DARKMARKET

The machines are only referred to as ‘skimmers’ if they are being
used for nefarious purposes, otherwise they are identical in function
to those commercially available. Some ‘skimmers’ are commercially
produced and then acquired by criminals, others are home-made. The
‘skimmer’ was the carding equivalent of James Watt’s steam engine at
the outset of the Industrial Revolution. Over the next decade the great
majority of credit-card and PIN numbers (‘dumps’ and ‘wholes’, as
they are known) used fraudulently were ‘skimmed’ from ATMs and
businesses around the world.

As a talented hacker, Dimitry also quickly noticed that the security
systems developed by the nascent e-commerce community in the United
States were primitive and easily cracked. How successful he was initially
is entirely unclear. Dima liked to put it about that he had attained the
gold standard of dollar millionaire before celebrating his seventeenth
birthday. But never forget: lies are the most common currency of the
Internet, and some of his cyber pals tell a different story.

‘He was greedy, deceitful and always drawn to the criminal milieu,’
blogged another Odessa hacker. ‘But the image of a successful million-
aire was a far cry from reality.’

At this point, Dimitry disappeared, along with some of his more
outrageous money-making schemes. Some months later he emerged
from a chrysalis conferring anonymity as Script, a gloriously adept
creature that flitted excitedly between two new websites, carder.org and
carder.ru. These were little more than discussion forums where Russian
hackers chewed the digital cud about how it might be possible to access
the gazillions of dollars, pounds, yen and euros locked away behind
credit cards. One of the original members of these sites remembered
them as ‘desultory, unstable’ and ultimately ‘unrewarding’.

Script, however, thought long and hard. If you had websites for all
other manner of commerce, why not develop one for the inchoate trade
in stolen credit-card numbers, bank accounts and other valuable data?
He had a compelling motive for wanting to establish such a presence
on the Web. For Script himself had begun to accumulate large amounts
of these data, which he had neither the time nor the resources to exploit.
He wanted to turn all his numbers into cash. He wanted to sell.

The timing was perfect. In the preceding five years, the Internet had
hosted a furious growth in commercial activity. Nobody had fully antic-
ipated this, because its originators had envisaged the Web as a tool to