When Ryan Montgomery isn’t busy tending to his businesses, you can find him demonstrating another hacking trick on his Instagram to educate people on protecting themselves online and offline, such as how to prevent a website from stealing your data, remove your data from Google search results, and protect your device from malicious charging cables.
This is one of the many reasons why the 31-year-old from Delray Beach is one of the most sought-after speakers and guests for conferences and podcasts around the world, especially after he gained attention for his efforts to combat the plague of child exploitation on the internet. For his heroism, he is known as a child safety warrior. Caplin News spoke with Montgomery over the phone after meeting him at a hacker conference called HackMiami.
On July 23, 1993, about 20 miles from Philadelphia in Delaware County, Pa., the now famous ethical hacker and entrepreneur Montgomery was born. He credits his family for saving him at the age of 17 when he stopped using drugs from the grim fate of jails, institutions, and death. Applying what he’s learned, he co-founded a Substance Use/Mental Health facility called “Boca Recovery Center” in 2016.
He affectionately describes his mother, Marie McCoy, as an angel. She was a former bartender and never got involved with drugs or crime. He describes his father, Daniel Montgomery, as the polar opposite because he has been in and out of jail his entire life. He says his late grandfather, George Shonleber, and his grandmother, Phyllis Shonleber, were essential to his growth. He has half-brothers and sisters from his father, but currently, he’s closest with his half-sister Arionna and half-brother Danny Jr. He also has six cousins on his mom’s side; He considers them the closest thing to siblings. (Chad, Caiden, Gavin, Riley, Sedona, Shane).
Montgomery, also known by his hacker handle as “0day,” started his cybersecurity career at age 11 as a black/grey hat hacker (a black/grey hat hacker dabbles in legally questionable activities to acquire knowledge or other material gains while a white hat hacker sincerely tries to obey the law). His first fascination was with exploits on the AOL Instant Messaging platform, known back then as “AIM.”
He explains, “I don’t fully remember why I decided to pursue cybersecurity, but the simple answer is the adrenaline rush that it gives me when I find an exploit or bypass a restriction is unmatched by anything else I’ve done in life. Most kids were playing games and outside, and I spent most of my time on the computer trying to learn.”
At 16 years of age, Montgomery started investing his time as a cybersecurity specialist in finding website vulnerabilities and informing website owners without expecting compensation. This activity was not legal, but it was the beginning and foundation of his professional career and eventually led to his creation of the cybersecurity technology platform Pentester.com in 2021.
But before that, everything changed on April 26, 2020, when disturbing screenshots were sent to him from his friend’s wife – a concerned mother herself – from the website Rapey that caused a visceral reaction of revulsion and a strong desire for intervention. Before he got involved in bringing justice to this evil underworld, he was just as oblivious to its seriousness as anyone else.
Montgomery comments, “The messages included a few screenshots highlighting this terrible website, including one with a father that was showing his child in the bathtub (that was clear to be nude, but you could only see their back) with a title that said ‘They have no idea what’s going to happen to them tonight’ and underneath were other users on the Rapey platform elaborating on what they wanted to do their child.”
“My friend’s wife sent me the messages because she is a mother herself, and the existence of this website deeply angered her,” he continued. “She knew that I was involved in the cybersecurity space and figured I would be the person to ‘take the site down.’”
“I didn’t realize they were as vile as they were,” he said. “They engage in these horrific activities without shame or restraint of any kind. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into; it made me sick to my stomach, and I wanted to do something with my knowledge of cybersecurity.”
He obtained user information and messages, IP addresses, emails and usernames from this website. Montgomery also discovered backups of information for incel communities (involuntary celibates) from Rapey (for which there was a significant overlap) while avoiding any interaction with illegal content and promptly reporting them to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
Within days of receiving the screenshots, Montgomery claims to have two direct messages between Nathan Larson, the admin and creator of Rapey and a politician in Virginia who ran for Congress twice, and Fredrick Hans Lennart Neij, a co-founder of a public torrent tracker known as The Pirate Bay. Neij falsely claimed that the photos were “troll content” and “vacation photos of children.” Montgomery alleges that Neij assisted Larson in troubleshooting the website when it was live and that Neij consciously covered up his involvement in the hosting of Rapey. Law enforcement has yet to investigate him.
