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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This story takes place in Yonkers, which is about 30 minutes north of New York City. And what I learned about Yonkers is that almost 15% of the people who live there have ancestry that traces back to the Dominican Republic. Apparently, a lot of people migrate from the DR to Yonkers, New York, which made me wonder why.
Chapter 2: What are the main reasons for Dominican migration to the US?
And I've come to understand that they move from the DR to the US for three main reasons. One, because they're a dreamer. Two, because they're a hustler. Or three, because they're a struggler. The dreamers come chasing a bright new future where they can get good paying, steady work, a better life for their kids, and even legal citizenship. The hustlers don't always follow the rules.
They're scrappy. They're always on the lookout for new opportunities. They're good at negotiating, and they're persistent. And the strugglers, man, they just want to survive. They don't have big plans, and they're not trying to find shortcuts. They just want to do what it takes to get by, day by day. These are true stories from the dark side of the Internet. I'm Jack Recider.
This is Darknet Diaries. This episode is sponsored by Maze. Security teams are drowning in vulnerabilities. 40,000 common vulnerabilities and exposures, aka CVEs, dropped in 2025 alone, with attackers being able to exploit new vulns in days, not weeks. Our backlogs are a ticking time bomb. Engineers do not have enough time to manually triage them all. But what if they did?
That's the question Maze was created to answer. Maze uses AI agents to triage and remediate cloud vulnerabilities. Traditional vuln scans use rigid rule sets, like if CVE is on a publicly exposed asset, make it a critical. But that's silly. Maze's AI agents investigate every vulnerability in your cloud
the way your best security engineer would, figuring out what's actually exploitable, not just what's theoretically risky. They remove the noise, prioritize bones that matter, and manage remediation so your team stops wasting time on meaningless bones. So check out maze at mazehq.com slash darknet to learn all about AI vulnerability management that works. That's maze spelled M-A-Z-E.
mazehq.com slash darknet. This episode is sponsored by ThreatLocker. If you've listened to Darknet Diaries for a while, you've already heard of ThreatLocker. I've talked about how they lock environments down, deny by default, zero trust, all of it. But the problem they were solving changed because attackers changed. They don't break in like they used to.
Now they just log in with real credentials, real sessions, nothing that looks out of place. And once they're in, they're treated like they belong. So ThreatLocker took what they already were doing and pushed it further with their Zero Trust Network Access and Zero Trust Cloud Access. So now access isn't just about logging in.
It's about the device, the connection, and whether any of it should be trusted at all. If you want to see what Zero Trust looks like when it's done right, go to ThreatLocker.com slash Darknet. That's ThreatLocker.com slash Darknet. This is a story about a guy named Alberto Yussi Lajud Pena. He was born in the Dominican Republic.
And when he was a teenager, his family immigrated to the United States, to Yonkers, New York, to be exact, which is about an hour north of New York City. And by the way, Washington Heights, a neighborhood in New York City, has so many people from the DR, its nickname is Little DR. And for a lot of people, being in the big city fills them up with big ideas.
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Chapter 3: Who is Alberto Yussi Lajud Pena and what is his background?
But they had to wait for December 21st, 2012, to do the heist. It was only on that day that these cards would work. It was literally the perfect day for the heist. The day in December was Friday. So if they started after 5 p.m., everyone at the banks would be going home for the weekend. And they'd have the ATMs to themselves. Barely anyone around to watch. But that wasn't all.
The week after would be Christmas. So many bank employees were taking their Christmas breaks and holiday vacations. They'd be understaffed, which would make it easier to not get noticed. I imagine the excitement that everyone must have had leading up to this, thinking about their route through the city, the plan, the money they could get from all this. It was starting to feel real.
Alberto, Elvis, they all went back to their jobs, driving buses or working at Kmart, doing deliveries, waiting and worrying, daydreaming at the register or staring blankly at the road, thinking over the plan again and again, knowing that soon, if they really could pull it off, they might have enough money to live the life they really wanted.
I wonder how Alberta woke up on that day of December 21st. When you know you're going to commit a bank heist that night, do you just roll out of bed like a normal day? The plan was for everyone to get into Manhattan alone. They wanted to be clever and not be seen together, just in case. Everyone would stay in communication by text. Alberto and his guys got into town one by one.
