Brett Shannon Johnson was a top administrator of ShadowCrew, a crime-facilitating web forum that grew out of counterfeitlibrary.com, which he ran. He eluded the Secret Service's October 2004 raids on the forum, which led to a dozen arrests. Johnson's case began when he was arrested in February 2005 for buying counterfeit Bank of America cashier's checks he planned to use to purchase items on eBay for resale. In exchange for a reduced sentence, he agreed to work undercover for the Secret Service's Columbia, South Carolina office, embedding himself as an administrator on two other carding forums, ScandinavianCarding and CardersMarket, under an investigation agents dubbed Operation Anglerphish; they nicknamed him "The Original Internet Godfather."
Secret Service agents acknowledge that Johnson committed unauthorized crimes during the roughly 10 months he worked undercover for them, though they maintain he did not commit them from the government office itself. While informing, Johnson purchased computers with stolen credit-card numbers and filed more than a hundred fraudulent tax returns in other people's names, by his own account using a laptop in the Secret Service office to gather victims' information, work he says continued largely undetected because handlers often grew distracted after hours. "There were two agents with him at all times, and we had a 42-inch plasma (monitor) that projected everything he did on it," Neal Dolan, special agent in charge of the agency's South Carolina division, told Wired in 2007. "You'd have to have been asleep not to have seen what he was doing (if he were committing crimes) -- and they weren't," he said, while acknowledging Johnson was unsupervised outside the office.
Agents discovered the scheme in 2006; Johnson went on the run, was placed on the Secret Service's most-wanted list, and was recaptured in August 2006, later escaping custody before being caught again. He was convicted on charges including aggravated identity theft, in case number 3:06cr01129-CMC in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, and a federal judge sentenced him to six years and three months in prison and ordered him to pay more than $300,000 in restitution. By his own estimate he stole about $2 million over five years of crime. Since his release, Johnson has worked as a cybersecurity consultant and speaker through his company AnglerPhish Security, advising on identity-theft prevention and discussing his history publicly, including in a two-part 2022 interview on the podcast Darknet Diaries.
