DARKMARK

Importantly for hackers, they are ‘dynamic’, which means that they do not leave a trace of the conversations conducted on them unless some- body consciously saves their exchanges. ‘Safemail’ is an encrypted email system that cannot be cracked. Unless, that is, you can persuade an Israeli court to subpoena the information you are looking for, as a company in Tel Aviv owns and runs it.

Respondents to Fred Brown’s adverts were then invited to join bankfraud@yahoogroups.com, whose aims and ethos were explicit: ‘This group is for people who don’t want to work legit but for cash and are willing to bend the rules. This group will teach you how to defraud banks and identity theft.’ It is a measure of the pervasiveness of fraudulent activity on the Web that Fred felt able to promote his busi- ness so openly. It would be several years before law enforcement noticed him, and that was only because he eventually made an unchar- acteristically crass error.

Fred’s adverts were designed to skin a cat in that most traditional fashion – the inside job. If you can persuade a bank employee to filch and then hand over customer details, you save yourself the sweat of having to crack the accounts or credit cards. Perpetrators of fraud on the Internet invest considerable effort in trying to find disgruntled or distressed bank employees, because having a reliable insider working with you can increase your earnings dramatically. Armed with the account details, the criminal is free to enter the account over the Internet as he would his own, before transferring cash into a designated account of his choosing. Unless the infiltrator needs a significant sum in a hurry, the preferred method of theft involves sucking out small amounts over a long period, so that neither bank nor customer notices.

But Fred Brown was also developing some more advanced methods of fraud. He was able to enter deeper into a bank’s system, where he could engage in such practices as increasing an account’s overdraft facility. He seemingly had the know-how to change names and addresses and, of course, fish out passwords.

By laying the foundations of his trade long before he came to the United Kingdom, Fred demonstrated his systematic approach to business. He was considered; he was not socially insecure; and he did not waste much time playing computer games. Fred Brown (aka Freddy Brown, Fred B. Brown, Freddy B, FredB and Freddybb) regarded the Internet as a simple and easy way of defrauding countless people of large sums of money.