25

THE INVISIBLE MAN

Renukanth thought he could start a new life. His exclusion from DarkMarket had triggered a depression that lasted for three weeks. The site that he had nurtured from nothing was the only thing that mattered to him and it had been snatched away. As the winter of 2006 gave way to spring 2007 and his initial shock receded, a strange sense of liberation slowly overcame him. He found he was able to give up smoking crack and drinking. The fog in his brain started to lift and he returned to the gym, in an effort to lose some of the weight that had developed during his days as DarkMarket’s obsessive administrator. JiLsi was small, and it was a short journey from being stick thin to bulbous fat.

After a few weeks he sent a request to the DarkMarket administrators to allow him back onto the site. This they did, although they rejected his request to return as administrator. Instead, they conferred a unique – if meaningless – honorific title, Respected Member.

He could no longer wield the power of life and death over the website’s members, but he continued to assist its smooth functioning. One member had worked a credit card scam at a Texaco garage in Portsmouth on England’s south coast. Somebody had installed a mini- camera in the ceiling above the point-of-sale machine at the checkout. Not only were the cards being skimmed, but their owners were being filmed inputting their PINs. Unfortunately for JiLsi, he agreed to act as Escrow Officer purely as a favour to the other member. But worse than this, he asked another member, Sockaddr, to cash out the cards in the United States. Sockaddr was the primary undercover Secret Service agent on DarkMarket.