July 19, 2023 • 49 mins
How vulnerable are you to giving away personal or corporate secrets? How likely are you to try and gather that information from others?
Guest: Robert Kerbeck
Book: https://www.robertkerbeck.com/book/ruse/
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Promo: Our True Crime Podcast
Disclaimer: Kristen, Murder She Told
Music: Jake Pierle -- https://jakepierle.bandcamp.com/
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Ignorance Was Bliss online: https://linktr.ee/iwbpodcast
Sponsor: Bath By Bex (code CBDkate for 25% off)
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Guest: Robert Kerbeck
Book: https://www.robertkerbeck.com/book/ruse/
....................
Promo: Our True Crime Podcast
Disclaimer: Kristen, Murder She Told
Music: Jake Pierle -- https://jakepierle.bandcamp.com/
....................
Ignorance Was Bliss online: https://linktr.ee/iwbpodcast
Sponsor: Bath By Bex (code CBDkate for 25% off)
Sponsor: Komuso Design (code bliss15 for 15% off)
Sponsor: Horrific Hope Film Festival 2024 (code bliss24 for 15% off submission)
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Last year, there were nearly twentytwo thousand murders in the US. Not
surprisingly, more than two hundred truecrime podcasts launch every year in the US
alone. There's no shortage of crimesand no shortage of crime podcasts to cover
them. But none of those showshave the heart of our true crime podcasts.
(00:21):
Thank goodness. Well, they didn'teven have seatbelt laws back then.
They ain't never worse the going Yeah, it's fine. He could not remember
exactly what happened and thought that hehad blacked out. That was about it.
That's all he could tell officers.He was drawing things, saying that
the thoughts won't stop. I wantto see how this plays out. It's
(00:45):
heartbreaking, isn't it? Time youmade our true crime podcast? Your true
crime podcast. Our true crime podcastavailable on all your favorite podcasting apps.
This podcast involves topics such as violence, sex, and mental illness. If
this might disturb you were those aroundyou, please reconsider it's okay. Privacy
(01:10):
and confidentiality have been protected, withpersonal information removed when possible. If you
ever feel unsafe or suicidal, pleasecall your local crisis center or national hotline.
In the US, the National SuicidePrevention lifeline is eight zero zero two
seven three eight two five five.If you need to take a break,
that's okay too. Self care isencouraged. You matter. Hey, this
(01:44):
is Kate. If you think backon the worst thing you ever did,
did you know it? It's atime. And I don't mean like the
most awkward you were socially, ora slip of the tongue or something like
that, but I mean breaking thelaw. All of us have in some
(02:06):
way, whether it's speeding or corporatetheft or I don't know, if you've
murdered somebody. Please don't tell me. I need I need plausible deniability of
my life right now. But forreal, did you know you were doing
it at the time? And wouldyou ever tell anybody about it? Ever?
(02:32):
I'm at a point where I probablywould. You know that I haven't
committed any significant crimes that would landme in jail anyway, and those that
I have are things like speeding orunderage drinking or that which by now the
(02:59):
statute of limitations has run out orit's not provable. And so I'm good.
My guests today very carefully and deliberatelycommitted corporate crimes. He says,
So I'm not making any assumptions here, I'm quoting him. And then he
(03:23):
waited very carefully and very deliberately untilthe statute of limitations had run out so
that he could tell his story.His name is Robert Kirbeck. He's written
a book called Ruse. I loveit, and it makes me wonder both
(03:45):
how likely are most of us tocommit crimes given the opportunity, and also
how vulnerable are we to give awayin information we're not supposed to give away.
If somebody sounds convincing enough, areyou sure you really want to know?
(04:10):
This is ignorance? Was bliss?My name is Robert Kirbek. I'm
(04:46):
so happy to be here. I'mthe author of this crazy book called rus
Lion American Dream from Hollywood to WallStreet, which is the true crime story
of my career as a corporate spy. Okay, so there's a lot in
there, so I have my firstquestion is is a little adjacent? Um?
(05:09):
I consume a lot of true crime. It's where I sort of short
out my forensic psychologists, So youknow that's where I'm rooted. I hate
the phrase like, I hate like, why do we not just call it
crime? Like I don't understand thetrue part of it. It's like so,
but but in your case, youknow, rules and true don't necessarily
(05:33):
go together. So you know,talk to me about that. That's a
great point. Yeah, you know, I I like to say that I've
written an honest book about lying.Um. You know. So yeah,
you know, um, you knowwhat we did, um is you know,
we would call major corporations and wewould you know, um, we
(05:54):
were actors. The woman who hadthe small spying firm that hired me,
she only hired actors. This isin New York City, early nineties.
And she hired actors because we coulddo accents. We could create voices,
personas characters, and we would callmajor corporations. And back then we started,
it was Wall Streets. We werecalling Wall Street banks and financial institutions
(06:16):
and we would create these stories wecalled employees ruses, and we would get
people on the other end of thephone to release corporate secrets and private corporate
information that was worth you know,hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions
of dollars, sometimes tens of millionsof dollars, and on occasion some portion
(06:38):
of a billion dollars. And sowith that, there's there's you know,
there's two sides to that story,right, because I'm the one here you
knowingly are mining for corporate secrets thataren't yours to mind. For fine,
but I also look at the peoplewho gave them to you, like,
(07:00):
should they had known better? Orwere you just that good? Well,
I think the answer to that questionis yes on both counts, right.
I mean, these are smart people, you know, people working at these
major corporations there, for the mostpart, they've gone to the finest schools.
You're wearing a Harvard sweatshirt. Youknow a lot of the people that
I roused went to Harvard, soyou would think that they would know better.
(07:24):
Then they're also trained not to releaseinformation, and yet we were able
to get people to tell us thingsthat in a million years they should never
tell us. And I think partof that is that we were good.
That's why the woman hired us.But there's also this thing with human beings
which people are desperate for somebody totalk to and for someone to listen to
(07:49):
them. And you know, oneof the things in being an actor,
you know everybody thinks about actors havethe gift of gab, and I think
the more important quality for a goodactor is the ability to listen, and
as a corporate spy, listening isprobably the number one skill. I could
hear in the tone of your voicewhen you answer the phone if you were
going to be difficult or whether youwere going to be an easy mark.
(08:11):
Well, and that's I mean.So you and I our careers paralleled in
a lot of ways. You know, as a forensic psychologist, I'm given
a question by the court and Iwork so some states you only work either
for the prosecution or the defense.Other states you work for the state.
And I quite enjoyed the fact thatI worked for the state, and that
meant I was allowed to come upwith you know, like I wasn't steered
(08:35):
find only answers that the prosecution wanted, are only answers that the defense wanted.
I just found the answers that theygave me. And nobody's a human
life dissector like you don't. Youcan't tell necessarily what the truth is based
on their words, but it's kindof easy to tell with some practice when
(08:56):
someone is lying, when they arestruggle for the correct answer, or when
they are knowingly giving you a wronganswer, And a lot of it is
listening. A lot of it istaking the time to get to know how
this person speaks under normal circumstances.And then suddenly there's a break, suddenly
there's a shift, and you're like, okay, I'm writing this one down.
(09:22):
And so it's just an interesting thingbecause you know, for me,
I didn't have you know, itsounds like, and please correct me if
I'm wrong, that you were inthis, you know, as a profit
driven business, and for me,I was in it as a court witness,
and so I didn't have the sameinvestment in what the answer was.
(09:48):
You know, I just I justknew when they were lying, and I
would note it down, like Idon't think they're telling the truth about this
thing? What is it? Thetruth? Don't care? Whereas it sounds
like you had a different level ofinvestment in figuring out what the truth actually
was. Yeah, well, Imean I took this job because I had
moved to New York to become anactor, and of course actors need survival
(10:11):
jobs, whether it's waiting tables,bartending. And I stumbled into a career.
I mean, who stumbles into acareer as a corporate spy? But
that's what happened to me. Ithink that's what makes this story. People
are interested in the story because nocorporate spies ever written a book about being
a corporate spy before. And itis pretty insane the things that we did.
(10:31):
But when I started out, Iwas getting eight dollars an hour,
which of course seems ludicrous now thatwe were taking risk, you were.
One of my first big assignments wascalling defense contractors and finding out the people
that were in charge of designing topsecret weapons programs. Now, theoretically,
if I had been selling that informationto the Chinese or the Russians, I
(10:52):
could have gone the jail for therest of my life. But I was
just selling those secrets to their rivals. So if you know so, in
other words, if if Lockheed hiredme, I was selling those secrets to
Boeing, If Bowing hired me,I was selling those secrets to Martin Marietta,
you know whatever the defense firms youknow were I don't remember exactly at
the time, but um, butyeah, you know, that's you know,
(11:13):
And that was part of the reasonwe rationalize it as young people.
As we were going, well,it's just a survival job. We're not
getting rich from the job and allthese corporations, you know, I'm here
to tell you. You know,people say, well, you know,
do do most corporations hire spies?And I say, no, most don't.
