Connor Tumbleson
Appearances
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And this interview guy, he goes, hey, why don't you change your name, turn off your camera and just sit in this call? And I was like, holy cow, that is amazing. It was your idea. I love it. I want to sit here and figure out what's going on. So I change my name, you know, I turn off my Zoom camera and I'm sitting in the call when he admits another Connor Tumbleson.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And this is where the story goes even crazier is I then sit in a call and listen to a guy with kind of this accent that I can't place. I think I can safely say it's probably not American, but I don't know where. And this guy then proceeds to say that he's Connor Tumbleson.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And not only that, he starts reading off all my accomplishes, even says his GitHub address, which is odd because I haven't changed my alias online alias in like 20 years. So Ibotpeaches everywhere is me. So to hear someone say that, it was just extremely upsetting. And I'm just sitting in this call, listening to this guy proceed to just list things.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
I can tell he's reading the sheet word for word that I'm looking at.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Yep, definitely that. And I'm talking to some co-workers at the same time during this because we're just all sitting around because they're all at this point involved in the story. And I couldn't stay on mute any longer. It was just really, really rough. I thought I could sit there and just listen to information. But I turned my camera on and kind of just started talking.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And I said, hey, I'm the real Connor Tumbleson. So who are you? And I didn't get, I think, more than five, 10 words out of my mouth. And he just dropped the call. which was pretty sad because I really wanted to figure out if we could have just a candid conversation of why this was happening. But he left the call immediately. What was going through your mind after that interview?
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Just the fact that another Conor joined the call, a fake me, I was so confused because I was under the impression initially that this guy I was talking to, Andrew, had ended up joining the call and going forward with this. And I was like, why would he do that? He just leaked it all to me. I couldn't really figure out in my head how there was actually someone joining the call.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Yeah, exactly. So at that point, I'm talking to the interviewer again because the other Connor has left the call. I was like, hey, do you mind just sending me everything you have? I was asking for who applied, how did he apply, etc. This guy goes, yeah, sure. Can I have your e-mail address? I was like, hey, just take the e-mail they gave you and take the two off the end of it.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
it was such an embarrassingly copied email. It was just my email with a number two at the end. So sure enough, this company, they then email me and it's just screenshots of Upwork. And it's, this is where I got way more creeped out is it was a fake Upwork of me. And once again, it was a highly detailed resumes accomplishments.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
They even had like a random Laravel certification I got from a few years ago. And I didn't even put that on anywhere except in a tweet. So I was like, This is a crazy amount of detail that someone went to to make a real truthful, but also exaggerated in a lot of regards, Upwork account of me.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Yeah. And I think I honestly had never really used Upwork or, you know, only slightly heard of it myself at the time. So I was also Googling, what is this thing? And yeah, just as you described, it seemed like It was just an ad hoc applying to a job as an individual using my fake information.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
So at this point, now that I have screenshots of my fake Upwork account, including my real photo that was like a recent work photo, I was like, okay, this is getting really crazy now. I thanked the interviewer for really letting me sit on the call. I said, thanks for this info and took all that info and then wrote another large email to Andrew where I honestly asked him, was that you on the call?
