He started examining all the administrators’ traffic and then spotted some IP addresses that looked odd. Anyone can look up IP addresses and see where they are located – which company or individual is associated with them, and the name of their parent Internet Service Provider. One was registered to a company called Pembrooke Associates. Iceman looked high and low on the Web for information about the company, but there was nothing except on a website listing businesses. Here was the company name and a phone number. He then performed a reverse search on the phone number and found its associated address: 2000 Technology Drive, Pittsburgh, PA.

When he read the address, it was enough to make even Iceman shiver. He had come across it only a couple of weeks earlier, after one of his colleagues on CardersMarket had found a template document on a website, which included the acronym NCFTA and that same address in Pittsburgh. When Iceman looked up this organisation, he discovered it was the National Cyber Forensic Training Alliance, a quasi-governmental body that assists a variety of US law-enforcement agencies in their work on a broad range of cyber-security issues.

Deep in his virtual existence, Iceman suddenly felt the chill touch of the real world. He had always suspected that law enforcement was lurking around every corner, but this was unambiguous – he was convinced that it could not be a mistake. Having believed for many months that he was untouchable and the man controlling the carding community, Max Vision was suddenly worried.

After lengthy consultations, three of Iceman’s colleagues at CardersMarket – silo, c0rrupted0ne and dystopia – decided to contact Matrix001 from DarkMarket to share their suspicions about the IP address and the FBI, and to plan a way forward. Matrix001 was the one administrator whom nobody believed was attached to law enforcement in any way, so they sent him the evidence about the NCFTA and Technology Drive in Pittsburgh, with a stark message sent over icq:

dystopia: we’ve known it for a long time, but we finally have proof
dystopia: matrix, DM is a sting site
dystopia: 100%