All of them do. It's notmost firms. It's all firms are
(11:35):
hiring spies in one shape or another. I mean, you do to do
to get ahead. And sometimes sometimesit's it's you know, it's it's if
you you you manipulate the weakness ofyour opponent, and if your opponent is
willing to give you information, thereyou go, you know. And so
(11:56):
it's hard to know. So like, are you afraid now or when you
wrote the book, or at thetime that you were employed, any of
those? Are you afraid of legalconsequences? Yeah? Well, of course
at the time, we were deathlyafraid of legal consequences. And you know,
in the book, we had anumber of very very close calls with
(12:16):
you know, a laundry list ofagencies that usually had three letters in their
names. And you know, oneof the reasons I can write and publish
the book now is because the statuteof limitations has expired on any potential crimes
that I may or may not havecommitted. So yeah, so I can
breathe, you know easy now.But back in the day and in the
(12:37):
timeframe of the book, yeah,there were some close calls. There were
some knock on the door and don'tanswer kind of yes, correct, knock
on the door, people coming tothe door, people calling people following.
Yeah, yeah, no, itwas definitely there were some frightening moments because
(12:58):
we were actors. The idea thatwe were going to go to jail for
a long period of time for oursurvival job, you know what I mean,
that was really, you know,you know, obviously very disturbing because
you know, we're like, well, you know, geez, we're only
getting eight dollars an hour, ninedollars an hour, ten dollars now.
Now, later on during the courseof the book, I went from it
turned an eight dollars an hour job. At one point I was making two
(13:22):
million dollars a year at what peoplesaid, I was the you know,
the number one corporate spy in theworld. So big change. But for
most of that time there wasn't alot of money. Was only kind of
in the two thousands, says wehad to run up to the crash of
two thousand and eight, where theintelligence that we were extracting became so incredibly
(13:43):
valuable that firms were willing to payanything for it. Were you also concerned
about the safety of loved one's familythat sort of thing, or did you
really feel like it was just youit was going to own any repercussions.
Yeah, I mean, you know, for most of the the book and
most of the stuff, I wasa single guy. Um, so I
was. I wasn't concerned about anyother family members getting blowback. But then
(14:07):
later, you know, I gotmarried and I had a kid, and
that was the moment. You know, when you have a child, you
know you want to you know,you want to be a good person,
right and um, and I youknow, my child heard me rusing one
day on the phone when they werelittle, and they said, you know,
you know, what are you doing. And I tried to, you
know, explain my justifications and rationalizations. And my child said, but it's
(14:28):
dishonest, and I said, yeah, yeah it is. And that was
the moment where I knew I hadto stop and I had to get out
of it. And I did andand and obviously now I've written a book
about it. I mean, kidsruined everything right, that's a great line.
I love that. I'm going tosteal that kids. I mean,
it's it's tough. You know,family changes a lot of things about how
(14:52):
you how you function in the world. What was your because I'm curious the
concept of accents fascinates me when II my survival job through grad school was
doing like temp work upfront at alot of biotech firms in Cambridge, mass
Yeah. So I suppose I couldhave gotten you, for sure, you
(15:16):
could have. That was a veryvery hot industry with a lot of valuable
information and secrets, you know,and so missed opportunity on that one.
But so one of them, youknow, they go and they show you
around, and you're there for twoweeks or a month or whatever however long
the actual person is gone. Andthe guy that was giving me the tour
(15:41):
stopped me and he said, areyou from upstate New York? And I
was like, that's creepy, YesI am. He's like, are you
from I don't know, somewhere betweenElmira and Binghamton. And I'm like,
shut up, yeah, you know. And and it turns out he had
made a study of, you know, of accents and where people are from.
(16:03):
And right around that time, someoneI don't know capital As someone had
done a study of where in Americais the sort of purest visual quote,
purest American accent, and it wasElmira, New York, which is about
forty five minutes outside of where Igrew up, and so I have a
(16:26):
very My accent was very close tothat, except for my short a sounds.
My short a sounds come out likelike the word c A N.
It comes out ken for me ratherthan can like it's very difficult for me
to do that. And then ifI get tired, which is you know,
(16:48):
the first three years on my podcast, if you listen, you can
hear it when I'm tired, whenI'm editing or whatever, because I'm so
focused, I get a Canadian accentbecause that's where I went to college,
is up on the Canadian boarder.And so I start to talk, I'm
sorry and tomorrow will do that andthat, and I hear myself do it
later and I'm like, what wasI doing? And it's not it's not
put on, It's just that's wheremy my head and my voice go when
(17:14):
I'm tired. And I don't hearaccents very well, I'm hard of hearing.
So talk to me about some ofthe accents that you really like,
really enjoyed, or that you foundreally difficult. Yeah. So you know,
um, the woman who trained meher go to accent was Irish,
and so, um, you know, in the beginning, I was trying
to do an Irish accent. Butmy Irish accent sounded like I was doing
(17:37):
you know, the They're after meLucky charms, you know, the commercials.
You know. It just wasn't verygood, you know. And and
uh, and another guy he hadan assuming he had an English accent.
You know, he had gone toboarding school in England, so he had
a really good you know, uhEnglish accent. And I tried to do
that. I wasn't very good atthat. I tried scott Scottish, you
know, mustov done last night,right, you know, and and they
(18:00):
just they weren't very good. ButI speak some German, you know,
I learned German in high school andcollege, so I can proficient in German,
and so I do a pretty goodGerman accent, you know. And
so that was my go to accent, you know. And you know,
i'd call people up and remember corporationsnow especially, they have offices all over
the world. They have offices inTokyo, in London, in Germany,
(18:22):
in you know, in you know, Belgium, in Charlotte, in Dallas,
in San Francisco, you know,all over. So you could be
an executive in any office, youknow. So I would call up and
I'd go, hello, this isGelhat calling from the office in Frankfurt,
Germany. If he have a EuropeanUnion regulators here and venezom information from the
(18:44):
States, and people would go,oh my god, Gerhardt. You know,
yeah, I've I've seen I've seenyour name before, I've heard of
you. You run compliance for theEuropean Division. Oh hey, buddy,
what's going on? Right? Andso people now, you know, they're
like, nobody's thinking, what waita second, what are the odds that
someone's pretending to be the head ofcompliance in Germany and putting on a German
(19:07):
accent. It's it's just not nobody'seven thinking about that. And so because
of that, are they gonna isanybody gonna say nine to Gerhardt? No,
nobody ever shut down the German accentploy. You know, it was
just basically, you know, onehundred percent success rate because people are you
know, they're thrown off by it. And that was one of the crazy
things about doing this kind of corporatespying is the crazier the ploy, the
(19:32):
more outlandish, the ruse, themore believable it was. And in the
beginning we actually went out in personand did corporate spying in person. But
what we learned very quickly is thatyou could get far more information using the
anonymity of the social engineering phone call, or what I call the ruse call,
then you could by going in person. And obviously going in person was
far more dangerous, right, sowe pretty quickly stopped going to things in
(19:56):
person because we learned you could justget any I think you wanted to know
over the phone. Well, andand it's vaguely shocking to me even so,
any this is pre grad school daysin the late nineties. I worked
five VM. I worked on theirhealth desk, and people perfect, yeah.
(20:18):
Well, and I would work aloneat night a lot. And this
all of this is like missed opportunities. I'm fully aware, but I would
have people call me and like Ihad one guy very explicitly very unhappy because
his office was too warm. Itwas too warm in his office would I
(20:40):
come down and turn down the thermostatbecause he could see it. It was
right there in his room. Hejust didn't want to stand up and reach
over his desk. And I waslike, sir, I'm sitting in upstate
New York. Where are you located? And it never occurred to him that
I wasn't. He turns out hewas in Houston. So I was like,
okay, I could get in mycar. I'll be there in three
(21:03):
days. You know you're going tocover hotel rooms and meals or like my
guy, my buddy, And thatwas that wasn't even sort of that was
them calling me. You know,you just call the four three to five
seven to help to get to me, and that's that's how they would get
to me. It wasn't too longafter that where it's sort of to become
(21:23):
easier and easier to spoof calls andto make numbers sound like they would look
like they were coming from somewhere else, and believing you're from a certain institution
or having just a little bit ofinformation about a given institution could be enough
for people to give you all kindsof information. The number of people who
(21:45):
gave me their passwords over the phone. Yeah, I would be like,
what are you doing. I'm nineteen, you're one hundred and twelve, and
you own a yacht. I guaranteto it. And I just casually asked
you for your password. I don'tneed your password to reset your your printer.
(22:07):
What do you do? I wouldjust ask, because I was kind
of pain in the ass, andthey would just get you know, and
yeah that all it took was thatknowing that Oh, yeah, I'm from
the I'm from the Endicot office.I was at the fish Kill office last
week, and you know, yeah, you're done in Houston. Okay,
Okay, she clearly she knows enoughabout it. So here's my password.
No big deal. Yeah, Imean, look what I say all the
(22:30):
time, because you know, Igo on programs. Now, you know,
I've gone from obviously you know,offense to defense, from spying to
now helping corporations and individuals prevent spyingand mitigate that the you know, the
risks of spying, which are obviouslyquite significant with these ransomware attacks. And
one of the first things I tellyou know, firms all the time is
that if I can hack your people, I don't need to hack your computers,
(22:52):
I can have your people do itfor me. You know which that
we did? You know, andyou know, the corporations today in America,
small, medium and large, publicand non public spend a tremendous amount
of money securing their technology, youknow, their networks, their servers,
the firewall, the encryption, youknow, on and on, great,
fantastic important, but they spend afraction, a minuscule fraction of those funds
(23:18):
on training and educating employees. Andif you don't train and educate your employees
about this type of you know,cybercrime, using social engineering, phishing,
hacking, all of the myriad formsyou're you know, all of the money
you've spent on the technology is fornaught because the people can be hacked,
I mean easily. I told peoplebefore, you know, before I hit
(23:42):
record, I asked, you doyou want to be anonymous? And because
once in a while I have peoplewho come in the show who want to
tell a story but they don't wantto associated with their name or their projects
or whatever. And that's fine,it's rare, but I always ask,
because you can't put the toothpaste backin the tube, right, So I
(24:03):
always ask, and I've had people, and I think this is just the
cutest I've had people tell me,Oh, I couldn't possibly be anonymous.
