DARKMARK

time I had ever heard either of the website or the name of the FBI Special Agent Keith J. Mularski. It was the beginning of a strange journey.

I set out to meet and interview as many of the central characters in DarkMarket's history as I could, spread out in a dozen countries: thieves, cops, double agents, lawyers, hackers, crackers and more prosaic criminals. I also consulted a large volume of court documents relating to DarkMarket and those involved in it. Former and current cyber criminals and police officers supplied me with additional documents and information. I was never able to access a full archive of the website itself, but managed to forage for significant chunks of it. Agent Mularski, with an almost full archive of DarkMarket, is the only person involved that I met who had complete documentary oversight.

Beyond the elusive archive, some of the documentary evidence – while helpful – was inaccurate; this especially relates to material that prosecutors presented at many of the trials. In my assessment, these inaccuracies were not the result of carelessness or vindictiveness, nor were they intentional. Rather they reflected the highly technical and often confusing nature of the evidence in cyber-related trials. Judges and attorneys were struggling to come to terms with this peculiar culture as anyone else does, when confronted with malfeasance on the Web for the first time.

So the core of the story lies in the personalities involved and their actions. This testimony is of course largely based on their personal memories stretching back over a decade. Beneath the well-established fallibility of recall, all players involved were pursuing their own agendas, seeking to highlight some parts of their DarkMarket activity and conceal others. In this they were assisted by the duplicitous nature of communication over the Internet, by a culture in which there are few sanctions against lying and dissembling.

My attempts to assess when an interviewee was lying, embellishing or fantasising and when an interviewee was earnestly telling the truth were only partially successful. Everybody I interviewed was brimming with intelligence, even if some lacked the firm hand on the moral rudder necessary to negotiate the troubled waters of cyber criminality. But as I delved deeper and deeper into DarkMarket's weird world, I realised that the different versions of the same stories at the heart of the website's history were contradictory and unreconcilable. It has been