“Do you like it?” she’d begged, words flying from the tip of her tongue.

“Yes, yes. It’s beautiful” he responded, looking more at the diamonds on the necklace than the girl. “We’ll take it — is there a set of earrings that would compliment the style?” he said to the store’s assistant that’d been assisting them.

Five minutes later, their friend and means of locomotion returned to the store, painfully and obviously excited. “The one I picked out is perfect,” he said to the first man, “and it’s exactly the type of hard drive I’d been wanting. 21 times as fast!”

Just back from the computer store on the North-West corner of the mall, located off Halifax’s city center. As the only real metro in Nova Scotia, it attracted all sorts on all sorts of missions.

“Great, get them to bag it… We’re nearly done here.” The first man was matter-of-fact, mission in mind.

The girl was still gazing at herself with intent in the mirror, eyeing her curves and the shines of the diamonds as she turned. The assistant was presently reviewing a selection of earrings for what he assumed was a lucky yuppie on a glamorous trip to the city.

He didn’t know they were poor aside from the cigarettes and drugs in their pockets.

Destitute.

He didn’t know the mission’s intent.

Bringing them to the counter, he rang through the items: necklace, two sets of earrings. Just over $4100 — just under the $5000 maximum per store they’d set for themselves. After ringing, he asked for a valid method of payment — seemingly having had secured his commission in the back of his mind.

The man brandished a Visa with a name that didn’t match his and numbers he’d grabbed off the internet, then pressed into the card using a 72-character card embossing machine he’d acquired fresh from the darkweb, an anonymous drop and a top-rated reseller.

The clerk ran the card, and the mag strip didn’t work — as expected for the crew, not expected for him.

Before running the numbers from the front of the card, the clerk had had training a week before to test the card to see if it was manually embossed in a new machine that the mall had acquired to fend off credit fraud.

This wasn’t expected by the crew — being a new policy that the first man hadn’t yet encountered, even though he’d prematurely promised the group different presents as a vig of the grift.

In fact: each of the stores they visited had given their employees this training.

In fact: anti-money laundering and fraud classes has hit the employees of most of Halifax of late, in an effort for the victim rate to go down. The fact that the money’s both insured and even stolen — really — from banks, is an argument that goes unheard by most parties.

In fact: as they returned defeated from the mall, after the first man had to explain twice there must have been some damage to the card and yadda yadda false alarm — talked his way out of a massive little charge and tiny massive fine — they couldn’t even book a hotel on the phone without a valid CVC (the 3-digit number on the back of cards, to prevent internet fraud — except on Amazon, who seem to skirt the laws with their internal Know-Your-Customer policies). Fact is, they couldn’t book a hotel.

Returning back to Pictou County, two hours North of where they’d admitted defeat, the first man — by the name of Boche, not Jack as the credit card had claimed — he had to explain countless times as the driver complained about gas lost and no vig gained: this is the first time this plan didn’t work, would have to refine the process in order to next time succeed.

He had no refining ideas that might work.

This plan was dead. Tens, fifties thousands dollars — or more — in items resold on Kijiji and Craigslist, hundreds, thousands — or more — in vigs shared; this plan would no longer sustain him.

Outwardly, his little girl he’d wanted to impress seemed more unimpressed diamondless than he.

Inwardly, she had a future — without this scam, he was crushed.

Destitute.

— —

As young as the woman in the first section was — she wasn’t nearly as young in the girl in this second.

Young, unsure, nearly pubescent — however you phrase it, this girl wasn’t old enough to be meeting who she was meeting. She’d e-met him on a ‘seeking friends’ site three weeks before, from her friend’s basement on the other side of the continent from where and a little bit before the plan was hatched to rip off the stores in Nova Scotia’s little city.

The California sun was hot — as hot as a California gets, in the dead of summer. He said his name was Dev but she couldn’t be sure of that — having herself provided him a pseudonym, cleverly she’d thought as June — named simply after the month where they’d started chatting.

Clever.

Dumb, clever girl.

Put on the spot she was unsure about talking to a 36 year old, but he’d just seemed so genuine and heartbroken in his little mid-life crisis. She liked a challenge, anyhow, being bored with her age-appropriate mates.

She’d progressingly gotten older and older, losing her virginity only a year earlier to someone statutory raping her — technically. She knew they weren’t in love, but deep down she thought — even voiced — ‘who’s abusing who?’

That game was John (Dev)’s favorite. Paying for nudes, who’s abusing who? The nude requester or the nude provider? Paying to meet in a public toilet and get it on — who’s abusing who? She comes out on top having economically dominated him, and he comes out on top having endangered himself with the law and getting his little pinky stinky, to boot.

They did, she did, he did and he did.

— —

Hackforums.net

It’s a whitenet site where non-Russian hackers congregate.

Credit card dumps, scammers scamming scammers, built on top of a forum and delivered to those who don’t even mask their internet browsing privacy.

Boche wasn’t that dumb, mind you — not for the current mission. Five months ago he’d accomplished the same mission with a different objective than he’d had now, with the hindsight illuminating new cash money he could draw from the same plan.

He’d had a network of about 1000 computers tied together by a virus, and implementing elevated permissions programs of his choice — his cash money here was mining cryptocurrency, but it didn’t prove effective.

Bots dropped off the net, presumably because they noticed the hack or maybe because they were fake bots — either way, the ones remaining didn’t net net.

He was fueled by an experience he’d had while barely pubescent — aroundabouts the time he lost touch with one of his childhood best friends.

As a challenge with another good friend of his, he’d hack as many computers with a little backdoor trojan, script kiddie style, as his friend would hack as many computers as he could, too. They’d catch up after 9 or so over a game of Counter-Strike, a coffee and a spliff and discuss their findings.

They’d often times find funny passwords for friends and colleagues, the friend’s name being Paul and once even finding a cutie with the password ‘ILovePaul’ — funny little conversations and even dialup internet passwords. All sorts of gold.

The hindsight for what Boche found on the first friend’s computer, though, and the gold that could have been wrought if he approached it different… That’s the key memory in his focus.

His friend’s dad had been having an affair.

He caught his friend’s dad — conversation history, screenshots, pictures and videos.

His friend’s dad was into some weird, crazy stuff — furries and playing dressup while going to work on days off without a better excuse for his wife, kids.

Presented with the evidence, Boche was compelled by a few options. At thirteen years young and without any addictions to speak of — yet — he could really find a use about $5000 for now and $10 000 every so often to keep his blackmail from being fired.

