DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [107]
The suspect led them to a luxury villa complete with outdoor swimming pool. After days of observation, the surveillance team had ascertained that several men were living in the villa. But it did not take Bilal long to establish who was giving orders to the team. Going through criminal records, he soon identified him as one Çagatay Evyapan.
At college a gifted student of electrical engineering, Çagatay now had real form. He had first been arrested on fraud charges in 1998. Two years later came his biggest miscalculation when he and his collaborators were caught red-handed using cloned white plastic credit cards to extract cash from ATMs in the port of Izmir. After having served five years of a twenty-seven-year sentence, the prospect of further incarceration was too much for him. And so one day in May 2005 Çagatay went over the top of his prison walls and off the radar. He was less a fugitive and more a ghost.
He blamed his arrest in 2000 on the men with whom he was working – something he was determined not to allow again. If you want something done properly, ran Çagatay’s basic philosophy, do it yourself.
Naturally he understood that during his five years in prison the cyber world had undergone significant changes. He knew all about Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors that may be placed inexpensively onto an integrated circuit will continue to double every two years until roughly 2015. Translated into real life, that law means that every year gadgets get funkier, computer programs more complex, hacking tools more devious and the rewards correspondingly more juicy. And so he set about adapting to the new circumstances.
First, he needed a new cyber identity. Çagatay disappeared for almost four years, his name being replaced on his passport with the name of one his subordinates, the bodyguard Hakan Öztan, and in the ether by Cha0 (pronounced like the Italian greeting). He had been using the first syllable of his name and the figure zero since he first graced the BBS boards in the early 1990s. At that time, Cha0’s exceptional security system had ensured that nobody could identify him. In public forums like CrimeEnforcers and DarkMarket, Cha0 sold skimmers. In private, he sold impenetrable security systems for computer users who really did not want their identity revealed.
But now Bilal had stumbled upon him. However, it was one thing spotting Cha0’s location. It was quite another gathering the requisite evidence to build a case against him. Turkey’s judges and prosecutors are even less acquainted with the Internet than their equivalents in Western Europe or America, and already the city had spawned several high-profile, expensive defence lawyers who were quickly learning how to exploit that ignorance for the benefit of their clients and their own bank balances.
Çagatay was enjoying his summer – he was a convivial chap who liked to step out with his friends. He often escorted beautiful women, including, it was rumoured, one daring member of the Saudi royal family. He liked expensive drinks, fine dining and attending parties on yachts, and over the years had put on some weight. Money appeared to be no object in the pursuit of his fancy lifestyle.
Bilal put tails on Çagatay’s various co-workers – the evidence was mounting that Cha0 was not just Çagatay Evyapan, but a well-oiled criminal syndicate. This was organised crime, not some script-kiddy hacking servers for the first time. As such, it was evidence of a growing trend around the world. For a long time traditional organised-crime syndicates regarded fraud on the Web as crime-lite and scarcely worthy of their attention. That was now beginning to change. Cybercrime was becoming more systematic, more efficient