Darknet Diaries

And I should tell you some stuff before we get started.

Zakaria first contacted me around 2017, about a year after starting my other podcast, Darknet Diaries, which is a show I do about true stories from the dark side of the internet.

He said he had a story for me, so we got on the phone, and our first call floored me.

I think we talked for four hours.

And as I sat with it, I realized I had a million more questions.

So week after week, month after month, we kept messaging each other, and we'd have hours and hours of phone calls to go over every little detail and go over it again and again.

These were by far the wildest calls I've ever been on with anyone in my life, and that's saying a lot since I've spoken to some pretty wild people in my other podcast, Darknet Diaries.

But every single time I'd end the call with him, I was just stunned for hours.

This short audio story was produced by myself, Proximity Sound.

If you enjoyed the story, you might like another podcast I work on called Darknet Diaries, true stories from the dark side of the internet, hosted by Jack Rhysider.

The music featured here was also created by my brother, Sembers.

And now the winner of our 2026 Listener Story Competition, Story 6 by Ricardo.

There's a couple of blog posts about it.

It's also published on a podcast called Darknet Diaries, which is saying that she did a lot of research and took these boxes to a lab and examined what they were doing.

And I'm going to skip to the conclusion here and skip the details, but the conclusion that the security community has come to is that, wow, this is actually one of the operations that... somebody, probably from some government, it's probably the Chinese government, but no one's sure exactly, has, this is part of one of their operations.

So they make these boxes and they sell them to various places and they do do what they say.

That is original music from Breakmaster Cylinder, music producer.

He's made the music on shows like Darknet Diaries and The Verge and Decoder, and, uh, we actually paid him to make us some music.

So that is original.

That is a Primary Tech original.

[laughs] Don't even post about it, and you'll probably be a lot closer to getting away from it.

So do, do I think I could do crime? I think I know enough, and I've listened to enough Darknet Diaries-

Yeah

... that I could take the steps required to not leave a trail, 'cause that's basically what it takes.

Yeah.

One of my favorite podcasts, other than Haley's, is Darknet Diaries.

And there might be some people in here that listen to that.

But here's an episode from a couple of years ago where he's interviewed this guy.

It's the most crazy story I've ever heard.

And right now it's hidden within the Darknet Diaries premium feed.

If you want to listen to it early, please go to plus.darknetdiaries.com.

Otherwise, you're going to have to wait for the public release, which is coming later this month.

This show is created by me, Pony Pie, Jack Rhysider, mixing by Proximity Sound, and our theme music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder.

There's an option in WhatsApp and I can never figure out, is it mark as read or mark as read? This is Darknet Diaries.