DARKMARK

by post rather than email. Detlef and his parents
resisted the journalist's first few attempts to talk to him,
but after three months they relented, so in early
October Kai found himself sitting opposite the young man
over a cup of coffee.

Kai Laufen was no novice. Born in northern
Germany, he was brought up partly in Brazil and spoke
fluent Portuguese, Spanish and English. He had worked
throughout South America and knew a thing or two
about organised crime and gangsters. But now he could
scarcely believe his ears as Detlef regaled him with the
tale of Matrix001 and his adventures in a virtual world
where everyone boasted peculiar names and communicated
in a hybrid English - part gangster, part anarchist and
part Tolkien - as they bought and sold stolen financial
details.

Kai readily grasped the implications of this new
style of wrongdoing. With the aid of the Internet, the
perpetrators could commit crimes thousands of miles
away, on a multitude of unknown victims who might or
might not discover that their privacy had been violated
and their money or identity stolen.

Yet if it was so foolproof, Kai wondered, how did
Detlef manage to get himself arrested? 'Simple,' he
replied, 'one of my fellow administrators, who I worked
with over many months, was an FBI agent. He was
tracking me and he alerted the German police.' The
journalist thought the young man was perhaps
exaggerating his own importance, so he asked him
whether he had any documentary evidence to support
that. 'Yes,' said Detlef, 'I'll send it to you.'

A few days later Detlef sent Laufen the
prosecutor's statement outlining the state's case against the
young man, written in the German language's
inimitable legalese:

As evidenced by the investigation dossier, this
administrator who in the final analysis had complete
control over all arrangements at least from June 2006
onwards was the FBI Agent, Keith Mularski, who had
offered to host the server in order to gather more accurate
information about the buyers and sellers. I refer here to
the Case Document 148, File 1, in which Mr Keith
Mularski informs the investigating officer of the Regional
Police, Frank Eismann [sic], as follows: Master
Splynter [sic] is me. That the user Master Splynter
[sic] ran the server is proven by Case Document