The adventure to Vegas was unreal on multiple levels. I had heard these dudes were taking jets to Florida and California, and I wanted a piece of that for sure. It went with my whole “fuck the system to the max” tweaker mentality at the time. I met Sawyer for the first time as a client when I was dealing ice. You meet all sorts of colorful characters doing that, he was one of the most memorable. I was standing outside my loft in the Heights and Sawyer rolls up in a brand new White BMW X6. He’s white with blonde hair and in his 30’s rolling with 3 other young black dudes. Not the most low profile crew. Sawyer was well spoken, educated, and friendly. He invited me over to his upscale town home that was just down the street from my bachelor pad loft I had rented after my divorce. We both lived in a nice area close to downtown Houston. He had a 4 story town home with an amazing hot tub overlooking downtown Houston on his roof. I always brought a large amount of good quality meth with me wherever I went and always smoked every one out on my shit so he liked when I rolled by. As we became closer friends I learned he was an ex oil and gas software engineer. Ohio State Law and University of North Texas undergrad. It didn’t take long for me to come to the conclusion that Sawyer was actually one the smartest people I have ever met at any time in my life. Dude was smart and did not give a fuck about taking risks.

When we first met, we were both neck deep in our addiction. We had both quit lucrative jobs and said fuck all to the 9 to 5 life. My plan for ongoing income was an underground illegal gambling game room. These gamerooms are hidden in plain sight all over Houston and Dallas. When I asked him what his plans were for a job he detailed out to me his “three pronged business plan.” Prong one was a legit State Farm insurance boutique as a front, prong two was an underground gambling game room, and prong three was (I shit you not,) a hot tub late night club on Washington Ave. What I noticed about Sawyer wasn’t the big game he talked, it’s what he showed me. For example, one day smoking some bowls at his top floor he told me how he didn’t like the way the walls along the stairs were raised to the ceiling on the top level. He told me he was going to cut the wall out and place columns there instead. “Yeah, I don’t like this wall so I am going to just take this whole thing out and place some columns here instead. I think it will really open up the room.” I thought to myself “Yeah, right. Another fleeting tweaker idea.” The next week I went there and sure enough he had contracted with some builders and the wall was gone and there stood these amazing looking columns. Ill be damned if it didn’t actually open up the whole room. It looked awesome. So when he pitched his “three pronged plan” to me and said he wanted me to come on board as the game room operator I told him I was in. I know talent when I see it and I decided I was going to ride Sawyers coattails of talent and intelligence as far as I could. I shared this with him and we decided to start running fraud shit together. Taking his natural intelligence and massive balls of steel and combining that with my meth and knowledge of the consumer finance system. I didn’t know where we would end up, but I had to find out how far we could take this thing. You never hear about the criminals that actually get away with their shit and there are no doubt some out there that still haven’t been caught. Why not us?

 

A lot of crazy shit went down as a result of my friendship with Sawyer, heck just being at Sawyers house in general always generated some type of surreal situation. On a daily basis, people strung out on meth with a lot of money and no jobs wreak havoc on their environment. On a side note, I should mention that while he was a young looking white guy in his 30’s, he was also gay and had an affinity for younger (like 18-22) black gay thuggish type dudes. It actually took me multiple times hanging out with them before it clicked in my head that they gay in the first place. I would usually roll over to his place with a different tweaker girl every time I visited. Being that I was the plug and we decided to partner up, he let me bring any girl I wanted to use his rooftop hot tub.

When we decided to team up, we shared what we were both doing fraud-wise and how we were doing it. He told me that they had just returned from a trip to California on a jet. I would typically call bullshit on something like this, but I had learned by this point that Sawyer didn’t really bullshit about stuff. I told him I wanted in on it and that I wanted to go on the next trip. He said they were planning a trip to Vegas to pick up some motorcycles and asked if I wanted to come. Of course I jumped on that offer. He said, “Alright, well lets book a flight then shall we?” Lol, this guy….as I sat in the room I was shocked to hear how he was doing this. He had taken a commonly used credit card force authorization scam that was used at cell phone stores and was applying it to larger purchases.

The process of this particular scam is to talk an unknowing employee into manually inputting a specific series of commands directly into the credit card terminal. This forces the sale to be processed and prints up a receipt just as if it were a legitimate transaction. The back story to get them to do this can be whatever you want it to be, you can get as creative as you want, just talk them into blindly following your instructions to push those specific buttons. Originally, we would have the person in the store attempting the purchase fake a call to the bank after the initial credit card was declined. That person would then hand the phone over to the employee and make then think they were talking to a bank rep.

So, we walk into AT&T and first identify a target employee, in this example; Shelley. We ring up a couple of IPhones at the counter after briefly chatting about the weather or current events. Anything to show that we are well-spoken and not drugged out losers. We dressed nicely and were clean shaven as best we could.

Shelley: “That’ll be $1,460.87”

Sawyer: “Sure here’s my card” (Hands her his card that’s already been maxed out.)

Shelley: “Sorry sir this card was declined.”

Sawyer: “Yeah, this happens a lot. I had some issues with fraud so I have an authorization code placed on my account. Here let me call Cap One and they will straighten it out.” (Pretends to call the bank, but actually calls one of us. We’ll call this person FBR for Fake Bank Rep). Sawyer pretends to have a discussion with FBR about how his card was declined and that he needs the bank rep to provide the bank authorization process to the store employee so that the transaction can be approved.

Sawyer: “Here, the bank rep would like to speak with you.” He hands his cell phone over to Shelley.