Everybody would recognize my voice, andI'm like my friend. First of all,
if I tell them it's my neighborfrom next door, They're going to
(24:25):
hear what I tell them to hear, because it's how people do. And
if I talk to them long enoughand they get tired enough, they're going
to totally forget all of it anyway, And you know, the whole in
forensic psychology, there is this wholething around false confessions. Absolutely, I
can get you to confess to thinkyou know, I can get you to
confess to crimes and countries you've neverbeen in. If I'm given long enough
(24:47):
and I make you tired enough,and I make you scared enough, it's
not you know, And I'm trainedin that so that I don't accidentally lead
people there. But that information isout there and can be misused. Yeah,
no doubt, no doubt. Imean, you know, one of
the things we did a lot whenwe were you know, calling companies,
is we would do a lot ofresearch in advance. You know, We're
(25:11):
not just you know, picking upthe phone and calling people. We're literally
you know, studying, studying thefirm, studying the people at the firm,
reading the press releases. We know, you know, did the football
team win the day before? Youknow, was there some uh you know,
um critical event that happened in thecity of building fouled down whatever,
that we're going to be able toutilize in our ploy in our ruse,
(25:34):
so that it makes it seem likewe are on top of everything. There's
no way we could be making upwhat we're saying because we've done so much
homework. We've done our due diligence, and that really pays off when you
do that kind of thing. Imean, it cracts me. After you
mentioned sports specifically, I I'm aterrible sports wife. Like I've been married
(25:56):
for twenty three years. My husband'shockey player. He watches like he would
watch underwater basket weaving if it wascompetitive, do you know what I mean?
Like, I like that sport,that sounds good. You know,
he would just doesn't matter. Hejust all of the sport. And I'm
a terrible sportswife because I just can'tcare. But when I was working,
(26:17):
especially at IBM, I would makea point of having a list that I
would print out first thing before everyshift of what Citi's IBM had major hubs
in and what sports were going onand who won. And for me,
it wasn't to hack. I wasn'tagain you know, hindsight, but for
(26:41):
me, it was just to tryto get him talking to me, because
nobody calls the help desk happy,right, every single person who calls the
help desk is already pissed off.And so if I can get him because
it takes a couple of minutes toget into the system and figure out what's
going on, and if I canget him to chat a little bit about
the Oilers game last night, andyou know, did you catch this play?
(27:03):
And they start talking and I'm like, I didn't catch that play.
I don't know what you're talking about. But good for you. You're happy
now, bid right. And it'slittle things like that. They believe Now
we're buddies. That's right, that'sright. And that's what you're trying to
do, is you're trying to createthe telephone buddy. You know, there's
a woman in my book. Shestarts the book and she ends the book,
and she was basically my mole formany, many years, and in
(27:26):
the end of the book she says, you're one of my favorite people at
the firm. You're one of myfavorite people at the firm. I don't
work for the firm. I've nevermet this woman. I've spoken to her
for ten plus years. She's givenme information she should never have given me
for ten plus years. And what'sa crazy about that situation is that in
(27:49):
corporate America you have these friendships thattake place solely over the telephone, solely
over the telephone, which is reallyof course, I guess now it's a
little bit more zoom. You knowzoom too. But um, you know,
it's funny you were talking about workingfor IBM. You know, IBM
was a major target for us.I mean, IBM was a company that
(28:11):
obviously had a lot of secrets thatpeople wanted to know about, and so
I was hired many times to extractinformation from IBM. And the help desk
was definitely a place we would stopon our journey to learn things, right,
because you're there to what to helpyou know, uh, you know,
now, I mean I was alsothere to mess with people. So
(28:33):
but yes, okay, fair,I was I was now some help desks
were less helpful than others, andsome help desks would be sophisticated and would
recognize that they would get a lotof calls from people trying to find out
stuff that they shouldn't find out.But you know, you know, two
out of three times the help deskwould give a lot of information that they
shouldn't give. And also you alsomentioned that you were a temp in the
(28:56):
past. Tempts were a great placeto to get information because a lot of
people that were temps. They wouldbe temps for two weeks, they would
be temps for three weeks, andthey would people would like them, and
then there would be another temp opportunity, so they would move over. Maybe
they were an assistant for this personnow and they moved over, and now
they're an assistant over here, andnow they're in a receptionist here. They're
(29:17):
moving around, but there's still atemp, right, there's still a tempt.
But now they've been there for threemonths, four months, so they
know some things. They know howto access systems, they know how to
look up stuff, you know,on the server. And so we would
utilize the temps often because they were, you know, still afraid to make
waves, and so they'd be willingto tell people things again that they shouldn't,
(29:38):
that they shouldn't, you know,I, I honestly feel grateful that
I wasn't at the front desk verylong. It's a temp because they learned
that I worked at IBM, andso that that meant I could do technology
stuff. Even though by then Ihad decided I was not going to be
an engineer. I was going togo into psychology. I still had all
(29:59):
of those brains stuck with how touse a computer right, and so very
often I didn't have a dedicated phoneline. And you're making me extremely grateful
that I didn't have a dedicated phoneline, exactly. I'm thinking one business
is in particular. This is Iwent to grad school in Boston, and
it's a business that everybody's heard of, and I was tasked with build a
(30:23):
database of their customers and approximate amountsof money that go in and out between
them. That's an incredible amount ofmoney and trust to put on. I
was twenty twenty one, twenty two, Like I was not old enough for
(30:47):
this shit, Like don't do thatto me, and like I knew at
some level, like if somebody hadcalled me and asked me about this stuff,
where if someone had asked me toemail this stuff, I would have
known not to only because I wasuncomfortable having it in the first place,
you know. And this was thefirst place that I ever worked where there
(31:07):
was that culture of going out afterwork from Martini's. And I remember asking
them like, how do you knowhow do you know what you're supposed to
tell people and what you're not supposedto tell people, and how how do
you know who to report if youthink somebody's messing with you? And they
were like, oh, nobody'd messedwith us, And I'm like, you're
(31:30):
the first person I'd messed with.What are you talking about? You know?
Because you're so casual and cool withit all. But for me,
it was not. I just wasn'tin the mindset so much of corporate spying
and hacking as I was that Iwas studying criminal justice at the same time,
and so I was spending a lotof time with cops, and I
(31:52):
was spending a lot of time becausecriminal justice is a weird, weird field.
If you sit in a criminal justiceclassroom, it's like there's a there's
a thunderstorm gonna formed down the centerof the room. Because on one side
you got these cute little twenty twoyear old who are going to save the
world, and on the other side, you've got a bunch of you know,
fifty year old lieutenants who've been inthey've already been in the police department
(32:15):
for twenty five years, and they'rejust look, they're getting their degree so
that they can advance in the field. And there's a real different attitude between
those between the I'm going to savethe world and shut up and give you
my degree. Also, you're seventeen, you don't know shit about shit and
(32:35):
pull up your pants like that sortof Dennis Leary attitude. And so I
would go then from there to thiscompany and be like, how do you
how do you like in real life? How do you know? And they
were, why are you even asking? Yeah? I mean, look,
I think that there is a hubriskto many people. And I'd even argue
(32:58):
most people in in corporate America andnot just America globally that people think,
oh, I wouldn't give that informationout. I would never say anything.
I would, you know, AndI'm here to tell you that when I
make a ruse phone call. Nineout of ten people, nine out of
ten are going to tell me everythingthat I want to know, or at
least everything that they can tell me, everything that they have access to.
(33:22):
Nine out of ten people are notas skeptical as they think they are.
And if you take just a littletime to form that buddy yep mindset that
yeah, I mean forensic psychologists.Why would anyone who is objectively sane,
(33:45):
and most of them are, whywould they look at me and say,
yes, I killed this person inthis place at this time for this reason.
Why would you do that? Don'tdo that. Your lawyer's not in
the room, don't talk to me. But they would, and you know,
I would get disclaimer that said,you know your lawyer's not in the
room, you're still willing to talkto me. Yes, I am,
okay, and so you know I'mnot going to tell him no, right
(34:08):
right. But but it's that peopleare less you know, they're there.
It's not gullible exactly, It's justthat they're less skeptical than they like.
It's cool to be skeptical. Butbut but I think there's also this yearning
for the human connection, right,there's this yearning for the human connection.
And you know, and I canonly speak to my world, not your
(34:29):
world obviously, but you know,in corporate America, I think that there
is a distance. You know,people aren't as you know, connected as
they'd like to be. And whenthey are connected, and it's in sort
of a superficial kind of way,because you know, look, corporate America
is very competitive. It's very cutthroat. One guy's getting fired, one person's
(34:50):
missing out on a promotion, somebodyelse is getting laid off. I mean,
you know, it is dog eatdog, and so people don't trust
each other. And so if allof a sudden you get somebody on the
own and there's a friendship that isdeveloped and a rapport that's developed, you
know, people are desperate for that, and so all of a sudden,
you think, oh, wow,here's somebody who's kind of real. Here's
someone who's kind of fun. Right, boy, I'm enjoying talking to this
(35:15):
person. And you know what,they're really listening to me gripe about my
boss. You know, boy,you know this person's kind of cool.
