‘I Was a Weird Kid’: Jailhouse Confessions of a Teen Hacker

Between the money bag and clown emojis, the lmfaos and the loooools, a pixelated thumbnail of a teenager covered in blood appeared in a Telegram group chat on a September afternoon in 2022. Noah Urban, then an 18-year-old living in Palm Coast, Florida, clicked play.

He watched as the kid in the video begged him to transfer $200,000 to his captors, who were holding guns to his head. “Elijah, for real bro, you know we used to work together in the past,” the boy said, addressing Noah by one of his aliases. His face was swollen, his mouth full ...