However, the prodromal brain he’d had before being diagnosed and medicated for all his disorders and personality traits felt some issues with this plan. He felt as though he should tell his friend — he felt as though he should do right on the side of decency.

This is the lesson.

He did right — showed his friend — his friend showed his mom. The father lost his wife, house, kids — and his friend lost his family, house, dad.

It broke and still breaks his friend’s heart.

They no longer talk.

The money would have been preferable, if properly executed.

This sat in the back of his mind, as did his present hunger and smokelessness. Having spent his last $80 on sub-par quality cocaine that’s hours since passed, and having no nicotine, he needed a plan. His credit card scam — rest Her peace — was dead. He needed income.

He could, of course, subject himself to labor — but he didn’t much like that plan. As a self-proclaimed communist from well before the trojan days began, he never wanted to slave to labor while someone else pocketed the difference,

He’d had, in the past, and moreover there was nothing nearby in his rural Canadian experience that would match his resume’s experience.

He was looking for the Johns of the world.

He was planning systematic extortion of thousands — tens, thousands, or more — people.

Using his studied artificial intelligence skills and his studied psychology skills, he was planning to reap thousands — tens, thousands, or more — but first, he needed money. It takes money to make money, or money begets money, or whatever soundbite you subscribe to and resonates with you — he needed to fuel the debauchery.

Finding what he’d wanted on the site, secured behind a VPN connected to an overseas VPS doing the searching, he turned to his Facebook Messenger to see who — if anyone — had $500.

That’s Virtual Private Network, and Virtual Private Server.

The plan was really dead-simple.

Instead of computers as targets, his botnet would live on a server and communicate with Android phones up to a certain version.

These Android phone’s conversations, browser histories, passwords, images, videos, audio input — everything would be logged, uploaded in real-time and even over mobile data — served via a bad .APK installation file that people would willingly download, thinking they would get a streaming software or something.

Those rooted or hacked Androids would even be more susceptible and have the virus installed as a system service, even staying on there after the infected install file and installed virus program might theoretically be discovered and removed.

Epic.

The delivery method was any one of a number Android virus spreading services — where sellers and resellers advertised as many as 1000 infected phones for $35, $50 USD, paid in Bitcoin, anonymously wired over the ethers from one anonymous address to another anonymous address.

Once enough phones were infected, Boche intended to lock all their files with an encryption protocol and 16-character password needed to unlock the files.

Afterwards, he would spam the phones with dialogues and alerts telling them of their security hole and advising them they’d never get their data back — and threatening to analyse their personal communications and histories unless a ransom demand was made.

He drafted a communication to communicate, and emailed it to himself over anonymous encrypted email.

Hi! Just wanted to let you know that we’ve backed up all your device’s files (images, videos), chat logs for the last month, passwords for every website or form you’ve ever filled, (credit cards, banking…) and all other pertinent information.

If you’re a law-abiding citizen, you have nothing to worry about. After we analyze all of the data we’ve collected, we’ll find that you were indeed one of the ‘good people’ and unlock your data. You can still use your phone as normal until it gets unlocked, just without access to your files.

Should you, however, be selling crack or are a pedophile then our team will find the evidence and report it anonymously to your local police (and grab a tiny cash reward for ourselves when they search & seize or arrest you).

If you’re cheating on your Sigificant Other and we find out exactly what the damages might be, we’ll let them know — we’re sure that all of your email contacts of all of your facebook contacts being spammed a message about your infidelity along with picture or video proof for good measure will do the trick. Easiest route down the path of losing the wife, house, kids, and future…

Maybe you’re not committing crimes yourself, but the folks on your Snapchat or Facebook talk openly about their crimelord status or maybe you’ve overheard some juicey info — it’d be quite upsetting for your crimelord friends to be outted because we found out who’s manufacturing what or who’s been selling to who, and it turns out that it’s your fault…

How to avoid your fate? Send 0.01002751 Bitcoin EXACTLY so I know it’s you to this bitcoin address: 19pfzPkGxzkbgLjFZ6693m7RKziLzeiRnf.

What’s a bitcoin? How do you get one, or 1/100 of one? Put the above bitcoin address into https://www.canadianbitcoins.com and pay by credit card. You may only be able to buy $50 CAD worth of bitcoin in your first transaction, so be sure to create additional transactions on your credit card.

Our overseas team of data analysts will start looking at the list of people we’ve locked in 7 calendar days. Anyone who’s paid their BTC amount by that time will have their devices unlocked and no search of their data will be started. We’ve created an artificial intelligence algorithm that compares certain keywords or keyphrases to rank which of you is most likely committing crimes or even some light adultery, in order to find the most fruitful gains quicker.

Remember: even if you factory reset your phone or replace your operating system, there’s no feasible way for any computer to break the encryption on all of your files without costing $10 000 000 and taking 24 000 years.

What’s more is that we’ll see which have you have taken measures to cirumvent the encryption, leading us to believe that we’d find some juicey activity in our backed up logs and filestructure of your phone that both you and the authorities have 0 chance of finding, given anonymous internet techniques, practices and currencies.

Bye for now,

-Your Friendly Neighbourhood Ethical Hacker

— -

A few days earlier, the rumbling Chrysler 300 that dropped her off had a matte black engine hood that stood out from the silver body of the car, and the driver’s-side window was replaced with a plastic sheet.

The plastic covering was held to the window frame with a double layer of duct tape, but still flapped loudly as the car sped away. Although she had been in the passenger seat, she felt the bits of broken window pane stuck to her leggings and brushed them off onto the sidewalk. She dropped the cigarette she has just finished atop the shards of glass, and stepped on the butt with her black leather flats and sighed.

She didn’t like what was coming next, so she slowly ascended the stairwell to the all girls home that she had been staying at for the last two days. She knew the resident counsellor was watching her from the picture window through the sheer curtains without taking a glance at the building.

“Anna! You come straight here, please!” Janice, the counsellor, exclaimed as Anna entered the home.

Anna walked towards Janice and the window, but didn’t look up from the floor.

“I can’t explain how worried I was, and that boy that dropped you off! I can’t begin to describe the risk you’re putting yourself in, Anna, and again!” Janice breathlessly gushed. Her hands were outstretched and her eyebrows were furrowed. Janice’s medium-length, thin, salt-and-pepper hair was messy and her worried tone affected Anna.

“I’m not being unsafe.” Anna said, stoically. She didn’t look up for more than a few seconds before she fixed her gaze on a chip out of the hardwood floor in the common area. The overhead light was brighter than usual to Anna, and she felt the sensory overload with every decibel of Janice’s concerned spiel.

