By Joshua Nall
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Daywoo
It was the summer of 2016 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was
me and my older brother, Glow, he was dark-skinned with 360 waves in his head,
and my best friend Huffy, he was light-skinned with green eyes and cornrows in
his head. He thought he was the shit. They said me and Glow looked alike, but I
was much taller than he was. We were all young. I was 20, so was Huffy. Glow
was 22. All day and night we sat in our bedroom at our parents’ house searching
the web trying to find a new method. Me and Glow had the same mom and dad, and
both our parents had decent-paying jobs. Pops worked at Butter Ball as a forklift
driver and Moms worked at St. Mary’s Hospital as an RN. Huffy’s momma smoked
crack and got every government assistance and check she could possibly get. It
was nothing in his house. Our parents knew his situation, so they didn’t trip
about him always being at our house.
We were beginners, but we stayed in our rooms all day on our
iMac computers searching the dark web looking up everything we could on
scamming. We learned a few new method, but we hadn’t tested nothing out yet. A
lot of methods we learned were how to trick people out of their information over
the phone. None of us had the patience to sit there and talk to people for
hours and finesse them. We wanted to do something more hands-on.
“I found something,” Glow said.
“What did you find?” I asked.
“Every site I looked up on Onion always have something on
buying credit card numbers. I think we should channel our research into
learning more about this,” Glow said.
“Credit card numbers? What the fuck is we gone do with some
numbers if we don’t have the card to go along with it?” Huffy said as he paced around
the room. He didn’t have a laptop. He
always used one of our when we got bored researching.
“Maybe we could use the credit card numbers online to buy
stuff we need,” I replied.
“Yeah, but that could lead back to our address and if it’s
somebody we know, that could also lead back to us. That’s why we need to do
more research before we put all our eggs in one basket,” Glow said.
Me and Huffy both said, “Right” at the same time, agreeing
with Glow. We did need to do some more research before we did anything or made
any move.
We sat on our computers for hours searching and learning
everything we could about credit card numbers. We Googled and watched almost
every YouTube video we could find on the subject. We did this until the morning.
When it was all said and done, we knew what we had to do.
We learned that we needed to buy an MSR reader/writer
machine, an embosser machine, and blank credit cards if we wanted to become “card
crackers.” We already had laptops.
We found a website called Telegram that other scammers used
to buy and sell projects that were considered illegal. Tele was easy to use,
and we ended up buying everything we needed on there. We got the embosser brand
new for $450 and the MSR for $199, and we ordered 1500 white blank cards from a
vendor for $350. Now all we had to do was wait for our merch to come in the mail.
We all agreed to send the merch to Huffy’s house. For one,
his momma was never there. We didn’t want to send nothing to come back to our
address. If anything went wrong, our Pops would be trippin’ and we didn’t want
that headache on us.
Huffy agreed to sit and wait at his momma’s crib until our
packages came. Me and Glow had the tracking numbers for the packages, so we
knew the time and dates when our merch was gonna arrive.
Now that we spent our last few dollars on all this equipment,
we wanted to make our money back and then some.
Huffy
I had been posted up at my mom’s crib for about a week. I
hated being here. There was no Wi-Fi and no food in the refrigerator. Luckily,
I had my brothers Daywoo and Glow to bring me some food every night, or I would
have died up in this bitch. I hate not having no money. It was my fault that I
didn’t have any money, though. I spent it all on the gift card scam we was
doing around the city on people.
We would first buy a $500 gift card for Best Buy or JCPenney.
Secondly, we would remember the 16-digit card number by heart. Then we would
post the gift card on Facebook for half the money and wait until somebody
wanted to buy it. Normally, we would get a lot of buyers. When somebody wanted
to buy the card, we would pull up on all the people that wanted to buy the card
one by one. We would have the fake card on deck. We would act like it was the
card with $500 on it, but it’s not. We would call the customer service number
on the back. When the operator’s voice told us to punch in the 16-digit number,
we would punch in the numbers from the $500 card that we memorized.
We made sure they heard the total balance before giving them
the card. They would give us $250, then we would bounce. We were able to do
this more than 100 times before our names became bad within the city.
We always split the money three ways. I spent my share as
fast as it came. Glow and Daywoo were able to save their money because they lived
in a decent home. I was a Section 8 baby. I had to fend for myself.
When it came to Daywoo and Glow, they were like brothers to
me. They never judged me about my situation growing up as kids. Now that we
were grown men, we knew and understood each other.
Ring, ring, ring.
I looked at my phone to see who was calling me, and it was
Daywoo. I picked up and answered the call.
“What’s good, bro?” I said as I was lying down on the sofa.
“Did you get them packages? All three of them say delivered
on the tracker,” he said.
I hurried and stood up from the sofa before I said, “I’m
finna go check. I ain’t seen nothing. I been checking the mail every hour. It usually
run about noon.” I looked at my phone. It was 12:51 p.m.
“It’s there. Go check,” he shot back.
I walked to the front door. There were three packages
stacked on top of each other. I smiled before I said, “Yeah, it’s here.” I
picked up the packages off the ground before bringing them in the house.
“We on our way to come get you.”
“You know where I’m at. I ain’t going no where.”
“All right, be there in a few,” he said before hanging up
the phone. I sat back down on the couch. I knew they were going to be there to pick
me up within 15 to 20 minutes.
As I was waiting for Daywoo and Glow to show up, my momma busted
up in the house with her dope fiend ass friend Bobby Jo and Pam being loud. I
knew I wasn’t gonna be able to get a power nap in now that dukes had showed up.