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Because I really had no idea what was going on at this point because I couldn't really figure out how a third Connor joined the call. And Andrew, after he gets back from class, actually responds and he gives me a ton of information. He not only sends me every email that he, you know, went back and forth with this Marist person to like establish this fake employment.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
But he also sends me screenshots of all these Slack channels where he only joined that day as, you know, part of joining this kind of paid work thing. So now I basically have Upwork screenshots, Slack screenshots, and email screenshots.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
It's like a never-ending circle of just bouncing between fake emails. And that's where it just gets crazy. I'm trying to follow this weirdness of I can't trust anything. Everyone's fake. The person Andrew is talking to is not even Maris because Maris is just another impersonated individual. So I'm just really losing track of who's real or not.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
P&D, I find their website because they just explained it in their Slack channel, a P&D design. I just start, you know, doing basic things, trying to figure out other websites P&D design built. I'm just trying to figure out who owns P&D design. I end up finding the person who owns it. I call them once or twice. No one ever picks up. I email them. No one ever responds. I don't know what to do.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
I just wanted to talk to someone who was associated with P&D design and they just never respond to any of my reaching out. I don't remember if I put it in the blog post, but I called a lot of the numbers that were in the document that Andrew got from P&D. And those numbers were like these American embassies in foreign countries. I was like, this is crazy.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
I was like, I don't even mean to call these numbers. And here I am thinking it's some official number for a business, and I'm calling embassies.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Yeah, and I think at the same time, I'm trying to behind all the websites that P&D Design built, and they had this weird obsession about disabling right-click. It seems like such an old technique to stop your right click. And I'm just like finding all these sites. And I think that they're in the hundreds of just all these sites disable right click.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
They have the same Google Analytics ID and they have this weird footer where it's like, hey, we created it P&D design. But guess what? Our CEOs by CEO crunches and our ITs by IT tech fixes. And the design was via visible dev. And all these companies are P&D basically. Yeah.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
He would write emails saying, Hey, this is going to sound extremely strange, but... I feel like I'm getting my identity something impersonate. I don't know how to explain it. But can you answer a simple question? Did a company PND design build your website? I thought it was a pretty simple ask.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Unfortunately, you know, some people told me some very just rough things like to just mind my own business, ignored me or refused to help me. Except for one guy that I think after I talked a few emails back and forth, understood I was a real person and then finally told me, yes, we had never worked with this company before.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
So at this point, I'm realizing that I don't think I can trust a single thing that is going on in this Slack channel, in this email chain. And the story just continues to grow in these weird angles.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
So at this point, I felt like I had done a good deal of research. I'd kind of tracked down who I thought was involved, what was going on, all thanks to Andrew kind of leaking this information to me and I think, holy cow, I have a lot of information to finish my blog post and make a presentation.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
I'm emailing myself my fake email. Sure enough, the email account of my fake self responds and just tells me, I don't remember exactly, but I think they said I look cute or something, which I think is the strangest thing, because I'm fuming kind of at this point of why someone's using my real name and everything, and they're just joking around.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Of course, I add that screenshot to the blog post, and I think that's what a lot of folks on Reddit and Twitter all like the most, is just that random screenshot of me emailing myself.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Because then I finished that blog post. And I think that's where the story gets even stranger. Because that blog post just skyrockets to the top of Hacker News within, I think, an hour of me posting it. And my poor little Linode server falls over because it's never had more than like 1,000 hits and it's getting 20,000 at it.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
What I didn't really recognize with getting to the top of Hacker News is how many people just offered to join your kind of investigation and search. And then I have people everywhere just DMing me, messaging me of other similar emails and similar kind of slacks and messages, but different names.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And I was like, this is a huge story because people are giving me personal examples where they were like an interviewer. Someone was like, I jumped on a call with someone because they wanted to talk through it. And this one guy at a random company was like, we were talking to an interviewee.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
who didn't know anything of why he was on the call or who he was talking to, he was asking us questions of why he was there. I was thinking that's crazy because that rings a bell. If you don't know anything of why you're joining a call except given a document a couple minutes before you're supposed to be there, I could see that happening. Then people
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
are telling me, oh, I live kind of by where P&D Design is, their headquarters. And they're like, we'll go visit the office for you. And I was like, well, thanks. And it starts piecing together some things.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
I then get a link to Brian Krebs of just all of his investigative research. And someone links me to one of his articles where he was like investigating all these fake LinkedIn profiles of like the upwards of 100, 200,000 of them. I'm thinking this is insane. There's people – all these fake profiles on LinkedIn. I know they're on Upwork." I was like, the story is huge.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
I just unfortunately was one person that's a bit more connected than I think of others that may have no idea their information was harvested to make a real looking profile to then use to get a job from.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Yeah. I mean, it has to get crazy because at that point you're thinking, let's say that goes successfully and you end up hiring a fake me. We can tell from the Slack conversations,
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
that had Andrew successfully done this interview, he doesn't need any technical experience at this point because they say all technical requirements should just be gathered and given back to the Slack channel, where presumably a lot of engineers are waiting to do whatever task is requested.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
So then I'm thinking at this point, you are basically becoming maybe a project owner, manager, or someone to just manage kind of engineers behind you, but you're just the front-facing English-speaking person. And I think that's a kind of motto in business design that happens and works everywhere. So I'm thinking, why is this happening in a more kind of more malicious intent way of – hiding that.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And I'm thinking maybe this is some Upwork thing where it's easier to hire an individual that's maybe masquerading as a company behind it. And I'm getting confused because I'm thinking, how are you getting paid? What is kind of, you know, the legal, what social numbers, like social security numbers are getting used? Like this is just employment at the end of the day.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
pay by bitcoin forever there has to be something or some real names come out and then when i'm this blog post is out there and more and more people are reporting this i'm thinking this must be working because so many people are telling me that they're finding like cold emails to them to be part of it or it's happened to them or they've interviewed people they suggest like guess it happened to
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Sometimes people are hesitant to join with another company or work with them versus doing a quick contract job with a single individual. But what if you're like working with a single individual who's kind of hiding behind a company just without your knowledge?