Janice moved closer to Anna to continue to speak- but Anna stepped back. Anna put her left hand up and asked if she could go to bed. Janice simply burst into tears and obliged. Anna turned and left the room.

She headed straight to the room and single bed she was assigned and kicked off her ballet flats then lowered herself onto the patchwork quilt that hadn’t been unmade since the client before her. Anna was too tired to wash her face and thought about that for a few seconds before she faded out.

Sixteen and a half hours later, Anna’s flip-phone started buzzing in her bra. It woke her up. Groggy, she answered. A deep male voice told her to get a shower because he wasn’t more than ten minutes out. Anna panicked because she knew that as soon as Janice heard her stirring, Anna was going to have to comply with hours of disciplinary action and counselling sessions and would probably have to eat something. Anna, however hungry she really was, didn’t care in the least about a nutritious meal. Anna needed her fix and was compelled to jump out of the bedroom window to meet the driver of the multi-colored 300 again today.

When Anna opened the car door, she noticed the cloud of marijuana smoke pour into the open air and disappear. The driver smiled a perfect grin, and set a burning joint into the ashtray in the cupholder between the seats. He handed Anna a pack of cigarettes and she sat down and closed the door.

She didn’t expect any relief from the cigarette, which is why she always closed her eyes when the calmness struck her and the smoke filled her lungs. Anna never expected anything to be easy, and she realized in that moment that she couldn’t go back to the girl’s home. She had completely burned that bridge today.

It was a few seconds after that first puff when Anna noticed the car was going twenty kilometres over the speed limit. She switched the cigarette for the burning joint and took a puff of that. It was strong, but she didn’t let the smoke out of her lungs until the urge to cough broke through.
“You didn’t do your hair, Anna.” The driver stated, as he flicked a strand of her long black hair into her face.

Anna flinched and looked out her window. The plastic covering was flapping and was louder than her tinge of guilt.

“Janice was going to call the cops if she saw me, Mase, I can’t go back there again. They’ll report me to protective services.” Anna explained.

“I know,” he said.

Her hair was unbrushed, and she knew that yesterday’s makeup left racoon-like bags under her otherwise bright green eyes. She felt more guilt while she brushed a piece of lint off of her leggings. She remembered the pair of jeans she loved were sitting on the dresser at the group home and felt even worse.

Anna was wearing a dark jean jacket and a white t-shirt with a silk-screened “Calvin Clien” written across the front in black lettering. Her faded leggings needed to be washed, as did she, but she couldn’t keep thinking about that.

Then, she wondered for a second what Mase would say when he realized she forgot the jeans. Mase always had a cigarette for her, but Anna knew that all he cared about was money, and the jeans were her only change of clothing, so she figured Mase would create trouble over her forgetfulness considering he gave the jeans to her a few days earlier. She was anxious, fiending, and a little tired.

She listened to the flapping of the plastic in the window as the rap music flooded the rest of her consciousness until the joint took affect and her eyes got heavy.

She didn’t mention the jeans until Mase stopped the car abruptly in front of a couple parked Harley Davidson’s. The Harley directly in front of the 300 was newer and almost completely black, minus the red needle on the speedometer.

It belonged to someone she never thought she would see again. The other Harley was a bit less extravagant but equally as appealing. It was a burnt orange, and the pack strapped to the back was locked with a visible padlock. Anna knew the contents, and she knew that’s why Mase was here.

Anna cringed when Mase honked the horn. She thought it was audacious and she was always concerned about police when he acted this way. She wished he would do business more discreetly. Still, two men with black leather jackets brought the pack from the Harley and got into the back seat of Mase’s car with it. Anna’s nervous system went into a spin. She didn’t need to wait much longer now.

The men were in their early thirties, both with more than a decade on Anna, yet they spoke so simply that Anna assumed they got hit in the head one too many times. She tried not to smile at the thought as they spoke about the contents of the pack to Mase.

Anna leaned closer to the ashtray to look for a decent sized butt to light up as she waited for her fix, but didn’t see one. At least Mase recognized her intent and passed her another cigarette. She didn’t light it up before the men in the back seat passed her the CD case with a thin white line gleaming back at her.

Mase handed her a rolled up hundred dollar bill with a small piece of tape around it to hold it together. Anna didn’t hesitate to sniff the line back then. The rush subsided quickly but the high was clean, and she thanked the man as she handed the empty case back to him.

Mase said he has to go, Anna said good-bye, and the two men left the car without the package. Then, Mase instructed Anna to open the pack and count the contents out loud to him, as she had the last time she was in this situation.

Anna counted 28 sealed grams of cocaine, but Mase was driving quickly, and the loud music was so distracting that she dropped a couple onto the floor matt.

Mase shot her a dirty look with his eyes cut into slits and barked at her to pull it together in a gruff tone.

Anna flashed back to her biological parents sitting on a floral couch in the dark living room back when she was ten. She recalled the smell of burning tires, or so she thought, until she witnessed the crack rocks on the glass coffee table and she knew her parents weren’t going to save her from the life she was forced to endure.

At ten, she was already fully equipped to repress the hard feelings that would force her into many unmistakable risks. She thought of her father’s dark yellow smile and cracked teeth, but she pushed that thought away like she had pushed off on her barbie bicycle to the neighbors after her father overdosed on that living room floor.

The thought about the obituary that didn’t describe his addictive nature or his negligence that she tried to forgive every time she had these intrusive thoughts.

It was then that Mase relaxed. He asked her to bust out cocaine for him, and she did. She held the pressed powder under her Forever 21 rewards card until she felt it smoothing out for consumption. She made a couple pretty lines and passed him the CD case as he drove.

He snorted the two lines and asked for another. She knew she was next, so she took her drugs and began to feel chatty. This side effect irritated Mase, so she kept to her flip phone and texted her close friend Jenny. Immediately, Jenny asked Anna’s location, but Anna knew better.

She kept her texts short and sweet and said she was safe. Jenny sent a long paragraph expressing concern and fraught with emotion. Anna simply closed her phone, after sending a single heart emoji, and she took another line from the pile.

It was then that she got a Facebook message from Boche. They’d known each other through other people and had met on a few occasions and at a few parties, but never really sat down and chatted — which is why she found the contents and undertone of the messages suspicious.

Boche was mentioning that they could make a shit ton of money and get some free stuff if they used credit cards he’d looked up and scammed to grab stuff from the city.

Having been scammed out of money, time or sex by ‘friends’ before, she was unsure — but she was interested in the opportunity as she owed a few people money, including Mase. It didn’t seem to require any upfront costs for her, anyhow, other than finding a drive to the city — of course, Mase came to mind. She didn’t make any promises or assurances, but said she’d think about it.

