Hello Everyone,
Welcome to my home on the Internet.
This is going to be a long introduction; because, I want one central place where everyone can get to know all about me instead of repeating the same questions over and over in the forum boards, chat rooms, etc. Instead, I’ll just direct you all here and you can find out what ever you want to know.
So why is there so much to know anyway? Well it’s a long story that expands many years but I will try to give you a condensed version here.
Around 1988 my life was somewhat normal. I was living at home and working as a baker in a donut shop. There were also the occasional disagreements with my dad but nothing to bad. That is until I left one weekend for Las Vegas and that’s where everything changed in my life.
While I was on my little weekend adventure in Vegas, I happened to meet a very interesting person that was making a living playing Blackjack? Interesting I thought, being able to live in Vegas and play cards sounded like the perfect life style to me being young and plenty of time on my hands. So long story short, I ended up moving to Vegas soon after and learned to play Blackjack by counting cards and eventually joined his card counting team. This was wonderful, for about 3 years or so, but I started getting bored and blackjack had lost it’s challenge for me. It wasn’t keeping my mind occupied no more because I knew how it worked already and basically you’re nothing more than a robot playing cards. So I needed to move on.
Apparently, that was being homeless. I ended up meeting a very interesting old man named Frank Woodman and found him quite different than anyone I’ve ever meet before. He seemed to know a lot about EVERYTHING but he was homeless and I didn’t have anything better to do so we hung out, for about another 3 years. Yes there is plenty of adventures in both of the above scenarios but don’t have the room to go into that here. Maybe in my autobiography.
I finally left being homeless and got a job at Subway. The owner was a young ambitious man and he soon had 3 stores in the Las Vegas area. This is also around the time I hooked up with my first girl friend in Las Vegas. Her name was Real and we both took the same bus in the morning to work. After about a year I became store manager and in my spare time I discovered Internet marketing, or actually porn at that time. By putting up websites and selling memberships to these porn sites is where I learned about affiliate marketing which eventually let me deeper into Internet marketing.
During this whole time frame I was interested in computers. The first one I ever got was a 486 and I can remember when I finally made it to a Pentium 60/66. I though the world of computer’s couldn’t go no further. Boy was I wrong. But I did have a couple websites and naturally my free homepage on Geocities. I thought I had made the big time for sure now! All of this went on until about 1999-2000.
Right around 2000, Real and me broke up and I found Kathryn (Kat) through an online dating site, which ended up being my current wife now. And yes, were still together and soon to be our 10th Anniversary. I also ended up leaving the Subway job because of differences with the owner.
Now we come up on the time period where a lot of my beliefs and thinking that I learned from Frank, when I was homeless, turned out to be wrong. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but during that homeless period I passed out in a large scrap-wrecking yard and woke up with the sound of dogs barking and the police helicopter blasting my way. So what did I do? What any person in that situation would do, hide under a front-loader. Well needless to say, I was arrested and charged with Grand Larceny, which is a felony but I wasn’t worried about that at the time. Beside I couldn’t afford a lawyer anyway so got a public defender appointed to me and the only thing there taught in law school, apparently, is to plead guilty and take a lesser sentence! So sure why not if it gets me out of here.
Well it was that incident that would end up screwing any attempt I had at finding a good job in the future. But I didn’t worried about it at the time? No, I didn’t think it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. After all it’s my only offense in my life why would it? It’s not like I’m a career criminal with a rap sheet so-to-speak. Yea, right! I was finding it very hard to get a good paying job but still keep trying when possible. Soon I started not checking the “are you a felon box” and started getting interviews and got hired once. It was a telemarketing job and after about a year they ended up being closed down by the city. So apparently the only ones that will hire you for a good paying job are ones that are criminals themselves!
Well to cut a long story short, during this time period I had a ton of free time on my hands at home so I entrenched myself in studying about computers, mainly hacking and malware. I got interested in malware because it was a quick way to learn how computers vulnerabilities. All you have to do is find the vulnerability the malware is using to get in and start expanding and learning from that.
After a while I ended up perfecting my computer skills and was very good at reverse engineering malware and analyzing programs for vulnerabilities. So good actually, I ended up getting invited into private forum boards from both the hacker community and the security industry, mainly the AV companies. DON’T go and Google for “CyberSorcerer” to find out where I hang out in the hacker community because naturally I wouldn’t use the same nick name in both places. Did you REALLY think I would use the same nick for both industries? Really!