FBR: ”Hello, good afternoon this is Charles Thompson, representative 87654, calling from Capital One Consumer Credit Services on a recorded line, with whom am I speaking?”

Shelley: “Hi, this is Shelley with AT&T. Yes the card was just declined.”

FBR: “Yes, Shelley we have had instances of fraud on this customers account and have implemented an additional level of security authorization in the form of a code. Are you in front of the credit card terminal at the moment?”

Shelley: “Yes I am”

FBR: ”Ok, from the sale screen, select the far right purple button to scroll down. Now go ahead and select the F1 button.” [F1 is the force sale command and the goal is to get them to hit that button to process a forced authorization purchase.]
FBR continues: “Now enter the transaction amount, the credit card number, and then the expiration date. It will ask if the card is present, select “Yes” and enter the three digit CVV code on the back. It should display the amount of the sale is that correct?”

Shelley: “Yes! It is.”

FBR: “Ok perfect. Hit Enter and it should be asking for the 5 digit approval code. Let me know when you are ready…the approval code is 73856.” Please enter that and now press the green Enter button.”

As she hits the Enter button, the receipt shoots out of the terminal just as if it were a legit transaction. It looks like any other legitimate purchase from here on out. It actually doesn’t matter what 5 numbers you give the rep for the authorization code. Any five digit code will work. The codes are meant to be used internally by a company’s accounting department to force a sale in specific situations. Say for example a high level executive or VIP client. Company’s are expected to assign and categorize their own codes for different situations. I could give the girl 12345 and it will work. From her point of view, all that she knows is that she is pushing buttons and all of the sudden the receipt is being produced and it shows as a completed sale.

Once Sawyer saw this in action at a cell phone store he wondered why it wouldn’t work for other purchases. He took everything to the extreme. He developed a process where he completely excluded the involvement of the FBR. He would call different companies and organizations over and over again until he got some new or ignorant employee that accepted his story of the bank having added an authorization code to his account.

Sitting in the room listening to him do this was sooooo uncomfortable and fascinating at the same time. He was high off of his ass while he did it and it would make me cringe so hard some of the shit he would say. He would bullshit beyond a point that I had ever heard anyone before. He did it with conviction. He didn’t care if it didn’t work one time, he would just hang up and try the next private jet company or any other company. A majority of times they wouldn’t fall for it and would get suspicious or ask a supervisor and hearing his responses to their inquiries was just like “Oh my God dude I can’t believe you are going there.” Lol, often the employee would catch on that it was a scam and he would play if off as long as he could until they either hung up or caved in. The beauty of this scam is that it takes a long time for the company to realize it’s been duped. The sale processes like a completed transaction and they don’t pick up on it as fraud until like a month later when they start matching funds and payments to credit card transactions.

We were able to book the presidential suite at the Ritz Carlton in Dallas by writing out the force authorization code instructions on the paper credit card authorization charge form and faxing it in. We never even spoke to anyone until they were calling to confirm the purchase. We used it to purchase art, three-wheeled Spyder motorcycles, and Polaris Slingshot vehicles. We also rented multiple luxury vehicles and drove them all around Houston. It was not uncommon for him to have a Bentley, Range Rover, Mercedes, and Slingshot all parked outside of his town home at any one time. 

So when some purchases for some motorcycles were approved in California, we decided to make an adventure out of it. We decided we would book a jet to Vegas, party a couple of days, then take a limo to Cali to pick up the bikes. We would then all ride them back through the desert to Las Vegas where we would have them shipped back to Houston. That was the plan, it almost worked. I’ll detail why it didn’t work and how close we came in another post. I have very few pictures from this time period. I lost a lot of cell phones and didn’t cloud my photos. Someone recently sent me these that I had sent to them back when we took that trip.

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The picture on the left is me about to board the plane with 5-6 other dudes including Sawyer. The total cost of the flight was just over $38,000.  There was no airport security check.  We walked from the private jet terminal directly up the steps and onto the Gulfstream G650.  That being the case, of course I brought an ounce of meth with me. It was not uncommon for me to stay up multiple days in a row during this time period. You pretty much just keep going on meth until collapsing from exhaustion. I remember being extremely tired boarding and there being a huge leather couch that I immediately fell asleep on after we took off.  In typical tweaker style, Sawyer decided it would be a good idea to smoke the meth bong in the bathroom of the jet.  I remember half sleeping while they smoked in there and remember one of the pilots opening the bathroom door and yelling at them that they can’t be doing that.  They laughed their asses off and I wondered if the pilot had noticed it was meth and if there was going to be police waiting for us when we landed.  The only thing waiting for us when we landed was the Cadillac Escalade we had chartered to take us to the hotel.

The photo above is on approach into the strip. I remember not wanting any pics of my face because I was nervous we would get caught.  What was really dumb though was that we all had to present our real IDs before we boarded so they knew exactly who we all were. This trip occurred not too long after I had divorced. My ex knew I was up to no good, but she never expected corporate security for a private jet airline to be knocking on her door looking for me.  She gave them my number and they called and interviewed me at which point I said all I know is I was invited to go and I went. I didn’t know it was bogus and I didn’t know who did it.  Sawyer ended up getting caught for this along with some other fraud shit. He was set up in a sting where he was attempting to purchase 1,000 Iphones posing as the IT Director for a fictitious oil and gas company he had created.  Other than about $70,000 of art floating around in a tweaker house in Houston somewhere, all purchases were recovered and returned in good order.