— -

Boche:

I’m an extremely high-functioning person with psychotic and sociopathic disorders, homicidal ideation, AMA

/r/serialkillers

I note a lot of discussions here involve the classifications, legal status and abilities of people with ‘beautiful minds,’ so I thought I’d AMA myself.

The admins may not approve but one of my favorite ‘woe is me’ claims is usually something =akin to ‘I want to start murdering small animals so I can finally get the treatment I need.

Or bigger, smarter prey.. there’s greater joy from greater challenge, no?’ and I’ve been hospitalized with ideation of suicidal / homicidal thoughts or plans maybe 7–10 times.

The last time I’d been hospitalized I told them about my plan to use anonymous internet services to hide my tracks and start convincing already sick people around the world (incels, your average teenager) to murder people at random, without apparent motive, and that I’d only need 8 confirmed to ‘beat’ Charlie Manson and be recognized in history.

A legacy, if you will. I even wrote a book with this as the plot and it’s on Amazon, but I’m not here to peddle my wares — I’m here to help you folks understand psychotic disorders a little more.

Fun fact: people with psychotic disorders are far more likely to be abused than to abuse someone. We’re far more likely to smoke, attempt suicide or abuse hard drugs than the general public — google it, the stats are there.

I was diagnosed about 12 years ago with drug-induced schizophrenia and panic disorder. Those diagnoses have progressed over the years and now are all of schizoaffective (enough symptoms to be diagnosed schizophrenic with an underlying mood disorder), bipolar, panic disorder and anti-social personality disorder.

Here’s some of my work that’ll help shed light on the mind of a maniac:

The original post had three links here, but I think my content was ghosted because brand new account and outbound link.

You can find the content by Googling:

steemit hodlorbust ‘everything and nothing’ — 2008–10–28

steemit hodlorbust ‘Panic.doc’ — 2009–11–15

steemit hodlorbust Of Approaching the Precipace and Touching the Infinite

Boche:

here’s my 3rd attempt at this post, with an account with more karma:

2nd post ghosted — let’s see if I use a real Reddit account if we can post here? Sent modmail on the original more anonymous account to see why content is being removed.

Not that if it’s due to the ‘we’re not a fandom and we don’t support imitation’ clause then fear not, as I have never and will never act on these kinds of thoughts — there’s a huge difference from experiencing alternate realities to believing them.

Losing track of one’s actual reality (however vague that is) is a prime diagnostic factor in schizophrenia, usually hallucinations or delusions — but I’ve been well-sedated for years and haven’t suffered a loss of reality in a long, long time. There’s no danger here — I’m just trying to spur up some interesting debate :)

Moderator:

The threads were removed because your account is brand new, but they would have been removed regardless of that fact. Take the edgelord AMA somewhere else, no one here cares.

Thanks

— —

Anna’s flip-phone buzzed rapidly as multiple messages poured in and she took her phone to the bathroom of Mase’s crowded house. She pushed past a couple of women who were kissing each other’s necks while the shorter woman held a burning joint between her first two fingers. Anna closed the bathroom door and saw the messages from Boche:

B: Brilliant Idea, but we need fast cash. Can you get 500usd and get to my place asap?
A: I’m not working tonight. Mase is having a party. Last time was a rip off Boche, and we still owe gas money.
B: I’ll send a car for you if you can? Obviously, I’ll split the profits.
A: I fell for this before. Can’t talk now.

A picture came through, and Anna’s eyes lit up. The message described a 3.7 million dollar profit scheme in Bitcoin.

Now, Anna knows nothing about cryptocurrency, but she does have a desperation for freedom like Bosche and she knows he won’t stop until he has an empire. She wanted in.

The party continued all around Mase’s house, but she needed the investment money before Boche got the money elsewhere. Anna was not about to pass up the opportunity, so she began to withdrawal from the commotion of the party and she sat at a small round table in the galley kitchen.

She thought for a few seconds. She was torn between the craving for a line of cocaine and suddenly becoming interested in the pile of patched jackets on the dryer by the front door of the house. Anna glanced around and saw that she was alone.

The party was congregated in the other parts of the house, and the pile of jackets were not being watched by anyone else. She moved towards the pile, and quickly checked the top jackets pockets. Three crisp hundreds.

She was elated. She worked quickly, checking each pocket and scoring different dimes of mystery drugs that looked like cocaine and a few tabs of acid. She collected $823 and stuffed the drugs and money into her bra.

Then, she went back to the bathroom to try the dope. The first dime bag she pulled out had about a .5 of white powder with a faint yellow tinge and it sparkled a tiny bit when she turned it in her hand.

She stuck her pinky nail in the powder and sniffed a bump. Immediately, she knew it was the same cocaine she had earlier that day, and smiled. Score, she thought. She thought about taking off then to Boche’s but didn’t want to be conspicuous.

She entered the living room with a mischievous grin that she knew wouldn’t resonate suspicion amongst the chattery room of utterly beaming coke heads. She was unknown to the rest of the party. That’s when she saw the plate lined with beautiful crushed up pure cocaine, and sat beside the dealer.

— —

So, Boche needed an AI. He needed something to deal with natural language, and pull out and rank keywords and negative keywords based on a score for each, ranging potential threads or chunks of conversation on a -1 to 1 scale — he’d already accomplished like work before, and needed to do it again.

So, he looked up his code from when he quote unquote ‘hacked’ a local dating site.

from nltk.sentiment.vader import SentimentIntensityAnalyzer

new_words = {

‘gaming’: 7.0,

‘Mental health’: 9,

‘new things or ideas’: 6,

‘culture’: 6,

‘creative’: 8,

‘artsy’: 5,

‘eclectic’: 8,

‘gym’: -10,

‘god’: -8,

‘cigarettes’: -10,

‘I work’: 10,

‘workout’: -10,

‘Trans’: -10,

‘single mother’: -5,

‘independent’: 2.5,

‘i have kids’: -5,

‘entrepreneur’: 10,

‘small business owner’: 10,

‘am looking to get married’: 10,

‘am not looking to get married’: -10,

‘I won\’t be marrying’: -10

}

analyser = SentimentIntensityAnalyzer()

analyser.lexicon.update(new_words)

Good enough of a start, he started building his own lexicon to deal with people being quote unquote ‘bad’ on the internet.

And so, the madness began.

He got an inbox from his little Diamond Girl.

A: So I found some money :) :)

B: Good stuff man you’re a lifesaver. Are you still at Mase’s?

A: Yeah and operational security warning I should stay here for the night and not say much more.