“Boy, what you doing laying up in my house all day? You got
some money? I know you out here hustling doing something. Give me a few dollars,”
she said.
Even though I wanted to just so I could get her out of my
face, so she could leave me alone, I said, “I ain’t got nothing right now,” and
pulled out both my pockets to show her.
“You better get you a hustle or something or you’re going to be a broke ass like yo daddy,” she said standing in front of me with one hand on her hip.
That was one thing she liked to do, compare me to my father. All my life, he’d been in and out of prison. I barely even knew him. I hated when she compared me to him.
“You ain’t got to worry about that. I’m never going to be
like him.”
“Jackie, why are you messing with that boy? You see he in
here laying down,” Pam said to my momma.
“That’s the problem. He just laying around ain’t doin’
nothing,” Momma shot back at her. “And bitch, mind yo' business.”
Ring, ring, ring.
I hurried up and picked up the phone. As soon as I answered
it, it was Glow’s voice. “Bro, we outside.”
“All right, here I come.” I hung up the phone and placed it
in my pocket. I quickly got up and picked up all the packages.
“I see you got good mail coming here,” Momma said. I knew
she was trying to be nosey. I learned over the years not to pay her no mind.
“Yeah, these my books. I enrolled myself in GRCC for the
fall,” I told her.
“See girl, at least yo’ son trying to do something positive with
his life, “Bobby Jo said somewhat excited.
“He need to do something. But in the meantime, them books
can’t feed him,” Momma said. That’s what I hated about her. She always had
something negative to say. I didn’t know if it was the drugs or just her.
Before she started getting high, she worked a job and always kept a few dollars
in her purse.
Now she was a negative broke ass junkie that talked shit
about everybody. Once I got my money, I was never coming back. I had to get
away from her.
I quickly rushed up out of the house as fast as I could. I
was glad I had homeboys like Daywoo and Glow.
Soon as he seen me, Glow said, “What’s up, bro? Put that
shit in the trunk and hop in.”
I placed the boxes in the trunk like he told me to. Daywoo
was waiting for me on the passenger side, so I could hop in the two-door coupe.
When I got in the car, I dapped up with boy of my boys
before we pulled off.
Glow
I pulled my Camaro back up to the crib. Me and Daywoo just
went and picked up our boy, Huffy. When we got word our packages landed, we
went right over there and picked him up. I was somewhat excited because I been
doing my research on the credit card fraud. Now it was time to put everything I
learned into existence.
Before we got out of the car, I popped the trunk. We each
grabbed a box and took it in the house.
When we got in the house, we all walked right up to me and
Daywoo’s bedroom we shared since kids. I was the last one in, so I shut the
door.
We all started busting down the FedEx boxes. When we was
done, everything was there: the MSR, the embosser, and all 1500 white blank
cards.
“Y’all, I’m ready to turn up around this MF,” Daywoo said
nonchalantly. We all looked at each other before saying, “Fuck year.”
“We should start off with 50 cards as a test run before we
go crazy out here and spend our last,” I said, reminding them that after this experiment,
if it didn’t work, it was back to broke, but I had a good feeling that we was
gone be straight.
I watched Daywoo walk over to the laptop and start typing. “I
finna buy us 50 bin numbers for $5 a piece from this vendor on Telegram right
now,” he said.
Me and Huffy walked over to Daywoo as he was buying the bin
numbers.
“Huffy, grab the MSR machine, so we can get this show on the
road,” I said. Huffy picked up the MSR machine and handed it to Daywoo. I looked
at the computer screen and seen that it looked like a checkout menu.
I watched Daywoo take the bin numbers and go to the Telegram
message box, and there were 50 unread messages there, all texted in numbers and
words.
Daywoo plugged the USB cord for the MSR into the computer. I
watched him download the MSR software to the computer. When he was finished, he
clicked on the MSR icon that popped up.
Daywoo went back to his Telegram messages. All I seen him do
was copy and paste. Before he did anything else, he said, “One of y’all grab me
one of them blank cards. I didn’t even have to move. Huffy did all the legwork.
He handed Daywoo a card.
Daywoo clicked “Write.” When it said “Process Complete,” he
swiped the card in the reader/writer.
We sat there and watched him do this with every gift card
until he finished all 50 messages in his Telegram account.
“Now we gotta see how these cards work,” I said, looking at
all the cards we had lying on my bed. Huffy had the cards in order, so they
wouldn’t get mixed up.
“Before we do any of that, we gone need to print something
on these cards,” Daywoo said.
“What you have in mind?” Huffy asked.
“Platinum Express,” I said.
“It makes sense to me,” Daywoo said.
We hooked the embosser up to the laptop so we could link in
the program and write all the different card names with any business around the
world. If we wanted to make a Foot Locker gift card, we could with the
embosser.
We turned each of the white blank cards into something. We
just placed the numbers in the embosser, so we could stamp the 16-digit number
on the cards, and so we could turn the blank cards into platinum express credit
cards. When we were done flipping all 50 cards, we were ready for some action.
“So how is we gonna get money off the cards?” Huffy asked.
Both me and Daywoo laughed at him before I said, “The ATM.
Where else do you go when you have a credit card, and you want to pull money
off?” Both me and Daywoo dapped up after we was done laughing.
About the Author
Joshua Nall, AKA JOBUNDLES, is a dedicated writer
incarcerated somewhere in the FBOP with an unwavering ambition and passion. Being
a musician has deeply influenced his creative process and storytelling
abilities. Every day he is plotting, reading, studying, and writing in his cell
until he is released.