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And I think that is maybe what's kind of an attraction on Upwork is you get these individuals kind of even fake me profiles that come in at really low offers of working and say, I'm a single individual. I can do all these tasks with a really great resume. But little do you know if you hire that individual.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
that you might have an entire dead team behind you that you just never meet, know, or interact with. And I think that's my current running theory.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
I think probably on GitHub, it's probably definitely harder to make fake ones because you can just look back, I think, on my profile and see a couple of 10, 15 years of just commit history. I think you're definitely copying and pasting those. Even if you took all the repos, you're going to have a pretty empty historic graph. And... Maybe that's exactly why.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
People just, it's easier just to claim one is yours and talk about it.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
I don't think I'm doing anything kind of wrong. I'm just working two jobs at once and none of the companies know. And I think, holy cow, this guy's just dumping knowledge out to me. And I was thinking, is this this whole employment remote is crazy.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Yeah, that's a crazy one too. I think one person tweeted me that one of maybe it's just a state-sponsored unlimited budget, just see how many companies you can join and then extract information.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
No, unfortunately neither. I had sent many emails to Maris, the real Maris email, and never got a response. And I just gave up calling, leaving voicemails with PND. I sent LinkedIn messages. I sent more. I kind of even worded things as I just want to have a good conversation, but just no response.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Yeah. Today, I think where I am now is I continue to just research things people give me and just go through this entirely large list of, I'd say, roughly 100 websites. I'm just continuing to reach out and find contact information for all of them to just see if anyone is willing to talk to me on who built their website, how's the interaction.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
and all the communication between them and the company to kind of figure out if I can find any more information besides what I continue to find is just fake emails, generic documents, and any lack of just true, real information. Because I think someone paid someone at some point and knows some real, real info.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Yeah, so I'm Connor Tumbleson. I'm just kind of an engineer here in Tampa, kind of really gone up the steps over the years. I think I'm our director of engineering now, so I kind of just really do a lot of tech stuff.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. I'm sitting at lunch, you know, and your phone goes off and I get just one of those weird subject titles that I think is just an easily deletable one. I think it word for word was something like, Connor, your identity is stolen.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And I was just like, yeah, this is probably spam because it came from kind of an address I didn't recognize. It looked like a bunch of kind of foreign characters I didn't recognize. And I was like, oh, yeah, this is this is a delete. But then before I deleted, I saw it in an attachment. I was like, OK, I'm on my phone.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
This is, I think, probably an easy preview, especially since it was kind of a suspect email. But thankfully, I could just preview it and I previewed it and it was like my resume, but it wasn't. I was like, this is really odd.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
I kind of just quickly ate my lunch, you know, and kind of ran back to my computer and just jumped on to view it, you know, in Gmail. And at that point when I expanded it for real, I saw it was way more than like my resume. It was like an introduction of me from like a, I was really rough reading it from very first inspection because it was like someone trying to pretend they were me.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Because not only was the email just clearly wrong, but the address was like an address that was for sale on Zillow kind of right around where I live. Then it was my resume. Then it was like information about a company. And then it was information of like a fake cover letter I wrote. And at this point, I'm thinking, holy cow, what is going on here?
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Because now I think this is actually legitimate because there's someone that's put a great deal of effort into taking a lot of my true, you know, like earned achievements, whatever, school, everything, but then mixed it with a bunch of things that are lies, which I think, funny enough, boosted my resume in a way. But, yeah, they weren't true.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
It was just a mixture of lies and truth in a huge document.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Yeah, so it was weird. He was telling me that there was this guy, Maris, and it's just a guy that was hiring him to be an engineer. And I was like, OK, what does that have to do with me? And then he says, like, you know, in the next sentence in the email, he's like, it turns out I was supposed to pretend to be you and I didn't feel comfortable with it and sent me the doc.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
So I read that, I read the doc, and I'm still thinking, this is weird. Because as you just mentioned, like, I'm getting suspicious that the guy just wants me to sign into something, buy something. So I just sent a quick response. And I said, so to get this right, you were hired at a company and then paid to pretend to be me for an interview.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And he responds and goes, yeah, I'm about to go to class. But here's a few log snippets of just a Slack channel.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And at this point, I'm actually just getting attached to this, because in the screenshot he sends me, he's talking about... the interview that's supposed to be in like a few hours time that I'm looking at of me that he is like, you know, no longer attending. And this is crazy because I'm also talking to a coworker next to me at this point. Like, should I join this interview? What is going on?