Look, they listened to me.Just now, Hey, you need me
to look up something on the system, or you need me to share my
password with you, so you oh, sure, hey, go for it,
buddy, And it would just blowme away. That people, once
you won them over, it's likethey were under your spell. They would
(35:37):
not only do anything for you,but more often than not, I could
get someone eventually they wouldn't have anymore information. They'd go, look,
I don't know the answer to that. I don't know the answer to that.
And I'd say, well, whodoes know the answer to that?
And they go, well, Iknow somebody over in legal that I think
was working on that the other day. They would probably know. I said,
(35:58):
could you call over there for me? I'll hold on you call over
because of this person knows them,so they're they're going to be willing to
give that information, you know whatI mean. And so now I've made
you, not only have I gotteneverything out of you that I can,
now, I've made you my internalspy, so that now I've got you
going around getting information which now you'regoing to relate to me. Did you
(36:22):
feel guilt? For sure? Forsure? And in the book, I
you know, I reckon with themoral issues. You know again in the
beginning, in the beginning, weyou know, my buddy and I this
guy Packs, He's one of themain characters in the in the book.
That's not his real name, butyou know, he and I were like
best friends, and he got methe job, and so we worked the
(36:42):
job together, and we learned ittogether, and so we kind of justified
it as in, you know,we were actors. We were trying to
make it as actors. The jobwas temporary. I was a working actor.
I mean I did over fifty majorTV shows, you know, Er
Melrose, Play, Star Trek,Chicago Hope, you know, you know,
worked with huge stars and celebrities,you know, you know, James
(37:05):
Gandolfini, George Clooney, Kevin SpaceyOutpaco, Paul Newman, you know,
on and on, and they're alsopart of the book. Some of these
stories are part of the book.But then later on, I think what
happened is is, especially when Istarted to make a lot of money,
I had like a resentment. Ihad a resentment about Wall Street. I
(37:27):
had a resentment like why are thesepeople making millions and millions of dollars and
yet teachers, actors, poets,you know, uh, you know,
you know, you know, whateverwhatever industry that it just is not you
know, you know, not paidwell, not respected. You know,
my wife worked in the music businessas an assistant and she was underpaid and
(37:49):
undervalued. She worked for Madonna,who treated everybody like hell, and so
you know, these things kind offactored in, and at a certain point
I was like, you know what, boo who for Gold and Sacks,
like boo hoo for Wells Fargo.You know, like we're constantly reading stories
about these firms ripping people off,or taking advantage of their customers, or
you know, or or causing theglobal crash in two thousand and eight,
(38:12):
which you can make a pretty strongargument that wals, the greed of Wall
Street was directly responsible for that crash, right, so you know so,
and again that's not to justify it. It's not to say it's right,
but those were the rationalizations that Iwas using at that time. You boil
the person into the entity, yes, yes, Now let's also be honest.
(38:36):
I was rusing real human beings,right, I was tricking real human
beings, and for that I dofeel shame. I do feel guilt.
But again, what I tried todo is when I was doing my rusing,
I tried specifically to ruse righted executives. I went Brow to Bro and
(38:57):
I would call the senior vice president. I would call the executive right president.
I would call the general manager firstoff, because I found their assistance
to be much more challenging to getinformation out of. They were They've been
trained, you know, assistance oftenor you know, trained to be gatekeepers,
and they're good at their jobs.But the executives, you know,
i'd call them after five o'clock andi'd go Bro to Bro. I would
(39:19):
offer them, you know, ticketwhatever city they were in, I'd go,
hey, look, you know theauditors were in here this week.
They got a luxury box for thefor the Cleveland Cavaliers and the New York
Knicks or the San Francisco forty nineers or whatever, and you guys have
been killing it in your department.We got some extra seats, so you
guys interested, Oh my god,yeah, you know, you know,
is it include food? And ofcourse it includes food and booze? What
(39:39):
are you kidding? It's a luxurysuite, you know. Oh yeah,
we're in Okay, Look, Ineed to listen to the guys and your
team. I want you to givethem to me an order though, of
who are the heaviest hitters, whoare the guys that are making the most
money for our firm, because Iwant to, you know, I want
to make sure they get the bestseats. Well, what am I doing.
I'm getting the information on who thetop people are at my client's rivals,
(40:01):
so now they can steal those people, you know, um or.
And then of course then I'm takingit further and I'm you know, hey,
listen, you know what's going onwith that product, that project?
When's that thing launching? Boy,that's exciting I've been hearing. Oh yeah,
well I'm not supposed to talk aboutit, but it's coming out,
you know, I thought it outit on. We just signed this contract
with x y Z firm for sixteenmillion. Hasn't even been announced yet.
(40:22):
Oh good to know. Good,you know. So all of this thing
you're using sort of you know,friendship, you know. And again part
of my justification rationalization was I wasgoing after executives that, in my humble
opinion, were making unconscionable amounts ofmoney, and so I didn't feel I
didn't feel that bad about burning them. It's fair, I mean fair both
(40:47):
because making uncomfortable amount of money andyou shouldn't know better, You just shouldn't
have. But you know, there'sa certain amount of like just don't don't
don't you know, they don't ask, don't tell, I don't tell,
no tell, don't do that.So a question, though, when you
get in that ruse mindset and thatbecomes part of your lifestyle, does it
(41:13):
impact your outside relationships. It's agreat question. Yeah, it's a great
question. Look it it was alwaystempting, you know, to take the
ruse into real life, you know, and to go, ah, you
know, boy, you know whatwhat other rusing could I do? You
know, man, you know,maybe I could do some insider trading.
You know, maybe I could youknow, you know, I don't know,
(41:37):
you know, deal drugs, started, prostitution ring, I don't know.
I mean I never contemplated any ofthose things. And I certainly never
did any insider trading because like,for me, that was one like they
even got Martha Stewart for insider tradings. It was like, you know,
rusing was one thing inside or tradingwas something I didn't want to mess with.
But yeah, look I really triedto draw a line so that you
(41:58):
know, when I was doing therusing phone call, I was lying and
manipulating and all of that. Andthen as soon as kind of the day
was done and I closed the dooron that office, I had to leave
that behind because I knew that ifI went into a life of that kind
of subterfusion and it just it wasn'tgoing to lead me anywhere I wanted to
go. I mean, it canbecome almost natural, almost second nature to
(42:21):
you know. So I again I'mjust pulling out from my own perspective.
Is when I would do forensic workor and I also did crisis work.
And one of the things that youhave to do is, like I said,
we have to chat with let mehave to get to know them a
little bit. You also have tocheck your reality and your logic at the
(42:42):
door, and you have to enterinto this person's world. And sometimes their
worlds are pretty screwed up, andthat's fine, that's just you have to
rule with that. And the trickis to remember to pick up your own
logic and reality and reality at thedoor when you leave again. And you
(43:04):
know, I spent a lot oftime talking to convicted or charged criminals,
right, and I learned stuff.You know, you start to learn how
like, oh, this is whereyou got it wrong. This is what
I could do. I know howto do things that normal people don't know
how to do, and why notdo it? And for me, the
(43:28):
answer is because I wanted a lifeand because I wanted to separate work from
my life. And but that's youknow, that's a very conscious thing,
because it can become very natural tojust I mean, you know, I
could find out anything about anybody thatI wanted to know. I mean,
that's like a that's like a crazysuperpower, you know. You know,
(43:50):
I could find out your bank balance, I could find out you know,
you know, you know, ifyou were cheating on your spot. I
could find out anything anything, becauseall it takes is just talking to people,
you know, whether it's talking tosomebody at a bank or talking to
somebody you work with or whatever.And you could I could concoct stories all
day long as to how to getthat information out of people. But you
(44:10):
know, I didn't want to doany of that stuff in my personal life.
You know, I didn't you know, want to know those things about
my neighbors or you know, weremy co workers or whatever the heck.
You know, I'm like I'm justdoing this ruge job getting stuff out of
corporate America, and then you know, and then when the day is done,
you know, I'm I'm trying tobe, as you know, forthright
(44:32):
and upfront and straightforward as possible.I have to say. I sit in
a pretty skeptical and and closed bubblein a lot of ways, to the
(44:59):
point where I don't answer a lotof phone calls. Don't call me,
like my god, but if somebodydoes, I screen them and then I'll
call back if they leave a message, and it's something important. Until this
year and with me having been sosick with the gastroparesis and being on home
(45:24):
healthcare, and that means I havea nurse coming once a week, and
I have deliveries of medical supplies,and I talk to just various people that
call me every week, and thatmeans I have to answer the phone more
often. And yet I'm skeptical andcareful, and I don't acknowledge my name
(45:55):
until they say it first. AndI don't ever say yes until I'm sure
who I'm talking to, because Ihave this sort of paranoia that they're recording
me and later will use that wordyes out of context. To imply that
(46:21):
I had agreed to some service orphone call in some way or whatever.
Like I worked with people who hadgotten caught. I worked with people who
talked too early. And so I'vealways been maybe a little, maybe a
lot paranoid on the phone when talkingto people, and Robert has done an
(46:45):
excellent job of confirming that I needto keep doing that. So Robert,
thank you so much for coming andtalking to me. It was a fascinating
conversation, and I hope you'll comeback. I know you have another book
out, and just we could justkeep talking, you know what I'm saying.