B: Lol I can understand #OpSec. When are you free?

A: Let’s meet tomorrow? Your place?

Boche sent a message to the guy selling the bot. Shit was getting real. Buddy’s name is Triang, according to Skype.

B: interested in DARK SHADES V6.0. Are you still able to escrow while your account is limited?

T: Hey there

T: Not sure

T: But can deliver the product immediately here.

T: Here mate?

B: hey man thank for writing. Unsure if I’d want to move forward without escrow but we can maybe do a 1mo subscription to start then move up

B: What are the key differences among your software and free RATs?

T: Yes sure.

T: Your hf profile link please ?

B: I just made a brand new one, one moment

T: Yep

B: tell you the truth I lost the login. it had 0 interactions tho

B: it was a throwaway one for me to find droid net and scope out how much loads would cost

T: Okay but you asked if we could make escrow , but you dont have acc ?

B: Yeah I didn’t realize I deleted the welcome email

B: if you can do escrow, I can create another

B: I have no funds yet — I will by next week

T: Alright no prob

T: There are many features that put our different in a higher level from other free/paid Android rats.

T: :)

T: Anti Guard is a feature which blocks all antivirus apps on the playstore. By default our app disables access to the antivirus apps to protect itself from being detected.

B: Smart yeah

T: Anti Doze Mode : Doze Mode was introduced by google in 6.0 to kill all background apps when phone was put to sleep. Our product has anti doze mode to prevent itself from being killed. It runs all the time.

T: App blocker : Wanna block an app from running on the phone ? This feature comes in handy.

T: Encryption/Decryption : you can call it as Ran***are.

B: Ohh damn that’s cool

T: Low Orbit Canon : You can Ddos a website using this.

T: Just run 500 threads on your local machine (xamp) your phone takes it down in less than 2 mins

T: Screen logger : Records the server and uploads it back to the server.

T: Notification Logger : All incoming notifications are tapped and sent to the server.

T: The rest features are misc which can be found in any android rats ; )

T: GPS,Contacts,SMS etc..

B: I think that the guard and doze are huge advantages

B: about encryption/decryption, how does that work?

T: Yup.

B: does it use a custom message to display? would factory reset on bootloader allow someone to circumvent it

T: You can choose to encrypt a file/file type with a specific extension/All files with a 16 Character Password

T: Phone runs normally to the user , but all the files will be encrypted . You can send an alert dialog on his screen to tell him that all his files are encrypted

T: No matter what he does he cant decrypt it without the password.

T: Features vary with prices. If you are looking for all the features you gotta go with 6 month or Life time Pack

B: yes, understood

B: I’d be happier going lifetime should we be able to use hf escrow

B: why is your acco

B: why is your account limited?

T: Hf Chat conversation , spoke about ransomware

B: Damn

T: Lets do it. i have my friend on hf. He coded this with me

B: great man

T: If you are happy lets do it with his account.

B: I’ll have the $ as early as next as next week, maybe tomorrow

T: Not a problem

B: do you know anywhere with good US/CA/UK/AU droid loads?

T: haha no buddy.

T: We make deal on Monday ?

T: Will make time for you if its okay

B: If I have the funds by then, sure. I shuold have them 1–8 business days from now

B: which features are on the 1 month subscription? so I can test?

T: You will get the antiguard and misc features in 1 mo sub.

T: Anti Guard, App Blocker as well.
B: oh but with escrow I’ll have time to test on my own device and verify it works? on lifetime

T: Dont worry at all. At the time of delivery , we test it on your phone and deliver it.

T: We did that to our previous clients.

T: We test the product on clients device before we deliver it to show them that our product functions great.

B: that’s good business

B: great

B: ok, let’s touch base Monday

T: Yup.

T: See you then.

T: We accept crypto btw

T: Btc/eth are accepted at the moment. As mentioned on the thread.

B: Yup np.

T: See you.

B: Does lifetime sub include any updates? is it on v6.0 now?

B: and is it a cpanel I have access to, or a static server I put up somewhere?/

T: Yes. It started with 4.0 .

T: Webserver.

T: Just get a webhosting . Thats fine.

B: Np can do

B: how does the alert dialogue work?

B: can someone copypaste a btc address from it?

T: It appears on the screen. You use it as phishers

T: Google/Facebook/Snapchat/Android Settings/Whatsapp icons are supported. And users can interact with alert dialog.

T:

T: That one is an alert dialog for older version of our product.

T: The current version has different UI

B: so if the workflow was 1. encrypt 2. display an alert that says ‘yo we locked you, send $100 to unlock to (btc address)’

T: “someone has tried to log into your….” can be edited by the controller (attacker)

T: Um.. haha we want you to use it for legitimate purpose. Haha so we cant comment on it

B: can we place clickable <a href> links?

B: Oh no problem

T: No. But you can open links in their browsers (gotta check this feature and will confirm if this feature exists)

B: yes. that’d be great

B: are these actions done on a per-unit basis or globally?

T: You can shorten the url and instead write “Please open the link in your browser manually”

B: like alert, link, can those be applied to all affected units at once?

T: At the moment, you interact with one bot at one time

T: We can implement that feature if you go for custom pack

T: You pay extra , we add those features in it.

B: hmm

B: to add encrypt for all bots, alert for all bots at once — how much?

T: 70–90$

B: or even better, for bots tagged with a certain tag. so I can tag a set of bots ‘run 1,’ then run the sequence, then as I acquire more bots we could run the sequence on ‘run 2’ tag

B: so as to not affect the first set twice

T: Oh this one

T: By default every bot has its unique id

T: You can edit the id in ascending order from 1 to …..

T: So you select first 15 bots to run a sequence, when new bots add up you edit their names from 16 to 50 and select these 16 to50 bots and run some program

B: yeah

B: so the idea would be to select 1–15, then 16–50 and run the encrypt then alert ( a few times for alerts)

B: but keep them all separate just write down the unique Id range

T: If you donot provide a unique id then bots get confused haha . You wont receive files. It all gets messed up

T: Files = photos taken, contacts etc..

….

…

..

.

Does this guy think I’m a noob?

.

..

…

….

B: ok how long would it take to implement batch encrypt, batch alert?

B: I’ll have some $ by this week like I said. we can start then.. Maybe even tomorrow

T: New bots are displayed at the top with serial number.

T: So you select new bots and execute something

B: oh we can already do this as I’d described?

T: We shall do one thing

T: You select the bots you want to execute command1 . After executing you select different bots you want to execute command2

T: So the same command will not affect the other bots

B: yes

T: Alright

T: The button value “Verify” , The text message , The icon all are editable in the latest version

B: does it require the input field?

