37

ZORRO UNMASKED

Just as Matrix was standing trial in June 2008,
a radio reporter, Kai Laufen, was flicking through
a copy of the MIT's* Technology Review when he spotted
an article on cybercrime. Until this moment the
investigative journalist from Karlsruhe in south-west
Germany had no idea that it was becoming such a problem.
He was intrigued and decided to discover the extent
to which cybercrime was affecting Germany.

Cautious but thorough, Laufen began by researching
the clauses in Germany's penal code relating to
computer crime. Once he had found them, he dispatched
emails to about fifty district and municipal courts
around the country asking whether they were dealing
with any such cases.

He received only a couple of replies, but conveniently
one of them referred to a case of credit-card fraud
at a local court in Göppingen, a small backwater
in Baden-Württemberg, just a short drive from where
Laufen lived. A young man, Detlef Hartmann, was
awaiting sentencing on thirteen charges of having
used cloned credit cards.

The story didn't sound particularly interesting,
but Laufen decided nonetheless to contact the
provincial police in Stuttgart, and before long
the basics of cybercrime were being explained to
him by Inspector Frank Eissmann. In passing he said
that the FBI had assisted his Department IV in
the investigation of Hartmann.

The day after Detlef received a nineteen-month
suspended sentence on 2nd July, Kai wrote to him
requesting an interview, sent quaintly

* Massachusetts Institute of Technology, not to be
confused with the acronym of Turkey's National
Intelligence Agency.