BILAL IN PITTSBURGH

sunshine, Turkish police had sent out a signal that on cybercrime, they were keen to cooperate and they had the know-how to do it.

Although the JiIsis and Matrixes of this world were no longer treading the DarkMarket boards, the rest of the crew were still active - indeed, DarkMarket was again experiencing a surge of criminal activity. Ironically, the key to that revival lay in the arrest of another cyber criminal: Iceman.

In September 2007 US law-enforcement officers had finally tracked down Max Vision at his hideaway apartment in downtown San Francisco. CardersMarket had crumbled with Iceman’s demise and so, while mazafaka controlled the Russian carding scene, DarkMarket was now the unchallenged champion of English-speaking cyber criminals. Directly or indirectly the site was still generating hundreds of thousands of pounds of illegal profits every month and it remained as popular as ever among carders and hackers.

There were now three key players on DarkMarket: Cha0, Master Splyntr and Shtirlitz. The mysterious Lord Cyric would soon join them. Cyric’s presence on the carding scene was generating enmity and adoration in equal measure among carders. Those who loathed him believed him to be the FBI plant, Mularski, although there was also a suspicion that Master Splyntr and Shtirlitz were actually working for, or with, US law enforcement. The one thing that everyone agreed upon, whether cop or hacker, was that the most serious criminal remaining on the board was Cha0.

In contrast to their bulging dossiers on his fellow DarkMarketeers, Mularski and Şen knew just two salient facts about Cha0 himself: he lived in Istanbul; and he had a thriving business selling so-called 'skimmers,' that essential tool of the fraudster in the Age of Plastic. But the detectives had no real name for Cha0; no physical address; no IP address and no known associates. Either Cha0 didn’t exist (not impossible) or he never made mistakes.

If it was the latter, then Cha0 would appear to have perfected a system of disguising his digital tracks so that the forensic sleuths found it impossible to home in on his location. Part of that masking system was provided by Grendel, who helped out DarkMarket (against payment) in his spare time. This was ironic as Grendel was also providing the shell system that disguised the location of Mularski’s servers. Grendel had originally been invited to provide these services to DarkMarket by