EPILOGUE

Western Europe. The plan had been for Master Splyntr to re-emerge as the one honest carder who had foiled the FBI's attempts at capture, who was hence deserving of even greater levels of trust within the carding fraternity.

Instead, in response to the DarkMarket affair, hackers, crackers and cyber criminals are burrowing deeper into the digital underground. There is also increasing specialisation in the business. Hackers and malware coders are developing designer programs that target specific systems or seek out particular information. They then sell this to a group that actually supervises the penetration of a financial institution or its customers. Once they have access to the money, they will contact a 'mule herder', a person or group who employs 'money mules' across the world. There are countless advertisements on websites offering work to people using their computers at home. A number of these are placed by mule herders. The herder asks potential mules to place their bank accounts at the herder's disposal in exchange for a percentage of the sums flowing through them.

The breaking down of criminal activity into these distinct entities makes it more difficult for law enforcement to identify what is actually going on and who is cooperating with whom. The proliferation of mobile devices and apps also offers huge opportunities to cyber crim- inals.

The rapid expansion of Internet users presents another major problem. Police in Western Europe have noted that the size of the Chinese criminal hacking community is growing apace. Until recently, the 419 or Advanced Fraud Fee scam was the preserve of West African criminal groups, especially Nigerians, the proud creators of those bizarre emails urgently entreating the recipient to assist in the move- ment of millions of dollars of a deceased dictator.

419, named after the relevant paragraph in Nigeria's penal code, is a very old trick - it forms the heart of The Alchemist, a comedy by the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson. In essence, the fraudster persuades the victim to advance a small sum of money on the promise that this will lead to the victim receiving a much greater amount later on. He then either milks his victim for more money or simply disappears with the first tranche. While possible in Elizabethan times, it was a laborious business. The Internet has made it extremely lucrative because, using spam emails, the criminal can reach an audience of