I ended up getting hired with one of the Top Anti-Virus companies as a researcher. Get this, AFTER their manager in the research department talk to me on the phone and learned more about me, and what I know, they wanted to hire me! Sounds great right? Well only one problem, I’ve applied for 2 other positions in the computer security research field, both Government contractors that said they wanted to hire me in both emails and phone conversations. I even have copies of the conversations. I DID NOT want to screw this up so I figured I would be truthful and fill out the WHOLE job application correctly and be up-front. Well short story, I got letters back from both within no time giving some excuse why they couldn’t hire me. So in my opinion, if you have a felony you will never get hired with a government contractor or the government themselves for that matter.
So with the AV position I said not this time. I’m going to lie now and see what happens. Well guess what, I got hired and they paid for my round trip flight and hotel to the East coast and back home so I can sign the paper work and get a tour of the place. So now guess what happened? I did have to consent to a background check and after they got it back I was shortly let go. Granted along with some excuse that I wasn’t working out, bla bla, basic boilerplate response. And yes you could say that I got let go because I lied on the application by not checking “felony conviction” and you might be right. But, I GURANTEE you that I wouldn’t have been hired if I had checked yes there, because of my prior job applications. Telling the truth in my opinion doesn’t work either because you can say “I’ve been there done that” and it just doesn’t happen. That is “Unless You Know Someone” that’s the only way you’ll probably even have a chance in getting hired.
So, I’ve decided to give up working for a company and go it on my own as an Independent Security Researcher. Now with my background I knew I wouldn’t get many consulting calls, but didn’t know exactly where this would take me. I just keep doing my own research, code breaking, vulnerability searching, and exploit coding to see where if any value would ever come from it.
In around 2004, while sitting on the couch, I had an extreme intense pain run down through my left leg and had to be rushed to the hospital. They took x-rays from all different angles and couldn’t find anything so sense I didn’t have insurance and nothing was physically, or visibly, wrong with me I had to leave. Ever sense that day I can’t stand for very long, about 20-30 minutes at a time, and can only walk for about 100 yards before having to sit down and rest. That was a changing point “again” in my life. Now I basically couldn’t even get a job at McDonalds. So now what do I do?
The wife, at the time, was working for an answering service so at least there was one full-time income coming in to keep us off the streets, but I needed to do something, or find some way to get an income coming in. So we sit down on one of her days off and talked about the whole situation and what would be best for the future.
Here is what we come up with. It’s about 2005 now, and from my past experience with being an online porn affiliate, I knew I could make money online and the online world was drastically changing sense the 1990’s. Internet Marketing was becoming a big thing and I could see it was definitely going to be able to provide a “work at home” environment.
So my plan was to learn all I could about internet marketing and hopefully get to making enough money to be able to support both of us when it ever got around to when she wouldn’t be able to work either. I knew this would take some time because I’m the type o person that has to know everything about what I’m doing before I am fully comfortable to depend on it. So I told her that this learning phase could not take ANY money from what she was making, because that money was barely enough to support us let alone afford to spend on training. I told her I would make the money I needed from the Internet and we would have to only use that money to help pay for more learning that I needed. So a long story short, again, I ended up spending A LOT of money on Internet marketing courses. Pretty much everything available between 2005 until about 2009.but I finally got to where I was making some money and things are looking up.
Now comes along the bad economy and everyone is getting hit with hard times. So some of our family, and friends, starting asking how am I making money working online? It sounded to them like a good way to bring in extra money. So me being extremely knowledgeable about the Internet now I said I can teach you right from the Internet. I’ll make some videos showing exactly what to do and you just have to follow along. Well that worked out great for them so that got me thinking. If their on hard times I’m sure others are too and what I did for them can be done on a larger scale to help others earn extra income, or replace there current income in time.
That’s where Online Money Coaching some into play. I decided to just start up a membership site teaching anyone that wants to join how they can make money online using the knowledge I’ve learned from ALL the courses, memberships, ebooks, etc that I’ve learned from over the past few years. This site will be officially opening up Jan 1st, 2011 so keep your eyes out for it if you’re interested.
If you’re still reading then this was probably interesting to you. It might be a good idea for my to write an autobiography and put it up on Amazon? Might be a future project if enough requests come in for it.
Thank you,
Lonnie (CyberSorcerer) Gardner
