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This was CarderPlanet’s trump card. The Family members were monitoring all the comings and goings. After introducing the vetting system, they further strengthened security by making this a pay site to keep out mischief-makers. There was initially ‘a big influx of amateurs who just cluttered up the forum’, whom Script wanted rid of, but even more damaging was the presence of the rippers, ‘who offer low-quality services or fail to deliver services in exchange for the money they take’.

But CarderPlanet was not just a department store for cyber thieves, for the vetting system enabled administrators to act as guarantors for the business conducted via their website. In exchange, they received adulation, cash and a much bigger and more efficient market for their products, all in one go.

While a genuine hacker, Script was unusual inasmuch as he was driven primarily by a desire to make money. Although young, he well appreciated the oceans of cash in which the Western world and particularly America was floating. Profit is indubitably a powerful force, but the creative genius behind CarderPlanet was not Script, but his senior collaborator, Boa, for whom money was a secondary consideration.

Boa was a very different character from the rest of the Planet’s inhabitants. In his late thirties when Script first created the Planet, he was a good two decades older than most of his colleagues and vastly experienced in the ways of the world.

In the 1980s when the Soviet Union still existed, Boa had proved himself a gifted student of electronics, completing two university degrees. He developed a particular interest in the world of amateur short-wave radio. In those days that was a sensitive hobby to pursue, as Soviet intelligence (and, in the case of short-wave radio, military intelligence) was intent on maintaining control of all communication flowing in and out of the country.

Boa was hugely popular, with an easy manner that could mutate into charisma at a moment’s notice. Even though some friends assumed he was working with the signals section of military intelligence, he nonetheless became a poster-boy for the ham-radio fraternity around the world, which, as one might imagine, includes a high percentage of rather shy, geeky characters.

Boa attained a worldwide reputation for becoming the first amateur radio operator to broadcast from the military-restricted area of the Vietnamese Spratly Islands, following this up with an even more