You South Africa – 29 August 2019

idea; he just wanted to sell me his bike.”
Once in a while, he gets caught. “When
someone gets hinky you can feel the con-
versation getting away from you,” Rob
says. “Bad guys have instincts too. But
that’s okay because being one of the
good guys, you can make a mistake here
and there. A bad guy can’t make any mis-
takes.”
Bringing down bad guys means a lot of
people loathe Rob. “When you’re in this
world your nemeses are everywhere,” he
says with relish.

W

HILE Rob’s online sleuth-
ing takes him on virtual
journeys all over the
world, sometimes fate
takes a hand and infor-
mation lands right in his
lap, which is what happened with the
Russian spam gang.
Rob’s investigation into the gang’s
counterfeit ring led him to a key player,
a Russian living in Massachusetts. In a
twist of fate, he and his target had mail-
boxes at the same UPS store in Boston.
Rob has mailboxes all over the country
under different names, undercover iden-
tities he uses to buy counterfeit goods. In
this case, the fake identity paid off in an
unexpected way. “I got his mail once.”
That’s how I found out the Russian man’s
identity, Rob explains. “It was pure coin-
cidence.” He fed this evidence back to the
FBI and the Federal Trade Commission,
who tracked down other key players,
leading to the downfall of the biggest
spamming operation in history.
While Rob admits the funeral flowers
spooked him, he says most of his ene-
mies are only virtual. “The nice thing
about financial crimes,” he says, “is that
there aren’t a lot of violent crimes as a
direct result” of getting caught.
However, his father’s cautious ap-
proach has stuck. His condo, in a gated
community in the upscale seaside com-
munity of Marina del Rey, is stocked with
plenty of weapons. “I have nine or 10
guns. It’s nice to have a loaded gun in
each room.”
Despite mobster threats and the sense
that danger’s always right around the
corner, Rob insists there isn’t much that
scares him. “You just don’t have the time
to be scared; you’re so busy doing the
work, you just keep on doing it,” he says.
“Sometimes I think it’s stupidity, but
sometimes you’re so obsessed with the
case you don’t think of things like that.”

For someone as au fait as Rob about

internet security, it seems a little strange

that he puts so much of himself out

there. His Facebook profile is public, and

you can see the articles he’s posted about

his work alongside his thoughts such as

“Why aren’t ghosts in movies naked?”

On Instagram you can scroll through a

slew of selfies, pictures of his lunch, and

snaps of his dog, Chauncey, on the beach.

You can find him on Snapchat and on

LinkedIn, where he blogs about cyberse-

curity. But Rob points out that while it

looks as though he’s an open book, most

of the information is superficial. He lives

by something he calls the haystack prin-

ciple, which basically means the more

you share, the bigger your virtual hay-

stack and the harder it is to find the “nee-

dles” of critical information.

“There are a few things, work and per-

sonal, that I don’t want anybody to know.

Everything else I let the world see.”

While Rob courts the limelight, Jason is

happy to lead a quiet life in his suburban

Dallas home with his wife and three kids.

“I’m pretty under wraps,” Jason says. “I’m

fine with people not knowing who I am.”

The brothers’ single-minded dedica-

tion to busting counterfeiters has helped

win some landmark cases, including

Chloé vs TradeKey and Louis Vuitton vs

Akanoc: two victories that marked a

move to prosecute the marketplaces

where counterfeiters sell their goods.

Robert Holmes would’ve been proud,

but their father isn’t around to see histo-

ry repeating.

In 2004, two decades after his wife’s su-

icide, Robert killed himself. He’d lived

with a heavy burden, Rob says. “For 23

years my father had that in the back of

his mind, the guilt from that.”

Rob sighs. He doesn’t want to talk

about it. He believes anybody on the

worst day of their life could go ahead and

end it. “If you’re on the ledge and there’s

not someone there that one time, that

might be the day.”

Thirty-five years after those first un-

dercover stings when their father paid

them in ice cream, Robert Holmes is still

a larger-than-life figure. “He wasn’t very

vocal, but he had that look; he was proud

of us,” Jason says. “I know he’d be proud

of us now.”

“If you can make it, they’ll fake it,” Rob

says. “There’ll always be new technolo-

gies, new techniques. I’m never going to

stop catching counterfeiters.” S

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