(47:07):
Thank you guys for listening. Ihope maybe maybe this conversation created just
a little bit of extra paranoia inyou, because I don't want any of
my listeners to be the target orthe victim of a personal crime or a
(47:32):
corporate crime that was avoidable. Soyou know, just be careful, unless
you're a corporate executive with billions ofdollars, in which case, please give
out all of the information you canbecause let's share that wealth, can we
(47:52):
Maybe maybe yeah, that'd be okay. I need to back in a couple
of days with another book release thatis coming out, So until then,
take good care of yourselves and youknow, don't give out sensitive information. You matter
Last year, there were nearly twentytwo thousand murders in the US. Not
surprisingly, more than two hundred truecrime podcasts launch every year in the US
alone. There's no shortage of crimesand no shortage of crime podcasts to cover
them. But none of those showshave the heart of our true crime podcasts.
(00:21):
Thank goodness. Well, they didn'teven have seatbelt laws back then.
They ain't never worse the going Yeah, it's fine. He could not remember
exactly what happened and thought that hehad blacked out. That was about it.
That's all he could tell officers.He was drawing things, saying that
the thoughts won't stop. I wantto see how this plays out. It's
(00:45):
heartbreaking, isn't it? Time youmade our true crime podcast? Your true
crime podcast. Our true crime podcastavailable on all your favorite podcasting apps.
This podcast involves topics such as violence, sex, and mental illness. If
this might disturb you were those aroundyou, please reconsider it's okay. Privacy
(01:10):
and confidentiality have been protected, withpersonal information removed when possible. If you
ever feel unsafe or suicidal, pleasecall your local crisis center or national hotline.
In the US, the National SuicidePrevention lifeline is eight zero zero two
seven three eight two five five.If you need to take a break,
that's okay too. Self care isencouraged. You matter. Hey, this
(01:44):
is Kate. If you think backon the worst thing you ever did,
did you know it? It's atime. And I don't mean like the
most awkward you were socially, ora slip of the tongue or something like
that, but I mean breaking thelaw. All of us have in some
(02:06):
way, whether it's speeding or corporatetheft or I don't know, if you've
murdered somebody. Please don't tell me. I need I need plausible deniability of
my life right now. But forreal, did you know you were doing
it at the time? And wouldyou ever tell anybody about it? Ever?
(02:32):
I'm at a point where I probablywould. You know that I haven't
committed any significant crimes that would landme in jail anyway, and those that
I have are things like speeding orunderage drinking or that which by now the
(02:59):
statute of limitations has run out orit's not provable. And so I'm good.
My guests today very carefully and deliberatelycommitted corporate crimes. He says,
So I'm not making any assumptions here, I'm quoting him. And then he
(03:23):
waited very carefully and very deliberately untilthe statute of limitations had run out so
that he could tell his story.His name is Robert Kirbeck. He's written
a book called Ruse. I loveit, and it makes me wonder both
(03:45):
how likely are most of us tocommit crimes given the opportunity, and also
how vulnerable are we to give awayin information we're not supposed to give away.
If somebody sounds convincing enough, areyou sure you really want to know?
(04:10):
This is ignorance? Was bliss?My name is Robert Kirbek. I'm
(04:46):
so happy to be here. I'mthe author of this crazy book called rus
Lion American Dream from Hollywood to WallStreet, which is the true crime story
of my career as a corporate spy. Okay, so there's a lot in
there, so I have my firstquestion is is a little adjacent? Um?
(05:09):
I consume a lot of true crime. It's where I sort of short
out my forensic psychologists, So youknow that's where I'm rooted. I hate
the phrase like, I hate like, why do we not just call it
crime? Like I don't understand thetrue part of it. It's like so,
but but in your case, youknow, rules and true don't necessarily
(05:33):
go together. So you know,talk to me about that. That's a
great point. Yeah, you know, I I like to say that I've
written an honest book about lying.Um. You know. So yeah,
you know, um, you knowwhat we did, um is you know,
we would call major corporations and wewould you know, um, we
(05:54):
were actors. The woman who hadthe small spying firm that hired me,
she only hired actors. This isin New York City, early nineties.
And she hired actors because we coulddo accents. We could create voices,
personas characters, and we would callmajor corporations. And back then we started,
it was Wall Streets. We werecalling Wall Street banks and financial institutions
(06:16):
and we would create these stories wecalled employees ruses, and we would get
people on the other end of thephone to release corporate secrets and private corporate
information that was worth you know,hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions
of dollars, sometimes tens of millionsof dollars, and on occasion some portion
(06:38):
of a billion dollars. And sowith that, there's there's you know,
there's two sides to that story,right, because I'm the one here you
knowingly are mining for corporate secrets thataren't yours to mind. For fine,
but I also look at the peoplewho gave them to you, like,
(07:00):
should they had known better? Orwere you just that good? Well,
I think the answer to that questionis yes on both counts, right.
I mean, these are smart people, you know, people working at these
major corporations there, for the mostpart, they've gone to the finest schools.
You're wearing a Harvard sweatshirt. Youknow a lot of the people that
I roused went to Harvard, soyou would think that they would know better.
(07:24):
Then they're also trained not to releaseinformation, and yet we were able
to get people to tell us thingsthat in a million years they should never
tell us. And I think partof that is that we were good.
That's why the woman hired us.But there's also this thing with human beings
which people are desperate for somebody totalk to and for someone to listen to
(07:49):
them. And you know, oneof the things in being an actor,
you know everybody thinks about actors havethe gift of gab, and I think
the more important quality for a goodactor is the ability to listen, and
as a corporate spy, listening isprobably the number one skill. I could
hear in the tone of your voicewhen you answer the phone if you were
going to be difficult or whether youwere going to be an easy mark.
(08:11):
Well, and that's I mean.So you and I our careers paralleled in
a lot of ways. You know, as a forensic psychologist, I'm given
a question by the court and Iwork so some states you only work either
for the prosecution or the defense.Other states you work for the state.
And I quite enjoyed the fact thatI worked for the state, and that
meant I was allowed to come upwith you know, like I wasn't steered
(08:35):
find only answers that the prosecution wanted, are only answers that the defense wanted.
I just found the answers that theygave me. And nobody's a human
life dissector like you don't. Youcan't tell necessarily what the truth is based
on their words, but it's kindof easy to tell with some practice when
(08:56):
someone is lying, when they arestruggle for the correct answer, or when
they are knowingly giving you a wronganswer, And a lot of it is
listening. A lot of it istaking the time to get to know how
this person speaks under normal circumstances.And then suddenly there's a break, suddenly
there's a shift, and you're like, okay, I'm writing this one down.
(09:22):
And so it's just an interesting thingbecause you know, for me,
I didn't have you know, itsounds like, and please correct me if
I'm wrong, that you were inthis, you know, as a profit
driven business, and for me,I was in it as a court witness,
and so I didn't have the sameinvestment in what the answer was.
(09:48):
You know, I just I justknew when they were lying, and I
would note it down, like Idon't think they're telling the truth about this
thing? What is it? Thetruth? Don't care? Whereas it sounds
like you had a different level ofinvestment in figuring out what the truth actually
was. Yeah, well, Imean I took this job because I had
moved to New York to become anactor, and of course actors need survival
(10:11):
jobs, whether it's waiting tables,bartending. And I stumbled into a career.
I mean, who stumbles into acareer as a corporate spy? But
that's what happened to me. Ithink that's what makes this story. People
are interested in the story because nocorporate spies ever written a book about being
a corporate spy before. And itis pretty insane the things that we did.
(10:31):
But when I started out, Iwas getting eight dollars an hour,
which of course seems ludicrous now thatwe were taking risk, you were.
One of my first big assignments wascalling defense contractors and finding out the people
that were in charge of designing topsecret weapons programs. Now, theoretically,
if I had been selling that informationto the Chinese or the Russians, I
(10:52):
could have gone the jail for therest of my life. But I was
just selling those secrets to their rivals. So if you know so, in
other words, if if Lockheed hiredme, I was selling those secrets to
Boeing, If Bowing hired me,I was selling those secrets to Martin Marietta,
you know whatever the defense firms youknow were I don't remember exactly at
the time, but um, butyeah, you know, that's you know,
(11:13):
And that was part of the reasonwe rationalize it as young people.
As we were going, well,it's just a survival job. We're not
getting rich from the job and allthese corporations, you know, I'm here
to tell you. You know,people say, well, you know,
do do most corporations hire spies?And I say, no, most don't.
All of them do. It's notmost firms. It's all firms are
(11:35):
hiring spies in one shape or another. I mean, you do to do
to get ahead. And sometimes sometimesit's it's you know, it's it's if
you you you manipulate the weakness ofyour opponent, and if your opponent is
willing to give you information, thereyou go, you know. And so
(11:56):
it's hard to know. So like, are you afraid now or when you
wrote the book, or at thetime that you were employed, any of
those? Are you afraid of legalconsequences? Yeah? Well, of course
at the time, we were deathlyafraid of legal consequences. And you know,
in the book, we had anumber of very very close calls with
(12:16):
you know, a laundry list ofagencies that usually had three letters in their
names. And you know, oneof the reasons I can write and publish
the book now is because the statuteof limitations has expired on any potential crimes
that I may or may not havecommitted. So yeah, so I can
breathe, you know easy now.But back in the day and in the
(12:37):
timeframe of the book, yeah,there were some close calls. There were
some knock on the door and don'tanswer kind of yes, correct, knock
on the door, people coming tothe door, people calling people following.
