DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [111]
Cautious but thorough, Laufen began by researching the clauses in Germany’s penal code relating to computer crime. Once he had found them, he dispatched emails to about fifty district and municipal courts around the country asking whether they were dealing with any such cases.
He received only a couple of replies, but conveniently one of them referred to a case of credit-card fraud at a local court in Göppingen, a small backwater in Baden-Württemberg, just a short drive from where Laufen lived. A young man, Detlef Hartmann, was awaiting sentencing on thirteen charges of having used cloned credit cards.
The story didn’t sound particularly interesting, but Laufen decided nonetheless to contact the provincial police in Stuttgart, and before long the basics of cybercrime were being explained to him by Inspector Frank Eissmann. In passing he said that the FBI had assisted his Department IV in the investigation of Hartmann.
The day after Detlef received a nineteen-month suspended sentence on 2nd July, Kai wrote to him requesting an interview, sent quaintly by post rather than email. Detlef and his parents resisted the journalist’s first few attempts to talk to him, but after three months they relented, so in early October Kai found himself sitting opposite the young man over a cup of coffee.
Kai Laufen was no novice. Born in northern Germany, he was brought up partly in Brazil and spoke fluent Portuguese, Spanish and English. He had worked throughout South America and knew a thing or two about organised crime and gangsters. But now he could scarcely believe his ears as Detlef regaled him with the tale of Matrix001 and his adventures in a virtual world where everyone boasted peculiar names and communicated in a hybrid English – part gangster, part anarchist and part Tolkien – as they bought and sold stolen financial details.
Kai readily grasped the implications of this new style of wrongdoing. With the aid of the Internet, the perpetrators could commit crimes thousands of miles away, on a multitude of unknown victims who might or might not discover that their privacy had been violated and their money or identity stolen.
Yet if it was so foolproof, Kai wondered, how did Detlef manage to get himself arrested? ‘Simple,’ he replied, ‘one of my fellow administrators, who I worked with over many months, was an FBI agent. He was tracking me and he alerted the German police.’ The journalist thought the young man was perhaps exaggerating his own importance, so he asked him whether he had any documentary evidence to support that. ‘Yes,’ said Detlef, ‘I’ll send it to you.’
A few days later Detlef sent Laufen the prosecutor’s statement outlining the state’s case against the young man, written in the German language’s inimitable legalese:
As evidenced by the investigation dossier, this administrator who in the final analysis had complete control over all arrangements at least from June 2006 onwards was the FBI Agent, Keith Mularski, who had offered to host the server in order to gather more accurate information about the buyers and sellers. I refer here to the Case Document 148, File 1, in which Mr Keith Mularski informs the investigating officer of the Regional Police, Frank Eismann [sic], as follows: Master Splynter [sic] is me. That the user Master Splynter [sic] ran the server is proven by Case Document 190, Email from Keith Mularski dated 09.03.2007: He paid me for the Server.
Kai was startled. He read the key sentence again. Master Splynter is me. Not only was Detlef Hartmann correct that the FBI had been on his cyber tail, but the prosecutor’s office had named the agent and his alias. The game was up and he, Kai Laufen, had uncovered the truth about one of the world’s most prominent cybercops. Three months earlier he had barely heard of cybercrime.
When Kai called the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance in Pittsburgh, he was put straight through to Keith Mularski, whose manner was, as always, most accommodating. But as the journalist read the sentence from the email – Master Splynter is me – there was total silence