Chapter 1: What if the music charts aren't real?
I've always liked the idea of fake it till you make it, where you act like someone you want to be until you become them. This sometimes comes with imposter syndrome, but I think the antidote to that is just more experience. But how do you go from being a total beginner to confidently doing something? I often turn to the bookstore to help me there. But you know a book that's always bothered me?
It's those for dummies books, like the C Programming for Dummies or the Complete Idiot's Guide. Even if I don't have a clue where to start, I would never buy one of those books because I don't consider myself a dummy or an idiot because I want to fake it till I make it. And I don't want to fake being a dummy. I want to be a great programmer.
So a dummy's guide to programming is not the direction I want to be going. I think what those books failed to do is they seem to target who you are now, not what you want to become. And that was their failure, at least for me.
Chapter 2: How did Andrew profit from streaming loopholes?
I've bought tons of how-to books, but I will never buy one of those books. To me, the key to success is in the aspiration. I would instantly buy books that were titled, How to Be an Amazing C Programmer. because that is what I want to become. And the book could contain the exact same words as the other book that's C Programming for Dummies, but it would have an entirely different impact on me.
Every time I saw the title, I'd feel like I'm becoming more and more like the person I want to be, an amazing programmer. And that would give me that false sense of greatness, which is exactly what it's like to fake it till you make it. Because it's not about who you are today. It's about who you aspire to be tomorrow.
It's about embracing the journey of transformation and allowing your actions to shape your destiny. So go ahead and fake it. You can lie to yourself if you want, because sometimes the greatest lies are the ones that propel us towards our truest selves.
These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Recider. This is Darknet Diaries.
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Chapter 3: What are gray hat, black hat, and white hat marketing?
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Chapter 4: How did Andrew manipulate social media platforms?
Learn more at AdaptiveSecurity.com. That's AdaptiveSecurity.com. Today, I'm talking with Andrew. Yeah, I'm Andrew, baby. Andrew has a really unique job that I can't wait to ask him about. But first, we should learn about how he got there.
So I started on Facebook when it was still EDU based and then I was one of the first 50 beta advertisers on Twitter and learning to misuse their system.
misuse their system these systems are huge and complex algorithms likes follows and a whole ad network he wondered if he could manipulate any of that to his benefit same thing with youtube he's able to break anything into the front page of youtube and i guess i quickly became the guy that you would go to um if you wanted to sort of like gray hat black hats and stuff
Gray hat and black hat and white hat, let's talk about that. That's going to come up a lot in this episode. And we'll start with white hat. White hat is doing something that's 100% legal and safe, such as hacking your own computer. Nobody is going to come arrest you for that. Black hat is doing something that's illegal, such as hacking your ex's lawyer to see what they're plotting against you.
Gray hat is somewhere in between. Maybe it's technically not legal, but you're hacking into something only for research, but not to cause harm. But these terms also apply to marketers. Someone who follows the rules, such as paying for ads the normal way, that's a white hat marketer.
But someone who uses bots, for instance, to artificially create a bunch of five-star reviews for something, that would be a black hat marketer, in my opinion, because they are lying and cheating with their so-called marketing and run the risk of being thrown off the very platform that they're trying to grow on.
At least, this is what I think these terms mean going into this episode, but my definitions might change as we go further. So, in my opinion, Andrew was a black hat marketer. He was trying to promote certain products or people by tricking people or systems to artificially inflate something's popularity.
My favorite thing at the time was like jacking. It was a weird time period because it was before fan pages. So initially when Facebook first launched, you could only friend request somebody and there was a 5,000 person limit. And what you used to do is you would hide the request friend request button or when fan pages launched the fan follow button, but you would hide it in the pixels.
I don't know if you've come across that.
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Chapter 5: What fraud problems did Andrew discover in music streaming?