Yeah, yeah, no, itwas definitely there were some frightening moments because
(12:58):
we were actors. The idea thatwe were going to go to jail for
a long period of time for oursurvival job, you know what I mean,
that was really, you know,you know, obviously very disturbing because
you know, we're like, well, you know, geez, we're only
getting eight dollars an hour, ninedollars an hour, ten dollars now.
Now, later on during the courseof the book, I went from it
turned an eight dollars an hour job. At one point I was making two
(13:22):
million dollars a year at what peoplesaid, I was the you know,
the number one corporate spy in theworld. So big change. But for
most of that time there wasn't alot of money. Was only kind of
in the two thousands, says wehad to run up to the crash of
two thousand and eight, where theintelligence that we were extracting became so incredibly
(13:43):
valuable that firms were willing to payanything for it. Were you also concerned
about the safety of loved one's familythat sort of thing, or did you
really feel like it was just youit was going to own any repercussions.
Yeah, I mean, you know, for most of the the book and
most of the stuff, I wasa single guy. Um, so I
was. I wasn't concerned about anyother family members getting blowback. But then
(14:07):
later, you know, I gotmarried and I had a kid, and
that was the moment. You know, when you have a child, you
know you want to you know,you want to be a good person,
right and um, and I youknow, my child heard me rusing one
day on the phone when they werelittle, and they said, you know,
you know, what are you doing. And I tried to, you
know, explain my justifications and rationalizations. And my child said, but it's
(14:28):
dishonest, and I said, yeah, yeah it is. And that was
the moment where I knew I hadto stop and I had to get out
of it. And I did andand and obviously now I've written a book
about it. I mean, kidsruined everything right, that's a great line.
I love that. I'm going tosteal that kids. I mean,
it's it's tough. You know,family changes a lot of things about how
(14:52):
you how you function in the world. What was your because I'm curious the
concept of accents fascinates me when II my survival job through grad school was
doing like temp work upfront at alot of biotech firms in Cambridge, mass
Yeah. So I suppose I couldhave gotten you, for sure, you
(15:16):
could have. That was a veryvery hot industry with a lot of valuable
information and secrets, you know,and so missed opportunity on that one.
But so one of them, youknow, they go and they show you
around, and you're there for twoweeks or a month or whatever however long
the actual person is gone. Andthe guy that was giving me the tour
(15:41):
stopped me and he said, areyou from upstate New York? And I
was like, that's creepy, YesI am. He's like, are you
from I don't know, somewhere betweenElmira and Binghamton. And I'm like,
shut up, yeah, you know. And and it turns out he had
made a study of, you know, of accents and where people are from.
(16:03):
And right around that time, someoneI don't know capital As someone had
done a study of where in Americais the sort of purest visual quote,
purest American accent, and it wasElmira, New York, which is about
forty five minutes outside of where Igrew up, and so I have a
(16:26):
very My accent was very close tothat, except for my short a sounds.
My short a sounds come out likelike the word c A N.
It comes out ken for me ratherthan can like it's very difficult for me
to do that. And then ifI get tired, which is you know,
(16:48):
the first three years on my podcast, if you listen, you can
hear it when I'm tired, whenI'm editing or whatever, because I'm so
focused, I get a Canadian accentbecause that's where I went to college,
is up on the Canadian boarder.And so I start to talk, I'm
sorry and tomorrow will do that andthat, and I hear myself do it
later and I'm like, what wasI doing? And it's not it's not
put on, It's just that's wheremy my head and my voice go when
(17:14):
I'm tired. And I don't hearaccents very well, I'm hard of hearing.
So talk to me about some ofthe accents that you really like,
really enjoyed, or that you foundreally difficult. Yeah. So you know,
um, the woman who trained meher go to accent was Irish,
and so, um, you know, in the beginning, I was trying
to do an Irish accent. Butmy Irish accent sounded like I was doing
(17:37):
you know, the They're after meLucky charms, you know, the commercials.
You know. It just wasn't verygood, you know. And and
uh, and another guy he hadan assuming he had an English accent.
You know, he had gone toboarding school in England, so he had
a really good you know, uhEnglish accent. And I tried to do
that. I wasn't very good atthat. I tried scott Scottish, you
know, mustov done last night,right, you know, and and they
(18:00):
just they weren't very good. ButI speak some German, you know,
I learned German in high school andcollege, so I can proficient in German,
and so I do a pretty goodGerman accent, you know. And
so that was my go to accent, you know. And you know,
i'd call people up and remember corporationsnow especially, they have offices all over
the world. They have offices inTokyo, in London, in Germany,
(18:22):
in you know, in you know, Belgium, in Charlotte, in Dallas,
in San Francisco, you know,all over. So you could be
an executive in any office, youknow. So I would call up and
I'd go, hello, this isGelhat calling from the office in Frankfurt,
Germany. If he have a EuropeanUnion regulators here and venezom information from the
(18:44):
States, and people would go,oh my god, Gerhardt. You know,
yeah, I've I've seen I've seenyour name before, I've heard of
you. You run compliance for theEuropean Division. Oh hey, buddy,
what's going on? Right? Andso people now, you know, they're
like, nobody's thinking, what waita second, what are the odds that
someone's pretending to be the head ofcompliance in Germany and putting on a German
(19:07):
accent. It's it's just not nobody'seven thinking about that. And so because
of that, are they gonna isanybody gonna say nine to Gerhardt? No,
nobody ever shut down the German accentploy. You know, it was
just basically, you know, onehundred percent success rate because people are you
know, they're thrown off by it. And that was one of the crazy
things about doing this kind of corporatespying is the crazier the ploy, the
(19:32):
more outlandish, the ruse, themore believable it was. And in the
beginning we actually went out in personand did corporate spying in person. But
what we learned very quickly is thatyou could get far more information using the
anonymity of the social engineering phone call, or what I call the ruse call,
then you could by going in person. And obviously going in person was
far more dangerous, right, sowe pretty quickly stopped going to things in
(19:56):
person because we learned you could justget any I think you wanted to know
over the phone. Well, andand it's vaguely shocking to me even so,
any this is pre grad school daysin the late nineties. I worked
five VM. I worked on theirhealth desk, and people perfect, yeah.
(20:18):
Well, and I would work aloneat night a lot. And this
all of this is like missed opportunities. I'm fully aware, but I would
have people call me and like Ihad one guy very explicitly very unhappy because
his office was too warm. Itwas too warm in his office would I
(20:40):
come down and turn down the thermostatbecause he could see it. It was
right there in his room. Hejust didn't want to stand up and reach
over his desk. And I waslike, sir, I'm sitting in upstate
New York. Where are you located? And it never occurred to him that
I wasn't. He turns out hewas in Houston. So I was like,
okay, I could get in mycar. I'll be there in three
(21:03):
days. You know you're going tocover hotel rooms and meals or like my
guy, my buddy, And thatwas that wasn't even sort of that was
them calling me. You know,you just call the four three to five
seven to help to get to me, and that's that's how they would get
to me. It wasn't too longafter that where it's sort of to become
(21:23):
easier and easier to spoof calls andto make numbers sound like they would look
like they were coming from somewhere else, and believing you're from a certain institution
or having just a little bit ofinformation about a given institution could be enough
for people to give you all kindsof information. The number of people who
(21:45):
gave me their passwords over the phone. Yeah, I would be like,
what are you doing. I'm nineteen, you're one hundred and twelve, and
you own a yacht. I guaranteto it. And I just casually asked
you for your password. I don'tneed your password to reset your your printer.
(22:07):
What do you do? I wouldjust ask, because I was kind
of pain in the ass, andthey would just get you know, and
yeah that all it took was thatknowing that Oh, yeah, I'm from
the I'm from the Endicot office.I was at the fish Kill office last
week, and you know, yeah, you're done in Houston. Okay,
Okay, she clearly she knows enoughabout it. So here's my password.
No big deal. Yeah, Imean, look what I say all the
(22:30):
time, because you know, Igo on programs. Now, you know,
I've gone from obviously you know,offense to defense, from spying to
now helping corporations and individuals prevent spyingand mitigate that the you know, the
risks of spying, which are obviouslyquite significant with these ransomware attacks. And
one of the first things I tellyou know, firms all the time is
that if I can hack your people, I don't need to hack your computers,
(22:52):
I can have your people do itfor me. You know which that
we did? You know, andyou know, the corporations today in America,
small, medium and large, publicand non public spend a tremendous amount
of money securing their technology, youknow, their networks, their servers,
the firewall, the encryption, youknow, on and on, great,
fantastic important, but they spend afraction, a minuscule fraction of those funds
(23:18):
on training and educating employees. Andif you don't train and educate your employees
about this type of you know,cybercrime, using social engineering, phishing,
hacking, all of the myriad formsyou're you know, all of the money
you've spent on the technology is fornaught because the people can be hacked,
I mean easily. I told peoplebefore, you know, before I hit
(23:42):
record, I asked, you doyou want to be anonymous? And because
once in a while I have peoplewho come in the show who want to
tell a story but they don't wantto associated with their name or their projects
or whatever. And that's fine,it's rare, but I always ask,
because you can't put the toothpaste backin the tube, right, So I
(24:03):
always ask, and I've had people, and I think this is just the
cutest I've had people tell me,Oh, I couldn't possibly be anonymous.
