Greg
Appearances
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
The one with the Romanian accent is the real one, just to set that up front.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Go into every single version that was released into the credit screen. And on the programmer, there's only one name ever. There's also multiple Romanian quotes from BUG Mafia. It's quite obvious that the author is fucking Romanian.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Because it was just me doing everything. The whole source, I was in possession of it the whole time.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
I learned Delphi by working on Sub7. It was my very first project. It was spaghetti code. That was the main reason it wasn't shared. And every single version was dedicated to BUG Mafia. How do you explain that, Greg?
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
This was at the very end. After I left the scene, there was one version released by Reed101. That's what you're bringing up?
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
How do you explain B.U.G. Mafia in the credits? Can you answer the question? The band... Because they're... Yeah, the band, the Romanian hip-hop band that was mentioned in every single release. It's the band where the nickname Mob Man comes from. How do you explain that? Let me pull up the videos of... We used to listen to them. Videos of what?
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
In 1999, first version that does mention it, BUG Mafia didn't even have any songs online, man. I brought tapes with me from Romania. They were only on tape. You could not have heard of them on the internet in 1999 when this was put in the About credits. It just doesn't make sense, man. Like everything.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
You mentioned that you made it for some Ultima Online things, like to steal credits or something. What was the story, Jack? Because he mentioned it on your podcast.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
It was all an Ultima Online thing. You would find traces of it looking up Ultima Online EXE or INI or something. You could open it up because the server opens up files and you can find those file names if you open the EXE in a text editor. So you'd find it had a method where it would modify win.ini to start up. So you could find that reference in the EXE there. If
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
none of the versions have any sort of reference to any Ultima Online things. Files or EXEs or program names. The stuff that you came up with doesn't make any goddamn sense, man. I'm surprised that it lasted this long, honestly. I'm surprised you were able to push it for this long.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
The master passcode has my birthday in it. That's another one. It has my birthday in it. Are you born in October 15, 1980? How do we know that that's your birthday? I'll send you a picture of my driver's license.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
I highly doubt that it says that. I doubt that you're born on October 15, 1980. Okay. You show me a picture.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Oh, is that what started the whole thing? The whole stealing the identity because the birthdays matched?
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Because it was mentioned. It's on the sub-7 wiki, man. It was a known fact.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
So on the official Sub7 website, there were multiple references to Romania and Craiova, the city where I'm from.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
This is related to the birthday. I'm just going back to the Romanian thing. Like, There's multiple verses in Romanian in the about screens, in a couple of the different versions.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Yeah. So how, like what? It's obviously a Romanian that made it. Not some great guy from Florida.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
And also, yeah, speaking of which... The first five or six versions, the first thing that the About credit said was from Windsor, Ontario. Were you ever in Windsor, Ontario?
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Yeah, you can get any of the versions. Download any of the old versions. There's multiple. There's 12, 15. Do you have them all? Every single one, you can go to the About screen. Yeah. And the first five or six say from Windsor, Ontario, dedicated to BUG Mafia. And some of them have quotes in Romanian.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
They don't let me go to Canada. I know they don't because you have a record. How do you explain that then in the credits? You can't, dude. You can't. You can't come up with bullshit fast enough. I'm missing the Euros for this. You're what? You're wasting Euros for this? I'm missing the Euro 2024 soccer game. It's a long game. You'll be all right. I'm just kidding. Romania played yesterday.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
What does a Delphi function start and end with, if you're such a good person?
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
A function. What's the first thing you do after the function? What is the beginning and the end of the block of code? How is that denoted in Delphi? No. How do you define the beginning and the end of a function? You know in C you have the curly brackets? What do you have in Delphi? Like, Jack, this is ridiculous, man. I doubt this guy even touched Delphi, you know?
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
So let's say you define a function. You type the word function and then you put the function name. Then what's on the next line? You begin, you end, you do stuff. That's what I was looking for, man. The beginning and the end. I don't know, it just sounds pretty basic. So you don't even know basic stuff, man?
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Of course you don't. I have notes. I have multiple backup CDs that I burnt with multiple stages of the source. I have a hoodie that I used to sell back then in the store. I took pictures of it. I have the source code. I have multiple proofs.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
At this point, you're just bullshitting. Because there's no GitHub. There's no source. Or if there is, it's definitely not a sub-7 source.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
okay it's zero zero proof it's all talk i have multiple things that i've put out there i gave him all to ill will and he posted them on his twitter there's notes there's little handwritten notes with with ideas and because i worked on this like four years i put a lot of hard work into it this wasn't just some script to to steal ultima online credit like really dude
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
That's the only actual proof he came forward. And that was never actually owned by the real mob man. Never. It's not documented anywhere. I never owned any domains back then because I was trying to stay anonymous. Everybody else was buying them. So all he did is he bought an expired domain. So in the credits also, there's a Gmail account as well.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
How long has it been? It's hilarious. I feel sorry for you, man. Like your biggest accomplishment is impersonating somebody else. Like, you know, I feel sorry for you.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Oh, is that why you go to all the conferences saying you're a mob man? You don't even tell anyone? I don't, because a lot of people don't even know what it is. It has pictures of you at DEFCONs, multiple DEFCONs, when you're going around with mob man and telling everybody you made sub-7. But now you're saying you don't tell people. Come on, dude. Just come out with it.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
I'm saying it right now. I'm coming out and saying, you're the creator. This guy's unknown.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
You have been coming out and saying the truth. Are you going to stop going to places and claiming you're a mob man?