And another one that we did that was really interesting at the time was around YouTube. So we figured out that you could basically... There were these pop-under ads back then, and you could...
most people recognize them from the sort of like penis enlargement ads and things like that you click out of a website and there'd be like the annoying little open browser underneath it we would load it with youtube videos on mute and we were able to rack up you know hundreds of thousands of plays uh to a youtube video quickly and if we could get three to four hundred thousand views um
quietly in the background, we could basically break into the algorithm on the front page. And back then, people would go to the front page of YouTube to see what was trending. So we would be able to break a bunch of different content pieces onto the front page of YouTube. And at that point, they had to sink or swim. You basically had to have good content that people liked or not.
But pretty quickly, it was evident. You either went viral or you were trash and you were removed quite quickly. So we could get you there, but the question was whether or not you would stick. Geesh.
Now, see, to me, this is all black hat marketing. You aren't bringing real customers to your site or video page. Instead, it's all fake. It's not quite bots. It's real people clicking things, but they're tricked into clicking things and they don't know they're clicking it. The stuff they're viewing is invisible to them, but it's playing in the background.
And so I call this black hat marketing because if YouTube found out that you manipulated your way to the front page, they'd probably ban you. But I also think if you have a bunch of fake followers, then that's not real marketing either. That's cheating and lying and manipulating. Now, when you say we, what was this? Where's we? I had a couple partners that we did this with.
Was this like a black hat marketing firm? You know, that term wasn't really a thing then. I would say we all considered it marketing, but we didn't... I mean, yes, it's Black Hat, but I wouldn't say that that's what we visualized it as at the time. At the time, we really felt like we were just a marketing firm using all the possible channels we could to give a brand an opportunity to take off.
What I got known for at the time was we launched an artist on Facebook, and he had no label, no... No major label, like nothing. He was found at a bonfire in Nantucket. So it was kind of like an interesting thing. When we went to the labels back then and tried to convince them that you could use Facebook to launch an artist, everyone laughed at us and said...
Facebook's for kids, we have a website, we do email lists, we do paid marketing, this isn't part of our mix. No one believed it was possible until we did it. And then after we did it, everyone wanted to pay us to do it. And the hardest thing was trying to like, continue to perform because then everyone that finds a vein that works, everyone starts copying you and then you have to find a new way.
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Chapter 6: How is blockchain being used to track music streams?
And I would also say that no one even called it social media marketing. At the time, there was digital marketing. New media was a term. There wasn't even a term for it. Growth hacking wasn't even a term. No one even used the word growth hacking. That just was not a thing at that moment. So it is interesting to see how the whole thing's evolved. I do think that if you asked us point blank,
is what you're doing violating terms and services? For sure, we would have lied and told you. We would have told you no. But we all knew. We weren't drinking the Kool-Aid. Everyone in the company knew we were violating terms and services. I think the thing we thought was, who cares?
If a real user likes what we have to do, like what we're presenting them, we're not faking the genuine product market fit. We're just trying to get in front of those people those eyeballs and see if we are a product market fit.
That was a stretch as well. But I agree with you that I think a good marketing campaign is one that actually, because I think most people are like, I hate marketers, I hate ads, I hate all this stuff. But when a product lands in front of you and it's the perfect thing, it's your new favorite song, and you're like, holy cow, I can't believe I just found this, then you don't hate it, right?
Totally. And so if you can match that person who needs this product with this thing, and that is a marketing move that you've done, then that is fantastic marketing. And I wish that's how all marketing was, is to actually find the person who... who needs it, and then focus on them. Unfortunately, marketing has a lot of wasted eyeballs looking at it.
For sure. I mean, even back then, I remember seeing this thing in probably like 2011, I feel like, where there was this report that came out in like an advertising sort of research report that only 8% of people who saw an ad online were real.
Wow.
It was just technically a machine connecting with another machine presenting the ad, but there wasn't a real person on the other end. That was 15 years ago. I can only imagine how much worse it's gotten.
Yeah. When you were doing this Black Hat stuff, did you have any success stories of people that you made or products that you launched well and just huge success with these techniques?
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Chapter 7: What impact does fraud have on artists and the industry?