Everybody would recognize my voice, andI'm like my friend. First of all,
if I tell them it's my neighborfrom next door, They're going to
(24:25):
hear what I tell them to hear, because it's how people do. And
if I talk to them long enoughand they get tired enough, they're going
to totally forget all of it anyway, And you know, the whole in
forensic psychology, there is this wholething around false confessions. Absolutely, I
can get you to confess to thinkyou know, I can get you to
confess to crimes and countries you've neverbeen in. If I'm given long enough
(24:47):
and I make you tired enough,and I make you scared enough, it's
not you know, And I'm trainedin that so that I don't accidentally lead
people there. But that information isout there and can be misused. Yeah,
no doubt, no doubt. Imean, you know, one of
the things we did a lot whenwe were you know, calling companies,
is we would do a lot ofresearch in advance. You know, We're
(25:11):
not just you know, picking upthe phone and calling people. We're literally
you know, studying, studying thefirm, studying the people at the firm,
reading the press releases. We know, you know, did the football
team win the day before? Youknow, was there some uh you know,
um critical event that happened in thecity of building fouled down whatever,
that we're going to be able toutilize in our ploy in our ruse,
(25:34):
so that it makes it seem likewe are on top of everything. There's
no way we could be making upwhat we're saying because we've done so much
homework. We've done our due diligence, and that really pays off when you
do that kind of thing. Imean, it cracts me. After you
mentioned sports specifically, I I'm aterrible sports wife. Like I've been married
(25:56):
for twenty three years. My husband'shockey player. He watches like he would
watch underwater basket weaving if it wascompetitive, do you know what I mean?
Like, I like that sport,that sounds good. You know,
he would just doesn't matter. Hejust all of the sport. And I'm
a terrible sportswife because I just can'tcare. But when I was working,
(26:17):
especially at IBM, I would makea point of having a list that I
would print out first thing before everyshift of what Citi's IBM had major hubs
in and what sports were going onand who won. And for me,
it wasn't to hack. I wasn'tagain you know, hindsight, but for
(26:41):
me, it was just to tryto get him talking to me, because
nobody calls the help desk happy,right, every single person who calls the
help desk is already pissed off.And so if I can get him because
it takes a couple of minutes toget into the system and figure out what's
going on, and if I canget him to chat a little bit about
the Oilers game last night, andyou know, did you catch this play?
(27:03):
And they start talking and I'm like, I didn't catch that play.
I don't know what you're talking about. But good for you. You're happy
now, bid right. And it'slittle things like that. They believe Now
we're buddies. That's right, that'sright. And that's what you're trying to
do, is you're trying to createthe telephone buddy. You know, there's
a woman in my book. Shestarts the book and she ends the book,
and she was basically my mole formany, many years, and in
(27:26):
the end of the book she says, you're one of my favorite people at
the firm. You're one of myfavorite people at the firm. I don't
work for the firm. I've nevermet this woman. I've spoken to her
for ten plus years. She's givenme information she should never have given me
for ten plus years. And what'sa crazy about that situation is that in
(27:49):
corporate America you have these friendships thattake place solely over the telephone, solely
over the telephone, which is reallyof course, I guess now it's a
little bit more zoom. You knowzoom too. But um, you know,
it's funny you were talking about workingfor IBM. You know, IBM
was a major target for us.I mean, IBM was a company that
(28:11):
obviously had a lot of secrets thatpeople wanted to know about, and so
I was hired many times to extractinformation from IBM. And the help desk
was definitely a place we would stopon our journey to learn things, right,
because you're there to what to helpyou know, uh, you know,
now, I mean I was alsothere to mess with people. So
(28:33):
but yes, okay, fair,I was I was now some help desks
were less helpful than others, andsome help desks would be sophisticated and would
recognize that they would get a lotof calls from people trying to find out
stuff that they shouldn't find out.But you know, you know, two
out of three times the help deskwould give a lot of information that they
shouldn't give. And also you alsomentioned that you were a temp in the
(28:56):
past. Tempts were a great placeto to get information because a lot of
people that were temps. They wouldbe temps for two weeks, they would
be temps for three weeks, andthey would people would like them, and
then there would be another temp opportunity, so they would move over. Maybe
they were an assistant for this personnow and they moved over, and now
they're an assistant over here, andnow they're in a receptionist here. They're
(29:17):
moving around, but there's still atemp, right, there's still a tempt.
But now they've been there for threemonths, four months, so they
know some things. They know howto access systems, they know how to
look up stuff, you know,on the server. And so we would
utilize the temps often because they were, you know, still afraid to make
waves, and so they'd be willingto tell people things again that they shouldn't,
(29:38):
that they shouldn't, you know,I, I honestly feel grateful that
I wasn't at the front desk verylong. It's a temp because they learned
that I worked at IBM, andso that that meant I could do technology
stuff. Even though by then Ihad decided I was not going to be
an engineer. I was going togo into psychology. I still had all
(29:59):
of those brains stuck with how touse a computer right, and so very
often I didn't have a dedicated phoneline. And you're making me extremely grateful
that I didn't have a dedicated phoneline, exactly. I'm thinking one business
is in particular. This is Iwent to grad school in Boston, and
it's a business that everybody's heard of, and I was tasked with build a
(30:23):
database of their customers and approximate amountsof money that go in and out between
them. That's an incredible amount ofmoney and trust to put on. I
was twenty twenty one, twenty two, Like I was not old enough for
(30:47):
this shit, Like don't do thatto me, and like I knew at
some level, like if somebody hadcalled me and asked me about this stuff,
where if someone had asked me toemail this stuff, I would have
known not to only because I wasuncomfortable having it in the first place,
you know. And this was thefirst place that I ever worked where there
(31:07):
was that culture of going out afterwork from Martini's. And I remember asking
them like, how do you knowhow do you know what you're supposed to
tell people and what you're not supposedto tell people, and how how do
you know who to report if youthink somebody's messing with you? And they
were like, oh, nobody'd messedwith us, And I'm like, you're
(31:30):
the first person I'd messed with.What are you talking about? You know?
Because you're so casual and cool withit all. But for me,
it was not. I just wasn'tin the mindset so much of corporate spying
and hacking as I was that Iwas studying criminal justice at the same time,
and so I was spending a lotof time with cops, and I
(31:52):
was spending a lot of time becausecriminal justice is a weird, weird field.
If you sit in a criminal justiceclassroom, it's like there's a there's
a thunderstorm gonna formed down the centerof the room. Because on one side
you got these cute little twenty twoyear old who are going to save the
world, and on the other side, you've got a bunch of you know,
fifty year old lieutenants who've been inthey've already been in the police department
(32:15):
for twenty five years, and they'rejust look, they're getting their degree so
that they can advance in the field. And there's a real different attitude between
those between the I'm going to savethe world and shut up and give you
my degree. Also, you're seventeen, you don't know shit about shit and
(32:35):
pull up your pants like that sortof Dennis Leary attitude. And so I
would go then from there to thiscompany and be like, how do you
how do you like in real life? How do you know? And they
were, why are you even asking? Yeah? I mean, look,
I think that there is a hubriskto many people. And I'd even argue
(32:58):
most people in in corporate America andnot just America globally that people think,
oh, I wouldn't give that informationout. I would never say anything.
I would, you know, AndI'm here to tell you that when I
make a ruse phone call. Nineout of ten people, nine out of
ten are going to tell me everythingthat I want to know, or at
least everything that they can tell me, everything that they have access to.
(33:22):
Nine out of ten people are notas skeptical as they think they are.
And if you take just a littletime to form that buddy yep mindset that
yeah, I mean forensic psychologists.Why would anyone who is objectively sane,
(33:45):
and most of them are, whywould they look at me and say,
yes, I killed this person inthis place at this time for this reason.
Why would you do that? Don'tdo that. Your lawyer's not in
the room, don't talk to me. But they would, and you know,
I would get disclaimer that said,you know your lawyer's not in the
room, you're still willing to talkto me. Yes, I am,
okay, and so you know I'mnot going to tell him no, right
(34:08):
right. But but it's that peopleare less you know, they're there.
It's not gullible exactly, It's justthat they're less skeptical than they like.
It's cool to be skeptical. Butbut but I think there's also this yearning
for the human connection, right,there's this yearning for the human connection.
And you know, and I canonly speak to my world, not your
(34:29):
world obviously, but you know,in corporate America, I think that there
is a distance. You know,people aren't as you know, connected as
they'd like to be. And whenthey are connected, and it's in sort
of a superficial kind of way,because you know, look, corporate America
is very competitive. It's very cutthroat. One guy's getting fired, one person's
(34:50):
missing out on a promotion, somebodyelse is getting laid off. I mean,
you know, it is dog eatdog, and so people don't trust
each other. And so if allof a sudden you get somebody on the
own and there's a friendship that isdeveloped and a rapport that's developed, you
know, people are desperate for that, and so all of a sudden,
you think, oh, wow,here's somebody who's kind of real. Here's
someone who's kind of fun. Right, boy, I'm enjoying talking to this
(35:15):
person. And you know what,they're really listening to me gripe about my
boss. You know, boy,you know this person's kind of cool.
Look, they listened to me.Just now, Hey, you need me
to look up something on the system, or you need me to share my
password with you, so you oh, sure, hey, go for it,
buddy, And it would just blowme away. That people, once
you won them over, it's likethey were under your spell. They would
(35:37):
not only do anything for you,but more often than not, I could
get someone eventually they wouldn't have anymore information. They'd go, look,
I don't know the answer to that. I don't know the answer to that.
And I'd say, well, whodoes know the answer to that?
