A FAMILY AFFAIR

astonishing achievement: sending the first ever amateur
signals from North Korea. He was fêted from
America across Europe to Australia for this
ham-radio first, drawing large crowds of fans
when he appeared at their conventions in the
1990s. Good-looking and exceptionally
articulate, he was instinctively liked by people,
and everyone wanted to be his friend.

Boa came across CarderPlanet while surfing
the Web in the autumn of 1999 and was
immediately impressed by its entrepreneurial,
if chaotic spirit. Living on Malta, he already
had a successful global business that sold
high-end surveillance, counter-surveillance
and anti-terrorist technology to politicians
and businessmen in more than sixty
countries around the world.

Aware of Boa's professional experience and
organisational ability, Script invited him to join
'The Family' after a few months. Struck by
Script's drive and energy after he first spotted
the website in early 2002, Boa agreed to join
CarderPlanet. 'When Boa came on board, he
completely reanimated the Planet,' remembered
one of the youngsters who had moved to the
Planet. 'He was responsible for the slick design
and introduced a number of new sections. He
became a local celebrity.'

At the same time, Boa agreed with Script
that he would set up a second website, Boa
Factory, whose activities would complement
the work of CarderPlanet while emphasising
different sectors of the trade — Boa Factory
was known, amongst other things, as a specialist
producer of counterfeit passports and ID cards,
as well as developing a larger wholesale trade
in cloned credit cards and dumps. Whereas Boa
was exclusively a business site, CarderPlanet
emphasised the social aspect of the underground
where individual carders could meet, chat, buy
and sell on the Web.

Boa Factory developed a revolutionary tool,
subsequently adopted by CarderPlanet, that
enabled the growth of cybercrime on an
industrial scale. The greatest challenge facing
cyber thieves lay in the knowledge that the
person they were doing business with was also
a criminal and, ipso facto, untrustworthy. Boa
devised the escrow system, known initially
as the Warrant Service, to solve the problem.
A vendor would provide the escrow officer
with a sample of his wares (a dozen or so
credit card numbers and PINs) while the
potential buyer would send the money to
him at the same time. The escrow officer
would then test the wares and, if they
delivered the cash as promised, he would
release the money