A fraudulent detective found the FBI secret device used to detect the location, and was released

The story below tells of a rogue criminal who has done everything he can to study some mysterious device that the American police used to arrest him.

This device is used to find the exact location of the house he is staying in even if the Verizon operator cannot. All of his prison efforts helped him to be freed, combining a mind of an unusually intelligent man with tremendous belief that he would succeed. Please read through, make sure that it is nothing less than action movies, so you will understand how people search for locations with mobile networks as well as virtue never give up when they can.

Package $ 68,000 and FBI miss

On May 6, 2008, a package containing $ 68,000 in cash was transferred to the FedEx store in Palo Alto, California, USA. These bills were washed with kerosene fuel just like instructions, the package was also vacuumed twice and placed in a stuffed animal and wrapped in gifts. Even this store is carefully selected: this is the place to open through the night and is only 150m from the subway station. The package is generally delivered and will be picked up by a man named Patrick Stout.

This amount is being tracked carefully. It was prepared by a messenger, who had been a criminal, was arrested and was associated with an interdisciplinary FBI force, the US Department of Taxation and the US Postal Service to investigate a tax conviction. .

At around 5 am, the subject appeared. A black jacketed white man came in from the back door, presented his driver's license with Patrick Stout, took the package and quickly left. He tore the package in the garbage bin near the FedEx store, stuffed the stuffed animal into his pocket and headed to the train station. Two policemen quickly followed the tail but were quickly discovered and cut by the object. Agents flocked to the train station but could not find him amidst the early morning train ride. Trains can take suspects to any city along the west coast from San Francisco to San Jose, but also go straight to the city's airport.

Just a few minutes after taking the goods, the man named Stout is gone.

The package is generally delivered and will be picked up by a man named Patrick Stout.

From here, every other clue does not seem to lead anywhere. Stout's license is a fake: the address does not exist, the identity card number belongs to a woman in Bakersfield. Stout continued to talk to the police messenger and said he did not know he was being followed at FedEx store, just that he felt afraid to go faster and hide. A few weeks later, Stout continued to receive a package of $ 18,000 worth of gold bars at the same FedEx store, but when the investigators found out, it was all over.

The messenger informed the interdisciplinary force about a series of bank accounts that he was instructed to use to deposit money, all using fake names - Sam Blat, Benjamin Cohan, Aaron Johnson. In these accounts, more than $ 400,000 spread out. The FBI may freeze these assets if they show the bank the collected evidence, but that will touch the subject. They wanted to catch him, not to scare him and escape.

Arrested - take home!

The best clue they have is an IP address that Stout uses to fill in fake tax returns. It comes from an AirCard from Verizon Wireless. This is a device that allows a laptop to access the Internet using a mobile network even if the computer does not have an integrated SIM slot, you can imagine it as 3G USB in Vietnam. The problem is that the aforementioned AirCard is also registered with another fake name with a sufficient shelf life to receive the goods. AirCard is also not bound to any home address such as fiber optic Internet. Every time Stout uses the device, Verizon only knows the suspect is connected to certain broadcast stations in the city of San Jose and that's it, can't trace him to the place.

Three months after the FedEx store, on August 3 of the same year, interdisciplinary forces broke into a rented apartment near San Jose airport under the name of Steven Travis Brawner. Agents had caught Stout nearby and had an order to search the apartment as well as his lockers. They found $ 117,000 in cash, 230 ounces of gold, 588 ounces of silver, a dark colored jacket and Verizon AirCard with a bank account. When the case ended, agents found $ 1.4 million.

Why can police find Rigmaiden's apartment location?

The suspect was sentenced to 35 charges of fraud, 35 identity fraud counts, and 3 other minor offenses - this is enough for him to spend his life in prison. Later that day, when the fingerprint was taken, the police finally discovered his real name: not Rupard, Stout, Brawner, Aldrich or any other name. His real name is Daniel Rigmaiden.

But why could the police find the location of Rigmaiden's apartment? There is no evidence on legal records regarding that. In order to detect Rigmaiden, investigators had to use some secret device to allow them to track suspects with a higher accuracy than what Verizon could do. They call this "cell-site simulator" , while the commercial name of the device is Stingray (Vietnamese means stingray). Neither of these words appear in court papers, and for some reason the device must be hidden even with the judge.

Stingray worked perfectly. Agents found the AirCard location that the suspect used and now has enough evidence to charge. But years later, the case was closed but still contained something extremely complicated.From prison, Rigmaiden did everything to bring this device to light.

The story of escaping sin begins .

