, very quickly, we were able to realize this is valuable information we’re gathering, and this could be helpful information, if shared with the right people. So then we kind of built a business model out of it, and changed the focus to enriching data to a usable level that we could share with with law enforcement and potential clients as well.

 

Rick Jordan  

That’s incredible. So what were some of the biggest discoveries that you found?

 

Tobin Shea  

Sure, again, I think, I think when we when we started, we knew, yeah, of course, there’s some, there’s cyber criminals, there’s hackers, you know, living in basements and and stuff. But when we really started kind of crunching the numbers, I’m talking 10s of millions of cards being sold every year, and that’s just credit and debit card, then we said, well, oh my gosh, there might be even more social security numbers and, you know, people’s home addresses, phone numbers, you know, just personal identifiable information, or PII, for short, getting sold. And again, it just reached this industrial scale that was kind of hard to fathom, actually. You know, how much was was really going on.

 

Rick Jordan  

It’s interesting because, I mean, that’s my world that I live in, right, having a cyber security company and. Yeah, it’s the dark web is an interesting thing. You know, there was a documentary that just released a couple of weeks ago that I’m in. It was the sequel to an original called Cyber crime. But this one is called the Dark Web uncovered, you know. And one of the points that I made in it was, you know, the dark web is actually really just where the transaction takes place, and that’s where you are having all of your data and research involved with but then there’s also delivery of the goods. I’d be interested even beyond that, I don’t know how you would capture this data. You see the credit cards turn over so much on the dark web. But then how long does it take from that to get to the actual fulfillment of the product, and the product can be, if we’re talking real, you know, anything from drugs all the way down to human beings in trafficking, yeah. And

 

Tobin Shea  

so we actually, we briefly, unofficially, it didn’t pan out, you know, budgetary issues and, you know, whatnot. It’s a big machine. But we briefly helped out with the United States Postal Service and delivering or identifying packages that were used to deliver illicit substances, mostly drugs. Kind of funny, little unknown fact, it’s theorized that the US Postal Service is the largest drug distributor in the world. That

 

Rick Jordan  

wouldn’t surprise me. Yeah,

 

Tobin Shea  

and, you know, pros and cons of the Fourth Amendment are, you know, of course, our individual privacy, but it also makes it hard for the government to, you know, do mass, you know, like package scanning and stuff like that,

 

Rick Jordan  

especially when it’s domestic, you know, coming in from overseas, it’s a different story, because it has to go through customs, and that’s scanned all along

 

Tobin Shea  

customs, they catch a lot domestic. They have to have pretty compelling evidence to open it back. You got it. So you’re right. The fulfillment is that’s a whole nother crazy process. And you know, to some extent, you can monitor, you know, try to monitor shipping trends and things like that. But I believe it was the Hydra market that was recently closed down this year in a pretty neat multinational campaign. But one of their services was money laundering. So you set them your Bitcoin and they sent you a, no kidding, a duffel bag of cash. And how they would do it was, you know, you would send them your Bitcoin. Of course, they’d probably take a, you know, 10, 15% fee off the top, and then you would get a message of GPS coordinates, and you would go to said coordinates at said day, and you would dig up a duffel bag of money. That’s the wildest thing ever that sounds like something out of a movie, and they moved, I mean, who knows how much money that way? Some speculate millions. Others speculate billions of money by this crazy drop service of bearing duffel bags around the world for cyber criminals to learn it.

 

Rick Jordan  

No joke. You know, I talk to my team a lot here on the on the cyber side. And, you know, nobody within the cyber security company was involved with my private Protection Agency, and I blending those two together. It’s exactly what you’re talking about. I would tell stories and be or just say, well, this kind of stuff goes on, and almost all of them are just disbelief, right? No way, no way. That’s real. Just like you said, it sounds like it’s something out of a movie. I’m like for real. There’s a world out there that is exactly what you’re saying right now. That is still just like some kind of drop from a James Bond movie. This is how this stuff takes place. Money laundering is still live and well, and by the way, that’s why the Secret Service was actually initiated to begin with, outside of presidential protection, most of what the Secret Service does, even to this day, has to do with counterfeit money and money laundering. That’s the I think that’s like 75% of their budget. Man, it’s insane.

 

Tobin Shea  

Absolutely. Yeah, you know, I think it was an interesting statistic. I think it was about 1/5 of the world economy is thought to be part of the, quote, black economy, illegal things. And that comes out to, oh, gosh, I think it was some like, $16 trillion a year was part of the illegal economy. Yeah, that’s a lot of money. Yep, 16 a year. So you bet that there is industrial, you know, business going on at that scale to support $16 trillion you bet there are delivery services. And you know, money laundering, cash drops, and you know only a fraction of that exists on the dark web. But you know, the point is, it’s a big industry, and big industries need, you know, large stable companies to support them, and they exist.

 

Rick Jordan  

You got that right? Man, wow. This is exciting. You know, we’ve had, we’ve gone such through an array of conversation today, starting out with three words from your bio about firearm safety, going into genetic research and dark. Web surveillance. Man, you’ve done so much. You know, it’s interesting how you’ve started to cross all these different thresholds, but I see the common thread across all of them. Man, and it’s data, really, if I were to phrase it a different way, it’s truth, you know, that’s what I appreciate. It’s about what you’re doing, and I can’t wait to see what you’re going to do next now. Man, we’re gonna, we’re gonna stay in touch, for sure, and I’m excited to see what, what is next you got to have something cooking up in that amazing, ginormous brain of yours.

 

Tobin Shea  

Thank you so much. Yeah, no, I would certainly love, love to stay in contact. But you’re right, data, data, truth. And you know, when I meet clients, or, you know, potential investors, fundraising question, science background, that’s interesting as you get into this. And I always say, you know, I’m a scientist. First, everything we do here at mindwise, our cybersecurity, fraud prevention company, it’s all about the data. It’s all backed by data. 

 

Rick Jordan  

So scientist first, brilliant website, mindwise.io, check it out. Connect with Tobin on LinkedIn. It looks like Tobin. Shay, S, H, E, A dude. Thanks for coming on today, man. I appreciate the conversation.

 

Tobin Shea  

Thanks so much, Rick, it was a great time for you.