Episode Details

A DarkNet Horror Story by Boo RhodesHave you ever done something so stupid that it turned around and bit you really hard on the ass? That is what happened to me the day I stole a laptop at a coffee shop.I was broke. I mean really broke. I had lost my job about 8 months before and I barely even had 3 months of savings when I lost it. This was back in 2020 when everything was shut down so finding a job was hard and since my job was a contract phone job from home, they wouldn’t give me any unemployment. I was out on my own! I don’t know why the company I worked at shut down, but I think the owner got COVID and suddenly we were all let go.I applied for many different jobs, but it seemed that all of the telecommute jobs were taken and the grocery stores in the area weren’t hiring. All of the other stores and businesses were pretty much shut down.During my many walks at that time, eight months into the COVID pandemic, I took a long walk to figure out my finances. I lived in a mobile home at the time so I owned the house but not the land. I had to pay for the land I lived on. I could sell the mobile home but then I wouldn’t have a place to live. If I couldn’t pay my lot fee though, I’d be forced to sell anyway. I was so confused.At that point I was really hungry and everything was closed except for this coffee shop. I heard the owner was a little rebellious and didn’t shut down. I had just ten more dollars of cash from my emergency stash and I was dying for a latte.As I sat there for three hours sipping down my cold latte and nibbling at my muffin, I watched only two others enter the building and leave. One of them just grabbed a coffee and left. Another one worked on a computer for a little bit then got busy on a phone call at the pay phone of all things. He ran out the door so fast and zoomed off in his European sports car so fast, he must have forgotten his laptop because there it sat on the table.I waited for him to come back or for the owner to at least clean up the table and take the laptop away to await its owner but the owner was oblivious to anything else but the news of the pandemic. I went to use the restroom and, in a bit of a panic, I picked up the laptop on the way back to my table and shoved it inside my backpack. I mean, who was going to notice? The guy obviously didn’t care about it and neither did the shop owner.I ordered another muffin to go. It took the guy at the counter a moment to realize I was even waiting for him even after hitting the bell. He grumbled, “Have a nice day,” as he shoved it into the bag and went back to his tv show.I ran all the way home. If anything, I could wipe out the hard drive on the machine and sell it for a few hundred on eBay so I could wait one more month before losing my house. If the man didn’t care about it that much then it didn’t matter, right?I sat down and opened the machine. It had a full battery but the man didn’t leave a charger. I figured I had a few hours of time left where I could wipe out the operating system and all of the data then sell it without an OS. It was just a standard PC so anything system would work on it. If I sold it barebones on the dark web instead of eBay then no one would ever report it, right?When I opened the device, I had to select my wifi instead of it automatically finding it, which I found kind of odd. Usually, any device seeks out hotspot signals. I logged into my hotspot instead of my wifi to keep my network safe. Supposedly there was a firewall in between them with a dynamic IP address on the hotspot which would be harder to trace. Honestly, I found it weird the machine didn’t have a login password. All of my devices have passwords.I poked around to find any personal information I could find so I could hide the sale from the person, company, or location the person might be from. I admit, I’ve done some shady things online and I know how to isolate certain locations to hide what I’m doing. I looked everywhere including the pictures and the inter