DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [15]
But before Fred was let loose on the Web, his Dr Jekyll – Adewale Taiwo – had other matters to attend to, namely the year spent studying for an MSc in chemical engineering at Manchester University, where he arrived in October 2005. A month before receiving his Masters in May 2006, he opened an account with the London Gold Exchange (LGE), into which he could transfer money from any high-street bank.
The LGE buys gold with the money you deposit and gives you ‘digital currency’ credits. With its headquarters in Belize and its gold stored in Switzerland, the misnamed London Gold Exchange was one of several institutions that expanded during the 1990s and were favoured by fraudsters and money-launderers. Once Taiwo had shifted his funds into the London Gold Exchange, he then sent it on to an account he held at a similar institution, E-Gold, from where he would distribute cash around the world via Western Union, either to launder it or pay off his collaborators.
As with all his work, he proved meticulous and efficient: an excellent student and an excellent criminal. Grimley Smith snapped him up as a first-class prospect soon after Manchester awarded him the Masters degree – at the same time as the Internet fraud fraternity welcomed him as a serious player.
Adewale Taiwo was a gifted chemical engineer. Still in his twenties, he was regarded as one of the high-flyers at Grimley Smith and before long he was travelling as far afield as China and Venezuela for his work. He dressed well, but never ostentatiously, and his BMW was appropriate to his salary and his lifestyle. He took both his lives very seriously and, of course, his legitimate work acted as a credible disguise protecting his underground activity. A respected and successful company in the energy sector is one of the last places one would look for a major cyber criminal, especially not among the firm’s industrious and highly skilled engineers.
When DS Chris Dawson started looking at the extent of Fred Brown’s fraud, he was flabbergasted. Even after narrowing the evidence down, he was still looking at some 34,000 files, some of which were 100–150 pages long. Early on, he spotted a single file that had 100 pages jam-packed with American credit-card numbers, along with their security codes and all the requisite passwords.
DS Dawson was a homicide officer – nobody in Humberside had ever worked a high-end Internet fraud before, and he and his colleague on the case had to attend to their day jobs. He simply didn’t know where to start. Along with the files, there was the software for an MSR206. This device is probably the most important weapon in the arsenal of the credit-card fraudsters, who are known by the generic term ‘carders’. With this, the carder can ‘clone’ a credit card. This means copying all the information on the magnetic strip at the back and pasting it onto a piece of blank white plastic with an empty magnetic strip. The MSR206 is a personal mint.
Dawson also found key logging trojans on the files. These are to the criminal hacker what a jemmy is to the safe-cracker. The early viruses were very different creatures from the key loggers. When viruses first circulated in large numbers in the 1990s, they were designed by adolescents and students, so-called script kiddies, who wanted to demonstrate their prowess as anarchic programmers. Irritatingly, they chose to do this by inconveniencing as many computer users around the world as they could.
Once your computer was infected, it might behave in any number of ways: it could slow down; if you requested one application, say Microsoft Word, an Internet browser might open instead; it would automatically shut the computer down; and, worst of all, it could destroy your files and data. There are tales of authors losing entire manuscripts