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
You can say you're a mob man, just not the one that made Sub-7. Big difference.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Can we agree on that? Come on. You know you want to. You've been living a lie.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
If anybody, like, for the listeners out there, right, like, If you think you can challenge me or anything like that, or if you knew me from back in the day, just send a message. We'll talk it out. I'm not hiding anything. I can show all the stuff that I talked about. The CDs. I still have the hoodie. I can put it in pictures. I can meet you up if you come over here. I'm still in Windsor.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
To see the proof, right? To see the proof. If anybody wants to challenge me in any way or wants to actually see all this stuff that I'm talking about. I didn't think you were going to show up, honestly. Because really, what could you have said?
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Because you're being outed. Because you're being outed for how much bullshit you've been spewing.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
For something you don't care about, you sure as hell spent a lot of time and effort. This isn't just some fad.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
You've been going around giving interviews as the author of Sub7. How is that not effort put into it? You've been going to DEF CON conferences.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
You're really going with this, man? Like, really? What source code? Why do you keep going back to it? I thought we agreed on you're not going to claim that no more.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
You said sub-7 source, so I'm not going to let you bullshit right now because that's not the sub-7 source. That has never left my hands until it was released by Illwill on GitHub. Never. You'll not find a copy of it anywhere in the world, on any website, on any backup, except the ones I have. So, like... As soon as you said sub-seven source, like, no, dude, stop. You got to stop.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
I made this Sub 7. It's a remote access tool. And it was a Trojan horse virus.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
You could open and close the CD wrong. You could flip the screen. You could hide the start button. You could move the mouse on their screen and click around. You could open up their C drive, change their wallpaper.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
1999, I want to say. And what is the meaning of it? It's... it comes from a rap band a romanian rap band called bug mafia it's a bucharest underground mafia that's their name i'm a big fan of them and when i was thinking coming up with a new nickname it just had a nice ring to it mob man you know yeah yeah i like it yeah
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
It wasn't really a hacking thing. It was more of a programming thing. I taught myself to program when I was very little. I did a whole bunch of little games. This was back when I was still in Romania. So in 97, moved to Canada with the whole family. Then I found out about Delphi. I wanted to start learning in Delphi. So I just happened to pick a rat to work on, basically.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Yeah. Well, it all stemmed from Netbus, right? It preceded Sub-7. It was one of the original Trojans. It was called NetBus, so I played around with that a little bit, and that's kind of what inspired me to create something similar. What did NetBus do? It was the same thing, a remote access Trojan, a rat. It had a little UI and a server. You would send somebody and then connect to them.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
So that's kind of what I was trying to emulate when I started. And then... After I got a couple of features going, I packaged it up and uploaded it to a hacking site. That started picking up steam. I had my contact details on there. And people started sending me emails contacting me. Oh, can you add this? Can you add this? Can you add this? So that's kind of how it grew from there.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
I was like, hmm, I wonder if I can do this in Delphi. So I would look into it, do some research, see if I can find it out. And if it was possible, I would just do it.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
It was all fun at the beginning and for the first many versions, it was all just fun. Having fun with people, you know, playing tricks on them, pranks and things like that. That was the whole motivation behind it and everything else. But then started hearing all these stories about people using it for malicious purposes.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Always in the back of my mind was sort of like, well, there's many of these tools available. They just happened to pick the one I made. They would have just picked a different one if it wasn't for Sub-7. So, I mean, it's part of why I left, I guess, in the end. I wanted to get into something else, some sort of different.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Throughout the whole thing, I've always tagged as a hacker, you know, but I was just a programmer. I was trying to learn to program.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Some of the most popular features in it were the ones just for fun, like the Matrix one. You just turn your whole screen black and you type letters one by one. It was basically a chat, but you couldn't get out of it. You couldn't do anything. You would just chat back and forth with whoever was on the other end.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
The very first time I heard about somebody impersonating my name and taking credit for all this stuff was stemmed from your podcast. I had a local friend, Sebastian, we call him Septa, that is a big fan of your podcast and heard that you had an interview with Mob Man. Obviously, he knew what that was, you know, and was looking forward to listening to it and listen to it.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
And he's like, what is this? Who's this guy? He sent me a message. He's like, yo, I listened to the podcast expecting you. And there's this other guy talking about some random stuff. I don't know what's going on. That's how I found out first. And then a couple of months later, Illwill contacted me. He's the one that started the whole process.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
He sent me a little zip file with a couple of details about me. He had a picture of my car. And he was like, the password for the zip file is your full name. So if it's really you, then you should be able to open it. He's like, I'm 99% sure that it's you, that I've traced you there. And I replied, I said, well, you're right. You can be 100% sure now. And he was the one that kind of
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
not convinced me because i was a little bit indifferent right like i this was a long time ago i don't know if i really want to get back into any of that but he made a good point like a lot of people have made their start with this you know and it's not right to have somebody else take the credit like History should be set straight.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Because the whole thing was I didn't want to publicly say who I was. You know, I didn't want to publicly admit all this stuff. Why was that? I don't know. I don't know. After a really, really long time, it didn't really make any sense to still stay hidden.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
People started getting in trouble for making tools like that at that point. Like you said, you know, like just for making them, not for actually using them. So that contributed to like, I need to get out of here.
Darknet Diaries
150: mobman 2
Yeah. No, no. I never got into any actual trouble or heard of anything, but I kept everything private, like everything. Nobody knew my name, even the people that are closest to me, closest to me in the scene, like part of the crew and things like that. Nobody actually knew. They knew the city I was in. The very first version said the city I was in said from Windsor, Ontario.