DARKMARKET

While exhorting others to indulge in all manner of dubious activities, Lord Cyric never engaged in criminal transactions himself, which reinforced the thesis that he was working for law enforcement or an intelligence agency.

Everybody believed, however, that Lord Cyric had a voluminous knowledge of the carding community and how it worked. And that is why he was much sought after. Carders wanted him to put them in touch with peers whom he could vouch for, or because they wanted to know what he had on them. And the police in the US and Western Europe were still searching for him in the hope of recruiting him as part of their crusade against cybercrime.

Cyric was the quintessential figure of the cyber underground — he appeared as if from nowhere; he displayed boundless, if unappealing arrogance; but above all his motivation for spending endless hours posting messages, engaging in often-futile debate and agitating his peers was obscure.

Until Mert Ortaç revealed that two of the most prominent posters on Turkey's embryonic Internet, the Bulletin Board Service, were nick-named Cha0 and Lord Cyric, nobody had even begun to pull the threads together.

Using his trademark mixture of charm and duplicity, Mert — posting as PilotM in the late spring of 2007 — introduced himself to Lord Cyric as a third person, a mutual acquaintance of them both. 'Hey, old boy!' he messaged him, 'what are you doing on a board like this?' Cyric was keen to ask the man masquerading as his old friend exactly the same question! Soon, however, they were chatting happily, especially about encryption issues. Mert noticed that Lord Cyric was an extremely gifted computer engineer, confirming his suspicions about the character's real identity. After some days or weeks of exchanging ideas and information, Cyric agreed to facilitate a virtual meeting between Cha0 and Mert (still pretending to be somebody else). Using encrypted icq exchanges, Mert started chatting to Cha0 (in Turkish of course).

'Look,' Cha0 told Mert, 'I don't spend much time in Turkey. I prefer to be abroad.' He went on that he didn't much like his compatriots and avoided dealing with them whenever possible. 'My name,' he said, 'is Şahin and I will only speak Turkish if I absolutely have to.' He was prepared to talk Turkish with Mert because they were introduced by Lord Cyric. 'He and I are very old friends,' Cha0 said.