“There are not enough resources allocated for this issue,” Montgomery adds. “There are too many victims, too many cases, and not enough task forces of law enforcement to combat the issue, at least in the United States.” He continues, “I immediately went to the media afterward and spoke to 11 different media stations, and their legal team was unwilling to run it.”
Larson was arrested six months later in Denver at an airport with a 12-year-old girl he had allegedly raped and kidnapped. He died in custody from suicide by self-starvation. This crime was the main motivation for Montgomery to pursue justice in this field, which nobody wanted to touch. He argues that had the media or authorities acted quickly enough, they could have prevented more crimes against children.
Montgomery was 29 when he was interviewed on the “Shawn Ryan Show” in 2023. It became their most-viewed episode at 7.5 million views on the second most listened-to podcast channel on Spotify in the United States. He tells his story of investigating child predators as a vigilante. Then, one month later, he started with law enforcement in the Sentinel Foundation as its CTO in June of the same year, a foundation whose goal is to end child exploitation.
He says, “I saw a documentary about Justin Payne, a vigilante predator catcher, and it motivated me to reach out to other people doing the same thing.”
Dustin Lampros, his friend and colleague, is a UFC-bound professional MMA fighter who worked closely with him in the past in the 561PC group (561 Predator Catcher, founded in 2023) and was on the UFC TUF show (Ultimate Fighting Championship: The Ultimate Fighter), 29th season. Unfortunately, two federal agents told them that continuing to do “vigilante” work would discredit the evidence in the cases against the predators because the evidence presented as a civilian is not admissible in court. Montgomery believed he could make a larger impact working in the Sentinel Foundation while Dustin continued to catch predators.
Lampros remarks, “Ryan showed me how real this side of the world is (such as joining a random teen chat from the top of a search engine to demonstrate how easy it was to find predators), and my jaw dropped. I’ve had people in my life who were victims of it. He asked me if I’d like to confront these guys, and I was all in.” He continues, “With Ryan being the brains, we did it for 6 or 7 months. And eventually, after doing podcasts, Ryan’s voice got heard. Light has been shined on it, and it’s going to change the future. As a professional fighter, I felt I had the courage to do this and expose these guys.”
A common trend of these organizations was that they only had profile photos and usernames but nothing else identifiable. Montgomery adds, “I asked them (independent predator-catching organizations) to send as much evidence as possible, and then I would populate a case file with all their personal information to intimidate the predators into staying long enough for law enforcement to apprehend them.” This information was the missing piece to the puzzle. He was able to identify and assist in their exposure. He did this without compensation or recognition.
When a citizen, Bryan Joseph, recognized Montgomery publicly, he said, “Ryan helps our community a lot. In this world, we have kids, and we have to make sure our community is safe, and Ryan is doing exactly that.”
Montgomery’s work is emotionally draining and demoralizing, but that doesn’t discourage him from the dirty job of witnessing these atrocities and punishing these criminals guilty of crimes against humanity, of crimes that shock the human conscience, of crimes that cry out for justice.
When pressed on the different profiles, this is what Montgomery had to say,
“The profile of the predatory pedophile is not as obvious as the typical neighborhood criminal with gang tattoos, prison battle scars, and a record of felonies. They usually show disingenuous remorse for the crime they were about to commit. The four categories are as follows:”
· Groomers: They usually build trust gradually under the radar with the victim to establish rapport through showering gifts and prizes so that the child will surrender their innocence to them.
· Malignant authority figures, even religious ones: Isolate the child from others and intimidate them into compliance until they fulfill their sick fantasies.
· Opportunists: Those who only exhibit these predatory behaviors when their judgment is compromised or strongly believe in their exemption from justice.
· Preferential offenders: They are obsessive, extremely organized, and take calculated pre-meditated steps to increase the chances of access to children.
He says to look for these red flags or warning signs:
· Complete disregard for physical boundaries.
· Excessive interest in being around and helping children without apparent motive.
· Attempting to isolate the children from their parents, guardians, friends, or peers by fabricating opportunities to be alone with them.
· Encouraging a conspiracy of secrecy surrounding their activity.
· Frequenting locations where children congregate.
