162: Hieu

I wanna make sure I I pronounce your name right. So can you say your name for me? My name is Hu Minh Roh. Hu was born in Vietnam. I'm growing up in a a small town in Vietnam. It's called Cambran. I was started to be a hacker when I was very young, maybe around, like, 14, 15 years old. And then just kinda kinda, like, out of, college, you see, you know, like, wondering about how the Internet working. And and, back then, the Internet is very expensive and super slow. That's one of the reason that I started to hack and steal, a few, Internet dialed accounts to be able to use it, without paying any anything. That's kind of the my my first time I got into trouble when I was, like, 15 years old. This was around 2004, a time when 56 k modems were the most popular way to get online. And the way it worked is you dialed a phone number and connected to the ISP that way, and they would connect you to the internet. But the ISP would charge you by the minute to go online. Can you imagine that being charged for every minute you're on the internet? That's how it worked back then. You couldn't afford that, so he figured out a way to use someone else's account, basically stealing someone else's ISP connection to get online. And that meant other people were paying for him to get online. And, just like a few months, you know, few months using this, stolen Internet backup account, I got kinda, like, a paperwork sent to my, house. And my parents, they got very surprised, and then they told me what's it about. And then, they I told them, you know, it's it's, related to some, stolen, Internet accounts. The paperwork said that Hugh did $5,000 in damage, and his father had to pay the fees. That's a lot of money. His father was pretty mad and sent him away to go live with his uncle in Ho Chi Minh City. And little did everyone know, it was going to be there in Ho Chi Minh City where he was going to build a darknet service and was going to make a fortune doing it. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. This episode is sponsored by DeleteMe. DeleteMe makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. DeleteMe does all the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal information off of data brokers' websites and then continues to monitor and remove personal info you don't want on the web. Privacy is a super important topic to me. So a few years ago, I signed up. Delete Me immediately got busy scouring the Internet for my name and gave me reports …