ON THE ROAD TO NOWHERE

Even so, Mert's truth remains no less plausible than Inspector Şen's truth. The key lies not in the identity of Şahin or Çağatay. It is hidden within the character of Cha0. There is no doubt that the man who masterminded the skimming factory and acted as administrator on DarkMarket was Çağatay Evyapan. The issue is whether Evyapan controlled the entire operation or whether he was working on behalf of a bigger criminal syndicate.

All in all, Turkish police arrested some two dozen people who, the evidence suggests, were connected to Cha0's operation either as an inner core or as satellites. The virtual criminal was just that – he was not a real character, but an amalgam of individuals with different skills working as a unit. In the same way the Ukrainian founder of CarderPlanet, Script, had recognised that the generic term 'carder' in fact hid a multitude of different skills: some were real hackers; some were graphic designers; some were electronic engineers building skimmers; some skimmed ATMs; some cashed out; some provided security; some gathered intelligence, sometimes on behalf of the criminals and sometimes on behalf of the police.

Thus both men, Cha0 and Script, anticipated the world of cybercrime post-DarkMarket – a move away from a loosely bound community of individuals engaged in opportunistic criminal activity towards a much more systematic criminal organisation in which its members fulfilled specialist tasks: spamming, virus-writing, money-laundering, operating botnets and other essential criminal activities of the virtual world.

So maybe 'Cha0' was just such an operation – the whole caboodle rolled into one. Cha0 was a collective name that sought in the first instance to gain at least a partial monopoly in the new industry of credit-card fraud through skimming. It was an audacious plan, which came very close to succeeding, had it not been for the combined efforts of Keith Mularski and Bilal Şen, as well as the backup provided by other police agencies and by certain other individuals.

The degree to which Cha0, the entity, was organised hints strongly at something else. Traditional criminal fraternities have until recently 'tended to regard cyber criminals as second-class citizens', as one of SOCA's leading cybercops described them. But during the existence of DarkMarket police forces across the world started observing how traditional organised-crime groups were making unexpected appearances during investigations into cybercrime.