In October 2015, The Verge site met Rigmaiden in Phoenix City, where Rigmaiden was living after being released from a nearby federal prison about a year ago. With extreme privacy obsession, Rigmaiden rendezvous with the guy of The Verge site at a nearby shopping mall. They invite each other to go camping as Rigmaiden is a person who likes to go on a picnic, and the thrilling story about the journey to bring Stingray to light begins.

Born in Seaside, California, Rigmaiden lives privately after finishing high school and living in student quarters. He quickly became an expert in counterfeiting identity cards and sold them to teenagers who wanted to go to a beer bar.

On a beautiful day, he decided to hide himself from the world. " I don't want to be attached to this social system. I need to take a step back and take it out." Rigmaiden moves to live in a small motel near the coast, sometimes living in a tent or camping area. "That place is so peaceful," he said.

He spends a summer in Big Sur, a remote area of ​​California known for its redwood trees. He created a campsite deep in the forest and developed pleasures flying freely between trees and between cliffs. He likes to work, likes freedom, and above all likes feeling up high with a little fear in it."You almost have to cling to the cliff. Because you know that if you fall, you're dead."

Such trips cost more than what Rigmaiden earned from selling fake identity cards, so he thought of another way: to file a tax return for those who had just died. He liked these tricks because according to him, it did not affect any particular victim. You are not stealing someone's money alive. Every time he gets a tax refund, he usually gets thousands of dollars. Over time, this proved to be extremely effective and gave Rigmaiden more money than he needed to survive. Rigmaiden follows a rule: selling fake IDs and tricking tax refunds for 6 months to make money, then spending 1 year out.

Of course, Rigmaiden is always very careful about his identity. His name often changes, and every one of the cabinets he rented or once sent is used with different fake identity cards. Each move is carefully calculated: from the computer used to fill the tax return to the post office where the money is delivered, from the forwarder will take the money package to the bank account used to pour money into . According to what he had set up, nothing could be used to track Rigmaiden.

Except that AirCard . I don't think the police have enough "procedures" to follow him, but he knows that there will be a way to do it. Speaking of how it works, the AirCard will broadcast in all directions, like a dog barking in a crowded way. When the signal reached a Verizon radio station, it was mixed with thousands of signals from other devices. But in theory, someone with the right device can still find out where the dog is barking and barking.

For many years before, AirCard's weakness was only a hypothesis. But when he was arrested at his apartment in 2008, Rigmaiden knew well that this was the truth. As soon as he was arrested, Rigmaiden thought that he immediately came to the AirCard to the culprit. The interdisciplinary force used a certain device, a device no one knew. His later thought was that he would have to do something to bring this device to light, and that was not simple."I know I have to learn a legal system to get out of jail."

Effortlessly research in prison

Ever since his arrest, he has always thought about getting rid of a crime while being transferred from one prison to another. He wrote a lot of letters to his lawyer, usually putting all the prisoners' requests in writing with a 7cm long pencil given by the prison. But that doesn't seem to change anything. He faces a federal case with community witnesses. The equitization of a secret device , about invisible radio waves will only bring trouble to you.

But he still believes that the US government is hiding something. He saw a search warrant for his home, but there was no reason for it, except that investigators used "historical data of telephone broadcast stations and other techniques". But a broadcast station receives thousands of signals from thousands of phones at the same time. Even the most detailed data is not enough to lead to a certain apartment. There must be something else.

He works continuously for 6 days a week, sometimes for 15 hours a day.When he couldn't print a file, he wrote it himself.

If he guessed correctly, this meant agents were hiding something from the judge, and that was enough for the case to be dismissed. But the problem is that your criticism is all about technical issues that you alone understand. Your lawyer doesn't know what a broadcast station is. So is the judge. So he started spending many hours in the prison library, usually 3 hours a week, until he found the answer.

Here, he met a precious friend, a lawyer who was imprisoned for fraud. Rigmaiden learns about the trials, how they occur, about the records, allegations and requirements that plaintiffs and defendants often use. Finally, Rigmaiden decided to use the "legal battle" strategy by sending a series of petitions and proposals to the court. "When you hire a lawyer, he or she will have to choose things they can challenge important because of time and money limits. And I challenge everything."

So Rigmaiden fired the first lawyer, then fired both the second lawyer and finally allowed himself to defend himself. The court allowed him to increase the library time to 5 hours a day. He works continuously for 6 days a week, sometimes for 15 hours a day. When he couldn't print a file, he wrote it himself.

Meanwhile, he also found traces of some mysterious device that captured him. Last October, the court allowed him to access records in his case, somewhere around 14,000 pages. In the process of scouring the file box near the end, he found the word "Stingray" written in the notes of an investigator. I think this is some brand.