And they go, well, Iknow somebody over in legal that I think
was working on that the other day. They would probably know. I said,
(35:58):
could you call over there for me? I'll hold on you call over
because of this person knows them,so they're they're going to be willing to
give that information, you know whatI mean. And so now I've made
you, not only have I gotteneverything out of you that I can,
now, I've made you my internalspy, so that now I've got you
going around getting information which now you'regoing to relate to me. Did you
(36:22):
feel guilt? For sure? Forsure? And in the book, I
you know, I reckon with themoral issues. You know again in the
beginning, in the beginning, weyou know, my buddy and I this
guy Packs, He's one of themain characters in the in the book.
That's not his real name, butyou know, he and I were like
best friends, and he got methe job, and so we worked the
(36:42):
job together, and we learned ittogether, and so we kind of justified
it as in, you know,we were actors. We were trying to
make it as actors. The jobwas temporary. I was a working actor.
I mean I did over fifty majorTV shows, you know, Er
Melrose, Play, Star Trek,Chicago Hope, you know, you know,
worked with huge stars and celebrities,you know, you know, James
(37:05):
Gandolfini, George Clooney, Kevin SpaceyOutpaco, Paul Newman, you know,
on and on, and they're alsopart of the book. Some of these
stories are part of the book.But then later on, I think what
happened is is, especially when Istarted to make a lot of money,
I had like a resentment. Ihad a resentment about Wall Street. I
(37:27):
had a resentment like why are thesepeople making millions and millions of dollars and
yet teachers, actors, poets,you know, uh, you know,
you know, you know, whateverwhatever industry that it just is not you
know, you know, not paidwell, not respected. You know,
my wife worked in the music businessas an assistant and she was underpaid and
(37:49):
undervalued. She worked for Madonna,who treated everybody like hell, and so
you know, these things kind offactored in, and at a certain point
I was like, you know what, boo who for Gold and Sacks,
like boo hoo for Wells Fargo.You know, like we're constantly reading stories
about these firms ripping people off,or taking advantage of their customers, or
you know, or or causing theglobal crash in two thousand and eight,
(38:12):
which you can make a pretty strongargument that wals, the greed of Wall
Street was directly responsible for that crash, right, so you know so,
and again that's not to justify it. It's not to say it's right,
but those were the rationalizations that Iwas using at that time. You boil
the person into the entity, yes, yes, Now let's also be honest.
(38:36):
I was rusing real human beings,right, I was tricking real human
beings, and for that I dofeel shame. I do feel guilt.
But again, what I tried todo is when I was doing my rusing,
I tried specifically to ruse righted executives. I went Brow to Bro and
(38:57):
I would call the senior vice president. I would call the executive right president.
I would call the general manager firstoff, because I found their assistance
to be much more challenging to getinformation out of. They were They've been
trained, you know, assistance oftenor you know, trained to be gatekeepers,
and they're good at their jobs.But the executives, you know,
i'd call them after five o'clock andi'd go Bro to Bro. I would
(39:19):
offer them, you know, ticketwhatever city they were in, I'd go,
hey, look, you know theauditors were in here this week.
They got a luxury box for thefor the Cleveland Cavaliers and the New York
Knicks or the San Francisco forty nineers or whatever, and you guys have
been killing it in your department.We got some extra seats, so you
guys interested, Oh my god,yeah, you know, you know,
is it include food? And ofcourse it includes food and booze? What
(39:39):
are you kidding? It's a luxurysuite, you know. Oh yeah,
we're in Okay, Look, Ineed to listen to the guys and your
team. I want you to givethem to me an order though, of
who are the heaviest hitters, whoare the guys that are making the most
money for our firm, because Iwant to, you know, I want
to make sure they get the bestseats. Well, what am I doing.
I'm getting the information on who thetop people are at my client's rivals,
(40:01):
so now they can steal those people, you know, um or.
And then of course then I'm takingit further and I'm you know, hey,
listen, you know what's going onwith that product, that project?
When's that thing launching? Boy,that's exciting I've been hearing. Oh yeah,
well I'm not supposed to talk aboutit, but it's coming out,
you know, I thought it outit on. We just signed this contract
with x y Z firm for sixteenmillion. Hasn't even been announced yet.
(40:22):
Oh good to know. Good,you know. So all of this thing
you're using sort of you know,friendship, you know. And again part
of my justification rationalization was I wasgoing after executives that, in my humble
opinion, were making unconscionable amounts ofmoney, and so I didn't feel I
didn't feel that bad about burning them. It's fair, I mean fair both
(40:47):
because making uncomfortable amount of money andyou shouldn't know better, You just shouldn't
have. But you know, there'sa certain amount of like just don't don't
don't you know, they don't ask, don't tell, I don't tell,
no tell, don't do that.So a question, though, when you
get in that ruse mindset and thatbecomes part of your lifestyle, does it
(41:13):
impact your outside relationships. It's agreat question. Yeah, it's a great
question. Look it it was alwaystempting, you know, to take the
ruse into real life, you know, and to go, ah, you
know, boy, you know whatwhat other rusing could I do? You
know, man, you know,maybe I could do some insider trading.
You know, maybe I could youknow, you know, I don't know,
(41:37):
you know, deal drugs, started, prostitution ring, I don't know.
I mean I never contemplated any ofthose things. And I certainly never
did any insider trading because like,for me, that was one like they
even got Martha Stewart for insider tradings. It was like, you know,
rusing was one thing inside or tradingwas something I didn't want to mess with.
But yeah, look I really triedto draw a line so that you
(41:58):
know, when I was doing therusing phone call, I was lying and
manipulating and all of that. Andthen as soon as kind of the day
was done and I closed the dooron that office, I had to leave
that behind because I knew that ifI went into a life of that kind
of subterfusion and it just it wasn'tgoing to lead me anywhere I wanted to
go. I mean, it canbecome almost natural, almost second nature to
(42:21):
you know. So I again I'mjust pulling out from my own perspective.
Is when I would do forensic workor and I also did crisis work.
And one of the things that youhave to do is, like I said,
we have to chat with let mehave to get to know them a
little bit. You also have tocheck your reality and your logic at the
(42:42):
door, and you have to enterinto this person's world. And sometimes their
worlds are pretty screwed up, andthat's fine, that's just you have to
rule with that. And the trickis to remember to pick up your own
logic and reality and reality at thedoor when you leave again. And you
(43:04):
know, I spent a lot oftime talking to convicted or charged criminals,
right, and I learned stuff.You know, you start to learn how
like, oh, this is whereyou got it wrong. This is what
I could do. I know howto do things that normal people don't know
how to do, and why notdo it? And for me, the
(43:28):
answer is because I wanted a lifeand because I wanted to separate work from
my life. And but that's youknow, that's a very conscious thing,
because it can become very natural tojust I mean, you know, I
could find out anything about anybody thatI wanted to know. I mean,
that's like a that's like a crazysuperpower, you know. You know,
(43:50):
I could find out your bank balance, I could find out you know,
you know, you know, ifyou were cheating on your spot. I
could find out anything anything, becauseall it takes is just talking to people,
you know, whether it's talking tosomebody at a bank or talking to
somebody you work with or whatever.And you could I could concoct stories all
day long as to how to getthat information out of people. But you
(44:10):
know, I didn't want to doany of that stuff in my personal life.
You know, I didn't you know, want to know those things about
my neighbors or you know, weremy co workers or whatever the heck.
You know, I'm like I'm justdoing this ruge job getting stuff out of
corporate America, and then you know, and then when the day is done,
you know, I'm I'm trying tobe, as you know, forthright
(44:32):
and upfront and straightforward as possible.I have to say. I sit in
a pretty skeptical and and closed bubblein a lot of ways, to the
(44:59):
point where I don't answer a lotof phone calls. Don't call me,
like my god, but if somebodydoes, I screen them and then I'll
call back if they leave a message, and it's something important. Until this
year and with me having been sosick with the gastroparesis and being on home
(45:24):
healthcare, and that means I havea nurse coming once a week, and
I have deliveries of medical supplies,and I talk to just various people that
call me every week, and thatmeans I have to answer the phone more
often. And yet I'm skeptical andcareful, and I don't acknowledge my name
(45:55):
until they say it first. AndI don't ever say yes until I'm sure
who I'm talking to, because Ihave this sort of paranoia that they're recording
me and later will use that wordyes out of context. To imply that
(46:21):
I had agreed to some service orphone call in some way or whatever.
Like I worked with people who hadgotten caught. I worked with people who
talked too early. And so I'vealways been maybe a little, maybe a
lot paranoid on the phone when talkingto people, and Robert has done an
(46:45):
excellent job of confirming that I needto keep doing that. So Robert,
thank you so much for coming andtalking to me. It was a fascinating
conversation, and I hope you'll comeback. I know you have another book
out, and just we could justkeep talking, you know what I'm saying.
(47:07):
Thank you guys for listening. Ihope maybe maybe this conversation created just
a little bit of extra paranoia inyou, because I don't want any of
my listeners to be the target orthe victim of a personal crime or a
(47:32):
corporate crime that was avoidable. Soyou know, just be careful, unless
you're a corporate executive with billions ofdollars, in which case, please give
out all of the information you canbecause let's share that wealth, can we
(47:52):
Maybe maybe yeah, that'd be okay. I need to back in a couple
of days with another book release thatis coming out, So until then,
take good care of yourselves and youknow, don't give out sensitive information. You matter
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