[jimsparkman]

Wow, quite brazen. What an interesting read.

Couple things that stood out to me was that the incident occurs in December and the raid ensues March 24th, so roughly 3 months. Building the case I presume.

Then after the raid, the accused doubles down and seeds fake news stories.

[seibelj]

I'm a big fan of a show called "Forensic Files", which is like a real-life CSI where each episode is a documentary and only takes 20 minutes (I highly recommend).

In addition to the the usual passion killings and random murders, there is the occasional criminal that thinks they are way smarter than everyone else and doubles or triples down even as the noose is tightening, because they 100% believe they are geniuses and will get away with it.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVVL_U4BTGs

In this episode a member of Mensa, who enjoyed staging murder mystery dinner parties for his Mensa friends, poisoned his neighbor over loud music and barking dogs, and thought he was such a criminal mastermind that he could talk his way out of it. These people have mental disorders.

[Vaslo]

George Trepal was certainly one of the better episodes! Amazing that one detective had to go undercover for almost two years before he slipped up. Then they found traces of the rare poison in his home. You’d think he would have trashed it and cleaned like crazy but I bet he thought he would get away with it and may want to do it again.

Great show

[dmix]

They were also fortunate to have that level of expertise, both medically and law enforcement which the US offered.

But I guess in retrospect using an exotic method of killing someone is bound to draw heavy attention.

[jimsparkman]

Thanks for the recommendation! Now that you mention it, I’ve seen similar behavior on Dateline. Wonder if there are other terms for essentially “digging the hole deeper.”

[ocdtrekkie]

It sounds like he got caught because his VPN dropped during some sort of outage. It's funny because I feel like "don't do crime from your home network" should be an incredibly obvious concept.

[anonu]

He also used keys as the "attacker" that were known to be his as a regular employee. That seems like a n00b move.

[blitzar]

So he litterally signed the attack with his PGP key.

[kadoban]

I can't imagine just using some random VPN is really going to help much anyway. When the cops come knocking they're just going to give you up right?

[Hamuko]

Surfshark VPN advertises "strict no-logs policy", "independently audited" and "obfuscated, RAM-only servers". Of course, advertising is just advertising, reality may be different.

[astrange]

Paypal, and apparently this guy's email server, don't have a no-receipts policy though.

[stjohnswarts]

some services drop your payment information after something like 45 days, -supposedly-. Who knows if they actually do.

[kadoban]

Yeah, so many say that, but I do find it very hard to believe.

If nothing else, wouldn't they want to keep some information about customers that in the past have abused the service? You need some way to ban assholes, right? How would you do that if you have no idea who anyone is?