Secret Service Informant Turns into Identity Thief: The Brett Shannon Johnson Story
The United States Secret Service has witnessed yet another informant turned criminal. Convicted of credit card and identity theft, Brett Shannon Johnson is now facing six years and three months imprisonment and paying at least $300,000 in restitution.
Choosing between weekly salaries of $350 from the Secret Service compared to making at least $5,000 per week betraying his duties by commiting tax-refund scams was not a difficult choice for Brett Johnson to make. While working undercover for ten months with the Secret Service and earning his $350 by tipping the Columbia, South Carolina office of the agency to credit card thieves, Johnson was at the same time operating a tax-refund scam under the name of Gollumfun.
Johnson started his ten-month working relationship with the Secret Service when he was captured in 2005 as one of the administrators of an illegal cyber operation web discussion forum called Shadowcrew.com. Instead of facing multiple charges and a significantly longer sentence, he was asked to track down other online carding forums as federal undercover informant. The federal government enlisting captured criminals to help investigations is an action that is not uncommon to law enforcers – the use of criminals as informants have been considered to be a necessity to some investigations.
He started working three months after his arrest on a dubbed “Operation Anglerpish” and was even supplied with an apartment, where his girlfriend stayed with him, plus a daily allowance of $50. While Johnson claimed that he started scheming while under agency supervision, that claim was refuted by the South Carolina division’s special agent in-charge Neal Dolan as two agents were monitored to be with him during office hours. However, Dolan admitted that they were not required to monitor Johnson outside of these hours, in which times the informant used all the data obtained from the agency’s database to assist his illegal operations while not under agency watch.
Even with video surveillance and two agents monitoring him during the six hours a day, six days a week work, Johnson still found enough time to procure all the information he needed for brewing up his new business.
“As time went on, it became more apparent to me that I had a good chance of not getting caught,” said Johnson.
According to a statement from Brett Shannon Johnson, the names and credit card numbers he used for his fraudulent tax-return scam was acquired on the same laptop that he had access to the information inside the office. These actions by Johnson were unnoticed by the agents monitoring him as he threw them off by asking them to monitor audit trails that he asked them to do. Once he was alone, he would research the information he needed for his scam.
“There were two agents with him at all times, and we had a 42-inch plasma (monitor) that projected everything he did on it,” says Neal Dolan. “You’d have to have been asleep not to have seen what he was doing (if he were committing crimes) – and they weren’t. This wasn’t a mafia case where we were going to sit on this guy 24 hours a day. He was told we’d make spot checks on him. But he’s an adult. I told him, if you want to go back to jail then you know what path (to take), and that’s the path he took.”
Johnson’s next step was to purchase several computers and IP addresses in order to not be traced, and file for tax returns using other people’s names and identification. This contributed significantly to the grand total of $2 million dollars he earned over a five-year illegal money-making career. While working as an informant to find illegal activities in cyber crime websites and then reveal them to the government, Johnson managed to put up two of his own illegal websites – CardersMarket and ScandinavianCarding.
Johnson’s case has proved to be fodder for many critics of using convicted offenders as informants and on top of this, paying them a stipend. It has also raised many questions as to the proper monitoring and surveillance allotted to these informants. Dolan reasons out that while these informants may have been given a chance to make up for their crimes, the decision to continue doing so or returning to the path of crime is theirs to make. Johnson himself says that putting him in that situation was like “taking an unrehabilitated crack or heroin addict and placing him in a drug environment, telling him not to use drugs.”
“I would place myself in the top five or 10 for doing what I do. Hopefully, I can find a way to make it benefit people instead of hurting them,” says Johnson. “And yeah, I’m sorry for what I’ve done.”
Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to have any raw statistics of how prevalent these infomants-turned-rogues scenarios are. Most of these cases are under strict confidentiality, thus only a small number of cases reach the media’s attention.
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