Elvis had to leave work early in order to make it in time, and he was still wearing his Domino's pizza hat by the time he got to his starting point in midtown Manhattan. Alberto was checking his phone, waiting for the signal from his supplier. Everyone was ready. The guy who gave him the cards would tell him when to start. Bing! Just on time. Alberto got a text message that said, it's go time.
And he sent everyone else the message. The clock had started. All at once, these eight cashiers from Yonkers walked up to ATMs at banks spread across the city. The lobbies were closed, but the ATMs weren't. Alberto walked up to one carrying an empty backpack. He looked around. The coast was clear. He looked up. A camera was pointing right at him. Breathe. Play it cool. He put the card in.
What was the pin? Oh yeah. He typed it in. The screen was loading. Pin was accepted. Nice. It's a good start. Time to try the first withdrawal. Enter a custom amount. $800. Accept the fee. Transaction. Processing. Processing. Processing. Come on, is it always this slow? Then, approved. Money started dispensing. Easy money. He grabbed it from the machine. There it was. $800. It felt good.
This is really happening. But he quickly stuffed it in his bag, pulled his card from the machine, and did it again. After doing it a couple times on this ATM, he left. A few thousand dollars was now in his backpack. Act normal. Don't panic. He walked slowly. How do you tell if someone's watching you? It's hard not to be paranoid. Thousands of dollars, a month's pay stolen and it's in his bag.
This wasn't a trial run anymore. This was really happening. He checked his watch. No time to spare. He went to another bank and he did it again. Got to the ATM, inserted the card, entered the pin, withdraw $800, complete the transaction, rinse and repeat. ATM, card, pin, withdraw, repeat.
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Chapter 4: What role do tarjeteros play in the credit card fraud economy?
On one wild drunken night at a club in South Beach, Florida, they danced and splurged on bottles of Moet and Don Perignon until four in the morning. The bill was $4,000 plus tip. or in other words, one ATM's worth. Life was going really well for them. It was like the world was theirs. But with $2.8 million missing from New York banks, some investigators started looking for clues.
Alberto was the first to sense something was off. Maybe his boss tipped him off, or someone told him that they got a call from the police, or maybe he just sensed it. I imagine the hairs on the back of his neck would tingle every now and then. I mean, they had to know there were cameras all over New York City.
And it was just a matter of time for someone to figure out which cards were used, which transactions were fraudulent, and then pulling up that surveillance video of the people using the ATMs. And Alberto had a feeling that someone was watching those videos. Watching him. It was making him paranoid. So he wanted to get away and lay low.
Alberto was starting to think, being in America is becoming risky. It might be a better idea to leave the country, go back to the DR for a while, wait for things to cool down. He wanted to play it smart, and he thought with his cut of the money, he could live a happy life with his wife in the DR with that amount. It would be a good life. So that was his plan.
He got a plane ticket to fly to the DR and leave the country. And he thought about it more, and he realized it's the only plan. If he stays, it's just a matter of time before the police find him, so he has to leave. But the trip to the DR was going to be risky. Alberto wasn't sure if the police had any info on him. If he tries to board the plane, are they going to stop him?
But he took the chance anyway. He threw $100,000 in cash in his luggage and went to the airport. He was nervous about taking a flight with all that money and possibly under investigation by the feds, but he made it onto the plane and all the way home to the DR without any problems. Alberto got away with his split of the money, safe and sound in his wife's hometown with his wife and family.
It felt good to be home. What about the other guys? They were all in the US still. When Alberto fled the country, Elvis realized he should probably go on the run too. Alberto was the guy who knew everything. It's a bad sign when your leader leaves you. Elvis suddenly felt like everything was closing in on him. So in a panic, he left behind his mom and siblings and raced to the JFK airport.
He didn't want to draw any attention, so he only took $2,000 in cash with him, but it didn't matter. By then, the investigators had positive ideas on him and others, and when Elvis got to the airport, he was arrested. Alberto felt bad for his buddy. Man, someone got arrested over this. This is getting serious. But at the same time, Alberto felt even better that he left the country when he did.
He must have just barely slipped the police. But all the dominoes started falling one by one. Each of the guys Alberto worked with were either arrested or turned themselves in. Did Alberto feel guilty? I don't know. He probably couldn't believe his own luck. He was in the DR with his family.
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