DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [17]
Banks like to keep the extent of fraud quiet partly for competitive reasons and partly because they do not want their customers to demand a return to the old ways. Electronic banking saves them huge sums of money because the customer is carrying out tasks that were once the preserve of branches and their staff. If we were all to refuse to manage our finances via the Internet, banks would be compelled to reinvent the extensive network of branches through which they used to serve us. That would cost an awful lot of money and, as we now know, the banks have spent everything they have, along with hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ cash, underwriting egregious speculative ventures and their obscenely inflated bonus payments.
So DS Dawson was obliged slowly to piece together the puzzle with only limited assistance from the banking fraternity. In his favour, however, was the fact that Fred Brown had made a couple of significant errors in constructing his network of fraud: although his bankfraud@yahoogroups.com was registered with yahoo in America, the email address attached to it was yahoo.co.uk. Because it was a British domain name, Dawson was able to subpoena the material from yahoo immediately. He was less fortunate with the Safemail account. He had to request a British court to request from an Israeli court that Safemail allow him access to Fred Brown’s encrypted account. That took months and all the time he was under pressure from the courts to disclose its evidence to defence lawyers and to speed up the proceedings.
Dawson’s bosses were unhappy: he could feel the pressure building. None of the victims of the crimes he was investigating came from Humberside – the credit-card holders were spread all over the world. One, the Reverend John, was in neighbouring West Yorkshire, but that was about it. ‘I can’t afford to have one of my best homicide officers working on a fraud case which has nothing to do with this area!’ Dawson was warned on more than one occasion. Something in the detective drove him on, though. He wouldn’t let go and so, to assuage his superiors, he started working in his own time, sometimes late into the night, poring over the dancing numbers.
In despair at how the investigation of Adewale Taiwo was starting to consume his life, Dawson requested assistance from the regional intelligence unit. They were unable to help, but suggested that Dawson ask the City of London High-Tech Unit if they had information that might assist him. No, came the reply, but why don’t you approach the Serious Organised Crime Agency?
Finally, Dawson contacted SOCA at their secret operational headquarters in London, which is like something out of Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File or Funeral in Berlin: brass plates with the name of a fictitious company, and everyone pretending not to work for the agency that Tony Blair described as Britain’s answer to the FBI (much to its officers’ irritation).
Dawson asked for assistance in a complex fraud case that involved a mysterious man named Fred Brown. He received a curt call back from the big boys in the metropolis: ‘What do you know about Freddie Brown?’ After all, the tone implied, you’re just a local plod from Humberside.
‘Nothing,’ DS Dawson replied, ‘except that I’ve got him on remand up here in Scunthorpe.’
There was silence down the end of the line. ‘Have you ever heard of something called DarkMarket, DS Dawson?’ the voice continued.
‘No, never. Why?’
Dawson’s fish was even bigger than he realised.
But the news also came as some surprise to SOCA. Freddybb had been on their radar for several years, but the DarkMarket investigation had gone quiet for a while after a series of arrests the previous summer. They had not envisaged that a copper from Scunthorpe would revitalise it. But Britain’s largest online crime unit had learned one thing above all else since a group of Ukrainian cyber thieves set up the first website dedicated to global crime in