CIAO, CHAO

bastardised English, which had become the lingua franca of the Web, acting as a cipher that enabled Brazilians to communicate with Koreans and Bulgarians with Indonesians; soon the spelling and usage of even native English-speakers started to develop in many peculiar directions on the Internet. One could hazard a guess at the origin of a message-poster, but it was usually impossible to identify with any accuracy his or her nationality.

The same did not apply to Russian or Chinese. Posters on Russian-language criminal websites littered their comments with local slang, which some linguists may have been able to follow, but only the most gifted would be able to replicate without being spotted as a non-native speaker. FBI agents would give nothing away on an English-language board, but on a Russian board they would have a struggle getting past the first login. Although US law-enforcement and intelligence officers have used native Russian and Chinese speakers on occasions, they have certainly never possessed anything approaching the financial and linguistic resources to take control of a Russian site in the way they partially appropriated DarkMarket.

On English-language sites, however, one was much less certain of an interlocutor's true identity. The agency of the Web enabled, and even encouraged, people to change their personalities. This was by no means restricted to the criminal world. Dating sites were already home to some of the most sustained and intense mendacity in history. In chat rooms, people liked to impart a sense of their own talent and importance, which rarely corresponded to the mundane reality of their lives. The Web fostered this because people were unable to check up on their virtual partners' behavioural traits. Everyone was discovering that on the Web they could lie without fear of exposure or opprobrium.

Criminals were not only subject to the same laws on duplicity, but were especially good practitioners. DarkMarket provided ample proof. In chatlogs the fiendish Devilman, for example, would project an image of a young fast-living ladeez man (although he reserved his most persistent affection for cheap 'dumps'). But when detectives knocked on the door of 62 Lime Tree Grove, Doncaster, the two-up, two-down semi where Devilman's real-life alter ego, John McHugh, resided, they were greeted by a man in his early sixties whose first response on being informed of his arrest was, 'Would you mind if I go and put my dentures in first?' In court, when it came to sentencing, he included