T: Yes . It was supposed to be used for phishing.

T: Just like the pic

B: also are the features like encrypt and alert command-line programs with switches for options?

T: Didnt catch it

B: like when we select the bots to execute command1, is that like a string like alertBox.sh — icon=fb — desc=”Enter fb pw!”

T: Nope

T: To you , alert dialog box will be displayed to type what should be displayed on their mobile

B: so yes, in order to be effective I’d need to be able to do encrypt + alertbox en masse

T: En masse spanish? Mexican ?

B: sorry french I think

B: in groups, I mean

T: Yes

T: I have got something. As it takes some time , a week or two to finish your project you can send us some upfront so we can start working on it. By the time we finish it you can pay the full.

Armed with the success of the conversation, Boche went back to his code. He picked words and phrases like ‘keep it secret’ ‘don’t tell anyone’ ‘I could go to jail,’ ‘per gram,’ ‘lose my wife’ as +1 in the Natural Language assessment, and opposite words and phrases as a -1.

After having rated 10s, 100s 1000s of lines of text, he’d figure out a logical way to separate the text into chunks — maybe by datetime index — and then rate the chunks for a more specific rating by, say, day.

‘This is going to be easy-peasey,’ he thought to himself.

B: we’re honestly going to be loaded rich if this works

A: What are the chances, though?

B: depends how lucky we get.. And how many times I have to refine the AI to get it right

B: but honestly I’m worried

A: About what? What?

B: How do I not die on cocaine if I have too much money? If I have infinite income and a taste for coco, how does one not overdose on a given day?

A: we should get clean

B: well, yeah, easier said than done. Even rehab doesn’t fucking work they removed the therapeutic programming from public rehabs because it cost too much fucking money. Last time I went I had the programming and lasted like 28 days sober. Wouldn’t be worth a damn now other than to physically detox. I can do that on my own

A: I’m worried too. I do too much of it. I’ve been thinking about smoking meth or heroin so I can save money. It’s not like I even pay for it anyways, just trade favors…

B: Lol who’s abusing who?

A: Best game. ;)

B: Well recovery is worth thinking about. I need to worry about how I’ll sustain myself when I’m too old to work

A: Too old to scam? Is there such a thing? Silly twerp!

Speaking of lols, Boche published his new lexicon additions to GitHub. While the application for looking for subversive, punishable behavior remains a mystery — in the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ sense — there’s 0 risk and a ‘fuck you’ to investigators and the man if he flaunts some of the underlying tech he’s using to accomplish the means by which he net nets.

-> git add .

-> git commit -m “initial commit”

-> git push

Username and password authentication, and done and done. He reminded his Google Assistant to remind him to set up secure shell access to GitHub sometime tomorrow, reviewed his other outstanding reminders, and thought damn!

He forgot to call his mom. It’s now 11:08pm, far past her bedtime, and he said a brief ‘Ok google,’ waited a second, and said a brief ‘remind me to call mom finally tomorrow at 6 p. m. ‘

He noted with annoyance that his privacy settings on his internet router had messed with the auto timezone on his phone again, disconnected from Skype in the incognito window and turned off all of his privacy features locally on the laptop and on the router. Voila, and the phone was fixed.

— —

Our friend and target John was presently sitting in a parking lot in a neighbouring town. This is the fourth parking lot of the fourth hotel he’d visited that day. He was preparing to exit the vehicle — phone was left at home, as it was on all his missions, as his benefactors worried about the privacy and security of mobile device’s tracking people.

Turns out, well they should be.

He left the car unlocked and walkedto a nearby coffee spot he’d mapped out earlier.

Sitting there, drinking an extra-large triple triple he’d ordered from the attendant at the counter, he counted the minutes passing by on his watch.

After exactly 45 minutes, he made the journey back to the car.

Assuming — correctly — he was one vacuum-sealed bag of heroin later, he sparked the engine and drove away.

— —

Tens. Thousnds. Files.

Boche was faced with tens of thousands of logfiles.

This was the gold money loot he’d wanted…

The virus had successfully spread onto 12476 Android devices, after paying the $150 for the bot and $80 to upgrade the features and spending the rest of the seed money on spreading the bot…

The bot then reported keystrokes, passwords, locations back to the server in real-time. The server sorted the information, apparently, in it’s UI panel accessible to the web admin user which — in turn — accessed the logs separated into folders by IP then folders for the individual functions.

Applying this knowledge, he modified his nascent Python AI to search through these folders and subfolders…

… and crossed his fingers….

He ran the algorithm, and waited as it progressed through the cash money loot log files and rated them each on a scale of -1 to 1 for the lexicon analysis.

He waited.

2000… 3000….

As the count slowly increased, he again worried about his expensive habit and how that could approach a physical danger should he simply have too much money.

He thought about how he could potentially resign himself to a rehab program — even a longer, more intensive paid program should he have the funds — and thought about whether or not it would yield any results.

Anna, who seems to spend more time with him than she does with her druglord friend nowadays — which he appreciated more than he let on — seemed to think positively on the subject.

Helping each other help themselves, they can find the strength to overcome the underlying and unbearable need be fucked up. Having a plan for the future and some goals and some wholesome activities to pass the time instead of resorting to artificial highs..

it’s a paradigm shift. A doublethink. A mindfuck.

An imperative.

A biological imperative.

5000…

He thought about an Artificial Intelligence article he’d recently written, and how an AI using Novel Search would approach his problem.

if he considered the least likely solutions first, and worked his way inwards to find acceptable solutions that might not seem obvious — working from least obvious to more obvious — what would Novel Search suggest about quitting cocaine and other temporary highs? What sort of activity might prove to replace that kind of joy? He’d only experienced true joy through cocaine in recent memory.

6000…

He thought back to the last time he had that sense of pure ecstasy and elation without an artificial source.

At 17, he’d rapelled out of a helicopter as part of an adventure holiday — the sheer thrill of the inherent danger of heights and being in control of one’s own descent gave him a rush of adrenaline he’d never felt before, and only ever felt again with cocaine.

7000…

Maybe that’s a good answer? He lit a smoke and thought about it: danger sports? Extreme sports? Is that what they’re called? He’s not at the peak of physical perfection, but there is a ziplining outfit in nearby River John — maybe he could give that a shot? It’s outside his comfort zone, and not something he would normally consider under any circumstances — thus is the joy of applying Novel Search.

