DARKMARKET

had been established and developed by real criminals, whereas many of the Shadowcrew team were dilettantes whose boundless hubris was fed by the unfathomable sums of money they were making.

The further RedBrigade kept away from these characters, the less likely he was to be spotted by law enforcement. All but a tiny minority of Shadowcrew members were unaware that the Secret Service had achieved deep penetration of the website.

In April 2003 Albert Gonzales, a young American of Cuban origin and one of the most senior Shadowcrew members, had been busted. He was known to the carders as CumbaJohnny. But they did not know that after his arrest he had turned informant, which was the critical breakthrough for the Secret Service. Gonzales ran a so-called Virtual Private Network (VPN) through which the website's leading actors communicated with one another. A properly maintained VPN renders detection by law enforcement very hard, if not impossible - unless of course the guy administering the administrators is also administering to the cops, as Gonzales was.

On 26th October 2004 the US Secret Service launched a series of raids across the United States, which led to the initial arrest and indictment of nineteen individuals for their role in shadowcrew.com. Several more were picked up later.

'Shadowcrew,' ran the indictment for criminal conspiracy, 'was an international organisation of approximately 4,000 members which promoted and facilitated a wide variety of criminal activities.' It was the biggest outing for the Secret Service's young posse of cybercops. The indictment presented in a New Jersey district court sounded dramatic. 'Administrators,' it continued, 'collectively controlled the direction of the organisation, handling day-to-day management decisions as well as long-term strategic planning for its continued viability ... The administrators had full access to the computer servers hosting the Shadowcrew website and, correspondingly, had ultimate responsibility for the physical administration, maintenance and security of these computer servers as well as for the content of the website.'

The media engaged with the Shadowcrew takedown in a rush of excitement, going so far as to suggest that this was the virtual equivalent of crushing the Corleone clan in Sicily. Coverage was helped because one of the indicted was a woman, Karin Andersson, aka Kafka, although the Secret Service had actually failed to uncover that the real