A SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS

In April 2007 Cha0 had expelled Dron from DarkMarket, and with him went Dron's ability to fix the microprocessors on his skimming machines. He asked Mert if he would be able to do this and Mert agreed. He was now becoming seriously involved with Cha0's criminal business, which meant that he was garnering a most precious commodity – trust.

Only Mert has claimed an intimacy between himself, Cha0 and Cyric. Of course, the latter two cannot say with any certainty whether they exchanged messages with Mert because he was masquerading as somebody else. Cha0 explicitly denied ever having met or communicated with him until the fateful day when he abducted him and placed his photograph, via Haber 7, on the Internet.

More importantly, nobody else in Turkey or elsewhere has ever acknowledged the existence of the mysterious Şahin. Beyond Mert's word, there is no evidence that Şahin exists, including when the two eventually met. But Mert did prove correct in one important fact: the friendship between Lord Cyric and Cha0 went back a very long way.

Mert, of course, was also still working for Turkey's Intelligence Agency. And so most evenings after he had spent much of the day pretending to work at Fox Turkey, playing around on DarkMarket or fashioning microprocessors for Cha0's illegal skimming industry, Mert would report back to his handlers on his day's findings. He told them about a Polish spammer called Master Splyntr, about the security genius Grendel, about Lord Cyric and Cha0, about the backup servers that the DarkMarket administrators managed in different European countries, and about the activities of the DHKP/C.

What else was he up to? His boss at Fox Turkey began to grow very suspicious of him. He noted that Mert now almost never completed the tasks that were given to him, providing instead a litany of excuses as to why he was absent from his work station. He claimed he had a serious medical condition and repeatedly tried to borrow money from his colleagues. If he was so successful, his boss wondered, how come he was always short of cash?

One day the boss discovered that Mert had asked for all his co-workers' passwords. He allegedly needed them to install a major upgrade of the system. Just in time, the boss put a stop to this plan as he suspected that Mert wanted the passwords for less honourable reasons.