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Like, I feel like someone is pretending to be me in an interview later today. And that is kind of crazy to think about.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Yeah, and I think that's what really kind of really sketched me out or made me feel a bit uneasy. Because at the end of the day, I thought, why not just make some AI generator random document if you're trying to go out there and get jobs? Connor still feels like he needs more details from Andrew. Something just isn't adding up still. I'm trying to actually email him a lot.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
I'm saying like, hey, I need more info here. I dug deeper into this and it's more creepy than I thought. And I was like... Hey, what more can you give me? Can you give me all your email communications? Can you tell me more? And he was like, sorry, I'm going to class. And I was like, oh, so the person that's helping me through this is like no longer available. How did Andrew get involved in this?
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
He mentioned that he kind of just got cold emailed, like just a random email, presumably from his GitHub, where someone reached out and said they were looking for a partner to join him and needed a bit of development experience. And this was a guy that was kind of a fresh developer right out of school that was looking for a kind of place to work, and it seemed like a great chance.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
So I think he continued moving forward with his employment. As they said, they needed a good English-speaking engineer. And he fit all those boxes. Andrew ends up joining this company. They get invited to a Slack channel. And the same day he joins a Slack channel, roughly a few hours later, he ends up getting just a bunch of messages.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Now, when Andrew joined this Slack chat, he was greeted by someone just named PND. This PND person, his acronym, ends up posting to Andrew and says, hey, you're going to pretend to be this person. And it's a link to that document that he ends up linking or kind of sharing to me.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And that's when Andrew realizes, I don't really want to be part of this because Connor looks like a kind of English-speaking engineer. Why am I pretending to be him? And Maris, I mean, Maris or the PND, we don't really know who this person is, says, yeah, Connor's not our engineer. Is that going to be a problem for you? And he says, yeah, that violates his ethical kind of behavior.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And Andrew just ends up leaving and taking a bunch of information with him. So I'm thinking to Andrew, this guy's amazing. Just leaked a bunch of information to me from this whole thing. And I guess lost a job in the process. Probably not the best job, but for someone looking for work, I guess a job was a job.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
Yep, exactly. So I think I opened it around noon, and the interview was at 4 or 4.30. So it was a pretty quick turnaround on all this.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And it, of course, had the Zoom link and the time and the company and the meeting. And I was like, oh, this is crazy. I'm going to use this for sure. So then I join it. But I actually joined the interview about five minutes before it starts. And I'm just kind of sitting in a Zoom channel. You know, it's the Zoom waiting room. I can't really talk to anyone yet. I'm stuck there.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And my fear is I'm sitting in this meeting and someone isn't enjoying before me like another person. And then I'm stuck in kind of a debate. But thankfully, the interviewer, he shows up early and adds me. And we both jump on video, kind of sitting in the same spot I am now.
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And I say, hey, before we jump into interviews, you're not going to believe anything I'm going to tell you, so I'm going to go really quick. And I just proceed to tell this guy, and I think I just spew it out as quick as I can, of saying, like, I didn't apply for this job, but I am indeed the person that you have all the documentation for. And he starts getting really confused here, trying to not
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
him. And I'm trying to explain, no, this is legitimate. I'm the real Connor, but I did not apply for this job. And he starts joking with me, well, your resume is really good. We were hoping this was a real interview. And while we're talking, I'm trying to explain what happened from my perspective, that I got an email. I'm asking him, can you share from your perspective who applied for the job?
Darknet Diaries
133: I'm the Real Connor
And while we're talking about this, because he lets me know that it was on Upwork, that my fake self applied for the job. Then he tells me that there's another Connor Tumbleson in the waiting room. And at this point, I'm kind of freaking out a bit because now another fake Connor has decided to join the call and he's trapped in the meeting room.