“I’m not a fighter. I’m not tough,” said Logan Dulien, a perma-bronzed Californian surfer who claims to be just about 120 pounds soaking wet. “But I wanted to draw blood … they got me … then I wanted to get them back.”
What happened to Dulien on August 12 last year launched him on a quest for revenge. He would help take down a gang of alleged sophisticated thieves that authorities say operated up and down the sun-kissed coast of Southern California for years, stealing over $1 million from more than 100 surfers.
“I thought I’m gonna go surf, take 20 minutes of saltwater therapy,” Dulien told CNN while retracing the steps he took that morning in his hometown of Newport Beach. His mother had died two days prior, and he needed a little time in the water before an appointment to arrange her cremation.
He parked his car, grabbed his board and stashed his keys near the trash cans at his beachfront pad, where pro surfer buddies from around the world crash when they’re in town. Unknown to Dulien, a man was watching him. And when he got word from an accomplice on the beach that Dulien had paddled out to the break, he swooped in. He snatched Dulien’s keys from their hidey hole, unlocked his car, stole his phone and wallet, locked the car, then took that phone and wallet to a hacker parked nearby, who immediately got to work accessing Dulien’s phone, and through that phone, every bank account and credit card that he had.
Mere minutes later, Dulien was searching in vain for those keys. And within an hour, that gang of thieves was hammering Dulien’s credit cards at high-end stores nearby. They spent over $20,000 at Chanel on handbags alone, according to court documents. Such spending, of course, drew scrutiny from the credit card companies. “They send a notification: ‘Fraud alert: Was this you?’” explained Dulien. “And the guy’s sitting there on the phone. … He’d just write, ‘Yes.’ So, the charges would keep going through.”
Dulien had maxed out his credit card to make “Snapt5” — the latest in his series of cult surf movies — but that didn’t stop the gang.
“I had $30,000 in debt to American Express,” he told us. “They paid off the American Express through my online banking … so they could go and shop!” He said an investigator from American Express would later reach out to say that same day, three other surfers were hit just a little farther north at Huntington Beach. “The total he said that day between four surfers was a quarter-million dollars.”
That afternoon, Dulien made his way to the bank where he listened to a clerk read out fraudulent charge after fraudulent charge. “I’m just sitting there, kind of deteriorating, like, emotionally. I just watched my mom die 48 hours before and it’s been a really rough year and a half. And then this stuff is happening to me,” he said, welling up with emotion. Dulien had lost over $150,000. “I was basically like, I don’t give a f**k who this is, I’m gonna do everything I can to make them pay.”
The thief who allegedly broke into Dulien’s car that day made one critical mistake — he walked onto Dulien’s property and into range of the security cameras Dulien has at his beach house.
“Right there, see that camera? That’s where they f**ked up,” said Dulien, pointing to a camera high on the wall, near the stairs up to his place and the trash cans. “I have the surveillance and basically I became a detective.”
Dulien sent the grainy images to a techy friend who cleaned them up, sharpening the face of the alleged thief. He posted what had happened to him and that surveillance camera footage to his more than 120,000 followers on social media. Stab, an online surf publication, then picked up the story, too. “All these surfers started DMing to me: ‘The same thing happened to me!’” said Dulien with a gleeful grin. “I’m like: This is what these guys do — they rob surfers!”
Tyler Gunter, an up-and-coming pro and once a protégé of Dulien, was among those with a tale of woe. “I had a contest coming up in a couple of days. The waves don’t look good, and I just had to get in the water, went for a quick 40-minute surf,” Gunter told CNN. He uses the word “gnarly” a lot and seems unfazed by anything in life. But this hit hard.
“I came back and I’m looking at my tire, I’m like, ‘Man, where’s my keys?’ Like, ‘I swear my keys should be here.’” His keys were nowhere to be seen. But he could see through his car window that the glovebox was open and the car had been ransacked. “But the car’s locked!” he explained. “Now I’m stuck in a parking lot in my wetsuit with no resources, no phone, nothing. And they’re off doing whatever they were doing.”
What they were doing was allegedly spending a lot of his money at a mall while, Gunter says, a hacker was liquidating his stock and crypto portfolios. Gunter borrowed a lifeguard’s phone, called his girlfriend, who logged into his accounts and, he says, watched his money drain away. Gunter says he was taken for a little over $50,000 in all.
But Dulien still didn’t understand how exactly those thieves were accessing phones and then bank accounts. “I’m about to find out that there’s these other lower-end guys but it’s really one guy — it’s a professional Jedi Master hacker.”
According to court documents, a low-level accomplice would steal a surfer’s phone and wallet then immediately hand them off to that hacker. Bypassing phone security and FaceID is very complex. Even the FBI brings in outside contractors to do it. But these days, once you get into a phone, once you crack FaceID, you have access to pretty much every cent the owner of that phone has in the world.
Another surfer who surfs the same break as his high school buddy Dulien, is now a detective with the Newport Beach Police Department and was assigned to the case. Every tip or clue Dulien found, he would pass on to his old friend who built, along with others in law enforcement, a picture of just how big the crime spree might be. Warning signs were posted on the beachfront street. But the thefts continued.
“Even knowing that the police are hot on their trail, they still keep hitting the same exact street,” said Dulien. He called that street where he and many others were hit the thieves’ “honey pot.” There is a reliable break offshore, even when conditions aren’t great. So, there are nearly always surfers parking up there and paddling out without their car keys.
But there still wasn’t enough evidence for anyone to make arrests, until a neighbor of Dulien put up security cameras on their property, facing out to where those surfers were parking. “They got the guys, like, red-handed,” explained Dulien. “It has them visually going in, the handing off the phone. I mean, it has everything.”
One of the alleged thieves would later flip and tell federal agents that the suspects “focused on vehicles belonging to surfers as the surfers would be out on the water for significant periods of time and would not be able to take their keys with them.”
“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel … or a surfer in a barrel,” laughed Dulien.
That hacker whom Dulien described as a “Jedi Master” was, authorities say, picked up nearby with cards, phones and other incriminating evidence in his possession. His name is Moundir Kamil. He’s a Moroccan national who is in this country illegally, previously convicted of bank robbery. He’s even served time in a California prison.
“I don’t care if you’re a Republican, if you’re a Democrat,” said Dulien, who does not follow politics. “How could anyone think, ‘Yeah, let’s keep this guy, let’s let him hang here and keep robbing all of us.’”
Dulien has managed to claw almost all of his money back. And Daniel Castillo, the man police say is pictured in that first crucial surveillance camera footage, is now facing more than 30 charges including grand theft and fraud. He doesn’t have a lawyer. And has not yet entered a plea. Kamil is in custody awaiting trial. A lawyer representing him declined to comment to CNN, and Kamil has yet to enter a plea.
Meanwhile, the surfers of Southern California feel just a little safer. “The surf community is one tribe. … Everyone doesn’t get along but, like, at the end of the day if someone’s drowning, we’re gonna do whatever we can to save them,” said Dulien. “I feel very happy to know that these guys aren’t gonna do this to anyone else, especially other surfers.”