— —

Novel Search Applied via Evolutionary AI, Creating a Money-Making Machine

1. Introduction
2. Novel Search
3. Evolutionary Algorithm & Competing Artificial Intelligence Genomes
4. Money-Making Machine
5. Future Use-Cases: Conquering Every World Health Organization and United Nations Initiatives

Introduction

If you take new and novel (pun intended… read on!) ways to approach a given problem, you can come up with new and exciting ways to defeat that problem.

If the problem is ‘how do we trade better than the average cryptocurrency investor, and gain an edge that persists among market conditions’ then there’s a few possible solutions: the manual way, where we learn how to react to a given situation or market condition, or the automated way, where computers do it faster.

In the manual way, we’re limited by our response times and because the majority of our competition are indeed automated traders or even automate trading desks, any edge we temporarily experience will soon be defeated when the market shifts.

In the automated solution, we can use any given search result for ‘github automated crypto bot’ and see what sort of success we can have.

We can even devise our own strategy on Mudrex or TradingView and connect it to an exchange, or hire a third-party freelance developer for $$thousands to recreate our pride and joy — but certain characteristics like lag experienced from the crypto exchange’s APIs hitting our servers will render such plans useless.

What’s the best answer?

How about employing computers themselves to learn how to react to new and different market conditions in real-time, by re-appropriating existing crypto trading platforms and optimizing the input variables over a set period of time — using live data and live funds to see how the market reacts to buys, sells, or volume in the orderbooks at a certain point in time?

On my birthday of this year, I was headhunted by an organization’s CEO in order to achieve this effect.

He was looking primarily for someone with lived experience making market maker bots, or rather, those bots that manipulate both sides of the orderbooks in real-time — on exchanges like BitMex or Deribit, where one can absorb the trading fee rebate for having an order executed against oneself, there isn’t even really a need to accurately predict the movement of a market — so long as you have enough volume on either or both sides of the books, you can count your profits in the fee rebate.

Enter my GitHub profile https://githu.com/dunncreativess — where maybe 30–50 of my 111 repositories deal specifically with crypto trading, and the majority of that subset deal with crypto trading arbitrage or other high-frequency trading, and most of those attempt to automate and profit from fee rebates.

The first occurence of this was ‘Qryptos Fee Monster,’ which did turn a tidy profit but — more importantly, maybe — traded crypto back and forth over the course of a test 24–48 hours to the tune of $5000, $10 000 traded notional value with a mere $200 invested.

Sorry, in lamen’s?

My bot sat behind the scenes and sold, say, 0.02 Bitcoin for the equivalent value in Ether, then — when the markets hit the right condition — traded it back again, most times at a profitable difference.

The key fact was that Qryptos had a fee rebate if you made the market — that is, again, if someone executes an order based on one that you’ve posted on the order book, where that person or bot is the ‘taker’ in the maker-taker model.

So, even if I bought and sold an asset and underlying at a loss, there is a fraction of a percent revenues made from the fee rebate itself.

Either way, my exceptional lessons in both making markets and driving notional liquidity landed me a brand spanking new job as Chief Liquidity Officer, on the founding team of this organization.

This introduction to their value proposition serves as my third set of eyes on the algorithms and learning models employed, and although I am an absolute novice at Artificial Intelligence and Evolutionary Algos, I hope it sheds some light and peaks some interest on what they are, how they function and — dare I say it — how they might end up saving the world, in more ways than one, after we patent and sell our money-making machine.

Novel Search

When a human approaches a problem — at least, classically and logically — they’ll identify what the problem’s outline is, and then devise ways to achieve a net net result of conquering the problem.

For a problem like ‘how do I get some milk’ the answer might obviously be ‘walk to the fridge, extract milk carton, open, drink, replace, close fridge, walk back to couch.’

How did we find that answer?

We ranked in our heads the different options for getting milk. Because we had milk in the fridge, we outlawed the answers like ‘go to grocery store, buy milk’ that involved us going out of the house.

We then applied other filters and assumptions, like ‘the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.’

This methodology — the classic, logical human method — is the exact opposite of Novel Search in Artificial Intelligence.

In Novel Search, the computer will construct all the possible solutions to a problem and then try them from the least likely to succeed and progress to more and more likely. This obviously takes more time — but for a mathematical and systematic problem, a computer excludes the losing solutions in a fraction of a millisecond.

What we’re left with are the solutions that would seem unreasonable — or rather, unfathomable — to the average human, or even a supergenius. The computer has now rewarded it’s algorithm for finding extremely unlikely solutions for issues.

When does this come in handy?

Take our money-printing machine problem, for instance.

If you can acquire an edge over a given market — in crypto, equities, futures, or options, or whatever — and assert your dominance over that derived edge while maintaining that no other human or machine can recreate your edge, you alluva sudden have a very, very powerful and intricate tool. You have an evergreen edge.

Evolutionary Algorithm & Competing Artificial Intelligence Genomes

How do we make our edge even better?

Instead of a purely AI solution, our proprietary solution employs another layer of optimization that most wouldn’t consider.

In an Evolutionary Algorithm, we feed the input variables into competing species of the AI bot that take a different spin — learn a different way, apply a different Novel Search — and the outputs are rated on key performance indicators that sort the genomes into winners and losers. The winners then procreate, and apply a healthy dose of mutation to the genes — combining the best solutions into baby solutions, who compete in that new generation to see if they can beat the older generation.

Mutations aren’t just for fun, or even just for profit: they’re for the good of the species! Think: if humans never developed opposing thumbs, where would we be? Forward-facing eyes? When we take a brand-new look at the input variables and come up with fantastic, random new ways to approach them, we can find unexpected results — that are then selected by a process of natural selection.

Believe in Darwinism or not, the results are outstanding.

What we then get is a set of learned data competing against itself — and against other species, to boot — to create and focus on better results. We can then apply the generations down the line to the problem set in forward-facing tests, to see how they perform with real conditions and real dollars.

The simulations continue in the background, and the species as well as the training data become our Intellectual Property, whereas most of the other stuff is open-source and available to a careful Google search.

Money-Making Machine

So what do we do with these kinds of doubly-effective algorithms, tied in and dependant on each other?

Rather than find milk to consume — let’s find money to make.

This is where I come in with the mission and vision — I’ve been finding and recreating Free and Open Source Software existing on GitHub or elsewhere as crypto trading bots, then creating APIs for the input and output data that make them tick and seeing if we can get the AI to train sets and species against the data, to simulate more or less profits (more or less max daily drawdown, more or less notionary volume, etc…) and we can build our army of bots.

This army performs under bearish, bullish conditions and even sideways markets — and there are neural evolutionary AIs that exist to manage the bot-specific ones, exchange-specific ones, countering counterparty risk by hedging among variables.

