DARKMARK

and organised crime. Furthermore, the United States was competing
with Europe and Russia for influence over the country, and at this time
the prevailing wind was blowing from Moscow with some force. As
long as he stayed in Ukraine, Kovalchuk was safe.

In the midst of this, in late 2002 while Inspector Crabb was still in
San Francisco, he was called in by the security department of Visa,
whose headquarters happen to be located there, too. Their people were
frustrated by the inordinate success of a hacker named Boa, who had
successfully stolen or assisted others in stealing tens of thousands of
credit cards through his notorious website the Boa Factory. Crabb’s ears
pricked up - he knew that name, Boa, from various conversations he
had seen on Kovalchuk’s account. Hadn’t Kovalchuk been buying a lot
from Boa Factory and learning the tricks of the trade from it, as well
as discussing the development of CarderPlanet? The postal inspector
was rapidly homing in on Boa and Script as the two key figures behind
CarderPlanet. Discreetly, through Interpol, he put out a note to other
law-enforcement agencies requesting that they be in touch should they
pick up any Ukrainians suspected of high-tech crime.

In late February 2003 Roman Vega was returning from a business
trip to his home in Malta when one of his friends asked him to drop
off and see him in Nicosia, Cyprus. He spent an evening drinking and
reminiscing with his pal about their adventures in Burma in 1991 when
they were part of the team that sent the first ham-radio broadcast from
the military-run state.

On returning to his room at the Hotel Castelli, Vega had an
unpleasant surprise awaiting him in the form of Modesto Poyiadjis, a
local police inspector, who promptly arrested the Ukrainian as an acces-
sory to a credit-card fraud perpetrated by another Ukrainian guest
whom Vega had allowed to stay in his room (a bad move, as it turned
out). For Vega, it was the beginning of a relationship with law enforce-
ment in Cyprus and the United States that can only be described as
Kafkaesque.

After Poyiadjis had checked through the Interpol records, he made
contact with Greg Crabb, the lead officer in the US investigation of
Boa. He told the man from the US Postal Inspectorate that he believed
Roman Vega was none other than Boa. Crabb could barely contain his
excitement. Even before the call was over, in his mind he was booking
the first flight to Nicosia. It was not just the prospect of attempting to