DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [114]
Inspector Sen’s work was done. After the arrest, the case was handed over to the prosecution service, as required by Turkish law. But if Çagatay Evyapan was Cha0, then who was this character Sahin, whom Mert Ortaç insisted was the real Cha0. Was Sahin a mere figment of Mert’s imagination? After all, Mert did have a history as a fantasist and embellisher.
Fond though he was of spinning a yarn, the fundamental aspects of Mert’s story were true. He did work for various official organisations, including the Intelligence Agency; he was a highly gifted programmer with a particular skill for decrypting smart cards; he did make huge sums of money from selling fake Digiturk cards, for which he was later investigated; he did lavish money and entertainment on people he wanted to impress; he did tread the DarkMarket boards using Sadun’s nicknames, Cryptos and PilotM; he did holiday with his girlfriend at the Adam & Eve Hotel in Antalya; and he was most definitely kidnapped and humiliated by Çagatay Evyapan.
However, he was unable to offer any proof for his central claim that Cha0’s real identity was the mysterious Sahin. Mert demonstrated such a detailed knowledge of the inner workings of DarkMarket that, if he was lying, somebody or some organisation must have furnished him with some or all of these details. The question is – and it remains stubbornly unanswered – why? And who were they trying to frame or discredit by throwing the extraordinary Mr Ortaç into the mix? Certainly not Çagatay Evyapan as he emerges from Mert’s story as a lesser criminal? The police? Or was it perhaps the man who Mert claims was Lord Cyric, a prominent member of the Turkish and global internet scene?
Even so, Mert’s truth remains no less plausible than Inspector Sen’s truth. The key lies not in the identity of Sahin or Çagatay. It is hidden within the character of Cha0. There is no doubt that the man who masterminded the skimming factory and acted as administrator on DarkMarket was Çagatay Evyapan. The issue is whether Evyapan controlled the entire operation or whether he was working on behalf of a bigger criminal syndicate.
All in all, Turkish police arrested some two dozen people who, the evidence suggests, were connected to Cha0’s operation either as an inner core or as satellites. The virtual criminal was just that – he was not a real character, but an amalgam of individuals with different skills working as a unit. In the same way the Ukrainian founder of CarderPlanet, Script, had recognised that the generic term ‘carder’ in fact hid a multitude of different skills: some were real hackers; some were graphic designers; some were electronic engineers building skimmers; some skimmed ATMs; some cashed out; some provided security; some gathered intelligence, sometimes on behalf of the criminals and sometimes on behalf of the police.
Thus both men, Cha0 and Script, anticipated the world of cybercrime post-DarkMarket – a move away from a loosely bound community of individuals engaged in opportunistic criminal activity towards a much more systematic criminal organisation in which its members fulfilled specialist tasks: spamming, virus-writing, money-laundering, operating botnets and other essential criminal activities of the virtual world.
So maybe ‘Cha0’ was just such an operation – the whole caboodle rolled into one. Cha0 was a collective name that sought in the first instance to gain at least a partial monopoly in the new industry of credit-card fraud through skimming. It was an audacious plan, which came very close to succeeding, had it not been for the combined efforts of Keith Mularski and Bilal Sen, as well as the backup provided by other police agencies and by certain other individuals.
The degree to which Cha0, the entity, was organised hints strongly at something else. Traditional criminal fraternities have until recently ‘tended to regard cyber criminals as second-class citizens’, as one of SOCA’s leading cybercops described them. But during the existence of DarkMarket police forces across the world started observing how traditional organised-crime