What’s worse than a market that jumps or crashes? One that does so when you hold a position in the opposite way, of course! If you’re aiming to capitalize on the market staying around the same price, absorbing market making fee rebates, then wouldn’t you want to hedge in real-time using a long straddle in options for your underlying asset? If the market jumps too much in either direction, your puts or calls suddenly become a very worthwhile investment… that’s your tip for the day :)

Future Use-Cases: Conquering Every World Health Organization and United Nations Initiatives

Let’s say you have a given world need that can be addressed with smarter data that has an industry-leading edge.

Namely… all of them come to mind.

We can apply our patented solution to any given need that could save the planet from hunger, sex trade, or supply chain logistics.

These are the greater humanitarian and organizational goals.

— —

14000 different conversations, sorted by 24-hour period, have been indexed by Boche’s AI.

He sorted the results by the resulting score, and eyed his top contenders.

After 3 false flags in the top #3 spots, he lit a smoke. There are more negative keywords here he can add to the AI to make it smarter.. to avoid these kinds of red flags in the future.

He clicked on the #4 result.

Throughout the 17 hours of logged conversation, Boche counted this target talking to 3.. 4… 5? different underage girls.

Talking.. explicitly.

Secretively.

Boche is now excited. Elated. The AI worked and.. moreover.. there’s a chance to make money!

He began the process. He marked down this ‘John’ and laughed, as Johns are John Does, but this target is legitimately a John.

He went through another 20 top results, and found a drug dealer and two people cheating on their significant other.

This.

Is.

Easy.

He sent the initial message, locked the phones, and started preparing individual messages for the individual transgressions.

Pay money. Or lose your secrets. Face the law. Face your wife Dorothy.

For added effect, he watched their chat logs as they exploded with paranoia and suspicion. One person thought it was his buddy messing with him.. another thought it was The Man.

He waited.

He watched his Bitcoin address.

He waited.

He watched the logs.

People started to search ‘how do I buy bitcoin…’

It was going to work.

One person out of the group turned off their phone immediately.

— —

John’s handler and boss he knew only by the pseudonym ‘Reeg’ looked at him in utter disbelief.

‘You were doing what?’ Reeg said, exacerbated.

‘Nothing against anybody’s will really.. I mean, you can’t rape the willing, right?’ said John. He was trying desperately to get some help to keep his penchant for debauchery under wraps. He wanted his benefactors to benefit him once again.

‘You’re a fucking idiot, man. You should have known this would eventually blow up in your face. Give me your phone and I’ll see if I can make this go away. And keep it in your fucking pants, man!’

John handed Reeg the phone.

Reeg, in turn, about 45 minutes later handed the phone up again one link in the chain. Reeg didn’t get to advance as far as he had without having an eye for goldmines, though.

‘If we can find whatever person did this to John, we can recreate this scam and turn it into big money,’ he said.

His superior brought it to their own in-house hacker, and handed him the phone.

‘See what you can find out… the more info, the bigger the reward.’

The hacker — Mustaf — began to work.

What he’d find, much to his dismay, is a program that sent constant information to a redirect that eventually landed on a server overseas. There was no domain name — just the DNS redirect, meaning the hacker involved could switch server IPs that the traffic landed on without losing any of his bots in the botnet.

Smart, he thought.

The program was part of an illegal download John had done to be able to download music from YouTube without a subscription.

Dumbass, he thought.

He called the superior — this is, of course, three days later — and asked if they had bodies on the ground in Switzerland. They did, or knew someone who could be bought, and the next week there was a knock at the doors of the man who ran networking sysadmin for the hosting company where the server’s VPS was located.

Two very large, very intimidating men were able to get some details out of him after he connected to the company’s back office, specifically accessing the database that the VPS ran and — in view-only mode — deduced the username, password, and login URL for the admin panel for the virus.

This effect, of course, no federal investigation could have yielded. The threat of violence does some awesome things.

After receiving this information, Mustaf found the hackforum selling page for the bot’s creators. Contacting them and offering a bit of a bitcoin bribe, he managed to get as much information from them as possible about recent sales.

This led him, also, to the size of the executable file (archived) that was delivered.

He’d already had a backdoor access to most popular telecoms across Canada, and their logs. He did a batch search to find files of exactly that name and with that exact metadata… if this was unsuccessful, he’d have to try US, UK, AU, etc, but he thought there’s a good chance the perp is in Canada as John is.

Turns out, he was right, even though it was just a coincidence.

‘Nova Scotia… cheeky.’

There was a result for the file, on the day and time that the bribed creators of the bot had divulged. The IP could be tracked to a single apartment building.

— —

The cocaine was perfect. Sweet. Delicious.

Boche and Anna were celebrating one last high before committing to be sober.

Earning over $5000 in only a week, they had found a new financial freedom.

Life seemed perfect. Sweet. Delicious.

There was a knock at the door, and they didn’t feel like sharing so they turned down the lights and became silent.

The knock became louder.

They bust down the door, and two huge men entered.

‘Boche?!’ screamed Anna, ‘What’s going on?!’

The men controlled the situation, sat the pair down and gave Boche an ultimatum: work for us, or face the consequences.

Boche resisted, telling them that he’d seen people go down the mob path and never come out alive. He refused. ‘Under no uncertain terms will I…’

The men dragged the pair into the car, and set off. Pistol to Anna’s head, her crying, Boche gave them the answers they asked for.

Arriving, 15 minutes later of near-silence save for Anna’s tears, the man in the driver’s seat exited the car. Knowing the plan by now, Boche tried in vain to reach for his weapon — out-gangstered, the man pistol whipped him into unconsciousness. The last thing Boche remembered was the smell of cookies in the oven inside the building, and Anna’s scream.

He woke up. The men were gone. Anna was in tears at his feet. There was blood everywhere.

‘They shot her…’ she said, tears refilling her eyes,’ …dead…’

— —

Four months after the incident where they murdered Boche’s mother to teach him a lesson, he and Anna were 2000 miles West and living under assumed identities.

Refusing to fall in line with the mafia, he’d found out the identities of the two men that’d accosted them by running their visual profile through CSIS’s systems he backengineered himself into — then, through a list of known associates, found their boss’s names and photos and, in turn, their bosses.

Mr Big. After a direct email to one of them, a life-long standoff between Boche and the mob began.

They stayed off of drugs.

Their habits had cost them one of the dearest people — to both of them.

Toiling away together, they drew strength from one another.

Their secret was to find a reason to hate it. To loathe it.