DARKMARKET

distribute them. Mularski and Şen had uncovered some evidence
suggesting that his products were going as far abroad as the United
States, New Zealand and South America, and that some were bulk
purchases. In that event, he was unlikely to be using personal couriers.
Given the numbers he was beginning to shift, this was probably prohi
bitively complicated. Bilal pondered the reasons for the increase in
productivity, but drew a blank.

He was unaware that one year earlier, in the late spring of 2007,
Cha0 had fallen out with Dron, the Canadian skimmer specialist whom
the Secret Service and Detective Spencer Frizzell of the Calgary Police
were preparing to arrest. Cha0 claimed that Dron was ‘a difficult char
acter’ who irritated his customers and had therefore sullied the good
reputation of DarkMarket. The many positive messages about Dron’s
service suggested that Cha0’s motivation may have been different —
certainly other carders on the board maintained that Cha0 had delib
erately targeted Dron for his own reasons.

About a month before the young Canadian skimming expert and
salesman was picked up by Detective Frizzell, Cha0, using his position
as administrator, announced that Dron would be excluded from Dark
Market and would not be allowed back. Cha0 could now activate his
plan to dominate the skimming market and move into action.

DarkMarket had provided a vital platform for Dron’s wares — a large
number of his devices were sold to carders who had spotted his paid
adverts on the board. DarkMarket was also used as the primary adver
tising vehicle for CrimeEnforcers.com, through which Cha0 was selling
his own skimmers. Cha0 also offered packaged solutions to wannabe
cyber criminals, including training, manuals and all the equipment
needed for a start-up operation.

But once he had removed Dron from the equation, he changed his
business model: interested parties were no longer at liberty to purchase
his skimmers; they had to hire them instead. Cha0 would send them
out, but with a little added modification.

After Dron’s expulsion, Cha0 was in a position to jack up the unit
price of the skimmers — from now on they would cost $7,000 to hire,
up from $5,000 to buy. For this, clients would receive a PIN pad along
with the skimmer. They would install the skimmer on the mouth of
an ATM and lay the PIN pad over the existing one. When bank
customers inserted their cards and typed in their PINs, these were