The prison library doesn't have an Internet connection, but the manager can still help you with certain information if you ask. Finally, Rigmaiden found a brochure about Stingray by Harris Corporation, which advertised the features he was suspicious of. Now he knew that the device existed, what he needed to prove next was that the police used it to arrest him. In a meeting of Maricopa County, some people agreed to buy police a device that the payer was the government. Because there is no public tender, the purchase invoice must be submitted to the public. This bill is about a cell-site simulator device manufactured by Harris Corporation.

Mobile wave detector

This detector , like other detectors, works by exploiting a fundamental flaw in mobile networks. Our phones always listen to signals from the nearest broadcast stations or stations with the least traffic at any one time. When it sees the signal, the phone responds to a range of identification numbers for the station, which is your phone number. However, this signal is not required to originate from a network station. Since there is no authentication process performed at an early stage, location detection devices can intervene, detecting the identifier as well as the relative location of the phone that is located in the area.

Security researchers have warned this since the 1990s, some even accuse operators of deliberately opening it to serve law enforcement units. At the time Rigmaiden was arrested, this struggle was almost gone.

In 2003, Harris Corporation introduced Stingray , a slim, smaller device compared to previous wave detectors, accompanied by strong advertising campaigns in the US market. US intelligence agencies have used it to track foreign subjects. The US police also put Stingrays on the plane and flew around the city to collect somewhere several tens of thousands of numbers just to find a number they needed. Over time, equipment is provided to local police departments, where equipment can be used to find murderers or kidnappers.

In 2003, Harris Corporation introduced Stingray, a smaller, smaller device than previous detectors.

Whenever they buy a device from Harris, they sign an agreement not to disclose it in public documents. If Stingray is revealed, according to Harris, the criminal will know and the device will become useless immediately. Agencies still need to decide from the court to be able to use the device, but they only use very general words to describe Stingray. In most cases, the judge did not know they were signing permission to use Stingray.

But they couldn't hide all the traces. Rigmaiden found Stingray in various places on the web. He found Harris patents to better understand how the device works. He also asked for more information about the device based on the Freedom of Information Law but was not approved because it was "a secret method". He also carefully read the same cases as himself to know how the police can find hackers.

Stingray was brought to light for the first time

After more than two years of efforts, Rigmaiden found hundreds of pages of documents about Stingray. He needed an ally, so he sent what he found to many privacy organizations but often didn't get anything more than a letter. Not only because he was pursuing a ghost device but also because he submitted hundreds of other files to court. An ordinary person will accept the situation and obediently go to jail. A thick file like a Rigmaiden directory has shown that he is not an ordinary person.

Rigmaiden then sent his file to Christopher Soghoian, a doctoral student who is working on monitoring through mobile network bandwidth. There are many unclear things, but Soghoian knows that what Rigmaiden is talking about probably exists. He was convinced that Rigmaiden was right.

Soghoian sent this file to Jennifer Valentino-Devries, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. A month later, her story was published on the front page of the newspaper, first bringing Stingray to light and talking about a technology that could challenge the constitutional rights of the American people. When a newspaper was brought to Rigmaiden's cell, he was very surprised. For the first time, he had a reason to think that his findings were related to more cases than his own.

However, Rigmaiden's situation did not change much. Prosecutors did not cancel the case because of an ambiguity in the search warrant, and although the news about Stingray weakened the plaintiff's side, everything was still going on. He continued to bomb with lots of new requests, and the court was forced to consider those requests in accordance with the process. You even sued FBI civilians for a number of different reasons.

In 2013, prosecutors made an agreement with criminal charges of Rigmaiden. Rigmaiden believes that this agreement is very important."The reason they want to give up this case is not because they are worried that Stingray will be revealed, it has already been revealed. The main reason is that they want to get rid of me and all the files that I put up. I bring them too much to do and take up their resources. " In April 2014, Rigmaiden officially accepted this agreement and walked out of prison with the role of a free man!

In April 2014, Rigmaiden officially accepted this agreement and walked out of prison with the role of a free man!

Rigmaiden is now living a normal life. He did not earn money from the legal work he had done in prison, he had just quit his job as a telemarketer and was about to get a job as a web developer. He did not have a private car (his profile makes him difficult to borrow money to buy), so he had to travel a long way by bus or train. Last year, he stood up to speak at a defendant's attorney forum at the University of Arizona, an experience he wanted to do once more. Currently, his agreement with the police does not allow him to leave the Phoenix area, a suspended sentence.

"You have to realize what situation you can make a difference and grab it ," Rigmaiden said. "I don't think you'll get that opportunity often."