DARKMARKET

down. If it had been in the physical world, Splyntr muttered to himself, you’d just go beat the bastard up. But in cyberspace you have little choice except to close the site down, wait for the attacker to calm down or negotiate some sort of agreement.

As a consequence, the administrators had to monitor all the conflicts brewing between members and try to defuse them before they erupted. Your average cyber criminal has the manners of a chimpanzee and the tongue of a Sicilian fishwife. Anonymity breeds an intrinsic lack of trust across the Internet, and the criminal world is especially susceptible to this because of the potential threat from the police and from the perceived invulnerability conferred by the user’s anonymity. So the insults on forums like DarkMarket escalate swiftly into open verbal warfare. Herein, incidentally, lay one of the trump cards held by police investigating cybercrime – in a community riven by a variety of suspicions, a skilled reader can manipulate disputes to his own advantage.

The admin team naturally decided the fate of members’ status within the DM hierarchy. The four would go into a private conclave – a forum to which only they had access – to discuss whether, for example, a salesman of stolen credit cards had a sufficiently reliable record to be awarded the coveted title of Reviewed Vendor, which enabled him to sell cards without restriction through DarkMarket.

Naturally the administrators were also permanently scanning for the presence of cybercops, not to mention the ‘scumbags and rippers’ – those criminals who refused to adhere to the rules of the underworld.

Spotting ‘rippers’ was also a key part in the admin’s third and most vital job – operating the escrow service to ensure fair play in the realm of the unfair. As with the original carding site, CarderPlanet, the successful management of escrow was a critical factor in transforming DarkMarket into the pre-eminent criminal website of its day. JiLsi ran the escrow, but the most important arbiter of the service was Cha0.

Finally, the administrators had to keep a sharp eye out for anyone using the site to distribute child pornography or to sell and buy drugs and weapons. This was not born of moral indignation, but of the belief that the police would be less energetic in their pursuit of the site if they restricted themselves to carding and identity crimes.

The first half of 2006 had been a mixed time for Renu. The bad luck had started in February. He had walked out of the Java Bean café