The French Connection

makes it extremely tough to convince a prosecutor to take the case on, and difficult to prove in court. Outside the United States, convictions in this embryonic area of the law tend to bring shorter sentences than conventional crime, which means that police forces are compelled to invest a lot of resources for some fairly unspectacular results. But the issue with somebody like Dron is that the more successful he became, the more his output would drain local and global economies. The potential losses from as skilled an operator as Dron were enormous. Nonetheless, there are tens of thousands of active cyber criminals out in the ether, and only a tiny fraction of them are ever likely to get caught.

Although he was taciturn and uneducated, Joehle was clearly talented. His combination of entrepreneurial and engineering skills would prob- ably see him bounce back, once he had gone through a court case and imprisonment. He had already passed his know-how onto other members of DarkMarket, one of whom was building a vast factory of skimmers halfway around the world. But ultimately that was the respon- sibility neither of Dron nor of Detective Frizzell – the speed with which skills are communicated over the darkside of the Web is another compelling reason for national police forces to improve their commu- nication with counterparts abroad.

Once Dron and Matrix were taken out, the police would need to move fast against their next targets before the DarkMarketeers noticed the sudden, and largely inexplicable, disappearance from the Internet of their regular contacts. The Secret Service was in better shape here, because Cha0, in his capacity as DarkMarket administrator, had already excluded Dron from the board.

While Dron was still posting on the board, Cha0 had exploited his authority to extract the secrets of the young engineer's trade. As soon as he and his team (for Cha0 had several accomplices) had got the knack, he shut down Dron's membership, just as he had done with JiLsi in December 2006. Dron would no longer be able to advertise on DarkMarket, and because most of the other boards had been liqui- dated in the battle royal between DM and CardersMarket, the young Canadian's marketing strategy had been severely hampered. With Dron out of the way, Cha0 meanwhile was busy attempting to establish his own near-monopoly in the sale of skimmer machines.

Because Dron had been banned from DarkMarket, his three French