Okay. Number one iTunes, number seven. Is that fake numbers? Is that fake numbers? Those are real numbers. That's the crazy part. That's what I'm saying. I don't feel like it was black hat because we got in front of all the... To your point, we got in front of people who decided they really loved...
this artist and because they really love that artist and we and we sort of had an 18-month plan so as we were building this artist with all these techniques we were providing them with content to get them more and more hooked and engaged with the artist and when we released that artist EP, that artist went number one over everybody. Like, I remember we beat DJ Khaled as an example.
Like, we beat everybody. And no one could believe it. I mean, we were called out. People thought we faked numbers. We didn't fake anything. Like, it was all real. We just sort of met the consumer... We were in front of the consumer at the right moment when they, quote unquote, discovered this artist and then thought they really liked it.
And so again, the techniques allowed us to engage and have a real product market fit, but the techniques we used were definitely not approved.
Yeah, I mean, when I first started this podcast, I was like, all right, let's market it. And you start noticing some of these black hat marketing techniques. And I had to really sit and look at myself in the mirror and be like, am I a guy who is going to cheat my way to success? Like fake it till you make it. And I had a long debate about it. And I'm like, no, I'm a hacker.
Of course, I'm going to use every chick in the book, right? This is great. Let's try it all. And then I was like, no, this is not honest. This is unethical and all that sort of stuff. So I landed, this is funny, I landed on no black hat marketing, but I'm totally for guerrilla marketing, which is crazy. which is unsanctioned marketing, right?
So if I go to a conference and there's an empty booth where a vendor didn't show up, I might sit down at that booth, put like a little banner up that says, hey, this is Darknet Diaries. And I didn't pay $10,000 for that booth until the people come and say, hey, did you pay for this booth? No. Okay, well, get out. All right, cool.
And so I'll put stickers on places that aren't supposed to be stickers and all kinds of stuff like that. So that to me is guerrilla marketing.
No, I agree. I think that's definitely... And I have some examples. We launched an app in 2013 called Hater App. It was an Instagram for everything you hate. And our logo was a giant thumbs down. And we went to South by Southwest, and we just started putting stickers on people's backs as they were walking. And there were thousands of people walking around with these stickers. And it went viral.
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Chapter 8: How can streaming services combat fraud effectively?
The downside was we built this thing totally crappy just to see if it would work as an MVP. And it went, like we had hundreds of thousands of downloads, like overnight, and the app was not functional. It was a complete mess.
But it was like such an interesting moment where I remember doing interviews with like, we did interviews with like Wall Street Journal and everyone and it was like a huge story at the time. Because we basically did this guerrilla approach and it kind of worked. And I guess to your point, I always viewed the stuff I did online.
I mean, maybe I'm just justifying it now, you know, like hindsight, you know, revisionist history. But I remember you really feeling like the things we were doing online was the guerrilla version of what we did in person, you know, for like these types of techniques.
Something I noticed on the podcast world is that people can fake their way to the top on Apple podcast charts, but most of them fall off a cliff as soon as they stop paying their black hat marketer.
Totally. And so there's an artist I know who I won't throw under the bus who is a major artist now. They were up for a Grammy, a bunch of things. Their entire first album was fake.
Okay, I know who you're talking about. Check this out. I saw this article last week. Spotify accuses Drake of forging billions of fraudulent streams.
That's not who I was talking about. That's also interesting.
Okay, so that's what Andrew was busy doing for a while. He was living in Los Angeles, and he wasn't just doing black hat marketing, launching people's careers, but also building websites and tech companies and buying and selling them. He was solidly tuned into the internet and saw it in a way that not many did. And one of his friends is Morgan, and they like to go into football games together.
Back in the day, we had tickets to the LA Rams. So we would go to the games every week, every, you know, eight times a year or whatever. We'd go to the games all together. We had 10 seats together. So it was Morgan, me, and a bunch of music exec guys that we'd known and just randomly together. So anyway, we were there all the time. And around, I was everyone's weird crypto friend.
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