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THE ODESSA FILES

Odessa, Ukraine, June 2002

They came from as far north as St Petersburg and from Latvia on the Baltic Sea; one delegate arrived from Belarus, a country created in 1990, seemingly as a living memorial to communism. The Russians were there in force and Ukraine provided a host of delegates, whether from Ternopil in the west, Kiev in the centre, Kharkov in the north or Donetsk in the east.

But the First Worldwide Carders' Conference (FWCC) was truly international. Some attendees had arrived from Western Europe while others had flown in from as far away as the Persian Gulf, Canada and South America. The FWCC's press release lamented how delegates from Australia and South-East Asia hadn't made it, due to travel difficulties.

The organisers hand-picked three dozen or so delegates from the 400 applications they had received. Those lucky enough to be given the thumbs-up knew that the invitation alone would provide a huge boost to their reputation within the fiercely hierarchical world of online criminals.

In order to throw police off the scent, the organisers originally announced that they were holding the event on several luxury yachts moored off Turkey's Black Sea coast. But this was just a feint. After all, where else could you possibly hold the world's first ever conference for cyber criminals than in Odessa - Ukraine's fabled city of rogues?

Using their well-tested methods, the Tsar, Stalin and Hitler all had a crack at taming this wild beast, but none of them could crush Eastern Europe's most enduring criminal fraternity. 'Without an understanding