Shawn Nunley handed over evidence that helped put Kevin Mitnick, once the most wanted hacker in America, in prison. Years later the two became friends, and when Mitnick died he left Nunley enough money to buy his dream car: a Porsche 911. [1]
That's the part that's real. We'll get to the part that isn't.
The phone call
In the 1990s Nunley was a network administrator at Novell, the company behind NetWare, then the backbone of countless corporate, government, and academic networks. Late one night he got a call from a man claiming to be a colleague named Gabe Nault, asking for direct inbound modem access, a request that broke policy and that Nunley, who ran the network's inbound connectivity, knew was abnormal. The caller had a story ready: emergency code changes for a genuine top-secret project called Snowbird, complicated by a vacation in Vail. The Vail detail even matched the greeting on the real Nault's voicemail.
It was Mitnick, talking his way in rather than breaking in, the same social-engineering trick that built his reputation. Something felt wrong to Nunley, and that instinct fed the trail of evidence. Mitnick was eventually charged with 14 counts of felony wire fraud.
How they got from that to a bequest is the human mystery at the center of this; Nunley has said only that they became friends.
About that photo
Here's where the viral version oversells itself. Nunley shared the story on the r/porsche subreddit alongside a photo of the gifted 911, and commenters quickly flagged that the image was AI-generated rather than a real photograph of a real car. The security research account vxunderground mocked how obvious it was: "These truly gifted people cracked the case." [2]
The fake picture doesn't disprove the gift. It just means the glamour shot wasn't real, and that the core of the story rests entirely on Nunley's own account.
So: a man helped imprison the world's most famous hacker, befriended him, and was left a Porsche by him. Probably true. The photo everyone passed around of it, definitely not.
Sources
Primary source: This Man Was Gifted His Dream Car by the Notorious Hacker He Put in Prison
- Tweet by @SpeedSportLife — @SpeedSportLife · community
- Tweet by @vxunderground — @vxunderground · community
- Tweet by @Arcane_Aii — @Arcane_Aii · community